Shatter Zone

“Yeah?” Robert growled, notching another arrow into the crossbow. “What if we don’t wanna?”

Turning slightly, Delphi stared hard at the big man. “You have no choice,” he replied, making a gesture at the horses.

Lashed to the bumper of the predark truck with knotted lengths of old rope, the three animals shook violently all over, then slumped to the ground with red blood gushing from their slack mouths. The brothers stared in horror at the chilled horses and slowly turned back to Delphi. The outlander was still smiling, the expression tolerant, almost amused. It sent a shiver down their spines.

“Don’t fret about your beasts. You shall receive exemplary compensation for this assignment,” Delphi continued smoothly, tucking his slim hands up the loose sleeves of his robe. “Transport, reconnaissance, heavy ordnance…”

Having no idea what half of those words meant, John said nothing, his fingers aching to reload the longblaster, but knowing it would be seen as a sign of fear. Forcing his hands to obey, the elder Rogan rested the weapon casually on a shoulder. In any negotiation, especially when the other fellow held all the blasters, a man had to stay cool and calm. If all you had was words, then try not to use any. That always threw off the other fellow and helped even the balance a little.

Chuckling softly, Delphi seemed to be extraordinarily pleased by the lack of action for some reason, as if a pet had done a particularly clever trick and deserved a treat.

“Okay, you got our attention,” John stated, taking a step forward. “What’s the job, Whitey?”

“Something has been lost,” Delphi said, anger crossing his pale face for the first time.

“And ya want us to find it.” Alan snorted in disdain. “Easy enough. What is it that you’re looking for?”

“Salvation,” Delphi growled as a strange humming filled the air and white mists suddenly appeared to engulf the four coldhearts. “Salvation!”

Clawing for their weps, the Rogan brothers felt themselves drop into the ground, as the desert disappeared, replaced by an infinite panorama of burning stars.

TWO HOURS LATER the companions were halfway through their inspection of the redoubt.

Starting at the bottom, the companions did a fast recce on the humming nuclear reactors behind the thick walls of unbreakable glass, although Mildred sometimes called it Plexiglas. Then came the life support rooms, where the hundreds of pumps and filters kept the base clean, warm and uncontaminated from the radblasted hellzone outside the redoubt.

Everything was functioning normally and seemed to be in perfect working order. But all of that changed once the companions reached the storage and barracks areas. On that level, the redoubt was as bare as the last one they had visited. Every room, every closet, was completely empty. Even the beds in the barracks were devoid of mattresses and pillows. There wasn’t a pencil in a desk drawer or a roll of wipe on the toilet.

“If the last redoubt never got its supplies delivered or was stripped clean,” Ryan muttered, walking along a corridor, “then this one was still being built.”

“You can load that into a damn blaster,” J.B. agreed, his fingerless gloves tight on the Uzi machine gun. Some of the sections seemed unformed and still rough along the edges. It was just little things, doors out of plumb, keypads off kilter, details that nobody would ever notice, unless they had been in a hundred other redoubts.

Pausing at the next closed door, the companions took combat positions. With Jak keeping cover, Krysty pushed open an unlocked door. The walls were unpainted, and in the next room the floor was only bare concrete, without even linoleum tiles in place.

“Never seen so much nothing,” Jak drawled angrily, the heavy Colt staying tight in his grip.

“I agree with your double negative,” Doc rumbled pensively, easing down the hammer on his massive LeMat pistol. “This is most curious indeed.”

After checking out the entire level, the companions went to the elevator and pressed a button for the cage. When it arrived, they checked for traps, then piled inside. Using the tip of his SIG-Sauer pistol, Ryan started to press the button for the garage at the top of the redoubt, but then paused and hit the button for the next level upward instead.

“Impatient, lover?” Krysty asked, tilting her head.

With a tiny vibration, the elevator started smoothly upward.

“Worried,” Ryan answered honestly. “Sure. If the blast doors are remotely locked by whitecoats, then we’re prisoners.”

“Trapped without food,” Mildred said, frowning as she leaned against the bare metal wall. “Damn, I hadn’t thought of that possibility.”

“Starvation is a mighty slow way to be chilled,” J.B. noted, removing the unlit cigar, only to put it back in place once more.

“Eat blaster first,” Jak stated coldly, tilting his head slightly forward so that his snowy hair fell across his face, hiding the features.

“Then again, maybe Operation Chronos only wants us trapped long enough to get weak, and then they capture us alive,” Ryan guessed, voicing his dark thoughts. Why fight an enemy at full strength when you can wait a few days and clamp on the slave chains without resistance?

“Alive,” Jak growled. “Like for experiments?”

“Sure. Why not?”

“Nuke that,” Jak muttered, tightening the grip on his blaster.

Just then, the elevator gave a musical chime and the doors parted. As the companions stepped into the corridor, they became instantly alert. In spite of the warm breeze from the wall vents, there was a dry chill in the air. This was something they had encountered only once before, a long time ago.

“Just like that redoubt in Zero City,” Ryan said as a warning, bringing up the barrel of the Steyr longblaster. The two blasters were rock-steady in his hands.

“Just as long as it isn’t another Alaska,” Krysty added grimly, her hair tightening in response. The old madman in charge of that redoubt had a lot of funny ideas about breeding, and the companions had been triple glad to leave that place far behind. A recent visit had spooked them all.

Easing along the corridor, the companions saw only bare, blank walls until taking a corner. A huge steel door stood at the far end of the next passageway, the metal-and-ceramic surface touched with patches of snowy frost along the edges. There was no doubt that this was the source of the cold.

“A deeper,” Jak stated, stopping in his tracks.

Ever so slowly, Ryan gave a nod. Yeah, definitely looked like a Deep Storage Locker. He remembered the first time the Trader had told him and J.B. about such things. Just another legend, they’d thought at the time, only this one happened to be true. A deeper, a Deep Storage Locker, was a special vault filled with dead air—inert gases, Mildred called them—and then made colder than winter ice. The combo was supposed to keep everything from aging, suspended animation was the whitecoat term. The ammo would be live, the canned food fresh, the blasters in perfect condition, the medicine still potent. The companions had found only one of these before in all of their travels, and that deeper had been guarded by a sec hunter droid.

“How much C-4 do we have, John Barrymore?” Doc asked, using his left hand to pull back the massive hammer of the LeMat. It locked into place with a solid click, the single-action revolver now ready for immediate firing.

“Plas? Not a scrap left,” J.B. said around the cigar. “I’m down to road flares and bad language.”

“Mebbe we should check the blast doors first, lover,” Krysty said hesitantly. “Just in case we have to run.”

There was logic to that, Ryan had to admit. But there was also no denying the fact that somebody had rigged their last jump, and he’d sure as hell feel a lot better about that with some spare brass jingling in his pocket.

“We keep going,” the one-eyed man growled, hefting his longblaster. “But spread out more. We’ll need space if there’s a sec hunter droid inside the locker.”

“What we’d need is a freaking bazooka,” Mildred muttered under her breath, shifting her grip on the scattergun.

Proceeding warily along the corridor, the companions took their time and checked every room along the passageway in turn, making sure there wouldn’t be any surprises left behind them if the locker proved to be guarded.

Once past the last door, the companions gathered in front of the icy portal and studied it carefully. There was a painted curve on the floor to show the swing of the armored slab, and a keypad on the wall offered easy access.

Holstering the SIG-Sauer, Ryan started forward, but the moment he crossed the painted line, a siren started to bleat, and a red light began to flash above the icy locker.

“Warning!” a mechanical voice blared from the ceiling, rattling the tiles. “Warning! Intruder alert! Intruder alert! All security personnel to Section 9! Repeat! All security personnel to Section 9!”

Swinging the Steyr upward, Ryan blew the speaker apart with a single shot and blessed silence returned to the hallway.

“Stupe machines,” J.B. commented, using the barrel of the Uzi to push back his fedora. “Can’t tell the difference between—”

The Armorer never got to finish the statement as there came a soft hiss and the corridor behind them was suddenly closed off by a grid of steel bars that dropped from the ceiling to violently slam onto the floor. If anybody had been standing under the gate, he or she would have been mashed into bloody pulp.

“Good thing…” Ryan started, then felt cold adrenaline flood his body as a second sigh sounded. On impulse he dived forward. While in the air, something smacked into his left boot, sending the man tumbling. He hit the wall hard, gritting his teeth against the pain shooting through his ankle. Nuking hell!