Sunchild. James Axler

lay on the floor of the chamber. His patched camou jacket, littered with the leaf-bladed throwing knives that were his specialty, seemed almost to smother him. As always seemed to happen during a jump, he had vomited, wretched strings of bile that dripped from his nose and mouth, forming small acrid puddles around his face. His breathing was regular and shallow, and he showed little sign of regaining consciousness. The boy beside him, however, was beginning to stir.

      The casual observer would think that it was Ryan Cawdor who was prone on the chamber floor, then would notice that under the black mop of curly hair, the chiseled face was bereft of scarring and still held two eyes. The limbs were rangy, the musculature strong but still taking shape. But there was no mistaking that the boy was of Cawdor blood.

      Dean Cawdor, recently turned twelve years old, was his father in miniature, and for Ryan it was an uncanny experience to look on his son and see himself some twenty-odd years previous. He even recognized the bridling brashness and overconfidence in his abilities that Ryan himself had been prone to at that age—except that Ryan had gone through this stage in the comparative safety and security of Front Royal, under the patronage of his father, the ville’s baron. Dean had to go through this learning experience in an environment where one wrong move could mean instant death, or worse…a lingering, tortuous death. So perhaps sometimes the older Cawdor was harsh in slapping down his son’s brazen self-confidence, but only because he was aware of what was happening inside the boy and felt an urgent need to quell the impetuousness that could be Dean’s undoing.

      Even as this passed through the one-eyed warrior’s mind, Dean groaned softly and raised his head slowly, opening his eyes and then raising himself in the same manner as his father.

      With Doc also now on his feet, Mildred devoted her medical attentions to taking care of Jak. The albino’s tolerance to the bodily stresses of the jumps was lower than the others.

      Slowly, Jak came round, wiping the sticky mucus and bile from his face with his sleeve, and hawking a glob of phlegm from his throat.

      “Okay to go?” Ryan questioned him.

      Jak nodded. “As ever be.”

      “Let’s do it.”

      THE DOOR to the chamber had unlocked automatically when the jump had been completed. It was a safety facet of the mat-trans system that the doors on both the sending and receiving chambers had to be shut before the transfer could take place, and that the comp systems would automatically lock and unlock the doors when the transfer got underway and ended. Or at least, the aging and mostly uncared-for tech had worked that way thus far. Any deviation was beyond their control, and so not really worth consideration or worry.

      They exited the chamber singly, checking the immediate area as they went, prepared to provide cover and defense for those who would follow. As always, Ryan took the lead, with J.B. at the rear.

      The anteroom and control room outside the mattrans unit were empty. The comp consoles winked and chattered softly in the semidarkness, with much of the lighting having fallen prey to the passing years and lack of maintenance. The lack of dust was due to the antistatic air conditioner, which still worked.

      There were no signs of life.

      It took little time for them to ascertain that the redoubt was, on these lower levels at least, completely deserted. It was in a reasonable condition. There were signs of stress in some of the walls, suggesting that earth movements resulting from the tremors and quakes following skydark had made some impact on the redoubt, but most of the lighting was still working, and there was some circulation of air through a purification plant. The air was clean, but a little thin, suggesting that the plant was damaged.

      “Can’t stay here too long,” Mildred remarked as they explored the empty rooms. “The air’s fine now, but it won’t last that way forever.”

      “Why not?” Dean countered. “It’s been okay up to now, right?”

      “Think about it, my boy,” Doc interjected with a sardonic note. “The air is, shall we say, a little thin down here. Suggesting, I should imagine, some malfunction of the ancient technology keeping this place alive, albeit perhaps in a wheezing and somewhat dubious manner…A little like myself, in fact.”

      “So?” Dean prompted, still in the dark.

      “So, it’s thin and strained when the redoubt is empty. But now it has seven people breathing in at a ridiculous rate. A rate made, with some irony, even faster by its very paucity.”

      “Big words for say we use faster than made,” Jak commented with an amused look at the old man. Doc merely shrugged.

      “So how long you reckon we got?” J.B. asked Mildred.

      She shook her head, the ends of her plaits moving rhythmically as though caught by a much needed draft of air. “Couldn’t say for sure, John. It’s like being at a high altitude. I don’t think we’d suffocate for a few days, but the more rarefied it gets, the more it might affect us. Hallucinations, maybe.”

      “Great. Like jolt only not so good,” Jak muttered in a dour tone.

      “Think we can risk a night?” Ryan asked Mildred. “I’d like us to get some rest before tackling whatever may be out there or risk another jump.”

      “I’d say we could do that,” Mildred replied after some thought.

      “Good. Now let’s try and find the shower stalls, mebbe some clean clothes. That’d make me feel better for a start,” Krysty added.

      “Right. Stink like mutie polecat on heat,” Jak grunted.

      It didn’t take long to find the shower stalls and washing facilities. Like most redoubts, this one was laid out to a specification that had been generally used. There had been exceptions, but for the most part it could be assumed that if a person had explored one redoubt, he or she had a fair chance of navigating every other one he or she came across.

      The showers were still working. As with several of the redoubts they had encountered so far, the lighting in this one was erratic. But the water was still on, and the heaters still worked. The first streams of water were lukewarm, flecked with some decay and foreign matter from the pipes, but after a minute or so by Ryan’s wrist chron the water was clear, flowing freely and of an even temperature.

      They took turns to shower, keeping a guard at all times. It seemed that the redoubt was deserted apart from their presence, but they could never be too sure. The friends had been taken unawares on a previous occasion.

      It was a simple matter to find clean clothing. The store rooms for all redoubts were situated in the same place, and in this redoubt they were lucky enough to find underclothes and thermally insulated outerwear that had lain unused for over a century. They took the opportunity to change clothes and would later launder what they usually wore.

      One strange thing, though—the clothes weren’t the usual regulation khaki and olive-green, or white. Some of the clothes were in colors that seemed, under the dim lighting, to be black or a dark blue. Some of it, under the better lighting of the corridor, even revealed itself to be purple, a color rarely if ever seen in predark sec conditions. And the lighter colors were yellows and sky-blues. It was a small but significant difference.

      “These make a change,” Dean remarked as he dressed, “but it doesn’t seem right to me.”

      “You’re right,” Krysty agreed. “The armies from before skydark would never have used this.” She held up a purple T-shirt that seemed, in the light, to have streaks of a faded pattern running across it. “This is no ordinary military redoubt.”

      “Built on the same lines, though,” Ryan said thoughtfully. “Odd. Most of the nonmilitary redoubts we’ve jumped to have been different. But this…”

      “I know,” Mildred said. “It’s uncanny, and maybe just a bit creepy. It’s a military base, but with so many nonmilitary touches. If only it wasn’t so damned dark…I’d swear that these rooms are just a bit smaller than the usual size. It’s like someone got the military blueprints