He was stretched out, no flesh remaining on the bones, his skin blackened by the passing of the ages. One arm was reaching toward the door, as if he’d been knocking for help. Or, perhaps, had tried to get back into the relative safety of the mat-trans unit at the last moment.
“Master sergeant,” Mildred commented, looking at the golden stripes on the faded, paper-thin cloth of the uniform.
“Where there’s one, there’ll be others, as Trader used to say.” J.B. caught Ryan’s eye as he spoke, looking away again in slight embarrassment.
Ryan nodded agreement. “Be amazed if we don’t find more chills as we move along.”
THERE WERE A DOZEN in the first hundred yards of the passage, all in the same mummified condition.
“Don’t get it, Dad.”
“What, son?”
“Looks like the jump rooms were safest in the redoubt. People dying out here. How come they didn’t get back inside and have a better chance of safety?”
Ryan thought about the question. “Damned if I know, Dean.”
“I believe that I can answer that one, my dear Cawdor.” Doc stooped over Dean, like a buzzard over a ground squirrel. “I believe that the matter-transfer section of the redoubt would have been deliberately locked against anyone, because it probably represented the only sure way out of here. The authorities-senior officers and the rest of the beribboned imbeciles-wouldn’t have wanted desertion on a massive scale. Not with a war to be fought.” He gave a short barking laugh. “Some war, some fight. They feared the men and women under their command might’ve crammed in here and fled to all points north and south. East and west. So they took the obvious precaution and barred the door.”
“And they all died.” Mildred sighed. “Such stupidity and such a dreadful waste.”
The physical state of the redoubt got worse. They climbed four sets of wide stairs, each time discovering more damage and more bodies.
The deep cracks in the hugely thick concrete walls and vaulted ceilings were more obvious, and in two or three places whole sections of masonry had collapsed, spilling piles of dusty gray stone across the passages, exposing the rusting sections of fractured reinforcing metal.
J.B. drew Ryan’s attention to the small rad counters they each wore. “Orange.”
“None of the corpses show any obvious signs of being shot or wounded. Likely it was seepage from the nukes.”
The Armorer thought about it, looking around. They were in an open space with several alternate routes opening off, most of them blocked by sec doors. A dozen bodies lay near them, some stretched out, some huddled in a fetal position, knees drawn up to their sagging jaws.
“Probably. But if the redoubt had been sealed, some of them might simply have gotten trapped in a closed section and starved to death.”
“Way the place has been pounded makes me wonder about what kind of hardware the Ruskies used. Doesn’t look much like neutron bombing.”
The neutron missiles had been developed in the latter part of the twentieth century to take out all forms of life but leave buildings standing. The idea being that the winners could move in and take over the defeated country with as little logistical trouble as possible.
The drawback that none of the master tacticians in the Kremlin and the Pentagon had considered was that there wasn’t a simple comp-programmed winner and loser, like there’d been in their billion-dollar war.
There were only losers.
THE REDOUBT WAS a bleakly depressing place, brimming with hopeless, pointless death.
All the evidence pointed to an evacuation that had gone wrong and an attempt to safely seal the whole complex that had been a virtual failure.
The only part of the whole rambling military base that had survived more or less unscathed was the mat-trans unit.
Krysty was walking with Ryan as they approached yet another closed set of sec doors, the green control lever in the down position.
“If these poor devils were trapped down here, why didn’t they just open the doors to get out? If we can do it, then why couldn’t they?”
Ryan paused, turning to face her. “I wondered. Then I figured it out. When they were trying to seal the base, they must’ve used some master control to override the manual controls. Part of the main comp system must’ve been took out.”