He did, however, talk at great length of the disease they had encountered in Crossroads, and how they felt it related to the Illuminated Ones and their sightings. Mildred and Doc told of the incidences of smallpox before it had been eradicated long before the nukecaust. They wanted to drive home just how devastating it could be, in case it was hard for the Gate to imagine.
They shouldn’t have worried. Gloria could quite plainly see the importance of such a disease spreading across the land.
“None of us have been in the ville long enough to see such a thing,” she began when Ryan had finished, “but it seems to me that the baron is some kind of a stupidworks fool who’d rather hide his head than face facts. If they’re hiding it away, then it’ll be the chilling of them. That’s their choice, but not when it affects the rest of the people across the land.
“I knew our paths would cross again,” she continued, “as it’s in our fate. As to your notion that the old tech would send us to different places from the Illuminated Ones, then it’s either a wrongheaded notion, or that tech really is fucked by time…because we ended up following them right into the belly of their beast.”
The Gate queen paused before continuing. “I know that you’d warned us about traveling through the chambers, and how it could make you feel, but I don’t think any of us were really prepared for that feeling of being torn up into tiny pieces and then flung through the air before being shoved back together by someone with a heaviness of hand. None of us was really ready to fight, and the fact that we had to get it together and face whatever was outside the chamber only made things harder.
“But I guess that they were feeling the same way— or else they didn’t expect us to follow them—as no one came to attack us when we were at our most vulnerable… for which I give thanks to the goddess.
“We were soon ready, and we came out into a room like the one we had left. It was deserted except for a few of the Illuminated soldiers, and we were able to chill them real easy, as they were taken totally by surprise. I guess they were able to raise an alarm, ’cause a whole load of others were ready to meet us when we hit the corridors. Trouble was, they knew exactly where they were, and we didn’t—shit, we had no way of knowing if that redoubt was the same design as the one we had left behind. And we were wondering where the hell you were! ‘Cause we knew you’d jumped into the other chamber, and the second chamber where we’d landed was empty when we got the hell out, we kinda figured that you’d gotten chilled along the way, and that made us all madder than ever, I guess…
“There were more of them than us, and they had those laser blasters, as well as normal ones, but fuck it. We were mad and ready to chill any fucker that got in our way, and you know that they might have the hardware but they ain’t no good at firefighting, so we were able to drive them back and make some kind of dent on their numbers. We lost a couple, but a lot less than you’d expect when we were supposed to be the ones up against it.
“We were making progress, but suddenly it changed. They pulled right back, and we were chasing them rather than fighting them. I guess it was a tactic to make us chase and run where the hell they wanted us. Not the first time they tried that, but this time we were so blood fired that we were blinded, and let them push us exactly where they wanted. They sealed off some corridors so that we were going exactly where they wanted. Then it happened.
“Ahead of us, the corridor was sealed with a sec door, and as we went through, before we had a chance to double back they brought the door down on our tail. We were trapped in a section of corridor, and as we started to try and break out, they started soaking us with water, for Gaia’s sake! Yet it wasn’t like the trick they tried on us before, to soak us into submission. This was different. It wasn’t water like ice, and it was too fine to really get in the way, so we were able to keep hammering at the door with battering rams, and trying to lever the door or blow the mechanism. We were too hemmed in to try any plas-ex or heavy duty blasters on the door, which was the fucker of it.”