Outlanders 37 Rim of the World, page 9
"I'm fine," Domi responded, holding out the backpack in both hands.
Philboyd eyed it speculatively. "You're sure it's inactive?"
"Like I told you over the transcomm," she answered waspishly, "the head of the thing flew off for parts unknown."
Brewster Philboyd was a little over six feet tall and wide and formed the natural boundary between Idaho and Montana.
Curving through a tumble of chert outcroppings, the road climbed higher and higher toward a hogback ridge. Domi looked northward toward a parallel mountain range, the Beaverheads. Its highest peak, the Garfield, was still snowcapped.
She turned another bend, then topped the rise. The road widened as it entered a broad plateau. At one time, steel guardrails had bordered the lip overlooking a chasm, but only a few rusted metal stanchions remained. The rusted-out husks of several vehicles rested at the bottom. They had lain there since the time of the skydark, the nuclear winter, weathering all the seasons that came after.
On Domi's right, the plateau debouched into the higher slopes, and the setting sun gleamed off the white headstones marking over a dozen grave sites. The fabricated markers bore only last names: Cotta, Dylan, Adrian and many more. Ten of them were less than a year old, inscribed with the names of the Moon-base émigrés who had died defending Cerberus from the assault staged by Overlord Enlil. The plateau itself was still pockmarked by the craters inflicted by that attack.
One the headstones read simply Quavell, and every time Domi saw it, her throat constricted and her eyes stung with unshed tears.
A grim, gray peak of granite shouldered the sky on the opposite side of the plateau. At its base was the vanadium-alloy security door that led into the heart of the Cerberus redoubt. The multi ton door was already lanky of build, seeming to be all kneecaps, elbows and knuckles when he walked. Blond-white hair was swept back from a receding hairline. He wore old-fashioned black-rimmed eyeglasses. His cheeks were pitted with the sort of scars associated with chronic teenage acne.
Philboyd was one of a number of space scientists who had arrived in the Cerberus redoubt from a forgotten Moon base over the past year and a half. Like Lakesh, he was a "freezie," post nuke slang for someone who had been placed in stasis, although conventional cryonics was not the method applied.
"Maybe you could sort of put it down," he ventured mildly, as if he didn't want to offend Domi—which, taking into account her tempestuous nature, he didn't.
She slitted her ruby eyes in annoyance and Lakesh said in an amused tone, "Friend Brewster is quite right. We should examine it out here and make sure it presents no danger before carting it inside."
Sighing impatiently, Domi knelt, placed the backpack flat on the tarmac and unzipped it with a triumphant flourish. Straightening up, she declared pridefully, "It's shot to shit, so you can damn well bet it's inactive, just like I told you when I commed."
When she had gotten within the one-mile range of the little radiophone, she had informed the redoubt of her skirmish with the cyberspider.
Philboyd and Lakesh bent over the machine, hands on their knees, eyeing the metal carapace punctured by three bullet holes. "Some sort of surveillance drone," Philboyd said musingly. "Too small to register on our motion detectors and not producing a thermal signature, either."
"And with a detachable sensory apparatus," murmured Lakesh, pointing to the conduit that had served as support for the turret head. "Very damn advanced piece of gear."
Philboyd pursed his lips contemplatively. "You're sure none of the barons had anything like this?"
"Quite sure. I would have known. No, this probe was dispatched by an overlord to spy on us, to test our defenses and security perimeter."
Domi cocked her head at a quizzical angle. "Then that screws the truce, right? Spying on us?"
Zipping up the backpack and lifting it with both hands, Lakesh replied, "Not really, since we don't know which overlord is responsible. Actually, I expected some sort of feint from one of them long before now."
"Besides," Philboyd interposed, "we're violating the terms of the truce ourselves by planting DeFore in Africa. She's checking out the possibility of overlord activity in the Congo. That's the same as spying."
"It's no longer a possibility," Lakesh said darkly. "I received a communication from her not more than twenty minutes ago. She reported that Overlord Utu is terrorizing the Waziri people in the vicinity of the Usumbur Tract, so the telemetry conveyed by the Vela satellite is confirmed."
Although most satellites had been little more than free-floating scrap metal for well over a century, Cerberus had always possessed the proper electronic ears and eyes to receive the transmissions from at least two them. One was of the Vela reconnaissance class, which carried narrow-band multispectral scanners. It could detect the electromagnetic radiation reflected by every object on Earth, including subsurface geomagnetic waves. The scanner was tied into an extremely high resolution photographic relay system.
A year's worth of hard work on the part of Lakesh's apprentice, Donald Bry, at long last allowed Cerberus to gain control of the Vela and the Comsat. Knowing that the Annunaki empire had been originally established on the African subcontinent, Bry had programmed the Vela to transmit any imagery from there that fit a preselected parameter.
Only ten days before, Cerberus downloaded a telemetric sequence that showed an object resembling a silver disc flitting over the Congo, hovering over the only settlement in the region, then shooting out of sight so rapidly it almost seemed to vanish. Computer enhancement of the image proved what Lakesh and Bry had suspected anyway—the disc was one of the small fleet of scout vessels carried by Tiamat, the inestimably ancient, gargantuan Annunaki starship in Earth orbit. Apparently the overlords had access to at least one each.
"What else did she say?" Philboyd asked.
"Both of you can listen to the full report yourselves," Lakesh replied. "I'm interested in your input."
"More interested in washing up first," Domi replied, stepping over the threshold into the redoubt, finger stubbing her sweat-damp hair. "Hot out there today."
Lakesh followed her into the installation, smiling as she kissed the forefinger of her right hand and then planted the finger on the illustration of Cerberus on the wall beneath the door control. Although the official designations of all Totality Concept–related redoubts were based on the phonetic alphabet, almost no one who had ever been stationed in the facility referred to it by its official code name of Bravo. The mixture of civilian scientists and military personnel simply called it Cerberus.
Corporal Mooney, one of the enlisted men with artistic aspirations, went so far as to illustrate the door next to the entrance with an image of the three-headed hound that had guarded the gateway to Hades. Rather than attempt even a vaguely realistic representation, he used indelible paints to create a slavering black hellhound with a trio of snarling heads sprouting out of an exaggeratedly muscled neck.
The neck was bound by a spiked collar, and the three jaws gaped wide open, blood and fire gushing between great fangs. In case anyone didn't grasp the meaning, he emblazoned beneath the image the single word Cerberus, wrought in overdone, ornate Gothic script.
Domi had drifted into the habit of giving the illustration, the totem of the redoubt, little greeting and farewell kisses when she passed by. Lakesh found the ritual silly but endearing.
He had found very little endearing in the past fifty years of his life. Five decades before, he had been revived from stasis and drafted to serve the nine god- kings who assumed lordship over the Earth. It was only after his resurrection that he had realized the horrific magnitude of their plan to conquer humanity.
Lakesh had tried many times since his resurrection to arrest the tide of extinction inexorably engulfing the human race. First had been his attempts to manipulate the human genetic samples in storage, preserved in vitro since before the nukecaust, to provide the hybridization program with a supply of the best DNA. He had hoped to create an underground resistance movement of superior human beings to oppose the barons and their hidden masters, the Archon Directorate.
A revolutionary force needed a headquarters, and the Cerberus redoubt seemed the most serviceable. The installation contained a frightfully well-equipped armory and two dozen self-contained apartments, a cafeteria, a decontamination center, an infirmary, a swimming pool and even detention cells on the bottom level. The facility also had a limestone filtration system that continually recycled the complex's water supply.
Domi padded barefoot down the main corridor, a twenty-foot-wide passageway made of softly gleaming vanadium alloy and shaped like a square with an arch on top. Great curving ribs of metal and massive girders supported the high rock roof.
Lakesh walked beside her, noting the looks she received from some of the people they passed, but the glances were essentially respectful and even admiring from the men. Like Kane, Brigid and Grant, Domi was considered something special among the personnel, a hero. The actions performed by the four of them had quite literally saved the world.
Unlike her three friends, Domi didn't mind the attention from the Manitius immigrants. Although Cerberus had been constructed to provide a comfortable home for well over a hundred people, it had pretty much been deserted for nearly two centuries.
When Domi, as well as Grant, Kane and Brigid arrived at the installation over three years before, there had been only a dozen permanent residents. Like them, all of the personnel were exiles from the villes brought there by Lakesh because of their training and abilities. Still, for a long time, the Cerberus personnel were outnumbered by shadowed corridors, empty rooms and sepulchral silences.
Over the past year and a half, the corridors had bustled with life, the empty rooms filled and the silences replaced by conversation and laughter. The immigrants from the Manitius Moon base had arrived on a fairly regular basis ever since the destination-lock code to the Luna gateway unit had been discovered. Whether the émigrés intended to remain in the installation or try to make separate lives for themselves in the Outlands, was still an open question. With the fall of the baronies, anarchy had overtaken most of the baronial territories. As they reached a T junction in the passageway, Domi turned left toward the residential wing. She nearly collided with Donald Bry, striding swiftly from his quarters. He muttered an apology and the girl went on her way without a backward glance.
When Bry caught sight of the backpack in Lakesh's hands, his eyes widened. A slightly built, round-shouldered man with an unruly mass of copper-colored hair, he asked eagerly, "Is that the cyberspider gadget?"
Before Lakesh could answer, he reached for the pack and Philboyd stepped up, putting a proprietary hand on it. "Hold on, Donny," he said sternly. "Who said you'd get first crack at it?"
"You're an astrophysicist," Bry shot back, grabbing the other end. "I'm the hardware man hereabouts."
For a few seconds, the two men engaged in a tug-of-war for possession of the backpack, despite the fact that Lakesh held on to the straps.
"Neither one of you can have it unless you learn to share," he said, not releasing his grip.
"Oh, come on," Bry said sharply. "I've got seniority—"
"Lakesh!" Mariah Falk's agitated voice blared out over the public-address transcom system. All three men jumped.
Turning to the nearest voice-activated wall comm, Lakesh called out, "What is it?"
"I need you in the command center," the woman replied. "The latest satellite telemetry from Africa shows one of Tiamat's scout ships on a direct heading with the Sudan—and the biolink readings on Brigid, Grant and Kane are spiking into metabolic shutdown territory !"
Chapter 11
The command center of Cerberus was a long, vault-walled, high-ceilinged room filled with orderly rows of comp terminals and workstations. The central control complex held five dedicated and eight shared sub-processors, all linked to the mainframe behind the far wall. Two hundred years ago, the computer 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 spanning 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.
In the cool semidarkness the huge room hummed with the quietly efficient chatter of the system operators. Lakesh and Bry strode down the wide aisle formed by two facing rows of workstations.
The control center was surprisingly well manned, but inasmuch as the complex was the brain of the redoubt, it naturally drew personnel from all quarters. Almost all of the people sitting at the various stations were émigrés from the Manitius Moon base. The only long-term Cerberus staff members Lakesh saw were Farrell and Banks.
Monitor screens flashed incomprehensible images and streams of data in machine talk. Bry, who had reluctantly relinquished his grip on the cyberspider out of a sense of duty, took a seat beside Banks at the environ-ops console. Philboyd had carried the cyberspider to the workroom adjacent to the armory.
Coming to stand beside Mariah Falk, who was seated at the biolink medical station, Lakesh asked curtly, "Status?"
A slender, wiry woman in her mid-forties, Dr. Mariah Falk's short chestnut-brown hair was threaded with gray. Deep creases curved out from either side of her nose to the corners of her mouth. Her face showed lines of strain.
"We've been getting sporadic high-stress signals for the last couple of hours, but nothing like this." She nodded to the monitor she sat before. On the screen he saw an aerial topographical map of the Sudan. Superimposed over it flashed three icons. The telemetry transmitted from Kane's, Grant's and Brigid's subdermal biolink transponders scrolled in a drop-down window across the top of the screen.
The Comsat kept track of Cerberus personnel by their subcutaneous transponders when they were out in the field. Everyone in the installation had been injected with the transponders, which transmitted heart rate, respiration, blood count and brain-wave patterns. Based on organic nanotechnology, the transponder was a non-harmful radioactive chemical that bound itself to an individual's glucose and the middle layers of the epidermis.
The computer systems recorded every byte of data sent to the Comsat and directed it down 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 another 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 bright, angry red, an electronic phenomenon Lakesh had never seen before.
"Every one of their metabolic functions are highly accelerated," Mariah said worriedly. "I'm not a medical doctor, but I know that's not good."
"Neither is this," put in Farrell, seated at the main ops console. The shaven-headed, goateed man gazed fixedly at the VGA monitor, a flat LCD screen nearly four feet square. "We've got a bogey- right on top of them."
Glancing toward him, Lakesh saw that the top half of the screen glowed with a CGI grid pattern. A drop-down window displayed scrolling numbers that Lakesh knew were measurements of changing coordinates. One of the grid squares enclosed a bright bead of light. "Has it taken any hostile action?" he asked.
Farrell shook his head. "I don't think it needs to." Lakesh squinted over at the screen. "Why not?" Touching a key on the board, Farrell announced,
"Because of this."
Shades of bright color bloomed up from the central grid pattern like the petals of an unimaginably huge flower. Hues of red, white, yellow, green, cyan, blue and even violet spread out across the terrain.
"This is a thermal line-scan," Farrell said dolefully. "The spectroscopic analysis indicates exceptionally high levels of radiation."
Lakesh didn't allow the sudden surge of fear to register either in his bearing or voice. "Source?"
"I don't know," Farrell answered. "It's a pretty rocky area, and if they were checking out an alleged Totality Concept site..." His words trailed off and he lifted his shoulders in a shrug.
Mariah stated, "If they're being exposed to radiation, then that might interfere with the transponder signals. We may not be receiving a true read."
Banks turned in his chair toward them. "That's very possible," he said encouragingly. A young black man with a neatly trimmed beard and an easygoing manner, he had undergone training over the past couple of years in medical matters, particularly the operation and limitations of the transponders.
"The biolinks send out steady, regular signals," he went on. "We've known the signals to be disrupted in the past by everything from atmospheric conditions to sun-spots. Maybe even a radiation spike in the non-lethal range could interfere with them."
"Even so," said Lakesh flatly, "I find the timing suspicious. Assuming the scout ship is piloted by Overlord Utu and not a remote-controlled drone as DeFore postulated, then he could be the culprit behind the radiation surge."
