Lost Gates (21 page)

They careered around a bend past the armory. Not sparing it a glance, they skittered along the corridor, their feet weirdly silent beneath the noise of the sirens. It could be that the sirens were more than a mere alarm. Their very presence masked so much other sound that it would be a simple matter for any other attack mechanisms to be launched without coming to Ryan’s and Jak’s notice until it was too late.

So it was only with a modicum of surprise that they saw the sec door between two sections of corridor start to grind down in front of them. The noise of the long-immobile mechanism was drowned out, but from the way that the dust fell in a black rain through the flickering red light, it was obvious that the door had been dormant for a long time, and wasn’t falling with the intended speed. Was it just the strobe that made it seem as though the door was actually shuddering, or was it that the mechanism was stilted enough to make the motion as grinding as it appeared?

They could only hope so. They were still about a hundred yards from the door, and even though it was falling with an almost painful slowness it was going to
be a tight call. There were flickers of movement on the other side of the door, but the black sheet of metal that descended made it almost impossible to make out what might lay in wait for them.

There would be time for that when they were past the door. Whatever it might be, it wouldn’t matter if they found themselves trapped on this side, cut off from the mat-trans unit.

The door was now only a couple of yards from the floor; they were more than a couple of yards from the shrinking aperture. There was only one thing to do. Jak launched himself forward, hitting the ground belly-first and skidding over the floor so that he shot beneath the shrinking gap, rolling as he did so that he would come up facing whatever awaited them, blaster in hand and ready to act.

It was only when he came to his feet that he felt, rather than saw, that Ryan wasn’t beside him.

The one-eyed man saw Jak launch himself across the floor and under the gap, and he knew that this was the only option that was open to him. Yet he was filled with trepidation. Hitting the floor like that with his ribs as they were was a greater risk than facing whatever was on the other side of the lowering door. In combat, he felt confident. Of the stabbing he could feel with each footfall, each breath, he wasn’t so sure.

There was no choice in the matter. Jak was already down and under with the door lowering at what now seemed to be an incredibly fast rate. He knew that it was all perception, and that the door was moving at the same rate as it had a few moments earlier. But this shift told him that he had to throw caution to the wind and
get down on his belly. It was only later that it would hit him as odd that the door was coming down from the ceiling, rather than in a vertical manner as was the norm. This was obviously no ordinary sec door.

Only later because, at that moment, the whole of his being was shuddering with the incredible pain that came in conjunction with his contact to the floor. His ribs felt as though they were crushed beneath the weight of his torso as he hit the deck, and rather than skid and slide as Jak had done, he jackknifed and doubled-up in agony, rolling at a much slower speed. That was crucial. He found himself too slow to beat the unrelenting momentum of the door. By the time he reached it, the metal was too low for him to slide under and he found himself bouncing back off it. His body was too thick and muscular to slide and squeeze into the narrowing gap, and he rolled back.

When he opened his eye, which he’d squeezed shut in almost unbearable pain, he found that he was now stranded on the wrong side of the sec door. He opened that eye in time to see the last vestige of light from the other side of the door disappear behind the bland, dark metal.

Wincing at the knives of pain that shot across his ribs as he hauled himself to his feet, Ryan wondered how he could break through the door. And he wondered what Jak was facing on the other side.

But all such speculation was driven from his mind as the low rumbling at his back became felt, rather than merely audible, below the sirens and the strobe. He turned to face the source of the noise.

“Fireblast!” he gasped, despite the pain the exclamation caused.

J
AK STOOD SQUARE
on to the enemy that now faced him. Aware that he was alone, he felt a pang of relief. If he was going to have to face this, then he would rather do it alone. Ryan was struggling, and Jak knew deep inside that whatever he intended, his devotion to his comrade would have divided his attention.

The thing that was in front of him would demand everything he had.

It was unlike anything he had seen before, and yet had a sinuous familiarity. He had heard Doc talk of the strange machines made by the whitecoats in the days before skydark, yet he had never really been able to grasp some of what the old man had said. Now, he felt that it was all too clear. The gently writhing creature in front of him—no, not creature, for it was certainly a machine despite the uncanny reptilian manner in which it swayed—was like a snake, raised on its belly so that the head was poised ready to dart forward and attack.

Jak looked the creature up and down. It was hard to see in the strobing red and black, but it seemed to have no obvious weak spots. In fact, it seemed to be made from one continuous and living piece of metal.

But there was no such thing that he had ever seen, and from his rudimentary knowledge he was certain that such a thing couldn’t exist. If it was metal, it couldn’t move like that without being ribbed or jointed in some way. It was just a matter of finding those joins. It had to be some kind of fake skin covering it that made it look seamless and sinuous.

If it was metallic, and ribbed or jointed, then his blaster would be no good. Jak holstered the Colt Python and palmed a leaf-bladed knife in each hand.

It was then that he realized that the thing worked on the principle of motion detection. For as he moved, his elbows shimmered in sharp darting angles away from his body—and the head of the creature, previously poised and immobile, jerked suddenly in each direction.

He stopped, suddenly, motionless and alert, studying that which was his prey. It was as still. It seemed strange that there were two such small oases of calm in the midst of the flashing light and two-note roar. They both seemed to stand apart from their surroundings. Jak watched carefully, his own breathing reduced to a shallow draw that was barely noticeable.

And then he moved, a sudden kinetic blur of action, taking strides that combined with leaps and hops to make his movements erratic and hard to follow. If the machine did what he suspected, he would have to make damn sure that he was hard to follow.

The blazing light, crackle of heat and choking sprays of concrete dust that followed in his wake showed that he had been correct. The bastard mechanism was fitted with a laser that pulsed bursts of energy at the areas where Jak had been but a fraction of a second before. It intended to blast him from the face of the redoubt, but he proving just a little too quick.

But from the heat he could feel in the heels of his combat boots as he moved, a little too quick wouldn’t be quick enough for much longer. The heat was becoming more painful with each burst. It was getting the range and sight of him.

He wasn’t one for fancy theorizing, but it was pretty obvious by now that this redoubt had been some kind of
research base. He’d never seen things like this before, and hoped that he’d get out of here and never see things like it again. Perhaps that was why the armory had been wired. The advanced test stuff was stored there, and by using these mechanical creatures to protect it they were also testing them at the same time.

It might have seemed odd that this was calmly running through the front of his mind as he kept just a millisecond ahead of the laser fired by the mechanical snake. Odd only if you weren’t Jak Lauren. Operating on instinct and trusting that very asset was what kept him alive. And the best way to tap into that was not to muddle it by worrying about your problem. Think about something else and let the back of the brain sort out a solution.

It would have to be bastard quick, though. He could feel the blisters forming as his heels burned.

It flickered across his mind—would Ryan get past the sheet metal sec door?

“F
IREBLAST AND FUCK IT
,” the one-eyed man breathed, wincing at the strain on his ribs as he did. The low rumbling that had cut through the siren’s wail now revealed its source: a bottom-heavy, squat flatbed on tracks that were made for a more porous and yielding surface than the concrete floor. The metal caterpillar was scoring the floor, making a noise disproportionate to its size. Ryan had expected some kind of big version of what they had just faced. Not this….

The tracks had been deceptive. The wag was wide, but the blaster mounted on it wasn’t the kind of cannon he had expected. It was smaller, and seemed dwarfed
by the width of the flatbed. It didn’t, in fact, look like it could do much harm at all.

But it wouldn’t be on something that wide and heavy-duty without a reason. Why?

He stood immobile, waiting. In an echo of what Jak was just discovering, he came to the same conclusion about the redoubt’s purpose—hidden on the document Crabbe possessed, but that kind of duplicity figured—and also to the possibility of the machine having a motion detector.

He was four-square to the sec door, facing the strange wag. For what seemed an eternity but was probably only a heartbeat he waited—then it began. A dull throbbing low in his gut, a slow pulse that he couldn’t hear so much as feel, and sensations of nausea and a spinning head.

He snorted, tried to shake his head to clear it, feeling like he was going to pass out. The tiny blaster mounted on the flatbed started to glow green at the tip. The metal frame and the caterpillar tracks on which it was mounted seemed to shimmer in front of his eyes, though the walls and floor around stayed still.

That was it—vibration and sonics. Doc had once said something about the whitecoats having such weapons, and there had been suggestions of this from the technomads who had come to their aid in the past.

The nozzle was pointed right at him. He knew he had to get the hell out of the way, and quick. But it seemed that the vibration was deep in his bones now, making the gristle and tendon between the joints seize up and refuse to obey the commands of his nervous system. Muscles seemed to shake and vibrate as if he’d been in
a fight followed by an all-night run across rocky terrain. His ribs felt as if they were being pried apart. The sound from the tiny blaster was now so immense that it blotted out the sirens. There was nothing except the low, slow oscillation from the flatbed. It wasn’t so much that he could hear as it that it enveloped him, forming a barrier against all other sound, growing greater with each wave, like an ocean crashing on the shore, moving in and taking over as the tide washed over the rocks. He was the rock, and he was about to be obliterated.

But he was in front of the sec door; the barrier that barred his way. Maybe…

He was as good as chilled unless he moved now. There was only the one chance. Eye screwed tight in concentration, his breath rasping in protesting lungs as the oscillation seemed to be interfering with his natural rhythms, slowing them to its own pace, Ryan focused all the strength he could muster into one last, sudden and violent act. If he couldn’t make his protesting body act counter to the obscenely slow pulse, then he’d board the last train west. He thought of Krysty, J.B., Mildred and Doc; of Jak, on the other side of the door. He thought of all they had been through and all they would continue to go through together…if he could just do this one thing.

Maybe it was these thoughts and emotions that spurred him on. Maybe it was nothing more than the desire to survive, to carry on. It didn’t matter, ultimately. All that mattered was that when the moment came, he was able to throw himself to one side. At least, that was his intent. His musculature was suffering heavily from the sonic interference, and his leap to
the side was in truth nothing more than a collapse and crawl toward the far wall.

But it was enough. The pulse grew so intense that, even out of the direct line, it made him vomit as his stomach was turned inside out. He felt as though his eardrums were being ruptured by rusty blades.

If he could have looked around, other than sightlessly at the floor, he would have seen the black metal sheeting of the sec door wobble, seem to melt, and then implode with a roar that drowned the sirens that, as the pulse suddenly ceased, momentarily returned to his ears.

J
AK’S SPEED WAS
increasing as he leaped from spot to spot, just ahead of the laser from the snakelike machine, partly because increasing his speed was the only way to avoid getting himself fried. It was also partly because he had some idea of a plan. The machine was made to move like a reptile, but it wasn’t flesh and blood. It was metal and machinery. As such, it was jointed. And he had been watching, seeing how it moved, and was sure that he knew where the joints were on the sinuous body. There was a section where, he was almost certain from his rudimentary knowledge of mechanics, the metal heart had to be contained. All he had to do was to get in a position to strike, and he knew that he could drive his knives into the belly of the beast and blow out its circuits.

He was making a wider arc with each jump. Soon he would have the speed and range to run up the wall and somersault in the air. The machine would find it hard to bend its head section back on itself. If he was
quick enough, he could beat the arc it would take and get in underneath its range, landing exactly where he needed to thrust his own metal into the heart of the creature, an alien metal that could slay the mechanical dragon.

He was fast enough now and one step away from using the wall as a springboard. Yet all the while he was aware of a deep throbbing pulse that resounded down his spine. It was as he turned, pivoted and thrust off the wall with one foot that he could see the sec door behind the snake machine. It looked as though it was melting from the middle outward, turning to liquid that pulsed in time with the vibration down his spine. The very center was now beginning to glow.