“By the Earth Mother, Ryan, it’s hot in this place.”
“I figure we’re somewhere far to the southeast.”
“Still in Deathlands?”
“Mebbe beyond.”
With no apparent effort, the girl uncoiled herself to stand by him. Ryan was a good two inches clear of six feet, but she was less than a palm’s span below him. He marveled at her amazing powers of recovery. Though the others were all moving, moaning and sighing, Krysty’s green eyes were bright as ever, and she was leaning against the glass wall, arranging her staggeringly bright red hair with long fingers. The girl wore khaki coveralls, tucked into a beautiful pair of cowboy boots, also from the Alaskan redoubt. They were hand-stitched in blue calf, overlaid with silver falcons, wings spread wide. The toes of the boots were knife-sharp, chiseled from silver. Her gun was also silvered, a 9 mm Heckler amp; Koch P7A-13.
In the next few minutes they all managed to stand, though Lori felt sick, kneeling with vomit drooling from her mouth. Doc knelt at her side with a cracking of knee joints, putting a comforting arm around the girl.
“Where we come? Hot. Never known hot. How we come to this? Walls different color.”
“Tell her, Doc,” said J.B. “Like to hear how you explain it to the dummy.”
Doc Tanner scowled at the Armorer. “I would be obliged, Mr. Dix, if you would refrain from calling Miss Quint a dummy. She is not a mute. Nor a mutie. That foul imbecile Quint never educated her and kept her in a state of terror. She is as bright as you or I.” He paused for a moment. “Certainly as bright as you.”
“Fireblast!” swore Ryan. “It’s bastard hot. Guess I’ll leave my coat here.” Dropping the long garment with its white fir trim to the floor, he hesitated, then retrieved a white silk scarf with weighted ends from a pocket.
“Why hot? My head hurts.” Lori stood and leaned against Doc. Finnegan seemed as though he was going to make some joke about the oddly matched couple, then caught Ryan’s good eye and closed his mouth.
“The pain will abate, child,” Doc said. “We are now in some other, hotter part of what was the United States. Unless we have been carried to one of the gateways that was established in But let us not consider that for a while.”
Ryan listened, puzzled. Doc occasionally dropped strange hints about the gateways and what they could do. As if he possessed more knowledge than he possibly could.
“No, we enter this chamber, built long years ago, before the great nuclear conflict that destroyed this earth as we knew it, and the mechanism operates. Instant matter transmitter. From here to there in that much time.” He clicked his bony fingers together to emphasize the shortness.
Lori’s face was utterly blank, but she nodded as if she understood.
“These transmitters were known as gateways. They were hidden in many locations throughout the land. I imagine most were destroyed. But they were well made, using what was called the state-of-the-art technology. Many survived, hidden within a variety of redoubts.”
“Like home?” she asked.
Doc nodded, his long white hair drifting across the high cheekbones. “Precisely, Miss Quint. Like that vision of Dante’s last circle of the inferno that you knew as your home. This is a gateway. A part of Project Cerberus. Research from scientists that was to run to the very end of endless night.”
“When was we home?”
This time Doc shook his head. “Alas, I have no really accurate chronometer, Miss Quint. But my memory, addled though it often is, recalls a transmission time of less than .0001 of a nanosecond. Of course, it seems longer because of the recovery time from the molecular scrambling and disassembly.”
In the few jumps he’d made, Ryan had wondered how long it took. On one he’d checked the chron on his left wrist, but it didn’t seem to have moved at all from the beginning to the end of the journey. Doc’s explanation hadn’t made it any easier to understand. All he knew was that you got into one of the surviving gateways and closed the door. An infinity of scattered time later, you were in another gateway, perhaps three thousand miles away.