James Axler - Polestar Omega

Outside the mat-trans unit and in the control room, he saw his companions lined up with black cloth hoods pulled over their heads. Behind them, the colored lights of the mat-trans’s control panels blinked erratically. A layer of frost coated one side of the room. The concrete walls were cracked in places, floor to ceiling. Thick tendrils of ice had seeped through the gaps; they looked like pale blue tree roots. Then a hood came down over his head from behind and he couldn’t see anything.

“Your clothes and boots are contaminated,” the leader said. “Stand still while we remove them. We will dress you in clean coveralls and boots. If you fight us, you will go naked.”

“Don’t resist,” Ryan said through the hood. He let them pull off his clothes and help him into a baggy jumpsuit and a pair of too-loose, slip-on boots. As his arms were drawn behind his back and his wrists handcuffed, Mildred let out a shrill yelp followed by a string of curses.

“Mildred, are you all right?” Ryan asked.

A hand gripped his right biceps and he was forced to move forward. He could hear the crunch of footsteps ahead of him on the frozen floor. They marched in a straight line, down what he presumed was a long hallway, then turned and began climbing down flights of stairs. Sustained movement returned feeling to his hands and feet, and the shivering stopped. As they continued to descend, Ryan kept count of the number of landings they passed. When they reached the twentieth, his boots splashed through standing water. It was definitely warming up.

The grip on his arm squeezed tighter, making him stop. “Lift your foot,” a muffled voice said in his ear.

Ryan stepped over the unseen obstacle, then felt the rush of air as behind him a heavy door slammed shut. The hand on his arm pushed him onward and down another long passageway. It was much warmer now, and he could feel and hear a steady grinding sound somewhere below.

They came to more stairs, but these were narrow and spiraled tightly downward without landings. Ryan counted the steps as they descended. It was getting harder and harder for him to maintain his bearings and keep track of the details of the route back to the mat-trans.

At the bottom of the staircase was another straightaway. They traveled a short distance along it before he was steered to the right. Strong hands slammed Ryan’s shoulder into a wall and behind his back, chained the manacles to what felt like a metal ring set at waist height. Footsteps moved away and then a door banged shut.

“Is everyone here?” he asked from under the hood. “Check in.”

“I’m here,” Mildred said. “Might have a case of frostbite, though, I can’t tell without looking.”

“Not hurt,” Jak said. “Bastards took blades. No weps left.”

“A bit rumpled, but unharmed,” Doc said.

“I’m here and okay,” Ricky reported.

As Ryan waited and waited for Krysty to answer, his pulse began to pound. “Krysty, are you still with us, are you okay?”

After a pause, a familiar voice spoke up. “Sure thing, lover, I was just messing with you. Wanted to know if you missed me.”

Though Ryan was irked, he had to admit it was kind of funny and the joke broke the tension of their predicament. “Don’t say anything more for the time being,” he told them. “For all we know the orange bastards could still be in the room. Or they could be listening. Just try to warm up and relax.”

But Ryan wasn’t relaxing. His mind raced, trying to put together what little he had seen and heard. Who were their captors? He didn’t have a clue, except that they seemed to speak accentless English. From the temperature and all the ice, the redoubt where they found themselves was either somewhere at high altitude, far north, or mebbe close to one of the poles. Ryan didn’t think they had made a big jump in elevation, say to a mountaintop glacier; he was experiencing no light-headedness, none of the usual, all-over prickling of the skin.

The orange suits looked like specialized protective gear, which told him that these people had used whitecoat technology to adapt to life in the cold. He’d only had the briefest glimpse, but the suits looked repaired, rips and tears patched with less faded fabric—they could have been originally manufactured predark, like the M-16 longblasters they carried.

Ryan turned his head at the sound of the door opening and the shuffle and scrape of shoe soles on concrete. Without preamble, the hood was ripped off his head and he stared into the face of man about his height, but ten years older, with short-cropped silver hair and hard brown eyes. He wore no orange suit, nor did any of the others. Male and female, they were all dressed like scientists, and they all had black respirators strapped over their noses and mouths.

“Bastard whitecoats,” J.B. said in disgust.

The silver-haired man turned from Ryan and appeared to stare down the line of captives in canary-yellow coveralls—from the tall, shapely redhead to the male albino, from the black woman with beaded plaits to the short man in glasses and squashed down hat, from the scarecrow senior citizen to the strapping young Latino. “My, my,” he said, “haven’t we netted ourselves a motley crew.”

Eyes beaming, he addressed the companions. “Welcome to the redoubt Polestar Omega,” he said. “I am Dr. Victor Lima. My team and I are tasked with biosecurity—the identification and quarantine of potential hazards to human life. Before we can let you enter the central compound, we must test your blood and tissue for contaminants. The tests are painless and quick. We should have the results back in a matter of minutes. Are you all amenable?”

“Don’t see that we have a choice,” Ryan replied. The small room they were in had no windows. Floor, walls, low ceiling were poured concrete, and there was a distinctive, sharp pong in the air—it smelled like ammonia.

“We need to take blood and tissue samples before we can admit you to the redoubt’s general population,” Dr. Lima said. “If you don’t cooperate, we will sedate you and take the samples anyway.” He nodded at his assistants who flourished loaded syringes from behind their backs. “The choice of course is yours.”

“What kind of contaminants are you screening for?” Mildred asked. “You don’t need blood to test radiation levels.”

“It appears we have an expert on the subject,” Dr. Lima said. “Where did you receive your training?”

“University of Deathlands.”

“Well, Doctor,” Lima said, “you will certainly appreciate the fact that ours is an isolated population, without acquired immunities. We are therefore theoretically vulnerable to hostile microorganisms and toxic chemical compounds from the wider world. We must take all necessary precautions.”

“What happens if we come back ‘contaminated’?” Mildred said.

“You will have to be quarantined until you are treated and cleared.”

“A nice, restful sleep might be welcome,” Doc said, displaying a set of remarkably fine teeth for a man apparently in his sixties. In reality, the old man was more than two hundred years old, having been time-trawled from his own Victorian era to the final years of the twentieth century, then cruelly discarded by the scientists who had kidnapped him, flung forward beyond an impending nuclear apocalypse to its terrible aftermath—Deathlands. The serene smile and a shifting of weight onto the balls of his feet said if called on, Doc was more than ready for a fight, even a hopeless one.

“Give them what they want,” Ryan said.

Ricky looked at him in disbelief.

“You heard me. We know when we’re beaten. Take your samples.”

“Pequeños cabrónes,” Ricky muttered. But he, too, stood still for the personal violation, letting them draw a vial of blood from his arm and swab the inside of his mouth with a stick tipped in cotton.