Labyrinth

by James Axler

  “There are no research notes,” she said. “They were probably all on the hard drive. And that’s fried.”

  “Shall we try the other office?”

  They left Bob’s digs and moved on to Enid’s. Her expansive bookcase had similar reference works on biochemistry and human and animal medicine. But additionally, there were shelves of books on prehistoric Native American culture in the southwest United States and northern Mexico. The walls were decorated with framed photos of Little Pueblo canyon, before, during and after the reservoir was filled in. And there were detailed photos of the cliff dwellings, the caves, and symbols their occupants had carved into the soft stone.

  Pinned to Enid’s workstation bulletin board were duplicates of the snapshots they’d seen in Bob’s office. And a set of greeting cards. All addressed to Enid from Bob, with love.

  One showed a tall, statuesque, masked woman in a black latex catsuit, complete with ears and a tail. She stood on towering high heels, brandishing a bullwhip.

  A kitten of a different stripe.

  There were others in the same vein. Heels. Whips. Latex. Cat-ear masks. Amazons.

  “Mead and Shumer must have had an interesting relationship,” Mildred said.

  Doc nodded. “It went well beyond the confines of pure research, so it seems.”

  “This machine looks functional,” Mildred said of Enid’s computer. Apparently, it had been shut off before the redoubt was abandoned. When she hit the on button, the thing started to whine and boot up the operating system. The CRT screen flashed on. Mildred said, “Now, we’re getting somewhere.”

  After a few seconds, the password prompt came up.

  Mildred typed in a word. It was rejected.

  “Let’s try this, then,” she said, typing a longer word.

  After a pause, the system gave her access.

  “What password did you use?” Doc said.

  “Sexkitten, of course.”

  “I find it hard to reconcile the late Ms. Mead’s physical appearance with the proclivities revealed by these missives,” he said. “She reminds me more of an underfed, myopic chicken than an amorous cat.”

  “Still waters run deep.”

  Mildred had already keystroked the computer’s search function to locate the main research protocol files. After some preliminary chittering, the screen filled with a list of code names and file numbers. The most repeated code name was TAB. Mildred opened the largest document with that designation. It was an image file.

  A head appeared on the twenty-four-inch screen.

  Three-dimensionally rendered, and slowly rotating.

  The features of the brown face looked vaguely human, but melted, flattened and smeared. The mouth was extremely broad and the bump of the nose as wide as the mouth. Between heavy ridges of brow and cheek, the eyes were huge and all black. Inhuman. The face’s covering didn’t look like skin; it looked like a jigsaw puzzle of rigid plates of various sizes and shapes, held together by fine blacks seams of more flexible material. The skull was flat, and its top bore a crest of three-inch-long, black spikes that could have been monumentally thick hairs. There were no ears or earholes on the sides of the head. As the rear of the skull rotated into view, Mildred noted the fine stipling on its armored plates.

  They watched as the animation loop repeated again and again. And every time it turned to face forward, its mouth opened wide, exposing multiple rows of black-edged, pointed teeth.

  “What exactly are we looking at?” Doc asked Mildred. “Is it a bizarre insect of some kind, highly magnified?”

  “Let’s see,” she said. She pulled the scroll tab to the bottom of the image frame, where she found a specifications table. The TAB acronym was spelled out in the table’s legend.

  Transgenic Autonymous Bioweapon.

  “We still don’t know what it is,” she said, “but at least we know what it was designed to do. It’s a killing machine.”

  Doc read through the table, then said, “From those specifications, it cannot possibly be an insect. It weighs 110 pounds and measures five feet in length. It’s three and a half feet tall at the shoulder.”

  “It’s not all insect, anyway,” Mildred said. “That’s what the transgenic designation means. That creature is a DNA construct, a composite of different gene sources.”

  “This is all quite baffling, I must admit.”

  “We need a component list of the donor gene sequences Bob and Enid drew from,” Mildred said. She backstepped to the screen of code names and started opening other TAB folders until she found what she was looking for. “Here we go,” she said as another list of files popped up. “Looks like Bob and Enid took sections of DNA from a wide variety of creatures.”

  Doc stared at the screen as she scrolled down the list. “That cannot be correct,” he protested. “They borrowed genetic material from a bullfrog? From a flea?”

  “For its size,” Mildred said, “the bullfrog is a fearsome predator. It will attempt to kill and eat anything it can fit into its bucket of a mouth. Birds. Fish. Snakes. And a flea’s fast twitch muscle fibers react hundreds of times faster than a human being’s. Put that ability in a hundred-pound body, with the right hard wiring, and thirty-foot, standing leaps are a piece of cake.”

  Doc continued to read from the list. “And a scorpion? What are the implications of that?”

  Mildred flipped back to the image file, scrolling up until the creature’s short arms came into view. As the image turned, a six-inch, black thorn uncurled from a pod on the back of its wrist.

  “There’s the stinger,” Mildred said. “The poison sacs are probably under the pod, protected by the meat of the muscle, and compressed by voluntary contractions.” She returned to the spec table. “It’s armed with a powerful neurotoxin. It produces immobilizing paralysis of the central nervous system within twenty seconds.”

  “I counted six appendages,” Doc said. “The short upper pair, and four longer ones.”

  They scanned the row of nasty-looking horns that backed each of the lower legs.

  “All its weapons seemed designed for close-quarters combat,” Doc remarked.

  Mildred used the cursor to point out a series of holes along both sides of its torso, or abdomen. “I think those are its ears,” she said “Look at the way the side plates overlap. That body is capable of extreme cross-sectional flattening. And discounting the long rear legs, it’s a fairly compact target, from back to belly.”

  “Not only fast, but hard to see.”

  “The contributions of these other gene donors aren’t obvious from the external physiology,” Mildred said. “The digestive system. Endocrine system. Instinctive drives. Things like that.”

  “I thought I saw something else,” Doc said. “Return to the component list for a moment, please.” When she did, he said, “Scroll down. More. More. There. Stop. Fifth line.”

  “Good Lord, it has human genes in it, too,” Mildred said. When she double-clicked the file name, more information came up. Perhaps more than she wanted to know.

  “Bob and Enid gave of themselves to create that thing,” Doc said. “Their own substance.”

  “That’s what it looks like,” Mildred said. “The Transgenic Autonymous Bioweapon is their love child. They mingled their genetic material with that of literally dozens of other species.”

  “‘Congratulations, it’s an It!’” Doc quoted.

  “There’s got to be more data here on the bioweapon’s capabilities,” Mildred said. She found what she was looking for in a text file. The document was addressed to a covert, government military funding source, and intended as confirmation of the research program’s progress to date. In this document, the Transgenic Autonymous Bioweapon was also referred to with a more touchy-feely nickname—trannie.

  “I was right about the fast twitch muscle fibers,” Mildred said, looking up from the screen. “That’s where the trannie gets its explosive power and speed. And it has a neural net to match.”

  “It appears to also
have a propensity to dig tunnels and burrows,” Doc said.

  “Look at those enzymatic secretions.”

  Though the long biochemical names meant little to Doc, he could make sense of the graph affixed to the document. It showed the corrosive effects of the trannie’s various secretions on hardened concrete over time.

  “What it secretes and excretes,” Mildred said, “lubricates passage through its burrows and breaks down the chemical bonds of the concrete matrix, reducing it to the consistency of wet sand.”

  Doc resumed reading. “It’s highly territorial. It seeks out and destroys anything living within its range.”

  “And it’s parthenogenic,” Mildred said. “It self-replicates. It doesn’t need a mate to start building an army of genetically identical offspring.”

  “What part of this thing is human?”

  “That could take weeks to figure out,” Mildred said. “But now we know why the project had to be buried in the bottom of the reservoir. This is a new predatory life form. Autonomous. Top of the food chain. It makes its own command decisions, based on its instinctive drives. Predictions about its behavior based on the sum of its genetics would be unreliable. The true nature of this beast would have to be observed. There’s no other way to assess the interplay of new genes, body structures and instincts.

  “How would such a weapon be deployed?” Doc said. “And how would it be controlled it once it’s released in the field?”

  “Some operational controls are built in, genetically hardwired,” Mildred said. “Look here. This says it’s photophobic. It avoids sunlight. Its preferred hunt and home locations are in the dark. That characteristic would keep it below ground, at least during the day. Bob and Enid had to have included that feature for a reason. I’d say it was so the trannie concentrates exclusively on its assigned targets, which are most likely in hardened, subsurface positions.”

  “How would they turn it off?”

  “That would require a termination gene,” Mildred said. “There’s no other way to decommission something like this.”

  “You have lost me again, I am afraid.”

  “Every living cell contains a DNA sequence that starts the death process. An automatic self-destruct that kicks in at some point, either a function of age or of external conditions. A bioengineered creature made up of a little of this and a little of that would contain conflicting and potentially disastrous self-destruct commands. The flea code would tell all the cells to die too soon. The human cells would tell cells to live too long. The death codes would have to be removed from all cells, and replaced with something uniform.”

  “A serious complication, no doubt.”

  “If you read this document, it was the major sticking point of the entire program. The success of the project hinged on the ability to pull the plug on this weapon once its mission was accomplished. Because of its autonomy, because of its capabilities, termination had be built in. In terms of men and materiél, the cost of cleaning out an infestation of trannies after a successful mission would have been staggering. And maybe even impossible.

  “Deciding on an appropriate life span for the weapon would have required elaborate and extensive computer modeling. From this, it doesn’t look like they got that far. On the day the world ended, Bob and Enid hadn’t come up with a way to kill their baby.”

  WHEN KRYSTY AND JAK found the entrance to a long, windowless corridor on the tenth floor, they figured they were on the right track. As a rule, mat-trans units were separated from the cores of the redoubts. Perhaps for safety reasons. There was always the danger of radiation leakage. Or power pulse interference with electronic and computer systems. Perhaps the isolation was for security reasons. In this case, the long hallway was the tip of the security iceberg. Barring their path, and completely blocking the corridor, was another holding cell-security checkpoint.

  They walked through the unlocked cell and out the other side.

  The tile floor vibrated steadily, minutely, underfoot. And there was a faint background hum.

  “Sounds like the system is up and online,” Krysty said.

  On the other side of a pair of heavy swing doors was the redoubt’s mat-trans terminus. Its banks of computers merrily chattered, tape and hard drives whirring as they collected and processed current pre-trans data from other stations along the wireless, invisible grid. On the far wall were two portholed steel doors, about ten feet apart.

  “Two mat-trans,” Jak said.

  “That is strange,” Krysty said. Normally, each redoubt was supplied with a single unit.

  When they looked through the porthole on the left, they saw the usual armaglass walls and floor plates. This particular set was black, flecked with crimson.

  “Looks like standard redoubt issue to me,” Krysty said.

  “Other one.”

  “That definitely isn’t standard issue.”

  The door to the second chamber had an additional—and unique—element. Two feet from the floor, in its middle was a massively overbuilt, circular docking apparatus. Alongside the door was a wheeled cart that had been constructed around a windowless, vanadium steel box. At either end of the compartment were docking hatches that matched the apparatus in the chamber door.

  Krysty peered through the porthole window and blinked in amazement at what she saw. The inside of the second mat-trans unit looked like an instrument of medieval torture, an Iron Maiden. It was lined with thousands upon thousands of needle sharp steel spikes. Three inches apart, they jutted from the cobalt-colored armaglass floor, ceiling and walls.

  She opened the door. Right behind it was the only spike-free section of the chamber. A space of about a cubic yard.

  Roughly the same size as the interior of the wheeled cart’s box.

  Krysty stepped around to the handle end of the cart. Attached to it was a hand-operated brake lever that locked all four wheels. On the top of the box in front of the handle was a red toggle switch with a caution notice. Next to that was a bulleted safety checklist.

  “Stranger and stranger,” she said.

  The cart’s hatches weren’t locked. When Krysty looked inside, the first thing she noticed was the bad smell. It was so vile she jerked her head back. She held her breath to continue the examination. Around the middle of the interior walls was a line of quarter-inch steel tubing, perforated with evenly spaced pinholes. They looked like burner jets.

  She flipped the red switch.

  After a series of rapid clicks, there was a whoosh, and a yard of flame shot out the front hatch.

  “What for?” Jak said.

  “I’m pretty sure the flame makes what’s inside want to leave,” Krysty said. “Makes it want to go into the chamber.”

  “What’s inside?”

  “Good question. Whatever it is, those spikes keep it from moving away from the back of the chamber door.”

  Jak closed the door and looked through the window. “Blind spot,” he said “Cannot see space unless door open.”

  “This unit has transport presets,” Krysty said as she examined the chamber’s wall-mounted control panel. “The redoubt locations are locked in. It can’t be used for any other destinations.”

  Jak checked the control settings. The destination latlons were coded, A through V. “Where go?” he said.

  Krysty found the answer on a large, framed wall map, five feet away. The code letters were marked in red in various locations.

  Siberia. Ukraine. Urals.

  Even Jak, whose ability to read was limited, understood the implication of the landmass shown on the map.

  “Not use this one,” he said.

  “Definitely not,” Krysty agreed.

  If the map wasn’t some kind of twisted whitecoat joke, it implied an ability to penetrate and splice into the mat-trans grid of the Soviet Union’s predark redoubt system. To materialize some kind of cargo deep inside the most vital and protected enclaves of the enemy.

  They took a swivel chair from the adjoining room and put it in the
unspiked mat-trans chamber. Jak closed the door.

  The faint hum grew louder and louder, building to an ear-spliting whine. Then the room lights dimmed for an instant. When they came back on, Krysty and Jak looked through the porthole. The chair had vanished and the jump mist was already dissipating.

  Krysty unslung Ryan’s rifle and set it down on the cart. Jak did the same with J.B.’s M-4000.

  “We’re good to go,” she said. “All we’ve got to do is find them.”

  WHEN KRYSTY AND JAK rejoined Doc and Mildred on the eighteenth subfloor they compared notes on what they had separately discovered, and the truth about Little Pueblo’s demons started to become clear.

  “So, the trannies were meant to be a Doomsday bioweapon,” Krysty said. “Designed to penetrate and depopulate the chain of Soviet redoubts after Armageddon.”

  “And using the Soviet’s own mat-trans system to get the weapons inside,” Mildred said.

  “Quite an interesting strategy, really,” Doc said. “If successful, it eliminates the threat of future enemy attacks. And taking control of the Soviet redoubts effectively doubles the available resources of the American nukecaust survivors.”

  “There’s an ironic twist to the siting of the project in this location,” Mildred said. She pointed to Enid Mead’s shelves of books on Native American prehistory. “Enid certainly knew about the existence of the Little Pueblo Canyon demon legend from her extensive reading on the subject. A demon that hates the light. That eats humans. That is spawned out of thin air, like a ghost. That is unkillable, like a ghost. From all the photographs she collected, I’d say she had a particular fascination with the vanished cliff people’s culture. She and Bob had the power—and the funding—to make the canyon’s ancient legend come to life.”

  “We still don’t know what happened here after nukeday,” Krysty said. “We know the reservoir drained away, and the trannie, or trannies, got loose, but we don’t know how. Or why they ended up in the dam.”