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How odd, death I can face, Krysty thought privately as she scrubbed diligently away. But not pain. Have I experienced so much that I am getting weak? Mother Gaia, help me, if that ever happens!
Suddenly the sound of boots rang on the concrete behind them, and the three companions turned to see a stocky black woman walk out of the redoubt.
“Aw, hell, still raining,” Mildred Wyeth said angrily, contorting her face into a dark scowl. “Damn it, we’re never going to get a sample of those trees!”
The short physician was dressed in Army fatigue pants, an officer’s white shirt and a loose denim jacket. Clipped to the front of her canvas web belt was a Czech ZKR target pistol, and draped over her shoulder was a canvas bag with the faded letters M*A*S*H on the side. The predark field surgery kit had never left her possession since she’d recently found it. The medicine was long gone, but the few surgical instruments it contained were beyond price.
“Nobody’s going anywhere, Millie,” J.B. said kindly, curling an arm around the woman’s waist. “Sorry.”
Mildred moved a little closer to the Armorer, savoring the warmth coming off the man. “Who would have thought it ever possible,” she muttered, squinting into the storm. “Plants, living green plants immune to the acid rain!”
“Some new mutation, probably,” Krysty said, tucking the toothbrush and box of baking soda into a pocket of her bearskin coat. “Not every mutie wants to eat people.”
“Just most of them.” J.B. snorted in droll humor.
“Mebbe these plants feed off the rain,” Ryan said unexpectedly, his brow furrowed. “We know for a fact that the predark whitecoats were working on making things that could survive skydark.”
The companions grew silent at that comment. They had encountered the experiments of the crazy whitecoats before, the bioweps, genetically altered creatures that could withstand certain hostile conditions, some even surviving the deadly rads in the blast craters.
“If only I could get a sample…” Mildred muttered, easing away from her lover.
For a moment there flashed in her mind the legend of Johnny Appleseed from the eighteenth century, how he traveled across North America scattering apple seeds and creating entire forests of fruit trees, changing grasslands into beautiful forests. She could do that with just a few cuttings from the strange plants out there. Mildred would just have to plant a few sprigs everywhere the companions went. Oh, she would never see the final results, but someday, in a hundred years, the continent could be green again. Deserts turned into forests. It would work! The Deathlands could be defeated! If only…
Lost in her reverie, Mildred started forward when a gust of wind from outside washed along the access tunnel and she flinched at the sharp stink of the rain. If only we had an APC, she thought. But would even an armored personnel carrier, or a U.S. Army tank be safe in this downpour? Probably not.
“They are as unreachable as the stars, madam,” Doc Tanner rumbled, his voice sounding deeper than the thunder.
The four companions turned to see their other friends amble through the open doorway of the redoubt. With nobody standing in the way anymore, the multiton door slid closed, the titanic slab of metal easing into the adamantine wall as silent as a knife in a dream.
Tall and lean, Doc Tanner was dressed as if from another century with a swallowtail jacket and frilly shirt. But the impression of gentility was beguiled by the strictly utilitarian .455 LeMat handcannon on his gunbelt, the grip of the massive black-powder weapon worn from constant use. Tucked under one arm, Doc carried an ebony walking stick with a silver lion’s head for a handle. Hidden inside was a rapier of the finest Toledo steel.
“NASA has sent probes to the stars, you old coot,” Mildred snapped irritably.
“Indeed, madam, so you say,” Doc continued unabated. “But they brought nothing useful back that we know about, and so shall it be again this time, I am afraid. We can look, but not touch.”
“Just like in vid,” Jak Lauren stated, brushing back his snowy-white hair. The albino teenager was wearing camou-color clothing. His jacket was a deadly weapon, as bits of razor-sharp metal had been sewn into the fabric here and there. If anyone grabbed him by the collar, the person would lose fingers. A number of leaf-bladed throwing knives were hidden about his person, and a massive .357 Magnum Colt Python was holstered at his side.
“What vid was that?” Ryan asked over a shoulder.
Jak shrugged. “Dean and I saw in another redoubt. Victory for Victoria, mebbe. Skinny man standing in snow look through window at fat baron in a gaudy house stuffing self with food.” The teenager frowned. “Not follow story after that. Boring, but only vid that still played on comp.”
“Victor/Victoria,” Mildred corrected him with a wan smile. “Yes, I wouldn’t think that a musical comedy would be to your liking.”
Jak arched an eyebrow. “Why say? Like music vids. Always lots of food, pretty girls.”
“And that, my young friend, is as good a description of paradise as any in these draconian days.” Doc sighed. Slipping the walking stick out from under his arm, Doc strode to the very end of the tunnel, stopping only a few feet away from the damp spot on the floor where the rain had been blown inside.
“Most people, I believe, shall never see, a poem as lovely as… What was that line?” Doc whispered softly, then spun fast. “Ryan, we simply must have those trees! Surely something can be done. That city cannot be more than a league away. Maybe less.”
A league? “We wouldn’t last ten feet in that,” Ryan stated gruffly, hitching up his gunbelt. As the lightning flashed once more, the big man turned his back on the storm. “Come on, we’ve wasted enough time. Let’s go.”
“But…”
“Cut the gab,” Ryan snapped impatiently. “We agreed to wait a day for the storm to end. Well, it’s still here and the day is gone. Time to go. You zero that?”
“Yes, my friend, I understand,” Doc rumbled in acquiescence. “It has, indeed, been a full day, and fair is fair.”
Going to the entrance of the redoubt, Ryan tapped a code into the armored keypad set into the doorjamb. There was a brief pause, then the huge black portal ponderously slid closed. Ryan gave one last look toward the nameless city and its surrounding forest. Trees that could withstand the acid rains. With a grimace, the one-eyed man turned and entered the redoubt. The rest of the companions stayed close behind.
As the group walked along the entranceway of the redoubt, they heard the massive nukeproof door slide shut with a subdued boom of compressed air.
Running stiff fingers through his black hair, Ryan tried not to let his anger show. Shitfire, this base had been a triple zero. No food, no ammo, no exit. Oh, sure, all of the basic stuff in the base worked, everybody had washed their clothing and soaked in hot baths until they felt clean again. Hell, J.B. had even found a pair of decent socks, and Doc had located a tiny plastic vial of silicon lube. The stuff was made for comp printers, but worked just fine on the sword hidden inside his walking stick. But that had been the lot. The rest of the redoubt had been stripped clean, bare to the walls. And worse, their food supplies were getting dangerously low again. The companions had six days’ worth of MRE packs left. After that, they’d be eating stewed boot if they couldn’t find anything in this redoubt. There really was no other choice. The companions would have to jump again, whether they wanted to or not.
Exiting the passageway, the somber group crossed the vast parking garage and retrieved their backpacks. All around them, the painted lines on the concrete floor of the garage were empty and waiting. This was where the staff of the redoubt would have parked over a hundred wags: civie cars, motorcycles, Hummers, APCs, trucks and even the occasional tank. But the garage looked brand-new, as if it had been built and then abandoned. There wasn’t a single tool on the pegboard racks behind the workbenches, only the tape outlines of where each tool should be placed after it had been used. The drawers were empty, the supply closet vacant, and there wasn’t a single stain in the grease pit. Even the fuel storage tanks were bone-dry, the seals on the new pumps intact and unbroken.
As the companions crowded into the spotlessly clean elevator, J.B. hit the middle button and the cage swiftly descended to the center level of the redoubt. When the doors parted with a sigh, the companions trundled along the corridor and dutifully checked the straps on their backpacks and the loads in their weapons. The corridor was lined with doors on each side, and when the companions had arrived the previous day, every one of them had been closed and locked. One at a time, each door had been carefully opened, only to reveal a deserted room or office, without so much as a piece of furniture or a candy wrapper on the carpeted floor. It had taken most of a day for them to go through the entire base before finally admitting that the place was as empty as a mutie’s pockets. This wasn’t the first redoubt they had found in this condition, but it seemed to be happening more and more often. Was somebody looting the underground forts besides themselves? It was a sobering thought, and one that left the companions apprehensive and uneasy. The redoubts had been their lifeline more times than could be counted.
Reaching the door for the control room, Ryan pushed it aside and strode past the banks of humming comps. This was the heart of the redoubt, or more correctly, the brain. These were the machines that controlled the mighty fission reactors deep down in the subbasement for the life support systems, air-recycling, water sanitation, the freezers, the front door and the all-important mat-trans units. Without the comps, the base instantly became an airless tomb.
After passing through the anteroom, Ryan drew his 9 mm SIG-Sauer blaster before further pushing open a door to a room surrounded by armaglass. As the vanadium portal swung aside, he gave the chamber a quick scan with his weapon at the ready. The companions weren’t the only people who knew about the secret mat-trans units, and more than once they had found evidence of others just leaving the gateways.
However, the entry chamber was uninhabited. With his blaster leading the way, Ryan warily stepped through the doorway into the next room. The hexagonal chamber was a deep red in color, sprinkled with flakes of a hundred colors. The gateway chamber in each redoubt was a different color, supposedly for the purpose of identification. But if there was a chart to show what the colors meant, they had never found such a thing. The wall of this chamber vaguely resembled the terrazzo flooring used in most government buildings and major shopping malls, only with a much greater depth of color.
“It’s clear,” Ryan announced, holstering his blaster.
The others filed into the chamber, past Ryan. As he closed the door behind them, something rolled out of the shadows at the far end of the control room. With its two metallic antennas quivering, the boxy device rushed to the main computer and urgently extended a probe to quickly connect with the master control panel.
HALFWAY ACROSS THE WORLD, Delphi suddenly felt a vibration inside his left wrist, and flipped his hand over to see a message scrolling along the palm monitor. Excellent! The prey had been found at last!
Quickly typing instructions on his bare wrist, Delphi waited impatiently as the droid accessed circuits undisturbed for a century. Come on, come on…
Now, a roster of available redoubts was displayed. Frowning at the list, Delphi chose one at random. It was a base he had never been to before because it was on the Forbidden list. But this was a day for breaking the rules, and once the process had started he saw little reason to be cautious now.
“Get ready, traitor,” Delphi muttered, his heart quickening to the thrill of the hunt. “Here I come….”
RYAN CHECKED to make sure that everybody was safely inside the unit and seated on the floor.
“Ready?” he asked.
“Yeah, ready as we’ll ever be,” J.B. mumbled, removing his glasses and tucking them safely away in a pocket. The jumps always hit the companions hard, often sending them to the floor puking out their guts from the shock and pain of the instantaneous transference. Doubling over, J.B.’s glasses had once bent when they flew off his face and someone had stepped on them. It had taken him days to repair the frames, and he subsequently swore that sort of triple-stupe mistake would never happen again. His backup glasses were functional, but unflattering.
“Once more into the breach, dear friends,” Doc said in that singsong quality that meant he was quoting something.
Mildred merely snorted at the Shakespearean reference, and Ryan slammed the door shut. As he hurried to sit next to Krysty, a fine mist swirled upward from the disks on the floor to engulf the companions, mists from the ceiling descended upon them. They braced themselves for the expected snap of tiny sparks to crackle over their exposed skin. But instead, there was only a soothing warmth that spread through their bodies as the thickening mist began to swirl faster with every heartbeat.
What in nuking hell? Ryan thought in confusion. Something didn’t feel right. After so many jumps, there was a certain “sameness” that the companions had come to expect. So anything out of the norm was suspicious. Was the mat-trans broken? Were they being sent somewhere, or worse, were they going nowhere? Mebbe the computer was having a malfunc. Nuking hell, he had to stop this jump!
Frantically trying to stand to reach the door, Ryan felt the floor drop away and he knew that he had been just a split second too slow. The jump had begun.
As gently as falling through a cloud, the terrified companions descended into the artificial forever of the matter transfer, and vanished from sight.
Chapter Three
But even as it started, their fall came to a relaxing halt and the companions were able to watch as the electronic mists faded away to leave them unharmed and unruffled in a new mat-trans unit.
“Son a bitch,” Ryan muttered, drawing his blaster without conscious thought.
“We not dead,” Jak mumbled, sounding slightly shocked. With a gesture, a throwing knife slipped out of his sleeve and dropped into his waiting hand.
“No,” a hoarse voice whispered.
Turning, the companions saw Doc cringing against the wall, braced as if for a blow. His hands twisted the silver-lion’s head on the walking stick, exposing a few inches of the stainless-steel sword hidden inside the hollow sheath.
“You okay?” Mildred asked, reaching out a hand.
“Not again,” Doc rambled, eyes darting about madly. “No hardship means a controlled jump. That means they…they have found me. Operation Chronos has found me again!”
“Are you sure—” Ryan began slowly.
Suddenly a new light came into Doc’s wild eyes and his face went pale as he closed the stick with a solid click. “No, by the Three Kennedys, they haven’t found me, the bastards have found us!” he gasped. “But they can’t have you. I wouldn’t let them get their hands on you, too!”
Whipping out his ebony stick, Doc lunged toward Krysty. Even though the sword stick was sheathed, the redhead twisted aside. But it hadn’t been necessary. The bottom of the stick missed her by inches, as intended, and stabbed the Last Destination button on the control panel.
Recoiling at the sight, everybody braced for the torture of instantaneous travel, but nothing happened. The mat-trans unit didn’t respond to the signal from the emergency LD button.
“Nuke me,” J.B. said hoarsely, putting on his glasses. “Well, that never happened before! We should have gone right back to last redoubt. The LD button has never failed to work before!”
“I don’t think it failed now,” Krysty said, her hair flexing unhappily about her tense features. “I think we’re not being allowed to leave.”
“You mean, that maybe Doc is right,” Mildred returned, “and that this might have been a controlled jump?”
“Could be, yes.”
“Mutie shit,” Jak muttered. “Just malfunc.”
Ryan slid the Steyr SSG-70 longblaster off his shoulder and worked the bolt.
There were only four 5-round clips remaining for the Steyr, but the neckered-down brass packed a hell of a lot more punch than the fat 9 mm Parabellum rounds in the SIG-Sauer. Anything could be behind that door, from a squad of armed whitecoats to a sec droid hunter. Once, very long ago, Ryan had chilled a cougar with his bare hands, and the Deathlands warrior would rather do that again than face a sec hunter droid even if he was armed with a predark bazooka. The damn machines were almost impossible to stop once they started coming after a target.
“If you’re feeling nervous,” Ryan added, “then start us on a jump.” The man was listening hard to the redoubt, getting the feel of the place, the gentle hum of the air vents, the muffled noises of the water pipes and high-pitched whine of the fluorescent lights overhead. Everything seemed normal, not a thing was different or strange, and that was scaring the nuking hell out of the warrior.
Keeping his handcannon level, Jak reached for the keypad and tapped the LD button to no result.
“Okay,” the teen stated angrily. “We trapped.”
“No, please, we must jump again,” Doc begged, dropping the ebony stick. Pushing the others aside, he hit the controls in a fast sequence. “We cannot let them find you…you have no idea what they can do…will do to you…we have to leave right now!”
Mildred reached out a hand, but the time traveler dodged out of the way.
Closing a fist, Doc started pounding on the keypad. “Work, damn you, why will you not work!”
The startled companions exchanged worried expressions at the outburst, but before they could do anything Doc slipped to the floor and started to weep uncontrollably, his face buried in his hands.
The sight of such weakness shocked Ryan for a moment, then he suddenly understood, and felt like a fool. It had to have been all of those jumps that had scrambled Doc’s brain and made him so forgetful. Pieced together from various conversations, Ryan knew that the agents of Operation Chronos had trawled dozens of people from the past and brought them into the twentieth century. But Doc was the only person to ever survive the process sane. The predark whitecoats had nearly turned the poor Vermont scholar inside and out trying to solve that vital mystery.
Then one day, Doc was deemed too much trouble to deal with and was sent into the future, to arrive in Deathlands. The agents of Operation Chronos immediately regretted the decision and took off after him in hot pursuit. But there was no way to track the old man in the vast wasteland that was the Deathlands. The agents of Chronos had long ago given up the chase as impossible, but Doc kept running. Finally he wandered, dazed and confused, into some serious nuking trouble with a lunatic baron before accidentally encountering the companions.
“Sweet Jesus, look what they’ve done to him,” Mildred said softly. Kneeling by the sobbing man, she tenderly stroked his hair. “Doc might annoy the hell out of me at times, but he’s no coward. The old coot has proved that a thousand times. The horrors he must have endured at the hands of those whitecoats….”
Doc had once claimed that Operation Chronos was a subdivision of Overproject Whisper, the group that built the redoubts and invented the mat-trans units. Was that, in fact, true? Were there perhaps other unknown groups prowling through the redoubts of the world? There was very little about the bases that they knew for certain. Except that everybody they met was usually an enemy.
Kneeling, Jak handed Doc the dropped sword stick, and the trembling scholar hugged it tightly to his heaving chest.
“Sorry,” Doc whispered in a hoarse voice, tears on his cheeks. “I seem to have…lost control there for just a moment. I will be fine in a trice. Really, I will….”
“Theophilus,” Ryan said, stumbling over the name.
Sluggishly, Dr. Theophilus Algernon Tanner looked up in shock at Ryan’s scarred face. It was the very first time he could recall the man using his Christian name.
“If those nuke-sucking whitecoats are coming, then we’ll face the entire fragging lot of them together, old friend,” Ryan stated, offering a scarred hand.
A long minute passed as Doc breathed deeply, the color slowly returning to his features. Then the silver-haired gentleman reached out and clasped Ryan’s hand in a powerful grip. It always caught the one-eyed man by surprise that Doc looked sixty, but really was only in his late thirties and as strong as a horse. His mind had been damaged but not his body, and not his fighting spirit.
“Together,” Ryan said, helping the man to stand.
The two stood for a moment, hands tightly clasped.
“Together, my friend,” Doc vowed, his voice as strong as ever. As he released the hold, he softly added, “And please allow me to apologize for my earlier…lapse. You see, I—”
“Frag it,” Ryan said bluntly, glancing over his shoulder at the closed door. “It don’t mean drek.”
“Doesn’t,” Krysty corrected him. “And anybody who says they’ve never been scared is a liar. Gaia knows we’ve all been there.”
“Fuckin’ A,” Jak chimed in, slapping Doc on the shoulder.
“Nuke them till they glow, then shoot them in the dark,” Mildred added impulsively.
The rest of the companions chuckled at that, but Doc threw back his head to roar in laughter. “Indeed, madam! Well said. Cry havoc, and let loose the dogs of war, eh?”
“Oh, stuff it, you old coot.”
“Well, as long as we’re not going anywhere,” Ryan said grimly, striding across the chamber’s cold floor, “then we better get ready for company. Get hard, people. If the whitecoats do come for us, it’s going to be bloody.”
“I hear ya,” J.B. stated, leveling his Uzi machine pistol and walking across the chamber to join his old friend. The fleeting moment of camaraderie was past. Back to the grim business of staying alive.
This new mat-trans unit was the same as every other, a hexagonal room made of seamless armaglass, with small hidden vents near the ceiling, one door with concealed hinges, and an operating lever to open it. The only difference was the color. Nothing else.
As the rest of the companions prepared to leave the mat-trans unit, J.B. eased the M-4000 shotgun off his shoulder and passed the weapon to Mildred. Tucking away her ZKR revolver, the physician expertly racked the scattergun to chamber a 12-gauge cartridge.
