Shatter Zone

As gently as falling through a cloud, the terrified companions descended into the artificial forever of the matter transfer, and vanished from sight.

Chapter Three

But even as it started, their fall came to a relaxing halt and the companions were able to watch as the electronic mists faded away to leave them unharmed and unruffled in a new mat-trans unit.

“Son a bitch,” Ryan muttered, drawing his blaster without conscious thought.

“We not dead,” Jak mumbled, sounding slightly shocked. With a gesture, a throwing knife slipped out of his sleeve and dropped into his waiting hand.

“No,” a hoarse voice whispered.

Turning, the companions saw Doc cringing against the wall, braced as if for a blow. His hands twisted the silver-lion’s head on the walking stick, exposing a few inches of the stainless-steel sword hidden inside the hollow sheath.

“You okay?” Mildred asked, reaching out a hand.

“Not again,” Doc rambled, eyes darting about madly. “No hardship means a controlled jump. That means they…they have found me. Operation Chronos has found me again!”

“Are you sure—” Ryan began slowly.

Suddenly a new light came into Doc’s wild eyes and his face went pale as he closed the stick with a solid click. “No, by the Three Kennedys, they haven’t found me, the bastards have found us!” he gasped. “But they can’t have you. I wouldn’t let them get their hands on you, too!”

Whipping out his ebony stick, Doc lunged toward Krysty. Even though the sword stick was sheathed, the redhead twisted aside. But it hadn’t been necessary. The bottom of the stick missed her by inches, as intended, and stabbed the Last Destination button on the control panel.

Recoiling at the sight, everybody braced for the torture of instantaneous travel, but nothing happened. The mat-trans unit didn’t respond to the signal from the emergency LD button.

“Nuke me,” J.B. said hoarsely, putting on his glasses. “Well, that never happened before! We should have gone right back to last redoubt. The LD button has never failed to work before!”

“I don’t think it failed now,” Krysty said, her hair flexing unhappily about her tense features. “I think we’re not being allowed to leave.”

“You mean, that maybe Doc is right,” Mildred returned, “and that this might have been a controlled jump?”

“Could be, yes.”

“Mutie shit,” Jak muttered. “Just malfunc.”

Ryan slid the Steyr SSG-70 longblaster off his shoulder and worked the bolt.

There were only four 5-round clips remaining for the Steyr, but the neckered-down brass packed a hell of a lot more punch than the fat 9 mm Parabellum rounds in the SIG-Sauer. Anything could be behind that door, from a squad of armed whitecoats to a sec droid hunter. Once, very long ago, Ryan had chilled a cougar with his bare hands, and the Deathlands warrior would rather do that again than face a sec hunter droid even if he was armed with a predark bazooka. The damn machines were almost impossible to stop once they started coming after a target.

“If you’re feeling nervous,” Ryan added, “then start us on a jump.” The man was listening hard to the redoubt, getting the feel of the place, the gentle hum of the air vents, the muffled noises of the water pipes and high-pitched whine of the fluorescent lights overhead. Everything seemed normal, not a thing was different or strange, and that was scaring the nuking hell out of the warrior.

Keeping his handcannon level, Jak reached for the keypad and tapped the LD button to no result.

“Okay,” the teen stated angrily. “We trapped.”

“No, please, we must jump again,” Doc begged, dropping the ebony stick. Pushing the others aside, he hit the controls in a fast sequence. “We cannot let them find you…you have no idea what they can do…will do to you…we have to leave right now!”

Mildred reached out a hand, but the time traveler dodged out of the way.

Closing a fist, Doc started pounding on the keypad. “Work, damn you, why will you not work!”

The startled companions exchanged worried expressions at the outburst, but before they could do anything Doc slipped to the floor and started to weep uncontrollably, his face buried in his hands.

The sight of such weakness shocked Ryan for a moment, then he suddenly understood, and felt like a fool. It had to have been all of those jumps that had scrambled Doc’s brain and made him so forgetful. Pieced together from various conversations, Ryan knew that the agents of Operation Chronos had trawled dozens of people from the past and brought them into the twentieth century. But Doc was the only person to ever survive the process sane. The predark whitecoats had nearly turned the poor Vermont scholar inside and out trying to solve that vital mystery.

Then one day, Doc was deemed too much trouble to deal with and was sent into the future, to arrive in Deathlands. The agents of Operation Chronos immediately regretted the decision and took off after him in hot pursuit. But there was no way to track the old man in the vast wasteland that was the Deathlands. The agents of Chronos had long ago given up the chase as impossible, but Doc kept running. Finally he wandered, dazed and confused, into some serious nuking trouble with a lunatic baron before accidentally encountering the companions.

“Sweet Jesus, look what they’ve done to him,” Mildred said softly. Kneeling by the sobbing man, she tenderly stroked his hair. “Doc might annoy the hell out of me at times, but he’s no coward. The old coot has proved that a thousand times. The horrors he must have endured at the hands of those whitecoats….”

Doc had once claimed that Operation Chronos was a subdivision of Overproject Whisper, the group that built the redoubts and invented the mat-trans units. Was that, in fact, true? Were there perhaps other unknown groups prowling through the redoubts of the world? There was very little about the bases that they knew for certain. Except that everybody they met was usually an enemy.

Kneeling, Jak handed Doc the dropped sword stick, and the trembling scholar hugged it tightly to his heaving chest.

“Sorry,” Doc whispered in a hoarse voice, tears on his cheeks. “I seem to have…lost control there for just a moment. I will be fine in a trice. Really, I will….”

“Theophilus,” Ryan said, stumbling over the name.

Sluggishly, Dr. Theophilus Algernon Tanner looked up in shock at Ryan’s scarred face. It was the very first time he could recall the man using his Christian name.

“If those nuke-sucking whitecoats are coming, then we’ll face the entire fragging lot of them together, old friend,” Ryan stated, offering a scarred hand.

A long minute passed as Doc breathed deeply, the color slowly returning to his features. Then the silver-haired gentleman reached out and clasped Ryan’s hand in a powerful grip. It always caught the one-eyed man by surprise that Doc looked sixty, but really was only in his late thirties and as strong as a horse. His mind had been damaged but not his body, and not his fighting spirit.

“Together,” Ryan said, helping the man to stand.

The two stood for a moment, hands tightly clasped.

“Together, my friend,” Doc vowed, his voice as strong as ever. As he released the hold, he softly added, “And please allow me to apologize for my earlier…lapse. You see, I—”

“Frag it,” Ryan said bluntly, glancing over his shoulder at the closed door. “It don’t mean drek.”

“Doesn’t,” Krysty corrected him. “And anybody who says they’ve never been scared is a liar. Gaia knows we’ve all been there.”

“Fuckin’ A,” Jak chimed in, slapping Doc on the shoulder.

“Nuke them till they glow, then shoot them in the dark,” Mildred added impulsively.

The rest of the companions chuckled at that, but Doc threw back his head to roar in laughter. “Indeed, madam! Well said. Cry havoc, and let loose the dogs of war, eh?”

“Oh, stuff it, you old coot.”

“Well, as long as we’re not going anywhere,” Ryan said grimly, striding across the chamber’s cold floor, “then we better get ready for company. Get hard, people. If the whitecoats do come for us, it’s going to be bloody.”

“I hear ya,” J.B. stated, leveling his Uzi machine pistol and walking across the chamber to join his old friend. The fleeting moment of camaraderie was past. Back to the grim business of staying alive.

This new mat-trans unit was the same as every other, a hexagonal room made of seamless armaglass, with small hidden vents near the ceiling, one door with concealed hinges, and an operating lever to open it. The only difference was the color. Nothing else.

As the rest of the companions prepared to leave the mat-trans unit, J.B. eased the M-4000 shotgun off his shoulder and passed the weapon to Mildred. Tucking away her ZKR revolver, the physician expertly racked the scattergun to chamber a 12-gauge cartridge.