He couldn’t breathe.
The air was agonizingly thin, and his lungs sucked frantically for oxygen that wasn’t there.
“Fireblast!” he tried to yell, but all that came out of his throat was a faint mewing, like that of a drowning kitten. None of the others showed any signs of coming around from the jump, but in the dim light Ryan could see that all of them were breathing fast and shallow.
The pattern of disks was different on the floor and on the ceiling, and the chamber seemed smaller than the others. The walls were dark blue glass, and only the dim-mest light penetrated.
The moment Ryan Cawdor began his struggle to stand up, he knew this gateway was frighteningly different than the others. His body felt oddly light, and he stayed on hands and knees, gagging, a thin worm of yellow bile dangling from his open mouth.
“Got to…” he panted. “Got to fucking move from…”
He crawled over the outstretched legs of Lori Quint, snagging his pants on the tinkling silver spurs on her crimson boots. The effort of moving from one side of the chamber to the other made him pant as if he’d just sprinted a mile over a furrowed field. Ryan found him-self swaying, almost floating, as if the gravity in the gate-way had been reduced to near zero.
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He fumbled for the handle of the door, his fingers clumsy. It seemed as if all sensation had gone from his body, and he staggered sideways, banging his shoulder hard on the wall. Ryan heard someone moaning and coughing behind him. His guess was Jak Lauren, but there wasn’t time to check.
The Heckler & Koch G-12 caseless automatic rifle dropped with a clatter, but he didn’t notice that it had fallen. After an infinity of effort, he managed to wrench the door open, revealing the familiar small room beyond it. The farther door was also open, and Ryan glimpsed flickering lights and comp-consoles turning and chatter-ing to one another.
The gateways were triggered by the closing of the door, operating on a random principle. With the last of his fading power, he succeeded in slamming it shut once more. Gasping, his eyesight dimming, Ryan dropped to his knees, conscious even at that moment of the peculiar slowness of his fall. The chamber lights began to dance and glow again, and the blackness clawed its way across the front of his brain like a tendriled web.
When he’d come around, the sickness had been far worse than ever before. All of them-except Jak Lau-ren-had thrown up, and the chamber floor was awash with vomit. Oddly Ryan was the only one with any rec-ollection of their stopover. And he hadn’t any idea of where they’d gone.
He tried to ask Doc. “Did Cerberus ever have any way-weird gateways?”
“I fear that my present intestinal incapacity renders that question difficult to respond to, my dear Ryan. Perhaps at some other time?”
“It was like I was floating, Doc. The air tasted thinned down like double repure water. Couldn’t breathe, and
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only just made it to mat-trans us. At least the air’s safe here.”
Doc looked puzzled. He shook his head, eyes squeezed tightly shut. “Floating, my dear Ryan? How can one float? And air that is thin! It’s truly the most arrant tar-adiddle I ever did hear.” For a moment Doc’s eyes opened, and Ryan saw the fierce intellect that still blazed. “Unless of course, they… There was some talk of a gateway that was to be built upon…”
He was interrupted by Lori rolling her head on his lap, tiny bubbles of yellow froth hanging on her lips. She moaned and reached for Doc’s hand, breaking the brief run of his concentration.
Ryan leaned down over the old man’s shoulders. “Come on, Doc.”
“What?”
“You were saying about what you thought the bastard gateway might have been.”
“I was?”
“You were.”
“By the three Kennedys, but my head feels as though some knave’s been dancing a polka inside it. I fear I can recall nothing of what I was saying. Do forgive me, Ryan.”
“Sure, Doc.”
It was something else to keep on the mental back burner. There’d been something about that dark blue gateway that had been like nothing on Earth.