Crimson Waters

“Well, let’s get rolling, people,” Ryan said. “Finding some kind of supplies in this rad-blasted redoubt is of more than passing interest to me.”

* * *

“WHAT COULD DO?” Jak asked.

A quick search had showed the redoubt’s stores were well looted, so empty they might never have been stocked in the first place. But that wasn’t what had them all standing and staring openmouthed in awe and surprise.

The albino youth asked a good question, Ryan judged. The walls of a redoubt could shrug off blaster bullets like spit, and it would take a powerful blaster to seriously scratch them.

The corridor ahead of them was pinched shut, like an old length of hose with a swag-bellied sec man standing on it.

“Seismic activity, at a guess, dear boy,” Doc said.

“Talk plain, Doc!” Jak admonished.

“Earthquakes,” J.B. said.

“I thought most of the really massive quakes happened along the Pacific Rim,” Mildred said.

“The West Indies and Central America have been traditional hotbeds of such upheaval,” Doc said, used to Jak’s outbursts.

While he could sit stone still for hours on guard or on a hunt, Jak wasn’t known for patience where his fellow humans were concerned, particularly the time-trawled professor. Still, Ryan eyed the old man closely. He also had a habit of drifting in and out of reality.

Mildred grunted. “Oh. That’s right. I remember back in the early twentieth century there was a terrible eruption that killed tens of thousands of people. Mount Pelée, the volcano was called. Wiped out the city of Saint-Pierre the way Vesuvius did Pompeii.”

“On the island of Martinique, then,” Doc said. “That would lie south and perhaps somewhat east of here, if my reading of that map fragment was correct.”

J.B. rubbed the back of his neck. “We sure got bellies full of eruptions when we were in Mex Land,” he remarked.

“Gaia is restless here,” Krysty said, frowning. Her emerald-green eyes were pointed at the crushed corridor, but Ryan saw they were focused on nothing in particular.

He shook his head. “It doesn’t matter. We need to find a way out of here.”

“Find food,” Jak said. “Hungry.”

“How can you even think of food?” Mildred demanded. “My stomach’s still doing slow rolls from that damned jump.”

J.B. squinted critically into the dark depths of his upended canteen. “I wouldn’t sweat the grub, Jak,” he said. “The water’s about gone. Dehydration’ll chill us before hunger gets a proper start gnawing our vitals.”

“So,” Ryan said. “Out.”

“I hope the doors aren’t blocked by the same forces that did this,” Mildred said. “Whatever they were.”

Jak shook his head. “Open. Air fresh.”

Mildred eyed him. “You sure about that, Jak?”

“Power’s still on,” J.B. added. “Or didn’t you notice we’re not stumbling around in darkness blacker than twelve feet up a stubbie’s bowels?”

Jak shook his head irritably. “Air fresh,” he repeated. “Not filtered. Not smell?”

J.B. drew in a deep breath. “Mebbe not,” he said, “compared to you.”

Ryan grunted. “So lead the way,” he said to Jak. “Get us out of here.”

* * *

J.B. SQUINTED THROUGH his minisextant at the sun, which was about halfway up a blue sky free of chem clouds. “You were right about the map,” J.B. said, lowering the device. “We’re in the Caribbean, all right.”

The companions stood on the highest point of the island, which was as bare as a baby’s backside and not a whole lot larger, if not nearly so smooth. In fact, the rock beneath their feet was black, hard and porous—lava. Though it didn’t rise more than forty or fifty feet above the dancing green water that surrounded it, its regular shape unpleasantly suggested that it was the cinder cone of an actual volcano.

The breeze up the west side of the island, off a beach where stretches of white sand alternated with rusty-brown, smelled of salt and decaying sea life.

“What now?” Krysty asked.

“We could try the mat-trans,” Mildred said. “It hasn’t exactly taken us a long time to find out there was nothing but rock and sand on this damn island. Might be able to get back inside the time limit of the LD button.”

The gateways had a feature that allowed a user to return to the originating point by pressing the “last destination” button within half an hour of a jump.

J.B. frowned at his wrist chron. “We’d be crowding it,” he said. “Anyway, I’m not rightly sure I want to trust a malfunking machine.”

“Do you like the idea of dying of thirst here, with water, water everywhere, and not a drop to damn well drink?” Mildred asked.

“Not starve, anyway,” Jak said. “Sea here—food always.”

* * *

MILDRED GLARED AROUND at the others. “Why not try the gateway? We can always jump to a random destination. It got us here, after all.”

J.B. shook his head. “Bad idea, Millie. There’s something wrong with it. I don’t think it’s safe.”

“Safe?” Doc whinnied the word like a laughing horse. Mildred noted the way his blue eyes rolled. He was losing his grip on reality, which was never rock solid to begin with. “Jumping through time and space by such unnatural means is never safe, J.B.! Never safe at all.”

Doc slumped suddenly, his face crumpling like an old newspaper. Mildred knew he was remembering his lost family and life, before he’d been time-trawled away from everything he knew or held dear by the scientists of Operation Chronos.

“We’re not trying the mat-trans,” Ryan said. He wasn’t a man who minced words; while he might consult his friends on decisions, once he spoke in that tone, as flat and hard as slate, it was final. “We’re getting off this nuke-withered rock. Alive.”

Krysty had walked down toward the beach to the northwest. It wasn’t a long trip.

“There are islands off this way,” she said. “Some of them have trees.”

“Might be game,” J.B. added.

“Trees mean fresh water,” Jak said.

“Not necessarily where we can get at it,” Ryan said. “But yeah.”

“This is an area, as our youthful friend so astutely points out, that abounds in edible sea life,” Doc said. He seemed to have snapped back to the present; he tended to do that when confronted with a problem he found interesting, Mildred had noticed. “That suggests humans live here, too.”