Axler, James - Deathlands 56 - Sunchild

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Axler,_James_-_Deathlands_56_-_Sunchild

Doc probed deeper

"The question remains unanswered. Is there any of the poisonous old tech still on

the premises, the rancid remnants of a bygone and perhaps best forgotten age?

Some relic of that pernicious evil known as the Totality Concept?"

Doc hadn't idly brought up the name of the Totality Concept. He had spoken the

name in the hopes of eliciting some kind of reaction.

The baron hadn't recognized the name at all, and had seemed genuine in his

bemusement at the use of the term. But then, Doc hadn't been watching the

baron. His eyes had been kept firmly on Jenna, and he had seen her sharp

features harden as the words were spoken. The raven eyes had fixed on him, met

his full on and tried to fathom his intent.

There was old tech here. Old tech related to secret government projects of the

past. And maybe there was something that would link this ville to the main body

of the Illuminated Ones, and the place in the North they were searching for.

A GOLD EAGLE BOOK FROM WORLDWIDE

TORONTO • NEW YORK • LONDON • AMSTERDAM • PARIS •

SYDNEY • HAMBURG • STOCKHOLM • ATHENS • TOKYO • MILAN

MADRID • WARSAW • BUDAPEST • AUCKLAND

If you purchased this book without a cover you should be aware 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

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book."

First edition December 2001

ISBN 0-373-62566-9

SUNCHILD

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 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.

…there have always been secrets, and there has always been power. It's just that

some of it has been out in the open, and some of it has been in the shadows.

That's the worst— you can never be sure what's going on in the shadows. That

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twilight world where there are only half-truths and half-lies, and no such thing as

trust

—From a report to a Congress Committee on hidden cabals and covert

operations,

August 23, 1954

Printed in U.S.A.

THE DEATHLANDS SAGA

This world is their legacy, a world born in the violent nuclear spasm of 2001 that

was the bitter outcome of a struggle for global dominance.

There is no real escape from this shockscape where life always hangs in the

balance, vulnerable to newly demonic nature, barbarism, lawlessness.

But they are the warrior survivalists, and they endure—in the way of the lion, the

hawk and the tiger, true to nature's heart despite its ruination.

Ryan Cawdor: The privileged son of an East Coast baron. Acquainted with

betrayal from a tender age, he is a master of the hard realities.

Krysty Wroth: Harmony ville's own Titian-haired beauty, a woman with the

strength of tempered steel. Her premonitions and Gaia powers have been

fostered by her Mother Sonja.

J. B. Dix, the Armorer: Weapons master and Ryan's close ally, he, too, honed

his skills traversing the Deathlands with the legendary Trader.

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Doctor Theophilus Tanner: Torn from his family and a gentler life in 1896,

Doc has been thrown into a future he couldn't have imagined.

Dr. Mildred Wyeth: Her father was killed by the Ku Klux Klan, but her fate is

not much lighter. Restored from predark cryogenic suspension, she brings

twentieth-century healing skills to a nightmare.

Jak Lauren: A true child of the wastelands, reared on adversity, loss and

danger, the albino teenager is a fierce fighter and loyal friend.

Dean Cawdor: Ryan's young son by Sharona accepts the only world he knows,

and yet he is the seedling bearing the promise of tomorrow.

In a world where all was lost, they are humanity's last hope…

Chapter One

Ryan Cawdor opened his eye.

A sharp, stabbing pain shot through his head, piercing to the back of his brain

like a red-hot needle pushed through the center of that diamond-hard blue orb.

No matter how many times he made the jump using the mat-trans, no matter how

often he steeled himself for the inevitable agonies of recovery and regaining

consciousness, it still amazed him that it could hurt so much. He'd lost count of

the number of times his scarred and pitted torso had been injured in combat,

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racked with pain in torture; still, any of that seemed preferable, right now, to the

agonies of regaining full consciousness after a jump.

Ryan's muscled body, honed by years of travel and combat, trained to cope with

a harsh existence, complained in no uncertain manner as he rose from his prone

position onto one elbow. His curly black hair, matted with sweat, hung down

over his active eye and the empty socket, protected by a patch and scored by a

long, livid and puckered scar.

The lead in his muscles moved as the lactic acid dispersed, and the oxygen from

the stale air he breathed so heavily started to traverse his bloodstream. He looked

across to the seemingly slight but deceptively wiry frame of J. B. Dix, the man

known as the Armorer, a position he had fulfilled for Trader, and where Ryan

had first met the man he could call friend in a land where such things were rare.

John Barrymore Dix was slumped across the frosted floor of the mat-trans

chamber, across the now still disks that glowed when the chamber was about to

activate. A faint tang of ozone remained in the brackish air, a sign that Ryan

hadn't taken long to regain consciousness after the final stages of the jump. J.B.,

on the other hand, was still out cold, his chest moving visibly as he tried to gulp

in air. His precious and battered fedora lay beside him, along with his Smith &

Wesson M-4000 scattergun, his Uzi and the Tekna knife that had been

invaluable when the aging tech of the blasters had given trouble.

Not that it often happened. The Armorer was an artist, if such a thing could be

said to exist in the Deathlands. His eyes would sparkle behind his wire-rimmed

spectacles—now safely stored in his pocket against the trauma of the jump—

when he talked of weaponry, and his knowledge of blasters, grens and any other

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weapon was second to none. He made sure that the group with whom he traveled

kept its weaponry in excellent condition at all times, taking pride in his work. A

pride that was far from idle, as a misfiring blaster in the middle of a firefight

would mean buying the farm when survival was much the preferred option.

Beside the prone J.B., her hand reaching out to him protectively, was Dr.

Mildred Wyeth. Sometimes cynical in the face of adversity, her phlegmatic

attitude in some ways echoed that of the Armorer, and had led to their

relationship and understanding deepening over their travels. Despite the horror

of the post apocalypse world into which she had been thrown, Mildred's predark

idealism still powered her onward. Trapped in cryogenic suspension following

complications during a minor operation, Mildred had awakened into something

that for her was a nightmare. Initially, she had clashed with Ryan Cawdor,

questioning his right to assume leadership of the group. But Ryan's fighting

skills and survival instincts had won her respect, as had his strong sense of

justice, albeit tempered by necessary pragmatism. Besides which, she noticed

that although assuming leadership and thus having the final say, Ryan believed

strongly in teamwork, and played to the strengths of his companions.

Mildred's beaded plaits hung over her dark face, almost a pallid gray as the

waves of nausea from the jump dragged her toward consciousness.

A low moan, tortured and like a wailing lost soul seeking rest, drew the one-eyed

warrior's attention, causing him to turn slowly. As it came from the inside of the

chamber, and was in a tone he knew well, he allowed himself the luxury of

taking his time, allowing his still complaining equilibrium to adjust to the

movement of his head. If he hadn't recognized the sound, or if it had originated

outside the chamber, he would have steeled himself, ignored the sudden

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dizziness and nausea and reached for his panga and his 9 mm SIG-Sauer P-226

blaster.

This time there was no need: the moan emanated, as he knew it had to, from the

bony and angular figure dressed in a frock coat who lay propped against the far

wall of the chamber. Dr. Theophilus Tanner was, in real time, somewhere in his

mid- to late-thirties. Yet his real age was incalculable, as he had been plucked

from his own time into another, and then tossed back into the stream of time.

Doc's muddled and bemused memories told of a time before the turn of the

twentieth century, when life was sedate and ordered. The unwilling and

unwitting subject of an experiment by the whitecoat scientists of a time

immediately prior to skydark, Doc had proved too quarrelsome, too much

trouble, and had been used as a test subject in an experiment to project forward

in time.

It was an irony that the experiment had probably saved his life, landing him as it

did nearly a century after the devastation of the nuclear war known as skydark.

However, the damage to his physical and mental states was a subject of

speculation. Mildred often referred to him as a crazy old fool, but was the first to

own that this was merely irritation with his more unstable moments. The truth

was that the Oxford- and Harvard-educated Tanner had weathered experiences

that would have broken a lesser man. He looked weatherbeaten and aged—

strangers would take him for twice his probable age—and from time to time was

inclined to ramble in a seemingly senile and illogical manner, though these bouts

were not as common as they used to be.

Yet he was also capable of a tenacious and wiry strength, and possessed a razor-

sharp mind that could cut through the stress and strain of his most unusual life.

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For a man whose first experience of the Deathlands had been near death under

torture at the hands of Baron Jordan Teague and his psychopathic sec chief Cort

Strasser in the ville of Mocsin, Doc was surprisingly able to hold his fragile

sanity together.

"I know—how much more of this can he take? Right, lover?"

Ryan turned back at the sound of Krysty Wroth's voice, which sounded like a

sonorous bell in the enclosed space, clear and ringing, yet quiet and controlled.

The flame-haired woman was sitting with her knees drawn up to her chin,

wrapped in the bearskin coat that hid the toned and shaped curves of her body.

She flashed Ryan a smile that sparked through her green eyes. Yet she still

showed signs of the strain caused by the jump.

Ryan allowed himself a smile in return, and cursed as he felt the muscles of his

face ache as they moved. "Always read my thoughts," he replied. Then he

indicated Doc. "It's true enough. Hurts bad for us, let alone what Doc's been

through."

"Crazy old coot'll outlive us all, you'll see…" Mildred tentatively raised herself

onto one foot, remaining half-kneeling until she was sure of her balance. J.B.,

still on his back but now conscious, allowed himself merely a grunt of assent.

"Okay, people, how are we doing?" Ryan asked. It was a rhetorical question.

They were doing well, so far.

By now, Ryan and Krysty were on their feet, both massaging life back into their

aching and dulled limbs. It was a luxury they knew they could allow themselves.

J.B. was checking his blasters, which was no more than second nature to him.

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Mildred was checking Doc, pulling back his eyelid to see his rolling eyeball as

his muttering grew less incoherent.

"My dear woman, I would appreciate a less heavy hand on my optic nerve," he

murmured from his incoherence, the eyeball beginning to still and focus.

"No thanks, not a bit of it," Mildred replied with an indulgent smile, breathing

silent thanks that Doc had made it once more.

There were still two members of the group who had failed to completely surface

from the jump. Jak Lauren, the whip-thin and immensely strong albino, still lay

on the floor of the chamber. His patched camou jacket, littered with the leaf-

bladed throwing knives that were his specialty, seemed almost to smother him.

As always seemed to happen during a jump, he had vomited, wretched strings of

bile that dripped from his nose and mouth, forming small acrid puddles around

his face. His breathing was regular and shallow, and he showed little sign of

regaining consciousness. The boy beside him, however, was beginning to stir.

The casual observer would think that it was Ryan Cawdor who was prone on the

chamber floor, then would notice that under the black mop of curly hair, the

chiseled face was bereft of scarring and still held two eyes. The limbs were

rangy, the musculature strong but still taking shape. But there was no mistaking

that the boy was of Cawdor blood.

Dean Cawdor, recently turned twelve years old, was his father in miniature, and

for Ryan it was an uncanny experience to look on his son and see himself some

twenty-odd years previous. He even recognized the bridling brashness and

overconfidence in his abilities that Ryan himself had been prone to at that age—

except that Ryan had gone through this stage in the comparative safety and

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security of Front Royal, under the patronage of his father, the ville's baron. Dean

had to go through this learning experience in an environment where one wrong

move could mean instant death, or worse…a lingering, tortuous death. So

perhaps sometimes the older Cawdor was harsh in slapping down his son's

brazen self-confidence, but only because he was aware of what was happening

inside the boy and felt an urgent need to quell the impetuousness that could be

Dean's undoing.

Even as this passed through the one-eyed warrior's mind, Dean groaned softly

and raised his head slowly, opening his eyes and then raising himself in the same

manner as his father.

With Doc also now on his feet, Mildred devoted her medical attentions to taking

care of Jak. The albino's tolerance to the bodily stresses of the jumps was lower

than the others.

Slowly, Jak came round, wiping the sticky mucus and bile from his face with his

sleeve, and hawking a glob of phlegm from his throat.

"Okay to go?" Ryan questioned him.

Jak nodded. "As ever be."

"Let's do it."

THE DOOR to the chamber had unlocked automatically when the jump had

been completed. It was a safety facet of the mat-trans system that the doors on

both the sending and receiving chambers had to be shut before the transfer could

take place, and that the comp systems would automatically lock and unlock the

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Axler,_James_-_Deathlands_56_-_SunchildDocprobeddeeper"Thequestionremainsunanswered.Isthereanyofthepoisonousoldtech\stillonthepremises,therancidremnantsofabygoneandperhapsbestforgotten\age?SomerelicofthatperniciousevilknownastheTotalityConcept?"Dochadn'tidlybroughtupthenameoftheTotalityConcept.Hehad...

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Axler, James - Deathlands 56 - Sunchild

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