Lost Gates

by James Axler

  J.B. looked at his wrist chron. Only ten minutes of their allotted thirty had been used, and they had secured the area.

  “Figure we shouldn’t hang around here too long. Let’s get ourselves some ordnance and get out of here.”

  “Yeah…” There was something in Krysty’s tone and the way she gazed around the mess room that made J.B. turn back as he headed for the door.

  “What?” he asked.

  She shrugged. “It’s strange, really. It just struck me that these people are using the redoubt and living the kind of life that Crabbe is looking for. They’ve found their own small piece of the motherlode that he’s obsessed with, and they’re making some kind of use of it. That’s just what he’d like to do, except the stupe fat bastard is still caught up in his own little power games.”

  “These people might be, too. We haven’t seen them, and hopefully we won’t. So let’s just get going.”

  She shrugged. “Yeah, guess you’re right. It’s just that I’ve gotten a little curious.”

  “Fair enough, but we don’t have time for that right now,” J.B. said.

  Krysty knew he was right: there was no telling what the inhabitants of the redoubt might be like. They lived in a civilized fashion when they were inside the redoubt, but there was no way of knowing what they were like when they were outside. Or what they would be like when they came back to find that their safe haven had been invaded from the inside.

  She followed J.B. to the armory, where they surveyed its contents.

  “Too much choice.” J.B. grinned. “Where do we start?”

  “Something small, easily hidden,” Krysty commented. “We need to get it past McCready’s men when they take our blasters from us.”

  “You reckon?” J.B. queried. “Think about it. We’re the last ones to go out, and the last to come back. Do we really need to hide it?”

  “Come out blasting, you mean?” And when he nodded, she added, “Then why do we need anything else? Couldn’t we just use our own ordnance? Come to that, if we’re the last ones to go out and come back, then why shouldn’t they just blast the fuck out of us when they open the mat-trans door?”

  “Because they’ll think we have the disk, and Crabbe isn’t going to risk damaging it,” J.B. stated. “So we’ll have a chance to start blasting before they take the weapons from us.”

  “Yeah, and if we do that, then they take out the others before they have a chance to use whatever they’ve got,” Krysty argued. “Think about it, J.B. We come out meek, make out we’ve found the disk, let them take our blasters and let their guard down, then hit them with whatever we’ve taken from here. That means they get taken by surprise, and our people get a chance to ready whatever it is they’ve hidden away.”

  J.B. sniffed. “You put it that way, guess I can’t argue,” he agreed.

  He was about to move toward the grens, having already figured like Doc and Mildred before him that a gas gren would be a good start, when Krysty stopped him.

  “Wait,” she said suddenly. He looked at her quizzically, though he could see that her hair had suddenly tightened on her scalp, curling protectively around her neck even as he stared. He waited for her to continue.

  “There’s something really wrong here,” she said.

  “What?”

  She shook her head. “I don’t know… I just know that something isn’t right.”

  His face set. “Okay then. We have some time to play with, but let’s forget that. I don’t know what the fuck is going on here, or how these people live, and I don’t care. Let’s grab some weapons and get out.”

  With which he turned away from her and reached toward the grens. A box of gas grens lay behind an already open box of frag grens, and his hand snaked toward it.

  “No!” Krysty began as the dread feeling in the back of her head took shape. She suddenly realized that it was as much instinct as doomie feeling that was fueling this dread. She had seen something that hadn’t registered, but now…

  “Dark night!” J.B. cursed, mentally calling himself every kind of a stupe that he could as he realized what he had done. In taking the crate of gas grens to open it, he had triggered a trap.

  Maybe these people weren’t quite the technically ignorant stupes they had supposed, he thought. Or maybe they were just suspicious of one another, regardless of the seeming harmony that their living conditions suggested. Whatever was behind it didn’t matter. All that did was that the closed crate of grens was empty—he could tell this by how light it was to his touch—and now it seemed to have triggered a light beam that shot across to the door, triggering its closure mechanism. The sec door slid across swiftly, its mechanism undimmed by the passing decades, and although Krysty flung herself full length, reaching out to try to jam it at the last by thrusting the barrel of her handblaster into the ever smaller gap, she found that she was just a fraction of a second too late.

  J.B. ran across to the door, thumping the panel around the keypad in frustration. He keyed in every default sec code, but even as he did so he was aware that it wasn’t likely to work. He turned and looked at Krysty, who was picking herself up from the floor, her face a mirror of the frustration and anger that he was feeling.

  There was nothing they could do now but wait, and pray that their captors wouldn’t be gone for long. If it was more than—they both checked their chrons—eighteen minutes, then they were screwed. There would be no way they could return to Crabbe, and whatever happened they would be stuck in this place.

  The fact that they were in an armory, and so it was unlikely that their captors would come in blasting was of little consolation.

  All they could do was wait.

  THE WAITING WAS driving Crabbe to the point of madness. The baron was pacing up and down, his mood swinging violently between elation and frustration. Mildred watched him and recognized the symptoms of a man on the verge of a breakdown. She could also see that McCready, although not a man who had the medical training but nonetheless a man of great cunning, was able to make a similar diagnosis. The time would soon be coming when he would make his move. Maybe that would be a good thing. In the confusion it could be easier for them to use the weapons that they had been able to conceal. She was sure that Ryan and Jak were carrying, just as she and Doc were.

  “MAKE YOURSELF comfortable. There’s no knowing how long we’ll have to wait, so we might as well rest and be ready for them.” Krysty sighed in a resigned tone as she settled on the floor.

  “I can’t.” J.B. shook his head in frustration as he paced. He was on edge, and there was no way he was going to be able to keep it frosty. He blamed himself entirely. How could he be such a stupe? It wasn’t the thought of having to enter into a firefight that bothered him. He could do that with his eyes shut and still outshoot most men. No, it was the thought that they were running out of time and could be stuck here that was bothering him. He could remember vaguely the map they had seen of the redoubt locations. Which one this was, he had no idea. They would be stranded unless they could shoot their way out in—he checked the chron again—just over ten minutes. The hands seemed to move with an infinite slowness as he looked at the face, and yet they were still too bastard fast for his liking.

  It would need one hell of a change in luck. But maybe, having suffered so much bad in the past few hours, they were due such a change.

  No sooner had that thought crossed his mind than he heard voices and footsteps approaching, muffled by the thickness of the door separating them from the corridor outside, but nonetheless plainly audible.

  Ten minutes. Hurry, you bastards.

  Krysty was now on her feet, her blaster held down by her side, partly concealed behind her thigh, but her hand tensed around the butt. J.B. nodded to her as he stepped back to stand beside her, bringing up the mini-Uzi so that the barrel was parallel to the floor at waist level.

  The voices outside grew clearer.

  “How did they get in here?”

  “The tech… Always knew that it all mus
t work, or else we wouldn’t be able to live down here. Mebbe they come from somewhere like this and they’ve figured out the shit that we haven’t.”

  “Dangerous, then.”

  Three voices. The footsteps were too indistinct to make out. Maybe just the three, maybe one or two others that weren’t speaking. They’d only know when the sec door was opened. J.B. kept his gaze level and focused on the sec door.

  The voices and footsteps ceased, and the door began to slide open. As it did, it seemed that the corridor beyond was deserted. J.B.’s lips quirked into the shadow of a grin. They weren’t that stupe, obviously.

  “Okay, you come out with your blasters lowered, and no harm will come to you,” yelled one of the three—at least—men in the corridor.

  “You think we’re crazy?” Krysty replied calmly. “Why would we make ourselves defenseless and then come out?”

  “Because you haven’t got any way out, and you can’t stay there indefinitely,” the voice replied.

  “That’s true. But then again, we stay here and you can’t fire on us without blowing yourselves to hell. See this?” J.B. had an idea as he spoke, and bent to reach behind him for where the box of frag grens lay partly opened. He grabbed one and tossed it into the corridor without pulling the pin. There were momentary sounds of panicked movement as the gren hit the concrete and rolled out of J.B.’s view.

  “You see that?” he continued before anyone outside had a chance to take action. “That was just a warning. I’ve got a whole box of these at my feet. Next one comes out without the pin unless you back off.”

  “Do that and you’ll blast the fuck out of all of us,” said another of the disembodied voices, this one from the opposite side of the corridor to the first.

  So they had split into two groups. The bad news was that it meant both sides of the corridor were covered. The good news was that it divided their forces. Krysty looked at her chron and gestured to J.B., showing him her wrist.

  Eight minutes. They had to move quickly now.

  “What have we got to lose?” J.B. said hurriedly. “You’re going to chill us anyway, right?”

  “Who says we’re gonna do that?” The third voice made itself heard. It was to the left of the doorway, leading back toward the upper levels. That made only one on the side that they needed to take. More importantly, this voice had an authority that the other two lacked. This was top man in the group. The way in which J.B. addressed him played up to this.

  “Why else corner us like this? If you call your men off, then mebbe we can talk about this. You look like you run this place pretty well. Mebbe we can come to an agreement of some kind.”

  The voice gave a harsh, barking laugh. “Nice try. But I’m not in charge here. None of us are. We work together.”

  “You don’t trust one another, though,” Krysty stated. “Why else lay the trap?”

  “Because we don’t understand all this predark shit. We can use some of it, sure, but that don’t mean we get it. But someone might. So we’re a little cautious… And guess what, we were right. ’Cause you’re here, right?”

  “Right,” J.B. said, glancing at his chron. Just over five minutes. If they had time, then maybe they could stall until they could come up with some kind of plan. But time was the one thing that they didn’t have. He looked at Krysty and shrugged, mouthing “Trust me” at her as he suddenly took her arm and threw her to one side of the doorway, so that she twisted and hit the wall square with her back, gasping as the air was momentarily driven from her lungs. She looked bewildered and then shocked as she watched J.B. and realized what he was about to do.

  The Armorer took one of the frag grens from the open box, pulled the pin, and then flicked his wrist as he leaned toward the open doorway. The spin on the gren took it out through the gap at an angle, moving in the air as it did so. It hit the far wall and bounced, the spin causing it to cannon off the wall at a corresponding angle so that it fell beyond the open doorway and into the area where two of the voices had been standing. There was a momentarily jumble of confused and panicked voices before they were obliterated by the noise of the gren exploding. J.B. had already flung himself down, opening his mouth to equalize the pressure change brought about by the explosion. He could only hope that Krysty’s reactions were quick enough for her to do the same.

  He was taking one hell of a risk, he knew, but a calculated one. The armory was behind thick walls, and he had angled the gren’s trajectory as much as possible so that it would explode in an area where little, if any, of the shrapnel would blow in through the doorway. It was still possible that he could trigger off the ordnance around him, but highly unlikely.

  If he had called it right…

  A sudden and engulfing silence swept over him momentarily. It seemed as though the whole world had gone silent, including himself. His central nervous system, which he could hear even at the most extreme of moments, was seemingly stunned into silence. The pressure was like being suddenly immersed in a tank of water and thrust down several fathoms, only to surface again with a gasp of shock as the pressure suddenly returned some kind of equilibrium.

  He gasped for air, felt his jaw ache with the shock wave, and his hearing return, if bottom-end heavy and lacking in anything that would register above a muffled roar. From experience, he knew that this would soon pass. The important thing was that he was still there. Looking across the room, through the clouds of choking concrete dust that were billowing in from the open doorway, he could see that Krysty was still also alive. The Titian-haired beauty had dragged herself to her feet, shaking the dust from her tightly coiled hair and the sense back into her head.

  They were still there. That was the most important thing. The detonation hadn’t penetrated the walls, and no shrapnel from the gren had leaked back into the armory and triggered a domino-effect explosion.

  J.B. felt as if he were moving in slow motion as he hurried to grab Krysty by the arm. She was still slightly dazed from the blast, her eyes not quite in focus. That was okay. He felt like she looked. It didn’t matter. He knew her well enough by now to know that she could recover on the run. He tried to speak, but found that he couldn’t hear the words inside his own head, let alone expect her to hear them. So he yelled. It was still muffled and distant to him—to Krysty, too, most likely—but at least she seemed to be able to understand him.

  “Move out…check corridor…back to chamber…blast anyone following…” He nodded vigorously, feeling absurd as he did so, but hoping that this would somehow emphasize his message.

  He need not have worried. Krysty was already nodding with an equal vigor, checking her blaster and moving to the doorway. She pointed in the direction of the corridor leading back to the mat-trans. J.B. nodded briefly and gestured his intent in the opposite direction. At his signal, she moved out into the corridor, blaster held in front of her, while he did likewise to cover the opposite direction.

  There had only been one man on the mat-trans side of the doorway. They had figured that, and Krysty could now see that they had been correct. He had tried to turn away from the blast but had found nowhere to seek cover. As a result, he had been hit from the back by the frag shrapnel, which had ripped into him from top of the head to the feet. All that remained was a bloody pulp shaped like a human. She prodded him with her foot, turning him over to reveal that his front was almost untouched, apart from a gout of blood that had been forced up his throat and had dribbled down his chin, and an expression of complete surprise.

  She turned to face back down the corridor, where J.B. was looking. They assumed there had been three men: It was hard to tell now, as all that remained were bloodied mounds of flesh and bone in some vague semblance of shape. The remainder of what had once constituted human beings was spread across the walls, floor and ceiling.

  They would present no problem. It was their companions, alerted by the blast and now bearing down with a noise that was audible even through the roaring fog that was J.B.’s and Krysty’s returning hearing, who wo
uld present a real threat.

  J.B. gestured to her that they should move. She began to run, turning on her heel every few steps to look back. J.B. was close on her heels, spending some of the time running backward, watching for the approaching enemy.

  Time was of the essence now, not just because they had an unknown number of potential assailants at their backs, but also because they were running out of time before the automatic return timer would run out, and they would be either stranded here or at the mercy of a random jump.

  That the enemy was gaining on them was of little doubt. Even with impaired hearing, they could tell that the rest of the coldhearts who called the redoubt home were closing on them. The anger in their yelling voices increased as they stumbled on the remains of their friends. J.B. and Krysty had reached a bend in the corridor, and it gave them an edge as they descended toward the mat-trans. The bend covered them and allowed them to race forward without having to check over their shoulders.

  That they had misjudged was made obvious by the sudden hail of blasterfire that showered them with concrete chips as the whining ordnance rained around them. The coldhearts were either firing blind at the corner or their anger had blunted their aim. It didn’t matter which. It gave Krysty and J.B. a warning that should have been their chilling.

  Instead it alerted them to the fact that they needed to stop for a moment. To go on would have been obeying the imperative of time, but would only have led to their own premature deaths. Instead they acted as one, falling back to the angle of the bend that would allow them the most cover as the enemy approached.