"We need a guard, Ryan?" the Armorer asked.

"Doesn't seem to be any sign that the crazie had any company here. After the past few hours, I figure we all need some sleep real bad. Let's take a chance. The doors are bolted at both ends of this dormitory. We got our blasters at our sides."

J.B. nodded his agreement. "Fine. I feel kinda tired."

Ryan grinned at his old friend. "That's a first. I swear I can't recall ever hearing you say before in all the years... You must be tired."

Krysty called to him. "Couple of beds here pushed together, lover. Not used, neither. Double spread of blankets."

Ryan closed the flimsy hardboard door and switched off the light. There was still plenty of glow from the main overhead lamps that were never switched off in any redoubt.

He felt bone weary. "You getting undressed?" Krysty asked from where she lay sprawled on the bed. Her sentient hair framed her pale cheeks limply, setting off the startling green of her eyes.

Ryan shook his head. "Nope. I'll peel off what's wet and... Guess that's everything. Fireblast! Yeah, why not?"

She didn't move, watching him as he unlaced the combat boots, cursing the seawater that had tightened the knots. He peeled the socks off his pale, puckered feet, carefully unburdening himself of his armory of weapons: rifle, pistol and panga, the hidden slim-bladed flensing knife. He unwound the white silk scarf with the strangler's weights at both ends, then removed the heavy coat with the white fur collar and the rest of his clothes, until he stood, swaying with tiredness, magnificently naked in front of her.

"Very good, lover," she said softly, clapping her hands gently together. "Now you lie down here and watch me."

"Krysty," he warned her, "I'm not going to be up to this tonight. Leave it lay until the dawning. I can't do a thing until I've slept."

"We'll see." She licked her lips very slowly, and despite his protestations, Ryan felt a tremor stirring at his groin.

He moved past her and lay on the bed, not bothering to pull up the blankets. As in most redoubts, the automatic temperature control kept conditions comfortable. Krysty glanced across at him, admiring the planes of muscle across his lean torso, noticing, as she always did on the rare occasions she saw him nude, the seamed scars and weals of old wounds that mapped his body from temple to heel.

The woman pulled off her dark blue leather boots, throwing them down by the bed, the silver points on the toes gleaming softly. The khaki coveralls peeled away from her and fell about her bare feet, leaving only the sheen of her bikini pants, strung across her hips.

"Want me to keep these on?" she asked, hooking her thumbs in the elastic and posing like a border gaudy house wh.o.r.e for him, her b.r.e.a.s.t.s like fire-tipped cones of firm flesh.

"Told you. I'm too d.a.m.ned tired," he insisted.

She grinned impishly, pointing at the part of his body that was insistently giving the lie to his words.

"That's not tired, lover." Krysty grinned.

"Let's just sleep now. Make love tomorrow, when we wake up."

Farther along they both heard Doc cry out, an anguished yelp of terror and

despair, torn from his sleeping mind.

"Poor old b.a.s.t.a.r.d," Ryan said. "Hope he feels more himself tomorrow."

"Lori'll help him do that."

"Yeah."

Krysty walked to the bed and folded herself onto it, leaning against Ryan's raised knees. She ran her hand gently up his leg, stroking the inside of his thighs.

Higher.

"What d'you say, lover?" she whispered.

"I say that I can't. Not tonight. I'm sorry, love, but I can't."

Higher, her strong fingers proving him more of a liar.

"I can't, Krysty."

But he could.

Chapter Six.

THE BATTERING ON THE DOOR of their dormitory sent Ryan's hand scrabbling for the b.u.t.t of the SIG-Sauer Waster, feeling the chill of the metal against the warmth of his palm.

But the voice outside was Doc's and he relaxed again, Krysty cuddling up against him under the blankets.

"For gentlemen in England now a'bed will think themselves accursed they were not here and hold their manhood cheap... Upon my soul, friend Cawdor, friend Glamis, are you in there with yon wanton maiden, holding your manhood?"

"If Doc knew I was holding it, he'd go fire-red with embarra.s.sment," Krysty whispered.

"He sounds in good voice." He called out to the old man. "You got first food cooked and waiting for us, Doc?"

"Of course. Eggs fresher than tomorrow's sunrise done just the way you like 'em. Fluffy and full of get-up-and-go goodness. Rashers of orange-cured ham so thick you need a forklift to get them to your mouth. Honey-roasted chicken pieces and crisp link patties. Peaches and melons that fell off the trees five minutes ago. Coffee strong enough and black enough to float a six-shooter. Bread that hasn't even finished being baked yet awhile. And b.u.t.ter that was in the cow less than a half hour since."

"Doc," Ryan said, swinging his long legs out of the bed and starting to pull on his pants, "you got yourself a couple of hungry customers. It really is good as you say?"

"Sure! Come and get it! Come and get it!"

A few minutes later Ryan cautiously lifted the brittle off-white plastic spoon to his lips, grimacing at the familiar gray texture and stodgy consistency of the dull mess resting like a sullen reproach in the middle of the plate.

"You lying old b.a.s.t.a.r.d!" he shouted. "It's just f.u.c.king self-heat, like it always is."

Doc cackled with merriment, eyes glinting at the success of his small joke. "Yes, dear Ryan, yes. But you had a good couple of minutes there antic.i.p.ating it, didn't you?"

A decent, uninterrupted night's sleep was such a rarity in the Deathlands that all seven of them were in high spirits as they ate their breakfast, with the possible exception of Donfil More, who was tenderly rubbing the lower part of his back, complaining that the bed was a foot too short for him.

"Every bed too short f'you," Jak sn.i.g.g.e.red.

APART FROM DONFIL'S Smith & Wesson, there didn't seem to be any worthwhile armament sections in the vast, rambling redoubt. Even the first superficial survey of the morning made it clear that the land, wherever they were, had definitely been subject to a major shift and drop. Whole sections of the complex had totally disappeared, corridors ending in blank walls of smeared earth, as though a gigantic knife had hacked through them.

Some of the redoubts that had been totally abandoned at the time of the long winters had been scoured clear with fine combs; every single artifact, notice, instruction or plan had been removed. But that wasn't the case here, as they found when they finished their dreary breakfast and set out to explore.

Every main pa.s.sage and junction area had its own 3-D holo map of the entire redoubt that showed where they were at any given moment, as well as tappable info about how to move around both inside and outside.

Since there was no sign of any danger, Ryan agreed that they should split up. Doc and Lori were accompanied by Jak, and J.B. went on a recce with the Mescalero shaman. Ryan went with Krysty.

After studying one of the plans, Ryan realized that the gateway section could be totally cut off from the rest of the redoubt, only accessible now down the tottering ladder at the lowest turning of the tide. Once again there came the nagging doubt that he'd closed the outer sealing doors to the mat-trans section.

The map also showed, at the highest floor level near something marked as Main Entrance, a rectangular building called Visitor Center and Initial Indoctrination Module.

"Sounds worth a look, lover?" Krysty suggested.

"Yeah. Doesn't sound like there's all that much around this place worth a look. It's kind of funny in away."

"What is?"

"We've seen redoubts cleared right out, and yet you still can find something mebbe useful around the place. You know?"

"Yeah."

"This looks like it was in use right up till the nukes started falling-"

Krysty shook her head. "More than that, lover. We already saw that there's somebody around somewhere who's still using the redoubt-least the gateways-to jump."

"I know. But apart from the big landslide, this place is filled with food and everything. We could live here the rest of our lives and never need to go outside again."

"Call that living?"

"No. Call it existing. Once saw some old vid, back around b.l.o.o.d.y Kansas, with some friends who got holed up in a kind of ville. Muties all around them trying to get in. They sort of existed."

"What happened to them?"

Ryan shook his head. "No idea. Vid player broke before we got to the end of the story. I guess they all died."

Krysty reached in her pocket and drew out the small, gleaming black Apache tear, the smooth stone she'd brought with her from the wilderness of the Southwest. She threw it up in the air and caught it, bringing it to her lips for a gentle kiss. "How 'bout we all go up and get us some fresh air. What do you say to that?"

"Yeah," Ryan said with a noticeable lack of enthusiasm. "Why not?"

None of the others had found anything of great interest in the parts of the redoubt they'd been exploring. Donfil had been fascinated by a room packed from floor-toceiling with boxes of tablets.

"They were called... What was their name, again, J.B.?"

"Tranks and sleepers," the Armorer replied.

"Yes." The shaman nodded. "Pills to make you sleep and pills to stop you worrying. It is not the way of my people to take such things. There is wrong in the balance if such 'pills' are needed."

Doc laughed, still sounding a little weak after his ordeal of the previous day. "One pill to make you larger and one to make you small," he chanted. "Go ask Alice, but I think she doesn't live hereabouts anymore."

Ryan didn't take much notice, figuring the old man's skull was still a couple of rounds short of a full mag.

THE DEAD MUTIE had obviously been an old loner, a packie, hanging around the corpses of old buildings for what he could suck out of the ruins. By far the greater threat to their safety was the mysterious, unseen stranger who'd been able to manipulate the controls of the gateway with such apparent ease. He could be dangerous.

So Ryan led them along in full firefight order, blasters at the ready, fingers on triggers, nerves drawn as tight as bowstrings. J.B. brought up the rear of their patrol, with the rest of them strung out between.

The journey up toward the surface was trouble-free and uneventful, and they followed the explicit maps at every turn and junction. The walls were gently curved, with the overbright lighting fading to normal as they climbed into the highest levels. It crossed Ryan's mind that it was odd the redoubt contained no corpses. Where were all the dead? The atomic generators had been built and programmed to provide air, heat and light for a thousand years. But they weren't programmed to shift what must have been several hundred iced bodies.

"This is it." Ryan held up his clenched fist in the signal for them to stop and beckoned them all forward into the large open s.p.a.ce. Oil stains marked the concrete floor.

"Usual control," Jak commented, pointing to the green lever.

Unusually it was pointing in the up position, meaning that the main outer doors had been opened from the inside, which was probably the handiwork of the deceased mutie.

"Ready to go out, friends?" Ryan asked, glancing around.

"Let's do it," Krysty said.

The door swung open with a greased silence, letting in a wave of cool, fresh air, which was such a contrast to the dull recirculated air of the redoubt that it tasted like a heady, sparkling wine.

"My word," Doc breathed, stepping through the entrance. "That is just so beautiful it makes you..." He shook his head in mute wonderment at the scene.

They stood near the crest of the hill, a rounded slope that was at the center of a small island. The sea was spread around it in a dark gray expanse, touched with dappled weals of bright silver. It looked as if the island was about four miles across and barely two miles wide, the flanks of the hill speckled with stands of larch, pine and fir.

Down to the left they could see the flash of a waterfall, among an expanse of aspen, maple and live oaks. Ryan had never seen anything quite so brilliant as the magnificent show of color from the trees. Every imaginable shade from dark green, through dull brown, to fiery reds and startling orange. It was almost as if the mountain was ablaze from sea's edge to the beginnings of bare, gray rock.

"New England fall," Doc told them.

"It's beautiful," Lori said, kneeling down on a bank of soft, cropped turf.

"Road there." Jak pointed to where the blacktop, partly overgrown, wound across the flank of the hill toward the shattered remains of a stone harbor.

"Never saw anything so bright and strong as those trees," J.B. said quietly, taking off his gla.s.ses and polishing them on his sleeve.

"What makes them that color, Doc?" Ryan asked.

"The bright reds and golds? I recall reading in some...some time back. The soil and the season brings it on. All that brave array of brilliant hues and tints is simply the last scene of death. The leaves die back for the winter, and before they die they display all their rich panoply. That is what we see here, my friends. The brightness of death."

There was an infinite calm about the morning. Away to the north they could make out either the mainland or more islands. Around the granite headland below them they could see great circling clouds of cormorants, rising like smoke from the sea. Farther out, Ryan thought for a moment that he spotted some vast creature moving through the sullen waves, broaching for a moment, then disappearing. But he couldn't be certain, and it didn't reappear.

Donfil joined Lori, sitting cross-legged and gazing around him, eyes hidden by the mirrored sungla.s.ses. He looked like some skeletal hunting bird, waiting patiently for its prey by a quiet forest pool.

"This is the first place I have seen in many, many moons," he said. "There is a word in the tongue of the lost Navaho people. They speak of hozro in their language."

"What's it mean? Hozro?" Krysty asked the shaman.

He paused as he considered the question. "Hozro is to be as one with your world. With your... what is the Anglo word?"

"Environment?" Doc offered. "Big buzzword way back when."