"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 reallywasn'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.
Now here was clear, undeniable evidence that this secondary gateway had been used as a link, not only with other gateways across the land, but also outward.
Everyone wanted to talk about it, but Ryan stopped the excited chatter. "Come on, friends! Nothing more here to see." He took the space suit and threw it back into the locker. "Let's go find us some food and somewhere to rest up after that jump."
"But, my dear Ryan, do you not realize what this discovery means?"
"Sure, Doc. Means someone, apart from us seven, knows how to use a Gateway. Mebbe they know better than us how they work. But we just missed 'em by the width of a knife blade. They've gone..." he waved an arm in the vague direction of the brightly lit ceiling "...somewhere out there. We keep moving long enough and far enough, we'll likely come across 'em one day."
Donfil slung his Sharps .50 across his shoulders by its braided strap, gripping his new Smith & Wesson blaster in his long fingers. Ryan shook his head as he glanced at the immensely tall Apache, thinking what a raggle-taggle band they were.
"Smell like swamps," Jak said, pausing suddenly, sniffing at the cool, recirculated air like a pointing hound.
Ryan also took in several deep breaths through his nose, as did the others.
Only Krysty noticed anything. "Sort of rotting plants and salty and... Can't place the smell, but Jak's right. There's something around."
The door out of the main control section of the redoubt opened on a simple manual switch. In the corridor beyond, Ryan immediately noticed that there were prepared firing points for defense, with side walls cutting out at angles to give cover to riflemen. That was something new as well, strengthening the feeling that this place was, somehow, real special.
"Smell's stronger," Ryan said. "I can taste it now."
The passageway forked after a hundred paces. To the right was a flight of stairs going upward, with a door at its top. To the left was a massively solid pair of titanium-steel doors, surrounded by thick black rubber sealing strips.
"Stop a battalion of war wags, doors like that," J.B. said.
Lori shivered and Doc hastily put his arm around her shoulder. "Feel colder and wet." She screwed up her face to show her discomfort.
"Yes. There's the sensation of a long-closed tomb down here, Ryan," Doc commented. "Best we try to go upward, I think."
Ryan shook his head. "Those look like outer doors to the redoubt. Best thing is to find out what kind of place we've landed up in. J.B. can use his sextant, and we'll have some idea, mebbe, of what to expect. There's the main control lock to the right of the entrance."
It was a chromed steel wheel, which was obviously linked to some system of gears that would swing open the huge doors. At a nod from Ryan, the Armorer went to lay a hand on the wheel. "Real cold," he said.
"Everyone back and ready for trouble," Ryan warned. "Could be... Just take real good care."
They all heard the faint hiss of hydraulics engaging — the whirring of long-static motors grumbling into reluctant life. Above the sounds Ryan detected the noise of cogs not quite meshing, metal grinding ominously.
"Not good, J.B.!" he called.
But the face beneath the shadowing fedora hat didn't turn toward him, and he realized that the Armorer wasn't able to hear him.
The polished wheel started to revolve slowly, J.B.'s knuckles white with the effort of moving it around.
"It's real hard and... No, it's going now. Yeah, there she..."
The words were drowned out by the great green-white gusher of water that jetted between the opening doors, bursting among the group with the power of a fire hose and knocking them off their feet.
Ryan opened his mouth to yell for them to make for the stairs, but he was nearly choked by the rush of freezing salt water that filled his throat.
He rolled over and over, fighting to get to his feet, clawing his way up the wall until he could find his balance. The wave was already three feet deep, swirling around the tops of his thighs. He'd automatically hung on to his weapons as the sea tumbled him down. To his enormous relief, Ryan saw that the inrush had hit him harder than the rest, since he'd been standing near the center of the passageway.
Doc had Lori by the arm and was already leading her up the stairs toward the high set of doors. The girl was barely able to walk, her long blond hair hanging limply across her shoulders.
Jak was on the second step, scarcely knee-deep, brushing back his mane of snow-white hair, peering down for the others. J.B. was clinging to the chrome wheel, braced against the wall, hat tugged immovably down over his forehead. He shook his head as he turned to face Ryan. Above the thunder of the deepening water, Ryan couldn't hear him, but the shape of his mouth and the movement of the head made it clear that the control was jammed. Nothing could stop the sea from continuing to pour into the redoubt.
Krysty came bursting up from underwater, hair like a spurt of fire around her face. She managed to stand alongside her man, putting her lips close to his ears to shout "You all right, lover? Make for the stairs? Only way."
"Yeah!" he bellowed, wondering how deep below the sea the doors of the redoubt lay, and if the other exit from the corridor, some thirty feet above them, would be open.
Out of the corner of his eye he spotted Donfil, brandishing his new blaster, the incoming waves hardly reaching to his knees as he picked his way toward the staircase with the ungainly delicacy of a feeding stork.
Ryan clutched Krysty by the hand and they battled together across the corridor, joined by J.B. just before they reached the line of steps. The sea had already reached their waists.
"Jammed solid!" J.B. yelled. "Couldn't shift it an inch."
"Best hope we can open those doors at the top. Or we're in the deepest shit."
"Unless the waters stop rising."
The doors proved immovably locked. As the seven huddled wetly together on the narrow landing, all they could do was watch the dull gray waters rise inexorably higher toward them.
Higher and higher.