The unit data banks didn’t hold his eye. The surface of the wall they were leaning against, however, did warrant a second look.
They were stone walls, with mortar slopped in the cracks instead of vanadium steel alloy, and Ryan thought they looked like the interiors of a castle or keep. He found himself scanning the corners, looking for the flames of burning torches. Instead, all he saw were the fluorescent strip lights used as illumination within a redoubt or a mat-trans gateway control area. “I don’t like the looks of this,” Ryan said softly to his waiting friends, and before he could continue his thought, a new wrench was thrown into the gears of the situation.
“Are you coming out or not?” a commanding voice from outside the mat-trans chamber boomed.
Ryan almost fired a round from the barrel of the SIG-Sauer the moment he heard the unknown speaker, but his honed instincts told him to hold off until he could learn more and determine the situation. If he closed the mat-trans chamber door, the auto mechanism would initiate another jump, and multiple jumps were enough to make a person feel like walking death.
Three figures came out from one side of the mat-trans chamber, their presence previously hidden by one of the thick exterior armaglass walls. A single man, the leader, was now standing in front of Ryan and the partially opened door.
“I promise I won’t bite,” the man said with a grin, both hands held out, palms open and empty in the so-called universal gesture of friendship.
“I’ve heard that before,” Ryan retorted.
“Yes, I imagine you have. Still, you have nothing to worry about from me.”
“I’m not worried about you,” the one-eyed man stated, keeping the bore of the SIG-Sauer leveled at the heads of the two sec men, who were on a higher plane than the shorter man standing in front of them.
“You mean my guards? They’re here for me, not you,” the mystery man said, nodding toward the imposing human presence on his left, then right. “Meet Garcia and Lopez.”
The two sec men flanking the speaker were large specimens, heavily muscled and solid, each a few inches taller than Ryan’s six feet two inches. They were dressed identically in sleeveless black T-shirts, olive green Army-issue trousers and what appeared to be regulation U.S. Army combat boots. Red headbands circled their heads.
There couldn’t have been anyone more different from them than the third man standing between them.
Tall, lean and imposing, with long silver hair coming back off his forehead that gave him a dramatic widow’s peak at the center of his hairline, the man looked like royalty, or what Ryan had always thought picture-book royalty should look like. The mystery man’s face was long and narrow, with high cheekbones that added a cultured air of elegance to his overall appearance. His eyebrows were bushy and of a stiffer, darker gray than his hair, giving his flashing eyes a shielded, hooded look, like a human bird of prey.
However, it wasn’t the fellow’s face that gave Ryan pause. What worried him were the clothes the man was wearing. First and foremost, mental alarm bells went off when the one-eyed man spied the long white lab coat. Under the overcoat was a neatly pressed black dress shirt and dark charcoal-gray trousers. Against the fabric of the black shirt was a light gray necktie with a golden lion’s head for a tie tack.
Ryan hadn’t seen a necktie since he visited the Anthill.
There had been other encounters with men in formal attire, but after the chaos and the degradation of the hidden installation behind the rock faces of
Mount Rushmore, Ryan had decided once and for all that the presence of ties and business suits in Death-lands was never a good sign.
The man was smiling, apparently delighted at the arrival of his new visitors, but his inviting expression wasn’t as open and inviting as it might have seemed, since he felt the need for guards. The menacing hulks of the twin sec men on either side of the greeter were the deterrents that kept Ryan’s gun hand steady, and the muzzle of the SIG-Sauer lowered in a readied, but nonthreatening position. Ryan knew the arma-glass of the chamber would protect him in the event of a gun battle, but he really didn’t want to test it under such potentially disastrous conditions.