Outlanders 32 Evil Abyss, page 7
Kane felt the pressure of Ayn Thoraldson's hate-filled glare against the back of his head and sighed. "Yeah, just starting to think period; might do me some good"
Chapter 6
Mohandas Lakesh Singh stared over the lip of the precipice without really seeing what lay at the bottom—not that there was much to actually look at.
The sky over the craggy cliffs was a heavy, leaden gray, despite the midmorning hour. The sudden rain shower had finally stopped, and the mountain air smelled clean and fresh. The rich scent of wet grassy meadows and groves of trees rolled up from the footfall below.
Standing on the rutted asphalt-covered plateau, Lakesh faced a deep abyss that plummeted straight down a thousand feet or more. At one time, steel guardrails had bordered the lip of the road, but only a few rusted metal stanchions remained. Although he couldn't see them, Lakesh knew the skeletons of several vehicles rested at the bottom of the chasm. They had laid there since the nuclear holocaust or the subsequent skydark, weathering all the seasons that came after, like monuments to predark desperation.
Also down there, completely invisible among the rocks bordering the stream, lay the three pieces of the Chintamani Stone, the Shining Trapezohedron. In a moment of impulsive self-righteousness, an act Lakesh still bitterly resented, Kane had dumped them down there like so much garbage. More than once he had contemplated climbing down the cliff face to search for them. But not only would the effort be exceptionally hazardous, it would also be futile. Even if he managed to retrieve the three black stones, he would never be permitted to put their dimensional-rifting properties to use again.
He shivered in the cold air. Although autumn had yet to give way to winter, the mornings were still chilly at such a high attitude. Lakesh seemed particularly susceptible to cold temperatures, and he wasn't sure if it was due to being born in the tropical climate of Kashmir or was a metabolic carryover from the 148 years, three months and thirteen days he'd spent in cryo stasis. Although it made no scientific sense, he had been susceptible to cold ever since.
He glanced up at the gray Montana sky. For a generation following the nuclear holocaust of 2001, the sky had been gray twenty-four hours a day. The worldwide atomic explosions had filled the atmosphere with inestimable sons of dust and debris, severely diminishing the amount of sunlight reaching Earth. The thirty-year-long nuclear winter, the skydark, had caused many of the survivors of the nukecaust to freeze to death in the long night. The shadows on the plateau were no less deep and dark than those that covered the entire world during the nuclear winter, a quality Lakesh always found appropriate, since the Cerberus redoubt was built into a peak of the Montana mountain range known colloquially as the Darks. Long ago, in the centuries preceding the apocalypse, the mountains had been known as the Bitterroot Range. In the generations since the nukecaust, a sinister mythology had been ascribed to the mountains, with their mysteriously shadowed forests and hell-deep, dangerous ravines.
The road leading down from Cerberus to the foothills was little more than a cracked and twisted asphalt ribbon, skirting yawning chasms and cliffs. Acres of the mountainsides had collapsed during the nuke-triggered earthquakes newly two centuries ago. The wilderness area was virtually unpopulated. The nearest settlement was nearly a hundred miles away, and it consisted of a small band of Indians, Sioux and Cheyenne.
Lakesh turned away, massaging his throbbing temples, hoping the headache was only stress induced and not the symptoms of a condition far more serious. If there were any solutions to the worries assailing him, they didn't lie within the abyss.
The scraps of a chain-link fence enclosing the entrance to the Cerberus redoubt clinked in the breeze. When Cerberus was built in the mid-1990s, no expense had been spared to make the installation a masterpiece of impenetrability. The tri-level, thirty-acre facility had come through the nukecaust in good condition. Its radiation shielding was still intact, and an elaborate system of heat-sensing warning devices, night-vision video cameras and motion- trigger alarms surrounded the plateau that concealed it. When Lakesh had reactivated the installation some thirty years before, the repairs he made had been minor, primarily cosmetic in nature. Over a period of time, he had added a security system to the plateau surrounding the redoubt. He had been forced to work in secret and completely alone, so the upgrades had taken several years to complete.
Planted within rocky clefts of the mountain peak and concealed by camouflage netting were the uplinks with an orbiting Vela-class reconnaissance satellite, and a Comsat. It could be safely assumed that no one or nothing could approach Cerberus undetected by land or by air—not that he expected anyone to make the attempt, particularly overland. In the unlikely instance of an organized assault against the installation, an electronic force field energized with particles of antimatter could be activated at the touch of a button.
In one way it was the most recent addition to the Cerberus security systems, but in another way, one of the oldest. The plateau had originally been protected by the energy shield but at some point over the past century, it had come to be deactivated. With the help of Brewster Philboyd, the force-field emitter had been repaired and put back into service.
Recessed within the rock face of the mountain peak was a fifteen-foot-high, twenty-two-foot-wide sec door. Vanadium alloy gleamed beneath peeling paint. The gate opened like an accordion, folding to one side, and was operated by a punched-in code and a hidden lever control. One of its panels was partially ajar, allowing light from the interior to spill out. It faintly illuminated the area where the plateau debauched into the higher slopes, and gleamed off the white headstones marking eleven grave sites.
The fabricated markers bore only last names: Cotta, Rauch, Adrian, Davis. Seven of them were new, inscribed with the names of the Moon base émigrés who had died defending Cerberus from the incursion staged by the mad god, Maccan, and his followers. Two of the graves didn't hold remains at all. Adrian and Davis had died years ago in Mongolia at the hands of the Tushe Gun, and their bodies had never been recovered. Lakesh wondered gloomily how many more such austere markers Farrell would fashion in the redoubt's workshop before the work of Cerberus was done. At the moment he feared three new stones would need to be made in the very near future, inscribed with the names Philboyd, Pennick and Baptiste.
Lakesh sighed, realizing he had been grousing alone in the dusk long enough. Slowly, reluctantly, he walked toward the see door. Cerberus had been built over two hundred years ago as the seat of Project Cerberus, and all design and construction specs were aimed at making Cerberus a viable, impenetrable community of at least a hundred people.
Although there were still fewer than that now, the installation currently held mom people than had been stationed there since the last days of the twentieth century. For most of the permanent residents, time was measured by the controlled dimming and brightening of lights to simulate sunrise and sunset.
When the day-shift lighting had automatically switched on, the desire to get out in the fresh air had become a compulsion, despite the rain shower. As a young genius, Lakesh had spent most of his youth laboring within the walls of installations much like Cerberus, only rarely venturing into nature.
During his late teens he had been recruited, duped into serving the web of treachery that had been the Totality Concept. His brilliance in the fields of quantum physics and cybernetics eventually earned him the overseer position of Project Cerberus, the subdivision that dealt with matter-transmission through hyper-dimensional channels. Without him, them would have never been the quantum mat-trans inducer process, otherwise known as the Cerberus gateway network—or, he reflected sourly, never such a thing as the interphaser, which very well might have caused the deaths of three of the redoubt's valued personnel. And in the instance of Brigid Baptiste, perhaps the loss of the closest thing he had to a daughter.
Clenching his teeth and fists, Lakesh stepped through the open sec door panel and marched purposefully down the twenty-foot-wide main corridor. The floors and walls were sheathed by dully gleaming vanadium alloy. The high rock roof was supported by curving arches of thick metal.
A large illustration of a three-headed, froth-mouthed black hound was rendered in lurid colors on the wall near the sec door control lever. Underneath the image, in an ornately overdone Gothic script, was written the single word: Cerberus.
The artist had been one of the enlisted men assigned to the redoubt toward the end of twentieth century. Lakesh hadn't bothered to remove the illustration, partly because the paint was indelible and partly because the ferocious guardian of the gateway to Hades seemed an appropriate totem and code name for the project devoted to ripping open gates in the quantum field.
He caught a glimpse of himself in one of the polished wall panels. Although distorted, he saw a reflection of a well-built man of medium height, with thick, glossy, black hair, an unlined dark olive complexion and a long, aquiline nose. He looked no older than fifty, despite a few strands of gray streaking through his temples. He resembled a middle-aged man of East Indian extraction - in reasonably good health. In reality, he was just a year or so shy of celebrating his 250th birthday. His good health was on loan and could disappear at the whim of Sam, the imperator.
He still remembered with startling clarity what Sam had said to him as he writhed in pain across the corridor floor of the Scorpia Prime's fortress: "I will concede my defeat on this occasion, Mohandas, but it's only a small move in a far larger game. But I'm the game master, and it's up to me whether I'll keep you alive to contend against me another day, or kill you at a whim. I have plenty of time to make up my mind."
Months before, upon their initial meeting, Sam had restored Lakesh's physical condition to that of a man in his mid-forties by what, at the time, seemed to be a miraculous laying on of hands. Then, Lakesh's eyes had been covered by thick lenses, a hearing aid inserted in one ear and he resembled a hunched-over, spindly old scarecrow who appeared to be fighting the grave for every hour he remained on the planet.
At the time Sam claimed he had increased Lakesh's production of two antioxidant enzymes, catalase and superoxide dismutase, and boosted up his alkyglycerol level to the point where the aging process was for all intents and purposes reversed.
Sam had accomplished it, but it was not until recently that Lakesh learned the precise methodology—when he laid his hands on Lakesh, be had injected nanomachines into his body. The nanites were programmed to recognize and destroy the dangerous replicators, 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.
The nanites stimulated the metabolism by resetting cellular control mechanisms, but the results of a recent medical examination had shown that the nanites in Lakesh's body were now inert. They no longer worked to maintain his metabolism at its restored levels. If Sam had exerted control over them, he had either relinquished it on his own accord as a way to punish him or the influence was broken for another reason. Regardless of the reasons, DeFore's prognosis was that Lakesh would begin to age, but at an accelerated rate.
He had no choice but to agree with her gloomy diagnosis. The worst-case scenario she offered had him back to his pre-restoration physical condition inside of a year. The absolutely best-case situation would be one where he simply began to age normally from the point the nanites stopped functioning, but he knew that was an unrealistic hope at best and a delusion at worst. Without the help of Sam's nano-machines, his body simply couldn't maintain its present state. In fact, the possibility existed that his cardiovascular system wouldn't be able to withstand the strain of rapid aging and would shut down.
But until that day, he told himself, he would still try to control his own personal world within a world that the Cerberus command center represented.
The command center was a long, vault-walled, high- ceilinged room filled with orderly rows of comp terminals and stations. The central control complex had five dedicated and eight shared sub-processors, all linked to the mainframe behind the far wall Two hundred years ago, A had been an advanced model, carrying experimental, error-correcting microchips of such a tiny size that they even reacted to quantum fluctuations. Biochip technology had been employed when it was built, protein molecules sandwiched between microscopic glass-and-metal circuits.
On the opposite side of the operations center, an anteroom held the eight-foot-tall mat-trans chamber, rising from an elevated platform. Upright slabs of translucent, brown-hued armaglass formed six walls around it Armaglass was manufactured in the last decades of the twentieth century from a special compound that plasticized and combined the properties of steel and glass. It was used as walls in the jump chambers to confine quantum-energy overspills.
Lakesh glanced over his shoulder at the indicator lights of the huge Mercator relief map of the world that spanned one entire wall. Pinpoints of light shone steadily in almost every country, connected by a thin, glowing pattern of lines. They represented the Cerberus network, the locations of all functioning gateway units across the planet. None of the tiny lights blinked, so no indexed mat-trans was currently in use.
Monitor screens flashed incomprehensible images and streams of data in machine talk. Only Donald Bry, Mariah Falk and Quavell were present in the redoubt's nerve center. In the wake of the recent assault on the redoubt, some of the operational functions of the installation had been restored only tonal levels. Although the major repairs had been completed, a few of the subsystems had yet to be thoroughly debugged.
Lakesh wasn't concerned about those, however. Coming to stand beside Quavell, who was seated before the biolink medical monitor, he asked gruffly, "Status?"
Chapter 7
The inhumanly large, crystal-blue eyes of Quavell regarded him placidly. She filled her head slightly as she shifted in her chair, trying to find a comfortable position. Her eyes dominated a face of chiseled, elfin loveliness. If not for the grave austerity of her expression, she would have been beautiful. White-blond hair the texture of silk threads fell from her domed skull and curled inward at her slender shoulders.
Under five feet tall, her small, fragile form was encased in a silvery-gray, skintight bodysuit. It only accentuated the distended condition of her belly and the slenderness of her limbs. The material of the one-piece garment was a synthetic polymer with a high degree of elasticity, and it provided adequate support for her gravid condition.
"There has been very little change since the last time you inquired," she responded crisply. Lakesh thought he detected a patronizing note in her soft, childlike voice, but he attributed his sensitivity to lingering resentment against the hybrids. "As you can see, Domi, Grant and Kane are in very close proximity to Redoubt Tango. They actually could be within it by now"
She nodded to the monitor she sat before. On the screen he saw an aerial topographical map of the state of Minnesota. Superimposed over it flashed three icons. The telemetry transmitted from Kane's, Grant's and Domi’s sub-dermal biolink transponders scrolled in a drop-down window across the top of the screen. The computer systems recorded every byte of data sent to the Comsat and directed it to the redoubt's hidden antenna array. Sophisticated scanning filters combed through the telemetric signals using special human biological encoding.
The digital data stream was then routed to mother console through the locational program, to precisely isolate the team's present position in time and space. The program considered and discarded thousands of possibilities within milliseconds.
All of the icons glowed a steady green, which indicated everyone was in good health.
"And if they are indeed within the redoubt proper," Quavell continued, "then they should be returning here in very short order."
Redoubt Tango was one of the many of the Totality Concept—related installations buried within subterranean military complexes all over the United State, The official designations of the redoubts had been based on the old international radio code, as in "Tango" representing the letter `T’ The official title of the Cerberus facility was Redoubt Bravo.
Before the apocalypse, only a handful of people knew the redoubts even existed, and only half a handful knew all their locations. That knowledge had been lost after the nukecaust, rediscovered a century later, then jealously, ruthlessly guarded.
Even before the nukecaust, the purposes of the redoubts and the Cerberus gateways were classified at the highest secret level. Lakesh knew the mania for secrecy was justified. A device that could transport matter—like nuclear devices—was a more important weapon than the atomic weapons themselves. If a state of war existed, it was theoretically possible to invade the enemy nation and pour in troops, tanks, personnel carriers and whatever weapons tactics indicated.
Lakesh tried to focus on the less destructive applications of the gateways. Given wide use, the mat-trans could eliminate long-haul transportation of goods and even turn international travel into no more daunting a journey than opening and closing a door. He realized, of course, that many decades, perhaps even a century, would pass before the gateway units would be accepted by the public for tourist traffic. The transit phase was so unnerving that wide public acceptance was probably an impossibility.
Eventually, Lakesh hoped, the gateways would primarily be used for space exploration, replacing cumbersome, slow-moving shuttles that were restricted to the closer planets of the solar system.
But with the interphaser, the applications widened even beyond that. Jumping from my point on Earth, it was possible to establish a base anywhere on Earth and conceivably on the other planets, if corresponding vortex nodes could be matched up within the gateway and interphaser's targeting computers.
Even then, the mystery of the origin of the technology that made the entire system viable haunted Lakesh. It would be many years before he came across the shocking fact that although the integral components were of terrestrial origin, they were constructed under the auspices of a nonhuman intelligence—or at least, nonhuman as defined by late-twentieth-century standards. Nearly two centuries would pass before Lakesh learned the entire story, or a version of it.
