He swung the panga down in a tight arc, severing the cord in the middle. While Mildred tried to stop Kry sty’s bleeding, Ryan left the chalet, carrying the stickie infant by its heels. He took it across the farmyard, under snow-capped mountains and a bright blue sky. He carried it to the pigpen, where his hogs awaited their slops.
And threw it in.
RYAN CAME TO ON HIS KNEES. His head was spinning, but he knew he had to get up and get ready to fight The lapis-lazuLi-colored armaglass wall was no help when it came to standing. It was slicker than slick. He bit the tip of his tongue until he tasted blood. The sharp pain cleared his head, driving back the tendrils of jump fog.
Mildred was already up and trying to rouse Doc. J.B. appeared to be awake, but just barely. Ryan gripped him under an armpit and helped him to his feet.
“Bad jump?” J.B. asked.
“Is there any other kind?” .
“Yeah, dumb question.”
Doc stood up on his own and brushed at the front of his frock coat’s lapels. It was a fruitless gesture. What was on those lapels had been there for a very long time, and it was never coming off.
“I don’t see anyone outside,” Mildred said as she turned back from the chamber door’s small window. “We’d better move while we can.”
They gathered up their weapons and slipped out the gateway door.
The room outside could have been transplanted from most of the redoubts they had visited over the years. It was standardized, government issue: low ceiling, fluorescent lights, computer banks, linoleum floor, rows of metal desks. The only thing different about this place were the piles of black plastic garbage bags lying along the outside of the chamber.
Ryan untied one of the bags and poked around inside. When he drew his hand back, it was full of papers. “The Apocalypticon,” he said. “It’s all right here where Kaa dumped it.”
“The glory that was Greece, the grandeur that was, et cetera, et cetera,” Doc intoned.
“Help me get the nuke out of the chamber,” Ryan said.
When they had lifted the device and its gurney onto the floor of the complex, Ryan lifted the plastic bag he had opened and dumped the contents out on the tile.
He grabbed one of the handholds built into the side of the nuke’s casing and nodded at J.B. “Give me a hand here,” he said.
The two of them muscled the bomb into the center of the opened plastic bag.
“Set the timer but don’t engage it yet,” Ryan instructed.
J.B. leaned over the nuke and tapped a nine-digit access code into its keypad. “Okay, how much time should we give them?”
“Five minutes ought to do it.”
J.B. input the numbers. “To engage the timer you just hit this button once.”
“Got it,” Ryan said. He started pouring the papers on top of the nuke. He didn’t tie the top closed, but left it folded over. “Now let’s find a way out of here,” he said.
Chapter Twenty-Five
It was hard for Krysty to maintain her composure with Kaa sitting so close to her on the settee, discussing his plans for their imminent marriage. The veil of illusion had been lifted from her eyes. Whatever the mat-trans system had given to her in terms of psychic simpatico with Kaa and members of die stickle race, it had subsequently taken it away. She remembered what she’d felt before her last jump, but she couldn’t remember why. In retrospect it all seemed like one of those fever-inspired nightmares in which the internal logic is perfect, if demonic, and when you wake up, you recall that while you slept, you acted against all your waking principles and, to your shame, had a great time doing so.
Krysty had been taught by Mother Sonja to respect all life, and to judge beings by their actions, not their genetics. Mother Sonja had taught her to judge quickly, and be right. Deathlands was no place for a universal do-gooder, even one with the power of Gaia. Do-gooderism wasn’t a survival trait in the place Krysty called home.