the girl stepped gracefully through the breakers toward Philboyd, she pushed a diving mask up onto her forehead. She wore a delicate silver chain around her neck, and a tiny jeweled pendant in the shape of a jagat, the Hindu symbol of love, nestled between her small, taut breasts. Other than the nine-inch knife scabbarded to the calf of her right leg, Domi wore only the pendant.
As she walked onto the beach, she stared at Philboyd with challenging ruby eyes. “What are you lookin’ at?”
Philboyd shook himself and hastily stepped away from the shoreline before the waves soaked his shoes. “Sorry, I was just lost in thought.”
Striding past him, Domi stripped off the diving mask and walked toward her clothes, draped over a large round boulder. “’Long as that’s all you get lost in, Brewster.”
Philboyd felt his face heat up, but he wasn’t sure if it was due to embarrassment or the unremitting California sun, blazing down on the stretch of beach that bordered the barony once called Snakefish.
Gulls wheeled on the thermal currents created by the juncture of the beach and the thundering sea. They soared gracefully through the smoky spume raised by the nearby breakers. There was very little to see except sand, rocks and the long line of combers smashing against seaweed-draped boulders.
The slow tide made gurgling sounds around the base of the rocks. Despite Domi’s harsh words, the young albino woman wasn’t really hostile, but Philboyd never enjoyed being alone in her company. She had the forthright manner characteristic of other outlanders he had met, but he knew from experience she could be deadly dangerous.
Although she was beautiful despite all the scars marring the pearly perfection of her skin, Domi exuded an aggressive, almost angry energy, so Philboyd pretended not to watch as she got dressed. Her compact body was a smooth symmetrical flow of curving lines with small porcelain breasts rising to sharp points and a hard-muscled stomach. With the droplets of water glittering on her arms and legs, her pale skin looked almost luminous.
As she tugged a black T-shirt over her short-cropped white hair, Domi said in her clipped voice, “Time to get back the ville. Nothin’ out there I saw that could cause earth tremors or the sea quakes they told us about.”
Philboyd nodded distractedly, glancing out at the whitecaps. “Gedrick claimed most of the tidal disturbances were along this stretch.”
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
