Chapter Two

Ryan Cawdor opened his eye.

The walls of the gateway they'd jumped from had been dull gray armaglass. That redoubt had been situated in the quake-torn remnants of what had once been known, nearly a hundred years ago, as California, way back before the Great Madness when the skies grew dark and a civilization died. A world had almost died, as well. The surface of the earth was now dotted with no more than small, inbred, isolated settlements, often with a high rate of bizarre mutations.

On the far side of the six-sided room, Doc Tanner was sobbing to himself very quietly, like a tiny cornered kitten. His mouth sagged open and a thread of spittle dangled into his lap. One hand still gripped the silver lion's head hilt of his ebony swordstick. Ryan could see that the old man had been crying, with gobbets of tears clinging to the gray stubble on his cheeks and chin.

The sudden, shocking death of Doc's girlfriend, Lori Quint, had horrified them all. The rushing fire had dashed all hope of a rescue. There had been no chance even of a decent burial. Bearing in mind the fragile state of Doc Tanner's mind, it wasn't out of the question that he'd slipped straight into a catatonic madness.

Ryan sighed, massaging his temples with his fingers. Making a jump was like having some crazed mutie with iron gloves rummaging around inside your brain. Ryan had once been fed some jolt that contained a quantity of synthesized spin. His head had felt like it was being sucked dry and sandblasted all at the same time. Using a mat-trans gateway was much worse.

He coughed and reached down automatically for his G-12 caseless Heckler & Koch assault rifle, fingers stroking its smooth body. Ryan shuffled himself to a more upright position, wincing as the butt of his handblaster dug into his hip.

To clear his scrambled mind he ran through a check on the specifications of the pistol.

"Schweizerische Industrie-Gesellschaft Sauer of Ecken-forde, model .226, 9 mm. Overall length is 7.62 inches. Barrel length is 4.41 inches. Weight, loaded, is 25.52 ounces. Fifteen rounds. Push-button release."

"You didn't mention the built-in baffle silencer," J. B. Dix called from the opposite side of the chamber.

"I was coming to it." Ryan grinned at the diminutive armorer.

"Sure you were. Rad-blast it! These jumps still make me feel like throwing up." J.B. carefully unfolded his wire-rimmed glasses from a pocket of his worn leather jacket and wiped them on his sleeve. He held them up to the ceiling lights then placed them on his nose. He looked at Doc, who sat next to him.

The old man's eyes were closed and he was still weeping, but the mewing sounds of his distress had ceased. J.B. caught Ryan's eye, and he tapped his own forehead meaningfully. "Could be Lori's chilling's pushed him into the back room for keeps."

"Could be."

Krysty Wroth, next in line to Ryan, was also awake. She brushed a hand through her fiery mane of scarlet hair and sniffed. "Thought I was going to float around in the dark forever. There has to be a better way of traveling a thousand miles in a couple of seconds." She looked across at Doc. "Hope you aren't right, J.B., about him. The old-timer's hold on what's real and what isn't was never too, strong. Lori dying like that... It's enough we got a sick freezie on our hands without Doc going slack-mouthed on us."

The freezie was lying on his back next to Krysty. A thin, trickle of blood seeped from a corner of his lips, through the black stubble of his sprouting beard. His horn-rimmed glasses lay on the floor on one of the glowing metal disks.

Ryan Cawdor looked at the man.

When Richard Neal Ginsberg had gone into the cryo center in October of the year 2000, only three months before sky-dark, he'd been thirty years old, and a top scientist and electronics expert, working on aspects of the mat-trans chambers known as gateways. He had also been suffering from amyotrophic lateral sclerosis..."Lou Gehrig's disease" — an incurable progressive disease that leads to unsteadiness, wasting of the muscles and exhaustion.

Rick Ginsberg had been woken from his long freezing, expecting to find himself in some future world of wonderously advanced medicine and science that would cure his ailment. Instead, he'd been jerked to life in the Deathlands, still terminally ill, though the sickness was prone to periods of remission.

"Hell's bloody bells!" Rich moaned, turning on his side and beginning to retch.

"Know how feels," Jak said, the last of the six to recover. "Head's like gaudy-house shit-bucket." The boy stood up, staggering slightly, pressing his pale hand against the armaglass. "Wonder where fuck are this time?" he asked, as laconic as ever.

Jak was fifteen years old, as skinny as whipcord and one of the best hand-to-hand fighting machines that Ryan had ever seen. And he'd seen some good ones in his time. Jak had hair as white as the driven snow on the Sierra peaks, and eyes as red as a laser death-sight.

Ryan forced himself to stand, hating the dizziness and weakness that a jump always brought on. He leaned against the wall, glimpsing his own reflection: a tall man with long, curling black hair, a patch covering his left eye. A vivid cicatrix seamed his right cheek from near the corner of his eye to the corner of his narrow, cruel mouth.

"I look like a one-legged whore could spit in my face and knock me down," he muttered.

"No different from usual, lover," Krysty replied, reaching up for his helping hand.

He pulled the woman to her feet, aware of the lithe strength in her body. He felt a surge of passion for her, a passion that he knew in his heart was closer to love than anything he'd ever known in his thirty-five years.

"Doc," she called.

The metal disks that patterned ceiling and floor had finally lost their glow, fading to cold, dull metal. Everyone except Doc and Rick had gotten up from the floor. The freezie was on hands and knees, breathing hard through his open mouth.

Krysty walked across the chamber and knelt by Doc's side, holding his hand in hers.

"Doc?" she repeated.

He blinked and managed to sit up, with her arm around his shoulders. "I fear that I have been crying, my dear," he said, wiping at his red-rimmed eyes with trembling fingers. "Made the most awful ass of myself, I expect. But I dreamed, you see."

"It's all right, Doc," Ryan said. "We all got dreams some of the time. You don't have any dreams, then they can't come true."

"Not that sort of dream, Ryan, my dear fellow. Oh, my head is splitting. More of a nightmare. I was on a picnic with my dearest Emily and the two little babes. But there was..." He stopped suddenly and looked around the gateway.

"What is it, Doc?" Krysty asked.

"Where is my... Where is Lori? Where has she gone, my own?.."

"Fire, Doc," Jak told him. "Fell and got burned. Nobody could've helped. No fucking chance."

The old man looked puzzled. "Then, she isdead. Ah, the dream contained the... Then, what year is this, my comrades? For a moment I thought I had ascended to Heaven."

"Hell, Doc," Rick said, pulling himself to his feet with the aid of a stout bamboo walking stick.

The old man clutched Krysty and began to sob again, shoulders quivering, the ragged noise of his crying the only sound in the total stillness.

Ryan bit his lip. If Doc was going to give up on them, then there would be a hard decision to make. He liked the old man very much, but the safety of the group came first.

He knew something of Doc's past and knew that his mind had improved since they'd plucked him from the living death of Mocsin and its hated sec boss, Cort Strasser. But it hadn't been the ville of Jordan Teague that had stripped a few notches from Doc's mental equipment. For that you had to go way, way back — more than a hundred years.