James Axler – Circle Thrice

“Take it all the way up,” ordered Ryan, rising to his feet, still gripping the SIG-Sauer.

The gears hissed and whirred, and the huge sec-steel door rose ponderously to vanish into the ceiling of the control room, halting with a slight grating jar.

“Feel anything, lover?” he asked Krysty, who stood at his elbow.

She shook her head. “Just a great age of nothing. Can’t sense any kind of life reading.”

“Good.”

“But there’s always the possibility of my power being thrown off by all the steel and lead shielding in these places. Bear that in mind, lover.”

“Sure.”

The passage beyond the open door gaped smooth and silent. As in most redoubts, the ceiling was curved, with recessed lighting and a number of tiny sec cameras fixed at the junction of concrete wall and ceiling, ceaselessly roaming, a glowing red light showing when they were actually transmitting pictures back to some long-abandoned central control area of the complex.

“We going out?” Jak asked.

“Sure. Skirmish line, and everyone keep it on condition triple-red.”

Chapter Five

Ryan led the way toward the left, though experience in many other redoubts made him guess what he might find. Almost universally the passage to the left of the entrance to the mat-trans unit ended in a blank wall, as though the original, long-dead builders had deliberately made the gateway in the deepest, most secure part of the complex, as far away from the surface and potential danger as possible.

Above the sec door was a notice that he’d seen before in a variety of forms Entry To This High-Security Section Of The Redoubt Is Absolutely Forbidden To All Personnel Below The Security Clearing Of B12.

The corridor wound gently, ending after about a hundred yards in a blank, unfinished wall of raw rock. The stone crystals glittered brightly in the stark overhead lighting.

“Like gold,” Jak said.

“More like the gold of fools, son,” Doc stated. “Iron pyrites, unless I miss my guess.”

“No point standing looking at it,” Ryan said. “About-face and let’s move on out.”

IT WAS A BIG REDOUBT, nothing like some of the smaller, concealed buildings that they’d come across in their travels. This one was seriously substantial. You could sense it, even if you didn’t have any special mutie powers.

“Feels like being buried at the bottom of the deepest mine shaft in the world,” J.B. commented, his voice falling flatly into the endless space of the wide corridor.

“We must be careful not to risk a mine-shaft gap, mein President,” Mildred said, laughing. She looked at the others, grinning at their puzzled faces. “I haven’t gone crazy. Sort of a quote from a movie. Doctor Strangelove . Had a long subtitle. ‘How I stopped worrying and learned to love the bomb.’ Think that was it. Never thought about that until now. Amazingly prophetic movie. Kind of a black comedy.”

“Never heard of it,” Ryan said, shaking his head. “Didn’t survive skydark.”

The woman nodded. “I somehow think that the director might have liked that irony.”

They moved toward the right, the corridor winding in a big circle, rising slightly as it went upward.

“Like being inside the shell of a huge snail,” Krysty commented. “Going to get dizzy if this goes on much farther.”

They passed a number of side passages, but all were blocked off by immovable sec doors. Each had a digital panel at the side, but the letter and number codes had vanished in the nuke haze of a century earlier.

Each time they came to one of the green painted doors, Jak wandered over and punched the keys at random, shaking his mane of stark white hair in disappointment.

Doc laughed. “I would hazard a guess that the odds against your stumbling on the right combination to open any of the doors is something in the order of Let me see.” He closed his pale blue eyes as he did the calculation. “Six to one. No, that cannot be correct. Of course. I had forgotten that the decimal point should” He tapped the twin barrels of the massive Le Mat on the side of his head. “One hundred and eight million, six hundred and forty thousand to one. Very roughly. To the nearest ten thousand or so. Somewhere in that vicinity. Approximately. More or less. A rough estimate, of course. Rather a”