Axler, James - Deathlands 13 - Seedling

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The dying woman had been knifed by one of the scalie guards as she'd tried

to escape

"Should I end it for her?" Ryan asked, hand on his panga.

At the sound of his voice, the woman's eyes opened. For several long heartbeats

she gazed blindly into space. Then she moved her head and her eyes locked on

Ryan's face. "You," she finally whispered.

Her hand spidered up her chest to her throat and gripped a square metal pendant.

"Take," she commanded, her eyes burning into Ryan's good one. "Open. Rona

said to find you. Died long back. Quest. Look after." Her breathing was becoming

faster and more shallow.

Slowly Ryan opened the locket and found that it con-tained two things—a tiny

ringlet of blond hair and a pic-ture, a faded, pale brown portrait.

"Who is it?" he asked, even though he knew what the an-swer was going to be.

"Your son, Ryan Cawdor. It's your son."

Seedling

# 13 in the Deathlands series

James Axler

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A GOLD EAGLE BOOK FROM WORLDWIDE

TORONTO • NEW YORK • LONDON • PARIS • AMSTERDAM •

STOCKHOLM • HAMBURG • ATHENS • MILAN • TOKYO • SYDNEY

This is for Geoff, Anne, Ben and Saul Kelly, who are friends. If you don't have

dreams, then how can they come true?

First edition September 1991 ISBN 0-373-62513-8 SEEDLING

of this work in whole or 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 permission of the publisher, Worldwide Library, 225 Duncan Mill

Road, Don Mills, Ontario, Canada M3B 3K9.

All the 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 the incidents are pure invention.

® are Trademarks registered in the United States Patent and Trademark Office

and in other countries.

Printed in U.S.A.

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Chapter One

Ryan Cawdor opened his eye, then closed it again, hoping to avoid throwing up.

He'd lost count of the number of jumps he'd made over the past year or so, but

there was one great truth.

They didn't get any easier.

The first moments weren't too bad—the humming and the lights glowing in floor

and ceiling, the fin-gers of mist appearing in the chamber, hiding the colored

armaglass walls.

Then the good part ended.

Ryan had thought about the sensation several times, trying to focus his mind on

precisely what happened during a jump from gateway to gateway, from mat-trans

chamber to mat-trans chamber.

All he could think was that it was like having a clumsy child disassemble your

skull, then run a pointed file around the inside, scraping at the sensi-tive parts of

your brain, stirring things up so that past, present and future got hopelessly

scrambled.

There was pain and nausea every time, and a blinding ache in the head as though

someone had been trying to remove your eyes, from the inside.

Ryan cautiously opened his good right eye, draw-ing a slow, whistling breath as

he fought for control. He took another breath and felt relieved as he real-ized he

definitely wasn't going to vomit this time.

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"Fireblast," he muttered.

None of the others had regained consciousness yet, all lying or sitting around the

chamber. It was odd not to see Jak Lauren there. The snow-headed albino boy had

been with them for… For how long?

Ryan couldn't remember. It seemed like forever, and now the boy was gone.

Another surge from his stomach brought the bitter taste of bile. Ryan swallowed

hard and closed his eye again.

Memories twisted in his head, one above all—the narrow face, eyes blazing with a

feral hatred, staring at him. And a hand, fingers twisted in agony, vanish-ing into

the sucking slime.

The Trader used to say he didn't have any ene-mies, and when someone picked up

on it, as was the rule, he'd smile that wise, lopsided smile and say, "None alive."

But that wasn't true. In Deathlands there were al-ways new enemies.

A voice jerked him from his reverie.

"Still sleeping, lover?"

"I feel like double-shit."

"We're getting too old for all these jumps."

For the third time Ryan risked opening an eye. Krysty Wroth was sitting next to

him, running her fingers through her fiery hair. It tumbled over her shoulders,

strangely sentient, seeming to move of its own volition.

"Some are bad," he admitted.

She smiled. "And some are worse."

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"Yeah."

"Seems funny without the kid."

"Hope he and his lady make it."

Krysty reached across and touched his arm. "That cut doesn't look too good,

lover."

It was a souvenir of the dizzying fight against Cort Strasser, inflicted by his bone-

hilted knife. Blood had run down Ryan's arm, crusting on the fingers of his left

hand, but now the long, shallow wound was dried.

"I look better than Strasser."

"Anyone looks better than Strasser." The third voice in the chamber rang off the

maroon walls of armaglass.

"Thanks, J.B.," Ryan said. "Enjoy the trip?"

The slight figure of J. B. Dix, Armorer to the group of friends, straightened. He

put his hands into his jacket pocket and retrieved his wire-framed specta-cles.

"Lost my autorifle and my Tekna knife. Go on like this, Ryan, and I'll end up

naked."

"You got blood on your mouth," Krysty told him.

There was a tiny thread of crimson leaking from the corner of J.B.'s lips, and he

wiped it away on his sleeve.

Krysty stood, the heels of her western-style boots clattering on the metal disks in

the floor. She swayed a little and placed a hand on the wall. "Gaia! That wasn't the

most fun I've had."

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"How's Mildred?" Ryan asked, looking at the fourth member of their quintet.

"Old Mildred's fine, apart from some son of a bitch banging on the inside of my

head with a ham-mer."

Mildred Wyeth was a doctor, born in December 1964, well over 130 years earlier.

She'd gone into the hospital for a minor operation in the last days of De-cember in

the year 2000, just three weeks before the nuke-madness that brought utter ruin to

the world. As a result of a medical accident, Mildred had been cryogenically

frozen, lying in suspended animation until snatched from her endless sleep by

Ryan Caw-dor and his comrades.

Since then she'd been one of them, sharing their small triumphs as well as their

dangers.

Now she was sitting up, rubbing at the side of her face, which was still badly

swollen from the brutal beating she'd taken from Cort Strasser. "I'll never get used

to these jumps," she said quietly.

"Doc doesn't look so good," J.B. observed, mov-ing to the side of the last member

of their group.

Doc had an even stranger life history than Mildred. Born Theophilus Algernon

Tanner in South Strafford, Vermont, on February 14,1868, he had a glit-tering

career as a scientist and was married with two small children. But in November

1896 he was trawled into the future.

He was an experiment of Project Cerberus, which was a part of Overproject

Whisper, itself a small cog within the vast secret machine known by the code

name of the Totality Concept. The attempt to bring and send people through the

barrier of time was al-most totally a failure. If it had any success, then that success

was Doctor Theophilus Tanner.

Doc was a prickly and difficult subject, deeply dis-turbed at losing his wife,

family and friends. He made several illicit attempts to rejoin them, despite the

risks of the unstable equipment. To get rid of him, the white-coated operators of

Cerberus sent him off into the future, to the present in Deathlands.

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The effects of the appalling disorientation meant that Doc would never again be

totally sane. At his best he was only a couple cents short of a dollar. Sometimes he

lost track of quite "when" he was liv-ing.

Now he lay on his side, knees drawn under him, a trail of spittle linking his open

mouth to the polished floor of the gateway chamber.

His stubbled face was parchment-pale, and his breathing was ragged. His right

hand clutched his precious swordstick, which was made of ebony, with a silver

handle shaped like a lion's head.

Mildred got to her hands and knees, groaning, and crawled to the old man's side.

None of them actually knew how old Doc really was. He'd only been in his late

twenties when he was trawled forward, yet he looked and acted like a man in his

sixties. It was a by-product of tampering with temporal paradoxes. As Doc

himself once remarked, "I confess to being in fair shape for a man who is actually

over two hun-dred years old."

"He's going to be all right?" Ryan asked.

By now all four of them were standing around Doc Tanner.

His eyes blinked open.

"By the three Kennedys!" he said feebly, looking up at them. "I feel akin to a man

who has fallen down a deep well. Could you possibly stand a tad farther away

while I recover myself?"

Helped by Mildred and J.B., he stood reasonably well, his knee joints cracking

like snapped kindling. He wiped away the saliva and sighed. "Did anyone else

find that a particularly pain-filled jump?"

"Yeah," Mildred agreed, "worst I've known."

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Ryan nodded. "Could be there was a malfunction in the equipment."

Krysty was looking around the chamber. She stood still for a few moments, eyes

closed, concentrating, using some of the strange mutie power of the Earth Mother

to try to "see" their surroundings.

"No," she said, shaking her head. "Can't feel anything. It's always hard inside

these places. They seem to sort of blanket the reception for me."

"Then we'd better go look," Ryan decided. "Ev-eryone ready?"

"As I'll ever be, my dear fellow." was Doc's re-sponse.

The others contented themselves with nodding, and all drew their

blasters—Krysty her silvered Heckler & Koch P7A-13 9 mm pistol; J.B. his trusty

Steyr AUG 5.6 mm automatic; Mildred, who had represented the United States in

the free-shooting pistol event in the last ever Olympic Games before skydark, had

an ex-otic target blaster. It was a beautiful ZKR 551 six-shot revolver chambered

to take a Smith & Wesson .38 round; Ryan had his usual SIG-Sauer P-226 blaster

with the built-in baffle silencer; Doc, typically had what was probably the only Le

Mat Civil War re-volver in the whole of Deathlands. It exploded a sin-gle .63

round from a scattergun barrel, as well as firing nine standard .36-caliber bullets.

Ryan looked at his ragtag army, caught Krysty's emerald eyes and grinned. "Well,

here we go again, lover."

She didn't return his smile.

Ryan turned away from her and reached for the lever that would open the

gateway.

"Ready?" he asked quietly, and threw the lever.

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Chapter Two

The opening mechanism on the gateway worked smoothly and almost silently.

The thick armored glass swung back, revealing the usual small anteroom that was

present in all of the redoubts the companions had visited.

This one was about twelve feet square, with benches along two walls and a fold-

down table. The door set in the far wall was ajar, showing the main control room.

Everything was as it had been in other gateways.

Ryan led the way out, pausing as he entered the larger room, waiting for Krysty to

join him.

"Well?" he asked.

She closed her eyes and stood still, shaking her head. "Can't do it, lover."

"Why?"

"Can't override my imagination. Worst enemy of someone with the power of

seeing. Doomies suffer from it even worse."

"Wouldn't of thought it."

"Wouldn't have thought it," she corrected auto-matically.

J.B. looked at the control consoles, rows of vid-screens and comp-processors, with

dancing lines of details, numbers and codes. Lights flickered and shone green,

amber and red.

"Looks good and clean," he observed.

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In the past they'd entered control bases and found frightening evidence of

malfunction. All redoubts had been built with their own nuke-gens, and most of

these continued to work, long years after their hu-man masters had vanished into

ashes.

Doc glanced around, holstering the massive Le Mat pistol. "Shipshape and Bristol

fashion," he com-mented.

"People built these complexes sure built them to last," Mildred said, running her

finger along one of the desks, showing it dust free to the others. "Spot-less."

"There's antistat conditioning here. Filters and cleans. Without anyone coming or

going for a hun-dred years, there's no disturbance." Ryan looked along the

consoles. "Though there's some plas-mugs along there."

It was the kind of thing that Jak Lauren would have darted toward. As it was,

Krysty walked slowly and picked up one of them. She peered into it and pulled a

face.

"Long, long gone," she said.

Ryan joined her and picked up another of the dis-posable beakers. The inside bore

a faint stain of brown, but it was utterly dry.

"If they had been topped up, I would have raised one and given you a toast." Doc

picked up a single cup from another console. "To our friends—" he flourished it "-

from-Oh!"

Liquid splashed all over the front of his stained frock coat, adding another layer to

the patina of an-tique dirt.

Everyone stared at him in disbelief. Doc looked at the wetness on his clothes,

dripping from his fingers. "How can this be?" he whispered. "A century come and

a century gone, and this still holds—" he smelled his hands......... "—what is a

perfectly acceptable substi-tute for coffee."

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d13_seedling2Thedyingwomanhadbeenknifedbyoneofthescalieguardsasshe'dtri\edtoescape"ShouldIenditforher?"Ryanasked,handonhispanga.Atthesoundofhisvoice,thewoman'seyesopened.Forseverallonghea\rtbeatsshegazedblindlyintospace.Thenshemovedherheadandhereyeslocke\donRyan'sface."You,"shefinallywhispered.Herha...

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Axler, James - Deathlands 13 - Seedling

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