So, with time running out, Ryan hurried Jak and Krysty along through the weapons complex. The timers had been set to go in just thirty minutes. It didn't leave them much of a margin, but it would also make it hard for the scientists to manage to defuse everything. And he'd even scattered a few clever boobies in the shelving, ready to be triggered if anyone was careless. Either way, the subterranean redoubt should go up around 12:40.
There wasn't much time for any delays.
J.B., Lori and Doc Tanner had returned to the base of the main entrance elevator. The bodies of five sec men lay in a tangled heap at the mouth of the corridor that led toward the scientists' living quarters.
The Armorer looked carefully at his chron. "I make it 12:16. I don't hear them coming yet."
Everything was set and ready.
"Twelve-sixteen," Jak said.
If the explosives did their stuff, a devastating chain reaction would occur in the stores of lethal weapons. The first bang would lead to others, eventually spreading fire and destruction throughout the whole complex.
All the three of them had to do now was rejoin the other trio near the single exit to safety.
They were only a couple of turns in the corridor from their destination when Dr. Ethel Tardy appeared from a side door and waddled into the center of the passage. She was holding a chromed handblaster, which was connected to wires that trailed away out of sight. The muzzle was slightly bell-shaped and was pointed in their direction.
The tiny woman smiled, beaming eyes hugely distorted by her thick spectacles. Her sweet, lisping little voice showed no trace of anger.
"You have been busy, sabotagewise. We lost track of our surveillance mode operation on Dr. Tanner and the others in your party."
"Tough shit, lady." Ryan hesitated about trying to blast the diminutive scientist, the short hairs prickling at the back of his neck at the sight of the outlandish weapon she held. What was it, and what might it do?
She answered the unspoken question. "One move from you and I shall use this. It is one of our prize items of research, tested thus far only on our mutant experimental personnel."
"Bitch," Krysty muttered, too quietly for Dr. Tardy to hear her.
"It is listed as an emdee. Which stands for a Molecular Destabilizer. I eagerly anticipate using it upon you three and examining the results."
"What's it do?" Jak asked.
Ryan was wondering whether he should try to snap the G-12 onto continuous and rip the poisonous dwarf into bloody ribbons of flesh. But she was too far away — and her finger was on a button that had to be a firing trigger.
"Your tissue, bone, blood, skin are all composed of molecules bonded together. This will remove those fragile bonds." She could have been lecturing to a class of students.
Only Krysty had even an inkling of what she was trying to explain. "But if you do that..."
Dr. Ethel Tardy positively twinkled at her. "Yes, you see it! The entire structure dissolves. You melt into a billion, billion particles. Total disintegration." She smiled broadly. "And it is so painful. The element of consciousness remains surprisingly long. It is one of the best of my own inventions."
"You death-crazed lunatic," Ryan said, unable to control his loathing for the insane woman.
"No. Central bless you. We are the saviors of the world. Only through death can you come to a new life. That's how it's always been in the rules."
"You're sick," Krysty spat. "Sick and fit for death."
Dr. Tardy wasn't to be convinced. "Wrong, wrong, wrong. Quadruple negative. Central has always wanted what we can now give them. Now we can finally destroy it all. The evil will be purged, the land cleansed by fire and by the horsemen of disease and pestilence."
Now she was beginning to sound like some biblical prophet, drawing on the Book of Revelation.
"You'll wipe out the few survivors of the madness of the long chill?" Krysty asked.
"They will welcome our redemption."
"A vile death!"
Dr. Tardy shook her little Buddha-like head. "They are not worth the saving."
"Some are," Jak said, hand sliding around toward a concealed dagger.
"Move your fingers another micrometer and you're instant dusty soup," the scientist said. "Good. Now we must know what you've been doing. We know you've terminated our sec men, but we lost you as you came to the research section. What have you done? What can you hope to do? Why check us in our Central-blessed designs? Do you not see how grand is our aim here?"
Ryan took a half step forward. "Me an' my friends go around the Deathlands and there's times we do us some chilling. There's those needs it. And I like to figure the world's a touch better as we pass on by. I heard someone once talk about the darkness on the land, how he hoped to hold it back some, like carrying a sword into the sunset. Mebbe even carry it on through to a dawn. A new dawn. Sounds fucking stupid to you? Sure it does. But I'm for life. You're not."
"I'm for..." Dr. Ethel Tardy began, when Dr. Theophilus Tanner appeared like a ragged angel of vengeance and shot her carefully through the back of the head with his two-hundred-year-old Le Mat pistol.
"Rot in your own hell," he said.
Chapter Twenty-Three
A brief and vicious firefight with a dozen of the mutie sec men slowed them a dangerous few seconds. Fortunately Ryan's party took no casualties and were finally in the elevator, climbing fast toward a fresh Oregon afternoon.
The ascent took precisely the eighty-five seconds the descent had taken. The box of dulled steel seemed to rise with agonizing slowness. Once, when they were near the top, the elevator shook, rattling against the sides of the shaft, and they dimly heard the sound of a muffled explosion. Ryan checked his chron; J.B. did the same.
"Coupl'a minutes early," he said.
"Can't trust old plas," the Armorer replied.
When they got to the top, it was a beautiful day. The sun beamed down from a cloudless sky of unsullied azure. A hawk floated majestically between the peaks away to the west. The bowl of mountains around Crater Lake was topped with a frosting of snow, but the air was warm and fresh. The main entrance wasn't guarded, and there were several of the amphibious boat wags on the ramp under the shadow of the jagged rocks that concealed the complex.
"Look at the water," Lori said. "It dances."
They looked.
The impenetrable deeps were a rich blue, normally placid and calm. Now the water was rippling agitatedly, tiny waves rising and breaking against one another and lapping at the stone ramp like thousands of little sucking mouths.
"I can feel it and hear it," Krysty said urgently, head to one side, her crimson hair like strands of fire in the sunlight.
"The bombs going?" Ryan asked.
"Sure. Can't you hear it?"
The Wizard Island Complex for Scientific Advancement was buried so deeply that not even Ryan's keen hearing could detect anything happening. But he could feelit. Through the thick soles of his combat boots, he could sense the faint susurration that was coming through thousands of feet of rock.
"Best go. Who'll drive?" Ryan asked.
Normally it would have been Finnegan.
"Me," Jak offered, leaping into the control seat, his snowy hair blowing in the light breeze.
Away above them Ryan noticed a small herd of deer running fast over the gray pumice slopes, their sharp hooves kicking up powder behind them. It looked as if something had spooked them.
The pink eyes of the albino spotted a faint trail that climbed the steep sides of the basin around the lake, and he aimed the amphib at it. He lowered the wheels as they reached land and gunned the motor to force the amphib up among the trees. Behind them the surface of the water was becoming more restless as whitecaps rippled the rich blue.