“How long?”
“A few hours. Some personnel are dead, many missing, others scattered all around. We’ve got people out hunting for them.”
The corridor ended at a bank of elevators. The captain selected one, scanned his yellow flimsy, pressed an unmarked button, and was rewarded by a short, stomach-flipping descent. The shiny, steel doors hissed back to reveal a security checkpoint: a guard cubicle encased in bulletproof glass, a retinal scanner, an ID-card reader, and apertures in the walls and ceiling that hinted at other, less friendly defenses. Lessing was reminded of Marvelous Gap, but this was bigger, fancier, and deadlier. It was also probably armed and active.
The door to the guard cubicle was ajar. The captain entered but backed out again. “Body in there,” he remarked, “and the retinal scanner’s been disconnected by somebody who knows how. Light shows the airlock to the control center is open.”
“Airlock?” Wrench piped up.
“Yes. This complex is constructed of layers of steel, plastic, and a special concrete. The whole thing sits on springs in an oil bath, and a gyroscope holds it level against anything short of a direct missile strike. You could drop the moon on New York, and this place’d hardly jiggle.”
“This Major Golden… he’s inside, then?” Lessing wanted to know.
“Guess so. But don’t sweat it. He may have a right to be down here. After all, a lot of people still don’t know Outram’s alive and legally in charge. Golden may’ve been sent by the Joint Chiefs, the Secretary of Defense, or some other agency.”
Beyond the airlock they traversed a tunnel three meters long, walled with flexible plastic and ending in a second security door. The latter was also open, and they passed through into a round chamber some thirty meters in diameter and ten meters high. The center of this room was occupied by a two-tier, circular dais about ten meters across. Four short staircases led up from the main floor to rows of grey, crackle-finish consoles on the lower level of the dais. Two more sets of steps then ascended another meter or two to the top level, a bare platform three meters wide. This was surrounded by a metal railing and contained two black-plastic-upholstered chairs and what resembled a speaker’s lectern. Lights, lenses, microphones, and cables swung down out of the shadows overhead like robot spiderwebs.
More desks, consoles, and metal cabinets crowded the main floor, and huge, dark screens glimmered all around the walls. Computers certainly had changed since Lessing had played Planet-Zapper in high school!
There was no one in the room.
The captain called, “Major Golden? Major Golden? Hey! Anybody here?”
“Two doors on the other side of the platform.” Lessing pointed.
“Access to the works.” The captain sucked in air from his suit tanks and licked his lips. “Storage. The broom closet.”
Wrench slipped past to prowl between the silent rows of desks and cabinets. They let him go; he knew more than they did about the great machine that slumbered here.
No corpses. No water, standing or running. The air ought to be good. What the hell? Lessing pulled off his helmet. The captain gave him a quizzical look but did the same, then went over and climbed up onto the top dais. Lessing stayed where he was, automatic in hand. He sensed others here, others who either could not or would not answer.
The captain stood spraddle-legged in the middle of the upper platform, extracted his yellow paper, looked self-consciously up at the microphones above his head, and began to recite numbers.
The effect was magicaclass="underline" a green light sprang to life here, an amber blinker there. A bank of screens bloomed with lambent colors on one wall, a graph and columns of ever-changing read-outs glowed on another.
Wrench exclaimed, “Hey, Lessing, come here! I’ve got the internal TV working! Oh, man, look…!” He broke off.
Something was wrong. Lessing reached him in three long strides. Wrench was staring at a single, large screen which was segmented into forty or fifty smaller pictures. Most of these showed empty offices, rooms, and passages. A few contained corpses. In one frame smoke eddied up toward the ceiling, and Lessing recognized the reception area: the two soldiers and their driver were sharing a comradely toke of pot
Wrench pointed. One of the lower frames pictured five uniformed soldiers. All had their backs to the camera as they peered through a door: one crouching in front, the rest poised behind him. All bore U.S. Army M-25 assault rifles. The kneeling man aimed his weapon at a distant figure on a dais in the large, lighted room beyond the door.
“Get down!” Lessing yelled. “Captain—”
They heard the rifle shot twice: once, tinnily, from the TV speakers in front of them, and then instantly again from the leftmost doorway on the other side of the central platform. It echoed on around the room The captain whirled, seemed to teeter on invisible roller skates, then crashed down on top of one of the dais’s two chairs.
“Shit!” shrilled Wrench. He hit the floor between two consoles just ahead of a stitch-line of bullet holes. Lessing was even faster. Over their heads the damaged consoles fizzed and sparked.
Lessing began to crawl along an aisle toward the dais. “Get where you can put a grenade through that open door!” He raised his head and risked a look over one of the metal desks.
The captain stirred, rolled, and slid off the top platform onto a desk on the lower tier. It collapsed with a crash, and the unseen sniper let off a whole magazine out of sheer jitters. He hit no one.
Wrench fired at the doorway. His grenade hit the adjoining wall, ricocheted, and exploded with ear-shattering effect under one of the computer consoles. There were cries from the opfoes, and Wrench shrieked an obscenity back. Another flurry of shots ripped metal, glass, and wall-board to shreds above him. Lessing heard the little man scuttling away under the desks.
They were outgunned unless Wrench got lucky. What had he loaded his launcher with? High explosive, armour-piercing, tear gas, or smoke grenades? Their military med-van had been supplied with a variety of munitions. Right now they needed smoke for a quick retreat
Someone on the other side of the room was screaming. Wrench’s grenade had taken at least one man out of the firefight. The yelling stopped abruptly. Either the opfo had passed out or else his friends had popped him with a needle of narcodine.
Lessing found the captain still breathing, but blood bubbled from his lips and nose, and the front of his N.B.C. suit was a mess. He gestured weakly at the yellow sheet, now smeared with red.
“These… three… numbers.” He gulped, swallowed, and struggled with the words. “Say them. Aloud. Get help… computer has… radio link.” Experience told Lessing that the man was going into shock. He might still have a chance if they got him to a hospital right away.
Lessing held the paper up to the light. He half rose, made sure he was out of the line of fire, and shouted out the captain’s three five-digit numbers, one numeral at a time. There were more numbers on the other side of the paper; the one at the bottom was in a black-pencilled box of its own, a box marked “Top Secret” and “Terminal Emergency Only.” Things weren’t quite that bad yet Lessing tore the paper in two and stuffed the bottom half into his suit’s pocket It wouldn’t do for the opfoes to get that number! Maybe Wrench could make something of it all.
There wasn’t time to do more with the computer. Lessing heard the enemy spreading out into the main room, moving to encircle them. They knew the captain’s party had started with three; now there were two.
The opfoes had lost track of Lessing, however. Ten meters away he saw a soldier in a pale-green N.B.C. suit emerge from beneath a work table. The man was facing the other way, seeking Wrench. Lessing steadied his gun barrel against a desk leg and fired. The man bleated, jerked, and went limp.