become dislodged from his thin nose and lay on the floor. Finnegan was snoring,
flat on his back, revealing a mouthful of teeth that overlapped and jostled one
another like a view into an excavated graveyard. Hunaker was curled into a fetal
ball, eyes blinking as she began to recover. Henn held his leg, the blood still
trickling steadily from it. Okie was also bleeding, crimson rivulets threading
from between her fingers as she clamped her hand over the superficial flesh
wound in her shoulder. Her other hand held the M-16 tight. Krysty was sitting
up, shaking her head to clear the mist from it. The front of her overalls was
soaked with blood from the Indian that Ryan had decapitated.
Doc was groaning, with a small pool of yellow bile near his feet. As he sat up,
he looked toward Ryan. “Upon my… I am becoming too old for this sort of
foolishness, sir. Indeed I am.”
“If they wreck the Redoubt up in the Darks, then what if we tried to get back?”
“Not a wise idea, Mr. Cawdor. I will alter the setting so that the automatic
return is negated. That is, if we should decide not to remain here.”
“Where is here, Doc?” grunted Hunaker, standing up.
The glass was a pale gray color, and as Ryan stood he noticed that there was a
network of very fine cracks lacing the plate. He took a deep breath. The air
smelled bad. He could taste the oily flavor of methane on his tongue, and some
other, bitter chemical.
“Don’t like this. J.B., you come with me. Rest of you stay here. Doc, you’d best
alter the control.”
“You do appreciate that I can change them so we don’t return, but I have no
control over where we might eventually finish up?”
“Yeah. Just do it, Doc. Ready, J.B.?”
“As I’ll ever be.”
As soon as they left the trans-mat chamber, Ryan sensed something was wrong.
Gravely wrong. The bitter flavor of the air was stronger and it was very warm.
The door to the anteroom was already ajar. There was no furniture there at all,
and the walls were marked with deep gouges and scratches, with smears of burned
ash across the ceiling. The outer was also partly open, showing nothing but a
great darkness.
“Don’t like it, Ryan,” said J.B.
“I know what you mean.”
Ryan moved to the door and peered out. The darkness was not total. The sky
glowed an unimaginably deep red, with flashes of lightning scattered across it.
But each bolt of lightning stayed in place for several seconds as though frozen
there. Distant thunder rumbled. The land seemed flat and sandy, from what they
could make out in the strip of light that spilled out through the open doorway.
On a sudden deadly impulse, Ryan flicked on the small geiger counter in his
lapel. Immediately it began to crackle and click louder than he’d ever thought
possible.
“It’s a hot spot! “said J.B.
“There’s enough milli-rads here to fry a war wag. Let’s go.”
As he turned, Ryan glimpsed something moving out in that seared desert.
Something blasphemously huge, lumbering toward the remnants of the Redoubt. He
hadn’t made out the shape of the entity, except that it had seemed in that
single glimpse to have no true shape at all.
With the knowledge of that horror at his heels, Ryan pushed J.B. ahead of him,
past the banks of machines, many silent and blind. He saw the others, gathered
in the door of the chamber, and the look on his face propelled them into instant
action. Guns sprang into hands.
“No. Just get out!”
“I’ve altered…” began Doc, but Ryan elbowed him aside, pulling the door and
slamming it shut behind J.B. and himself.
The lights came on and the thick mist rose about their feet.
“Here we go,” said Krysty softly. “Where to this time?”
“Somewhere better,” Ryan began to say, but he felt the suction of his mind and
the atoms and molecules of his body being displaced.
But even as the displacement occurred, and in spite of it, Ryan Cawdor knew with
a profound and gratifying certainty that, in fact, they had already achieved,