Pulling out his SIG-Sauer blaster, Ryan clicked off the safety and then racked the slide to chamber a round for instant use. Everybody was back on their feet, so it was time to recce the rest of the redoubt to see if there was anything useful in the storerooms.
There was something odd about this redoubt. The air coming from the wall vent was warm, instead of cool. Sniffing carefully, Ryan couldn’t detect the smell of an electrical fire, or lava. Last year, a jump to a tropical redoubt had the group arriving just as the local volcano erupted. They had barely escaped, with chunks of the molten stone actually arriving with them at the next redoubt. And that was cutting the razor edge of life just too damn close by anybody’s standards.
“Get ready, people,” Ryan growled, and the rest pulled blasters and checked their loads.
“Ready,” Krysty said, closing the cylinder of her .38 S&W revolver.
“I got your back, Dad,” Dean added, leveling his Browning Hi-Power. The rest simply nodded, holding their weapons in an easy grip. They had done this a thousand times before, but routine made a person careless, and careless got a person chilled in the Deathlands.
Stationing himself near the door of the chamber, Ryan stood guard alongside J.B. while the man checked the portal for boobies. Traps were unusual, but a few other people knew about the secret of the redoubts, and while most of them were now in the boneyard, some were still sucking air and walking around.
But this time the door was clear, and at J.B.’s signal, Ryan worked the lever to swing it open. The SIG-Sauer leading the way, Ryan took the point into the control room with the others fanning out behind. The room appeared to be deserted, the only motion coming from the comps that operated the military base.
Comp screens lined the walls, and control consoles winked and blinked in silent frenzy as the massive comps went silently about their imponderable functions.
Then Doc whistled softly and gestured with the barrel of his big LeMat. An entire section of the monitors were dark. Ryan didn’t remember ever seeing that before. It made him uneasy to see the complex machinery do anything out of the ordinary. That almost always meant trouble. Mildred went to the front of a monitor and flipped down the tiny control panel to check the contrast and power.
“Live and functioning,” she reported after a minute. “These are dead because they’re not receiving any data.”
“Leave,” Jak said with a scowl. “Busted here, means busted elsewhere.”
Listening to the rest of the comps humming softly, Ryan gave the matter some serious thought. A malfunk could mean the rest of the base was frozen solid with ice, or flooded, or airless as the moon. Opening the door to the hallway could bring instant death. The comps did everything here, and if they were broken, then anything was possible. Damn things might have even cycled open the blast door to the outside world and let in anything, stickies, runts, hell hounds or a host of various muties. Automatically, Ryan checked the implo gren in a coat pocket. Need a lot of space to use the gren, but it could stop just about anything. The trick was to make sure the person throwing the implo didn’t get aced along with the target.
“No, we aren’t leaving yet,” Ryan decided, rubbing his unshaven jaw. “I want to check the hallway before deciding to make tracks. J.B. and Mildred, stay by the door to the mat-trans chamber. But if we come running back, slam it tight behind us.”
“Got ya covered,” J.B. said, and the man and woman went back through the other doorway and into the chamber.
This time, Krysty and Jak stood guard, while Ryan placed a palm against the corridor to check for heat. It was warm, but not hot, so he listened for a moment for any sounds coming from the other side, then worked the handle and opened the door a crack.
The corridor was empty. The overhead lights were working, but the bright glow of the fluorescent tubes had been reduced to a dim bluish sheen from the passage of the years. The air vents were still blowing warm air instead of cool, but Ryan was starting to wonder if that was deliberate. Maybe the redoubt was at the North Pole, or inside a glacier, and it needed to be kept this warm. Anything was possible. The predark government had hidden the subterranean bases in the oddest places.