Neutron Solstice

Chapter One

Ryan Cawdor stirred and opened his eyes.

The last tendrils of the mist were clearing away. On the floor the pattern of raised metallic disks no longer glowed. The same pattern on the ceiling of the hexagonal chamber reflected his own face, distorted and blurred. The walls were of smoked armored glass, tinted a deep blue. It was much the same as other gateways that Ryan had been in. Maybe a little cleaner and in better condition than some of them.

He took a quick glance around him. Something else struck Ryan. This particular gateway was warm. Indeed, after his recent sojourn in the biting chill of the land that had once been called Alaska, it was uncomfortably hot.

Even though it had been days since he'd been wounded, the small cut on his left hand still stung. Then, he had been in the extreme northwest of the country, still in the grip of nuclear winter. From the heat he guessed that they were somewhere down south, and toward the east. By his calculation it was around the middle of February.

Around the chamber, all slumped over like untidy bundles of clothing, were Ryan's six comrades. Four of them had been with him since they had traveled on the armored War Wag One, with the Trader, roaming across the Deathlands of Central United States, buying cheap and selling dear. They'd been fighting for life in a country that was still ninety-five percent devastated from the great nuclear war of January, 2001, nearly a hundred years ago.

The first of them to be showing signs of recovery was J. B. Dix, the Armorer. Around forty years of age, lean and compact, J.B. knew more about weapons than anyone alive. His battered fedora sat at a rakish angle on his forehead; his wire-rimmed glasses had slid down his thin, sallow face.

He blinked awake, his right hand going in a conditioned reflex to the Mini-Uzi that rested across his lap. The big Steyr AUG 5.6 mm pistol was bolstered on his right hip.

"Hot, Ryan," he said.

J.B. was a man of very few words. And all of them were relevant.

"Yeah," replied Ryan. He thought about standing up and decided he didn't quite feel ready for that, not just yet. The patch over the empty right eye socket had moved a little, and he edged it back into place. The butt of his pistol Ч a SIG-Sauer P-226 9 mm handgun with fifteen rounds in the mag Ч banged against the glass, and he reached to his hip to adjust it. On the opposite hip Ryan carried a panga with an eighteen-inch blade. His immediate and obvious armaments were completed by the Heckler & Koch G-12 automatic rifle and fifty caseless rounds of 4.7 mm.

Nobody in Deathlands ever worried about having too many weapons.

"Doc looks ill," commented J.B.

Ryan glanced across the gateway chamber at the oldest and most mysterious member of their party.

Doctor Theophilus Tanner. "Doc." Tall and skinny, aged around sixty, with peculiarly excellent teeth. Doc had a deep, resonant voice, and often spoke in a strangely old-fashioned way. He was sprawled on his side, breathing noisily through his gaping mouth. His battered stovepipe hat had rolled across the gateway chamber. The ebony sword stick with the silver lion's-head top was in his lap, and the bizarre Le Mat percussion pistol was holstered at his belt.

Doc had been rescued from the ugly township of Mocsin, his mind better than half gone. But he seemed to have a lot of arcane knowledge, touching on the technology of the past. The far past, even before the bombs and missiles ruined the land.

Next to him, Finnegan and Hennings propped each other up. The former, stout and short, carried a gray Heckler & Koch submachine gun with a drum mag of fifty rounds of 9 mm and a built-in silencer, Hennings was a tall black man with an identical HK54A gun by his right hand.

Old friends from the days with Ryan Cawdor and J. B. Dix on the war wag, they were tough-fighting men, fiercely independent, each with a dark and macabre sense of humor.

Both men wore identical clothes, more like uniforms: dark blue high-necked jumpers, with matching pants. Both in black midcalf combat boots, with steel toe caps.

Lori Quint lay next to Doc. Ryan had noticed over the past few days that the old man and the six-foot blond teenager had been becoming increasingly friendly. It wasn't that surprising. In Deathlands the first thing you needed was a reliable weapon. A friend came a close second.

Lori had been the second wife of mad, ragged Quint, the Keeper of the redoubt in Alaska that concealed the gateway. The long fur coat that she wore in the chilly north was by her side, but now she wore a short maroon suede skirt, hiked up around her long tanned limbs. The red satin blouse was torn and stained. She stirred as consciousness came creeping back, the tiny silver spurs on her thighboots of crimson leather tinkling with a thin clear sound. Her only gun was a small pearl-handled PPK .22 pistol.

Ryan, feeling the familiar dizziness and pressure behind the eyes from previous jumps, eventually decided to make an effort to stand. At his side, Krysty Wroth was coming around. He looked down at her, filling with a great wave of affection. That was the best word he could believe about it. "Love" was a word that was not much used by Ryan Cawdor.

"By the Earth Mother, Ryan, it's hot in this place."

"I figure we're somewhere far to the southeast."

"Still in Deathlands?"

"Mebbe beyond."

With no apparent effort, the girl uncoiled herself to stand by him. Ryan was a good two inches clear of six feet, but she was less than a palm's span below him. He marveled at her amazing powers of recovery. Though the others were all moving, moaning and sighing, Krysty's green eyes were bright as ever, and she was leaning against the glass wall, arranging her staggeringly bright red hair with long fingers. The girl wore khaki coveralls, tucked into a beautiful pair of cowboy boots, also from the Alaskan redoubt. They were hand-stitched in blue calf, overlaid with silver falcons, wings spread wide. The toes of the boots were knife-sharp, chiseled from silver. Her gun was also silvered, a 9 mm Heckler & Koch P7A-13.

In the next few minutes they all managed to stand, though Lori felt sick, kneeling with vomit drooling from her mouth. Doc knelt at her side with a cracking of knee joints, putting a comforting arm around the girl.

"Where we come? Hot. Never known hot. How we come to this? Walls different color."

"Tell her, Doc," said J.B. "Like to hear how you explain it to the dummy."

Doc Tanner scowled at the Armorer. "I would be obliged, Mr. Dix, if you would refrain from calling Miss Quint a dummy. She is not a mute. Nor a mutie. That foul imbecile Quint never educated her and kept her in a state of terror. She is as bright as you or I." He paused for a moment. "Certainly as bright as you."

"Fireblast!" swore Ryan. "It's bastard hot. Guess I'll leave my coat here." Dropping the long garment with its white fir trim to the floor, he hesitated, then retrieved a white silk scarf with weighted ends from a pocket.

"Why hot? My head hurts." Lori stood and leaned against Doc. Finnegan seemed as though he was going to make some joke about the oddly matched couple, then caught Ryan's good eye and closed his mouth.

"The pain will abate, child," Doc said. "We are now in some other, hotter part of what was the United States. Unless we have been carried to one of the gateways that was established in... But let us not consider that for a while."

Ryan listened, puzzled. Doc occasionally dropped strange hints about the gateways and what they could do. As if he possessed more knowledge than he possibly could.

"No, we enter this chamber, built long years ago, before the great nuclear conflict that destroyed this earth as we knew it, and the mechanism operates. Instant matter transmitter. From here to there in thatmuch time." He clicked his bony fingers together to emphasize the shortness.

Lori's face was utterly blank, but she nodded as if she understood.

"These transmitters were known as gateways. They were hidden in many locations throughout the land. I imagine most were destroyed. But they were well made, using what was called the state-of-the-art technology. Many survived, hidden within a variety of redoubts."

"Like home?" she asked.

Doc nodded, his long white hair drifting across the high cheekbones. "Precisely, Miss Quint. Like that vision of Dante's last circle of the inferno that you knew as your home. This is a gateway. A part of Project Cerberus. Research from scientists that was to run to the very end of endless night."

"When was we home?"

This time Doc shook his head. "Alas, I have no really accurate chronometer, Miss Quint. But my memory, addled though it often is, recalls a transmission time of less than .0001 of a nanosecond. Of course, it seems longer because of the recovery time from the molecular scrambling and disassembly."

In the few jumps he'd made, Ryan had wondered how long it took. On one he'd checked the chron on his left wrist, but it didn't seem to have moved at all from the beginning to the end of the journey. Doc's explanation hadn't made it any easier to understand. All he knew was that you got into one of the surviving gateways and closed the door. An infinity of scattered time later, you were in another gateway, perhaps three thousand miles away.

"So we was there and here at same time?" asked Lori, in her slow, almost tranquilized voice.

Doc smiled paternally at her, but the hand that squeezed the top of her thigh, where skirt nearly met boots, was far from paternal.

The old man turned his smile on Ryan Cawdor. But it was quickly replaced with a taut expression of horror. The eyes bulged wide at Ryan. Doc's grip on sanity gradually seemed to be returning, but it was still frail.

"The men of science, Ryan. Upon my soul, ladies and gentlemen, but they are such inhumane scum. They seek better and better ways of slaughter. Oh, the sights I saw when I was... oh, the horrors!" He closed his eyes, swaying like an aspen in a summer wind. "A young man, a taxi driver from Minneapolis, a petty thief... nothing vicious in him. Seen him used as a guinea pig for one of their nerve toxins. Seen him trying to bite his hand off, gnawing to the bloody bone. Children, from Asia, experiments for the agency that... rubbing their own excrement in great ulcerated sores that they had torn in their own flesh. Oh..."

He began to weep. Lori put her arms around him, hugging his frail body as he sobbed uncontrollably.

For a moment, everyone avoided eye contact. It was Ryan who broke the silence.

"Best we move."

"Yeah," said J. B. Dix.

The door to the gateway opened smoothly. The anteroom was filled with chattering banks of computers and ranged equipment that hummed and whirred. Red and green and amber lights flickered. This was the cleanest and apparently best-preserved gateway control room that Ryan had seen.

Above the small panel of numbered and lettered buttons by the side of the chamber door, there was a notice that Ryan had seen before. Up in the Darks, where it had all begun for them.

"Entry Absolutely Forbidden to All but B12 Cleared Personnel. Mat-trans."

This time there was no small room between the controls and the actual gateway. There was a massive door of vanadium-steel at the far side of the room.

"Blasters ready," ordered Ryan, taking out the SIG-Sauer pistol, steadying it, his finger firm on the trigger.

Everyone drew rifles or pistols and ranged around Cawdor as he reached for the door. In the humid heat it felt cool to the touch. To the right was a green lever, pointing to the floor, with the word Closed printed on it. Ryan grasped it and tugged it upward, toward the Open position.

When the door was only a couple of inches ajar, Ryan eased the lever back to the neutral position, pressing his good eye to the slit and squinting both ways along the corridor that ran outside.

"Anything?" asked J. B. Dix.

"No. Pass the rad counter."

The Armorer handed him a small device, like a pocket chron, that measured the radioactivity. It cheeped and muttered quietly, showing no more than a minor surface level. There were places scattered throughout the country where it would have howled out the danger. These hot spots were often near cities or towns where there had been either missile complexes or communication centers.

"Safe?"

"Yeah."

Hennings was at his elbow as the door hissed open the rest of the way.

"Fucking hot, Ryan. Help sweat some of Finn's fat."

"Careful the sun don't fucking burn you blacker, Henn," replied the stout little man.

"Cut it, you two," snapped Ryan. "Come on. Keep tight and careful."

Nobody needed telling where to go.

Ryan led the way, as always. Then came Krysty, light on her feet, two paces behind. Hennings was third in line. Doc, with an arm around Lori, was in the middle of the group. Finn was last but one, with J.B. bringing up the rear, about ten paces behind everyone, constantly turning to check that nobody was trying to come up behind to cold-cock them.

The corridors were a pale cream stone, seamless, curving slightly to the right. About four paces wide, and about twelve feet high. Lighting was contained in recessed strips. There were no doors on either side.

"This a redoubt, Doc?" Ryan asked.

"Perchance not, Mr. Cawdor. Not all of the gateways were built within the large storage redoubts."

The corridor wound on. Ryan's guess was that it was going to come a full 360 degrees. Every now and then they passed beneath what were obviously defensive barriers, locked away in the ceiling. And every thirty or forty paces they walked under the cold gaze of small vid cameras, set in the angle between wall and curved roof.

"Nobody?" called J. B. Dix from the rear.

"Not a smell or sight of 'em," Ryan replied.

"There's nobody," said Krysty Wroth, voice utterly decisive.

"Sure?"

"Sure, lover," she said.

In the century after the nuclear apocalypse many parts of what had been the United States were disastrously contaminated by all forms of nuclear poison. Chem clouds, bitter winter, acid rain and lethal doses of radiation had all combined to produce a multitude of genetic mutations. Muties came in all shapes, sizes and forms.

In many cases their names gave clues as to what they were like and how they acted.

Stickies had strangely developed hands and feet that enabled them to grip almost any surface. They were hard to kill.

Sensers were able to see into the future, mainly in a very limited and often inaccurate way.

Doomies could only feel when some disaster was going to happen. They could rarely be specific, but their premonitions were generally correct.

Crazies were... well, crazies were plain crazy.

Krysty was a kind of mutie. Ryan had found it difficult to handle when he first became aware of it. After they'd first made love. She had mixed talents. Her long hair was slightly sentient and seemed to move of its own volition. She could often sense trouble, in the way that a doomseer could. Also, she had unusually keen sight and hearing.

But her greatest attribute was generally hidden. Her late mother, Sonja, had always drilled into the girl the key phrase: Strive for Life. She had come from a settlement called Harmony, which had a reputation as a sanctuary, as peaceful hamlets were called. Krysty had been taught there by her mother, and by two good men, her uncle Tyas McNann and his friend Peter Maritza. They had taught her to respect the Earth Mother, Gaia, as she was called, after the Greek goddess of the earth.

Though it exhausted her, Krysty was capable of disciplining her mind and body to such an extent that she could unleash a terrifying physical strength.

It wasn't just humans that bred muties.

In his thirty or so years, Ryan had encountered just about every kind of genetic perversion that a diseased mind could imagine. Fish and fowl. Insects from the locked rooms of a dying nightmare. Animals and snakes and birds. All distorted into obscene parodies of their original forms.

Ryan believed that this odd circular redoubt was devoid of life. Krysty just confirmed his suspicions. The air tasted clean and untouched. Once you'd smelled death, you never forgot it. Not ever.

It was only about three minutes later that they reached what looked like the main doors. The corridor opened to a room about ten paces square. The walls showed faint shadow-shapes, squares and rectangles, where pictures or notices had been hung. But the entire complex was clear. Whoever had been there when Armageddon came had done a good cleaning. Nothing remained, not even dust. It was all hermetically sealed, waiting for human beings to return.

"There's no control panel," said Finn. "Not like the others."

The walls around the doors were smooth and clean, lacking any kind of opening mechanism. Ryan looked to Doc for help.

"I confess I'm baffled. The individual design of some of the gateways was outside the scope of the Cerberus people."

"Blast it. Got some grens." As usual, J. B. Dix was direct in his thinking.

"I suggest caution, Mr. Dix," replied Doc. "Some of these main entry ports are highly sophisticated. If we were to fail to blow it open, then we might find we had permanently closed the building's only exit."

"So? What do we do?" asked Ryan. "Feels warmer here than anywhere."

"Got to bring fresh air in every now and then. Been going for a hundred years, give or take. So some outside air and humidity leaks in. I am of the opinion that the controls for this might be in some hidden master unit."

"In the big fucking fire!" swore Hennings. "That mean we can't get out?"

"Wait," said Lori, pushing past them all and walking slowly, fearfully toward the dully gleaming great doors.

"What's she going to do?" hissed J.B. "Lean her tits on it?"

"Shut up, Dix," warned Krysty. "Looks like the kid knows something we don't."

About six feet from the portal, Lori hesitated, then took two more long strides forward, her little spurs tinkling.

At first nothing seemed to happen.

Then like a metallic giant unclenching his fists, the doors began to slide ponderously back, letting in a waft of humid air that made all seven of them gasp. The doorway was nearly forty feet wide, and when the doors finally stopped moving, a stretch of corridor, around two hundred paces in length, was revealed. At its end was a steel wall with an ordinary-sized door set in it.

"Come," said Lori, stepping briskly forward, followed by the others with varying degrees of reluctance.

On the right-hand wall someone had neatly stenciled the word Goodbye.

"How d'you know just to walk up to it like that?" shouted Ryan, his words ringing out above the echoes of boot-heels.

Turning her head over her shoulder, Lori answered, "Back door out home. Quint show me. Earth slip and cover it. Look same. Eyes see us and open door. Eyes of dead men."

"Mebbe boobied, girl," called Hennings, running past her, stopping at the door and pushing cautiously at the handle. "Locked!" he bellowed.

"No," said the girl, moving him aside and taking the handle in her right hand. She pulled it slowly toward herself.

It was unlocked.

Henn followed the tall blond girl out into the daylight. Ryan came next, with the others at his heels. He stood on the threshold of the building, staring out. The light was oddly diffused, with shifting green shadows moving in the doorway. He drew a deep breath, filling his lungs, tasting the air, savoring it like a connoisseur.

Ryan Cawdor had visited many parts of the continent. He had walked the cracked avenues of New York City, through the groves of whispering vegetation with poisonous flowers and berries on every corner. Gazed across the oily brew of chemicals to the charred stump of what had once been a mighty statue. Something the locals mostly called Libberlady.

He'd been in the cold and ice of the north and down in the glowing rad-crazy wastes of the southern deserts, where chem clouds flamed from east to west. If J.B. was right, and they were in the southeast, then it was new territory for him.

"Some ozone," he muttered. "Can taste gas. Mebbe in the ground or water. Fireblast, but it's hot and wet here."

Already he was sweating, a trickle of perspiration running down the small of his back. From habit he glanced behind him, seeing to his surprise that virtually all of the gateway was below ground. Creepers twined all about the shallow concrete single-story building, covering it with an impenetrable mat of gray-green foliage. His first guess was that this superb natural camouflage was the main reason the gateway hadn't been entered and despoiled.

"Here we come," said Finnegan, staring out at the unbelievable landscape around them.

Krysty shuddered. Within the deeps of the limitless swamp that stretched all around them, she sensed a slow stirring.

It was not a good feeling.