Axler, James - Deathlands 31 - Keeper of the Sun

VIP免费

2024-12-07 0 0 530.87KB 260 页 5.9玖币

侵权投诉

James Axler - Death Lands - Keeper of the Sun

The bolt slid home and the lock clicked into action.

The shogun looked around the room. "We have been locked in," he said quietly.

Other than the main door and the high windows, the only way in or out of the ballroom

would be through the rectangular air vents in the ceiling. , But they weren't big enough

for access.

One of the sec men in the far corner of the huge room, directly below an air vent,

suddenly began to cough. Ryan spun, seeing that two more soldiers had been stricken

with coughing fits. He looked up at the air vents, a sudden dreadful suspicion filling his

mind.

It was Mashashige who voiced the danger. "It is an attack with gas," he said with an

almost insane calm.

"The ronin have trapped us like foxes in their den and will kill us with poison gas."

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 book."

This one is for Sue and Ann, connoisseurs of teashops and very good friends. In

hope that they both succeed in finding the elusive gold at the rainbow's end.

First edition April 1996

ISBN 0-373-62531-6

KEEPERS OF THE SUN

file:///C|/2590%20Sci-Fi%20and%20Fantasy%20E...eper%20of%20the%20Sun%20(v1.0)%20[html].html (1 of 260) [12/28/2004 1:01:17 AM]

James Axler - Death Lands - Keeper of the Sun

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.

Printed In U.S.A.

There are those who believe that the mysteries of Japan were discovered in the nineteenth

century. This is fallacious thinking. The true mysteries of Japan have not yet been

discovered. Nor will they ever be.

—From Scouting in the East,

by Sir Arthur Bowden-Powell,

Crest Press, Norwich, 1895

Keepers of the Sun

#31 in the Deathlands series

James Axler

file:///C|/2590%20Sci-Fi%20and%20Fantasy%20E...eper%20of%20the%20Sun%20(v1.0)%20[html].html (2 of 260) [12/28/2004 1:01:17 AM]

James Axler - Death Lands - Keeper of the Sun

Chapter One

The gateway chamber, a few miles north of Glenwood Springs in old Colorado, was

flooded to knee height.

Ryan stood in the pink-walled armaglass hexagonal chamber, holding hands with Krysty

Wroth. Doc Tanner was next to her, close to Jak Lauren. The albino teenager was leaning

back, soaking wet from a fall into the water. Next to him stood J. B. Dix, folding his

glasses and putting them into a pocket of his coat, preparing for the expected matter-

transfer jump that would take them to an unknown and uncontrollable destination. The

last of the six friends, Mildred Wyeth, was trembling with the cold, the beads in her

plaited hair whispering against one another.

The door was firmly closed, which should have triggered the jump mechanism, but it

seemed as if the flooding had done serious damage to the electrics.

They waited for the disks in the floor and ceiling to start glowing—the former just visible

under the water—and for the mist to gather about their heads.

"Has anyone considered that if we fall unconscious, we might drown during the jump?"

Doc asked.

But nothing happened.

Ryan opened and closed the door again.

A flash of silver light blazed from the control room, and every one of the lamps went out.

In the silent dark, the water was still rising.

"We trapped?" Jak's voice sounded hollow and flat, muffled by the water in the chamber.

file:///C|/2590%20Sci-Fi%20and%20Fantasy%20E...eper%20of%20the%20Sun%20(v1.0)%20[html].html (3 of 260) [12/28/2004 1:01:17 AM]

James Axler - Death Lands - Keeper of the Sun

"No. Door opens," Ryan said. "Worst is we can still get out and climb back to the surface.

Move on from there. Be a real pain in the ass."

"Try it again," J.B. suggested.

"Think the power's all down," Ryan said. But he remembered the words of the Trader, his

old commander on the war wags: Keep on trying until something better happens on by.

He picked his way across the floor, water lapping at his groin, and fumbled for the

handle. He pushed it open a little way, conscious of the resistance from the flood, and

pulled it shut as hard as he could.

At the third try, Ryan thought that he heard a more positive click from the lock, but he

couldn't be sure because of the noise of the water sloshing around inside the chamber.

"Quiet," he said. "Think it might be working."

Doc coughed. "Has anyone considered what I said a few moments ago?"

J.B. looked down at the water, almost invisible in the darkness. "Comes up past my

knees," he said. "Two feet. Two and a half feet. Plenty to drown in."

"It's starting," Krysty warned. "Jump's beginning. Feel it like a feather behind my eyes."

"Everyone sit down, backs against the wall!" Ryan raised his voice, aware of the ceiling

disks beginning to glow brightly, the ones below the water showing more dimly. "Arms

around each other for support."

Mildred exclaimed as she sat down, "Water's colder by the second," her voice already

beginning to sound slurred and distant. "Comes up to my chin."

"Hang on tight, friends." Ryan sat and clutched at Krysty, his arm around her, pressing

his back to the armaglass wall. The chill struck halfway up his chest. There was no longer

any point in trying to save the blasters from the water.

A mist formed at the top of the hexagonal chamber, filtering down over them.

The usual feeling of having his brains curdled and whipped into oatmeal mush started to

file:///C|/2590%20Sci-Fi%20and%20Fantasy%20E...eper%20of%20the%20Sun%20(v1.0)%20[html].html (4 of 260) [12/28/2004 1:01:17 AM]

James Axler - Death Lands - Keeper of the Sun

overcome Ryan as the mat-trans unit began to swing into grudging, reluctant life.

His last thought was to wonder if the flooding was going to affect the mysterious

mechanics of the jump, take them to some other place or time.

Or take them nowhere, so that their molecules were sprinkled through the universe.

Ryan closed his eyes.

Chapter Two

Ryan opened his eye.

His first conscious thought was that the floodwater had disappeared. Secondly he saw

that the color of the armaglass walls had changed from the pale salmon pink of the

Colorado redoubt to a fiery orange that glowed like the rising sun.

He took several long, deep breaths, amazed at how well he felt. Normally a jump left

everyone sick and prostrate, and sometimes generated hideous nightmares. This time he

had no sense of time passing. His eye had closed, and there had been a kind of period of

blackness. Then he opened his eye again, and the jump appeared to have been

successfully completed.

Ryan was the first to come around and he sat motionless, resting, his arm still around

Krysty, her long red hair brushing his wrist.

He glanced sideways at her, seeing an attractive woman in her midtwenties. As she was

still unconscious, her bright emerald eyes were hidden. She was close to six feet tall,

strongly built, and wore a blue jacket and a white shirt over dark blue pants.

Across the chamber, J.B. was stirring. John Barrymore Dix, hailing originally from

Cripple Creek, was known throughout Deathlands as the Armorer because of his unique

knowledge and skills with all weaponry.

file:///C|/2590%20Sci-Fi%20and%20Fantasy%20E...eper%20of%20the%20Sun%20(v1.0)%20[html].html (5 of 260) [12/28/2004 1:01:17 AM]

James Axler - Death Lands - Keeper of the Sun

J.B.'s first act on recovering was to check that his beloved fedora hat was still in place,

then to take his spectacles from his pocket and place them on the bridge of his bony nose.

He peered across at Ryan.

"Not a bad jump." J.B. had always been a man of few words.

He was Ryan's oldest friend. They had met as young men, full of gall and sand, and rode

with the Trader in his war wags. They'd traveled and fought all across Deathlands for

more than ten years, learning the manifold skills of killing at the hands of the notorious

master.

J.B.'s next move was to check his blasters, the Uzi machine pistol with twenty 9 mm full-

metal jacket rounds and the brutal Smith & Wesson M-4000 shotgun. The weapon had

been designed to hold eight rounds of Remington flechettes, each round containing

twenty inch-long, needle-pointed darts.

"Not bad," Ryan agreed.

It wasn't just that the flood had vanished from the gateway chamber. The six friends had

been sitting chest deep in the water. Now they all seemed to be bone-dry, and there wasn't

a trace of moisture on the floor.

Ryan closed his good, right eye and opened it again. He automatically checked his own

hardware—the Steyr SSG-70 hunting rifle, which fired a 7.62 mm bullet, its accuracy

increased with a Starlight nightscope and a laser image enhancer. On his right hip he

carried his trusty SIG-Sauer P-226 automatic pistol, which fired fifteen rounds of 9 mm

ammunition. Everything was in place and bone-dry. Finally Ryan's hand poised along the

taped hilt of his eighteen-inch panga, sheathed on his left hip.

Jak Lauren was next to recover.

The teenager blinked open his ruby eyes, running fingers through his shoulder-length

white hair. He swallowed hard. "Don't feel bad."

Jak was only five feet four inches tall, and barely pushed the scales over one hundred

pounds. But he was a fine acrobat and the finest hand-to-hand fighter that Ryan had ever

known. He was also a genius with the leaf-bladed throwing knives that he kept hidden all

about him.

file:///C|/2590%20Sci-Fi%20and%20Fantasy%20E...eper%20of%20the%20Sun%20(v1.0)%20[html].html (6 of 260) [12/28/2004 1:01:17 AM]

James Axler - Death Lands - Keeper of the Sun

Despite his age, Jak had lived several lifetimes. He'd been a married man and a father

before tragedy had robbed him of that happiness.

Krysty had come around from the jump without Ryan noticing. He felt her stir against

him and turned to kiss her lightly on the cheek. "Welcome to somewhere else, lover," he

said quietly. "How is it?"

She sighed. "Felt better. Then again, I've surely felt a whole lot worse. That was one of

the better jumps."

Ryan nodded. "Mildred's coming out of it," he said. "Leaves Doc to last."

"As usual," the black woman muttered, still sitting with her eyes closed.

Ryan grinned at Krysty, squeezing her fingers. Ever since the thirty-six-year-old doctor

had joined them, she and Doc Tanner had always teased each other.

Mildred Winonia Wyeth was born in December 1964, more than a century earlier. She

had been one of the world's greatest authorities on the science of medical freezing, which

turned seriously ironic when she went into hospital for minor abdominal surgery in late

December of the year 2000. Something went wrong with the operation, and to save her

life the doctors decided to freeze her.

Only a few days later and the world exploded.

The nuclear holocaust that had been feared for nearly sixty years finally happened. The

heavens were blackened with missiles, at the time that was later to be called "skydark."

Tens of millions died in the massive blasts of the first couple of days. Then came the

predicted period of the long winters, with the insidious radiation chilling off hundreds of

millions of the survivors of the first strikes.

And through all the endless years of bleakness, Mildred Wyeth slept dreamlessly on.

Gradually a form of civilization crept back to what had once been the United States of

America—what was now Deathlands.

There were isolated communities called villes, many with their own rulers, who named

themselves barons. It was a world of violence, ruled by the gun and the knife; a world

where science and industry were almost gone; a world with virtually no airplanes and few

motorized vehicles, adapted to run on crudely processed gasoline; a world with only

file:///C|/2590%20Sci-Fi%20and%20Fantasy%20E...eper%20of%20the%20Sun%20(v1.0)%20[html].html (7 of 260) [12/28/2004 1:01:17 AM]

James Axler - Death Lands - Keeper of the Sun

rudimentary power, no television or telephones.

Ryan and his friends had finally awakened Mildred from her long sleep, and she was now

an integral member of their small group.

"I don't remember feeling so well after a jump," she said. "Not ever."

Her right hand reached down for the comfort of the butt of her ZKR 551 Czech target

revolver. The 6-shot revolver had been chambered to take a Smith & Wesson .38-caliber

round. Mildred, other than being a specialist in cryogenics, had been a member of the

U.S. pistol-shooting team in the last-ever Olympics, in Atlanta in 1996.

She was, quite simply, the finest shot that Ryan had ever seen.

"Doc hasn't even got his usual nosebleed," she observed, standing up a little unsteadily.

"And where in the name of Mary and Joseph did all the water go? Even my clothes are

dust dry."

Ryan shook his head. "Don't know. Must've sort of drained away during the jump. Who

knows?"

The truth was, nobody knew.

All they knew was that in the last months before skydark, the government had poured

billions of dollars into what was memorably called an aggressive defense. The master

plan was christened the Totality Concept, of which the Strategic Defense Initiative had

been one small part. Operation Chronos had been ultrasecret research into time-trawling,

which plucked people from their own past and dragged them helplessly forward into the

militaristic present.

Then there had been Overproject Whisper; and a crucial segment of this had been code-

named Cerberus—matter transfer.

Highly secret installations had been buried deep within a number of military complexes,

which were called redoubts. Most were built in the last five years of the previous century,

many in isolated parts of national parks to the pointless disgust of the conservationist

lobby. Opposition to the siting of the many redoubts was ruthlessly crushed, with most of

the leading protagonists mysteriously disappearing.

file:///C|/2590%20Sci-Fi%20and%20Fantasy%20E...eper%20of%20the%20Sun%20(v1.0)%20[html].html (8 of 260) [12/28/2004 1:01:17 AM]

James Axler - Death Lands - Keeper of the Sun

But the system worked.

You entered a gateway in Portland, Maine, for example, pressed in the code and woke up

sometime later in say, Portland, Oregon.

Ryan and his companions had stumbled on one of the gateways many months ago, and

triggered the start mechanism by simply closing the door. But they had no idea of how to

control the system. As far as was known, all of the intricate coding instructions for the

mat-trans units had been destroyed during the skydark and the long winters—which

meant that you got into a gateway to make a jump from Portland, Maine, for example,

and you might end up anywhere: Florida, Montana, west Texas, Oregon, New York,

Moscow, Louisiana, the Amazon jungle, Pocatello, Bucksnort....

Anywhere.

Five of them were up on their feet now, stretching, waiting for the sixth member of the

group to lurch back out of the mind-crushing numbness of the jump.

Dr. Theophilus Algernon Tanner was the only surviving subject trawled forward in time

during Operation Chronos.

He'd been born in the beautiful hamlet of South Strafford in Vermont on Valentine's day

in 1868. Highly intelligent, successful, traveled and cultured, he had been married in June

of 1891 to Emily Chandler. In the next four years they had two adorable children, Rachel

and little Jolyon.

In November 1896 Doc Tanner was trawled forward in time to 1998. During the next two

years, he made himself intolerably awkward, constantly trying everything he could to

return to his own time and to his wife and children, or to sabotage the detested Chronos

operation. In the end he became such a running sore, the whitecoats got rid of him by

pushing him forward nearly a hundred years, into Deathlands where he met up with Ryan

Cawdor. It was an event that almost certainly saved the old man's life.

The experiences of being trawled had toppled the balance of his fine brain, and he clung

to sanity by ragged nails. Now he was generally in good mental health, though sometimes

a few cogs failed to connect and he would slip away for a few seconds. But he always

came back.

Doc was as tall as Ryan at six-three, but as skinny as a lath. He had silvery hair, which

hung to his shoulders, and wore an ancient frock coat, so old that it showed patches of

file:///C|/2590%20Sci-Fi%20and%20Fantasy%20E...eper%20of%20the%20Sun%20(v1.0)%20[html].html (9 of 260) [12/28/2004 1:01:17 AM]

James Axler - Death Lands - Keeper of the Sun

dull green mold, though the garment was in slightly better condition than his cracked

knee-boots. His weapon of choice was a unique gold-plated commemorative J.E.B. Stuart

9-shot LeMat revolver, which also fired a single 18-gauge scattergun round.

He also carried an ebony cane with a silver lion's-head hilt that concealed a slender rapier

of finest Toledo steel.

"By the Three Kennedys! What a fine jump that was. I'm ready now for any roister-

doistering that you may care to mention. Be it drinking snapdragons or jumping jointed

stools."

"Hi, Doc," Krysty said, reaching down to help him to his feet. "Glad to see you're back

with us."

"I never really left, did I, my dear?" He looked around the chamber and brushed at his

clothes. "I have two comments to make on our location. Firstly to point out that the color

of the walls is by far the most hideous that I can remember. Like the agonizing feeling at

the back of the eyes after a long night's drinking of porter at O'Flaherty's Irish bar, down

on the Tenderloin in old Boston."

Everyone waited, and Ryan finally asked the old man. "You said you had two comments,

Doc?"

"Ah, yes. Indeed I have. Perhaps it's my failing memory, but I seem to recall that we

commenced the jump while sitting neck deep in floodwater. Does anyone have any

suggestions where it might have gone?"

"We were just talking about that," J.B. said. "And the answer, Doc, is that nobody has

any idea. Somewhere in the middle of the jump it just sort of vanished."

"Well enough, John Barrymore. I shed no tears for its departure. There are few things

more unpleasant than walking around with wet underwear."

"Guess you know about that, Doc." Mildred grinned. "Not one of my problems."

He shook his cane at her in mock anger. "Aroint thee, rump-fed runyon."

"Would if I knew how," she retorted. "But I don't, so I guess I won't."

file:///C|/2590%20Sci-Fi%20and%20Fantasy%20...per%20of%20the%20Sun%20(v1.0)%20[html].html (10 of 260) [12/28/2004 1:01:17 AM]

文档加载中……请稍候！
如果长时间未打开，您也可以点击刷新试试。

下载文档到电脑，查找使用更方便

5.9 玖币 0人已下载

立即下载 VIP免费下载

摘要：

JamesAxler-DeathLands-KeeperoftheSunTheboltslidhomeandthelockclickedintoaction.Theshogunlookedaroundtheroom."Wehavebeenlockedin,"hesaidqui\etly.Otherthanthemaindoorandthehighwindows,theonlywayinoroutof\theballroomwouldbethroughtherectangularairventsintheceiling.,Buttheywe\ren'tbigenoughforaccess.One...

展开>> 收起<<

Axler, James - Deathlands 31 - Keeper of the Sun.pdf

共260页,预览10页

还剩页未读，继续阅读

声明：本站为文档C2C交易模式，即用户上传的文档直接被用户下载，本站只是中间服务平台，本站所有文档下载所得的收益归上传人(含作者)所有。玖贝云文库仅提供信息存储空间，仅对用户上传内容的表现方式做保护处理，对上载内容本身不做任何修改或编辑。若文档所含内容侵犯了您的版权或隐私，请立即通知玖贝云文库，我们立即给予删除！

Axler, James - Deathlands 31 - Keeper of the Sun

相关推荐

开通VIP享超值会员特权

作者详情

相关内容

热门标签

举报选择: