by James Axler
But that didn't mean it was possible to escape from the redoubt that contained the gateway, nor even to use the gateway to escape again.
And when the gateway door was opened, no one had any idea of what dangers or horrors might be waiting on the other side.
Ryan set his finger on the curved trigger of the G-12 and reached for the handle of the chamber door. "Ready? Then let's go."
Chapter Two
THE LIGHT that had filtered through the turquoise walls had been dimmed, like a far-off lamp glimpsed underwater. As soon as the door began to ease silently open, the light flooded in, dazzlingly bright.
"Fireblast!" Ryan cursed, shading his eye. "There's some special kind of power source working here, Doc, giving out this much energy."
Like the others, Doc had at first also turned his head away, then squinted through watering eyes into the room beyond the gateway chamber. "Upon my soul, friends! The power of many a candle here. I have not seen… nor can I imagine why. Unless this gateway had some special function."
"Like what?" Krysty asked.
"I fear that I can't even make what one might call an educated guess, my dear Miss Wroth. There were some special sections that I could not, on a need-to-know basis, involve myself with."
"But you were on Cerberus, Doc?" J.B. queried.
"Indeed. But you must recall the concept of the Russian doll, my dear fellow. There is a huge doll, and when you open it there is a large doll within, and when you open that one, there is a medium-size doll within, and when you open that one there is a smaller doll within and—"
"We get the picture, Doc," Ryan said, fearing that the old man's mind was going to slide off into one of its lateral spirals that brought him perilously close to madness.
"Yeah, we see," the Armorer added. "Russian dolls. What's that got to do with Project Cerberus?"
"What's what got to do with what?" Doc asked, his forehead furrowed with confusion.
"You said about special gateways not being part of Project Cerberus," Ryan explained, barely managing to keep his patience.
"Correct," Doc beamed. "Give that customer a large coconut. Cerberus was the doll within Overproject Whisper. In its own turn, Overproject Whisper was concealed from the eyes of the public and the media beneath the accommodating skirts of our country's Totality Concept. You understand?"
"Yeah. Double-clear, Doc. Some things you knew, and some you didn't."
Ryan turned and pushed the door open farther, his eye becoming accustomed to the brightness. Every single mat-trans chamber he'd seen had been part of an identical setup, though the shrouding redoubts were all different in design.
There was the small anteroom opening off the glass-paneled chamber, which measured about five long paces by three and contained an empty table against one wall.
Beyond that Ryan knew there would be a main control area, all whirling comp-wheels, disks, dials and flickering lights.
"Look." Lori pointed. "What's it saying, Doc? Can't read loopy words."
"Called graffiti, it was. Some poor devil scrawled this generations back, my dear, lovely child. It says, "I don't have a drinking problem, except when I can't get a drink. It's a joke."
Nobody laughed.
The words had been scrawled on the pale cream wall just at the side of a row of bare shelves. It was the only decoration in the room.
"Ready, Ryan?" J.B. asked, the mini-Uzi braced against his hip.
"Go."
It was just as Ryan expected, but the room was much bigger and brighter than any of the others they'd come across. The chamber measured a good hundred paces long by forty wide.
"By the three Kennedys!" Doc exclaimed, pointing at one side of the doorway they'd all just stepped through.
There was a second gateway chamber.
The usual message had been printed above it in stark black lettering on a white ground: Entry Absolutely Forbidden to All but B19 Cleared Personnel. Mat-Trans.
"Not quite the same, Ryan," Krysty said. "The gateway we came from says B12. That one says B19. What's the difference, Doc? Any idea?"
"Nineteen's a much higher classification. Nabobs from the Pentagon personnel privy to Whisper would have been 19s. I wasn't ever leaked that high. Couldn't be trusted."
"So, what is it?" Lori asked.
"Something new that they were working on?" J.B. suggested.
Doc shook his head. "I confess myself utterly bewildered by this. I never heard of any such development in any redoubt. Ryan, my dear friend, have you ever heard of anything like this?"
"I never even heard of one gateway, Doc, never mind two."
"One way find out," Jak said softly.
The anteroom connecting the control chamber to the actual gateway was larger than usual. Unlike any others they'd seen, it was split in two, with a separate section to the left that contained a number of benches with hooks above for clothes, as well as dark green sec-plas lockers with slatted doors.
Jak led the way, his blaster gleaming brightly in the harsh, metallic glare of the lights. J.B. came second, followed by Doc and Lori. Donfil More padded along on his bare feet, eyes darting from side to side. Krysty and Ryan brought up the rear. All of them had their guns up and ready.
The girl hesitated, catching Ryan by the sleeve. "Hold it, lover," she said, with a quiet intensity in her voice,
"What?"
"Hold up," she called, halting the others.
Ryan knew from his months with Krysty that her mutie powers came and went, sometimes strong and sometimes weak. From the look on her face, he knew that this feeling was a strong one.
"Yeah?"
"Someone's been here. Recent. So recent I can almost taste their sweat."
"I feel the scent of men," the stooping Indian announced. "Close and yet far away. Cold deserts away from here."
Ryan didn't have any mutie extra sense, but he had all the instincts of a hunting killer wolf. As he stood in the doorway, he knew that Krysty and Donfil were both right. The faint prickling at his nape told him the same damned story. The redoubt wasn't empty.
"Shall check lockers?" Jak asked, almost dancing on the balls of his feet with the sudden tension.
"Later, mebbe," Ryan replied. "Doc, you seen anything like this?"
"Indeed, I have not. All gateway complexes were built, as far as I know, to an identical pattern. Every one."
"Check the mat-trans chamber itself?" J.B. suggested.
Ryan nodded.
Just to the right of the doorway there was another scrawled piece of graffiti, in what looked like the same hand.
"The large print giveth and the small print taketh away," it read. Beneath it, in a different hand, someone had neatly added "Tom Waits said that."
Ryan wondered who Tom Waits had been, guessing it was probably the name of one of the men who'd been working in the redoubt when infinity had beckoned.
The shaman paused and turned around, mirrored glasses reflecting the doorway and the main control behind them. He looked at Ryan.
"You think of infinity, my brother." It was a statement, not a question. "Do you know what infinity truly is?"
Ryan nodded. "I read it once, years back, when I was a kid, 'bout the age of Jak here. I read that to understand infinity you have to imagine that the whole damned planet is a sphere of polished vanadium steel. Once every thousand years a butterfly comes by and brushes the metal ball with its wing. Very gently. Imagine Earth wearing away, and you get a kind of glimpse of infinity."
"That's fucking loveliest!" Lori exclaimed, shaking her long blond hair in wonderment. "Fucking loveliest, Ryan."
"Watch the bad-mouthing language, my sweet little enchantress," Doc warned.
"Sorry." She grinned. "Mebbe you'll spank my buns for it tonight, huh?"
"Yeah, you do that, Doc," Jak cackled, hopping around from foot to foot like a snow-headed dervish.
"Button your lip, young fellow," Doc demanded, blushing deep crimson. "Can't we get on with going into the hornswoggled bo
ondocked gateway?"
Jak couldn't stop giggling, leaning helplessly against one of the lockers, so Ryan pushed to the front and stood in front of the control panel. "Three-five-two to open it, Doc?"
"Who knows, Ryan? Since it has a higher security coding, I doubt very much if it will be the same numerical cipher."
Ryan reached out with the end of the barrel of the G-12 caseless and the door swung open. The silver glass walls of the gateway were shimmering, showing that it was actually in use!
Chapter Three
"FIREBLAST?"
"Gala!"
"Dark night!"
"By Ysun!"
"Doc! What's…?"
"Damn, oh damn!"
"By the three Kennedys!"
It was one of the biggest shocks Ryan and his friends had ever encountered. Bigger than the mutie alligator or the stoning or the Russians in the snows.
Ryan felt for a heart-stopping moment like a fond father who'd gone up to his child's bedroom to reassure the frightened toddler that there really wasn't a bogeyman in the closet. He'd opened the door with a broad smile and seen… seen a squatting, dribbling creature, all raw head and bloody bones, reaching for him with soft fingers that ended in ravening points of ragged horn.
The armored glass walls were almost opaque, but the glowing disks in floor and ceiling flared through, and frail tendrils of white mist crept out beneath the door. There wasn't the least moment of doubt that someone, or something, was using the gateway for a jump.
"Coming or going?" Ryan asked J.B.
"Can't tell. Can't see inside. Can you tell, Doc? Doc, come on!"
The old man was standing like one stricken, hand pressed to his chest, all the color drained from his lined cheeks.
"Leave him," Ryan snapped. "Everyone out. Find cover in the main control room. Move it!"
Lori dragged Doc out on stumbling feet, through the side room, pulling him into hiding behind one of the banks of comp-disks. Jak was kneeling next to them, his pistol as steady as death in both hands. Krysty and Ryan went the other way, finding space where they could take cover and watch the main gateway chamber at the same time. J.B. and Donfil darted around the corner to wait in the other gateway, the Armorer's Steyr blaster poised like a cobra waiting to strike. The Apache held his clumsy great Sharps rifle braced against his hip.
Even at that moment of heightened tension, it crossed Ryan's mind that the tall shaman needed a decent handblaster.
"See anything?" Jak hissed. "Can't hear nothing."
Ryan held his breath and cautiously edged his good eye around the corner of a control console, peering across into the mat-trans chamber. He blinked and then checked again what he saw.
"Light's fading," he called. "Don't move yet, but it looks like whoever's going and not coming."
He counted a hundred slow, measured beats of his heart, carefully checking again, easing around the edge of the cover, not taking a chance.
One of his first memories of joining War Wag One and the Trader was a firefight against some hillies up in the Zarks, most of them armed with two-hundred-year-old muskets. The man at his side had stuck his head up a touch careless, and Ryan would never forget the warm, sticky splash of brains and clotted blood that had darted into his face as the back of the man's skull exploded.
"What's it look like, lover?" Krysty whispered at his elbow.
"Light's most gone."
"Could still be coming," J.B. called. "We get well blacked out of it when we jump. Could be they're in there."
It was a good point. Ryan kept them for another fifteen minutes, watching the clicking digits of his wrist chron. "Man hurries when he doesn't have to gets himself an early chilling and gives the buzzards a free lunch," Trader used to say.
"Come on. Cover us," Ryan said, beckoning to Krysty and J.B. to follow him.
The glass walls were blank, with an impenetrable silvery sheen. Ryan put out a hand and touched one with the tips of his fingers.
"Still warm."
When they'd been making a jump he hadn't noticed any change in the temperature, but the feeling of having your brains curdled meant you weren't too aware of what was going down around you.
"Shall I open the door?" J.B. asked.
Ryan licked his dry lips. "Guess so. Slow and easy."
"Sure."
The mat-trans chamber was completely empty, not a speck of dust or a bead of moisture. No hint that it had just been used. Ryan called for the others to join them. "Watch you don't touch anything," he warned. "This might operate differently than the other gateways."
Doc paused to study the control panel near the entrance door, shaking his head. "I swear that I have never seen aught like this. Quite different from anything I worked on with Cerberus. It has most definitely been used for transmitting someone to somewhere. But the good Lord alone might know who and where."
"No point in hanging around here," Krysty said. "Nothing to see. Best we move out. Get us some food, if there is any. Break out for the day."
"Or night?" Lori asked quietly.
ANOTHER OF THE TRADER'S RULES had been that you only split your forces when there was no help for it. "Half your men and you got half your power," he would sometimes say.
Though Krysty, Doc, Lori and Jak were all for proceeding into the rest of the redoubt, Ryan insisted they first spend a little time in checking out the lockers that lined the second anteroom.
Most of them were empty. One had a porno pic of a slant-eyed girl with enormous breasts, touching herself with her left hand while the right held the engorged cock of a massive pit bull terrier. The laser-holo caught Jak's attention for several seconds.
"Never seen nothing like it," he said, turning away reluctantly.
At the bottom of one of the narrow cupboards J.B. found a spent cartridge case. "Forty-four," he said, dropping it with a metallic thunk.
The most amazing discovery was in the second last locker in the row. The lock had jammed, and Ryan had to pry it open.
"Well, look at this," he breathed.
The locker contained a black zippered bag, which looked like it contained some kind of bulky uniform. Ryan left that until last. On the top shelf was a pair of worn combat boots with steel tips to heels and toes. Tucked in behind them was an Eickhorn combat knife with a seven-inch blade, rusted and frail from being kept there for so long. A rubbed leather strap held a bolstered pistol, a customized Smith & Wesson Distinguished Combat .357 Magnum.
"Model 686," the armorer commented, hefting the gun, testing the action. He thumbed back on the hammer and eased it down, checking to see if the revolver carried a full load. "Not bad. Not bad at all. Soft on the trigger. Bit of wear around the cylinder. Got a ball catch added in the crane. Mat fiber-blast finish. Nice blaster. Got the Wichita rib sight added for accuracy. Standard six-inch barrel, six rounds. Stocked up with Silvalube bullets."
It was rare that the slightly built man ever spoke more than two consecutive sentences, other than when you got him talking about blasters. Or weapons of any kind.
Ryan took it from him. "Donfil could do with a handblaster, J.B. How'd this be for him?"
"Plenty of gun. Extra sight's a big bonus. Looks like a box of hollow-nose on that shelf up there. Yeah. What d'you think?"
The skeletal Apache stooped and took the blaster from Ryan's fingers, feeling the balance, extending his arm and squinting along the barrel. He finally nodded and tucked the gun into his belt.
"What's this, Ryan?" Jak asked, pulling out a cotton vest that nearly fell apart in his hands. There was writing across the front in faded red lettering. Life Sucks and Then You're Chilled.
Jak crumpled the garment and threw it into the locker.
A denim jacket carried the multiheaded dog that was the symbol of Project Cerberus. Ryan checked through the pockets in case there was anything that might cast some light on the mysterious gateway but found only a torn candy bar wrapper, a handful of loose change and a sliver of card that had once held a condom.
/> He reached out and zipped open the plastic bag, the whisper of sound seeming almost deafening in the stillness of the chamber. All of them jumped as something shapeless and gleaming came toppling out, arms and legs flailing toward them.
"Nearly fucking chilled it." Jak grinned down at the empty, hooded garment that sprawled at their feet.
"Looks like a diving suit," Krysty said. "Had a pic of one in an old book back in Harmony. Book 'bout a subsea boat from real old times."
"Doubtlessly Jules?" Doc suggested.
"No," she replied. "No jewels, no gold, no treasure at all."
"Let it pass," the old man said.
Ryan stooped and picked up the suit, seeing that it was covered in all sorts of numbered and lettered patches, pockets and straps. The material shimmered in his hands and was surprisingly light. There was some sort of screw connection around the neck where it looked as though a helmet had once been fixed, confirming Krysty's guess that the garment had been used for diving. But there was something about it—
"I don't think…" he began, but Doc interrupted him, snatching at the suit and peering at it shortsightedly.
"No!" the old man yelled, voice cracking in his excitement. "No, it's not a diving suit! Course it's not."
"Then what is it?" Lori asked.
Ryan knew the answer a jagged shard of iced time before Doc spoke.
"It's what we used to call a space suit," Doc told them.
The idea that this particular gateway could be used as a portal for travel off the planet into the silent deeps of space didn't, somehow, surprise Ryan Cawdor. He'd read in old books about the way the United States, as it had been called before the name of Deathlands overlaid it, had been dabbling in the exploration of space from the 1950s or so. And in the ten years before nuke-cull, they'd been pouring more and more trillions of dollars into setting up circling stations that would eventually become self-supporting. Just how far some of those plans had gone was unknown. Guesses replaced facts as government censorship bit heavily into the freedom of the media in the nineties.