Krysty put down her cup. “Gaia! I can’t believe you, Ryan, I truly can’t. We are having our first good time inin a long while, halfway through the first day you’re talking about making plans to get off and vanish into Deathlands again. What is the point of all this?”
“All right, all right. Sorry, love. You’re right. Just that I get kind of prickly sitting in comfort with all this fat, tricked-over food. Not really my style.”
Doc blinked. “Putting on the style, are we? By God, but we are, my trusty companions. We’ll go no more a’roving, so far into the night. Or should we? This floating gilded palace of sin brings back so much of my early life that I almost expect to see my dearest Emily poised at the head of the grand staircase, in her finest ball gown of salmon pink silk, her tiara glittering, osprey fan in gloved fingers, her kind eyes seeking me out.” He shook his head. “It is enduringly painful, dear friends. As though the fragile temporal curtain between us had grown more thin and opaque, and I could reach her with but a single step.”
Mildred reached out and took his hand. “I know what you feel, Doc.”
“Do you, Dr. Wyeth?” He nodded slowly. “Perhaps you and I are the only ones left in all Deathlands who share the knowledge and the feeling. That we live while everyone we ever knew is a hundred years in the cold, cold ground. Nearer two hundred years in my own sorry case.” He levered himself upright, grunting with the effort. “I think I shall go and rest awhile.”
He spoke to Jak. “If you should choose to come gamboling and somersetting in during the afternoon, pray attempt do it with some quietus, dear child. Let an old man have his requiem.”
“Sure. Going to recce, Doc. Won’t wake you.”
“Want some jack for the machines, Jak?” Ryan asked. “Or play a little cards?”
The teenager grinned at him, ruby eyes glinting. “Not cards. Seen too many sharps look like got aces up sleeves. Might try machines. Cheat you honest.”
Ryan felt in his pockets and handed over a fistful of small jack. “Spend it unwisely,” he said.
“Will do.”
They were so unused to the array of rich food that all five finally decided to go to their cabins for a couple of hours of rest and relaxation, leaving Jak to explore the Golden Eagle on his own.
RYAN KICKED off his combat boots and slumped on the soft bed, fumbling to loose his belt. He dropped it on the floor, the hilt of the panga clattering against the leg of the bed. He had already removed the SIG-Sauer and tucked it under the pillow.
Krysty had opened the window, letting in the afternoon warmth, breathing in the fresh air. She had stripped to a pair of pale blue silk panties and a plain white T-shirt. Following Ryan’s lead, she put her own blaster, the short-barreled double-action Smith amp; Wesson 640, beneath her own pillow.
As they lay side by side, in that deliciously comfortable world between waking and sleeping, they both heard the sound of ponderously heavy steps from above their heads, walking slowly up and down the guarded stateroom.
“Sounds like a giant in a kid’s fairy story,” Krysty said dozily.
“Real big man. Don’t think I can recall meeting a baron who weighed in over the three-hundred-pound mark. From the guards, it’s got to be someone with serious power and jack. Be curious to see who it is. Might ask around the crew.”
“Doesn’t matter,” Krysty said. “Long as he hasn’t captured the lost twins and is holding them in a cage of gingerbread and spun honey, waiting to crunch their bones to make his bread. Or boil their hearts to give himself everlasting life. Anyway, might just be a lonely, fat old lady, promenading up and down with a sour expression on her rosebud lips.”
Ryan coughed. “Go to sleep, love.”
JAK WAITED TO TRY his luck on three or four of the beautifully restored slot machines that lined several of the main gambling rooms. Most of them dated from the mystic days before the long winters and before the brief nukecaust of skydark, and had been adapted from the ancient quarter and dime slots.