Almost all of it was original issue, dating from right before skydark. The planners of the old COG, or Continuity of Government, programs had prudently recognized that unlike food, medicine and clothing, technologyparticularly weaponsif kept sheltered could endure the test of time and last generation after generation. Arms and equipment of every sort had been stockpiled in underground locations all over the United States.
Unfortunately the COG planners hadn’t foreseen the nukecaust would be such a colossal overkill that the very people the Stockpiles had been intended for mostly perished, like the rest of the population. Some survivors of the nuking and their descendants carved out lucrative careers looting and trading the contents of the Stockpiles. Hordes of exceptionally well-armed people once rampaged across the length and breadth of the Deathlands.
When the Program of Unification was instituted during the Council of Front Royal, one of the fundamental agreements was that the people must be disarmed and the remaining Stockpiles secured. Of course, to institute this action, the barons and their security forces not only had to be better armed than the Deathland hordes, but they also had to know the locations of the Stockpiles. The barons were provided with both of these requisites, and far more.
The early years of the program had been very violent and bloody, and Salvo missed those glory days as though he had participated in them. When he was young, he had met a few doddering oldsters who claimed to have been in the thick of things, sweeping across the continent, driving the anarchist scum and so-called baron blasters into the sea.
There had been one group of baron blasters who had escaped the deadly sweeps, and in some parts of the Outlands, they were still revered as folk heroes, the subject of ballads and tall tales. The band led by the legendary Cawdor was long gone, but their exploits, if believed, were clearly a lesson for posterity.
Salvo shook his head to clear it of mental meanderings. Now that he was well past the armory, he relaxed a bit. He didn’t want to appear tense or distracted during his audience with Baron Cobalt.
A dozen yards beyond the guards and the sec door, he turned to the right, down a tight, windowless passage. The passage dead-ended at a service accessway, a locked door that supposedly led down to a generator room. Salvo inserted a key into the lock and clicked it open.
Inside the door was an elevator shaft, just large enough to accommodate two men. He stepped onto the pancake-shaped disk and pulled the door shut behind him. Automatic lock solenoids snapped into place, and the disk on which he stood shot upward.
Up. Way up, far above all the other levels.
The disk hissed to a pneumatic stop, and Salvo opened the door, striding quickly across the ramp and down into the baron’s suite. All the strings of power in the ville extended down from this level.
The foyer was magnificent, as was every room in the suite that Salvo had ever visited. Glittering light cast from many crystal chandeliers flooded every corner of the entrance hall.
He couldn’t help but smile wryly at the lavish evidence of power, especially when he occasionally received memos that the Intel section was fast using up its allotted monthly quota of electricity.
At the far end of the foyer, flanking huge, ivory-and-gold-inlaid double doors, were two members of the elite Baronial Guard. Their polished black boots had walked no other surface than these equally polished floors; their white uniform jackets and red trousers had never been exposed to the elements of the outlands, let alone a hellzone. They gazed at him impassively, in his drab gray bodysuit, and inwardly he cursed them and Baron Cobalt for contriving such a situation to instill a sense of uncertainty and inferiority.
The guards opened the doors, and as Salvo walked between them he saw their faces twist, for the merest fraction of an instant, into sardonic smiles of superiority. Salvo ignored them. He had long ago filed their likenesses in the termination-pending section of his memory. If there should ever come a day. when they found themselves within reach of his power, he would take great satisfaction in stripping them of their immaculate uniforms and dropping them naked from a Deathbird into a hellzone.