Mildred shook her head. “No. One of the greats of rock and roll. Lead-guitar man who played with Elvis and Ricky Nelson and all the best. Nice to see someone appreciated him.”
“They signed their graffiti,” Ryan said. “Someone called Rog wrote it.”
“Must’ve been a rock-and-roll man.” Mildred smiled at the thought. “They always used to say that rock and roll would never die.”
THERE WERE MORE SIGNS in the control room of a violent skirmish. More bullet holes had been stitched along one wall, running up into the sloping ceiling, taking out two strips of neon lighting and one of the probing sec cameras. There was also an ancient stain, showing almost black on the pale cream floor, that looked remarkably like old blood.
“Couple of the consoles been blasted from here to perdition,” Doc observed, leaning on the corner of a desk to steady himself.
Ryan looked around the room. “Rest are all working fine by the look of it.”
“No bodies,” Krysty said. “Shows there was time to do some cleaning after the shooting.”
“Doesn’t seem to have affected any of the main controls.” Ryan glanced at Doc. “Any idea what those two comp consoles would have done?”
“The broken ones?”
“Yeah?”
The old man walked and looked at them, his head to one side. “I believe that the one on the left was an Awac Subcomm 14. The other one was an Andromeda Suff84.”
Ryan waited for a further explanation. “Yeah? So, what did they do? What aspects of the mat-trans unit did they work? That’s what matters.”
Doc sighed. “I fear that it would take greater wisdom than I possess to answer that, old friend. All I can do is tell you what they were called.”
“How do you know that?” Mildred asked. “I’m grudgingly impressed at your memory, Doc.”
“Ah, well, I cannot truthfully take the credit for that. There are neat little labels attached to the desks in front of each of the comp screens.”
“READY?”
Ryan knelt on the cold stone floor, up against the massive sec door that sealed off the mat-trans section from the rest of what he assumed would be another redoubt. Jak, still looking a whiter shade of pale, was standing by to operate the green handle that controlled the raising and lowering of the door, waiting for the word.
“Take her up six.”
Jak eased the lever upward, and they all heard the familiar noise of hydraulic gears operating behind the thick, reinforced walls.
After a moment’s hesitation the door began to move slowly upward.
“Stop,” Ryan ordered, flattening himself and squinting out to check for any obvious sign of danger.
All he could see was the most familiar of redoubt sightsan expanse of bare corridor, curving away to the left and right, brightly lit.
“Up another six inches. Hold it.”
Now Ryan could see farther in both directions. He breathed in, tasting the air, savoring the flatness and dull quality that normally indicated that the military complex hadn’t been broken into over the century since skydark.
All of the redoubts had been powered with the finest examples of twentieth-century American scientific knowledge, nuclear power plants that were designed to be self-maintaining, controlling every aspect of the redoubts temperature, humidity and air quality; filtering, cleaning and recycling automatically for close to a hundred years without a mortal hand being laid on the controls.
If there was any problem, then there were automatic cutouts and bypass arrangements so that the whole complex would carry on running at a minimally low level, ticking over, waiting for the humans to return once the nuclear threat was done and passed.
But the nuclear threat had destroyed the world. The events of skydark killed all but a tiny handful of the planet’s population, irrevocably shattering science and industry forever and a day. The long winters set the country back to its Deathlands status, similar in some ways to the dark times of the Middle Ages in Europe, with a number of larger and smaller villes, some of them ruled by their own barons.
So the humans never returned.
But the redoubts continued.
Someit would never be known how manyhad been destroyed by the first strike, wiped away at ground zero. But a surprising number had survived, relatively unscarred.