streaked armaglass ended abruptly as the wall met a floor inlaid with the disks
that also peppered the ceiling.
He reached out for his weapons, feeling his hand brush the stock of the Steyr
SSG-70. Where that lay, his SIG-Sauer couldn’t be far away.
His hand touched warm flesh, and he felt fingers instinctively grasp at him.
Head still pounding, he turned his eye to focus on Krysty Wroth, her flaming red
hair coiled protectively to her head and neck. Her mutie heritage gave her hair
a sentience that acted as an early-warning system, coiling close to her head
when danger threatened. After a jump it usually took some time to flow freely,
but never before had he seen it this defensive.
It set off a triple-red warning in his brain, and he forced his disoriented
reflexes to respond. Forcing unwilling calf muscles to brace his legs as he got
to his feet, he looked around the chamber.
J.B. Dix, Ryan’s oldest friend and a fellow traveler since their days with the
Trader, was beginning to regain consciousness on the far side of the chamber.
His beloved and battered fedora was pulled down over his eyes, and his right
hand moved instinctively toward one of his capacious pockets to pull free his
glasses. Ryan could see that his breathing was steady, and that he was
recovering from the jump with his usual speed.
The Armorer’s other hand was held by Dr. Mildred Wyeth, a survivor of predark
days who had been cryogenically preserved before the big blow of 2001, then
thawed by Ryan in the postnuclear age of the Deathlands. The stocky black
woman’s hair hung in beaded plaits around her downturned head. She was beginning
to stir, raising her head and opening her eyes. Her Czech-made ZKR 551 revolver
lay in her lap, and before she was fully conscious her hand closed on it.
Dean, Ryan’s son, was still out. A thin trickle of blood ran from his nose to
his top lip. He grunted as the effects of the jump began to wear off and the
first nausea of consciousness returned.
“Dark night, my head’s thumping like mutie drums on a bad day.”
Ryan turned, dark spots still exploding in his vision at the speed of the
movement. “Thought it was just me.” Ryan winced at the pounding that was still
making his empty eye socket throb.
“Everybody.” Jak followed the statement with a wretch of bile that splashed onto
the floor of the gateway. The jumps usually made him vomit, and he spit out the
remains of the bile before rising to his feet, pulling on the patched camou
jacket that carried his hidden throwing knives and holstering his .357 Magnum
Colt Python blaster with a fluid grace.
“The bells, ah, the bells, Esmerelda. Ask not for whom they toll. The bells toll
for thee, my Emily…my Esmerelda…”
Doc’s eyes were open and staring, but they shared the same faraway quality as
his voice. The jumps always proved the hardest for Doc Tanner, whose white hair
hung in soaked strands around his face, streaked with perspiration and the blood
that flowed from his nose and trickled from the corner of his mouth. No one knew
how old Doc really was. Trawled from the 1890s into the immediate years
preceding skydark by the whitecoats of Operation Chronos, a part of the Totality
Concept, which had also furnished the redoubts with the mat-trans units, Dr.
Theophilus Tanner had proved to be a problem. Such a problem that the whitecoat
scientists had decided to use him for a further experiment, shooting him forward
in time—ironically only a short time before their own lives were ended by the
madness of skydark—and landing him in the maelstrom that was the Deathlands.
According to records the companions had come upon in the whitecoat hell of
Crater Lake, Doc had been in his early thirties when snatched. The stresses of
time trawling had made Doc physically resemble an old man, and his mind had a
similar fragility that sometimes tipped him over into temporary madness.
His speech was stopped by an urge to vomit, and he spewed the blood that had run
down his throat.