James Axler - Deathlands 13- Seedling

/* /*]] */ d13_seedling2 The dying woman had been knifed by one of the scalie guards as she'd tried to escape

"Should I end it for her?" Ryan asked, hand on his panga.At the sound of his voice, the woman's eyes opened. For several long heartbeats she gazed blindly into space. Then she moved her head and her eyes locked on Ryan's face. "You," she finally whispered.Her hand spidered up her chest to her throat and gripped a square metal pendant. "Take," she commanded, her eyes burning into Ryan's good one. "Open. Rona said to find you. Died long back. Quest. Look after." Her breathing was becoming faster and more shallow.Slowly Ryan opened the locket and found that it contained two thingsa tiny ringlet of blond hair and a picture, a faded, pale brown portrait."Who is it?" he asked, even though he knew what the answer was going to be."Your son, Ryan Cawdor. It's your son." 13 in the Deathlands series A GOLD EAGLE BOOK FROM WORLDWIDETORONTO NEW YORK LONDON PARIS AMSTERDAM STOCKHOLM HAMBURG ATHENS MILAN TOKYO SYDNEYThis is for Geoff, Anne, Ben and Saul Kelly, who are friends. If you don't have dreams, then how can they come true?First edition September 1991 ISBN 0-373-62513-8 SEEDLINGCopyright 1991 by Worldwide Library. Philippine copyright 1991. Australian copyright 1991.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 permission of the publisher, Worldwide Library, 225 Duncan Mill Road, Don Mills, Ontario, Canada M3B 3K9.All the 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 the incidents are pure invention.are Trademarks registered in the United States Patent and Trademark Office and in other countries.Printed in U.S.A. Ryan Cawdor opened his eye, then closed it again, hoping to avoid throwing up. He'd lost count of the number of jumps he'd made over the past year or so, but there was one great truth.They didn't get any easier.The first moments weren't too badthe humming and the lights glowing in floor and ceiling, the fingers of mist appearing in the chamber, hiding the colored armaglass walls.Then the good part ended.Ryan had thought about the sensation several times, trying to focus his mind on precisely what happened during a jump from gateway to gateway, from mat-trans chamber to mat-trans chamber.All he could think was that it was like having a clumsy child disassemble your skull, then run a pointed file around the inside, scraping at the sensitive parts of your brain, stirring things up so that past, present and future got hopelessly scrambled.There was pain and nausea every time, and a blinding ache in the head as though someone had been trying to remove your eyes, from the inside.Ryan cautiously opened his good right eye, drawing a slow, whistling breath as he fought for control. He took another breath and felt relieved as he realized he definitely wasn't going to vomit this time."Fireblast," he muttered.None of the others had regained consciousness yet, all lying or sitting around the chamber. It was odd not to see Jak Lauren there. The snow-headed albino boy had been with them for For how long?Ryan couldn't remember. It seemed like forever, and now the boy was gone.Another surge from his stomach brought the bitter taste of bile. Ryan swallowed hard and closed his eye again.Memories twisted in his head, one above allthe narrow face, eyes blazing with a feral hatred, staring at him. And a hand, fingers twisted in agony, vanishing into the sucking slime.The Trader used to say he didn't have any enemies, and when someone picked up on it, as was the rule, he'd smile that wise, lopsided smile and say, "None alive."But that wasn't true. In Deathlands there were always new enemies.A voice jerked him from his reverie."Still sleeping, lover?""I feel like double-shit.""We're getting too old for all these jumps."For the third time Ryan risked opening an eye. Krysty Wroth was sitting next to him, running her fingers through her fiery hair. It tumbled over her shoulders, strangely sentient, seeming to move of its own volition."Some are bad," he admitted.She smiled. "And some are worse.""Yeah.""Seems funny without the kid.""Hope he and his lady make it."Krysty reached across and touched his arm. "That cut doesn't look too good, lover."It was a souvenir of the dizzying fight against Cort Strasser, inflicted by his bone-hilted knife. Blood had run down Ryan's arm, crusting on the fingers of his left hand, but now the long, shallow wound was dried."I look better than Strasser.""Anyone looks better than Strasser." The third voice in the chamber rang off the maroon walls of armaglass."Thanks, J.B.," Ryan said. "Enjoy the trip?"The slight figure of J. B. Dix, Armorer to the group of friends, straightened. He put his hands into his jacket pocket and retrieved his wire-framed spectacles. "Lost my autorifle and my Tekna knife. Go on like this, Ryan, and I'll end up naked.""You got blood on your mouth," Krysty told him.There was a tiny thread of crimson leaking from the corner of J.B.'s lips, and he wiped it away on his sleeve.Krysty stood, the heels of her western-style boots clattering on the metal disks in the floor. She swayed a little and placed a hand on the wall. "Gaia! That wasn't the most fun I've had.""How's Mildred?" Ryan asked, looking at the fourth member of their quintet."Old Mildred's fine, apart from some son of a bitch banging on the inside of my head with a hammer."Mildred Wyeth was a doctor, born in December 1964, well over 130 years earlier. She'd gone into the hospital for a minor operation in the last days of December in the year 2000, just three weeks before the nuke-madness that brought utter ruin to the world. As a result of a medical accident, Mildred had been cryogenically frozen, lying in suspended animation until snatched from her endless sleep by Ryan Cawdor and his comrades.Since then she'd been one of them, sharing their small triumphs as well as their dangers.Now she was sitting up, rubbing at the side of her face, which was still badly swollen from the brutal beating she'd taken from Cort Strasser. "I'll never get used to these jumps," she said quietly."Doc doesn't look so good," J.B. observed, moving to the side of the last member of their group.Doc had an even stranger life history than Mildred. Born Theophilus Algernon Tanner in South Strafford, Vermont, on February 14,1868, he had a glittering career as a scientist and was married with two small children. But in November 1896 he was trawled into the future.He was an experiment of Project Cerberus, which was a part of Overproject Whisper, itself a small cog within the vast secret machine known by the code name of the Totality Concept. The attempt to bring and send people through the barrier of time was almost totally a failure. If it had any success, then that success was Doctor Theophilus Tanner.Doc was a prickly and difficult subject, deeply disturbed at losing his wife, family and friends. He made several illicit attempts to rejoin them, despite the risks of the unstable equipment. To get rid of him, the white-coated operators of Cerberus sent him off into the future, to the present in Deathlands.The effects of the appalling disorientation meant that Doc would never again be totally sane. At his best he was only a couple cents short of a dollar. Sometimes he lost track of quite "when" he was living.Now he lay on his side, knees drawn under him, a trail of spittle linking his open mouth to the polished floor of the gateway chamber.His stubbled face was parchment-pale, and his breathing was ragged. His right hand clutched his precious swordstick, which was made of ebony, with a silver handle shaped like a lion's head.Mildred got to her hands and knees, groaning, and crawled to the old man's side. None of them actually knew how old Doc really was. He'd only been in his late twenties when he was trawled forward, yet he looked and acted like a man in his sixties. It was a byproduct of tampering with temporal paradoxes. As Doc himself once remarked, "I confess to being in fair shape for a man who is actually over two hundred years old.""He's going to be all right?" Ryan asked.By now all four of them were standing around Doc Tanner.His eyes blinked open."By the three Kennedys!" he said feebly, looking up at them. "I feel akin to a man who has fallen down a deep well. Could you possibly stand a tad farther away while I recover myself?"Helped by Mildred and J.B., he stood reasonably well, his knee joints cracking like snapped kindling. He wiped away the saliva and sighed. "Did anyone else find that a particularly pain-filled jump?""Yeah," Mildred agreed, "worst I've known."Ryan nodded. "Could be there was a malfunction in the equipment."Krysty was looking around the chamber. She stood still for a few moments, eyes closed, concentrating, using some of the strange mutie power of the Earth Mother to try to "see" their surroundings."No," she said, shaking her head. "Can't feel anything. It's always hard inside these places. They seem to sort of blanket the reception for me.""Then we'd better go look," Ryan decided. "Everyone ready?""As I'll ever be, my dear fellow." was Doc's response.The others contented themselves with nodding, and all drew their blastersKrysty her silvered Heckler amp; Koch P7A-13 9 mm pistol; J.B. his trusty Steyr AUG 5.6 mm automatic; Mildred, who had represented the United States in the free-shooting pistol event in the last ever Olympic Games before skydark, had an exotic target blaster. It was a beautiful ZKR 551 six-shot revolver chambered to take a Smith amp; Wesson .38 round; Ryan had his usual SIG-Sauer P-226 blaster with the built-in baffle silencer; Doc, typically had what was probably the only Le Mat Civil War revolver in the whole of Deathlands. It exploded a single .63 round from a scattergun barrel, as well as firing nine standard .36-caliber bullets.Ryan looked at his ragtag army, caught Krysty's emerald eyes and grinned. "Well, here we go again, lover."She didn't return his smile.Ryan turned away from her and reached for the lever that would open the gateway."Ready?" he asked quietly, and threw the lever. Next page