Circle Thrice

As the walls splintered and a torrent of fluid stone flooded into the chamber, Ryan and the others had already left it.

Just left it.

Their bodies had been disintegrated, coded by the mat-trans digital controls by the door, to be reassembled in a similar gateway in the heart of old Tennessee, in Deathlands.

But the process was crucially interrupted by the quake.

Chapter Two

The mat-trans units were highly sophisticated pieces of equipment, the finest that the whitecoat scientists of the predark times could design and manufacture. In the last year or so before skydark, and the transition of the United States of America into Deathlands, with the deaths of around 99.4 percent of the population during the nuke holocaust and the long winters that followed, the government had been working on a number of ultrasecret projects.

The Totality Concept was the blanket name for all the differing branches of research. Within that Pentagon-controlled umbrella, there was Operation Chronos, dealing with time travel; the Genesis Project, which dealt with genetic tampering and DNA research; and Overproject Whisper, which had a number of arcane, mysterious and murderous subdivisions. One of these was Cerberus, which covered the installation of matter-transfer gateways in a number of specially built military complexes called redoubts.

The greens and liberals and conservationists at the end of the twentieth century had been enraged at the way the government had chosen to site these redoubts, riding roughshod over all objections. Many of the redoubts were located in idyllic and isolated parts of the country, remote from cities. In many cases the deep-buried complexes had been located in national parks.

In the apocalypse that followed the skydark mega-cull, some of these redoubts had been destroyed. But others, abandoned, had been maintained by superbly engineered nuke power plants that kept the gateways functioning.

Ryan and his friends had stumbled on one of these long-hidden redoubts and accidentally triggered the mat-trans unit, finding that they had miraculously “jumped” to somewhere else.

Since then, they’d made a number of such jumps, generally with safety and success, but not always. The big problem was that all scientific data had gone with the missiles, and nobody knew the codes that enabled the users to choose a specific location.

All Ryan knew was that when you shut the door of the hexagonal armaglass chamber, you triggered the jump mechanism, became unconscious and woke up some other place.

That was what was supposed to happen.

But the timing of the devastating earthquake had proved crucial to the jump.

The dissolution of the molecular structure of each of the six companions had taken place, but the reassembly was abruptly interrupted.

The reception unit in Tennessee was on alert, the initial mechanism functioning.

But there was nothing to receive.

The microcomps were searching the void, making tens of millions of calculations every second, seeking the physical parameters for the six humans in order to try to complete the assembly and conclude the jump.

Ryan Cawdor. Male. Late thirties. Seventy-four inches. Two hundred and five pounds. Eyes negative. Left eye missing. Right eye pale blue. Skin dark. Hair curly and black. A dozen or more scars all over his body, including one that ran from eye to the corner of the mouth on the right side of his face.

A myriad list of endless details covered every aspect and measurement of Ryan, from the length of his stubble to the condition of his fingernails.

It went on to describe the clothes that Ryan Cawdor had been wearingthe long coat and the white silk scarf weighted at the end with silver dollars, blue denim shirt, dark blue pants, combat boots.

The comps searched for comparisons, weights and calibers for his weapons. The Steyr SSG-70 fired a 7.62 mm round and was mounted with a laser image enhancer and Starlight nightscope. A SIG-Sauer automatic was holstered on his hip, the P-226 model, carrying fifteen rounds of 9 mm full-metal-jacket rounds. Length was 7.72 inches. Barrel length was 4.41 inches, its weight 25.52 ounces. An eighteen-inch panga was sheathed on the other hip, with a blade honed to a whisper of death.

There were similar details for the other five friends, concentrating on the unusual elements that made them the individuals that they were.