Lost Gates

While J.B. was thinking of the armory, Mildred was wondering about the medical facilities. Meds and dressings would make it a lot easier for them to handle the pain and the minor injuries they had sustained. And handle it was exactly what they would need to do if they were to leap on any avenue of escape that might present itself. Krysty and Doc, meanwhile, thought of the dorms and showers they had passed. A hot shower would soothe many of their aches, and clear their heads. And they’d need clear heads if they were to make a break.

Ryan was thinking of all that, while at the same time trying to observe his companions and assess the level of punishment they could risk. There was no doubt that the night had taken a toll on them. Whatever Crabbe wanted, the longer it took him to explain, then the better it might be. At least time would give them the opportunity to snatch some recuperation.

Jak wasn’t bothered by the dirt, the pain or the need to rest. He just watched everything carefully, noting the areas where the sec men were weak or sloppy, noting where the lighting had dimmed, providing places to hide and strike. As soon as the chance came, he would be ready.

With all these thoughts preoccupying them, the companions were silent as they were led farther into the military installation.

Finally they reached their destination—the control room of the mat-trans unit.

The sec man in front of them pulled back, revealing an open door. There were noises from within: low, whispery voices and the shuffling of movement. At a gesture from the squat sec man, the companions moved into the room.

Two men stood by one of the comps. One was tall and thin, slightly stooped and balding, with long strands of hair falling around his shoulders in contrast to a pate that shone under the lights. He had a list in his hand, and Ryan recognized the type of paper. They had seen these before: single sheets, laminated to protect against constant use.

Did the sheet tell the two men something about the mat-trans? Had these men worked out how the mechanism worked? Ryan knew from experience that the companions weren’t the only ones who used the mat-trans system.

As the group entered the control room and shuffled to a halt, the two men turned. Ryan had assumed that the tall man was Baron Crabbe, but as the second one turned to face them, there was something about his expression that said otherwise. He was shorter, and stout, yet there was a hardness about his frame, and the squaring of his shoulders, that suggested the fat had formed a layer over solid muscle. He was clean-shaved, with hair cropped close to his bullet skull. Scars showed through, as did some on his face under the stubble. As he saw them, his face broke into a satisfied grin, his mouth raising only on one side, the other paralyzed by the scar that ran from the corner and down his chin.

But it was his eyes—they bored into the group, examining them minutely and flickering from one to the other. At each, he paused before nodding shortly. His eyes blazed brightly with excitement.

“At last,” he said finally. “All this time, and then you go and land virtually at my bastard feet. It seemed too good to be true.”

“They passed the code test, Baron,” the squat sec man reported. His deference was in complete contrast to the way he had spoken to his captives, and Ryan found it both amusing and instructive. Another clue on how to handle the man when the moment came.

“I knew they would, Nelson,” Crabbe snapped with a tone that veered between irritation and anger. “Stand back, let them settle. Please, be seated,” he added with a more unctuous tone, although only indicating the floor.

“It would help if we weren’t tethered like a bunch of pack animals,” Mildred said as they started to lower themselves.

“Of course, of course,” Crabbe said, although in a tone that suggested it wouldn’t otherwise have occurred to him. He gestured to his sec chief. “Nelson, cut them loose.”

The squat man moved carefully in front of the group. He had holstered his blaster and held J.B.’s knife in his hand—a deliberate move, no doubt—and used it to cut free their wrists and ankles. He brandished the knife close to Ryan’s artery as he sliced at his wrist, a grin flashing across his face as he caught Ryan’s eye. A provocation, and then he was gone again, vanished to their rear.

Crabbe, satisfied that they were now comfortable enough to listen, began while they each massaged life and full feeling back into their hands and feet.

“This must be a familiar room to you all. At least, if you’re who I think you are. You have knowledge I need. Mebbe I have knowledge that will help you make sense of what you know. It’s like that,” he added, appearing to go off at a tangent, “what’s left of the predark world. Bits and pieces, some of which make sense, and some of which makes none at all. And then you get some small glimmering that suddenly makes the previously insane seem somehow sane. Things that make no fucking sense at all suddenly seem to be transformed into things that are just so blindingly obvious that you think you must have been a stupe not to see it before.

“Like the stories of this guy, Trader,” he continued, emphasizing the name and watching them carefully. After Valiant’s explanation, they were expecting this, and so Crabbe didn’t get the reaction he wanted. His words were met with a blandness that did nothing to inform him, and little more than irritate him.

“Have it that way, then,” he said softly. “See, the thing I could never understand about the legendary Trader was his seemingly limitless supply of stuff. A hidden predark stockpile my ass. He had an underground base. I just know it My men found this one when we had a quake. The shit covering it dropped off like so much crap. Took us a long time to figure out a way in. Now that I know how it works, it’s a marvel to me that we did it all. Punching those fucking keys in any order… Now that I know how these doors work, I take it as a sign that we got in here. It’s meant.”

“What is meant?” Doc asked.

“Why, my using my knowledge and the knowledge that I get from you to run the whole of this pesthole and make it great again. I know, from what I’ve seen in here, that this land used to be the one that everyone else looked up to. Now there must be a whole chunk of world out there that’s still got people, even if it’s like us. We should be great in their eyes.”

“Ah, glory…” Doc said absently.

From the slightly glazed expression, which puzzled Crabbe, Mildred could tell that the old man was still slightly concussed.

“But not gold?” Doc added.

Crabbe’s brow furrowed. “Gold? Well, yeah, of course I mean that, too. Hell, I’d be stupe if I didn’t. Ain’t that what everyone wants? Ain’t that the same thing as glory? Glory gets you respect, and so does jack, gold. Goes hand in hand, I’d say.”

“If it’s the way to glory and jack, then why didn’t Trader take that? Why haven’t we? Suppose we are the people you say. Ask yourself why we were doing shitty jobs in Hawknose waiting for the next convoy out,” Ryan said.

Crabbe eyed him shrewdly. “Fair point, Brian. But this is the only place like this around these parts. I know that ’cause I read that there map.” He indicated the area behind them. On the wall over a row of comps lining one side of the room was a clear glass screen, outlined with a map of the predark United States. On it were marked the locations of redoubts across the continent. “The way I see it is this—somehow you wandered away from one of these places. I bet you’ve been to lots of them. Mebbe that’s what you do. Go to one of these, see what you can pick up, then move to the next. Mebbe you got a stockpile in one of them, mebbe you’re looking for the next big stockpile. Whatever, I reckon you left one of them, got into a fight and ended up stranded in the middle of nowhere. Fact is, you ending up at Hawknose may have been no accident, now that I think about it. Mebbe the reason you landed there is because you were headed for the nearest one you knew…here.”

He finished with a triumphant flourish. In the silence that followed, Ryan was unsure as to whether the baron expected them to cave in and admit that he was right. The demonstration of reasoning that had got Crabbe to this point was disturbing. What other assumptions had he made about Trader? About them? And what, as a result, would he expect from them?

Ryan decided that the only way to find out would be to play him at his own game.

“Okay, so you got us. And you’re right. Question is, where does that get you?”

Crabbe looked at Ryan closely, studying him as though to somehow discern whether he was being deceived. Ryan held the baron’s gaze, steady, impassive.

The baron’s weathered features creased. “Knew it. I fucking knew it. Didn’t I tell you, Sal?” he asked, turning to the tall, thin man.

Sal simply nodded, his face unreadable.

“So where does that leave us then, Baron? All cards on the table.”

“Huh?” The baron looked confused for a moment. “Ah, you mean everything out in the open, right? ‘Cards on the table’—what kind of a stupe expression is that? Something you’ve picked up from the old ways in your travels?”

“Yeah, must be,” Ryan answered blandly. In truth, he’d heard it all over Deathlands, and had no idea where he’d first started using it. But if that was what Crabbe wanted to believe, then that was just fine.

Crabbe shook his head, laughing. “There is just so much that I need to find out, but first, we need to get down to basics. Am I right? There’s a whole network of these underground bases, like on that map. Was that Trader’s secret?”

“Not exactly,” Ryan began carefully. “There are a number of these places, like you’ve worked out. Getting from one to the other is difficult, and some of them have been looted or are damaged in some way.”

“What ways?” Crabbe snapped, as though suspicious of anything that may deviate from his own ideas.

Ryan knew that was worth bearing in mind. “Well,” he said, “you saw how this place was exposed. Sometimes quakes bear down deep, cause cracks in the tunnels. Some places just collapse in on themselves.”

Crabbe nodded slowly. “Right…and looted, you say. So there are places where others have got into these bases.” He looked at Ryan, who merely nodded. “Then if that’s right, how come there ain’t people appearing from everywhere?”

“I told you. Getting from one to another is difficult.”

“But you do it,” Crabbe said quickly. “So you must have the secret.”

“What secret?” Ryan asked slowly.

Crabbe smiled slyly. “One of the legends of Trader. There was a disk that was part of the old tech. It showed where the big stockpile was. Where all the jack and weapons predark were hidden when they knew the nukecaust was going off. It showed where it was, and how to get there. How to get there, Brian. Which means the secret of moving between the bases. And that’s got everything to do with this.”

Crabbe turned and strode the few paces to the mat-trans unit.

The baron once again getting his name wrong was another reminder that the man’s half-assed assumptions spelled trouble. He had worked out that the mat-trans was a means of transportation, but not how it worked. That, presumably, was part of the information that he wanted to extract from the group.

More worrying was his assumption that so much knowledge was contained on one old comp disk. Again, it was rooted in a piece of truth. There once was a disk, but it had contained nothing more than a few codes for redoubts. It had been damaged, and was, in all likelihood, nothing more than a piece of tech that housed some mundane and routine information. The disk was long gone, lost during one of their mad scrambles for survival.

How could they explain that to a man who had already decided to believe what he wanted? He was certain that Trader had had a disk, but he was dead wrong.