Ryan answered her question. "You carry your share, Lori, and nobody chills you. You let us down and then you get treated like anyone outside the group. If that means chilling, then..." The sentence trailed away into the stillness of the room.
The tension stretched, against the background of flickering lights, dancing dials and chattering comp-consoles. This was the nerve center of the whole redoubt, where every aspect of the building was controlled. Once, it had all been set running for the convenience of the human occupants. Now they were gone, but it still kept steadily to its ordained tasks.
"Looks like they left in a hurry," Krysty said, easing the moment.
In his blood-blurred anger at Lori's casual stupidity, Ryan had barely noticed what the control room looked like. Now he took a few moments to glance around.
If he hadn't known better, he might have guessed that the workers had only rushed out of the big room minutes ago, rather than nearly a hundred years back. There were a number of Styrofoam cups, and plastic containers that had once held sandwiches, long rotted and gone. Pens and pads lay scattered on the benches, scraps of crumpled paper on the floor. On an impulse Ryan stopped and picked one up from the tiles near his feet, unfolding it carefully.
"Like the Dead Sea Scrolls," Doc said. "Open with caution."
The paper was part of a comp-print, covered on one side with an incomprehensible mass of jumbled figures. He turned it over. There, on the other side, was faded handwriting — a question from one person, with a reply in different colored ink.
My room after last food?
Piss in a hot spot!
Ryan grinned. "Nothing changes, does it?" He crumpled the note to brittle shards and let them filter through his fingers like grains of sand.
They spent a quarter of an hour wandering around the control center. Ryan joined Doc by the main display panels that ran all of the gateway's mat-trans functions. The old man was shaking his head at the coded numbers and letters on the liquid-crystal console.
"Make any sense of it, Doc?"
"No. The men who worked on these were a small and highly specialized team, some of the best brains on all of the Totality Concept. I had heard the odd whisper, of course, around the canteens and bars. But nothing that... If only we could learn how to drive these darned buggies! Least we could get where we wanted and not where they shoot us. All along the disassembly line and back again."
"Place like this — abandoned in a hurry — could there be a manual or something?"
Doc sucked at his peculiarly perfect teeth. "Doubt it, my dear fellow. Software and all instructs would go first of all. Instant self-destruct. Press the button on the can, and it's incinerated and pulverized in fifteen seconds. It's the hardware you can't get rid of so easily."
"Must have been someplace they held copies of all the vital documents and stuff?"
The old man patted him on the arm. "Course there was, Mr. Cawdor. Course. Nearly all missile complexes, military bases, fortresses... all of them. But there was one small problem. As soon..."
Ryan interrupted him. "I get it, Doc. Primary, triple-red targets for the nuking? Missile complexes, military bases and... Yeah, I get it. Mebbe one day we'll find something, tucked away at the back of a file, forgotten. Mebbe."
Doc Tanner shook his head. "We had a saying, Ryan. It'll happen when pigs fly. I haven't seen any airborne bacon for a very, very long time."
There was a printed card tacked to the wall by the exit door from the control room. The letters had peeled, and one or two had fallen off completely. But it was still legible: Warning. On Egress No B12 Sec-Cleared Documentation to Be Removed Under Pain of Instant Court-Martial. This Means YOU.
Doc nodded. "Brings it back. A sign like that surely brings it back. Once they saw I was a kind of threat to them, they watched me closer than a hawk watches a rabbit. By then all international security had become so compromised and infiltrated that I guess us and the Russkies knew all along what we were all doing and what they were doing. Secrets!" He gave a short, cynical laugh. "Not anymore, there weren't."
Jak coughed. "Sorry interrupt. Hungry. Gotta be food around redoubt left in big hurry. Let's go."
"Sure," Ryan agreed. "Everyone ready? Lori? You ready?"
Her bad mood had blown away like a summer squall, and she favored him with her broadest smile. "Yeah, Ryan."
From their previous visits to the concealed fortresses, they all knew that they now faced one of the moments of maximum danger. The entrance that linked the control room and the gateway to the rest of the redoubt was sufficiently strong to withstand almost any power used against it. It wasn't uncommon for local muties to have broken into other sections of the redoubts, but they lacked the weaponry to force the double doors.
"Three-five-two code?" J.B. said.
"Guess so."
It bore out Doc's comments about how ridiculous a lot of the sec regs had become. In every redoubt they'd entered, the "code" to get in and out of the control section had been numerical. Three-five-two to open it and two-five-three to close it.
Ryan wondered why they didn't just have a pair of buttons marked Open and Close.
The Armorer punched out the triple numerals, standing to one side, his Uzi at the ready, braced against his hip. The other five companions were ranged behind him, ready to pour full-metal jacketed death into anything waiting for them. Nothing happened at all.
"Dark night!" J.B. exclaimed in a voice of the mildest annoyance.
"Try it again," Krysty suggested.
"Could try reversing it," Ryan said.
"If they've played tricks, it'll take a long time to go through all the combinations of three numbers," Doc said, sighing. "The number of possible permutations is... about... approximately... Well, it's a lot."
J.B. pressed the same three numerals again. "Two's a mite sticky. Ah, that's got it."
Behind the immensely thick walls, huge gears began their ponderous engagement, moving for the first time in all the long, still years. Grudgingly edging the double doors apart, the powerful hydraulics hissed at the weight.
Once the gap was wide enough, J.B. slipped through, eyes searching in both directions down the brightly lit corridor beyond. The rest waited, nerves stretched tightly.
"Clear," the Armorer called. "It's a sealed section. Ends in a blank wall one way, no doors. Other way it curves a little to the right. Then there's a big sec door, a ceiling-to-floor job. No side entrances."
Jak led the others out. The entrance to the control section was now wide open. This was always a difficult moment, particularly as the controls weren't functioning perfectly. If they left the doors open, then there was a serious risk of other trespassers finding their way in and destroying the gateway, stranding them wherever they were. But to close them meant a similar danger — they might permanently malfunction and keep them locked out for good.
"You got two bad options then pick the least bad," had been the advice of the Trader.
Ryan punched in two and five and three. Unhesitatingly the double doors closed tightly shut.
It was a typical redoubt corridor, around twenty feet wide, with a slightly arched roof nearly fifteen feet high at its crown. Strip lighting was set at the line where wall and ceiling merged. Ryan spotted the tiny sec cameras dotted along the roof, their probing lenses turning in an eternal quest. No doubt they were already carrying the pictures of the first intruders for a century to some far-off security center. And nobody would be there to take notice of the invasion of the redoubt.
"Least there's no problem which way to go," J.B. said, pushing his glasses farther up his narrow nose.