James Axler - Outlanders 06 - Doomstar Relic

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From
the creator
of Deathlands
£omes
James Axler
01
o
A harrowing journey in the
midst of a new reality...
available at your favorite
retail outlet, only from
GOUT1FC
"Oh, no," Brigid breathed
Kane and the others weren't certain of the cause of Brisid's asitation, but she telegraphed it
to them by her tense posture.
Bel-Tier's image dissolved into a glittering swarm of pixels which leaped across the room
and resolved into Tara. In a clear voice, she announced, "Implementing maximum defense
measure Z for Zulu, D for Doomstar. Activation code zero-zero-doomstar-zero."
Tara extended her arms outward from her body, keeping her palms flat and perpendicular
with the floor, forming a T. She arched her back, thrust out her firm breasts, and a
diamond-shaped slit opened between them. A swirling splash of multicolored light spilled
out.
Calmly she said, "Doomstar program now on-line."
Other titles in this series:
Exile to Hell Destiny Run Savage Sun Omega Path Parallax Red
JAMES AXLER
DOOMSTAR RELIC
A GOLD EAGLE BOOK FROM
WORLDWIDE
TORONTO • NEW YORK • LONDON AMSTERDAM • PARIS • SYDNEY • HAMBURG
STOCKHOLM • ATHENS • TOKYO • MILAN MADRID • WARSAW • BUDAPEST 'AUCKLAND
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 September 1998 ISBN 0-373-63819-1
DOOMSTAR RELIC
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 MSB 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.
® 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.
The moist star upon whose influence
Neptune's empire stands was sick almost to doomsday with eclipse. —Act I, Hamlet William Shakespeare
The Road to Outlands— From Secret Government Files to the Future
Almost two hundred years after the slobal 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 aftermath—forever known as skydark— reshaped continents and turned civilization
into ashes.
Nearly depopulated, America became the Deathlands— poisoned 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 enforced—to 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
masters—and 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, community—the very rootedness of humanity was denied. With no continuity, there was no
forward momentum to the future. And that was the crux—when 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.
. I
Chapter 1
South central Alaska
The lights of the aurora borealis surged in the northern sky. The glitter of the first stars of the evening was
swallowed by the great iridescent bands of green and blue and purple. The ethereal colors shimmered on
the blanket of white that draped the land near the top of the world. The atmospheric display of
pyrotechnics, breathtaking in magnitude, held no interest for the twin figures making their way steadily
across the frozen landscape.
Both of their bodies were concealed by heavily padded, quilted thermal coveralls. Thick woolen scarves
wound around their faces, and their eyes were protected by frost-rimed goggles.
Barch clenched his teeth to keep them from chattering and for the hundredth time in the past six hours
regretted he'd ever allowed himself to seduce Ber-rier. He'd read of other men and what they had done
to obtain fortune and glory, to achieve their dreams of possessing pieces of raw, naked power. In
ancient legend, such power was always harnessed and con-
10
JAMES AXLER
tained in such fragile vessels as chalices, boxes, amulets and even crude wooden and stone spears.
Barch knew most of the stories were indeed only that—fictions dreamed up when mankind still
possessed the spirit to dream and the leisure time to put such fantastic stories down on paper. He wasn't
a believer in magic or the mystical, but he had been a player in the Intel loop long enough to know that
things were never as they appeared to be.
Barch liked being one of those lucky ones allowed access behind the stage dressing. It delighted him to
have the keys to the back door and to know all the locks to the hidden doors of influence of Ragnarville.
But even his knowledge and position as the Magistrate Division administrator went only so far.
Even a Magistrate, a high-ranking member of the Ragnarville Trust, could freeze to death in
forty-below-zero temperatures. Ultimately the subzero Alaskan air would take its toll, the predark tech
and weapons caches of Redoubt Zulu be damned. There were still some places on Earth where the
nuclear winter, the skydark of two centuries ago, had never relinquished its icy grip. Alaska was one of
them.
Under the protective helmet and woolen cap, Barch's skull was clean shaved, without so much as a tuft
of hair to act as additional insulation against the cold. His dark, sharp-boned face possessed only a
single obsidian black eye, his left one. The right was covered by a leather patch. But his one eye was
capable of boring a hole of fear through even the
Doomstar Relic
11
most fearless of people, as Berrier had reason to know.
The woman stopped at the lip of a ledge and from a case hanging from her shoulder, she removed a
compact set of binoculars. Lifting her goggles, she raised them to her eyes. For a few long, silent
seconds, she peered into them, making adjustments now and then. Barch waited, not giving in to the
impulse to stamp his booted feet. A stiff breeze stirred up loose snow, setting into a motion a brief flurry
around them. He saw nothing in the snow-swept valley below but black spruce thickets protruding
above the snow line. Here and there, in the low country, snow had blown away from the round knobs of
small outcroppings. Barch had never seen such a vista of desolation, not even in hellzones.
"There," Berrier said hoarsely, extending a gloved finger to point to the snow waste. Her voice was
muffled by the layers of wool. "We're far enough away from the redoubt now to get a full view. If you
give your eyes time to focus when using the binoculars, you can spot the tops of the antenna array."
She held out the binoculars. Barch took them, raising his goggles, blinking at the exquisite sting of the
dry, cold air against the moisture of his eye. He peered into the eyepiece, across the snowscape to the
coordinates Berrier had indicated. The vision enhancers were of predark manufacture, possessing
ultra-low-dispersion elements in the lenses to allow sta-
12
JAMES AXLER
ble, distortion-free long-distance viewing even in low light.
Squinting, Barch held back his impatience and gave his eye time to adjust, as the archivist had instructed.
After a few seconds, the dark metal frameworks of the antennae came into sharp relief against the white
blanket of snow, sticking up like skeletal, long-dead trees. He silently approximated the distance,
realizing the diameter of the half-buried rims of the transmission dishes had to be immense in order to be
seen at all from a mile away.
"You see them?" Berrier asked, interrupting Barch's thoughts.
"I see them," answered Barch. "How the hell could you have spotted that array out there? You told me
your eyes were bad." He felt the saliva in his mouth dry up from the brittle cold, even in the short time his
mouth was open to speak.
"My vision is pretty piss poor," Berrier admitted. "I'm just well-informed."
"Knowing where to look, that's the secret isn't it, Berrier?"
"You know damn good and well it is, Barch."
"Since you're so well-informed, explain to me why anyone in their right minds would build a military
installation up in this part of the world."
"Privacy, for one," she said, adopting a detached, lecturing tone. "And don't forget, when this installation
was constructed, the weather here was much different. This part of Alaska wasn't frozen over. The
Doomstar Relic
13
air was cold, yes, but there was little snowfall and it wasn't in a permanent deep freeze. Weather
patterns went all screwy during the skydark. Besides, if this is the spot I think it is, the builders could
have designed their own weather systems and kept their own climate as snug and warm as a tropical
island within a five-mile radius had they chosen to do so."
"Yet another application of the system?"
Berrier nodded. "Weather control would have been just the beginning."
Barch waited for her to say more, refusing to ask "Like what?" for elaboration, even though the cold had
penetrated the fleece lining of his boots and made his toes ache. He had to maintain his dominance over
the archivist, and that couldn't be done if he allowed himself to be tested like a child.
At length, Berrier said, "There were rumors of mind-control technologies, of using accurately timed,
artificially excited electromagnetic strokes to induce a pattern of oscillations over certain regions of the
Earth. The brain performance of large populations could be impaired and channeled to adhere to certain
behaviors."
Barch shifted his feet in the crusty snow, looking first at the nearly buried antenna array, then back to
Berrier. "Sounds like more predark techno-bullshit."
The archivist stiffened and replied sharply, "Before the nukecaust, before the skydark, humanity had
added a substantial amount of electromagnetic energy to Earth's environment. There wasn't one spot
14
JAMES AXLER
on the planet that didn't have some form of electro-magnetism zapping it, from radio waves to
microwaves."
"So?"
"So, the first attempt to coordinate all that radiation was made here, the first attempt to convince six
billion human beings to be obedient, unquestioning slaves."
Berrier gestured to the vista of white all around them. "That was the ultimate aim of the High-frequency
Active Auroral Research Program. There were other HAARP installations on the planet, but this one
was the nexus point, the hub of the wheel."
She turned her head to stare at Barch, and even through her goggles, he felt the heat of her stare. "Now
do you understand why this redoubt is so important, why I chose this one out of all the others?"
Barch didn't respond. He visualized the staggering population of Earth before the nuclear megacull of
2001. Whole nations of people ran out of control, demanding rights, rioting and warring to grab their
piece of fast-vanishing natural resources. A program, a device like HAARP would have solved an
inestimable number of global problems without a single mushroom cloud or a speck of fallout.
His teeth began to chatter, but he managed to grin nevertheless. He couldn't repress a shiver, but it
wasn't due to the cold. It was anticipation. He wheeled around. "Let's get back inside."
The entrance to Redoubt Zulu was recessed into
Doomstar Relic
15
the side of a mountain. An ice-encrusted and rutted, crumbling blacktop road led up from the mouth of
the shallow valley. Barch and Berrier trudged up it, heads bowed against the strong gusts of wind so
cold they felt as if it blew from the gulfs of deep space. Berrier panted and struggled, feet seeking
purchase on the frozen asphalt, but she didn't complain. Barch couldn't help but feel a twinge of
admiration for the woman. An academic she was, a key tapper and paper pusher who had never left
Ragnarville, but she was tough of spirit.
Barch remembered how confident Berrier had seemed when the historian approached him over a month
ago regarding some information she had found in the archives computer database. Barch had planted the
seed in Berrier's brain nearly a year before, during an investigation of certain members of Ragnarville's
Historical Division. The archivists were plentiful—intelligent men and women chosen for their memory
skills, their innate abilities with a computer keyboard and, best of all, their ability to process information
and comprehend. However, no matter how bright members of the Historical Division might be, they
were only human, and as such, were vulnerable to frailties, like loneliness.
Barch did his research on the existing pool of mid-level archivists in an attempt to seek out the right man
or woman, and had settled on Roberta J. Berrier, who fit the profile that he had assembled. Berrier was
young, under the age of thirty. Single, apparently eel-
16
JAMES AXLER
ibate, with some old family connections stretching downward into the Tartarus Pits, the lowest levels of
ville society. She was very intelligent, with a tested IQ and Rothman ratings that were both at the top of
their respective scales. Yet her psychological profile—a profile Barch had access to as administrator of
the Magistrate Division—also damned the young woman as being too trusting, with a strong streak of
romanticism.
Not that Berrier was a doormat. She was also quite arrogant and self-confident to the point of being
reckless.
Barch didn't mind. He believed in using arrogant people, bending them to his will, since they were usually
too proud to create problems and too embarrassed to risk exposure of their own foibles. Berrier had
plenty of them.
The investigation of the Historical Division was fairly routine, a standard feint to ferret out potential
seditionists and Preservationist sympathizers. According to ville dogma, the Preservationists were
archivists scattered throughout the nine-ville network. They were devoted to secretly preserving past
knowledge, to piecing together the unrevised history of not only the predark, but also the postholocaust
world.
Therefore, Barch arranged to have Berrier accused of being a Preservationist sympathizer. The terrified
young woman was dragged away from her workstation in the middle of her shift, stripped naked and
thrown into the cell blocks.
Doomstar Relic
17
In most instances, 99.9 percent of them, in fact, any type of accusation made by a Magistrate resulted in
a termination warrant. Berrier knew this, and Barch let her think it over for twenty-four hours, naked and
shivering in the bare, six-by-five cell.
At the end of those twenty-four hours, Barch personally released her, apologized profusely for the
grievous error made by one of his overzealous subordinates and promised she was now under his
protection. Berrier was so grateful, so weak with relief and hunger, all she could do was hug his knees
and sob.
Thus began their relationship, and Barch was careful to keep it platonic at first. The physical aspects of it
would come later, after he discovered how devoted she was to him. One afternoon, during a routine tour
of the Historical Division, he said to her casually, "If you happen to uncover anything about the redoubts,
I'd be very grateful."
Berrier managed to keep most of the shock she felt from showing on her face, but not all of it. Barch
repressed a self-congratulatory grin. Over the course of postskydark generations, strange stories,
rumors, legends had circulated about bizarre places buried deep in what was formerly known as the
Deathlands. The tales had these subterranean enclaves stuffed with breathtaking scientific marvels,
fabulous technological treasure troves.
The enigmas of the redoubts, especially those connected to the Totality Concept, were one of the most
18
JAMES AXLER
ruthlessly guarded secrets of the baronies. During the Program of Unification, some eighty-five years
before, the locations of the redoubts within the territories of the villes were sought out and secured.
Anyone who spoke of having knowledge of them, even based on hearsay, was hunted down and
exterminated. Tales of the redoubts were suppressed to such an extent that they became baseless
folktales, dismissed as sheer legend.
Only a member of the Trust like Barch, or an arrogantly curious archivist like Berrier, would know
otherwise.
"I thought the Magistrate Division had their own drones to do this sort of covert information dig," Berrier
had retorted, but kept her arrogance in check due to her gratitude toward the Mag.
"Can't trust my own, Berrier. I trust you as I hope you trust me."
He lowered his head to close to Berrier's left ear, so close he could see the fine pores in the historian's
smooth skin. "I'm looking for something to help both of us. So we can always be together. A Mag and
an archivist can't be legally matched, you know. To be together, we need to find a place for ourselves,
far from the power of the baron."
That whispered suggestion of living without the heel of a baron on her neck was all the motivation Berrier
needed. However, searching the Historical Division's database required time, patience and stealth. The
files containing direct references to the
Doomstar Relic
19
redoubts were restricted to archivists holding Xeno clearances. Berrier had no choice but to sneak in
through digital back doors. If she hadn't been so confident in her abilities to manipulate the computer
system, she wouldn't have made even the first attempt. But she found very little following such a slow,
painstaking procedure. Only her wellspring of arrogance and the romantic dream Barch had implanted in
her imagination kept her going.
When her motivation flagged, diluted by doubts and fear of discovery, Barch decided it was time to
move their relationship into the physical realm. One night, he made love to Berrier—actually, he fucked
her, but he did his utmost to convince her that he was making love to her. He was only a little surprised
to learn she was a virgin. After that night, any doubts she might have harbored evaporated. Still, the data
search was excruciatingly time-consuming.
Then, a month ago, after a council of the nine barons, the path to the secrets in the database was
cleared. All of the baronies in the ville network united in a cooperative mission—to recce the redoubts
and their individual territories for any recent signs of use or entrance. The mission was, of course, covert
and the reasons behind it murky.
Even as a division administrator and a member of the Ragnarville Trust, Barch still wasn't certain of the
purpose of the effort. According to fragments of Intel, just over six months ago a couple of Magistrates
in Cobaltville had gone renegade and disap-
20
JAMES AXLER
peared. And more recently, they had returned to the ville and kidnapped a high-ranking archivist,
allegedly right under the nose of Baron Cobalt.
Another, current piece bit of Intel, this one originating in Sharpeville, indicated that one of the turncoat
Mags had been sighted in Redoubt Papa and seriously injured Baron Sharpe, perhaps even chilled him.
A report on whether the baron had survived the encounter was still pending. The man, Kane by name,
sounded like Barch's kind of Magistrate.
At any rate, it was patently obvious the fused-out Mags knew about the mat-trans gateways in the
redoubts and used them to elude apprehension.
None of that particularly interested Barch. All that the project meant to him was the opening of hitherto
locked doors of information and opportunity. He inveighed heavily upon Ragnarville's senior archivist to
upgrade Berrier's clearance to Xeno in order to adequately fulfill the lord baron's command. Shortly
thereafter, she found the specs and data regarding Redoubt Zulu.
Barch's treaded boot soles slipped on a patch of ice and he nearly fell, jerking his thoughts back to the
present. Berrier was in the lead, so she didn't notice. He swore under his breath as he regained his
balance. Before they came here to Alaska, to Redoubt Zulu, the woman would have dogged his heels,
never daring to walk in front of him.
The massive sec door had been left up, and snow had drifted over the threshold. Once beyond it, in the
Doomstar Relic
21
corridor, Berrier punched in the code on a green liquid-crystal display pad. With a hissing, squeaking
rumble of buried hydraulics, the multiton door slid down, seamlessly joining with the floor with a dull
thud. The knife-edged wind ceased to slash at them.
Sighing in relief, Berrier removed her head coverings, letting the goggles dangle around her neck by the
elastic strap. She was not very tall, barely five foot five. Her hair was pale yellow and as fine as a
newborn's, cropped so close to the scalp it should have been a severe, military-style bristle cut, but due
to its softness the hair had a feathered look. Her hair was the only thing soft about Berrier. Intelligence
showed in the high arch of her brows. Her lips were dark and full. The potential for coldness, even
cruelty, was evident in her aquamarine blue eyes.
Barch liked that potential. It was the only thing he found truly attractive about the woman. Tugging down
his scarf, he scratched at the flakes of frost in his goatee. He rested his goggles on his forehead and
asked, "So, what have we stumbled onto here, Berrier?"
Berrier smiled bleakly. "The legacy of Nikola Tesla. What was built here stretches all the way back to
him."
"Who is Nikola Tesla?"
"A predark genius, a theoretician, an engineer. His work goes back into the early 1900s by the old
calendar." Berrier's smile stretched into a grin. "He was the archetype of the mad scientist...mysterious,
22
JAMES AXLER
misunderstood and exploited by those who followed him. Guys like Edison and Steinmetz were one
thing, but Tesla...he was a true visionary."
Barch only vaguely recognized the name of Edison, and Steinmetz meant nothing at all to him. "You
sound impressed."
The historian shrugged. "I am. The man was truly ahead of his time. In fact, some of his ideas were so
advanced, they were looked upon as black magic, or sorcery mixed with science. Mankind was only
beginning to catch up with him by the late twentieth century, but of course, the human race took a giant
step backward and such things as the discoveries of a long-dead scientist and inventor took a low
priority to daily survival."
"Spare me the history lesson, Berrier. What's Tesla got to do with HAARP?''
Berrier's eyes narrowed in irritation. "Simple. He invented the goddamn thing. At least, he invented the
core of the idea. See, back in his time, his more advanced theories were viewed as strictly speculative.
For example, the notorious Tesla Death Ray might have really been a particle-beam idea that Tesla tried
to sell the old-style U.S. military as an antiaircraft weapon."
Barch sighed impatiently. "There's got to be an op center for the redoubt for HAARP somewhere in
here."
Berrier pursed her lips and slid a hand inside a pouch pocket of her thermal garment. She withdrew
Doomstar Relic
23
a folded map and opened it up. Since their arrival in the installation via the mat-trans gateway six hours
earlier, the two people had made an attempt to explore the layout of the immense, multilayered
installation. According to Berrier, Redoubt Zulu was possibly the largest complex of its kind in the
Totality Concept network, housing at one time a thousand people and the last one constructed before
the end of the twentieth century. It was virtually a small city buried within a mountain.
During the Program of Unification, Redoubt Zulu had been ceded to the territory of Baron Ragnar. It
made sense only because Ragnarville was the northernmost ville in what once was the continental United
摘要:

FromthecreatorofDeathlands£omesJamesAxler01oAharrowingjourneyinthemidstofanewreality...availableatyourfavoriteretailoutlet,onlyfromGOUT1FC"Oh,no,"BrigidbreathedKaneandtheothersweren'tcertainofthecauseofBrisid'sasitation,butshetelegraphedittothembyhertenseposture.Bel-Tier'simagedissolvedintoaglitteri...

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