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Chapter One (#u0fd6aa4a-2708-5ab5-b954-3509c57faa62)
Chapter Two (#ua956fc5c-d244-54e5-a0ad-3ff33ee85c8a)
Chapter Three (#u18e6c524-d48f-5e55-9986-97405119c941)
Chapter Four (#u62a01fe8-1fcb-5142-b3c7-499bf7ec0f54)
Chapter Five (#u913b26fa-a180-50b5-a548-c9400ebb5dfa)
Chapter Six (#u4937f2d1-17c5-54c1-9c19-e876fda50a42)
Chapter Seven (#u1579d9b2-3de8-54c5-9696-aec46996ce8a)
Chapter Eight (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Nine (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Ten (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Eleven (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Twelve (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Thirteen (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Fourteen (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Fifteen (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Sixteen (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Seventeen (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Eighteen (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Nineteen (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Twenty (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Twenty-One (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Twenty-Two (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Twenty-Three (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Twenty-Four (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Twenty-Five (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Twenty-Six (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Twenty-Seven (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Twenty-Eight (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Twenty-Nine (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Thirty (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Thirty-One (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Thirty-Two (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Thirty-Three (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Thirty-Four (#litres_trial_promo)
Epilogue (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter One
Ryan Cawdor let out a gasp and cracked open his eye.
“Everything all right, lover?” Krysty Wroth, Ryan’s titian-haired lover looked concerned.
Memories of a jump nightmare swirled around his head.
Even though the jump had been tough on him, Ryan was in top physical condition, and his ability to recover from the mat-trans jumps was better than most in his small band of travelers. He’d experienced a bad jump dream, nothing more than that.
“Been better, but I’m okay,” he said. “You?”
“I’ve been worse,” Krysty answered.
Ryan believed that to be true. Her gorgeous mane of bright red hair, which usually lay flat against her head and shoulders after a jump, was full and thick, and cascaded over her shoulders like a waterfall.
She gestured to her right with a nod. “Doc didn’t do so well, though.”
Ryan looked at Dr. Theophilus Algernon Tanner, a tall and skinny man dressed in an old and worn frock coat. To the casual observer, he appeared to be in his sixties, but it could be argued that the man was actually hundreds of years old. Ryan knelt next to Doc and put a hand on the man’s shoulder. “You with us, Doc?”
“‘Is this a dagger I see before me—’” Doc muttered.
“Can you hear me, Doc?”
“‘—the handle toward my hand?’”
J. B. Dix, the group’s armorer and weapons expert, removed his spectacles and rubbed his head. “What’s Doc talking about now?”
“It’s Shakespeare,” Dr. Mildred Wyeth replied. “Macbeth.”
“Sounds…interesting,” Krysty commented.
“Sounds crazy,” Jak Lauren said.
The teenaged albino usually fared the worst of all the members in the group after a jump, but this time he looked as if he came through unscathed.
It was Doc who’d had the hardest ride.
He’d be out of it for a while, his thoughts rambling and erratic, but he’d be all right in time.
Ryan shook one of the old man’s shoulders. “Are you all right?”
“What?” Doc said, shaking his head as if the brain inside were shrouded in cobwebs.
When he saw the one-eyed man standing over him, Doc gave Ryan an angry scowl. “I say, my dear Ryan, if you’d like my attention I suggest you use the nomenclature provided for me upon my birth, meaning you can call me Theophilus, or Theo, if you like, or you can simply use the more vernacular terms Doc or Doc Tanner. There is no need to wrench my shoulder from my body!”
Ryan grinned. “I’ll take that as a yes.”
Doc massaged his aching shoulder.
“Where this place?” Jak asked, turning slowly to study the walls.
Ryan looked around the chamber as well, but didn’t recognize the purple-blue tint of the armaglass walls. The colors were similar to several chambers they’d been in before, but none had had this exact pattern or shading.
“Only one way to find out for sure,” Ryan said. “Triple red.”
He put his left hand on the handle that would open the door to the chamber.
For a moment the inside of the chamber was filled with the sound of the friends’ blasters being unholstered and cocked.
Then, silence.
Ryan turned the handle and pushed against the door. Slowly, the door swung open.
And then it stopped with a loud creak.
At the same time, the stench of death wafted into the chamber, causing several of the friends to cough.
“Is it blocked?” J.B. asked.
“Can’t tell,” Ryan answered.
He pushed against the door and felt resistance. He stopped a moment, reset his feet and tried it again. This time, with the help of J.B. and Jak, he was able to force open the door.
Mildred, Krysty and Doc’s blasters swept across the open doorway, but found no one outside the chamber waiting for them.
Ryan and the others pushed the door all the way open. It came to an abrupt stop with a grinding halt, metal against metal, and it was obvious to them why the door had been so hard to open. The steel had been bashed and scarred on the outside and several of the hinges were gone, either torn away from the door or just smashed beyond recognition.
“Blasterfire?” Jak asked, putting the tip of his index finger into a large pit in the outside of the door.
“Yeah, and mebbe some grens,” J.B. added. “Recent, too.”
“And all other manner of weaponry as well,” Doc offered.
There’d been a firefight in the redoubt, that much was obvious. There were blaster marks on the walls, and entire sections of floor and walls that had been scarred by blasters and who knew what else.
“Thought redoubts nukeproof,” Jak stated.
J.B. turned toward the albino teenager. “They are, but that’s when the nukes go off on the outside. From the looks of this damage, there were bombs or grens going off in here.”
“Then how come the chamber wasn’t damaged?” Mildred asked.
Ryan tried to close the door to the chamber, but it wouldn’t swing back. He left the door where it was, hanging open at a strange angle. “Inside wasn’t damaged. Outside was blasted to hell.”
“So it held together just long enough,” Mildred continued, “to receive one last band of jumpers.”
J.B. nodded again. “Looks like it.”
They inspected the outside of the chamber more closely for several moments.
“Ryan, over here,” Krysty called from a corner of the control room.
As Ryan made his way over to her, he became aware of the stench of rotting flesh.
“Bodies,” Krysty said. “Lots of them.”
There were at least a dozen bodies strewed across the floor near the wall. They’d been cut down by blasterfire and had died where they’d fallen. There were skeletons at the bottom of the mess, but some of the corpses on top didn’t look that far gone.
Krysty suddenly raised her hand.
The rest of the friends went silent.
“Someone’s coming,” Krysty announced, her hair tightly wound around her head and neck as an added indication of the danger.
Ryan signaled the rest of them to scatter and find cover, and then he waited in silence for the sound of footsteps. At last he could hear them, softly padding feet approaching their position at a modest rate, seemingly walking without purpose.
And then he saw her as she rounded the corner to the room surrounding the chamber. Or perhaps more correctly, saw it.
It was a young, pale-skinned girl. Her hair was a dusty black and her body was covered in fresh red scars and bleeding sores. She wore only a pair of shorts, and the tiny buds of her breasts told Ryan she was younger than twelve.
Ryan stepped forward, and the rest of the friends followed, stepping out of the shadows. “Hello,” he said.
She didn’t answer. Instead she just looked at him and smiled. “You got bang?” she said.
Ryan wasn’t sure what the right answer was, so he said nothing.
“Want bang.”
Ryan shook his head, then looked to the rest of the friends for an answer.
