But it was no longer Krysty who straddled him in the wildly swinging hammock. The woman was unbelievably old, her skin sweating with ancient evil, her rheumy eyes glistening down at Ryan’s agony, her straggling, matted hair lying lank across the yellowed, goatlike skull.
“Not her, lover. Never was her. That flame-haired bitch with her Gaia powers and her fucking Mother Sonja!”
Ryan closed his eye again, but the crone was pinching at his face, squeezing his good eye between finger and thumb, forcing it open.
He was forced to look up at the needle as he sped the last seconds toward a pounding orgasm. Ryan didn’t even have time to scream. It was a bad jump. Bad.
Chapter Three
Ryan recovered first. He rolled onto his side and retched violently, bringing up threads of yellow bile and clotted lumps of food, congealed from his last meal.
His head hurt, with a band of steel clamped around his temples. Slowly and with infinite caution, Ryan lifted his right hand toward his closed eye, his good right eye, touching it with fingers that trembled.
He blinked it open and saw armaglass walls of a dull, dark brown, showing that they had successfully jumped somewhere else. The disks in floor and ceiling had ceased to glow, and the mist near the top of the gateway had almost vanished.
He felt terrible, his brain still being chewed around inside his head. The slightest movement produced murderous vertigo that led in turn to violent sickness.
Ryan decided to lie still for a while, until his body recovered from the shock of the jump.
He could still taste the burning gasoline that had given them the flaming send-off. He remembered the relief that the natives had failed to get at them, though his last sentient memory was of dark figures, silhouetted against the flames, struggling to wrench open the gateway door.
Ryan blinked again, lifting a hand to rub at his eye with his sleeve.
He was right. There was something lying just inside the door of the chamber. Some kind of small animal.
Whatever it was, Ryan decided that it was no threat to him. It had the unmistakable stillness of death. Perhaps some little creature had been sheltering in the gateway and had been caught by the speed of the second jump.
He crawled a few inches closer, peering at it, then heard J.B.’s voice, sounding frail and weak, from behind him. “It’s a hand.”
“A hand?”
“Yeah. Hand.”
Ryan squinted, realizing that the Armorer was correct.
It was a human hand, dark skinned, with the end joint of the middle finger missing from an old wound. Three thin bracelets of woven hair encircled the wrist.
Ryan took a single deep, slow breath and risked sitting up, steadying himself against the cold armaglass wall. He got a new perspective on the severed hand, seeing that it had been cut off a few inches above the wrist, halfway toward the elbow. It was a startlingly clean wound, with very little blood, the two ends of bone showing as white and clean as if a massive guillotine had been used on them.
“Looks like the poor bastard got the door open just as the jump was taking place,” J.B. said, sniffing, removing his glasses to polish them. “We brought his hand with us. Rest of him must’ve stayed and bled back in the jungle.”
“Fireblast!” Ryan looked across at his old friend. “You look worse than I fed.”
J.B. tried a fragile smile but didn’t even get close to it. “I feel about twice as bad as you look, and you look three times as bad as me.”
“Not the best jump. You have bad dreams?”
The Armorer replaced his spectacles, looking around for his fedora and tugging it on at a jaunty angle. “Seemed like I was drowning in a small, sealed room under the sea. Too realistic for me.”
“I was being fucked and murdered at the same time by” He hesitated, holding back a part of the nightmare. “By this evil old slut.”
“Dark night!” J.B. had tried to stand, using the shotgun as a crutch, but his strength failed him and he dropped back to hands and knees.
“Think the others have had such a bastardly bad jump?” Ryan asked.
“Hope not. For their sake. Might’ve been something to do with the mat-trans being used twice so close together. Or the equipment might have malfunctioned.”
Ryan looked around, feeling the nausea retreating. “Think we’ve reached the same place?”
J.B. wiped sweat from his forehead. “Find out soon enough. I’d have thought they might have been letting us know they were here by now.”
“Yeah.”
There could be any of a hundred reasons why Krysty and the others weren’t already opening up the heavy door and greeting their safe arrival.
But the most likely and the most menacing was that they’d somehow jumped to a different destination. The LD button might have failed to work.
But as the Trader used to say, there was plenty of time to worry about things you could control and understand without bothering about anything else.
“Feel up to moving?” Ryan asked.
J.B. cleared his throat. “Pretty up and walking good. Ready when you are.”
“Sure?”
“Yeah. Long as I don’t have to run or fight or do anything more than a gentle stroll, then I’m your man, Ryan.” He pushed a hand against the walls and stood, rocking from side to side, eyes pinwheeling behind the lenses of his glasses.
“Sure?” Ryan repeated.
“Let’s do it.”
Ryan drew the SIG-Sauer, checked that the Steyr was snug over his shoulder, then opened the door a few inches and kicked the severed hand out of the way.
He saw the usual small side room that stood between the actual mat-trans chamber and the main control area. It was about ten feet square, bare of furniture, with a couple of empty shelves on the wall to the right.
Through the open doorway beyond it Ryan could see the rows of desks, computers and monitor screens that typified that section of the military redoubts.
He stepped out of the chamber, J.B. right at his heels, and sniffed the air, finding it had the arid and flat taste typical of most gateways.
The redoubts had mostly been built during the last years of the twentieth century, mainly in out-of-the-way places in the wilderness regions of the country. Despite the bitter and fruitless objections of the powerful conservation lobby, these often happened to be in national parks.
The redoubts had been powered by the most sophisticated nuke plants, designed to run on carefully planned comp programs without any human interference. This meant that after the megakilling of sky-dark, many of the surviving redoubts carried on running themselves, ignorant of the fact that their human masters were already dead or dying of rad sickness.
So the stabilization procedures involving cleaning, security and air-conditioning were still working in most of the redoubts.
A faded piece of pink paper on the wall was tacked to the off-white plaster.
Ryan checked it out before going on to examine the rest of the gateway complex. It was already obvious that Krysty and the others weren’t in the immediate vicinity.
“What is it?” J.B. asked.
Ryan read it aloud. “Says ‘Redoubt 47’s own theater group invites you to their January production, Whip It Out and Wipe It , a revue written by Officer Jim Laurens. Take your mind off the troubles. Monday thru Friday, 1900 hours.’ That’s all.”
The Armorer screwed up his eyes, peering at it. “Must’ve been just before sky dark. The intensity of the military situation would’ve been the troubles it mentions.”
“Wonder if the show ever took place?” Ryan looked at the notice. “Guess it doesn’t matter much either way. Let’s go check out the rest of the place.”
THE MAIN CONTROL AREA WAS in excellent shape, with no sign of any structural damage or electrical failure. The banks of controls showed flickering lights and whirling dials, giving off the faint distant hum of the operating machinery.
“No clue anyone’s been here for a hundred years,” J.B. said, running a finger along the top of the nearest desk, showing it to Ryan, completely clean.
“Main sec doors are closed.”
“Yeah.”
Ryan stood still, sniffing at the air. “I reckon I can just about smell sweat.”
“Sure you’re not imagining it?”
“Mebbe.”
“They have to have come this way.” J.B. shook his bead, pushing back the fedora.
“Why didn’t they wait?”
The Armorer looked around, considering the question. “Too many possible answers to that, friend.” He hesitated. “I reckon I can smell sweat, as well.”
“Better get the sec doors open. See what lies behind them. If Krysty and Dean and the others aren’t there, then we can start doing some serious worrying.”
The green lever at the side of the vanadium-steel door was in the down “locked” position.
“Usual,” J.B. said, taking hold of the lever. “Stop it after a few inches.”