Jak spotted the wire.
"Look!"
A thin pale blue length of wire ran into the crack in the wall, behind the massive sec-steel hinges. J.B. traced it with a cautious finger, watchful for any mercury tremblers or prox-fuses. But it was a very straightforward piece of plas-ex plus detonator. The actual explosive was concealed on a ridge above the top of the doors.
"Nobody been in here since sky-dark," the Armorer said.
"Could be recent."
J.B. shook his head at Ryan's suggestion. "No. Not stuff wired this way. It's crude, and it's also old. Besides, it would've blown if anyone had tried to enter."
"Cut it?"
"Yeah." J.B. dragged over a wooden chair and stood on it, drawing his Tekna knife and easing the needle point behind the wire.
"Everyone take cover," Ryan ordered, crouching behind one of the consoles in the corner of the strangely cramped room. Krysty knelt beside him, with Jak, Doc and Rick farther along, near the wall.
"What if it blows?" the freezie asked.
"Keep tight and small on the floor, hands over your ears, eyes shut. And keep your mouth open. That way you keep the blast damage to a minimum."
"Thanks, Ryan. Thanks a lot."
"Stick head between knees and kiss ass goodbye," Jak sniggered.
"Everyone ready?" J.B. yelled. "Then here we go."
The snick of the knife cutting through the wire was followed immediately by the deafening boom of the explosion.
Despite having followed his own instructions, Ryan felt the pressure against his eardrums, the plas-ex blowing and filling the room with noise and fine white dust.
"Fireblast!" he coughed. "J.B.! Hey, you all right there?"
Jak moved first, darting toward the entrance doors, ducking under the blinding cloud. "He's here, out cold. Blood on him."
Ryan was the second one there, stooping alongside the white-haired boy, seeing the slight figure of John Barrymore Dix lying like a child's discarded doll, one arm crooked, legs doubled under him. His glasses were hanging on one ear and his beloved fedora had vanished. Blood oozed from J.B.'s ears, nostrils and open mouth. The Tekna was still gripped firmly in his right hand.
"Breathing," Jak pronounced, feeling for the pulse beneath J.B.'s right ear. "Strong beat."
"Roll him onto his side so that he doesn't risk choking," Doc suggested.
"Leave him be!" Krysty demanded, leaning over Ryan to look at J.B.
"Shoulder's out," Jak observed. "Put back now or big problem. See it 'fore."
J.B.'s eyes flickered open and rolled in their sockets. "Kid's right. Put back now, Ryan. Do it for me." His eyes closed again and his body tensed, anticipating the pain to come.
"Could be he's snapped a rib or two," Rick said worriedly. "Try anything and you could hurt him real bad."
"Already hurting real bad, freezie," J.B. muttered, keeping his eyes shut. "Listen, Ryan, before you do it. There was a second charge. Never seen it. Cut the wire and it blew. Must've lost most of its power. Should have taken me off at the shoulders. Okay. Now do it."
Riding with the Trader, Ryan Cawdor had seen most every kind of wound or sickness or injury known to man or to woman.
Traveling over rough terrain, often on broken-down highways corrugated by the ripple effect of nukings, meant some bumpy journeys. A sudden turn or lurch could cause sprained wrists, broken ankles and, often, dislocated shoulders. The cure for that was fairly simple.
Painful, but simple.
While Doc and Krysty each held a leg still, Jak took the Armorer's other arm and locked it tight in his hands. Ryan sat on the floor, putting his right foot into J.B.'s armpit, gripping the wrist of the damaged arm in both hands. He wriggled around to get comfortable and make sure he had enough purchase to do what had to be done. If it was left more than a few minutes the repair of the dislocation was going to be a major operation and could leave J.B. with a permanent weakness.
"Ready?" Ryan asked.
"Do it, Ryan," J.B. gritted from between clenched teeth.
Ryan braced himself and tugged hard on the wrist, feeling the damaged joint snap back into place with an audible click.
Ryan let go and stood up. "How's that?" he asked. But J.B. didn't answer him.
"Fainted," Jak said. "Shouldn't have called me 'kid.' Told him."
Fortunately, apart from some pain and stiffness in his shoulder, the Armorer wasn't too badly damaged. His ears were ringing and his head ached. The blood from his mouth was the result of biting through the tip of his tongue as the explosion hurled him off the chair. He was bruised around the kidneys and down the outside of the right thigh.
"Good news is that my hat's fine, glasses aren't broke, and pants aren't torn. Never got much good at mending. And all the weapons are fine."
"And the doors are open," Rick finished.
Ryan laughed. "They were open before J.B. got to playing with them."
The Armorer gave him the finger.
In all of the other redoubts they'd entered, the ponderous double sec doors had always opened onto an expanse of wide, brightly lit corridor that was part of the main military complex.
But not this time.
Ryan cautiously pushed the left-hand door, careful to make sure that the previous tenants hadn't left yet another plas-ex calling card to greet them.
"Fireblast," he spit.
"What is it?" Krysty asked at his shoulder, her own Heckler & Koch P7A-13 blaster at the ready. "What?"
Ryan loudly sucked in air. "This fireblasted triple-rad tooth of mine gave me a crack. Gotta get it pulled some time. Hole feels bigger than a three-hundred-pound gaudy whore's..."
"Ryan," she warned, lifting the barrel of the silvered pistol.
"Well. Hole feels big, and that's the truth, lover. It's bad."
"Never mind your black-dust tooth, Ryan! What's out there?"
Ryan looked around the edge of the door, turning back to face the others.
"Not a lot."
The walls were made of dirt, not concrete — dusty brown earth, packed tight, supported by thick wooden beams. Up in what once had been Pennsylvania, Ryan had come across an abandoned coal mine. It had been used as an emergency nuke shelter, but the bombing had caved in the entrance. A century of wind, rain and shifting land had opened it up. Ryan had never seen so many desiccated corpses, piled and tangled one upon another. The corridors had been supported in the same way as the room outside the gateway control.
There was no illumination at all, but Ryan spotted a neat plastic box-switch by the doors. He clicked it down and a few bulbs flickered into hesitant life. The room was barely eight feet across, with a ceiling that couldn't have been more than seven cramped feet in height. Some sort of barred gate was set in the far wall.
"Looks like the first redoubt ever built," Krysty said.
But Rick disagreed. "No. Can't be. I know this looks like someone's backyard but the mat-trans technology is... like I said. It's state-of-the-art. Miniaturized circuits, the works. So, this stuff outside doesn't make any sense."
The air tasted cool and damp, like the cellar of a long-abandoned house, a smell of kerosene and old bicycles, of empty bottles and piles of rotting newspaper tied up with twine.
"What do you feel, lover?" Ryan asked. "Anything bad around?"
Krysty shook her head. Her long red hair was still curled tightly around her nape. The effort of forcing the door had taken a toll, and she could barely stand unsupported.
"Don't know, lover. Truth is, I don't feel anything but bushed out. Sorry."
Ryan nodded. "Sure. Let's go find a way out of this tomb."
He led the way, blaster probing the air in front of him like the tongue of a cobra.
The barrier in the far wall was high-quality vanadium steel, made from bars as thick as a man's index finger, with a space between them of less than a half inch. The crossbars were set three inches apart. It was an impressive security device, its quad-lock and bolts set in a steel insert drilled right through into concrete. There was no gap in the door, either at the top or bottom.
Cautiously Ryan reached out and pushed it, and the barred door swung silently open.
"Unlocked," he said, unable to hide his relief. It wouldn't have been easy to blow.
Beyond it was another wall switch. He considered the possibility that this could also have been wired, but rejected the notion. The charges planted back at the gateway had all the hallmarks of a last-minute decision. Maybe in the final minutes of the withdrawal from the redoubt someone with a few yards of wire and a handful of plas-ex decided to make it tough for anyone trying to break into the mat-trans section of the complex.
The overhead neon strip stuttered into life. They were all in a small stone-walled chamber, ten feet square. The smell of damp was much stronger, and the earth beneath their boots was moist. The walls were streaked with fungus and slime-green lichen.
"Look." Jak pointed to a rusted metal cabinet screwed to the wall by the barred door. "Open it?"
"Yeah. Slow and easy," J.B. said.
The door wasn't closed and the boy levered it open with his fingers, wincing at the screech of corroded metal from the hinges.
"Blaster," he said, hooking it out and holding it to show the others.
"Smith & Wesson .38," J.B. observed. "Or what's left of it."
The penetrating damp had reduced the handgun to a fragile orange skeleton. Jak dropped it to the floor where it crumbled apart, the brass-jacketed rounds spilling out.
"I never seen a redoubt like this one," Ryan said to nobody in particular.
"That way?" Rick asked, pointing to a plain door on the far side of the small room. "Stupid question, Ginsberg. Where the hell else are we going to go? Back to the torture chamber again? Thanks, but no thanks, guys."
Ryan gripped the handle and pressed it, part of his mind waiting for the starburst of an explosion that would tell him he'd made a poor calculation. There was the click of the lock turning and the door opened. Light spilled from the room behind him, illuminating the bottom of an iron spiral staircase, the treads and rails coated with a patina of reddish rust. There was no other exit or door.
"Up," he said.
"Wow!" Rick panted about five minutes into the climb. "This is what we used to call a whole lot of no fun."
He and Krysty were finding the going very hard indeed.
Ryan tested the stairs, worried that a hundred years of the bone-chilling damp might have rotted the iron. Though the surface flaked away, the main structure seemed sound. The light switch at the bottom of the ladder didn't work, so they ascended in almost total blackness. It wasn't even possible to see how far they had to climb, or if there was any way out once they reached the top. Ryan sympathized with the freezie's comment. It wasa lot of no fun,
"Fifteen minutes." J.B.'s voice echoed around the concrete stairwell. "Reckon we've climbed around two hundred feet, allowing for the stops."
"You talking about me, J.B.?" Krysty asked, pausing for breath.
He didn't reply.
"Can't... sorry, folks. I'm utterly... I'm fucked up hill and down." Rick sat on the cold steps, nearly weeping, his face a pale blur in the darkness. The others gathered around him. Krysty was also near the outer limit of exhaustion, head in her hands. Doc was bearing up surprisingly well, his cane tapping away on the sonorous metal, ringing in the sighing space below them.
Ryan, J.B. and Jak were capable of climbing on forever.
But it was an eerie feeling. The light from beneath had almost vanished, just a tiny circle of palest yellow, so faint that to blink was to lose sight of it.
"I swear that this is akin to swimming in the ether, lost between heaven and earth," Doc muttered.
"Reminds me of Pontchartrain Causeway," Rick said, fighting to gather breath. "Long bridge that brings you into New Orleans. Guess I should say that it used to bring you in. Must be gone now. It was so damned long that when you were driving across and you were around the middle..." A coughing fit cut off the words. "Sweet Lord! Oh, better now. Yeah. In the middle you could look to both sides and see nothing but water. Look ahead and you couldn't make out the city. Just water. And you looked behind and the land vanished. Just more of the same water. Scared the shit out of me when I was a kid."
Ryan leaned on the rail, feeling it give a little under his weight. He straightened, looked down, then up, trying to make out an ending of the spidery staircase. "Yeah, Rick. Know what you mean."
"Here!" Jak called, his faint voice floating down from the angelic heights far above the others.
"Door?" Ryan shouted.
"Yeah. Can't move. Shall?.."
"No. Wait for the rest of us!"
He climbed swiftly, J.B. at his heels, leaving the other three to fumble their way up after him as best they could.
There was a platform, big enough to hold a dozen men, but as Ryan set his foot to it, he felt the tremor of movement and turned to the Armorer, behind him. "Stay there! It's swaying some."
"They can't have done this trip every time they wanted to use the gateway," J.B. said, no more out of breath than if he'd taken a stroll around a garden on a spring morning. "Got to be an elevator someplace here."
"Could be it got wrecked during the nukings. They put this in as a standby."
"Mebbe. Tell you, Ryan, this is the damnedest place I ever did see."
Doc was closing in on them, his voice ringing like a cathedral bell. "Oh, if my love were in my arms..."
"Take it easy," J.B. called, silencing the song. "Platform here's not that safe. Tell the others behind you."
They heard the old man relaying the message down the spidery staircase.
Ryan felt his way toward the albino boy, grateful for the avalanche of snowy hair that guided him like a beacon.
"Got it. There's..." He ran his hands over the whole door, feeling two small sec bolts at top and bottom. He slid them both open, turned the handle and pushed the door away from him.
A rush of bitingly cold air swept over him, air so fresh it almost brought tears to his eye.
"We're out," he said, looking into a wintry night.
From the delicate coral pink of the eastern sky, dawn wasn't far off. The six friends huddled together for warmth. Ryan, arm around Krysty, looked around and tried to make sense of what he saw.
The door had been cunningly concealed as a part of a chimney flue, so cleverly camouflaged that it was no surprise it had been hidden for a century. But this was no redoubt.
They were in the ruined attic of a large house, almost a mansion from what they could see of it. Some of the roof tiles had disappeared, revealing the star-spangled heavens, though scudding clouds made it impossible to recognize any of the constellations. Snow came in fine showers between the stark rafters, piling under the eaves.
Jak was all for exploring, but Ryan told him to sit still and not risk moving around in the dark. Orderedhim, pointing out that the state of the outer roof spoke of serious damage. And who knew what worse damage was lower down.
Doc and J.B. fell asleep and Krysty dozed a while in Ryan's arms. Jak was sulking at being told off. Rick, on Ryan's left side, was still awake.
"What d'you figure?" he whispered.
"Fucked if I know, Rick. It's no official redoubt, that's certain."
"Could be a private sec center. I heard some rich folks — seriously rich, you understand — had their own cryo centers."
"Private freezies?"
"You hear of someone called Walt Disney?"
Ryan nodded. "Course. Invented Mickey the mouse. Seen old vids."
"Sort of. Well, the word was old Walt had himself frozen — he had the big ''C — and he was kept on ice in a sort of fun fair, in Sleeping Beauty's castle. Kind of appropriate, isn't it?"
"Sure." Ryan had no idea what Rick was talking about.
Soon as the first light of the sun appeared, J.B. took out his minisextant and computed where they were.
He repeated the procedure and shook his head. He did it again. And again. By now they were all awake and watching, puzzled. Ryan asked the question.
"Where are we?"
J.B. swallowed hard. "Something wrong with this," he said, shaking the sextant. "Either that, or we're smack in the middle of Russia. Somewhere near their old city of Moscow."
Nobody said a word.