James Axler - Shatter Zone

“Okay, I’m on point,” Ryan stated. “Jak and Krysty, cover me. Mildred and Doc, hold off as backup. J.B., you bring up the rear.” The one-eyed man had almost issued instructions to Dean, too, but his son had left the group a few months ago. His absence left like a ragged wound deep inside Ryan, but pain was part of life, and he accepted it as such. Only the dead felt nothing.

As the other companions moved into positions, Ryan pressed an ear against the door, listening for the sounds of any movement beyond. The silence was thick and heavy. Gingerly, he ran his hands along the jamb, searching for boobies. J.B. then stepped forward and ran a small pocket compass along the surface of the metal. The magnetic needle didn’t quiver once to indicate a hidden magnetic switch or mass proximity fuse.

Mildred tried to snort at the sight of J.B. studiously moving the tiny plastic compass along the door frame. The compass was a recent acquisition, found inside a cereal box in the ruins of a predark convenience store. It was a toy, nothing more, laughably inaccurate compared to a Boy Scout compass or a military-issue model. However, most of the predark compasses the companions found had been demagnetized by the EMP blasts of the nukes that burned down civilization. Incredibly, the toy still worked, and that alone made it invaluable.

“Looks clean,” J.B. said hesitantly, tucking away the precious compass and stepping back. “At least, no traps that I can find.”

Out of the corner of her eye, Mildred noticed that Doc’s hands were shaking a little as he set the selector pin on the LeMat.

“Sure that you can shoot straight?” she asked bluntly.

“Shoot? Absolutely,” Doc replied, assuming a firing position with the Civil War revolver. “As for straight, that is another matter entirely.”

“You know, they may not have attacked us yet,” Krysty said unexpectedly, “because they don’t know we’re here.”

Thoughtfully sucking at a hollow tooth, Ryan considered that notion. “Fair enough. Let’s try for a nightcreep first,” he suggested, inspecting the SIG-Sauer’s acoustical silencer. “We go soft and silent. No blasters until absolutely necessary. Jak, get ready.”

The albino teenager holstered his Colt Python and flexed both hands. Leaf-bladed throwing knives slid from inside his camou sleeves. He flipped the blades once in the air, catching them by the handles, then nodded. “Ready.”

“Triple red,” Ryan ordered, advancing to the door and pulling the lever. As the door swung aside, he slipped into the anteroom, then the control room with his blaster leading the way.

Nobody was in sight.

Whistling softly, Ryan waited as Jak and Krysty moved into the control room. Then the three companions quickly spread out so that they wouldn’t offer a group target for any snipers. Moving in unison across the control room, the three listened hard, but couldn’t hear a thing except for the soft mechanical hum of the giant, wall-spanning comps, and their own harsh breathing.

Reaching the opposite door, Ryan whistled and the other companions entered the control room, their blasters searching for any possible dangers. Staying close to the rear, Doc seemed uneasy, the scholar constantly switching his black-powder blaster from hand to hand to dry his palms on a pant leg.

“Nothing here—” Ryan started to say, then abruptly spun around and fired from the hip. Across the room something exploded in the shadows under the main console, spraying out bits of plastic and wiring.

Advancing slowly, Ryan scowled at the smoking device, wondering what the hell it could be. Then his eye went wide as the pieces lying on the floor began to ripple through an array of colors to finally match the pattern of the floor. But the effect only lasted a few moments before the smashed electronic circuitry of the broken device gave an audible click and the plastic faded into a neutral beige.

“Shit,” Jak muttered, tucking away a knife. “Seen lizard do, but…machine?”

“That is a probe droid,” Doc said, the wall vents gently sucking away the acrid smoke rising from the debris. “A robotic hunter for Operation Chronos.”

“Like dog?” Jak asked.

“Exactly. It is just one of their many…toys,” Doc finished with a sour expression. Standing straight, the scholar looked around with a scowl. “But if I recall correctly, a probe droid is for true emergencies only. By gad, where are we, their headquarters?”

“Does the place look familiar?” Krysty asked, frowning, her long hair coiling tightly in response to her tense nerves.

“They all do, dear lady,” Doc said angrily, thumbing back the hammer on his handcannon, only to gently ease it down again. “I always assumed that was done deliberately as another of their endless defenses. If an enemy force jumped in, they would still have to waste precious time making sure they were at the right location before attacking.”

“The way we do,” J.B. said unhappily.

“Exactly.”

“Shit.”

“Any chance two of them?” Jak asked urgently, watching the shadows in the corner for any suspicious movements.

Askance, Doc raised an eyebrow. “Two? Good Lord, no. You’re looking at about several million dollars’ worth of advanced robotics lying in pieces on the floor. They never even sent one of these after me before. I learned of them only by accident when I was crawling through an air vent in one of their insufferable prisons.”

“That during an escape attempt?” J.B. asked, reaching into a pocket and pulling out half a cigar. He tucked the stogie into his mouth and chewed it into place.

“During one of my many attempted escapes,” Doc corrected, his face going neutral. “They caught me that time, and…punished me severely. Then the scientists decided I was too much trouble, and, well, you know the rest.”

“A hunting probe,” Ryan growled, rubbing his chin. “If the whitecoats didn’t send one after Doc, then we can damn well guess what it was looking for this time.”

“Us. The whole nuking group,” Krysty said grimly, her hair flexing in agitation. “I thought there had been something watching us in the redoubts for a while.”

“Well, they found us at last,” J.B. agreed, tilting back his fedora.

“No, they haven’t,” Mildred corrected, kneeling alongside the broken machine. Fumbling among the wreckage, she lifted a flexible cable into view. “See this? It’s a USB cable, and I don’t see any radio inside the probe.”

Moving the end of the cable closer to the master control board, she point at a USB port set about a foot off the floor. “That’s where this goes,” Mildred stated, holding the cable near the input jack, then she moved it slightly farther away again, just to be safe. “So maybe this droid knows we’re here, but it never got the chance to tell anybody.”

“Mebbe,” Ryan said darkly, his face unreadable. “On the other hand, if they were here, they’d be using the sec vid cams in the walls and not some fancy robot.”

“So the whitecoats must be in another redoubt.”

“Yeah.”

“Makes sense,” Krysty agreed, looking at the hallway door. “But there’s only one way to be sure.”

Crossing the control room, Ryan went to the exit and yanked open the door. The outside hallway was empty, all of the doors along both sides of the passageway closed as usual. The floor was spotlessly clean, the air from the vents warm and clean, smelling ever so slightly of disinfectant chemicals. Personally, Ryan would have been more comforted by a few scorch marks from explosions and some decaying corpses. A redoubt full of dead he could comprehend. Why the predark mil had removed all of the supplies and left the bases stripped bare had never made any nuking sense.