James Axler - Warlord Of The Pit

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.