Chapter Two

 

 

The mat-trans units were highly sophisticated pieces of equipment, the finest that the whitecoat scientists of the predark times could design and manufacture. In the last year or so before skydark, and the transition of the United States of America into Deathlands, with the deaths of around 99.4 percent of the population during the nuke holocaust and the long winters that followed, the government had been working on a number of ultrasecret projects.

 

The Totality Concept was the blanket name for all the differing branches of research. Within that Pentagon-controlled umbrella, there was Operation Chronos, dealing with time travel; the Genesis Project, which dealt with genetic tampering and DNA research; and Overproject Whisper, which had a number of arcane, mysterious and murderous subdivisions. One of these was Cerberus, which covered the installation of matter-transfer gateways in a number of specially built military complexes called redoubts.

 

The greens and liberals and conservationists at the end of the twentieth century had been enraged at the way the government had chosen to site these redoubts, riding roughshod over all objections. Many of the redoubts were located in idyllic and isolated parts of the country, remote from cities. In many cases the deep-buried complexes had been located in national parks.

 

In the apocalypse that followed the skydark mega-cull, some of these redoubts had been destroyed. But others, abandoned, had been maintained by superbly engineered nuke power plants that kept the gateways functioning.

 

Ryan and his friends had stumbled on one of these long-hidden redoubts and accidentally triggered the mat-trans unit, finding that they had miraculously "jumped" to somewhere else.

 

Since then, they'd made a number of such jumps, generally with safety and success, but not always. The big problem was that all scientific data had gone with the missiles, and nobody knew the codes that enabled the users to choose a specific location.

 

All Ryan knew was that when you shut the door of the hexagonal armaglass chamber, you triggered the jump mechanism, became unconscious and woke up some other place.

 

That was what was supposed to happen.

 

But the timing of the devastating earthquake had proved crucial to the jump.

 

The dissolution of the molecular structure of each of the six companions had taken place, but the reassembly was abruptly interrupted.

 

The reception unit in Tennessee was on alert, the initial mechanism functioning.

 

But there was nothing to receive.

 

The microcomps were searching the void, making tens of millions of calculations every second, seeking the physical parameters for the six humans in order to try to complete the assembly and conclude the jump.

 

Ryan Cawdor. Male. Late thirties. Seventy-four inches. Two hundred and five pounds. Eyes negative. Left eye missing. Right eye pale blue. Skin dark. Hair curly and black. A dozen or more scars all over his body, including one that ran from eye to the corner of the mouth on the right side of his face.

 

A myriad list of endless details covered every aspect and measurement of Ryan, from the length of his stubble to the condition of his fingernails.

 

It went on to describe the clothes that Ryan Cawdor had been wearingthe long coat and the white silk scarf weighted at the end with silver dollars, blue denim shirt, dark blue pants, combat boots.

 

The comps searched for comparisons, weights and calibers for his weapons. The Steyr SSG-70 fired a 7.62 mm round and was mounted with a laser image enhancer and Starlight nightscope. A SIG-Sauer automatic was holstered on his hip, the P-226 model, carrying fifteen rounds of 9 mm full-metal-jacket rounds. Length was 7.72 inches. Barrel length was 4.41 inches, its weight 25.52 ounces. An eighteen-inch panga was sheathed on the other hip, with a blade honed to a whisper of death.

 

There were similar details for the other five friends, concentrating on the unusual elements that made them the individuals that they were.

 

John Barrymore Dix. Male. Similar age to Ryan. Sixty-eight inches tall and one-forty pounds soaking wet. Hair thin and dark brown. Complexion sallow. Eyes brown. Lean build. Wire-rimmed spectacles. Clothes included jacket and pants with endlessly capacious pockets filled with all manner of miniature tools, picklocks, wrist chron and microsextant. And his beloved fedora hat.

 

He had two blasters, the M-4000 Smith amp; Wesson 12-gauge scattergun with a folding butt, pistol grip and its unique ammo, eight rounds of Remington flechettes. Twenty of the lethal inch-long darts were in each shell. His Uzi automatic machine pistol held twenty rounds of 9 mm ammo.

 

Krysty Wroth. Female. Mid-twenties. Seventy-one inches and one-fifty pounds. Green eyed, with fresh complexion. Well built. Long red hair. Nearly a century after the nukecaust there was still residual genetic damage throughout Deathlands that led to all manner of mutations in animal and vegetable life. The comps were thrown by Krysty Wroth's fiery hair, puzzled by its sentience. In times of stress it would seem to shrink and curl closer to Krysty's skull, almost like a cap. When things were going well, then it would flow luxuriantly across her shoulders.

 

White shirt. Blue pants and jacket. The system reproduced precisely what she'd been wearing. The unusual boots, Western style, dark blue leather, with chiseled silver points on the toes mid embroidered with silver spread-winged falcons.

 

Her weapon was a Smith amp; Wesson double-action Model 640, 5-shot, .38-caliber blaster with a stubby two-inch barrel.

 

The unseen mutations that were an integral part of Krysty's persona were also duplicated. Her strange gift of "seeing" a threat of danger. Or "feeling" when there was any life force in the immediate area.

 

Krysty's other mutie talent had been inherited from her mother, Sonja, back when she'd been a teenage girl in the ville of Harmony up in old Colorado. At times of direst need, Krysty could draw on the power of Gaia, the Earth Mother, which would briefly give her phenomenal, almost supernatural strength. But she would pay a dreadful price for utilizing this power and would collapse, utterly drained and barely conscious.

 

The mat-trans system had some problems with Jak Lauren. Male. Late teens. Only sixty-four inches tall and barely tipping the scales at one-ten pounds. Deep facial scars. Hair of purest white. Skin white. Eyes of ruby red. Full-blown albino. Very athletic build.

 

Leather-and-canvas camouflage coat over ragged fur jacket. Denim pants. Combat boots.

 

Satin-finish Colt Python Magnum, .357 caliber. Six round. Six-inch barrel. A man-stopper. A cannon of a blaster for the skinny albino teenager. He also carried a number of leaf-shaped throwing knives, with heavy taped hilts, concealed all about his person.

 

Mildred Winonia Wyeth. Female. Age indeterminate. Either late thirties or one hundred and twenty. The comp found that aspect of Mildred difficult to handle. It had no way of knowing that she had been born in Lincoln, Nebraska, on December 17,1964. A doctor and expert on the medical freezing of human beings, she had gone into hospital for minor abdominal surgery a few days before skydark, on December 28, 2000. Ironically things had gone badly wrong, and to save her life it had been necessary to freeze her cryonically.

 

She had been plucked back from eternal sleep by Ryan and the others.

 

Skin, black. Hair, black, in beaded plaits. Height, sixty-four inches. Weight, one hundred and forty pounds. Eyes, brown.

 

Wore quilted denim jacket, reinforced military jeans and calf-length boots of black leather. Mildred's weapon was typical of the woman and her unusual skills.

 

In the last-ever Olympic games, held in Atlanta in 1996, she had won the silver medal for the free-shooting pistol event. She had scored three ninety-eight from four hundred and was arguably the finest shot in Deathlands.

 

She carried a target revolver, a ZKR 551, made at the Zbrojovka works in Brno, Czechoslovakia. Designed by the Koucky brothers, the blaster held six .38-caliber rounds. The beautiful handblaster had a solid frame side-rod ejector and short fall thumb cocking hammer.

 

With it Mildred could put all six rounds into a three-inch target at fifty yards.

 

Last of the six was Dr. Theophilus Algernon Tanner, whose genetic makeup was so unusual it completely freaked out the computer. Most of Doc's mat-trans facts were simple and reasonably straightforward.

 

Male, height of seventy-five inches and weight of around one hundred and fifty pounds. Very skinny for his height. Hair, grizzled and shoulder length. Eyes, pale blue. Face, deeply lined. Oddly perfect teeth. Deep voice.

 

The clothes weren't a problem. Old-fashioned frock coat, faded and stained coppery green with age. Cracked knee boots. White denim shirt.

 

And the weapons weren't common, but they could be found in the infinite data base of the mat-trans system.

 

His blaster was a reproduction of a famous handgun from the days of the Civil War. The J. E. B. Stuart commemorative Le Mat, engraved and inlaid with gold. Peculiar for a pistol, the Le Mat had two barrels. One fired a single round of 18-gauge grapeshot. A quick adjustment of the hammer accessed nine .44-caliber rounds, on the cap-and-ball system.

 

The other weapon that Doc always carried was a long ebony swordstick, with a silver lion's-head hilt. The black wooden cane concealed a rapier of superb-quality Toledo steel that bore the engraved message No Me Saques Sin Razon; No Me Envaines Sin Honor Do not draw me without good reason and do not sheathe me without honor .

 

It was when the computer came to Doc's age that the powerful comp nearly blew its fuses.

 

Data does not compute was its message to itself, seeking to find some way of rationalizing the contradictory information that it received.

 

Doc's actual birth date was February 14,1868, which made him something like two hundred and thirty years old. He had married pretty little Emily Chandler on June 17, 1891. They had two children Rachel, who was three years old, and Jolyon, who was just one when their father completely vanished.

 

Operation Chronos had been working in ultrasecret conditions to try to achieve time travel with a view toward utilizing it against the Russians. Assassinating Joseph Stalin was just one of the aims of the project.

 

Sadly the whitecoats could never get it right.

 

They began by trying to trawl people from the past. Judge Crater was one of their spectacular failures. The writer Ambrose Bierce was another. They disappeared from their pasts, but what emerged in the secret laboratories in Virginia bore scant relationship to anything human. After they had thrown up at the hideous abortions of humanity that they had trawled into the present, the horrified whitecoats ordered that the remnants be hastily burned.

 

Their successes could be counted on the fingers of one hand. And the prize of them all was the eminent scientist and philosopher, Dr. Theophilus Tanner, one of the leading academics of the Victorian era.

 

They dragged him forward to 1998, where he proved so difficult and uncooperative a study that they were glad to get rid of him by pushing him forward again in December of 2000. The scientists, who had destroyed his life, died days later in the nightmare of skydark, and Doc found himself stranded in the heart of Deathlands, nearly a hundred years in the future.

 

For reasons that nobody could understand, this man, who was only in his midthirties, resembled a man in his sixties.

 

The experiences had also taken their toll on his mind. Doc wasn't always in absolute control, but then no one was in control when consigning the body's particles to the mat-trans process.

 

But eventually all the physical elements were resolved and the process of reassembling the six humans in the redoubt in Tennessee began.

 

 

 

A NORMAL JUMP, under the best of circumstances, was extremely trying for the participants, always leading to a period of mental blackness and, not unusually, some degree of trauma.

 

That happened in even the best of jumps. And the jump from the burning house in Japan to the redoubt in Tennessee wasn't the best.

 

Not by a country mile.

 

The interruption to the process of matter transfer compounded the usual nightmares.

 

It was bad.