Outlanders 31 uluru dest.., p.1
Outlanders 31 Uluru Destiny, page 1
Prologue
As the desert world of the great landmass beneath the Southern Cross held its breath in anticipation of the dawn, the little girl waited patiently.
To all appearances she appeared an unexceptional little girl. Perhaps seven years old, squatting on a flat, slightly tilted rock slab, her elbows braced on skinny brown thighs. She wore a ragged smock that had long ago taken on the color of the sere reddish brown land that stretched around her. She held a small, vaguely humanoid effigy, twisted together of rags so old and grease-impregnated they had virtually fused together, clamped beneath one tiny arm. Her constant companion, the effigy, had little knot-nubs for ears on either side of its round, featureless head.
Beneath a mad mass of ropy curls, dark brown with a hint of auburn, the girl's little face was a study in serene concentration as she watched the space, darker within darkness, beneath a tumble of flat boulders. Most humans would call her pretty, even those whose beauty image did not fit well with the strong features characteristic of her folk, which she herself possessed, albeit in child form. But she wasn't giving that, or them, any thought.
Perhaps she was extraordinary in her stillness. But she was concentrating. It had a purpose.
A band of yellow silhouetted ridges to the east. The dark star-scattered sky above, the tortured land below, seemed to undergo a subtle but sudden phase transition. All was about to change, and something already had.
Something, more, had sensed that change.
First she felt it stir, through her bare feet pressed to the rock with toes splayed. Then she heard it, a dry rustling and scraping.
And then she saw it, as it emerged into the night, which had not long to live.
It moved by slapping the rock before it with its huge splayed claws and dragging its dry belly and great wide tail along behind, pushing with clawed hind limbs as if swimming across the rock instead of walking. It blinked great sunflower eyes and sampled the suddenly freshening wind with a flicking forked tongue.
The vast head turned toward her, trailing flags of pale spittle from the bottom of its lower jaw. It sensed her, right enough. Its eyes made out the hump of vague lightness against a sky that had not yet begun to lighten except along its lower eastern seam. Its restless tongue brought particles of mammal scent to receptors within its mouth.
It was megalania, a monitor lizard, more than five meters long from blunt snout to the dagger tip of its tail, and weighing more than a metric ton.
After the nuclear devastation of roughly two hundred sun cycles before, certain types of animal had grown to enormous sizes. Megalania was not one. It had always been this large— this one, a male with a missing toe on its right hind foot, had taken fifty years to grow this large and would grow larger as it continued to live and feed. Its kind had ruled this desert island continent, vying for meat with giant flightless predatory birds and carnivorous kangaroos. Those rivals had vanished, long before the nukecaust.
Megalania had vanished, too—but only from the eyes of humankind. Its numbers had dwindled, had begun to dwindle millennia ago when the upstart hairless apes arrived to compete with it and the hunting birds and killer marsupials. But it had never died completely away. It had simply stayed sheltered, as this one had against the night, hidden among the rocks.
For a moment it watched the small mammalian creature watching it. It hungered. And this creature fit the profile of prey.
The creature knew the hairless apes could kill it. But this one was too small.
Yet the lizard didn't stir. It was sluggish, its metabolism running off the last of the heat it had stored during the sun's reign the previous day. Its bulk held heat well, shed it slowly, especially with earth and rock around to insulate it. But its size could also be a lethal disadvantage: if it stayed too long under the direct eye of the sun, now that the hot time of year was beginning, its blood could literally begin to boil where it ran near the surface of its thick yet fine-scaled skin. Its daytime life was a dance of sun and shade. And hunting, of course.
Sensing dawn's advent perhaps in the shifting of the wind—or perhaps, within, simply knowing—it had issued forth despite what to it was life-sapping chill. For the very first rays of dawn, feeble and slanting, would begin to reenergize it, restore mobility to its limbs and keenness to its senses with little risk of lethal overheating. This, then, was prime hunting time: the beginning of day.
Still, it was sluggish with chill and sleep. The little prey was near, and showed no fear. Yet the monster lizard did not launch itself with the last of the energy stored within its vast body—and there was enough, if little more. Nor did it slash with giant jaws, rimmed with teeth like shards of broken glass, and moreover toxic to warm-bloods by reason of the by-products of the microorganisms that dwelled in its mouth, feeding off the rotting shreds and sinews of its former meals. And then clamp, and hold, and wait, should the prey be slow to cease its struggles.
Beyond the boulder jumble and its guardian monster, beyond the red desert and the purple-blue-black mountains, rose a brilliant point of light, blue-white. This was Lilga, in the language of the people who dwelled here: the Morning Star.
The little girl smiled to greet it. She was also Lilga.
The huge reptile stared at her a moment more. Then it turned away its vast and ominous face and dragged itself laboriously off, skin hissing on sandstone, to seek elsewhere for its breakfast.
Lilga watched, happily fascinated, until the immense beast vanished with a final flourish of its sharp-tipped tail. Then she stood and stretched, and ran back toward where her people were gathered. Because little girls, like big lizards, got powerfully hungry of a morning.
A mile before her, the great rock Uluru caught the sun's first direct rays and took crimson fire to start another day.
Chapter 1
For the first time since the Program of Unification's final victory, intrusion-alert Klaxons blared within the sterile confines of the Palladiumville Monolith's upper levels. Men encased in shiny black-beetle armor carapaces began to move purposefully, guns gripped in polycarbonate-gauntleted hands.
Elsewhere confusion ruled. Within the disciplined ambit of baronial ville life, periodic drills were regularly scheduled for every conceivable emergency up to, and including evacuation of the upper levels. No such plans were considered necessary for the population of the Tartarus Pits below each ville. The Pit dwellers were considered thoroughly expendable assets, to the extent they were considered "assets" at all. However, over the decades adherence to that schedule had slipped slightly. The prospect of someone unauthorized actually finding his or her way into the upper stories of the gleaming white Administrative Monolith seemed remote at best.
Yet now it was happening.
And not just within one of the four subsidiary Enclave towers in which most of the privileged few actual citizens lived, but within the gleaming white stone phallus of the monolith itself, thrusting three hundred feet into a hot blue summer sky feathered with clouds by the winds off Lake Erie. Indeed, according to the light blinking in the command center of the Magistrate Division on Cappa Level, the intrusion was taking place in a storage area of the Historical Division, one floor above.
Just one floor beneath the sacrosanct aerie of Baron Palladium himself.
"Quit your bitching, Hendrix," snarled the commander of the Magistrate ready squad as he headed down a Cappa Level corridor with alarms blaring from the walls. He slammed home the bolt of his Copperhead on a gleaming silver 4.85 mm cartridge.
"But this is bogus, Senior Magistrate," Hendrix said. He carried his black hard-contact helmet in the crook of his arm. His tow hair was a thatch at just the limit of regulation length.
"This is supposed to be an easy pull."
It was. Palladiumville Mags were no softer than the men of any other barony's Magistrate Division. But they had limits that even their unsympathetic superiors had recognized. The half-dozen men on the internal-alert response team had spent too long on high-stress hard-contact details, either patrolling the Tartarus Pits, named for the caverns below Hell, where Zeus imprisoned the overthrown Titans, or the Outlands beyond the barony's high walls.
Which were worse than Hell.
Palladiumville's environs were especially brutal: the Great Lakes region had taken a pounding during the nukecaust. While it hadn't received the same degree of thermonuclear scourging as the east coast, it still boasted plenty of lethal hot zones. Much of the rest of the area was a nightmare of urban and industrial wreckage, a jungle of concrete and structural steel that provided a fertile environment and excellent cover for the nastiest kind of Outlands scum: Dregs, Roamers, taints and the very nastiest kinds of mutants, scabbies and stickies and even more exotic horrors. The trashed cities and industrial zones had provided a wonderland of hiding places from the genocidal campaign the nine barons had waged against muties following the Program of Unification.
Despite the fact that the Mags were, by design, the baddest boys on the block, with the best armor, the heaviest firepower and lethal, well-protected support vehicles like Deathbird attack choppers and Sandcat FAVs to lay serious and immediately lethal hurt upon all who challenged the authority of their baronial masters, the desperate hell-scum swarming in the Pits were dangerous. Even to Mags cased in their distinctive, near indestructible, black hard-contact armor.
And the stone hearts and literal monsters in the Outlands were a hundred times worse. Service in either environment took a brutal toll on even the most case-hardened Magistrat
Not that the barons and their administrative subordinates were tempted to allow their human pit bulls too much downtime. So what better way to give them a break than by keeping them ready to answer an alarm that, in over three generations, had never sounded?
"Fuck the luck, anyway," Hendrix grumbled.
"Clamp the chow-lock and put your damn hat on," Senior Mag Laydon snarled.
"What've we got, boss?" asked Creedy, a wiry light-skinned black who was the tallest man in the Palladium Mag Division. His helmet was secured and he spoke over the trans-comm channel.
His mouth, visible below the sweep of his visor, twitched periodically. Ten days before something resembling a four-foot-wide blend of pitcher plant and Venus flytrap had suddenly clamped down on the upper half of his partner, Montanez, while they hunted roamers in the trashed-out suburb of Shaker Heights, almost in view of the monolith. The plant had drawn Creedy's partner into itself. Creedy had promptly pulled his buddy out of the giant tangle of green and bilious vegetation, but all he got back was Montanez's hips and legs.
Mag life's a bitch, Hendrix thought, and then you get dissolved by some fucking acid-generating plant.
"Intel has an unauthorized database access from a computer terminal in Archival Storage 23- Bravo," Laydon said. Pointing to Marchetta and Dorsey to cover with their blasters, he led the way up the stairs to the level above, Copperhead in hand. Whatever else he was, Laydon was no coward.
"Who'd be triple stupe enough to get vidded waltzing down the hall and busting into a damn storage room?" asked Hendrix, who had his helmet on now and was on the net, too.
At the door to Bravo Level, Laydon turned. He showed a nasty grin beneath the dark-tinted visor of his helmet. "Nobody," he said.
"What do you mean?" Nguyen asked.
"I mean the vid pickups show no one entered the room." "Then who the hell's inside?" Hendrix asked.
"Who the fuck knows? Nobody ever put a cam in the storeroom itself. Why waste Mag time watching a bunch of crap dug out of the rubble moldering on shelves, when we could be kicking doors and busting heads?"
The Klaxons died as he held his forearm so a scanner beside the landing's blast- and fireproof door could read the identity chip planted beneath his skin. Hendrix was glad; that merciless rhythmic racket was giving him a migraine and just generally getting on his tits. The door swung open with the slight hiss of an airtight seal losing integrity. Bullpup Copper head ready in both hands, Laydon stepped through and to one side, quickly clearing the doorway's so-called fatal funnel.
Laydon was a twenty-year Mag and hadn't gotten that way by taking shit for granted. Somebody had gotten into the Historical Division storage compartment. The only way in was through the corridor. Therefore the best bet was that the cams in the corridor had been jobbed, probably by a tech—and if that had been done by anybody but the perp or perps now doing the deed, Laydon would be more than happy to personally bang on as many technicians as needful to get the true ungarbled word. And if the corridor surveillance had been compromised, there might just be bad guys awaiting them outside the storeroom.
There weren't.
As Nguyen and Creedy burst through and took up kneeling positions, Nguyen in front of Laydon and the beanpole Mag on the other side of the door, the senior Magistrate could clearly see the corridor was empty, the door to 23- Z shut.
Laydon gestured. Taitt and Hendrix, his posture and the whole way he moved eloquent of resentment, trotted down to secure the corridor from the far side of 23- Z down. Marchetta and Dorsey took up positions flanking the door, their Copperheads tipped toward e sound-deadening acoustic-tile ceiling. Creedy and the dubious Hendrix stationed themselves at the door proper.
Laydon strode after them, as tall and ominous as an avenging god, the sound-sucking properties of ceiling and wall material absorbing the heavy falls of his polycarbonate-armored boots. He took up position behind the two Mags waiting to go in.
"Now let's see who the smart-asses are," he rumbled. Once again he used his identity chip to activate the door-opening mechanism.
The door slid aside with a swish. A scent of dust and age wafted out to the Mags, quivering with something they hoped Laydon would take for eagerness. Inside stood ranks of racks of stamped metal shelves. They bowed under the weight of a myriad assortment of objects, some encased in plastic, others just in dust, pieces of equipment, unidentifiable junk, old tools covered with cancerous growths of rust; weird embryos, some human, some vaguely so, some not even, floating in murky fluid in fat glass vessels; a head, a skull rather, that came to a weird point high and in back and then slanted down to where the neck used to be, with tufts of mouse-colored hair still straggling from parts of it, and a humanlike arrangement of staring-empty eye sockets and nostril holes crowded way down on the front.
"Shit," murmured Marchetta, who had slipped through and taken up a standing position flanking the door to the left. His partner, Dorsey, knelt to the right. "Place creeps me out."
"Can the chatter on the net," Laydon snarled. He stood contemptuously framed in the doorway, ignoring procedure and sense, as if daring the intruders to try to shoot it out with him.
Fused-out fuck, thought Hendrix. The tow-headed Mag gave his back a hate look.
The far wall had display cases filled with more weird, inexplicable crap running along the base. From a quick briefing as they suited up in the ready room Hendrix knew the workstation in unauthorized use was on that wall to the left, out of sight behind the silent shelves of relics from the two centuries of misery and desolation that followed the nukecaust—and beyond, rumor said, maybe tens of thousands of years, speaking voicelessly of secrets it was death to know.
The Archivist Division types all went around as if they had corncobs stuck up their butts. But behind their prissy exteriors, Hendrix knew, they were all fused solid. In the locker rooms and commissary of the Palladiumville Mag Division it was said that everybody born into Archives got a termination warrant filed along with the birth certificate. They either went crazy or reached a point at which they just knew too much. In either case the boys in black paid them a visit, sooner or later. Life in Archives sucked almost as bad as life as a Mag.
Yet Hendrix knew full well, that either life was better than being a crawling subservient tech, and that in turn, was worlds ahead of being one of the human rats and maggots polluting the Pits below their booted feet. And it would be insulting vermin to compare the Outlands scum to them: they were more like the black crud that grew in toilets that weren't cleaned often enough—something else that seemed to be happening around the ville more these days, or so Hendrix perceived.
In sum, life sucked if you were Magistrate Hendrix, but it sucked worse for most everybody else. This had led him to the conclusion that life sucked. It was the nearest he had ever come to philosophy.
The top Mag took a couple of slow steps into the room, clearing the way for the rest of the squad to enter. Creedy and Hendrix looked at each other. Hendrix suspected the lean, looming black man was as glad as he was their hard-contact visors hid almost all of his expression.
"You first," Creedy's visible lips said soundlessly.
"No, you," Hendrix shot back the same way.
"You!"
"No, you!"
"Fucking move, ladies," Laydon snarled, "or I'll start handing out some extra assholes—"
A young woman walked around the corner from between shelves into the main aisle that ran from the open door to the display cases at the rear. She was short, dark skinned, dressed in blue jeans and a dark pullover, with a knit cap pulled down over a mass of brown curls. Her features were odd, emphatic, blunt with a broad nose. She had them tipped down toward a clipboard she was carrying.
Laydon shot her.
She just glanced up from her pad. Her eyes were big and tawny gold. She saw the Mags before her in their gleaming armor and her jaw dropped. Then muzzle flame jetted yellow from the muzzle brake of Laydon's Copperhead with a shattering noise.
As if by magic, a handful of red holes dotted the front of the young woman's woolly-looking blouse. She staggered back as the tiny slugs lanced through her. The clipboard fell with a winging of white sheets to clatter on the floor. Then she collapsed as if melting in fast motion, flinging out an arm and knocking a rack of shelves.
