Ice and Fire d-8

by James Axler

  Ice and Fire

  ( Deathlands - 8 )

  James Axler

  Snakefish, California, is rich in the currency of post-holocaust America. Gasoline.

  Almost leveled by the soviet missiles that annihilated most of the West Coast, Snakefish is in the midst of a reconstruction, financed by a commodity far more valuable than the usual Deathlands jack.

  But greed and man's lust for power threaten to shatter the hard won peace and tranquillity of this fledgling community as disparate factions that fight for control of the substance that will give them wealth beyond their wildest dreams.

  Ryan Cawdor and his companions emerge from a gateway and step into the path of a smoldering war for power.

  James Axler

  Ice and Fire

  "Pro captu lectoris habent sua fata libelli," said Terentianus Maurus, around A.D 200. This is particularly true if the reader is my line editor, Cathy Haddad. This book is for her, with thanks for her always positive and friendly support.

  This ae nighte, this ae nighte, every nighte and alle, Fire and sleet and candle-lighte, and Christe receive thy soule.

  From the medieval ballad, "The Lyke-Wake Dirge"

  Chapter One

  Ryan Cawdor's fingers flexed, brushing against the polished metal floor of the mat-trans chamber. He was still struggling back from the dark depths of unconsciousness. The tip of his right index finger touched something sticky and warm, a little below body temperature. The finger moved a crabbing inch farther, investigating the substance.

  Ryan's one good eye blinked open for a moment, looking down at his hand.

  "Blood," he said.

  Blood it was — a dark pool of it, nearly eighteen inches across, crusting at the edges. Ryan touched again, checking that he was conscious, feeling the too-familiar stickiness.

  The chamber still smelled flat and bitter from the gases released during the jump, and the metal disks in floor and ceiling were creaking faintly as they cooled down.

  The armaglass walls were a pallid, translucent gray color. The gateway that they'd just left had been walled in a deep, brilliant turquoise. Ryan remembered that, remembered it because it had reminded him so much of the Indian jewelry of the far Southwest.

  He closed his eye again and took slow deep breaths, trying to speed his recovery. The jumps always scrambled everyone's brains, making them feel as if the contents of their skulls had been drained, freeze-dried, sandblasted and then returned. While Ryan had been out, his head had slumped and the patch over the blind socket of his left eye had become uncomfortable. He lifted a hand and adjusted it, opened his right eye and tried once more to focus on the crimson puddle.

  Blood meant that someone was bleeding — Ryan could deduce that much, despite the mind tremor of a gateway jump. He blinked and followed the blood to its source.

  "Fireblast," he sighed.

  Doc Tanner had suffered one of his sporadic nosebleeds during the period of blackout. Blood ran from his hawkish nose, through his grizzled stubble, down the furrows of his chin. It dribbled across his neck and over his stained blue denim shirt, pattering in an uncertain trickle onto the floor.

  Trying to collect his thoughts, Ryan looked around the hexagonal room. Despite the bleeding nose, Doc seemed to be all right.

  Doctor Theophilus Algernon Tanner looked to be around sixty years old. By one measure of time he was only about thirty. By another kind of temporal yardstick he was somewhere close to two hundred and twenty-eight.

  During the 1990s — eight or nine years before the skies had darkened with missiles and the civilized world disappeared forever, American scientists were working on different aspects of a top-secret program, under the umbrella name of the Totality Concept. The aspect that affected the life of Doc Tanner was a part of Overproject Whisper, called the Cerberus Project.

  The hidden gateways — mat-trans chambers — were in closely guarded fortresses or redoubts, which were scattered across North America.

  But they didn't just transport a man in a flicker of frozen time from place to place. The scientists believed they could also be used to breach the last barrier. Time. And in that misguided belief, they experimented in trawling a human being from the past.

  The failures were many, and horrifying. The one partial success was Doc Tanner.

  Married with two young children, Doc had been a respected man of science, in the year of Our Lord 1896...

  Ryan's reminiscence was checked as the old man coughed, spluttered and wiped a gnarled hand over his chin, bringing it away smeared with blood.

  November, two hundred years ago: the young scientist had been tugged forward through time to become the prize guinea pig in Project Cerberus. But Doc had never been the sort of person to sit quiet. After a number of combative years he became so troublesome that the faceless men had a choice. Terminate him with extreme rectitude or chron-jump him again. So Doc had been flung a hundred years into the future. A few weeks later all of the scientists he had left behind perished in the rad blasts of the last world war.

  Ryan had known him for about a year. Now Doc's mind was reasonably reliable, but the shattering events of his life had permanently tipped the balance of his brain and he was known to wander mentally.

  His girlfriend, Lori Quint, lay stretched out on the floor next to him, her blond head in his lap. Some of his blood had dribbled into her long hair, clotting and tangling. Though she was only seventeen years old, Lori had endured an appalling background of incest and violence. Her affection for the elderly scientist had been appealing, but over the past few weeks Ryan had begun to notice signs that all wasn't well between them. The girl was becoming easily irritated and sulky.

  But Ryan had learned from his old friend and boss, the Trader, a great and inalienable truth about women: "What women want from men is what men happen to be right out of," Trader had said.

  Sitting cross-legged next to Doc and Lori was the only other person of the group, other than Ryan, who'd ridden and fought with Trader. Now shaking his head to destroy the clinging fog in his brain, J. B. Dix, the Armorer, was recovering consciousness.

  Under five feet nine in height, slim built, J.B. was closing in on his fortieth year. His complexion was sallow and unhealthy, and his wire-rimmed glasses were hooked safely in a top pocket of his dark brown leather jacket. His beloved and much-traveled fedora lay between his feet. The Armorer was perhaps the greatest expert on weaponry in all the Deathlands. His preference was for a mini-Uzi and a Steyr AUG pistol. A Tekna fighting knife at his hip completed the obvious fighting gear. But his clothes and combat boots also concealed a wealth of hidden equipment: fuses, picklocks and stilettos; wire and a little plas-ex, as well as a folding sextant.

  J.B. was a walking arsenal.

  As Ryan looked across the chamber at his oldest friend, the man's gray eyes flicked open. He glanced around at the others.

  "Doc got a bloody nose," he said. "Rest look okay to me." The Armorer was never a man to use two words when one would do the job.

  There were two other people in the mat-trans room, both of them still unconscious. Next to J.B. in the circle was the youngest member of the traveling group of companions, a lad fifteen years of age. He weighed 110 pounds soaking wet and was five feet four inches tall. His long mane of spun silver hair cascaded across his skinny shoulders like a winter fall of Sierra melt-water. His mind blanked by the jump, the boy looked like a sleeping child, at peace with the world.

  To Ryan's knowledge, Jak Lauren had killed upward of a hundred human beings and probably as many muties. When it came to close-quarter butchery, Ryan had never seen anyone to match the teenager. A satin-finish .357 Magnum was tucked in his belt. The torn leather-and-canvas jacket he held in his lap, in camouflage brown, gray and gree
n, had tiny shards of razored steel sewn into it. He also carried several — Ryan never knew how many — leaf-bladed throwing knives. The youngster's ruby-red eyes remained stubbornly closed, though movement of his fingers showed that Jak was coming around.

  Krysty Wroth leaned against the armaglass wall, close by Ryan, still in the classic lotus position, the palms of her hands flat upon her thighs. Her fiery crimson hair was bunched protectively around her neck. Krysty's body trembled and she sighed. Then she opened her dazzling green eyes, turned her head and half smiled across at Ryan.

  "Don't get easier, do they, lover?" she asked quietly.

  "No. Just wish we could learn how to control where we go on these jumps. I worry that one day we're gonna end up in a gateway that doesn't exist, with half a mountain on top of us."

  "Reminds me of the time back in Harmony Ville, when I was a girl. Fat guy named Johannus fell clean out the top of a two-hundred-foot ponderosa. Folks heard him all the way down yelling out 'So far, so good. So far, so good.' Know what I mean?"

  Ryan had heard the story before, but it still amused him. Each time Krysty told it there was a different location and a different person doing the falling. But it remained a good tale.

  Now everyone was coming out of it. Lori rolled on her side, her face a pale yellow, holding her stomach. "I feel sick," she moaned. She raised a hand to investigate her hair. "Oh, blood! Who bleeds? Doc? All going in my buggered hair!" She managed to get to her hands and knees before beginning to retch. It had been some time since their last meal, and there was nothing in her stomach but threads of golden bile.

  The noise woke Doc. "By the three Kennedys! What's amiss here? Small nasal hemorrhage, I do believe."

  Jak Lauren tried to stand up, steadying himself against the shimmering gray wall. "Head fucked," he muttered. "Hate jumps. Head feels bad."

  "Take it easy," Ryan warned.

  Lori had stopped retching and had also stood up, picking at the matted blood in her hair. As she moved, the tiny silver spurs on her high red boots tinkled with a thin, clear sound.

  Ryan sighed and slowly uncoiled, picking up the Heckler & Koch G-12 automatic rifle from the floor, then checked that his SIG-Sauer 9 mm pistol was safely holstered at his belt. He reached down to help Krysty to her feet, getting a smile of appreciation in return.

  J.B. stood up in his neat, effortless way, brushing dust off his clothes. "Don't think I'll ever enjoy these jumps."

  Doc was last to his feet, dabbing at his bloodied nose with a blue swallow's-eye kerchief. He leaned on his ornate ebony swordstick, gripping it by the silver lion's-head top. "Upon my soul but I have made a dreadful mess on the floor. Considerable tapping of the claret."

  "And on my head, you stupe crazy," Lori moaned. "Got it on my boots." The sound of the leather sole peeling from the metal disks was unpleasantly sticky.

  "Sorry, my dearest dove." Doc moved to put his arm around her, but the tall blonde moved away, shrugging pettishly.

  "Everyone ready?" Ryan asked. He didn't need to check that both his blasters had rounds under the hammer. They always did.

  "Wonder where are now?" Jak said, licking his lips. "Can't smell or taste nothing."

  "Know when we get outside." J.B. glanced across at Ryan. "Now?"

  Ryan nodded. "Yeah. Blasters ready, people. Krysty, you open the chamber door."

  The trigger of the caseless G-12 felt good with Ryan's index finger wrapped around it. True, they'd never yet encountered a gateway where the main control room had been infiltrated, but there had to be a first time for everything.

  Krysty brushed the tumbling hair away from her face, gripped the handle and pushed the armored door open.

  Chapter Two

  "Safe," she said.

  As was usual in the gateways, the main mat-trans chamber opened into a small anteroom, which was only about twelve feet square and contained no furniture. A row of shelves lined one wall, and a dark green plastic beaker stood alone on the middle shelf. Generally the redoubts that Ryan had seen throughout the wastes of the Deathlands had been surprisingly clean. They were all run by efficient nuke plants and comp-controlled to regulate light, heat, humidity and antistat dust maintenance.

  This small room was no exception. Very faintly, far off, felt rather than heard, came the whispering vibration of the main power plant — self-maintaining, ticking away dutifully for a hundred years, still doing the job that its long-dead creators had programmed it to perform.

  J.B. followed Krysty, with Ryan eventually bringing up the rear. With six of them in the room it was a little crowded. Jak picked up the beaker and looked inside it. He shook his head and replaced the container on the shelf. "Dry as neutron bones."

  From several previous experiences, Ryan knew that beyond the closed door would be the main control room for the gateway. Its condition would probably give them a valuable clue as to the state of the rest of the redoubt. Some had been totally evacuated during the megadeath panic in the last weeks of the year 2000. Some had shown signs of having been left in a tearing hurry in the second week of January, 2001.

  "Ready?" Krysty asked.

  The heavy door was vanadium steel, with a hydraulic power switch. There was the hissing sound of the motor operating, and the door slid open. The six had traveled together long enough to know how they should operate in a potentially dangerous situation. Krysty and J.B. slithered out quickly, flattening themselves against the walls on either side of the entrance. Jak and Doc, with Lori dragging at their heels, darted toward the nearest cover, which was a line of workbenches. Ryan stayed behind for a moment in the anteroom, ready to provide supporting fire if it proved necessary.

  But the room was empty.

  The huge double doors that would link it to the remainder of the fortress were solidly closed. Ryan stepped out, easing the door shut behind him. He took his finger off the trigger of the G-12 and let the rifle dangle from its shoulder strap. Everyone else relaxed.

  "Lori!"

  "What, Ryan?"

  The tall, broad-shouldered man strode across to where the girl had draped herself across a padded chair. She glanced up, seeing the flare of anger in his eye, and winced as if Ryan had already struck her across the face.

  "Get up, girl," he ordered.

  Krysty moved a half step forward to try to intercede.

  "Keep out of it, lover," Ryan said, quiet, not even turning.

  Lori, eyes glued to his face, rose slowly to her feet. In her heels she came close to his six foot and two inches height. Nervously she lifted a hand to flick away an errant curl from her forehead.

  "Don't ever do that again, Lori," Ryan warned.

  "Do what?"

  "Come out of an unknown door like you were strolling into a high-fash clothes store in a fancy ville."

  "I don't know what..." she began, ducking and recoiling as he actually lifted a clenched fist toward her.

  Like a wolf checking its leap in midair, Ryan succeeded in holding back the intended blow.

  "Fireblast, you triple-stupe bitch! You think this is some kind of game? Bang and you're dead and then we all sit around and share a self-heat? Any team's as good as its weakest member."

  "And that's you, Lori," Krysty pointed out.

  "Just kept your fucking mouth shutting, Krysty," the younger girl snapped.

  "We all have to pull together, my dear," Doc said, trying to placate his teenage mistress.

  "You pull yourself, you old..."

  Ryan reached out and grabbed Lori by the collar, hefting her so that her toes barely scraped the floor of the control room. "Keep buttoned, girl! You screw up and we all get screwed up. Stay alert when you're supposed to."

  "What if I don't?" she sneered, recovering her nerve now she saw he wasn't actually going to hit her.

  "If you don't stop playing around with all of our lives? Easy, Lori. We dump you. Just walk away and leave you behind. I figure you might live a couple of days on your own."

  "You'd chill me?" She looked around
at the faces of the other four, seeking some sign that they disputed what Ryan was saying.

  Krysty met her gaze, nodding slightly. J.B. simply stared straight back at the blond teenager. Jak turned his fingers into a gun and pointed at her, drilling her between the eyes. Doc shuffled his feet and looked down at the floor.

  Ryan answered her question. "You carry your share, Lori, and nobody chills you. You let us down and then you get treated like anyone outside the group. If that means chilling, then..." The sentence trailed away into the stillness of the room.

  The tension stretched, against the background of flickering lights, dancing dials and chattering comp-consoles. This was the nerve center of the whole redoubt, where every aspect of the building was controlled. Once, it had all been set running for the convenience of the human occupants. Now they were gone, but it still kept steadily to its ordained tasks.

  "Looks like they left in a hurry," Krysty said, easing the moment.

  In his blood-blurred anger at Lori's casual stupidity, Ryan had barely noticed what the control room looked like. Now he took a few moments to glance around.

  If he hadn't known better, he might have guessed that the workers had only rushed out of the big room minutes ago, rather than nearly a hundred years back. There were a number of Styrofoam cups, and plastic containers that had once held sandwiches, long rotted and gone. Pens and pads lay scattered on the benches, scraps of crumpled paper on the floor. On an impulse Ryan stopped and picked one up from the tiles near his feet, unfolding it carefully.

  "Like the Dead Sea Scrolls," Doc said. "Open with caution."

  The paper was part of a comp-print, covered on one side with an incomprehensible mass of jumbled figures. He turned it over. There, on the other side, was faded handwriting — a question from one person, with a reply in different colored ink.

  My room after last food?

  Piss in a hot spot!

  Ryan grinned. "Nothing changes, does it?" He crumpled the note to brittle shards and let them filter through his fingers like grains of sand.