As they walked the corridors, Lakesh explained that the Cerberus redoubt was built into the side of a mountain peak and could be reached from the outside only by a single treacherous road. The sec door was usually closed, so the gateway brought people and materials in, and occasionally out. The thirty-acre facility had come through the nukecaust in fairly good shape. It, and most of the other redoubts, had been built according to specifications for maximum impenetrability, short of a direct hit. Its radiation shielding was still intact. Cerberus was powered by nuclear generators, and probably would continue to be for at least another five hundred years.
Lakesh showed them the armory, a room that was stacked nearly to the ceiling with wooden crates and boxes. Many of the crates were stenciled with the legend Property U.S. Army, and others bore words in Russian Cyrillic script.
They moved along the walls, inspecting the contents of glass-fronted cases. M-16 A-l assault rifles were neatly stacked in one, and an open crate beside it was filled with hundreds of rounds of 5.56 mm ammunition. There were SA80 subguns and 9 mm Heckler amp; Koch VP-70 semiautomatic pistols complete with holsters and belts. Farther on they found bazookas, tripod-mounted M-249 machine guns and several crates of grenades. Mounted in a corner was a full suit of Magistrate body armor. Every piece of ordnance and hardware, from the smallest-caliber handblaster to the biggest-bore M-79 grenade launcher, was in perfect condition.
Even Kane, in his mind-befogged state, was impressed. If he had doubted Lakesh before, he didn’t now. To possess this kind of arsenal, only a step or two below the one in Cobaltville, the old man had to be tapped into a very special, very exclusive pipeline.
“Compliments of the Anthill,” said Lakesh grimly. He added, as an afterthought, “I hate guns.”
“Couldn’t tell it by this room,” observed Domi.
Gesturing to the Mag armor, Grant asked, “Where’d you come by that?”
“It belonged to a disaffected member of your former fraternity,” Lakesh said quietly. “Anson, by name. For a time, he was part of our little group here.”
“What happened to him?”
“He killed himself with his own side arm. He had seen too much, and the truth was far more than he could bear.”
Lakesh doddered out of the armory, his face seamed with grief. “Come on, children.”
Another big chamber held a pair of all-terrain vehicles, a modified and armored Hussar Hotspur Land Rover and a current version of the Sandcat. Its armor was rust free, the treads solid and sturdy, and a USMG-73 heavy machine gun was enclosed within a small turret. A diesel fuel pump stood in the corner.
Out in the corridor again, they approached the gateway chamber. Nodding toward the cavity in the wall, Lakesh said, “This redoubt has a historic significance other than its use as a base for Cerberus. Before the barons consolidated their rule, Ryan Cawdor and his band of warriors blew that hole in the wall. Redoubt Bravo was their first jumping-off point to many other installations, including those overseas.”
“How do you know that?” Brigid asked.
Before Lakesh answered, he stepped to a section of vanadium-alloy wall. From the pocket of his bodysuit, he produced a small object molded of black plastic. He pointed it, pressed a stud and very slowly, a slab of alloy tilted inward at the top. It was precisely balanced on hidden pivots.
“If Cawdor and friends had a sonic key, they wouldn’t have been forced to deface the redoubt.”
They filed into the control room for the gateway, and Lakesh gestured to the rows of computers. “To answer your question, Brigid, all mat-trans units contain molecular-imaging scanners. Every pattern of every atom of transmitted matter is stored in the scanners’ memory banks. They can be replayed and reviewed, if you know how.”
“Cawdor, Wyeth and the others didn’t know how?”
“No. They knew very little. Their destinations were chosen by the target-destination computers on a strictly random logarithm. Catch-as-catch-can. A damn dangerous undertaking, but I suppose it was better than traveling across the Deathlands on foot or by vehicle. Of course, all access to any functioning redoubt ended with the advent of the unification program.”
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