That was T for Tarl, one of the younger riders who resented Bayard’s transformation of their traditional, thuggish ways. It had been almost insultingly easy to turn the man using his human agents. A few pouches of gold, promises of power once Jake was gone, and the subtle manipulation of the boy’s ego. Humans were so predictably venal.

  As Philip paced, he wondered if Tarl had survived the massacre. He suspected not. The dart-rifle teams had been instructed to target the Pterodactyl Riders first, and according to the Draconian’s report, they’d been magnificently efficient.

  “I’m going to the portal,” he said.

  One bodyguard lurched ahead; the other took up station behind Philip.

  They climbed the worn stone steps to the portal chamber. To Philip’s shock, the chamber was in chaos. Three red-robed priests were hunched over the portal frame, having partially disassembled the control matrix.

  Philip blinked in horror.

  He glanced at his bodyguards.

  “We didn’t know,” one said. “We had no idea.”

  Components lay scattered across the floor like a child’s abandoned puzzle. One priest was actually poking a delicate piece with a pick.

  “What in the name of the Original’s DNA are you doing?” Philip shouted, forgetting to maintain his dignified persona.

  The priests turned and stood, their serpentine faces unreadable. They did not look happy with the outburst.

  “The Dark Citadel is ours,” the senior priest hissed.

  Philip listened to the translation. He seethed, but he nodded. He’d better be careful. With news of the victory, these Ophidians might think they didn’t need more Institute help.

  “It is your device, of course,” Philip said. “But it is ancient technology, and easily broken.”

  “We study and learn,” the senior priest said.

  Philip saw the parchment to the side and the scrawls on it. Could these red-robed barbarians really think they could learn by doing this? He blinked several times, reminding himself that a few of the priests were clever. However, they had roughly the same chance of replicating portal technology as a mollusk had of composing a symphony.

  “Have you succeeded in your study?” Philip forced himself to say.

  “Not yet,” the priest admitted. “Now we are attempting to put things back.”

  “You want it to work again, yes?” Philip said.

  “That is so,” the priest said.

  Philip noticed the tall Ophidian holding onto the quantum stabilizer. Part of him wanted to order his bodyguards to burn these wretches down, but he couldn’t do that and hope to guide the priests later.

  He needed to calm himself.

  Philip bowed his head, counting to five. Then he looked up. “I could fix it for you.”

  “You know the procedures?” the priest asked.

  “I do.”

  “We will stay and watch.”

  “Of course,” Philip said, though what he really wanted was to scream at his guards to kill them all.

  This was galling. Bayard would probably land on Tellus a day or two ahead of his arrival. All the planning, all the careful orchestration was potentially ruined because these scaled simpletons couldn’t resist playing with technology infinitely beyond their comprehension.

  The senior priest hissed at the other two.

  They stepped back, and then he joined them.

  All three slid their hands into the opposite sleeves of their red robes.

  Taking a deep breath, Philip set to work. The quantum stabilizer went into its housing with a click that should have been obvious to anyone with even rudimentary technical knowledge.

  The Ophidians hissed as if with understanding.

  Philip wanted to shake his head, but he heard the scratching of pen on parchment.

  Could these fools really be learning? He would have to pay more attention to the Ophidians when he returned after his mission on Tellus.

  The alignment crystals were more problematic. The ham-fisted priests had actually managed to crack one, no doubt reducing its efficiency. He’d have to compensate with manual adjustments during transit, which meant a bumpier ride and a higher chance of errors.

  As he worked, Philip secretly shut off the translator and activated his personal communication device. It was linked to the ancient communication array in the other chamber.

  Amazingly, he had an open channel to Tellus. It was weak and corrupted, but he needed to send a message and hope for the best.

  “Observer Station Seven,” he whispered. “This is Superior Philip. Respond.”

  He’d put a bud in his ear, and now heard static crackle, then a barely audible voice: “…perior…lip…we read…barely…”

  That must be: Superior Philip, we read you, barely.

  “The Traveler may already be in Ploor,” Philip whispered slowly and clearly. “Begin the urban agitation protocols. Ensure that both the Tog and Synthetic Mind forces are actively hunting for him.”

  “…ready detect…unusual readings at…ziggurat…”

  Then the connection died with a burst of static that made Philip’s ear ring. He tried to re-establish contact, but got nothing. In truth, he was surprised this had worked at all.

  He now returned to his repairs with renewed urgency.

  His meticulous plan was unraveling like a cheap sweater.

  He’d intended to be on Tellus before Jake arrived, positioned in the observation sphere, recording every moment of the Traveler’s struggle against the hell world’s various threats. The data would have been invaluable for the Institute’s Mercenary Cultivation Program. How did their tactical decision-making degrade as radiation poisoning set in? At what point did the survival instinct override moral considerations?

  More importantly for Philip personally, he would have been able to watch Bayard suffer, to see that arrogant bastard realize he’d been manipulated from the beginning. To watch the great Traveler reduced to a desperate animal scrambling for survival in a radioactive wasteland.

  Instead, Philip was playing catch-up, trying to salvage something from a plan that had already gone sideways.

  Oh, this was bad.

  This was very bad.

  -9-

  The sensation of reforming was off. Usually, materializing from obelisk travel felt like stepping through a door—one moment you’re there, the next you’re here. This time it felt like being assembled from broken glass, each piece grinding against the others.

  When my vision cleared, I lay on a stone slab as usual. But unlike other times, the walls were cracked, with strange burns scarring the stone. Through a massive hole in one wall, I could see a city that made my stomach clench.

  Skeletal skyscrapers stretched into a sick yellow sky. Some were sheared off halfway up, their steel bones exposed like compound fractures. Others leaned against each other in frozen collapse. The air tasted of rust and something chemical that made my sinuses burn. In the distance, a dull orange glow pulsed against the cloud cover.

  Then I heard a low rumble that wasn’t thunder.

  A mushroom cloud was rising far in the distance. I couldn’t believe it. What kind of war world or hell world was this? The pyramidion had sent me here on purpose. Even dead, Psi-Master Omilcar, the Chief Sark of Mu, had screwed me. This must be a trap, his final middle finger from beyond the grave.

  “Son of a bitch,” I whispered.

  I felt like a loser, like a punk. This was too much. I… I…

  I blinked and wiped away tears from my cheeks.

  I looked down at my boots.

  While I stood here in some atomic hellscape, the reptilian host would be marching on Zangabal, Kovia and Theros. The cities had been stripped of their defenders because I’d led them to slaughter. Suvorov would hold Sky Island, but for how long? And what good was a floating island when the cities below burned?

  Hey, dude, are you gonna cry like a little girl? Are you gonna give up? Or are you gonna do something about this?

  “What can I do?” I whispered.

  Fight! Find the bastard who engineered all this and kill him. Save the people who are counting on you.

  I bit my lower lip. I couldn’t give up. No. I had to fight, to win through no matter what. I thought about the Marines who had fought against the Japanese of World War II. I thought hard about Guadalcanal, the early phase.

  Yeah, no more tears, no more pity for the idiot who had led thousands to their deaths. It was time to turn this around no matter what it took.

  I forced myself to breathe, to think. The first rule of survival was to assess your situation. I needed to get my head in the game and do this right, as I had in the past.

  I was wearing my Earth clothes—leather jacket, jeans and boots. My knife was still on my belt. I had an automatic and a few extra magazines, some water bottles and rations. The air was making me lightheaded. I hoped it wasn’t lethal. If it were, nothing would matter soon anyway. So I’d work on the premise I could survive here.

  With that said—or thought—I exited through the hole and found myself on a giant ziggurat as always. It stood in a huge plaza with broken buildings around it. The ground below was a mix of fused glass and rubble. Every surface was covered with a fine gray dust. That included the broad ziggurat steps. The dust puffed up with each step I took downward.

  In many ways, this reminded me of Kaldar, just many times worse.

  In the center of the plaza, a fountain stood dry and cracked. A nearby statue had melted into an abstract horror.

  I heard another distant rumble. It wasn’t an explosion this time, more like thunder. I looked up to see the clouds above churning unnaturally. They had a greenish tinge that reminded me of tornado weather, but worse. Everything here was worse.

  I needed to find the obelisk. In every world I’d visited, the ziggurat and obelisk were separate structures, sometimes miles apart. But which direction should I go? The city struck me as massive, and I could see multiple pyramid-like structures dotting the skyline. Any of them could house the obelisk. Or none of them.

  A clicking sound made me freeze. I was standing in the plaza at this point.

  The sound came from my left, mechanical and rhythmic, like metal points on concrete. I hurried to a building and pressed myself against a wall, peering around the corner.

  A machine skittered onto the plaza. It was spider-like, the size of a German Shepherd. It reminded me of those Mars machines. This one had a rotating sensor cluster where its head should be. Red lights swept back and forth as it moved, scanning. It paused at my footprints in the dust, the sensor cluster spinning faster.

  I held my breath, drawing my automatic. I didn’t know if the bullets would help, but it was better to try than just die.

  The machine chirped something before continuing its patrol, following my tracks toward the fountain. I had maybe thirty seconds before it realized the tracks ended and backtracked.

  I decided to hightail it outta here, keeping the ziggurat between the machine and me, heading for a collapsed storefront across the street. The display windows had long ago shattered, leaving gaping mouths full of shadow. I slipped inside just as the machine’s chirping changed pitch. It must have figured out something was wrong.

  The store’s interior was a tomb. Mannequins lay toppled, their plastic flesh melted and reformed into nightmare shapes. Shelves had collapsed into domino patterns. Everything was covered with that gray dust, undisturbed for who knew how long.

  Through the broken window, I watched the spider-thing appear, its sensor cluster spinning frantically. It chirped again, louder this time. An answering chirp came from somewhere distant.

  Was it calling for backup? That was just great.

  I needed to move again, but move to where? Without knowing where the obelisk was, I could wander in this dead city until radiation or machines or God knew what else killed me. And every minute I wasted here, more people died on Mu.

  The weight of everything crashed down on me yet again—thousands of men dead because I’d been too confident, too sure of our air superiority. Now I was trapped in an atomic hell while the Tsargol Plain survivors faced annihilation.

  “Get it together, Marine,” I whispered. Self-pity wouldn’t get me home. It wouldn’t save anyone, and I was getting sick of it.

  I nodded, telling myself I was going to fix everything. I was going to go to the wall and back, maybe hell and back, but I would die trying or do it, fixing things.

  “Hooray,” I whispered, grinning stupidly afterward. That actually made me feel just a tad better.

  Okay. First, I needed information about this place. Second, I needed to find that obelisk. Third, I needed to survive long enough to use it.

  The spider-thing’s chirping was getting closer, and now I could hear more answering calls. I holstered my automatic and grabbed a rusted pipe from the debris. Then I slipped out the store’s back exit into an alley.

  The alley was narrow, filled with the rusted shells of vehicles I didn’t recognize. I climbed over them, trying to move quietly, but every surface seemed to either creak or crumble at my touch. At the alley’s end, I peered out at another street.

  This one had weird skeletons. Their bones were bleached white, and many had modifications. Metal plates bolted to skulls. Extra arms grafted on with steel joints. Some had tusks—actual tusks—growing from their lower jaws.

  Another explosion echoed across the city. I felt the ground shiver, while a building two blocks away collapsed, sending up a cloud of dust and debris.

  Then, through the cloud, I saw shapes moving. They didn’t seem like machines. Ah. They were hunched figures wearing piecemeal armor, carrying rifles or flamethrowers.

  They were human-shaped. As they got closer, I could see tusks jutting from their mouths. From a few, their eyes reflected light like a cat’s. Were these mutants? They were heading straight for the plaza.

  Right. They must have heard the thunder and seen the lightning from my arrival. Would that have sounded different from other noises here?

  I didn’t know.

  I had a choice, though: stay hidden and hope they passed, or follow them and maybe learn something about this place.

  The thought of my men dying on Mu made the choice for me. I couldn’t afford to play it too safe. I needed information, and these mutants were the first living things I’d seen.

  I waited until they passed, then followed at a distance, keeping to shadows and doorways.

  They stopped at the ziggurat, studying the dust. One ran halfway up the ziggurat before another called him back.

  They huddled together and finally started moving elsewhere.

  I kept following, staying well back. It was interesting that the spider-machine had left.

  I followed them for five blocks. The city changed, buildings giving way to a massive crater filled with green-glowing water. The mutants skirted it, and I did the same. The air here made my skin itch.

  Finally, they stopped at what looked like a subway entrance, its stairs descending into darkness. They muttered to each other, then descended.

  Now what was I going to do?

  -10-

  I left the subway entrance and continued my exploration. Going down seemed far too stupid an action even for me.

  I soon discovered that the city went on forever, a graveyard that made me think of those old photos of Dresden after the firebombing in World War II, though not everywhere. Some sections were amazingly intact. The skeletal remains of buildings stretched in every direction, their steel bones exposed where concrete had been blasted away. Rusted vehicles sat in the streets like dead beetles, their windows blown out, interiors filled with that gray dust that covered everything.

  I’d come out of the ziggurat feeling the familiar post-transfer energy, my atoms freshly reconstituted, and muscles humming with the vitality you always got from obelisk travel. It was probably the only reason I could keep moving through this horrific landscape. The air tasted like metal and chemicals, and the sick yellow sky pressed down like a weight.

  Some time later, I spotted three new mutants about a block and a half behind me. They froze when they saw me, standing stock-still like predators deciding if I was worth the chase. These three wore rags for garments, but they held big, old rifles.

  I turned and started walking fast, not quite running but moving with purpose, let me tell you.

  Every time I checked over my shoulder, they were closer. They weren’t rushing, just maintaining a steady pace as if they knew I’d tire before they did.

  I hated them.

  At this point, my boots crunched through broken glass and debris. The streets here were a maze of collapsed overpasses and crater-pools filled with oily water. I had to detour around a building that had fallen sideways, creating a barrier of twisted metal and concrete. The detour cost me. The mutants were maybe two football fields away now.

  I spat the foul taste from my mouth.

  The air was getting to me. Each breath felt like inhaling thick, poisonous soup. My lungs had started burning and now my legs were getting heavy. The boost from the transfer was wearing off, and this planet’s atmosphere was taking its toll on me.

  I thought about using my automatic, but every bullet was precious. I had no idea how long I’d be here, where the obelisk was, or what else might try to kill me before I found it. Besides, these mutants hadn’t attacked yet. Maybe they were just following, seeing where I’d go. There was no point starting a firefight I might not win if I didn’t have to.

  I grunted, thinking about their rifles. I needed to find something here and bring it back to Mu. The image of thousands of spearmen dying on the Tsargol Plain kept playing in my head. My brilliant strategy, my united army: cut down by dart rifles I hadn’t seen coming. Suvorov was holding Sky Island, but for how long? The reptilian host would move on the other cities soon.

  I needed tech weapons. Even just rifles or old-fashioned machine guns would do. I needed something to even the odds against the Saddoth-supplied dart rifles and marksmen. A crate of AK-47s would be awesome.