Lakesh preferred to think of the trilevel, thirty-acre facility as a sanctuary for exiles.
Constructed in the late 1990s primarily of vanadium alloy, the redoubt boasted design and construction specs that had been aimed at making the complex an impenetrable community of at least a hundred people.
It held considerably fewer than that now, an even dozen human beings, counting Kane, Brigid and Grant. Balam couldn’t be counted, inasmuch as he was a prisoner and not truly human.
The redoubt contained a frightfully well-equipped armory and two dozen self-contained apartments, a cafeteria, a decontamination center, a medical dispensary, a swimming pool and even holding cells on the bottom level. Its mat-trans gateway unit was the first one built after the prototype proved successful.
The ragged remains of a chain-link fence enclosed the plateau. Though they couldn’t be seen, it was also surrounded by an elaborate system of heat-sensing warning devices, night-vision vid cameras and motion-trigger alarms. A telemetric communications array, uplinked to the very few reconnaissance satellites still in orbit, was nestled at the top of the mountain peak.
The main multiton security door opened like an accordion, folding to one side, operated by a punched-in code and a hidden lever control. Nothing short of an antitank shell could even dent the vanadium alloy.
Lakesh shivered as a chill breeze gusted up from the chasm. He’d been born in the tropical climate of Kashmir, India, more than two hundred years earlier, and his internal thermostat was still stuck there. Although he had spent a century in cryogenic stasis, and though it made no real scientific sense, he had been very vulnerable to cold ever since.
Patting Domi’s right shoulder, he said, “The sun is going down, darlingest one. Let’s go inside. They’ll not try the road at night.”
“Wait a while longer,” she replied. “Nothing else to do.”
Lakesh’s thin lips quirked in a sad smile. Among the Cerberus polymath personnel, only Domi possessed no specific area of expertise. Half-feral, very nearly illiterate, she had arrived at the redoubt more or less by accident.
.He had arranged for the escapes of the staff from various baronies when they ran afoul of one ville law or another. Domi’s speciality lay in simple survival, and the injury she had recently suffered severely curtailed her skills in that.
DeFore, the redoubt’s medic, had rebuilt her shattered shoulder with an artificial ball-and-socket joint only a few days before. Any kind of major reconstructive surgery exacted an emotional toll, as well as a physical oneas Lakesh had reason to know.
Upon his revival from cryogenic sleep, he had undergone several operations in order to prolong his life and his usefulness to the Program of Unification. His brown, glaucoma-afflicted eyes were replaced with new blue ones, his leaky old heart exchanged for a sound new one and his lungs changed out. The joints in his knees weren’t the same as those he had been born with, either. Though his wrinkled, liver-spotted skin made him look exceptionally old, his physiology was that of a fifty-year-old man’s.
He swept his gaze again over the mountain peak looming above them. Lakesh’s single purpose in life had been devoted to science, to dispelling the un-known, reasoning that was the only way to save the idiot, half-insane world from itself.
For that purpose, he had studied most of his life, learned twelve languages and then left the country of his birth to work for what he truly believed was a way to restore sanity on earth. His devotion and belief had been as utterly and thoroughly betrayed as it was possible for a human being’s to be and not commit suicide out of despair.
Lakesh shivered again and winced as his half-healed abrasions pulled. Domi noticed the wince.
“You go back,” she said. “No reason for you to be out freezing ass off because of me.”
Domi’s eyes suddenly widened, and she tilted her head in the direction of the road stretching away from the perimeter of the plateau. “Hear something.”
Lakesh strained his ears but heard nothing except the sighing of the wind. He didn’t question her. If Domi claimed she heard a sound, then she heard it.
A moment later, he detected a distant moaning drone, rising, falling, then rising again. As it grew louder, he recognized it as the noise made by a laboring engine as the vehicle upshifted, then downshifted.