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Once she could stand, he was off and running, pushing her ahead of him. He
followed some crazed logic of his own, winding and doubling between the ruins,
climbing over tottering gantries and bridges of rusting metal, across chasms
filled with quicksand. She realized that he was trying to find a way into the
complex, but every gate and door was long blocked or fallen.
He hardly spoke to her, apart from the occasional curse, generally accompanied
by a slap or a kick. Once they stopped and he allowed her to sip from a
canteen of warm, stale water. The rest of the time they moved at dizzying
speed.
"Bastard fast," Jak said, waiting for the others to catch up to him.
They were on the edge of an open space. All around them rose the wreckage of
the massive military complex. Some walls still stood, forty to fifty feet
high, some with slitted ob-ports, shadowed slashes of blackness against the
sun-washed concrete.
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It made the skin crawl to know that Cort Strasser might be behind any of the
windows, squinting through the sniperscope of his SVD.
The tracks were easy to follow, Mildred's sneakers and Strasser's boots. They
were wide spaced, showing the pair was often running. Occasionally they'd
vanish on bare stone, but the albino teenager would always pick them up again.
"Way he's spinning around& we're closing in." J.B. pointed at a deep heel
mark, with some water still seeping into it. "Minutes is all."
Ryan had a sudden sense that an ending was coming near.
Chapter Forty-One
BEFORE THEY FOUND Cort Strasser, they stumbled over the remnants of what had
once been the cryo-center. Ryan's fears proved right. The buildings hadn't
been built as solidly as those of the redoubt, and the effects of the nuking
and subsequent quakes had proved totally ruinous.
Only one part had been freakishly preserved, where a roof had fallen at an
angle and had protected one of the inner chambers. The five friends stood by
the canted concrete roof, trying to make out what lay beneath it. There was
the glint of glass.
Doc straightened. "I do not imagine anything can have survived beneath that,
Ryan."
"No."
The disappointment was considerable.
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"Want to go take a look, lover?" Krysty asked, sensing his disappointment. She
touched him gently on the arm.
"Yeah."
Jak and J.B. remained outside the tumbled building, on watch against the
appearance of Cort Strasser.
"Watch that roof," the Armorer wanted. "I've seen better on pesthole
outhouses."
The fallen roof kept the interior in shadow. Ryan led the way, crawling on
hands and knees under the lowest part, managing to straighten after a few
feet, looking around him. Krysty was at his side, Doc also standing up, knees
cracking.
"Gaia!"
The single word said it all. The two other freezie centers that they'd entered
had been in good shape, more or less fully functioning. Here there was no
suspended life, only death.
Old death.
The pods that had held the cryogenically treated bodies were smashed, torn
apart by the angry, shifting earth. Cables and life-support systems had been
ripped away and lay like a nest of torpid reptiles, all around the cracked
floor.
As Ryan moved he heard a deep rumble, as something shifted far within the
complex. The roof creaked, and a light dust filtered down across his head and
shoulders. He shrugged it off.
"Don't take too long, partner," J.B. called.
"Be out in a minute."
Protected from sun and rain and from the attacks of voracious animals, the
interior
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of the large cryo-chamber was surprisingly untouched. But the purpose that it
had been built for had vanished in a single microsecond, a century ago.
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Ryan leaned over one of the broken capsules, looking into the shadowed inside,
and saw the torn ends of several tubes, and the plastic shroud that had once
held a human being in frozen, suspended animation. The body was gone, rotted
down to a distorted skeleton, the bones all wrapped in a layer of dark brown
gristle and sinew. The flesh had melted away and dried into black dust.
He reached in and took a handful, holding it out at arm's length and letting
it trickle through his fingers to the floor.
"There's God's plenty," Doc Tanner said quietly. "Such was man."
It was good to scramble back out into the morning sun.
"Fuck this."
Mildred stopped, surprised by the sudden flatness in Strasser's voice. They'd
reached the far side of the devastated complex, moving through various open
spaces between fallen buildings. The ex-sec boss had tied her hands again and
had taken the lead, dragging on a length of thin rope.
Now he'd halted, having just stepped over a low wall. Behind and below him,
the woman wasn't able to see what it was that had brought him to a standstill.
"What's wrong?" she asked cautiously. Over the last hour or so Strasser had
become even more taciturn, snarling and muttering to himself.
"Come and look, bitch!" He jerked on the line so hard that she nearly fell
flat on her face.
Mildred hopped clumsily over the wall and stood alongside Strasser. "Jesus."
There was nothing in front of her feet.
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Six feet of seamed concrete and then space. The whole building ended as if a
gigantic cleaver had sliced through it, carving down past the bedrock, leaving
a hacked cliff that dropped sheer and smooth for three hundred feet.
"I'm not going to fuck around any more. No more running or hiding from that
bastard, Cawdor! No, this is it."
"You going to jump?" Mildred asked, rewarded by a lipless smile of utter
venom.
"This is a good day to die, bitch. Before it's done there'll be some chilling.
Mebbe me. Mebbe you. Ryan. The other bastard grave eaters! This is enough!" He
pulled at the rope, leading her back over the parapet toward the sprawling
remnants of the redoubt.
"Where we going?"
"To find Cawdor. And chill him."
Krysty found the entrance. They'd gone a long way through the sprawling ruins
finding more and more of the perilous patches of soft, clinging sand, filling
every hollow and dip. Jak had been leading, still trailing the marks of
Mildred and her captor, when the flame-haired woman called him to halt.
"Hold it, there, Jak."
"What?"
She looked around her. "I felt& I
saw something. In here." She tapped her forehead. "There is a way in, and
there is part untouched."
"The gateway?" Ryan asked.
"I don't know, lover. Might be. I can feel deeps around us. There's a doorway
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over& " She looked around and pointed to a shattered corner of a wall. "Just
around there."
It had been the main weapons complex, which meant it had been built with extra
reinforcements. And there was a massive sec door, standing slightly ajar. Ryan
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put his face to the gap and tried to see inside, but it was full dark. The air
smelled stale and dusty, but he'd tasted worse.
He touched the cool metal and it moved, feather-balanced, despite the damage
all around it. Ryan eased it open a couple of feet to give them room to
squeeze inside.
There was a crackle of sound and a string of ceiling lights flickered on,
showing a corridor ahead, totally bare. On the wall to his right there was a
large annotated map of the redoubt.
He whistled to himself. Generally the mat-trans units would be hidden far
below the safest and most secure areas of the redoubts. If the gods smiled on
them, then they could be all right.
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