James Axler.

Outlanders.

Tomb of Time.

Time, like an ever-rolling stream, Bears all its sons away; They fly forgotten, as a dream Dies at the opening day.

-Isaac Watts, 1674-1748.

The Road to Outlands- From Secret Government Files to the Future.

Almost two hundred years after the global holocaust, Kane, a former Magistrate of Cobaltville, often thought the world had been lucky to survive at all after a nuclear device detonated in the Russian emba.s.sy in Washington, D.C. The aftermath-forever known as skydark- reshaped continents and turned civilization into ashes.

Nearly depopulated, America became the Deathlands- poisoned by radiation, home to chaos and mutated life forms. Feudal rule reappeared in the form of baronies, while remote outposts clung to a brutish existence.

What eventually helped shape this wasteland were the redoubts, the secret preholocaust military installations with stores of weapons, and the home of gateways, the locational matter-transfer facilities.

Some of the redoubts hid clues that had once fed wild theories of government cover-ups and alien visitations.

Rearmed from redoubt stockpiles, the barons consolidated ttieir power and reclaimed technology for the villes. Their power, supported by some invisible authority, extended beyond their fortified walls to what was now called the Outlands. It was here that the rootstock of humanity survived, living with h.e.l.lzones and chemical storms, hounded by Magistrates.

In the villes, rigid laws were enforced-to atone for the sins of the past and prepare the way for a better future. That was the barons' public credo and their right-to-rule.

Kane, along with friend and fellow Magistrate Grant, had upheld that claim until a fateful Outlands expedition.

A displaced piece of technology...a question to a keeper of the archives...a vague clue about alien masters-and their world shifted radically. Suddenly, Brigid Baptiste, the archivist, faced summary execution, and Grant a quick termination. For Kane there was forgiveness if he pledged his unquestioning allegiance toBaron Cobalt and his unknown masters and abandoned his friends.

But that allegiance would make him support a mysterious and alien power and deny loyalty and friends. Then what else was there?

Kane had been brought up solely to serve the ville. Brigid's only link with her family was her mother's red-gold hair, green eyes and supple form. Grants clues to his lineage were his ebony skin and powerful physique.

But Domi, she of the white hair, was an Outiander pressed into s.e.xual servitude in Cobaltville. She at least knew her roots and was a reminder to the exiles that the outcasts belonged in the human family.

Parents, friends, community-the very rootedness of humanity was denied. With no continuity, there was no forward momentum to the future. And that was the crux-when Kane began to wonder if there was a future.

For Kane, It wouldn't do. So the only way was out- way, way out.

After their escape, they found shelter at the forgotten Cerberus redoubt headed by Lakesh, a scientist, Cobaltville^ head archivist, and secret opponent of the barons.

With their past turned into a lie, their future threatened, only one thing was left to give meaning to the outcasts. The hunger for freedom, the will to resist the hostile influences. And perhaps, by opposing, end them.

Chapter 1.

The dead man seemed to be kneeling in prayer. Hunched over with both hands raised palms outward and his head tilted back, he looked as if he were seeking benediction. Judging by the condition of his body, he had received d.a.m.nation instead.

The man was completely black-not only his hair, skin and fingernails, but also his teeth. His mouth gaped open in an agonized rictus, exposing a tongue the hue of ebony. His eyes resembled a pair of small onyx orbs. His clothing, which appeared to consist of a short denim jacket and zippered coverall, was as jet-black as the rest of him. His clothing, flesh and hah- had the texture of porous charcoal or black plaster. The figure looked more like a three-dimensional shadow or a singularly unattractive statue than a corpse.

Eyeing the man closely, Kane ventured, "Rad exposure?"

Brigid Baptiste hesitated a second before murmuring, "Not of a kind I'm familiar with."

"And just how many kinds is that?" asked Grant, his brow furrowed.

Brigid shrugged. "Just off the top of my head, there's X-ray, neutron, gamma, cobalt-"

"We get the general idea," Reba DeFore broke in dryly.

Brigid cast her a slightly irritated glance and gestured toward the kneeling corpse. "I don't think you do.

Whatever did that to this man doesn't fit the symptomology of any recorded type of radiation exposure."

From the breast pocket of her shirt she undipped her rad counter and stepped closer to the motionless figure. Pa.s.sing the little square instrument over the top of the man's head, she kept a close watch on the LCD window. It continued to glow a steady yellow-green. The device didn't emit a warning electronic chirp, so she returned it to her pocket."Rad levels read within the tolerance range," Brigid announced. "Not even a hundred roentgens. It's well within acceptable limits."

"How can you be so sure it's not what it looks like?" DeFore inquired. "Just a statue some scrounger was moving and then abandoned?"

Kane answered in a flat voice, "When you come on more of these field trips with us, you'll learn that almost nothing is what it appears to be. No, this is- was-a human being."

Grant pursed his lips. "Could a chemical have done that to him? Some sort of strong corrosive?"

Brigid shook her head. "That doesn't seem likely." Absently, she combed a hand through her thick hair, which tumbled in waves from beneath the long-billed olive-green cap on her head to spill artlessly over her khaki-clad shoulders like a red-gold mane. Her delicate features didn't show her inner consternation and confusion. Her complexion, fair and lightly dusted with freckles across her nose and cheeks, held a rosy hue.

Her eyes weren't just green; they were a deep, clear emerald, glittering now in anxiety. She was tall and willowy, her figure slender and taut. Long in the leg, her athletic physique reflected an unusual strength without detracting from her undeniable femininity, despite the unflattering shirt, trousers and high-topped jump boots she wore.

Kane stepped closer to the ebony figure and carefully sniffed the air. "He hasn't been burned, that's for sure. It's more like he's coated with something."

At a shade over six feet, he was nearly a half a head taller than Brigid Baptiste. Long limbed and rangy, he was a lean, sinewy wolf of a man, carrying most of his muscle ma.s.s in his upper body above a slim waist. His skin was lightly bronzed from exposure to the elements except for a thin scar that stretched like a white thread across his cheek. Kane wore a twin to Brigid's long billed olive-green cap over his longish, dark hair. Sun-touched highlights showed at the temples and nape. His pale eyes, blue with just enough gray in them to resemble the high sky at sunset, were bright and alert behind the dark lenses of sungla.s.ses.

"Some kind of heat or radiation did that to him," Grant argued in his characteristic lionlike rumble of a voice. "He almost looks like he's been carbonized ... or calcified.''

Grant's long, heavy-jawed face was twisted in a scowl. Droplets of perspiration sparkled against his coffee-brown skin. He stood four inches over six feet tall, and was very broad in the chest and shoulders. Gray sprinkled his short-cropped, tight-curled hair, but it didn't show in the heavy black mustache that swept fiercely out from either side of his grim, tight-lipped mouth.

"In fact," he continued, his eyes narrowing to suspicious slits, "he looks sort of like all of us did after we were transported from New Edo to China."

Both Kane and Brigid regarded him in surprise, their thoughts flying back to the incident he described, nearly three months in the past. After they had been teleported through means still undetermined, all of their bodies had been covered by a layer of soot that smelled faintly of hot grease. The ends of their hair had been scorched, as well."Are we going to stand around here and talk about it?" Reba DeFore demanded impatiently. "Or are we going to move on?"

No one responded to the brown-eyed, bronze-skinned woman's sharp tone. Brigid, Grant and Kane knew how anxious and fearful the medic became whenever she left the shielded shelter of the Cerberus redoubt in Montana. Her blouse showed half-moons of perspiration at the armpits and neckline, and the intricate braid she favored for her ash-blond hair had come undone. She hadn't bothered trying to pat it back into place, although loose tendrils hung about her face. The posture of her stocky body telegraphed tension.

All of them were tense, particularly since they were strolling through a h.e.l.lzone, even though Chicago hadn't been a first-strike target. Still, it had taken a couple of direct hits from neutron bombs during the brief but all-out nuclear war of two centuries ago. They had been tramping down the litter-choked streets, between bombed-out ruins and collapsed buildings for the better part of an hour. Some areas were nothing but acre upon acre of scorched and shattered concrete, with rusting rods of reinforcing iron protruding from the ground like withered stalks of some mutated crop.

There were signs that some kind of incendiary agents had been dropped on the city, but they weren't nuclear in nature despite how the indicators of their rad counters occasionally glowed between the far end of the green scale and yellow. Brigid had told them that megascale radioactive deposits from nuclear power plants and toxic-waste dumps contaminated much of the soil of the Midwest, as well as the Great Lakes. With the wholesale destruction of large land areas during the nukecaust, these smaller catastrophes poisoned the ground with such virulence that they were rendered sterile for generations.

Kane, Grant and Brigid had visited several derelict predark cities, and Chicago seemed to be in better shape than most, but it still echoed with the relics of a lost civilization.

Kane started to turn away from the kneeling figure, then did a double take. He leaned forward, slitting his eyes. Where there should have been an ear on the right side of the man's head, there was only a ragged nub, looking like a crushed cigar b.u.t.t.

"What is it?" Brigid asked.

"He's missing an ear," Kane replied, pointing. "See?"

Brigid squinted in the direction of his finger, then from a pocket of her shirt she withdrew the symbol of her former office as a Cobaltville archivist. She slipped on the pair of rectangular-lensed, wire-framed spectacles and gazed at the man's head. Although the eyegla.s.ses were something of a reminder of her past life, they also served to correct an astigmatism.

Kane briefly wondered if her vision hadn't been further impaired by the head injury she suffered a few months before. Brigid seemed in good condition, and DeFore had p.r.o.nounced her fully recov- ered. The only visible sign of the wound-which had laid her scalp open to the bone and put her in a coma for several days-was a faintly red horizontal line on her right temple. Her recovery time had been little short of uncanny. Kane was always impressed by the woman's tensile-spring resiliency. However, he couldn't help but notice how she needed her gla.s.ses more and more since the injury."I see it," she said, "but I don't necessarily think it's significant."

"It doesn't look like an old wound," he declared. "There's no sign of scarring."

With the barrel of his Copperhead, the close-a.s.sault subgun he carried slung over a shoulder, Kane gently prodded the side of the corpse's head. A hairline crack appeared in the black skull and from it curled a lazy tendril of equally black smoke. At the same time, an astringent stench filled Kane's nostrils, an odor of hot sulfur mixed with ammonia As he took a hasty step back, the crack in the dead man's head expanded into a split and more of the oily vapor plumed out. The smoke spread quickly, and the kneeling man seemed to unravel as twists of mist rose like a mult.i.tude of loose black threads. Within a heartbeat he turned into a cloud of vaguely human-shaped sepia mist. Clothing, flesh, bones and hair dissolved into a foul-smelling fog. The fetid miasma rose over the street, and a gusting breeze wafted the cloud to one side.

In less than five seconds, the dissolution was complete. Nothing remained of the dead man except flakes and a couple of handfuls of black dust. Kane, Brigid, DeFore and Grant gaped wide-eyed, shocked into speechlessness. They watched in silence as the cloud of black vapor continued to lift and slowly disperse, floating toward the broken ramparts of the Chicago skyline.

It took Kane three attempts before he was able to husk out, "You don't see that every day."

When no one replied, he cut his eyes over to Brigid. "Speculation?" he inquired. "Hypotheses?

Techn.o.babble?"

Her intense gaze still fixed on the fading sc.r.a.ps of smoke, Brigid said, "I'd guess it to be a form of molecular decohesion, similar to the effect of the MD gun. I'm sure you remember that."

Kane didn't bother responding to her a.s.sumption. Although he didn't possess an eidetic memory like Brigid Baptiste, the incidents in Redoubt Papa and aboard the Parallax Red s.p.a.ce station to which she referred were impressed indelibly in his mind.

"Similar, you said." DeFore's tone was skeptical. "Not the same?"

Brigid nodded. "That's right. If this is the work of a molecular destabilizer, it's a new application, but the result is pretty much the same." She snapped the fingers of both hands. "Poof."

As if the snapping of her fingers were a signal, the detonation of thunder boomed in the distance, a long, loud roll. Kane scanned the horizon and saw billowing clouds ma.s.sing over the shattered column of the Sears Tower, at least two miles away. The underside of the clouds bore a sickly green tinge, undershot by a salmon pink.

"Chem storm," he announced flatly. "It wouldn't be a stroll through a h.e.l.lzone without one."

No one laughed. The early years of skydark, the generation-long nuclear winter, had been a period of nature gone amok. Hundreds of very nearly simultaneous nuclear explosions had propelled ma.s.sive quant.i.ties of pulverized rubble into the atmosphere, clogging the sky and blanketing all of Earth in a thick cloud of dust, debris, smoke and fallout.For nearly two decades, it was as if the very elements were trying to purge the Earth of the few survivors of the atomic megacull. The exchange of nuclear missiles did more than slaughter most of Earth's inhabitants-it distorted the ecosystems that were not completely obliterated. The entire atmosphere of the planet had been hideously polluted by the nukecaust, producing all manner of deadly side effects.

After eight generations, the lingering effects of the nukecaust and skydark were more subtle, an underlying texture to a world struggling to heal itself. Yet the side effects of the war were still unavoid- able, like a grim reminder to humanity to never take the permanence of the Earth for granted again.

One of the worst and most frequent side effects was chem storms, showers of acid-tainted rain that could scorch the flesh off any animal caught in the open. They were lingering examples of the freakish weather effects common after the holocaust and the nuclear winter. Chem storms were dangerous partly because of their intensity, but mainly because of the acids, heavy metals and other chemical compounds that fell with the rain.

In the immediate aftermath of the nukecaust, chem storms could strip flesh from bone in less than a minute. As the environment recovered, the pa.s.sage of time diluted the potency of the storms, but the lethal acid rain could still melt flesh from the bones during long exposure.

Fortunately, chem storms were no longer as frequent as they had been even a century before, but the peculiar geothermals of h.e.l.lzones seemed to attract them. Although fewer h.e.l.lzones existed now, there were still a number of places where the geological or meteorological consequences of the nukecaust prevented a full recovery. The pa.s.sage of time could not completely cleanse the zones of hideous, invisible plagues.

The west coast of the United States was one such zone, where much of what had been California was under water. The best-known zone was the miles- long D.C.-New Jersey-New York Corridor, a vast stretch of abandoned factory complexes, warehouses and overgrown ruins. D.C., otherwise known as Washington Hole, was still the most active hot spot in the country. Kane still retained vivid and unpleasant memories of his one visit to the Hole.

Only a vast sea of fused black gla.s.s occupied the tract of land that once held the seat of American government. Seen from a distance, the crater lent the region the name by which it had been known for nearly two centuries. Washington Hole was the h.e.l.lzone of h.e.l.lzones, still jolted by ground tremors and soaked by the intermittent flooding of Potomac Lake. A volcano, barely an infant in geological terms, had burst up from the rad-blasted ground. The peak dribbled a constant stream of foul-smelling smoke, mixing with the chem-tainted rain clouds to form a wispy umbrella stinking of sulfur and chlorine.

Fortunately, this region of the Midwest was only warm, not hot, but a h.e.l.lzone was still a h.e.l.lzone even if the rad levels were low. One of the mysteries sp.a.w.ned by the nukecaust was how h.e.l.lzones could coexist cheek to jowl with "clean" regions.

There was another flash of lightning, so close that Kane could feel his skin tingle and body hair stand up.

The thunderclap followed almost immediately. All of them smelled the ozone in the air.

"I think we'd better get to cover," Kane announced.

His tone was calm and uninflected, but in truth he was very anxious. It wasn't only the exertion of the long, slogging trek through the ruins of Chicago that made him nervous. His sixth sense, his point man's sense, warned of a danger far more immediate than unpredictable weather.For a moment Kane contemplated ordering a retreat back to the Sandcat, but he knew by the time they even reached the halfway point to where the vehicle was parked, the chem storm would be upon them.

There were measures against the dangers of acid rains, airtight protective suits and helmets, but none of them carried either a suit or a helmet. They were over a thousand miles away, stored safely in the Cerberus armory. His and Grant's Magistrate body armor was treated to withstand all weather, but both suits were in the Cat. As it was, neither man cared to test whether their polycarbonate exoskele-tons could survive a dousing of acid rain.

Besides, the heat was surprisingly oppressive, particularly for the Midwest so early in the spring.

Marching around in the body armor and its Kevlar-weave undersheathing was like walking around in a portable sauna, even in the coolest of temperatures. In the Outlands, the black armor would have been a target for jackals skulking among the ruins.

Grant removed a small map from his pants and unfolded it. He glanced from it to a small compa.s.s he held in his right hand. The map had been gen- crated by the database in Cerberus and depicted the city's layout before the nuke. A little doubtfully he said, "According to this, we only have about three klicks to Redoubt Echo."

"Yeah," Kane agreed musingly. "But we'll have to spend some time searching for the entrance, and that storm looks like it's moving at ten klicks an hour. We've already spent a week getting here... another couple of hours won't make much difference."

Brigid leaned over to study the map. "We're in the vicinity of the Illinois Deep Waterway, so the Lake District Central Filtration Plant ought to be easy to spot."

"Why were so many of the Totality Concept installations hidden inside of other buildings?" De-Fore asked sourly.

"The old purloined-letter approach," Brigid replied. "The predark strategists thought hiding their secrets in plain sight-more or less-kept them safe from discovery."

"Don't complain," Kane replied. "A lot of them were hidden inside of national parks. At least we're not having to cover Sequoia National Forest inch by inch."

Stowing the compa.s.s back in his pocket, Grant undipped his trans-comm unit from his web belt. He flipped up the cover of the palm-sized radio- phone. Depressing the transmit key, he asked, "Domi, do you read me?"

Only the crackle and pop of static hissed from the comm. Grant opened his mouth to repeat the query, but his words were drowned out by a thunderclap so loud and explosive everyone flinched. The air shivered from its violence.

' 'Forget it,'' Brigid declared. ' 'We're out of range and the storm is ionizing the atmosphere. Besides, she's safer than we are at the moment."

All of them glanced again at the black clouds building like a solid wall over the derelict outskirts of Chicago. The mountainous thunderheads continued to skim out of the north, blotting out the sky above the broken spire of the Sears Tower. The billowing ma.s.s thickened rapidly, casting deep shadow overthe entire perimeter and bringing a sudden and oppressive gloom. The atmosphere seemed to gain weight, pressing against eardrums, making respiration labored.

The blackness slowly lowered and spread like a blanket. Strange crackles of luminescence glowed within its roiling center, like flashes of heat lightning. The underside of the cloud surged out, belling downward and narrowing into a black funnel shape. The tip brushed the top of a building like a tentative finger, and even at that distance they glimpsed debris swirling around it.

"I read about storms like this," Brigid said grimly. "This kind has a small cyclonic center that's completely unpredictable, sp.a.w.ning twisters every few minutes. You can't tell where one will hit."

No one questioned her statement. As a former archivist in the Cobaltville Historical Division, Bri-gid's knowledge on a wide variety of subjects was profound. Her greatest a.s.set was her eidetic, or "photographic," memory. She could instantly recall hi detail everything she had read, seen or experienced, which was both a blessing and a curse.

The funnel cloud drew back up into the thunder-head, and a moment later a shifting curtain of rain fell.

Even from the distance, they saw little puffs of vapor rising from the impact points of the raindrops.

Kane tried to quash his rising sense of dread and worry about Domi. If she stayed inside the Sandcat, she was completely safe. Although built to serve as a FAV, a Fast Attack Vehicle, the dual-tracked wag was armored with a ceramic-armagla.s.s bond to shield it from both intense and ambient radiation. It would certainly be sufficient to protect her from a shower of acid rain-provided she hadn't decided to explore her surroundings. The little albino girl from the Outlands was unpredictable, often driven by impulses and whims. She had become more so over the past few months, ever since her resurrection.