James Axler – Deathlands 35 – Skydark

He put his head between his hands. What was he to do now? he asked himself. To pursue her to the ends of the earth? That’s what the heroes of the legends had

done. They had put aside all other concerns and chased after the ladyloves who had rejected them.

It seemed an empty quest, more suited to willful and wild paladins than to their wise and respected leader.

That, too, he had learned from his study of Charlemagne’s life.

But he couldn’t deny the pain in his heart. It was exactly as he had imagined it, and as hurtful as what he had felt at the death of his loyal troops, at the loss of his army. It was hard for him to reconcile the equality of pain. Though no one had died just now, his sense of loss was no less. Twice in a single day, a victory mat he had longed for had been snatched from his grasp.

He wanted revenge against the impostor Angelica for deceiving him, but only on his terms. He wouldn’t spend time and energy chasing her down now. To do mat would mean giving up his plans for the rebuilding of his army. No, he would wait to taste vengeance. Once he had his troop strength up, much wiser for the mistakes be had made, he would resume his campaign against the eastern barons. Eventually his path and hers would cross again. And then he would make her pay.

Kaa got up and looked at the gateway chamber’s control panel. The LD button was still clicked in. She and the boy had jumped back to Willie ville. So much the better, he thought They might still be in the vicinity when he returned in a week or two with fresh troops.

As he stepped out of the chamber, he regarded the stickles who had followed him down from the mansion.

They were the nucleus of his new army. He reached up to open his third eye and converse with them, but a sound nearby made him stop.

It was a cheeping noise, harsh, electronic.

It seemed to be coming from the pile of trash bags.

Kaa knelt over the heap and quickly located the source of the sound. He ripped open the bag and stared dumbfounded at the domed top of a mininuke. The cheeping abruptly stopped. It was meant to draw attention to the countdown timer, and it had.

The numbers had fallen to sixty seconds, fifty-nine, fifty-eight.

The piebald man leaped to his feet. There was no time to explain the situation to the stickies, no time to peel back his lid and show them the kind of help he required. Kaa began to grab the black plastic bags and throw them over his shoulder into the gateway

chamber. There were a lot of bags, and he didn’t have much

time to work.

He tried not to think about how Angelica had sabotaged him, the extent of her treachery, how she had to have conspired with others to plant the nuke under his nose. In a fury he moved the Apocalypticon from the floor to the heart of the chamber. The stickies huddled together uneasily out under the lights. They didn’t understand his agitation, and it alarmed them.

Twenty-two seconds.

Twenty-one.

He had to stop, even though there were still precious

documents outside the chamber. He knew it would take time to reprogram the controls and for the system to cycle up for transfer.

Without a word to his stickies, Kaa jumped back through the chamber entry. He couldn’t risk just hitting the LD button again. There was no telling what kind of welcoming committee Angelica and her friends would have waiting for him. He wasn’t an expert at running the gateways yet, but he knew how to switch the system to automatic, which meant that once the chamber powered up, he would be sent at random to the nearest available mat-trans unit, and that meant he could end up well away from ground zero.

He tripped the automatic sequencer, and the chamber began to hum. As he reached for the door handle, he looked at his stickies, clustered there with the remaining plastic bags. How could he turn his back on them?