Patronizingly Lakesh said, “Young man, I was not going to ask you to go anywhere but to the workroom and put together a precision toolkit for me.”
Bry reacted with surprise. “For you?”
“I can’t pull the imaging-scanner memory banks with my bare hands, can I?”
Brigid stared, then gaped at him. “You?” she demanded. ” You’re going?”
He lifted his shoulders in a negligent shrug. “And, of course, anyone else who might care to accompany me.”
Lakesh angled an ironic eyebrow at her. “Can you think of any volunteers?”
Chapter 9
Kane opened his eyes and stared at the hexagonal island upon which he lay. He blinked, and his sense of perspective returned in piecemeal fashion.
He sprawled not across an island, but on a glittering metal floor plate in the shape of a hexagon, interlocking with others that comprised the jump platform of the gateway. Beneath it, he heard the emitter array’s characteristic hurricane howl fading away to a high-pitched whine.
He lay on his side, his stomach spasming, and his head swam dizzily. The vertigo was routine by now, a customary side effect of rematerialization. The nausea ebbed, but he knew better than to sit up until the light-headedness went away completely.
All things considered, temporary queasiness and dizziness were small prices to pay in exchange for traveling hundreds, sometimes thousands of miles, in a handful of minutes.
Occasionally the toll exacted was terrible, as when he, Brigid and Grant jumped to a malfunctioning unit in Russia. The matter-stream modulations couldn’t be synchronized with the destination lock, and all of them suffered a severe case of debilitating jump sickness, including hallucinations, weakness and vomiting.
Hearing a rustle of cloth behind him, Kane gingerly eased himself up on one polycarbonate-shod elbow, looking around slowly. Brigid and Lakesh stirred from their supine positions on the platform. The floor plates had already lost their silvery shimmer, and the last wisps of spark-shot mist disappeared even as he looked at it. Lakesh claimed that the vapor wasn’t really a mist at all, but a plasma wave form brought into existence by the inducer’s “quincunx effect.”
Brigid was the first to sit up, blinking at the arma-glass walls enclosing the jump chamber. The beautiful shade of clear, cerulean blue told her they had completed the transit to Redoubt Papa. The six-sided chambers in the Cerberus mat-trans network were color coded so authorized jumpers could tell at a glance which redoubt they had materialized into.
It seemed an inefficient method of differentiating one installation from another, but Lakesh had once explained that before the nukecaust, only personnel holding color-coded security clearances were allowed to make use of the system. Inasmuch as their use was restricted to a select few of the units, it was fairly easy for them to memorize which color designated what redoubt.
Lakesh hiked himself up on his elbows, turned a wince into a squint and declared, “Transition achieved, I take it.”
Climbing carefully to his feet, Kane made a swift visual inspection of his armor, making sure all the sections and joints were sealed. He bent down and picked up his helmet, slipping it over his head and activating the image enhancer. It worked perfectly, for which he was grateful. A few weeks before, the light-amplification microchannel feed to the visor had been damaged. It had taken the Cerberus techs days to repair it, and he had been warned that rough treatment might yet cause it to malfunction.
Extending a black-gauntleted hand to Lakesh, he said, “How are you feeling, old man?”
Rather than taking his hand, Lakesh passed him up the compact tool kit, replying, “Invigorated.”
He and Brigid stood up. She consulted the small rad counter clipped to the belt girding her bodysuit. The needle wavered in the low-end-yellow range.
“Tepid readings,” she said. “I guess the radiation shielding has held out to some extent. It’s tolerable as long as we don’t overstay.”
Lifting his left wrist, Kane turned toward the door. Strapped around it was a small device made of molded black plastic and stamped metal. A liquid crystal display window exuded a faint glow. The motion detector showed no movement within the radius of its invisible sensor beams.