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 "Back!" Ryan yelled

 

 He ejected the clip and rammed in another from the supply he'd removed from Panner's corpse. It seemed to him that his people were only reacting. To survive, they had to get these soldiers on the run.

 

 "Dad, get down!" Dean shouted as he saw the drum rise from the center of the wag. It looked like a circle of blasters on a rotating wheel, which began to spin rapidly.

 

 Ryan dived as the rotating wheel spit fire. He felt a plucking at his clothes, small objects whistling past his ears and through his hair.

 

 Trank darts.

 

 His last conscious thought was that someone wanted very badly to take them alive.

 

 Why?

 

 Rat King

 

 # 51 in the Deathlands series

 

 James Axler

 

  

 

 May we not who are partakers of their brotherhood claim that in a small way at least we are partakers of their glory? Certainly it is our duty to keep these traditions alive and in our memory, and to pass them on untarnished to those who come after us.

 

 —Rear Admiral Albert Gleaves, USN, 1859-1937

 

 THE SAGA

 

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

 

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

 

 But they are the warrior survivalists, and they endure—in the way of the lion, the hawk and the tiger, true to nature's heart 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 Deathlands with the legendary Trader.

 

 Doctor Theophilus Tanner: Torn 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 world he knows, and yet he is the seedling bearing the promise of tomorrow.

 

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

 

  

 

 Prologue

 

  

 

 The old man was going to die soon. He knew it, and so did the others. They could feel the pain of old age, of a body's survival systems shutting down one by one.

 

 They could feel it within him, reaching out to spread over them. One chilled, all chilled.

 

 Inevitably they panicked and wanted him detached, their mute cries coming through on the readings as a sudden increase in electrical activity. Readings the like of which no one in the redoubt had ever seen before.

 

 MURPHY GLANCED over the shoulder of the hunched tech. His hands were slow on the keyboard, laboriously tapping in a code to trigger a programmed instruction.

 

 Except that Murphy knew there wasn't a code. Wasn't a program.

 

 "Wallace will have to know," he said.

 

 The tech said nothing. He just kept tapping. Tap-tap-tap… even though the screen repeatedly told him that there was no response from the mechanism.

 

 Murphy hit the man on the shoulder. He didn't often come to this level, and sec men of his standing didn't bother to fraternize with the other ranks. That was just the way it was. He felt the small rankle of irritation grow to a full-blown itch of anger. An itch he had to scratch.

 

 "Hey, stupe, why don't you answer when I say something? You know you have to answer to superior officers."

 

 Murphy swung the tech around by the shoulder and drew back his arm to deliver a backhand blow. It was his favorite form of mild reproof, as each of his four fingers had a thick silver or steel ring rammed down beyond the knuckle joint. The index finger had a ring with the head of an old god called Elvis, his name embossed underneath. The middle finger had a skull and crossbones-—the edges of the crossbone motif would make a satisfying tear on many an impudent mouth— and the third finger had a five-pointed star that had been awarded to him by Wallace in recognition of the manner in which he had led the defenses on the last outsider attack. Many of the scum had been chilled on that day.

 

 But it was the little finger that held the prize—a diamond cut into many sharp razor edges that could lacerate with only the most glancing of blows. The metal that held the ring on his finger was thin compared to the other rings, but the jewel was a prized weapon, handed down his line from the days before skydark.

 

 Murphy relished taking out his anger on the stupe tech, but halted when the man's face whirled to look into his. The eyes were empty and dull, the nose misshapen into a blob of flesh with no septum. The mouth was open, jaw slack, drool on the receding chin.

 

 Murphy gave a sigh of disgust, his anger temporarily retreating. The tech had to have gotten some mutie blood in his line somewhere. The colony deliberately stole women and some men from the outsiders in order to try to keep the gene pool from getting too stagnant. The trouble was, the rad-blasted valley still suffered from intense chem storms and the irradiated dust brought in by the whirlwinds. The poison became trapped within the valley's confines and just circulated again and again, spraying whatever crops the outsiders could grow, seeping through the food chain into the animals the outsiders caught and ate.

 

 Murphy's men tried to get clean specimens on their raids, but sometimes it was just so hard to tell.

 

 The only way you knew was when you got this…

 

 "Stupe bastard, you don't even know what I'm saying, do you?"

 

 There was no answer. Just the empty eyes.

 

 "I'll just have to tell him myself, I guess." Murphy sighed. With exaggerated care he turned the tech so that he faced his terminal once more. He started to tap in the nonexistent code again.

 

 With a last look through the Plexiglas shield that separated the mechanism from the banks of terminals, and a shudder at the sight that lay beyond, Murphy left the tech alone with whatever thoughts went through the head of a triple-stupe mutie bastard.

 

 MURPHY FOUND Wallace in his office. As always. Sometimes it seemed that Gen Wallace didn't move outside of the office, not even to piss or shit. But if that was the case, Murphy had no idea where he stowed his waste products.

 

 "Sir, permission to report possible code red," Murphy said in staccato fashion, knocking on the door as he spoke. He clicked his heels and saluted, his arm raised in front of him. As prescribed, he didn't look at Wallace until his superior spoke.

 

 "Sarj Murphy, report received and understood. What's the matter?"

 

 Wallace was a big man, spilling out of his uniform, which was frayed at the cuffs and shiny with age. For all that, it was well and regularly laundered, like Murphy's uniform and the tech's white coat. The colony believed in God and cleanliness, like it said in the good book.

 

 Murphy, given permission to look at Wallace by the superior's reply, directed his gaze at the big man as he stepped into the room.

 

 "Trouble, sir. It's the mechanism. One of the components is finally succumbing to obsolescence."

 

 Wallace steepled his fingers and stared at them. He didn't answer for what seemed to be a long time. Then finally he spoke.

 

 "No such thing as obsolescence, Sarj. Recycle is the law. We have parts we can use."

 

 It wasn't a question.

 

 Murphy pulled at his collar uncomfortably. It was too tight, his father having had less of a bull neck. The pants, on the other hand, were too big, where his grandfather had carried a paunch. Right now he'd like to be able to swap one for the other. He felt blood suffuse his face.

 

 "Sir, not so sure about the parts."

 

 Wallace looked at him. His eyes were cold, flinty in the shadowless glare of the fluorescent lighting.

 

 "You daring to argue with the good book, Sarj? You recycle. It works. Always."

 

 Murphy kept his jaw tight. Stupe bastard. Wallace was in command because his father had been Gen Wallace, and his father before him. Just like Murphy's father had been Sarj Murphy, and his father before him. That's the way it was. But Murphy wondered about the strict reg on heredity. There was too much danger of mutie blood infecting the ranks to keep it that simple. The tech was a good example. Dammit, Murphy knew he was smarter than Wallace—smarter than nearly everyone in the redoubt. But the regs couldn't be broken. Never had been. That was how they'd managed to stay as the colony while skydark decimated the outside—the rad-blasted and scarred world the outsiders called Deathlands.

 

 Problem was, it left them with a triple-stupe bastard like Gen Wallace, too inflexible to believe that anything new could ever happen. He'd never actually been outside.

 

 Murphy had. He knew that things changed all the time.

 

 Like now.

 

 "Sir, I really think you should come and see the mechanism."

 

 Wallace snorted. "Sarj, if this is a pointless trip and the recycling can go ahead as usual, then you're on a charge, mister."

 

 Murphy said nothing. He let the big man heave himself out of the chair and waddle after him as he headed back down the corridor toward the tech section. He walked fast, knowing it would make following hard for Wallace and enjoying the small piece of revenge for the Gen's lack of concern.

 

 WHEN WALLACE REACHED the tech section, puffing and panting behind the fitter Murphy, he was in a foul mood.

 

 "You, what's the problem?" he barked at the tech.

 

 "Sir, he can't answer you. Mutie blood."

 

 "Goddamn!" Wallace exploded. "How many times do you have to be told, Sarj. That just can't happen."

 

 "No, sir," Murphy said quietly. "Just like this can't happen, I guess." He indicated the Plexiglas screen.

 

 Wallace looked beyond and frowned.

 

 "Vital signs going down on number three. He was the oldest of the bunch when the great experiment began to run. Got most major organs recycled, and some limbs. Doesn't seem to be anything actually in need to replacement. Just seems to be…fading out."

 

 Wallace didn't seem to be listening.

 

 "Sir?"

 

 "Recycle."

 

 "But what, sir?"

 

 "The whole damn component, Sarj. If a part of the component can be replaced, then why not the whole damn thing? 'Cause the man is just one part of a larger organism—the mechanism. Recycle, Sarj."

 

 Murphy tried to hide his bewilderment. "But, sir, the whole mechanism is predark. The old man is 187 years, three months, two weeks by old chron time. Forty years older than the other components, true, but still, where do I find something of a similar age?"

 

 "That's your problem, Sarj. You're in charge of sec corps. You requisition supplies. Not my problem—what the good book calls delegation."

 

 Murphy ground his teeth. The good book was written before the great chilling. What the hell did it know about right now? But he kept it to himself. He didn't want to be put on a charge. As head of sec corps, he knew what that meant. And he'd trained his men too well.

 

 "Is that a problem, Sarj?" Wallace asked, the flinty eyes glittering in the quivering flesh of his fat face. Fat, but still hard and cruel at the jaw.

 

 Murphy was spared from lying by the sudden deafening blare of alarms that hadn't been used since predark times.

 

 Wallace looked around in surprise. The tech whined and covered his ears.

 

 "Alarms—shit, it must be the mat-trans," Murphy said.

 

 Wallace frowned. "Don't be stupe. No one's ever got it working. Lost the know-how after the great chilling."

 

 "Who said someone got it working from this end?" Murphy whispered.

 

  

 

 Chapter One

 

  

 

 The jump had been as sickening as usual. Ryan Cawdor opened his eye and felt a dull ache across the areas of his face that hadn't been numbed by scar tissue. The empty socket behind the eye patch felt as if it were pulsing in time with his heartbeat, and he flicked open his right eye, the bloodshot blue watering.

 

 Mat-trans jumps were painful and disjointing at all times, the atoms of each individual body being disassembled then flung across vast distances until reconfigured by the mat-trans computers at whichever redoubt was programmed to pick up the signal. The time between was taken up by nightmares and wanderings through the dark nights of imagination. The time immediately after awakening was usually filled with nausea and weakness.

 

 Ryan shook his head, trying to rid himself of the pulsing that thumped inside his skull. He looked across the dull green-and-cobalt-blue walls to where the streaked armaglass ended abruptly as the wall met a floor inlaid with the disks that also peppered the ceiling.

 

 He reached out for his weapons, feeling his hand brush the stock of the Steyr SSG-70. Where that lay, his SIG-Sauer couldn't be far away.

 

 His hand touched warm flesh, and he felt fingers instinctively grasp at him. Head still pounding, he turned his eye to focus on Krysty Wroth, her flaming red hair coiled protectively to her head and neck. Her mutie heritage gave her hair a sentience that acted as an early-warning system, coiling close to her head when danger threatened. After a jump it usually took some time to flow freely, but never before had he seen it this defensive.

 

 It set off a triple-red warning in his brain, and he forced his disoriented reflexes to respond. Forcing unwilling calf muscles to brace his legs as he got to his feet, he looked around the chamber.

 

 J.B. Dix, Ryan's oldest friend and a fellow traveler since their days with the Trader, was beginning to regain consciousness on the far side of the chamber. His beloved and battered fedora was pulled down over his eyes, and his right hand moved instinctively toward one of his capacious pockets to pull free his glasses. Ryan could see that his breathing was steady, and that he was recovering from the jump with his usual speed.

 

 The Armorer's other hand was held by Dr. Mildred Wyeth, a survivor of predark days who had been cryogenically preserved before the big blow of 2001, then thawed by Ryan in the postnuclear age of the Deathlands. The stocky black woman's hair hung in beaded plaits around her downturned head. She was beginning to stir, raising her head and opening her eyes. Her Czech-made ZKR 551 revolver lay in her lap, and before she was fully conscious her hand closed on it.

 

 Dean, Ryan's son, was still out. A thin trickle of blood ran from his nose to his top lip. He grunted as the effects of the jump began to wear off and the first nausea of consciousness returned.

 

 "Dark night, my head's thumping like mutie drums on a bad day."

 

 Ryan turned, dark spots still exploding in his vision at the speed of the movement. "Thought it was just me." Ryan winced at the pounding that was still making his empty eye socket throb.

 

 "Everybody." Jak followed the statement with a wretch of bile that splashed onto the floor of the gateway. The jumps usually made him vomit, and he spit out the remains of the bile before rising to his feet, pulling on the patched camou jacket that carried his hidden throwing knives and holstering his .357 Magnum Colt Python blaster with a fluid grace.

 

 "The bells, ah, the bells, Esmerelda. Ask not for whom they toll. The bells toll for thee, my Emily…my Esmerelda…"

 

 Doc's eyes were open and staring, but they shared the same faraway quality as his voice. The jumps always proved the hardest for Doc Tanner, whose white hair hung in soaked strands around his face, streaked with perspiration and the blood that flowed from his nose and trickled from the corner of his mouth. No one knew how old Doc really was. Trawled from the 1890s into the immediate years preceding skydark by the whitecoats of Operation Chronos, a part of the Totality Concept, which had also furnished the redoubts with the mat-trans units, Dr. Theophilus Tanner had proved to be a problem. Such a problem that the whitecoat scientists had decided to use him for a further experiment, shooting him forward in time—ironically only a short time before their own lives were ended by the madness of skydark—and landing him in the maelstrom that was the Deathlands.

 

 According to records the companions had come upon in the whitecoat hell of Crater Lake, Doc had been in his early thirties when snatched. The stresses of time trawling had made Doc physically resemble an old man, and his mind had a similar fragility that sometimes tipped him over into temporary madness.

 

 His speech was stopped by an urge to vomit, and he spewed the blood that had run down his throat.

 

 Mildred went over to him.

 

 "Crazy old fool. Sometimes I don't know how his mind ever snaps back from the strain of these jumps," she said as she ran a quick check on his vital signs.

 

 Doc smiled. "Perhaps it never does, and this scenario is nothing but the product of a disordered psyche."

 

 "Big words. Feel better," Jak commented shortly. "Right about bells."

 

 "Gaia, I've never heard a bell quite like that before," Krysty said as she moved toward Ryan. Now fully recovered from the jump, and with a resilience that was close to the one-eyed warrior's, she spoke in a low, urgent tone. "Sounds more like a siren. A warning of some kind, mebbe?"

 

 "New redoubt," J.B. commented, looking at the walls. "Could have an old alarm system. Mebbe working off the same power supply."

 

 "Never heard one before. Why now?"

 

 "Why not?" Dean asked. "Stupe comp systems get faults all the time."

 

 "Not that often, son," Ryan replied, his mind racing. "There's something else—"

 

 "The chamber," Krysty finished. "We've never seen one this spotlessly clean before. Almost like it's been swept out."

 

 "Which would mean someone lives here," Mildred added.

 

 Electrostatic air conditioning also kept the dust from the floors and walls of most redoubts—in theory. But in truth there had been occasions where time had led to at least one part of the system failing.

 

 "Your grasp of logic is most admirable," Doc said weakly. "Would it therefore be remiss of me to suggest even more than our usual caution?" He was still shaky on his feet, but had the heavy LeMat blaster ready, his lion's-head swordstick thrust into his belt.

 

 Ryan nodded grimly. "Last thing we need just after a jump. Going into a situation cold like this is the best way to get chilled."

 

 But already his fighter's brain was going into action. Whatever lay behind that door would expect them to come out blasting…if it was anything like other inhabitants of Deathlands. But what if it wasn't? What if it was like Alaska, where gatekeeper Quint had been using the redoubt as a refuge from the harshness of life outside?

 

 He dismissed the option. The only way to stay alive was to assume that everything was hostile until proved otherwise. And maybe even then you'd have to chill it.

 

 Ryan looked at J.B. and could see that the Armorer had been thinking the same way. He had the M-4000 in his hands and was checking the load.

 

 "Think what I'm thinking?" he asked laconically.

 

 "Guess so," Ryan replied. "Mebbe one or mebbe many. Either way, they'll expect us to come out blasting. It's our only chance. Bastard door is so narrow it doesn't give us a chance to spread quickly."

 

 "Can't stay like rats in trap," Jak said.

 

 In a trap or walking into a hail of blasterfire. Not much of a choice. The Trader used to say there was only one choice: choose to live or choose to die. Ryan knew that they couldn't stay in the chamber forever.

 

 "J.B., you lay down covering fire when the door opens. I'll head out and try to find cover. Mildred, Krysty, you follow. Jak, bring up the rear."

 

 "What about me, Dad?"

 

 Ryan turned to his son. "You and Doc take longest to recover from the jumps. Mebbe buy you a few seconds. You come out after J.B. blasts again. Door that narrow, it's difficult to come out with covering fire unless you want your head blasted."

 

 "Bad enough that some other bastard wants to chill you, without us chilling ourselves," Mildred commented with a dark humor.

 

 In just a few seconds, the group had loosened the chains of torpor and fatigue that the jumps usually left binding them, and were all running on adrenaline.

 

 Krysty's hair still clung protectively to her head.

 

 "I've got a bad feeling about this, lover."

 

 "So have the rest of us," Ryan replied.

 

 She shook her head. "No, not like that. I just get the feeling that this is going to be the easy part."

 

 "Fireblast! If this is the easy part, then I don't want to be around when the difficult part arrives."

 

 He turned to the Armorer. "Ready?"

 

 J.B. nodded.

 

 "Backs to the wall, people. This is it."

 

 With caution Ryan tried the wheel lock that opened the chamber door. They hadn't seen a chamber door like this since the old military installation in Dulce, New Mexico. Was this going to be a regular redoubt, or something different? The door was unusual but the rest of the chamber was the same as most—armaglass, not concrete like Dulce. The wheel gave easily under his grip, far easier than he expected. Yet more evidence that this redoubt was in regular use.

 

 Did this mean someone else knew the secret of the gateways?

 

 The wheel spun, and the door opened smoothly.

 

 Only a fraction. Ryan stopped it and braced himself for any immediate attack. J.B. was at his side, the scattergun up and ready.

 

 Nothing.

 

 "So far, so good."

 

 "Doesn't mean much," the Armorer added. "They're not stupe enough to rush us. Could make them more dangerous."

 

 Ryan nodded. They would proceed as planned.

 

 As they flattened themselves to the green-and-cobalt walls on the left side of the chamber door, Ryan reached out a hand and steadied himself to fling it open. J.B. stood slightly away from the wall, to one side of his friend, ready to step out and fire a covering blast as the one-eyed man flung himself through the door.

 

 Many years of traversing the Deathlands and encountering death, staring it in the face before blasting it away, gave the two friends an almost telepathic bond. Ryan gave only the slightest of nods before flexing his wrist and flicking the door.

 

 As he had expected from the ease with which the wheel lock had worked, the door opened freely, as though smoothly oiled and with no friction to impede the motion.

 

 J.B. stepped in front of the door at an oblique angle, aided by the hexagonal shape of the chamber, his finger closing on the Smith & Wesson's trigger and squeezing until the cartridge exploded with an almost deafening impact in the enclosed space. The flechettes of barbed steel were driven from the barrel in an ever-widening arc. Anyone standing in the room beyond wouldn't be standing for long.

 

 Ryan sprang through the doorway, rolling across the floor, trying to get a fix on any possible cover. He moved so quickly on the back of J.B.'s shot that the hot air from the blaster seemed to brush his cheek as he passed.

 

 His eye took in the surroundings at a glance as he rolled. The throbbing pulse of the siren still pounded in his head, but otherwise conditions seemed normal. The usual anteroom was missing, but the control room was fairly standard. There were the usual free-standing comp terminals, as well as desks, chairs and terminals that blinked on and off in the controlled atmosphere. The harsh fluorescent lighting cast no shadow on the room, leaving no place for anyone to hide.

 

 Ryan came out of the roll into a crouch behind one of the desks, which he pushed on its side to provide cover. It would be no good against heavy blasters, but the steel would act as a shield against small-caliber handblasters, as well as providing a visual blind.

 

 It was only when the clatter of the uprighted desk and comp terminal died away that he realized the alarm had stopped.

 

 Krysty, Mildred and Jak sprinted from the doorway to cover, risking their speed in the enclosed space against the reactions of anyone training a blaster on them.

 

 There were no blasters; there was nothing.

 

 Behind a desk on the far side of the room, Jak picked up a framed photograph that had been knocked onto the floor. The glass had cracked, throwing a web of lines across the smiling face of a young woman long since dead. There had been similar personal mementos on desks in some of the other redoubts they had seen.

 

 They meant nothing to Jak, but it didn't escape his notice that there was no dust on the frame. It had been regularly cleaned.

 

 Without pause he threw the frame high in the air, over the top of the desk and out into the unknown territory that was the rest of the room.

 

 There was no response. No blasterfire.

 

 Following through in one motion and using the momentary distraction of the airborne object, Jak aimed the Python over the top of the desk; bobbing up briefly to locate any enemies.

 

 The room was empty. Seemingly.

 

 Mildred had taken advantage of the diversion to scan the room.

 

 "Damn place is empty, Ryan," she called.

 

 "Mebbe. Mebbe only seems." Jak smiled across at her. "Mebbe not stupes."

 

 The last thing any of them expected was the voice that came from the corridor beyond the door at the end of the room.

 

 "Right so far, Sarj. Let's see if they're officer material."

 

 WALLACE WAS WATCHING the outsiders on a vid monitor positioned in the corridor. He could see two men and two women strung out in a line behind their temporary cover. The camera was behind them, positioned on the wall above and to the right of the mat-trans chamber door, on the angle of the hexagon.

 

 He now knew that there were at least four of them. They were sharp and showed intelligence. Were there any others still in the mat-trans chamber? The armaglass was too opaque to be sure.

 

 Murphy stood behind the big man, watching over his shoulder. He was irritated that Wallace had taken over management of this operation. As head of sec corps, it was Murphy's job to handle attacks of any kind.

 

 Even if they came from within.

 

 "Temporary stalemate, Sarj. We go in, they blast. They get blasted back. Need them alive, but we got more men. Numbers, Sarj, that's the key. That's why the mechanism is so important."

 

 Murphy didn't respond. The problem with the mechanism was bothering Wallace more than he wanted to let on. Why else mention it?

 

 This could be the break that Murphy had been waiting for. The circumstances when the regs could be broken. But that was for another time. Right now there were more pressing problems.

 

 Like how many were left in the chamber.

 

 RYAN SCANNED the empty room.

 

 "How many people beyond the door?" Mildred asked.

 

 "One is one too many," Krysty replied. "I feel like a complete stupe behind this." She tapped the edge of the desk with the barrel of her Smith & Wesson .38.

 

 "Any cover is better than no cover. And if we don't know how many of them, they sure as hell don't know how many of us." Ryan kept his attention fixed on the doorway at the far end of the room, watching for the slightest movement.

 

 Jak took the opportunity to recce the area to the rear, knowing that Ryan had the front covered.

 

 "Not sure. Vid behind. Mebbe watching us."

 

 Mildred looked around and saw the camera above Ryan's head.

 

 "Smile, you're on TV."

 

 One round from her ZKR 551 took out the camera through the lens in a shower of sparks. They rained over Ryan, but the one-eyed man ignored them, keeping his attention fixed on the redoubt doorway.

 

 "Just as well I held the second shot," J.B. said quietly from inside the chamber. He kept his voice as low as possible in the eerie quiet mat had succeeded the siren. "If they know about you, then there's three of us they don't know about."

 

 "So what do we do? We can't stay here forever, just like we couldn't stay in there," Mildred said grimly, gesturing to the mat-trans chamber.

 

 "One trap for another." Jak had his back to the table, checking his blaster. He looked over at Ryan, smoothing the milk-white hair away from his scarred albino skin. His red eyes were piercing.

 

 Ryan smiled tightly. "Read something once about what they used to call a Mexican standoff. Bastard stupe name, but I guess this is what they meant."

 

 WALLACE CURSED as the monitor went dead.

 

 "Sir, what do you want me to do, sir?" Murphy said in a flat monotone, trying to keep the amusement out of his voice.

 

 "I want them alive. No casualties. I want to know how they used the mat-trans."

 

 "It might be that they don't see it that way, sir."

 

 Wallace turned toward Murphy. The sec man shivered as he looked into the heart of his superior and saw a glimmer of insanity too close to the surface. He knew that the Gen would be a hard man to usurp, and hoped that Wallace couldn't in some way know his plans. The Gen was a true believer, fired by the regs. He had the fire of generations burning in his veins.

 

 "They will, Sarj. You make them."

 

 The fat man turned on his heel with an astonishing precision for someone his size, and waddled off down the corridor.

 

 Murphy looked after him, then turned to the five sec corps personnel he had with him. They were all trained by him personally, and were the cream of his corps. Their uniforms were crisp and well laundered, although still carrying some stains from the chilling they had accomplished on the raids to the outside. They were well drilled from the manual, and also had a few tricks Murphy had picked up along the way.

 

 They were the elite he would use when the time came.

 

 But how was he going to break this stalemate?

 

  

 

 Chapter Two

 

  

 

 Inside the chamber both Doc and Dean had taken advantage of the time bought by Ryan's actions to recover fully from the effects of the jump. They stood, blasters ready for action, to one side of the Armorer.

 

 "John Barrymore," Doc whispered, "if I may hazard a suggestion. We three are something of a Trojan horse, and could perhaps be of some use in that manner."

 

 "No sense there, Doc. Tell me a little more."

 

 "When the Trojans were at war with—"

 

 "Not the history, Doc. Not now. Just what you mean for us," the Armorer interrupted. Like Ryan he was easily irritated when Doc's lectures appeared at the worst moments. Like now.

 

 "My apologies," Doc said with a short bow. "I shall endeavor to explain in simple terms, in order to save precious moments. If we are in here, and our opponents have no idea about us, then our companions can act as a decoy by appearing to surrender—"

 

 "That's a stupe idea," Dean said angrily. "Sure way to get everyone chilled. Why don't we just jump again?"

 

 J.B. shook his head. "Came across a chamber like this before. The door isn't the trigger…maybe an earlier mat-trans, I don't know. This'll need triggering from out there." He gestured to the outside with the M-4000.

 

 Dean was unconvinced. "I still say Doc's idea is double stupe."

 

 "Mebbe not. Not if we're all quick enough," the Armorer replied. Raising his voice slightly, he continued, "Ryan, you hear that?"

 

 "We all heard," the one-eyed warrior replied. "A slim chance is better than no chance, and I'll go bastard crazy unless we break this deadlock." He turned to the others. "It's the only way to draw them—whoever the hell they are—into the room. But we need to be triple alert here. Scatter as soon as the others appear."

 

 He was greeted with three nods of assent.

 

 Ryan called out. "Hey, you out there. How are we going to end this?"

 

 "Only one way," came the voice from the corridor. "You outsiders throw down your blasters and we come and get you. No way you can get out, and there's more of us than you. Besides, we're under orders to keep you alive."

 

 Ryan looked across at Krysty, whose hair was still protectively clinging to her.

 

 "Sounds like shit to me," he whispered.

 

 "Amen to that," Mildred added.

 

 Krysty shook her head. "No, I think he's telling the truth. It's what comes after that worries me." She shook her head as she noted Ryan's puzzled expression. "I can't explain it, lover. It's just not clear enough."

 

 "Move or sit?" Jak asked. The inactivity was making him restless. A born hunter and predator, Jak had the ability to stay still and patient for hours when tracking and hunting. Patience wasn't the problem. A decision had been made, and now he was itching to spring to action.

 

 "Let's do it." Ryan threw the Steyr over the top of the upturned desk. He kept the SIG-Sauer, holstering the blaster, and checked automatically for the panga, secured in a sheath against his leg. Beside him Krysty threw her blaster out into the middle of the room. Mildred threw hers with reluctance.

 

 The last to throw out his weapon was Jak, the heavy Python thudding loudly on the floor. Like Ryan, he chose to keep something close to hand—the leaf-bladed throwing knives stayed secreted on him, hidden in the folds and patches of his jacket.

 

 "Okay—sounds good to me," Murphy said from beyond the door. "Now come forward slowly."

 

 Almost as one, the companions stepped around the flimsy barriers of the overturned desks, Ryan fractionally ahead of the others. All kept their muscles as tight as whipcord, nerve ends jangling for the slightest sign of movement. It was a fairly large room, looking identical to the ones in all the redoubts they had come across. It was cleaner, and had less of an empty, desolate feel than the others. For all that, it was just a standard control room.

 

 So there was that advantage. They knew the territory. Whoever they were facing wouldn't expect that.

 

 It wasn't much of an advantage, but it might be all they needed. Behind them, in the chamber, J.B. clamped his fedora on his head and adjusted the wire rims of his glasses. He could feel, rather than see, Dean tense up for action with the same granite stance as his father. Doc raised the LeMat, tension transforming him from a seemingly mad old man into a taut killing machine.

 

 They were ready.

 

 MURPHY HEARD THE MOVEMENTS around the blind corner. He had sharp ears, honed by a lifetime of avoiding stickies and the ambushing gangs of outsiders he encountered every time he led a party from the redoubt. It was part of the hereditary chain that he had been trained for this since birth.

 

 When he knew they were in the center of the room, he nodded to one of his sec corps.

 

 "Okay, Panner. Now."

 

 Pri Firclas Panner was a short woman with hooded eyes and a heavy body build. In spite of the extra weight, her uniform was too large for her. It showed the marks of being altered and gave her a deceptively unbalanced and clumsy look. In fact her father had been a born killer, and her mother an outsider who had slit her throat after her daughter had been born, as though knowing the psychotic offspring she had produced. Panner liked her work. Too keenly. Panner was Murphy's most trusted ally, and it was only gene-pool regs that stopped him joining with her.

 

 A flicker of a sadistic smile crossed Panner's face.

 

 "Those fuckers'll wish they'd never tried to invade, Sarj," she said in a lusty, throaty voice. The thought of what they were about to suffer excited her. She'd seen these grens at work before. They didn't kill, but were far more subtle in their pain. It lasted longer and left the sufferer alive for other tortures.

 

 Before Murphy had time to take in Panner's arousal, the stocky sec woman soldier swung her body in front of the doorway with a rebel yell that had been passed down her line since the days of skydark.

 

 As she yelled, she adopted a classic firing stance, bracing her legs apart. The gren launcher in her hands was of an experimental type rarely seen in the Deathlands, and was one of only two that were left on the redoubt.

 

 AT THE SOUND of Panner's voice, the friends scattered across the room, diving for whatever scant cover they could find. Jak flipped over and landed on his feet behind a desk, one of the leaf-bladed knives balanced in the palm of his hand, perfectly weighted for throwing. Ryan also sought cover, rolling and coming to a halt with the SIG-Sauer in hand, his eye trying to sight the woman in the doorway.

 

 But she was already gone.

 

 The yell had covered a loud popping sound as the gren had launched. It hit the wall above the chamber door and bounced in front of Krysty.

 

 "Shit…" She threw herself away from the strangely shaped gren, which was oblong with a squared end and unlike anything she'd ever seen before. Not that it mattered—a gren was a gren. It didn't have to be just one shape to be able to chill you.

 

 J.B. appeared in the chamber doorway, holding his Uzi, preferring its accuracy to the less controlled M-4000, which could hit the rest of his party as easily as any enemy sec men.

 

 "Gas gren of some kind. Try to cover your mouths, breathe as shallow as possible," he yelled, pulling a kerchief from one of his pockets and thrusting it over his nose and mouth.

 

 A pale white mist, similar to that preceding a jump, started to infuse the room. It had no smell, but an immediate effect. Ryan felt his eye mist with tears as the gas pricked at it.

 

 "Fireblast! Need to get the hell out of here." His words came slowly. It seemed as though his brain were cut off from his body, the thoughts traveling miles to reach limbs that felt heavy and leaden. The SIG seemed to weigh more than usual, the weight dragging his arm down.

 

 The others were now out in the room, and they seemed to be moving in slow motion.

 

 "Nerve gas. They must be able to seal the room— otherwise the air-conditioning system would spread it through the whole place." Mildred gasped out the words, trying hard to breathe shallow as she sunk to her hands and knees. "John, they must want us alive. Why?" She collapsed unconscious as she forced out the question, trying to look around for the Armorer.

 

 J.B. was close to the floor, figuring that the gas would rise, being lighter than air, and that the air nearer the ground would be clearer, at least giving him a chance of staying conscious long enough to see what their captors looked like.

 

 Ryan was on the floor beside him. Both men were struggling to stay conscious. J.B. swum in and out of focus in Ryan's good eye.

 

 "Well organized. Not crazy muties for sure. Precise, like well-drilled sec men," the Armorer forced out.

 

 It sounded to Ryan as if J.B. were talking in slow motion, the words drawn out and distorted. Blackness closed in at the edge of his vision, as if he were entering a long, dark tunnel.

 

 The Armorer was the last one to pass out. He didn't last long enough to see the door open.

 

 WHEN J.B. OPENED his eyes again, he found that he was staring at the ceiling of a dorm. Hauling himself onto the edge of the bed, he could see that all six of his companions were laid out on the beds, as well. It was one of the smaller sleepers in a redoubt, usually accommodating only four beds. But even with the extra three beds, there was still room to move around and stretch aching muscles. Outside the closed door, he could hear distant activity. From the sound of it, a large number of people inhabited the redoubt.

 

 Figuring it a certainty that they were heavily guarded on the outside, he looked around for a sec camera like the one Jak had spotted above the chamber door. The dorms didn't usually have them, but then this was obviously no ordinary redoubt.

 

 The sec camera was above the door, pivoting on a bracket and covering the entire room in a sweep. The only blind spot would be right up against the door, which was next to useless. Its steadily flashing red light showed that somebody was watching them.

 

 A quick search of his pockets while he gained his equilibrium on the edge of the bed showed the Armorer that his pockets had been stripped of all ammunition, and that his knife had also been taken. That his blasters would have been taken from him he had assumed as a matter of course.

 

 He stood and found that his muscles were sluggish, and that his arms and legs felt as though all the tendons had been sliced through. Pain lanced through them, and they failed to respond immediately.

 

 His first, tentative steps were toward Mildred. She was still out cold, as he could see when he thumbed back her eyelid to reveal the eyeball rolled up in the socket. At his touch she moaned slightly and shifted in her deep sleep.

 

 Moving with increasing ease and speed among the rest of the party, J.B. was able to determine that all of them were still unconscious. Jak's coat and knives had been taken from him, as had Ryan's SIG-Sauer and panga. Both Dean and Doc had also lost their blasters.

 

 But surprisingly they had neglected to take Doc's swordstick from him. The dark ebony cane with the silver lion's head looked like a walking stick from pre-dark days, and perhaps their captors had assumed it was an aid to the old man. He had already seen that Ryan still had his scarf wound around his neck. It was heavily weighted at the ends, and was a deceptively useful stealth weapon. It, too, also had the advantage of seeming to be innocuous.

 

 Two weapons left, then. Their first mistake. That was encouraging. If there was one error, then there would be the opportunity for others.

 

 Suddenly feeling overcome with a wave of exhaustion, J.B. made his way back to his own bed, trying not to show surprise at the discovery of Doc's swordstick.

 

 He sat on the edge of the bed and took a deep breath, which sawed his lungs.

 

 "Dark night," he croaked through dry lips, "what was in that gren?"

 

 He figured that he had awakened first because he had managed to avoid gulping as much of the gas as the others. And yet it had still had this effect on him…how would the others feel when they began to come around?

 

 He took off his wire-rimmed spectacles and polished them with his kerchief. Their captors knew he was awake. They'd figure the others wouldn't be far behind. And they'd know that they wouldn't be in any condition for a fight.

 

 The only thing to do right now was sit it out.

 

 BY THE ARMORER'S wrist chron, it was just over fifteen minutes before Ryan stirred.

 

 "Feel like a nuke shit in a pox-riddled gaudy house," he muttered in a low, quiet voice, forcing his eye open.

 

 He still felt as if he were separated from his body. His eye focused on J.B., sitting on the edge of his bed.

 

 "Effects take a little while to wear off. Feels like you've had every tendon in your body severed and then soldered back together. Otherwise it's not too bad."

 

 Ryan forced a smile. A joke from J.B. was a rare thing, and could only mean that his old friend had the situation as assessed and secured as was humanly possible. Ryan's hand instinctively slipped down to his waist and leg, feeling for the panga, touching only the empty sheath.

 

 "They took everything. Only left Doc his walking stick." J.B. spoke carefully, indicating with a slight tilt of his fedora the sec camera behind him.

 

 Ryan took it in at a glance. He didn't know whether they could be heard, as well as seen, but he wasn't taking any chances with predark technology that was in the hands of people who obviously knew how to use it.

 

 Krysty moaned as she raised her head behind them. J.B. repeated his warning about the aftereffects of the gas gren.

 

 "Gaia! This and a jump in the same day… It's no wonder I feel like a herd of mutie pigs has trampled over every bone in my body."

 

 "Tell me about it, girl," Mildred murmured as she began to tentatively move her own limbs.

 

 Jak had obviously taken in more of the gas, as it was some time before he recovered consciousness, during which time Dean had opened his eyes.

 

 "Anyone know who did this?" Jak asked finally, shaking his head to clear his vision. "Tell me and I chill with pleasure."

 

 Only Doc remained unconscious. Mildred grabbed her backpack and went over to him. In addition to bits of cloth used as bandages, it usually contained medical supplies traded at villes or plundered from redoubts and ruined sites across Deathlands. The bag now revealed itself to be empty.

 

 "Shit. Whoever they are, they've taken everything."

 

 "Figured they would. The bastards are thorough." J.B. pushed his fedora back on his head. "Mostly," he added.

 

 Mildred felt Doc's pulse, which raced out of control. The old man was sweating and moaning, his REM making his eyelids twitch uncontrollably. The physician cursed the people who held them, and cursed the Deathlands. Why had they taken the few medical supplies she had?

 

 "Is he going to be okay?" Dean asked. "He doesn't look too good."

 

 "I wonder how much more he can take," Krysty added.

 

 "So do I. It's hard enough to figure out what's happened to his metabolism anyway, without the stresses of a mat-trans jump and a nerve-gas gren adding to it in such quick succession."

 

 She was still holding Doc's wrist when his slack hand suddenly made a grab for her arm, holding it tightly with a strength belied by his skinny frame. His eyes opened wide, staring glassily into the light above her.

 

 "Ah, Emily, my dear. Is it teatime already? I fear I am studying too hard, as I seem to fall into the arms of Morpheus far too quickly. So tired… Tell me, did you toast me a muffin, and is there honey for tea? I promise that I will take you and the children for a picnic when the weather improves enough."

 

 Doc's rambling didn't disguise the click of the door as it opened behind them.

 

 Ryan turned slowly. No need to turn quickly and make jumpy trigger fingers itch on their blasters.

 

 A man and a woman stood just inside the room. Both sec guards held 9 mm Heckler & Koch MP-5 K blasters, with the casual air of the regular user who was used to little opposition. Light grip, ready to brace and tighten on the trigger in an instant. They felt they didn't have to keep on the alert, as the blasters would take out the closely gathered group in front of them with ease.

 

 In Deathlands you always kept on the alert or got chilled.

 

 Ryan noted it as mistake number two.

 

  

 

 Chapter Three

 

  

 

 "Is there any point in asking where you're taking us?" Ryan asked as they exited the room.

 

 "Shut up and walk," Murphy replied, a smile playing across his face.

 

 His captain reveled in having the upper hand. Ryan could see that it made him sloppy. The Heckler & Koch was pointing downward at an angle of about sixty degrees. It would take him precious fractions of a second to level it.

 

 The corridor was a typical redoubt corridor. Long, with a dull floor and walls broken only by the installation of vanadium-steel sec doors.

 

 It was bizarre to see shuffling figures attending to maintenance tasks. One man was mopping the floor; another had the control panel off a sec door and was staring blankly at the wires, as though trying to remember why he had taken it off in the first place.

 

 "John, is it me or is this ridiculous?" Mildred whispered from the side of her mouth to the Armorer, who was walking slowly beside her. "They call this an armed guard?"

 

 "They're either triple stupe or it's a trap of some kind," J.B. replied. "Problem is, I can't figure out what kind of trap."

 

 "Or why… I'll go for the stupe option. Maybe they just need to get out more."

 

 Panner heard the whispered conversation and yelled, "Hey, shut the fuck up, you black bitch. And you, four-eyes."

 

 Mildred's lips tightened, and J.B. could feel her body tense beside him. Not that he was exactly pleased at being insulted by someone who was made brave by a blaster.

 

 "Oh-oh," Dean murmured to himself, exchanging a shifting glance with Jak. Both were aware of Mildred's intense hatred of stupes who picked on her color. Both knew it would be stored up for a future occasion.

 

 Which came sooner than they expected.

 

 Doc had been lagging behind. He walked slower than the rest of the party, and Panner had gleefully jabbed him in the ribs with the barrel of her weapon, spurring him on. Looking over his shoulder, Ryan wasn't sure if the old man was planning something or if the effects of the jump and the nerve-gas gren still debilitated him. He tried to look at Krysty, to see if she could give him some indication. To see if she could sense something.

 

 There wasn't time.

 

 Doc was still shuffling, and Panner shoved him again. Harder, this time. Hearing her braying laugh, J.B. looked around at the same time as Ryan.

 

 Both men knew instinctively that Doc was giving them an opportunity to move. He had timed his last shuffle until they passed the point where one of the maintenance men was washing the floor with an old, almost bald mop. Suds and water were gathered to one side of the corridor, and Doc contrived to stumble away from Panner and slip on the soapy water.

 

 He fell in a manner that appeared to Murphy and Panner to be clumsy, but was in fact a perfect pratfall. Spinning on his heel so that he reversed position and faced the two sec personnel, Doc fell backward. Although it would seem that he was out of control, both J.B. and Ryan noted that the old man relaxed his muscles, spiraling to the concrete floor with a floppiness that protected him from breaking bones.

 

 He also knew exactly the way in which he would land. He contrived to get the lion's-head walking stick on one side of his body, shielding it from the view of the sec corps.

 

 Panner was laughing so hard that her flabby jowls wobbled, and her eyes ran with tears.

 

 "What are we worried about, Sarj? These outsider scum are no danger. This old fucker can't even stay on his feet!"

 

 Even the otherwise taciturn Murphy stopped scowling long enough to crack a grin. Panner stepped forward, her Heckler & Koch blaster now lowered to the concrete floor, and idly prodded the prone Doc with her combat boot.

 

 "C'mon, get up before I chill you and mess the floor, you old fart."

 

 With a speed that would seem surprising for his age, Doc flicked his right arm from the position over his body where he had been grasping the hilt of his stick. Instead of ebony, a rapier-thin double-edged blade of the finest Toledo steel whistled through the air, catching the light from overhead.

 

 It would have mesmerized Panner if she'd had the chance to see the light reflected. However, by the time this happened, she had already dropped her blaster and was clutching at the blood pumping from her torn throat. With the most delicate twist of his wrist, Doc had stroked back and forth, the blade ripping at the exposed area of flesh between Panner's chin and the beginning of her combat armored vest.

 

 " 'Manners maketh the man.' I would venture to suggest that bad manners can be an undoing," Doc murmured.

 

 The blade had cut through her carotid artery, ripped tendon, fat and muscle and severed her jugular. It was a perfectly judged stroke, avoiding jarring the blade on bone and throwing the timing of the attack. Blood spilled from her mouth, open in an "O" of surprise. It pumped over and between her fingers, spilling down her combat vest and covering the newly washed floor. It also splashed onto Doc, already climbing to his feet with a limber spring that was spurred on by an adrenaline rush.

 

 Murphy dropped his own blaster, barrel to the floor, unable to believe his own eyes. Panner was his second-in-command, his loyal lieutenant. She had the instincts of a killer, and yet an old man had chilled her in front of his eyes. Furthermore he couldn't work out where the blade had come from.

 

 In slow motion he watched her blaster fall toward the floor.

 

 Before it had a chance to touch the concrete, J.B. sprang toward it and caught it, his forward momentum carrying him into a roll, which pulled up painfully short against the wall of the corridor. The Armorer grunted as the blow knocked the air from his lungs, but regardless he pulled himself into a sitting position. The Heckler & Koch was positioned in his hands, finger taut on the trigger, directed at Murphy's head. The Armorer would have preferred a body shot, but knew it would be useless with the combat vest. At this range it wouldn't stop a burst of fire fatally injuring the sec man, but it could slow his death enough for him to chill his opponent.

 

 J.B.'s snap aim wasn't to be tested. Murphy had allowed his full attention to be directed toward the Armorer, and hadn't noticed Ryan step forward just two paces.

 

 That was all it needed. The one-eyed man unfurled the scarf from around his neck, wrapping one end around his right hand. The weighted end swung down loosely, and with a snap of his wrist he jerked the scarf so that the metal weights were propelled like a slingshot, catching Murphy on his right temple.

 

 The sec man grunted and collapsed in a heap on the floor, his blaster falling from his grip and clattering to the concrete. Ryan retrieved it, checked it and had it in hand ready for use in one fluid motion. Without a closer check, Ryan couldn't tell if Murphy was still breathing. Certainly he was out cold, and for some time. There was an indent in the side of his skull, a depression that was already turning blue and weeping blood slowly.

 

 That only left any possible danger from the two maintenance men. Jak took the one nearer Doc, the one who had been cleaning the floor. The man had been looking blankly at the action unfolding in front of him, and didn't even notice Jak until the wiry albino had his hands around the man's throat. Then he slackly turned his head, his dull eyes staring into the youth's glowing red orbs with an incomprehension of what was happening to him.

 

 Jak twisted, snapping the man's neck and watching the light in his eyes slowly fade and extinguish. There was little change in his expression, as though he hadn't even taken in his own chilling.

 

 The maintenance man who had been working on the sec-door control panel was more of a problem. But not much. Just that bit detached from the action, being ten feet in front of Mildred and J.B., he watched with an uncomprehending horror at what was occurring.

 

 Like the comp tech Murphy had tried to talk to earlier in the day, the maintenance man was from a lower level in the colony, a level where mutie blood and inbreeding had been more rife. Somewhere along the line, a stickie had entered his family tree, as evinced by the suckered pads that spread out where he should have had fingertips. It gave him a strong grip on the needle-thin screwdriver he was holding, a piece of sharp, strong metal that would have no problem penetrating bone, as well as flesh.

 

 There was little intelligence in his brain, but a strong loyalty to the colony that had been passed down since the earliest days of skydark. He was aware of Murphy's and Panner's positions in the colony, and that he had to try to help them.

 

 With a wild yell he charged toward the group.

 

 Mildred, like the others, had her attention focused on Murphy and Panner, aware of the immediate danger from their blasters. She whirled, catching sight of the maintenance man out of the corner of her eye as she began to turn. She threw her balance back on one heel, and his wild, running thrust went past her.

 

 Completely off balance, the maintenance man flailed wildly toward Dean, who muttered an oath Krysty would have scolded him for using as he adopted a combat stance.

 

 He was ready for the man when he arrived. Moving under the tall mutie's body, which was bent forward at the waist by his momentum, Dean held his hand rigid and drove his fingers into the man's Adam's apple.

 

 A look of pain and shock crossed the mutie maintenance man's face before his mouth dribbled a pale pink mixture of blood and spittle over sharp teeth that emphasized the stickie genes in him. It was followed a second later by a ribbon of bright blood.

 

 The suffocating man's momentum pulled Dean down to the floor with him. The boy cursed as he tried to get away from the flailing, gagging man.

 

 "Come on, son," Ryan said, pulling the man back by his hair so that Dean could free himself.

 

 "Go now, yes?" Jak asked.

 

 "We should," J.B. agreed, gesturing to a winking sec camera with his newly acquired blaster. "They'll be onto us soon enough. And they'll be able to follow."

 

 "Then shoot out sec cameras."

 

 Doc was on his feet, trying to brush himself off and avoid smearing Panner's blood on his clothes. He looked weary, as though the burst of activity had drained him of energy. "Then, if I may make a suggestion of some use, it would perhaps be best if we were to be moving on. Time to get those, ah, big wheels rolling."

 

 "Doc, you speak some godawful claptrap sometimes, but just occasionally you come out with a gem of truth." Mildred sighed.

 

 "The armory first, then," Ryan said. "We need to get some more weapons and our own damn blasters back. They outstrip us in terms of manpower and blasters."

 

 "But we've got one advantage," Dean said with a wry smile.

 

 "Yeah?"

 

 "Yeah—they're definitely stupe bastards."

 

 Ryan allowed himself a grin. "Yeah, mebbe."

 

 He switched his attention to the corridor. "Okay. I'll take point. Usual formation, people. J.B., cover the back."

 

 The Armorer nodded. "Any other weapons on those coldhearts?" He indicated Murphy and Panner.

 

 Ryan frowned. "None. That's even weirder. It's as if they don't expect trouble, even though they're sec."

 

 They started to move off along the corridor, back in the direction they had come. Jak had taken the needle-thin screwdriver from the dead hand of the maintenance man. It would be a useful weapon in hand-to-hand combat if little else.

 

 In nearly all the redoubts they had landed in, the armory had been located in the same place. There was no reason to assume otherwise here. The long corridors offered little cover for the companions, but equally little cover for any sec men who might try to attack. Ryan figured that they had the advantage in that the redoubt dwellers wouldn't expect them to know the layout.

 

 It was pretty obvious to all of them that the sec men were trained and had the weaponry to do serious damage, but didn't have the combat skills or wit that the friends had acquired during their journeys across the Deathlands. Stealth wasn't something these sec men were familiar with.

 

 "I just don't get it," Dean said as they proceeded with extreme caution. "How come they live here, got all this equipment and they can't fight? And how come they haven't used the mat-trans?"

 

 Doc smiled, tapping the ferrule of his swordstick against his thigh and showing his set of perfect white teeth.

 

 "Ah, young Dean, if only you had finished your schooling with the good Mr. Brody. Your grasp of logic is incomplete. What proof have we that they do not use the mat-trans?" He waited for Dean to answer, and when the youth didn't, he continued, "Furthermore did you learn nothing from your biology classes? I suspect that if these are survivors from a predark community, as seems likely by their mode of dress and some of their speech, then the likelihood is that an astonishing degree of inbreeding has taken place. And there is nothing like that for dulling the wits. Would you agree, my dear Dr. Wyeth?"

 

 Mildred allowed herself a small smile. She remembered the freezies she and Ryan had encountered in the Anthill, hidden beneath the remains of Mount Rushmore. There was no inbreeding involved there, as the survivors of predark times had lengthened their lives with biomechanical body parts and low temperatures. They had mat-trans units, as well as a map of every redoubt across the old U.S.A., but they hadn't used them as far as she knew. This was too long a story to go into. Instead she said, "Your timing for a discussion on genetics is bad, but I guess you've just about summed it up. By the look of it, I'd say these people definitely don't get out enough."

 

 "What about stickie?" Jak asked, his eyes still flickering as he scanned the corridor, screwdriver poised and balanced in his palm.

 

 "Ah, there you have me." Doc shrugged. "Although it isn't beyond the bounds of possibility that some outside blood, particularly of a mutated variety, could have—"

 

 "Doc," Ryan said softly.

 

 "Yes, my dear Ryan?"

 

 "Shut up. Save the school lesson for when we're out of here."

 

 Doc deferred with a bow of the head, realizing that Ryan's words were prompted by their arrival at a junction in the corridors.

 

 It hadn't escaped Ryan's notice that Krysty had been quiet. Too quiet, almost as if something was distracting her.

 

 As the group halted some ten feet from the junction, Ryan whispered, "Something's very wrong with all this. Too easy. They can't be that stupe, can they?"

 

 "I don't know, lover," Krysty replied, resting her hand on his arm. He could almost feel the tension in her fingertips. "Back, there I didn't feel like it was a setup. But here it's different. Now that we've got the run of the place, I don't feel danger like they're going to chill us…something different. More devious. Uncle Tyas McCann used to warn us of trying to interpret people who had a different way of looking at things. You always have to be on your guard, as they think in a different way. Makes them more difficult to second-guess."

 

 "And that's what's happening here." It was more of a statement than a question. From the moment they arrived, they had been on the defensive, unable to go on the offensive and gain freedom. Whoever was the baron or leader in this redoubt had a mind that worked on different lines from any Ryan could remember encountering. Until he could work out what this leader wanted, they would be at a disadvantage.

 

 He scanned the area in front of him, straining his ears until he could almost hear his own circulation pumping around his body.

 

 It was deathly silent. The background babble of activity that had accompanied their escorted walk from the dorm and down the first corridor had ceased. Now there was nothing.

 

 "J.B.?"

 

 "I'm with you," the Armorer replied. "Withdrawn all sec men. Every damn man, by the sound."

 

 "Could be trap at armory," Jak stated.

 

 "Only one way to find out," Ryan said. He lifted the Heckler & Koch until its length was parallel to his good eye. He felt the unfamiliar weight of the blaster, adjusting his balance for what was to come. "Dead end ahead. Two blind corners each way. Shitty odds, but all we've got. J.B., keep our asses covered."

 

 "You bet."

 

 "Careful, lover," Krysty whispered. "Even more than usual. This is more than just that…"

 

 Without answering, the one-eyed man steeled himself and launched into the corridor. He hunched into himself to make a smaller target and threw himself across the breadth of the corridor, spraying covering fire first one way and then the other, twisting with a suppleness born of many close-combat situations. He was relying on the fact that any sec men gathered on either side of the junction would not want to fire at random for fear of hitting their compatriots facing them. They would want to aim carefully, and his covering fire should cause just enough confusion to prevent that. And maybe take out a few of them at the same time.

 

 Ryan came to rest against the wall of the corridor, the repeated blasts of the Heckler & Koch still reverberating in his ears, ringing through the empty corridor.

 

 "Fireblast!" he exclaimed under his breath. The corridor was empty on either side for as far as he could see.

 

 He looked across at his companions. They were staring at him with as much bewilderment as he felt.

 

 Ryan shrugged. "Empty. The whole redoubt seems bastard empty. What's going on?"

 

 "Like fighting ghosts," Jak said, stepping into the corridor.

 

 "Mebbe that's the idea," the Armorer said, bringing up the rear of the party and not allowing his watchfulness to slacken.

 

 "That would make sense with what I can feel." Krysty rubbed her brow, sweeping back the flaming hair that clung tightly to her. "They're hanging back on purpose, just waiting for us."

 

 "Why don't they just come out with it and try to chill us?" Ryan cursed. It occurred to him that Krysty had been right when she said that they should beware of people who didn't think the same way. Just what were the tactics at work here?

 

 Doc resheathed his sword and leaned on the stick.

 

 "I have a supposition. It may be the ravings of a fool, but I truly believe that they wish to keep us alive."

 

 "When we've chilled three, mebbe four of their people? Doesn't make sense." J.B. shook his head.

 

 "To us, perhaps not," Doc said. "However, we are not cognizant of whatever reason they may have for keeping us alive."

 

 Remembering the perverse habits of some of the barons they had come across, and the trade in body parts that had centered around old military installations, it was not a thought on which to dwell.

 

 "Stupes may not be so stupe after all," Ryan murmured. "The only thing we can do is keep moving to the armory, then be on triple red for an ambush. Seems to be the only place it can happen."

 

 They advanced in line, still keeping alert. In all their travels they had yet to come across a redoubt where the vanadium-steel sec doors could be closed in any other way than by punching in the code on the wall-mounted panels. It seemed unlikely, then, that they could be trapped by their enemies sealing off a section of corridor by remote triggering of the doors. Then again, they'd never jumped into a redoubt that had a population that was actually maintaining it, or seemed to have any idea how the old comp systems worked.

 

 All the corridors were deserted. The only signs of life were the detritus of people moving out in a hurry: a clipboard and pen that lay on the floor; another mop and bucket similar to the one belonging to the chilled maintenance man; a frayed and worn service cap, with a threadbare insignia.

 

 It seemed obvious that whoever commanded the redoubt had pulled out all personnel to some secure place without sounding an alarm. That indicated a strong sense of discipline among that personnel.

 

 By the time they reached the location of the armory, all of them were feeling strung out. The complete silence was unnerving. In other redoubts it had been normal, but here—where they knew the redoubt was still a base of some kind—the silence was eerie.

 

 The sec door to the armory was raised. From their oblique approach angle, Ryan could see into the room. It appeared unoccupied, the ranks and boxes of blasters, grens and ammunition undisturbed by human presence.

 

 There was, however, still half of the armory that was hidden from view by the angle.

 

 "Too quiet," Jak mouthed into Ryan's ear. "Too empty. Want us there."

 

 Every instinct told Ryan that Jak was correct. The armory, too, was deserted.

 

 Dean stated what they were all thinking. "If it is empty, that's 'cause they want us in there. Once we're in there, we're trapped."

 

 All it would take would be the release of the sec door to the armory, and all seven of them would be trapped inside. They'd have all the weapons in the redoubt, but it wouldn't do them any good against being starved to death, or gassed by a nerve gren or by some kind of nerve-gas supply fed into the air circulation. From bitter experience they all knew that no gren or plas-ex could penetrate the vanadium steel—always assuming that they could have survived the impact blast from inside the armory. Or that it wouldn't trigger off every other gren, shell, cartridge or piece of plas-ex in there.

 

 "Simple solution," J.B. told them. "Half of us stay here on watch. At least that way some of us will stay on the outside."

 

 "Mebbe," Ryan answered. "But mebbe that just leaves us trapped in different ways and our forces halved. Better we stay together right now."

 

 "But for what?" Krysty asked with a shiver. "We've come up against some real evil, but this is triple weird. This is just so…so innocent somehow. There's no sense of pleasure in chilling going on here."

 

 As she spoke, they became aware of the rumble of heavy wheels on the concrete floor, and the high whine of an electric engine.

 

 "Krysty, there's nothing innocent about that baby," Mildred husked in an awed voice as a bizarre wag turned the far corner of the corridor.

 

 IN THE WEAPONS-DEVELOPMENT lab, Gen Wallace perched his enormous bulk on the groaning stool, its wheels squeaking in protest as he rocked the stool back and forth. His fingers hovered nervously over the keyboard, using the keys to guide the remote wag. It hadn't been used for several generations, and it was only thanks to the continued diligence of the weapons-development team that the wag still worked. They hadn't actually developed any weapons for five generations, but the blueprints left by their ancestors were used to assiduously strip and clean all the weapons in their possession. It was their task and purpose. That was how it was in the good book.

 

 Murphy spumed the use of tech weapons, claiming that they would be useless on the outside, and that blasters and a well-drilled sec corps were the only essentials.

 

 Wallace furrowed his brow. Where was Murphy now? Unconscious, maybe chilled, on a concrete floor.

 

 And the outsiders he wanted so badly… Murphy would have chilled them. Wallace wanted them alive. They were recyclable. Especially the old man. He seemed perfect for the mechanism.

 

 The vid screen flickered above the terminal the Gen was using. In shaky black and white, reverberating in time with the movement of the wag, Wallace could see the seven people standing by the open armory door. He knew he had guessed right. They needed blasters, and he had used that need to trap them. That was why he was the Gen.

 

 They were frozen in disbelief for a fraction of a second. Then the one-eyed man in front and the man with spectacles at the rear raised their blasters. The black woman, the one with the strange hair, the boy, the albino and the old man—yes, the all-important old man— stood between.

 

 Gen Wallace stopped the wag and grasped the handheld microphone that stood by the terminal. He thumbed a switch.

 

 "You people. You will obey the regs and put your blasters on the floor. Hands on heads, then follow the wag. No harm will befall you. We come in peace. It is imperative that we have full and fruitful discussions."

 

 He saw the one-eyed man shout something and open fire with the Heckler & Koch. The sec camera was obviously hit, as the screen went black.

 

 Wallace sighed. Why did they do this? Didn't they know the regs stated all resistance was futile? He keyed in a comp code.

 

 "BACK," RYAN YELLED.

 

 "Back where?" J.B. asked. "Damn redoubt corridors don't have any cover."

 

 "Past the last sec door, John," Mildred cried, passing the Armorer and pulling at his arm. "Maybe they're like all other soldiers and pencil the code under the punch plate."

 

 J.B. figured Mildred had a point—that was usually how they found the sec codes of some doors in redoubts.

 

 "Worth a try," Ryan yelled over the chatter of his Heckler & Koch as he emptied the clip at the wag. "It's the only way we can outdistance this thing, buy some bastard time."

 

 He ejected the clip and inserted another from the meager supply he'd removed from Panner's corpse. It seemed to him that they were doing nothing but react. They had to turn the situation around and act, get these soldiers on the run.

 

 "Dad, get down!" Dean yelled as he saw the drum rise from the center of the wag. It looked like a circle of blasters on a rotating wheel, which began to rapidly spin.

 

 Ryan dived as the rotating wheel spit fire. He felt a plucking at his clothes, small objects whistling past his ears and through his hair.

 

 Krysty screamed behind him. He tried to turn, but movement was sluggish. His vision narrowed.

 

 Trank darts.

 

 His last conscious thought was that someone wanted very badly to take them alive.

 

 What reason could prompt that risk?

 

  

 

 Chapter Four

 

  

 

 Dean Cawdor was sure that there was something wrong. It was night, and he was making his way across the marshy grasses that separated the boys' dormitories from those of the girls.

 

 That was weird; in all his time at the Nicholas Brody School, he couldn't recall the area between the dormitories being such a swamp. It hadn't been such a long trek, either. Dean's calf muscles ached, each step tearing at them and sapping his strength. He ground his teeth as he pulled a foot out of the sucking earth and moved on.

 

 The girls' dormitory seemed to fall farther into the distance the longer he walked. His breath came in rasps, and his chest felt as though it were about to burst, a burn crossing his lungs with each painful intake of air.

 

 The more he thought about it, the more bizarre it seemed. He had no idea why he was doing this. Trying to think as hard as possible, to concentrate as much as he could while the distractions of searing lungs and tearing muscles pulled at the edges of his mind, Dean knew that something was wrong.

 

 Was it a nightmare?

 

 No, not that… Dean didn't dream with such clarity. His muscles never ripped and tore in his dreams, and his lungs never felt as though they would explode in his chest as if someone had rammed a gren down his throat.

 

 Vaguely, plucking at the corners of his mind, he could remember the redoubt and what had followed. When he reached the point where the trank darts were fired at him, everything descended into blackness…

 

 Until now. So how did he get here? It certainly wasn't an ordinary dream.

 

 "HIS REM IS GOING totally crazy, Gen. I think we should pull him out before the kid ruptures something."

 

 Gen Wallace fixed the tech with a gaze that spoke of barely suppressed fury. Murphy, watching from a few paces back, noted the way that the small man quailed at the Gen's stare. He seemed to visibly shrink. It was something in the way Wallace looked at you. There was a mixture of ice and fire in that gaze, like the barely controlled impassive skin over a raging volcano of fury. The thought of being the agent that unleashed it wasn't pleasant. Murphy screwed his face into a wry grin, or something close. A genetic problem had resulted in numb facial muscles, so they didn't respond too well. Inbreeding. At least it was minor compared to many.

 

 Murphy switched his attention from Wallace and the tech to the kid on the couch. He suppressed a shiver as his view took in the boy, stretched naked on the PVC-covered foam rubber that molded to the contours of his body. Not that you could see much of him under the trailing mess of wires and electrodes that covered his body, attached to the skin by guar-gum pads that occasionally slipped on the sweaty surface of the boy's twitching skin. The wires entwined across the floor until they reached the opened back of a small comp console that sparked ominously with faint crackles.

 

 This part of the old R&D facility was populated by some of the geekiest specimens Murphy had ever seen. The tech who had just been stared down by the Gen, for example. He was a small, hunchbacked man with a squeaky voice—whiny and irritating even after a few words—who stood at barely four feet tall. His white coat trailed across the floor, and the sleeves were turned up several times so that his tiny hands could poke out of the ends. But worst of all from Murphy's point of view, the geek tech was wearing thickly lensed glasses that still didn't seem strong enough for his vision, as he squinted heavily when he stared at Wallace.

 

 That could account for the sparking and crackling terminals. Although it was almost sacrilege to think, Murphy felt certain that the techs weren't learning anything new, and whatever was supposed to be passed down the family lines was somehow going astray.

 

 Murphy doubted that Wallace would get whatever he wanted from any of these outsiders. Chances were that they would be killed on these machines before the Gen learned anything.

 

 Murphy looked at the kid, jerking and twitching underneath the skein of wire.

 

 He wouldn't last long.

 

 IT TOOK EVERY OUNCE of strength, stubbornness and sheer determination that Dean had, but he finally crossed the swampy grasslands and reached firm earth that felt as hard and smooth as metal beneath his feet.

 

 So far, so good. Dean had no idea why he was doing this, but he was driven by some inner message that pushed him on by instinct.

 

 The night was cold and still, and he could almost see the steam rise from his hot, sweating body by the fallow light of the shrouded moon as he made his way across the earth toward the three-story blockhouse that constituted the girls' dormitory. A veranda ran around the length of the building, with stanchions at each corner that would allow him a swift and easy ascent. Even with the pains that still flowed like the blood through his legs, pulsing in time with his hammering heart.

 

 Almost counting between breaths to keep some sort of rhythm to his actions, Dean trotted across the empty expanse of earth that stood before the building, keeping an eye out for the guards. Yet it was quiet. Too quiet Not even the cry of the whippoorwill disturbed the air.

 

 Why was there no one else around?

 

 "WHAT DOES THIS MEAN?" Wallace snapped.

 

 The tech squinted at the flickering monitor, where various lines were changing pattern and tone at a rapid rate. He glanced up at the Gen. It was hard for Murphy to discern anything on the strange little face, but he was sure there was an aura of fear.

 

 "I, uh, I'm not too sure, sir. We don't usually register such readings when we run tests."

 

 "Do you run tests on subjects, then?" Murphy asked, trying to keep the sarcasm out of his voice.

 

 The geek tech shot Murphy a glance of pure venom, "There aren't any subjects as a rule," he muttered in his high, penetrating voice. "We only run simulations."

 

 Wallace snapped the technician's head around to him with a blow from the flat of his hand. His fat jowls wobbled in fury. "You mean that we could lose these outsiders?"

 

 The tech shrugged. "I don't think so…"

 

 THE ROOF on the veranda was made of sheets of corrugated metal that allowed any rainwater to flow into the eaves troughs that had given Dean easy foot-and handholds. The roof was steeply angled, but the corrugation made it relatively easy for him to scramble up, even though his aching calf muscles protested.

 

 Clinging to the rough texture of the dormitory's outside wall, the youth steadied his breathing and counted the number of windows. Three along would bring him to where Phaedra was waiting. It seemed a long time since he had left the school with his father and their companions. A long time since he had seen Phaedra, and since she had kissed him, stirring feelings in him that were still strange.

 

 Stranger still was the fact that, despite he was clinging on to the outside of an out-of-bounds building at a school he no longer attended, with aching muscles that felt as though they could give way at any moment, and that he could be discovered by the guards Brody employed as much to keep the sexes apart as to keep the school safe from outside marauders, Dean felt safe. As if he were coming home to a safe place.

 

 Third window along. Dean edged his way across the veranda roof until he was directly underneath. The tip of his nose could touch the sill, and as the window was open it was a simple matter to push it up and then lift himself up over the sill and into the room.

 

 Inside, Dean was immediately aware that things were, once again, not as they should be. The room was larger than those he remembered, and cleaner. There was virtually nothing in the room except one bed, square against the wall opposite the window. Strange—there were at least two occupants to each room in the dormitory buildings. So why was this different?

 

 The bed was covered with an insect net, draped over the poles that held the net four feet above the bed, like a canopy, and falling to the floor, gathering in a pool around the feet of the bed.

 

 "Dean? Is that you, come back again?"

 

 Dean's heart raced, but not from exertion. It was Phaedra's voice, just as he remembered.

 

 "I guess it is," he said slowly, trying to control his breathing. "I don't know exactly how I got here, but…"

 

 "It doesn't matter," she replied, cutting across him. "The important thing is that you're here now, and it's safe."

 

 Dean wanted to speak, but some instinct stopped him. Why should she use a word likesafe ? He'd been thinking that, sure, but why would Phaedra say it?

 

 The net over the bed stirred, and was pushed aside. Phaedra emerged from the misty depths, and Dean caught his breath as she rose from the bed and stood in front of him. Her long hair fell perfectly straight, parted in the middle and tumbling over her shoulders and down over her breasts. She was naked, and Dean felt stirrings within him that were still new enough to be alien.

 

 Phaedra stepped forward.

 

 "I knew you'd come back one day, Dean. Back to where it's safe."

 

 She held out her hand. Dean hesitated, then raised his own arm to take her hand.

 

 Again why would she saysafe ?

 

 As Dean's fingers were about to brush against Phaedra's, some instinct made him suddenly pull back his hand.

 

 She immediately changed. Her face hardened, seemed to grow old and lined in front of him. She opened her mouth, and instead of speech nothing emerged but a harsh and sibilant hiss, like a stickle that was about to attack. Her hair seemed to disappear without Dean noticing where it had gone, and her hands grew the ugly suckers typical of the mutie stickies. Her open mouth was filled with sharp, needle-point teeth, and he could smell her fetid breath across the short distance between them.

 

 Although the sudden transformation was shocking, Dean showed the same sharp reactions that had kept his father alive for many long hard years traversing the Deathlands, and snapped onto his back heel, throwing his balance back to roll with the attack. Phaedra—or whatever it was that had pretended to be her—came forward and pitched into him. He used the creature's momentum and his own back-foot balance to throw it over his head.

 

 The creature hit the wall behind with a sickening thud. They were close enough for it to lose none of the initial momentum, and so it hit the hard surface with some force—enough to knock plaster off the wall in chunks, dust filling the air. Dean coughed, tears filling his eyes and blurring his sight.

 

 He swore under his breath, not wanting to shout and risk taking in another lungful of dust.

 

 The stickie came at him, rising from the floor as though it had merely brushed the wall. It hissed and spit at him, rushing at him with arms flailing.

 

 Dean backed up and readied himself in a combat stance, prepared to take the creature. He blocked one wild swing of its arm and followed with a straight-handed thrust at the stickie's exposed right side. He felt his fingers penetrate the soft flesh with a sickening squelch, and he jerked his hand free as quickly as possible, determined not to get stuck in the creature. It yelped in fear and pain, pulling back, its thin blood spewing out of the ragged wound.

 

 Anger, the fear and the pain were just about discernible in the black and glistening eyes as it gave a cry and rushed for Dean once again.

 

 Why, he thought, casting a glance around, was there never anything around to be used as a makeshift weapon when a person really needed it?

 

 It was a momentary lapse of total concentration that his father would never have made: Dean's youth and inexperience teaching him a harsh lesson.

 

 The stickie was on him a split second before he was fully prepared. The flailing arms were just a touch too quick for his defenses, and one of the hands glanced across his face, the blow pulling at his flesh and scoring it.

 

 The pain spurred Dean into complete concentration. He had to end this, and end it now. He lowered himself and dived in underneath the flailing arms, pushing against the stickie with all the power he could muster from his aching calf muscles. It was enough to drive them back against the wall. Dean was ready for the impact, and gritted his teeth as the impact jarred every bone in his body. He heard the sickening crunch of splintering bone, the thin snapping sounds of the stickie's ribs giving way and the high, fluting whine of its cries of pain.

 

 Every breath driven from its unprepared body, it sank to the floor, stunned, as Dean stepped back.

 

 The youth ignored the aches of his own body and focused his attention on the task at hand. While the stickie was still sitting, dazed, Dean stepped forward and took its head in his hands. Tensing his muscles, he jerked the head sharply to the right, and then to the left.

 

 He heard the snapping of its neck a millisecond before the cry of pain and surprise that was wrung from its throat. The light in its eyes dimmed swiftly and faded.

 

 As Dean stepped back, it was no longer a stickie. There, in front of him, with her neck broken and her naked body covered in weals and bruises, blood running over her belly to pool between her thighs, was Phaedra.

 

 Dean howled in anguish.

 

 "THE KID'S GOING CRAZY," yelled the small tech as Dean's jerking, howling body lifted itself off the couch, pulling wires and electrodes from his body, the tangles and terminals coming out of the comp console with an alarming amount of sparks and crackles. A small fire broke out, doused immediately by an alarmed whitecoat with a high-domed forehead and bug eyes. She was completely bald, with her front teeth missing. It would seem that she also had a cleft palate, as she uttered a worried yet incomprehensible noise.

 

 The only calm personnel in the room were Murphy and Wallace. Sarj Murphy studied the Gen very closely.

 

 "Desist this ridiculousness. The good book dictates calm in times of emergency, and I will have calm."

 

 Wallace's voice rose almost imperceptibly in volume as he got to the end of the statement, but the increase was accentuated by the sudden silence that descended on the room, broken only by the hum and buzz of the still fizzling terminals.

 

 Murphy couldn't help but be impressed. And worried. This would be a formidable foe.

 

 "Bring the outsider back," Wallace continued in quiet, authoritative tones.

 

 "I'm not sure if we can… At least, not that quickly," the geek tech said absently, squinting heavily at where Dean had subsided back onto the couch. His eyes were moving wildly behind the closed lids, and his breathing was labored and shallow.

 

 "I think you will," Wallace said simply.

 

 "Sir." The tech snapped to attention, something in Wallace's voice reminding him of his position.

 

 Murphy, on the other hand, was dubious. And if the kid didn't survive, what hope was there for the old man who lay in the next sick bay, similarly wired up?

 

 "NOT LIKE THIS, DOC. Frightening."

 

 "Worry not, my sweet. There is no puzzle to which there is not a solution, if you care to think of it. Be it logical or lateral, there is always a path that can be followed."

 

 "Don't look to me like there are any paths here at all." Lori looked at Doc Tanner with wide and uncomprehending eyes.

 

 Doc sighed. It was ever the way that Lori, as sweet as she was, failed to understand the simplest allusion. He cared deeply for the girl—a fellow waif in a strange land—but couldn't help but find her obtuseness, at times, irritating.

 

 They were standing in a dark cavern, the only light— if it could be called such—a faint phosphorescent glow from the rocks around them. The cavern seemed to stretch away into an unspecific and threatening darkness, a feeling of fear that was in no way alleviated by the faint roar of a distant gale and the odor of old, burned flesh that hung over them like a curtain.

 

 The pearl handle of Lori's Walther PPK .22 blaster glowed softly as it picked up the reflection of the rocks. Her long blond hair framed her glittering eyes. Doc could see little else of her in the darkness, but as they advanced a few steps he could hear the clicking of her high heels on the rock floor.

 

 In the mind of Dr. Theophilus Tanner, reason struggled to gain the upper hand over the encroachment of fear. Doc knew that the others considered him crazy, sometimes tipping into incoherence. The simple fact was that they were correct He had seen things and been through mind- and body-wrenching experiences that no one else had shared. And it was unlikely that anyone else would.

 

 He shuddered involuntarily as he remembered things he had seen when the scientists of Operation Chronos had tried to shut him up. He remembered the mewling mess that had been Judge Crater. Perhaps he would have been better dead than to end up like this, prone to lapses into insanity. For a man with Doc's intelligence, it was a strain to know that he walked a narrow ledge between coherence and madness. He had once heard someone say that stupidity had saved many a man from madness. Perhaps that was true.

 

 "Doc, what we gonna do?"

 

 Doc was jolted back to the moment. He looked at Lori, peering through the darkness to focus on her.

 

 "I said, what we gonna—"

 

 "I know, my dear. I heard you the first time. My grasp on sanity may be a little tenuous at times, but my hearing has not suffered. As to the action I propose we take, I would suggest that the best course of action at the present time is to actually take no action."

 

 Lori giggled. "You're crazy, Doc."

 

 Doc smiled to himself but refrained from comment. Slowly, in his mind, the fragments of the puzzle were assembling themselves into a whole. He remembered the fat, evil-looking woman whose throat he had sliced in twain. He remembered the attempt to escape from the redoubt, and the signs of a sudden evacuation by the staff. And then there were the trank darts fired from the strange vehicle.

 

 And now he was here.

 

 With Lori?

 

 Doc felt the weight of the LeMat in his hand, and knew that it was primed to be fired. In his other hand he held the swordstick. It was a sign to him of the changes that had occurred in his life that he, an academic by vocation, no longer felt safe unless he had a weapon or two at hand. Particularly now.

 

 Particularly as, although she was standing next to him, he knew that Lori had been dead for no little time.

 

 Doc was about to speak when a blast of air hit him like a solid blow to the solar plexus, doubling him over and driving the breath from his body. He was aware of Lori screaming, her shrill voice mixing into the roar of the gale as it hit them.

 

 With a sickening realization, Doc knew that they were facing a foe worse than any baron, scavenger or mutie. They were facing the implacable force of nature gone wild, distorted by the rad blast of skydark.

 

 It was a foe against which all weapons were useless.

 

 "Doc! Help me…"

 

 "THE OLD DUDE is looking a bit wired," remarked Pri Firclas Baker, scratching his head and noting idly that he'd made his tender scalp bleed again, a tuft of hair caught under his nail.

 

 "It's nothing we can't handle," snapped the willowy woman who was the end of a long line of techs for this section. By some fluke, Dr. Tricks was an almost perfect specimen of womanhood. A throwback to a cleaner, less rad blasted gene pool, she had flowing raven hair and sharp, classical features with high cheekbones. As a result she was the target of lustful attention from every male in the redoubt. At first Gen Wallace had high hopes of using Tricks to start a new gene pool and eradicate some of the problems of inbreeding and mutie infiltration.

 

 Until he discovered the one flaw in Tricks's otherwise immaculate makeup: she was sterile. He ruled that she was out-of-bounds. If she couldn't breed, then he didn't want his men wasting their seed on her.

 

 It didn't stop them trying, which made her weary of the attention.

 

 It also made any male soldiers assigned to her section slack in their attention to detail. Baker had been commanded by Wallace to inform him of any change in the old man's signs. He was too busy watching Tricks move around the lab to really pay much attention to the way in which the monitor screen was registering a rapid variety of signals. Like Dean, studied so carefully in the next room, Doc had REM that was going crazy, and sweat poured from his body as the muscles twitched beneath his skin.

 

 "Don't you think you should go and tell the Gen what's happening here?" Dr. Tricks said archly.

 

 "No, it's nothing," Baker replied without giving the monitors a second glance. "The old dude'll probably kick it, but so what?"

 

 "I'm not so sure that the Gen will see it that way," Tricks warned.

 

 "Screw him."

 

 "Brave words when he's not here."

 

 "Screw him. Although I'd rather screw you."

 

 Tricks sighed as Baker moved toward her, and she reached for the small, palm-sized stun gun she'd taken from the R&D repository some time back for just such an occasion. But despite this distraction, she still kept an eye on Doc, who had started to make small whining noises in the back of his throat.

 

 THE WIND HAD BUFFETED Doc until he was huddled into a corner of the cavern, hunched into a fetal position, trying to protect as much of his aching body as was possible from the sheer force of the air and the myriad small pebbles and specks of dust and dirt that whipped and stung against exposed skin. His eardrums hurt where the roar of the wind drove pressure against them until he felt that they would burst.

 

 And yet he could still hear Lori screaming over the roar of the wind. It was so plaintive, so helpless, that it overrode Doc's desire to protect his eyes and ears. He looked up, screwing up his eyes to try to cut down on the amount of dust that could tear at them. The force of the wind was such that his eyes dried almost immediately, and he blinked painfully.

 

 The phosphorescence provided enough light for him to see that Lori had been blown along almost to a point where she was hidden by the encroaching maw of darkness. She was clinging to the rocks, her clothes almost torn from her body, dark flecks on her skin showing where the flesh had been ripped, raising bloody weals.

 

 Perhaps it was his imagination. Perhaps it was his conscience. Whatever, Doc was sure that he could see a pleading light in her eyes, despite the fact that logically he shouldn't be able to tell from this distance, in these conditions.

 

 He knew that if he didn't go to help her, then she would surely die.

 

 And yet she was already dead. Doc knew that. He could recall with an awful clarity the nightmares he still suffered where he saw her consumed by flames. Lori was dead. She couldn't be here. Yet she was.

 

 And he couldn't fail her again.

 

 AS BAKER ADVANCED on Tricks, Doc gave a loud yell and almost lifted himself off the couch.

 

 "I really think you'd better get the Gen," Tricks said softly as Baker turned in shock. "I think he's ready."

 

 IT WAS ALMOST impossible to describe the sensation of moving against that implacable gale. It was like drowning in air, yet the stones and dirt that whipped against him made it at times seem like fighting against a moving, living wall of rock. And still Doc pressed on, his wiry frame pushing every ounce of strength he had into forward progress.

 

 He got to within a few yards of Lori before he looked up again. What he saw made his dry eyes fill with tears, caused him to pull up dead.

 

 There were now three figures being blown into the maw of the tunnel. Lori wasn't one of them.

 

 "Emily?" he whispered. Doc felt as though any sanity he might be clinging to was about to be severed, driven from him by the vision that was now before his eyes: his wife and children being thrown into the darkness by the roar of the gale.

 

 And then the greatest contradiction of all hit him: how could he be fighting against a howling wind that was blowing his family in the opposite direction? Many things in nature had changed since skydark, but not something as fundamental as this.

 

 Doc dropped to his knees and howled.

 

 MILDRED SHOOK her head, her beaded plaits swaying about her shoulders.

 

 "No way. It just can't be."

 

 The doctor sitting opposite her smiled sadly. "You know something, Mildred? If you were sitting here right now, where I am, you wouldn't be in the slightest surprised by what you're doing."

 

 Mildred fixed him with a stare. "Come on, you're not telling me that I haven't got a valid point. More than anyone else you have sitting here, I know that an initial diagnosis can be misleading…"

 

 "Listen to yourself, Mildred. It's typical denial. We've run a full series of tests. You have a cyst. It's not major, and it can easily be removed. There won't be a problem."

 

 Mildred sat back and looked out of the window at the freeway beyond the hospital entrance. All of a sudden she felt so lonely. Everyone out there seemed so carefree, so untroubled by an invasion of possibly hostile cells within their own body.

 

 "Mildred?"

 

 She turned back to the doctor opposite. Strange, but he seemed to know her well, judging by his attitude, yet she couldn't remember ever seeing him before.

 

 "I'm sorry." She smiled. "I was just…"

 

 He nodded in a typically medical manner. So understanding, yet also so impersonal. "Don't worry about it, Mildred. It won't be a difficult procedure. In fact, we could do it right now."

 

 Before Mildred had a chance to react, he pressed a buzzer on his desk, and she heard the oak double doors behind her swing open. She spun in her chair to see, with some shock, a fully operational surgery in the room she was sure had been a reception when… When she came in?

 

 Mildred turned back. "Wait a second here. Don't rush me on this. I—"

 

 She stopped dead. The doctor was dressed in a surgeon's gown, but instead of a surgical mask and cap, he was wearing a Ku Klux Klan hood.

 

 "You're not getting your hands on me, motherfucker," Mildred growled angrily, springing to her feet. But any attempts to escape were stalled by the iron grip of two men who appeared behind her, seemingly from nowhere, to grasp her firmly by the arms. Glancing over her shoulder, she could see that both men also wore surgical gowns and Klan hoods.

 

 "What's this about?" she demanded, conserving any energy for an attempt at escape when their grip was relaxed.

 

 "Simple. We're going to remove your cyst. But as you may have a reaction to the anesthetic, we're going to dispense with it."

 

 Mildred felt a cold sweat break out down her spine. From the tone of his voice, she knew that he meant every word. They were going to operate without an anesthetic. For the fun of it. The shock would probably kill her.

 

 The two men dragged Mildred into the operating room and pulled her onto the operating table. Not for one second did they release their grip. Mildred tried to struggle as she was hauled across the table, but to no avail. They remained completely implacable.

 

 When she was on the table, one of them took full control of her, holding her down with incredible strength while the other secured her hands and feet with restraining straps. She kicked out at him, catching him under the chin and snapping his head back with a force that should have rendered him unconscious.

 

 He didn't even pause in his actions.

 

 When Mildred was secured on the table, the doctor walked into the operating room with an almost obscenely casual air, humming gently to himself. He was carrying a tar-and-gas torch—she could tell by the mixed odor in the otherwise sterile atmosphere.

 

 The sweat gathered in a tiny pool at the small of her back. The smell of the torch reminded her of her father, and the way he burned inside his church. She could imagine him, praying for his soul as the Klansmen gathered outside, watching the building burn. She could imagine his prayers, desperate for his own life but still pleading for forgiveness against the scum who were killing him slowly and painfully.

 

 With a flick of an expensive gold lighter, the doctor lit the torch, which crackled and flared into life. The heat was noticeable even from several yards.

 

 "If we're not going to use an anesthetic, the least we can do is cauterize the wound," the doctor said, his eyes laughing behind his Klan hood.

 

 One of the others picked up a scalpel and advanced toward her. He ripped off her clothes and poised the scalpel, which caught the light of the torch and flickered over her.

 

 Mildred, knowing she was completely powerless and doomed, gave in to her frustration and fear, and screamed.

 

 "I THINK SHE'S about ready. Go and tell the Gen."

 

 The guard nodded at the tech, and turned to leave the room. When he reached the door, it was opened by Murphy.

 

 "Sir, the woman has reached a state of readiness. I was just about to report to the Gen, sir."

 

 Murphy nodded. "Good. The old man and the boy are still alive. And now she's ready. The mutie albino outsider seems impervious, but I guess no process is foolproof."

 

 The tech, feeling that the R&D department was once again being impugned by the Army, was about to say something when a warning glance from the guard silenced him.

 

 The hell with it. Let the Army thugs think what they liked. The outsiders' resistance to interrogation had been reduced to virtually zero in a fraction of the time their heavy-handed methods would take.

 

 "Army bastard," the tech muttered as Murphy and the guard left. The insult was wasted on the unconscious Mildred, but it made the tech feel better.

 

  

 

 Chapter Five

 

  

 

 Ryan was back in Front Royal, and all hell was about to break loose.

 

 The one-eyed man was in a gaudy house even more run-down than those he usually encountered on the trek across the Deathlands. The old stone walls were scarred and pitted with the marks of a hundred bottles, a thousand fights. Dried blood stained patches of old plaster that the gaudy proprietor hadn't bothered to clean. Perhaps he figured that the marks would serve as a deterrent to anyone fool enough to start another brawl.

 

 Guess he was going to be wrong. The almost deserted "reception" area, where an ugly and multiscarred bar-keep served drinks to waiting customers, was occupied by three bored-looking sluts of indeterminate age and two drunken men who looked far past the point where they would be able to perform. And then there was Ryan.

 

 Try as he might, the one-eyed man couldn't recall exactly how he had reached this place. Through a vague fog of memory he could remember the redoubt, the escape and the strange machine firing trank darts. And then?

 

 And then this. He looked at the glass in his hand, filled with a spirit that tasted as foul as the glass looked, and wondered how many he had downed before becoming aware he was in a gaudy house.

 

 Just looking at the glass seemed to be all the cue one of the drunks needed.

 

 "Hey, you, One eye," he yelled across the room.

 

 Ryan tried to ignore him. No point looking for trouble. It was obviously looking for him. Just let it come and roll with it. It wouldn't take long.

 

 "Shit, the fucker's deaf, as well as half-blind," the other drunk yelled, directing the comment at Ryan.

 

 The one-eyed man turned to face them, taking them in and weighing their possible danger areas. The one who started the exchange was tall and skinny, no more than 140 pounds and over six feet tall. He had long, loose, lean limbs, his arms dangling at his sides as he swayed gently in a drunken haze with an idiot grin on his face. An old steel bayonet, rusted but still lethal, hung from his belt. His eyes held a mean gleam.

 

 His companion was about six inches shorter, and fifty pounds heavier. All of it was muscle. He had a homemade knife in his belt, jagged metal attached to a wooden handle with wire. It looked more like a tool than a weapon, but still lethal enough. Like the taller man, he was dressed in cutoff jeans that were stiff with oil, dirt and sweat. Both wore heavy combat boots that, perversely, seemed to be immaculately maintained. The men were naked from the waist up, which only served to draw Ryan's attention to the blaster that hung off the squat drunk's shoulder.

 

 It was a Heckler & Koch G-12 caseless rifle, like the one that had served Ryan well for more years than he cared to remember.

 

 So they were armed, and they outnumbered him two-to-one. But he was sober and had more weapons.

 

 Unconsciously his hand traveled to where his panga was sheathed. A tremor of surprise shot through him when he realized it wasn't there. Neither, now that he came to consider it, could he feel the comfortable weight of the SIG-Sauer or Steyr SSG-70.

 

 So they outnumbered him and he was unarmed. The odds had shifted. Ryan felt a charge go through his body as his adrenaline level rose, and he shifted gears to adjust to the situation.

 

 The bartender leaned across to him. "You pay for any damage caused if you live, fucker. Just like those scum pay if they live. House rules."

 

 "Seems fair," Ryan said shortly. At least he could be fairly certain now that it wasn't three-to-one.

 

 "Hey, I think One-eye wants to fight. Mebbe he can only see one of us 'cause he's only got one eye," the skinny drunk yelled.

 

 As a witticism it wasn't much, but it was enough to make his companion laugh with such a ferocity that he spit a stream of alcohol across the floor, dribbling the remnants down his chin, belly and crotch.

 

 It was just the break that Ryan needed to even the score. The interior of the gaudy was lit by a series of naked torches that hung from the walls. One of them was behind the bar, about halfway between Ryan and the drunks.

 

 The one-eyed man sprang onto the rickety wooden board that served as a bar, his balance delicately poised as the groaning wood swayed beneath his weight. He reached across the head of the startled barkeep and grabbed the torch.

 

 The two drunks were also baffled by this seemingly pointless move. Their surprise, and the alcohol haze, conspired to delay their reactions for just the necessary fraction of a second. If they had been sober, it would have been a close shave for Ryan.

 

 As the skinny drunk drew the bayonet and threw it at Ryan, the one-eyed man realized the rusty metal may be badly maintained, but it was a fair bet that the rust was the result of staining by blood. Instinctively shifting the weight in his palm, the skinny drunk had thrown the bayonet so that the lethal point whistled past Ryan's ear. It nicked the skin and drew blood as the one-eyed warrior shifted his balance to pitch the torch seemingly into the middle of the floor.

 

 The squat drunk was too busy unshouldering the Heckler & Koch to notice where the torch landed. The filthy floor had a line of damp leading a trail of spit alcohol, ending at a midpoint between the two drunks and where Ryan had initially been standing. The torch landed at that midpoint, the raw sugarcane alcohol igniting as the flames touched the dirt.

 

 A tongue of blue flame shot along the floor and up the leg of the squat drunk. He'd drunk so much of the raw spirit that he didn't at first feel the pain as the flames scorched his skin and ignited on the old stained denim. He swung the rifle around to sight on Ryan, drawing on the trigger before the intense heat and pain penetrated his fogged consciousness, roasting his balls and making him squeal.

 

 He moved back, trying to step away from the flames, beat at his burning crotch and fire at the one-eyed warrior all at the same time.

 

 Bullets sprayed into the ceiling, bringing down plaster, wood chippings and dust. The three sluts, who had been watching with a mild disinterest, now screamed and disappeared faster than a rat down a hole.

 

 The scrawny drunk had his attention distracted, and half turned to his friend. Ryan, however, didn't let anything deter him from his only course of action. He launched himself from the groaning bar and crashed into the thin drunk, taking him down. A battered plastic chair took the brunt of the impact, and Ryan felt rather than heard the crack of the drunk's elbow as it shattered on the metal frame of the chair.

 

 Bones didn't usually break that easy, and Ryan rode his luck by following up while the drunk was disoriented and distracted by the pain. With the heel of his hand, he forced the man's chin back. A thin, wailing cry of surprise and pain escaped from the drunk's stretched throat. With his free hand Ryan chopped at the man's exposed Adam's apple. He felt cartilage crack beneath his granite hand.

 

 The drunk choked and coughed blood. He was limp with shock, and it took Ryan just one twist to break the man's neck.

 

 An angry cry from behind Ryan alerted him to the possibility that the squat drunk had become a danger once more. He rolled to one side to see the drunk coming toward him, holding the handmade knife. His legs were blistered and charred, and the denim appeared burned into his skin, but above the waist he seemed to have escaped damage from the fire. The rifle lay across the room, discarded in drunken anger.

 

 Good. Ryan stayed calm, despite the adrenaline race of his pulse. The more angry an opponent, the more likely he was to make mistakes.

 

 Like lunging at a man and committing his strength and balance to one direction, when his foe was moving in another.

 

 With a wild yell the squat drunk threw himself toward Ryan, who moved back across the slumped corpse of the skinny drunk. His muscle-bound opponent wasn't expecting Ryan to head in that direction, so the knife hit empty dirt, sticking in the floor.

 

 Momentarily confused, the squat drunk was torn between going after Ryan and retrieving his sole weapon. It was a mistake that enabled Ryan to spring to his feet. The squat drunk turned his head to see where his opponent was just in time to receive the toe of Ryan's combat boot at the point of his jaw. The bone shattered like delicate porcelain china, splintering in the drunk's face.

 

 Ryan stepped back as the drunk hit the floor for the last time, and turned, expecting to see the barkeep ready to argue about the damages.

 

 Instead he was greeted with a sight that made his senses reel. Harvey, his dead brother, the cause of so much trouble in Front Royal and the reason Ryan had been forced to leave the ville, stood behind the bar, flanked by sec men.

 

 "Congratulations, Ryan. Now see what you can do against my boys…"

 

 WALLACE AND MURPHY had left Dean, now disconnected from the comp, and stood over his father, watching the signs on the monitor.

 

 "He's ready," Wallace said, nodding.

 

 J.B. HAD THE WORST nightmare of his life come true. The Armorer was defenceless against a horde of stickies. All his weapons jammed. All his grens had refused to go off. His fedora was lost, as was his minisextant.

 

 But most importantly of all, his spectacles had been knocked off at some point that he couldn't quite recall. So he was fumbling in a blurry mist.

 

 Dark night, but he never lost his spectacles. It was something he went out of his way to avoid, and he couldn't understand where or how they had gone missing. All he knew was that the Uzi had jammed as soon as he squeezed the trigger, the M-4000 scattergun had no cartridges and his capacious pockets were suddenly, mysteriously empty except for grens that failed to detonate. His knife was stuck in the body of the only stickie he had so far managed to chill. Stuck so hard that he couldn't move it, and couldn't waste time devoting his full attention to it as the horde of muties overran him.

 

 J.B. couldn't even see where he was as they pinned him to the ground. He could smell their foul odor and feel the heat of their bodies as a multitude of suckered ringers grasped his body, wriggling obscenely across him as he was secured in a tight mass grip and lifted from the ground.

 

 He felt the quality of the air change as he was lifted above their heads and carried along. The light increased, and he guessed that he had been sheltered somewhere, but was now out in the open. The landscape blurred as he was jarred up and down on the uneven ground. He could hear the debased chattering of the stickies as they moved en masse.

 

 He struggled, even though he knew it was pointless. There were too many of them, their grip was too tight and he was severely impaired by the loss of his glasses. Despite this, his acute sense of survival impelled him to try. A slim-to-nothing chance was preferable to no chance at all. The Trader used to say that there was no such thing as no chance, only people who couldn't spot it.

 

 As J.B. flexed his muscles, some of the stickies stumbled beneath him. One caught a foot on a stone and lost balance, careering into others, who also lost balance. Among the unintelligent creatures, this caused a mass panic, and J.B. was pitched forward into their midst.

 

 He landed on his feet and hit the ground running. Vague shapes and blurs stood in his way, but were soon knocked aside by sharply aimed blows.

 

 He was off and running, but didn't know where.

 

 The ground was bumpy, stones rolling under his boots as he ran, trying desperately to put some distance between himself and the stickies. His breath came hard, and he could feel the blood pounding in his ears. It was pounding so hard that it took a few seconds for him to realise that he wasn't being followed. There was no sound from behind him.

 

 That was even more worrying than being chased by the stickies.

 

 What was stopping them from following? The answer came to him as he slowed. His feet began to sink into the marshy earth, which became more of a quagmire as he continued, dragging one painful leg after another, until his calf muscles began to tear.

 

 "THAT'S REALLY INTERESTING, sir," the small tech said to Wallace.

 

 "Is it? Explain, boy. This tech stuff isn't part of my duty."

 

 Pulling back one of his sleeves so that his tiny hand could point to a series of flowing lines on the monitor, the tech turned to Wallace and Murphy.

 

 "As you may know, sirs, our ancestors were in charge of developing new weaponry for the cold war between—"

 

 "Spare the history lesson and cut to the chase, runt," Murphy snapped. "The military has work to do."

 

 The tech sighed and continued in pained tones. "Well, before skydark and the great isolation and the time of recycling, there was only a certain amount of the preliminary work that was completed. There are only so many image stimuli that can be fed to the subject for them to feed and respond to. The idea of the swamp has been fed to this subject and the boy we were watching a while ago. And both seem to have interpreted this stimuli at different points in the cycle."

 

 "So?" Wallace asked blankly.

 

 "Well, it suggests… It… It's just kind of interesting to us down here, sir," the tech finished weakly.

 

 "Son, it don't matter bodiddly-squat how they see it, as long as it gets us results," Wallace said blandly.

 

 Murphy suppressed a smile. He still believed that his methods could have softened the outsiders with greater speed, but the Gen loved his toys.

 

 Wallace turned to Murphy. "He's ready now. Just the red-haired bitch to go."

 

 GAIA, BUT THESE NIGHTS were cold.

 

 Krysty huddled into herself, trying to preserve some body warmth in the darkness. She could feel that her flowing red hair had tightened like a steel spring until it was close to her scalp, coiling tightly against her nape.

 

 She didn't need this sign to tell her there was danger about. She could hear it in the rustling of the leaves, the scratching of the undergrowth as it moved, disturbed by the predators that were always just out of view.

 

 They weren't human. She knew that because she had never heard any sec men or hunters who could move that quietly. If not for the fact that so long on the road had attuned her to danger, she would have taken the noises for nothing more than the movement of the night air.

 

 But this night there was no movement. Despite the cold, it was as still as the hottest summer day. So still that the air seemed to solidify around her.

 

 Krysty knew that she was on her own, that she was outnumbered. That the odds were against her making it to morning.

 

 Even more so when she checked the pockets of the bearskin coat that, despite its bulk, was still failing to cut out the chilled air. Her Smith & Wesson Model 640.38 was with her, but there was no ammunition. And a blaster without ammo was as useless as a man with no dick in a gaudy house free-for-all.

 

 The crescent moon cast little light, but there was enough to shine off the silver-winged falcons and points on her boots, and to catch her misted breath in the air. It was enough to cast shadows across the copse, where she sat on the rotted stump of a felled tree, and into the forest beyond. The forest rustled with barely concealed danger.

 

 It briefly occurred to her that the danger came not from there but from something else. There was no reason why she should be alone and unarmed. There was no recollection of arriving here. None of it added up.

 

 It flashed through her mind that the real danger was whatever was making her think she was at this place.

 

 "NOW, THAT'S an interesting reaction," Dr. Tricks mused.

 

 "In what way?" Murphy asked, using it as an excuse to move closer to her as he looked over her shoulder.

 

 "You see these lines here?" she continued, ignoring his heavy-breathing presence and indicating a sudden flattening of the signal on the monitor. "It means a decrease of tension and adrenaline."

 

 "So?"

 

 "So, the clever little mutie is onto us. She may be as hard to crack as the albino."

 

 Murphy smiled and put a hand on her shoulder. "You see, you R&D personnel always put too much trust in science. Brute force and ignorance is what wins battles. Always has been."

 

 "We'll see."

 

 KRYSTY KEPT HERSELF ALERT, despite the sudden doubts that sprang through her mind about the veracity of her senses.

 

 To her left, just out of her range of vision, she heard an increase in rustling and spun to meet it.

 

 "You?"

 

 "Yes, me." Uncle Tyas McCann stepped into the sparse light of the moon. He looked just as he had when she had last seen him. How long ago was that now?

 

 "Too long," he said, seeming to sense her thoughts, before breaking into a throaty chuckle.

 

 Krysty's hair coiled even tighter, straining against the muscles of her neck. It was a little like him, sure, but there was something here that just didn't make sense. He was dead, and this—apparition, for want of another word—wasn't that much like him at all in the faint light.

 

 "That's very perceptive of you," he replied to her thoughts. "You always were too damn smart, Krysty. Just like Sonja."

 

 Tyas McCann never mentioned Sonja, either. Krysty's mother—perhaps dead, perhaps not—had always been a topic he would avoid.

 

 Krysty stood, feeling the cold air invade her as the movement drove the scant warmth from under her coat. She shivered, and not just from the cold.

 

 "That's right. You should be very afraid, because this is a scenario that you can't control or defeat. You know your mind is being manipulated, and I'm here because I'm what you fear most of all."

 

 "I never feared Uncle Tyas," Krysty replied, trying to keep a tremor of cold and fear from her voice.

 

 "True. But then again, wouldn't that be your worst nightmare? For me to suddenly turn against you, to attack you? How would you react? Would you try to defeat me in order to save yourself?"

 

 "Are you going to try to find out?"

 

 He smiled. "You know the answer to that."

 

 Krysty nodded, as much to herself as to the thing that called itself Tyas McCann. If what she suspected was true, then he couldn't harm her.

 

 "Are you sure about that?" he asked.

 

 "Try me."

 

 Tyas smiled. It was harsh and evil, not at all like the man she remembered, which would make sense. If this was her nightmare, then he would be the opposite of the loving father figure she had once known.

 

 Krysty stood perfectly still as he advanced upon her. If she was right, then nothing could really happen to her.

 

 She closed her eyes and waited for the moment to come. With a roar of anger, Tyas McCann reached out and grasped her left arm. He wrenched and pulled with a barely controlled fury, twisting her arm at its socket. Krysty felt the tendons and muscles tear inside her arm, blood vessels exploding and veins and arteries rupturing.

 

 With the sickening, crunching squelch of bone and flesh mixed with the tearing of fabric and fur, Krysty's arm came off in Tyas McCann's hands. She opened her eyes to see him fling it away into the trees. There was a rustle, like animals descending on carrion.

 

 She looked down at her exposed shoulder joint, blood pulsing onto the earth, steaming as her body temperature met the cold night air. She should feel pain, shock…but nothing penetrated her consciousness. She was perfectly calm.

 

 Tyas McCann looked perplexed.

 

 Krysty smiled. It was beatific. Even though she had not called upon the power of Gaia to give her strength, she could feel the energies running through her veins, helping her to see through her course of action.

 

 Tyas McCann snarled at her and repeated the procedure on her right arm. Once again she heard the severing of the limb but felt nothing.

 

 A haze began to descend over her, something that she put down to the loss of blood. Even though it wasn't her real physical sense, or a real death, she knew that she had to see it through to the end. She had to call the bluff of whoever was playing with her mind.

 

 "You will not fight?"

 

 "I will not fear," she replied, her voice sounding distant in her own ears.

 

 The darkest night slipped away into a blackness darker than anything she had ever imagined.

 

 "SHE'S BEATEN THE COMP," Dr. Tricks remarked, watching the signals on the console.

 

 Wallace pulled a face, his tightly pursing lips making his multiple chins wobble.

 

 Tricks raised an eyebrow. "Two out of seven isn't bad." She looked at Krysty, naked and encased in a skein of wires and electrodes. Unlike everyone except Jak, Krysty had not one drop of perspiration on her body. "It's probably something to do with their mutie blood. I'd like to study them some more, Gen. The mutie outsider scum we usually get die very quickly. These show more resilience."

 

 Wallace shook his head. "No deal. These will be recycled in another manner. They're necessary for my plans, and as Gen I pull rank on you every time, Doctor."

 

 "Just what are your plans, sir?" Murphy asked.

 

 "Now that they're suitably softened up, I want you to extract their backgrounds from them. Particularly the old one. He may be of the greatest use."

 

 "If I may beg your indulgence and ask, sir, why didn't you just hand them over to me?"

 

 Wallace fixed Murphy with a sneering stare that bespoke contempt. "Time is of the essence, Sarj. To get quick results you may have to harm them physically. And I cannot have that." He turned to survey Krysty with a cold, emotionless eye. "At least, not yet."

 

  

 

 Chapter Six

 

  

 

 The disorientation and mental stresses of the brainwashing process softened them all. It was distressingly, boringly easy for Murphy to interrogate them. The level of resistance was low, and some of them he hit just for fun. Particularly the one-eyed man, whose name he discovered was Ryan Cawdor.

 

 The interrogation room was constructed just as Murphy's forefathers had wanted it: like something out of the crumbling pages of the books that he kept in his quarters and would sometimes thumb through. It made him feel more in touch with the world before skydark, the world on which his world view was based.