Stoneface
Stoneface
34 in the Deathlands series James Axler
Prologue
Ryan opened his eye.
As usual he didn’t know where he was after the mat-trans jump. But his mind was clear enough, and he was thankful he had been spared the horrible nightmares that were the frequent side effects of the gateway’s quantum energy overflow.
With crystal clarity he remembered escaping Gert Wolfram’s Tennessee fortress, leaving it aflame and overrun with stickies, the flight by hot-air balloon to the subterranean redoubt.
He remembered closing the door to the gateway chamber, and the disks in the floor and ceiling beginning to glow as the matter-to-energy converter assembly automatically powered up.
He remembered the spark-shot mist gathering overhead, seeping down, and the darkness closing in.
And then there was light again and he opened his eye, expecting to be somewhere else.
Most of the time, a change in the color of the arma-glass walls of the chamber was the only thing that told Ryan and his friends that a mat-trans jump had been successfully completed.
In every redoubt, the octagonal design of the chamber remained the same, though each chamber was color-coded. The predark engineers had obviously decided color-coding was the simplest method of differentiating the chambers, evidently so the original gateway jumpers would know at a glance into which redoubt they had materialized. He’d often wondered why they hadn’t simply put up signs identifying the locations. He chalked it up to yet another unfathomable mystery of predark scientific reasoning.
This gateway chamber had dingy white walls, and they weren’t made of translucent armaglass. Instead, they were heavy, mortared concrete blocks. The door was a slab of steel set tightly in the wall, a wheel-lock jutting from the rivet-studded, cross-beamed mass.
A thin thread of light shone from a single overhead fixture, the glare stabbing painfully at his eye. There was a distant high-pitched whine he had never heard before, the sound of an engine or generator. He felt its regular pulsation through the floor beneath his hands and booted feet.
His five friends stirred. He heard a mutter from Jak, a grunt from J.B. and a groan from Doc. Krysty sat up, brushing a wisp of crimson hair from her face. “Everybody feel all right?”
As a matter a fact, everybody did, remarkably so. It had been one of the smoothest jumps in recent memory. Not only had there been no hideous hallucinatory nightmares, no one was complaining of nausea, dizziness, headaches or other symptoms of “jump sickness.”
Jak and Mildred were the last to push themselves into sitting positions. The stocky black woman looked around and said, “This isn’t a gateway chamber. Not exactly.”
J.B. removed his spectacles from a capacious pocket of his coat, settled them on his bony nose and said, “Yeah. Never saw a unit like this before.”
Doc climbed to his feet with the help of his sword-stick. The ceiling was low, and he couldn’t stand at his full height. “Unusually cramped quarters. Inasmuch as I have a touch of claustrophobia, I would prefer less confined environs.”
Ryan stood and went to the door. He had to stoop slightly, too. He put his hands on the wheel-lock, giving it a counterclockwise twist. It didn’t budge. The wheel obviously hadn’t been turned in a very long time. Taking and holding a deep breath, he threw all of his weight and upper-body strength against the lock.
With a tortured screech of rusted gears tearing free from time-frozen stasis, the wheel turned. Slowly and resistantly at first, then Ryan was able to initiate handover-hand spin.
He threw his shoulder against the steel door and there was a sucking sound of rotten rubber seals ripping. The hinges squealed and the door opened. He stepped out, blaster in hand. Everyone followed him, alert and watchful. Then they stopped and stared.
“Dark night,” J.B. breathed.
“Where this?” Jak demanded.
“This isn’t a redoubt,” Krysty said uneasily.
They were in a medium-size room with a dozen desks, most of them covered with computer terminals. Sheets of crumbling, flaking paper lay in pieces beneath discolored coffee cups and verdigris-eaten brass paperweights.
A control console ran the length of one wall, consisting primarily of glass-encased readouts and gauges. A fine layer of dust clung to everything, coating the floor and instrument panels with a powdery gray film. They could taste it on their tongues, and the floating particles tickled nostril hairs.