“Fair enough,” J.B. said, and took a deep drink.
His churning stomach calmed almost instantly, and the headache cleared in only a few minutes. Feeling much better, he passed Ryan the canteen and reached into his shirt pocket to pull on his pair of wire-rimmed glasses. The wiry Armorer always took them off in case he fell sprawling to the floor and broke the spectacles.
Splashing a few drops into his palm, Ryan wiped down his face before taking a swig, holding the concoction in his mouth for a moment to cut the metallic taste of the bad jump. As he swallowed, he scowled deeply at the mat-trans unit. A sprawled form wearing an antique-style frock coat remained still, an ebony walking stick inches away from an outstretched hand.
“Mildred, something’s wrong with Doc!” Ryan snapped.
Grabbing her satchel, Mildred crawled over the floor and awkwardly rolled the silver-haired man onto his back to check the pulse in his neck with a fingertip. But the beat was strong and slow with no sign of arrhythmia. The frilled shirt rose and fell as the old man breathed steadily.
“He’s fine,” Mildred announced. “Just passed out from the jump. They always hit him hard.”
“Because he’s from another time, or because he has jumped so much more than us?” Dean asked in concern. “Are the jumps going to get worse for us over the years?”
“Good question. However, I have no idea,” Mildred answered honestly. “But let’s hope not. Any worse than this one and we’ll arrive as corpses.”
“Besides,” J.B. added, straightening the fedora on his head. “We haven’t been…” Here, the Armorer fumbled for the right word, then chose the truth. “Experimented on by the lunatics who built the redoubts, or tortured for years by an insane baron.”
“Sometimes I’m surprised that he’s sane at all, poor thing,” Krysty said softly.
“Indeed, m-madam,” Doc Tanner rumbled, slowly raising his head in a saurian manner. “So a-am I, if any are t-truly sane these d-dark days.”
“Aw, stuff it, ya old coot,” Mildred said, but the words carried no anger. “You’ll outlive all of us combined.”
“Perhaps I already have,” Doc said, “and that is the problem from the start.” Then the tall man shook as he violently coughed, but that subsided and he gazed at the others with clear eyes. “Cream and gold, I perceive. We have not been here before, my dear Ryan.”
“No, it’s a new redoubt,” the one-eyed man replied, tossing the canteen.
Across the chamber, Mildred made the catch and shoved the container into Doc’s grasp. “Here, drink the last of the jump juice. Do you a world of good.”
“Somebody else made it, then, madam, and not you? Excellent news.”
“Shaddup drink,” Jak growled, slowly standing. The teen weaved slightly, but then the weakness passed and he stood without hindrance.
Draining the last of the brew of meds and roots, Professor Theophilus Algernon Tanner soon felt the universe slip into focus once more and he recapped the canteen, returning it to the physician with a grateful nod.
Smoothing the frilly front of his white shirt, Doc tightened his black string bow tie, then used stiff fingers to try to control his unruly crop of silver-white hair. Although only thirty-eight years old, his forced journeys through time had visibly aged the man, and scrambled his memory until often the past and the present mixed freely.
With careful hands, Doc checked the massive blaster at his side to make sure none of the black powder charges had come loose in the jump. The .44 LeMat was a Civil War revolver carrying nine chambers in the primary cylinder, and a short 12-gauge barrel set under the main barrel. It was slow to load, but hit like a cannon. But even more important, the weapon was from Doc’s own time period, a direct physical link to his lost home and the family still waiting for him in the distant past.
Hawking to clear the phlegm from his throat, Ryan spit into the corner of the chamber and fixed the leather patch that covered the puckered ruin of his missing left eye, a gift from his brother Harvey. In grim efficiency, Ryan then did a weapons check, briefly touching his small arsenal of blasters and knives.