James Axler - Deathlands 28 Emerald Fire

/* /*]] */ Axler,_James_-_Deathlands_28_-_Emerald_Fire An arrow hissed through the door, clattering against the back wall of the control room

Ryan and J.B. dropped to their knees behind the last row of desks, the one-eyed man glancing to the rear to see that everyone else was in the chamber, standing, blasters ready.Trader often said that life generally came down to two choices a bad one and the other one. If he and J.B. turned and ran for it, jumping into the chamber and slamming the door, it would give the natives precious seconds to come after them and trap them before the jump mechanism operated.So there was the other choice."Get on the floor," he yelled to his friends."Ready," Krysty called a few moments later."We stay," he said quietly to J.B.Ryan rose onto hands and knees and powered himself forward to slam the armaglass door, triggering the jump mechanism. "Wait for us," he yelled. "Be along when we can."A long arrow struck the door, so close it nicked Ryan's sleeve. He dropped to the floor, crawling back to join the Armorer.Behind him he knew that the metal disks in the floor and ceiling of the chamber would be glowing, and fine tendrils of mist would be gathering near the top of the six-sided room. In less than a minute his companions would be somewhere else.He and J.B., oldest and best of friends, hunkered in their limited shelter, blasters ready for the inevitable attack.* * * Ruby sparks from a pinon fire, soaring into the black velvet of an Albuquerque sky. The best of memories. This is for Carla and Jim Wright, with much love and great affection. The best of friends. 28 in the Deathlands series First edition October 1995ISBN 0-373-62528-6Copyright 1995 by Worldwide Library.All rights reserved. Except for use in any review, the reproduction or utilization of this work in whole or in part in any form by any electronic, mechanical or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including xerography, photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, is forbidden without the written permission of the publisher, Worldwide Library, 225 Duncan Mill Road, Don Mills, Ontario, Canada M3B 3K9.All characters in this book have no existence outside the imagination of the author and have no relation whatsoever to anyone bearing the same name or names. They are not even distantly inspired by any individual known or unknown to the author, and all incidents are pure invention.and TM are trademarks of the publisher. Trademarks indicated with are registered in the United States Patent and Trademark Office, the Canadian Trade Marks Office and in other countries.Printed in U.S.A.* * * The art of the Incas, the Aztecs and the Mayas is amongst the most beautiful in the history of mankind. Sadly those civilizations also produced some of the most barbarous and inhuman cruelties the world has ever known.From The Sun, the Pyramid and the Knife , by Jedediah Alnwick, published by The Free Press of Corrales, NM The sick darkness was passing.Ryan Cawdor steadied his breathing, conscious that the jump had been one of the easiest that he could remember. There had been none of the hideous gibbering dreams that sometimes swam out of the black horror of a bad jump.He felt slightly sick, there was a throbbing pressure behind his eye and his stomach felt as though it had gone ten rounds with a rabid mule."Fireblast," he whispered to himself, still not risking opening his eye.Ryan was conscious that his hand was still being gripped by Krysty Wroth. That in itself was a sign that the mat-trans unit had functioned well.All he needed to know now was whether everyone was all right and where the jump had taken them.He breathed in slowly, aware that the air felt very hot and moist. And green.Ryan opened his eye. When civilization was blown apart in the massive nuclear holocaust of 2001, the world had been geared for all kinds of military action, most of it supposed to be top secret at the highest level. But many people had heard about the Totality Concept, the cover-all policy that ranged from time travel to self-supporting space stations packed with laser-guided hardware.One of the subsections of the Concept was called Overproject Whisper, and one small part of that was Operation Chronos, which was concentrating on the largely doomed research into time traveling, or "trawling," as it had become known. The idea of pulling targets from the past or pushing them into the future was interesting. But in practice there were less than a handful of successes.One of them, Dr. Theophilus Tanner, was recovering in the mat-trans chamber across from Ryan Cawdor.The matter transmitter had been developed in a laboratory complex in Maryland and was one of the limited successes of the Totality Concept. The mat-trans units were often an integral part of the secret military complexesknown as redoubtshastily and secretly built all across the United States, with a few elsewhere in the world. These "gateways," as they were called, were developed in those shadowed, paranoid days that closed the twentieth century, and made it possible for people to be sent instantly from one location to another."How're you feeling, Doc?" Ryan's voice sounded flat and hollow in the hexagonal chamber. The color of the armaglass walls varied from place to place. This time they were an odd shade of pallid green.The old man ran a hand across his face, smiling and showing his oddly perfect set of gleaming teeth. His light blue eyes twinkled at Ryan."Upon my soul, dear friend! Relative to a rare good day, then this is still some way less than adequacy. However, compared to an average mat-trans jump, I feel as frolicsome as a dog with two tails. Or a monkey with six paws. Or an elephant with three trunks. Or a""I get the picture, Doc. Not a bad jump, was it?"The silver-haired old man fumbled in one of the capacious pockets of his frock coat, so ancient that the black material had a strange greenish patina that Doc swore stoutly wasn't mold. He pulled out a blue swallow's-eye kerchief and mopped his brow."By the Three Kennedys! The jump was passing fair, but the heat here puts me much in mind of the botanical gardens in London, at Kew. There was some verse, but I confess that its remembrance seems to have dodged away from my poor corroded old brain."Doc had been a leading academic back in Omaha, Nebraska, in November of 1896, living a happy and contented life with his beautiful young wife, Emily, and his two beloved children, Rachel, who had been three years old, and Jolyon, barely past his first birthday.The white-coated scientists, whom he had come to detest with a bitter loathing, had plucked him from the past and drawn him forward to 1998, as part of Operation Chronos. It was then discovered that their success with Doc had been a freakish event, with virtually all of their other experiments failing horribly.Doc himself was such a stubborn and recalcitrant time traveler that the scientists, in December of 2000, propelled him many years into the futureinto the post holocaust United States, which had become known as Deathlands. Most of the time his mind functioned reasonably well, but stress sometimes sent him spinning off onto some alternative thought beam that was all his own.He reached out to retrieve his lion's-head ebony cane, which concealed a gleaming rapier of Toledo steel, stretching his long, skinny legs in their cracked knee boots. Then his hand automatically went for the unusual handblaster that was holstered at his hip.It was an ornate Le Mat, a weapon that dated back to the early days of the Civil War. The blaster was engraved and decorated with twenty-four-carat gold as a commemorative tribute to the immortal memory of James Ewell Brown StuartJeb Stuart, the greatest cavalryman of his country. The massive cannon, weighing over three and a half pounds, had two barrels and an adjustable hammer. It fired a single .63-caliber round, like a shotgun. As well, a revolver chamber held nine .44-caliber rounds.At any range around twenty feet it was devastatingly lethal. At much over fifty feet it was fairly innocuous in the old man's hands.The Armorer was also sitting next to Doc, feeling for his neatly folded spectacles in a pocket of his worn leather jacket, finally perching them on the bridge of his narrow nose. Five feet eight inches tall, and just about reaching one-forty when soaking wet, John Barrymore Dix was Ryan's oldest friend. They had both joined the legendary Trader and his armored war wags when they were young men, filled with sand and gall. And they had learned many things from Trader, mostly about surviving, about mistakes not made.J. B. Dix was undeniably the greatest authority on weaponry in all of Deathlands.His own armament consisted of a 20-round 9 mm Uzi automatic machine pistol, and an unusual scattergun. The Smith amp; Wesson M-4000 didn't fire ordinary rounds. It held eight Remington 12-gauge cartridges, each with twenty flechettes, tiny, murderous inch-long darts.J.B. grinned at Ryan and picked up his beloved fedora with his left hand, blowing dust from the crown and placing it carefully on his head."That's one of the best jumps I ever had," he said. "But it's hot and wet, isn't it? Where in the black dust have we jumped to this time?"He turned to look at the stocky black woman who sat next to him, reaching out to hold her hand as she jerked back into consciousness.Mildred Winona Wyeth was in her middle thirties, the daughter of a Baptist minister who had been burned to death by Klans in a firebombing back in 1965.A leading expert in her field of cryogenics and cryosurgery, she was also a brilliant shot with a pistol and had won the free-shooting silver medal in the last Olympic Games of all time, in Atlanta in 1996. The event four years later had been canceled due to the terminal deterioration in world politics.Three days before the end of the year 2000, Mildred had been admitted to hospital for a minor operation. Unpredictably the anesthetic produced a near-fatal reaction. In a desperate bid to save Mildred's life, her doctor had, ironically, frozen her, putting the woman into suspended animation in a nuke-powered hospital, hoping to revive her at some future time from the coma that had claimed her. There she had stayed in an endless, dreamless sleep, until Ryan and the others, ragged Prince Charmings, had come along and awakened her from both the coma and her suspended state. The tiny beads in Mildred's plaited hair rattled as she moved her head. "Guess I don't feel too bad," she stated. Mildred was wearing a quilt-lined denim jacket, and reinforced military jeans tucked into black calf-length boots. On her hip was a Czech-made target revolver, the ZKR 551, from the Zbrojovka works in Brno. It was a 6-shot blaster, chambered to take a Smith amp; Wesson .38-caliber round, with a solid frame-side rod ejector and a short-fall thumb-cocking hammer. Mildred used to claim she could take out a gnat's eye at forty paces with the weapon. She wasn't joking.Next to her, still sleeping, was eleven-year-old Dean Cawdor. He had his father's dark complexion and shock of black, curly hair. It was only in the last year or so that Ryan had ever known that he had a son, the result of a single sexual encounter with a woman named Sharona. The boy and his mother had roamed Deathlands until she had died, rad sick, handing over responsibility for Dean to a friend who had eventually met Ryan and the companions in a chance encounter in Newyork."Gaia!" The voice belonged to the flame-haired woman sitting next to Ryan. "Wonders never cease. I actually don't feel sick, lover. It's hot in here."Krysty Wroth was Ryan's partner, lover and friend. Her long red hair was strangely sentient and reacted to a threat of danger. Now her tresses were curled tightly and defensively at her nape. The woman herself had a mutie quality, being able to sense the presence of other life forms and identify them as a possible menace, though she wasn't a full-fledged doomie, able to pinpoint what was going to happen.She yawned and stretched, catlike and graceful, looking around at the others and seeing that Dean was the only one not yet back with them. "Air feels triple moist, like being in a Hopi sweat bath," she said."Must be somewhere south," Ryan replied. "Down the keys or the bayous."The seventh and last of the group of traveling friends uncoiled himself from the corner of the chamber, next around in the circle from J.B.Jak Lauren was sixteen years old, standing a bare five feet four and tipping the scales at a little over one-ten. He had the lean body of a trained acrobat, and wore a ragged collection of cotton and leather clothing. His obvious weapon was a satin-finish .357 Magnum Colt Python, holstered on his hip, but Jak wasn't keen on blasters and preferred to rely on his hidden arsenal of leaf-bladed throwing knives.But the first thing that everyone noticed about Jak was his mane of hair, as white as a magnesium night flare, then his eyes glittering like molten rubies. The young man was a true albino.Jak had traveled with Ryan and company on two separate occasions. They'd first encountered one another in the swamps of Louisiana, when they'd helped him against the vicious Baron Tourment, murderer of his father. Some time later Jak had met and married Christina Ballinger and they'd had a daughter, Jenny, sharing a brief happiness on their New Mexico spread. Happiness in Deathlands was something you grabbed at as it rode by. And it didn't often last long. It wasn't all that many weeks since Jak had buried his wife and child.And now he was back with Ryan and the other companions.Dean was finally coming around from the effects of the mat-trans jump, blinking open his dark brown eyes and looking immediately for his father. "All right, Dad?""Yeah. All right. Seems to have been a good jump. How do you feel?"Dean sniffed and raised a hand to his face, coming away with a smear of blood on his fingers. "Nose," he explained. "Think I must've banged it on my knee or something. Apart from that I feel like a real hot pipe."Ryan nodded, though he still made no effort to get up. His brain felt the feathery, tumbling sickness that always came from a jump, but the discomfort was nothing compared to the usual bone-deep nausea."Everyone take it easy for a few minutes," he warned. "Don't get fooled into thinking that we're all aces on the lines, just because we haven't thrown up or stuff."While he sat resting in the locked gateway chamber, Ryan checked out his own array of weapons.The eighteen-inch panga was sheathed on his hip, its tip like a needle, its double edge honed to a whispering sharpness. On his other hip was the powerful SIG-Sauer P-226. It had a four-and-a-half-inch barrel and held fifteen rounds of full-metal-jacket 9 mm bullets. The built-in baffle silencer was no longer as efficient as it had once been, but it still muffled the sharp explosive crack when the trigger was squeezed. His Steyr SSG-70 bolt-action rifle fired ten lethal 7.62 mm rounds. It also had a laser image enhancer and a Starlite night scope.As Ryan looked over his weapons, he noticed out of the corner of his eye that the Armorer was doing the same with his own blasters.Once he was satisfied, Ryan glanced around the six-sided chamber. "We all ready to move on?"There was a nodding of heads and a muttering of agreement from everyone."Double red," Ryan said. "Here we go." Next page