Lost Gates (23 page)

“Think there’s anything in that, and we’ll find it tougher going?” the Armorer asked.

Krysty shook her head. “Jak was just shitting Crabbe. I don’t think there’s any reason to any of this. I would have said they were just maintenance redoubts from the look I had at that list. But mebbe some of them were storage facilities, too, and that’s why they had that weird shit.”

J.B. grinned crookedly as the mist began to form. “Yeah, well, let’s hope we find a nice little storage facility for heavy-duty blasters this time around.”

They were the last words she remembered as the darkness closed in around her.

W
HEN THE DARKNESS
ebbed away to be replaced by a foul light and an equally foul taste in her mouth, Krysty knew that they had arrived at their destination. She was sprawled facedown on the floor, and she fully expected the taste in her mouth to be echoed by a leaden feeling in her limbs. Yet as she tried to drag herself to her feet, she realized that she felt very differently. There was almost a springiness to her as she clambered to her feet, and she looked over to see that J.B. was similarly affected.

“Weird, huh?” she said. “Wonder if there are any other surprises waiting for us out there?”

“Nothing like last time, I hope,” the Armorer answered wryly as he moved to the redoubt door. “Take it like last time, okay?”

Krysty nodded, and as he opened the door onto the anteroom beyond, they fell into the roles that they had established for themselves on the last jump. And, as it had been that time, it was a simple task to secure the anteroom as it was empty, and the control room showed no sign of having been in use since skydark.

“So far, so good,” J.B. murmured as they recced the corridor before heading out. The rooms were cold and dry, despite the temperate conditions maintained automatically. It was a different kind of cold, one that came from years of emptiness and lack of use.

“Looks like it might be an easy ride,” J.B. observed.

“Don’t speak too soon,” Krysty retorted. “Wish Crabbe could see this, though. It shoots holes right through his belief.”

“Hey, he only has that ’cause of Jak…and that’s Jak’s
way of ensuring the rest of us stay away from buying the farm before we get back.”

“I know,” she admitted. “It’s just that Crabbe is really bugging me.”

“Don’t let him,” J.B. said in a matter-of-fact tone as they moved along the corridor, scoping out the empty rooms as they went. “The way I figure it, both Millie and Doc, and Jak and Ryan managed to get some kind of weapon they could hide away on their last jump. I figure if we can do the same, and we get surprise on our side, then we can wipe out that scumsucker McCready before Crabbe even knows what’s going on.”

“You figure him for the real danger?” she asked as she kicked open another door onto an empty room.

“Dark night, the baron is a fat fuck with a temper, but he’s got no real ordnance. McCready is the man with the blaster. And he’s boss of the men with the other blasters. I’ve seen the way he looks at the baron when he thinks Crabbe isn’t looking. And I’ve seen the way his men obey him. I know who they’d be with if it came to a straight decision.”

“Yeah, guess I’d have to go with you on that,” Krysty admitted. Her hair was twitching at the ends, but she couldn’t figure out why. The place seemed deserted.

“J.B.,” she said quietly, “is it me, or do you reckon this place is just a little too quiet?”

“Not sure if you could call anything too quiet after some of the shit we’ve all been through,” J.B. mused. “Feels to me like it’s empty down here, and there doesn’t seem to be too much sign of life. Why? You starting to feel something?”

Krysty shook her head. “I don’t know,” she said
slowly. “There’s something that doesn’t feel right, but I’m not really sure.”

J.B. grinned and racked his mini-Uzi. “Just have to keep it triple red. And blast first, ask later, right?”

“Sounds okay to me,” she agreed.

They moved along the deserted corridor until they were beginning to move up to the next level. Unlike some of the redoubts in this sector that were on the baron’s list, there seemed to be nothing wrong with this one. The corridors were free of dust and dirt, and the air was fresh and clean. All of the maintenance systems were working fine, and it gave the redoubt the strange feeling of being a place where the previous inhabitants had just left temporarily, and would be back in a moment.

When they reached the next level, it became apparent that something wasn’t right. The sec doors to the dorm areas were closed, and they showed no signs of being forced or even of having any wear. But when they opened them, they could see that the beds within had been disturbed, and there were clothes on the floors.

“Someone left in a hurry and never came back,” J.B. murmured.

“Don’t be so sure,” Krysty returned. She could feel her scalp prickling as her hair started to coil, though for the moment she couldn’t identify the feeling of unease that was causing this. She walked to the bed nearest to where she was standing, on the threshold to the room. Bending, she reached down and touched the sheet and blanket that were rumpled in the middle of the mattress. She had only half expected it to be cold, so even
though it was a shock to find it still warm, it didn’t make her jump.

“I don’t think we’re as alone as we thought,” she said softly. “Though where the hell anyone else is hiding down here I don’t know.”

J.B. joined her, looking down at the bed as though expecting it to yield some secrets to him.

“It hasn’t been empty that long by the feel of it,” she continued. “Though where they are… I mean, I can feel that there must be someone using this place, but I don’t feel like they’re here.”

“Mebbe they’re not,” J.B. said. “Could be they’re out on a hunt or recce of some kind. Whatever, we’d better be real careful.”

They left the dorm and, making certain that their blasters were ready to fire at the slightest twitch of a trigger finger, they explored the level they were on in more depth. There were two other dorm rooms, both of which showed signs of life. There was some soiled laundry on the floors, but not enough to suggest that these people—whomever they may be—lived like animals. Indeed, to judge by the shower and latrine blocks that they then explored, the people who used this redoubt as a domicile were about as civilized as it was possible to get in the Deathlands. They showed every sign of keeping the redoubt as a clean, well-maintained residence.

That showed a certain intelligence, if nothing else—keep the place in good condition and don’t destroy the haven you have found. It was an intelligence that could make them very dangerous indeed.

Krysty and J.B. continued their recce and moved up to the next level. The kitchens, food stores and dining
area showed signs of use. The stores were depleted, but not needlessly decimated, and there were cuts of meat in the deep-freeze area that weren’t wrapped in plastic, and had obviously been chilled in recent times. The kitchen area was a little dirty, as though not recently cleaned, but had obviously been rearranged and washed down at some point. In short, it probably resembled the way it would have looked in predark times when it was a working military base. The original food stocks had been partially used, but showed signs of being eked out with care and caution, another sign of an obvious intelligence at work.

“These people use this as a base. They’re not just muties, stupes, stickies, crazies or looters,” J.B. stated. “Dangerous.”

“Probably out doing whatever it is they do. And from the look of the meat in the freezer, they can do it well,” Krysty added.

“Then we’d better be ready for them when they come back,” J.B. said softly. “Let’s see what they’ve done to the armory.”

Ultracautious and on triple-red alert, they continued their exploration by moving toward the armory and the medical facilities. They found a selective use of the facilities that told them a lot about the type of people who had made the redoubt home.

In the medical room, things like bandages were in heavy use. Dressings for wounds were sorely depleted. Yet the more complex meds, and the ready-filled hypos of antibiotics and painkillers that Mildred had taught them about, and which had been so useful to them, were
untouched, as were the facilities for minor surgery that all such redoubts carried.

The armory told a similar story. The handblasters and SMGs had been freely looted, as had the ammo for such things. Among the stock of rifles, too, there had been some heavy use. Yet even here, the stock depletion hadn’t been random and unchecked. The boxes from which they had been taken were stacked carefully to one side, seemingly to keep a record of what had been used. Those boxes that hadn’t been opened had been separated from the others with an equal care. And yet they had stayed away from the boxes of grens. Again, a careful separation had taken place, as frag grens had been moved to sit beside the boxes of ammo. Some of them were now empty, with one half-full and open on the floor. The flamethrowers had been left in their racks, untouched.

“Very selective, aren’t they?” Krysty commented, eyeing the ordnance that they had used as much as that which they had ignored.

“Go for what you know, and don’t trust the tech you can’t take apart,” J.B. mused, scratching his forehead under the brim of his fedora. “That would explain why the mat-trans had been left alone.”

“And why it felt so empty down there,” Krysty added. The way in which her occasional doomie sense had been bugging her was now a little more explainable. And it gave them more of a clue as to the kind of people they would have to expect when they returned from wherever they had gone.

“I’d bet you every piece of ordnance in here that they’ve got no idea how this place works. They’re just
thankful that it does. Which, I’m hoping, means that they also don’t know how to work all the automatic sec shit, and watch the cams. So mebbe, when they get back, they won’t have any indication that we’re here. That’ll give us the drop over them, at least. If we’re still here, that is. Just a bit of luck and we can be away before they get back.”

Krysty pursed her lips and nodded. “Yeah, sounds reasonable. Guess we’d better recce the rest of the place while we still can.”

The Armorer nodded, and they wasted no time in covering the rest of the redoubt. There was a vehicle bay that was large enough for two wags, both of which were gone. Oil and gas stains on the concrete showed that they were in some kind of regular use, and cans of gas were stored by the predark reservoirs that were built in to the bay, bespeaking of a regular use and an outside source of gas.

Question was, where did it come from and how had they acquired it?

A quick recce of the rest of the areas showed that the sec camera area had been left well alone, while what had once been the mess room for the predark military staff was in regular use. One thing for sure—these people had been happy to use the facilities, and if they had ever questioned how it kept itself ticking over they had opted not to delve too deeply. They also felt secure enough to never leave a guard behind when they left their base.

J.B. looked at his wrist chron. Only ten minutes of their allotted thirty had been used, and they had secured the area.

“Figure we shouldn’t hang around here too long. Let’s get ourselves some ordnance and get out of here.”

“Yeah…” There was something in Krysty’s tone and the way she gazed around the mess room that made J.B. turn back as he headed for the door.

“What?” he asked.

She shrugged. “It’s strange, really. It just struck me that these people are using the redoubt and living the kind of life that Crabbe is looking for. They’ve found their own small piece of the motherlode that he’s obsessed with, and they’re making some kind of use of it. That’s just what he’d like to do, except the stupe fat bastard is still caught up in his own little power games.”

“These people might be, too. We haven’t seen them, and hopefully we won’t. So let’s just get going.”

She shrugged. “Yeah, guess you’re right. It’s just that I’ve gotten a little curious.”

“Fair enough, but we don’t have time for that right now,” J.B. said.

Krysty knew he was right: there was no telling what the inhabitants of the redoubt might be like. They lived in a civilized fashion when they were inside the redoubt, but there was no way of knowing what they were like when they were outside. Or what they would be like when they came back to find that their safe haven had been invaded from the inside.

She followed J.B. to the armory, where they surveyed its contents.

“Too much choice.” J.B. grinned. “Where do we start?”

“Something small, easily hidden,” Krysty com
mented. “We need to get it past McCready’s men when they take our blasters from us.”

“You reckon?” J.B. queried. “Think about it. We’re the last ones to go out, and the last to come back. Do we really need to hide it?”

“Come out blasting, you mean?” And when he nodded, she added, “Then why do we need anything else? Couldn’t we just use our own ordnance? Come to that, if we’re the last ones to go out and come back, then why shouldn’t they just blast the fuck out of us when they open the mat-trans door?”

“Because they’ll think we have the disk, and Crabbe isn’t going to risk damaging it,” J.B. stated. “So we’ll have a chance to start blasting before they take the weapons from us.”

“Yeah, and if we do that, then they take out the others before they have a chance to use whatever they’ve got,” Krysty argued. “Think about it, J.B. We come out meek, make out we’ve found the disk, let them take our blasters and let their guard down, then hit them with whatever we’ve taken from here. That means they get taken by surprise, and our people get a chance to ready whatever it is they’ve hidden away.”

J.B. sniffed. “You put it that way, guess I can’t argue,” he agreed.

He was about to move toward the grens, having already figured like Doc and Mildred before him that a gas gren would be a good start, when Krysty stopped him.

“Wait,” she said suddenly. He looked at her quizzically, though he could see that her hair had suddenly
tightened on her scalp, curling protectively around her neck even as he stared. He waited for her to continue.