James Axler - Red Equinox

"How long?"

Krysty shook her head. She, too, looked close to exhaustion. The flaming crimson of her hair was dulled and coiled flat against her head, not tumbling free and fiery over her shoulders as it usually did. There were dark rings beneath her startlingly green eyes.

"Way I see it, it's coming down to hours, lover. Only hours. The muscles are all failing, like a machine where every part quits at once. He's having a real hard time swallowing."

"Best go see him."

"In there." She pointed across the hall to the main shuttered chamber.

Rick's eyes were open as Ryan, Krysty and J.B. walked in on him. He was lying in a corner of the room, under piles of furs, barely visible.

"Hi, guys. You made it." His voice was slurred and slow.

"How is it?" Ryan asked.

"That's like... like askin' Mrs. Lincoln if she liked the play." He croaked a laugh, like a raven, very far off.

"Listen, Rick." Ryan knelt down at his side, Krysty and J.B. standing behind him. There was the sound of footsteps, and Ryan turned to see that Doc and Jak had also entered the room.

"Go ahead, man. Speaking's getting harder, but I can still listen real good."

"We got clear of the ville. But we faced up with that sec man, Gregori Zimyanin. Mebbe we should have chilled him. I don't know. There's too many throats to try and cut them all."

"You fear that the Russians might try to pursue us?" Doc asked.

"Yeah. Their tracker got wasted. But Zimyanin's not a stupe. He got a map and he'll have sec reports. Food stolen from villes around. Won't take him that long to start drawing some lines and find that they all connect close by here. Then it's only an hour or so before we get visitors."

Rick swallowed several times, as though he were trying to summon up strength to speak, coughing to clear his throat. A shimmering ghost of a near-smile appeared and hung on his lips for a few heartbeats, then vanished.

"You mean get my finger out of the hole, Ryan. Time's a wasting. Sure. You get me down to the gateway and sit me comfortable and... Hell's bells, it hurts... Help me get there and we'll save the ship."

"When, Ryan?" Jak asked.

"Now."

"There were some killings. Some men disappeared. I want the request taken to my office. Clerk Second Class Alicia Andreyinichna will know. I must know as soon as possible. While we wait, I want men to sweep every stinking hovel for twenty miles around. I want word of food or clothes being taken. Word of any strangers. Word of hearing blasters. Tracks. Wags. Anything that's even a breath away from the ordinary. Anything at all. Understand? Good. Then get on with it. I'm sure we're close. I want to be closer."

When they helped Rick to his feet, Ryan saw that the tattered and scorched American flag was neatly folded at his side. The freezie was almost helpless, unable to stand unaided. Outside, the skies had cleared and the temperature had dropped below zero. Krysty had suggested a fire to keep the glow of life in Rick, but Ryan vetoed the idea. The smoke from the chimney would carry for miles and would lead any pursuers to them as surely as a bank of floodlights.

Zorro was underfoot as they began to move Rick up the main stairs of the house. Ryan nearly tripped over the puppy and kicked out at it.

"Fireblast, Doc! Keep the bitching dog out of the way or I'll snap its neck."

"Stow it, lover," Krysty protested. "It's only a little dog."

Ryan turned quickly and faced her angrily. "I meant what I said. This isn't some double-easy kids' game. I figure we have to be out of this place one way or another by the end of tomorrow. Probably sooner. Or the Russkies'll pick us off easy as a bear plucking ripe thimbleberries."

Zimyanin was only a handful of miles away from the dacha by sunset of the same day. He'd enlisted one of the gangs of teenage wolverines from the nearest suburb, knowing that their blind loyalty to the Party and their insatiable relish for cruelty and death made them the perfect instruments of terror.

It had taken irritatingly long for the information he wanted to be transmitted from his office in Moscow. When it came, nobody had a decent map of the area. Zimyanin was finding that his patience was slipping from his control like sand through an hourglass. Everything was going wrong. If Aliev had still been alive he was confident that Cawdor, Dix and the rest of the spies would already be dangling from a convenient branch. If his bosses hadn't ordered them back to the ville for some popular show trials.

Now they were still at liberty and he didn't know where.

The news was beginning to filter in to him from the wolf pack.

A lad of twelve, with webbed fingers, brought word of food disappearing from some wretched collection of hovels to the southwest.

Always to the southwest.

Another boy, who seemed incapable of not picking his nose, said there was talk of a giant lone wolf that was raiding some of the hamlets, stealing food.

"Southwest?" Zimyanin asked, already knowing the answer. He wasn't surprised when the boy nodded his agreement.

By evening the local sec commander had finally been located. He had been off on a secret mission that involved some illicit cheese and beef, which he was taking a percentage of. His sister-in-law had tracked him down with the sickening news that some stone-eyed bastard of a senior sec officer wanted him urgently.

Pausing only to change his undershorts, the man rushed along to meet with Zimyanin. To his enormous relief the Muscovite didn't seem concerned about where he'd been or even what he'd been doing. Zimyanin simply wanted to draw on his specialized local information, briefing him on the situation and asking him for his thoughts.

"They are hiding," Zimyanin concluded.

"Yes, Comrade Major-Commissar. But you do not think that they might have simply kept running? That their base is farther out?"

Zimyanin had taken off his cap with the silver circle, and he rubbed his hand over his bald skull. He considered the suggestion, but swiftly rejected it.

"No."

"But they..."

"No. I plotted all reports. All of them. They began a few miles from here. No farther. And now they go back by precisely the same route. They are hiding someplace close by. I saw a name on a map. The name was Peredelkino."

The sec commander nodded thoughtfully, his brain sharpened by his fear that his black-market dealings might be discovered, and honed further by relief that they hadn't been.

"Peredelkino? Yes, I know it. The stories are that Stalin provided large houses there. In fact, I believe that the Americans were given one."

"You are sure? A dacha that was once owned by the Americans, at Peredelkino? Then we have them, Mother Russia! We have them!"

"We must mount an attack," Zimyanin continued. "Not a massive attack. It might come to that, but I want to try to take them by surprise. Send me the vicious little bastard who runs the pack."

"You sure are one powerful woman, Krysty," Ryan said, shaking his head as he saw again the full extent of the damage done to the locking mechanism of the gateway door.

"Not my strength," she replied. "I can only do that by calling on the Earth Mother. You know that."

"Sure."

He looked at the twisted metal, with entrails of the lock hanging out. Doc was at his elbow, peering at the wreckage.

"A sorry sight, my dear Ryan. Depressing to see the cunning works of man's hands laid so sadly low, is it not?"

"It is, Doc."

"I confess that I have spent some totally unprofitable hours while you were away, down here in the bowels of the earth. I was trying to work out some way whereby we might bypass the lock and trigger the jump mechanism from within."