Crimson Waters. James Axler
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depths of his upended canteen. “I wouldn’t sweat the grub, Jak,” he said. “The water’s about gone. Dehydration’ll chill us before hunger gets a proper start gnawing our vitals.”
“So,” Ryan said. “Out.”
“I hope the doors aren’t blocked by the same forces that did this,” Mildred said. “Whatever they were.”
Jak shook his head. “Open. Air fresh.”
Mildred eyed him. “You sure about that, Jak?”
“Power’s still on,” J.B. added. “Or didn’t you notice we’re not stumbling around in darkness blacker than twelve feet up a stubbie’s bowels?”
Jak shook his head irritably. “Air fresh,” he repeated. “Not filtered. Not smell?”
J.B. drew in a deep breath. “Mebbe not,” he said, “compared to you.”
Ryan grunted. “So lead the way,” he said to Jak. “Get us out of here.”
* * *
J.B. SQUINTED THROUGH his minisextant at the sun, which was about halfway up a blue sky free of chem clouds. “You were right about the map,” J.B. said, lowering the device. “We’re in the Caribbean, all right.”
The companions stood on the highest point of the island, which was as bare as a baby’s backside and not a whole lot larger, if not nearly so smooth. In fact, the rock beneath their feet was black, hard and porous—lava. Though it didn’t rise more than forty or fifty feet above the dancing green water that surrounded it, its regular shape unpleasantly suggested that it was the cinder cone of an actual volcano.
The breeze up the west side of the island, off a beach where stretches of white sand alternated with rusty-brown, smelled of salt and decaying sea life.
“What now?” Krysty asked.
“We could try the mat-trans,” Mildred said. “It hasn’t exactly taken us a long time to find out there was nothing but rock and sand on this damn island. Might be able to get back inside the time limit of the LD button.”
The gateways had a feature that allowed a user to return to the originating point by pressing the “last destination” button within half an hour of a jump.
J.B. frowned at his wrist chron. “We’d be crowding it,” he said. “Anyway, I’m not rightly sure I want to trust a malfunking machine.”
“Do you like the idea of dying of thirst here, with water, water everywhere, and not a drop to damn well drink?” Mildred asked.
“Not starve, anyway,” Jak said. “Sea here—food always.”
* * *
MILDRED GLARED AROUND at the others. “Why not try the gateway? We can always jump to a random destination. It got us here, after all.”
J.B. shook his head. “Bad idea, Millie. There’s something wrong with it. I don’t think it’s safe.”
“Safe?” Doc whinnied the word like a laughing horse. Mildred noted the way his blue eyes rolled. He was losing his grip on reality, which was never rock solid to begin with. “Jumping through time and space by such unnatural means is never safe, J.B.! Never safe at all.”
Doc slumped suddenly, his face crumpling like an old newspaper. Mildred knew he was remembering his lost family and life, before he’d been time-trawled away from everything he knew or held dear by the scientists of Operation Chronos.
“We’re not trying the mat-trans,” Ryan said. He wasn’t a man who minced words; while he might consult his friends on decisions, once he spoke in that tone, as flat and hard as slate, it was final. “We’re getting off this nuke-withered rock. Alive.”
Krysty had walked down toward the beach to the northwest. It wasn’t a long trip.
“There are islands off this way,” she said. “Some of them have trees.”
“Might be game,” J.B. added.
“Trees mean fresh water,” Jak said.
“Not necessarily where we can get at it,” Ryan said. “But yeah.”
“This is an area, as our youthful friend so astutely points out, that abounds in edible sea life,” Doc said. He seemed to have snapped back to the present; he tended to do that when confronted with a problem he found interesting, Mildred had noticed. “That suggests humans live here, too.”
“That’s so,” Ryan said. “People go where there’s chow. So we start working our way from island to island. Only question is, how?”
“Nearest island’s a good mile, mile and a half off,” J.B. said. “Anybody feel like a swim?”
“You’ve got to be kidding me, John Barrymore,” Mildred said. The armorer was her lover. “I can’t swim that far. We don’t know what the current’s like, anyway.”
“Sharks,” Jak stated.
“Just joking, Millie,” J.B. said.
“Down here!”
Everybody looked to where Krysty was standing on the beach with her back to the sea. She was waving.
“I think I found a way!”
Chapter Two
“What way?” Jak said. “Only see water.”
Ryan stood at Krysty’s side on the white coral sand. The others had gathered nearby.
“You have to learn to look below the surface, Jak,” J.B. said.
Ryan was doing so, and frowning. The water close to shore was shallow and as clear as glass, but he wasn’t sure what it was he was seeing.
“It would appear to be a road,” Doc said, bending over like a feeding crane to peer into the water. “Made out of cyclopean blocks. Limestone, I would say.”
Mildred’s forehead creased into a frown. “That sounds like the Bimini Roads,” she said. “Except aren’t they off the Bahamas? And I don’t think the Bahamas are all that near to here, are they?”
Ryan polled the others with his eye. They looked as blank as he felt.
Doc blinked at Mildred like a newly hatched baby bird. “Dear lady,” he said, “I fear the rest of us have little idea what you are saying. Except that, yes, the Bahamas lie far to the northwest of here, beyond the island of Hispaniola. Quite near the east coast of Florida, in fact.”
“So, what would subsurface blocks like this be doing here?” Mildred demanded.
“Who knows?” Ryan said. “Why care?”
“The road, if that’s what it is, seems to lead right past that next island,” Krysty observed. She flashed that smile Ryan loved so well, as dazzling as late-morning sun breaking bright off the wavelets.
“If the road leads to the next island,” Ryan said, “it’s the closest thing to a way off this sorry bare-ass rock that we’ve got. I’m going.”
Doc straightened and shot the cuffs of the white shirt he wore beneath his frock coat. “And we shall follow,” he said. “As usual.”
* * *
“OW! SHIT.”
“What is it, Mildred?” Krysty asked.
They were wading through thigh-deep water, following the big oblong blocks of pale stone. Ryan led, holding his Steyr Scout Tactical longblaster at the ready. Behind him marched J.B., cradling his Uzi. Then Mildred, Krysty and Doc, who flourished his swordstick in the hot air with every sloshing step. Jak brought up the rear, scowling around at the water as if expecting something to dart through it and bite them.
As it appeared, something