Axler, James - Deathlands 19 - Deep Empire

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The sea around Krysty was flat and undisturbed. Michael had vanished.

Before her mind started to cope, Ryan was in motion. He struck the water to

Krysty's right, heading for the spur of rock that marked the sunken entrance to the

redoubt.

J.B. was a moment behind him, followed immediately by Dean. Krysty drew

breath, ready to duck dive after them, when Doc exploded into the sea only a yard

away from her.

A moment later Doc's head broke the surface, his white mane pasted to his thin

skull. "No sign," he bellowed.

"He'll be…" Doc began, striving for a note of reassurance, the sentence dying

stillborn as Dean, J.B. and Ryan appeared from the cavernous redoubt. With no

sign of Michael.

"Oh, Gaia!" Krysty's voice was harsh with shock. She stood, pointing toward the

western horizon, her face frozen. "Look out there!"

There was a massive eruption about three hundred yards from shore. White froth

and a burst of spray soared into the sky. All that they could make out, writhing at

the core of the thrashing disturbance, was a giant, sinuous shape.

"Sea snake," Ryan said. "And—" He broke off as the creature crashed back into

the water again, rolling to reveal, for the first time, its hideous head.

And the limp body of Michael Brother clasped in its blunt, hoglike jaws…

Deep Empire

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James Axler

A GOLD EAGLE BOOK FROM WORLDWIDE

TORONTO • NEW YORK • LONDON AMSTERDAM • RARE • 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."

This one has to be for Chris Priest who has succeeded in taking me,

gibbering, to reveal the singing chasm of infinity. Well, he knows what it

means! Thanks, squire.

Second edition April 1999

ISBN 0-373-62557-X

DEEP EMPIRE

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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.

® 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.

There are those who see the future as a place of sunshine, honey and sylvan

glades. Others see it as a time when eggs moulder in their shells, corpses lie

rotting in the streets and the little children weep. Who is to say which is correct?

—From Smiley Smile Or Breaky Heart?

by Jeremy Christian, Ortyx Press,

Chapter One

Coburn and the pursuing posse were closing fast through the snowy Colorado

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evening, but Ryan Cawdor and his companions had made it to the massive locked

sec doors of the redoubt. All of them were close to the ragged edge with fatigue

and the effects of the altitude. Doc Tanner was on hands and knees, breath rasping

in his throat, shoulders shaking with exhaustion.

"By the three Kennedys, my brothers and sisters," he panted, "but somewhere to

lay this old gray head would be most damnably welcome to me."

Ryan reached up and pressed the control panel at the side of the right-hand door,

punching in the familiar code of 3-5-20.

"Open sesame," Mildred said.

The whole group was filled with a tense energy, knowing that the horrors of the

past couple of weeks were safely behind them and security lay just ahead.

"What?" J. B. Dix asked.

Ryan pressed the numbers again.

And again.

Nothing.

He tried a fourth time, though he was only too aware of the futility of the gesture.

If the comp lock hadn't worked the first time around, then it wasn't going to work

at all.

Nothing happened. The vast sec-steel entrance remained immovably locked

against them.

"Fireblast!" Ryan swore.

There wasn't time for much of a discussion or argument. J.B. summed it up in his

usual combat-wise, concise way. "Coburn won't risk coming closer. He knows

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we're well armed and hold the high ground. Can't get behind us. Can't get above

us. He'll figure we're stuck up here, like hogs on ice. So, we got the dark hours on

our side."

Ryan nodded. "They can't easily get up at us. We can't move down from this

place. Only hope is for one of us to climb up the cliff face. In through where the

earth slip opened the interior corridor walls. Try and open up the sec doors from

inside." He paused a moment. "Have to be me."

Dean's face was a pale blur in the icy gloom. "But, Dad. The worms."

"Yeah, son. I know."

None of them could forget the worms.

THE TRADER USED TO SAY that if a man was going to get hurt, then waiting

wouldn't make it any better. Ryan left the walnut-stocked Steyr SSG-70 bolt-

action rifle behind with the others, taking the SIG-Sauer P-226, snug in its holster,

and his old and trusted eighteen-inch panga in its oiled sheath on his left hip. His

thin-bladed flensing knife was concealed in the small of his back.

The snow was falling again with a serious intent, settling on the rocks all around

him, on the faces of his companions and on the flaming hair of Krysty Wroth.

"Take care, lover," she whispered, kissing him once on the cheek, her lips like fire

on his skin.

"Don't I always?"

"What if you can't get in? Or you can't make it to the main doors? Or you can't

work the lock from inside?" Michael Brother bit his lips. "What then, Ryan?"

"Then, young fellow, you'll all have some tough decisions to take."

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Doc shook him by the hand, his grasp surprisingly powerful for such an old man.

"Test every foot and handhold, there's a good chap. Some mountain-climbing

fellow told me that, back in about 1890. Or, was it 1980? I fear that I

disremember, Ryan."

"I get the message, Doc. Thanks." He looked at the circle of friends, nodding to

Mildred, who gave him a thumbs-up sign. "Right. Here goes."

ONCE HE WAS ouT of the shelter of the plateau, Ryan encountered the full force

of the wind, biting in from the north. It plucked at his long coat, ruffling the white

fur that trimmed it, and made his good right eye water, probing under the patch

across the raw empty left socket.

Despite the bitter cold, Ryan knew better than to try to climb with gloves on.

Though his fingers were cold, he kept moving them, fighting off numbness. In the

shrieking maelstrom of the blizzard he couldn't see how far he'd climbed, nor how

far there still was to go up the jagged face.

His memory put the ascent at two or three hundred feet. He moved cautiously,

making sure that every foothold was secure before shifting his boots to the next

one, testing the crevices and outcrops of granite with his fingers. Ideally he knew

that he should always have either a foot and two hands on, or a hand and two feet.

Logical advice didn't always help.

Ryan was losing track of height, space and time. He hadn't checked his wrist

chron before leaving the others, but he guessed he'd been working his way up the

side of the mountain for the better part of a half hour.

Twice he'd slipped as icebound chunks of rock came loose under a foot or hand,

sending him sliding yards down the cliff.

The noise of the wind was constant, filling his ears, blurring his concentration. All

around him there was a whiteout, snow swirling into his mouth and eye, the force

of the blizzard threatening to pluck him into the abyss.

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Ryan paused and flattened against the stone, fighting for breath. It had occurred to

him several minutes earlier that there was a serious risk of his climbing past the

cleft in the granite face, going on up and up, like a blinded, bottled spider, trapped

in the storm, doomed to scramble on until exhaustion and the weather brought his

lonely ending.

He tried to replay in his mind the look of the hillside when they'd stood outside

the entrance doors of the redoubt and stared upward. It seemed to him that it

might have been a little more to the…

"Right," he whispered.

But he knew well enough how conditions like this could totally addle a man's

sense of direction.

There'd been a motor mechanic from War Wag One, somewhere near the big

lakes of the northeast. He'd been plagued with a virulent dysentery and had

disdained the common latrines, choosing instead to go a few yards into the

surrounding forest.

And the snows had swallowed him up.

Only when the blizzard ceased, thirty-six hours later, had they found his frozen

corpse, less than fifty feet from safety.

Ryan steadied his breathing, trying to use the power of Gaia, the Earth Mother,

that Krysty had taught him. But it was so hard to concentrate.

Just for a moment the memories of the old war wags brought a fleeting thought of

Abe, his old friend who had chosen to go off into Deathlands to try to find

whether the Trader was dead or alive. That had been…

But Ryan's memory wouldn't function. All there was in the universe was cold and

wind and an infinity of white.

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HE WAS OUT of the blizzard.

Ryan found himself lying down, knees drawn up under his chin, a thread of

frozen spittle linking him to stone. To concrete.

It was entrancingly comfortable.

Warm.

It felt so good that there was a temptation to simply lie there for a few more

minutes and rest. Surely that couldn't do too much harm, could it?

Maybe even sleep.

"Fuck, no!" Ryan shouted, his voice hardly reaching his own ears.

There wasn't a lot of sensation left in his hands, but he pummeled himself in the

face, eye closed, kicking out with his frozen feet, forcing the pain of recirculating

blood, mouth open in a rictus of agony.

Finally he found that he could see, make out the dim shape of passage walls on

either side of him, and a domed roof.

He'd managed it, blundering into the redoubt by a heady mixture of luck and

judgment.

Ryan pulled himself upright and stared into the curving darkness of the corridor.

That was the easy part done.

Chapter Two

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While he regained control over his body, Ryan checked his chron, shaking it and

bringing the tiny numbers closer to his face, unable to believe what they showed.

The whole climb had devoured less than forty minutes.

It took him nearly as long to be certain that his body was back to something

approaching full combat readiness. He flexed his fingers and moved his head

from side to side, falling to a crouch and then jumping up and kicking sideways.

To anyone watching, he knew that he'd have presented a bizarre sight. But J.B.

had once said that it was better to look stupid and stay alive than be crucial-cool

and dead.

Finally, feeling as ready as he could be, Ryan drew the panga from its sheath and

readied himself to move toward the heart of the complex.

It was still bitingly cold, his breath feathering out in front of him, and he could

hear the distant roaring of the gale, fading away behind. Crystals of ice crunched

under his boots as he picked his way along the sweep of the passage, taking the

greatest care to stay in the center, away from the pitted walls and their lethal

inhabitants.

Now he'd reached a point where some of the overhead lights were functioning,

casting a sepulchral pallor over the place. One or two of the tiny sec cameras were

also working, their lenses flicking from side to side, miniature ruby lights

glowing.

From his memory, Ryan knew that he would soon be reaching the region where

the walls had been honeycombed by the white worms. If he could get past that

section in safety, he would pass the entrance to the mat-trans unit, then on into the

heart of the military redoubt and down to try to open the doors to his waiting

companions.

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He stopped and glanced behind him.

There had been a small noise, like a footfall, or metal touching the ice-sheathed

walls. But the curve of the corridor was enough to limit his vision to less than

fifty yards.

Ryan waited for a moment, then carried carefully on, occasionally glancing

behind him.

If he was lucky, then he might not disturb the murderous worms.

Now he could see the first signs of their activity.

The surface of the concrete, already pitting and seamed by age and by the shifting

of the earth beyond, had begun to show a different texture—larger holes,

accentuated by the shadows from the overhead lighting. Ryan had never actually

seen Swiss cheeses with their smooth holes, but he'd occasionally come across

pictures of them in the brittle old mags that still littered the wrecked malls of

Deathlands. That was what the walls of the redoubt corridor were starting to

resemble.

Ryan stopped, knowing that a combination of speed and silence was his best hope

to get past without disturbing the lurkers within the walls.

A yard ahead of him, the brittle stone exploded in a burst of powdery shards. The

sound of the gunshot was almost simultaneous, roaring out, filling the arched

passage.

Most men would have stood still for a frozen second of time, shocked into

immobility.

And they would have died.

Before the second round slashed past him, gouging another crater from the

concrete, Ryan was in motion. His combat-honed mind racing like a comp in

overdrive.

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摘要：

dummy1TheseaaroundKrystywasflatandundisturbed.Michaelhadvanished.Beforehermindstartedtocope,Ryanwasinmotion.Hestruckthewater\toKrysty'sright,headingforthespurofrockthatmarkedthesunkenentr\ancetotheredoubt.J.B.wasamomentbehindhim,followedimmediatelybyDean.Krystydrew\breath,readytoduckdiveafterthem,wh...

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Axler, James - Deathlands 19 - Deep Empire

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