“Wasting time, G.W.,” the third speaker said. “Let’s take him out the back and fill his mouth from the privy till he tells us about the predarkies.”
Abe felt a slight draft as though someone had opened a door to the cold night outside.
“You got a room here, barkeep?” one of the trio asked.
“Yeah.”
“Best take him there. Be quieter and more kind of private to ask him what we want.”
The new voice was harsh, and sounded weary. “Best step away slow and careful.”
“Butt out, you white-head sheep fucker, or you get what this runt gets.”
Abe knew precisely what was happening, knew whose voice it was, knew what he would do now. He prayed passionately that the man with the blaster pushed against his skull didn’t pull the trigger as he died.
The Armalite was set on single shot, but the three shots came so close together that it sounded like full-auto.
The triple shadows vanished from the table and Abe stood, drawing his one Colt, seeing immediately that it wasn’t needed.
“Don’t you ever learn, Abe? I said in that letter to watch your back.”
Trader smiled.
Chapter Six
Ryan blinked his eye open and promptly closed it again, unable to bear the instant lancing pain that drove through the optic nerve into the heartland of his brain.
The one-eyed man slowly took stock of his body, not risking any sort of sudden movement. He lay on his right side, knees drawn up to his chest in a fetal position, hands clasping each other for comfort. Apart from the ferocious headache, there was also a gut-roiling sickness and a faint tremor running through all his limbs.
“Better never to have jumped at all,” Ryan muttered through clenched teeth.
Though he knew that wasn’t true.
He risked another glance, wanting to check on the color of the armaglass walls. Pale yellow would mean a return to Florida, which wasn’t something that he contemplated with any pleasure. Purple would mean he was back in that strangely alien gateway that had seemed like some sort of museum.
The walls were a cheery cherry red.
It was so positive and bright that Ryan groaned, taking in plenty of shallow breaths to hold away the nausea that threatened to erupt.
While lying very still, he tried to taste the air. It had the familiar flat, recirculated flavor, though maybe a tad less arid and dull than usual.
Moving in extreme slow motion, Ryan sat up, shuffling sideways until he could rest his back against the nearest wall. Like someone squinting into the brightness of the rising sun, he eased open his eye again.
He took stock of his possessions, beginning with the blasters and the two knives. He’d always had the irrational fear that making a jump would, one day, land him in a foreign place, completely naked.
But this one was all right. Apart from feeling that a day-old lamb would take him over five rounds.
Ryan stretched, forcing the variety of cramping kinks from his muscles. The threat of vomiting was fast receding and he risked standing up, swaying a little, steadying himself with one hand on the cool glass of the wall. Using some of the basic remedial skills that Krysty had taught him, he powered himself along the road to recovery.
In less than three minutes he began to feel that he could at least give that day-old lamb a run for its money.
THE DOOR HISSED OPEN with a hydraulic perfection, revealing the small room that led through to the usual main control area of the mat-trans unit.
Ryan stepped out of the chamber, SIG-Sauer preceding him, the barrel of the blaster moving from side to side. Other than the usual faint sounds of the comp controls clicking and whirring, the place was as silent as the grave.
He noticed some boxes on nearby shelves, padded brown cardboard, dried and brittle. Their contents were announced in watery-blue stenciled letters that ran diagonally across each box Surgical Gloves Twelve Dozen PairsGreen; Sterile Face Masks Surgical/PathologyTwenty-four Gross; Op Room/ Morgue/Laboratory BootsMidcalfPlastic WhiteM/F-Sizes L amp; XL.
For several long seconds Ryan stood and stared at the boxes, puzzled. He’d never come across anything remotely like this in any of the other hidden redoubts that he’d visited.