James Axler – Way of the Wolf

Dean fell asleep with his back to the wall, his hands held out before him to soak up the warm air coming through the vent.

Ryan was feeling the fatigue himself. He glanced at J.B. “Situation we’re in is pretty bad, but we’re not going to get anywhere without sleep.”

“Been over thirty hours since we got any,” J.B. said. “Except for that near coma the jump provided us.”

Doc stretched and yawned. “If you are suggesting that we get some, my dear Ryan, then I heartily accept the decision.”

“Me, too,” Mildred said.

“Should we post a guard?” Krysty asked.

Ryan shook his head. “I think we can be pretty certain that we’re all that’s left alive inside this redoubt. And the sec doors are wedged pretty tight. We should be just fine.”

He took time to get Dean settled proper, remembering the Trader’s words in the jump dream. It made matters worse thinking about his son going down into the ocean when the iceberg fragmented.

He joined Krysty, stretching out beside her so they could share the warmth between them. The environmental controls had made a difference, but the room still had a long way to go before it got comfortably heated. Still, they were no longer in danger of freezing to death if they slept.

“Something on mind,” Jak called from the corner.

“What?” Ryan asked.

“Warm up redoubt, iceberg melt faster?”

“The lad has a point,” Doc said.

“And we’re all out of choices,” Ryan answered. And he didn’t remember a single thing after that.

“THIS REDOUBT ISN’T as big as a lot of them we’ve been to,” J.B. said. The Armorer sat in the corner, his fedora cocked back on his head while he worked a pencil over a ragged spiral-bound notebook.

Ryan blinked sleep out of his eye. “How long you been up?”

“Twenty, thirty minutes.” J.B. had a fresh bandage on his side where he had been hit by the bullets during the fight back in Hazard. A med-kit had been in the room under all the ice, as well.

“Been outside?” Ryan sat up, disentangling himself from Krysty’s arms. Her sentient hair lay protectively over her face.

“Nope.”

“Find a map?”

“You could call it that.” The Armorer kept working on the notebook with his stub of a pencil. “Reread a lot of those electrical blueprints this morning when my head seemed clearer. Was working too late to be sharp yesterday.”

“A man working with not enough sleep is a man aiming on taking a dirt nap,” Ryan said, remembering the Trader’s words.

“Know it. That’s why I gave the blueprints another go this morning. I think I’ve got a pretty good idea of where everything is and what it might be.”

Ryan pushed up from the cold floor and joined the Armorer. Even with the heat on, a chill remained in the room. “Tell me.”

J.B. tapped the drawing as he spoke. “This isn’t scale. You’re getting my best guess.”

“It’ll do.”

“You got the room here with the mat-trans in it.” The pencil hit the center of the page near the top. “Then you got the shaft you explored yesterday.”

Ryan knew “yesterday” was a relative term. They had slept, so a “day” had passed by.

“The big chem lab’s off that,” J.B. went on. “Storerooms off the shaft. Mostly stuff for containing the nerve gas in case of an accident.”

That explained the plastic suits with oxygen tanks Jak had found on some of the corpses frozen in the corridor. But the explosion had come too soon, too unexpectedly for it to be much good.

“And that takes you to the entrance you say was torn off,” J.B. said. “Going back the other way, things appear to be a bit more hopeful. From what I can decipher, looks to be an armory and galley below, a warehouse-sized storeroom and mebbe what looks like a dock.”

“A dock? What kind of wags?” Ryan asked.

“Not wags,” J.B. said. “Paperwork I found let on like it might be boats. Mebbe even a small sub. Won’t know until we go look.”

“Then we’d better get it done. What about the mat-trans?”

“Going to have to take it apart,” J.B. replied. “Mebbe I’ll know more after I do that.”