Читать книгу Warlord Of The Pit - James Axler - Страница 7

As the naked girl waded out of the water like a pearly-skinned Aphrodite, water cascaded from her limbs, the bright sunlight sparkling in the droplets.

For a disoriented instant, Brewster Philboyd felt suspended in the kind of delectable daydream an over-hormoned teenage boy would concoct—standing on a beach as a beautiful nude girl waded through the shallows toward him.

As the girl stepped gracefully through the breakers toward Philboyd, she pushed a diving mask up onto her forehead. She wore a delicate silver chain around her neck, and a tiny jeweled pendant in the shape of a jagat, the Hindu symbol of love, nestled between her small, taut breasts. Other than the nine-inch knife scabbarded to the calf of her right leg, Domi wore only the pendant.

As she walked onto the beach, she stared at Philboyd with challenging ruby eyes. “What are you lookin’ at?”

Philboyd shook himself and hastily stepped away from the shoreline before the waves soaked his shoes. “Sorry, I was just lost in thought.”

Striding past him, Domi stripped off the diving mask and walked toward her clothes, draped over a large round boulder. “’Long as that’s all you get lost in, Brewster.”

Philboyd felt his face heat up, but he wasn’t sure if it was due to embarrassment or the unremitting California sun, blazing down on the stretch of beach that bordered the barony once called Snakefish.

Gulls wheeled on the thermal currents created by the juncture of the beach and the thundering sea. They soared gracefully through the smoky spume raised by the nearby breakers. There was very little to see except sand, rocks and the long line of combers smashing against seaweed-draped boulders.

The slow tide made gurgling sounds around the base of the rocks. Despite Domi’s harsh words, the young albino woman wasn’t really hostile, but Philboyd never enjoyed being alone in her company. She had the forthright manner characteristic of other outlanders he had met, but he knew from experience she could be deadly dangerous.

Although she was beautiful despite all the scars marring the pearly perfection of her skin, Domi exuded an aggressive, almost angry energy, so Philboyd pretended not to watch as she got dressed. Her compact body was a smooth symmetrical flow of curving lines with small porcelain breasts rising to sharp points and a hard-muscled stomach. With the droplets of water glittering on her arms and legs, her pale skin looked almost luminous.

As she tugged a black T-shirt over her short-cropped white hair, Domi said in her clipped voice, “Time to get back the ville. Nothin’ out there I saw that could cause earth tremors or the sea quakes they told us about.”

Philboyd nodded distractedly, glancing out at the whitecaps. “Gedrick claimed most of the tidal disturbances were along this stretch.”

Domi pulled on a pair of high-cut khaki shorts. “Didn’t see anything. I dived five times.”

Born a half-feral child of the Outlands, Domi was blessed with many attributes of those reared in the wilderness, including a natural swimming ability, as well as an exceptional lung capacity.

Reaching into a pocket, Domi withdrew a small rectangle of pressed plastic and metal. Flipping open the cover with a thumb, she punched in a code on the small keypad. “Edwards, you there?”

After a couple of seconds, a deep male voice responded, “Go ahead.”

“Me and Brewster are done out here. We’re on our way back the ville. We didn’t find anything. What about you and Mariah?”

“Negative,” Edwards said. “No signs of seismic activity that she could find.”

“Gotcha. Stand by.”

Folding the cover back over the comm unit, Domi cast a glance over her shoulder at Philboyd. “You ready?”

“As I ever will be,” he replied. “I guess it’s nice we got a free California beach vacation out of this, but I don’t think Snakefish is in danger of falling into the Pacific anytime soon.”

Domi put on a pair of sunglasses and said only, “Me neither.”

The lanky astrophysicist fell into step beside her. He stood a little over six feet tall, and in his beige T-shirt and baggy shorts, he appeared to be all protruding elbows, kneecaps and knuckles. Beneath his long-billed cap, his thinning blond hair was swept straight back, which made his high forehead seem very high indeed. He wore a pair of black-rimmed eyeglasses.

Philboyd, like all of the scientists who had arrived in the Cerberus redoubt from the Manitius Moon colony, was a “freezie,” postnuke slang for someone who had been placed in cryogenic stasis following the nuclear holocaust two centuries earlier.

Wistfully, he said, “This is the first time I’ve been to California. It’s nothing like the tourist brochures.” He paused and added with a wry grin, “Pismo has changed a little since the days of the Surf City.”

Domi eyed him quizzically. She padded barefoot across the hot sand. She almost never wore shoes. The soles of her feet bore calluses half an inch thick. “Don’t know what you’re talkin’ about.”

Philboyd shrugged. “I don’t know, either. I’m just trying to make conversation.”

Actually, Philboyd did know, that when the nukes flew and the mushroom clouds scorched their way into the heavens, the San Andreas Fault had given one great final heave and thousands of square miles of California coast dropped into the Pacific. For the past two centuries, the ocean had lapped less than thirty miles from the foothills of the Sierras.

Philboyd knew little about the ville of Snakefish beyond the fact it was the only barony built on the sea and at one time had a small fleet of warships. The walls of the fortress city loomed fifty feet high and at each intersecting corner protruded a Vulcan-Phalanx gun tower. Inside the walls stretched the complex of spired Enclaves. Each of the four towers was joined to the others by pedestrian bridges.

Before the baronial system had fallen, the people who worked for the ville administrators enjoyed lavish apartments, all the bounty of those favored by Baron Snakefish.

Far below the Enclaves spread the streets of the Tartarus Pits. This sector of Snakefish had served as a seething melting pot, where outlanders and slaggers lived. The lanes and footpaths swarmed with cheap labor, and the random movement between the Enclaves and Pits was tightly controlled—only a Pit dweller with a legitimate work order could even approach the cellar of an Enclave tower. The population of the Pits was as strictly and even more ruthlessly controlled than the traffic. The barons had decreed that the villes could support no more than five thousand residents, and the number of Pit dwellers could not exceed one thousand.

Seen from above, the Enclave towers formed a latticework of intersected circles, all connected to the center of the circle, from which rose the Administrative Monolith. The massive round column of white rock-crete jutted three hundred feet into the sky. Light poured out of the slit-shaped windows on each level.

Every level of the tower was designed to fulfill a specific capacity: E Level was a general construction and manufacturing facility, D Level was devoted to the preservation, preparation and distribution of food, and C Level held the Magistrate Division. On B Level was the Historical Archives, a combination of library, museum and computer center. The level was stocked with almost five hundred thousand books, discovered and restored over the past ninety years, not to mention an incredibly varied array of predark artifacts. The top level, or A Level, was reserved for the work of the administrators.

Domi and Philboyd crossed the plank bridge stretching over a canal and walked up the road to the open gates of Snakefish. Although there were no longer guard bunkers outfitted with remote-controlled GEC miniguns, the massive, pyramid-shaped dragon’s-teeth obstacles made of reinforced concrete still lined both sides of the road. Five feet high, each one weighed in the vicinity of one thousand pounds and was designed to break the tracks or axles of any assault vehicle trying to gain unauthorized entry.

The two people smelled the interior of the ville long before they passed through the open gates. Vendors had already opened up food stalls, and the primary items seemed to be dried fish.

Charcoal cookfires made the air smell a bit less fishy, but under the thick scents floated the pungency of poor sanitation and the accumulated stink of hundreds of people. They seemed to be of every shape, size and color, sporting all kinds of garb.

The mixture of building styles was as much of a polyglot as the population. There were old structures dating back to well before skydark, when Snakefish had been an oil refinery, and newer ones that were throwbacks to earlier styles as well as laminated plastic domes and great, squatting stone masses with no discernible architectural design to them at all.

If Domi’s and Philboyd’s presence caused a stir among the population of Snakefish, they did not detect it. The two people tramped the thronging streets, past shops, past taverns and even open-air dentists’ offices without drawing more than a curious glance. Philboyd reflected that by now, word had spread about the arrival of emissaries from Cerberus.

He spied Mariah Falk and Edwards standing near a vendor’s tent specializing in small household items. The two people were engaged in earnest conversation with Gedrick, the ville administrator.

Mariah caught sight of him and Domi and gestured toward them. Although Dr. Mariah Falk wasn’t particularly beautiful or particularly young, she was attractive. Her short chestnut-brown hair was threaded with gray at the temples. Deep laugh lines creased the corners of her eyes and curved out from either side of her nose to the corners of her mouth.

A geologist by trade and training, Mariah was another Manitius Moon base émigrée and she was dressed much like him in shorts and a T-shirt. A leather satchel hung from her left shoulder.

Edwards was only a couple of inches taller than Brewster Philboyd but considerably broader of build with overdeveloped triceps, biceps and deltoids. The big shaved-headed man wore a drab-olive T-shirt, green-striped camo pants and high-laced jump boots.

Gedrick was a man of medium height with brown skin. Despite the fact his complexion was completely different from Edwards and his chin framed by a goatee, he exuded a similar attitude of watchfulness.

Gedrick, like Edwards, was a former Magistrate. Although neither man wore a uniform, their right biceps were emblazoned with tattoos that depicted stylized, balanced scales of justice superimposed over nine-spoked wheels. The tattoos symbolized the Magistrate oath to keep the wheels of justice turning in the nine baronies.

Philboyd always felt uneasy in the presence of Magistrates, even those whom he considered friends like Kane and Grant.

Gedrick cast a glance toward the bespectacled astrophysicist and the petite albino woman when they joined their colleagues from Cerberus. For an instant, distaste flickered in Gedrick’s eyes when his gaze passed over Domi.

“So you didn’t find anything, either?” Gedrick demanded, his voice an aggressive rasp, as if steel wool lined his throat.

Domi shook her head. “Nothing that would give me the idea that this piece of California is unstable. I did some diving out where the tidal disturbances were reported. It seemed ordinary enough.”

Mariah Falk declared curtly, “I don’t know if that means anything. There are two varieties of tidal stressing that can generate earthquakes—diurnal and biweekly tides. The diurnal correlations would arise from more earthquakes only during the hours when the tidal stress is pushing in an encouraging direction, and biweekly effects are based on quakes when the sinusoidal stressing oscillations are the greatest.”

“Be that as it may,” Gedrick said, “we’ve been experiencing ground tremors every other day for the past two weeks. Each time they increase in duration and strength.”

“We’re aware of that,” Edwards said. “But—”

“I know you’re aware of it,” Gedrick broke in impatiently. “That’s why we called upon Cerberus, since you’re supposed to have all these fabulous predark specialists on hand. I’m also aware that two other villes have been destroyed by earthquakes in the past four months.”

“Mandeville and Palladiumville, yeah,” Philboyd said. “The only common factor is that, like Snakefish, they have become free villes—open to all, run like democracies—with the help of Cerberus advisers.”

Gedrick scowled at the taller man resentfully. “Maybe that’s the problem. Maybe if we just lock the place down and make it like the old days, our ville will stay standing.”

“I don’t think you’ll have to go those lengths,” Mariah said.

“Why not?” Gedrick barked. “We’re having the tremors, and you claim there’s no reason for them.”

Mariah chuckled self-consciously and from her satchel removed several pieces of grit-encrusted rock. “I dug these out of the shoreline, and there’s no sign of tectonic fracturing due to shallow oceanic thrust faults. I suppose it’s possible that this whole region experiences weak tremors due to the so-called syzygy effect, but after touring the area, I haven’t found any evidence of fault lines that could trigger episodic tremor and plate slips. Shallow earthquakes near midocean ridges aren’t uncommon in the Pacific, so perhaps you’re experiencing residual ripples.”

Gedrick’s eyebrows knitted at the bridge of his nose. “Two villes being destroyed by earthquakes can’t be a coincidence.”

Mariah returned the rock samples to the satchel. “I agree, but I don’t know what else to tell you.”

Domi glanced around, her eyes slitted. “There’s not much else we can do here, is there?”

Edwards lifted a broad shoulder in a negligent shrug. “Not really.”

Domi stared levelly at Gedrick. “Then, if you’ll return our weapons, we’ll be on our way.”

The brown man gestured toward the Administrative Monolith. “You can pick them up on the way to the mat-trans. Sorry, but the only way we’ve kept the ville from turning into a bloodbath again is by forbidding all firearms inside the city walls.”

“A reasonable policy,” Philboyd remarked, affecting not to notice the glare Edwards directed at him.

Gedrick blew out a frustrated sigh. “I may not seem like it, but I do appreciate the help. We never would have gotten the ville back together without Cerberus providing aid. I would have liked to have seen Kane, Grant and Brigid again.”

The corner of Philboyd’s mouth quirked in a smile. “We’re the B Squad. Nowadays, the three heads of Cerberus aren’t called in unless something really big happens.”

“Like what?” Gedrick asked, tone edged with sarcasm. “When my fucking ville falls down?”

Mariah Falk opened her mouth to answer, then cocked her head toward the rumble of thunder in the distance. Domi tilted her head back, squinting up into the cloudless expanse of blue sky.

“What the hell is that?” Edwards demanded, shielding his eyes with a hand and scanning the sky.

Philboyd felt a prickle of dread as he glanced around the streets. The sound grew louder, as if a great wheeled machine approached. The ground underfoot began to tremble, then it shifted fractionally. Fragments of brick and masonry tumbled from structures. Spiderweb patterns of cracks spread over the surface of the ville walls.

The people in the streets milled about uncertainly. There came the splintering of glass and a chimney toppled over, crashing onto the ground. A portion of a plastic-coated structure came down, and a vendor’s tent keeled over. Pieces of the ville walls loosened and rained down, first in flakes then in fist-size chunks. Screaming mothers began shoving their terrified children toward the gate.

A series of consecutive hammering tremors struck the ground from beneath. Rifts split the ground. Rocks and mortar, shaken loose from the walls all around, rained down. Philboyd’s legs buckled and he staggered but didn’t fall.

Waving his arms, Gedrick bellowed, “Everybody out! Everybody out of the ville! Stay away from the walls!”

Dodging the falling debris, the people stampeded toward the open gate, jostling one another. A small boy stumbled and fell, squalling. Domi scooped him up in her arms and turned toward the Cerberus personnel. “You heard the man! Let’s get the hell out of here!” she shouted.

Philboyd started to obey, then froze as the flood tide of people swirled around him. At the base of a wall a hundred yards away, a moving ripple appeared in the ground, as if a very large animal slid and burrowed just beneath the surface. Little puffs of dust burst up from the cracks in the topsoil.

The furrow inscribed a crescent and halted. Philboyd heard a steady grinding throb. The ground acquired a split and amid a geyserlike spray of dirt, a darkly gleaming metal form heaved up, surrounded by clouds of pulverized grit and sand. A wave of intense heat like that from an opened blast furnace struck his face. His skin felt as if it instantly dried up and shriveled. He recoiled, lifting a hand to shield his eyes. He glimpsed the earth heaving up like a giant wave and rolling toward him in a crushing comber of rock and soil.

A hand closed tightly around his right arm and hauled him backward.

“Move it, asshole!” Edwards snarled into his ear.

A deep fissure opened up in their path and the two men leaped over it. A span of wall toppled down, crushing vendors’ stalls. Edwards and Philboyd reeled on their feet, doing their best to maintain their balance on the convulsing earth. A shower of flying gravel pelted them.

Philboyd and Edwards dashed through the gate as the ville walls crumbled, folding inward, block after block, crash after crash. Panting, eyes stinging from dust, they ran across the bridge and joined Gedrick, Domi and Mariah on the far side of the canal. Gedrick bled from a raw gash on his left cheek. He did not seem to notice it.

The three people stared at the Administrative Monolith with wide, shocked eyes. As they watched, it swayed from side to side. Pieces of it fell away. Then the entire tower broke apart and collapsed with an earsplitting roar.

Tons of rock plunged downward, scattering in exploding fragments. A reverberating, extended thunderclap rolled as the tower cascaded down in a contained avalanche. Thick clouds of dust billowed up, roiling and rising, enveloping the interior of the ville like a gigantic ball of filthy cotton.

Then Philboyd coughed and fanned the grit-laden air. “I guess it’s time to call in the three heads of Cerberus.”