Outlander 05 - Parallax Red

  James Axler - Parallax Red Parallax Red

  James Axler

  If you purchased this book without a cover you should be aware that this book is stolen property. It was reported as "unsold and destroyed" to the publisher, and neither the author nor the publisher has received any payment for this "stripped book." First edition June 1998 ISBN 0-373-63818-3

  PARALLAX RED

  Special thanks to Mark Ellis for his contribution to the Outlanders concept, developed for Gold Eagle Books.

  Copyright 1998 by Worldwide Library.

  All rights reserved. Except for use in any review, the reproduction or utilization of this work in whole or in part in any form by any electronic, mechanical or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including xerography, photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, is forbidden without the written permission of the publisher, Worldwide Library, 225 Duncan Mill Road, Don Mills, Ontario, Canada M3B 3K9.

  All characters in this book have no existence outside the imagination of the author and have no relation whatsoever to anyone bearing the same name or names. They are not even distantly inspired by any individual known or unknown to the author, and all incidents are pure invention.

  lt;Sgt; and TM are trademarks of the publisher. Trademarks indicated with are registered in the United States Patent and Trademark Office, the Canadian Trade Marks Office and in other countries. Printed in U.S.A.

  We dance on the angle, From the edges we dangle and circle the parallax square When the fires of night consume us, we've gone only so far as we dare.

  "Millennium Fever," by Gavin Nebraska published by Explorer Press, Mt. Airy, NC, Dec. 2000

  The Road to Outlands From Secret Government Files to the Future

  Almost two hundred years after the global holocaust, Kane, a former Magistrate of Cobaltville, often thought the world had been lucky to survive at all after a nuclear device detonated in the Russian embassy in Washington, D.C. The aftermathforever known as skydark reshaped continents and turned civilization into ashes.

  Nearly depopulated, America became the Deathlandspoisoned by radiation, home to chaos and mutated life forms. Feudal rule reappeared in the form of baronies, while remote outposts clung to a brutish existence.

  What eventually helped shape this wasteland were the redoubts, the secret preholocaust military installations with stores of weapons, and the home of gateways, the locational matter-transfer facilities. Some of the redoubts hid clues that had once fed wild theories of government cover-ups and alien visitations.

  Rearmed from redoubt stockpiles, the barons consolidated their power and reclaimed technology for the villes. Their power, supported by some invisible authority, extended beyond their fortified walls to what was now called the Outlands. It was here that the rootstock of humanity survived, living with hellzones and chemical storms, hounded by Magistrates.

  In the villes, rigid laws were enforcedto atone for the sins of the past and prepare the way for a better future. That was the barons' public credo and their right-to-rule.

  Kane, along with friend and fellow Magistrate Grant, had upheld that claim until a fateful Outlands expedition. A displaced piece of technology...a question to a keeper of the archives...a vague clue about alien mastersand their world shifted radically. Suddenly, Brigid

  Baptiste, the archivist, faced summary execution, and Grant a quick termination. For Kane there was forgiveness if he pledged his unquestioning allegiance to Baron Cobalt and his unknown masters and abandoned his friends.

  But that allegiance would make him support a mysterious and alien power and deny loyalty and friends. Then what else was there?

  Kane had been brought up solely to serve the ville. Brigid's only link with her family was her mother's red-gold hair, green eyes and supple form. Grant's clues to his lineage were his ebony skin and powerful physique. But Domi, she of the white hair, was an Outlander pressed into sexual servitude in Cobaltville. She at least knew her roots and was a reminder to the exiles that the outcasts belonged in the human family.

  Parents, friends, communitythe very rootedness of humanity was denied. With no continuity, there was no forward momentum to the future. And that was the cruxwhen Kane began to wonder if there was a future.

  For Kane, it wouldn't do. So the only way was out way, way out.

  After their escape, they found shelter at the forgotten Cerberus redoubt headed by Lakesh, a scientist, Cobaltville's head archivist, and secret opponent of the barons.

  With their past turned into a lie, their future threatened, only one thing was left to give meaning to the outcasts. The hunger for freedom, the will to resist the hostile influences. And perhaps, by opposing, end them.

  Chapter 1

  Washington, D.C., had been dead for a very long time. How long and what had killed it was still a matter of conjecture.

  In predark days, some opinionated and learned people put forth persuasive arguments that Washington, the capital city of the most powerful nation on earth, had expired spiritually and morally sometime after World War II. The means of death was attributed to a confusing variety of blunt political instruments, wielded either by liberals or conservatives, foreign interests or government bureaucrats themselves.

  The arguments and accusations ceased abruptly on January 20, 2001, at 1200 p.m. EST. The one-megaton blast in Washington, D.C., on a presidential-inauguration Saturday, pretty much decided the question of the city's living or dead status. The detonation of two other nuclear warheads in and around the District of Columbia left no leeway for further debate. The citizens of Washington, D.C., liberal, conservative, independent or apathetic, perished so thoroughly it was a question for statisticians whether they had ever lived at all. Of course, the question was never addressed because no statisticians remained to conduct the necessary surveys.

  The complete and utter destruction of the city began a chain reaction, and by 1203 p.m. World War III was in motion. Within the next six hours, the face of the world disappeared beneath soaring fireballs and vast mushroom clouds. By the end of that Saturday afternoon, the nuclear winter began. Massive quantities of pulverized rubble had been propelled into the atmosphere, clogging the sky for a generation, blanketing all of earth in a thick cloud of radioactive dust, ash, debris, smoke and fallout.

  The exchange of atomic missiles did more than slaughter most of Earth's inhabitants. It distorted the ecosystems that were not completely obliterated and sculpted the face of the planet into a perverted parody of what it had been.

  After eight generations, the lingering effects of the holocaust and the nuclear winter were more subtle, an underlying texture to a world struggling to heal itself except in Washington, D.C., where the injuries had never healed, but simply scabbed over.

  Only a vast sea of fused black glass occupied the tract of land that once held the seat of American government. Seen from a distance, the crater lent the region the name by which it had been known for nearly two centuries. Washington Hole was a hellzone, still jolted by ground tremors and soaked by the intermittent flooding of Potomac Lake. A volcano, barely an infant in geological terms, had burst up from the rad-blasted ground. The peak dribbled a constant stream of foul-smelling smoke, mixing with the chem-tainted rain clouds to form a wispy umbrella stinking of sulfur and chlorine.

  The smell was so cloying and so fetid that new arrivals found it necessary to wear respiration masks until they grew accustomed to it. Of course, there weren't many new arrivals. The shanty towns that once ringed the outskirts of Washington Hole had been razed long ago, during the first year of the Program of Unification. Most of their inhabitants had succumbed to rad sickness years before. The former District of Columbia fell under the ju
risdiction of Sharpeville, and the baron was not inclined to abandon any piece of his territory to squatters, even those that he would have had difficulty giving away.

  Although the center of Washington and all of its suburbs had dissolved in the first three minutes of the nukecaust, the outer rim still contained a few crumbling ruins. Beyond the shells of buildings lay an expanse of rolling tableland, broken by ranges of hills. To the north rose a rampart of tumbled stones.

  The landscape lay dead, lifeless, except for an advancing mechanical movement.

  Stenz slid back the Sandcat's canopy and poked his helmeted head out, inhaling a whiff of the astringent air. Coughing, he fought back his gag reflex and resisted the impulse to rub his irritated mucus membranes. Sweat flowed like water down his cheeks. He endured the discomfort silently. A Magistrate who had twice been cited for meritorious service had to endureat least that was the constant claim of Ericson, his division commander.

  The Sandcat churned its way across the flatlands, twin plumes of grit curving up from the clattering metal tracks. The controlled roar of the 750-horsepower engine sounded uncomfortably loud, even through the polystyrene lining of his helmet.

  Built to serve as a FAV, or Fast Attack Vehicle, rather than a means of long-distance ground transportation, the Sandcat had a low-slung, blunt-lined chassis supported by a pair of flat, retractable tracks. An armored topside gun turret concealed a pair of USMG-73 heavy machine guns. The wag's armor was composed of a ceramic-armaglass bond which offered a shield against both intense and ambient radiation.

  The interior comfortably held four people. At the front of the compartment, right beneath the canopy, were the pilot's and co-pilot's chairs. In the rear, a double row of three jump seats faced each other. Four Magistrates in full armor stared at each other, anxious for the nine-hour journey to end and their mission to commence.

  Stenz was anxious for it, too, but only because the air-recycling system in the Cat wasn't working at maximum efficiency. When 1 he opened the canopy, he hoped for a fresh breeze, but he wasn't particularly surprised when he was disappointed.

  Below, from the pilot's chair, Presky called up, "Sir, we've got a midrange-orange rad count. You shouldn't be exposing yourself any longer than necessary."

  Stenz did not respond, either to the young man's words or to his tone of agitation. Presky had only been awarded his duty badge last year and had never been outside the walls of Sharpeville. As a Magistrate, he was still a cherry, not used to the rigors of duty or wearing the black polycarbonate battle armor for a longer period than weapons drills. He obviously wasn't accustomed to traveling through a hellzone, sharing cramped, poorly ventilated quarters with five other men.

  Stenz forced a bitter smile. It was a new experience for him, too. He had served in Sharpeville's Magistrate Division for the past eighteen years, and though his hair had gone gray and his face become scarred in its service, he had never been assigned to penetrate the dark territories of Washington Hole. The D.C.-New Jersey-New York Corridor comprised the largest and most dangerous hellzone. All of the Eastern Seaboard had been hard-nuked, but Washington Hole was still the most active hot spot in the country.

  Ericson had briefed him on the whats and wherefores of the op, but the whys were still incomplete. Stenz wasn't sure if he didn't prefer it that way.

  According to Ericson, all of the nine baronies in the ville network were engaged in a cooperative mission to recce the redoubts in their individual territories for any recent signs of use or entrance.

  Stenz had been stunned into dumbfounded silence when Ericson blandly mentioned the redoubts. Anyone who served in one of the ville divisions had heard whispers about the redoubts, the Continuity of Government stockpiles, perhaps even caught a murmured word here and there about the scientific marvels they contained.

  Over the course of postnukecaust generations, strange stories, rumors, campfire tales circulated about these bizarre places buried deep in what were known as the Deathlands The legends claimed these subterranean enclaves were stuffed with breathtaking technological treasure troves. It was even hinted that these redoubts provided escape routes to some happy land, lying beyond the scoured hellscape of the continental United States.

  When Ericson, his pale gray eyes as cold as his voice, confirmed matter-of-factly that the folk tales had a basis in reality, Stenz's stomach slipped sideways. He went on to state that a major component of the Program of Unification had been the seeking out and securing of all redoubts within the territories of the villes. Anyone who spoke of having knowledge of them, even based on hearsay, was ruthlessly hunted down and exterminated. Inside of a generation, tales of the redoubts were suppressed to such an extent that they became baseless legends, much as stories about Atlantis and Avalon had been dismissed in earlier centuries.

  Stenz felt no pride that he was being allowed to share a dark secret of humanity's past. Fear filled him as Ericson told him more things he would have rather not known. He mentioned the Totality Concept, an umbrella designation for supersecret American military researches into many different arcane and eldritch sciences, working to ensure the safety of the United States against all aggressors. Stenz didn't voice his opinion if that was the stated aim, then the program had failed miserably.

  One of these esoteric researches involved matter transmission, relying on a device known as a gateway. Ericson provided him with a thumbnail description of its function, though Stenz didn't comprehend it to any meaningful degree.

  Project Cerberus, a subdivision of the Totality Concept, dealt with the mat-trans gateways. Ericson claimed the project's purpose was to explore the possibilities of mass teleportation of surplus population.

  Stenz couldn't help but ask, "Teleport them to where?"

  Ericson shrugged and spoke of colonizing planets in the solar system without requiring the time and money of the predark space program.

  When Stenz asked him if such an undertaking had been accomplished before the nukecaust, Ericson replied bleakly, "I don't know."

  Despite his growing fear, Stenz had felt a bit sorry for himsorry for a man who seemed to know so much, yet still didn't know enough.

  Regardless of whether the goals of Project Cerberus had been achieved, a gateway unit had been installed in every Totality Concept redoubt. The installation near Washington Hole had been code-named Redoubt Papa.

  Stenz's assignment was to go there. Ericson had provided him with the information of how to gain entrance to the redoubt and check the mat-trans gateway control systems. He left it up to Stenz to handpick the Mags to accompany him on the journey to ground zero.

  Because of the unpredictable geothermals in the region, Ericson deemed the trip too risky to make by air. After all, men were easier to replace than Deathbirds. To blunt any objection that Stenz might lodge, Ericson had employed his own personal cliche "A Magistrate must endure."

  Although Ericson didn't mention the reasons behind the op beyond the fact it sprang from a recent council of the nine barons, Stenz had heard rumors. In fact, the Magistrate Divisions were wellsprings of rumor. Intel officers would pass on scraps of information to a friend, and that friend would pass it on to someone else, like a covert relay race.

  When the scraps reached Stenz, he found them too fantastic to believe but too disturbing to ignore. Some months back, a couple of Mags in Cobaltville had fused out, gone renegade and disappeared. Less than two weeks ago, they had returned and kidnapped a high-ranking archivist, allegedly right under the nose of Baron Cobalt. Combining that rumor with his assign-merit, Stenz came to the conclusion that the turncoat Mags knew about the gateways and used them to elude apprehension.

  Magistrates had deserted and bolted for the fragile freedom offered by the Outlands before. It rarely happened, but it wasn't unprecedented. In this instance, Stenz had heard murmurs of the involvement of the Preservationists, a shadowy conspiracy whose alleged objective was to overthrow the baronies.

  That could be the only reason for the mission to Redoubt
Papa, but Stenz made no mention of this to Ericson. His commander hadn't said that the information he had imparted was classified, under threat of termination if he ever spoke of it. He didn't have to say itStenz picked up the implication from the man's eyes, voice and bearing. As it was, he couldn't help but wonder how long he would live after completing the op and returning to Sharpeville.

  Now Stenz tried to ignore his fear, just like he tried to ignore the stink of the hellzone. He focused his gaze on the great heap of tumbled stone lying at the foot of a slope several hundred yards away. Impatiently he brushed sand particles away from his helmet's visor.

  Presky slowed the Sandcat, steadily applying the brakes. Stenz's eyes traveled up the huge chunks of rock and concrete, seeking the vanadium sec door Eric-son had briefed him about. It was situated inside a rock-ribbed hollow about halfway up the slope. Clumps of scraggly brush grew around it, masking the depression so effectively it was only by chance he glimpsed the dull reflection of light against the smooth alloy.

  Stenz dropped back down into his seat as Presky brought the wag to a complete halt. He glanced at the rad counter on the instrument panel. The glowing scar-let arrow wavered erratically across the scale, ticking uncomfortably close to the red band.

  Presky keyed off the engine, and Stenz announced sharply, "Disembark." His command was transmitted through the helmet transceivers.

  The four Magistrates in the jump seats obeyed his order without comment, climbing out through the rear storage hatch. Presky flung open the gull-wing door on the driver's side and stepped out. All five of them formed a line in front of the Sandcat, standing stiffly at attention.

  Stenz surveyed them swiftly, silently. All of them Miller, Hughes, Lewis, DeCampo and Preskywore the black polycarbonate body armor. The lightweight exoskeletons fit snugly over undersheathings made of Kevlar weave. Small disk-shaped badges of office were emblazoned on the arching left pectoral, depicting the stylized, balanced scales of justice superimposed over nine-spoked wheels. The badges symbolized the Magistrate's oath to keep the wheels of justice turning in the nine villes.