With the advantage of six hundred years of history, of countless bitter lessons learned, Nara considered her colonizer ancestors ignorant, shortsighted swine. A proper job of conquest and exploitation, a job in which not a drop of precious resources was wasted, took scientific and military precision. It took high-tech information gathering and rigorous data analysis. It also took an understanding of the psychology of the indigenous population, of the minds the environment had shaped.
What the Shadow man held in his head, the full range of his experience on this world, was absolutely priceless. If his knowledge was shared among the FIVE, it could maximize the return to all concerned and minimize the elapsed time. It could save, literally, billions of human lives. If, on the other hand, his knowledge was hoarded by just one of the FIVE, it would give that competitor an overwhelming advantage in the weeks and months to come.
A chime tone in her helmet snapped her out of her reverie. The countdown timer in the upper-left corner of her visor showed one minute until the gateway reappeared. Fifty-nine seconds. Fifty-eight.
Nara took a last look around, drinking in the brilliant sky, the limitless horizons, the expanse and emptiness, the unspoken promise of Shadow World. Of all that awaited her back on Eartha hero’s welcome, an honorary CEO-ship, an assured spot in historythe only thing that really mattered to her now was the guaranteed return trip.
A second chime alerted her that there were just twenty seconds left.
“Take your positions, now, “Colonel Gabhart said. “Everyone, stand well clear.”
The ground began to tremble underfoot, and once again a glittering tornado appeared in the middle of the street.
Chapter Twelve
When the air in the middle of the street began to shimmer, Ryan had already made up his mind to grab the woman and make her his hostage. But as the earth trembled and the shimmer took solid form, a funnel cloud, spinning, flecked with glittering points of light, his resolve slipped away. It was replaced by awe. Even in Deathlands, tornadoes didn’t appear out of cloudless skies. And tornadoes didn’t grow brighter and brighter, until the light was like a knife point thrust through the center of his eye. He shielded his face as thunder boomed, and the force of the shock wave jolted him back on his heels.
When Ryan lowered his hand he saw the funnel cloud was gone. In its place, in midair, the fabric of space was unzipping. As the slit widened, he choked on an odor, caustic and vile like burning plastic. In the gap he saw something, a gridwork of black pushing forward, out of nowhere. Ryan held his breath and held his ground. The edges of the opening gaped wider and wider, and the grille, bumper and headlights of a massive vehicle appeared. With a roar of its engine, it lunged forward, and as it did, it stretched and split the orifice to a towering height.
Indeed, it was a monster wag, black, dripping with oil. A helmeted figure, the driver, sat behind the gleaming windshield. As the front wheels appeared out of empty space, so did the nose cone of an enormous red-and-white missile, looming high above the cab. It had the word FIVE written on its side.
With another roar of its engine, the huge truck tractor emerged from the opening with one hundred feet of cargo. As the oil-dripping tail fins of the missile and the rear of the truck bed cleared the slit, it slammed shut with another clap of thunder.
The apparition didn’t completely disappear, though.
Ryan could still see something hanging there in space, vague, glittering, a spinning mist. He noticed that all the people in black armor were giving the affected area an extremely wide berth.
His first thought about the wag and rocket was that they had to have come through some kind of mat-trans gateway. He and the companions had uncovered the predark whitecoat technology and used it whenever they could to move around Deathlands. It was part of the Totality Concept, an ultrasecret U.S. program to develop weapons for future warfare. One of the research missions under the Totality Concept umbrella, known as Operation Cerberus, involved the transfer of matter, organic and inorganic, from one remote location to another. Another mission had been the time trawling that had brought Doc Tanner forward from the past.