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“Well, let’s get rolling, people,” Ryan said. “Finding some kind of supplies in this rad-blasted redoubt is of more than passing interest to me.”
* * *
“WHAT COULD DO?” Jak asked.
A quick search had showed the redoubt’s stores were well looted, so empty they might never have been stocked in the first place. But that wasn’t what had them all standing and staring openmouthed in awe and surprise.
The albino youth asked a good question, Ryan judged. The walls of a redoubt could shrug off blaster bullets like spit, and it would take a powerful blaster to seriously scratch them.
The corridor ahead of them was pinched shut, like an old length of hose with a swag-bellied sec man standing on it.
“Seismic activity, at a guess, dear boy,” Doc said.
“Talk plain, Doc!” Jak admonished.
“Earthquakes,” J.B. said.
“I thought most of the really massive quakes happened along the Pacific Rim,” Mildred said.
“The West Indies and Central America have been traditional hotbeds of such upheaval,” Doc said, used to Jak’s outbursts.
While he could sit stone still for hours on guard or on a hunt, Jak wasn’t known for patience where his fellow humans were concerned, particularly the time-trawled professor. Still, Ryan eyed the old man closely. He also had a habit of drifting in and out of reality.
Mildred grunted. “Oh. That’s right. I remember back in the early twentieth century there was a terrible eruption that killed tens of thousands of people. Mount Pelée, the volcano was called. Wiped out the city of Saint-Pierre the way Vesuvius did Pompeii.”
“On the island of Martinique, then,” Doc said. “That would lie south and perhaps somewhat east of here, if my reading of that map fragment was correct.”
J.B. rubbed the back of his neck. “We sure got bellies full of eruptions when we were in Mex Land,” he remarked.
“Gaia is restless here,” Krysty said, frowning. Her emerald-green eyes were pointed at the crushed corridor, but Ryan saw they were focused on nothing in particular.
He shook his head. “It doesn’t matter. We need to find a way out of here.”
“Find food,” Jak said. “Hungry.”
“How can you even think of food?” Mildred demanded. “My stomach’s still doing slow rolls from that damned jump.”
J.B. squinted critically into the dark depths of his upended canteen. “I wouldn’t sweat the grub, Jak,” he said. “The water’s about gone. Dehydration’ll chill us before hunger gets a proper start gnawing our vitals.”
“So,” Ryan said. “Out.”
“I hope the doors aren’t blocked by the same forces that did this,” Mildred said. “Whatever they were.”
Jak shook his head. “Open. Air fresh.”
Mildred eyed him. “You sure about that, Jak?”
“Power’s still on,” J.B. added. “Or didn’t you notice we’re not stumbling around in darkness blacker than twelve feet up a stubbie’s bowels?”
Jak shook his head irritably. “Air fresh,” he repeated. “Not filtered. Not smell?”
J.B. drew in a deep breath. “Mebbe not,” he said, “compared to you.”
Ryan grunted. “So lead the way,” he said to Jak. “Get us out of here.”
* * *
J.B. SQUINTED THROUGH his minisextant at the sun, which was about halfway up a blue sky free of chem clouds. “You were right about the map,” J.B. said, lowering the device. “We’re in the Caribbean, all right.”
The companions stood on the highest point of the island, which was as bare as a baby’s backside and not a whole lot larger, if not nearly so smooth. In fact, the rock beneath their feet was black, hard and porous—lava. Though it didn’t rise more than forty or fifty feet above the dancing green water that surrounded it, its regular shape unpleasantly suggested that it was the cinder cone of an actual volcano.
The breeze up the west side of the island, off a beach where stretches of white sand alternated with rusty-brown, smelled of salt and decaying sea life.
“What now?” Krysty asked.
“We could try the mat-trans,” Mildred said. “It hasn’t exactly taken us a long time to find out there was nothing but rock and sand on this damn island. Might be able to get back inside the time limit of the LD button.”
The gateways had a feature that allowed a user to return to the originating point by pressing the “last destination” button within half an hour of a jump.
J.B. frowned at his wrist chron. “We’d be crowding it,” he said. “Anyway, I’m not rightly sure I want to trust a malfunking machine.”
“Do you like the idea of dying of thirst here, with water, water everywhere, and not a drop to damn well drink?” Mildred asked.
“Not starve, anyway,” Jak said. “Sea here—food always.”
* * *
MILDRED GLARED AROUND at the others. “Why not try the gateway? We can always jump to a random destination. It got us here, after all.”
J.B. shook his head. “Bad idea, Millie. There’s something wrong with it. I don’t think it’s safe.”
“Safe?” Doc whinnied the word like a laughing horse. Mildred noted the way his blue eyes rolled. He was losing his grip on reality, which was never rock solid to begin with. “Jumping through time and space by such unnatural means is never safe, J.B.! Never safe at all.”
Doc slumped suddenly, his face crumpling like an old newspaper. Mildred knew he was remembering his lost family and life, before he’d been time-trawled away from everything he knew or held dear by the scientists of Operation Chronos.
“We’re not trying the mat-trans,” Ryan said. He wasn’t a man who minced words; while he might consult his friends on decisions, once he spoke in that tone, as flat and hard as slate, it was final. “We’re getting off this nuke-withered rock. Alive.”
Krysty had walked down toward the beach to the northwest. It wasn’t a long trip.
“There are islands off this way,” she said. “Some of them have trees.”
“Might be game,” J.B. added.
“Trees mean fresh water,” Jak said.
“Not necessarily where we can get at it,” Ryan said. “But yeah.”
“This is an area, as our youthful friend so astutely points out, that abounds in edible sea life,” Doc said. He seemed to have snapped back to the present; he tended to do that when confronted with a problem he found interesting, Mildred had noticed. “That suggests humans live here, too.”
“That’s so,” Ryan said. “People go where there’s chow. So we start working our way from island to island. Only question is, how?”
“Nearest island’s a good mile, mile and a half off,” J.B. said. “Anybody feel like a swim?”
“You’ve got to be kidding me, John Barrymore,” Mildred said. The armorer was her lover. “I can’t swim that far. We don’t know what the current’s like, anyway.”
“Sharks,” Jak stated.
“Just joking, Millie,” J.B. said.
“Down here!”
Everybody looked to where Krysty was standing on the beach with her back to the sea. She was waving.
“I think I found a way!”
Chapter Two
“What way?” Jak said. “Only see water.”
Ryan stood at Krysty’s side on the white coral sand. The others had gathered nearby.
“You have to learn to look below the surface, Jak,” J.B. said.
Ryan was doing so, and frowning. The water close to shore was shallow and as clear as glass, but he wasn’t sure what it was he was seeing.
“It would appear to be a road,” Doc said, bending over like a feeding crane to peer into the water. “Made out of cyclopean blocks. Limestone, I would say.”
Mildred’s forehead creased into a frown. “That sounds like the Bimini Roads,” she said. “Except aren’t they off the Bahamas? And I don’t think the Bahamas are all that near to here, are they?”
Ryan polled the others with his eye. They looked as blank as he felt.
Doc blinked at Mildred like a newly hatched baby bird. “Dear lady,” he said, “I fear the rest of us have little idea what you are saying. Except that, yes, the Bahamas lie far to the northwest of here, beyond the island of Hispaniola. Quite near the east coast of Florida, in fact.”
“So, what would subsurface blocks like this be doing here?” Mildred demanded.
“Who knows?” Ryan said. “Why care?”
“The road, if that’s what it is, seems to lead right past that next island,” Krysty observed. She flashed that smile Ryan loved so well, as dazzling as late-morning sun breaking bright off the wavelets.
“If the road leads to the next island,” Ryan said, “it’s the closest thing to a way off this sorry bare-ass rock that we’ve got. I’m going.”
Doc straightened and shot the cuffs of the white shirt he wore beneath his frock coat. “And we shall follow,” he said. “As usual.”
* * *
“OW! SHIT.”
“What is it, Mildred?” Krysty asked.
They were wading through thigh-deep water, following the big oblong blocks of pale stone. Ryan led, holding his Steyr Scout Tactical longblaster at the ready. Behind him marched J.B., cradling his Uzi. Then Mildred, Krysty and Doc, who flourished his swordstick in the hot air with every sloshing step. Jak brought up the rear, scowling around at the water as if expecting something to dart through it and bite them.
As it appeared, something just had. “My leg,” Mildred said. “Something stung me just now. Right above my right boot.”
Jak pointed. “There!”
What he was pointing at moved fast, but Krysty had good reflexes. She looked in time to see something like a silver shadow, long and slim as the concealed blade of Doc’s sword, dart away through the water.
Looking back at Mildred, she saw a dark cloud puff into the water by her leg.
“’Cudas!” Jak shouted.
“Barracuda,” Doc said doubtfully. “I didn’t think they were known for attacking humans. Swimmers, perhaps. But certainly not walking ones. Or even waders.”
Balancing precariously on one leg against the slow ocean current, Mildred hoisted her right leg out of the water. “Somehow I don’t think this one got the memo, Doc,” she said.
Evidently not. Krysty saw a red slice, vivid against the coffee-with-cream skin of Mildred’s calf. Blood flowed freely to drip into the water.
“Ace on the line,” J.B. said. “That blood could draw sharks.”
“Screw sharks!” shouted Jak. “More ’cuda coming!”
Quickly Krysty looked around. Sure enough, the shallow Caribbean waters, so deceptively peaceful on the surface, swarmed with sinister shiny shapes just below. Some circled just out of range. Others...
Mildred jumped one-legged straight out of the water. “Fuck!” she screamed. Through the roiling water Krysty saw a lean shape lance past, just where the woman had been standing.
With a rattling roar J.B. cut loose a burst from his machine pistol. Water spouted in an arc twenty feet from where Mildred was splashing back down. She came down on both feet but teetered. Krysty grabbed her wrist and kept her from toppling.
The fall itself was no danger, obviously, but to be floundering around, depending on her own modest human swimming abilities, while contending with a shoal of killer fish could be deadly.
A corpse bobbed to the surface. Its belly was white and showed the tips of black tiger stripes. Jaws filled with razor-edged teeth gaped. A round eye stared blankly. An inky cloud surrounded it.
“Good shooting.” Ryan hefted his Scout but didn’t find any targets worth a precious 7.62 mm round.
“Strike, more like,” J.B. called. “I was mainly looking to scare the nuke-suckers off. Or at least back. Bullets don’t travel for shit in water, anyway.”
“These barracuda seem unnaturally large,” Doc said. He had his sword drawn and pointed toward the water. “I do not recall them growing significantly longer than six feet, yet yon specimen is a good nine or ten feet long, and some of his kindred seem longer still.”
“Mebbe muties,” Jak said with a snarl of distaste.
“Keep moving, everybody!” Ryan said. “They’ll chew us to bits if we just stand here gaping like a pack of stupes!”
They moved into a slow-motion run, raising hip-high waves. Krysty held her snub-nosed Smith & Wesson Model 640 in her hand, but their wakes made it difficult to spot the finny horrors close by.
Then again, if they were that close it was probably too late to do anything about them, anyway. Seeing a shape arrow at her from about thirty feet off to her right, Krysty snapped a shot at it. The .38-caliber slug kicked up a foot-tall jet of water. Whether the bullet hit the ’cuda, or even came near, she didn’t know. The fish sheered away.
And she felt an impact against her own left calf. She looked down to see another ten-foot fish whip away from her. By reflex she looked down. It had ripped the tough denim of her jeans, but she saw no blood and felt no sting of salt water on a fresh wound.
“Go!” Jak shouted from right behind her.
