Outlanders 21 - Devil in the Moon Page 4

  "That means Cerberus isn't receiving our biolink transponder telemetry, either," Brigid continued. "I hope nobody panics."

  All the Cerberus personnel carried subcutaneous transponders. They were nonharmful radioactive chemicals that fit themselves into the human body and allowed the monitoring of heart rates, brain-wave pat­terns and blood counts. Based on organic nanotech-nology developed by the Totality Concept's Overproj-ect Excalibur, the transponders fed information through the Comsat relay satellite when personnel were out in the field. The computer systems recorded every byte of data sent to the Comsat and directed it to the redoubt's hidden antenna array. Sophisticated scanning filters combed through the telemetry using special human biological encoding.

  "How long do you figure this will take?" Kane asked, trying not to sound either impatient or anxious.

  "Hard to say," Brigid answered. "I'll have to run a system diagnostic. If I find any errors, they'll have to be fixed before we can risk phasing back to Cer­berus."

  So far, the interphaser hadn't materialized them ei­ther in a lake or an ocean or underground, a possi­bility that Kane privately feared. He knew an analog­ical computer was built into the interphaser to automatically select a vortex point above solid ground.

  Kane, Grant and Brigid had endured weeks of hard training in the use of the interphaser on short hops, selecting vortex points near the redoubt—or at least, near in the sense that if they couldn't make the return trip through a quantum channel they could conceiv­ably walk back to the installation. Only recently had they begun making jumps farther and farther afield from Cerberus.

  Grant grunted as if unconcerned. "We've got food and water to last a couple of days…longer if we ra­tion it." He cut his eyes toward Mina. "Unless, of course, your settlement offers us hospitality."

  Mina's expression twisted into a mask of horror. She gestured wildly, as if trying to wave away the very concept. ' 'No, no! No outsiders have ever come into the valley! There are strict rules about it. No one leaves, no one ever comes in! Chief of staff says we can't risk contamination!"

  Not looking up from the keypad, Brigid asked, "Does he mean radiation contamination or cultural contamination?"

  Mina replied, "Don't know, don't care. Just con­tamination."

  His curiosity piqued by the girl's extreme reaction, Kane asked nonchalantly, "What'll happen if we just show up at the institute asking to use the toilet?"

  Mina didn't answer, but a basso profundo voice wafted down from above. "You'll be flushed."

  Chapter 4

  Grant, Brigid and Kane reacted with varying degrees of surprise. Brigid didn't shift position, but only looked up toward the overhanging lip of the gully. Her face remained expressionless. During her years as an archivist in Cobaltville's Historical Division, Brigid had perfected a poker face. Because historians were always watched, it didn't do for them to show emotional reaction to a scrap of knowledge that may have escaped the censor's notice.

  Grant's and Kane's responses were not so re­strained. The tiny electric motors in their power hol­sters droned faintly, and Sin Eaters slapped into the men's waiting hands. The barrels pointed up at the group of people arrayed in a line on the ravine's edge. There were eight of them, a mixture of men and women. All of them stared down, some whispering among themselves. Their faces registered dismay.

  The women wore loose-fitting, sleeveless shifts. Strange little white caps were perched on their heads. Brigid had seen pix of similar headgear in books. They werb nurse's caps, or imitations of them.

  All of the men were attired in baggy overalls of a material resembling denim. They were uniformlv.

  bald, their heads obviously shaved. Three of the men carried long bars of dark iron, filed to a point at one end and hooked at the other. The bars were some four feet long, an inch in diameter, a combination of bludgeon and skewer.

  "Sec men," Grant muttered in weary exasperation, employing the old postskydark euphemism for secu­rity forces.

  Mina bleated in fear and dropped to her knees, head bowed. Kane scanned the men's faces, wondering which one had spoken in such a deep voice. His eyes swept over them, then tracked back to a face that showed an expression the exact opposite of dismay.

  Although he was attired in the same baggy denim overalls, his bony frame was stretched at least six and a half feet from the soles of his feet to his bald pate. The overalls fit poorly; they drooped on his skinny body like rags on a wire hanger. He couldn't have topped the scales at more than 150.

  His pale blue eyes, however, were alert and intel­ligent. His nose was hooked, his jaw prominent, al­most prognathous. His face bore a design in black paint, meant to represent a pair of scalloped wings sweeping up from the corners of his eyes and almost meeting in the center of his forehead. Kane assumed the artwork had something to do with the Day of the Basilisk.

  At the moment, the bottom half of the man's face was split by a wide grin that displayed two rows of exceptionally white, exceptionally pointed teeth. The light glanced off them, and an involuntary shudder went through Kane's body. The man's teeth were made of burnished steel.

  For a moment Kane couldn't understand what the man found so amusing that he continued to grin. He came to the realization he couldn't help it—two puck­ered scars curved up from the corners of his lips, dis­appearing into the folds of his cheeks. The man's mouth had been sliced, stitched and fixed in a per­manent macabre grin. The scars were old, so the dis­figurement had happened a long time ago.

  Behind him he heard Brigid murmur, "Dr. Sardon-icus, I presume."

  The grinning man heard her and bowed his head in her direction. "Quite so. I'm happy to learn that our little Mina has filled you in about our valley. Did she also happen to mention that outlanders are not per­mitted here?"

  ' 'She might have made some sort of reference to it," Grant said blandly.

  Sardonicus bestowed a slit-eyed stare on the pistol in Grant's hand. "I thought I heard gunfire, and I must admit that's a sound I never thought to hear again.'' He paused and added genially, ' 'But the spice of new experiences is the sauce in the feast of life, wouldn't you say?"

  When he didn't receive an answer, Sardonicus barked, "Mina! To me. Groundskeeper Hogan, give her a lift."

  Without hesitation, the girl rose to her feet and stepped beneath the lip of the gully. A man lowered his iron bar so Mina could grasp the hooked end. He pulled her effortlessly up to the ridge. He was big, his bare arms rippling with overdeveloped muscles. He kept his eyes fixed on Grant's face during the entire process. His mouth twitched in a slight sneer of superiority.

  When Mina stood between Sardonicus and Hogan, the grinning man asked, "May I have your names?"

  Kane waggled the barrel of his Sin Eater negli­gently. "No need. We won't be here long enough to establish any kind of familiarity."

  "I beg to differ." Sardonicus turned toward Mina. "Do you know who they are, child?"

  Obediently, the girl pointed to the three people one at a time, reciting their names in turn. "Grant. Brigid. Kane."

  Sardonicus nodded. ' 'Ah. And how did Grant, Bri­gid and Kane come to be here?"

  Mina shook her head. "I don't really know, Doctor. I think it has something to do with that little metal thing on the ground over there."

  Sardonicus squinted in Brigid's direction, appar­ently not in the least interested in the litter of screamwing corpses. "Ah," he said again. "And what is that little metal thing on the ground over there?"

  "Brigid called it a quantum interphase transducer, version two." Mina repeated Brigid's words crisply, imitating even her pronunciation.

  It was impossible for Dr. Sardonicus to frown, but his arched eyebrows curved down to the bridge of his prominent nose, lending him the resemblance of a hawk in a high state of consternation. "Gibberish."

  Brigid slowly climbed to her feet, standing over the pyramid. Kane could faintly hear it ticking through the reboot process. "It's a machine that helps us to travel from place to place," Brigid said with studied calm. "It harnesses vortex points, natural earth en­ergies, to open portals between hyperspatial channels. That's a very oversimplified explanation, but you get the general idea."

  Sardonicus stared at her unblinkingly, his grin fro­zen, his teeth glinting. He seemed to be trying to fig­ure if Brigid was mocking him or just dissembling. Neither Grant nor Kane blamed him for his momen­tary loss of words. Kane in particular retained vivid memories of the time, nearly two years ago, when the operational theory of the prototype interphaser had been first explained to him by its creator, Mohandas Lakesh Singh.

  One of the brilliant minds of the twentieth century, Lakesh was more than 250 years old. He had spent a century and a half of those years in cryogenic stasis, and after his resurrection some fifty years before, he had undergone several operations to further prolong his life. Neither his resuscitation or the reconstructive surgeries had been performed out of Samaritan im­pulses. His life and health had been prolonged so he could serve the Program of Unification and the con­tinent-spanning network of baronies.

  The interphaser was Lakesh's latest creation, ac­tually a newer version that evolved from the Totality Concept's Project Cerberus. Utilizing bits of preex­isting technology, the aim of Project Cerberus was essentially converting matter to energy and back again to matter. The entire principle behind matter transmission was that everything organic and inor­ganic could be reduced to encoded information. The primary stumbling block to actually moving the prin­ciple from the theoretical to the practical was the sheer quantity of information that had to be transmit­ted, received and reconstituted without making any errors in the decoding.

  Scientists labored over a way to make this possible for nearly fifty years, financed by black funds fun-neled from other government projects.

  Project Cerberus, like all the other Totality Concept researches, was classified above top secret. A few high government officials knew it existed, as did members of the Joint Chiefs of Staff of the military. The secrecy was believed to be more than important; it was considered to be almost a religion.

  The matter transmitter had other, less destructive applications, as well. Given wide use, it could elim­inate inefficient transportation systems and be used for space exploration and colonizing planets in the solar system without the time- and money-consuming efforts to build spaceships.

  However, matter transmission had been found to be absolutely impossible to achieve by the employ­ment of Einsteinian physics. Only quantum physics, coupled with quantum mechanics, had made it work beyond a couple of prototypes that transported steel balls only a few feet across a room. But even those crude early models could not have functioned at all without the basic components that preexisted the To­tality Concept.

  Mohandas Lakesh Singh, the project's overseer, ex­perienced the epiphany and made that breakthrough. Armed with this knowledge, under Lakesh's guidance the quantum interphase mat-trans inducers opened a rift in the hyperdimensional quantum stream, between a relativistic here and there. The Cerberus technology did more than beam matter from one spot in linear space to another. It reduced organic and inorganic material to digital information and transmitted it along hyperdimensional pathways on a carrier wave.

  In 1989, Lakesh himself had been the first suc­cessful long-distance matter transfer of a human sub­ject, traveling a hundred yards from a prototype gate­way chamber to a receiving booth. That initial success was replicated many times, and with the replication came the modifications and improvements of the quantum interphase mat-trans inducers, reaching the point where they were manufactured in modular form.

  The latest modification was a miniaturized version of a mat-trans unit, employing much of the same hardware and operating principles. The gateways functioned by tapping into the quantum stream, the invisible pathways that crisscrossed outside perceived physical space and terminating in worm holes. The interphaser interacted with the energy within a natu­rally occurring vortex and caused a temporary over­lapping of two dimensions. The vortex then became an intersection point, a discontinuous quantum jump, beyond relativistic space-time.

  According to Lakesh, evidence indicated there were many vortex nodes, centers of intense energy, located in the same proximity on each of the planets of the solar system, and those points correlated to vortex centers on Earth. The power points of the planet, places that naturally generated specific types of energy, possessed both positive and projective fre­quencies, and others were negative and receptive. He referred to the positive energy as prana, which was an old Sanskrit term meaning "the world soul." La­kesh was sure some ancient peoples were aware of these symmetrical geo-energies and constructed mon­uments over the vortex points in order to manipulate them. He suspected the knowledge was suppressed over the centuries. Kane had no reason to doubt the suppression of such knowledge, even if he was skep­tical of everything else.

  Sardonicus squared his skinny shoulders and an­nounced in his deep voice, "I really don't think I believe you."

  "I really don't think I give much of a shit whether you do or not," Kane retorted indifferently. "We ar-rived here while Mina was being attacked by screamwings—the basilisks. She survived your little test, so take her back to the institute and leave us alone. We'll be out of sight and out of mind soon enough."

  Murmuring passed among the people again. "You're very wrong, Kane," Sardonicus declared.

  Kane cocked his head quizzically. "Which part?"

  "You did the exact opposite of saving this girl's life. In actual fact, you've caused it to be forfeit. By interfering with the therapy, you've triggered in her a dissocial reaction. It was her responsibility to survive or not. Since you took that away from her, she now lacks a sense of responsibility to the community and can't be allowed to return."

  Grant's eyes narrowed, his index finger hovering over the trigger stud of his pistol. "I hope that doesn't mean what I think it means."

  Sardonicus replied, "You hope in vain. Grounds-keeper Hogan—"

  The big man who had lifted Mina out of the gully instantly placed the sharpened end of his iron rod against the girl's neck. The point depressed the flesh at the hinge of her jaw, right above her carotid artery.

  Mina's eyelids fluttered for an instant, like the wings of a panicked butterfly, but she didn't other­wise move. She stood motionless, not even appearing to breathe.

  "However," Sardonicus continued, "additional therapy sessions might reverse her affliction…on the condition you come with me to the sanatorium will­ingly/'

  "Let me guess the rest," Brigid intoned with cold sarcasm. "If we don't come with you willingly, you'll kill her right here and now."

  Sardonicus's grin seemed to widen, his teeth flash­ing like a pair of polished saw blades. "Exactly."

  "If you do kill her right here and now," grated Kane, "I'll damn sure do the same to you."

  Sardonicus sniffed disdainfully. "Classic aggres­sive personality with underlying sociopathic behavior models. Surely you realize that she'll be just as dead as I will be. Do you think that will be an equitable exchange—my death for hers?"

  "Why do you want us to go with you?" Grant demanded hotly.

  "Chain-of-command protocols," Sardonicus re­plied smoothly. "It's the purview of Chief of Staff Eljay to decide what's to be done with interlopers— not that he's ever been faced with such a situation."

  The timbre of the man's voice changed subtly, but Kane caught the edge of resentment in his words nev­ertheless. He stored the observation away in case it could come in useful.

  "And," Sardonicus went on, "since you're not rag-assed wanderers, he may decide it's in the best interests of the valley if you join the community."

  A chuckle lurked at the back of his throat as he added, "Providing you pass the entrance exams."

  Cold fingers of dread caressed the base of Kane's spine and tickled the back of his neck. Sardonicus stopped trying to stifle his chuckle and threw back his head and laughed. His eyes shone brightly. Kane rec­ognized the quality of the laugh and the light burning in Dr. Sardonicus's eyes. They were those of a mad­man. He knew with a grim certainty that the man's threat to kill Mina was not an empty bluff, regardless if it meant his death, as well.

  Inhaling deeply through his nostrils, Kane turned slightly so he could read the expressions on his friends' faces. Unsurprisingly, they were inscrutable. Grant's face in particular was as immobile as if it were carved out of mahogany.

  "Are you going to leave this up to me?" he asked irritably from one side of his mouth.

  Neither Brigid nor Grant responded for a long tick of time. Then Brigid took a step forward. "All right, Doctor. Stop the posturing. We'll go with you."

  Hogan still kept the point of his iron rod pressed against Mina's neck. Sardonicus quirked questioning eyebrows at Kane and Grant. Slowly, the two men lowered their weapons. Just as slowly and deliber­ately, Hogan removed the metal skewer from the girl's throat.

  Sardonicus uttered a strange sobbing sound that Kane interpreted as a laugh of relieved triumph. He spoke to the other men in the group, and they bent over, extending the iron bars down into the gully, hooked ends foremost.

  Kane and Grant pushed their Sin Eaters back in the forearm holsters. Kane waved Brigid forward. "Ladies and decision makers first."

  As Brigid reached for the hook, Sardonicus snapped, "Bring your mechanism."

  Without even an instant of hesitation, Brigid shot back,''You don't want me to do that…not unless you want your precious valley contaminated."

  Sardonicus narrowed his eyes to suspicious slits, but he didn't interrupt as Brigid went on, "The in-terphaser emits radioactive particles. They're deadly. Your water and crops will be poisoned and so will your people."

  She ran a careless hand over the front of her shadow suit. ' 'This material protects us from the ra­diation."