answer. “Yeah.”
“You are hungered?”
“Yeah.” Finnegan got the answer in first.
“Come forward. Leave your weapons of destruction. You will not need them while
under the protection of the Keeper.”
“Can’t wait to meet him,” muttered Hunaker, standing and stretching like a big
cat.
Hennings went to retrieve the radio, but the voice from the loudspeaker snapped,
“No! Leave that. There is no need to communicate with the chill beyond these
walls. None.”
“Can hardly reach War Wag One, anyway. Range is only ’bout fifteen miles. Could
be way farther off than that.” Hennings put the radio back with the blasters and
grenades.
Ryan led them through the circular corridor, past several doors in the roof. The
smell of cooked food became stronger. Intermittently they passed beneath a tiny,
silent vid camera.
“This goddamn place goes on forever,” moaned Okie, kicking a wall. Sparks flew
from the steel tips of her combat boots.
“Doc? You got any ideas where we might be?” asked Ryan.
Since they’d emerged from the gateway, the old man had been strangely quiet,
stalking along, the antiquated hat perched on top of the bony skull. The
business of the trap and the creaking voice with its orders hardly seemed to
have bothered him at all. Now he started at Ryan’s question.
“What was that, my dear Mr. Cawdor? I fear that my thoughts were elsewhere.”
“Any idea where we are?”
“In a redoubt, sir.”
“We fuckin’ know that,” sighed Hunaker.
“It is a place of some size, unless I miss my guess. My memory is clouded— After
a jump, I have always been a touch… there were so many.”
“How many?”
“Many stockpiles and also many redoubts. Indeed, in places of the blessed land
where it was thought attacks might be concentrated, I recall they built some
redoubts that were also stockpiles. Perhaps this is such a place.”
They’d been walking, by Ryan’s calculation, for nearly fifteen minutes, covering
more than a mile at their brisk pace.
When they reached a steel barrier, blocking their progress, they stood and
stared at it. Finally Ryan stepped forward and looked into the nearest camera,
“I am becoming tired of this. We are all hungry and thirsty and in need of rest.
We come in peace. We have laid down our weapons, yet still you treat us like an
invadin’ enemy.”
Even as he spoke, he realized that he had unconsciously slipped into the same
form of address as the person behind the screens.
“The Keeper has never seen the like,” came the reply, crackling and wheezing.
Either the sound reproduction was poor or a decrepit old man was talking. Or
both.
“Then let us see this Keeper. Let us talk to him. We are few. This redoubt must
hold hundreds of armed men.”
A burst of laughter spluttered from the loudspeaker, followed by silence.
J.B. moved closer to Ryan, and whispered, “Could use the plasex and run for that
gateway.”
“Yeah. Get the fuck out of this fireblasted place. Let’s…”
He was interrupted by the door ahead of them beginning to slide slowly upward,
revealing the legs, then bodies, then heads of three people standing facing
them.
“I’ll eat my bastard blaster,” whispered Okie, shaking her black hair in
disbelief.
Two women and a man were spread across the corridor, two paces apart, each
holding a gun. Ryan sized them up, trying to hide his bewilderment. He’d
expected to see the cream of the redoubt’s guards: a squad of uniformed sec men,
helmeted and masked, each with a gleaming laser rifle or sonic stunner.
The man at the center of the trio stood a scant five feet tall, Ryan guessed. He
was dressed in a bizarre assortment of rags and tawdry finery: a jacket that
bore sparkling sequins, leather breeches that were hacked off raggedly above the
scrawny knees, and a woman’s high-heeled boot on the right foot and a stained
shoe of blue canvas on the left. Numerous medals on scraps of iridescent
ribbons, jingled from his left breast. A bandolier that crossed his chest
contained an extraordinary range of ammunition. Even at a snatched glance Ryan
could make out six or seven different calibers.
It was tough to estimate his age. He was so stooped and bent that he might have