Lost Gates (8 page)

“Are you telling us that he—” Mildred indicated the balding man “—has worked out how the mat-trans unit works?” She could barely keep the incredulity from her voice.

Sal coughed and looked bashful. Despite the incongruity of the situation, he was obviously not used to being praised by his baron. His voice, when he did speak, was somehow higher and more fluting than seemed right for his lugubrious appearance.

“I wouldn’t go as far as to say that,” he said mod
estly. “The principles on which the actual process works seem to be more than purely mechanical, and so are outside the realm of my particular skills. Science has gone back to the Dark Ages, and we have a lot of catching up to do. Despite that, I have to say that I’ve found that much of the base operates on mechanical principles that aren’t so far removed from those anyone would encounter on the outside. A little more complex and developed, perhaps, but despite that not really hard to assimilate. So it has to be said that it didn’t take me long, if I may be boastful, to work it out.”

Crabbe shook his head. “Sal watches too many of those other vids, the ones where guys with spectacles like yours—” he indicated J.B. “—talk shit about the world before skydark. Too many words. To make it simple, Sal can turn the power on and off, stop the fucker from working.”

“Okay,” Ryan admitted, “you hold all the weapons, and they’re all cocked and loaded. So what’s your plan?”

Crabbe smiled and nodded. “Glad you see it that way, Brian. We’ll do it like this. You people sit yourselves down over there, backs to the wall.” He indicated the far wall of the room, farthest from the mat-trans, and waited while they moved over and seated themselves.

Once they were in position, he beckoned McCready to enter. The sec chief turned to his rear and beckoned his men from the corridor. Two of them entered the control room with their blasters raised, while another two carried between them a tarp that bore all the weapons that had been taken from the companions in Hawknose.
They carried it between two desks and dumped it on the floor, stepping back as they raised their own blasters to cover the seated group.

“Now, we’ve got you, and we’ve got your weapons. Like I said to you last night, the way I’m gonna handle this is simple. Two of you will go off to one of the locations on the list while the others stay here, to make sure they return. The two going will be handed their weapons by a sec man. The rest of you will be covered by two more of my men. You so much as even look at any of us wrong, and their trigger fingers are gonna itch. Then when you get back, you hand over your blasters to my boys straight away. You might take some of us out if you get the urge, but be sure that the remainder of you will get shot to shit if that happens. Am I clear?”

Ryan looked at his companions. To an outsider, their expressions would have been unreadable. To Ryan, it was clear—they would play along for the sake of keeping themselves alive until such time as any one or two of them could find a way out for the group.

“You’re clear,” he said blandly to Crabbe.

“Good.” The baron nodded. “Now, like I said, I’m gonna send you out in pairs. Seems to me that it’d be a good idea to match Snowy with you, Brian, as I hear he don’t say much and might be the simple one.”

Ryan tried to suppress his amusement, both at how wrong the baron was and also at the anger he knew would be seething behind Jak’s calm visage.

“And I also figure that Millicent should go with Jock. I know he’s a crazie, for sure, and she’s the one who knows how to control him. I also figure that he ain’t
so great at the moment, so mebbe he needs her to help him out.”

Mildred figured that the baron wasn’t far off his assessment, no matter what Doc may think of it. His concussion from the night before hadn’t done anything to change the baron’s preconceived notion, and although babysitting the old buzzard wasn’t on her favorite list of things to do, she still felt that his head injury could make him the most vulnerable. As such, she was kind of relieved that she could keep an eye on him. But seeing the look of thunder on Doc’s face, she knew his thinking had stopped at the phrase “he’s a crazie, for sure.” The rest was lost to him.

“Which just leaves Kirsty and J.T. to pair up. The strongest pairing, by all accounts. The blaster expert and the mutie. Hellfire, I’m surprised they need the rest of you. So that’s how we do it. And you go first….”

He indicated Mildred and Doc, both of whom looked surprised, particularly given the terms with which he had addressed Doc.

“Yeah, thought that would surprise you,” he said. “My way of thinking is this—get the crazie into action first, see how the bastard holds up. ’Cause you got two bases each if you’re gonna clear my list, so best to see if some of you are gonna have to double or triple up.”

“My dear sir,” Doc intoned, mustering as much restraint and dignity as he could manage, particularly as all he really wanted to do right then was to rip off the baron’s head. “You need have no fear of my failing. Not for you, for I do not give a fig about your worthless and putrid opinions, but for my friends. For I have never let them down, and nor do I intend to start now.”

“Good, good.” Crabbe smiled. “I don’t give a shit why you do it, Jock, just as long as you do. Now you and Millicent point out which of that little stash is yours,” he continued, indicating the inventory on the tarp, “and then get yourselves over to the thing there.” He waved at the mat-trans unit. “And one of you can go and punch in the code that powers it…just one of you, and you’ll be covered.”

Krysty stood and moved to the comp, nervously scanning the keys and displays. She breathed an inner sigh of relief when she realized that it was the same as any she had seen. There were a few minor variations, as there always were, but the basics were those that she understood. As she stood there, Doc and Mildred stood slowly, always mindful of the blasters that were trained on them. Both hesitated.

“Move to the blasters slowly, then point yours out to my men,” Crabbe said in a low, clear voice. His demeanor had changed. Now that it had come to the business end of things, there was an iciness about him that defined why he had become a baron. While he observed, and his men covered them, Doc pointed out the LeMat and his lion’s-head swordstick. They were handed to him carefully, along with spare ordnance that was taken from J.B.’s capacious munitions bag. It amused Doc that they had defined his cane as being more than it seemed. The point wasn’t lost on Mildred as she indicated her Czech ZKR, and was handed it along with extra ammo.

“Now step over to the glass room,” Crabbe murmured. “Weird kind of glass, Brian. Mebbe you can tell me more about it.”

“Mebbe I can. Later, though, when this is done,” Ryan answered carefully.

Crabbe’s eyes shifted to him. “Sure…when this is done,” he replied in an ambivalent tone.

Then, switching his attention to his mechanic, he said firmly, “Power it up, Sal.”

The stooped, balding engineer nodded and strode rapidly to the far side of the control room. Only now, by following his passage, could Krysty see that the mechanic had put a circuit break into the power lines. It looked crude and primitive, but she marveled at the skill he had shown. It seemed that Crabbe was right about him.

Sal threw the switch and the previously dark and silent equipment hummed and pulsed into life. The monitors flickered, and Krysty could see information scrolling on the screens.

“Well?” Krysty said. “Where are the coordinates you want them sent to?”

Crabbe grinned and handed her the list. “We just gonna work from top to bottom, Kirsty. You send them to the first one.”

She nodded, scanning the paper. It was a list of six redoubts with their locations across the old United States, and the mat-trans codes that would enable her to send her friends to each one. Keying in the codes would be simple. There were no commands for return, as she had feared. It would be up to each of them to make sure they could hit the Last Destination button in time.

There was one other thing. It made her want to laugh, although it was too bitter even for that. She
knew, as they all did, that the disk sought by Crabbe wasn’t in any of these locations. The whole operation—their capture, confinement, and the charade of the mat-trans jumps—was ironic beyond words.

There was more than a series of locations and codes on the list. Crabbe couldn’t read them, but Krysty could. And it made her want to weep.

The list was a routine maintenance roster. The six locations were all within one old state. They held nothing of importance, but were maintenance and storage redoubts to service the central location. The redoubt in which they were now confined was less, even, than this. Its purpose was nothing more than to house a staff that would routinely jump to these redoubts and perform the most basic of maintenance and mopping up.

The whole of Crabbe’s fantasy was reality in reverse. All they would be performing in this pantomime was a simple janitorial rota from a time before the nukes came down.

She wished that there was some way that she could communicate this to Mildred and Doc. But as they sheathed their weapons and stood on the threshold of the mat-trans unit, there was nothing she could do or say. Her eyes locked with Mildred’s. The physician gave the briefest of nods: time to do it.

As Krysty watched—as they all watched—Mildred opened the armaglass door and stepped inside, followed by Doc. They stood on the threshold, looking out, as Krysty fed the coordinates into the console. She looked up and nodded.

With a sharp intake of breath, Mildred pulled the unit door until it clicked shut.

“This, then, is the moment of truth,” Doc said softly as the they heard the locking system slide home.

Mildred nodded. “Better get ourselves ready.”

Neither of them relished the jump, and knew only too well the rigors it would place on their bodies. As the air crackled around them, the sharpness of ozone filling their nostrils, they picked places to sit on the chamber floor. The disks that were inlaid into the floor of the chamber began to glow. Wispy columns of white mist, so frail and slight as to be almost invisible, seemed to grow from nowhere. The mist started to appear more solid as the moments passed and the air around them became charged. To just breathe seemed like a static shock to the lungs. Nausea rose in their chests, choking like bile. And then the blackness overwhelmed them.

S
O THAT’S WHAT
it looks like when that thing works,” Crabbe breathed in tones of awe as the room glowed momentarily, the light shining through the armaglass walls in an incandescent flash that had an afterglow on the retina.

“I must work out how that works,” Sal said softly. From the look on his lugubrious features, now suddenly alive, it was plain that the marvel of the machine had infused him, rather than the avarice of the baron.

Even McCready was stunned to silence by what had occurred. He looked down at the companions as they sat along the wall. Ryan could see that the sec man was viewing them in a different light.

“What does that feel like?” he asked quietly.

Ryan grinned slowly. “Like nothing on earth,” he replied. “Like every last little piece of you is being ripped to shreds, flung across the world and then glued back together again by a stickie with the shakes.”

“Sounds like crap,” McCready breathed.

“It is,” Ryan said simply. “But how else are you going to get around?”

M
ILDRED WOKE
with a start. Her head jolted forward, although her brain felt like it was still in the same spot. She felt her stomach heave, and she turned her head just in time to puke on the floor rather than over herself.

Unsteady, she pulled herself to her feet. The unit spun around her. She tried to shake her head to clear it, but it was too disorienting. She stopped, fearful of losing her balance. Reaching out to place a hand on the armaglass wall, she winced as her palm came into contact with the surface. It was almost pulsing with heat.

A low moan to one side distracted her. She turned to find Doc stretched out on his side, his hair splayed around his head, his limbs at angles that looked almost unnatural.

“Doc,” she croaked, her voice nothing more than a dried-up husk of its normal self.

The old man raised his head, supporting himself on his forearms before trying to sit up. His eyes were a lit
tle cloudy, but there was some light breaking through. He flashed her a crooked grin.

“I confess, I had forgotten quite how…shitty, I think is the best epithet…these jumps could be. I tried to stand a little too soon. Could you, if at all possible…?” he added, almost embarrassed.

Mildred slowly moved toward him, and gingerly assisted Doc into a kneeling position. Already, she was beginning to feel better as the worst excesses of the jump process began to recede.

Doc gave a short, barking cough of a laugh. “Some force to be reckoned with, eh, my dear Dr. Wyeth? Once is bad enough, but to make the return in just half an hour?” He shook his head. “The stresses must be—”

“Something we don’t need to think about, Doc,” she cut in. “We need to recce this place and see if we can get something together so that we can better that bastard Crabbe.”

Doc nodded, breathing heavily and deeply as he got to his feet. “I shall be fine in a few moments. The sooner we get out there, the better. Who knows what we’ll find.”

“Exactly. That’s why we need to be sharp,” Mildred said softly, drawing her ZKR and checking it. “Can’t do the usual routine when there’s only two of us. Have to wing it.”

“I shall follow your lead, dear lady,” Doc agreed as he examined the LeMat.

Mildred moved to the door of the mat-trans unit. “Cover me, Doc. I’ll hail you when it’s all clear.”

She didn’t bother to look back, knowing that Doc would assume the position without comment. The trust
between the companions was strong, bonded in the blood of themselves and others.

She hauled the door open as the automatic lock cleared. Using the portal as a shield, she scoped the interior of the antechamber and as much as she could of the control room beyond.

It was empty. And quiet. It had the air of a place that had been empty and undisturbed since before the nukecaust. There was a stillness about the atmosphere that bespoke of a long emptiness. They had spent too long being pitched into redoubts for Mildred not to recognize it. But there was more than that. The air itself had a staleness that could only come from being too long recycled without any other elements. If the redoubt had been breached, then there would be some fresher air coming into the atmosphere. But this had a flatness, almost producing a dull metallic taste at the back of the throat and nose.

Still, she would take this cautiously. Moving swiftly and keeping low, Mildred moved out from behind the cover of the door, seeking the cover of the banks of comps that lined the room. Her blaster was in her raised hand, her finger lightly resting on the trigger.

The only sound in the room was her own breathing, which was loud and almost overwhelming in her own ears—partly, she was sure, because she was still not operating at one hundred percent. But mostly because the redoubt was empty.

Checking the rest of the control room was easy. It was a small room, in what was probably a small redoubt. She had seen one like this before, a long while back. The purpose of such small redoubts was lost to
her. It didn’t matter much, except that in this case it decreased the chances of either of them finding much that they could use against Crabbe.

“Doc, it’s clear,” she called. Then added, as the old man emerged from the mat-trans unit, “It doesn’t look like this place has been visited since before skydark.”

Doc sniffed the air experimentally, then looked around. “Unusual layout, too. Our captor would be very disappointed.”

“Yeah, and we might be, too. Unless we find it was some kind of ordnance storehouse, that is.”

Doc smiled slowly. “Now I do not think we’re likely to get that lucky, do you?”

She shrugged. “Probably not, but we can hope, right? Let’s get this done. Best stay alert, just in case we’re wrong.”

“That goes without saying,” Doc assented.

Mildred keyed in the code that would open the door onto the corridor, keeping herself behind the frame as she surveyed the empty and desolate expanse of concrete beyond the chamber. Even by the austere standards of most old military bases, this was stark. The floor and ceiling were of rough concrete, and the lighting overhead was on red emergency, waiting for a repair that never came. It was as empty and chilled as the control room.

“Some systems failed, then,” Mildred commented as they began to move toward the next level.

“Could be why the air is stale,” Doc mused. “Perhaps it is as well we do not have that long to tarry.”

Almost certain now that the redoubt was empty, they moved at a greater speed. There were three levels to
this redoubt. A small dorm and washroom on the next level up revealed that only four people could be stationed here, and from the lack of anything personal it was almost certain that it had been empty when the nukes fell. On the same level were the medical facilities and the armory. Where the dorm had been open, the doors to these rooms remained stubbornly locked, even after entering the codes scratched on the lock keypads.

“Dammit, why aren’t they responding?” Mildred asked, frustrated.

“It could be that the light is not the only circuit to fail with age,” Doc mused. “It could be that a fail-safe has been triggered.”

“Just our luck,” Mildred said, punching the keypad to vent her anger.

“Let us try the next level to see what we can find,” Doc said hurriedly, consulting his wrist chron. “There is not much time.”

Still taking precautions, even though now sure that they were alone, they moved to the top level. They found the purpose of the redoubt. It housed large fuel reservoirs within a bay area designed for military wags—instruction plates and haz chem warnings on the walls confirmed this—and a small control room in which the cameras on the interior and exterior were monitored. They could see this through a bay window of reinforced Plexiglas, tinted against the lighting that should have suffused the bay—except that now the bay was a dull red, and the interior of the sec room, much like the mat-trans control room, was still lit by a fully working circuit. Within the room lay the panels that
controlled the entire redoubt. To gain access to these would have unlocked the armory and med room. Mildred had no doubt about that. She knew that to fire on it would be futile. The glass was bulletproof, without doubt. And there was nothing in the refueling bay to use against it. From the pristine look of the tanks, she doubted that the fully equipped redoubt had even seen use before the nukecaust. Certainly, the floor was unmarked by any vehicles that may have used it at some point in the past.

“Dammit,” she yelled, hammering the butt of the ZKR against the Plexiglas window. “So close…”

“But forever out of our reach,” Doc counseled, “and particularly during the time we have left.” He indicated his wrist chron. The thirty minutes grace they had was fast slipping away.

Mildred grimaced. “You’re right. We’d better be getting back.”

They moved toward the back of the refueling bay and the exit to the lower levels. Suddenly she stopped.

“What is it?” Doc asked.

She looked puzzled. “Can you hear that?” she asked. And then, when he failed to answer, but merely appeared quizzical, “That buzzing. It’s like insects.” She set her head to one side, banging her ear with the heel of her hand. “Like they’re inside, but…”

She looked up, the words falling silent on her lips. She couldn’t believe what she was seeing. A mosquito swirled in the air, almost dancing, then buzzed around her head, so close that she could feel the air disturbance. As she watched, it flew toward the exit, turned once more and was joined by another. A slow trickle
of them emerged from the red darkness, growing to a stream that began to swell in volume, both physically and aurally.

“Doc, where the hell did they come from?” she whispered.

But Doc only looked bemused.

The swarm was large and menacing now, moving with a perfect symmetry that allowed them to circle in flight with a race that was awesome to watch. Or at least, it would have been if not for the fact that their perfect circle was designed purely to bring their flight in line with an attack on Mildred.

She made to turn and run, figuring that if she could angle that run, she stood a chance of reaching the level exit before the swarm, and maybe shutting them off.

Doc…

She glanced over her shoulder as she ran. Doc was standing there, watching her, seemingly oblivious of the swarm as it passed him.

“Run!” she yelled, breath catching in her throat. The metallic tang to the air made it hard to breathe.

Doc tilted his head. Why, he wondered, was Mildred headed off at such speed? She was acting like a spooked horse, running blind with panic. And yet he couldn’t see anything that could account for that.

The bay was empty and silent.

Mildred reached the level exit and turned. In the red light it seemed as though the mosquitoes hung motionless for a moment, then dissolved into thin air. She panted heavily, gulping down air. The tang rasped at the back of her mouth, and made her sinuses feel as though they were being sandblasted.

“Doc, what…” she breathed.

The old man strode toward her, a look of concern discernible on his face when he came within the red illumination.

“I do not know, my dear Mildred. But I do know that I did not see whatever it was that you saw. That being the case, I suggest we make speed before such a thing happens again.”

Mildred shook her head as though to clear it, although the vision and the sound were now gone. “Yeah, I guess you’re right, Doc. What the hell happened there?”

Doc sniffed the air speculatively. “I am not sure, but I suspect that the quality of the air may have something to do with it. Have you noticed a change?”

Mildred gave him a wry grin. “You’re asking me that after what just happened?”

“A fair point,” Doc conceded as he hustled her into the corridor leading to the next level down. It struck him, as they moved, that it had been an incredibly stupid question for him to ask. So ridiculous, in fact, that it was laughable. He chuckled. The sound was low and mellifluous, rumbling deep in his chest and stomach, a ripple that ran through his whole body, making it hard for him to move. The band of muscle across his abdomen seemed to go into spasm, bending him over with the sudden pain. And yet, despite the agony, he felt compelled to laugh.

It came out of him now in gouts, overriding anything else he might feel. Even rational thought was hard, overwhelmed by the need to laugh and the pain
it was causing him. He couldn’t breathe, his ribs constricted by the spasm in his gut.

Mildred stopped and looked back. Doc was convulsed in fits of laughter. Literally—he looked like a man in the throes of a fit. As she watched, he doubled over and fell to the floor, twitching, laughing all the while, despite the pain that he had to be in as he spasmed. She hurried toward him, her mind racing. First the mosquitoes, now the uncontrollable laughter. What could be causing it? They knew that the redoubt was empty, so there was no human hand that could be behind the strange effects.

She realized what was happening. The air has tasted different to her shortly before she had seen the first mosquito. Doc had remarked on a similar sensation shortly before he had started to laugh.

They both knew that the air was stale and recycled. It hadn’t been breathed by humans for over a century. And the redoubt had been evacuated before skydark, as there was no sign of habitation. What if there had been a reason for that? Suppose that the redoubt had been more than just a refueling depot? Suppose it was home to chemical weapons? Nerve agents of some kind? Suppose there had been a leak of these agents, and they had infected the redoubt. Perhaps an evacuation had been ordered until the problem had been resolved.