Outlander 05 - Parallax Red

by James Axler

  Elle struck one final note, and Kane levered himself up to a sitting position, astonished by how physically good he felt. Brigid went to one knee beside him, hands on his shoulders, eyes full of questions and anxiety.

  "I'm fine." He sounded surprised. He probed the knife wounds in his shoulder and rib cage and felt no twinge, not even a stinging sensation. He stared at Sin-dri wonderingly. They were nearly face-to-face.

  Sindri raised his left hand, palm outward. "Quite remarkable, isn't it? On the one hand, the instrument produces pain so intense you prefer death to tolerating it."

  He flipped his hand over, showing the back of it. "And on the other, music so beautiful it heals and restores health. That was the duality I spoke of."

  Grimly Brigid said, "You might have told us what you had in mind."

  "And spoiled the surprise and diluted the dramatic effect of the demonstration? I fear my showman's spirit would not allow that."

  Kane eyed the harp, thinking back to the infrasound wands wielded by the hybrids at Dulce, to the instrument played by Aifa in Ireland. They all seemed related, devices operating on the same principle. He knew it wasn't a coincidence.

  Slowly he rose to his feet, towering threateningly over Sindri. "I don't like being used as a fucking guinea pig, little man."

  Sindri stared up at him, not in the least intimidated. "Neither do any of us, but it's a situation we had no choice but to accept."

  "What did the instrument do?" asked Brigid. "How does it work?"

  "Every energy form has its own balanced gap between the upper and lower energy states, each size of the gap giving a particular frequency to the radiation emitted. If the radiation within this particular frequency falls on an energized atomlike living matterit stimulates it in the same way a gong vibrates when its note is struck on a piano. Harmony and disharmony."

  Sindri smiled, displaying his excellent teeth. "I hope you don't think my little demonstration of its principles was a breach of manners."

  "Not at all," said Kane. "You have perfect manners."

  "And pretty damn imperfect morals," Grant said.

  Sindri's face lost its beam. For a second, rage looked out of his eyes as a glare that glittered. It was instantly veiled. He wheeled around and marched across the floor.

  Grant whispered to Kane, "You sure you're okay?"

  Kane nodded. "Yeah. I actually think I'm better off than I was before."

  Brigid's eyes narrowed. "Explain."

  Sindri called with quizzical impatience, "Gentlemen and lady, if you will please join me?''

  They joined him under the colossal head suspended by the network of cables. Tapping the chin with his cane, Sindri declared, "This morose fellow is who started all the trouble, began the entire sequence of events which led to this moment."

  "Who is he?" Brigid asked.

  Sindri sighed and shrugged. ' 'His name, if ever he had one, is lost in the mists of prehistory. Perhaps he had many...Ra, Lugh, Odin, Yahweh."

  "I have no idea what you mean," said Brigid icily.

  Sindri said, "In 1976 the satellite probes of the Viking Mars Mission transmitted more than fifty thousand photographic images of the planet's surface back to Earth. The image on frame 35A72 of the Cydonia Plains became the mystery of mysteries of the late twentieth century. A vast stone head, over a mile and a half long by one mile wide."

  Waving to the head looming above him, he continued, "This is a model of the mysterious Mars masque built to a fraction of the scale. I can testify the original is much more awe-inspiring. As you may have guessed, the photograph of the face was debunked by the authorities of the day as a result of natural erosion, tricks of light and shadow."

  Kane looked the head over again, trying to visualize the size of the original. He found he could not.

  "Of course," Sindri continued, "although the possibility of an extraterrestrial civilization in our solar system was publicly sneered at, a furious, concerted and covert campaign began to investigate and lay claim to any artifacts this nonexistent Martian civilization may have left behind."

  Sindri gazed up at the face, and his expression mirrored the majestic sadness etched into it. "They left behind very little of value. Wherever they went, whatever happened to them, the Danaan took their secrets with them."

  Brigid had worked very hard in her years as an archivist to perfect a poker face, so her reaction was restricted to an almost imperceptibly raised eyebrow. Grant seemed momentarily frozen, and Kane's whole body tightened, as though a jolt of current coursed through him. He echoed, "The Danaan?"

  Sindri cast him a curious glance. "Yes, that was the name they were known by. Or more accurately, what they were called in Terran mythologies."

  Kane stared at the head with a new intensity, whispering, "Son of a bitch ."

  Sindri asked, "You know of them?"

  Grant answered gruffly, "How could we?"

  Ignoring him, Sindri said urgently, "You must tell me what you know, how you know. I need your cooperation."

  "Cooperation?" echoed Brigid. "For what?"

  "For the return to Earth of me and my people, to retrieve our long-denied legacy as Terrans."

  "Why should we?" Grant asked.

  Sindri nodded toward the trestle tables. "There are discoveries here worth taking back to Earth."

  "You're proposing a trade agreement?" Kane's tone still quivered with barely suppressed surprise at the mention of the Danaan.

  "Naturally. You can make it easier for us. You can tell us the safest places for us to settle, to transplant the colony."

  "Why do you want to come to Earth so badly?" inquired Brigid. "It's not exactly an Eden."

  Sindri's features contorted, as if he were struggling to keep himself composed. ' 'It is not that we want to. We need to."

  "Why?" Brigid persisted. "The environmental conditions are not those in which you were raised, the planet is still trying to recover from the war"

  Sindri's words came out in a rush. "I told you we were all that remains of the Cydonia Compound colony. I meant that literally. We are the last of our kind, the final, dwindling generation. Unless we leave Mars, we will diethere will be no more after us. Utter extinction, Miss Brigid. Thorough and complete."

  He drew in a sharp breath through finely drawn nostrils. "That is all you need to know, for the moment."

  "The hell it is," rumbled Grant. "The little you've told us so far is through inference, feeding us information in unconnected bits and scraps. If you want anything from any of us, wipe the snake oil off your tongue and speak straight from the shoulder."

  Sindri's face revealed conflicting emotions. Anger, desperation, doubt and something else, raw and primal and not easily identifiable. Finally, in a very hushed tone, he declared, "I will tell you what you want. But as Mr. Kane mentioned, I seek a trade agreement. I tell you and you tell me. We will barter with information. A fair exchange, I think. Do we have a bargain?"

  Brigid, Grant and Kane regarded him silently, with flinty eyes and expressionless faces.

  Sindri rapped sharply on the floor with the ferrule of his cane. Elle sidled close, stubby fingers poised over the harp strings. In the same low voice, he said, "Make no mistake. I can put all three of you in so much agony you'd kill each other to be the first to answer my questions. I prefer not to do that. It is coercion, not cooperation, and such actions do not come naturally to me. However, if you leave me with no other option, I will undertake that course. Regretfully, but very, very devotedly."

  His eyes flicked back and forth across their faces. "Do we have a bargain?"

  When the answer wasn't forthcoming, Sindri clenched his delicate hands, the knuckles standing out against the flesh like ivory knobs. He thrust his head forward and roared furiously, "Answer me! Do we have a bargain ?"

  Lips compressed, Kane glanced into his friends' faces, cast his gaze to the harp, remembered the universe of pain it had put him in and said grimly, "Bargain."

  Sindri instantly unknotted his fists
. He extended his right hand. Kane reluctantly took it, noting how his almost completely folded over Sindri's. The little man gave his hand two swift, perfunctory pumps and announced, "Done and done."

  He laughed, his eyes shining brightly. Kane recognized the quality of the laugh and the light burning in Sindri's eyes. They were those of a madman.

  Sindri smoothly slipped back into the persona of congenial host. He offered to take them on a tour of the space station, not that there was, he added, anything particularly remarkable to see.

  He directed them to a comer of the warehouse where a small, four-wheeled, battery-powered cart was parked. He had rigged an enclosed canopy of sorts with sheets of transparent plastic draped over an aluminum framework. A small tank hissed a steady stream of oxygen into the cramped interior.

  Brigid sat beside Sindri in a bucket seat as he manipulated foot pedals and a steering wheel. Grant and Kane sat facing each other in the back, heads low, their knees pressed into each other's.

  Sindri drove the cart along the corridors, chatting gaily, as if he were on a Sunday drive in the country with long-lost cousins. He told them about Parallax Red , or at least what he knew about it.

  Construction on the station began in early 1977, shortly after the photographic discoveries of the Viking Mars probe. Originally the project was a covert joint undertaking between America and Russia, but the commanding organizational body had been something called Overproject Majestic.

  Some years previously, a small secret base had been established on the Moon in the Manitius Crater region. This site was chosen because of its proximity to artifacts that some scientists speculated were the shattered remains of an incredibly ancient city, once protected by massive geodesic domes.

  The early shuttlecraft program ferried construction materials to a point in the Moon's orbit, where they were retrieved by the engineers living there via short-range unmanned vessels. From there, they were conveyed to Lagrange Region 2, on the dark side of the Moon.

  Parallax Red had a twofold purposeto establish a permanent Terran military presence in space and to use the base as a jumping-off point for missions to Mars.

  However, the construction project was mind-staggeringly costly and excruciatingly slow.

  The loss in life was exceptionally high, as well, due to accidents and the cumulative debilitating effects of zero gravity.

  "From what I read in the few journals still extant," Sindri said, "conditions in the first decade of the project were beastly, technical problems nearly insurmountable and the schedule was woefully behind, on the order of three years."

  "Something obviously turned it around," Brigid commented.

  Sindri nodded, steering the cart around a curve in the passageway wall. "That something was the advent and installation of a gadget colloquially known as a gateway. One was installed in Manitius base in 1990, and another a few months later on the station itself."

  Grant and Kane exchanged dour glances. What Sindri said fit with what they knew of the Project Cerberus timeline.

  "After that," Sindri declared, "construction on Parallax Red resumed, and the major portions of it were completed in a little less than a year. Once that was accomplished, the focus turned to Mars.

  "In the intervening years however, the situation had changed. Other unique features had been discovered on the planet. Constructs that were obviously unnatural and that resembled a pyramid city showed up in the photos...the products of design and all that implied.

  "The situational change was political. By the mid-1980s, the Soviets had withdrawn their support from the Parallax Red project and made their own partisan plans to investigate the so-called Monuments of Mars."

  Sindri laughed shortly and went on. "In 1988, Russia launched two probes supposedly to investigate the Martian moon Phobos. Both were lost without revealing anything."

  Kane leaned forward. "Lost? How were they lost?"

  Sindri turned the wheel and guided the cart up a ramp slanted at a forty-five-degree angle. "More than likely, they were destroyed."

  "By who or what?" asked Grant.

  The ramp ended in a white, blister-shaped pocket, about the size of the mat-trans control room. Sindri applied the brakes, and the cart squeaked to a halt. "Disembark if you've a mind to, but you will find the quality of air and gravity severely lacking."

  All of them saturated their lungs with oxygen before pushing aside the plastic sheets and climbing out of the cart. As Sindri warned them, the gravity was very low, probably a fraction of a G above zero. The air was exceptionally thin and cold.

  The chamber was dominated by a ten-foot-high platform surrounding an elongated object shaped in some ways like a cannon, but one that appeared composed of an alchemical fusion of glass, ceramic and metal.

  A ladder and a lift led up to the railed platform. Underneath they saw ribbons of circuitry and control consoles. Nestled directly beneath the cannon, enclosed by transparent armaglass partitions, was a humped row of dynamos.

  Voice tight so as not to allow more air than necessary to escape his lungs, Grant said, "It's a weapon. A blaster."

  Sindri nodded. "I believe it was deployed to destroy the Russian space probes."

  "What is it?" Kane asked. "An MD gun?"

  Sindri swung his head toward him, regarding him keenly. "No, Mr. Kane, it is not, though I am interested in learning how you know about it."

  He pointed to the long barrel of the cannon. "It is a GRASER, a gamma-ray-powered laser projector. Gamma-ray photons are millions of times more powerful than infrared photons produced even by ruby lasers. This is a true death ray, horrifyingly powerful, far worse than a molecular destabilizer. A few billion megawatts of GRASER power might conceivably blow up the Sun, force it to go nova."

  Sindri half strode, half drifted to a control panel. He pressed a series of buttons, snapped a toggle switch and the white blister slowly became translucent, then transparent. The outlanders recognized the same microcir-cuitry system as in the Sandcat's gun turret, where an electric impulse was fed to the treated armaglass bubble. Outside the dome, space spread like a vast, black velvet curtain, dusted with tiny diamonds.

  "The GRASER was a major component of the so-called Strategic Defense Initiative," said Sindri, a slight wheeze in his voice. "I refer to it as Thor's Hammer, throwing thunderbolts from the heavens to destroy the cowering sinners below."

  "Is it still functional?" Brigid inquired.

  "No. The dynamos drew their power from an array of electromagnets. Over the years, they became degaussed."

  Sindri put a hand over his mouth, swallowing a cough and waving them back to the cart. He hit the control switches, and the blister turned opaque again.

  Back inside the vehicle, they sat for a few moments, breathing deeply, replenishing their lungs. At length,

  Brigid asked, "Did the Russians suspect how their spacecraft were destroyed?"

  Sindri nodded. "I'm sure they did. They waited until January 20, 2001, to retaliate. Physical evidence here points to explosive decompression of the most strategic points of the station. It's my personal opinion that a swarm of Russian killer satellites attacked Parallax Red , severely decreasing its rotation cycle."

  "And the people here?" asked Kane. "What happened to them?"

  "The ones who didn't die simply fled. Earth certainly didn't offer much in the way of a sanctuary."

  "So they went to Mars?" Grant ventured.

  "Exactly. I know that much."

  "How many survivors?" inquired Brigid.

  "Enough," replied Sindri, a cold note of bitterness sounding in his voice.

  "Enough for what?"

  Sindri didn't respond for a long moment. When he did, it was in the form of a sneering chuckle. "Like the rats left behind here, enough to be fruitful and multiply."

  Chapter 18

  Sindri turned in his seat to face Kane. "Your casual mention of the molecular destabilizer surprised and intrigued me. How do you know of it?"

  "We found its handiwor
k in Redoubt Papa," he answered. "Three Mags and one of their vehicles unraveled."

  "Mags." A line of puzzlement appeared between Sindri's eyes. "What are Mags?"

  "Magistrates," Brigid told him.

  Sindri shook his head, indicating he didn't understand.

  Grant said, "Sec men."

  Sindri frowned slightly, then comprehension dawned in his eyes. "You mean security men, like police officers?"

  Kane nodded. "Yes."

  Sindri turned back around, starting the cart's motor. "Mags and sec men. Have all Terrans been trained to think in shorthand, or are you three special cases?"

  As he steered the cart back toward the ramp, he said, "Tell me about Magistrates."

  The three of them took turns, choosing their words carefully. Brigid limited herself to a historical background, describing how the Magistrates were the organizational descendants of a proposed global police force of the late twentieth century, one that had judicial, as well as law-enforcement powers.

  Grant and Kane supplied a few specifics about the Magistrate Divisions, soft-pedaling the patrilineal traditions and the oaths sworn to wring order out of postnukecaust chaos. They refrained from mentioning their own long associations with the Magistrates.

  "Nasty customers," Sindri commented. "But I suppose fascism is always an attractive alternative to the madness of freedom. Had these Mags of yours come to Redoubt Papa because my people accidentally set off an alarm of some sort?"

  "No," said Kane slowly. "We aren't really sure why they were there."

  "You're not sure." Sindri's voice was gently chiding.

  "No."

  "I'm sure of one thing, Mr. Kane. You're withholding information in violation of our bargain."

  Sindri suddenly wrenched the steering wheel, turning the cart down a side-branching corridor. It dead-ended inside a room that was not much larger than a niche. Within it, resting on a four-wheeled platform, was a totally unfamiliar machine.

  "There," said Sindri genially, "is your molecular destabilizer. Not quite as impressive as the GRASER, is it?"