by James Axler
Like the armor, their helmets were made of black polycarbonate, and fitted over the upper half and back of the head, leaving only a portion of the mouth and chin exposed. The red-tinted visors were composed of electrochemical polymers and connected to a passive night sight that intensified ambient light to permit one-color night vision.
Stenz snapped, "Lock and lock."
In unison, the Magistrates raised their right arms, bending them at the elbow. They extended their index fingers. Five tiny electric motors whined as they tensed their wrist tendons. Sensitive actuators activated flexible cables in the forearm holsters and snapped the Sin
Eaters smoothly into gloved hands. Since the big-bored automatic handblasters had no trigger guards or safeties, the pistols fired immediately upon the touch of crooked index fingers.
They stood quietly, barrels pointed toward the lead-colored sky. Though they were too disciplined to show it, Stenz knew they were all worried about the high rad count. He nodded, not in approval of their silent acceptance of the risks, but in acknowledgment. "I'll take the point. Let's move out."
He clambered up the pile of lichen-patched stone. Though Ericson hadn't said so, he figured the massive slabs and chunks of rock had once been the upper floors of a multilevel complex. Sheared-away reinforcing rods jutted out of the edges of some pieces like rusty, skeletal fingers.
A tiny six-legged lizard, its skin bleached a dingy brown, flopped sluggishly out of his path. Its eyes were covered by a gelatinous film. Stenz inhaled sharply at the sight of the mutated reptile. The acrid air seared his throat, and it took a great effort not to succumb to a coughing fit.
The climb was not particularly rugged because the heaps of fallen rock and concrete formed a crude stairway. Beneath a shelf of granite stood the wide sec door. As Ericson had described, a square keypad was positioned within the recessed double frame. Taking and holding a deep breath, he punched in the three-digit entrance code, 3-5-2.
Stenz released his breath when a grinding, squeaking sound of buried hydraulics and gears began to build. He stepped back, eyeing the shuddering portal nervously. The vibration triggered miniavalanches in the surrounding stone, small pebbles pattering down amid sifting showers of grit.
Though he couldn't be positive, the laborious groaning of the mechanisms indicated that the door hadn't opened in a long time, perhaps not since before the oukecaust.
Like a curtain of steel, the massive door slowly inched upward. With a squealing grate of rust breaking free and a prolonged pneumatic hiss, it slid into slots between the double frame channels. Solenoids snapped loudly as they caught and held. The rumbling, grinding oise ceased abruptly. The Magistrates behind him drew back uncertainly.
A wide, square corridor yawned on the other side of the threshold. Inadequately lit by a single light strip stretching along the center of the ceiling, the glow was a dim, misty white. Stenz saw an undisturbed layer of dust covering the floor.
He activated the tiny image enhancer on the forepart of his helmet. The corridor leaped into clear, sharp, one-color focus. A musty odor tickled his nostrils. Feeling the pressure of the eyes of the squad on his back, Stenz squared his shoulders and took the first step beneath the sec door and into Redoubt Papa. The Magistrates followed him, fanning out across the passageway in the standard wedge deployment of personnel and firepower.
Stenz wasn't surprised that the overhead light still functioned. He'd been told that the redoubts were powered by nuclear generators, which were buried in the deepest part of the installations, just like the mat-trans gateways. As he walked along, heel to toe, he kept alert for any sign of a stairwell or an elevator shaft.
The corridor turned sharply to the left. Splits and bulges showed in the walls and ceiling where the vanadium alloy had buckled. Redoubt Papa may not have received a direct strike, but even a thermonuclear near miss had come very close to collapsing it.
Stenz suddenly froze, gesturing behind him for the squad to halt. The patina of dust filming the floor showed markings, but they were so unlike footprints he couldn't quickly identify them.
Easing down to one knee, he silently cursed the feeble light. As he gazed at the marks, he felt his heart suddenly trip-hammer inside his polycarbonate-encased chest. A cold hand seemed to stroke the buttons of his spine.
The prints were small, like a child's, but they didn't look like feet. They resembled the impressions made by distorted, malformed hands, with all the fingers the same length and a stubby thumb crooked at a forty-five-degree angle. He experienced a momentary irrational suspicion that a gang of mutie children had broken into the complex and walked around on their hands simply to bewilder any Mags that might stop by one day.
Stenz knew that the prints were recent and, judging by the other markings, whoever made them had alternately pulled and pushed a heavy object. Double rows of straight lines cutting through the dust suggested wheels.
He rose to his feet, whispering, "Triple red."
Moving forward again, he cautiously peered down unlit side passages before passing them. After a dozen yards, the corridor dead-ended at a closed sec door, the green control lever on the frame in the down position.
Turning to Presky, he said quietly, "I'll throw the switch. You stand ready."
Stenz stepped into the corner between the frame and the wall and gripped the lever in his left hand. He waited until the rest of the squad shifted around the corridor so they could fire without hitting Presky.
The lever was stiff, but Stenz wrenched it up. Presky Icnsed as the squeaking hiss of hydraulics filled the passageway, holding his Sin Eater in a two-fisted grip.
The slab of vanadium alloy slid upward far more smoothly than the main entrance door. Stenz was dismayed by that, knowing it meant the sec door had been operated in the recent past.
The door's upward progress stopped, clicking into yhce. The squeal of the lifting mechanism faded and seemed to blend with a new sounda faint, high-pitched whine so distant that Stenz couldn't really be certain he heard it.
Presky thrust his head forward. "Nothing. No lights. All dark. Can't see a thing."
Stenz began to step away from the lever when he felt a tingling, pins-and-needles sensation all over his body, as if he were skirting a low-level electrical field. The tingling became a prickle. The fine hairs all over his body seemed to vibrate, to bristle. The air pulsed Kke the beating of a gigantic, invisible heart.
Presky opened his mouth and half shouted, "I see a light"
With a ripping whiplash sound, the door seemed to gush a torrent of blood. A wavering funnel of intolerably bright crimson light washed from the darkness and spiashed over Presky. For an instant, his body swayed as if he stood in the path of a stiff wind. He rocked back on his heels. In the space of a heartbeat, his armor bubbled like boiling tar, then flapped away in black streamers, splattering the walls and floor with thick, semiliquid tendrils.
The twenty 9 mm rounds in the magazine of his Sin Eater exploded simultaneously in a flare of flame and an eardrum-jarring concussion. Presky didn't fall. His body flowed, smearing itself across the floor like a viscous ebony pudding bearing only the vaguest suggestion of a human outline.
Stenz stood wedged between the door frame and the wall, paralyzed by terror and shock. His eyes watched Presky ooze over the corridor, and his ears heard moist, slithery sounds as the man's jellied remains stretched slowly along the passageway.
Then all the Magistrates began to scream, to curse, to retreat in panic. Stenz slammed down the lever in a spasmodic movement, but the sec door didn't drop. Hughes and DeCampo, on the run, swiveled around to hurl indiscriminate blasterfire in the direction of the open doorway, forcing Stenz to jam himself sideways against the wall to avoid the wild slugs.
Under other circumstances, he would have shouted orders to bring his men under control. Instead, he began to sob, hot tears springing from his eyes and scorching their way down his cheeks.
A red, shimmering spear engulfed DeCampo's head. Polycarbonate,
hair, bone and flesh slapped against the wall as if someone had tossed a basinful of sludge there. As the man's headless body toppled to the floor, the liquid mixture of flesh, bone, brains and polymer trickled down the wall like silt.
Stenz kicked himself away from the corner and caught a fragmented glimpse of a light dancing in the darkness beyond the doorway. A periphery of radiance shone around it like a ghostly halo.
His boots gouged gashes in Presky with the sound of a man running through a bog. As he leaped over DeCampo's decapitated corpse, he thought he heard another soundvoices raised in malicious, drunken laughter.
Stenz risked a quick over-the-shoulder glance and he cried out in horror. He had a fleeting vision of a broad, inhumanly flattened head peering over the threshold. Pendulous lips writhed, twisting in a wet smile of glee. Beneath the head, he saw a monstrously misshapen, stunted body.
Stenz ran, bleating in terror with every step. He ignored the hot stream of urine running down his leg just as he ignored the flow of tears burning his skin. He raced down the corridor, the drumming footfalls of Hughes, Miller and Lewis rebounding from the floors and wails ahead of him.
Even when he turned the corner and was presumably out of sight of the thing behind the door, he didn't slow his pace. The square of light in the open entrance gaped like the gates of salvation. The three Magistrates were already plunging through it, scrambling recklessly down the rock face.
Stenz followed them, jumping from ledge to ledge. He had stopped bleating, stopped sobbing. The only sounds were his harsh breathing and the crunching of boot soles on stone. His racing thoughts settled into a slightly more rational rhythm. The other marks he had seen in the dust indicated that whatever weapon had been unleashed in the redoubt was mounted on wheels. He had no conception what kind of weapon it could be or its operating principles. The Sandcat, with its shielded, armored hull, might offer some protection
Stenz stumbled, his grasping hands catching only thin air as he plummeted downward to strike his head at the bottom of the slope. Only his helmet saved him from a fractured skull. As it was, he lay stunned for a long moment. When he heard the roar of the Sandcat's engine, he sat up groggily, gritting his teeth against the surge of nausea.
The Sandcat lurched backward, gears clashing. Stenz struggled to his feet, shrieking, "Don't leave me, you fucking slaggers!"
A column of light burst from the recessed doorway of the redoubt. It touched the Sandcat, washing it down in a stream of crimson luminescence. For an instant, it acquired the red hue of the light. Then a billowing orange-yellow fireball swallowed it.
The shock wave slammed Stenz off his feet, the wave of superheated air instantly drying the tears on his face, blistering the exposed flesh. The concussion rolled over him like an extended thunderclap. Pieces of the vehicle banged and clattered all around him, bouncing from the rock tumble.
Lifting his head, peering through his soot-blackened visor, he watched the brilliant beam of scarlet carve a churning crescent in the ground around the smoldering, split-open husk of the Sandcat, then lance toward him. With stones against his back, he had nowhere to go. He flung up an arm.
As the polycarbonate sheath on his forearm splattered away like droplets of black wax, he thought bitterly of Ericson's tiresome refrain "A Magistrate must endure."
Chapter 2
Grant pressed his back into the cliff face and tried very hard to look like a rock. His dark brown coloring and equally dark clothing helped him blend in with the shadows cast by a granite cleft.
He turned his head, scanning the gorge floor some fifty feet below. He saw nothing but outcroppings and thickets. Still the sound of shod horse hooves reached him, beating distantly like flint against steel.
He had climbed to this point to plant the three-pound block of plastic explosive. Now he felt like a target, advertising not only his presence but that of Kane and Brigid Baptiste, who worked somewhere deeper in the gorge.
Turning slightly, he tilted his head, looking at the black bulk of the Bitterroot Range silhouetted against the late-morning Montana sky. The narrow canyon was the only path through the foothills into the high peaks. Once it had been a two-lane highway, and even now patches of the blacktop showed through the tangles of overgrowth. There was even a hint of a white line painted down the center of the road.
The cracked and twisted asphalt ribbon skirted yawning chasms and precipices. Although acres of the mountainside had collapsed during the nuke-triggered earthquakes nearly two centuries ago, much of the road remained intact. The highway pitched and turned treacherously, but it could still be negotiated by determined travelers in all-terrain vehicles. It led to only one placea mountain plateau and the Cerberus redoubt.
They had come down from the plateau to find a way to either disguise the road or make it completely impassable. The latter option was a blade that cut two waysthough the mat-trans unit in Cerberus was the primary means of transporting people and materiel into and out of the sanctuary, maintaining an open overland route made sound tactical sense.
After the events of the past ten days, the road was, more than ever, a channel for a full Magistrate assault. Although the Cerberus gateway was listed on all ville records as utterly inoperable, Lakesh extrapolated that Baron Cobalt would leave no redoubt unopened in his search for him. A hybrid spawn of human and other he might be, but the baron was no fool.
The baron had witnessed a group of interloping se-ditionists using his own personal gateway to transport elsewhere, so logically his quarry had to have a destinationand that meant another functioning mat-trans unit. The matter-stream modulations of the Cerberus unit were slightly out of phase with other gateways, so they couldn't be traced. The baron's only alternative was a hands-on, physical verification. Kane usually argued with Lakesh on issues of strategy, frequently just to be contentious, but not this time. If he were in the baron's place, he would have done the same thing.
Besides the desire to rescue his trusted adviser from the grasp of people he believed to be murderous insurgents, there was something else at stake Baron Cobalt's monumental vanity and ego. Kane had twice humiliated the baron, and that was three times too many for a creature who perceived himself as semidivine.
Grant prodded the explosive charge jammed into the cleft of the gorge wall, making sure the radio-activated detonation cap was securely affixed to it. The combination of RDX and polyisobutyleije plasticizer was very stable. Even if it fell, the C-4 compound wouldn't go off, since its impact sensitivity was 0.75 kilometers per minute.
After careful examination of the canyon walls, Grant had decided the cleft was the best place to plant the block of C-4. At this height, the cliff rose in a series of ledges of dry, crumbling stone, separated by vertical slabs of granite that decades of wind, acid rain and snow had eaten away. Tons of delicately balanced and overhanging rock could easily be dislodged by the right kind of demolition charge, planted in the proper place.
He glanced down into the gorge again, taking a certain pride in looking for and not being able to spot the Hussar Hotspur Land Rover. He had done an exemplary job with uprooted shrubbery and camouflage netting.
At the faint squeak of saddle leather, Grant turned his head, looking out past the mouth of the gorge, feeling for and finding the compact binoculars attached to his web belt. Bringing them to his eyes, peering through the ruby-coated lenses, he swept his gaze over the gently rolling, pebble-littered hills beyond the defile. He wasn't looking for Magistrates, who would have made too much noise, with Sandcat engines roaring or Deathbirds dropping out of the sky.
Intruders on horseback most likely meant Indians, from the small settlement of Sioux and Cheyenne. Many tribes of American Indians believed the nuke-caust was the purification promised by ancient prophecy, and over the past two centuries they had reclaimed what was left of their ancestral lands, protecting them ruthlessly from invasion.
Still, the settlement was over a hundred miles away, according to Lakesh, and in the years since the nuke-cau
st, the Indians had ascribed a sinister mythology to the Bitterroot Range. Because of their mysteriously shadowed forests and deep, dangerous ravines, they were known as the Darks. Most people, white or red and otherwise, gave the mountains a wide berth.
Squinting through the eyepieces, Grant caught a flicker of movement. Swiftly he tightened the focus and the microbinoculars' 8X21 magnifying power brought the distant details to crystal clarity. He stared, dumbfounded. A troop of people mounted on horseback rode up out of a declivity in the grasslands. They advanced purposefully toward the entrance of the gorge.
He estimated at least twenty of them, most riding in a single file, but with a few spread out in flank. Armed with blasters, long, clumsy flintlock affairs, the riders also carried swords, pikes and battle-axes strapped to the saddles of their mounts.
As they drew closer, Grant made out their harsh, strong features, hair ranging in color from dark to fair to brindled red, the men with drooping, leonine mustaches. They wore a complicated arrangement of garmentsvests covered with metal wafers, sky blue shirts, baggy breeches that were either checked or striped or polka-dotted. Long, beribboned cloaks trimmed with fur hung from their shoulders.
Their headgear was no less eclecticred scarves, turbans, broad-brimmed leather hats decorated with feathery plumes and dangling foxtails. The women wore skirts slit at the sides above the thigh, and their unruly mops of hair were bound up with rawhide thongs. Necklaces of painted bone and wolves' teeth banded their throats. In fact, all of them, men and women alike, had the bearing and feral expressions of wolves.
A lean man riding point caught Grant's attention. His dark, shoulder-length hair showed a stippling of silver, and his face was deeply creased with lines of suffering and the scars of combat. A strip of wolf pelt encircled his broad, deeply furrowed forehead. Beneath a drooping mustache, the grim slash of his mouth had a lupine quality to it. His black eyes, under bushy dark brows, were like chunks of obsidian.
