Inside the armaglass, someone was appearing. Someone or something.
RYAN WALKED along the center of the passage, oblivious to what was happening behind him.
It was a familiar experience, following the broad curve, all his nerves on double-red alert. But there was a massive difference to other times.
Now he was a man alone, on the edge.
The scent of chemicals, both tart and sweet, was definitely stronger. It seemed that the place was in excellent condition, with all of the lights functioning and every camera swiveling to follow his progress. The walls were flawless, the smooth concrete showing no sign of any cracking or deterioration. The floor was virtually dust-free, and Ryan could just detect the faint vibration of the hidden, distant nuke generator still faithfully keeping the redoubt serviced.
He passed only three or four side doors, all locked and comp coded. The likelihood was that they were service quarters for the personnel who maintained the mat-trans section. In some of the redoubts that they’d discovered, the gateways had been completely self-contained.
Ryan glanced down at his chron, seeing that it was a few seconds shy of 0825, less than half an hour since he’d completed the jump.
J.B. SIGHED, rolling back his sleeve to check the time on his wrist chron. Twenty-five minutes past the hour. And the hour didn’t much matter as that would only be resolved by finding where he was.
By and large he’d found that Deathlands still conformed to the old tradition of time zones, though many of the frontier villes either operated their own eccentric time scale or, sometimes, had no real time at all.
The Armorer stood, clutching his fedora, and placed it carefully on his head, wincing with the effort. The walls of the gateway were an unrelenting cherry red, a color that appeared to pulse and throb in time with the beats of the heart.
He opened the door and sniffed, peering through his spectacles at the boxes on the shelves.
“Hospital,” he said quietly.
J.B. dropped to his knees, staring closely at the floor. There was something that almost looked like the print of a boot in the fragile layer of fine dust, but it was impossible to be sure. In an unchanging environment the mark could easily have been made the best part of a hundred years ago, when the redoubt was finally being evacuated.
He moved into the main control area, glancing around him and checking the time on the wall, which now showed 0831. J.B. altered his chron accordingly.
There was no sign of any human life around, so he immediately and unhesitatingly made his way toward the main sec doors into the mat-trans section of the redoubt.
He paused by the green lever, sniffing the air. “Some sort of chemicals. Yeah, definitely like a hospital.” For a moment J.B. considered leaving a note in case anyone else came after him, but decided that it would be pointless.
There wasn’t much doubt that he was now on his own, cut off from Ryan and Mildred and the rest of the group by some fault in the jump mechanism back in Florida.
All he could do was to emerge from this vault and work out where in all Deathlands he was, then begin the near-impossible task of tracking down the others.
He pushed the control up, kneeling with the Uzi on full-auto, ready to spray a burst of lead at any threat from outside. But the rising door revealed only an empty expanse of corridor, slightly less wide than the usual, closed off to the left, curving away to the right.
Once outside, J.B. threw the lever down to close the doors again, sealing the complex, and set off at a brisk walk to his right, heels clicking on the barren stone.
His wrist chron showed him a time of precisely 0837.
Behind him the control area was still and quiet, with only the dancing lights on the comp screens moving, and the wall clock inexorably ticking around to 0840.
The gateway began to run through its mat-trans cycle all over again.
Chapter Seven
Ryan saw the elevator at the end of the passage and his heart sank into his boots. The last time he’d traveled in one, the result had been close to terminal. Also, as he walked carefully toward the dull gleam of the sliding sec door, he could see that there was a complicated comp-code control panel at the side, one containing a mixture of letters, numbers and colors. It was probably a four-symbol code, but it would take, literally, millions of random attempts before you hit on the correct combination.