James Axler - Deathlands 36 Skydark

THE DEATHLANDS SAGA

Deathlands 36 - Skydark

By: James Axler

Publisher: Silhouette Books

Publication Date: 1997-12-1

ISBN-10: 0373625367

SBN-13: 9780373625369

This world is their legacy, a worid born in the violent nuclear spasm of 2001 dial was the bitter outcome of a struggle for global dominance.

There is no real escape from this shockscape where life always bangs in the balance, vulnerable to newly demonic nature, barbarism, lawlessness.

But they are the warrior survivalists, and they endurein the way of the lion, the hawk and the tiger, true to nature's bean despite its ruination.

Ryan Cawdor: The privileged son of an East Coast baron. Acquainted with betrayal from a tender age, he is a master of the hard realities.

Krysty Wroth: Harmony ville's own Titian-haired beauty, a woman with the strength of tempered steel. Her premonitions and Gaia powers have been fostered by her Mother Sonja.

J. B. Dix, the Armorer: Weapons master and Ryan's close ally, he, too, honed his skills traversing the Deamlands with the legendary Trader. Doctor Theophflus Tanner: Tom from his family and a gentler life in 1896, Doc has been thrown into a future he couldn't have imagined.

Dr. Mildred Wyeth: Her father was killed by the Ku Klux Klan, but her fate is not much lighter. Restored from predark cryogenic suspension, she brings twentieth-century healing skills to a nightmare. Jak Lauren: A true child of the wastelands, reared on adversity, loss and danger, the albino teenager is a fierce fighter and loyal friend.

Dean Cawdor: Ryan's young son by Sharona accepts the only worid he knows, and yet he is the seedling bearing die promise of tomorrow.

In a world where all was lost, they are humanity's last hope....

Prologue

There was no escape from the nightmare of Death lands after the nuclear holocaust in 2001. Ryan Cawdor understood that, take it or leave it, this was Ms world. He never forgot that no court of law, no army of deliverance, no rescue squad would be there to put things to right-ever.

What population was left existed without laws or moral guidance, other than to obey the savage rules of survival. Nature lay waste, ruined, contaminated, the tragic price humanity paid for the blind worship of science. And there was hardly a steeper price than the kind of severe genetic scrambling that created those mutated humans who were monstrous in body and mind.

Life always meant peril in the Death lands, but the mutants seemed to symbolize the unconscious dread of the disintegration of the species. So they were often targeted for summary execution by the norms, and those mutants who were able and of a like mind energetically returned the favor.

Through this world Ryan Cawdor and his warrior survivalists roamed, with predark wags if a lucky find provided scarce fuel. But even with the wags travel was

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a high risk enterprise, and increasingly the mat-trans units in the redoubts offered the best option for a change of scene or quick exit from a hotspot.

Built before skydark, the redoubts and their mat-trans gateways had endured the nuke barrage because they were entirely self-contained, blast-proofed and powered by their own nuclear reactors.

In the course of dozens of locational jumps with the units, they had come across only a very few people who had discovered the secret of the gateways.

All that was about to change.

And not for the better.

Chapter One

A whisper of chill, stale air crept along the mat-trans chamber's armaglass walls, and with it came a whiff of something sharp and electric. As the raised metallic floor plates began to glow brighter, Ryan Cawdor scanned the faces of his five friends.

Only Krysty returned his gaze, her green eyes steady. Though she held her head high and her long-limbed, statuesque body defiantly erect, he could tell mat deep down she was anxious about the jump: her prehensile, mutant red hair had drawn close to her nape, retracting in response to danger.

The woman's anxiety was understandable. The danger was very real, and close enough to taste.

Mildred Wyeth sat beside Krysty with her eyes shut and her head bowed. The multiple beaded plaits of Mildred's hair swayed slightly as she clenched her hands into fists at her sides, her stocky form tensed as if to absorb a body blow. Whip-lean Jak Lauren stared blankly off in the middle distance; though the expression in his ruby-colored eyes was unreadable, the tendons of his jaws flexed like steel cables under the waxy white of his scarred cheeks. J. B. Dix gripped the brim of his beloved fedora with both hands, twisting it down

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to seat it more firmly on his head. Behind the Armorer's round, steel-rimmed spectacles, Ryan caught the glimmer of a sardonic smile. What was that old predark saying? When the crapfall really got heavy, it was time to screw on your hat.

Ryan turned to Doc Tanner last. The old man's eyes were tightly closed, his lips moving as he muttered softly to himself. He repeated a short phrase over and over. Under the present circumstances, on the verge of molecular disassembly, any whisper might have been taken for a prayer. Though the phrase Doc was repeating sounded vaguely like a plea for mercy or salvation, it wasn't

The one-eyed man recognized the strange words. Doc, a fountainhead of obscure, dated and often arcane knowledge, had taught Ryan the phrase and its meaning.

Morituri te salutamus.

As Doc had explained, the words were in Latin one of many human languages long dead before the nuke shit hit the fan. Morituri te salutamus was a Roman gladiator's oath to his emperor before entering mortal combat, which signified submission and allegiance to a higher power and an acceptance of one's own fate.

"We who are about to die salute you."

Ryan figured the part about accepting fate was a flat-out given; what the rest meant was a mystery to him. He had no idea who or what Doc thought he was saluting, .or if the old man even knew. The experience of

having been time-trawled into the future had done something to the old man's mind. He didn't always talk rationally.

A swirling gray mist appeared near the chamber's ceiling. Tendrils of the mist drifted down, obscuring everything.

A curious person caught in the same situation might have wondered if the fog really existed or if it was an illusion, a figment of a mind already being systematically deconstructed, cell by cell. Ryan Cawdor wasn't a man to linger over questions that served no immediate purpose. He was a stone-hard pragmatist, a bottom liner, which was why he and his friends used the mat-trans units. Having journeyed across post-Armageddon America on foot and in the Trader's war wags for many years, he knew how dangerous Chose alternate modes of transportation were. The odds were heavily stacked against the long-term survival of conventional travelers, no matter how well armed they were. Of the many thousands of human fatalities he had seen in Deathlands, few had been quick and painless.

Ryan fell through the space where the floor should have been, spiral ing downward, faster and faster through black emptiness. Somewhere in the middle of his wind milling fall, he completely lost consciousness. Mercifully everything went blank. But not for long. The mind dreamed in transit, and the dreams were always bad.

The instant of deathlike oblivion was shattered by a

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surge of color, sound and the full range of physical sensations; the jump dream had begun.

It was night.

He hit the ground running. His bare feet slapped against moist soil as he raced toward a distant tower of flames. And as he ran, he knew it wasn't his own body that carried him. It was too light, too quick, too strong for its size. The differencesthe raw speed and the agilityamazed him.