heard they had somethin' like this.'
'How does it work?' asked Krysty, running her fingers over the smooth glass of the door.
'Who knows? Chance is it doesn't work at all. When the long chill came, they was workin' on a lot of clever things like this. I read they were close to...'
Doc pushed past them all, sweeping open the door and bowing low. 'Here be dragons, lords and ladies. Enter and leave.'
It was a chamber, six sided, all the walls of the same brown tinted glass. The floor was patterned with metallic disks, raised very slightly. The pattern was repeated in the ceiling. The opening of the door triggered some sort of mechanism and a few of the disks began to glow faintly in a seemingly random form. A faint mist appeared in the room, swirling and darting. Ryan drew a slow, deep breath, remembering the fog outside. Was this the same? Some deadly trap by long-dead hands...
Doc stepped in, beckoning them to follow. 'Around and around the little wheel goes, and where it stops... Come in.'
Nothing more happened. The mist coiled about the cracked boots, rising no farther than the knees. More of the disks were gleaming with a silvery light, and Ryan could hear the faintest of humming sounds.
'Hell, why not?' he said, and stepped in, followed by all the others.
With a cackle of manic glee Doc immediately leaped and slammed the door shut so hard that the room vibrated.
'Off we go!' he yelped, voice rising to a banshee wail.
The hum rose to a whine. The lights flashed a pattern that dazzled and forced the intruders to close their eyes. Ryan was aware that the fog had thickened, climbing all about them, filling their lungs. He coughed, unable to breathe. There was a dreadful pressure in his ears. For a moment it felt as if a huge fist was reaching inside his head and squeezing his brain like a sponge.
His body grew light, and he knew that he was passing out.
Ryan's last thought as he fought his way into unconsciousness was that he should have killed Doc days ago.
Even that was swallowed by an impenetrable blackness.
Chapter Seventeen
Ryan opened his eye.
There was a mild pain across his temples, like after a night of drinking home brew. His pulse was up and so was his breathing. He lay still, aware of a tingling sensation at the tips of toes and fingers. He lifted his hands and touched his face, feeling a faint numbness. And his black, curly hair bristled with static electricity. He closed his eye and opened it again, blinking up at a ceiling of patterned metal disks that glowed. A glow that was fading even as he looked up at it.
He tried to work out just how he felt. His stomach swirled as if he'd been riding War Wag One over the bumpiest road in all Deathlands. And his brain relayed the curious sensation of having been sucked into itself and then dragged through a vacuum before being rammed back into his skull.
But he lived.
Whatever that bastard machine was supposed to have done, it had failed. The trap had not been properly sprung. Maybe over the decades the gas or poison or whatever had lost its power. He thought again that he ought to kill Doc. Now, without any further hesitation.
'Ryan? You all... Mother, my head aches.'
Ryan sat up, looking around, seeing all his comrades either slumped unconscious or showing the first signs of recovering. Krysty blinked and sighed.
'How d'you feel?' he said.
She licked her lips, brushing a hand through the tumbling hair. 'I've felt better. What was it? Death trap went wrong?'
'Don't know. Doc knew about it, the old...'
'Where are we, Mr. Cawdor?'
Ryan drew the LAPA, finger on the trigger. 'We're still in the Redoubt and we're all alive. Trick didn't work, Doc.'
'Trick? Upon my soul, but it is no trick. And it
'What? Knocked us on our asses, that's all.'
Doc was up, tottering, steadying himself with a hand on the streaked glass of the wall. Everyone was now back to some degree of awareness.
'What color were the walls of the gateway in the Redoubt, Mr. Cawdor?'
'Brown and...' Ryan's jaw sagged a little. 'Fireheat! These are green. They've changed.'
'No. We've changed. The gateway worked. We are no longer within the Redoubt in the Darks.'
That was enough to bring them all to their feet. J.B. doubled over and retched as though he was about to throw up, but nothing came.
'Not in the Darks no more?' he gasped, wiping a gloved hand over his mouth. 'Where, then?'
'Ah...' The triumphant smile had vanished. 'That is one of the many problems with the gateways. Not always reliable. Depends on destination setting.'
Whatever had happened while they were all out cold, Doc's madness had deserted him and he spoke clearly and intelligently.
'They started here about a hundred years back, trying to transmit matter. They began with a pair of small metal balls. Light gray metal balls. They got them to travel a few centimeters. And they went on from there.'
While he listened, Ryan moved around the room. The walls were certainly a changed color and the air tasted different. Not flat and dead as in the Redoubt. Was all this possible? Had the fog been a luci-gas? Was this all some chem dream?
'They wanted to use it for military purposes. But the big war stopped that good. By then they'd set up a network of these Redoubts, each with gates. Send and receive, and some big mistakes. Horrible things did happen.'
He stopped as though his mind was lodging on unbearable memories. Ryan reached to open the door, but Doc waved a hand to stop him.
'Not yet. Nearly done. Gates can be set as this one was. But all codes are now lost, lost forever. So it's a gamble
'But... some of these gates must have been destroyed in the fighting,' said Ryan. 'What would have happened if the controls had been set for one of those? Then what?'
'Most in the wilderness areas were destroyed. As to your question, I suppose that possibility represents the final frontier!'
And he laughed.
'You crazy bastard,' spat Hun, moving toward him with her fist clenched.
'Leave him be,' ordered Ryan, stopping her.
'Let's go see where we are.'
'I am obliged, Mr. Cawdor,' Doc said, relapsing once more into the archaic way of speaking. 'Most of all I would dislike having to strike a lady. Next I would dislike being struck by one.'
The door opened easily.
Opened onto a room of the same scale as the one back at the Redoubt. Any of Ryan's doubts were dispelled when he saw a table knocked over on its side and two of the shelves slipping lopsidedly. A long crack ran down the wall, deep enough to insert a hand.
In the next room, the consoles whirred and lights danced, but there was an undertone of grinding and Ryan could smell a frail scent of smoldering. Of a fire that slumbered somewhere within the machinery that surrounded them. He could see all eight of his group reflected in the smeared metal of the door that he knew would open on a blank passage. To the right of it there was a green lever in the down position, with the word Closed printed beneath
