Dectra Chain
James Axler
Dectra Chain
James Axler
Chapter One
RYAN CAWDOR OPENED HIS EYE, then closed it again, feeling the certainty that to try to move would make him throw up. He took several rapid, shallow breaths, fighting the nausea, swallowing hard. Sweat beaded his forehead, and his stomach was cramping. A mat-trans jump through one of the gateways always resulted in unconsciousness and a gut-churning sickness as every molecule was sucked into infinity and then reassembled in another gateway.
Ryan had never made an attempt to understand the technology of the hidden mat-trans chambers. Indeed, virtually all knowledge of anything technical or scientific had vanished on that January morning when the world disappeared under a nuclear haze, about a hundred years ago.
He could hear someone moaning and retching on the far side of the hexagonal room, which was protected with thick walls of colored, armored glass. Ryan still didn’t feel confident enough to risk opening his eye again. All but one of the six people with him had made several jumps before and they knew what to expect.
But for one it was the first time.
Man Whose Eyes See More had been until very recently the wise man, or shaman, to a subtribe of the Mescalero Apaches, who lived among the jagged red canyons of the land that had once been called New Mexico. He’d never been more than fifty miles from his birthplace in Drowned Squaw Canyon, but now he didn’t know where he was. All he knew was that his head was spinning, as though Ysun, giver of all life, had scooped out the pink-gray mush that filled his skull and taken it into its mouth only to spit it out again.
His mirrored sunglasses had fallen from his face, and he fumbled for them, not wanting to risk opening his eyes in case he saw What? Nothing? Death? An endless darkness beyond all time? The shaman didn’t know.
Very, very cautiously, he eased open his dark brown eyes.
“Nothing,” he said to himself, conscious of how harsh and dry his voice sounded, as though it hadn’t been used for several days. “Nothing has happened here at all.”
They were exactly where they’d been when Ryan Cawdor, known to the Indian’s people as One Eye Chills, had closed the ponderous door. His new companions sat or lay just where they’d been before the swooping raven of blackness had come and plucked away his mind for a while.
The metal disks in the floor and the ceiling were no longer glowing, and the tendrils of pale mist had long evaporated. The shaman recalled a distant humming that had seemed to come simultaneously from inside and outside the chamber and had hurt the head.
He sighed, swallowing to clear the pressure on his ears. Then he noticed that something was different. Even though the six-sided room looked precisely the same, the walls had changed color. When they’d entered the gateway in New Mexico, the glass walls had been a rich golden hue. Now they were a deep turquoise, tinted like old Navaho jewelry.
“All right?” someone asked from his left. Man Whose Eyes See More nodded, regretting the sharp movement and the pain it caused him.
“I am not yet dead,” he said carefully.
“Good.”
The Apache knew that the speaker, John Barrymore Dix, was a man of very few words, never using two when one would be enough. Short and wiry, J.B. was the Armorer of the traveling group of friends that the shaman had joined. His sallow face rarely showed any emotion unless he was talking about blasters about weapons of any sort. His blue eyes would glitter behind his wire-rimmed spectacles, and he would push back the brim of the battered fedora he habitually wore. He could tell you all there was to know about rifles, carbines, automatics, revolvers and muskets.
Next to J.B., whom the Indians had christened Weapons Strike Fear, was the slumped and unconscious figure of a boy. Eyes of Wolf had been his name, but the Mescalero knew his proper name was Jak Lauren. He was only three inches over five feet in height, nearly two feet below Man Whose Eyes See More’s towering seven feet, and weighed in at 105 pounds.