Doc followed Jak into the larger room, staring around with an expression of fascinated horror and amazement.
"How in tarnation did we make this jump? Pile of rusting scrap like this shouldn't have jumped a fly across three inches of tabletop. Half these contacts are blown." He ran a finger across some of the banks of dead machinery. "Tell you what, my dear companions. If we ever leave here and arrive anywhere safely it will be the greatest miracle since Teddy's election. Dreadful neglect here."
"Hasn't been dusted in the best part of a hundred years, Doc," Krysty said, tapping one of the displays of flickering, fading lights with the barrel of her blaster.
Immediately the entire row of digital displays went blank. There was a sound like a distant turbine running down and shedding blades, and half of the overhead strip lights went dark.
"Don't do that again!" Ryan snapped. "That's double-stupe, Krysty!"
"Sorry. Looks like you're ace on the line, Doc. This place is ready to lie down and die, right here in front of us."
"Think we should wait here and recover some strength? I got me the feeling that whatever's out beyond the main entrance door isn't going to be smiling news."
"I think we all got that feeling, J.B.," Ryan agreed. "Doesn't look like there's any food or water around here. And we're not exactly overloaded."
"You want to go out there, lover?" Krysty asked.
"I don't wantto. If you got a rock and a hard place, you pick the hard place. Let's move out of here. J.B., take the main door."
There was a note of bleak determination in Ryan's voice that they all recognized.
"Sure." The Armorer moved light-footed between the rows of long-abandoned desks, toward the heavy double doors that sealed off the mat-trans unit from the rest of the redoubt.
Stenciled on the wall beside them was the faint message: 352 Open. 253 Close.
"Nothing like a secret code that no son of a bitch can remember." Ryan grinned. "Green lever's down. Lift it and press the buttons."
"Here come the discards and retards," Doc muttered. "Gentlemen rankers, all out on... Can't recall. Just remember that we were to be damned for all of eternity."
The rambling stopped when he caught Ryan's glance. It was a worry that the old man's mind still sometimes slipped a couple of notches, though he was better than when Ryan, Krysty and J.B. had first met him. Then it had been ten parts madness to a smattering of sanity.
The scientists who'd established matter-transmitting had also dabbled in temporal transfer — time jumps. In years of ultrasecret experiments there had only been one successful trawling of a live human being from the past... and a lot of hideously pulped abortions of failure.
The one success, nearly, had been Doc Tanner, picked out of November 1896 where he'd been a happily married man with two young children and dumped a century, then two, later. He made himself such a nuisance that he was eventually retrawled forward another hundred years.
None of that made for a well-balanced, incisive mind.
Doc nodded to himself, lost in some half world of his own, as J.B. threw the lever and coded in the numbers. The door, operated by its antique mechanism, began to move slowly upward.
"Fucking stink!" Jak gagged.
As the door made its ponderous ascent, the stench came seeping in below it, almost like a visible tide wave — rotten flesh and endless nauseating decay.
"No," Krysty whispered. "No, Ryan. Something's out there."
"Yeah, but it's gotta be long dead."
The door shuddered to a halt, about three-quarters open. Beyond it they could see only that the passage was completely dark. The light from behind them spilled out, then was swallowed by the stygian blackness.
"Need lamps," J.B. said.
"Nothing." Jak looked at Ryan for orders.
"You all wait here. I'll go a ways up the corridor and see what I find."
Within five paces the darkness absorbed him.
"Let it lie, lover," Krysty called, her voice muffled.
Ryan turned to reply, and was instantly knocked to the cold damp floor.
Chapter Three
The sudden shock of the fall knocked the breath from Ryan, but he automatically tried for the best defensive position. The Trader used to say that if you couldn't hit, then you tried to save yourself from getting hit. Trader was always a man who looked for the best option.
Ryan curled up tight, hands between his legs to protect his groin, head tucked in to keep his face from being too vulnerable, muscular shoulders hunched against a strangler.
Hands grabbed at him, soft flesh against his body. Breath hissed and slobbered in the darkness, with the same nauseating taste of decay as the air in the redoubt.
Almost instantly Ryan realized something very strange. The fingers that moved over him were feeble, almost tender, with no strength or power to them. In seconds he was recovered from the shock of the attack and began to resist.
"Ryan!" someone yelled. "What's happening?"
In the pitch blackness, he heard something that might have been speech, a wet, whispering sound, like someone whose tongue was too large for his dribbling mouth. Ryan kicked against the enfolding bodies and found himself easily upon his feet again.
Blunt teeth nibbled at his calf and he punched down, feeling spongy flesh that seemed to part under his fist, smearing his skin with a clammy ichor. There was a bubbling cry and something fell away from him onto the stones.
"Ryan!" It was Krysty's voice.
"It's okay! Got me some of the weakest muties the world ever saw. Stay there."
He could see the spillage of yellow light from the gateway control room, with four figures silhouetted against it. But where he stood was still inky gloom, with hands that pulled at him and tried to draw him down to the floor. He felt for the hilt of the panga at his hip and drew it in a muted hiss of promised death.
His eye had become accustomed to the blackness, and he could make out the dim figures of four attackers. One was already rolling on the floor, clutching at his face and moaning. The other three seemed torn between the desire to flee and the desire to attack. One stood off and the other two were groping at Ryan with hopeless, pawing gestures.
The muties were naked, and none was taller than five foot two. Their bodies were thin and weak. It was difficult to be sure, but there seemed to be an odd, shimmering phosphorescence about them. As far as Ryan could see, they were completely hairless and had no visible genitals.
The panga hissed once, lopping an arm off the nearest mutie. Blood pattered around Ryan's feet, and the creature went down like a gut-shot child.
"Want help?" Jak yelled.
"No. Stay there and get ready to drop the doors once I come back in."
A second hacking blow from the panga opened a huge gash across another mutie's lower abdomen, and its intestines spilled into the dirt. Now only one mutie remained up and interested.
"Coming!" Ryan yelled, his boots slithering in the puddled blood.
As he moved toward the beckoning light, the mutie suddenly hurled itself at him, fastening its puny grip around his leg, just below the knee. Ryan hardly checked his stride as he dragged the creature behind him, hearing the slimy scraping of its skin on the concrete floor of the passage.
Jak glided into the shadows, reaching for one of his concealed throwing-knives. He drew the delicate, leaf-bladed weapon and waited for Ryan to reach him so that he could stoop and slit the mutie's throat.
The smell, unbelievably, was becoming even stronger.
"Leave him, Jak. Bastard's weaker'n a half-drowned kitten."
Ryan finally reached the pool of light and could actually look down at his clinging opponent. It was the first time he'd seen the face of one of the subterranean muties.