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  Striding to the fallen sec men, the baron saw that they were both chilled, and he closed their eyes with his fingertips. Damn it, they had both been good men, his brothers in battle killed by a jacking coldheart. A boiling rage built inside the baron, but he forced it down. Getting angry wouldn’t bring them back. More’s the pity.

  Kneeling near the body of the trader, the baron retrieved the derringers and searched his clothing to find more ammo that fit the little palmblasters. He reloaded them both and tucked the blasters into his pockets. Now why hadn’t the damn feeb tried to sell him these? Nervously pulling out a handblaster, the baron purged the spent chambers and started the laborious reloading process while he studied the landscape. Nothing was in sight but flat ground all the way to the Ohi River, and only the soft whispering breeze of the Indera desert…

  The man went stiff. The eagles! Looking skyward, the baron gasped at the sight of the clear sky. Not a bird in sight around their nest. The eagles were gone.

  “Oh, fuck, no,” Jeffers muttered, scanning the rest of the blue sky. Not again!

  Suddenly a whistling sound cut the air and Jeffers spun just in time to see something plummet out of the thin air and hit the ground halfway between him and the ville. The blast seemed to rock the world, and Jeffers went flying backward. He hit the ground with a sickening crack and felt fire erupt inside his chest as a rib snapped. Nuking shit!

  He lost consciousness for a moment from the pain, but came abruptly awake as a second blast sounded. It was farther way, and sounded odd. Higher somehow, as if the explosion happened in the air.

  Cold adrenaline forced the man to his feet, and he weakly pulled out both derringers and fired at the sky as yet another detonation occurred directly on the overhang of rock above Indera ville. There was a moving dot in the sky, but if the weps hit anything, it was impossible to tell at this range.

  Dropping the spent palmblasters, Jeffers started hobbling for the ville as a double explosion rent air, closely followed by a crackling noise. In growing horror, the baron watched as the rocky overhang started to splinter along its base.

  “Get out!” Jeffers screamed at the top of his lungs, waving both arms. “Get out of the ville, you fools!”

  The sec men on the wall began to ring the alarm bell, just as sunlight moved across the ground to touch the ville. People started to scream as the overhang sagged lower and lower from the side of the mesa, and then came free.

  With his heart pounding, Jeffers insanely staggered toward the doomed ville and saw the colossal slab of granite impact.

  The walls crumbled like sand, the alarm bell went instantly silent, and the frightened screaming abruptly stopped. Having trouble breathing, the baron kept walking as he watched a billowing cloud of dust rise around the edges of the rock slab covering his home. Chilled. They were all chilled. It was impossible! Unthinkable! Indera ville had been destroyed by its main source of protection.

  Slowing to a halt, Baron Jeffers cradled his aching chest, and now felt a trickle running down his left leg. He glanced down to see a spreading red stain. Blood. Digger had to have shot him. He touched the wound, inhaled at the rush of pain. But that was a good sign. A major wound would have gone numb. Pain meant it was minor damage. There was hardly any bleeding. He could have it stitched by the ville healer….

  Raising his head, the man looked with uncomprehending eyes on the crushed debris of the ville. There was no more healer, or sec men, or anything. He was the baron of a graveyard. An outlander standing alone and wounded in the open.

  Just then, a soft buzzing noise came from above, and Jeffers squinted into the sun to see a small black shape moving through the sky in a lazy circle around the broken mesa.

  “Tregart,” he muttered, raising a bloody fist to shake at the sky. “Damn you to hell!”

  As if in response, the black shape swung away from the mesa and started directly toward the man. The dried mud in front of him kicking up dirty plumes as there came the faint sound of a rapid-fire blaster coming closer and closer.

  Chapter Two

  As the swirling mist in the mat-trans chamber faded, the six people standing inside the unit lay limply on the floor, gasping for breath.

  After a few minutes Ryan Cawdor brushed the curly black hair out of his scarred face and tried to focus his good eye on the chamber. Every mat-trans chamber was identical, and this one was no different. At the far end was a closed vanadium-steel door, with a lever. The portal had to be closed and locked before the mat-trans would operate, which was some sort of an ancient safety feature.

  Only the colors of each chamber’s armaglass walls changed, each location decorated in a different color for ease of identification. Unfortunately, those color codes were unknown, as were the commands that would let the companions control a jump between one underground redoubt and another. Each journey via a mat-trans unit was a random leap into the unknown.

  “Everybody okay?” Ryan asked, slowly forcing himself to stand.

  “No permanent harm, lover,” Krysty Wroth said, brushing the red hair from her face. Her green eyes flashed as they moved around the chamber, her wild mane of animated hair flexing unhappily from the aftereffects of the jump. The walls were orange with black stripes. That pattern was unknown to her. The companions had never been to this redoubt before, which was both good and bad.

  Standing without effort, Krysty straightened her clothing, redoing a few of the buttons on her white shirt. It was a touch too small for her full breasts, but it was all that had been available at the last redoubt. The military-issue bra was a tad snug but with any luck, she might find something more serviceable in this redoubt.

  Sweeping back her heavy bearskin coat, Krysty checked the knife in her left cowboy boot, then pulled the Smith & Wesson .38 revolver from the gunbelt around her trim waist. Far too many times the companions had arrived at a redoubt only to find they weren’t the only ones there.

  Busy checking his own weapons, Ryan merely grunted at the beautiful woman.

  “Dark night, it’s cold in here,” J.B. Dix said, adjusting his wire-rimmed glasses. The small man exhaled slowly, and his breath fogged slightly. “Must be thirty degrees, mebbe less.”

  Still lying on the plastic floor, the man with the silvery hair used an arm to lever himself up to look wearily around at them. Tall and thin, he appeared to be sixty years old, or even more, but his bright eyes sparkled with intelligence.

  “Indeed, you are quite correct, John Barrymore,” Doc Tanner intoned in his deep stentorian voice. “Something must be wrong with the life support system.”

  “I hope not,” Krysty stated, holstering her blaster. “That’s all there is between us and suffocating to death.”

  “Quite so, madam,” Doc whispered hoarsely. “Quite so.” The jumps through the mat-trans units always hit Doc and Jak Lauren the hardest. For Doc, it was probably because of the horrible experiments performed by Operation Chronos.

  Fumbling to locate his ebony swordstick on the floor, Dr. Theophilus Algernon Tanner wrapped both hands around the silver lion’s-head crest and levered himself erect. Dressed as if he were from the nineteenth century, the scholar wore a gentleman’s frilled shirt and a long frock coat that had seen better days. But there was also a huge LeMat .44 pistol at his side, the grip of the massive double-barrel revolver worn from constant use.

  “You okay, Jak?” Mildred Wyeth asked, swinging her med kit around to her front for easy access. Short and stocky, the black woman had once been a twentieth-century physician. During a relatively simple operation, something had gone wrong, and Mildred had been cryogenically frozen, only to be revived a hundred years later by Ryan and the companions. She had been traveling with them ever since.

  In the savage wastelands of the early twenty-second century, her skills as a trained physician were beyond price, even though Mildred had virtually no instruments or medicine. The med kit hanging over her shoulder was merely a patched canvas bag salvaged from a U.S. Army M*A*S*H unit. The bag was filled with strips of boiled cloth to be used as bandages, a small plastic bottle of homemade liquor called “shine” for disinfectant, a pack of razor blades found in a bombed-out supermarket for her scalpels, and similar crude items. She sometimes felt like a photographer without a camera. Dr. Mildred Wyeth had the skill to save lives, but the tools of her craft were only items of legend in these dark days.

  “F-feel fine.” Jak Lauren spit, using the back of a hand to wipe the drool from his mouth.

  Turning away from the wall where he had just been sick, Jak stood carefully, as if afraid his thin body might break from the effort. He was trying to keep it hidden from the others, but their travels through the mat-trans had been hitting the teenager hard lately, and it was taking longer and longer for him to get back on his feet after each jump. It was a strange condition for the albino teen, because he was normally as strong as a horse.

  As he checked over his .357 Magnum Colt Python revolver, Jak privately wondered if maybe the effects of the hundreds of jumps they had made were wearing him down. That would be bad news if true. The mat-trans units in the redoubts were the only safe way to traverse the burning deserts and rad-blasted hellzones of the Deathlands. It would be a triple-damn shame if he had to abandon using that method of transportation. Worse—he’d have to quit traveling with his companions.

  “By the Three Kennedys!” Doc roared, pulling at the lion head of his cane to extract a shining steel rapier from the ebony shaft. “Dean! Where is Dean!”

  The rest of the companions paused at that, and exchanged sad glances.

  “Sharona took him. He’s no longer with us,” Ryan said quietly. “Remember, Doc?”

  The time traveler arched both eyebrows in indignation, then slowly his features softened as he recalled the events of t
he past.

  “Ah, yes, my condolences, my dear Ryan,” Doc muttered in embarrassment, sheathing the blade once more and locking it tight with a twist of the handle. “I had forgotten. The jump, you know….”

  “Hey, anybody see my hat?” J.B. asked, running stiff fingers through his sparse hair.

  Ryan kicked the battered fedora across the chilly floor and J.B. scooped it up and tucked it back in place in a single move.

  “I could use one of those myself,” Mildred said, buttoning the collar of her denim shirt. “Damn, it really is cold in here.”

  “Mebbe everybody died leaving the air conditioner on,” Ryan said in a touch of rare humor as he went to the wall and placed a hand on the vent.

  “No, it’s working,” he reported, thoughtfully straightening the patch covering the ruin of his left eye. “And it’s warm, too.”

  “Warm?” Jak said, frowning as he tucked away the Colt Python. “Colder than doomie’s tit in here.” Shivering slightly, the teenager zipped up the front of his jacket. The garment was covered with bits of metal and mirrors, as well as razor blades. Razor blades also lined the collar. If anybody was foolish enough to try to grab the teen around the throat, the person might lose a few fingers.

  His combat instincts instantly alert, Ryan pulled out his SiG-Sauer and racked the slide to chamber a round.

  “J.B., check the door,” he ordered brusquely. “Everybody else, back into the mat-trans unit!”

  Quickly the others did as ordered.

  Gingerly touching the door, J.B. hissed with shock and pulled his hand back to suck on his fingertips.

  “Dark night! The bastard thing is freezing!” he mumbled around the fingers.

  Rotating the cylinder of her Czech ZKR .38 revolver as a prelude to possible battle, Mildred snapped her head around at that comment. “Impossible,” she said, starting forward. “The reactors in the basement of a redoubt should keep the base warm even if it was at the North Pole! And the only thing colder than that would be…” Her eyes went wide. “Ryan, check for a draft!”

  Frowning darkly, Ryan paused, then holstered his blaster. Walking over to join his friend, he pulled out a candle, and very carefully lit the wick with a predark butane lighter. Manufactured by the millions before skydark destroyed the world, the lighters were now worth more than a man’s life in trade. The only thing more valuable was a loaded blaster. The friends had found several in the past.

  As Ryan moved the candle along the frame of the oval doorway, J.B. reached into the munitions bag at his side and unearthed a bit of a candle and a butane lighter from the array of homemade explosives and predark grens.

  Slowly, the two men moved the flickering flames along the edge of the jam of the burnished steel door. The flames stayed steady until nearing the concealed hinges of the portal, then both wavered and went out.

  “Fireblast, there are holes in the seal,” Ryan said, tucking the spent candle away. “Some sort of draft sucking out all the warm air.”

  Doing the same with his candle, J.B. glowered at the door as if it were a ticking mine. “Gotta be one hell of vacuum on the other side,” he said, pushing back his hat. “Think we’re in space again?”

  “Mebbe,” Ryan returned. The companions had once found themselves in a “redoubt” that was orbiting the moon. They had been forced to leave almost immediately, but that redoubt had been safe and warm. If this one was in orbit and leaking air, then their wisest move would be to leave.

  “Let’s go,” Ryan stated, turning for the mat-trans unit. “No way we’re going to chance opening the door.”

  Hunching his shoulders, Jak muttered a curse. Another jump so soon wasn’t something any of them wanted to do.

  Going to join the others, Krysty moved past the vent and paused. The breeze was gone. Spinning, she placed a hand on the disguised vent and said a quick prayer to Gaia when she felt warm air, just a lot weaker than before. The life support of the redoubt had to have started working once they arrived, but was now running out of power. Soon, there might not be enough to operate the mat-trans!

  “Into the unit!” Krysty commanded, starting to run across the chamber. “Now! We jump right fucking now!”

  Not wasting a second, the rest of the companions jammed into the small chamber and as Krysty squeezed in with them, Ryan hit the LD button.

  Nothing happened.

  Fireblast! he raged silently. They had to have been here too long! The Last Destination option lasted for only thirty minutes! The LD button was no longer active and couldn’t send them back to the Arizona redoubt they had just left.

  With no other choice, Ryan hit the jump buttons hoping he’d randomly key a sequence that would take them somewhere. Almost instantly a new chill seeped into their living bones that had nothing to do with the vacuum of space. A swirling white mist rose from the solid floor and ceiling to fill the chamber, then lighting crackled in silent fury and the floor seemed to disappear as they all began falling into the artificial void that stretched from unit to unit across the planet, and beyond…

  RISING STIFFLY from his throne, the old baron limped across the dais in front of the blockhouse.

  The entire population of the ville filled the courtyard, as Baron Hugh Tregart hobbled down a short flight of stairs and headed for the pyre.

  Reaching twice the height of a man, the stack of wood was bound together with strong rope that had been carefully dampened to prevent it from burning through too quickly and disturbing the pyre, and its sole occupant. Wrapped in stiff canvas, the body lay on top of the flammable mound, a few relics from childhood placed alongside the trophies of manhood. The hide of the first griz bear he had ever killed, his gunbelt. Only the precious blaster was missing.

  Accepting a crackling torch from a sec man, the baron shuffled closer and blinked away some tears as he touched the pyre as if bestowing a benediction. Soaked with shine, oil, grease and even a few precious ounces of condensed fuel, the wood caught instantly, and the flames made a low roar as they spread over the pyre, meeting on the other side and then rising to the crest to engulf the still body of his son.

  A dark plume of roiling smoke soon rose to hide the corpse of Edmund Tregart, and all across the courtyard people began to openly weep or to bow their heads and mutter prayers as the flames began to consume the young man.

  “Ashes to ashes, dust to dust,” Baron Tregart said in a loud, clear voice, tossing the torch onto the growing bonfire. Tears were on his cheeks, but his face was as impassive as stone. Only the whiteness of his hand grasping the walking stick showed his inner emotions.

  “It is done,” the baron said, turning to face the crowd of ville folk and sec men. “My son is gone. Now, bring forth the killers!”

  There was a commotion at the rear of the crowd, and the people angrily parted to allow a group of grim sec men through with their two prisoners. Wrapped in chains, the captives were wearing only bloody rags, their exposed skin covered with red welts from endless whippings. One man had a badly broken nose, the other had an eye swollen shut and bulging with contained fluids.

  The ville folk cursed at the prisoners as they passed, several spit at the men, and a few raised sharp pieces of stone to throw. But the sec men got in the way, and the stones were reluctantly dropped to the dusty yard.

  In the background, armed guards walked along the top of the wall around Thunder ville, and while the men desperately wanted to watch the coming execution, they forced themselves to face outward. Funerals, weddings, births, any major event involving the baron was a good time for enemies to attack. The sec men clenched their fists in frustration and kept watch on the desert river outside the ville. The muddy waters of the Ohi helped to keep the ville alive, but the river also brought outlanders from the distant mountains, and those were always trouble.

  Returning to his throne, Baron Tregart sat heavily and cast a furtive gaze at the chair alongside. His wife, Hannah, was dying of the black cough, and now this. For a moment the old man thought his heart would break from the weight of his sorrow, then he inhaled slow and sat upright. A baron could never show weakness to his people, his father had always warned. Nor grant favors to an enemy. If he followed those two rules, his ville would prosper.