Outlander 05 - Parallax Red

by James Axler

  Kane stood for only a moment longer, then wheeled around and stalked down the corridor. He took no notice of the twinges of pain in his right knee.

  He knew what Crawler's fate would be once the Mags tired of waiting and decided to investigate the commotion. He refused to look back. The image of a crippled mutie hovering over and giving comfort to a dying hybrid, fatally wounded by a human, was impressed forevermore in his memory.

  Human, hybrid and mutie, engaged in a dance of the damned, loathing but relying on one another. He had often wondered where lay the future of the Earth. Kane hoped with every fiber of his heart that the trinity of hatred wasn't it.

  Chapter 12

  Lakesh swore. Then, in desperation, he hit a button on the keyboard and rotated the image on the screen, turning it upside down.

  "Might as well not have the imaging scanner's memory," he said angrily. "For all the bloody use it is."

  "You could reverse the read pattern," Bry suggested. "It might have a hidden encryption."

  "Like what?" snorted Lakesh. "'The walrus is Paul'?"

  Bry regarded him blankly. "I don't understand."

  Lakesh didn't respond, propping his chin on a fist. Bry sensed his bad humor and scooted his chair away. Bry attributed Lakesh's foul mood to more than trying to make sense of the spidery webwork of intersecting lines and crisscrossed hatch marks glowing on the screen, and he was right.

  From Lakesh's viewpoint, Kane's actions during and after the confrontation with Baron Sharpe seemed sloppy and dangerously open-ended. Not making certain of the mad baron's demise was one error, but compounding it by leaving the psi-mutie alive to tell his story had the potential to be the most serious.

  Reluctantly he admitted that had he been in Kane's place, he more than likely would have reacted in a similar fashion. But he was not Kane. One of the rea-sons he had recruited the man was his willingness to take violent action, the ruthless streak that had earned him several Magistrate Division decorations.

  Perhaps it was inevitable that a different man would emerge from the black armor after learning what he had about humanity's secret past. The open question was whether the new Kane could function effectively without incurring lethal consequences for everyone.

  He returned his attention to the screen. Dizzying, swirling spirals superimposed themselves over the straight lines. Attempting to isolate the different carrier-wave signatures into separate components was a far more difficult undertaking than he had imagined.

  Activated mat-trans units opened a hyperspatial shortcut, avoiding a clash with relativity and causality by moving in a direction at right angles to every possible direction in normal space. Therefore, hyperdi-mensional space was fiendishly complicated in configuration.

  Bry's suggestion about reversing the play order of the patterns refused to leave his mind. Certainly the standard method of tracing a quantum transit line wasn't proving fruitful. If he could not discover where Redoubt Papa's visitors had come from, then perhaps he could learn where they went.

  Lakesh hazarded a surreptitious glance over his shoulder, making certain Bry was otherwise occupied. He tapped the keyboard in the reverse sequence. The program came on-line, machine language blurring over the screen, the drive units humming purposefully. He leaned back in his chair to wait as the memory of the imaging scanners booted in through the framework-correlation logarithms.

  The control complex had five dedicated and eight shared subprocessors, all linked to the mainframe behind the far wall. Two hundred years ago, it had been an advanced model, carrying experimental, error-correcting microchips of such a tiny size that they even reacted to quantum fluctuations. Biochip technology had been Employed when it was built, protein molecules sandwiched between microscopic glass-and-metal circuits.

  The bright outlines of computer-generated images flashed on the screen. Three-dimensional geometric shapes, circles, spirals and squares, appeared and disappeared. The graphics were, of course, simplified representations of a hyperdimensional pathway. Actual reproductions were impossible, beyond the capabilities of either human or electronic eyes to see.

  A broken, glowing line raced across the screen, brilliant orange against depthless black, piercing the floating shapes. It scrolled back and forth until it literally filled the monitor.

  "What is this?" Lakesh asked in a stunned whisper.

  Bry heard him, turned in his chair and stared. "Never saw anything like that before."

  "The transit trace has gone beyond the indexed Cerberus network," Lakesh declared.

  Bry wheeled his chair closer, eyes narrowed. "Shit," he husked out in awe. "It's like it's following a trail that leads off the damn planet."

  As soon as he said it, the lines faded from the screen, replaced by bright green words "Destination lock achieved." In the lower left-hand corner, a rectangular window flipped through a dozen sets of numeric sequences.

  Bry stared, shook his head and stared again. "What kind of coordinates are those? Even if the gateway was perched on the top of Mount Everest, we wouldn't get readings like that."

  Lakesh pursued his lips contemplatively. "Wait until the correlation program has run its course."

  Within seconds, an image formed on the screen, a side view of a wheel, turning slowly on a cylindrically shaped axis. In the window, a block of copy appeared. Bry read the heading aloud '"USSPC What's that?"

  Distractedly Lakesh translated, "United States Space Command."

  Bry frowned as the graphic display on the screen altered, showing a cutaway view. In the window, the words "Parallax Red" appeared. He demanded, "What's a Parallax Red?"

  In a hushed murmur, Lakesh replied, "I'm almost afraid to find out."

  In the two hours since returning from Redoubt Papa, Kane's knee swelled and turned an unhealthy shade of blue. It throbbed with a dull ache so persistent he decided to swallow his pride and visit the dispensary, if not for treatment, then for a pain reliever.

  As he limped stiffly down the corridor from his quarters, a door opened ahead of him. Rouch stepped out of her apartment, zipping up her bodysuit. She caught sight of him, did a double take and smiled broadly. She let the zipper stay where it was, just below her breasts, not exposing them but allowing Kane to see she wore no underclothes.

  In mock admonishment, she said, "You didn't take me up on dinner."

  As he made a move to hobble around her, he said gruffly, "I was busy."

  Her expression and manner changed. "You're hurt." she said sympathetically, reaching out for him. She latched on to one of his arms.

  Kane's first impulse was to wave her away, but when she slipped an arm around his waist and leaned into him, he felt the surprising tensile strength in her slim frame. HeMecided to accept her help.

  He couldn't help but be a little intrigued by her, and she was certainly attractive. Maintaining a steady grip on him, Rouch walked down the corridor, keeping up a steady stream of chatter about inane topics.

  No, he corrected himself, not inane. Merely ordinary, about everyday things, with no connection to schemes, ops, hybrids, Archons or sudden death.

  To his surprise, he found himself able to keep up his end of the conversation on matters mundane. He realized a bit sourly that he and Baptiste almost never talked. They discussed, they frequently argued, but sitting down and conversing about the simple elements of life with each other never seemed to occur to them.

  As they approached the dispensary, Rouch said, "I sort of wanted to study medicine, but my early placement tests showed I didn't qualify. Just as well. The sight of blood makes me sick."

  The treatment room of the dispensary was deserted, all the beds empty. From the adjoining surgery came voices and the clink of metal. Kane caught a stinging whiff of chemicals, the tart smell of sterilizing fluids. When they reached the open doorway, Rouch stiffened and made a dry-heave gagging noise.

  DeFore, her aide, Auerbach, and Brigid stood around a dissecting table. The bright overhead lights glittered on an array of scalpels, k
nives, tongs and a wet, blood-sheened mess. The three wore surgical gowns and masks. DeFore's arms were crimson-soaked up to her elbows.

  They all looked up curiously as Rouch and Kane appeared. Kane saw Brigid's eyes narrowing, then widening in amusement as Rouch clapped a hand to her mouth, spun on her heel and fled from Kane's side.

  Brigid said, "We're performing a little postmortem work on our troll." Barely repressed laughter lurked in the back of her throat.

  "You didn't waste any time," he said.

  DeFore plunged her hands into the peeled-open chest cavity. "I wanted to get in and out before full rigor set in."

  Kane looked at the dissected corpse, at the various wet organs resting in assorted stainless-steel containers. A trick of the light made them look as if they were pulsing, and he felt just a little sick to his stomach. He had seenand madea number of corpses, but he had never grown accustomed to the clinical desecration of the dead.

  "I'd say you're doing more than a little postmortem," he said quietly. "What discovery have you contributed to the field of pathology?"

  "Very little," responded DeFore tersely, "since we know exactly what killed him and approximately when."

  "But," put in Brigid, her eyes emerald bright above her white mask, "our ongoing study of genetic nightmares may have been advanced a little."

  That captured Kane's attention, made him ignore the pain in his knee as he walked into the room. "How so?"

  Brigid waved a rubber-gloved hand over the gaping abdominal area. "See that?"

  Kane saw only raw viscera with a few streaks of a leathery brown. "See what?"

  "The major organs are enclosed in their own independent shielding of dense tissue," answered DeFore, picking up a probe and inserting it into the fibrous mass. A few^semisolid yellow lumps oozed out around the sharp point.

  "There's an extra organ a few centimeters behind and below the stomach," she said. "Food-reserve storage, in the form of adiposal deposits."

  Seeing Kane's blank look, Brigid supplied helpfully, "Fat."

  She pointed to the juncture of the troll's thighs. "See anything?"

  Kane craned his head, squinting, seeing only a small, fleshy pouchlike bulge. "Like what?"

  "Like genitalia. He has no external apparatus to speak of."

  Kane repressed a shudder. "You mean he doesn't have a, uh, a penis?"

  "Not a conventional one," DeFore replied. "It's more like a direct valve connection to the bladder rather than a reproductive organ. I might add that his bladder is twice the size it should be, even in an average human male."

  Kane flicked curious eyes from DeFore to Brigid. "Meaning?"

  "Meaning," spoke up Auerbach, "he could go days, maybe as long as a week, without having to take a leak."

  Kane grunted. "Handy."

  "Speaking of that" Brigid lifted the troll's right foot by the ankle "not only has the form of the bones been modified, but their .structural properties, too.

  They're not as rigid as our ownthey're far more elastic."

  Kane swallowed a sigh. "All right, time for the big revelation. Is he a mutie or hybrid or a what?"

  "He's a what," Brigid answered confidently.

  "What?"

  "He appears to be human enough, but the end result of people adapted for life in a low-gravity environment."

  "That's Baptiste's opinion," commented DeFore. "I'm not convinced yet."

  Brigid shrugged. "It's a hypothesis, but it's more than provisional." She dropped the foot and began ticking off points on bloody fingers. "The Vertebrae are modified to the point where the load-bearing function is no longer necessary. They are more like a system of levers.

  "The legs and feet don't have to support the full weight of the body, and therefore effectively become a second pair of arms and hands, useful for anchorage in a weightless or near weightless environment.

  "The outer epidermis is thick and strengthened, but without a significant loss in its elasticity. The pelvic girdle is very light."

  "And his size?" Kane asked. "What about that?"

  "The smaller and more compact the body structure, the less bulk he has to pack around while coping with low gravity."

  Kane studied the troll's fixed expression of ferocity. "If that's the kind of environment he came from, what the hell was he doing in Redoubt Papa?"

  "I would imagine," replied Brigid, "he was in a lot of discomfort due to the increased gravity and external atmospheric pressure. He may have even been half-drunk because of the richer oxygen content."

  Kane's brows/fcnitted. "Just where did he come from?"

  "Hopefully the imaging scanner's memory will give us an idea."

  As if on cue, Lakesh's voice filtered out of the speaker grid of the wall comm. "Dearest Brigid, friends Grant and Kaneplease join me in the control center as soon as soonest."

  DeFore nodded to Brigid. "Tell him I'll have a report ready within the hour."

  Stripping off the blood-spattered gown and peeling off the gloves, Brigid crossed the room to a sink and thoroughly washed her hands. "What were you and Rouch doing here anyway, Kane?"

  For a moment, his memory failed him. "I came to get something for my knee."

  "And Rouch?"

  "She was helping me."

  Brigid dried her hands briskly on a towel. "I guess you aroused her strong female drives toward mothering." She smiled when she said it, but her smile didn't reach her eyes.

  Kane bit back a retort, and turned toward the door. "Let's go."

  "Sure you don't need Rouch to get you there?"

  "Leather it, Baptiste."

  Grant was already in the control complex, standing behind a seated Lakesh and scowling at the main monitor screen. When they entered, he glanced toward them and growled, "You two will love this."

  On the screen glowed the cutaway outline of a round tube connected to a cylinder by a double array of slen-der rods. It resembled a narrow wheel or a particularly unappetizing doughnut.

  "What is it?" Kane asked.

  " ParallaxRed ," replied Lakesh matter-of-factly.

  Kane sighed in irritation. "And what's a Parallax Red ?"

  Brigid intoned, "A space habitat."

  "More commonly known as a space station," Lakesh said. "The existence of this one was rumored, hinted at, but never conclusively proven."

  All of them knew the stories about predark space settlements, even of bases on the moon. But after the nukecaust, without the transmission of telemetric signals to correct orbits, most of them dropped to Earth over a period of decades. In her former position as an archivist, Brigid had read about a Russian station that had crashed in the vicinity of the Western Islands in the early part of the century. Shostakovich's Anvil , its name had been.

  Beneath the diagram of the ring-shaped habitat, Brigid swiftly read the specs. Parallax Red was based on the Stanford Torus design, built with prestressed concrete, reinforced by vanadium-steel bulkheads and cables. The structure was an astonishing two miles in overall diameter, with a mass of over ten million tons.

  "You may be wondering why I direct your attention to this," said Lakesh.

  "Not particularly," Kane replied nonchalantly. "It's more than likely where our dead troll came from."

  Grant and Lakesh swiveled their heads toward him in astonishment. Kane met their gazes with a bland smile. "Am I close?"

  Tersely Brigid explained the findings of the autopsy on the troll and her own theories. Lakesh nodded when she was done. "It makes a reasonable amount of sense."

  He touched /the keyboard, and the image on the screen shifted to a full-color production painting showing a vast circle of parklike lawns where flowers bloomed and shrubbery grew in neat hedgerows. Fountains splashed here and there between the hedges, and little pools gleamed like polished silver.

  Lakesh sighed sadly. "Orbital space stations such as Skylab and Mir were well-known in the twentieth century, but it stands to reason there may have been others, kept under wraps. Parallax Red appears to have
been designed as an elite community, with a maximum population of five thousand. Something of a Utopia even, as you can see. The best of Earth transported to space."

  "Do you think the dwarf beamed down from there?" demanded Grant. "That not only does it have a mat trans, but the place is still functional after all this time?"

  "I make no such claims without hard data." He nodded toward the screen. "There is no record that Parallax Red was actually built, but inasmuch as the gateway I traced was not indexed and the pathway appears to lead to Lagrange Region 2,1 believe the conclusion is as apparent as it is inevitable."

  "You're going to explain Lagrange Region 2, right?" Grant inquired darkly.

  Lakesh laughed. "My apologies, friend Grant. There are five stable areas in space where the gravity from surrounding masses, the Earth, Moon and Sun, are precisely balanced. An object set to rest at a Lagrange point stays there indefinitely.

  "The points known as LI through L5 are all related to the Moon. The destination lock of the transit path I

  traced terminated in L2, on the far side, or dark side, of the Moon."

  Kane asked, "If Parallax Red was built, who put it up there?"

  "An excellent query, friend Kane, but alas I have no solid answers. The Totality Concept's Overproject Majestic dealt with astrophysics and the mechanics of space travel. There were rumors" He broke off, shaking his head wryly.

  "What kind of rumors?" pressed Brigid.

  Lakesh forced a rueful smile. "I was going to say, the 'lunatic kind,' but with two centuries of hindsight at my disposal, I can't afford to dismiss any form of speculation out of hand, no matter how superficially outrageous it appears."

  "Get to it," Grant urged impatiently.

  Lakesh coughed, eyes shifting behind the lenses of his spectacles as if in embarrassment. "An exceptionally bizarre conspiratorial premise was put forth in the waning days of the twentieth century, as a means to explain the epidemic of so-called alien abductions.

  "The scenario claimed that these people were all lifted off Earth to build secret bases, not only in space but on the Moon and..." Lakesh's voice trailed off, and he nervously wetted his lips.