Ryan laid his hand on the door and began to push it open. The voice was deafening, making everyone jump.
"Cryogenics command. Unauthorized personnel withdraw immediately! Security will take finality action!"
J.B. unslung his new blaster and leveled it at a bank of linked speakers set in the center of the arched ceiling.
"Unauthorized personnel withdraw immed..."
The integral silencer reduced the noise of the gun's explosion to a polite cough, like a nervous curate clearing his throat in front of his maiden aunt.
"That's telling big-mouth ratboy," Jak sniggered.
"Move it out," Ryan ordered.
Some years earlier, in wind-washed Wisconsin, Ryan had led a hunting party through the ruins of a deserted ville, and they'd come across the tumbled stones of what had once been a large hospital. One wing had been freakishly protected from the worst of the nuke blasting. He still remembered the cold wind blowing along the corridors and the look and feel of the place.
Now, on the fringes of the deep redoubt, there was a similar feeling.
Ryan almost felt that he could even catch the long-gone scent of disinfectant lingering in the dull, reprocessed air.
"Looks like they cleared up rather carefully here," Doc observed. "Look in here. Everything copybook neat and trim. Like they were hoping one day to come back and pick up where they left off."
It was true. Word processors stood at the ready, under plastic covers; phones waited for the next call; filing cabinets were closed and orderly; an operating room waited for a new patient, rustless scalpels and probes lying in glittering ranks with other nameless tools of the surgeon.
"Gives me creepies." Lori shuddered. "Reminds me of the redoubt I came from. Cold and... and watching us."
Ryan knew what the girl meant. It was oddly sinister the way that everything in this section was so perfect. It was almost as if they'd slipped through into a time warp. At any moment a sec man or a doctor or a nurse would walk along the antiseptic corridor and challenge them.
They reached another air-locked door.
Krysty was in the lead, but she faltered and stopped, putting her hand to her forehead.
"What is it?" Ryan asked, moving quickly to her side.
"Don't know, lover, but... Gaia! Something strange is... living and partly living. Dead and yet... not dead."
"Freezies," Doc said. "They must be what Krysty can 'see' in there."
"Could it?.."
She shook her head, the mass of crimson hair dancing across her shoulders like filaments spun from fire. "How the?.. I don't know, lover. I just tell you that there's something up ahead of us that's not like anything I ever sensed before."
"Could go back," J.B. suggested, the tone of his voice making it obvious that he wanted to keep going on.
"No. Krysty says that what's through there isn't alive, so it can't hurt us."
"But said not dead, as well," Jak pointed out, lips peeling back off his sharp teeth in a feral grin of anticipation.
"So, let's move on," Ryan said.
There were two air locks close together, each with its own set of instructions about making sure no clothing was trapped in closing doors and not attempting to leave until pressure equalizer had fully returned to zero.
Beyond the second set was an ordinary pair of double swing-doors. Now the humming and hissing sounds that they'd heard from way back had become much louder, as though they were closing in on the heart of a sleeping giant.
Ryan took the lead, pushing the doors open and stepping cautiously through, into a huge control room, much like the one that ran the gateway.
"This is it."
The other five filed in after him, stopping to gaze around at the amazing complex of comp-panels with lights, buttons and switches. The humming was louder.
"Look." Krysty pointed across at the long side wall of clear glass. Behind it, angled on a raised platform, were about twenty silvered capsules, looking like sci-fi coffins.
"Freezies," Doc breathed. "So, the stories were true. They exist, and there they are. By the three Kennedys, they're freezies!"
Chapter Seven
The control room contained everything needed to being functioning again immediately. Everything except instructions. The consoles held clues to how they might have operated, but nothing more.
"This one's marked Coolants Input," J.B. called to the others, who were wandering around the room.
"How d'you open up the doors here?" Lori asked, raiding a black handle on the glass wall in front of the capsules.
"Leave it, dearest!" Doc instructed. "We must exercise some care. A rash and hasty move could lead to an unimagined disaster."
"There's twenty-five of these metal boxes, Doc, but it looks like only nine of them are operational. Five got a liquid display saying Not in Use. Eleven got a red malfunction sign glowing, like something went wrong over the years."
"What about those nine?"
"Just a steady green. Lots of dials and bleepers, but they're all static."
"How 'bout unfreezing 'em, Doc," Jak yelled. "See what hundred-year man looks like."
Ryan smiled at the boy's enthusiasm. "What'd happen if we tried to let 'em out, Doc?"
"Who on God's green earth knows, my old comrade in arms? With nothing to guide us, I fear that it would not be a likely success."
"Could try, though," Ryan insisted, fascinated by the thought that the gleaming capsules might contain men and women from a hundred years ago, people with all the scientific knowledge and wisdom that they'd had in those days. Who knew what information they might be able to convey?
"I think not. To tamper with such things, far beyond our wisdom, Ryan... This could be a fearful Pandora's box of evil or disease. How can we take on that weighty responsibility?"
"We got every right, Doc. There's nobody else here but us. I say let's try and defrost 'em."
The old-timer sighed. "This is madness, my friend. Madness. But we don't even know how to begin to release them from their eternal durance."
"Ounce of plas-ex and they'll pop open like the belly of a drowned dog," J.B. said.
"Here," Krysty called. "Sealed panel says Emergency Mass Release Controls. This has got to be it."
They all gathered around.
The control was on what looked to be the master console. Certainly the chair in front of it was larger and more plush than any of the others. And smack in the center was the panel that Krysty had noticed. It was locked and had an intricate sec key attached to it by a steel chain.
"One key and three locks," observed Krysty.
"Not uncommon, my dear. Many high-security establishments will have a similar system. It prevents a single fit of schizoid psychotic madness. No one person can operate the master key. Or press the red button reading 'Do not pass Go and do not destroy the world.' We'll probably find a time delay on a single key that will shut down the whole override system."
"So where's other keys, Doc?" Jak asked. "Round here?"
"In the ruins of what was once the Pentagon? Or Washington? Camp David? Nevada? Air Force One? I can tell you, my snow-headed colleague, that those missing keys will remain missing until Gabriel blows his horn. And probably after that as well."
"Plas-ex time," J.B. announced, fumbling in the lining of his leather jacket.
Ryan was about to warn the Armorer to be careful, then decided to keep his mouth shut. J.B. would be as careful as he could be without needing to be told about it.
He teased out a tiny piece of the gray explosive, rolling it between his fingers. He worked the thin worm of plas-ex into a triangular shape, pressing it to the top of the sec-locked control. He took out a detonator, which was no larger than a thumbtack, and pushed one end into the gray strip.
"Ten seconds," he said. "Ready? Go." The Armorer tweaked the end of the detonator to activate its timing mechanism.