Free Chrono Spasm by James Axler Page A

was set in the outside wall. It looked out into the darkened ice and snow beyond and featured a pane of glass so thick that it had ripples across it. It was hard to make out anything, Mildred found as she parted the curtain to look through the window. All she could see was the towering structure of the glacier ville a little distance away, surrounding a courtyard on all sides.
    “We’re a story up from ground level,” Mildred told Krysty, keeping her voice low so as not to wake the sleepers in the room. “Maybe we could jump or climb down?”
    “If we could get this open,” Krysty said, pressing her hands against the cold glass and working them along the edges of the windowpane. It was locked solid with no catches that could be worked. “Big if,” she added grimly.
    Nyarla had hurried over to the brass burner, and Krysty and Mildred could see she had been here—or somewhere very similar—before. The other women were huddled close to the heater, too, sleeping where the warmth was strongest. Two of them stirred for a moment, surveying the newcomers before rolling over and going back to sleep. They were clearly used to a lot of comings and goings in this room, and a steady turnover of new faces, Mildred guessed.
    Mildred and Krysty looked at the room with distaste, knowing pretty well what it was. “Gaudy house or harem,” Mildred said, voicing what the other thought.
    “Looks like there’s just the one door,” Krysty said, searching the room and moving several woven tapestries aside.
    Mildred’s dark eyes scanned the door itself, her hand unconsciously moving to where a holster should have been strapped to her hip. Holster and blaster had been removed when the companions had surrendered to the hunters, while Mildred’s bag of medicines had been thoroughly searched and potential weapons removed before she’d been allowed to keep it. The door looked sturdy, made of a solid wood such as oak and rolled on a chiseled track outside the room like a train wheel, sealing the chamber like a stopper. The door was entirely blank, just the unaltered grain of the wood showing on this side, with no handle or turning device. That left them with no facility to open it from the inside and also meant there was no way of telling whether they were being watched, or when someone might be listening outside.
    Mildred’s fingers clenched as she brushed the side of her leg where her blaster should be, and she shook her head with irritation. Their captors had also given her and the rest of them a pat down, checking for any additional weapons. They had discovered Jak’s stash of knives that way, but they had missed the surgical scalpel that Mildred habitually carried in a sheath in her pants pocket next to a pencil; it was so small that it might easily have been mistaken for another pencil by cold-numbed fingers.
    For now, there was no way out of the room, not until someone on the other side of the door decided to open it. The noise of the door opening would be enough to alert them, so Mildred joined Krysty beside the heater, where several of the women were moaning in fitful sleep. Nyarla hugged herself, trying to get the warmth back into her frozen body. Krysty kneeled while Mildred adopted a position behind her and briefly examined her head where she had been pistol-whipped by the man in the woods. There was a lump there, a little swelling that bulged in her hairline.
    “You feel anything? Light-headed, any trouble focusing your eyes, things like that?” Mildred asked as she pressed two fingers lightly to the swelling.
    Krysty drew a sharp breath at Mildred’s touch, then assured her she felt okay. “Felt a bit sick at first,” she said, “but it’s passed now.”
    Mildred ran her hand through Krysty’s hair again, checking for any other signs of damage. There was no blood, and just the one swollen lump at the back of her skull, like a robin’s egg trying to break through the skin. Krysty winced when Mildred ran her fingers