Outlanders 11 armageddon.., p.1
Outlanders 11 Armageddon Axis, page 1
Prologue
Mount Rushmore, South Dakota October 3, 2002
Mohandas Lakesh Singh began his fiftieth birthday by watching Lieutenant Hayden go mad.
Standing in the T junction of Level Six, Lakesh watched as the Air Force officer hammered his head repeatedly against a sealed security door. The man shrieked as he did so. Most of his words were unintelligible, but Lakesh caught Biblical quotes, garbled references to stars falling into rivers and transforming them to wormwood.
No one tried to stop Hayden. The people in the corridor stood and blandly observed the lieutenant batter himself against the vanadium alloy until his face and head were glistening blotches of pulped flesh and exposed bone. When he finally fell to the floor and lay there twitching, everyone turned away and went on about their business.
Public suicides had become fairly commonplace in the Anthill over the past six months, particularly among those suffering from radiation sickness. At first those so afflicted tended to kill themselves in the privacy of their quarters, but after General Kettridge had decreed only internal-security officers could carry weapons, more and more of the self-immolations were staged out in the open.
Lakesh couldn't be sure if the reason was insanity due to brain-cell deterioration or a terminal display of defiance. More than likely, he thought bitterly, six of one, half a dozen of the other. Certainly the number of suicides seemed to grow as the second anniversary of the nuclear holocaust approached. Still and all, repetition did not make the suicides any easier to witness.
His heart gave a painful jerk, and instinctively he put a hand over the left side of his chest, trying to regulate his breathing. The arrhythmia he had suffered over the past couple of years had become more frequent since his confinement in the Anthill. Although a physicist by training and trade, Lakesh knew the prescribed medications dealt only with the symptoms, not with the cause. Eventually, he would have to undergo open-heart surgery.
A voice murmured behind him. "Why don't we all just do ourselves in? I don't know how much longer I can take this."
Lakesh glanced over his shoulder and saw a white- faced Gregson staring at the oozing ruin of Hayden's head. Gregson was a civilian cyberneticist who had been permitted to bring his wife and nine-year-old daughter to the installation. Lakesh knew him only slightly, from his last couple of months in the Cerberus redoubt. He didn't respond to the younger man's comments, who was speaking for the vast majority of the people inside the Anthill complex.
Hayden had stopped twitching. Lakesh edged around him, careful not to step in the pool of blood spreading out from the man's head. As he did so, he saw two green-coveralled sanitation men approaching with a casual, almost bored gait. One of them carried a folded body bag under an arm. Lakesh didn't bother watching them insert Hayden's corpse into the bag, just as he didn't bother speculating on the disposition of the man's remains. All he could think about was his birthday, and how it was also his last day, insofar as the rest of the world was concerned. Not that there was much constituting a world any longer, he reminded himself bleakly.
For the past eighteen months, Lakesh's world had been the interior of Mount Rushmore, a vast labyrinth of passageways, tunnels and levels bounded on all sides by vanadium-shielded rock. Unlike many of his fellow inhabitants, he did not suffer from claustrophobia or feel oppressed by life inside of a mountain. He had spent the past thirty years in similar environments, from the installation beneath the Archuleta Mesa in New Mexico to Redoubt Bravo high on a plateau in Montana. At this point in his life, he would have felt far more uncomfortable in the wide-open spaces of the outdoors. Of course, he reminded himself, if he went outdoors now he would be more than uncomfortable—he'd be dead.
Lakesh didn't find that prospect particularly unsettling, at least at the moment. He dreaded telling Dian of how he planned to spend the next century far more than he did dying.
He strode along the corridor, resolutely ignoring the bustle of damage control and containment crews as they raced to attend one crisis after another. Radiation alarms seemed to warble constantly, always drowning out the bland music filtering over the public-address system. The music was supposed to be comforting, but it could rarely be heard over the screaming of sirens.
As Lakesh entered the wide, sweeping curve of the main promenade, his attention was caught by a cluster of people near the decorative fountain. They were shouting and cheering. At the same instant he noted a pair of security officers in black uniforms and helmets jogging toward the disturbance, Shocksticks in their hands.
Lakesh quickened his pace and shouldered his way through the collection of shouting, laughing people. What he saw when he forced himself to the front line froze him in his tracks for a long moment.
A burly black man in military fatigues was endeavoring to push a young blond woman's head beneath the surface of the enclosed pool surrounding the fountain. The two combatants were grunting and snarling into each other's faces. While Lakesh watched, the woman raked the man's eyes with her fingernails.
"You Russkie whore!" the black man howled. He planted the heel of his broad hand beneath the woman's chin and shoved hard. The water closed over her head, and the man uttered a growl of triumph.
The security officers lunged forward, the crackling tips of the Shocksticks stroking the man along his back and midriff. He cried out shrilly as his limbs spasmed. He whirled away, falling in a heap as his legs tangled. Several onlookers muttered in disappointment.
One of the security men pulled the gasping, soaking-wet woman out of the pool while the other put himself between her and the crowd. He waved the Shockstick menacingly. "Get the fuck back."
"Let the bitch drown," a bearded man snapped. "She's a Russian—she doesn't need to be here with the rest of us. Her country started all this shit, blew away the world!"
Neither of the security officers responded to the man's declaration, even though half the crowd voiced fervent and profane agreement. The officers each took hold of one of the woman's arms and they hustled her away, ignoring the curses and catcalls hurled at them from the onlookers. They let the black man lie where he had fallen.
Lakesh turned and went on his way, his face registering no emotion. Over the past year, he had taught himself the technique of tuning out his surroundings. If he had not, he knew he would have gone mad as so many others had. Still, he couldn't help but wonder what had driven the woman to leave the guarded compound reserved for foreign personnel. In the lower levels lived a few Germans, Asians, Mideasterners and Russians. They were not naturalized American citizens like himself, but scientists, diplomats and their families. The Russians were kept segregated from the general population for a very good reason: officially their nation had touched off the nuclear holocaust with the detonation of a nuclear warhead hidden within the Soviet embassy in Washington, D.C.
Lakesh had very good reason to suspect the official version of events, but he kept his doubts to himself. More than likely, in a hundred years or less, all history prior to January 20, 2001, would be revised, disguised and rewritten out of all recognition.
As he passed the main operations room, he glanced in through the open doors. Men in neat dark business suits sat shoulder to shoulder with men in military fatigues at the various consoles. As the brain of the Anthill, the huge chamber was crammed with chassis upon chassis of complex electronic equipment. A bank of closed-circuit monitor screens ran the length of one wall, transmitting images from the various redoubts scattered across—and even beneath—the country. Most of the screens displayed nothing but dark and empty rooms. Others were filled with faces, their expressions ranging from outright terror to fury. He heard a babble of demands and pleas for permission to leave the redoubts and return to the Anthill.
The people on the monitor screens were cursed with security clearances below the ubiquitous B-12 and had been left behind when the mushroom clouds bloomed and the surface of the planet was covered by a blanket of scorching atomic fire. They begged for sanctuary, and Lakesh couldn't help but notice how almost no one in the operations center looked at the faces on the monitors or responded to their words.
He moved on, stamping hard on his pity for the hapless personnel trapped in the redoubts. With the gateway jump lines to the Anthill complex closed, there could be no escape Jumping to another redoubt was certainly no solution, since they would encounter the same problems as those in their own installations. And since the Anthill was plagued by those same difficulties but magnified due to its size and the number of people it had to support, it could not serve as a sanctuary. Those who pleaded for entrance did not know the Anthill installation was less than a dream that had failed; it was a vision that had never taken full shape.
Certainly there had been sufficient time for the Anthill and similar installations to achieve optimum operational status. As many as fifty years before, in the paranoid period following World War II and the detonation of the first nuclear device in Hiroshima, the Continuity of Government program was conceived and implemented.
COG was viewed as the ultimate insurance policy against an atomic attack, and to this end many subterranean command posts were constructed all over the country. The Anthill was by far the most ambitious, and all of Mount Rushmore was honeycombed with interconnected levels, passageways, stores, theaters and even a small sports arena. The interior vanadium-alloy walls were reinforced with a mixture of silicon foam and molten lead to provide radiation shielding.
But all of the precautions were insufficient wh
The full horrors of the nuclear winter hadn't been foreseen at all. For more than a year, a perpetual twilight lay over the world as megatons of pulverized dust and fallout clogged the sky.
Not even the heads of the presidents had come through the destruction unscathed. Three of the four stone images outside the Anthill had collapsed due to the ferocious, days-long quakes birthed by Soviet earthshaker bombs detonated off the Pacific Coast. Only Lincoln's head remained intact, but just barely. His high forehead had crumbled, and one of his huge eyes was deeply riven by ugly cracks.
The original timetable for outlasting the effects of the nuclear winter had stipulated five years or so. Now it appeared close to twenty years would pass before the people in Mount Rushmore could safely emerge into the new world their machinations had brought into existence.
After much thought and soul-searching, Lakesh decided he would rather wake up into that new world than die of heart disease within the walls of the Anthill. He certainly wasn't the only one of the facility's inhabitants to make that decision. He imagined that sooner than later, it would no longer be a matter of choice.
As he turned a corner, he saw a security drone hovering in front of him The mechanical device was barely two feet long, its body made of interlocking metal segments, like the carapace of an insect. Extensors and hooks studded its dully gleaming silver skin. The red photoreceptor shone down on him, fixing on the light-sensitive lozenge on his ID badge. The beam interacted with the electrochemical components of the cell, which confirmed Lakesh's identity and security clearance.
The drone moved on, humming purposefully. The machines had only recently been pressed into service, used more for monitoring than interference. They were referred to as "beetles," and the rumor mill whispered the buglike devices would soon be equipped with stings—tasers and voltage projectors.
The lozenge on Lakesh's badge allowed him to pass through the various security checkpoints without triggering so much as a beep from the sensors. Pausing before the double doors leading to the medical section, Lakesh automatically checked his reflection in the metal sheathing. He was neat and trim as always in his crisp white coveralls. His thick, jet-black hair showed not a thread of gray nor did his glossy mustache. His faintly olive complexion was still unlined, holding few creases from either age or stress, although he certainly had a stockpile of both. He used to enjoy a certain vanity in the fact he looked a decade or more younger than his actual age, but now he couldn't care less.
Still, because of that vanity he refused to wear his eyeglasses with their thick prescription lenses. Some months before, he had been diagnosed with incipient glaucoma, but he continued to postpone the recommended surgery. There seemed little point in it now. Besides, if matters in the Anthill continued on the present downslide, he would welcome blindness.
As he stepped close to the doors, his ID badge interacted with the sensors and the lock clicked open.
He pushed aside a door and entered the medical section. He strode down the corridor, not glancing into the examination rooms and laboratories lining both sides of the hall.
Lakesh had a broad idea of some of the biological research and experiments that had been transferred from the Dulce facility, but he didn't like to think of them or some of the whispered stories he'd been told by scientists attached to the subdivisions of Over- project Excalibur. Partly due to those hints, Lakesh had checked out the sublevel of the installation, referred to in whispers as Nightmare Alley. The memories of the monstrosities he glimpsed there still gave him anxiety attacks. The appellation had been borrowed from a 1940s film noir classic dealing with the gallery of human deformities and freaks found on a carnival midway.
Lakesh had never seen the movie, and after his covert visit to that sublevel he had no inclination whatever to do so.
He turned left into a laboratory, wending his way through a maze of heavy tables laden with networks of glass tubes, microscopes, centrifuges, stainless- steel fermentation tanks and a fluoroscope.
The few people concentrating on their work paid him no attention as he passed. Not even Dian realized he was there until he stood right at her elbow and softly cleared his throat.
She lifted her head from the eyepieces of the microscope and smiled at him. As always, the smile transformed her face, turning it from merely attractive to radiantly beautiful. The white lab smock she wore did little to conceal the bountiful curves and willowy slenderness of her figure. Her long wavy hair, swept back from a high forehead and pronounced widow's peak, held the color of sunset. Her eyes were such a deep blue as to be almost black. The complexion of her high-planed face was the hue of fine honey.
"Happy birthday," she said, reaching for his hand.
Lakesh tried to return her smile. "My happy returns won't be for some years yet."
Her smile faltered. She gazed at him steadily for a long, tense moment, then turned back to the microscope, but not before Lakesh glimpsed tears glimmering in her eyes. She understood his enigmatic reply, so he saw no reason to expand upon it. Instead he asked, "How goes the gene therapy?"
In a voice pitched so low it was barely a murmur, Dian answered, "Not well. If we'd been able to coordinate all of the Overproject Excalibur subdivisions from here like the original plan, the process would be further along. Right now, it's a classic case of the right hand not knowing what the left foot is doing."
Lakesh did not feel dismay or surprise by her response. It was standard by now. The various researches under the umbrella of Excalibur devoted to pantropic sciences and genetic engineering were too scattered, too separated to be efficiently coordinated. Project Genesis was down south in Louisiana, Project Invictus was stuck literally in the middle of nowhere out in the Guadalupe desert and Wild Wil Longley had allegedly absconded with its most crucial data shortly before the nukecaust.
Other experiments and researches into developing life-forms capable of adapting to the postholocaust environment were ongoing in the Anthill, but so far only horrors had been spawned. At least, that was how Lakesh thought of them, basing his assessment on the creatures he'd seen in Nightmare Alley.
Repressing a shudder, he laid a hand on Dian's shoulder and said quietly, "We discussed this, you know. At great length. It's not an arbitrary decision."
Her "yes" was a deliberately distracted whisper. She kept her face fastened to the microscope's eyepieces.
"Join me," Lakesh said.
Dian straightened up, face set in a tight, unreadable mask. "We discussed that, too. I'm needed here. I'm essential, at least for the immediate future."
A hard lump formed in Lakesh's throat and he swallowed it down, tasting bitter anger and disappointment. As a physicist, his presence in the Anthill was not particularly important, so when the option of entering cryostasis was offered to him, his initial reaction had been one of feeling useless.
But, after considering it for a couple of weeks, he had seen the logic of the offer. The Anthill's resources were already strained, and every day brought a new crisis. The prospect of going to sleep for twenty years and awakening into a world on its way to recovery became more enticing the longer he thought about it. And even if Dian elected to remain unfrozen, at least they would be the same age when he revived. She would no longer be twenty years his junior.
Other than that, the form of cryogenesis employed at the installation wasn't a standard freezing process.
It utilized technology that did not rely on liquid nitrogen or the removal of the subject's blood and organs. Lakesh never wondered aloud where the technology came from. Three words, which he had learned years ago in Dulce and been ordered never to repeat under pain of death explained it all: the Archon Directive.
Forcing a smile to his face, Lakesh asked, "Can your work spare you for a little while so you can spend some time with me?"
"As a birthday gift?" Dian's voice held a hard edge. "Or a bon voyage present?"
Lakesh's smile remained stitched to his face even as he turned away.
Swiftly, Dian rose from her stool and took him by the ann. Then she caught him in a tight embrace. "I'm sorry," she said in a voice tight with grief and sadness. "You're the only person in this hellhole who reminds me there was sanity in the world once. Without you here as my anchor, I'm afraid I'll go as mad as everybody else."
