“Silas,” Doc whispered, fingering the silver lion’s head on his swordstick.
“Silent recce,” Ryan declared, loosening the SIG-Sauer in its holster. “Five-yard spread. Go.”
The companions spread out and started into the forest once more. After a while, they left the trees and found themselves standing on the bank of a river. The water rushed over rocks, foaming white and dangerous. On the other side was a dirt road deeply cut with rain gullies. Beyond that were thick bushes and more trees. Other than the companions, there was nothing else in sight. “There,” Jak said, gesturing with his Colt. A short way up the river was another bridge, wider and more detailed than any of the others they had encountered so far.
“Odd,” Krysty noted. “That’s the first bridge with handrails. The others were just flat planks without railings.”
“Doesn’t look predark,” Dean estimated. “Mebbe it’s the first one the blues built. You always do the first of anything a bit fancier than needed.”
“It does not go anywhere,” Doc said, sounding annoyed. “They built a bridge, but not a road?”
“Changed minds,” Jak suggested.
“Or ran out of slaves,” Mildred countered.
Pensive, Ryan looked at the sky. Night was rapidly approaching. Should they continue to the redoubt, or check out the smoke? Tough choice.
“We’ll recce the smoke,” he decided. “But if we encounter any large groups of blue shirts, we run for the redoubt. Understood?” All nodded their assent.
The companions stayed within the cover provided by the trees until reaching the bridge. J.B. checked underneath from the shore, and they crossed without trouble. Past the road, they went into the woods and found the pines were only a few yards deep. They stopped in a neat line, the land beyond dotted with stumps and sloping away to a valley.
“Eureka,” Doc whispered, thumbing back the hammer on the LeMat.
A sprawling ville filled the floor of the mountain valley, at one end a brick building with a tall circular chimney pouring out thick smoke, insulated wires running from a battery of transformers and spreading across the valley in a black spiderweb of technology. New brick buildings stood alongside predark structures and a shiny new Quonset hut. A stone wall was being built around the enclosure, the tiny figures of sec men visible as they patrolled its top. Hundreds of people were moving about on the ground, doing incomprehensible things at that distance. Rising above everything was a huge white bowl set within a framework of steel girders and I-beams that rested on a slab of concrete. A slim pole thrust from the center of the bowl, pointing toward the cloudy sky, and tiny lights winked.
“Dark night, this is even bigger than the Anthill mock-up of D.C.,” J.B. muttered, cradling the Uzi in both arms.
“Fireblast! They have a bastard tank!” J.B. snorted. “Dead tank. See there? A couple of the sec men are hammering on the top hatch with chisels, trying to get inside.” Ryan relaxed slightly. “Good.”
“What bowl?” Jak asked, squinting in displeasure. Even though the teenager used the redoubts and mat-trans units, he was no fan of technology, and this smacked of predark science on a major scale.
“That, my friend, is a radio telescope,” Mildred said softly, as if afraid the people in the valley might her the words. “And it seems to be fully restored.”
Ryan scowled. “A sky talker.”
“Has Silas managed to launch something into orbit?” Krysty asked.
“Not here,” Ryan stated. “I’ve seen space ports, and this has none of the right machines. No fuels tanks, or fire equipment, no bunkers.” He frowned. “But it sure as hell was built to do something important.”
Mildred said something that sounded like “settee.”
“Come again, madam?” Doc asked.
“SETI,” she repeated. “That dish antenna was an old project even before the nuke war. The search for extraterrestrial life. The government was trying to talk, or at least listen, to alien civilizations. See if we were alone in the universe.”
Dean looked away from the dish. “You mean people on other worlds?” he asked incredulously. “Never thought of such a thing.”
“Most considered it crazy. Even if we reached anybody, the messages would have taken dozens or even hundreds of years to get there and come back.”