Outlanders 39 hydras rin.., p.6
Outlanders 39 Hydra's Ring, page 6
Grant employed his pet term for the Manitius personnel, and Philboyd cast him a sour glance. "Very witty— or it was the first time I heard it, a year ago."
Grant grunted and poured himself a cup of coffee. "When you've got a good line, why mess with it?"
Grant loomed six feet four inches tall in his stocking feet, and like Kane, he wore a black T-shirt, tricolor camo pants and thick-soled jump boots that added almost an inch to his impressive height. The spread of his shoulders on either side of his thickly corded neck was very broad. Because his body was all knotted sinew and muscle covered by deep brown flesh, he did not look his weight of 250 pounds.
His short-cropped hair was touched with gray at the temples, but it did not show in the gunfighter's mustache that swept out fiercely around both sides of his tightlipped mouth. Behind his lantern jaw and broken nose lay a mind of keen intelligence possessing a number of technical skills, from field-stripping and reassembling an SA-80 blindfolded to expertly piloting everything from helicopters to the Annunaki-built trans-atmospheric vehicles known as Mantas.
As Grant sat down, Kane poured cups of coffee for himself and Brigid.
One of the few advantages of being an exile in Cerberus was unrestricted access to genuine coffee, not the bitter synthetic gruel that had become the common, subpar substitute since skydark, the generation-long nuclear winter. Literally tons of freeze-dried packets of the real article were cached in the redoubt's storage areas. There was enough coffee to last the exiles several lifetimes.
Pulling up a chair, Kane seated himself across from Brigid and handed her the cup, intentionally splashing a few drops on the printout Lakesh was pretending to study.
Raising his head, Lakesh glared at him and declared, without preamble, "Since this is a security briefing, there is no better time to express my dismay at the lack of forethought you showed by allowing our secret ordnance to be carried outside. You could seriously impair any element of surprise we might be able to bring to bear—"
"Give it a rest, old man," Kane snapped. "You know we found less than a dozen of the rail guns on the Moon base, only five quartz cremators and four Gyrojet rocket pistols. Even if the Supreme Council knows we have them, it wouldn't make them call off a full-scale assault if they have one planned."
"That's not the point, Kane," Lakesh argued. "It's your flaunting of the security protocols we all agreed to abide by after the last assault."
Kane stared angrily into Lakesh's bright blue gaze, but the man never flinched. He had only recently grown accustomed to dealing with a robust—relatively speaking—Lakesh, whose eyes weren't covered by thick lenses and whose voice no longer rose to a reedy rasp. He also had to consciously catch himself from addressing Lakesh as "old man." It had become a habit over the past few years, and he found it was a hard one to break.
"You could look at it this way," Grant put in. "If the overlords know we have these kind of weapons, but not how many, they might think twice about mounting another attack."
Brigid nodded. "Grant has a point. But I'm afraid we might be leaning too far in the direction of paranoia here, overstating the intelligence-gathering capabilities of the Supreme Council. They've got more things on their plate than keeping us under surveillance."
Lakesh eyed her challengingly. "Utu dispatched a remote drone that very successfully penetrated our sensor net."
"And Domi very successfully shot the shit out of it,"
Philboyd interposed. "Whatever Utu was hoping to accomplish, either for himself or on the part of the council, he failed."
Lakesh fixed his bright blue gaze on the astrophysicist. "Supposition. Have you forgotten Tiamat?"
"How the hell could we?" Grant demanded gruffly. He tapped his chest and gestured to Brigid and Kane. "We're the only people at the table who actually saw the ship with our own eyes and went aboard her."
Tiamat was the inestimably ancient but sentient Annunaki starship in permanent Earth orbit, considered more of a goddess than a vessel by the overlords.
"Which makes your recalcitrance to accept a heightened awareness of security even more puzzling," Lakesh countered.
"Not really." Bry spoke for the first time, with an uncharacteristic degree of firm conviction in his tone. "We can't live every second of our lives expecting another attack. That's not preparedness, Lakesh—it's an obsession, dangerously close to mental illness."
Lakesh didn't respond, but only gaped in silent surprise as Bry picked up a file jacket. "If you're so worried, let's get on with the briefing and maybe your mind can be put at rest."
Kane didn't think it was only Lakesh's mind that needed placating, but he kept his opinion to himself, although he did exchange a brief, questioning glance with Grant.
Brigid leaned forward, propping her elbows on the table. "What have you got for us today, Donald?"
Opening the jacket, Bry said, "About what I've had for the past couple of months, ever since you got back from Africa. Locally, everything is in order. Nothing unusual has been reported by Sky Dog's scouts. There's little that indicates major movement on the part of any of the overlords. Nothing on the voyeur channel, either."
Bry employed his personal vernacular for the eavesdropping system he had developed through the communications link-up with the Keyhole comsat. It was the same system and same satellite they used to track the telemetry from the subcutaneous transponders implanted within the Cerberus personnel.
Bry had worked on the system for a long time and finally established an undetectable method of patching into the wireless communications channels all of the baronies used. The success rate wasn't one hundred percent, but he had been able to listen in on a number of baron-sanctioned operations in the Outlands. He monitored different frequencies on a daily basis, but ever since the fall of the baronies, all of the villes had been in a state of anarchy, with various factions seizing power, then being dispossessed by others. The radio transmissions were equally chaotic.
"What about activity from the Millennial Consortium?" Kane asked.
Bry shook his head. "I haven't heard anything about them on the ville comm channels. They've been keeping a pretty low profile since your run-in with them in Wyoming"
"Good," Grant stated with grim satisfaction. "I hate those guys."
The Millennial Consortium was, on the surface, a group of organized traders who plied their trade selling predark relics to the various villes. In the Outlands, it was actually the oldest profession.
Looting the abandoned ruins of predark cities was less a vocation that it was an Outland tradition. Entire generations of families had made careers of ferreting out and plundering the secret stockpiles the predark government had hidden in anticipation of a nation-wide catastrophe.
Most of the redoubts had been found and raided decades ago, but occasionally one hitherto untouched would be located. As the stockpiles became fewer, so did the independent salvaging and trading organizations. Various trader groups had been combining resources for the past couple of years, forming consortiums and absorbing the independent operators.
The consortiums employed and fed people in the Outlands, giving them a sense of security that had once been the sole province of the barons. There were some critics who compared the trader consortiums to the barons and talked of them with just as much ill favor.
Since first hearing of the Millennial Consortium a year before, the Cerberus warriors had learned first-hand that the organization was deeply involved in activities other than seeking out stockpiles, salvaging and trading. The group's ultimate goal was to rebuild America along the tenets of a technocracy, with a board of scientists and scholars governing the country.
Although the consortium's goals seemed utopian, the organization's method of operations was very pragmatic and cold-blooded. Their influence was widespread, very well managed and they were completely ruthless when it came to the furtherance of their agendas.
"What about Vela imagery?" Lakesh asked, sounding a little less impatient than he had a minute before. "Anything unusual transmitted from the Middle-east or Africa?"
From a folder, Bry fanned out several photographs. "A couple of interesting things have turned up, but not from there."
"From where?" Philboyd asked.
"China "
That caught Kane's attention and he put down his cup, leaning forward to peer at one of the satellite photos. Although most satellites had been little more than free-floating scrap metal for well over a century, Cerberus had always possessed the proper electronic ears and eyes to receive the transmissions from at least two them.
One was of the Vela reconnaissance class, which carried narrow-band multi-spectral scanners. It could detect the electromagnetic radiation reflected by every object on Earth, including subsurface geomagnetic waves. The scanner was tied into an extremely high resolution photographic relay system.
A year's worth of hard work on the part of Bry had at long last allowed Cerberus to gain control of the Vela and the Keyhole. Knowing that the Annunaki empire had been originally established on the African subcontinent, Bry had programmed the Vela to transmit any imagery from there that fit a preselected activity parameter.
Kane couldn't really identify much in the grid-covered photograph, except a square, light-colored object centered in one quadrant. "The Xian pyramid," he stated, tapping it with a thumb.
Bry nodded, using a fingernail to trace a wavering pattern of light and dark. "It appears there is considerable movement here, a massing of people in the valley. This was just transmitted over the uplink this morning. I should have tighter views later in the day."
Grant frowned, eyeing the image. "Is Erica forming an army or what?"
Pushing his glasses up on his forehead, Philboyd squinted intently at a photograph and said, "Quite the opposite. I'd say her valley is being invaded by one."
Brigid picked up one the photos and turned it upside down, scrutinizing it keenly. "If it's an invasion force, it looks to be of considerable size." She lifted her emerald gaze to Lakesh's face. "We don't have much intel about China since skydark, do we? There isn't a centralized government, is there?"
Before Lakesh could answer, the trans-comm on the wall emitted a buzz, and from the op center Farrell's voice shouted in alarm, "We've got unscheduled gateway activity and an unidentified jumper!"
Hitching around in his chair, Lakesh faced the unit and demanded loudly, "Jumping in from where?"
"Gee, let me guess—" Kane murmured. "Apparently from China!" Farrell exclaimed.
Kane pushed his chair back from the table. "That's just what I was going to say."
Chapter 7
Alarm Klaxons blared discordantly, echoing all over the redoubt. People ran through the corridors in apparent panic, but in actuality they were racing to pre-appointed emergency stations as per the red-alert drills. Still, Brigid, Kane and Grant had to dodge and sidestep to keep from being bowled over as they rushed to the operations center. Lakesh, Bry and Philboyd followed as swiftly as they could.
The central command complex served as the brains, the nerve center of the redoubt. The long, high-ceilinged room was divided by two aisles of computer stations. Half a dozen people sat before the terminals. Monitor screens flashed incomprehensible images and streams of data in machine talk
The operations center had five dedicated and eight shared subprocessors, all linked to the mainframe computer behind the far wall. Two centuries before, it had been one of the most advanced models ever built, carrying experimental, error-correcting microchips of such a tiny size that they even reacted to quantum fluctuations. Biochip technology had been employed when it was built, protein molecules sandwiched between microscopic glass and metal circuits.
The information contained in the main database may not have been the sum total of all humankind's knowledge, but not for lack of trying. Any bit, byte or shred of intelligence that had ever been digitized was only a few keystrokes and mouse clicks away.
A huge Mercator relief map of the world spanned the entire wall above the door. Pinpoints of light shone steadily in almost every country, connected by a thin glowing pattern of lines. They represented the Cerberus network, the locations of all functioning gateway units across the planet. As they entered, Lakesh and Bry cast quick, over-the-shoulder glances at the map. Both men discerned a tiny light blinking on the Asian continent.
On the opposite side of the operations center, an anteroom held the eight-foot-tall mat-trans chamber, rising from an elevated platform. Six upright slabs of brown-hued armaglass formed a translucent wall around it. From the emitter array emanated a sound much like the distant howling of a gale-force wind, rising in pitch. Bright flares showed like bursts of heat lightning on the other side of the walls, but they were safely contained.
Armaglass was manufactured in the last decades of the twentieth century from a special compound that plasticized and combined the properties of steel and glass. It was used as walls in the jump chambers to confine quantum-energy overspills.
Farrell, a shaved-headed man who affected a goatee and a gold hoop earring, rolled his chair back from the mat-trans control console on squeaking casters. The brown eyes he turned toward Lakesh and Bry were anxious.
"It's a standard gateway carrier wave," he said. "A unit to unit transmission, from China to here. The jump point of origin is the indexed unit in the Xian pyramid. Only one bio-sign, though."
Farrell stood up, allowing Bry to take his place at the console. Lakesh leaned forward, scrutinizing the monitor screen, which displayed a drop-down window. A jagged wave slid back and forth across a CGI scale. "You're right, friend Farrell. It's not the electromagnetic signature from the Heart of the World, acting as a tap conduit into the matter stream."
Eyeing the jump chamber speculatively, Kane said, "At least we know it's not Enlil."
"So who the hell is it?" Grant demanded.
Gazing at the image on the monitor, Bry stated, "Every piece of matter, whether organic or inorganic, that has been ever been transported to or from our gateway here has a computer record in the database. The image processor scans for patterns corresponding with those in the record and allows for materialization unless we physically locked out that pattern, redirecting it to a holding buffer."
Brigid smiled wryly. "In other words, whoever is coming into phase has been here before."
Bry nodded. "That's what I just said, isn't it? More than likely it's Erica van Sloan."
Philboyd speared Lakesh with a penetrating stare. "She has the destination code for this unit?"
Lakesh lifted a shoulder in a shrug. "Erica has had it for quite some time. After Sam—Enlil—deserted her, I saw no reason to go through the laborious process of changing the code once again."
Bry snorted disdainfully. "And you're the one complaining about our poor attention to security."
"She presents no threat to us," Lakesh shot back defensively. "On the contrary, she understands that Cerberus is her only potential ally against an overlord incursion. I've had diplomatic feelers out to her for months."
Crossing his arms over his chest, Kane commented dourly, "Not to mention you still want a piece of the Heart of the World Enlil left behind."
Lakesh cast him a challenging glance. "Is that so unusual? It's a vast source of untapped energy that needs to be studied."
"And manipulated," Grant rumbled. "But even if it is Erica who's coming to call, I don't think we should put out the welcome mat for her."
"We will still observe all due diligence," Lakesh agreed. Turning to Banks, who manned the main ops console, he ordered, "Turn off the alarms, but lower the security shields. Lock us down."
The young man's hands flew over a series of buttons on the keyboard. The alarm fell silent but the warbling was replaced by the pneumatic hissing of compressed air, the squeak of gears and a sequence of heavy, booming thuds resounding from the corridor. Four-inch thick vanadium alloy bulkheads dropped from the ceiling and sealed off the living quarters, engineering level and main sec door from the operations center, completely isolating it from the rest of the redoubt.
Kane, Grant and Brigid moved quickly into the anteroom. After the mad Maccan's murderous incursion into the installation, it had become standard protocol to have at least one armed guard standing by during a gateway materialization.
To simplify matters, a weapons locker had been moved into the ready room. Opening the locker door, Kane removed a lightweight SA-80 subgun and tossed it to Grant. He threw another one to Brigid, who snatched it out of the air as she hurried through the door.
All of the Cerberus personnel were required to become reasonably proficient with firearms, and the lightweight "point and shoot" subguns were the easiest for the firearm challenged to handle.
The three people took up positions all around the room, shouldering the subguns, barrels trained on the door of the jump chamber, making it the apex of a triangulated cross fire if one was necessary. They waited tensely as the unit droned through the materialization cycle. Because of the translucent quality of the brown-tinted armaglass shielding, they could see nothing within it except vague, shifting shapes without form or apparent solidity.
The chamber was full of the plasma bleed-off, a by-product of the ionized wave-forms that resembled mist. Within seconds, the stuttering electronic whine melded into a smooth hum. They heard the clicking of solenoids, and the heavy armaglass door swung open on its counter balanced hinges. Mist swirled and thread-thin static electricity discharges arced within the billowing mass
The laser autotargeters mounted atop the subguns pierced the thinning planes of vapor with bright red threads and cast killdots on a dark shape at the rear of the chamber.
"Come on out, Erica," Kane called. "Very slowly and very carefully."
Nothing happened for a long tick of time. No one stirred or spoke from within the unit.
Standing at the ready room's doorway, Lakesh said loudly, "Chu lai! Come out!"
Looking like a backlit shadow emerging from a fog bank, a slightly built figure appeared in the doorway and unsteadily stepped off the platform and into the ready room, holding up his hands to prove he was unarmed. His right hand was clenched in a fist.
