Doc noted the gesture. “Ah, Mr. Cawdor…a threat. Over the years I have become
overly familiar with threats.”
“The door?”
“It is the last door before the gate.”
Ryan closed his only eye, fighting for control. There were times when a great
scarlet mist drenched his senses and an entirely insensate rage possessed him.
There was the temptation to take this doddering imbecile with his antique
clothes and rich baritone voice, take him and rip the seamed old face from the
skull. Things were tough on Ryan now. The realization that Krysty Wroth was
probably a mutie had already shaken him. He’d fallen in love with a mutie! Once
this was over he would need to clear his mind on that one. But for now…
“Can you open the door, Doc?” in a voice calm as buttermilk.
“If I were within, then it would be a matter of the utmost simplicity.”
“Within what?” asked Finnegan.
“Inside the door, stupe,” hissed Henn.
“It cannot be opened from out here.”
Ryan looked at J.B. Suddenly both of them chorused, “Over, under or around.”
It had been one of the Trader’s pet sayings when confronted with a problem that
could not be solved directly.
“Over’s impossible. Under, as well, without digging gear.”
“Go back and radio the war wag for help?” suggested Hunaker.
“What about goin’ in the side?” Ryan asked. “In that room there. Maybe the walls
aren’t as thick. Worth a try.”
The room was a bare office with only a grease mark on one wall showing where
someone had sat and leaned back against it.
The first high-ex bomb broke the outer layer of the walls, exposing hollow
cavities of concrete and rusting iron rods. The room was perfect to contain and
compound an explosion. More grenades opened up a great hole in the far wall,
clean through to the other side.
The smoke and bitter fumes took some time to clear in that underground expanse
of still air. Ryan and J.B. went first, checking that the main structure was not
about to topple in on top of them.
“Looks good?”
“Yeah. I’ll call the— What was that?” Ryan’s acute hearing had caught the faint
rumble of a distant explosion, hollow and metallic.
J.B. had heard it, too. “Main door?”
“Could be. If it is, we’d best find a good ambush spot. We’ll need it. Else
those bastards can starve us out.”
The others joined them. “Hear that?” asked Krysty. “They’ve managed to blow the
main door.”
“We’ll stand and fight,” ordered Ryan. “Only choice we got.”
Doc coughed. “If the gate is still functioning, then there is that option. The
makers said it would last a thousand years. But others have made such a boast
and been proven wrong.”
“What is this nukeshittin’ gate? Where is it?”
“It is the alternative way out of the Redoubt. And it lies through that hole.”
They all scrambled through successfully, though Finnegan managed to tear his
sleeve on one of the jagged pieces of twisted metal. Inside, the rad counter on
Ryan’s coat began to cheep and mutter to itself a little louder, indicating a
marginally higher count of radiation. But it was not enough to worry them, and
Ryan switched the device off.
It was like nothing any of them had ever seen. Great banks of dials and
flickering lights, red, green and amber, with thousands of white switches.
Circuits hummed and crackled, and loops of tape moved erratically in a row of
machines. Occasionally they had found Stockpiles that held ranks of electrical
machines that none of them could figure out. But this was something else.
“Through there,” said Doc, pointing with a bony forefinger past the consoles to
a doorway.
Again Ryan led them through, into an anteroom. It had a polished table on one
side and four empty shelves on the other. Beyond it was another door.
“The gate is there. In that next room. Are we ready for it? It is the gate of
gates. From this point the hills will become more and more shallow, but the
valleys will become more and more deep.”
“We lost him again,” said Hun. Once Doc’s mind began to wander like this, it