The Gaming Outpost

I sat in a dungeon underneath a Roman city-factory in the Southern Great Plains of what had been America in my world.  My hands were chained to the wall, and my feet manacled to a set of stocks in front of me.  I had tried, fairly successfully to escape the sentence of crucifixtion by beating up my guard, and hightailing it out of here.

Unfortunately, close doesn’t matter in prison escapes except to make your jailers take you more seriously.  My arms were numb, my wrists bled from scrapes from the rusty iron, and my thighs burned as did my back since the stocks were positioned just so.

That is, the jailer, nursing a bruised neck, had placed the stocks out far enough that I had to lean backwards on my shoulders, or pull at the stocks with my ankles.  One burned my back, and the other scraped my calves.  Both burned my thighs.

I’d be tempted to bite my tongue off, but I hate to give up.  And I had a leather tongue guard inserted into my mouth, and strings tied around the back of my head to hold it in place.

I was not a very happy person at the moment although I attained moments of peace in my prayers.

After some indeterminate time, doors opened, and even I, who was used to solitude yearned for company.  But I felt certain that they had come for some other, and that I would be disapointed.

Occasionally, I heard the moans and shrieks of my fellow wretches.  Most of us were slated for the execution block, but a few of us, like me, had the special honor of crucifixtion to look forward too.

They would tie me down to a cross of rough-hewn wood for the splinter’s sake.  I’d be naked.  Then they would drive nails into the space between my wrist bones, and one to hold my feet together.

And there I’d hang.

If I wanted to breathe as I hung there, I’d have to push up on the nail in my feet.  If I didn’t, I’d slowly suffocate.  So one cycled from one unbearable sensation to another and back again until the body wore down, and the victim died.  This could take days.

The Romans really did have a lot of things going for them.  Rule of law, roads, general prosperity, and all that, but they were also completely unmitigatedly vicious when it suited their purposes.

And since I had supposedly killed a Senator, a man of extreme importance in their world, I was a target for their wrath.  And so it was with trepidation and surprise that I saw the jailer, he of the bruised throat, open the wooden door to reveal several well-dressed men behind him.

He began shouting at me even as he unlactched me.  The goal was intimidation, but it fell off me like rain off a good roof.  I had already decided that I would force them to kill me rather than be  crucified.

"We wish to talk with you, Tad-Day-Ose.  This is not your final day."  The leader of the men at the doorway spoke, and I searched his eyes for lies, and found none.  So instead of springing to my feet to rend and maim, I slowly gathered myself, and stood.

They took me out of the filthy dungeon, and offered me a drink of relatively clean water from the well.  Nothing tasted better than I had taken in a long time ago.  I enjoyed the sunlight on my face, and waited for the questions.

"Why did you kill the Senator?" The youngest man of the three in good togas asked me fiercely.  Also with them was a centurion in full armor, and with a sword.

"Lucas, I did not kill your father."  I responded after noting the similarities of face between this man, and the Senator.  Add the restrained passion in his words, and it all added up to Lucas, the eldest son of the Senator.  And now, I suspected a Senator in his own right.

He slapped me hard across the face, rocking my head back as I absorbed the blow.

"Who are you working for?" He screamed at me, and the other two just studied me.  One seemed to be a power, in his late middle age.  The other seemed his assistant.

"Who hates the Senator enough to kill him? Or who stands to gain, young Lucas?  A young man with pride, whose father is in internal exile, banished to the top of a tower, and that self-same fellow can save his family honor, and win a good position for himself."

He lunged at me, with his eyes wide, and infuriated, and the Centurion caught him like he was a child, and pushed him back.

"If you’re going to sit here, and insult a young man of a good family, and the future Senator of a fine region once the Emperor signs off on it, we can toss you back into the dungeon."  The ‘power’ spoke softly, but I listened very closely.

I bowed in acceptance.

"I merely want to ask, who profits?  Think on this, I do not profit.  What gain would I have had?  And if I could sneak up there, then why did I stand around and not sneak back?  Instead, I let myself be taken by your soldiers."

"Perhaps you couldn’t."  The power noted calmly as he studied me.

"The troops say he put up a huge fight.  Got a casualty."  Lucas spoke up.

"He didn’t.  Pardon, my lords, but the troopers were just saying that because it makes for a better story.  I heard the real story from them.  They said he tried to keep himself from being hurt, but no more than that."  The centurion spoke up, obviously a bit uncomfortable to be talking to his higher-ups.

"May I ask a question, Lord Prosecutor?" I bowed to the older man of the four.

He nodded.

"Do the tribes roundabout have legends or ways of travelling without being noticed.  Of slipping into buildings, and hiding for days without being caught."

"You speak of the Ninja in Nippon Province on the far side of the world.  The local Aztec horse tribes have some skill at hiding, but nothing like what you describe."

"So, then who got up there to kill him?"

"You did, I said." Lucas burst out, frustrated.

"With what? There was a plasma torch on the desk, but it had not been used."  I did have a plasma cannon in my backpack.  But my backpack was thankfully several miles away outside the factory fortress.

"You used it."  Lucas insisted.  "Its the only thing that makes sense.  I just need to find out who hired you."

"Okay, Lucas. Suppose I did.  I snuck up an ironwork tower in full daylight, and full view of potentially hundreds of factory workers.  Once I got there, I stole your father’s plasma torch from his holding place, and got him to sit down in a chair without any bruises or injuries, and then shot him in the left eye.  And then I put the torch down on a fake wood desk which did not scorch from the heat of the barrel.  And instead of escaping, I waited to be captured and crucified.  Even if I was suicidal, I could easily have jumped.  Tell me, o wise Senator Intendant, does this make sense to you?"

I spoke slow and calm because Lucas was on the raw edge of being berserk.  In truth, I felt sympathy for him, and I thought his fury and pain proved him innocent of his father’s murder.

He stepped away, and shrugged.

"Sophist." He muttered.  I merely raised an eyebrow at the prosecutor who shrugged.

"We don’t know how you did it, but you’re our only suspect."

Ah. Well that was swell. Very enlightened of them.  I was the only suspect so I got the chop even if I could not have done it.

"Let me show you how it was done, and give you another suspect." I spoke even as I frantically visualized the whole murder scene in my mind.  I had, when I wished it, perfect memory.  Although I’m not a true logician such as the Alchemist or Master Oak, still, I had picked up more than a few tricks along the way.  And I could force myself to be step-by-step logical if it was required of me.

So, begging their indulgence, I closed my eyes, and thought rapidly since I knew their patience would be gone soon.  I considered adding a dash of shamanistic dancing to entertain them, but its not my style.

And then I opened my eyes to see all four of them staring at me curiously.

"Its simple enough. Please follow me."

There was some heming and hawing, but the prosecutor seemed amused and intrigued so we did what he wanted.  They followed me.  Besides, I’m rather good at persuading people.  Usually, its intimidation, but I can do persuasion as well.

We walked into the factory, and into the wing that was on the right side of the dead body.  Which is the direction the beam of death must have come from.

We came to the telescope fixed on the balcony rail at the end of the factory wing.  Here a man sat in a chair, and peered out into the grasses looking for invaders.

I walked up to him, and looked at him, and knew.  Then I stumbled and fell, and crashed into the telescope.  My clumsiness ripped it loose from the railing, and it fell to the courtyard below where it shattered with a tinkling sound.

Curses, and oaths echoed in my ears.  After all, I had destroyed a very valuable item, and rendered the factory fort vulnerable to raiders.  The centurion had his blade at my throat which was foolish of him.  It would make it easier for me to disarm him if I wished.

"Oh, I-I’m sorry. Really.  But you don’t have to go fetch one from the far side at the armory. This scout has one in his locker."

A quick look by the prosecutor, and a betraying jerk of the face and neck by the scout revealed this was true.  So they rapidly ran down to the scout’s locker, and got out the telescope, and remounted it.

"Good. Now, you go down to the dungeon…" The prosecutor began, and I did a leg split.  My legs spread apart, and my head dropped below the blade.  A fist strike, dim mak style, to the solar plexus of the centurion was carefully gauged.  I had to do enough damage to penetrate his breastplate armor, but not enough to seriously hurt him.

The force of my blow flung him across the room, and he collapsed wheezing on the floor in the corner of the watchroom.  A quick reverse somersault, and I was back to my feet, and two steps to my left brought me up to the scout even as the others advanced with daggers out.

I tossed him into their path, and spun the telescope about.

"A-ha! I have you now." I shouted out with full melodrama.

Ugly laughter came back to me.

"Barbarian, thats a telescope."

"Really?" I put my finger on a black button that looked like it had no purpose.  And then I spun it across the quintet of them.  Noting facial reactions, I slowed, and put it across the secretary, and the scout.

The secretary began to sweat. And the scout stared back at me with cold hatred.  And I saw the prosecutor notice this even as the secretary tried to regain his composure.  But it was too late.

"Would you like to explain, scout? What happened?"

He got to his feet slowly and bitterly.

"You go ahead, outlander.  You seem to know the story."

"Very well.  The Senator in the tower was in internal exile.  He had done something, I rather suspect that was too ethical, and his enemies hated him for it, and had him punished for doing right."

"The Senator opposed the hiring of mercenaries from foriegn nations which makes a great deal of money for the Diplomatic Service." The prosecutor spoke.  "He felt it was unwise to leave our security in the hands of outsiders like you and the scout here."

"Most wise of him.  However, when men wish to cheat, the wise are not seen as a blessing.  Which explains where the secretary comes in.  He was paid to help get rid of an embarrassment to the Diplomatic Service, I’d wager."

The secretary just blubbered his agreement.  He was terrified as well he should be.

"But I didn’t kill him."

"No. You didn’t.  You only made it possible."

The secretary had nothing further to say on that.

"You went up the day before to ‘deliver some papers’ I’d guess.  Instead, you had a candle, a bit of sealing wax, and a windcharm set of circular lenses.  You hung it up near the window, and took the candle to melt the wax.  You used the melted wax to stick the lenses to the ceiling in a particular formation.  And then you left."

"I didn’t know they were going to kill him.  I swear it.  I thought it was a means to spy on him."

I wasn’t sure he was telling the truth, but  I nodded anyways in agreement.  He was too young, too soft, and he might be innocent.  I could not tell.  So, with a clean conscience, I exonerated him.  Because Roman justice was too harsh for even my taste.

"Just so."

"You will still be flogged, and your position taken from you.  Or you can enlist in the Legions."

I could already see it.  Expunge the shame of a young nobleman by enlisting in the Legions.  Maybe it would make a man of him.

Of course, shame and guilt are two different things.

"Then, our scout here, an outlander mercenary…."

"Who hated my father for his anti-mercenary…." Lucas began, and the scout barked out a harsh laugh.  Here was one who was ready for death.

"Your father showed wisdom in that one thing." The scout said.

"Yes." I agreed. "And  the scout took his telescope off the rail,a nd put in another telescope, one he had gotten from shady characters.  This scope had a laser attached to it, in the barrel of the scope.  And so once, the scout ….."

"But we are on the ground, and the tower is two hundred feet above us.  You could not even see the dead man from down here."  The prosecutor began objecting.

"You could if you looked through a telescope and through lenses which refracted the light so that it went around the corner of the floor."  I pointed out.  Also the fact that I felt a small wind up there seemed to indicate that the laser had cut through the exterior glass, it being not clear enough to let the laser cleanly through, and then gone on to its further work.

"But the beam would not be strong enough…"

"Which is why the assasin called the Senator on the phone the secretary left, and told him to look out the right window along with making some threats so that the Senator would feel moved to get his plasma torch out in self-defense."

"And then the beam would hit the dark center of the eye, the pupil, and the light would be absorbed by that blackness.  It would possibly be enough to kill a man whereas a scalp wound might have reflected enough to keep the man alive."  The prosecutor added.  "And the lenses would have been heated by the light passing through them, and the wax would have melted, and the windcharm then dropped to hang naturally."

"He felt no pain, Lucas.  And now.."  The prosecutor turned to the scout.  "Arrest him."  He ordered the recovered centurion.

"But I need to know why!" Lucas raged as he grabbed the shirt of the scout.

"Why? Why? It was simple. Eliani was my wife-to-be.  But your father liked her, and chose her as a concubine.  And then she died in childbirth."

"My father did her an honor.  You should have been happy for her.  You could have found another."

"I loved her." The scout said, and I saw non-comprehension in the Romans’ faces.

"Well, now you will hang on a tree for her." Lucas said with a smile.  The scout sagged in despair at the prospect of crucifixtion.

"If you have not love, what good are you?" I asked paraphrasing a famed chapter in the Bible.  The Romans scoffed and laughed.  I just looked at the scout, and his eyes flared in hope.  Then he nodded.

I pushed the button on the laser, burnt out his heart.  He fell dead to the ground, slipping free of Lucas’s vengeful hands.  They turned to me with rage on their faces, and I met it with my own, with the fury that had shattered worlds.

"Please, I’m begging you.  Please, start something."  I waited, physically yearning for the chance to kill them if they attacked me.  The centurion was the first to step out of my way, and the rest followed.  Lucas was the last with a burning gaze.

"I’ll get you for this insult." He hissed.

"Power, even righteousness, without love is nothing."

"You’re a fool." He snapped at me, and I walked out to preach the words of righteousness, the love of Christ, and the proper technique for taking down curtain walls with brass cannon to the horse tribes of the Aztec.

It had taken ten years of hard work, and a fair amount of jaw-jaw, but the pagan Haveners and the radioactive mutants of the Kingdom of Mutants and the Christian farmers of Pleasantdale had joined together to form a new society.  The mutants had contributed their psionic mastery (not caused by the radioactivity as they had thought), and the Haveners had added in their vast trade network they had constructed to get them slaves (but it was even more useful for decent merchants), and the farmers had provided food for body and for thought as the Free Confederation of Cities had risen based on their food and their tolerance of others.  All this had been necessary to build a hydropower dam to provide electricity to free the cryofrozen experts of a previous era.

And with their coming into the new post-apocalyptic future, the mutants had started to receive the gene therapy they so desperately needed, and the farmers got effective growing methods, and the amazonian Haveners got looms.

I prepared to enjoy the fruits of my labors with much thanksgiving, but I was needed elsewhere, and so the upper path above the dam failed under my running feet as I went on a practise run.  And I fell nearly a thousand feet to the surface of the lake.  At that speed, hitting water is roughly like hitting concrete.

I was grateful that I’d been able to recharge my Lekostian cybergear, and recover my Duffel Bag of Doom with its assortment of lethal surprises.  However, I was still short on Unfolding Honeycomb Fletchette Darts for my modified Uzi.  They would not have the ability to make them in this world for at least a century, so I’d done without.

And then I hit the water–head first since there was really no reason to prolong things.

And I woke in a new universe, as always.

Dry, stifling heat reached me first, followed by a faint chemical oder almost overwhelmed by the rank miasma of body wastes that filled the air.  I stood up from the cheap, green carpet surrounded by four walls of glass, and open air that spread out toward mountains in the far distance on my left.  In front of me, a metal panel and faux wood desk provided a minimal bar to the sight of the dead man’s body.

He lolled back bonelessly in a wood and fabric chair.  His head hung back, and his mouth hung open.  While he was not a handsome man, there was an essential quality of courage in his face.  Wrinkles besieged his open mouth, and a fringe of white hair crowned his head except near his dreadful wound.

He wore a toga over his tunic.  The Roman toga is frequently square, and it looked woolen.  His tunic underneath it went down to his knees, and had broad stripes on it.

Tunica laticlavia, I remembered.  My Latin is gutter Latin since the last time I visited the Eternal City, it had been in the second century after Christ, and I’d spent my time in the rougher parts of town before joining with another verser, Captain Charles, in an attempt to assasinate the current emperor.  But I remembered that senators wore the tunica laticlavia.

To double check, I went to my knees, and looked at his feet.  They were brown sandals with an ornament, in this case, an oak leaf, on the heel.  That settled it.  The dead man was a senator, which meant very important.

In my history, one old man had went out to meet a Syrian army outside of Alexandria, and instructed the invader to choose whether to leave or invade.  The general at the head of his army had asked for a day to make up his mind.  The old man had drawn a circle in the dust around the general, and told him he had until he stepped out of that circle.

The general with his invading army in front of an undefended city left rather than face down an old man…from Rome.  Which was the ticket, really.  For a very long time, being Roman meant something extraordinary.

Now, by this time, you may be wondering why I had not spent more time examining the guy’s body, or bemoaning his fate.  The answer is I did not know what sort of world I was in.  Some worlds, if you’re found with a dead body, they expect you to bury the guy with your own coin, but unless their are witnesses determined to come forward, no one is sent to trial.  In other worlds, you’re considered ritually contaminated, and the community needs to be purified by tossing you alive on top a pyre with the dead body.  So finding out the nature of the world was of vital importance to me.

But I was seriously starting to think I was in major trouble.  There was no certainty that these Romans were like my Romans.  After all, the Multiverse is a very big place.  But I knew where I’d be placing my bets.

The intense heat was slightly mollified by a bit of wind which tinkled the windchime dangling from the plate glass window to the left of the senator’s desk.  The wind chimes were perfect circles with some odd organically shaped bit on the upper edges of each.  It probably was some reflection about the nature of the almost pure mathematics of the heavens, and so I moved on to examine the wound.

His head lay back, and looking down on him, I could see a hole through his head.  The scent of cooked meat wafted off him.  The drillhole went down the center of where his left eye used to be, and continued into his skull.  The back end of his skull had exploded off, and was now decorating the floor. So I was pretty certain he had died in this chair, and not been toted here, and dumped.

Which was a problem because killing someone in a glass room is difficult to do without someone seeing you.

To his right, on the faux wooden desk, lay a small energy weapon.  Apparently, he had raised it too his left eye, and blown out the back of his skull.  And then his arm flopped back down, and the gun skittered on to the desk.

It was physically possible I decided.  Although it was a bit unlikely.  I looked around for a bit more evidence of suicide.

To his right, some sort of communication device lay on the floor.  It too was cheap, not like our senator’s clothing.  Carefully, I picked it up, and heard nothing but a hum.  It was loud enough to be a deliberately produced hum.

It had a small LCD screen which said, in Latin, of course, "One Call Recieved. Hangup?"

Interesting.  He had been talking on what looked to be a cellular phone when he died.  Which could be read as against the idea of suicide, but some suicides liked to torment the survivor by making them watch or listen.  However, while it is hard to deduce character from the lines in a person’s face, and even harder once they are dead and shot in the face–still the victim didn’t strike me as blatantly malevolent.  I’d chalk that one down against suicide, but faintly.

I heard some noise from outside and below, and looked out the windows.  Four windows of plate glass surrounded me.  This was truly a house without walls or privacy.  Looking out was looking down.  Below me some sort of factory with outer walls guarding a courtyard was bustling with people like a beehive smacked with a stick.

The factory had a grandness to it with noble columns and pediments at the main entrance, but the outer curtain wall told another story.  As did the hovercar, I saw below me.

I wondered if the hovercar could have flown up here, but a closer look at it made me shake my head.  It was strictly a ground-effect vehicle, and not an aircar.  Although that made me wonder about helicopters….

Below me, in a wing of the factory off to the right of the dead man, I saw a telescope.  And then another one a bit further on.  On the opposite side, likewise.

The back wall, the one facing away from the factory looked out over undisturbed grasslands.  And I got the idea of the local culture.  This factory was a fort/economic producer/seduction device.  The local tribes resisted the Romans enough to make it unsafe for people to live in suburbs and the like.

The factory was the equivalent of a medieval city-state.  And since they had curtain walls for defense, that pretty much ruled out gunpowder cannons for the attackers since curtain walls are meat to cannons.  By the way, curtain walls are what people think of typically for castle walls.

It was very interesting that Romans who were extremely effective at subduing the local populace, and evidently had a serious technological advantage were still not secure enough to move out from behind walls.

Evidently I was in some sort of tower since I saw nothing supporting me, and the ground was a good two hundred feet below.  This would be a difficult place to escape even for someone many people called the Ghost.  And that made it even harder for someone to sneak in here, unless that someone was say a guard with a right to be here….

Now, why did I think of a guard?

Perhaps the locals were masters at subterfuge, and at slipping into places they were not supposed to?  Perhaps the Romans faced the equivalent of the Ninja or the Sioux here?  Still, the only pre-cannon weapon that could do that kind of damage would have to be something like a heated iron poker.  If you heated it up red-hot, and stabbed the enemy in the eye it would cook the brain like this.

There was something wrong there, I felt it, but I couldn’t see it.

Okay, then, what about if the Ninja-Sioux had stolen a Roman weapon, and used it?  But a plasma torch is a very noisy weapon.  It quite literally roars.  In some cultures, they call it ‘the breath of the dragon’.

Wouldn’t someone have come running?  Or maybe the Romans in this timeline had discovered some sort of harmonic cancelization trick to damp out the noise?

My problem was no one except a ninja or an approved person could have gotten in here.  And unless no one truly cared, the roar of a dragon would have drawn them.

Hopelessly, I went over to the windchime, and felt faintly cooler until I stuck my hand to the convex shape of a chime.  It burned me.  And when I jerked free, some of the organic material came free as well.

And it burned as well.

Parafin, I think.  I rubbed it off on my pants, and tried to use my psi to heal myself to no avail. 

I went over the carpeted floor with a keen, sweeping eye, and immediately spotted the door in the floor, and opened it.  It led out onto a small slick metal platform guarded by a single rail from plummet into the open-air elevator shaft, or into the metal skeletonwork of an Eiffel Tower like structure.  But it was more like an outsized fire tower with the building on top of it.

You see, I was getting curious.  For what reason would they have this high status man in this glass box atop a tower, way out of the way?  I scratched my head on this one.  There was no sign of proper control functions.  A hovercar pretty much necessitated computerized screens, and I had not seen any monitors in the room. 

Of course, they might be hidden.  Frequently high-status people like to pretend to their underlings that they do nothing while they are secretly working very hard. And so they deliberately conceal the amount of work, and the tools of work they use.  Of course, then there is the bunch of high-status folk who don’t need to pretend.

I considered trying to flee by scampering down the skeletonwork, but I counted not ten or twenty, but fourty-five men with guns pointing them my way.  I had been seen.  Of course, I had not really been trying to hide which I was beginning to think had been a serious error of judgement.

Retreating to the glass-walled office, I considered taking up the energy pistol on the desk for my defense.  It was cool to the touch which I found odd.  I recognized the basic design.  Plasma torches are notoriously short ranged, and they melt if fired too often. But even one shot was enough to make them significantly hot.

Sighing, I made ready with prayers, and felt happier for a moment to feel the air conditioning finally click on.  Evidently from my look at it under the desk, it was on some sort of timer. Evidently, the Senator was one of those lucky to enjoy heat, because he had no sign of sweat, and I was making my shirt damp.

Further checks of the desk revealed a foam padded gun box with the cardboard lid left hastily off the top of the box.  It seemed to be unusual for the man as he seemed a precise fellow even if he had horrible green carpet.

In the center drawer, I saw a letter in Latin.  I struggled through it.

Dear Friends,

I know that I have brought shame on myself, and so I do this to recover my honor.  Fear not for me, for I am with Apollo now.

May my house prosper, and my eldest son Lucas, and all my children, and my wives and concubines know a measure of peace and honor now that I have left this too cruel earth behind, driven from it by enemies who showed me a cruel mercy so that I would see what I must do.  I go to my ancestors.

Patroculus Graachii, Senator of Rome representing the Sippi Plains. 

I looked at the letter, and at the man.  He didn’t write it.  Maybe he might have committed suicide, but if he had he would have scorched his enemies one last time.  I could not see him basically saying "my enemies were right" with that bit about ‘cruel mercy’.  But I wasn’t sure I was right.

Then I went back down to await the elevator.  It opened, and as expected, burly men in red tunics with gold-plated Kevlar came pourng out of the small room to take me prisoner with plasma torch, and gladius.

I tried to talk to them friendly-like. 

They hit me over the head, repeated with the prominent bulbs on the base of their hilts.  My gladius was not here, but it had no such hilt.  But then it was not designed as a crowd control weapon.

I woke up chained to a wall, and in darkness.  So, I slept off my beating, and was quite cheerful when the jailer came by to feed me brown bread, and water.

"Its not every day we have an assasin in our little factory-town."  He spoke, and I had him repeat himself thrice while I tried to get the hang of the language drift.  It seemed that the Latins had added tonality to their language, at least in part.  It was obviously a bit of a hack job like Modern English is.  But as in the case of Modern English and all its hybridizations, this kludge gave a greater subtlety and power that the original Latin had been lacking.

"Would it help if I said I didn’t do it?"

"Hah, now there’s a laugh.  No one can figure out how you convinced the Grand Senator to sign the suicide note since he was such a stuck-up, snobby, ‘I’ll die before I bend my principles’ sort of jerk.  You tell me how, and I’ll get you wine and cheese to add to your daily menu.  Actually no one knows how you got up there to plasma torch his face with his own gun."

He looked curiously at me, and I shrugged.

"Well, you’ll be talking soon enough.  They say crucifixtion makes even the strong man groan."

He left, and I shivered in fear.

Crucifixtion.  The most dire and painful method of inflicting death the extremely inventive Ancient World had come up with is what I’ve heard.  Now, I’ve never been crucified, but I was more than willing to take others words on this subject.  No personal experience was required.

And in the tradition of Ellery Queen: 1) You have the facts needed to tell how the man was killed (although to make it easier, I’ll allow questions of Tadeusz in his dungeon).  2)For a bonus, why was the man up in the tower in the first place?

"No. No." Lunging to my booted feet, I grabbed the pitted rock from Rachel Summerstars hands as she staggered up, with it held over her head, to bash in the brains of the mutant who wept at my feet. Sticking a pointing finger in her face, I gave her a look, and she subsided.

"Sit down." I ordered, and then carefully did not look at her until she plonked herself down on a rock fifteen feet away. The mutant then began to kiss my foot, and rub its flap of a nose against my ankle until I stepped back not one, but two needful paces. He quivered, wanting to further abase itself, but that creeped me out, not its pocked and corrupted body.

Besides, I saw the fellow glance at the sleeping tiger a few feet off next to the ruin of the lounge car which the slaves had abandoned. He essayed waking the mankiller with his mental domination, and failed due to my stronger command, and the tiger‘s physical need for sleep. The mutant was not even sincere in his protestations of loyalty and love. He wanted to wake his pet tiger, and unleash the monster on me.

I walked over past the lounge car with its twin poles, and leaned against the half-built pyramid formed of chunks of igneous rock which must be the large structure I had seen on the overview map I had in my pocket. Downhill past them both a village of slate roofed huts squatted behind the wooden palisade wall stretching across my path.

In the streets, I saw the occasional healthy slave, and a wide variety of mutants with many different body plans. Although all of them were variants on humanity.

"Whats your name?" I called out.

"Gregnak Tigermaster, your worshipfulness." He began to babble more profuse compliments, hoping that I would spare his life after he had tried to enslave me.

"Do you have any such named ‘Gregnak’?" I asked Rachel still sitting quietly on her rock. She shook her head ‘no’, and curled her lip at the mutant. There was a thought trickling around in the back of my head, but it would not come out, so I let it roam free in the canyons of my mind for a while. But it had something to do with Gregnak, and the oddity of his name.

I cajoled, and commanded Gregnak to show us his town. By his word, we were let through the gate, although I realized getting out was probably not going to be as easy. Other mutants kept us in their sight, and it would only take seconds for them to rush us.

A female, I believe, with three legs, and one eye stood in our path. I began to walk around her, but she scuttled sideways.

"Your cowardice will avail you nothing. Come within ten feet, and my telekinesis will rip you to shreds. I am Mighty Mordashnu."

I blinked, and decided that this one had the look of a gunslinger. Each culture has its own methods of dealing with trouble. Many would simply have refused me entrance at the gate, and some would have mobbed me after I got to some hard to defend spot.

Here, they evidently sent out champions such as this telekinetic. What with her poor depth perception, and general air of not quite sure what to do, I probably could rush her in a second. But, often cultures have certain attack methods considered taboo.

Instead of breaking their probably taboos, I reached out and touched her mind. Her surface thoughts were almost completely open with only the most rudimentary of shields between her and me. She wanted me to advance, desperately, so that once I was in the ten feet range of telekinesis, she’d be able to pound me. This notion of TK being limited in range to ten feet went against how I understood such things worked.

Digging deeper into her brain, I saw the mental pattern she used to create the telekinetic force. It had some weak spots, and was inexpertly assembled with key junctions almost flickering out of existence as the seconds piled on, and she held her pitiful concentration together. But, primarily, it had artificial limits on its power. There was no need for her to be limited to ten feet except she believed it to be true.

I reached out with my TK, and gently pushed on her carotid artery until she passed out. Then I, and my two ‘advisors’ went onward up the street toward the central temple building.

At the corner of the next ‘street’, another mutant. This one with four eyes. Two in the traditional locations, one in the ‘third eye’ and the fourth on his chin. The last looked red, sore, and weeping with yellowing pus dripping from both corners of it. It looked exquisitely painful, and I was moved with pity for him even as he challenged me to a duel.

“I am The Terrible Eye. I shall find your secrets, and make them mine, and you shall obey me…” He seemed to want to go on, but I had things to do so I repeated my last attack even as his feeble attempt at searching my memories lost its way in the mental defense entitled by the Ynvatani Sensitives, The Castle with Moving Walls. He collapsed, and I took a moment to use my psionic healing, and tend to his eye. After that, he seemed to relax, even in his sleep.

Two more mutants tried to stop me with roughly equal success. One did succeed in launching a plate at me, but I snatched it out of the air with a quick hand, and then I TK pushed the assailant back on his bottom before tapping him out with a carotid squeeze.

One thing I noted was that no one seemed that good at their psionic skills. When I inquired as to why, Gregnak seemed horrified.

"Train? But these are gifts of the radioactivity?"

"Radioactivity?" I questioned him, a bit startled.

He nodded and led us away from the temple to the right until we came to a large granite rock. A quick check of my geiger counter, and I stopped a good thirty feet away from it even as to my sickened shock, I saw people sunbathing on top of the two story chunk which must have been tossed here after being near point zero of one of the nukes.

"The Rock of Power."

"Figures. Mutants worship a rock. We at Haven worship the Green Tree." Rachel Summerstars said with a snort.

"Yeah, but you both take slaves, so you’re not off the hook either." I retorted and she shut up, hoping I’d forget about her.

"It gives us power. Both bane and benefit."

I understood as he explained it. The locals had been mistreated by the others in the wake of the Nuclear War, and so they had been forced to settle in the more radioactive regions. But, from their books they read, and from the theories they had been passed down to them by their parents, they knew that radioactivity, especially in large amounts gives people the ability to have psi powers.

I wanted to curse Charles Darwin, and the makers of some horrible movies which had led these folk astray. Now I knew where Gregnak came from. The name came from Hollywood. Art imitates life, and then life imitates art.

"So you meditate day and night on the Rock until you develop your power, right? Has it occurred to you that this meditation might be the key to developing new esper powers, and that the radioactivity does nothing but cause genetic damage?”

“No, your worshipfulness, no.” He cried out, and then cringed to the ground as a trio of mutants walked around the Rock of Power. They carried themselves with assurance. They knew they were the rulers, and that they were bad to the bone.

“Why have you come here to spread lies?” They thundered in one voice. It was modestly impressive, but believe me, I’ve seen better floor shows. And after an archangel thunders at you, one gets a tad blasé about the whole intimidation thing.

“I assume you trio are the bosses?”

“We are the Unity. A single mind with three aspects. We are Power.” They backed up their announcement with a general Project Emotion. Behind me, I heard an ooooh, and an aaaahhh. It seemed the rest of the town was arriving. Which made sense to me since lo-tech villages can be short on entertainment. It of course, failed to even move my shields.

“Well Unity,” I projected my own voice with good old fashioned lung power. And believe me, even back in the day, I had a loud voice when I wanted it. “I was brought here to be a slave by a tiger. The tiger sleeps, and the mind controller begs for my mercy. So, if you want to blame anyone for my coming here, well, I‘d have to say blame your own self for the ruin you bring to your followers.”

Two could play at the unfair question game.

The decrepit ranger house alongside the trail had the front edge of its roof broken by rot, and a four-hundred fifty pound tiger leaving its gaping mouth of a door, and heading my way.  My pulse pounding, I dropped into gorilla stance with my arms wide low, and flexed.  My only bit of fully functioning cyberware were my "Lee Slash-em Nails" which I extended by a mental command and a twitch of my fingers.

My Lekostian Empire cyberware was out of juice, and so my only other bit of cybernetics which I had gotten in another universer were quarter inch, extendible fingernails made of a titanium alloy, and razor sharp.  And I’m a big guy with excellent muscles from my travels.  Add to that, I’m an expert in a number of forms of unarmed combat, and trained in a bunch more.  So, I figured I might last three minutes against this beast unless I could shove my fingers in a spear strike into its brain or heart on the first or second blow.  Even then, it might kill me with a dying blow.  At the very least, this was going to open a new chapter in the Book of Pain.

"Hey." I heard to my right, and jerked as did the tiger.  We both looked out into the grass as forty feet away a man raised himself to his knees.  He wore a primitive ghillie suit, and carried what looked to be at least a sixty pound longbow.  "Stay to the left.  Out of my line of fire. We’ll get you out of this, buddy."

I recognized the voice, but not quite.  The blonde hair and blue eyes touched memory.  This archer who held a sixty pound pull without trembling looked like a cousin of the fellow who had ‘rescued’ me and tossed me into a cryofreeze.  Or more likely, I realized, this was a descendant.  After all, it was three-hundred fifty years or so since the nukes rolled in.

Yelling in agreement, I circled to the left to help the archer by forcing the tiger to turn broadside to present a better target.  But the tiger did not cooperate.  Instead, it sat down on its haunches, panted, and then scratched on the ground with its two inch long talons.

We all waited, and then it got up and padded slowly back into the cabin.  I looked over at the archer, and he shrugged in bafflement.  Both of us were glad because if the tiger didn’t want to open the ball, that was good.  I had estimated there was a one-in-five chance the tiger would have killed us both, and those are not betting odds.

Nothing happened for the space of a minute, and then I slow-stepped up to the scratches on the ground.  They were haphazzard, but they clearly spelled out.

"TALK. COME IN."

I waved the archer over, and the resemblance to his long-gone I guess, ancestor was even stronger.  However, he did not recognize me. 

We exchanged names.  His was Steelshaft, and mine Tadeusz.  And yes, his arrows were made of metal with wickedly sharp heads, and barbed to make taking them out difficult.  He was more than a head shorter than me, but his arms bulged out of his loose leather tunic as he studied the words with narrowed eyes on his sun-darkened face.

"I’ll go in. You…"

"I’ll stand on the roof with my arrows ready if thats how you want to do this."

I had been meaning to offer him a place much further away, but in truth there was little out here where he could defend himself against a tiger.  The cliffs were a ways back, and too far to be useful as a shooting battlement.  And the field he had risen out of was low, flat, and went on for a quarter of a mile.  In other words, a perfect place for a tiger to kill a man.

With sweat dampening my forehead, I stepped into the dimly lit room.  My eyes adjusted rapidly under my direction, and so I was only half-blind for a few seconds.  But that would have been enough if the tiger was to attack right then.

In the wrecked place with a shattered and rusted pile of ruins that centuries gone was a desk, I saw a lovely young woman with dark hair, and vivid, willful eyes.  Her hands were tied together, and across from her lay the tiger panting in the mild heat.

I stepped closer, and he raised a paw to her.  I stopped. That was clear enough.

My problem was tigers don’t kidnap and tie up young women.  They eat them as a light snack before moving on to chomp on a warrior sent to stop them.  I studied the creature, and saw it stand up.

It walked over to a saddlebag hanging on the wall, and pulled out with its teeth, a board with oversized letters attached via way of metal rods which the letters could slip up and down in a fashion reminiscent of an abacus.  The letter board was plopped on the ground, and the tiger began to point out a letter by dragging the other twenty-five away from the sought letter.

When it found the one it wanted, it slapped the floor with one foot that shook the room.  Something to remember for exploring old houses–you can always fall through into the basement, and impale yourself on a rusty yard tool.  And so, I noted the letter, and encouraged the beast to be more subtle next time with his affirmation.

It took a while, but he spelled out a word. 

"Y-O-U."

And then another.

"P-R-I-S-O-N-E-R".

I laughed in sheer startlement.  Granted, I had seen the girl tied up, which should have been a clue, but the audacity of this creature stunned me. 

"No. I’ll fight you."  I braced myself for the lunge and the death struggle.  Instead, the tiger spelled out more words.

"K-I-L-L."

"G-I-R-L."

"He’s threatening to kill me again, isn’t he?" The dark-haired girl said from the corner with a quavering tremble in her voice.  I nodded slowly.  The tiger waited with confidence writ across its broad face.

Fury and frustration rose inside my head, and I started to seriously consider a sudden death strike.  The tiger rose to its feet, and paced in front of me as if aware of my inclinations.  I stared back at it, noting possible hit locations for a hamstringing strike if my first hit missed.

My problem was if I agreed to be a prisoner, the next thing to come would be ropes.  And if I bent now, I’d bend then would be the logic of the tiger.

"I’ll go with you for now." I tried to negotiate.  It repeated its threat, and as it paced, I sidestepped so that I was between the girl and the tiger.  This startled it.

The tiger growled at me, and behind it, I could see my archer friend leaning over the roof edge to set up a shot.  I showed no sign of his existence, and indeed, stamped my foot to kick some dust up into the air, and foul the tiger’s sense of smell.

A step over the the saddlebag with its pre-arranged ropes, each a ready little bit suited for tying up a human, and I had the four ropes in my hand.  The tiger nodded beneficiently at me, and I cut the ropes into tiny chunks with a flash of my titanium nails.  The bits and pieces of ropes drifted to the floor.

It roared, and I tensed to leap. One more move, and I was ready to go on a death or glory strike.  And that was what decided it.  The tiger saw  I was not bluffing.

It spelled out a bit more.

"G-O W-I-T-H M-E."

So, it accepted my compromise.  Good.

And thus the girl and I began a long hike through brambles, and past oddly mutated cacti which tilted at all angles, and had fifteen and even twenty arms, although most of the arms were dying.  We clambered up shale slopes; leapt small streams which caused my geiger counter to chatter; and slept in tiny caves with the tiger keeping watch at night to make sure we had no inclination to go wandering.

In the trip, I found the girl’s name.

Rachel Summerstars.

She said it had been five years since she had met Baron Coranado and She-Who-Is-Gold.  I asked her what she did, and where she lived, and what is was like.  She gave me vague answers while assuring me that it was wonderful.

I didn’t trust her.

But it was just me and her since I had long since signalled the archer to leave us be.  There was no way he was going to be able to stalk a tiger for days on end without it realizing someone followed it.  So I tried to get more details, and just earned an outburst.

"Will you stop being so nosy? Can’t a girl have any secrets?!?"

Which since all I’d been asking was what her job was in her village seemed well….off.

That night, the tiger took me aside, and spelled out some words on its alphabet board.

"R-A-C-H-E-L."

"S-L-A-V-E-T-A-K-E-R."

"You mean she goes out and kidnaps people to bring back to her village as slaves?" I asked after I closed my mouth which had drooped open in shock.

The tiger nodded.

"Just like you do, right?" I guessed, but it felt right.

The tiger paused, and then nodded in agreement.

"The first time you try to enslave me, you’ve just signed your death warrant." I said calmly and pleasantly.  The tiger roared at me, and I rather deliberately yawned.

"I’m being nice here.  More nice than I’m used to being.  But you’re used up most of my patience."

The tiger stared at me as if baffled, and then chivvied me back to bed in a cozy little stone cave with enough leg room for a chihuahua for sure, but not nearly enough for me.

The next day, which I think was the fourth since I had been ‘kidnapped’ brought us to a palisade gate into a village.  Next to it was a pyramid of cut stone that reached fifty feet skyward, and was only half complete.  I saw no sign of sand ramps, rollers, or cranes.

The tiger led us up to a chaise lounge which was being carried by four men.  Each one was at the end of one of the two poles which supported the feather and flower bedecked seat. 

The man inside had no nose except for a small flap of useless tissue, and his right eye was black, although his left was green.  But his right eye had truths in it, stuff that quite literally shook my view of the world.

His skin was yellowing, and black spots and minor growths dotted its surface.  Breathing sterotorously, he waved us closer.  The tiger came and sat down beside him, although on the ground.  It began to purr.

*So, Tadeusz, you think you won’t be a slave, eh?* I heard in my mind, but his right eye, and the potentials in it had warned me, and his attempt at mind control in much the same manner that he mind controlled the tiger shattered on the well-trained mental defenses I had learned.

And that told me something.

I looked at the tiger.

"Sleep." I said, and it fell into a deep slumber, the rest that it had been denied for many days, as it guarded the two of us as we trekked onward.

"Step aside." I ordered, and the fearful slaves did so for fear of my wrath.  While it is possible, it is extremely rare for slave societies to have slaves that will fight to defend them.

 I stepped in, and grabbed the mutant about the neck of his mylar vest, and jerked him level with my face.  He looked disgusting, and his breath was worse.

"You have managed to annoy me. Congratulations. Very few people succeed in annoying me, since most of them are dead by the time they have seriously irritated me."  I spoke low, and soft, but with great penetrative power.

He collapsed weeping in my arms.

I sat him back down, and considered what to do.  It is true that I can if need be, kill a man who begs for his life, but it is harder.  As an afterthought, I sliced Rachel free of her rope bond, and she picked up a stone to brain the mutant with.

As I stopped her, I began to get the glimmers of a plan.

I continued to read from Baron Coranado’s report on this universe.  In flipping through the folder to the back where hid his sketches of mutated insects, a small post-it note fell out from the center crease.

"To the verser frozen in the ice, I and my wife wish we could talk to you, and hear your experiences as we are exceedingly keen on gathering data about the verse and versers.  Perhaps in another universe, we can.  I leave this report here to help you, and to start the conversation that begets knowledge, and from thus, perhaps some small wisdom.  All the best…May Ra Candleholder and the Great Dragonhawk watch over you.

–Baron Coranado and She-Who-Is-Gold"

Well, now it looked like I owed the two of them a favor since both of them were meticulous and painstaking researchers.   A heads-up on the nature of the world I was entering could be very useful.  Perhaps, I should start leaving notes where I arrived in case another verser came along behind me.  Of course, I might not want the locals to read it, which suggested putting it in Dar Koni which a fair number of versers have some idea on how to read.  I was undecided at the moment, and so turned back to reading the Report on World #312.

Day Six:

The seventeen year old female, a child really, although she doesn’t think of herself that way has prevailed upon us with much tears, and hystrionics to move our camp lest her tormenters descend upon us.  She paints gruesome pictures of the horrors they would unleash, but both I and She-Who-Is-Gold notice that many of the pertinent details are missing.

She doesn’t describe the popping sound one’s back makes as you are yanked lengthwise on a rack, as one example.  However, she does describe in detail the sensation of being put in stocks, and having the sun burn your neck as your muscles cramp.

So, I’m willing to believe she has suffered some moderately harsh corporal punishment.  But, in a Type 3b society of primitive, and isolated villages with minimal trade provided by a very few Free Traders, such is to be expected.

Day Seven:

Our new campsite is above a ravine, and to spare our ears, we’ve put Rachel Summerstars to work hauling water up hill in a bucket.  At least this way, we only have to hear her complain when she is at the top of the hill.

The fish in the river seem to be largely free of radioactivity, but smaller than one would expect in an untainted environment.  There are a number of albino fish as well, and the local fishhawks seem to avoid these.  I’m not sure why.

I think its time Gold went hunting.

Day Eight:

I’ve duct taped Rachel’s mouth shut.  Her shrieks of horror about She-Who-Is-Gold shooting a hawk with a bow were driving me crazy.  At first, she yelled about the pity of it, and then when she saw that was not working, she began to invent religious reasons, or so I believed.

This I might have respected if I had not already decided she was a self-dramatizing liar.  She-Who-Is-Gold is serious about her duties to the spirits, and had already apologized to the fishhawk for killing it.  But then, that is the difference between someone who is an opportunist and a follower of their gods.

I told her the duct tape was a spell of pain, and if she pulled it off it would hurt more and more each bit pulled off until the pain killed  her.  I should be ashamed of myself treating an uncivilized indigenous person that way, but I begin to sympathize with her tormenters who we have not seen any sign of.  I begin to expect that she ran away, and invented the whole tale.

Day Nine:

This is intolerable.

I opened one of our safe boxes to get out the hawk, and I find its gone.  Rachel threw it in the stream, and she is being defiant about it as well.  I decide not to tell her that she may have poisoned the stream.  Instead, I took out my pulse rifle, and shot one down out of the sky in front of her.

She collapsed in hysterics, and now my wife is furious with me.

However, my studies have yielded an interesting datum.  The fishhawk’s eyes are damaged by continuing radiation, and they seem not to be able to distinguish between the pale rocks of the creek bed, and the white albino fish.

Further study in the form of a trek with a geiger counter indicates that the fishhawk’s favorite watch rock from which they can examine the whole valley is hot enough to ‘cook an egg on it’ so to speak.  I don’t approach as even my microfauna guard against radiation might not be able to handle that many rads.

Day Ten through Fourteen:

To placate my wife, we move quickly toward "Haven", a local village that Rachel has heard Free Traders discuss.  This makes Rachel happy, and she does not begrudge too much the hourly stops to dig up soil samples, or the pictures taken of unique botanical specimens.

The field of five leaf clover is a pleasant surprise to all of us, although it does smell rank.

Day Fifteen:

She-Who-Is-Gold has begun to smile at me again, and I am happy.  Rachel has worn through the patience my harshness won her from my wife with her increasing tendency to treat us as servants.  But I would be happy to accept that since Gold gave me a secret grin.

We were attacked by a mountain goat today.  It lunged out of cover, and nearly gored Gold before I could knock it down with a tossed rock.  After that, She-Who-Is-Gold took her spear, and gutted it.

A close examination revealed that it had significant radiation burns, and was skeletal.  Its body was filled with huge amounts of adrenaline possibly from the pain of the burns. 

A closer examination was neccessary, and so we dissected it.  Its glands to regulate the amount of adrenaline in its blood were almost completely gone, dead tissue that had been destroyed by radiation.

So, it had been berserk when it attacked us, and in truth, I think its heart exploded as much as we killed it.

Day Sixteen:

We advance carefully with geiger counters out, and skirt a small valley which I believe must still glow blue at night.  In its depths, I see strange shapes moving about, but while my curiousity eats me, I know that radiation damage is a very hard way to go.

Day Seventeen:

We meet the Haveners.

They capture us with swords, spears, and whips in much evidence.

I am unhappy because the whips have radioactive shards of glass attached to them.  This is a sign of a 3b culture going perverse, and terror-driven.

However, Rachel when she proclaims her religion of the Green Tree is welcomed with open arms.  Myself, who has no particular god, although I like Christ and Ra Candleholder with his wife the Lady of Books, and Lord Tech, and my wife who is a devout worshipper of her spirits and their master, the Great Dragonhawk are confined.

Day Eighteen:

We escape the next night with ease.  Perhaps too easily.  However, in the night we get turned around, and walk through a High Rad Zone.

Since none of our pursuers seems close, we decide what to do with the last few days of our life here.

We have sensed a verser all along, and so we make for the verser.

Day Nineteen through Twenty-Three:

Every day was harder, and it took us a whole day to go the last five miles.  And then we discover the route to the verser is blocked.

This requires some thought.  We are tempted to give up, and move on.  Finally, we rig the Guitar Playing Robot Monkey with a camera, and lower it down a freight elevator shaft to find the verser.

We see that he is in ice, and we have stumbled on to some primitive cryofreeze facility.  After that, I retrieve the monkey, and collapse.  She-Who-Is-Gold has a slightly higher natural resistance, and she pens my note, and the last few words of this report, and sends down the monkey with the report.

After which, we will both drink the Tea of Peace, and fall asleep in each other’s arms to wake in a new world, world #313, and search out its secrets.

My eyes blur from tears, as I put down the folder on the stone floor of the room.  And then, I pick it back up, and scribble on the last page.

"I owe you. Thanks. Tadeusz."

Once that was done, I got up, and walked about.  The only way out was the freight elevator.  So, I pushed open the top hatch, and leapt up to grab the edge of the square window.  A simple pull-up, and my head protruded into darkness filled with skittering noises.

A cautious push forward of my left arm ran into dust an inch thick over cold metal.  I moderated my breating since I didn’t want to start sneezing up clouds of dust, and used that arm to begin to pull my body by friction and slight leverage up onto the roof of the freight elevator.

I hoped, and prayed, and found a central cable.  The oil on it had long since dried out which made this a basic exercise in endurance.  I began to climb the dirty, icky cable in the near-complete dark.

Counting arm lifts, I was beginning to feel good at twenty, when at thirty something ran down the cable, across my arms, down the back of my shirt.  I hung there, and then it decided to move on, and out my shirt.  It went down my leg and further on down the cable.

Rat or really large spider?

After that, I kept my ears open, and did not try to drop into trance to make the climbing easier.  At fifty feet up, my arms began to burn a bit.  At a hundred up, I took a break to wiggle my shoulders.

At one seventy-five, I touched thick, dust-laden spider silk.  Something dropped toward me, and I leapt in the dark with the light of the room far gone below. The arch of the jump stretched out, and I just knew I was going to run face first into a granite wall, and fall back and down.

Instead, my feet landed on a thin ledge, and I fell forward to smash my nose into a metal door.  I felt for the middle seam, where the doors parted, and found it.  But the door would not open.

Behind me! My senses cried out, and I ducked.  Something large and water-filled smushed and scratched past my head, and hit the door.  It slid down toward my legs, and I leapt again.

Backwards this time, I went, and caught the cable with both my hands.  This time, even as I heard things dropping toward me, and the skittering cries of my enemy, I spun about the cable horizontally.  Then I released, and flung myself at the spiderous mass on the door, and even more at the door itself.

The spider went plomph with a loud splatter, and then the doors fell forward ‘off’ their rusted into non-existence tracks.  I larrowed in light, with a graceful cat-like landing on top of the spider.

Behind me, I saw hundreds of fist-sized spiders, and one other really large football sized spider.  But they all moved rather sluggishly, and avoided the light.

I nodded to myself, and turned about, and clambered up a ramp, and went out through two doors of heavy steel, and into the great outdoors.

The exterior of the mountain was not what it had been before the bombs.  There was no mountain, no valley carpetted by pine.  Instead, a plain of shattered shale rock interspersed with chunks of limestone, and dotted with miniature joshua trees spread out before me.  A nuclear war is really bad for the environment.

The map in the folder had shown three villages.  One was Haven off to my left, or north about thirty miles.  The other, unnamed that Rachel must have come from was ahead of me to the east about ten miles.  Fifteen miles northeast of me was another village with what looked like some large structure in it.

Large structures are promising.  They tend to mean high technology.  And Haven did not sound too inviting with it imprisoning people for not worshipping a tree, if that is what they were doing.  And the other place, well, Rachel, who sounded a right troublemaker, had fled from there.  It was iffy.

I headed northeast across rocks that slid and wobbled underfoot even as rain clouds welled up in strength to the south.  The land pitched upwards, and then came to a short cliff.  Not wanting to break a leg in the wilderness, I searched to my left and right for a good half-mile looking for a pass. 

Finally, I found a narrow, winding path made by four-footed herbivores, and clambered on down with one hand dragging the ground to steady me on the steep slope.  So, my fingers came across a patch of fur.

I smelled it. Cat.  And not felinus domesticus either, I’d wager from the thickness of the hair.  It was probably a mountain lion.  And I had hardly any weapons.  This could be a problem.

At the base of the thirty foot tall cliff, I found a path leading northwest and southeast.  It looked like a human path, and so, even though I knew it took me off my course, I headed southeast through the thick dust along the bottom of the cliff.

A note chiselled into the cliff stone with uniform precision in the shape of a diamond caught my eye.

"Three knots to Ranger House.  Sign sanctioned by Hudsonian Bureau of Nature."  Since most of the ‘knots’ I knew were roughly similar to the ‘miles’ I knew, I took it in hope as a sign of a short walk ahead of me.  And it looked like this place had been named for Henry Hudson, although I could easily be totally wrong.  For all I knew this could be Central Asia, or the seven continent structure I was familiar with from my prime universe could be totally unusable here.

Eventually the cliff drooped to the ground, and left me walking down a track with intermittent lines of mint on either side.  The stuff, once planted, tends to survive, and replant itself.

Another half-mile, and I came to a log cabin.  Its porch had collapsed, and the windows were shattered, but even with its door open, it looked inviting.

And then the Siberian tiger walked out of its lair, the old Ranger House, and yawned at me with its very impressive teeth.  I’d forgotten that zoos have wild animals as exhibits, and that many of those exhibits had no doubt broken out in the bombs’ wake.  With my mouth dry, I tried to think up a plan even as four hundred fity pounds of man-eater tried to decide if he was hungry enough to get another snack right  now.