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“I’m a-alive,” J. B. Dix whispered, kneeling on the floor. An Uzi machine pistol hung at his side, and a pump-action S&W M-4000 scattergun was strapped across his backpack. A canvas bag lay on the floor alongside him.
Fighting a tremor, J.B. wiped a string of drool from his mouth with the cuff of his leather jacket. “J-just not sure why after that slice of hell.”
“I hear ya,” Ryan agreed, bracing a scarred hand against the cool armaglass wall and forcing himself to stand. A Steyr SSG-70 rifle was sticking out of his backpack, while a 9 mm SIG-Sauer pistol rode at his hip alongside an eighteen-inch-long panga.
Blinking hard to clear his vision, the one-eyed man could see that outside the mat-trans unit was a hexagonal chamber with cream-colored walls laced with a gold lattice pattern. That scheme was unfamiliar, which meant they had never been to this redoubt before. The walls of each gateway in the network of underground installations was a different color, the purpose of which was, the friends concluded, to let a jumper know immediately where he or she landed.
Leaning against a wall, Dr. Mildred Wyeth pulled a canvas satchel into her lap.
“H-here, t-try this,” she muttered, fumbling to open the bag. Inside was an assortment of precious surgical tools. The physician was slowly building a collection of medical supplies—sterile water, plastic baggies filled with sterilized cloth, a jar of sulfur dust for wounds, and such. Hardly little more than supermarket curatives back in her day, but enough to save a life in the shockscape known as the Deathlands.
Extracting a canteen, Mildred screwed off the cap and took a healthy swig before passing it to a boy almost in his teenage years. Physician heal thyself, she thought, waiting for the throbbing headache to ease.
Sitting on his butt, an arm propped against the floor to keep himself upright, Dean Cawdor accepted the container and took a long drink, sloshing the fluid about in his mouth to try to cut the taste of bile before finally swallowing.
“Tastes awful,” Dean said, making a face and handing the canteen away to a nearby woman with impossibly red hair.
Sitting with her legs folded, the woman was almost completely hidden by the shaggy bearskin coat. She threw back her head, revealing a face of inordinate beauty and eyes as green as the troubled sea. Her slim hand shook slightly as she raised the container and took several very small sips from the battered canteen.
“It’s not supposed to be delicious,” Mildred retorted, brushing away the beaded plaits from her own face. “Just calm your stomach enough so we don’t puke out our guts from jump sickness.”
“Need it for this one, that’s for damn sure,” Krysty Wroth said, passing the canteen to a pale teenager, crouched on his hands and knees.
Snow-white hair cascading past his pale face, Jak Lauren shook his head, ruby red eyes narrowed to mere slits in his pale face as if the stubborn youth were fighting the jump sickness by sheer willpower. Jak always fared poorly after a jump and usually was violently ill. This time was no better.
“What’s in this batch?” J.B. asked, accepting the canteen but taking a sniff before he drank. Some of Mildred’s brews worked pretty good, but others were totally useless. And one memorable batch actually made them feel sicker afterward.
“It’s the last of the aspirins, some vitamins, mint, skag root and a shot of brandy I’ve been saving for an emergency.”
“Fair enough,” J.B. said, and took a deep drink.
His churning stomach calmed almost instantly, and the headache cleared in only a few minutes. Feeling much better, he passed Ryan the canteen and reached into his shirt pocket to pull on his pair of wire-rimmed glasses. The wiry Armorer always took them off in case he fell sprawling to the floor and broke the spectacles.
Splashing a few drops into his palm, Ryan wiped down his face before taking a swig, holding the concoction in his mouth for a moment to cut the metallic taste of the bad jump. As he swallowed, he scowled deeply at the mat-trans unit. A sprawled form wearing an antique-style frock coat remained still, an ebony walking stick inches away from an outstretched hand.
“Mildred, something’s wrong with Doc!” Ryan snapped.
Grabbing her satchel, Mildred crawled over the floor and awkwardly rolled the silver-haired man onto his back to check the pulse in his neck with a fingertip. But the beat was strong and slow with no sign of arrhythmia. The frilled shirt rose and fell as the old man breathed steadily.
“He’s fine,” Mildred announced. “Just passed out from the jump. They always hit him hard.”
“Because he’s from another time, or because he has jumped so much more than us?” Dean asked in concern. “Are the jumps going to get worse for us over the years?”
“Good question. However, I have no idea,” Mildred answered honestly. “But let’s hope not. Any worse than this one and we’ll arrive as corpses.”
“Besides,” J.B. added, straightening the fedora on his head. “We haven’t been…” Here, the Armorer fumbled for the right word, then chose the truth. “Experimented on by the lunatics who built the redoubts, or tortured for years by an insane baron.”
“Sometimes I’m surprised that he’s sane at all, poor thing,” Krysty said softly.
“Indeed, m-madam,” Doc Tanner rumbled, slowly raising his head in a saurian manner. “So a-am I, if any are t-truly sane these d-dark days.”
“Aw, stuff it, ya old coot,” Mildred said, but the words carried no anger. “You’ll outlive all of us combined.”
“Perhaps I already have,” Doc said, “and that is the problem from the start.” Then the tall man shook as he violently coughed, but that subsided and he gazed at the others with clear eyes. “Cream and gold, I perceive. We have not been here before, my dear Ryan.”
“No, it’s a new redoubt,” the one-eyed man replied, tossing the canteen.
Across the chamber, Mildred made the catch and shoved the container into Doc’s grasp. “Here, drink the last of the jump juice. Do you a world of good.”
“Somebody else made it, then, madam, and not you? Excellent news.”
“Shaddup drink,” Jak growled, slowly standing. The teen weaved slightly, but then the weakness passed and he stood without hindrance.
Draining the last of the brew of meds and roots, Professor Theophilus Algernon Tanner soon felt the universe slip into focus once more and he recapped the canteen, returning it to the physician with a grateful nod.
Smoothing the frilly front of his white shirt, Doc tightened his black string bow tie, then used stiff fingers to try to control his unruly crop of silver-white hair. Although only thirty-eight years old, his forced journeys through time had visibly aged the man, and scrambled his memory until often the past and the present mixed freely.
With careful hands, Doc checked the massive blaster at his side to make sure none of the black powder charges had come loose in the jump. The .44 LeMat was a Civil War revolver carrying nine chambers in the primary cylinder, and a short 12-gauge barrel set under the main barrel. It was slow to load, but hit like a cannon. But even more important, the weapon was from Doc’s own time period, a direct physical link to his lost home and the family still waiting for him in the distant past.
Hawking to clear the phlegm from his throat, Ryan spit into the corner of the chamber and fixed the leather patch that covered the puckered ruin of his missing left eye, a gift from his brother Harvey. In grim efficiency, Ryan then did a weapons check, briefly touching his small arsenal of blasters and knives.
Pulling out his SIG-Sauer blaster, Ryan clicked off the safety and then racked the slide to chamber a round for instant use. Everybody was back on their feet, so it was time to recce the rest of the redoubt to see if there was anything useful in the storerooms.
There was something odd about this redoubt. The air coming from the wall vent was warm, instead of cool. Sniffing carefully, Ryan couldn’t detect the smell of an electrical fire, or lava. Last year, a jump to a tropical redoubt had the group arriving just as the local volcano erupted. They had barely escaped, with chunks of the molten stone actually arriving with them at the next redoubt. And that was cutting the razor edge of life just too damn close by anybody’s standards.
“Get ready, people,” Ryan growled, and the rest pulled blasters and checked their loads.
“Ready,” Krysty said, closing the cylinder of her .38 S&W revolver.
“I got your back, Dad,” Dean added, levelling his Browning Hi-Power. The rest simply nodded, holding their weapons in an easy grip. They had done this a thousand times before, but routine made a person careless, and careless got a person chilled in the Deathlands.
Stationing himself near the door of the chamber, Ryan stood guard alongside J.B. while the man checked the portal for boobies. Traps were unusual, but a few other people knew about the secret of the redoubts, and while most of them were now in the boneyard, some were still sucking air and walking around.
But this time the door was clear, and at J.B.’s signal, Ryan worked the lever to swing it open. The SIG-Sauer leading the way, Ryan took the point into the control room with the others fanning out behind. The room appeared to be deserted, the only motion coming from the comps that operated the military base.
Comp screens lined the walls, and control consoles winked and blinked in silent frenzy as the massive comps went silently about their imponderable functions.
Then Doc whistled softly and gestured with the barrel of his big LeMat. An entire section of the monitors were dark. Ryan didn’t remember ever seeing that before. It made him uneasy to see the complex machinery do anything out of the ordinary. That almost always meant trouble. Mildred went to the front of a monitor and flipped down the tiny control panel to check the contrast and power.
“Live and functioning,” she reported after a minute. “These are dead because they’re not receiving any data.”
“Leave,” Jak said with a scowl. “Busted here, means busted elsewhere.”
Listening to the rest of the comps humming softly, Ryan gave the matter some serious thought. A malfunk could mean the rest of the base was frozen solid with ice, or flooded, or airless as the moon. Opening the door to the hallway could bring instant death. The comps did everything here, and if they were broken, then anything was possible. Damn things might have even cycled open the blast door to the outside world and let in anything, stickies, runts, hell hounds or a host of various muties. Automatically, Ryan checked the implo gren in a coat pocket. Need a lot of space to use the gren, but it could stop just about anything. The trick was to make sure the person throwing the implo didn’t get aced along with the target.
“No, we aren’t leaving yet,” Ryan decided, rubbing his unshaven jaw. “I want to check the hallway before deciding to make tracks. J.B. and Mildred, stay by the door to the mat-trans chamber. But if we come running back, slam it tight behind us.”
“Got ya covered,” J.B. said, and the man and woman went back through the other doorway and into the chamber.
This time, Krysty and Jak stood guard, while Ryan placed a palm against the corridor to check for heat. It was warm, but not hot, so he listened for a moment for any sounds coming from the other side, then worked the handle and opened the door a crack.
The corridor was empty. The overhead lights were working, but the bright glow of the fluorescent tubes had been reduced to a dim bluish sheen from the passage of the years. The air vents were still blowing warm air instead of cool, but Ryan was starting to wonder if that was deliberate. Maybe the redoubt was at the North Pole, or inside a glacier, and it needed to be kept this warm. Anything was possible. The predark government had hidden the subterranean bases in the oddest places.
Placing fingers in his mouth, Ryan whistled sharply twice, and J.B. and Mildred rejoined the group. With practiced ease, the group spread out in groups of two and checked the offices lining the corridor, one person staying at the door while the other went inside. Then the pair switched and did the next room. As usual, Doc served as the anchorman, the colossal .44 LeMat held as reserve firepower.
As he kept track of the others as they moved from room to room, just for a split second the scholar thought he heard a metallic noise and almost called out a warning. But when it didn’t occur again, he grudgingly relaxed.
After a few minutes, the companions regrouped at the end of the corridor near the elevator and the door to the stairwell.
“This place is clean as a glass lake,” Krysty stated, sliding off her heavy coat and tying the arms around her waist. The heat was starting to bother her slightly.
“Found a humidor with two cigars,” Mildred announced, patting a pocket. “But since J.B. is trying to quit, I’ll just add them to the trade goods.”
“Thanks a heap,” J.B. muttered
“No ammo, no booze,” Jak added. “Lots bottles, all dry.”
“Couple of pencils,” Dean said, reaching into a pocket. “And a lighter. Anybody need a replacement?”
Tough and resilient, butane lighters were the gold of the new world. Even after a hundred years they still sparked a flame and worked for months with careful hoarding. Nearly worthless in the predark society, now the plastic cartridges were a month of eating, or a week of pleasure in a ville’s gaudy house.
“Mine’s almost dead,” Mildred said.
Without a comment Dean passed it over. The woman flicked the lighter to make sure it worked, then tucked it away. “Thanks. Nothing like them for cauterizing a wound.”
“No prob,” the boy answered, feeling a touch of pride at finding something useful.
Suddenly snapping her head to the left, Krysty frowned at the empty corridor.
“Something?” Ryan demanded softly, glancing about with his good eye. The hallway was clear, not even dust moving on the floor.
The woman started to speak, then shook her head. “Nothing, I guess. Must have just been the air vents.”
Doc frowned at the comment. “Indeed, madam. I also thought there had been a noise before,” he rumbled. “But dismissed it as superfluous clatter.”
Holstering his 9 mm blaster, Ryan eased the butt of the Steyr SSG-70 out of his backpack and worked the bolt. First it was too hot in the redoubt, now mysterious noises.
“Okay, get hard, people,” Ryan ordered. “Jak, Dean, watch the elevator. Anything that comes out, blast it. Doc and Mildred, guard the stairs. The rest of us will walk down to the reactor on the bottom level. Then come back up before searching the upper levels. This way we can know nothing is coming from behind.”
Cradling his Uzi, J.B. added, “Any trouble, fire a round. If nobody comes back in ten, then come running.”
“I shall serve as Horatius,” Doc rumbled, taking position near the corner of the hallway. This offered a clear field of fire in two directions and possible cover in case of incoming rounds.
“Horatius had two companions with him on that bridge,” Mildred muttered, joining the scholar, “and they both died.”
Leaning against the wall, Doc smiled widely, displaying his oddly perfect teeth. “Which is exactly why,” he said politely, “I was very careful to state that I alone was Horatius, and not you.”
Glowering at the man, Mildred said something in Latin that made his eyebrows rise in shock while Ryan eased open the door to the stairwell. As he did, a sound was clearly heard echoing down from the levels above. Something metallic and moving. Then came a horrible scream.
Chapter Three
“Air vent, my ass,” Ryan cursed as the scream echoed away.
He started forward, then paused, and for a tense moment sharply debated leaving. Whatever was happening here probably wasn’t their concern. Then again, the redoubts were the lifeline of the companions. If there were people in here, they needed to know how they got inside and what, if anything, they knew about the mat-trans system.
“Dad?” Dean asked anxiously, his knuckles white from the tight grip on his blaster.
“That could have been a child,” Krysty said, remembering a particularly gruesome event at a redoubt where the companions had arrived only seconds too late to save a young girl who was starving to death from taking her own life.
Anxiously, Doc added, “Knowledge is power, my dear Ryan.”
Yeah, the Trader used to say that, too. “Okay, we move as a group,” Ryan decided, almost against his better judgment. “I’m on point, one yard apart, two on two formation. Let’s go!”
“Just a sec,” J.B. countered, walking to the elevator and hitting the call button. The indicator lights in the lintel chimed in response as the cage started to descend from the upper levels.
Ryan nodded in approval at the distraction; every little bit helped. Doc and Mildred quickly joined the others in the stairwell and, moving fast, the companions quietly started up the ancient stairs of the redoubt, blasters leading the way.
At each level they paused, straining to hear anything, but there was only dusty silence. The dining hall, barracks, communications, medical, storage, each section was as still as a empty tomb. At the top level, the companions paused before the last door and were rewarded by some sort of humming noise.
“Dark night, but that’s familiar,” J.B. said, setting his fedora farther back on his head as a prelude to a fight. “Just can’t recall what the nuke it is, though.”
“I don’t like this,” Krysty whispered, her hair coiling tightly in response to the tension.
“Got something?” Jak asked, flexing his left hand. A knife slipped from the sleeve of his leather jacket into his palm at the gesture.
“No,” the redhead said slowly, as if unsure. “I’m not reading anything. This just feels wrong, a gut instinct.”
“Same here,” Mildred added, chewing at her lip.
With a worried expression on his young face, Dean grunted in agreement.
There was no light coming from under the jamb, so working the latch carefully, Ryan opened the door slightly, and held out a hand toward Doc. The scholar passed over his ebony stick and, easing it through the crack, Ryan reached toward the nearby light switch, flicked it on with a loud click and threw open the door.
This top level was the garage of the redoubt, tool benches and storage rooms to the left, the exit corridor to the distant right. The rest of the cavernous room was filled with vehicles, mostly civilian wags—compact cars and station wagons, some falling apart from body rust, others in decent condition.
However, a few of the larger machines were military wags, 4×4s, some Hummers and even an APC. The armored personnel carrier was lacking wheels, the axles resting on the stained concrete floor above a dark grease pit, but the chassis seemed intact.
“Hot pipe, over there!” Dean cried and started to fire his blaster.
Ryan turned fast and triggered his longblaster without conscious thought. Across the garage was a three-foot-wide crack in the nukeproof wall. That was unusual, but not startling. They had found damaged redoubts before. Some of the weapons used in skydark had been fantastically powerful. But standing directly in front of the crack was something potentially more dangerous than any nuke.
At first glance it resembled a chrome-plated humanoid, stooped over slightly like a hunchbacked ape. Its domed head was fronted with large crystalline eyes, the body composed of chrome rods, two elongated arms, one armed with a pneumatic hammer, the other sporting a set of tarnished blades that spun at blinding speed. That was the source of the humming noise.
Even as he fired the Steyr, Ryan narrowed his eye. A sec hunter droid! The companions had previously encountered the mech guardians of the redoubts. Once a hunter got your “scent,” it could track a person through a crowd of a thousand other people and across ten thousand miles, locked on to the target’s genetic code. The droid couldn’t be turned off, diverted from the chase, and never stopped until the allocated target was aced.
With a grinding noise of rusted gears, the machine turned away from the crack and started for them, the hammer thumping loudly as the spinning blades thrust forward.
“Double line!” Ryan shouted, and the companions hit the droid with everything they had, knowing only seconds remained before it would reach them, and in the cramped confines of the stairwell they would be chilled.
