With the sights of their weapons sweeping the surrounding crowd, the troopers backed their way across the flatland to the cargo door of the gyroplane. As Krysty was hustled inside, the slaves started shouting angrily and they surged forward, rushing the landing site. More axes sailed through the air, and two of the klieg lights shattered and winked out. This forced the guards to fire a series of warning shots to cover the aircraft’s departure. Though the shots weren’t that close, most of the slaves hit the deck to avoid the energy pulses.
Ryan didn’t go belly down on the glass and he didn’t duck. He stood rigidly upright, watching grimly as the gyro with Krysty in it lifted off. The black aircraft rose into the sun, which was just breaking through banks of gray clouds on the horizon.
“We’ll get her back, Dad,” Dean said as the gyro wheeled away toward the Slake City camp. “We’ll get her back.”
Chapter Sixteen
Krysty came to inside the gyro, buckled into a contour seat by a cross-chest harness. The cramped interior’s red lights swam as the aircraft made a sudden, gut-wrenching takeoff. For a moment the G-force had her stomach down around her boot tops.
When the pressure eased, she noticed the man sitting in the seat next to her. He had a high forehead and long skinny legs. Filthy and dressed in fetid rags, he smelled like a slaughterhouse on a hot day. He wore a big smile on his gap-toothed face.
“What are you grinning at?” Krysty demanded.
“The turn of my fortune at last,” he said. “Moments ago I was doomed, like you and your friends, to die a terrible, lingering death. Now I am saved.” He showed her his manacle-free wrists.
“Lucky you.”
“No, it has nothing to do with luck,” he said. “Dredda Otis Trask finally came to her senses.” Still grinning, he tapped the side of his head. “What’s in here is priceless, you see. I have a track record of success that belies my chronological years. My rise to professional prominence was meteoric. I assure you I have solved problems whose complexity and implications would crack your tiny mind. On my own world, statues were raised in my likeness. Halls of academe were named after me. I was emulated and bitterly envied by my peers.”
“Are you crazy?”
“Hardly, though what I have endured would have certainly driven lesser spirits mad. In the other reality, I was the wellspring of invention. I helped to postpone the collapse of human civilization by more than a decade. And I discovered a pathway to other universes.”
“You brought the battlesuits here?”
“That’s correct. I met your lover, Ryan Cawdor, in my reality. When I saw him outside the mine this evening, I took cover. I was afraid that even in my current condition he would recognize me. Our last encounter was less than cordial.”
“He would have torn your head off.”
The whitecoat ignored her comment and went on. “It was most amusing to meet your version of Dr. Theophilus Tanner in the flesh. You see, he was an important figure in the history of my world’s science. Not because of any discovery he made. He was a pivotal laboratory subject. As in your reality, my whitecoat predecessors trawled Dr. Tanner from the past, then expelled him to the future. However, instead of materializing in Deathlands, which of course never existed in my reality, he reappeared in my era, in the middle of a carniphage alert. He died on the spot.”
“A detailed examination of frozen samples of his tissues taken before his expulsion was the key to my cracking the barrier between dimensions. It’s a difficult concept to explain, even to someone with the proper academic credentials. To simplify is to over-simplify, in this case. Suffice it to say that the changes in his cellular structure brought on by the trawling event revealed certain specific physical mechanisms that had up until then not even been hinted at. My research into the nature of these mechanisms produced the miracle of reality transfer.”
Huth leaned closer to her and said, “I opened the door.”
As he spoke, her prehensile hair reacted, visibly shortening as it drew up into ringlets.