James Axler - Shatter Zone

Reaching the door for the control room, Ryan pushed it aside and strode past the banks of humming comps. This was the heart of the redoubt, or more correctly, the brain. These were the machines that controlled the mighty fission reactors deep down in the subbasement for the life support systems, air-recycling, water sanitation, the freezers, the front door and the all-important mat-trans units. Without the comps, the base instantly became an airless tomb.

After passing through the anteroom, Ryan drew his 9 mm SIG-Sauer blaster before further pushing open a door to a room surrounded by armaglass. As the vanadium portal swung aside, he gave the chamber a quick scan with his weapon at the ready. The companions weren’t the only people who knew about the secret mat-trans units, and more than once they had found evidence of others just leaving the gateways.

However, the entry chamber was uninhabited. With his blaster leading the way, Ryan warily stepped through the doorway into the next room. The hexagonal chamber was a deep red in color, sprinkled with flakes of a hundred colors. The gateway chamber in each redoubt was a different color, supposedly for the purpose of identification. But if there was a chart to show what the colors meant, they had never found such a thing. The wall of this chamber vaguely resembled the terrazzo flooring used in most government buildings and major shopping malls, only with a much greater depth of color.

“It’s clear,” Ryan announced, holstering his blaster.

The others filed into the chamber, past Ryan. As he closed the door behind them, something rolled out of the shadows at the far end of the control room. With its two metallic antennas quivering, the boxy device rushed to the main computer and urgently extended a probe to quickly connect with the master control panel.

HALFWAY ACROSS THE WORLD, Delphi suddenly felt a vibration inside his left wrist, and flipped his hand over to see a message scrolling along the palm monitor. Excellent! The prey had been found at last!

Quickly typing instructions on his bare wrist, Delphi waited impatiently as the droid accessed circuits undisturbed for a century. Come on, come on…

Now, a roster of available redoubts was displayed. Frowning at the list, Delphi chose one at random. It was a base he had never been to before because it was on the Forbidden list. But this was a day for breaking the rules, and once the process had started he saw little reason to be cautious now.

“Get ready, traitor,” Delphi muttered, his heart quickening to the thrill of the hunt. “Here I come….”

RYAN CHECKED to make sure that everybody was safely inside the unit and seated on the floor.

“Ready?” he asked.

“Yeah, ready as we’ll ever be,” J.B. mumbled, removing his glasses and tucking them safely away in a pocket. The jumps always hit the companions hard, often sending them to the floor puking out their guts from the shock and pain of the instantaneous transference. Doubling over, J.B.’s glasses had once bent when they flew off his face and someone had stepped on them. It had taken him days to repair the frames, and he subsequently swore that sort of triple-stupe mistake would never happen again. His backup glasses were functional, but unflattering.

“Once more into the breach, dear friends,” Doc said in that singsong quality that meant he was quoting something.

Mildred merely snorted at the Shakespearean reference, and Ryan slammed the door shut. As he hurried to sit next to Krysty, a fine mist swirled upward from the disks on the floor to engulf the companions, mists from the ceiling descended upon them. They braced themselves for the expected snap of tiny sparks to crackle over their exposed skin. But instead, there was only a soothing warmth that spread through their bodies as the thickening mist began to swirl faster with every heartbeat.

What in nuking hell? Ryan thought in confusion. Something didn’t feel right. After so many jumps, there was a certain “sameness” that the companions had come to expect. So anything out of the norm was suspicious. Was the mat-trans broken? Were they being sent somewhere, or worse, were they going nowhere? Mebbe the computer was having a malfunc. Nuking hell, he had to stop this jump!

Frantically trying to stand to reach the door, Ryan felt the floor drop away and he knew that he had been just a split second too slow. The jump had begun.

As gently as falling through a cloud, the terrified companions descended into the artificial forever of the matter transfer, and vanished from sight.

But even as it started, their fall came to a relaxing halt and the companions were able to watch as the electronic mists faded away to leave them unharmed and unruffled in a new mat-trans unit.

“Son a bitch,” Ryan muttered, drawing his blaster without conscious thought.

“We not dead,” Jak mumbled, sounding slightly shocked. With a gesture, a throwing knife slipped out of his sleeve and dropped into his waiting hand.

“No,” a hoarse voice whispered.

Turning, the companions saw Doc cringing against the wall, braced as if for a blow. His hands twisted the silver-lion’s head on the walking stick, exposing a few inches of the stainless-steel sword hidden inside the hollow sheath.

“You okay?” Mildred asked, reaching out a hand.

“Not again,” Doc rambled, eyes darting about madly. “No hardship means a controlled jump. That means they…they have found me. Operation Chronos has found me again!”

“Are you sure—” Ryan began slowly.

Suddenly a new light came into Doc’s wild eyes and his face went pale as he closed the stick with a solid click. “No, by the Three Kennedys, they haven’t found me, the bastards have found us!” he gasped. “But they can’t have you. I wouldn’t let them get their hands on you, too!”

Whipping out his ebony stick, Doc lunged toward Krysty. Even though the sword stick was sheathed, the redhead twisted aside. But it hadn’t been necessary. The bottom of the stick missed her by inches, as intended, and stabbed the Last Destination button on the control panel.

Recoiling at the sight, everybody braced for the torture of instantaneous travel, but nothing happened. The mat-trans unit didn’t respond to the signal from the emergency LD button.

“Nuke me,” J.B. said hoarsely, putting on his glasses. “Well, that never happened before! We should have gone right back to last redoubt. The LD button has never failed to work before!”

“I don’t think it failed now,” Krysty said, her hair flexing unhappily about her tense features. “I think we’re not being allowed to leave.”

“You mean, that maybe Doc is right,” Mildred returned, “and that this might have been a controlled jump?”

“Could be, yes.”

“Mutie shit,” Jak muttered. “Just malfunc.”

Ryan slid the Steyr SSG-70 longblaster off his shoulder and worked the bolt.

There were only four 5-round clips remaining for the Steyr, but the neckered-down brass packed a hell of a lot more punch than the fat 9 mm Parabellum rounds in the SIG-Sauer. Anything could be behind that door, from a squad of armed whitecoats to a sec droid hunter. Once, very long ago, Ryan had chilled a cougar with his bare hands, and the Deathlands warrior would rather do that again than face a sec hunter droid even if he was armed with a predark bazooka. The damn machines were almost impossible to stop once they started coming after a target.

“If you’re feeling nervous,” Ryan added, “then start us on a jump.” The man was listening hard to the redoubt, getting the feel of the place, the gentle hum of the air vents, the muffled noises of the water pipes and high-pitched whine of the fluorescent lights overhead. Everything seemed normal, not a thing was different or strange, and that was scaring the nuking hell out of the warrior.