Crater Lake

Chapter One

Jak Lauren's eyes, pale pink, snapped open.

A fearsome stab of pain jerked through his narrow skull, making him moan and close his eyes again. His fingers curled, nails digging into the palms of his hands. As he moved, leaning against the thick glass walls of the chamber, the tiny shards of razored steel sewn into his clothes sparkled brightly.

"Was blind, but now I see." Why did the words of the old hymn come floating back into his mind at that moment?

He cautiously opened his eyes again, screwing them up against the bright light. There was a pattern of raised disks of polished metal that glowed faintly, the image fading even as he looked at it. The smoked glass walls were deep crimson. That wasn't right. They'd been blue. Blue. He held on to that fact. His head felt awful. Worse than the time — it had been his tenth birthing day just over four years back — when his father had been burrowing. Digging into the cellars of some of the derelict houses on the edges of West Lowellton, near Lafayette, in what had once been Louisiana, his father had found a bottle of something called Southern Comfort — a ribbed bottle of clear glass with a golden cap. He'd given it to Jak. The warm liquor had tasted of peaches and summer, and it had burned his throat. He'd drunk nearly the whole bottle and then been monstrously sick.

But that hadn't been anything compared to this awful swirling feeling. It was as if someone had sucked his brain from the caverned chambers of his skull, leaving only an echoing hollow, or pumped his brain like a pink-gray slurry through the twisted copper tubes of a moonshiner's still, then spat the results back into his skull again.

"How're you doing, Whitey?"

Jak leaned over and groaned. He felt like throwing up. His long hair, purest white, trailed like plumes of lace over his shoulders. He drew in deep breaths, fighting for control. He did not want to show any sign of weakness in front of his six new friends.

"Not friends," he whispered to himself. Friends would betray you. Or they could be used to try to make you turn traitor. "Companions" was better.

"What's that?"

He didn't realize he'd spoken out loud.

"Cold," he said, seeing the fog of his breath. Back home in Louisiana he'd never seen that. Never seen snow or felt the bite of frost. He hadn't really believed that this gateway place would actually work and transmit them somewhere else.

"Yeah. Just sit back and relax. It's a shit feeling, but it'll pass."

"First time's the worst, Jak." That was a woman's voice.

He risked opening his eyes again, keeping his head perfectly still. The armored glass felt cool against his skin. The others were strewn around the room in varying stages of recovery from the mat-trans jump.

Jak's eyes first focused on the girl called Lori. At six feet she topped him by at least nine inches. Her long blond hair tumbled over her shoulders and across the bright red satin blouse that clung to the soft swell of her breasts. The boy's eyes were caught by the nipples, roused by the bitter cold in the gateway, peaking under the thin material. Her long thighs shone beneath the short maroon suede skirt. Jak knew that Lori was only a couple of years older than he was. He'd admired how she bore herself in combat situations, despite wearing the most absurd boots he'd ever seen. They were made of crimson leather, well over her knees, and had incredibly high heels. He had watched with disbelief when she'd run like a gazelle in those boots. Now she moved uneasily, the tiny silver spurs on each heel ringing like bells. At her belt she wore a pearl-handled .22-caliber Walther PPK pistol.

Next to her, one arm protectively around the girl's shoulders, was the oldest of the party, Dr. Theophilus Tanner. He looked around seventy, with grizzled hair and a graying stubble on his cadaverous jaw. He was tall and skinny and wore cracked knee boots splattered with Louisiana swamp mud. The pale blue denim shirt and stained frock coat that he wore seemed like relics, something out of an old, old picture book from well before the Big War. A kerchief with a blue swallow's-eye design protruded from the top pocket of his coat, and a battered stovepipe hat was beside him on the floor.

"I trust you are feeling a little more like rejoining the land of the living, my young friend?" the old man asked in his rich, mellow voice.

"Better," Jak said, nodding.

Doc patted Lori companionably on the arm, dislodging his walking cane from his lap. It was made of polished ebony, with a carved lion's head in silver at its top. Jak knew, because Finnegan had told him, that the stick concealed a rapier-thin sword. The old man also carried a bizarre double-barreled cap and ball pistol called a Le Mat.

Finnegan winked at Jak. The short fat man looked pale from the jump, beads of sweat dappling his sallow forehead. "Way weird, huh, kid?"

Jak nodded. He envied the way Finn dressed, though it did make him look a bit like a sec man — matching sweater and pants in dark blue and high black combat boots with steel-capped toes. One of the things that Jak Lauren knew a lot about was killing and all the ways of doing it. His father had often told him that killing was a craft like any other. And, like any other, it had to be learned.

Jak had learned it well.

In a soft leather sheath on his hip, Finnegan carried a long butcher's cleaver, its edge honed until it sang. In his belt was a 9 mm Model 92 Beretta. Finn's chubby hands cradled a Heckler & Koch submachine gun. Able to fire fifty rounds on either single, triple or continuous, it also sported a trim silencer. Jak had seen blaster catalogs in the undamaged houses where he'd been raised and recognized the weapon as a development from the HK54A2 from the late nineties.

Jak pushed against the wall, trying to stand up. The man next around the circle shook his head. "Give it time."

J. B. Dix, the Armorer, never used four words when three would be enough.

J.B. was the calmest, quietest man Jak Lauren had ever met. Lightly built, he weighed not much more than Jak's own one-twenty. Around forty years old, with a thin face and a yellowish complexion, he wore rimless glasses and habitually sported a battered fedora. Jak noticed he had the trick of never watching you when you expected it and always watching you when you weren't ready.

In a handmade canvas sling at his waist, he carried a mini-Uzi, complemented by a Steyr AUG 5.6 mm handgun on his hip. Jak suspected, though he hadn't seen any evidence of it, that J.B. also had a variety of hidden knives and other weapons about his person, perhaps under his leather jacket and nondescript pants.

"My first jump I thought I was going to die," a woman's voice said.

"Know what you mean, Krysty," J.B. replied, managing a wan smile.

Krysty Wroth scared the shit out of Jak. She was also tall, close to six feet, with a great body that fueled his adolescent fantasies. She had piercing green eyes and the brightest, thickest red hair the boy had ever encountered. Several times since their first meeting, he'd almost sworn the hair had had a bizarre life of its own, the vermilion fronds swaying gently in the breeze when there'd been no wind at all.

Krysty also had the power of seeing. He knew that. She could "feel" what was going to happen. Not like a full doomie, but enough to give a distant early warning of trouble. Also she had staggeringly good hearing and vision. Added to the fact that on occasion she was capable of feats of almost superhuman strength, it was enough to scare anyone.

She was sitting, knees drawn up to her chest, wearing khaki overalls tucked into a pair of beautiful western boots, which were made of dark blue calf with inlaid falcons in silver leather. The toes of the boots were chiseled silver points, making them both attractive and potentially lethal. She wore a holster that contained a silvered Heckler & Koch P7A-13 pistol that fired nine-millimeter rounds.

"Back with us, Jak?" she said, smiling at him. "By Gaia, but I shall never forget my first jump! Felt like my head was still a thousand miles behind me."

Jak nodded, pushing up until he was standing. The room swayed about him, and he staggered, nearly falling. With an effort he retained his balance.

"Don't push it, Jak," urged the sixth and last member of the group, the leader, Ryan Cawdor.

Ever since their first meeting, Jak Lauren had felt instinctively that Ryan Cawdor was a man he could follow. In the swamps he'd been leader, despite his youth, because nobody else killed as well as he did. Ryan Cawdor was something else.

Jak stared across the gateway mat-trans chamber at him. Ryan was stretched out on the floor, feet crossed, looking not terribly uncomfortable. He was the tallest in the party, about a foot taller than the white-haired boy, and lean-built, with broad shoulders and narrow hips. His hair was a mat of tight black curls, spreading over the white fur collar of his long coat of treated skins. Around his neck was a white silk scarf. Finn had once told Jak that there were lead weights in each end of the scarf that turned it into an excellent garrote.

The face was thin with high cheekbones. On the right side a long scar ran from the mouth to the corner of the eye, which was a chilling pale blue. The left eye was gone, the raw, weeping socket concealed by a leather patch. Finn had told Jak that Ryan's own brother had been responsible for the wound, but he didn't believe the fat man. Finnegan didn't always tell the whole truth.

Ryan wore a brown shirt and brown pants, with the bottoms slit so that they could slide easily over his combat boots. His right hand rested on the butt of a Heckler & Koch G-12 caseless fifty-shot automatic rifle with night-scope and silencer. Ryan, like Finn, wore a blade at his belt. But instead of a cleaver he carried a long steel panga, which was as broad as a machete. From the look of it, a strong man could behead an ox in a single stroke.

"You stare any harder at me, son, and you're going t'bore a hole through me." The words were said lightly, but Jak got the hint.

"Sorry, Ryan. Was looking at your handblaster."

The one-eyed man took the pistol out of his belt and lobbed it across the small room. Jak caught it easily in his right hand and studied it.

"Haven't seen one like this," he said. "SIG-Sauer, is it?"

Ryan glanced across at J.B. "You're the Armorer. You tell him all 'bout it."

In a flat, passionless voice, J.B. rattled off all the relevant details of the handgun.

"Model P-226. Nine mil. Fifteen rounds, push-button mag release. Barrel length 4.41 inches. Overall length 7.72 inches."

"Weight?" Jak asked.

"I'm coming to that, son. Keep your carriage behind the horse."

"Sorry."

"Weighs in at precisely 25.52 ounces. SIG-Sauer, like you said. Second half of the name's for J. P. Sauer and Son of Eckernforde. SIG is for Schweizerische Industrie-Gesellschaft. Anything else you want to know 'bout the blaster?"

Finnegan gave a great bellowing laugh. "You mean there's fucking more?"

Jak joined in the general laughter, feeling his strength flowing back now that he was standing up and his brains were settling back into his skull.

"How come it's so cold?" he asked, shivering in his tattered canvas-and-leather coat and breeches, dyed brown, gray and green for camouflage. He felt the weight of his trusty .357 Magnum, satin finish with the six-inch barrel, strapped to his thigh in its holster.

"Yeah, it is kind of cold," Ryan agreed, standing up with the easy grace of a large cat.

"Mebbe find some warm clothes in the redoubt," Krysty suggested, uncoiling at his side and rubbing her hands together.

"Bracing is the word I would use. So much more healthy than the awful humidity of the swamps, whatever they were called."

"Atchafalaya," J.B. said, reminding Doc Tanner where they'd been.

"God bless you," the old man replied. "Gesundheit is what we used to say."

The Armorer stared at him, blank-faced.

"Where are we now?" the boy asked, stretching himself and pushing his mane of white hair away from his eyes.

"We're here," Ryan Cawdor replied.

"We always here," Lori said, looking around at the others to make sure they realized she was joking.

"Yeah," Finn grunted. "Guess she's 'bout fucking right. We're always here."

Most of the other gateways Ryan had passed through had been clean and orderly. Once everyone was on their feet, blasters cocked and ready, he reached out and opened the door.

For several seconds nobody moved or spoke. Then Ryan said, very quietly, "Fireblast!"

It looked bad.