Skylock (12 page)

The pair donned their Ninja-style Kevlar body suits. Acrylic face shields and mail hoods replaced their fatigue caps and they entered the deadly barrier. While the suits did protect their movements through the cruel growth, it couldn't prevent a drastic slowing of the pace. By the time they'd cleared the thorny, shearing tangle, twenty-five precious minutes had been lost. Above, an accelerating change in the weather was becoming obvious. The temperature was falling and an eerie green pigment began filling the sky.

"Deck's stackin' against us," noted Baker.

Trennt yanked off his sweated faceplate. "Let's make the most of it."

The pair cinched themselves together on a fifteen-foot tether and entered the steep wooded hillside. Against their better judgment they hurried the pace, advancing under hasty cover-and-movement spurts, while negotiating the lethal mix of exposed roots and loose earth.

Successfully rounding the tiger pits and deadfalls, Trennt led their way toward the primary bank of laser-activated intruder alert grids. He low-crawled in a wide circuitous route around the control box of the first camouflaged grenade dispenser. Clipping jumper wires to its power terminals, Trennt snipped the leads. With a finger slash across his windpipe, he sat tight as Baker sidearmed a root ball into the beam path. Nothing happened.

Four more positions were located, probed, and tediously neutralized in the same painstaking manner. Clearing the final station, the rescuers were just yards from cresting the summit itself, when Baker lost his footing and stumbled onto the plane of a hidden shear plate.

The reactive earthwork broke loose even under his bantam weight. In a blink all the dirt for sixty feet around was cascading downhill, carrying the shooter away in an engineered landslide and chewing greedily after his partner.

Trennt dove safely outside the broken shear plane himself, but he was still tied fast to Baker, and felt the slack umbilical between them rapidly paying out.

The low fork of an anemic sapling was his nearest hope. He thrust the S-12 between its tines, twisting the barrel and stock in opposite directions. Jamming and locking his arms through the web sling, Trennt braced himself and prayed it would hold.

Behind, Baker spun about as the last of his tether line went taut. He left the ground like a hooked marlin breaking water, then slammed back to earth, speed pack first. It cushioned the blow as he jammed hard against a tree stump, held stiff as a ship's prow to parting waves of cascading gravel and sand.

The avalanche roared on and away, crashing off far below. Trennt was left gasping and wrenched in its choking, dusty wake. He painstakingly freed a numb hand from his gun sling brace and grabbed at the tether line. All he found was slack. Somewhere hundreds of yards below he imagined Baker, torn free, crushed, and mangled.

Still clutching the locked weapon, Trennt pivoted slowly for a look behind. A heavy tan curtain of gently twirling dust greeted him. But his movement also dislodged a jammed rock. The snarled tether shot free and sprang back to tension. Trennt choked up a mouthful of muddy slime, hopefully testing his voice.

"Baker?"

Through the heavy swirling veil a muffled cough answered.

"Yo, Pard."

"You okay?"

"Think so. Speed pack took most of it, I reckon. Nuthin' feels broke. But I'd guess we lost any element of surprise."

Trennt slowly reeled the man up. Sharing a nod at their good fortune, they started the final yards to the summit, and the research station just beyond.

They could see the compound's five prefab buildings. Living quarters, greenhouse, lab, and storage boasted all the latest high-tech support system gizmos. Solar-steam electrical generators and chemical fuel cells sat in protective sheds, routed by thick overhead umbilicals, to a vast array of computers, air conditioning, and refrigeration units.

But aside from a growing rustle of static in the treetops, all was silent. No smells, no sound, no movement. The steadily thickening sky allowed no more time for caution. Shotguns tucked tight and hip-high, the pair split up and entered the camp fringes.

Now among its buildings, they found the first obvious signs of trouble. The compound's power plant was rent and buckled from an explosion. Its window vents were blown free, aluminum wall panels bulged and, in spots, were peeled back and flattened in the jagged flowerlike petals of lethal shrapnel blooms.

Still, they saw no people. Taking cover beside the power station, Trennt leveled his weapon, finally calling aloud.

"Anyone in there, come on out! We're here to help you!"

Long seconds passed with no response.

"Do you hear me?" he repeated. "Come on out!"

Still nothing.

He was preparing to move forward when the barracks door burst open. Out flew a frazzled young woman. Wide-eyed and strung miles beyond hysteria, she glared in hateful silence for a moment, then charged Trennt, unafraid.

"Where have you been?" she demanded. "I've been waiting a whole day! What took you so long to get here?"

Trennt snapped his S-12 to port arms. He blocked her flailing advance and levered her off balance. But even knocked down, the woman regrouped and came at him again.

"Why did you take so long?" she growled, swinging wildly at his face with hands drawn into claws. "Where were you?"

Grabbing her wrists, Trennt forced her arms down.

"Where are the others?"

The woman didn't answer, struggling on and babbling, until he jarred her senses with a rattling shake.

"The others!"

She whiplashed in his grip. Then, suddenly frightful, she melted back to her exhausted senses.

"Inside," she whispered, wretched and spent. "All inside."

Trennt let her go, offering no apologies for his rough handling.

Doctor Keener was just beyond the radio room door. Piled under insulating blankets, he glistened in a bloodless white cast, doused in sweat and wheezing shallow, ravaged breaths. Beyond sat a row of blanket covered corpses.

"What happened here?"

The woman motioned vacantly about.

"I don't know. The powerhouse, it exploded. Blue smoke went everywhere."

She looked out a window, toward a tubular scaffold supporting weather monitoring gear and a small radio dish.

"Martin told me to climb, as fast as I could, while he woke up the others. The smoke was spreading all over by then. They were trying to cover their faces while they climbed. But they couldn't hang on. Martin couldn't pull them up either and fell back partway in it himself."

The woman broke into ragged sobs and sank to a dejected heap at Trennt's feet. He studied her for a moment, then checked the deepening cast of eastern sky.

"Baker. Call our bird over and help me take a quick look around. Let's find the goods and shut this place down."

"Grips, Pard."

But the gunman's radio was impossibly clogged with static. As agreed, Baker uncorked a signal rocket from his pack. A quick twist and smack of its primer cap sent the green starcluster streaking high into the ominous heavens.

Trennt, meanwhile, spared a few minutes to inspect the ruined powerhouse. Scattered hunks of spun metal littered the courtyard in silent testament of the blast's force. Inside the prefab walls he found the burst remnants of refrigeration and power units. Chalklike splatters of an odd yellow-green chemical precipitate were plastered about in dry, powdery streaks. And even now a faint bleachlike after-smell lingered.

Trennt was familiar enough with the bank of ruptured cylinders to recognize them as portable electrical fuel cells. Here, though, a double row of a dozen such bottles had been linked into a much more permanent and powerful arrangement. Thick braids of feed and return pipes were plumbed below to charging media and beyond to the pressurized chlorine separators and recyclers in an adjacent cubicle. Also sharing the space were refrigeration and air-conditioning containment systems.

Only token walls of a honeycomb insulating material separated one power medium from another. And a moment's study of the symmetric blast holes made Trennt aware of a peculiar and common orientation among the cubicles. He stepped back toward the doorway, realizing also that the power station was set slightly elevated to the entire camp—something military engineering strictly forbade out of normal environmental safety concerns.

Silently arrived, Baker gauged Trennt's scrutiny.

"Wha'cha see, Pard?"

Trennt shrugged, returning to the doorway.

"Maybe nothing."

By then the jet had settled in and its engines finished coasting down.

"I'll check the lab," Trennt said. "You salvage whatever might be of value in the barracks. And keep that bird ready for a quick start-up."

"Grips!"

Following Baker out, a final item caught Trennt's eye, something so obvious, he hadn't noticed it on entering. Mounted to the outside shed wall was an emergency panel box. Prominent yellow-and-black instructions were blazed across it:

for emergency systems shutdown,
push and twist right.

It was a typical total-suppression unit, simply meant to govern all the power mediums housed within. Even now its safety pin and tamper label remained undisturbed, but left of the broad striped handle, a small stainless steel turnkey and beaded chain dangled from a tiny unmarked side lock. Trennt gently touched his fingers to the chain, then continued on, for the labs.

A different type of devastation awaited him there. A premeditated, man-made kind. But the manner in which growth chambers and related seedlings had been destroyed seemed no random act of madness, for DNA synthesizing gear, electron microscopes, and genetic particle guns hadn't been touched at all.

Further on, Trennt swung open the main storage vault. Lifting a flashlight from his grommet belt, he thrust it inside the darkened chamber and keyed its beam. A cruel halogen brilliance exploded before him. Playing about the blackness, it chased off the stark and irregular shadows of more ruin.

A collection of loose leaf binders, note pads, and computer printouts sat in a half scorched heap at mid-floor. Further out was an empty gallon can of alcohol. Someone's attempt at kindling a fire had failed. Though no active extinguishing system was evident, Trennt reasoned the vault's dead air space may have acted as its own natural suppressant, quickly starving the flames.

Strewn about also lay a dozen or so small insulated storage chests. Looking as if they'd been cached here for shipment, the foot-square boxes now sat upended and scattered. Their intended contents appeared as numerous trays of thin glass vials suspended in protective wire racks. These had been stomped flat and likewise kicked about. Splashes of what must have been their contents glistened as straw-colored viscous liquid in the twisted wire and broken glass aftermath.

A new medium was also exposed to his light beam: the jagged crystal brilliance of shattered computer squares. Reminiscent of metallic sugar cubes, such squares had been the latest generation of data storage media before the arrival of Skylock.

Here, a few thousand of their fragments glimmered in a ruined bronzy sheen. But a smattering of cubes had escaped the rampage and dully reflected his light beam from distant corners of the room. Thinking they might still hold some useful information, Trennt knelt and began plucking them up.

Outside, the wind was steady now. Saint Elmo's fire danced like erratic blue flames about the treetops. Static electricity tickled the skin and ever-thickening ozone blended an eye-watering nip to the air.

The young woman sat beside Doctor Keener in the courtyard, hand in his, head down. Her disheveled auburn hair shot randomly about her face in the spiraling wind gusts; vacant, victim's eyes idly followed the strangers in their sacking of the place she'd called home.

Moments later those same empty eyes flared. They locked onto the handle of the small-caliber pistol gradually working its way loose from the pilot's coat pocket. Each time he passed, it loomed a little larger. She checked the man's face and he didn't seem aware.

On his fourth trip, gun and pilot gently parted company. It tumbled away unnoticed, plopping in the twirling dust nearly at the woman's feet. When the pilot returned to help escort the two survivors aboard his plane, the pistol was gone.

Trennt had assembled his meager salvage as Baker returned. The shootist gazed forlornly about the room. He touched gentle fingers to a large smear of the golden syrup splashed on the door frame and came away uneasy.

"'Spose this here is the stuff, Jimbo?"

"I'd say."

"We too late, then?"

"Might be."

"Damn!"

Sight of a distant data cube prompted Trennt to bend lower. As he did, his light beam swept to the far underside of a storage shelf. He retrieved the cube, paused, then scooted closer.

"Pard," rasped Baker anxiously, "wha' cha see?"

Wedged beneath was another wire rack of vials. Like the others, it too had been stomped and must have squirted there, lost from view. But the steel mesh of this particular batch had deflected under, rather than flattening out, cupping over to partially shield the vials. Eight were lost. Yet twelve others had survived.

Baker jammed clenched fists skyward as Trennt held them to view.

"Hot damn!" he cawed. "Easy Street, here we come!"

"I'll handle this," said Trennt, grabbing at one of the insulated boxes. "You kick around and find the floor plate for setting that detonator."

Brisk steps filled the lab behind and Kosinski popped his head in the vault.

"Guys," he entreated, "we've got to go. Now."

Simultaneously Baker rocked back on his heels, making an equally dismal announcement from across the room.

"Something's wrong with this thing, Jimbo. It won't arm."

"What?"

Trennt forgot the pilot and scrambled over. He tried a hand at forcing the dusty mechanism. But his effort might as well have been wasted on twisting an anvil.

"Shit, it's locked tight."

"Musta jammed when it broke my fall in the landslide."