James Axler - Outlanders 19 - Tomb of Time

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that this book is stolen property. It was reported as "unsold and destroyed" to the publisher, and neither the author

nor the publisher has received any payment for this "stripped book."

First edition November 2001 ISBN 0-373-63832-9

TOMB OF TIME

Special thanks to Mark Ellis for his contribution to the Outlanders concept, developed for Gold Eagle Books.

form by any electronic, mechanical or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including xerography,

photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, is forbidden without the written

permission of the publisher, Worldwide Library, 225 Duncan Mill Road, Don Mills, Ontario, Canada M3B 3K9.

All characters hi this book have no existence outside the imagination of the author and have no relation whatsoever

to anyone bearing the same name or names. They are not even distantly inspired by any individual known or

unknown to the author, and all incidents are pure invention.

® and TM are trademarks of the publisher. Trademarks indicated with ® are registered in the United States Patent and

Trademark Office, the Canadian Trade Marks Office and in other countries. Printed in U.S.A.

Time, like an ever-rolling stream, Bears all its sons away; They fly forgotten, as a dream Dies at the

opening day.

—Isaac Watts, 1674-1748

The Road to Outlands— From Secret Government Files to the Future

Almost two hundred years after the global holocaust, Kane, a former Magistrate of Cobaltville, often thought

the world had been lucky to survive at all after a nuclear device detonated in the Russian embassy in

Washington, D.C. The aftermath—forever known as skydark— reshaped continents and turned civilization

into ashes.

Nearly depopulated, America became the Deathlands— poisoned by radiation, home to chaos and mutated

life forms. Feudal rule reappeared in the form of baronies, while remote outposts clung to a brutish existence.

What eventually helped shape this wasteland were the redoubts, the secret preholocaust military

installations with stores of weapons, and the home of gateways, the locational matter-transfer facilities.

Some of the redoubts hid clues that had once fed wild theories of government cover-ups and alien visitations.

Rearmed from redoubt stockpiles, the barons consolidated ttieir power and reclaimed technology for the

villes. Their power, supported by some invisible authority, extended beyond their fortified walls to what was

now called the Outlands. It was here that the rootstock of humanity survived, living with hellzones and

chemical storms, hounded by Magistrates.

In the villes, rigid laws were enforced—to atone for the sins of the past and prepare the way for a better

future. That was the barons' public credo and their right-to-rule.

Kane, along with friend and fellow Magistrate Grant, had upheld that claim until a fateful Outlands expedition.

A displaced piece of technology...a question to a keeper of the archives...a vague clue about alien

masters—and their world shifted radically. Suddenly, Brigid Baptiste, the archivist, faced summary

execution, and

Grant a quick termination. For Kane there was forgiveness if he pledged his unquestioning allegiance to

Baron Cobalt and his unknown masters and abandoned his friends.

But that allegiance would make him support a mysterious and alien power and deny loyalty and friends. Then

what else was there?

Kane had been brought up solely to serve the ville. Brigid's only link with her family was her mother's red-gold

hair, green eyes and supple form. Grants clues to his lineage were his ebony skin and powerful physique.

But Domi, she of the white hair, was an Outiander pressed into sexual servitude in Cobaltville. She at least

knew her roots and was a reminder to the exiles that the outcasts belonged in the human family.

Parents, friends, community—the very rootedness of humanity was denied. With no continuity, there was no

forward momentum to the future. And that was the crux—when Kane began to wonder if there was a future.

For Kane, It wouldn't do. So the only way was out— way, way out.

After their escape, they found shelter at the forgotten Cerberus redoubt headed by Lakesh, a scientist,

Cobaltville^ head archivist, and secret opponent of the barons.

With their past turned into a lie, their future threatened, only one thing was left to give meaning to the

outcasts. The hunger for freedom, the will to resist the hostile influences. And perhaps, by opposing, end

them.

Chapter 1

The dead man seemed to be kneeling in prayer. Hunched over with both hands raised palms outward

and his head tilted back, he looked as if he were seeking benediction. Judging by the condition of his

body, he had received damnation instead.

The man was completely black—not only his hair, skin and fingernails, but also his teeth. His mouth

gaped open in an agonized rictus, exposing a tongue the hue of ebony. His eyes resembled a pair of

small onyx orbs. His clothing, which appeared to consist of a short denim jacket and zippered coverall,

was as jet-black as the rest of him. His clothing, flesh and hah- had the texture of porous charcoal or

black plaster. The figure looked more like a three-dimensional shadow or a singularly unattractive statue

than a corpse.

Eyeing the man closely, Kane ventured, "Rad exposure?"

Brigid Baptiste hesitated a second before murmuring, "Not of a kind I'm familiar with."

"And just how many kinds is that?" asked Grant, his brow furrowed.

Brigid shrugged. "Just off the top of my head, there's X-ray, neutron, gamma, cobalt—"

"We get the general idea," Reba DeFore broke in dryly.

Brigid cast her a slightly irritated glance and gestured toward the kneeling corpse. "I don't think you do.

Whatever did that to this man doesn't fit the symptomology of any recorded type of radiation exposure."

From the breast pocket of her shirt she undipped her rad counter and stepped closer to the motionless

figure. Passing the little square instrument over the top of the man's head, she kept a close watch on the

LCD window. It continued to glow a steady yellow-green. The device didn't emit a warning electronic

chirp, so she returned it to her pocket.

"Rad levels read within the tolerance range," Brigid announced. "Not even a hundred roentgens. It's well

within acceptable limits."

"How can you be so sure it's not what it looks like?" DeFore inquired. "Just a statue some scrounger

was moving and then abandoned?"

Kane answered in a flat voice, "When you come on more of these field trips with us, you'll learn that

almost nothing is what it appears to be. No, this is— was—a human being."

Grant pursed his lips. "Could a chemical have done that to him? Some sort of strong corrosive?"

Brigid shook her head. "That doesn't seem

likely." Absently, she combed a hand through her thick hair, which tumbled in waves from beneath the

long-billed olive-green cap on her head to spill artlessly over her khaki-clad shoulders like a red-gold

mane. Her delicate features didn't show her inner consternation and confusion. Her complexion, fair and

lightly dusted with freckles across her nose and cheeks, held a rosy hue.

Her eyes weren't just green; they were a deep, clear emerald, glittering now in anxiety. She was tall and

willowy, her figure slender and taut. Long in the leg, her athletic physique reflected an unusual strength

without detracting from her undeniable femininity, despite the unflattering shirt, trousers and high-topped

jump boots she wore.

Kane stepped closer to the ebony figure and carefully sniffed the air. "He hasn't been burned, that's for

sure. It's more like he's coated with something."

At a shade over six feet, he was nearly a half a head taller than Brigid Baptiste. Long limbed and rangy,

he was a lean, sinewy wolf of a man, carrying most of his muscle mass in his upper body above a slim

waist. His skin was lightly bronzed from exposure to the elements except for a thin scar that stretched

like a white thread across his cheek. Kane wore a twin to Brigid's long billed olive-green cap over his

longish, dark hair. Sun-touched highlights showed at the temples and nape. His pale eyes, blue with just

enough gray in them to resemble the high

sky at sunset, were bright and alert behind the dark lenses of sunglasses.

"Some kind of heat or radiation did that to him," Grant argued in his characteristic lionlike rumble of a

voice. "He almost looks like he's been carbonized ... or calcified.''

Grant's long, heavy-jawed face was twisted in a scowl. Droplets of perspiration sparkled against his

coffee-brown skin. He stood four inches over six feet tall, and was very broad in the chest and

shoulders. Gray sprinkled his short-cropped, tight-curled hair, but it didn't show in the heavy black

mustache that swept fiercely out from either side of his grim, tight-lipped mouth.

"In fact," he continued, his eyes narrowing to suspicious slits, "he looks sort of like all of us did after we

were transported from New Edo to China."

Both Kane and Brigid regarded him in surprise, their thoughts flying back to the incident he described,

nearly three months in the past. After they had been teleported through means still undetermined, all of

their bodies had been covered by a layer of soot that smelled faintly of hot grease. The ends of their hair

had been scorched, as well.

"Are we going to stand around here and talk about it?" Reba DeFore demanded impatiently. "Or are we

going to move on?"

No one responded to the brown-eyed, bronze-skinned woman's sharp tone. Brigid, Grant and

Kane knew how anxious and fearful the medic became whenever she left the shielded shelter of the

Cerberus redoubt in Montana. Her blouse showed half-moons of perspiration at the armpits and

neckline, and the intricate braid she favored for her ash-blond hair had come undone. She hadn't

bothered trying to pat it back into place, although loose tendrils hung about her face. The posture of her

stocky body telegraphed tension.

All of them were tense, particularly since they were strolling through a hellzone, even though Chicago

hadn't been a first-strike target. Still, it had taken a couple of direct hits from neutron bombs during the

brief but all-out nuclear war of two centuries ago. They had been tramping down the litter-choked

streets, between bombed-out ruins and collapsed buildings for the better part of an hour. Some areas

were nothing but acre upon acre of scorched and shattered concrete, with rusting rods of reinforcing iron

protruding from the ground like withered stalks of some mutated crop.

There were signs that some kind of incendiary agents had been dropped on the city, but they weren't

nuclear in nature despite how the indicators of their rad counters occasionally glowed between the far

end of the green scale and yellow. Brigid had told them that megascale radioactive deposits from nuclear

power plants and toxic-waste dumps contaminated much of the soil of the Midwest, as well

as the Great Lakes. With the wholesale destruction of large land areas during the nukecaust, these

smaller catastrophes poisoned the ground with such virulence that they were rendered sterile for

generations.

Kane, Grant and Brigid had visited several derelict predark cities, and Chicago seemed to be in better

shape than most, but it still echoed with the relics of a lost civilization.

Kane started to turn away from the kneeling figure, then did a double take. He leaned forward, slitting

his eyes. Where there should have been an ear on the right side of the man's head, there was only a

ragged nub, looking like a crushed cigar butt.

"What is it?" Brigid asked.

"He's missing an ear," Kane replied, pointing. "See?"

Brigid squinted in the direction of his finger, then from a pocket of her shirt she withdrew the symbol of

her former office as a Cobaltville archivist. She slipped on the pair of rectangular-lensed, wire-framed

spectacles and gazed at the man's head. Although the eyeglasses were something of a reminder of her

past life, they also served to correct an astigmatism.

Kane briefly wondered if her vision hadn't been further impaired by the head injury she suffered a few

months before. Brigid seemed in good condition, and DeFore had pronounced her fully recov-

ered. The only visible sign of the wound—which had laid her scalp open to the bone and put her in a

coma for several days—was a faintly red horizontal line on her right temple. Her recovery time had been

little short of uncanny. Kane was always impressed by the woman's tensile-spring resiliency. However,

he couldn't help but notice how she needed her glasses more and more since the injury.

"I see it," she said, "but I don't necessarily think it's significant."

"It doesn't look like an old wound," he declared. "There's no sign of scarring."

With the barrel of his Copperhead, the close-assault subgun he carried slung over a shoulder, Kane

gently prodded the side of the corpse's head. A hairline crack appeared in the black skull and from it

curled a lazy tendril of equally black smoke. At the same time, an astringent stench filled Kane's nostrils,

an odor of hot sulfur mixed with ammonia

As he took a hasty step back, the crack in the dead man's head expanded into a split and more of the

oily vapor plumed out. The smoke spread quickly, and the kneeling man seemed to unravel as twists of

mist rose like a multitude of loose black threads. Within a heartbeat he turned into a cloud of vaguely

human-shaped sepia mist. Clothing, flesh, bones and hair dissolved into a foul-smelling fog. The fetid

miasma rose over the street, and a gusting breeze wafted the cloud to one side.

In less than five seconds, the dissolution was complete. Nothing remained of the dead man except flakes

and a couple of handfuls of black dust. Kane, Brigid, DeFore and Grant gaped wide-eyed, shocked into

speechlessness. They watched in silence as the cloud of black vapor continued to lift and slowly

disperse, floating toward the broken ramparts of the Chicago skyline.

It took Kane three attempts before he was able to husk out, "You don't see that every day."

When no one replied, he cut his eyes over to Brigid. "Speculation?" he inquired. "Hypotheses?

Technobabble?"

Her intense gaze still fixed on the fading scraps of smoke, Brigid said, "I'd guess it to be a form of

molecular decohesion, similar to the effect of the MD gun. I'm sure you remember that."

Kane didn't bother responding to her assumption. Although he didn't possess an eidetic memory like

Brigid Baptiste, the incidents in Redoubt Papa and aboard the Parallax Red space station to which she

referred were impressed indelibly in his mind.

"Similar, you said." DeFore's tone was skeptical. "Not the same?"

Brigid nodded. "That's right. If this is the work of a molecular destabilizer, it's a new application, but the

result is pretty much the same." She snapped the fingers of both hands. "Poof."

As if the snapping of her fingers were a signal,

the detonation of thunder boomed in the distance, a long, loud roll. Kane scanned the horizon and saw

billowing clouds massing over the shattered column of the Sears Tower, at least two miles away. The

underside of the clouds bore a sickly green tinge, undershot by a salmon pink.

"Chem storm," he announced flatly. "It wouldn't be a stroll through a hellzone without one."

No one laughed. The early years of skydark, the generation-long nuclear winter, had been a period of

nature gone amok. Hundreds of very nearly simultaneous nuclear explosions had propelled massive

quantities of pulverized rubble into the atmosphere, clogging the sky and blanketing all of Earth in a thick

cloud of dust, debris, smoke and fallout.

For nearly two decades, it was as if the very elements were trying to purge the Earth of the few survivors

of the atomic megacull. The exchange of nuclear missiles did more than slaughter most of Earth's

inhabitants—it distorted the ecosystems that were not completely obliterated. The entire atmosphere of

the planet had been hideously polluted by the nukecaust, producing all manner of deadly side effects.

After eight generations, the lingering effects of the nukecaust and skydark were more subtle, an

underlying texture to a world struggling to heal itself. Yet the side effects of the war were still unavoid-

able, like a grim reminder to humanity to never take the permanence of the Earth for granted again.

One of the worst and most frequent side effects was chem storms, showers of acid-tainted rain that

could scorch the flesh off any animal caught in the open. They were lingering examples of the freakish

weather effects common after the holocaust and the nuclear winter. Chem storms were dangerous partly

because of their intensity, but mainly because of the acids, heavy metals and other chemical compounds

that fell with the rain.

In the immediate aftermath of the nukecaust, chem storms could strip flesh from bone in less than a

minute. As the environment recovered, the passage of time diluted the potency of the storms, but the

lethal acid rain could still melt flesh from the bones during long exposure.

Fortunately, chem storms were no longer as frequent as they had been even a century before, but the

peculiar geothermals of hellzones seemed to attract them. Although fewer hellzones existed now, there

were still a number of places where the geological or meteorological consequences of the nukecaust

prevented a full recovery. The passage of time could not completely cleanse the zones of hideous,

invisible plagues.

The west coast of the United States was one such zone, where much of what had been California was

under water. The best-known zone was the miles-

long D.C.-New Jersey-New York Corridor, a vast stretch of abandoned factory complexes,

warehouses and overgrown ruins. D.C., otherwise known as Washington Hole, was still the most active

hot spot in the country. Kane still retained vivid and unpleasant memories of his one visit to the Hole.

Only a vast sea of fused black glass occupied the tract of land that once held the seat of American

government. Seen from a distance, the crater lent the region the name by which it had been known for

nearly two centuries. Washington Hole was the hellzone of hellzones, still jolted by ground tremors and

soaked by the intermittent flooding of Potomac Lake. A volcano, barely an infant in geological terms,

had burst up from the rad-blasted ground. The peak dribbled a constant stream of foul-smelling smoke,

mixing with the chem-tainted rain clouds to form a wispy umbrella stinking of sulfur and chlorine.

Fortunately, this region of the Midwest was only warm, not hot, but a hellzone was still a hellzone even if

the rad levels were low. One of the mysteries spawned by the nukecaust was how hellzones could

coexist cheek to jowl with "clean" regions.

There was another flash of lightning, so close that Kane could feel his skin tingle and body hair stand up.

The thunderclap followed almost immediately. All of them smelled the ozone in the air.

"I think we'd better get to cover," Kane announced.

His tone was calm and uninflected, but in truth he was very anxious. It wasn't only the exertion of the

long, slogging trek through the ruins of Chicago that made him nervous. His sixth sense, his point man's

sense, warned of a danger far more immediate than unpredictable weather.

For a moment Kane contemplated ordering a retreat back to the Sandcat, but he knew by the time they

even reached the halfway point to where the vehicle was parked, the chem storm would be upon them.

There were measures against the dangers of acid rains, airtight protective suits and helmets, but none of

them carried either a suit or a helmet. They were over a thousand miles away, stored safely in the

Cerberus armory. His and Grant's Magistrate body armor was treated to withstand all weather, but both

suits were in the Cat. As it was, neither man cared to test whether their polycarbonate exoskele-tons

could survive a dousing of acid rain.

Besides, the heat was surprisingly oppressive, particularly for the Midwest so early in the spring.

Marching around in the body armor and its Kevlar-weave undersheathing was like walking around in a

portable sauna, even in the coolest of temperatures. In the Outlands, the black armor would have been a

target for jackals skulking among the ruins.

Grant removed a small map from his pants and unfolded it. He glanced from it to a small compass he

held in his right hand. The map had been gen-

crated by the database in Cerberus and depicted the city's layout before the nuke. A little doubtfully he

said, "According to this, we only have about three klicks to Redoubt Echo."

"Yeah," Kane agreed musingly. "But we'll have to spend some time searching for the entrance, and that

storm looks like it's moving at ten klicks an hour. We've already spent a week getting here... another

couple of hours won't make much difference."

Brigid leaned over to study the map. "We're in the vicinity of the Illinois Deep Waterway, so the Lake

District Central Filtration Plant ought to be easy to spot."

"Why were so many of the Totality Concept installations hidden inside of other buildings?" De-Fore

asked sourly.

"The old purloined-letter approach," Brigid replied. "The predark strategists thought hiding their secrets

in plain sight—more or less—kept them safe from discovery."

"Don't complain," Kane replied. "A lot of them were hidden inside of national parks. At least we're not

having to cover Sequoia National Forest inch by inch."

Stowing the compass back in his pocket, Grant undipped his trans-comm unit from his web belt. He

flipped up the cover of the palm-sized radio-

phone. Depressing the transmit key, he asked, "Domi, do you read me?"

Only the crackle and pop of static hissed from the comm. Grant opened his mouth to repeat the query,

but his words were drowned out by a thunderclap so loud and explosive everyone flinched. The air

shivered from its violence.

' 'Forget it,'' Brigid declared. ' 'We're out of range and the storm is ionizing the atmosphere. Besides,

she's safer than we are at the moment."

All of them glanced again at the black clouds building like a solid wall over the derelict outskirts of

Chicago. The mountainous thunderheads continued to skim out of the north, blotting out the sky above

the broken spire of the Sears Tower. The billowing mass thickened rapidly, casting deep shadow over

the entire perimeter and bringing a sudden and oppressive gloom. The atmosphere seemed to gain

weight, pressing against eardrums, making respiration labored.

The blackness slowly lowered and spread like a blanket. Strange crackles of luminescence glowed

within its roiling center, like flashes of heat lightning. The underside of the cloud surged out, belling

downward and narrowing into a black funnel shape. The tip brushed the top of a building like a tentative

finger, and even at that distance they glimpsed debris swirling around it.

"I read about storms like this," Brigid said

grimly. "This kind has a small cyclonic center that's completely unpredictable, spawning twisters every

few minutes. You can't tell where one will hit."

No one questioned her statement. As a former archivist in the Cobaltville Historical Division, Bri-gid's

knowledge on a wide variety of subjects was profound. Her greatest asset was her eidetic, or

"photographic," memory. She could instantly recall hi detail everything she had read, seen or

experienced, which was both a blessing and a curse.

The funnel cloud drew back up into the thunder-head, and a moment later a shifting curtain of rain fell.

Even from the distance, they saw little puffs of vapor rising from the impact points of the raindrops.

Kane tried to quash his rising sense of dread and worry about Domi. If she stayed inside the Sandcat,

she was completely safe. Although built to serve as a FAV, a Fast Attack Vehicle, the dual-tracked wag

was armored with a ceramic-armaglass bond to shield it from both intense and ambient radiation. It

would certainly be sufficient to protect her from a shower of acid rain—provided she hadn't decided to

explore her surroundings. The little albino girl from the Outlands was unpredictable, often driven by

impulses and whims. She had become more so over the past few months, ever since her resurrection.

Her retrieval, Kane corrected himself. Since Domi hadn't really been dead, she couldn't have been

resurrected. Still, the Outland girl's behavior

had become more and more erratic. She disappeared from the redoubt for extended periods, as if she

needed the solitude.

Kane remembered how, during his and Domi's captivity in the Area 51 complex, the albino had shown

an uncharacteristic display of compassion for the sickly hybrid infants kept there. He wondered if Domi

sought solitude in the thickly forested ravines of the mountainside in order to come to terms with what

she had learned about herself.

The one thing she hadn't learned was the details of her apparent death. Nobody else really knew the

precise details, either. In order to learn more, they had come to Chicago, the metropolis that had once

hosted Totality Concept's Operation Chronos. And so Domi, left behind in Sandcat, still didn't realize

she was the main reason for the mission.

Kane wheeled around to the southeast. "Let's get the hell off the street and find a roof somewhere."

He moved ahead, unconsciously assuming the point position. Kane always assumed the position of point

man. It was a habit he had acquired during his years as a Magistrate, and he saw no reason to abandon

it. Both Brigid and Grant had the utmost faith in Kane's instincts, what he referred to as his point man's

sense. When he walked point, Kane felt electrically alive, sharply tuned to every nuance of his

surroundings and what he was doing.

He led his three companions along the boulevard

quickly, avoiding pits of thick mud that looked as if they could easily be several yards deep. Rats, some

of them as big as housecats, scattered at their approach. A few of the bolder ones stopped after

then-initial fright and reared up on their hind legs to sniff at them as they passed by. Both Brigid and

DeFore did poor jobs of repressing shudders of revulsion. Their loathing for rodents went far deeper

than a simple antipathy for filth-wallowing vermin—both women had shared a nightmarish experience

with plague-infected rats in the bayous of Louisiana a few months back. Kane was a little surprised mat

they showed enough restraint not to shoot at the creatures.

The suburb of old Chi-town was comparatively intact, though that was a relative term. It was untouched

compared to Washington Hole, but it was still a wasteland. The buildings were little more than gutted

shells, the streets choked with rubble and debris. Thorny brush and weeds sprouted within the walls of

homes, and vines coiled around the wreckage of collapsed roofs. Scrubby grass grew in the pockets of

windblown debris and weathered detritus. On some of the city blocks, the breadth of rubble was so

widespread, they could see no discernible difference between the street and the ruins. The roadbed itself

had a ripple pattern to it, a characteristic result of earthquakes triggered by explosive shock waves.

During the nuke-triggered quakes, rivers and lakes were often diverted. Here in outer Chicago, rivers,

waterways, canals and Lake Michigan had run together to form temporary inland seas. The floodwaters

broke through storm drains and levees and overlaid the entire region with layers of brackish, fetid sludge.

They saw statues so deeply eroded and encrusted with dried muck it was no longer possible even to

identify the subjects as human, animal or otherwise.

Kane noticed how some buildings still stood among others that were no more than ragged foundations.

Wide dark bands of dried mud discolored many of the walls, from the ground to waist height. The next

street they turned down looked as if it had been a residential neighborhood, a mix of stores and luxury

apartment buildings. Many of them lacked roofs, but the walls still stood steadfast against the corrosive

effects of time and nature.

The sky quickly turned the hue of old lead as the banks of black clouds spread, like a tapestry unrolled

by a vast invisible hand. Grant kept checking their back trail but saw nothing but the labyrinth of tumbled

ruins. Bits of debris fluttered in the air, skimming across their path.

"The wind is rising fast," Brigid said, her mane of red-gold hair streaming out from the beneath the edges

of her cap.

Kane eyed the sky. "One of your tornadoes, maybe."

"An acid-rani tornado?" DeFore's crisp tone didn't quaver, but her stance telegraphed a mounting fear.

"Could be." Grant blinked as handful of wind-driven dust scoured his face. "By the looks of this place, it

wouldn't be the first time."

The wind increased, causing their clothes to flutter and stinging then- faces with particles of grit. Keeping

his mouth tightly closed, Kane looked toward the storm front and saw rain sweeping slowly in their

direction like a solid but shifting curtain. Faintly he caught a whiff reminiscent of rotten eggs blended with

burned brown sugar, seasoned by kerosene. The deep rumble of thunder had become a constant

kettle-drum roll in the background.

Brigid suddenly cried out and slapped at her hand. A second later, Kane felt a pinpoint burn on the back

of his neck, and he realized the leading edge of the squall had already reached them. They couldn't

afford to be choosy any longer, so the four people lunged into the first open doorway they saw.

It was a storefront with a gaping square in the front wall where a plate-glass window had once formed a

transparent barrier between the street and the shop's wares. The exterior of the building was

half-swallowed by creeper sand vines, saplings and green undergrowth. A quick upward glance showed

them at least a quarter of the roof and ceiling was still in place.

It wasn't much, but it offered them a measure of protection from the fiery kiss of the rain shower.

Through the layer of debris and detritus on the floor, Kane could just make out a mosaic pattern of

time-work. What had once been a huge showroom was now a broad open piazza. On the far side a

corridor stretched away into darkness. The corridor was bisected by a strip of light where the sunlight

lanced through a crack in the ceiling. He wasn't too anxious to enter it and find out what lay beyond the

crack— he retained vivid and exceedingly unpleasant memories of what explorations in similar settings

had wrought.

It was hot, even inside the building. The air was heavy and sluggish, pressing moisfly on exposed skin,

despite the approaching storm. Grant palmed away sweat from his forehead and muttered, "This is more

like the bayou than the Midwest."

Brigid nodded in silent, grim agreement, then flattened herself against the nearest wall just as the rain

began pattering down, first in a lazy drizzle then in a sheet.

Kane, Grant and DeFore put their backs against the wall and watched the drops strike the exposed

floor tiles with a series of prolonged hisses and tiny curls of smoke. The chemical stench wafting up

caught Kane by the throat and seared the tender tissues and scorched his nasal passages.

Clapping a hand over his nose and mouth, he struggled against a coughing fit. He was still struggling

when the ragged man came stumbling through the doorway.

Chapter 2

Neither Brigid nor DeFore saw Kane and Grant flex the tendons of their right wrists. Nor did they hear

the click of the actuators or the faint, brief drone of tiny electric motors and the solid slap of the butts of

the Sin Eaters sliding into the men's palms almost at the same time. But they did see the blasters appear

almost magically in their hands.

The official weapons of Magistrates, Sin Eaters were strapped to holsters on their right forearms. The

big-bore automatic handblasters were a little under fourteen inches in length. When not in use, the stocks

of the pistols folded over the top of the weapon, lying perpendicular to the frame, reducing their

bolstered lengths to ten inches. Cables and actuators attached to the weapons popped the Sin Eaters

into Grant's and Kane's waiting hands when they tensed their wrist tendons in the right sequence.

The 9 mm blasters had no safeties or trigger guards, and when the firing stud came in contact with a

crooked index finger, it would fire immediately. However, both Kane and Grant kept their fin-

gers extended and out of contact with the trigger stud.

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thatthisbookisstolenproperty.Itwasreportedas"unsoldanddestroyed"tothepublisher,andneithertheauthornorthepublisherhasreceivedanypaymentforthis"strippedbook."FirsteditionNovember2001ISBN0-373-63832-9TOMBOFTIMESpecialthankstoMarkEllisforhiscontributiontotheOutlandersconcept,developedforGoldEagleBooks.C...

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James Axler - Outlanders 19 - Tomb of Time.pdf

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James Axler - Outlanders 19 - Tomb of Time

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