by James Axler
Bell stopped short. “I think there’s something ahead…” he said over his shoulder.
Doc thought he saw the man reach out a hand.
“Metal,” Bell said. “Feels like a door. Yep. There’s a keypad lock beside the frame.”
Kirby carefully stepped around Doc to get closer.
Doc couldn’t see the door at all. From a distance of three feet, he could barely see the two men’s backs.
Something beeped in the mist. Something hissed. Then the swirling cloud that surrounded them was sucked away, drawn into the redoubt by a humidity or temperature gradient. Doc stared at the open doorway that had gobbled up the fog like a hungry mouth. Beyond it, banks of fluorescent lights flickered and came on, illuminating a long corridor.
“Never a doubt,” Kirby bragged.
“Shh,” Bell said. “Listen…”
A scraping, grunting sound came from the path below them. The rope snapped hard against Doc’s grip. After a momentary pause, it jerked again. Pause. Jerk. Something was pulling itself up the trail. Something big and sweaty, no doubt.
“Come on, Tanner,” Kirby said. He grabbed hold of Doc’s shoulder and pulled him into the redoubt. When all three of them were inside the entrance, the black man tapped the keypad on the interior door frame and the vanadium steel barrier slid shut.
“That should keep the bastard out,” Kirby said.
“Unless it knows how to use the lock,” Bell said. “Maybe we’d better shake a leg.”
This redoubt was similar to all the others Doc had seen. It was furnished in a grim institutional style: gray-tile floors and walls, broad rooms with low acoustic ceilings, rooms that were divided into a maze of cubbyhole offices by chin-high, moveable partitions. Unlike most of the other redoubts, this one hadn’t been looted and ransacked. The deserted workstations and tables were neat under their thick coating of dust. There were no papers strewed over the floor. The computer screens were unsmashed.
There was evidence of heavy foot traffic, though.
Big footprints tracked through the dust along the main hallway. And there were dark, muddy places where falling drips of sweat had mingled with the un-swept dirt of more than a century. The corridor smelled faintly but distinctly of acetone.
“Trainers have been here,” Bell said.
“There’s been no audible alarm,” Kirby said. “Think they’re looking for us already?”
“Count on it.”
Kirby referred to his printout map of the installation. “We’ve got to go down again,” he said, tapping the paper. “The mat-trans gateway is eight floors below us.”
“Then we’d better use an elevator,” Bell said. “No way can we control the stairwells against the trainers.”
“Where we are going, if I may ask?” Doc said.
“We’re about to jump from here to our redoubt,” Kirby told him. “That’s where the Chronos machinery is.”
The black man figured out the direction they had to travel and hurriedly led them onward.
As they trotted around the eerily empty room, Doc wondered if anyone had ever worked here. There were no personal items at any of the workstations. Just blank, gray corkboards, bookshelves with neatly stacked, spiral-bound technical manuals, a forest of identical ergonomic chairs. It appeared that all this effort, all this expense, had been for nothing.
When Kirby located the elevator, he pushed the button to summon the car, then stepped back. He and Bell shouldered their autoblasters and aimed for the middle of the doors. Doc held the LeMat in a two-handed grip, hammer cocked. They were ready to unleash an all-out barrage, but when the doors opened, the car was empty.
As they ducked into elevator, Kirby jabbed the muzzle of his assault rifle at the muddy floor. “Bastards have been in here, too,” he said.
The chemical fumes in the car’s enclosed space were dizzying. Like a paint factory.
“Phew, that’s some high-octane sweat!” Bell said. “Do you think it’s safe to use the elevator? Something in the motor could spark off on us and wham! We got ignition.”
“If it didn’t fireball when I hit the up button, it probably won’t now,” Kirby told him.
From the far side of the redoubt came the sound of a pneumatic door sliding back. From the direction and the sound, it was the same one they had used. Then heavy, running footsteps, getting louder and louder.
“It would appear the risk of descent has been superseded by the risk of staying here,” Doc said.
Kirby punched the down button. A spritely bell dinged.
The trio waited but nothing else happened.
There was a courtesy delay in the automatic closing of the doors. Kirby punched the button again. Dingdingdingding.
Still nothing.
Which gave the Olympic-sprinting trainer enough time to close the gap.
“Get him!” Bell cried as the mutie burst into view down the long, straight hall, like a shooting gallery target. He and Kirby opened fire with their M-16s, a little wild at first. The spray of 5.56 mm tumblers brought down tiles from the ceiling, shattered computer monitor screens and exploded light banks. The ricochets whined around the room.
Doc braced himself against the door frame and carefully aimed for the trainer’s eyes. Boom and flash. Boom and flash.
The creature held its taloned hand in front of its face and advanced at a dead run. Bullets and pistol balls smacked into it. It soaked them up like a sponge, and kept on coming.
Though it spurted some blood, it seemed to have no vitals to hit.
“Shit, shit, shit,” Bell snarled as he dumped an empty mag on the floor. He slapped home a full one, gave the charging handle a quick flip and resumed firing, all in a single fluid movement.
The trainer was ten feet away when the doors finally whooshed shut. Before it could pry them apart with its thumb talons, the car dropped.
Again the freezies braced themselves and took aim at the doors. As Doc had no time to reload the LeMat, he drew his sword. He was unsure what if anything that weapon could do against the trainers, but it made him feel better to have a blade in his hand, ready to strike.
When they arrived on the mat-trans level, the doors opened onto a deserted hallway. A profusion of muddy tracks ran down its center.
Before Kirby left the car, he pressed the buttons for the six lower floors, sending the elevator to the bottom of the shaft, giving them a little more time to work before the car could be called up.
The hum from nuke generators vibrated through the floor. Doc could feel it in the soles of his feet and halfway up his legs.
As they advanced, Bell and Kirby checked the rooms on either side of the hall to make sure they were clear.
“Oh, man, have a look at this,” Bell said, waving over Doc and Kirby.
There weren’t any sweaty footprints in the long room.
It was a different sort of mess.
The concrete floor was stained with blood and caustic chemicals, littered with boxes full of parts: medical, automotive, computer. Along one wall was a virtual machine shop with lathes, computerized drill presses, punch and milling machines. Low shelves were stacked with bar stock. On the opposite wall was a walk-in refrigerator and dozens of opaque fifty-five-gallon plastic drums containing shadowy, fetal position human forms. The barrels were topped off with formaldehyde, which acted as a room freshener.
In the center of the space, under powerful spotlights, was either an operating table or a mortuary slab.
It was occupied.
“What the hell is this?!” Kirby said.
Doc had the answer. “It’s Magus’s private laboratory. He fancies himself something of a virtuoso.”
“Come again?” Bell said. “He’s a musician?”
“No, virtuoso is an archaic term, from the seventeenth century. He’s a dabbler in things scientific or pseudoscientific. A talented amateur.”
The thing on the operating table might have debated that last point. It lay on its back, wrists and ankles belted in p
lace. It had been flayed, opened up, layer by layer. Each layer was pinned back with stainless-steel surgical clamps. Its chest cavity had been split wide and its organs opened to the air and the hard light.
Much of what he or she had been born with was missing. The eyes. The top of the skull. The genitalia. Muscle had been removed from both calves. Inside the red chasm of torso, a heart still beat laboriously, glistening lungs heaved.
“God, it’s alive!” Bell groaned.
“Do you think it’s conscious?” Kirby said. “Do you think it knows?”
“If so, it will thank me for this,” Doc said. With that, he thrust his sword point through the middle of the pounding heart and out the other side. The muscle pumped rapidly twice, squeezing around the double edged blade, then it stopped. As Doc withdrew his point, the gaping cavity began to fill with oozing blood.
“One less toy for the monster to amuse itself with,” Doc said. “Rest in peace, poor soul.”
They left Magus’s play room and continued on to the end of the hall. It turned out that Kirby’s downloaded map was accurate. Before them was the entrance to the redoubt’s mat-trans unit.
The control room was unoccupied, but its bank of computer drives were chittering, and every monitor screen was lit. Doc immediately picked out the massive metal door set in the far wall. It had an inches-thick, circular, gasketed window.
Kirby stood by while Bell bent over a monitor, surveying the system status and calling up the destination program’s GUIs.
Kirby walked to the chamber’s door, pressed the lever and pushed it open wide, revealing a small, low-ceiled gateway. The armaglass panels on the walls were marbled red and black, and shot through with seams of gold.
“The system is good to go,” Bell said from the consoles. “The coordinates are input.”
His last words.
They never heard it coming.
There was no slap of wet feet in the corridor. No rasp of breathing. No grunt of effort in the final lunge.
The trainer caught Colonel Bell from behind, pulling him away from the computer bank. Before he could reach the pistol grip of his M-16, an amber talon flicked out and stabbed into his earhole with a loud crunch, like a stake driven into a crisp apple.
As Doc backed toward the mat-trans unit doorway and the black man swung up his assault rifle, the trainer used its other amber gut hook to draw a line of red across the front of Bell’s throat. The freezie’s eyes bugged out, his lips moved as he frantically tried to speak. Blood gushed out over his tongue, pouring down his chest.
The trainer tossed Bell aside with one hand, like a wet trash bag. As the dying man crashed into the rows of monitors, the mutie lunged for the mat-trans gateway and more victims.
“Motherfucker!” Kirby howled. He shoved the muzzle of his M-16 at the onrushing mutie’s chest. When he pinned the trigger, the longblaster stuttered full-auto. Orange flame spewed from the muzzle onto the trainer’s sweat-slick skin.
Everything went white.
First ice cold.
Then blistering hot.
The explosion lifted Doc off his feet and sent him flying backward through the chamber door. The swordstick and its ebony sheath clipped the edges of doorway and flipped out of his hands, across the control room. As his backside hit the plates, all 250 pounds of Dr. Kirby landed sprawled across his legs. Ears ringing, Doc rolled out from under the scorched mathematician, slammed the gateway door shut. The jump mechanism didn’t automatically start when the door closed. He could see the trainer through the thick window glass. It spun around and around, the fire that billowed from its torso sheeting up over its face and head, black oily smoke staining the ceiling. Like a drunkard, the flaming mutie stumbled out into the hall, leaving the control room full of smoke.
Not of this earth, Doc thought.
He was stunned that the realization hadn’t come to him before this. But Bell and Kirby, also trained observers, hadn’t seen it, either. Sometimes the obvious was the most illusive. No creature born of this planet could evolve with the trainers’ limitation, their fatal flaw. Copious flammable perspiration was nonadaptive, which meant the trainers had to come from elsewhere, or as a doomie hag once described it, elsewhen, a place where the physical laws of earth did not apply, a place where the combustion of volatile materials occurred at a much higher temperatures.
“Good God, Graydon’s gone,” Kirby moaned, his head in his hands. “After all this, and he’s gone.”
More trainers appeared in the control-room doorway. They peered in, leery of the smoke.
“You didn’t know him,” Kirby said, tears racing down his mahogany cheeks. “You didn’t know his incredible brilliance. Graydon Bell was one of the greatest minds in the history of humankind. He was a second Einstein. And on top of that, a truly valiant and courageous man. He gave up everything to turn back the clock.”
“We must leave now,” Doc said.
“Agreed. The mission must succeed.” With that, Kirby keyed in the jump sequences.
The ambient hum got much, much louder. The metallic floor plates beneath his boots began to glow softly, growing brighter and brighter as the power level climbed. Doc smelled ozone, and when he looked up at the ceiling he saw the tendrils of jump mist beginning to form, drifting down around them. The armaglass walls started pulsating as if alive. The seams between the floor plates at Doc’s feet appeared to part, to spread wider and wider. And then he was falling through the yawning gap, falling into blackness at terrific speed.
Chapter Twenty-One
Krysty Wroth’s spine tingled from the base of her skull to the small of her back. Her breathing was shallow and quick. It felt as if she were only using the top inch or two of her lungs, right under her collarbones. She had come very close to meeting a very bad end. She could still see the underside of the Wazl’s jaw as it dragged her along, its serrated overbite, still feel the hot, fetid huff of its breath as it flapped its wings. If the lizard bird hadn’t been preoccupied first with escape and then with Jak’s throwing blade, it would have chewed off her face, or readjusted the grip of its claws to bite into her flesh instead of the shoulders of her coat.
There wasn’t time to brood on the near miss, even if she had wanted to. Magus had sprung his lethal trap, and the companions were caught in it, up to their eyeballs. Swimming to safety was out of the question. The uniforms with autorifles in the boats would put a quick end to any attempts to reach the big island. There was only one option: when the time was right, to put their heads down and go for broke.
By choosing to stay back on the rim and battle the Wazls, Ryan had given stickies time to fully commit themselves. Only when the muties had almost split the norm force in two did he shout and wave the companions on after him. As Krysty charged past Captain Eng, the islander realized what was happening and ordered his men to follow and join in the attack.
The idea was simple and straightforward, pure Roman Legion: meet the point of the stickie wedge with as much power as they could muster. Break the wedge apart so the recruits already in the bowl could encircle and chill the fragmented groups of stickies.
First, however, they had to push through the ranks of their own kind. They jumped over the bodies of the fallen, of the wounded trying desperately to pull themselves away. These were nothing like the casualties of Great Caesar’s army. This was altogether different sort of hand-to-hand meat grinder. The wounds were not clean-edged cuts and punctures from blades and spears. They were ragged holes, divots where skin and muscle had been ripped—or bitten—away.
Krysty ran on Ryan’s right, close on his heels. Around his broad shoulder she could see waving pale arms and swinging blades, and a red mist rising up from the hellish field of combat.
Mildred sprinted on her left; J.B. and Jak were right behind them. Before they reached the killzone, the islanders bringing up the rear started a war chant, or perhaps it was a death chant. Strange words shouted to the beat of their running footsteps, defiantly, grindingly out of sync with M
agus’s barrage of predark music. The last recruits in their way saw what was coming and gave ground. Ryan was the point of attack, the tip of the norm wedge. His panga flashing, he hurled himself into the enemy line.
His fists and feet and blade sent bodies flying to either side.
Right behind him, Krysty faced the screaming mutie horde, a yammering, jittering wall of dead eyes and drooling mouths. To keep her bayonet from getting stuck in bone, Krysty slashed and hacked with it, using the double-edged point and razor-sharp edge rather than the full length of the blade. To get the most power while continuing to move forward, she swung overhead, adding her grunts of effort to the roar of battle. The bayonet point drew lines of red down the middle of the pale faces, dividing them from forehead to chin. Clutching the split seams together, blood gushing between their sucker fingers, the wounded stickies twisted away and dropped to their knees.
The chanting islanders finished the job she and Ryan had started, slashing the fallen with their sabers, widening the column’s breach.
The term “bloodbath” was invented to describe a scene like this. From the tips of flashing swords and bayonets, from the heads of falling hammers and axes, sprays of gore flew in all directions, falling like hot, copper-scented rain. The ground underfoot was crimson and slick, like it had been lubricated with axle grease.
The muties that melted to either side of the wedge point found themselves caught under islander steel or trampled by islander feet. It wasn’t in the stickies’ nature to ever take a step back. They lacked the hardwiring for retreat. Or to put it another way, they couldn’t think that far ahead. Once they got their chill lust up, they pressed on, to victory or death. Nonfatal wounds didn’t stop or even slow them. Missing arms, hands, parts of their heads, they threw themselves forward with snapping jaws.
As one already wounded mutie jumped at Krysty’s face with arms and sucker fingers outstretched, she pivoted and bracing her back leg, as she let it slip past, thrust fifteen-and-a-half inches of steel into its exposed side. The blade slid in to the hilt, stopping with an elbow-jarring impact. It didn’t stick in the rib cage or vertebrae; when Krysty jerked back the blade, it slipped right out. As she turned back to meet another adversary, out of the corner of her eye, she saw the stickie she’d just stabbed popping up from the ground like it was on springs, just in time for the top of its bald head to meet J.B.’s tomahawk downswing.
