A dark patch covered his left eye, the right gleaming with a vivid, cold blue. A scar ran from its corner down to his mouth, both injuries dating from his childhood.
The reflection revealed that he wore a long coat, trimmed with white fur, and a white silk scarf was tucked around his neck.
As well as the powerful rifle, Ryan carried a trusty SIG-Sauer P-226 blaster, a 9 mm automatic with a built-in baffle silencer that had seen better days. Balancing it on the opposite hip was a long panga with a honed eighteen-inch blade that ended in a needle point.
“You come up with part two of the plan, Ryan?” J.B. asked.
“Part two?”
“Part one was getting the others to make a safe jump so we didn’t all get butchered in the gateway. I didn’t quite catch you telling me about part two, which is where you and me also get to jump safely.”
Ryan grinned. “Fair question. Guess I never got much beyond part one.”
There was a sudden burst of yelling from outside the open sec door, guttural words in an alien language that neither Ryan nor J.B. had heard before they arrived in the emerald jungle.
Ryan risked a quick glance over the top of the console, but there was nothing to be seen. “Best I can come up with is that you cover me and I run for the door, throw the handle and hope that the bastard thing drops quick enough to keep them out. How’s that sound to you for part two?”
“Like shit, Ryan.” J.B. adjusted his dusty, stained fedora. “Then again, I don’t have anything better. Real chance they’ll pick you off from outside.”
Ryan nodded. “Yeah.”
He narrowed his good eye, sniffing. “You smell anything? It smells like”
“Gasoline,” J.B. concluded. “Looks like part two just got obsolete.”
Chapter Two
“Doing to us what we did to those bastard ants! They’re hoping to drive us out.”
Life was measured in seconds.
There was no point now in trying to close the exterior sec door. The gas could be ignited in a heartbeat.
“Have to jump,” Ryan said. “Now.”
Keeping low, almost on hands and knees, the men splashed through the gasoline that had gushed into the area, reaching the closed door of the gateway chamber.
“Use the LD button,” J.B. said.
“I know,” Ryan replied irritably.
The one thing they’d been able to learn about mat-trans units was that their control panels contained small black buttons marked with the trim white letters L and D , which stood for last destination .
It worked two ways. If you’d made a bad jump, you could press the LD control and you would be back where you were before. Or, in this case, if you used the button within thirty minutes of a previous jump, then you would go to the same place.
That was the theory.
If Ryan and J.B. could make it safely and trigger the jump mechanism, then they should arrive at the same destination as the others.
The Trader always used to say that when it was time to move, the breadth of a human hair could make the difference between living and dying.
Ryan looked behind him. The rifle was across his shoulder and the handblaster in his fist. Their movement hadn’t been followed by a shower of arrows or spears, as he’d feared, which meant the natives out in the dense, sweating greenery were about to light the fire.
He reached up and threw open the door, gesturing for J.B. to roll into the chamber.
Now the natives saw that they were in danger of losing their prey.
There was a scream of rage, and an arrow struck the watery green armaglass only inches from Ryan’s shoulder, bouncing off and landing with a splash in the gasoline.
The control panel was set at chest height in the frame of the door, and Ryan lunged for it, left-handed, aiming for the LD button, hitting it.
Simultaneously, almost in slow motion, a burning branch was thrown into the gateway from outside, whirling in the air above the chattering consoles, the oxygen making the flames roar brightly.
It seemed to take forever for the fire to ignite the lake of gasoline.
Ryan grabbed the edge of the door and started to pull its great counterbalanced weight shut to trigger the mat-trans mechanism, his eye watching the torch.
The jagged branch landed, a ripple of blue fire running from it across the surface of the gasoline, turning it into a sea of fire.
“Dark night!” J.B. gasped, on hands and knees behind Ryan, holding the Uzi, ready to open up if the berserk natives came after them.
Ryan recoiled from the flaring heat that seared up at him, the hot yellow flames cut off by the closing armaglass door. The lock clicked shut and the mat-trans mechanism was activated.
The walls of the hexagonal chamber were immensely thick and powerful, but there was no way of locking or bolting the chamber to make it secure against an external attack. No doubt its original manufacturers, a century earlier, had never envisaged a time that it might be needed.
“Fire might keep them away,” Ryan said, sitting quickly on the floor, avoiding the metal disks, leaning his back against the cool armaglass. He noticed in passing how all the smooth walls were smeared with patches of lichen and moss, laid there in the extreme humidity of the jungle since they’d first arrived a few days earlier.
The fire was visible beyond the armaglass, the smell of smoke filtering through. But there was no sign of any of the natives daring the heat to try to get to them.
J.B. sat opposite Ryan, the scattergun across his lap. He snatched a moment to take off the fedora and place his spectacles safely in one of his pockets.
The air at the top of the chamber was already filling with tendrils of whirling gray-white mist, and the disks in floor and ceiling were glowing brightly.
Ryan could feel the familiar nauseous feeling of his brain being swirled around inside his skull, as though the bony walls were expanding and the pinkish tissue was shrinking, smaller and smaller toward infinity.
“Here we go,” he said, his voice thick, echoing inside his own head.
The darkness was birthing, spreading out from the depths of his own mind, swallowing all of his senses. Hearing went first, followed by speech.
At the last moment of sentience, Ryan thought he saw a dark group of figures, silhouetted against the bright fire, struggling to open the door of the chamber.
“Too”he muttered.
IT WAS A BAD JUMP. There were times when the transfer from here to there was made with nothing worse than a sick headache and, occasionally a nosebleed, but with no sensation that every molecule and atom of your body had been dissolved and projected through space and reassembled at some distant point. Other times, the jump fucked your head.
J.B. FOUND HIMSELF walking along a beach. The stones beneath his combat boots were of differing sizes, from duck egg to basketball. A thick mist drifted in from the gray sea to his right, which lapped at the edge of the beach with small, monotonous rollers, sucking at the shingle, rising and falling, advancing and withdrawing.
To his left he could just make out vast cliffs of smooth, polished granite, rising vertically, their tops out of sight in the lowering clouds.
The beach stretched ahead of him for about two hundred yards until it merged with the grayness. Behind him, the dreary vista was exactly the same.
Despite the chill, the Armorer was dressed only in a thin shirt and a torn pair of camouflage cotton pants. The air was bitterly cold and damp, and he shivered as he walked along. The sky was completely overcast, and he had no clue which direction he was taking.
The stretch of beach was completely deserted, with no seabirds wheeling above his head, no sign of life out to sea and not even the smallest crab clicking among the stones.
J.B. became aware that it was beginning to drizzle.
Suddenly, and seamlessly, he was inside the ruins of some vast building, filled with huge rusting pieces of machinery so archaic and corroded that it was impossible to tell what they might once have been.
Water dripped from the rotting ends of the roof timbers, splashing sonorously into great, dark weed-fronded pools that almost covered the stone floor.
And he was not alone.
Every time that J.B. took a few steps forward he caught the sound of someoneor somethingfollowing him. But when he stopped there was silence. And when he spun there was nothing to be seen.
The way forward led him deeper into the maw of the ancient building. His glasses were covered in condensation, but when J.B. tried to wipe them clean he found that it formed a sticky film, like spilled honey.