Apocalypse Unborn by James Axler

Author:James Axler
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi, pdf
Publisher: Harlequin Enterprises
Published: 2008-03-25T16:00:00+00:00

Chapter Fifteen

Dr. Antoine Kirby rechecked the mag in his M-16. It was a nervous habit he’d picked up. Too many firefights in too many hellholes had left him with the persistent, nagging feeling that every mag was a bullet or two light, no matter what the round counter said.

Bell noted the dropped clip with a smirk. It faded as quickly as it appeared. Under other circumstances, he would have given his partner grief about the tic, asking him if he was really sure he was topped off, asking him if a round-counter would lie, and if so, why; asking if he wanted to maybe swap mags. From the colonel’s dead silence, he was plenty anxious, too.

And with good reason.

Two-thirds of their escape route was exposed to up-angled fire. The rope-railed path up the cliffside was long, narrow, steep as hell, with a sheer drop-off to the beach, and had more than a dozen tight switchbacks to navigate. If Doc Tanner didn’t come along under his own power, they were going to have to coldcock him and drag him by his bootheels. Either way, unless they got a big jump on their adversaries, they were in trouble.

The freezies’ main advantage was surprise, no one would expect them to bolt in a vertical direction. That and the fact that they more or less knew where they were going.

Because Kirby and Bell’s redoubt had not been looted and ransacked, they had access to vast amounts of predark information, both inside and outside its strategic confines. Its surviving computer banks allowed them to identify other undestroyed redoubts in the global system, and to remotely monitor their mat-trans activity and ambient power levels. Redoubt linkage and communication had been critical to the reestablishment of social and political order, postholocaust. Order that had never come.

After following Doc and his companions to Morro Bay, and learning the direction of the voyage was south, they had a good idea where they were headed. They already had confirmation that the Devil’s Peak redoubt was operational and that its advanced cyber and mat-trans systems were in use. It was also the only functioning facility within range of a three-to four-day sail.

By a strange quirk of fate, Kirby had actually visited the site once before, during a visit home to California while he was on semester break from Princeton. Some mathematician colleagues of his at the University of Mexico who worked at the National Astronomic Observatory had invited him up to the summit to have a look through the installation’s 2.1 meter telescope. Before the nukecaust, the remote Baja mountaintop was the second-best viewing spot in the world, after the Mauna Kea Observatory in Hawaii.

Outside the computers of their redoubt, the freezies’ main source of information was gossip and rumor gathered along the hellscape’s overland trade routes. There was a certain, undeniable consistency to some of the stories about Magus. Steel Eyes was reported to have appeared in a variety of places separated by long distances, distances impossible to span even by wag if the dates were even close to being correct.

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