Sunchild

Chapter Two

Both Ryan and Krysty awoke the next day refreshed. Ryan felt easier, and on examining his wrist chron found that they had slept for almost twenty-four hours.

After he and Krysty had risen and dressed, they ventured out of the dorm. The unearthly quiet that always accompanied a deserted redoubt was broken by the distant and muffled sounds of talk and the clatter of dishes. Exchanging puzzled and amused glances, they followed the sounds until they became more audible.

“…don’t give shit. Not eating slop when self-heats there.”

“C’mon, Jak. Doc’s done his best, and it would make more sense to keep the self-heats and take them with us.” Mildred’s exasperation was showing through in her edgy tone.

“Yeah, but this crap’ll kill us before we get out of the main door, so then we won’t need self-heats anyway, will we?” There was a wry edge to Dean’s tone that suggested he was enjoying helping Jak to exasperate the more sensible Dr. Wyeth.

Who was looking for backup. “John, don’t just sit there and say nothing. Help me out on this one.”

“Leave me out of this, Millie,” came J.B.’s laconic tones. “This crap isn’t really edible, but then I don’t like self-heats much, either.”

Ryan and Krysty entered what was obviously the redoubt’s kitchen to find their companions arguing at a table, with the exception of Doc, who was standing over a pan that bubbled busily on a hot plate. He greeted them with a sheepish grin.

“I fear I may be the cause of some discontent,” he began. “Upon finding a supply of self-heats, but also some foodstuffs that had been dried and preserved, I reasoned that it would be sensible to try to make a meal from the latter, thus preserving the self-heats for our travels. However, I must confess that my attempts at the culinary arts have not been altogether—shall we say—successful.”

Krysty wrinkled her nose at the stale stench emanating from the pan, then glanced at Ryan. He, too, had noticed the smell. Doc noted their silent exchange.

“Precisely,” he replied to their unspoken question. “The desiccated foodstuffs and—well, what they were I can only assume—seem to be as stale as the spices with which I have endeavored to enliven them. Also, the consistency leaves a lot to be desired.”

“It’s not going to kill us,” Mildred argued. “It’ll still be nutritious, and that’s the main thing. We can’t waste self-heats.”

Ryan looked from Mildred to Doc. The old man shrugged once more, and smiled, revealing his eerily perfect teeth.

“I suspect I know exactly what you’re thinking,” he stated. “If I had merely dismissed the dried foodstuffs as so much dross, and merely pointed out the discovery of the self-heats, then all this argument could have been avoided.”

Ryan laughed. It was the first time for ages that he had felt able. “Don’t worry about it, Doc. Guess you’re right, but it’s nice to just be somewhere for a while where we have the time to argue about nothing.”

Doc grinned, his gleaming white teeth in his tightly drawn and lined face giving him the appearance of a skeletal jester. He said no more, but tossed the one-eyed warrior a self-heat, which Ryan opened.

“Let’s just enjoy it for now,” Ryan added, opening the container and setting off the process by which the contents were heated.

Doc distributed some more of the containers, and even Mildred conceded that, as poor as some self-heats could be in terms of taste, they were still superior to the bizarre hotchpotch, still bubbling gently if a little malevolently, Doc had thrown together on the hot plate.

They ate in silence, none of them realizing until that moment how hungry they were, and how tired they had to have been to sleep without even thinking about food prior to this.

When they had finished, Jak placed his container on the cluttered table and belched. “Air getting bad,” he muttered.

“And you’re not helping,” Dean pointed out.

“Seriously, though, Jak has a point,” Mildred added. “We’re going to have to think about leaving. The air-conditioning plant won’t be able to cope with us for much longer, and the air’s just going to get worse.”

“Okay, we’ll find the armory, check it out, then head on out,” Ryan said decisively. “Let’s check ourselves first, though—don’t want to be too relaxed.”

The group ran through their weapons and supplies. As well as his leaf-bladed throwing knives, Jak also carried a .357 Magnum Colt Python with a six-inch barrel. It was, as always, in immaculate condition. Dean checked his Browning Hi-Power, Mildred her Czech ZKR 551 .38-caliber target revolver, which she favored because it fitted in with her predark shooting skills that had seen her win an Olympic silver medal.

Doc’s favored blaster was a LeMat double-barrel percussion pistol, usually firing two different kinds of shot. It was effective as a scattergun at longer ranges, and deadly in close quarters. A .38-caliber Smith & Wesson Model 640 was Krysty’s preferred blaster, and this was also checked. Ryan shouldered his Steyr SSG-70 rifle, and inspected his SIG-Sauer handblaster.

Mildred and Krysty made sure that they had gathered the remains of the self-heats and tucked them into their backpacks.

They were ready, if still relaxed. Now to check out the armory.

As with everything else in the redoubt, it was ridiculously easy to find. And there was no sec lock on the door, which was easily opened.

“Dark night,” J.B. growled. “I knew it was too damned good to be true.”

The Armorer and Ryan walked into the room that had once housed the armory. It was empty, apart from one open crate, which contained several rifles.

“Something’s better than nothing,” Ryan commented, removing one of the rifles from the crate and handing it to J.B.

“Guess I was mebbe expecting too much,” J.B. replied, pushing his fedora back from his forehead and taking the rifle with his other hand. “But what’s this?”

“I was kind of hoping you could tell me that, partner,” the one-eyed warrior replied as he, too, examined one of the rifles.

They were of a fairly conventional shape, although the lines of the barrel and stock seemed to almost blur as they molded into one. The blaster was of some alloy with which they were both unfamiliar, and had a large, round red sight on the top, which was non-detachable. There was a crystal in a cage at the end of the barrel, instead of an opening, and there was no way of inserting ammo.

“You thinking what I’m thinking?” Ryan questioned.

J.B. put the rifle down and carefully wiped his spectacles. “Yep, guess so. Mebbe some kind of laser tech. Who knows how that kind of shit works? Never come across enough of it to figure that out. So if these were left here because they’re defective…”

“Then we leave them because they’re just deadweight to us.”

The Armorer nodded. “One way to find out.”

Ryan nodded agreement. Making sure that the armory was clear apart from themselves, they tried each rifle, toying with the settings. None would fire; most wouldn’t even fire up the digital displays that came up in the red sight. Those that did had low power readings and error messages that made little sense without a trained tech or a manual.

J.B. threw the last one to the floor in disgust—a disgust measured by his treatment of something he would usually cherish.

“Knew it was too good,” he repeated.

“Guess we better just watch that it’s as bad as it gets,” Ryan said quietly.

He and J.B. returned to the others. There was no need to explain, as they had gathered the results.

“So we head out?” Mildred asked.

Ryan assented. “Recce on the way to see if we can pick up anything of interest.”

They began to walk the corridors that led toward the elevators, emergency stairwells and upward ramps that would take them to the surface. The corridors were dingy, with just enough light to see in front, but not enough to stop the corner of vision from being obscured by shadow. They passed through several sec doors that were permanently open.

“Hey, has anyone noticed something weird?” Dean asked suddenly as they passed through yet another open door.

“How would you define weird?” Doc queried.

“Well, because all these doors are open I wouldn’t swear to it being the same all the way through, but I’ve looked at the last couple of sec panels, and they haven’t got numbers scratched on them.”

Ryan frowned. It was something and nothing. Predark sec men sometimes scratched the sec-code numbers onto the scratch plates on the reverse side of the sec door, in case they forgot the number sequence.

“So you think what?” he asked his son.

Dean shrugged. “Don’t know. Guess mebbe this wasn’t a regular military place. Whoever was stationed here, was here all the time, and wasn’t likely to forget.”

“And why all open?” Jak added. “Not usual.”

Ryan shook his head. “No, this isn’t an ordinary redoubt. What—”

He looked round sharply, guided by an instinct that told him Krysty had stopped behind him. She was staring at a closed door, and the hair around her nape had formed tendrils that hugged her neck.

“Mebbe we’ll find an answer in there,” she said. “It feels bad, but not like danger…just residual bad feeling.”

“If it can’t hurt us,” J.B. remarked, throwing a glance at Ryan. The one-eyed warrior gestured, and the Armorer stepped forward to the door. It had a computerized lock with a blank digital display, and when he tried the handle underneath, the door failed to yield.

With a shrug, he took a small piece of plas-ex from one of his pockets, added a detonator fuse and set it. Waiting until the others took cover, he activated the fuse and hurriedly stepped back himself.

The lock and display on the door was of glass and a soft metal, and the small blob of plas-ex was enough explosive to make the metal buckle and yield. Waiting for the friction-heated metal to cool for a few seconds, the Armorer tried the door once more, and it swung open. The smell of the explosion lingered in the poor air, catching at their throats.

Personal artifacts were strewed across the desk and the carpet, as though someone had wrecked the room in a rage. A swivel chair lay overturned on the door side of the desk, and the remains of a body were visible in the hollow beneath the desk.

Mildred moved around to get a better view. The body was dressed in a black T-shirt and combat pants, with scuffed boots. It looked paramilitary rather than military to her, reminding the woman of the punks and metalheads from her own predark days who had become obsessed with apocalyptic and militaristic imagery. Strands of hair still clung to the skull. The skeleton still clutched a gray service-issue Colt .45 with a customized mother-of-pearl pistol grip. The cause of death was obvious: part of the skull was lying across the room, splintered by the bullet that had passed through the right temple and out somewhere above the left ear.

Ryan noticed a poster on the wall. It was faded and crumbling, and over a dreamlike image were written, in gothic lettering, the words “Grateful Dead.”

“Guess he was,” Ryan said grimly, indicating the poster.

The comp terminal on the long-dead man’s desk would give them no clues. It had been thoroughly trashed and was beyond repair, with the keyboard dismembered and the screen smashed. There were only a few pieces of paper scattered about. They were fragile with age and crumbled when Dean or Ryan bent to pick them up. The fragments that remained were so faded with scrawled ink that they were unreadable.

“It seems to me that we are in the hands of some apocalyptic cult or other,” Doc commented mildly, squinting to read several posters that were still hanging—just—from the walls. They were faded, and the light was poor, but there was enough for him to see that they all had biblical imagery or photographs of dead, dying and starving people. The slogans beneath spoke of humankind—what was left—rising like a phoenix from the ashes of mass destruction.

“Creeps knew what coming,” Jak commented.

“I don’t think this was anything to do with the military,” Mildred said, looking around her. “Can you imagine predark soldiers having these weird posters?” She gestured at the walls, and then looked at her companions. “No, I don’t suppose you’d know, really,” she added lamely, suddenly feeling the weight of her years.

Doc broke the silence. “From my somewhat limited knowledge, I would have to agree. I suspect this truly is some kind of nonmilitary base. In which case, it may be worth our searching for clues, as we may find information—if not weapons—that can be used to our advantage.”

J.B. acknowledged Doc’s point. “Okay, but where do we look?”

“There’s as good a place as any,” Krysty said, pointing to a poster.

Ryan didn’t question her instinct. He simply tore down the poster, which crumbled at his touch, to reveal a small wall safe hidden behind. Set into the wall, it had a simple tumbler lock.

“Better be something here—can’t keep wasting this,” J.B. grumbled as he repeated his previous procedure with an even smaller blob of plas-ex.

The explosion sounded louder in the enclosed space as they retreated to outside the door. When the plaster dust had settled, Ryan could see that the door of the safe was hanging loosely from its hinges, and that the plaster surrounding had powdered in the blast. Advancing to the safe, Ryan used the long barrel of the Steyr to maneuver the door open, mindful of any booby traps that may not have been knocked out by the initial blast.

The door creaked and fell off the hinge. Peering inside, Ryan could see nothing but a small, spiral-bound notebook. Taking it out gingerly, he could feel that the pages weren’t of paper, but rather of some kind of plastic that was as thin as paper.

He put the book on the desk and opened it. The pages were typed, which made it easier to read.

“What does it say, lover?” Krysty asked, peering over his shoulder.

“Makes no sense to me,” Ryan said simply, shaking his head. “I can see the words, but what they’re supposed to mean…”

“Let me see.” Mildred took the book from him and began to read.

Obviously, it made some kind of sense to her, as she began to flick through the pages, referring back and forth, and nodding to herself from time to time.

“Fireblast!” Ryan exclaimed after a few minutes, the tension getting to him. “Are you just going to stand there until we all get old and die, or are you going to tell us what it says?”

Mildred gave Ryan a withering look. “The psycho who wrote this was clever, but mad. It kind of makes sense, but I need to read it through to get the gist. So lay off for a minute, eh?”

Ryan grinned in apology. Mildred grinned back and returned to the text.

Finally, she put the book down.

“Oh, boy, you’re going to love this,” she began. “These guys had nothing to do directly with the U.S. military, which means that this redoubt isn’t, strictly speaking, the same as the others we’ve come across. But—and this is a big but—they were part of a secret order that was partly funded by some black operations within the U.S. government.”

“Who gives shit now?” Jak interrupted.

“Yeah, that bit may all be ancient history, but it does explain why this is different from other redoubts. It was built using official plans and official money that had been siphoned off from official budgets. Strange, really, but I used to kind of think back in the old days that people who talked about that sort of thing happening were all nuts. Guess I was wrong and they were right, for all the good it did them.”

“Nice story, but still no nearer to telling me why it’s so important now,” J.B. mused.

“Ah, I think I may have an idea,” Doc interrupted. “Would I be right in assuming that some of that old whitecoat paranoia was therefore justified, and that the men behind this redoubt—and doubtless others like it—were more powerful than even their paymasters would suppose? After all, those laser rifles…”

He paused, waiting for the import of this to sink in. J.B. gestured. “Okay, go on, Millie.”

“Why, thank you, John,” the doctor answered with a sardonic edge to her voice. “According to this journal, this order, the Illuminated Ones, was in possession of knowledge that foretold the end of the world, and were hoodwinking the U.S. government. All the while they were supposed to be developing new tech and providing an extra bolt-hole for some government higher-ups, they were working on their main plan, which was to find the secret world at the center of the earth.”

“Crazies,” Jak spit, turning away.

Doc allowed himself a chuckle. “Of course, it does all fit, does it not, my dear Dr. Wyeth? Even when I was a young man, there were secret societies devoted to the accumulation of arcane knowledge, power and wealth, led by men who believed themselves better, and somehow ‘illuminated’ by secret truths. And men talked about secret entrances to hidden worlds at the center of the earth, and of gateways to enormous knowledge and wealth that lay to the north—”

“Like Trader’s stories and legends?” Ryan asked. “Could that be all they were?”

“Stupes like him could make it so by going there, Dad,” Dean answered, gesturing to the plaster-dusted skeleton on the carpet.

“It’s a fair point, lover,” Krysty added.

Ryan allowed himself a smile, and was about to answer when Mildred cut him short.

“There’s a couple of things I haven’t mentioned yet. Important things.”

“And they are?”

“Firstly, this journal ends about fifty years after skydark. This guy decided to stay behind when some made the jump to another gateway.”

“What? Then there may be—”

“Hang on, Ryan, I haven’t finished yet. Some made a jump, and others decided to move up top. He couldn’t face the change, so—” she let the comment hang, with just a glance at the skeleton “—so I guess there may be a colony waiting for us up top.”

The one-eyed warrior shrugged. “It’s possible, sure. But this also means that they must have had another base, better equipped, right? They wouldn’t just jump at random. Not if they’d been here that long.”

“That’s a reasonable assumption,” Mildred agreed. “So maybe we should make sure we can get back in here when we’ve taken a look outside, see all we can see.”

Krysty nodded her agreement, although the way her hair was moving closely around her neck and shoulders suggested a deep-seated unease at developments. “Mebbe their jump was to the mythical base in the north—the promised lands.”

“That is a lot of supposition, and it’s possibly joining dots to form an abstract picture,” Doc mused, “but it’ll do for fitting the pieces together until something better comes along.”

But J.B. had spotted the hesitancy in Mildred’s voice. “Why do we need to make sure we leave a way back in? If the main door is in as good condition as the rest of the redoubt…”

“That’s the problem, John. These crazies were so keen on their center-of-the-earth theory that they made their redoubts deeper than any we’ve ever come across. Deep enough to protect it from quakes nearer the surface that have affected other redoubts. That’s why this is in good repair still. But…”

“But it means it’s a whole lot longer of a way up, and there’s no knowing what we may find, right?” Ryan fixed his steely blue eye on Mildred.

“Right. And if the way is blocked, then we’ve got big trouble. We either risk a quick jump and God knows where this redoubt is linked to, or we stay here and gradually suffocate as the air gets poorer.”

“Shit choice,” Ryan said simply. “Guess we’ll just have to find a way out.”

Chapter Three

The Armorer was restless as they made their way through the darkened corridors of the redoubt toward the elevator shafts and stairwells that led to the surface.

“If there are still survivors up there, then they may be able to tell us about this so-called promised land…if they don’t try to chill us first,” he added with a wry inevitability.

“Erewhon,” Mildred muttered.

J.B. gave her a questioning look.

“Sorry, John,” she answered him. “It’s just the name that journal gave it.”

“An apt name,” Doc interjected dreamily. “A source of much pride to an ancient philosopher who should have known better. Would Samuel Butler smile at his Erewhon Eden being used for something that may be so apt?”

Dean shot Doc a quizzical stare. “What does all that mean?”

Doc smiled. “Erewhon, nowhere…just change a few letters. It could all be so apt.”

They came out into a loading bay about forty feet square and ill lit by the one remaining, flickering light. It was dustier than the rest of the corridors, and the temperature dropped a few degrees in the wide concrete expanse.

Directly in front of them were two large elevator bays, with the tempered-steel alloy doors closed. Small gatherings of dirt and dust on the floor swirled slightly in a faint draft, and collected at the point where the supposedly airtight door met. It didn’t encourage a belief in the working condition of the elevators.

“Could be that just the seals have broken down,” Ryan muttered, hunkering down to feel the dirt, and to judge the draft.

Krysty joined him. “Not good,” she whispered, almost to herself. “This isn’t just surface dirt—this is rock dust.”

Ryan stood, noting that his own sense of unease was mirrored in the way Krysty’s hair had tightened to her skull. The one-eyed warrior examined the comp panels that had controlled the elevator. They were dead, blank screens failing to register any signs of life no matter how many buttons he pressed.

“Guess it’s the stairs and maintenance shafts, then,” J.B. drawled, watching Ryan. “Good exercise.”

Ryan smiled. “Guess so. Gonna be a hell of a climb, though.”

“Why?” Jak asked.

“These people were obsessed with getting deep into the earth, and this is much deeper than the usual redoubt. So we’re going to have to climb farther,” Mildred explained.

“So the sooner we get started the better, I guess,” Dean said, looking around to find the access door to the emergency stairwells that were used to access a redoubt’s maintenance ducts.

The unassuming entrance was hidden in the dark shadows of the bay, and wasn’t on the centralized comp mainframe for the redoubt. This had been a measure to insure that parts of the redoubt could be accessed by engineers in cases where the mainframe had gone haywire and caused a malfunction that jammed the sec doors or elevators. So each door accessing the shafts on every level was notable only for having no sec lock, but a large lever lock.