Temple of the Gods - Andy McDermott [95]
‘That’s only one level. We’ve got another three floors of Buffs—’
‘Buffs?’
‘Big Ugly Fat Fu— uh, Fellows,’ Eddie told her.
The colonel smiled. ‘Three more floors of them, plus we’ve got Eagles, Hornets, Warthogs . . .’
‘Sounds more like a zoo than a military facility,’ said Nina.
‘Ha! Yeah, I guess. And then we’ve got choppers, and a lot more general equipment – trucks, jeeps, bulldozers, that kind of thing. And more tanks than you can shake a stick at.’
‘My tax dollars at work.’ Even in 1950s money, the cost of excavating Silent Peak must have been as huge as the base itself.
They passed the hangar and continued down. The next level contained more B-52s, with Huey utility helicopters nestled in amongst the colossi; the hangar below was packed with fighter aircraft. Then more bombers, this time joined by a trio of coal-black SR-71 Blackbird spy planes. Never mind the base, Nina thought – the value of the mothballed hardware it contained was equally mind-blowing.
A sound reached them from below, the echoing rumble of an idling engine. Its source was revealed as they approached the eleventh level. The main elevator platform, an enormous metal expanse almost filling the width of the shaft, waited here; the hangar itself was filled with precisely lined rows of M60 tanks. One of the armoured vehicles was surrounded by portable lighting rigs, a pair of men working on its open engine compartment. Wide flexible hoses snaked across the floor, drawing its exhaust fumes into a large extractor vent. ‘Routine maintenance,’ Kern explained as they continued to descend, passing through the complex web of girders forming the platform’s supporting structure. ‘Like I said, everything here is kept ready for action. If we needed to, we could have a couple dozen of those babies rolling out of here by tonight.’
‘Let’s hope we never need to,’ said Nina. The elevator drew closer to its final destination. She moved back to the railing, eager to see what the lowest level contained . . .
The sheer scale of what met her eyes was astounding. Despite the size of the rest of the base, it was in essence nothing more than a very large parking structure. The twelfth floor, however, was home to something vastly more complex.
The repository was a library – but beyond anything Nina had ever seen. The stacks were arranged in a grid, stretching away seemingly to infinity. And the shelf units were not built on a human scale; they were easily thirty feet high.
It quickly became clear that the whole place was not intended to be directly accessed by humans at all. Between the stacks ran a network of tracks, along which ran towering robotic forklifts. She had seen similar devices before: Automated Storage and Retrieval Systems, designed to collect specific items from large archives and deliver them to a central point. But the system at Silent Peak was several orders of magnitude larger and more complicated than anything she had encountered in academia.
‘My God,’ she said, genuinely awed. ‘How big is this place? There must be miles of shelves!’
‘Something like three hundred miles, if they were all laid end to end,’ said Kern as the platform stopped. ‘But Dr Ogleby can give you the exact details. I just work here.’ He opened another gate so they could exit the elevator, then led them to one of several cabins nearby. It was marked with a sign: Reading Rooms 01–08. Kern entered, Eddie and Nina exchanging ‘what the hell have we got into?’ glances behind him. Another man in Security Forces uniform sat by the door, looking utterly bored. He stood and saluted them, then returned to his blank-eyed torpor. Kern called out, ‘Dr Ogleby! Are you here?’
A bald man popped up like a groundhog to peer at them over a cubicle wall. ‘Oh, it’s you, Kern,’ he said, annoyed at being disturbed. He padded out to meet the new arrivals. Unlike the other base personnel he was a civilian, wearing a threadbare suit and a garish yellow bow