“Screw you, Ryan,” Mildred retorted hotly. The handcuff was still attached to one of her wrists and the shiny metal caught the light in the room and cast off a series of quick reflections, accenting her words. “I yelled for you to put on the brakes because a stray bullet could end up blasting one of the mat-trans comps behind the door. The last thing we want right now is to have lead flying through some of the operating machinery. It’s not worth risking our only way out of here for Jamaisvous.”
“Isn’t it?” the tall man said, barely repressing his anger as he spit his reply from behind clenched teeth. “Isn’t it?”
“Easy, lover,” Krysty said from behind Ryan. “There’s Doc to think about, too-he might be in there.”
Ryan didn’t acknowledge Krysty’s admonishment, choosing instead to glare at Mildred and hold her equally intent gaze for a span of five seconds before allowing himself to wind back his nerves a notch.
“Okay. Okay. You’re right, Mildred. My anger got ahead of my brain,” Ryan said tersely, discarding the matter and hoping the woman wouldn’t press him. Mildred remained silent, and Ryan gratefully turned his attention to his longtime friend and partner.
‘J.B.?”
“On it,” the Armorer replied, pushing past with his lock picks already in hand. The smaller man knelt and examined the lock from behind his spectacles. He didn’t move, as he studied the mechanism he was facing. “Shit,” he finally announced, settling back on his haunches.
“What?” Ryan demanded. “This can’t be any worse than fixing that mat-trans unit back in Greenland!”
J.B. threw up his hand and gestured at the mag lock. “Want to bet?”
Crater Lake, Oregon, 2096
Doc TANNER WAS playing with his balls.
At least, that’s what Ryan Cawdor called the oddly perfect metal orbs his companion was manipulating with his fingertips. Both Doc and Ryan had thought the twin spheroids lost back in the inferno of Jordan Teague’s manse during the fiery destruction of the pesthole known as Mocsin, but one of their companions had recovered the chunks of metal from the corpse of an overeager sec man and turned them over to Ryan for safekeeping.
Now, weeks after the fact, Ryan had remembered the balls weighing down the left-hand pocket of his long coat and gave them back to Doc. Upon their return, the man’s lined face had lit up and his eyes watered with shining tears, making Ryan feel more than a bit embarrassed.
“Hell, Doc, they’re only a few hunks of metal,” Ryan had insisted.
Doc wasn’t to be swayed. “Not to me, Ryan. Thank you. Thank you.”
Now that he had them back in his hands, Doc was as happy as a child with a new toy. Everyone had queried Doc as to what the things were, but the odd-speaking man had been evasive. He preferred to call them his “spheres to the past, present and future.” Ryan wasn’t sure what Doc meant by that designation, but as far as he was concerned, the old man was welcome to call them whatever he wished, since he’d been right about the gateways: the matter-transfer units; the physics-breaking reality of the transfer of matter, both nonliving and organic; point A to point X and back to point Q without the worry of having to travel in a straight line to get there in the quickest possible fashion; a genuine way out of a situation minus the dangers of overland transport by animal or wag or foot.
Such high-concept science fiction was the last thing Ryan expected to find hidden in the heart of the secret underground military labyrinth he and his friends had stumbled into, deep in the dark hills of the lands once known collectively as Montana. All the talk of murderous fog with claws and teeth guarding over a great treasure meant nothing to the one-eyed man, since he considered himself by and large to be a stone-cold pragmatist.
It turned out that the treasure lurking high in the Darks was one of the original gateways, guarded by the scientifically created demon dog of hell itself, Cerberus. Ryan pondered the memories of the chill of the wind in that frosty piece of hell, the wet coldness like a damp shroud draped across his scarred face and decided if he had any choice, any choice at all, he’d never go back to that particular desolate chunk of death-strewed landscape. It was the land of the breathing fog, contracting and expanding, alive with cloudy gray tendrils of mist and muck that elongated away from the central mass, the towering mist with the strange pulsating light located inside the center. If a man got too close, tentacles would come slithering out, impossibly fast, and once they touched flesh, the fog became solid, pulling prey into the central body away from gaping human eyes.