Rat King, page 5
"When we've chilled three, mebbe four of their people? Doesn't make sense." J.B.
shook his head.
"To us, perhaps not," Doc said. "However, we are not cognizant of whatever
reason they may have for keeping us alive."
Remembering the perverse habits of some of the barons they had come across, and
the trade in body parts that had centered around old military installations, it
was not a thought on which to dwell.
"Stupes may not be so stupe after all," Ryan murmured. "The only thing we can do
is keep moving to the armory, then be on triple red for an ambush. Seems to be
the only place it can happen."
They advanced in line, still keeping alert. In all their travels they had yet to
come across a redoubt where the vanadium-steel sec doors could be closed in any
other way than by punching in the code on the wall-mounted panels. It seemed
unlikely, then, that they could be trapped by their enemies sealing off a
section of corridor by remote triggering of the doors. Then again, they'd never
jumped into a redoubt that had a population that was actually maintaining it, or
seemed to have any idea how the old comp systems worked.
All the corridors were deserted. The only signs of life were the detritus of
people moving out in a hurry: a clipboard and pen that lay on the floor; another
mop and bucket similar to the one belonging to the chilled maintenance man; a
frayed and worn service cap, with a threadbare insignia.
It seemed obvious that whoever commanded the redoubt had pulled out all
personnel to some secure place without sounding an alarm. That indicated a
strong sense of discipline among that personnel.
By the time they reached the location of the armory, all of them were feeling
strung out. The complete silence was unnerving. In other redoubts it had been
normal, but here—where they knew the redoubt was still a base of some kind—the
silence was eerie.
The sec door to the armory was raised. From their oblique approach angle, Ryan
could see into the room. It appeared unoccupied, the ranks and boxes of
blasters, grens and ammunition undisturbed by human presence.
There was, however, still half of the armory that was hidden from view by the
angle.
"Too quiet," Jak mouthed into Ryan's ear. "Too empty. Want us there."
Every instinct told Ryan that Jak was correct. The armory, too, was deserted.
Dean stated what they were all thinking. "If it is empty, that's 'cause they
want us in there. Once we're in there, we're trapped."
All it would take would be the release of the sec door to the armory, and all
seven of them would be trapped inside. They'd have all the weapons in the
redoubt, but it wouldn't do them any good against being starved to death, or
gassed by a nerve gren or by some kind of nerve-gas supply fed into the air
circulation. From bitter experience they all knew that no gren or plas-ex could
penetrate the vanadium steel—always assuming that they could have survived the
impact blast from inside the armory. Or that it wouldn't trigger off every other
gren, shell, cartridge or piece of plas-ex in there.
"Simple solution," J.B. told them. "Half of us stay here on watch. At least that
way some of us will stay on the outside."
"Mebbe," Ryan answered. "But mebbe that just leaves us trapped in different ways
and our forces halved. Better we stay together right now."
"But for what?" Krysty asked with a shiver. "We've come up against some real
evil, but this is triple weird. This is just so…so innocent somehow. There's no
sense of pleasure in chilling going on here."
As she spoke, they became aware of the rumble of heavy wheels on the concrete
floor, and the high whine of an electric engine.
"Krysty, there's nothing innocent about that baby," Mildred husked in an awed
voice as a bizarre wag turned the far corner of the corridor.
IN THE WEAPONS-DEVELOPMENT lab, Gen Wallace perched his enormous bulk on the
groaning stool, its wheels squeaking in protest as he rocked the stool back and
forth. His fingers hovered nervously over the keyboard, using the keys to guide
the remote wag. It hadn't been used for several generations, and it was only
thanks to the continued diligence of the weapons-development team that the wag
still worked. They hadn't actually developed any weapons for five generations,
but the blueprints left by their ancestors were used to assiduously strip and
clean all the weapons in their possession. It was their task and purpose. That
was how it was in the good book.
Murphy spumed the use of tech weapons, claiming that they would be useless on
the outside, and that blasters and a well-drilled sec corps were the only
essentials.
Wallace furrowed his brow. Where was Murphy now? Unconscious, maybe chilled, on
a concrete floor.
And the outsiders he wanted so badly… Murphy would have chilled them. Wallace
wanted them alive. They were recyclable. Especially the old man. He seemed
perfect for the mechanism.
The vid screen flickered above the terminal the Gen was using. In shaky black
and white, reverberating in time with the movement of the wag, Wallace could see
the seven people standing by the open armory door. He knew he had guessed right.
They needed blasters, and he had used that need to trap them. That was why he
was the Gen.
They were frozen in disbelief for a fraction of a second. Then the one-eyed man
in front and the man with spectacles at the rear raised their blasters. The
black woman, the one with the strange hair, the boy, the albino and the old
man—yes, the all-important old man— stood between.
Gen Wallace stopped the wag and grasped the handheld microphone that stood by
the terminal. He thumbed a switch.
"You people. You will obey the regs and put your blasters on the floor. Hands on
heads, then follow the wag. No harm will befall you. We come in peace. It is
imperative that we have full and fruitful discussions."
He saw the one-eyed man shout something and open fire with the Heckler & Koch.
The sec camera was obviously hit, as the screen went black.
Wallace sighed. Why did they do this? Didn't they know the regs stated all
resistance was futile? He keyed in a comp code.
"BACK," RYAN YELLED.
"Back where?" J.B. asked. "Damn redoubt corridors don't have any cover."
"Past the last sec door, John," Mildred cried, passing the Armorer and pulling
at his arm. "Maybe they're like all other soldiers and pencil the code under the
punch plate."
J.B. figured Mildred had a point—that was usually how they found the sec codes
of some doors in redoubts.
"Worth a try," Ryan yelled over the chatter of his Heckler & Koch as he emptied
the clip at the wag. "It's the only way we can outdistance this thing, buy some
bastard time."
He ejected the clip and inserted another from the meager supply he'd removed
from Panner's corpse. It seemed to him that they were doing nothing but react.
They had to turn the situation around and act, get these soldiers on the run.
"Dad, get down!" Dean yelled as he saw the drum rise from the center of the wag.
It looked like a circle of blasters on a rotating wheel, which began to rapidly
spin.
Ryan dived as the rotating wheel spit fire. He felt a plucking at his clothes,
small objects whistling past his ears and through his hair.
Krysty screamed behind him. He tried to turn, but movement was sluggish. His
vision narrowed.
Trank darts.
His last conscious thought was that someone wanted very badly to take them
alive.
What reason could prompt that risk?
Chapter Four
Dean Cawdor was sure that there was something wrong. It was night, and he was
making his way across the marshy grasses that separated the boys' dormitories
from those of the girls.
That was weird; in all his time at the Nicholas Brody School, he couldn't recall
the area between the dormitories being such a swamp. It hadn't been such a long
trek, either. Dean's calf muscles ached, each step tearing at them and sapping
his strength. He ground his teeth as he pulled a foot out of the sucking earth
and moved on.
The girls' dormitory seemed to fall farther into the distance the longer he
walked. His breath came in rasps, and his chest felt as though it were about to
burst, a burn crossing his lungs with each painful intake of air.
The more he thought about it, the more bizarre it seemed. He had no idea why he
was doing this. Trying to think as hard as possible, to concentrate as much as
he could while the distractions of searing lungs and tearing muscles pulled at
the edges of his mind, Dean knew that something was wrong.
Was it a nightmare?
No, not that… Dean didn't dream with such clarity. His muscles never ripped and
tore in his dreams, and his lungs never felt as though they would explode in his
chest as if someone had rammed a gren down his throat.
Vaguely, plucking at the corners of his mind, he could remember the redoubt and
what had followed. When he reached the point where the trank darts were fired at
him, everything descended into blackness…
Until now. So how did he get here? It certainly wasn't an ordinary dream.
"HIS REM IS GOING totally crazy, Gen. I think we should pull him out before the
kid ruptures something."
Gen Wallace fixed the tech with a gaze that spoke of barely suppressed fury.
Murphy, watching from a few paces back, noted the way that the small man quailed
at the Gen's stare. He seemed to visibly shrink. It was something in the way
Wallace looked at you. There was a mixture of ice and fire in that gaze, like
the barely controlled impassive skin over a raging volcano of fury. The thought
of being the agent that unleashed it wasn't pleasant. Murphy screwed his face
into a wry grin, or something close. A genetic problem had resulted in numb
facial muscles, so they didn't respond too well. Inbreeding. At least it was
minor compared to many.
Murphy switched his attention from Wallace and the tech to the kid on the couch.
He suppressed a shiver as his view took in the boy, stretched naked on the
PVC-covered foam rubber that molded to the contours of his body. Not that you
could see much of him under the trailing mess of wires and electrodes that
covered his body, attached to the skin by guar-gum pads that occasionally
slipped on the sweaty surface of the boy's twitching skin. The wires entwined
across the floor until they reached the opened back of a small comp console that
sparked ominously with faint crackles.
This part of the old R&D facility was populated by some of the geekiest
specimens Murphy had ever seen. The tech who had just been stared down by the
Gen, for example. He was a small, hunchbacked man with a squeaky voice—whiny and
irritating even after a few words—who stood at barely four feet tall. His white
coat trailed across the floor, and the sleeves were turned up several times so
that his tiny hands could poke out of the ends. But worst of all from Murphy's
point of view, the geek tech was wearing thickly lensed glasses that still
didn't seem strong enough for his vision, as he squinted heavily when he stared
at Wallace.
That could account for the sparking and crackling terminals. Although it was
almost sacrilege to think, Murphy felt certain that the techs weren't learning
anything new, and whatever was supposed to be passed down the family lines was
somehow going astray.
Murphy doubted that Wallace would get whatever he wanted from any of these
outsiders. Chances were that they would be killed on these machines before the
Gen learned anything.
Murphy looked at the kid, jerking and twitching underneath the skein of wire.
He wouldn't last long.
IT TOOK EVERY OUNCE of strength, stubbornness and sheer determination that Dean
had, but he finally crossed the swampy grasslands and reached firm earth that
felt as hard and smooth as metal beneath his feet.
So far, so good. Dean had no idea why he was doing this, but he was driven by
some inner message that pushed him on by instinct.
The night was cold and still, and he could almost see the steam rise from his
hot, sweating body by the fallow light of the shrouded moon as he made his way
across the earth toward the three-story blockhouse that constituted the girls'
dormitory. A veranda ran around the length of the building, with stanchions at
each corner that would allow him a swift and easy ascent. Even with the pains
that still flowed like the blood through his legs, pulsing in time with his
hammering heart.
Almost counting between breaths to keep some sort of rhythm to his actions, Dean
trotted across the empty expanse of earth that stood before the building,
keeping an eye out for the guards. Yet it was quiet. Too quiet Not even the cry
of the whippoorwill disturbed the air.
Why was there no one else around?
"WHAT DOES THIS MEAN?" Wallace snapped.
The tech squinted at the flickering monitor, where various lines were changing
pattern and tone at a rapid rate. He glanced up at the Gen. It was hard for
Murphy to discern anything on the strange little face, but he was sure there was
an aura of fear.
"I, uh, I'm not too sure, sir. We don't usually register such readings when we
run tests."
"Do you run tests on subjects, then?" Murphy asked, trying to keep the sarcasm
out of his voice.
The geek tech shot Murphy a glance of pure venom, "There aren't any subjects as
a rule," he muttered in his high, penetrating voice. "We only run simulations."
Wallace snapped the technician's head around to him with a blow from the flat of
his hand. His fat jowls wobbled in fury. "You mean that we could lose these
outsiders?"
The tech shrugged. "I don't think so…"
THE ROOF on the veranda was made of sheets of corrugated metal that allowed any
rainwater to flow into the eaves troughs that had given Dean easy foot-and
handholds. The roof was steeply angled, but the corrugation made it relatively
easy for him to scramble up, even though his aching calf muscles protested.
Clinging to the rough texture of the dormitory's outside wall, the youth
steadied his breathing and counted the number of windows. Three along would
bring him to where Phaedra was waiting. It seemed a long time since he had left
the school with his father and their companions. A long time since he had seen
Phaedra, and since she had kissed him, stirring feelings in him that were still
strange.
Stranger still was the fact that, despite he was clinging on to the outside of
an out-of-bounds building at a school he no longer attended, with aching muscles
that felt as though they could give way at any moment, and that he could be
discovered by the guards Brody employed as much to keep the sexes apart as to
keep the school safe from outside marauders, Dean felt safe. As if he were
coming home to a safe place.
Third window along. Dean edged his way across the veranda roof until he was
directly underneath. The tip of his nose could touch the sill, and as the window
was open it was a simple matter to push it up and then lift himself up over the
sill and into the room.
Inside, Dean was immediately aware that things were, once again, not as they
should be. The room was larger than those he remembered, and cleaner. There was
virtually nothing in the room except one bed, square against the wall opposite
the window. Strange—there were at least two occupants to each room in the
dormitory buildings. So why was this different?
The bed was covered with an insect net, draped over the poles that held the net
four feet above the bed, like a canopy, and falling to the floor, gathering in a
pool around the feet of the bed.
"Dean? Is that you, come back again?"
Dean's heart raced, but not from exertion. It was Phaedra's voice, just as he
remembered.
"I guess it is," he said slowly, trying to control his breathing. "I don't know
exactly how I got here, but…"
"It doesn't matter," she replied, cutting across him. "The important thing is
that you're here now, and it's safe."
Dean wanted to speak, but some instinct stopped him. Why should she use a word
like safe? He'd been thinking that, sure, but why would Phaedra say it?
The net over the bed stirred, and was pushed aside. Phaedra emerged from the
misty depths, and Dean caught his breath as she rose from the bed and stood in
