Prologue

 

 

Ryan opened his eye.

 

As usual he didn't know where he was after the mat-trans jump. But his mind was clear enough, and he was thankful he had been spared the horrible nightmares that were the frequent side effects of the gateway's quantum energy overflow.

 

With crystal clarity he remembered escaping Gert Wolfram's Tennessee fortress, leaving it aflame and overrun with stickies, the flight by hot-air balloon to the subterranean redoubt.

 

He remembered closing the door to the gateway chamber, and the disks in the floor and ceiling beginning to glow as the matter-to-energy converter assembly automatically powered up.

 

He remembered the spark-shot mist gathering overhead, seeping down, and the darkness closing in.

 

And then there was light again and he opened his eye, expecting to be somewhere else.

 

Most of the time, a change in the color of the arma-glass walls of the chamber was the only thing that told Ryan and his friends that a mat-trans jump had been successfully completed.

 

In every redoubt, the octagonal design of the chamber remained the same, though each chamber was color-coded. The predark engineers had obviously decided color-coding was the simplest method of differentiating the chambers, evidently so the original gateway jumpers would know at a glance into which redoubt they had materialized. He'd often wondered why they hadn't simply put up signs identifying the locations. He chalked it up to yet another unfathomable mystery of predark scientific reasoning.

 

This gateway chamber had dingy white walls, and they weren't made of translucent armaglass. Instead, they were heavy, mortared concrete blocks. The door was a slab of steel set tightly in the wall, a wheel-lock jutting from the rivet-studded, cross-beamed mass.

 

A thin thread of light shone from a single overhead fixture, the glare stabbing painfully at his eye. There was a distant high-pitched whine he had never heard before, the sound of an engine or generator. He felt its regular pulsation through the floor beneath his hands and booted feet.

 

His five friends stirred. He heard a mutter from Jak, a grunt from J.B. and a groan from Doc. Krysty sat up, brushing a wisp of crimson hair from her face. "Everybody feel all right?"

 

As a matter a fact, everybody did, remarkably so. It had been one of the smoothest jumps in recent memory. Not only had there been no hideous hallucinatory nightmares, no one was complaining of nausea, dizziness, headaches or other symptoms of "jump sickness."

 

Jak and Mildred were the last to push themselves into sitting positions. The stocky black woman looked around and said, "This isn't a gateway chamber. Not exactly."

 

J.B. removed his spectacles from a capacious pocket of his coat, settled them on his bony nose and said, "Yeah. Never saw a unit like this before."

 

Doc climbed to his feet with the help of his sword-stick. The ceiling was low, and he couldn't stand at his full height. "Unusually cramped quarters. Inasmuch as I have a touch of claustrophobia, I would prefer less confined environs."

 

Ryan stood and went to the door. He had to stoop slightly, too. He put his hands on the wheel-lock, giving it a counterclockwise twist. It didn't budge. The wheel obviously hadn't been turned in a very long time. Taking and holding a deep breath, he threw all of his weight and upper-body strength against the lock.

 

With a tortured screech of rusted gears tearing free from time-frozen stasis, the wheel turned. Slowly and resistantly at first, then Ryan was able to initiate handover-hand spin.

 

He threw his shoulder against the steel door and there was a sucking sound of rotten rubber seals ripping. The hinges squealed and the door opened. He stepped out, blaster in hand. Everyone followed him, alert and watchful. Then they stopped and stared.

 

"Dark night," J.B. breathed.

 

"Where this?" Jak demanded.

 

"This isn't a redoubt," Krysty said uneasily.

 

They were in a medium-size room with a dozen desks, most of them covered with computer terminals. Sheets of crumbling, flaking paper lay in pieces beneath discolored coffee cups and verdigris-eaten brass paperweights.

 

A control console ran the length of one wall, consisting primarily of glass-encased readouts and gauges. A fine layer of dust clung to everything, coating the floor and instrument panels with a powdery gray film. They could taste it on their tongues, and the floating particles tickled nostril hairs.

 

On the other side of the wall, behind the console, the whining sound slowly faded.

 

Ryan silently agreed with Krysty. This place wasn't a redoubt. Almost all of the ones they had visited in the past had standardized layouts, adhering to the same design specs. Here there were no vanadium-steel sec doors, freestanding control consoles or flickering display monitors.

 

The door at the far end of the room was wood-paneled and had a simple knob rather than a lever or a sec-code keypad affixed to the frame. This place looked more like an office or a classroom.

 

"The Air Force," Mildred suddenly said.

 

Ryan turned toward her. She held a scrap of paper gingerly between thumb and forefinger. A small dark blue symbol was emblazoned near its top edge, a bird with outspread, upcurving wings.

 

"This is United States Air Force letterhead," she said, "a memo regarding the quantum interphase transducer experiments."

 

The vibrations of her voice and the soft touch of her breath were enough to cause the scrap of paper in her hand to crumble and float away in tiny fragments.

 

"I think we jumped into a military testing facility," she continued. "We jumped into a prototype gateway chamber."

 

Krysty looked around. "It's so old, there's probably very little of use to us here."

 

"Its power source is still operational," Doc pointed out.

 

Ryan walked to the door and put his hand on the knob. Following a procedure that was now ingrained habit, his five friends fanned out behind him, taking cover behind desks and drawing their weapons. Looking over his shoulder, he began counting in a soft voice. "One two"

 

On "three," he turned the knob, flung the door open and threw himself to one side. There was no sound from anywhere except the creak of rust-eaten hinges.

 

Ryan peered carefully around the door frame, staring into semidarkness. He blinked. He was looking down a long, smooth corridor, a dim glow of light filtering from its far end. Cool air brushed his face, blown from a distant, unseen opening.

 

Gesturing behind him to the others, the one-eyed man stepped out cautiously, heel to toe. His footfalls sent up flat, faint echoes. His companions joined him, pushing quietly through the dimness. J.B. took the point, Uzi in hand.

 

The corridor turned to the left like an L. J.B. paused at the angle, gestured for the others to wait and crept carefully out of sight. They could hear the muffled slapping sounds made by J.B.'s boots on the dust-filmed concrete floor.

 

The footfalls ceased. A latch clicked and the glow of light widened, dissolving the darkness. The air current increased in volume. They heard J.B.'s footsteps again, fast and hard. He was running. Ryan's finger crooked tight on the trigger of his handblaster.

 

The Armorer sprinted around the corner. His normally sallow face was flushed with excitement, his eyes behind the lenses of his spectacles wide.

 

Panting, he called to them, "Come on! You won't believe what I found!"