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In a rustling whisper, Philboyd told of terrifying pursuits, of ambushes on
staircases, of his friends dy-ing one by one, judged and turned to stone by
Me-gaera and her Furies.
"Obviously, the Oubolus and the shadow suits had been found in the citadel,"
Philboyd stated. "But none of us knew where it was. But we do know Ser-amis
used this old mining center as her base of op-erations."
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James Axler - Outlanders - Devil in the Moon
"Who were the Furies?" Kane asked.
Philboyd looked at him in surprise, as if he hadn't expected the question. "I
presume people she swung to her cause."
"You never saw their faces?"
"No& not then or now. They always wore those masks. Why do you ask?"
Kane only shook his head. He remembered the dead Fury he had unmasked in
Chicago, recalling its long-
jawed, narrow-chinned, high-cheekboned face. He'd recognized the facial
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type he had seen it often enough over the past couple of years, particularly
dur-ing his captivity in Area 51.
The man was a hybrid. If not a full-fledged one, then certainly some traces of
Balam's genetic material were buried in his familial woodpile. He had been
much taller than the average hybrid, and his eyes hadn't possessed the
prominent supraorbital ridge arches, either. Lakesh had learned that the DNA
of Balam's folk was infinitely adaptable, malleable, its segments able to
achieve a near seamless sequencing pattern with whatever biological material
was spliced to it. In some ways, it acted like a virus, overwriting other
genetic codes, picking and choosing the best human qualities to enhance. Their
DNA could be tin-kered with to create endless variations, adjusted and
fine-tuned.
Strongbow had led them all to believe that Enlil's DNA possessed the same
qualities, so it was possible the Furies were some mixture of human and
Annu-naki.
"Anyhow," went on Philboyd, "after a couple of months only me, Marian, Eduardo
and Neukirk were left.
They captured us but they didn't kill us. They put us into cryostasis."
Grant's eyebrows knitted in confusion. "Why? Why didn't you get the same
treatment as all the oth-ers?"
' 'Like I said, we four were the main DEVIL project team. Megaera needed us or
she figured she would need us at some future date, so were put into stor-age."
"And that date arrived?" Kane inquired.
Philboyd nodded. ' 'We were revived a little over a year ago. The DEVIL
platform's positioning system had malfunctioned, and we were expected to fix
it." His lips twitched in a mirthless smile. "We did, but we did more than
that. We downloaded all the sec-ondary analogues from our mainframes and
changed all the access codes, targeting and trajectory pro-grams, recognition
signals and launch commands. All the primary codes have been rewritten, and
any at-tempts to delete the new program results in an im-mediate lockout."
"Nobody figured it out?" Brigid asked.
Philboyd's eyes narrowed. "Most of the old tech-nical knowledge was lost
during our 193 years in sta-sis.
The descendants of the original base personnel know enough to keep certain
important systems func-tioning, but that's about it."
"How many people on the base now?" inquired Kane.
"I never did get an accurate idea. Megaera kept us isolated from the main
population. It was only after she and her Furies disappeared for a while that
we had the run of the place. Even then, those goddamn carnobots kept us from
going to a lot of the different sections."
"Who made those things, anyway?" Grant de-manded.
"They were manufactured back before the holo-caust," Philboyd answered. "They
were field-tested up here. Sometime during our period in stasis, their
programming was altered. I don't know what they were thinking when they did
that."
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"'They'?" echoed Grant.
"The new society that arose here." His tone be-came bleak and bitter. "A kind
of insane mixture of
Sumerian mythology and old paganism, with a little nature worship thrown in.
How something like that took hold is beyond me."
Thinking of the Valley of the Divinely Inspired, Kane smiled crookedly. "You'd
be surprised how easy it is to create new and crazy societies.'*
"That's true," agreed Brigid. "The first step is to destroy the old one and
old mind-sets. The nukecaust did that for you. A completely new system of
think-ing, of believing, of dealing with everyday life was forced on the
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people up here. Their old mind-sets were totally unsuitable to function within
that new system. For a time the changeover was held in check through force of
habit, but in the long run nothing short of a complete transformation of the
way people perceived and processed reality would do. That ap-pears to have
happened while you were sleeping."
The computer emitted a soft beep and Brigid an-nounced, "All right. I think
I've found what we were looking for."
Kane and Philboyd joined her at the machine. Words and numbers scrolled across
the screen with a dizzying rapidity. Philboyd demanded, "How the hell can you
read anything at that speed?"
"This a pretty old model," Brigid replied agree-ably. ' 'If I had the
opportunity, I could upgrade the is access and scroll time."
It took a couple of seconds for the meaning of Bri-gid''s response to register [ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]