Krysty leaned down, and her lips brushed his forehead. “A couple of hours. How do you feel?”
“Waterlogged.” With a groaning effort, he managed to hitch himself up to his elbows. He looked around, his brain still unsteady from his near drowning and the beating he had received from the self-styled Admiral Poseidon.
Little flares of pain ignited all over his body. He lay on the gently rocking deck of the small cabin cruiser. Flinging aside the blanket, he saw that his naked body was covered with abrasions and contusions. The salt air of the sea stung his wounds, and they pulled when he moved.
Krysty handed him a cup of fresh water, and he drank gratefully, rinsing his mouth and spitting over the side. “Where’s everybody else?”
She nodded toward the enclosed cabin amidships. “Down below, trying to get some rest. It was too cramped for me. What happened to Poseidon?”
Ryan sat up straighter, gritting his teeth. In a voice thick with savage satisfaction, he replied, “He sleeps with the fishes.”
With Krysty’s help, he managed to get to his feet. Standing at his full six feet two inches, he drew the tall, voluptuous woman against him, stroking her hair, noting that her normally brilliant green eyes were dulled by exhaustion.
“What about you?” he asked. “Are you all right?”
“I called on the power of Gaia,” she answered wearily, trying to repress the catch in her voice. “Men died.”
Ryan didn’t ask for details. Krysty Wroth was, by definition, a mutie. She possessed the empathic ability to sense danger in the offing. Her fiery mane of red hair was the outward manifestation of this power, stirring, curling, moving as if it were a separate, sentient organism. The few others with these prescient powers were called doomseers or doom-sniffers.
Krysty had been trained to hone this empathy by being in tune with the electromagnetic energies of Gaia, the Earth Mother. By tapping into these energies, the power field of the planet itself, Krysty could gain superhuman strength for a limited time. When possessed by Gaia, she entered an altered state of consciousness and turned into a raging death goddess. However, her manipulation of earth energies could only be used on occasion, as it exacted a great physical toll. Therefore, she had learned to handle her .38-caliber Smith & Wesson Model 640 revolver with devastating skill.
Ryan saw that her side arm wasn’t bolstered at her hip. “What happened to your blaster?”
Krysty shook her head. “I don’t know. Poseidon’s sec men must have confiscated it when they captured me and Jak.”
“Where are my clothes?”
Krysty pulled out of his embrace and moved toward the cabin. “They should be dry by now. I’ll tell everybody you’re up.”
Draping the blanket over his shoulders, Ryan sat on the side rail, scanning the roiling, starlit surface of the Lantic Ocean. Somewhere below swam the Dwellers, humans genetically altered to live in the depths of the sea. One of the muties, a fishman named Mike, had rescued him from drowning when he had escaped from Poseidon’s sinking submarine, the Raleigh.
Though Ryan Cawdor had no great love for muties, he wished the Dwellers well.
Lifting his gaze, he looked in the direction of the Kings Point naval base. Tongues of flame still licked at the night sky. He could only hope that the building containing the mat-trans unit hadn’t been consumed in the conflagration. He had no inclination to cruise along the coast of North Carolina. The sea held other mutated life-forms besides the Dwellers, and they weren’t as benign.
Other than that, his own blasters, the SIG-Sauer P-226 pistol and the Steyr SSG-70 rifle, were somewhere in the old military installation. He would risk another incursion into Admiral Poseidon’s sick little kingdom to retrieve them.
Krysty came out of the cabin, holding his clothes and combat boots. She was followed by the other members of his group, and they clustered around him, patting his back and pumping his hand until they realized he was wincing under the affection. Mildred Wyeth shooed everyone back.
“Ryan’s injuries haven’t gotten in much healing time in the past two hours,” she said, peeling up the lid of his single eye, his right one. She peered into it, adding, “Good. No broken veins. I was afraid you might be suffering a touch of anoxemia.”