Rack was passing the time thinking about how he would spend his leisure hours, those precious few that were allotted at the end of each shift for rest and recreation. Perhaps he would use the VR chamber and enter a scenario where he, for once, could be in charge of his own destiny. The VR chamber was among those items in the settlement kept in excellent working order. And with good cause, as the release it afforded the frustrated and strung-out lower orders such as Rack enabled them to still operate efficiently and toe the party line. They weren’t fools, they knew that this was why the equipment was kept in such good order, but didn’t object. How could they? Brought up in the order, they knew that it was essential that they all fulfill their tasks and keep the ideals alive.
The thought of what would happen when those ideals became a reality, and they were able to emerge from beneath the ground to take their rightful place up above caused him to wander off into an even deeper reverie, so deep that he almost didn’t notice the emergence of a group of people on the edge of the clearing covered by his camera. They were led by a small, barely dressed red-haired woman and a muscular, bronzed warrior with only one eye.
It had been so long since Rack had actually seen anything other than the odd stickie on the sec vid that it took him a moment to take in what was happening.
“Oh, shit,” he breathed as it struck home. This had to be the group that had taken out Sharofsky’s men a few nights back. And now they were here. Well, they’d pay for that.
Rack punched the button on the intercom in front of him. The speaker crackled into life, and a disjointed voice seeped through the static.
“Main room. What is it, Si?”
“Al, you’re not going to believe this, but even after that little warning they’ve come here.”
There was a pause, then the voice said, “You’re shittin’ me, right, Si? I mean, no one comes here. Everyone knows this is nowhere, right? That’s why it’s so safe. That’s why it was built, right? Jeez… Okay, let me deal with this.”
The intercom went dead, and Rack lost his sense of urgency. Let Al deal with it now. He would just sit here and watch, same as ever.
THE CARAVAN consisting of the Gate tribe and Ryan’s people entered the settlement. Once beyond the remnants of the wire fencing, there were other posts with ominously still cameras that littered the few hundred yards until they reached the point where the settlement began in earnest. They had entered at a tangent to the main entrance, and as such it was some distance to the first of the roads that crisscrossed the compound.
As Doc had suspected from the stories he had heard, the compound was military-industrial in design, and was modeled on the area surrounding the old Pentagon, long since wiped out in the nukecaust of skydark. And although this area had escaped the complete desolation of what had once been the state of Washington, it had received some residual damage. Many of the buildings that dotted the way along the roads showed pockmark and burn damage, exacerbated by the fact that they had been left empty in the years since.
The settlement seemed long dead, and the traffic signals at junctions that indicated that at one time there had been much traffic around the compound were now dead. A camera was mounted on each signal. As they progressed slowly through the compound, Dean kept an eye on the cameras. They, too, seemed long dead, but he couldn’t shake the idea that they were moving—just slightly, almost imperceptibly, but enough to justify his paranoia.
The Illuminated Ones would surely know that they were coming, and it was almost certain that they would have some kind of surveillance system in operation. After all, they seemed to have a much better set of old tech than any other sec force that the companions had come across in their travels. And they seemed to be able to travel using the mat-trans units, a system that few people, other than the companions, had ever discovered.