Seedling Read online

  Seedling

  Deathlands Saga

  Book XIII

  James Axler

  First edition September 1991

  ISBN 0-373-62513-8

  Copyright © 1991 by Worldwide Library

  Philippine copyright 1991

  Australian copyright 1991

  Content

  Excerpt

  Dedication

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  Chapter Seven

  Chapter Eight

  Chapter Nine

  Chapter Ten

  Chapter Eleven

  Chapter Twelve

  Chapter Thirteen

  Chapter Fourteen

  Chapter Fifteen

  Chapter Sixteen

  Chapter Seventeen

  Chapter Eighteen

  Chapter Nineteen

  Chapter Twenty

  Chapter Twenty-One

  Chapter Twenty-Two

  Chapter Twenty-Three

  Chapter Twenty-Four

  Chapter Twenty-Five

  Chapter Twenty-Six

  Chapter Twenty-Seven

  Chapter Twenty-Eight

  Chapter Twenty-Nine

  Chapter Thirty

  Chapter Thirty-One

  Chapter Thirty-Two

  Chapter Thirty-Three

  Chapter Thirty-Four

  Chapter Thirty-Five

  Chapter Thirty-Six

  Chapter Thirty-Seven

  Chapter Thirty-Eight

  Chapter Thirty-Nine

  Chapter Forty

  Chapter Forty-One

  Chapter Forty-Two

  Chapter Forty-Three

  Excerpt

  The dying woman had been knifed by one of the scalie guards as she'd tried to escape

  "Should I end it for her?" Ryan asked, hand on his panga.

  At the sound of his voice, the woman's eyes opened. For several long heartbeats she gazed blindly into space. Then she moved her head and her eyes locked on Ryan's face. "You," she finally whispered.

  Her hand spidered up her chest to her throat and gripped a square metal pendant. "Take," she commanded, her eyes burning into Ryan's good one. "Open. Rona said to find you. Died long back. Quest. Look after." Her breathing was becoming faster and more shallow.

  Slowly Ryan opened the locket and found that it con­tained two things—a tiny ringlet of blond hair and a pic­ture, a faded, pale brown portrait.

  "Who is it?" he asked, even though he knew what the an­swer was going to be.

  "Your son, Ryan Cawdor. It's your son."

  Dedication

  This is for Geoff, Anne, Ben and Saul Kelly, who are friends. If you don't have dreams, then how can they come true?

  Chapter One

  RYAN CAWDOR OPENED his eye, then closed it again, hoping to avoid throwing up. He'd lost count of the number of jumps he'd made over the past year or so, but there was one great truth.

  They didn't get any easier.

  The first moments weren't too bad—the humming and the lights glowing in floor and ceiling, the fin­gers of mist appearing in the chamber, hiding the colored armaglass walls.

  Then the good part ended.

  Ryan had thought about the sensation several times, trying to focus his mind on precisely what happened during a jump from gateway to gateway, from mat-trans chamber to mat-trans chamber.

  All he could think was that it was like having a clumsy child disassemble your skull, then run a pointed file around the inside, scraping at the sensi­tive parts of your brain, stirring things up so that past, present and future got hopelessly scrambled.

  There was pain and nausea every time, and a blinding ache in the head as though someone had been trying to remove your eyes, from the inside.

  Ryan cautiously opened his good right eye, draw­ing a slow, whistling breath as he fought for control. He took another breath and felt relieved as he real­ized he definitely wasn't going to vomit this time.

  "Fireblast," he muttered.

  None of the others had regained consciousness yet, all lying or sitting around the chamber. It was odd not to see Jak Lauren there. The snow-headed albino boy had been with them for… For how long?

  Ryan couldn't remember. It seemed like forever, and now the boy was gone.

  Another surge from his stomach brought the bitter taste of bile. Ryan swallowed hard and closed his eye again.

  Memories twisted in his head, one above all—the narrow face, eyes blazing with a feral hatred, staring at him. And a hand, fingers twisted in agony, vanish­ing into the sucking slime.

  The Trader used to say he didn't have any ene­mies, and when someone picked up on it, as was the rule, he'd smile that wise, lopsided smile and say, "None alive."

  But that wasn't true. In Deathlands there were al­ways new enemies.

  A voice jerked him from his reverie.

  "Still sleeping, lover?"

  "I feel like double-shit."

  "We're getting too old for all these jumps."

  For the third time Ryan risked opening an eye. Krysty Wroth was sitting next to him, running her fingers through her fiery hair. It tumbled over her shoulders, strangely sentient, seeming to move of its own volition.

  "Some are bad," he admitted.

  She smiled. "And some are worse."

  "Yeah."

  "Seems funny without the kid."

  "Hope he and his lady make it."

  Krysty reached across and touched his arm. "That cut doesn't look too good, lover."

  It was a souvenir of the dizzying fight against Cort Strasser, inflicted by his bone-hilted knife. Blood had run down Ryan's arm, crusting on the fingers of his left hand, but now the long, shallow wound was dried.

  "I look better than Strasser."

  "Anyone looks better than Strasser." The third voice in the chamber rang off the maroon walls of armaglass.

  "Thanks, J.B.," Ryan said. "Enjoy the trip?"

  The slight figure of J. B. Dix, Armorer to the group of friends, straightened. He put his hands into his jacket pocket and retrieved his wire-framed specta­cles. "Lost my autorifle and my Tekna knife. Go on like this, Ryan, and I'll end up naked."

  "You got blood on your mouth," Krysty told him.

  There was a tiny thread of crimson leaking from the corner of J.B.'s lips, and he wiped it away on his sleeve.

  Krysty stood, the heels of her western-style boots clattering on the metal disks in the floor. She swayed a little and placed a hand on the wall. "Gaia! That wasn't the most fun I've had."

  "How's Mildred?" Ryan asked, looking at the fourth member of their quintet.

  "Old Mildred's fine, apart from some son of a bitch banging on the inside of my head with a hammer."

  Mildred Wyeth was a doctor, born in December 1964, well over 130 years earlier. She'd gone into the hospital for a minor operation in the last days of De­cember in the year 2000, just three weeks before the nuke-madness that brought utter ruin to the world. As a result of a medical accident, Mildred had been cryogenically frozen, lying in suspended animation until snatched from her endless sleep by Ryan Caw­dor and his comrades.

  Since then she'd been one of them, sharing their small triumphs as well as their dangers.

  Now she was sitting up, rubbing at the side of her face, which was still badly swollen from the brutal beating she'd taken from Cort Strasser. "I'll never get used to these jumps," she said quietly.

  "Doc doesn't look so good," J.B. observed, mov­ing to the side of the last member of their group.

  Doc had an even stranger life history than Mildred. Born Theophilus Algernon Tanner in South Strafford, Vermont, on February 14,1868, he had a glit­tering car
eer as a scientist and was married with two small children. But in November 1896 he was trawled into the future.

  He was an experiment of Project Cerberus, which was a part of Overproject Whisper, itself a small cog within the vast secret machine known by the code name of the Totality Concept. The attempt to bring and send people through the barrier of time was al­most totally a failure. If it had any success, then that success was Doctor Theophilus Tanner.

  Doc was a prickly and difficult subject, deeply dis­turbed at losing his wife, family and friends. He made several illicit attempts to rejoin them, despite the risks of the unstable equipment. To get rid of him, the white-coated operators of Cerberus sent him off into the future, to the present in Deathlands.

  The effects of the appalling disorientation meant that Doc would never again be totally sane. At his best he was only a couple cents short of a dollar. Sometimes he lost track of quite "when" he was liv­ing.

  Now he lay on his side, knees drawn under him, a trail of spittle linking his open mouth to the polished floor of the gateway chamber.

  His stubbled face was parchment-pale, and his breathing was ragged. His right hand clutched his precious swordstick, which was made of ebony, with a silver handle shaped like a lion's head.

  Mildred got to her hands and knees, groaning, and crawled to the old man's side. None of them actually knew how old Doc really was. He'd only been in his late twenties when he was trawled forward, yet he looked and acted like a man in his sixties. It was a by­product of tampering with temporal paradoxes. As Doc himself once remarked, "I confess to being in fair shape for a man who is actually over two hun­dred years old."

  "He's going to be all right?" Ryan asked.

  By now all four of them were standing around Doc Tanner.

  His eyes blinked open.

  "By the three Kennedys!" he said feebly, looking up at them. "I feel akin to a man who has fallen down a deep well. Could you possibly stand a tad farther away while I recover myself?"

  Helped by Mildred and J.B., he stood reasonably well, his knee joints cracking like snapped kindling. He wiped away the saliva and sighed. "Did anyone else find that a particularly pain-filled jump?"

  "Yeah," Mildred agreed, "worst I've known."

  Ryan nodded. "Could be there was a malfunction in the equipment."

  Krysty was looking around the chamber. She stood still for a few moments, eyes closed, concentrating, using some of the strange mutie power of the Earth Mother to try to "see" their surroundings.

  "No," she said, shaking her head. "Can't feel anything. It's always hard inside these places. They seem to sort of blanket the reception for me."

  "Then we'd better go look," Ryan decided. "Ev­eryone ready?"

  "As I'll ever be, my dear fellow." was Doc's re­sponse.

  The others contented themselves with nodding, and all drew their blasters—Krysty her silvered Heckler & Koch P7A-13 9 mm pistol; J.B. his trusty Steyr AUG 5.6 mm automatic; Mildred, who had represented the United States in the free-shooting pistol event in the last ever Olympic Games before skydark, had an ex­otic target blaster. It was a beautiful ZKR 551 six-shot revolver chambered to take a Smith & Wesson .38 round; Ryan had his usual SIG-Sauer P-226 blaster with the built-in baffle silencer; Doc, typically had what was probably the only Le Mat Civil War re­volver in the whole of Deathlands. It exploded a sin­gle .63 round from a scattergun barrel, as well as firing nine standard .36-caliber bullets.

  Ryan looked at his ragtag army, caught Krysty's emerald eyes and grinned. "Well, here we go again, lover."

  She didn't return his smile.

  Ryan turned away from her and reached for the lever that would open the gateway.

  "Ready?" he asked quietly, and threw the lever.

  Chapter Two

  THE OPENING MECHANISM on the gateway worked smoothly and almost silently. The thick armored glass swung back, revealing the usual small anteroom that was present in all of the redoubts the companions had visited.

  This one was about twelve feet square, with benches along two walls and a fold-down table. The door set in the far wall was ajar, showing the main control room. Everything was as it had been in other gateways.

  Ryan led the way out, pausing as he entered the larger room, waiting for Krysty to join him.

  "Well?" he asked.

  She closed her eyes and stood still, shaking her head. "Can't do it, lover."

  "Why?"

  "Can't override my imagination. Worst enemy of someone with the power of seeing. Doomies suffer from it even worse."

  "Wouldn't of thought it."

  "Wouldn't have thought it," she corrected auto­matically.

  J.B. looked at the control consoles, rows of vid-screens and comp-processors, with dancing lines of details, numbers and codes. Lights flickered and shone green, amber and red.

  "Looks good and clean," he observed.

  In the past they'd entered control bases and found frightening evidence of malfunction. All redoubts had been built with their own nuke-gens, and most of these continued to work, long years after their hu­man masters had vanished into ashes.

  Doc glanced around, holstering the massive Le Mat pistol. "Shipshape and Bristol fashion," he com­mented.

  "People built these complexes sure built them to last," Mildred said, running her finger along one of the desks, showing it dust free to the others. "Spot­less."

  "There's antistat conditioning here. Filters and cleans. Without anyone coming or going for a hun­dred years, there's no disturbance." Ryan looked along the consoles. "Though there's some plas-mugs along there."

  It was the kind of thing that Jak Lauren would have darted toward. As it was, Krysty walked slowly and picked up one of them. She peered into it and pulled a face.

  "Long, long gone," she said.

  Ryan joined her and picked up another of the dis­posable beakers. The inside bore a faint stain of brown, but it was utterly dry.

  "If they had been topped up, I would have raised one and given you a toast." Doc picked up a single cup from another console. "To our friends—" he flourished it "-from-Oh!"

  Liquid splashed all over the front of his stained frock coat, adding another layer to the patina of an­tique dirt.

  Everyone stared at him in disbelief. Doc looked at the wetness on his clothes, dripping from his fingers. "How can this be?" he whispered. "A century come and a century gone, and this still holds—" he smelled his hands......... "—what is a perfectly acceptable substi­tute for coffee."

  Ryan dipped a finger into the cup and tasted it. "Sweet, as well."

  "But there isn't even any mold visible." Mildred rubbed the bruise on her cheek, lost in thought. "In a controlled temperature the cream-sub sweetener would have mold growing on it in less than seventy-two hours."

  Ryan pursed his lips. "Doesn't make sense, does it? This place looks like nobody's set foot in it since 2001, but…" He looked around the big room, won­dering for a moment if someone was hiding, some­one who drank coffee out of plastic mugs.

  "Better look out in the corridor," J.B. suggested.

  Apart from the entrance to the anteroom and the gateway beyond, the control suite had only one other door. Beyond it would lie a passage, probably high, wide and curving. There would be strip lighting in the angles between walls and ceiling, and perhaps tiny vid-sec cameras watching the endless emptiness. Be­yond that would lie the rest of the massive, sprawling complex of the hidden redoubt. It was always like that.

  "Its different," J.B. stated.

  The usual immensely heavy sec door they'd en­counter had a simple, consistent number code. To open it you keyed in 352 and to close it, 253.

  This was something else.

  The door was much lighter, with an armaglass panel set in its top half and a central wheel control to open and close it. There was no comp-panel at its side to work the mechanism.

  Doc peered through the window, shading it with his hand against the myriad reflecting lights. "Upon my soul," he said, almo
st to himself.

  "What is it, Doc?"

  The old man answered Ryan without turning his head. "If I was fond of a wager, then I would lay a little jack that we have a sort of airlock here. But why?"

  "Anything in there, Doc?" Mildred asked.

  "Nothing. And there's… Ah, what have we here?" he asked, spying a series of dials and scaled displays at the right side of the door.

  "Air pressure," J.B. told him, having already ex­amined them. "Internal and external."

  Mildred shook her head. "I don't get it." She tapped them with a forefinger. "They aren't work­ing. Show an outer pressure way too low."

  "Open it up, J.B., slow and real easy," Ryan di­rected.

  The Armorer took the central wheel and braced himself against it. Immediately it began to move, the polished chrome glittering in the bright lights of the control room.

  "Easy as a war wag through a mutie's hut," he said, rubbing at the palms of his hands. "Been greased recently, Ryan."

  "Keep turning."

  The wheel spun until there was the faint hiss of the rubber seals releasing the door.

  The intermediate room was about eight feet square, with a high ceiling. A vid-sec camera stared unblinkingly down from a corner. The walls were slightly rounded, with supporting ribs of bolted metal. Ev­erything was painted white.

  The five companions peered into it. Kiysty sniffed the air. "Smells sort of stale and flat. And dusty."

  Ryan sucked at his teeth. "Don't like the feel of this. What's anyone else think? How about you, Mildred?"

  "I haven't done this often enough to know. But if you all think there's something wrong, then maybe we should cut our losses and get out."

  "It'll mean another jump," Doc warned. "Not a prospect I think any of us welcome with particularly open arms."

  J.B. was studying the far door, which also had a large polished steel ring at its center and an array of dials and readouts set into the wall. The door was sealed with a thick strip of black rubber. "Certainly looks like an airlock," he said.

  "Must be a way of opening the outer door from inside here. Close this one again and then use an au­tomatic override on the far door." Krysty looked around. "But I don't see any way of doing it."