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  A giant white worm, fat and pulsating obscenely, slithered through the hole it had made in the wall. It dropped onto the floor, its dripping ooze blending with the filth on the floor and making it stickier. Was this how it trapped its victims? Or was it simply that it didn’t have victims, but was oblivious to their presence and there only by chance?

  Right now, that didn’t matter; the only thing that was in J.B.’s mind was that the worm stood between Krysty and himself, that he was on the wrong bastard side of the obscenity. On Krysty’s side was a clear run to the mat-trans unit. On his side were the creatures, who he could hear in the distance, gaining on him with every moment that he stood, mesmerised by the worm as it writhed on the floor. It turned what he assumed was its head toward him. Eyeless, it was presumably the head only because a mouth opened and closed, seemingly at random, needle-sharp teeth that dripped mucous showing in the pinched maw.

  The maw didn’t change in the way that it moved, even when the roar of Krysty’s Smith & Wesson was swiftly followed by chunks of pulpy white flesh splattering over him as the slug took out where she had—presumably—figured that it had its brain.

  The worm didn’t drop, as he would have hoped. But being covered in its viscous being while he could hear another ominous rumbling at his rear galvanized the Armorer into action. If the thing had no brain and wouldn’t lie down and buy the farm, then he had only one option open to him.

  “Krysty, stick to the wall,” he yelled before raising the min-Uzi and firing rapid staccato blasts into the worm, chopping up and down in a line so that white flesh and clear, stinking mucous filled the corridor in a fine spray. The maw still opened and closed with little apparent register of what was happening to it, but the purpose of the blasting was soon fulfilled. The blasterfire chopped the worm in two, causing the front end, raised as it was from the ground as the maw moved in the air, to topple and land with a wet splat on the concrete.

  Even before the tail end had stopped waving, J.B. was wading through the glop that formed puddles on the already sticky floor, the excrescence swilling around his ankles.

  Krysty’s face as she reached out to pull him through the mess that was slowing him needed no words. Saving their breath, they kept running, hearing the yelping of the creatures behind them as another of the worms broke through the wall of the corridor. What kind of mutie sickness had led to such abominations as the stunted creatures and the grossly inflated worms couldn’t be considered.

  The only thing that mattered was to reach the mat-trans.

  They kept running, even though the sounds of the creatures receded into the distance as they plumbed the lower levels. The worms had, in their own way, acted as the diversion that Krysty and J.B. needed.

  Exhausted, covered in mucous and stinking white flesh that stuck to the patches of shit and blood they had picked up earlier, they reached the control room.

  It was so quiet that it seemed impossible to consider that there was so much insanity only a hundred yards or so above them. They didn’t dare look back as they threw themselves into the mat-trans unit. Krysty slammed the door shut and hurried to hit the Last Destination button. J.B. checked his wrist chron. The irony was that they had three minutes’ grace. After all those obstacles, it was a miracle.

  But as the mist began to fill the mat-trans, J.B. regretted the loss of the gas grens and wondered how they would even begin to explain what they had seen.

  Chapter Eleven

  Mildred was eyeing the hands of her watch with alarm, and trying not to let it show in her face. Three minutes remained before it would be impossible for Krysty and J.B. to return. She had been through this with Ryan and Jak, but it was worse this time around. She figured it had to do with J.B. being one of those who were temporarily—she hoped—lost in the ether. She had little doubt that Ryan shared her feelings, although they were perhaps blunted by the opiates that still coursed through his body. She caught sight of Doc, who was watching her intently. Casting a glance to the side to see if he was being watched, he mouthed the words “Courage, mon brave” at her.

  The really stupid thing was that when she and Doc had been on their own mission, the thought of how those left behind had been feeling hadn’t occurred to her. Nor, she didn’t doubt, to Doc. In the heat of battle—which any such expedition was, no matter what—there was no time for reflection.

  Right now, there was too much damn time.

  Crabbe was eyeing her intently. A brooding silence had descended over the mat-trans control room. McCready’s hostility was obvious, and had bred a similar enmity from Jak. That upset Crabbe’s plans. His desires depended on their compliance, and to have his sec chief on the edge of opening fire wasn’t the best way to get that compliance. As a result, the baron had retreated into himself. Sal, loitering by the doorway, looked like he couldn’t wait to get away.

  Mildred doubted that she had ever been in a place where the atmosphere was so thick with hostility. It was oppressive, and made the prospect of escape seem all the more remote.

  She was wondering if J.B. and Krysty had discovered a weapons stash they could use to tip the balance when the air around them began to crackle with an energy that signaled the return of the travelers.

  “Son of a bitch…” she whispered to herself, turning away and closing her eyes as the unit glowed with a phosphorescent flash of brilliant light that seared its way into her retinas even though she had done her best to avoid any direct view. She heard Crabbe gasp as he was taken by surprise.

  Maybe this was the chance they were looking for. In that moment when the flash happened, the baron and his men were momentarily disabled. If they could just take advantage of it… They were far more used to the effects of the mat-trans, even though they had never really been on this side of the unit as a jump was made.

  As she tried to focus as she opened her eyes, Mildred knew that she was clutching at straws. The after-image of the flash burned yellow light on all the objects around her, making it hard to distinguish more than a blur of indistinct shapes.

  Dammit, there would be no easy way out of this. Even as the door opened and J.B. and Krysty stumbled out, she was barely able to see what they looked like.

  Though she could smell them….

  CONSCIOUSNESS WAS slow and almost out of her grasp, but Krysty willed herself back to a level where she was able to pull herself to her feet. A mat-trans jump always made her feel like shit, but this was worse. It was as though some of the pulpy flesh and glop that had shot from the worm, not to mention the slimy crap that had covered the floors and walls of the redoubt, had somehow become absorbed into her very being.

  J.B. had to have felt the same. He didn’t say anything, but then he didn’t have to. The fact that he was puking his guts out all over the floor said everything.

  She went across to him, still shaky on her feet, and tried to ask him if he was okay. It was a stupe question anyway, but one rendered impossible by the way that her throat seemed closed and dry, almost choking her on its own thickness. She contented herself with a touch on his shoulder. Just letting him know that they were back safe was, she hoped, enough. He looked up at her, but it was purely a reflex action. His eyes were unfocused, and his jaw was slack and drooling.

  Krysty’s mind was beginning to return to normal. Three redoubts on the list visited, and no weapons to hide and use against Crabbe. They were running out of time and opportunity.

  Gaia, only half the mission completed and all six of them were halfway to buying the farm. They might not need to fight back for their freedom. Their own chilling might buy it for them.

  Krysty tried to dismiss such thoughts from her mind. She usually wasn’t negative. It wasn’t the way she had been brought up back in Harmony, and it wasn’t how she had made it this far. But, as she helped J.B. to his feet and opened the door, facing out to the waiting sec men, blasters raised, she couldn’t see any way out. Their own weapons—the only edge they had—would be taken from them before they had a chance to protest.


  The bastard of it being that they had no energy with which to do anything other than accede to their captors, meek as if they were already beaten.

  Maybe they were, this time.

  “BY THE THREE KENNEDYS, what in heaven’s name has happened to you!” Doc exclaimed, rising to his feet as Krysty came out of the mat trans, supporting J.B., who was still unsteady on his feet. Doc stood, ignoring the sec man who tried to block his path with the barrel of a blaster. He brushed it away, much to the man’s amazement, and went to help Krysty as she guided J.B. to the area where they were being kept between jumps. The sec men surrounded them, blasters triple red as if expecting trouble purely from the fact that Krysty and J.B. were still in possession of their weapons. They had the grace to look embarrassed as Doc shot them a withering glance before turning to Crabbe.

  “You fool,” he said with venom that he couldn’t disguise. “Do you really think that these people pose a threat to you at the moment? You do not understand what undergoing a mat-trans journey can do to the human body. For pity’s sake let the good doctor over here so that she can render some assistance, or you will not be able to exploit us as you want for the rest of your cretinous list.”

  Crabbe should have been enraged by Doc’s outburst, yet he was shrewd enough to see the sense in what he was saying. Muttering something barely audible under his breath, he indicated to Mildred that she should leave her station and go to tend to her friends.

  Mildred left her post behind the comp desk and rushed to tend to her companions. As she did, it occurred to her that there was a slight change in Crabbe’s approach to them. Slight, but perhaps of use.

  But that was for later. Right now, she was more concerned with her friends.

  “Let me,” she said, taking Krysty and turning so that she could look into the eyes of the Titian-haired beauty. They were slightly unfocused, but clear.

  “It’s not me you should be looking at,” Krysty said in a cracked voice. “J.B. is in worse shape.”

  Mildred was glad that Krysty had told her that. She could see that J.B. was in a worse way, but her innate sense of fairness had compelled her to attend to Krysty first, not wishing to show favoritism to the man she loved.

  Ryan rose to his feet and took Krysty by the shoulders. Seeing her and J.B. in this condition was forcing him to push aside the worst effects of the opiates. As he looked into her eyes, she could almost see him willing the fog from his mind.

  “What happened out there?” he said in a clearer and more controlled voice than he had been able to use for some time. The steel in his soul told him that now was the time to pull together all the strength he had.

  And so, while Krysty started to unravel the almost unbelievable tale, Mildred tended to J.B. She listened to what Krysty had to say, half of her mind appalled by the creatures they had encountered, the other half working analytically to fathom which of the possible substances he had ingested had caused him to react in this way. For, apart from a few contusions, J.B. had suffered no real physical injury. Unlike Jak or Ryan, there were no signs of trauma. And yet he was still disoriented and vague.

  “Did you get covered in that shit, too?” she asked when Krysty had finished relating their experience.

  Krysty shook her head. Her tresses, even though the danger was now behind them, were still clinging tightly to her skull. “Depends on what you mean. Sure, I’ve got that stinking shit all over me, but that’s just from the floors. The gunk that came from the worm J.B. had to blast his way through—I didn’t get any of that on me, but he got covered in it. And he had to wade his way through it, too.”

  “Did he swallow any of it?” she pressed.

  Krysty shook her head. “I couldn’t tell you, Mildred. Really. I didn’t see much until he’d blasted his way through it. But I tell you what, I’d be really surprised if he didn’t get a mouthful of that crap, the way it spurted over him. And he’s puked enough up after the jump.”

  “Goddamn…” she murmured to herself. Deep somewhere within her memory, she recalled that there had been a toad, predark, that had a secretion with hallucinogenic properties as a defense mechanism. She’d seen cases in the hospital where she had served her internship—so long ago in so many ways as to seem almost like an hallucination in itself—of men and women who had tried to get high on toad licking and got it a little wrong, reducing themselves to puking wrecks. It seemed to her like the worm had evolved something similar by way of a defense, and J.B. had been an unwilling partaker.

  “Look, if he’s ingested something that is some way toxic, there’s no telling how long it’ll take him to be ready to jump again,” she said, directing her comments toward Crabbe. “You can’t expect him to go again any time soon.”

  Crabbe had been watching them with a growing cloud forming over him. His mood, which had been subdued and brooding before Krysty and J.B. arrived back, was now edging into the blackly explosive.

  “Who the fuck do you think you are, missy?” he growled. “You don’t tell me what to do. You’re supposed to find that disk for me in one of these redoubts. There are six. You’ve covered three and found fuck all. That ain’t my problem. Now mebbe that’s just the luck of it, and mebbe it’s you holding out on me for some reason. Either way, you keep going. You either come clean, or you find the disk in one of the three you got left. It’s that simple. You ain’t calling the shots here. I am. And you do what the fuck I say.”

  “That wasn’t what you said before,” Ryan said coldly.

  “Well, mebbe my patience is getting stretched mighty thin,” the baron snapped. “Nelson, get their blasters.”

  Mildred looked up at him. When she spoke, it was in a low and menacing tone, made all the more fearsome by that fact that she was now paying no heed to the situation in which they found themselves.

  “Listen, you stupid bastard,” she began, “don’t you get it? If you don’t give us the time to recover before you send us out again, then there’s no way that you’re going to get what you want out of us. You’ve been looking for us for a long time, right? You’ve trailed us, searched for us, and were glad when we fell into your hands, right? Well, if that’s the case, why the fuck do you want to throw it all away because you can’t stop your fat ass itching long enough for you to scratch it? If you got your brain in gear, you’d realize that there’s no way that we can do the job you want us to in the time that you’re giving us. Why not send your own sec men in there, then? You think they could do any better than us? You think they could do any worse the way we are right now? Get that brain of yours in action and try to figure it out, for God’s sake.”

  Crabbe stood silent. McCready was half grinning as he retrieved their blasters, expecting his baron to lose control and scream for them all to be chilled, which was something that the sec chief would have taken great pleasure in doing.

  But the baron eyed the companions calmly, taking in what Mildred had said and viewing them with a dispassionate eye.

  Hell, he figured, Millicent was right. She was on edge from tending to J.T. The man looked a mess, with his eyes showing white and rolling up into his head. Hellfire, even as Crabbe looked at him, his chin rolled forward onto his chest and he puked another thin line of the white glop onto his chest. Brian was trying to pull himself together, but those pills Millicent had given to him—the ones that had made him so spaced—were still running through his system. He was strong, but even so they would have slowed him down. Snowy? Well, he looked okay, but he was sullen and withdrawn. Too on-edge to be anything other than a liability if it came down to it. Jock? He was wired. But then he always was, so it kind of made no difference with him. That was why he needed someone with him who was level-headed. None of them fitted that description right now. Not even Kirsty. Right now, she looked exhausted, as if you could blow on her and knock her down. That was no damn good to him.

  Crabbe nodded, almost to himself, and grunted. “Yeah, I guess you got a point,” he said at length. “You’re halfway through. Take some time ou
t, and remember that the disk is in one of the places on this list—” he took up the laminate that had been lying on the desk “—and if you want to walk out of here and not buy the farm, you’d better find it.”

  Mildred knew what she would like to do with the laminate, but this time felt it best to hold her tongue. The baron had given them some breathing room, and for that alone she was grateful. But she knew, as did her companions, that there was no way that they would find what he wanted.

  Meantime, they should take the opportunity to rest up and recuperate while they had the chance. The time for action would come soon enough.

  Uneasy, with no chance to speak among themselves, they hunkered down to try to get some rest. McCready kept his sec men tight on them, and the tiny room seemed even smaller and more oppressive than before. Mildred felt as if the walls and ceiling were closing in on them, and from the looks of the others she knew that they were experiencing similar feelings. Crabbe was a brooding, malevolent presence that was always in the background, waiting….

  Time passed slowly, so slowly that it seemed as though the very hands of her wristwatch were slowing with every second.

  Mildred tended to J.B. The Armorer had puked all that he had ingested, and the worst of the effects were now beginning to wear off. His eyes were clear, and he was able to focus on as well as speak to Mildred. At first just a few croaks, he was soon able to form simple sentences. She was glad to see him returning to something approaching his normal self, though she doubted the toxin in his system would be fully cleared by the time he was obliged to take up arms again.

  For the others, Jak and Doc sat and brooded. Unwilling to speak, unable to do anything to aid their comrades, they both felt—in their own ways—useless. Ryan, too, was feeling that, but as the painkillers subsided, and his mind became less fogged, he began to think about what he could do to lead his friends out of this mess.