"Then let's do it," Ryan said, unsheathing his own panga.

And so began the next phase of the journey. They were out of the plain, and now only a few miles from the settlement that appeared on the surface to be devoid of life, but that they knew to somehow house the Illuminated Ones-probably in a redoubt of some kind.

When they had made camp for the night, Doc sat with Ryan, Krysty and Gloria, musing on this.

"It presents us with a whole series of th.o.r.n.y little problems, doesn't it?" he asked rhetorically. "If the Illuminated Ones are in a redoubt, then why have they never tried to travel around the Deathlands? Or at least, not to the extent where we have ever come across them before, or heard mention of them until recently."

"Mebbe, if they are the ones of which our legends speak, and they are the guardians of the gateway, then they have greater knowledge," Gloria mused, running loose earth through her fingers and watching it fall to the ground as she spoke. "Mebbe they have a way of regulating their travel through the old tech- yourselves have spoken of how you cannot control where you land. Well, mebbe they can."

Ryan and Krysty exchanged sharp glances. They, and the others, had been careful not to speak too much of their travels through the mat-trans in front of any of the Gate. Did this mean that Jak had been speaking to Gloria about these things without telling the others? There had been no set rule about this, but it had been a.s.sumed by all that it would be best to keep this quiet until or unless it was necessary.

Doc also noticed this, but chose to ignore the apparent oddity and keep his own counsel...as ever. "A good point, my dear lady. It would seem that it was the merest accident that tapped us into the previous Illuminated Ones' redoubt that we encountered. If they have their old tech in good working order, they may be able to use other redoubts and block their own ones from receiving any, ah, unwanted visitors, shall we say?"

"Well, they may be getting them now," Gloria said quietly, with a sly grin to herself.

Doc seemed not to notice this. He was staring over Gloria's head at some point far off in the middle distance, where there was something that only he seemed to see.

He continued in a faraway voice. "It was a strange thing, to be pitched into the middle of an alien time and to hear so much that seemed to make sense only with the benefit of hindsight. There were rumors of a secret society that was ready to take over the government and use it for its own ends if the end time came. And yet, in one of those strange dichotomies that seem to occur so often when power and intrigue become inextricably entwined, it was also rumored that this society was funded by the black operations budget of the very government that it sought to overthrow. Indeed, it was rumored that the security agencies of that government had infiltrated the secret society to such an extent that it was, in fact, operated by the government itself and was no more than a failsafe device for retaining power if civilization collapsed around its ears...which, of course, it did. Ironic, then, is it not, that this very society is now little more than a footnote to the saga of the Deathlands, existing in its own little void somewhere in the northeast of what used to be a so-called United States?"

There was a pause, then Gloria said, "Nice story, honey, but what does it have to do with what we're after?"

Doc seemed to snap back from his own private world, and for a moment looked at the Gate queen with eyes that were wide and innocent, uncomprehending of the world. And then her words filtered through, and a look of amazement spread across his face. "Why, is it not obvious? If the Illuminated Ones and the government of the old predark United States were one and the same, in effect, then doesn't it make sense that the shadow center of government that I heard rumors about will be the very place where the secret society will be based? Where the gateway you seek, and where the possible entry to the stockpile and peace which we seek... Well, where they will be?"

Ryan fixed Doc with a steely gaze from his icy blue eyes. "Are you saying what I think you're saying, Doc?"

The old man nodded. "I believe so, my friend. Welcome, indeed, to what is left of the const.i.tutional government of the United States of America. And believe me, you really are welcome to it..." he added bitterly.

AS THE NIGHT DREW in, Gloria gathered her people before the campfire. Only the guards outside the encampment were out of sight and hearing.

The Gate queen sat with her back to the fire, no more than a backlit shadow as she spoke, the light from the fire illuminating the halo of her red mane, making it glow like the fire from her soul as she began to breathe slowly, steadily and deeply, trancing herself to begin another retelling from the legends of her people. A retelling that was to be saved especially for a moment such as this, a moment when the great aim of the tribe was to finally be within their grasp.

Her voice was huskier, deeper and more sonorous as she began to recite from her trance.

"When the time came for the world as we knew it to end and for the people to begin over, it was said that the only way to preserve the past and begin the future was to preserve that which had made the past great, that which had helped to keep the power within.

"And so they made the place of hiding in the shape of power. Five-sided and like a pentagram but yet not, it was built in secret to mirror the power as perceived. Within and below, the power would now be centered within the shadow and like unto a mirror. It would be magnified and increased through the years until it was ready to be reclaimed...reclaimed at a point where the future was ready for the next rising.

"Those who would be a part of this reclamation of power were the chosen ones, the warriors who had been trained through the ages to use that power wisely and well. They would have to search, and on that search they would learn, so that when they arrived it would be the right time. Not before, and not after..."

The incantation continued, but Ryan glanced across and noticed Doc deep in thought. So it was that, after Gloria had finished and the Gate were dispersing for the long watches of the night, Ryan called his people together and sat them before the fire.

"So, Doc," the one-eyed warrior began, "tell me what you think."

"About what?" he replied, adding, "Unless you mean what I think you mean..."

"I do, Doc. She's talking about the Pentagon, right? I read about it when I was growing up in Front Royal. It all points to that, and it all ties in with what you were saying before. My guess is that the Gate were some kind of offshoot of the Illuminated Ones, mebbe a breakaway group of some kind. I knew there was a lot of dissension before skydark, a lot of strange cults and religions that thought the world would end with the coming of a new millennium. And my guess is that each of these groups would have supporters and believers who had some kind of power somewhere, or some kind of it to that power."

Doc smiled wryly. "Ah, now that I would not know much about, my friend. Remember, I was not around in that time for too long. Come to that, most of the time I was there they were too busy trying to keep me quiet and out of the way. I only know the rumors-"

"Yeah, well, I lived through it, Doc, and it sure as s.h.i.t sounds that way to me," Mildred said, shaking her head bitterly so that her plaits shook around her head.

"The funny thing is that most of us didn't believe that there would be anything in it."

"Yeah, but that's all history now," Dean cut in. "It doesn't really matter where the Gate came from, does it? It only matters that this place is what they've been looking for, and it's what we're looking for-"

"And that it's going to be heavily protected and a b.a.s.t.a.r.d to get into," J.B. said softly.

"Right. Hard f.u.c.kers," Jak murmured. "We need be triple red or chilled."

Ryan nodded. "True enough. But we need to know as much about their history as possible. Knowing where they come from and how they think will give us an advantage. If we can get into their heads just a little bit, it'll be an advantage when we're on their territory. Otherwise we're totally blind, and that can only be a bad thing."

"I agree with you there, lover," Krysty said. Her hair, although flowing and not tight to her head, still twitched a little as she spoke. "This isn't going to be easy. I don't like those laser blasters. They're not easy to fight against. We've been lucky so far because of numbers. But we don't know how many of them there are down there."

"You're right," J.B. agreed. "The laser blasters could be good weapons if they were in the right hands. So far the people who've been using them haven't been good fighters. That's been our luck. That could change. Besides, if they have those, what the h.e.l.l else do they have waiting for us?"

"It will be interesting to find out," Doc commented wryly. "At least between us we should have an idea of how the settlement is laid out, seeing as it seems to be a replica of the Pentagon."

"Have we?" Mildred said. "s.h.i.t, Doc, I lived through all that, but I don't think I could tell you what it looked like apart from the fact it had five sides!"

"Good job I try to read those old papers we find once in a while," Ryan said. "'Cause I've read a few things about it."

"It's not the settlement that worries me," J.B. muttered darkly, "or their weaponry. It's ours. Too many small-caliber handblasters, and the laser blasters we've got. Margia's too keen to use them."

J.B.'S WORDS WERE prophetic, as the blond armorer produced one of the captured blasters next morning, as camp was being drawn. She interrupted a brief target practice to test the weapon.

Examining the blaster from all angles, the blonde noticed that J.B. had come to watch.

"You know how to work these?" she asked him.

J.B. shook his head. "The only ones we ever found were broke. And h.e.l.l, watching the way the Illuminated Ones f.u.c.ked up with them, I'd guess that they're not that great."

Margia smiled, and for a second resembled her sister as one side of her mouth rose in the lopsided grin that the sour armorer was less inclined to favor than her warrior sister. "Mebbe you just couldn't work it out anyway, sweetie," she said. "Just mebbe I can do it better. Wouldn't that be something, if I could outdo the great J.B. Dix?"

He refused to rise to the bait, even though he was aware that all the Gate warriors gathered there were watching for his reaction. "Mebbe you can make it fire out here. Does that mean it's reliable in a firefight?"

"We'll have to see," Margia said. "Okay, let's do it."

She stepped up to the line drawn for the target shoot and raised the rifle to her shoulder. Fumbling a switch on the side, she squeezed the trigger and released a recoilless blast of light that scorched through the target, raising a gasp of interest from the a.s.sembled warriors.

"Pretty f.u.c.king good, even though I do say so myself." She smiled at J.B. "Guess mebbe I can just do this s.h.i.t better than you, honey."

Although the slur annoyed the Armorer, he was more concerned by the fact that Margia would now be certain to use the laser blasters in combat when he was sure that they were unreliable. It was the one thing he dreaded.

J.B. turned and walked away without a word, aware that there was nothing he could do. If he went to Gloria, then it would mean a possible rift at a crucial time. And even if he told Ryan, then there was nothing much that the one-eyed warrior could do.

It was an additional problem that they didn't need as they entered such dangerous territory.

Chapter Thirteen.

The journey through the rest of the woodland was ominously quiet. To get so close to the settlement, and to know that the hidden inhabitants knew they were close, yet to have no obstructions thrust in their path kept both the Gate tribe and Ryan's people in a state of constant tension. Not that that was necessarily bad. It helped them to stay triple red and frosty even when all around was quiet. But somehow the suspense was fraying their nerves and attention, making it sure that sooner or later they would snap.

So it was a relief to reach the end of the woods. As with the plain, the division wasn't natural. The woods ended abruptly, with a division that suggested a carefully maintained watch on nature encroaching too far onto what, on the surface at least, seemed a deserted and long since abandoned ville. This was belied by that careful maintenance.

Gloria dropped to her haunches as they emerged from the woods, holding up a hand to signal a halt. She pawed at the earth, taking a handful and sniffing it. Ryan crouched beside her.

"Tell you anything much?" he asked.

"Tells me enough, sweets. Tells me that it's been turned recently, and that it wasn't the first time. Woodland like this should spread easily. At the very least there should be saplings for the next hundred yards where the trees reclaim the land. And there's nothing wrong with the soil. This is good, rich earth, and the texture and moistness suggested that it's been turned regularly. If this was recent, then it would still have dry crust in it. This is loose." She crumbled the remnants of the soil in her hand through her fingers, sieving it gently and letting it fall until her hand was empty. "See?" she added. "Nothing left here." She held out her empty hand.

"So they keep the area clean but otherwise don't use it, and want anyone coming too close to think that it's deserted," the one-eyed warrior mused. He cast his eye to where the old wire fencing forming an enclosure around the ville had long since vanished. A row of evenly s.p.a.ced concrete posts, reinforced with steel rods, now corroded and covered with the grime of decades, stood for as far as he could see in either direction, like an endless row of rotten teeth in the mouth of a seemingly harmless mutie...one that could still take your head off if you didn't pay heed. The electrified wire that had ran between the posts was little more than a memory.

But Ryan was aware that this was a facade. They had already encountered the forces that had to surely live beneath the seemingly dead surface. Furthermore, they had seen and fought the results of the experiments these people had perpetrated on stickies.

His hard, steely blue left orb caught sight of a lone concrete pillar, seemingly undamaged. Set deep into the concrete was an opaque lens: a sec camera. The pillar was too high, at this angle, to get a good look at the deep-set camera, but the impa.s.sive blue-black lens stared unblinkingly ahead, refusing to tell him whether it was dead or un.o.btrusively recording their arrival at the edge of the settlement.

Gloria followed his gaze. "Soon find out," she said simply, realizing what was pa.s.sing through the one-eyed warrior's mind. "Just have to prepare for a reception committee."

"Whatever form it takes," Ryan murmured.

Both leaders rose, and Gloria turned back to her people. She whistled a series of low-pitched commands barely audible in the quiet of the ville but still carrying back to the rear of the caravan, where Doc gave Jon and Petor an amused stare. He waited until the last of the whistles had died away on the quiet morning.

"I can see the use of such a system-after all, who but you would be able to define its meaning-but by the Three Kennedys, it must be a devil of a job to learn."

Petor shrugged. "It's always been there, since we were little. Just like learning to talk."

"That's all it is," Jon added, "just different talk."

Doc shrugged. "And to think that when I was young they tried to wipe out races with such a complex system of communication, calling them primitive. Yet who thrives now?"

Jon and Petor looked at each other. Once again, Doc had lost them. But it was no matter, the movement of the caravan in front of them meant they were spared the possible long winded explanation that would follow asking him what the h.e.l.l he was talking about.

The Gate had begun to enter the settlement that might be the place where they met with their destiny.

THE FIRST LEVEL BEGAN more than a hundred feet below the surface. It was a warren of small offices and work s.p.a.ces, divided and soundproofed to enable the chatter and hum of electrical and computer equipment to stay muted, and not to build to an intolerable level of noise. Within these small units, a single operative monitored a single camera, with a vid machine recording on slow speed -with a jerky, almost surreal playback when required-any activity.

There was hardly any activity that took place on the outside, and most of the tapes used in the vid machines had been recycled so many times that watching the relatively dry and warm outside on tape playback became transformed into watching a winter scene, dappled with the snow of overused tape. Not that it mattered much, as the most they ever recorded was a bunch of altered stickies returning to where they had been released, hungry and tired and trying to find a way back into the womb that had birthed their even more mutated mutie forms.

The watchers worked in shifts, and were allocated other tasks every few calendar months so that they didn't burn out to the point where nothing on the screen could register anymore on their vid-fried synapses. They had a full life-or at least, as full a life as was possible when most of their existence was beneath ground.

And that was just as well, for when they were on sec-monitor duty they had to endure the most cloistered and mentally debilitating of environments. They sat in a molded chair, in front of the vid screen, the only sounds the loud whir and clank of the ancient vid recorders. Over the decades, these had grown louder and the machines more erratic. There were priorities, and even though there were plentiful supplies to keep the settlement in good condition, they existed in a perpetual state of emergency where only the things deemed necessities were allowed to be kept in A-l condition. The rest existed in a make-do-and-mend state. And because there had been so little threat from aboveground for so long, the sec-vid machines had slipped further and further down the priorities list until they had almost disappeared off the bottom.

Which was why sec-vid observer Simon Rack sat impa.s.sively in front of his monitor, in a darkened room lit only by a dull red glow, humming tunelessly to himself to try to blot out the noise of the machine. If this one machine had not been separated by the part.i.tion walls, and the noise had been amplified by that of the other vid machines, then the hideous racket would have been enough to drive a man to insanity. As it was, Rack felt sometimes close to the edge just in his small room, hemmed in by walls that were drab and barely visible in the semidarkness, the only distractions from the screen being the intercom system that connected him to the main sec force control room, the small chemical toilet in the corner of the room and the jumble of wires emerging from a cavity in one corner of the room, leading into a shaft. Sometimes, when he was really bored, Rack wondered what the jumble of wires had been connected to and why it had been removed. But as that had occurred long before his time, it was idle speculation, with nothing on which to base any guess he might try to make.

The toilet was in the room because the operative placed in the room was secured, locked in until the shift was over. It was something the operatives accepted, even if they didn't like it. The job was so tedious, so mind-numbingly boring, that an unlocked and open door might have proved an overwhelming temptation.

So he sat, humming noisily and badly, bored, and wishing that his shift would end. There was never anything to see, anyway.

Rack was pa.s.sing the time thinking about how he would spend his leisure hours, those precious few that were allotted at the end of each shift for rest and recreation. Perhaps he would use the VR chamber and enter a scenario where he, for once, could be in charge of his own destiny. The VR chamber was among those items in the settlement kept in excellent working order. And with good cause, as the release it afforded the frustrated and strung-out lower orders such as Rack enabled them to still operate efficiently and toe the party line. They weren't fools, they knew that this was why the equipment was kept in such good order, but didn't object. How could they? Brought up in the order, they knew that it was essential that they all fulfill their tasks and keep the ideals alive.

The thought of what would happen when those ideals became a reality, and they were able to emerge from beneath the ground to take their rightful place up above caused him to wander off into an even deeper reverie, so deep that he almost didn't notice the emergence of a group of people on the edge of the clearing covered by his camera. They were led by a small, barely dressed red-haired woman and a muscular, bronzed warrior with only one eye.

It had been so long since Rack had actually seen anything other than the odd stickie on the sec vid that it took him a moment to take in what was happening.

"Oh, s.h.i.t," he breathed as it struck home. This had to be the group that had taken out Sharofsky's men a few nights back. And now they were here. Well, they'd pay for that.

Rack punched the b.u.t.ton on the intercom in front of him. The speaker crackled into life, and a disjointed voice seeped through the static.

"Main room. What is it, Si?"

"Al, you're not going to believe this, but even after that little warning they've come here."

There was a pause, then the voice said, "You're s.h.i.ttin' me, right, Si? I mean, no one comes here. Everyone knows this is nowhere, right? That's why it's so safe. That's why it was built, right? Jeez... Okay, let me deal with this."

The intercom went dead, and Rack lost his sense of urgency. Let Al deal with it now. He would just sit here and watch, same as ever.

THE CARAVAN consisting of the Gate tribe and Ryan's people entered the settlement. Once beyond the remnants of the wire fencing, there were other posts with ominously still cameras that littered the few hundred yards until they reached the point where the settlement began in earnest. They had entered at a tangent to the main entrance, and as such it was some distance to the first of the roads that crisscrossed the compound.

As Doc had suspected from the stories he had heard, the compound was military-industrial in design, and was modeled on the area surrounding the old Pentagon, long since wiped out in the nukecaust of skydark. And although this area had escaped the complete desolation of what had once been the state of Washington, it had received some residual damage. Many of the buildings that dotted the way along the roads showed pockmark and burn damage, exacerbated by the fact that they had been left empty in the years since.

The settlement seemed long dead, and the traffic signals at junctions that indicated that at one time there had been much traffic around the compound were now dead. A camera was mounted on each signal. As they progressed slowly through the compound, Dean kept an eye on the cameras. They, too, seemed long dead, but he couldn't shake the idea that they were moving-just slightly, almost imperceptibly, but enough to justify his paranoia.

The Illuminated Ones would surely know that they were coming, and it was almost certain that they would have some kind of surveillance system in operation. After all, they seemed to have a much better set of old tech than any other sec force that the companions had come across in their travels. And they seemed to be able to travel using the mat-trans units, a system that few people, other than the companions, had ever discovered.

But despite the tech and despite the fact that they knew from their previous encounters that the Gate caravan was on its way, the Illuminated Ones seemed quiet. Too quiet.

There was little sign of any action within the compound except that of the Gate themselves. Gloria had dispatched a series of outriders to traverse the avenues and freeways of the compound, dodging between the buildings and checking the alleyways for any signs of life. It was a large compound, and the Gate progressed at a snail's pace while the outriders went on their mission, quartering the areas directly ahead and combing them thoroughly. Small groups scouted even farther ahead, running preliminary checks without endangering themselves or the tribe.

Blasters were drawn, and nerves were taut.

Jak held his .357 Magnum Colt Python with the barrel down to the ground and his arm rigid, the tendons stretched as tight as his nerves. He walked beside Gloria and Ryan. The warrior queen held her Vortak grasped in both hands, barrel to her left-hand side. Her icy blue eyes darted around her, her piercing stare attempting to cut through the surrounding buildings and see any lurking danger.

The outriders returned, Tammy among them. The auburn-haired, statuesque woman approached her queen and reported.

"I don't know how they're doing it, but they're up here somewhere and trying to direct us."

Gloria held up her hand to halt the caravan, then said, "Direct us? What do you mean, sweets?"

Tammy looked back in the direction she had come, as though searching for inspiration. She grimaced, bit her lip, then shrugged. "It's kind of hard to put into words, and it may sound really stupe, but I'm sure that there were some intersections blocked on the way back that hadn't been when I went on the way out."

"Are you sure?" Ryan asked.

Tammy shook her head distractedly. "Sure? What does that mean? I couldn't swear an oath to say that it was so, but it does seem kind of odd. For instance, there's all kind of junk littered about here, right?"