Outlanders 14 Hell Rising, page 2
"Does it feel like metal, Captain? Like any kind of ore you're familiar with?"
Quayle opened his hand, caressing the sphere with his thumb. Almost hesitantly, he answered. "It does not. It feels almost..." He trailed off, groping for a description.
"Organic?" Morrigan supplied.
He considered the word for a moment, his lips creasing in a frown. "Yes. Organic. Like something alive."
She nodded toward the unshuttered window through which sunlight shafted. "Expose it to the sun, Captain."
Quayle eyed her quizzically, then did as she suggested, holding his hand in the sunbeam, the small sphere nestled in the hollow of his palm absently, he noted how the surface of the orb did not glint in the light. After a few seconds, he demanded harshly, "Now what?"
"Wait."
"Wait for how—"
The rest of Quayle's words blurred into a hoarse cry of pain and astonishment. A searing heat exploded in his hand, scorching its way up his forearm. He heard a sizzle, as of raw meat being thrown onto a red-hot grill.
He jerked, flinging the little ball away from him. It struck the floor and rolled a few feet. Blinking back the tears of pain, he saw how a faint shimmer surrounded the orb, like the haze produced by heat waves. As the orb rolled, it left a thin black soot streak on the floor, wisps of smoke rising in its wake.
Glancing down at his hand, he grimaced at the blister forming on the palm, an angry red welt bright against the pale flesh.
"You Celtic bitch," he growled, but the insult sounded distracted, like an afterthought. "So the myths are true, then. The orichalcum is the firestone of legend."
Morrigan nodded sagely. "A vast source of energy. Imagine what you can do with a shipload of it. That's worth a few lives, isn't it?"
Quayle tried to keep a smile from crossing his face. Gruffly, he said, "Finding that shipload is the trick, isn't it?"
Morrigan shrugged. "It isn't a trick, Captain. It's an undertaking."
Quayle stepped toward the bead of orichalcum on the floor, but he didn't bend down to touch it or even nudge it with his foot. It no longer shimmered. Softly, he said, "Everything turns out to be a trick in the end, Miss Morrigan."
"Yes," she said unemotionally. "As the citizens of Atlantis found out to their sorrow."
Chapter 2
New Schwabenland, Antarctica
On the register of surprises, one of the most shocking was to have solid ground abruptly collapse from underfoot.
Grant had undergone many shocking experiences, but he couldn't repress a cry of fright as the crusted snow gave way beneath him. Bellowing, he fanned his arms as he plummeted downward, blinded by the mini-avalanche surrounding his body. Turning in the air, he tried to grab the ice-coated walls of the crevasse. His gloved fingers failed to secure a hold.
He hit the bottom flat-footed, the twin impacts jacking both knees up into his lower belly. Over the explosion of violently expelled air, he heard the faint chime of metal beneath his boots.
Falling over onto his left side, Grant tried to drag the painfully cold air into his emptied lungs. Snow covered the lenses of his goggles so he saw nothing but gray-white. Over his own gasps and the sifting rustle of snow swirling down around him, he heard Kane's voice, calling his name.
Grant forced himself to his elbows, breath rasping in and out of his straining lungs, the subzero air abrading the moist tissues of his sinuses and throat. He gestured up and behind him, not sure if Kane, Brigid Baptiste and Cotta could see him in the gloom at the bottom of the hole. He realized he had strolled over a crevasse bridged only by snow and hoarfrost, and he cursed himself for not allowing Kane to take the point as he usually did.
Clearing his goggles with a swipe of a mittened hand, Grant craned his neck up and around and saw the heads and shoulders of his companions outlined against the blue sky. At least he assumed they were his companions—it was hard to tell since they wore woolen, face-concealing balaclavas, goggles and hooded thermal suits as he did. He gauged the distance to them at a little less than twenty feet.
In a strangulated wheeze, he called up, "I think I found the front door."
"Good," Kane shouted down. "Guess you've earned your bread for the week."
The vibration of his voice echoing back and forth against the sides of the crevasse caused more snow to break loose and shower down. Grant sputtered, averting his face.
He whispered fiercely, "Knock it off! You trying to bury me alive?"
Grant's characteristic lion like rumble couldn't easily be pitched to a whisper, and his voice triggered more sifting rivulets.
"If that happens," Kane replied in a softer tone, "at least you'd keep for a long time in this place."
Heaving himself to his feet, Grant silently endured the twinge from his right leg. A few months previously, the tibia and talus bones had been fractured and still gave him intermittent pain, particularly in cold weather. And there couldn't be any colder weather than on the vast ice continent at the bottom of the world. He knew the South Polar region could support less life than even the most desolate of rad-scoured hellzones in what used to be America.
Brushing away crusts of snow clinging to his one- piece coverall, Grant swiftly examined his surroundings. Despite the garment's thick, quilted padding and battery-powered heat filaments in the lining, the subzero cold still penetrated. It bit at his nostrils, his lips, his eyes, anywhere it could find moisture.
He kicked at the snow underfoot and uncovered a patch of steel plate. "This is definitely the place."
Grant surveyed the crevasse walls and saw, half- embedded in the ice, horizontal strips of dark metal rising toward the opening. Moving closer, he saw the rungs of a steel ladder and he grunted in disgust.
"What have you found?" Brigid called down.
"A ladder," he replied sourly. "Wish I'd known."
"Our intel stated the installation was underground," she reminded him.
Grant didn't respond. Removing a small pickax from his backpack, he began chipping away at two centuries of Antarctic ice from the rungs, clearing just enough to provide toe and finger holds. The hollow space beneath the canopy of snow filled with a steady clang-clang. He climbed up as he worked. He wasn't too concerned about the vibrations causing the snow on the walls to collapse now that he knew it was only a covering for metal bulkheads.
After he hacked a narrow gouge between all the rungs and the wall to which they were bolted, Brigid, Cotta and Kane descended.
"A little warmer down here," Cotta observed.
"It just feels that way because we're out of the wind," replied Brigid. "It's still seventy below."
Lifting his goggles, Kane winced as the air stabbed his gray-blue eyes. "The sec door has got to be here somewhere."
From a zippered pocket in his coverall, he removed a Nighthawk micro light and clicked it on. He cast around the amber-hued, 5,000 candlepower mini beam, the halo of illumination sliding over the walls. He swept it back and forth. For an instant, something very small and a very dim green winked beneath the sheathing of ice. "There."
Taking the pickax from Grant, Brigid stepped to where Kane held the Nighthawk's beam steady. Carefully, she tapped and scraped away the frost, revealing a liquid crystal display panel glowing green above a keypad.
"Here we are," she announced.
"Why would the gateway be placed above the actual entrance to the installation?" Cotta's voice trembled slightly, either from fear or cold. He was still shaken by his recent trip through a mat-trans unit. Brigid, Grant and Kane sympathized with his reaction.
Cotta generally was quick-witted and fairly phlegmatic, but it was apparent he was scared half to death. Grant in particular couldn't criticize him for this. No human being, no matter how thoroughly briefed in advance, could be expected to remain unflappable on a hyper-dimensional trip through the quantum Interphase mat-trans inducer, colloquially known as a "gateway."
By stepping into the armaglass-enclosed chamber, one second a person was there, surrounded by glowing mist, and in the next second, the universe seemed to cave in. Perceptions changed, time jumped and for a heart-stopping instant, the cosmos seemed to stand still. Then the traveler was wherever the gateway had been programmed to materialize him or her. Whatever else, a trip through the gateway was unsettling to the mind, to the nerves and to the soul itself, as Grant had reasons to know.
By Cotta's view, less than an hour ago he had been in the Cerberus redoubt in Montana. Now he was inside the ass of the Earth itself, freezing and terrified and no doubt cursing himself for ever volunteering to be part of the jump team.
The gateway chamber into which the four of them had materialized didn't conform to the standard specs that Grant, Brigid and Kane had come to expect. It was very small, the walls not made of tinted armaglass shielding but rather of plates of sheet metal lined with lead foil. The door of the chamber was different, too, with a transparent panel set in its top half and a central wheel to open and seal it.
Once leaving the chamber, they saw that it was not placed on an elevated platform, and it opened directly into a small control center, barely ten feet across. There was no adjacent recovery anteroom beyond. A single, simplified master control console ran the length of one wall, and they recognized a few of the basic command panels from the Cerberus installation. Many of the indicator lights were dark. Beneath the concrete floor they heard the rhythmic throb of generators, beating with a nerve-scratching loudness. Within a few moments, the sound hummed down to silence.
They realized the little room was not part of a redoubt; it was the entire structure, a Quonset but that was little more than a hutch standing between two bastions of rock. They were a little surprised and perplexed, but they didn't expend too much time trying to reason it out. Using the map provided by the Cerberus database, the four people had pushed out of the hut and onto the vast ice fields, trudging through the high snowdrifts and battered by the keening wind. It hadn't been dangerously cold at first, but the wind kept rising. All they saw through the veils of snow was a range of low mountains, rugged and bleak in the far distance.
In response to Cotta's question about the location of the gateway, Brigid said, "I can only speculate." "We're listening," Kane prompted.
"If this was indeed a bioengineering facility, as Lakesh suspects, separating the means into and out of it is a sound security precaution. It prevents people from jumping directly into a potential biohazard or jumping out carrying contagions."
Grant nodded. "Yeah. But we don't know what kind of installation this really is. It's not part of the official Cerberus mat-trans network, so that means it's not a Totality Concept installation." He gestured in the general direction of the Quonset hut. "And that gateway unit looked like a prototype model."
Grant referred to the Cerberus Project, a subdivision of Overproject Whisper, which in turn had been a primary component of the Totality Concept. The Totality Concept was the umbrella designation for a long-range experimental program that explored arcane and esoteric scientific areas, from time travel to genetics. The researches dated back to World War II, when German scientists were laboring to build what turned out to be purely theoretical secret weapons for the Third Reich. The Allied powers adopted the researches, as well as many of the scientists, and constructed underground bases, primarily in the western United States, to further the experiments.
The Totality Concept was classified above top secret. It was known only to a few very high-ranking military officers and politicians. Few of the Presidents who held office during its existence were ever aware of the full ramifications.
"Whatever this place is," Brigid countered, "it has the same computerized lock as every other redoubt linked to the Totality Concept. Let's see what happens."
She punched in the access code on the keypad. The numbers 3-5-2 glowed in the LCD window. Kane and Grant tensed, making sure there was enough leeway between their right sleeves and heavy gloves to allow their Sin Eaters to jump into their hands if necessary. The Sin Eaters were big-bored automatic handblasters, less than fourteen inches in length at full extension, the magazines carrying twenty 9 mm rounds. When not in use, the stock folded over the top of the blaster, lying along the frame, reducing its holstered length to ten inches.
When the weapon was needed, the shooter tensed his wrist tendons, and sensitive actuators triggered flexible cables within the forearm holster, which snapped the pistol smoothly into his waiting hand, the butt unfolding in the same motion. Since the Sin Eaters had no trigger guards or safeties, the blasters fired immediately upon touching the shooter's crooked index finger.
They waited for what seemed like a very long time. Nothing happened. Grant stamped his feet impatiently as the cold penetrated his fleece-lined boots and three layers of socks.
Hugging himself, Cotta whispered, "What's going on?"
"Damn little, apparently," declared Kane. "All the works are probably frozen solid. Bet nobody's set foot in here since 2001 or before, so the barons couldn't be using it—"
A grinding rumble slowly built, overlaid by a series of squeaks, creaks and hisses. Long-disused gears, pulleys and hydraulics slowly moved. A huge oval of ice began to shake loose from the crevasse wall, quivering and acquiring a network of cracks that lengthened and widened. The four people recoiled as splinters of ice and clots of snow showered them. There was the prolonged hiss of seals releasing the door, and a thick metal disk swung ponderously out, like the door of a bank vault.
A surge of wonderfully warm air belled out through the round opening, forming a cloud of mist as it met the frigid atmosphere of the crevasse. Through the fog, they saw glowing lights as overhead neon tubes flickered and shed a yellow luminescence. The room beyond was small, more like a foyer than a chamber, but with a high, metal-ribbed ceiling. A vid spy-eye swiveled toward them, a power indicator light beneath the lenses shining steadily. Distantly, at the far edges of their hearing, they heard a low throb, a rhythmic tone as of machinery.
Cotta thrust his head forward cautiously and sniffed. "Smells sort of musty and stale."
Grant nodded. "Which is par for the course. I think Kane is right. The barons aren't using this place as a substitute for the Dulce facility. Nobody has been in here for a long, long time."
They weren't surprised by the functioning lights or the vid camera. All Totality Concept and Continuity of Government redoubts had been built with their own nuke generators and most of them continued to provide power centuries after their designers had crumbled to dust.
Kane stepped through the open door and into the foyer. The room narrowed down to another heavy metal door, this one with a wheel lock centered in its dark mass. It was covered by a thin patina of frost.
"Downright balmy in here," he said wryly. "Must be at least ten above."
He stripped off the goggles and balaclava, running a hand through his tousled hair. It was dark, a shade between black and chestnut, but showed sun-touched highlights.
An inch over six feet, Kane's lean, fiat-muscled body was completely concealed beneath the thermal suit, but it was apparent most of his muscle mass was contained in his upper body, lending his physique a marked resemblance to a wolf. His high-planed face held a watchful expression, as did his narrowed, gray-blue eyes. A thin, hairline scar cut across his left cheek.
Brigid removed her own mask, shaking loose an unruly mane of long red-gold hair, tossing it back over her shoulders. Despite the unflattering coverall garment, a discerning eye could see she held a woman's willowy shape on long, athletic legs. Her hair framed a smoothly sculpted face with a rosy complexion dusted lightly with freckles across her nose and cheeks. There was a softness in her features that bespoke a deep wellspring of compassion, yet a hint of iron resolve was there, too. Even in the dim light, the color of emeralds glittered in her big, feline-slanted eyes.
As they joined Brigid and Kane, Grant and Cotta peeled up their balaclavas. Grant stood six foot four, exceptionally broad across the shoulders and thick through the chest. His black hair was cut close to the scalp and peppered with a sprinkling of gray at his temples, but the down-sweeping mustache showed jet-black against his coffee-brown skin. His heavy jawed face was set in a scowl.
Cotta was the shortest of the men, but built along stocky lines. His curly, dark brown hair and equally brown eyes gave him a boyish appearance. A flat case containing first-aid items and survival rations hung from his shoulder by a strap. Pitching his voice low to disguise a tremor of anxiety, he asked, "We're going to go in there?"
Kane lifted a quilted shoulder in a shrug. "That's why we're here."
"Yeah," Cotta agreed nervously. "But you said nobody's been in here for a long time."
Reassuringly, Brigid said, "That's probably true, but it might not be true in a few weeks, a few days or even a few hours. We have to learn if there's an installation the barons can press into service as a bioengineering facility other than the one in Dulce. It would be naive to assume there aren't more installations like that one to use as a contingency. At least we know the Anthill complex in South Dakota won't serve that purpose."
