had achieved scant success, but she still tried.
“What is this, coffee and…honey?” Krysty asked, taking a sniff.
“Close enough. The best results I ever had against jump sickness was with a crude form of Irish coffee,” Mildred said apologetically. “I figure the relaxing effects of the shine, combined with the mental stimulant of the caffeine in the coffee, is what does the trick. But since I don’t know how these damn things work, it’s just a guess.” She gave a wan smile. “For all I know it could be the water content that keeps us from getting dehydrated, and the sugar.”
“Credo qua ab, sur dom est!” Doc announced dramatically.
Mentally, the physician translated the garbled Latin into, “I believe you, because the idea is absurd.” She wanted to snap back at the time traveler, but sadly, he was right.
One at a time, the companions took a drink, then stepped into the hexagonal chamber and found a spot to sit. There was an alphanumeric keypad set into the wall where a person could tap in the code for their next destination, but since they had never found a directory, Ryan, the last person in, closed the gateway door, which would automatically trigger a random jump.
White mist flooded the chamber, swirling around the companions, faster and faster. A powerful hum started to build as tiny sparks appeared inside the mist like a billion imprisoned stars, then the floor seemed to vanish and the companions dropped through infinity, accelerating beyond logic and reason. Each of them had related that it sometimes felt as if their skin pulled away from the bones, and that knives shot painfully through their bodies, piercing every organ. Other times there was no pain, but the companions experienced vivid jump “nightmares.”
Slowly, the noise faded, and there was only the sound of the friends’ harsh breathing. But a few minutes later a warm breeze started to blow from the wall vents, the sterilized air helping considerably to revive them.
“Eas…easy…jump.” Ryan coughed, then stopped talking as his stomach roiled, its contents threatening to leave.
Concentrating on his breathing, Ryan managed to ride out the usual wave of nausea and carefully sat up to inspect the others. Everybody else seemed fine, just limp and exhausted, but that was how they always arrived. Except for Doc and Jak. For some reason the jumps hit them harder than the others, and Doc was sprawled on the floor, clearly unconscious.
“At least…not bad sick,” Jak panted, wiping some drool off his face. “New juice helped.”
“Th-thanks. B-but I h-have no f-fragging idea if it h-helped or not…” Mildred wheezed, laying on her back to stare at the ceiling. She knew the unit was motionless, but it felt like it was spinning around and around, and standing at that moment was completely impossible.
It was often this way after a jump, and it took the companions several minutes to recover, during which they were almost completely unable to defend themselves. As a physician, Mildred thought this was a purely natural reaction, merely random synapses firing in their brains from being reduced to their component molecules being disassembled. Doc philosophically considered it merely a side effect of their disintegrated bodies being without a soul for a little while until it found them again at the new destination. Mildred considered that total nonsense, of course. However, as a scientist, she was forced to honestly admit there really was no way of knowing for sure which answer was correct. Or if the truth was somewhere in the middle, a sublime combination of both answers, with maybe another element unknown to either science or religion.
With a low groan, Ryan forced himself to stand, one scarred hand pressed to the smooth wall to help him remain upright. In a sheer effort of will, the one-eyed man took a shuffling step forward, then collapsed inadvertently on the lever that opened the door to the mat-trans unit. The portal opened, spilling Ryan into the antechamber. Blinking hard to clear his vision, he looked up to see that the armaglass walls of the mat-trans were colored a pale flesh tone with a diagonal black stripe. The theory was that each mat-trans was different so that a traveler instantly knew where he or she had arrived, but that was only a guess. The redoubts were as jammed full of the mysterious as they were advanced technology.
“Peach and black,” Ryan muttered, brushing back his damp hair. “We’ve never been here before.” A quick look showed no one lying in wait, but oddly the door leading to the control room was a closed oval hatch.
Sluggishly joining his friend, J.B. removed his glasses from the shirt pocket where he always put them for safekeeping during a jump.
“Yeah, this is a new redoubt,” he said, a gloved hand resting on top of the Uzi machine pistol. The man wasn’t sure if he had the strength to control the bucking 9 mm Israeli blaster, but it was better to have a blaster ready and not need it than the other way around.
Surreptitiously, Mildred made a note of the colors in her journal. Someday the information might come in handy.
“Something’s wrong here,” Krysty said with a scowl, a hand going to the blaster at her side. The woman seemed perfectly normal, but then she had always recovered faster than anybody else.
“Yeah, I feel, too,” Jak said, a knife dropping into his palm from a sleeve as his other hand drew the .357 Magnum Colt Python. “Sound wrong.”
“Then let us…” Doc began but broke into a ragged cough that drove the old man back to his knees. “Proceed…with care…” he whispered, using both hands to draw the huge LeMat and clumsily cock back the trigger.
“Better stay in the mat-trans,” Ryan decided, feeling the strength returning to his body. “If we come back with a droid on our ass, I want a backup here.”
“C-consider me…Balador on the…rainbow bridge…” Doc wheezed, then managed a smile. “None shall…pass.”
“Crazy old coot,” Mildred snorted, then passed the man the canteen again. “Here, finish it off, the coffee will do you a world of good.”
Nodding his gratitude, Doc holstered his weapon and accepted the canteen to start sipping at the contents with obvious pleasure. Slowly, some color began to return to his pale face.
Turning away, Ryan saw that J.B. was already at the oval door hatch, checking for traps.
“Clear,” he reported.
“Okay, friends. Triple red.”
Pulling out his SIG-Sauer, Ryan pressed down the lever that operated the oval door and it silently swung aside. Then with a snarl, the man instantly stepped backward, dropping into a crouch.
In the next room several big men in U.S. Navy uniforms operated the controls of the humming comps, M-16 assault rifles slung across their backs.
Chapter Four
Ryan swung up his longblaster, but before he could fire, the sailors at the work stations began to sag, then shrivel, their bodies wasting away in moments until there was nothing left of them but some grinning skeletons in perfectly preserved uniforms.
Giving a low whistle, Ryan waited until J.B. took a position behind him, his Uzi at the ready. Moving slowly forward, Ryan eased into the control room, his eye sweeping the interior for anything suspicious. But everything was as it was supposed to be, aside from the uniformed skeletons.
While the air vents sucked away the swirling cloud of dust, Ryan studied the comp. He had no idea what the twinkling
