by James Axler
The ice and snow plucked from the rock and swirled in the never-ending flurry of winds still numbed and chilled when coming into contact with exposed skin. Despite the layers of skins and furs that still swathed them, the companions were chilled to the bone by the constant crosswinds, this time without the exercise of marching to warm them in any way. It was all they could do not to succumb to the ravages of hypothermia. How ironic if their attempt to increase their speed was to cause their demise. However they chose to make their flight, it seemed as though they faced nothing but life-threatening obstacles.
Two nights huddled by fires built—on the second night—from some of their sleds caused them to double up for the last day, and to put more strain on the livestock—livestock that was becoming more and more unsettled as Jak slaughtered some to feed the others and to feed the companions. Ryan had been correct in his assumption that the creatures would be too hungry and cold to be that distressed by the slaughter, intent as they were on eating their chilled companions to appease the hunger gnawing at their guts; however they were still unsettled enough for their pace to be upset on the following day’s trek.
The trail took them along the base of the volcanic slopes that housed the Inuit village. They skirted the rock-enclosed passage and didn’t take the trail as it wound up into the wooded slopes, choosing to avoid a possible firefight by keeping to the base of the slope. Ryan hoped that the few remaining Inuit wouldn’t be hunting at that point in the day. The way he had it figured, they’d have enough trouble keeping the settlement going, and it was too early for them to be sniffing around for any sign of their warriors returning.
After passing the volcanic region, and watching it recede peacefully into the distance, it was only a matter of a few hours by sled before they reached the area where the redoubt was hidden.
All the while, Doc hovered between conscious and unconscious. Mildred tended to him, but could still find no reason why he shouldn’t be fully aware of what was occurring around him. It seemed to her almost as if he were surfacing, taking note of his surroundings, then retreating into his own mind after deciding that he didn’t like what he saw.
J.B. took what sightings he could in the appalling conditions, trusting the accuracy of the minisextant and his own skill to attain an accurate reading. Ryan hoped that the Armorer’s sense of direction under these conditions was accurate. They couldn’t last for much longer without some respite from the weather.
He didn’t care where they might end up when they made the mat-trans jump. Anywhere had to be better than this…although, he realized with bitterness it was probably how he’d felt before they ended up in these icy wastes.
J.B. motioned them to change direction and a familiar outcropping came into view. The end of their quest was in sight.
It was almost as if Doc knew. He surprised Mildred by raising himself up on one elbow and looking at her with a quizzical air that was at once all too familiar to her.
A suspicion confirmed when he opened his mouth and said, in a voice that was distinctly his own, ‘My dear Doctor, what on earth are we doing out here in these appalling conditions? And why, pray tell, do you look as though you’ve been on the losing side of a fight?’
Chapter Two
Although nothing had changed within the confines of the redoubt since they had last set foot there a few days before, the atmosphere that greeted them was totally different. Where there had previously been an air of gloom and foreboding, now there was nothing but a sense of relief. Despite the memories that had been stirred by their last incursion, there was no trace of remorse or remembrance. The strange atmosphere that had seemed to drape itself over them, penetrating to their very souls and painting their emotional world a darker shade of black, had now lifted.
Perhaps those ghosts that had been stirred had now dissipated, blown away by the experiences of the past few days. Perhaps those ghosts had never really existed and were just random memories that had fed a deeper malaise triggered by the act of a mat-trans jump. Or perhaps they were still here, but were now kept at bay by the fatigue that ate into their very bones, deadening all thought and all feeling in the effort just to keep moving until they were in a position to fall unconscious with exhaustion.
Ryan punched in the sec code once they were on the inside of the heavy entry doors. The remaining beasts had been freed from the sleds and driven away from the entrance. They lurked at a distance, unsure of what to do and where to go. Born into service, they were wild but with muted survival instincts, wanting to stick close to humans they saw as a source of food. There was only a slim chance that they would survive in the harsh environment, finding their way back to the remaining Inuit if they were lucky. It might have been kinder to have chilled them all, putting them out of their misery quickly and efficiently, yet it would have required an effort that none would have felt they had the energy to discharge.
As the door closed on the lurking beasts, on the snow and ice carried on chill winds and on the barren rock landscape, they felt a collective relief. The slightly musty recycled air, heated to a bearable temperature, kicked in, driving the cold from their bones. It was all they could do to keep from collapsing in the tunnel.
Except, perhaps, for Doc, who seemed filled with a new vitality.
‘By the Three Kennedys, I don’t know what’s been going on—nor, come to that, why I am still with you when I appear to have been in some sort of coma all this time—but I do know that whatever it is, it appears to have taken a hefty toll upon you all.’
‘Hefty toll,’ Mildred repeated with a short, barking laugh. ‘Doc, you mad old freak of nature, I don’t think you even know how funny that is.’
‘Funny would appear to be a strange word for it, given the condition in which you find yourselves,’ Doc replied, a little perplexed.
‘You know, it kind of depends on what you mean by funny, I guess,’ Mildred answered him. ‘I mean, do you see me laughing?’
‘That would seem to be the last thing that you are capable of doing right now,’ Doc threw back at her with all seriousness.
Mildred fixed him with a shrewd look. ‘I don’t think you’ve got the slightest idea what’s been going on, have you?’
Doc opened his mouth, but no words came forth. Only Mildred now stood at the end of the corridor with him. The others had wordlessly made their way down the corridor, headed for the showers and the dorms. They moved slowly and with the grim determination of those only kept awake by sheer willpower, a dogged one-foot-in-front-of-the-other approach all that kept them going. Mildred followed the direction of his gaze, read the complete confusion in his eyes.
‘No, I don’t suppose you have,’ she murmured more to herself than to the bewildered old man. Then, in a louder voice, she added, ‘Doc, I can’t tell you everything now. I’m just too damn tired and aching. Another few hours aren’t going to hurt. We just need to rest and clean up before we jump.’
‘We’re using the mat-trans again, so soon? But surely we should be looking for—’
‘Doc, just don’t,’ she interrupted, holding up a hand to silence him, then turning away to follow the others. She threw a parting shot over her shoulder. ‘Just wait, keep it all in until tomorrow, then you’ll understand.’
Doc stood watching her, a frown furrowing his brow. Whatever had happened out there—whatever it was that he couldn’t remember—it had some kind of effect on those people he called his friends. The only friends he had in this godforsaken land in which he had been forced to strive for survival. Even in the few short minutes that he had been conscious he had noticed that there was some kind of distance that had arisen between them.
Why? He could recall being here and leaving to strike out toward Ank Ridge. But then? He could recall depression, and he could recall a storm that mirrored his mood, a blizzard that obscured the landscape in the same way that his feelings had obscured his ability to observe and function what was happening around him…and after that? A blur of ideas, images and emotions that h
e couldn’t grasp.
The distance he felt was mirrored by the way in which they had left him at the head of the tunnel. As Mildred disappeared around a dog-leg bend, leaving him isolated by the entrance, he felt that the physical distance was nothing more than a mirror.
Reluctantly—for he had no idea what he would face when the others had rested—he followed on from them. By the time that he had reached the showers, they were stripped and washing the filth, ice and blood from their battered bodies.
Doc sat quietly as they finished and dried themselves. Only the barest necessity of communication took place, no more than a few words in each exchange. It was almost as though they were too tired to even acknowledge one another’s existence. Certainly, none seemed to acknowledge Doc’s presence.
Before too long he was left alone in the shower room, the others having gone in search of washing machines. Automatically, he stripped and washed himself, noting with an almost detached bemusement the signs of combat, the scars of recent wounds and the discoloration of contusion on his body. How he came to have these, he had no idea.
Frankly, he didn’t care. It was with no little sense of foreboding that he eventually joined the others in the dorms, where he tried to settle to sleep.
The redoubt was silent and still. Doc tried to will himself to sleep, but his mind was racing. Fragments of what might have occurred, and of the thoughts that had plagued what, to him, seemed like a distant dream, ran through his mind, tripping over each other in the race to assume order and to make some kind of sense.
Eventually the effort of trying to make sense from chaos was enough to tire him and he fell into a fitful, uneasy sleep.
DOC AWOKE the next morning to find that the others had risen before him. Despite the unease with which he had first fallen into sleep, it had proved to move from fitful to deep and dreamless, and he now felt refreshed and less apprehensive. He rose and dressed, going in search of the others. In the quiet of the redoubt, the hum of unmaintenanced machinery the only breaks in the silence, it wasn’t difficult to determine where they were.
Doc’s sense took him to the kitchens, where the others were attempting to construct some kind of appetizing and nutritious meal from what they had left in the stores before leaving the last time. Which was very little. But they were in no condition to be fussy about what they would eat. Even the remains of the stores beat charred and burned mule or dog meat when it came to a contest.
‘Doc, I didn’t want to wake you, so I left you,’ Krysty said on catching sight of him. ‘Hope that was okay. How are you feeling?’
‘Do you mean generally? Or are you being more specific—as in, do I feel quite insane today?’ Doc queried with as much of a grin as he could muster.
‘It wasn’t what I meant, but I guess it’s a fair question,’ Krysty mused. ‘I don’t know what you remember, but you kind of lost it for a while there.’
‘I’ll have to take your word for that,’ the old man answered, settling himself among them. ‘I have no recollection of any events after first leaving here and being caught in a blizzard.’
Ryan had been watching Doc carefully and had no doubts that the old man was telling the truth. There was something disingenuous about the old man. It was always easy to see when Doc was entering one of his mentally fragile phases, and equally it was easy to see when he had clarity of thought. Now was one of the latter times and Doc seemed genuinely confused about events. If nothing else, Ryan was glad to see the back of Joseph Jordan, whoever or whatever he may have been.
‘Dark night, there’s a lot that happened since then,’ J.B. said with a degree of wry understatement. ‘Where do we begin?’
Doc sat entranced while the events of the past few days were relayed to him. The trek across the wastelands, followed by their discovery by the Inuit hunting party when Doc tried to escape them. Their captivity in the Inuit settlement and near sacrifice in pagan- and Christian-inspired ritual to insure the fertility of the waning tribe. From this, the sudden emergence from fever of a new personality within Doc—that of the reincarnated Joseph Jordan. When the story reached this point, all watched Doc closely for some flicker of recognition, yet there was none. The only emotion to register on his face was that of astonishment.
From here, the old man’s astonishment mounted as they unfurled his plans to take on the ville of Fairbanks as a large-scale sacrifice to their Lord, and of the war party he had helped to prepare.
By the time that Mildred and Jak were relaying to him the doomed attack on the ville, and the manner in which they had almost been trapped within the burning streets, Doc’s face was ashen. Racing through his mind were thoughts of how his own insanity had nearly doomed his companions. Thoughts that jostled for space within his mind with others, that were darker and more introverted: how fragile was his mind, his personality, that it was able to be submerged so easily into some kind of disguise? How easy was it for him to sink into a kind of oblivion where he was able to threaten the very existence of those he valued most with no impunity?
‘Doc, Doc, are you okay?’
‘Eh?’ The old man shook himself from his reverie to see that the others were studying him closely. He realized that their story had ended and he had seemed not to acknowledge this.
‘I’m sorry,’ he began haltingly. ‘I just find it hard to comprehend. That I could have seemed to have functioned so clearly and yet to be advocating such madness. In fact, actively pursuing it.’ He shook his head slowly. ‘I have no recall of any of the events you have outlined, not even in the sense of a dream from which I was detached, merely the observer. What I recall is so much…less…’ He petered off, not quite sure where to begin.
In the ensuing silence Ryan scanned the companions as they sat around the kitchen of the redoubt. Mildred and Krysty, who seemed to have a better grasp of the complexities of Doc’s psyche than anyone else, were on edge, waiting for the old man to try to explain what had happened to him in his own mind. It was vital information for them, as they would be able to try to assess just where he was coming from…and perhaps where he was going to.
Jak was impassive. His scarred albino features were as grim and unreadable as they always were. Very rarely did any emotion escape the mask that he used to shield himself from the outside world. But he would be taking it in and making his own assessment.
J.B. looked like Ryan felt—as though he wanted to know what was happening with Doc but doubted that he could assimilate it. The two men had been friends for so long that Ryan was sure that J.B. felt the same way as he did. They were men of action and only used their sharp minds when action was called for. This was something beyond that range of experience.
Doc began again. ‘In my mind, I felt as though I were not here. Everything that I experienced on our journey to the Inuit ville was part of some test. I was back in the time from which I originally came. I was insane, locked in a padded room and going through these experiences as a kind of mental exercise. It was as though I were a rat in a maze, running blindly at the behest of some celestial scientist who had a purpose in mind for me, and if I reached the end of the maze I would be rewarded. Not with candy or cheese, but with the truth. A revelation that would explain why I was going through this whole experience…not just since landing here, but in the entire time since you, my dear friends, first saved me from the hands of Cort Strasser.
‘It seemed to me that in order to do this, I had to go through some kind of change, some kind of rebirth. I had to be like the butterfly that emerges from the chrysalis…even if that change meant that I had little or no knowledge of the life that I had experienced before that moment.
‘I suspect that that was the moment at which this man Jordan first made an appearance. I could not tell you who or what he was, only that once he appeared, I receded not just in your eyes, but in my own mind, as well. I have no recall of anything that happened after that, and only one fleeting memory from then until I awoke on the sled as we approached this place once more.
&n
bsp; ‘If I think about it, I can remember, just for a moment, standing in a log cabin staring at you all, wrapped in furs and skins. I tried to speak, but somehow the words would not come out. It was as though I were watching you through a gauze, as though I could hear you through a fog of white noise. My chest was constrained, making every breath something for which I had to fight, every syllable something that had to be forced from my lips. The words were there, but they would not come out.’
‘But it is fleeting, momentary, and after that there is nothing. Nothing until last evening, when I awoke to find myself on a sled, aware that something had happened, but not what that may be.’
Doc stuttered to a halt and shrugged, not knowing where to go.
‘I think that being here triggered things you didn’t want to remember and made you withdraw into yourself,’ Mildred said slowly. ‘Strange thing is, although it may sound like madness, it’s more a way of clinging on to your sanity.’
‘But at what cost?’ Doc spit bitterly. ‘What does it benefit me if I save sanity at the expense of losing identity? What use is it if I close down whenever things get too much? How does this settle with the notion that I am in some way a useful member of this group. Good heavens, Doctor, if I am to retreat into my own head at the drop of a hat, what possible use could I be to you? In fact, I could be nothing except a complete liability. And this is not a world in which to carry passengers.’
‘That’s for us to decide,’ Ryan cut in.
Doc shook his head firmly. ‘I cannot be responsible for such an eventuality.’
‘Then what do you propose to do about it?’ Krysty asked in a reasonable tone. ‘You want to stay here, alone? How long will you cling to your sanity then? You had a set of circumstances that are unlikely to occur again. I can’t see why you—’
‘But that is not the point,’ Doc shouted over her. ‘It may have been a one-off occurrence, but I cannot know that for sure, any more than you can. I cannot risk it happening again.’
