Outlanders 37 Rim of the World, page 10
Farrell's fingers tapped the keyboard. "I don't think so. I'll replay the telemetry and see what I get."
Lakesh nodded. "Thank you, friend Farrell."
He turned toward a pudgy Eurasian woman sitting at a computer station. "Miss Nguyen, have you had any luck with the database search?"
She swiveled her chair around, a pair of eyeglasses pushed up on her forehead. "Almost too much," she said wryly. "The first authentic mention of Prester John was found in the Chronicle of Otto, Bishop of Freising, in 1145. Otto gives as his authority Hugo, Bishop of Gabala. The latter, by order of the Christian prince Raymond of Antioch, went in 1144 to Pope Eugene II, to report the grievous position of Jerusalem, and to induce the West to send another crusade—"
Lakesh raised a peremptory hand. "I'm less interested in the possible reality of Prester John than I am about this so-called collar of his and why it's so important to both the Waziri and Overlord Utu."
A bit defensively, Nguyen said, "I'm still researching."
Lakesh smiled encouragingly. "Carry on."
He returned his attention to the blood-colored icons on the biolink monitor, trying to tamp down a rising sense of dread. He told himself if the erratic readings were due to a glitch, the Cerberus people would find that out.
Most of the people who lived in the Cerberus redoubt acted in the capacity of support personnel regardless of their specialized skills. They worked rotating shifts, eight hours a day, seven days a week. For the most part, their work was the routine maintenance and monitoring of the installation's environmental systems, the satellite data feed and the security network.
However, everyone was given at least a superficial understanding of all the redoubt's systems so they could pinch-hit in times of emergency. Fortunately, such a time had never arrived. Their small numbers had been a source of constant worry to Lakesh, but with the arrival of the Moon-base personnel, there was a larger pool of talent pool from which to draw.
Grant and Kane were exempt from cross-training inasmuch as they served as the enforcement arm of Cerberus and undertook far and away the lion's share of the risks. On their downtime between missions they made sure all the ordnance in the armory was in good condition and occasionally tuned up the vehicles in the depot.
Brigid Baptiste, due to her eidetic memory, was the most exemplary member of the redoubt's permanent staff since she could step into any vacancy. However, her gifts were a two-edged sword as those self-same polymath skills made her an indispensable addition to away missions. Lakesh had long ago given up trying to convince her she was too valuable to risk her life on away missions. He couldn't order her to stay behind, even if he had been so inclined.
Over two years before, Kane, Brigid and Grant had staged a mini-coup d'état. Lakesh hadn't been completely unseated from his position of authority, but he was now answerable to a more democratic process. At first he bitterly resented what he construed as the usurping of his power by ingrates, but over a period of time he accepted sharing his command with the other Cerberus exiles. It was the only fair tactic to take, since the majority of them were exiles due to his covert actions.
Before the arrival of the Moon colony émigrés, almost every person in the redoubt had arrived as a convicted criminal—after Lakesh had set them up, framing them for crimes against their respective villes. He admitted it was a cruel, heartless plan, with a barely acceptable risk factor, but it was the only way to spirit them out of their villes, turn them against the barons and make them feel indebted to him.
This bit of explosive and potentially fatal knowledge had not been shared with the other exiles. Only Kane, Grant and Brigid were aware of it.
But deception and misdirection had been part and parcel of the war they had waged for the past three years against the tyranny of the nine barons.
The barons—the hybridized god-kings who had inherited the Earth from their human cousins whom they scorned as "apekin"—were by their way of thinking, representatives of the final phase of human development. They had referred to themselves as "new humans" and empowered themselves to control not only their immediate environment, but also the evolution of other species.
The barons considered themselves the pinnacle of evolutionary achievement, as high above ordinary hybrids who were bred as a servant class, as the hybrids were above mere humans.
Baron and hybrid alike had been products a long- range genetic engineering program, a blending of human DNA and that of a race known as Archons. This race had been involved with humanity for many millennia, once associated with angels, demons and finally aliens known as the Grays. In reality, the Archons were hybrids themselves, a mixture of three races—the extraterrestrial Annunaki and Tuatha de Danaan and the very terrestrial Homo sapiens.
After a long and destructive war between the Annunaki and the Tuatha de Danaan, the two races chose to unite and create one combined people, a hybrid custodial race initially known as the First Folk, then much later as the Archons.
The establishment of the Program of Unification came in the second century following the nukecaust. The stated goals of the nine barons were to carry out the edicts of the Archon Directorate, of unifying the world and reducing humanity to the level of an expendable minority, existing only to be exploited as slave labor and as providers of genetic material.
Despite how mad the entire tale of Archon-human hybrids seemed initially, the Cerberus exiles used it as a focus of their hatred toward the baronial oligarchy. Then they learned their hatred was not only pointless, but pretty much without basis. The Archon Directorate did not exist, except as a cover story created in the twentieth century and expanded with each succeeding generation. It was all a ruse, bits of truth mixed in with outrageous fiction. Only a single so-called Archon existed on Earth and that was Balam, who had been the Cerberus redoubt's resident prisoner for over three and a half years.
Balam claimed the Archon Directorate was an appellation created by the predark governments. Lakesh referred to it as the Oz Effect, wherein a single vulnerable entity created the illusion of being the representative of an all-powerful machine that controlled humanity.
Lakesh, Kane, Brigid, Grant and the Cerberus exiles declared war on the dark forces devoted to maintaining the yoke of slavery around the collective necks of humankind. It was a struggle not just for the physical survival of humanity, but for the human spirit, the soul of an entire race.
Over the past three years, they scored many victories, defeated many enemies and solved mysteries of the past that molded the present and affected the future.
More importantly, they began to rekindle of the spark of hope within the breasts of the disenfranchised fighting to survive in the Outlands.
Victory, if not within their grasp, at least had no longer seemed an unattainable dream. But with the transformation of the barons into the overlords, Lakesh wondered if the war was now over—or if it had ever actually been waged at all. He was beginning to fear that everything he and his friends had experienced and endured so far had only been minor skirmishes, a mere prologue to the true conflict yet to come.
Farrell pushed his chair back and said matter-of-factly, "According to the Vela line-scan, the radiation readings began at least a minute before the arrival of the scout ship. The latest telemetry shows that it didn't hang around, either."
He indicated a grid square with a forefinger. The tiny bead of light shot through several squares and disappeared. Lakesh released his breath in a pent-up sigh. He didn't know why he suddenly felt so relieved. As far as he knew, his three best friends were even now dead or dying of radiation exposure.
Cerberus didn't receive real-time telemetry. There was a five-minute lag between transmission, reception and download. All the activity displayed on the screen had occurred minutes before. If Brigid, Grant and Kane were suffering, there was nothing anyone could do to rescue them, at least in anything approximating a timely manner and he found that thought surprisingly painful.
Lakesh had tried desperately, despite his often deceptive machinations, to remain loyal to his friends, people
he now felt to be his family, regardless of the personal problems that had occurred among them over the years.
In spite of, or perhaps even because of their frequent disagreements and arguments, they always looked out for one another, and genuinely cared for each other's well-being. In some ways, the emotional bond he felt for the Cerberus exiles was stronger than that of blood kin. Of course, anyone to whom he was directly related was two centuries dead.
As far as Lakesh was concerned, the three people in the Sudan redoubt were his best friends, his colleagues, even his children, and the thought of losing them with nothing to mark their passing but computer-generated icons on a monitor screen nearly paralyzed him with dread.
"Hey!" exclaimed Mariah so suddenly that Lakesh jumped, startled. "The readings aren't spiking so high now. They're still at the extreme far end of the normal range, though."
Lakesh squinted at the screen, noting how the icons no longer glowed bright red, but the heart and pulse rates were still elevated. He guessed Kane, Grant and Brigid had been exerting themselves while in a high state of emotional agitation.
"Judging by their positions," he observed, "they've moved away from the epicenter of the radiation. That's something."
"True," Mariah agreed bleakly. "I just wish I knew if it was a good or bad something."
Lakesh suddenly realized how weak his knees felt. He turned toward the exit. "If they're still moving," he replied, "then I'll assume it's a good something...at least until we hear otherwise. Keep me posted, Dr. Falk."
Chapter 12
Lakesh and Domi walked through the armory together. He winced at the sudden stab of pain in his right knee as he bumped it against the corner of a misplaced crate filled with disassembled CAR-15 carbines. Even though he was primarily responsible for moving most of the ordnance into the redoubt over a period of many years, he was still surprised at the sheer magnitude of weapons of destruction that were housed in the Cerberus arsenal.
The big square room was quite likely the best stocked and outfitted armory in postnuke America. Glass-fronted cases held racks of automatic assault rifles. There were many makes and models of subguns, as well as dozens of semiautomatic pistols and revolvers, complete with holsters and belts.
There was also heavy assault weaponry like bazookas, tripod-mounted 20 mm cannons, mortars and rocket launchers. All the ordnance had been laid down in hermetically sealed Continuity of Government installations before the nukecaust. Protected from the ravages of the outraged environment, nearly every piece of munitions and hardware was as pristine as the day it was first manufactured.
Lakesh himself had put the arsenal together over several decades, envisioning it as the major supply depot for a rebel army. The army never materialized, at least not in the fashion Lakesh hoped it would. Therefore, Cerberus was blessed with a surplus of death- dealing equipment that would have turned the most militaristic overlord green with envy, or give the most pacifistic of them heart failure—if they indeed possessed hearts.
As he and Domi walked past the stands and racks, he favored his right leg. Domi noticed him doing so and asked, "Knee again?"
Lakesh nodded, knowing better than to lie to her about his physical condition. When he had first met Domi, his eyes had been covered by thick lenses, a hearing aid inserted in one ear, and physically he most resembled a hunched-over spindly old scarecrow who appeared to be fighting the grave for every hour he remained on the planet.
And then, not quite two years ago, Sam the Imperator had laid his hands on Lakesh and miraculously restored his youth. At the time, Sam claimed he had increased Lakesh's production of two antioxidant enzymes, catalase and super-oxide dismutase, and boosted his alkyglycerol level to the point where the aging process was for all intents and purposes reversed.
Sam had indeed accomplished all of that, but only in the past year or so did Lakesh learn the precise methodology—when he laid his hands on Lakesh, Sam had injected nano machines into his body. The nanites were programmed to recognize and destroy dangerous organ-
isms, whether they were bacteria, cancer cells or viruses. Sam's nanites performed selective destruction on the genes of DNA cells, removing the part that caused aging.
For a time, he had felt he was living in the dream world of all old men—restored youth, vitality and enhanced sex drive, as Domi could attest.
However, the nanites in his body became inert after a time. He and DeFore feared that without the influence of the nano machines, he would begin to age, but at an accelerated rate. But so far, that gloomy diagnosis had not come to pass. True, he was sporting new gray hairs and he noticed the return of old aches and pains, but so far, the aging process seemed normal. He was cautiously optimistic that he would not reprise the fate of the title character in The Picture of Dorian Gray and he hoped Domi shared that optimism.
It had been a great source of joy to Lakesh when he learned Domi reciprocated his feelings and had no inhibitions about expressing them, regardless of the bitterness she still harbored over her unrequited love for Grant. In any event, he had broken a fifty-year streak of celibacy with her and they repeated the actions of that first delirious night whenever the opportunity arose.
In the beginning, he had felt compelled to keep his relationship with Domi a secret, and he wasn't sure why. At first he tried to convince himself it was concern over raising Grant's ire, but he knew that was simply a feeble excuse. With Grant's heart more or less pledged to Shizuka, the big man was too preoccupied with his attempts to make a new life with her to give the more covert—and intimate—activities among the redoubt personnel more than cursory attention.
When Domi accused him of being ashamed of their relationship, he had suddenly realized the true reasons he had kept their affair a secret—he feared she would be swept up in the same karmic backlash that he had long feared would shatter him. When the punishment had been averted, due he felt to Domi's devotion to him, he had made a rather noisy fanfare of announcing their relationship to one and all. Much to his chagrin, most of the people in the redoubt already knew about it. Or if they hadn't, they could not have cared less—Grant included, or so it seemed.
The two people passed through the armory and into the adjacent workroom. Rows of drafting tables with T-squares hanging from them lined one wall. Only a few lights were on, but they saw Brewster Philboyd perched on a stool at a long, low trestle table at the far end of the room. He was bent over a gooseneck magnifying lamp, and they heard the muted click and clack of metal against metal. The cyberspider lay on its back, the underside of its thorax peeled open. Mechanical parts and tools were scattered all around it.
Resting atop a pedestal next to him, enclosed within a locked transparent Lucite box, was an object resembling a very squat, broad-based pyramid made of smooth, dully gleaming metal. Barely one foot in width, the height of the interphaser did not exceed twelve inches.
The interphaser had evolved from Project Cerberus.
Three years before, Lakesh had constructed a small device on the same scientific principle as the mat-trans gateways, a portable quantum interphase inducer designed to interact with naturally occurring hyper-dimensional vortices.
The interphaser opened dimensional rifts much like the gateways, but instead of the rifts being pathways through linear space, Lakesh had envisioned them as a method to travel through the gaps in normal space-time.
The first version of the interphaser had not functioned according to its design, and was lost on its first mission. Much later, a situation arose that necessitated the construction of a second, improved model.
During the investigation of the Operation Chronos installation on Thunder Isle, a special encoded computer program named Parallax Points was discovered. Lakesh learned that the Parallax Points program was actually a map, a geodetic index, of all the vortex points on the planet. This discovery inspired Lakesh to rebuild the interphaser, even though decrypting the program was laborious and time-consuming. Each newly discovered set of coordinates was fed into the interphaser's targeting computer.
With the new data, the interphaser became more than a miniaturized version of a gateway unit, even though it employed much of the same hardware and operating principles. The mat-trans gateways functioned by tapping into the quantum stream, the invisible pathways that crisscrossed outside of perceived physical space and terminated in wormholes.
The interphaser interacted with the energy within a naturally occurring vortex and caused a temporary overlapping of two dimensions. The vortex then became an intersection point, a discontinuous quantum jump, beyond relativistic space-time. Evidence indicated there were many vortex nodes, centers of intense energy, located in the same proximity on each of the planets of the solar system, and those points correlated to vortex centers on Earth. The power points of the planet, places that naturally generated specific types of energy, possessed both positive and projective frequencies, and others were negative and receptive.
Once the interphaser was put into use, the Cerberus redoubt reverted to its original purpose—not a sanctuary for exiles, or the headquarters of a resistance movement against the tyranny of the barons, but a facility dedicated to unfathoming the eternal mysteries of space and time. Interphaser Version 2.0 had been lost during a mission to Mars to unlock a few of those eternal mysteries and Version 2.5 had been completed less than a year before, due mainly to the efforts of Philboyd and Brigid Baptiste.
However, no Parallax Points or mat-trans gateways could be located in the vicinity of the Usumbur Tract or even the Sudan, so Brigid, Kane, DeFore and Grant had flown to their destinations in the Trans-atmospheric Vehicles known as Mantas.
Reaching the trestle table, Domi inserted her head between the lamp's magnifying lens and the scattering of electronic components and machine parts. "Learned anything?"
