reached out a hand, but the time traveler dodged out of the way.
Closing a fist, Doc started pounding on the keypad. “Work, damn you, why will you not work!”
The startled companions exchanged worried expressions at the outburst, but before they could do anything Doc slipped to the floor and started to weep uncontrollably, his face buried in his hands.
The sight of such weakness shocked Ryan for a moment, then he suddenly understood, and felt like a fool. It had to have been all of those jumps that had scrambled Doc’s brain and made him so forgetful. Pieced together from various conversations, Ryan knew that the agents of Operation Chronos had trawled dozens of people from the past and brought them into the twentieth century. But Doc was the only person to ever survive the process sane. The predark whitecoats had nearly turned the poor Vermont scholar inside and out trying to solve that vital mystery.
Then one day, Doc was deemed too much trouble to deal with and was sent into the future, to arrive in Deathlands. The agents of Operation Chronos immediately regretted the decision and took off after him in hot pursuit. But there was no way to track the old man in the vast wasteland that was the Deathlands. The agents of Chronos had long ago given up the chase as impossible, but Doc kept running. Finally he wandered, dazed and confused, into some serious nuking trouble with a lunatic baron before accidentally encountering the companions.
“Sweet Jesus, look what they’ve done to him,” Mildred said softly. Kneeling by the sobbing man, she tenderly stroked his hair. “Doc might annoy the hell out of me at times, but he’s no coward. The old coot has proved that a thousand times. The horrors he must have endured at the hands of those whitecoats….”
Doc had once claimed that Operation Chronos was a subdivision of Overproject Whisper, the group that built the redoubts and invented the mat-trans units. Was that, in fact, true? Were there perhaps other unknown groups prowling through the redoubts of the world? There was very little about the bases that they knew for certain. Except that everybody they met was usually an enemy.
Kneeling, Jak handed Doc the dropped sword stick, and the trembling scholar hugged it tightly to his heaving chest.
“Sorry,” Doc whispered in a hoarse voice, tears on his cheeks. “I seem to have…lost control there for just a moment. I will be fine in a trice. Really, I will….”
“Theophilus,” Ryan said, stumbling over the name.
Sluggishly, Dr. Theophilus Algernon Tanner looked up in shock at Ryan’s scarred face. It was the very first time he could recall the man using his Christian name.
“If those nuke-sucking whitecoats are coming, then we’ll face the entire fragging lot of them together, old friend,” Ryan stated, offering a scarred hand.
A long minute passed as Doc breathed deeply, the color slowly returning to his features. Then the silver-haired gentleman reached out and clasped Ryan’s hand in a powerful grip. It always caught the one-eyed man by surprise that Doc looked sixty, but really was only in his late thirties and as strong as a horse. His mind had been damaged but not his body, and not his fighting spirit.
“Together,” Ryan said, helping the man to stand.
The two stood for a moment, hands tightly clasped.
“Together, my friend,” Doc vowed, his voice as strong as ever. As he released the hold, he softly added, “And please allow me to apologize for my earlier…lapse. You see, I—”
“Frag it,” Ryan said bluntly, glancing over his shoulder at the closed door. “It don’t mean drek.”
“Doesn’t,” Krysty corrected him. “And anybody who says they’ve never been scared is a liar. Gaia knows we’ve all been there.”
“Fuckin’ A,” Jak chimed in, slapping Doc on the shoulder.
“Nuke them till they glow, then shoot them in the dark,” Mildred added impulsively.
The rest of the companions chuckled at that, but Doc threw back his head to roar in laughter. “Indeed, madam! Well said. Cry havoc, and let loose the dogs of war, eh?”
“Oh, stuff it, you old coot.”
“Well, as long as we’re not going anywhere,” Ryan said grimly, striding across the chamber’s cold floor, “then we better get ready for company. Get hard, people. If the whitecoats do come for us, it’s going to be bloody.”
“I hear ya,” J.B. stated, leveling his Uzi machine pistol and walking across the chamber to join his old friend. The fleeting moment of camaraderie was past. Back to the grim business of staying alive.
This new mat-trans unit was the same as every other, a hexagonal room made of seamless armaglass, with small hidden vents near the ceiling, one door with concealed hinges, and an operating lever to open it. The only difference was the color. Nothing else.
As the rest of the companions prepared to leave the mat-trans unit, J.B. eased the M-4000 shotgun off his shoulder and passed the weapon to Mildred. Tucking away her ZKR revolver, the physician expertly racked the scattergun to chamber a 12-gauge cartridge.
“I wonder why they haven’t hit us already?” Krysty said, checking the load in her wheelgun. Five rounds, two of them predark, three reloads. All of the soft-lead ammo had been split into dumdums to maximize their destructive power. The slugs would go in like a finger but come out like a fist. But only on flesh. Against a machine, or a biowep, they were about as useless as spitting.
“Why? Not need,” Jak growled, swinging out the cylinder on his weapon and removing some of the brass cartridges. “Where go? Trapped like rats in shitter.” The Colt Magnum blaster had the unique attribute of being able to hold both .357 rounds and .38 rounds, which doubled the kind of brass he could use. Jak really couldn’t understand why everybody didn’t use this type of blaster. Just made good sense.
“Any grens?” Doc asked, checking the load in his LeMat. The black-powder weapon had nine chambers in the main cylinder, but only six were loaded at the moment. In the bulging pouches of his gunbelt, Doc had plenty of black powder, and .455 miniballs, but it had been a long time since he had found any fulminating mercury “nipples” needed to ignite the Civil War blaster. Without those caps, the deadly LeMat was reduced to nothing more than an oddly shaped club.
“No grens, plas or pipebombs,” J.B. replied, setting the firing switch on the Uzi to full-auto. “If we happen to run into a sec hunter droid, just aim at the eyes and stay out of the reach of its blades.”
“Good luck with trying that tactic,” Doc commented.
Removing the last .38 bullet, Jak tucked them carefully into a jacket pocket, then thumbed in the more powerful .357 rounds. If they were facing whitecoats, he wanted a sure chill with every stroke of the trigger.
“Here,” Mildred said, pulling a plastic bottle out of her med kit. She splashed some of the homie shine on a strip of cloth normally used for a bandage, then tied it around her mouth.
“In case they try to use sleeping gas,” she said, wetting another strip and passing it along. “I don’t know how much it’ll help, but this should buy us a little time.”
Everybody took a mask and tried not to make a face as the sharp smell of the homebrewed alcohol filled their nostrils.
Keeping
