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Rearmed from redoubt stockpiles, the barons consolidated their power and reclaimed technology for the villes.
Their power, supported by some invisible authority, extended beyond their fortified walls to what was now called the Outlands. It was here that the rootstock of humanity survived, living with hellzones and chemical storms, hounded by Magistrates. In the villes, rigid laws were enforced—to atone for the sins of the past and prepare the way for a better future. That was the barons' public credo and their right-to-rule. Kane, along with friend and fellow Magistrate Grant, had upheld that claim until a fateful Outlands expedition.
A displaced piece of technology Suddenly, Brigid Baptiste, the archivist, faced summary execution, and Grant a quick termination. For Kane there was forgiveness if he pledged his unquestioning allegiance to Baron Cobalt and his unknown masters and abandoned his friends. But that allegiance would make him support a mysterious and alien power and deny loyalty and friends.
Then what else was there? Kane had been brought up solely to serve the ville. Brigid's only link with her family was her mother's red-gold hair, green eyes and supple form. Grant's clues to his lineage were his ebony skin and powerful physique. But Domi, she of the white hair, was an Outlander pressed into sexual servitude in Cobaltville.
She at least knew her roots and was a reminder to the exiles that the outcasts belonged in the human family. Parents, friends, community—the very rootedness of humanity was denied. With no continuity, there was no forward momentum to the future. And that was the crux—when Kane began to wonder if there was a future. For Kane, it wouldn't do. So the only way was out— way, way out. After their escape, they found shelter at the forgotten Cerberus redoubt headed by Lakesh, a scientist, Cobaltville's head archivist, and secret opponent of the barons.
With their past turned into a lie, their future threatened, only one thing was left to give meaning to the outcasts. The hunger for freedom, the will to resist the hostile influences. And perhaps, by opposing, end them.
Chapter 1 Washington, D. How long and what had killed it was still a matter of conjecture. In predark days, some opinionated and learned people put forth persuasive arguments that Washington, the capital city of the most powerful nation on earth, had expired spiritually and morally sometime after World War II. The means of death was attributed to a confusing variety of blunt political instruments, wielded either by liberals or conservatives, foreign interests or government bureaucrats themselves.
The arguments and accusations ceased abruptly on January 20, , at p. The onemegaton blast in Washington, D. The detonation of two other nuclear warheads in and around the District of Columbia left no leeway for further debate. The citizens of Washington, D. Of course, the question was never addressed because no statisticians remained to conduct the necessary surveys.
The complete and utter destruction of the city began a chain reaction, and by p. World War III was in motion. Within the next six hours, the face of the world disappeared beneath soaring fireballs and vast mushroom clouds. By the end of that Saturday afternoon, the nuclear winter began. Massive quantities of pulverized rubble had been propelled into the atmosphere, clogging the sky for a generation, blanketing all of earth in a thick cloud of radioactive dust, ash, debris, smoke and fallout.
The exchange of atomic missiles did more than slaughter most of Earth's inhabitants. It distorted the ecosystems that were not completely obliterated and sculpted the face of the planet into a perverted parody of what it had been.
After eight generations, the lingering effects of the holocaust and the nuclear winter were more subtle, an underlying texture to a world struggling to heal itself— except in Washington, D. Only a vast sea of fused black glass occupied the tract of land that once held the seat of American government. Seen from a distance, the crater lent the region the name by which it had been known for nearly two centuries. Washington Hole was a hellzone, still jolted by ground tremors and soaked by the intermittent flooding of Potomac Lake.
A volcano, barely an infant in geological terms, had burst up from the rad-blasted ground. The peak dribbled a constant stream of foul-smelling smoke, mixing with the chem-tainted rain clouds to form a wispy umbrella stinking of sulfur and chlorine. The smell was so cloying and so fetid that new arrivals found it necessary to wear respiration masks until they grew accustomed to it.
Of course, there weren't many new arrivals. The shanty towns that once ringed the outskirts of Washington Hole had been razed long ago, during the first year of the Program of Unification. Most of their inhabitants had succumbed to rad sickness years before. The former District of Columbia fell under the jurisdiction of Sharpeville, and the baron was not inclined to abandon any piece of his territory to squatters, even those that he would have had difficulty giving away.
Although the center of Washington and all of its suburbs had dissolved in the first three minutes of the nukecaust, the outer rim still contained a few crumbling ruins. Beyond the shells of buildings lay an expanse of rolling tableland, broken by ranges of hills.
To the north rose a rampart of tumbled stones. The landscape lay dead, lifeless, except for an advancing mechanical movement. Stenz slid back the Sandcat's canopy and poked his helmeted head out, inhaling a whiff of the astringent air.
Coughing, he fought back his gag reflex and resisted the impulse to rub his irritated mucus membranes. Sweat flowed like water down his cheeks. He endured the discomfort silently. A Magistrate who had twice been cited for meritorious service had to endure—at least that was the constant claim of Ericson, his division commander.
The Sandcat churned its way across the flatlands, twin plumes of grit curving up from the clattering metal tracks. The controlled roar of the horsepower engine sounded uncomfortably loud, even through the polystyrene lining of his helmet. Built to serve as a FAV, or Fast Attack Vehicle, rather than a means of long-distance ground transportation, the Sandcat had a low-slung, blunt-lined chassis supported by a pair of flat, retractable tracks.
An armored topside gun turret concealed a pair of USMG heavy machine guns. The wag's armor was composed of a ceramic-armaglass bond which offered a shield against both intense and ambient radiation. The interior comfortably held four people.
At the front of the compartment, right beneath the canopy, were the pilot's and co-pilot's chairs. In the rear, a double row of three jump seats faced each other. Four Magistrates in full armor stared at each other, anxious for the nine-hour journey to end and their mission to commence. Stenz was anxious for it, too, but only because the air-recycling system in the Cat wasn't working at maximum efficiency.
When1 he opened the canopy, he hoped for a fresh breeze, but he wasn't particularly surprised when he was disappointed.
Below, from the pilot's chair, Presky called up, "Sir, we've got a midrange-orange rad count. You shouldn't be exposing yourself any longer than necessary. Presky had only been awarded his duty badge last year and had never been outside the walls of Sharpeville. As a Magistrate, he was still a cherry, not used to the rigors of duty or wearing the black polycarbonate battle armor for a longer period than weapons drills.
He obviously wasn't accustomed to traveling through a hellzone, sharing cramped, poorly ventilated quarters with five other men. Stenz forced a bitter smile. It was a new experience for him, too.
He had served in Sharpeville's Magistrate Division for the past eighteen years, and though his hair had gone gray and his face become scarred in its service, he had never been assigned to penetrate the dark territories of Washington Hole. The D. All of the Eastern Seaboard had been hard-nuked, but Washington Hole was still the most active hot spot in the country.
Ericson had briefed him on the whats and wherefores of the op, but the whys were still incomplete. Stenz wasn't sure if he didn't prefer it that way. According to Ericson, all of the nine baronies in the ville network were engaged in a cooperative mission— to recce the redoubts in their individual territories for any recent signs of use or entrance.
Stenz had been stunned into dumbfounded silence when Ericson blandly mentioned the redoubts. Anyone who served in one of the ville divisions had heard whispers about the redoubts, the Continuity of Government stockpiles, perhaps even caught a murmured word here and there about the scientific marvels they contained.
Over the course of postnukecaust generations, strange stories, rumors, campfire tales circulated about these bizarre places buried deep in what were known as the Deathlands The legends claimed these subterranean enclaves were stuffed with breathtaking technological treasure troves.
It was even hinted that these redoubts provided escape routes to some happy land, lying beyond the scoured hellscape of the continental United States. When Ericson, his pale gray eyes as cold as his voice, confirmed matter-of-factly that the folk tales had a basis in reality, Stenz's stomach slipped sideways. He went on to state that a major component of the Program of Unification had been the seeking out and securing of all redoubts within the territories of the villes.
Anyone who spoke of having knowledge of them, even based on hearsay, was ruthlessly hunted down and exterminated. Inside of a generation, tales of the redoubts were suppressed to such an extent that they became baseless legends, much as stories about Atlantis and Avalon had been dismissed in earlier centuries. Stenz felt no pride that he was being allowed to share a dark secret of humanity's past. Fear filled him as Ericson told him more things he would have rather not known. He mentioned the Totality Concept, an umbrella designation for supersecret American military researches into many different arcane and eldritch sciences, working to ensure the safety of the United States against all aggressors.
Stenz didn't voice his opinion if that was the stated aim, then the program had failed miserably. One of these esoteric researches involved matter transmission, relying on a device known as a gateway. Ericson provided him with a thumbnail description of its function, though Stenz didn't comprehend it to any meaningful degree. Project Cerberus, a subdivision of the Totality Concept, dealt with the mat-trans gateways. Ericson claimed the project's purpose was to explore the possibilities of mass teleportation of surplus population.
Stenz couldn't help but ask, "Teleport them to where? When Stenz asked him if such an undertaking had been accomplished before the nukecaust, Ericson replied bleakly, "I don't know.
Regardless of whether the goals of Project Cerberus had been achieved, a gateway unit had been installed in every Totality Concept redoubt. The installation near Washington Hole had been codenamed Redoubt Papa. Stenz's assignment was to go there. Ericson had provided him with the information of how to gain entrance to the redoubt and check the mat-trans gateway control systems. He left it up to Stenz to handpick the Mags to accompany him on the journey to ground zero.
Because of the unpredictable geothermals in the region, Ericson deemed the trip too risky to make by air. After all, men were easier to replace than Deathbirds. To blunt any objection that Stenz might lodge, Ericson had employed his own personal cliche: "A Magistrate must endure. In fact, the Magistrate Divisions were wellsprings of rumor.
Intel officers would pass on scraps of information to a friend, and that friend would pass it on to someone else, like a covert relay race. When the scraps reached Stenz, he found them too fantastic to believe but too disturbing to ignore. Some months back, a couple of Mags in Cobaltville had fused out, gone renegade and disappeared.
Less than two weeks ago, they had returned and kidnapped a high-ranking archivist, allegedly right under the nose of Baron Cobalt. Combining that rumor with his assign-merit, Stenz came to the conclusion that the turncoat Mags knew about the gateways and used them to elude apprehension. Magistrates had deserted and bolted for the fragile freedom offered by the Outlands before. It rarely happened, but it wasn't unprecedented. In this instance, Stenz had heard murmurs of the involvement of the Preservationists, a shadowy conspiracy whose alleged objective was to overthrow the baronies.
That could be the only reason for the mission to Redoubt Papa, but Stenz made no mention of this to Ericson. His commander hadn't said that the information he had imparted was classified, under threat of termination if he ever spoke of it. He didn't have to say it—Stenz picked up the implication from the man's eyes, voice and bearing. As it was, he couldn't help but wonder how long he would live after completing the op and returning to Sharpeville.
Now Stenz tried to ignore his fear, just like he tried to ignore the stink of the hellzone. He focused his gaze on the great heap of tumbled stone lying at the foot of a slope several hundred yards away.
Impatiently he brushed sand particles away from his helmet's visor. Presky slowed the Sandcat, steadily applying the brakes. Stenz's eyes traveled up the huge chunks of rock and concrete, seeking the vanadium sec door Eric-son had briefed him about. It was situated inside a rock-ribbed hollow about halfway up the slope. Clumps of scraggly brush grew around it, masking the depression so effectively it was only by chance he glimpsed the dull reflection of light against the smooth alloy.
Stenz dropped back down into his seat as Presky brought the wag to a complete halt. He glanced at the rad counter on the instrument panel.
The glowing scar-let arrow wavered erratically across the scale, ticking uncomfortably close to the red band. Presky keyed off the engine, and Stenz announced sharply, "Disembark.
The four Magistrates in the jump seats obeyed his order without comment, climbing out through the rear storage hatch. Presky flung open the gull-wing door on the driver's side and stepped out. All five of them formed a line in front of the Sandcat, standing stiffly at attention.
Stenz surveyed them swiftly, silently. The lightweight exoskeletons fit snugly over undersheathings made of Kevlar weave. Small disk-shaped badges of office were emblazoned on the arching left pectoral, depicting the stylized, balanced scales of justice superimposed over nine-spoked wheels.
The badges symbolized the Magistrate's oath to keep the wheels of justice turning in the nine villes. Like the armor, their helmets were made of black polycarbonate, and fitted over the upper half and back of the head, leaving only a portion of the mouth and chin exposed.
The red-tinted visors were composed of electrochemical polymers and connected to a passive night sight that intensified ambient light to permit one-color night vision. Stenz snapped, "Lock and lock. They extended their index fingers. Five tiny electric motors whined as they tensed their wrist tendons. Sensitive actuators activated flexible cables in the forearm holsters and snapped the Sin Eaters smoothly into gloved hands. Since the big-bored automatic handblasters had no trigger guards or safeties, the pistols fired immediately upon the touch of crooked index fingers.
They stood quietly, barrels pointed toward the lead-colored sky. Though they were too disciplined to show it, Stenz knew they were all worried about the high rad count. He nodded, not in approval of their silent acceptance of the risks, but in acknowledgment.
Let's move out. Though Ericson hadn't said so, he figured the massive slabs and chunks of rock had once been the upper floors of a multilevel complex. Shearedaway reinforcing rods jutted out of the edges of some pieces like rusty, skeletal fingers. A tiny six-legged lizard, its skin bleached a dingy brown, flopped sluggishly out of his path.
Its eyes were covered by a gelatinous film. Stenz inhaled sharply at the sight of the mutated reptile. The acrid air seared his throat, and it took a great effort not to succumb to a coughing fit.
The climb was not particularly rugged because the heaps of fallen rock and concrete formed a crude stairway. Beneath a shelf of granite stood the wide sec door. As Ericson had described, a square keypad was positioned within the recessed double frame. Taking and holding a deep breath, he punched in the three-digit entrance code, Stenz released his breath when a grinding, squeaking sound of buried hydraulics and gears began to build. He stepped back, eyeing the shuddering portal nervously.
The vibration triggered miniavalanches in the surrounding stone, small pebbles pattering down amid sifting showers of grit. Though he couldn't be positive, the laborious groaning of the mechanisms indicated that the door hadn't opened in a long time, perhaps not since before the oukecaust. Like a curtain of steel, the massive door slowly inched upward. With a squealing grate of rust breaking free and a prolonged pneumatic hiss, it slid into slots between the double frame channels.
Solenoids snapped loudly as they caught and held. The Magistrates behind him drew back uncertainly. A wide, square corridor yawned on the other side of the threshold. Inadequately lit by a single light strip stretching along the center of the ceiling, the glow was a dim, misty white.
Stenz saw an undisturbed layer of dust covering the floor. He activated the tiny image enhancer on the forepart of his helmet. The corridor leaped into clear, sharp, one-color focus. A musty odor tickled his nostrils. Feeling the pressure of the eyes of the squad on his back, Stenz squared his shoulders and took the first step beneath the sec door and into Redoubt Papa. The Magistrates followed him, fanning out across the passageway in the standard wedge deployment of personnel and firepower.
Stenz wasn't surprised that the overhead light still functioned. He'd been told that the redoubts were powered by nuclear generators, which were buried in the deepest part of the installations, just like the mat-trans gateways. As he walked along, heel to toe, he kept alert for any sign of a stairwell or an elevator shaft.
The corridor turned sharply to the left. Splits and bulges showed in the walls and ceiling where the vanadium alloy had buckled. Redoubt Papa may not have received a direct strike, but even a thermonuclear near miss had come very close to collapsing it. Stenz suddenly froze, gesturing behind him for the squad to halt. The patina of dust filming the floor showed markings, but they were so unlike footprints he couldn't quickly identify them.
Easing down to one knee, he silently cursed the feeble light. As he gazed at the marks, he felt his heart suddenly trip-hammer inside his polycarbonate-encased chest. A cold hand seemed to stroke the buttons of his spine. The prints were small, like a child's, but they didn't look like feet. They resembled the impressions made by distorted, malformed hands, with all the fingers the same length and a stubby thumb crooked at a forty-five-degree angle.
He experienced a momentary irrational suspicion that a gang of mutie children had broken into the complex and walked around on their hands simply to bewilder any Mags that might stop by one day.
Stenz knew that the prints were recent and, judging by the other markings, whoever made them had alternately pulled and pushed a heavy object.
Double rows of straight lines cutting through the dust suggested wheels. He rose to his feet, whispering, "Triple red. After a dozen yards, the corridor dead-ended at a closed sec door, the green control lever on the frame in the down position. Turning to Presky, he said quietly, "I'll throw the switch. You stand ready. He waited until the rest of the squad shifted around the corridor so they could fire without hitting Presky. The lever was stiff, but Stenz wrenched it up.
Presky Icnsed as the squeaking hiss of hydraulics filled the passageway, holding his Sin Eater in a two-fisted grip. The slab of vanadium alloy slid upward far more smoothly than the main entrance door. Stenz was dismayed by that, knowing it meant the sec door had been operated in the recent past.
The door's upward progress stopped, clicking into yhce. The squeal of the lifting mechanism faded and seemed to blend with a new sound—a faint, high-pitched whine so distant that Stenz couldn't really be certain he heard it. Presky thrust his head forward.
No lights. All dark. Can't see a thing. The tingling became a prickle. The fine hairs all over his body seemed to vibrate, to bristle.
The air pulsed Kke the beating of a gigantic, invisible heart. Presky opened his mouth and half shouted, "I see a light—" With a ripping whiplash sound, the door seemed to gush a torrent of blood. A wavering funnel of intolerably bright crimson light washed from the darkness and spiashed over Presky.
For an instant, his body swayed as if he stood in the path of a stiff wind. He rocked back on his heels. In the space of a heartbeat, his armor bubbled like boiling tar, then flapped away in black streamers, splattering the walls and floor with thick, semiliquid tendrils. The twenty 9 mm rounds in the magazine of his Sin Eater exploded simultaneously in a flare of flame and an eardrum-jarring concussion.
Presky didn't fall. His body flowed, smearing itself across the floor like a viscous ebony pudding bearing only the vaguest suggestion of a human outline. Stenz stood wedged between the door frame and the wall, paralyzed by terror and shock. His eyes watched Presky ooze over the corridor, and his ears heard moist, slithery sounds as the man's jellied remains stretched slowly along the passageway.
Then all the Magistrates began to scream, to curse, to retreat in panic. Stenz slammed down the lever in a spasmodic movement, but the sec door didn't drop. Hughes and DeCampo, on the run, swiveled around to hurl indiscriminate blasterfire in the direction of the open doorway, forcing Stenz to jam himself sideways against the wall to avoid the wild slugs.
Under other circumstances, he would have shouted orders to bring his men under control. Instead, he began to sob, hot tears springing from his eyes and scorching their way down his cheeks. A red, shimmering spear engulfed DeCampo's head. Polycarbonate, hair, bone and flesh slapped against the wall as if someone had tossed a basinful of sludge there.
As the man's headless body toppled to the floor, the liquid mixture of flesh, bone, brains and polymer trickled down the wall like silt. Stenz kicked himself away from the corner and caught a fragmented glimpse of a light dancing in the darkness beyond the doorway.
A periphery of radiance shone around it like a ghostly halo. His boots gouged gashes in Presky with the sound of a man running through a bog. As he leaped over DeCampo's decapitated corpse, he thought he heard another sound—voices raised in malicious, drunken laughter.
Stenz risked a quick over-the-shoulder glance and he cried out in horror. He had a fleeting vision of a broad, inhumanly flattened head peering over the threshold.
Pendulous lips writhed, twisting in a wet smile of glee. Beneath the head, he saw a monstrously misshapen, stunted body. Stenz ran, bleating in terror with every step. He ignored the hot stream of urine running down his leg just as he ignored the flow of tears burning his skin. He raced down the corridor, the drumming footfalls of Hughes, Miller and Lewis rebounding from the floors and wails ahead of him.
Even when he turned the corner and was presumably out of sight of the thing behind the door, he didn't slow his pace. The square of light in the open entrance gaped like the gates of salvation. The three Magistrates were already plunging through it, scrambling recklessly down the rock face.
Stenz followed them, jumping from ledge to ledge. He had stopped bleating, stopped sobbing. The only sounds were his harsh breathing and the crunching of boot soles on stone.
His racing thoughts settled into a slightly more rational rhythm. The other marks he had seen in the dust indicated that whatever weapon had been unleashed in the redoubt was mounted on wheels. Blizzard seems to have scored a decisive win in the never-ending battle against automated "bot" programs that play games like Hearthstone without human intervention.
Crawlerbots, maker of the popular Hearthcrawler bot, announced this morning that it is closing up shop in the wake of a recent crackdown on users of the automated play tools. In what's dubbed as its "last official announcement," Crawlerbots writes that "the recent ban wave in Hearthstone hit a lot of users.
With tears in our eyes we have to say bye. Crawlerbots' announcement comes after Blizzard temporarily banned several thousands Battle. Going forward, accounts using bots or other cheats will be closed "without warning," Blizzard said.
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