Sky Raider. James Axler

lower and lower from the side of the mesa, and then came free.

      With his heart pounding, Jeffers insanely staggered toward the doomed ville and saw the colossal slab of granite impact.

      The walls crumbled like sand, the alarm bell went instantly silent, and the frightened screaming abruptly stopped. Having trouble breathing, the baron kept walking as he watched a billowing cloud of dust rise around the edges of the rock slab covering his home. Chilled. They were all chilled. It was impossible! Unthinkable! Indera ville had been destroyed by its main source of protection.

      Slowing to a halt, Baron Jeffers cradled his aching chest, and now felt a trickle running down his left leg. He glanced down to see a spreading red stain. Blood. Digger had to have shot him. He touched the wound, inhaled at the rush of pain. But that was a good sign. A major wound would have gone numb. Pain meant it was minor damage. There was hardly any bleeding. He could have it stitched by the ville healer….

      Raising his head, the man looked with uncomprehending eyes on the crushed debris of the ville. There was no more healer, or sec men, or anything. He was the baron of a graveyard. An outlander standing alone and wounded in the open.

      Just then, a soft buzzing noise came from above, and Jeffers squinted into the sun to see a small black shape moving through the sky in a lazy circle around the broken mesa.

      “Tregart,” he muttered, raising a bloody fist to shake at the sky. “Damn you to hell!”

      As if in response, the black shape swung away from the mesa and started directly toward the man. The dried mud in front of him kicking up dirty plumes as there came the faint sound of a rapid-fire blaster coming closer and closer.

      Chapter Two

      As the swirling mist in the mat-trans chamber faded, the six people standing inside the unit lay limply on the floor, gasping for breath.

      After a few minutes Ryan Cawdor brushed the curly black hair out of his scarred face and tried to focus his good eye on the chamber. Every mat-trans chamber was identical, and this one was no different. At the far end was a closed vanadium-steel door, with a lever. The portal had to be closed and locked before the mat-trans would operate, which was some sort of an ancient safety feature.

      Only the colors of each chamber’s armaglass walls changed, each location decorated in a different color for ease of identification. Unfortunately, those color codes were unknown, as were the commands that would let the companions control a jump between one underground redoubt and another. Each journey via a mat-trans unit was a random leap into the unknown.

      “Everybody okay?” Ryan asked, slowly forcing himself to stand.

      “No permanent harm, lover,” Krysty Wroth said, brushing the red hair from her face. Her green eyes flashed as they moved around the chamber, her wild mane of animated hair flexing unhappily from the aftereffects of the jump. The walls were orange with black stripes. That pattern was unknown to her. The companions had never been to this redoubt before, which was both good and bad.

      Standing without effort, Krysty straightened her clothing, redoing a few of the buttons on her white shirt. It was a touch too small for her full breasts, but it was all that had been available at the last redoubt. The military-issue bra was a tad snug but with any luck, she might find something more serviceable in this redoubt.

      Sweeping back her heavy bearskin coat, Krysty checked the knife in her left cowboy boot, then pulled the Smith & Wesson .38 revolver from the gunbelt around her trim waist. Far too many times the companions had arrived at a redoubt only to find they weren’t the only ones there.

      Busy checking his own weapons, Ryan merely grunted at the beautiful woman.

      “Dark night, it’s cold in here,” J.B. Dix said, adjusting his wire-rimmed glasses. The small man exhaled slowly, and his breath fogged slightly. “Must be thirty degrees, mebbe less.”

      Still lying on the plastic floor, the man with the silvery hair used an arm to lever himself up to look wearily around at them. Tall and thin, he appeared to be sixty years old, or even more, but his bright eyes sparkled with intelligence.

      “Indeed, you are quite correct, John Barrymore,” Doc Tanner intoned in his deep stentorian voice. “Something must be wrong with the life support system.”

      “I hope not,” Krysty stated, holstering her blaster. “That’s all there is between us and suffocating to death.”

      “Quite so, madam,” Doc whispered hoarsely. “Quite so.” The jumps through the mat-trans units always hit Doc and Jak Lauren the hardest. For Doc, it was probably because of the horrible experiments performed by Operation Chronos.

      Fumbling to locate his ebony swordstick on the floor, Dr. Theophilus Algernon Tanner wrapped both hands around the silver lion’s-head crest and levered himself erect. Dressed as if he were from the nineteenth century, the scholar wore a gentleman’s frilled shirt and a long frock coat that had seen better days. But there was also a huge LeMat .44 pistol at his side, the grip of the massive double-barrel revolver worn from constant use.

      “You okay, Jak?” Mildred Wyeth asked, swinging her med kit around to her front for easy access. Short and stocky, the black woman had once been a twentieth-century physician. During a relatively simple operation, something had gone wrong, and Mildred had been cryogenically frozen, only to be revived a hundred years later by Ryan and the companions. She had been traveling with them ever since.

      In the savage wastelands of the early twenty-second century, her skills as a trained physician were beyond price, even though Mildred had virtually no instruments or medicine. The med kit hanging over her shoulder was merely a patched canvas bag salvaged from a U.S. Army M*A*S*H unit. The bag was filled with strips of boiled cloth to be used as bandages, a small plastic bottle of homemade liquor called “shine” for disinfectant, a pack of razor blades found in a bombed-out supermarket for her scalpels, and similar crude items. She sometimes felt like a photographer without a camera. Dr. Mildred Wyeth had the skill to save lives, but the tools of her craft were only items of legend in these dark days.

      “F-feel fine.” Jak Lauren spit, using the back of a hand to wipe the drool from his mouth.

      Turning away from the wall where he had just been sick, Jak stood carefully, as if afraid his thin body might break from the effort. He was trying to keep it hidden from the others, but their travels through the mat-trans had been hitting the teenager hard lately, and it was taking longer and longer for him to get back on his feet after each jump. It was a strange condition for the albino teen, because he was normally as strong as a horse.

      As he checked over his .357 Magnum Colt Python revolver, Jak privately wondered if maybe the effects of the hundreds of jumps they had made were wearing him down. That would be bad news if true. The mat-trans units in the redoubts were the only safe way to traverse the burning deserts and rad-blasted hellzones of the Deathlands. It would be a triple-damn shame if he had to abandon using that method of transportation. Worse—he’d have to quit traveling with his companions.

      “By the Three Kennedys!” Doc roared, pulling at the lion head of his cane to extract a shining steel rapier from the ebony shaft. “Dean! Where is Dean!”

      The rest of the companions paused at that, and exchanged sad glances.

      “Sharona took him. He’s no longer with us,” Ryan said quietly. “Remember, Doc?”

      The time traveler arched both eyebrows in indignation, then slowly his features softened as he recalled the events of the past.

      “Ah, yes, my condolences, my dear Ryan,” Doc muttered in embarrassment, sheathing the blade once more and locking it tight with a twist of the handle. “I had forgotten. The jump, you know….”

      “Hey, anybody see my hat?” J.B. asked, running stiff fingers through his sparse hair.

      Ryan kicked the battered fedora across the chilly floor and J.B. scooped it up and tucked it back in place in a single move.

      “I