James Axler - Deathlands 028 - Emerald Fire

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Deathlands 28 - Emerald Fire

/* /*]] */ Axler,_James_-_Deathlands_28_-_Emerald_Fire An arrow hissed through the door, clattering

against the back wall of the control room

Ryan and J.B. dropped to their knees behind the last row of desks, the one-eyed man glancing to the rear

to see that everyone else was in the chamber, standing, blasters ready.

Trader often said that life generally came down to two choices a bad one and the other one. If he and J.B.

turned and ran for it, jumping into the chamber and slamming the door, it would give the natives precious

seconds to come after them and trap them before the jump mechanism operated.

So there was the other choice.

"Get on the floor," he yelled to his friends.

"Ready," Krysty called a few moments later.

"We stay," he said quietly to J.B.

Ryan rose onto hands and knees and powered himself forward to slam the armaglass door, triggering the

jump mechanism. "Wait for us," he yelled. "Be along when we can."

A long arrow struck the door, so close it nicked Ryan's sleeve. He dropped to the floor, crawling back to

join the Armorer.

Behind him he knew that the metal disks in the floor and ceiling of the chamber would be glowing, and

fine tendrils of mist would be gathering near the top of the six-sided room. In less than a minute his

companions would be somewhere else.

He and J.B., oldest and best of friends, hunkered in their limited shelter, blasters ready for the inevitable

attack.

* * * Ruby sparks from a pinon fire, soaring into the black velvet of an Albuquerque sky. The best of

memories. This is for Carla and Jim Wright, with much love and great affection. The best of friends.

Deathlands

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Deathlands 28 - Emerald Fire

28 in the Deathlands series

James Axler

First edition October 1995

ISBN 0-373-62528-6

in part in any 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 in 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.

* * * The art of the Incas, the Aztecs and the Mayas is amongst the most beautiful in the history of

mankind. Sadly those civilizations also produced some of the most barbarous and inhuman cruelties the

world has ever known.

From The Sun, the Pyramid and the Knife , by Jedediah Alnwick, published by The Free Press of

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Deathlands 28 - Emerald Fire

Corrales, NM

Chapter One

The sick darkness was passing.

Ryan Cawdor steadied his breathing, conscious that the jump had been one of the easiest that he could

remember. There had been none of the hideous gibbering dreams that sometimes swam out of the black

horror of a bad jump.

He felt slightly sick, there was a throbbing pressure behind his eye and his stomach felt as though it had

gone ten rounds with a rabid mule.

"Fireblast," he whispered to himself, still not risking opening his eye.

Ryan was conscious that his hand was still being gripped by Krysty Wroth. That in itself was a sign that

the mat-trans unit had functioned well.

All he needed to know now was whether everyone was all right and where the jump had taken them.

He breathed in slowly, aware that the air felt very hot and moist. And green.

Ryan opened his eye.

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Deathlands 28 - Emerald Fire

Chapter Two

When civilization was blown apart in the massive nuclear holocaust of 2001, the world had been geared

for all kinds of military action, most of it supposed to be top secret at the highest level. But many people

had heard about the Totality Concept, the cover-all policy that ranged from time travel to self-supporting

space stations packed with laser-guided hardware.

One of the subsections of the Concept was called Overproject Whisper, and one small part of that was

Operation Chronos, which was concentrating on the largely doomed research into time traveling, or

"trawling," as it had become known. The idea of pulling targets from the past or pushing them into the

future was interesting. But in practice there were less than a handful of successes.

One of them, Dr. Theophilus Tanner, was recovering in the mat-trans chamber across from Ryan Cawdor.

The matter transmitter had been developed in a laboratory complex in Maryland and was one of the

limited successes of the Totality Concept. The mat-trans units were often an integral part of the secret

military complexesknown as redoubtshastily and secretly built all across the United States, with a few

elsewhere in the world. These "gateways," as they were called, were developed in those shadowed,

paranoid days that closed the twentieth century, and made it possible for people to be sent instantly from

one location to another.

"How're you feeling, Doc?" Ryan's voice sounded flat and hollow in the hexagonal chamber. The color of

the armaglass walls varied from place to place. This time they were an odd shade of pallid green.

The old man ran a hand across his face, smiling and showing his oddly perfect set of gleaming teeth. His

light blue eyes twinkled at Ryan.

"Upon my soul, dear friend! Relative to a rare good day, then this is still some way less than adequacy.

However, compared to an average mat-trans jump, I feel as frolicsome as a dog with two tails. Or a

monkey with six paws. Or an elephant with three trunks. Or a"

"I get the picture, Doc. Not a bad jump, was it?"

The silver-haired old man fumbled in one of the capacious pockets of his frock coat, so ancient that the

black material had a strange greenish patina that Doc swore stoutly wasn't mold. He pulled out a blue

swallow's-eye kerchief and mopped his brow.

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Deathlands 28 - Emerald Fire

"By the Three Kennedys! The jump was passing fair, but the heat here puts me much in mind of the

botanical gardens in London, at Kew. There was some verse, but I confess that its remembrance seems to

have dodged away from my poor corroded old brain."

Doc had been a leading academic back in Omaha, Nebraska, in November of 1896, living a happy and

contented life with his beautiful young wife, Emily, and his two beloved children, Rachel, who had been

three years old, and Jolyon, barely past his first birthday.

The white-coated scientists, whom he had come to detest with a bitter loathing, had plucked him from the

past and drawn him forward to 1998, as part of Operation Chronos. It was then discovered that their

success with Doc had been a freakish event, with virtually all of their other experiments failing horribly.

Doc himself was such a stubborn and recalcitrant time traveler that the scientists, in December of 2000,

propelled him many years into the futureinto the post holocaust United States, which had become known

as Deathlands. Most of the time his mind functioned reasonably well, but stress sometimes sent him

spinning off onto some alternative thought beam that was all his own.

He reached out to retrieve his lion's-head ebony cane, which concealed a gleaming rapier of Toledo steel,

stretching his long, skinny legs in their cracked knee boots. Then his hand automatically went for the

unusual handblaster that was holstered at his hip.

It was an ornate Le Mat, a weapon that dated back to the early days of the Civil War. The blaster was

engraved and decorated with twenty-four-carat gold as a commemorative tribute to the immortal memory

of James Ewell Brown StuartJeb Stuart, the greatest cavalryman of his country. The massive cannon,

weighing over three and a half pounds, had two barrels and an adjustable hammer. It fired a single .63-

caliber round, like a shotgun. As well, a revolver chamber held nine .44-caliber rounds.

At any range around twenty feet it was devastatingly lethal. At much over fifty feet it was fairly

innocuous in the old man's hands.

The Armorer was also sitting next to Doc, feeling for his neatly folded spectacles in a pocket of his worn

leather jacket, finally perching them on the bridge of his narrow nose. Five feet eight inches tall, and just

about reaching one-forty when soaking wet, John Barrymore Dix was Ryan's oldest friend. They had both

joined the legendary Trader and his armored war wags when they were young men, filled with sand and

gall. And they had learned many things from Trader, mostly about surviving, about mistakes not made.

J. B. Dix was undeniably the greatest authority on weaponry in all of Deathlands.

His own armament consisted of a 20-round 9 mm Uzi automatic machine pistol, and an unusual

scattergun. The Smith amp; Wesson M-4000 didn't fire ordinary rounds. It held eight Remington 12-

gauge cartridges, each with twenty flechettes, tiny, murderous inch-long darts.

J.B. grinned at Ryan and picked up his beloved fedora with his left hand, blowing dust from the crown

and placing it carefully on his head.

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Deathlands28-EmeraldFire/*/*]]*/Axler,_James_-_Deathlands_28_-_Emerald_FireAnarrowhissedthroughthedoor,clatteringagainstthebackwallofthecontrolroomRyanandJ.B.droppedtotheirkneesbehindthelastrowofdesks,theo e-eyedmanglancingtothereartoseethateveryoneelsewasinthechamber,standing,blastersready.Trader...

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