“But you didn’t fight them here, in the ville?” Ryan said.
“No sense in shooting up our own home,” Burning Man said. “We let them take their hostages as far as the bridge and the north side of the toll booth before we sprung the trap. When the cowards realized the fix
they were in, that it was over, that they were going to die on the bridge span, no matter what they did, they panicked, let the children go and turned to run. That’s when I cut loose on them with the flamethrower.”
“But you didn’t get them all,” Krysty said.
“I did that on purpose,” the baron assured her. “I let a pair of them get away, and then called off the pursuit. One of the two, the fat loudmouth back there, was the ringleader. I figured it was only fair that he and the other coward spent some quality time out on the lava field before the warriors dragged them back here.”
“The other one got eaten alive by mutie coyotes,” Krysty said.
“That’s what I mean by ‘quality time,’” Burning Man said.
The baron smiled with the uninjured half of his face, but the light that flashed in his eyes was no joke. It was like the dropping of a veil, or like turning over a slab of rock and finding something coiled and venomous-deadly beneath.
Something all too familiar.
Ryan had seen that same look of delight countless times before, on the faces of other Deathlands’ barons, of its coldhearts, of its chiller muties. And he wasn’t surprised to see it now. After all, what kind of human being routinely cooked other people, guilty or not, in their own juices instead of blowing out their brains with a single blaster shot, or hanging them from the nearest tree limb? What kind of human being chased other people across a hellish wasteland for the sole purpose of prolonging their suffering?
Burning Man’s disfigurement went far deeper than skin and muscle.
His acts of cruelty weren’t just calculations, entertainments for the villefolk, a way to instill fear and therefore obedience. Ryan knew his injuries were of the inner kind as well, grievous wounds of the soul. Whatever terrible things had been done to Captain Connors after his departure from Moonboy, the recovery of his sense of safety and power had been translated into outdoing his torturers, into returning the pain he had suffered, and was probably still suffering, a hundredfold and at every opportunity. Under the facade of a generous, caring leader, beneath Burning Man’s flaking white face paint, lurked something unpredictable and dangerous.
“What was the local history you mentioned?” Doc asked the baron.
The old man’s question appeared to break Burning Man’s train of thought. The rock slab slammed back down; the light winked out.
“And what happened to the predark town on the other side of the river?” Mildred added. “Was it destroyed in the nukecaust?”
At that moment the women returned; this time they carried steaming bowls, big metal spoons and stacks of small, woven-reed baskets. As the food was laid out on the table before them, the baron answered one of the companions’ questions. “Rupertville survived nukeday without a scratch,” he said. “What happened over there is a long, ugly story, and I don’t want to put you off your meal.”
“Not much chance of that,” Ryan said after he took a
whiff of the meat stew. His mouth immediately started to water.
The big chunks of meat were goat, chicken and pork—infused with cumin and cilantro. The thick, red sauce was made of crushed tomatoes and hot peppers, with shelled corn and pinto beans mixed in. A pungent, white soft cheese had been sprinkled and melted on top. The woven baskets held piles of hot, freshly made corn tortillas.
“Please, eat,” the baron said. “While you’re doing that, I’ll go and have a word with the fat coward. If you need more helpings of stew, just ask these ladies, and they’ll refill your bowls.”
After he left, J.B. hissed to the others, “That’s one crazy, hair-trigger son of a bitch.”
“That’s my diagnosis, too,” Mildred said. “Do we really want to throw our lot in with his?”
“Can’t trust,” Jak agreed.
“We need him,” Ryan countered. “There’s no way around it. He has trained fighters, transport, weapons and food. And he knows the technology we’re up against far better than we do. Without him, our odds go down big-time.”
“He could turn on us in a second,” Krysty said.
“If that happens, we’ll just have to be ready to deal with it,” Ryan said.
“This stew smells absolutely wonderful,” Doc interrupted. “I suggest we eat it while it is still hot.”
The companions ate without speaking, fixated on shoveling down the food. The only sounds in the kiva were groans of pleasure, and occasional belches to make room for more. They were wiping their twice-refilled
bowls clean with scraps of tortilla when Burning Man returned.
“Without a doubt that was the finest repast we have had in months,” Doc told him. “Most kind of you, sir, and most appreciated.”
The baron acknowledged the compliment.
“What did Big Mike tell you about Slake City?” Ryan asked him.
“The coward said the number of she-hes is small,” Burning Man replied. “Maybe a dozen of them, in all. They’ve got a couple of all-terrain wags. And a single gyroplane. He said the old site is now just a staging area where they assemble the newly gathered slaves. They’ve moved their main operation from the edge of the nukeglass massif to its center, to the mines at Slake City’s Ground Zero.”
“Funny, he didn’t mention the move to us,” Ryan said.
“Did you threaten to let a war dog castrate him?”
“We didn’t figure he had anything down there to lose,” Krysty said.
“The she-hes’ high-tech armor and weapons more than make up for our eight-to-one force advantage,” the baron went on.
“So, you’re saying you’re
not
going to go after them?” Ryan said.
From outside the kiva came the sounds of wag engines roaring to life and excited voices.
“We move out tomorrow at first light,” Burning Man told him. “It’s about 150 miles to Slake City. That will require two full days traveling if we take old Highway 84 to Interstate 15. The road bed is completely gone in
many places. No problem for the horses, but it means a lot of detours for the wags. Flash floods have cut some deep gullys through the plain, making for some wicked tricky traverses.”
“Even so, two days seems like a long time to get there,” Ryan said.
“We’ll have to slow down and take extra precautions when we get close to the nukeglass,” the baron said. “We don’t want to be spotted from the air. If that gyro locates our column, it has the firepower to kill us all.”
“What about our weapons?” Doc said.
“You’ll get them back tomorrow, before we leave,” Burning Man said. “Now, if you’re all finished eating, let’s find you a quiet, shady place to get some rest.”
Ryan and the others followed the baron out of the kiva.
In the central plaza, the preparations for the Slake City campaign were already well underway. A caravan of wags had been assembled in front of the semitrailers. The vehicles were a motley assortment of battered SUVs, all-terrain scout cars and flatbed pickup trucks, all crudely armored with scavenged sections of steel plate. A human chain of men, women and children loaded the flat beds with boxes of gear, food and containers of water. The men carefully rolled fifty-five-gallon drums of wag fuel up plank ramps.
The baron paused beside one of the wooden crates lined up on the ground. He knelt and after rummaging in the packing straw, came up with a rag-wrapped object about a foot long. He stripped off the protective covering, and proudly shoved the thing in Ryan’s face.
It was a short length of two-inch diameter, steel
cylinder, threaded and capped at both ends, with a drilled-out fuse hole. Pipe bomb.
Ryan looked around. There were boxes and boxes of them.
“On my birth world,” the baron said, “I learned a good deal about the manufacture of explosives.” As he weighed the crude bomb in his palm, that unholy light returned to his eyes. “And about blowing things up.”
Clad in a helmeted battlesuit, Dr. Huth stood hunched over a makeshift work table, his attention riveted on a monitor and the pair of side-by-side videos displayed there.
Both were of death by fire.
Moving the computer scroller with a gauntleted hand, he compared the same fractions of seconds of recorded time. There was a slight delay as the software interface corrected the blur, interpolating missing pixels.
The recording on the right captured the slaughter of a specter-free stickie, a creature he had sacrificed in order to get baseline, species-normal, biometric values as it expired. An array of remote sensors and cameras had chronicled the physiological effects of immolation. The sequences ended in full-frame whiteouts of total ignition.
On the left were the death throes of a mutant that Dr. Huth had infected with the specters’ microscopic seeds. Moments before the entities had burst out of the stickie’s bloated torso, he had incinerated it to ash. Again, the sensors had recorded the event in great detail: metabolism values, heart rate, blood pressure, oxygen saturation, kidney and liver function, brain wave output.
As Dr. Huth shifted the controller, moving back and forth between the last instant of life and the precise
moment of death, the numerics of the on-screen bio-readouts scrolled up, then plummeted down. Up and down. Up and down. The crawl-speed playback distorted the stickies’ final screams, turning ear-splitting shrieks into baritone bellows of pain.
Even though the cries were garbled in pitch and muffled by distance and force field, they still had the power to agitate his other test subjects. A faint chorus of sympathetic wails and moans echoed up from the bowels of the mine shaft.
When Dr. Huth’s side-by-side comparison of the readouts revealed no significant differences, right up to the millisecond of termination, he quickly switched computer programs from biometrics to biomass analysis. The spectrographic software detected radiation wavelengths given off by burning materials. From what burned, how brightly, and for how long, it measured bodily raw materials in percentiles.
He blinked at the screen. The spectrographs of both immolations were virtually identical, peak for peak, valley for valley.
It appeared that the specters, right up to the very instant of their breaking out, had taken nothing whatsoever from their victim.
Which was impossible according to the Law of Conservation of Matter.
To grow from microscopic size to more than six feet long, a living creature had to intake and process vast quantities of raw material.
Dr. Huth wanted to rub his aching eyes, but he couldn’t because of the battlesuit helmet’s face plate. He felt hollow and fluttery at his very core; exhausted
not only by twenty-four-hour cycles of nonstop effort, or the confines of the battlesuit he had been forced to live in for weeks, but also by the lack of concrete results and the rapidly closing time window. Every line of inquiry he had tried so far had been for naught. It suddenly seemed possible, even likely, that
this
was the one question he couldn’t dent, that he finally come to the limits of his intellectual powers, of his genius for invention and synthesis.
The whitecoat shut his eyes and took a series of deep, slow, restorative breaths. As he did so, his lips began to move. Softly, but distinctly, he repeated the mantra that in the face of defeat had always sustained him: “I am a problem solver. I am a problem solver. I am a problem solver.”
Gradually, over the course of several minutes of intense concentration, the self-reprogramming took effect, driving out the negative, counterproductive thoughts. Dr. Huth regained his composure and mental focus.
Without a doubt, he assured himself, this was the scale of problem he had been born to take on. And he had a long track record of success with similar, apparently hopeless challenges. When his overpopulated Earth was on the verge of running out of food, he had helped to develop a strain of energy-rich agrobacteria that, had it ever been industrially cultivated, might have saved billions upon billions of lives. It wasn’t his fault that in the rush to put the new technology in place the cyanospores had been accidently released into the environment, where they multiplied out of control, eventually smothering large underground sections of the megalopolis in green slunk.
As catastrophic and disappointing as that outcome had been, Dr. Huth hadn’t given up the search for an answer. He had been one of the first researchers to see the potential of converting inorganic rock, a virtually inexhaustible resource, into a form that could be partially digested by, and which would sustain, living creatures. That prolonged consumption of the synthetic fast food drove human beings homicidally insane was an unforeseen—but in his view completely acceptable—side effect. It was a matter for law enforcement and the military to deal with. As far as Dr. Huth was concerned, he had elegantly solved his earth’s mass starvation problem.
Twice.
As he stared, his eyes unfocused, at the stop-action images of incineration, he had an “Aha!” moment. In an instant of clarity the experimental design’s fatal flaw revealed itself to him. Up to this point he had been splitting hairs with the lives of his test subjects, shaving away the milliseconds between life and death, initiating termination closer and closer to the moment of breakout. This was done in order to test the hypothesis that in the interval prior to their hatching, the specters were harvesting resources from their host.
The potential error was in the experiment’s artificial limits, which eliminated the prospect of the specters’ release into the environment, but didn’t allow a complete testing of the hypothesis. It was still possible that the entities were taking something from their victims, just not in the time frame and under the circumstances allowed by the experiment. As things stood, Dr. Huth was the one doing the killing, triggering the incineration
before the entities could burst out. If the specters were harvesting from the host at the precise instant of death, or immediately thereafter, the current experimental design wouldn’t catch it. It was also conceivable that the specters had to actually cause the death themselves in order to take their bounty.
The next logical step was dire, indeed.
At least one clutch of specters had to be allowed to come to full term under laboratory conditions, allowed to break out of and kill their mutant host. Remote sensors would record the biometrics of the slaughter, and the burning of the stickie’s corpse would yield critical spectrographic data.
The risk involved was off the scale.
Although specters weren’t able to penetrate a laboratory cell’s force field or pass through the solid nukeglass walls, floor or ceiling, once they exited their host, there was still no way to kill them—at least not that Dr. Huth had discovered. And if for some reason they managed to escape the confines of the cell and the site’s deepest mine shaft, if they reached the open space of Deathlands, they would divide endlessly, and swarm by the millions upon the animal life of this world, eventually driving it to extinction. The human slaves at Ground Zero would be the first to die, and when that happened there would be no work force to gather nuke ore for reprocessing.
Dr. Huth and the she-hes would be forced to jump worlds again and quickly, with whatever energy they had stored.
From past experience, the odds of finding another hospitable Earth, or a replica planet with the resources necessary to repower their jump batteries were slim.
So far, it appeared that the X-ray treatments he had initiated on the twelfth Earth had eliminated the spore contamination. If it had spread from encystations inadvertently brought along with them, the mine slaves, who weren’t protected by battlesuits, should have already been showing signs of infestation. Barring a documented loss of specter containment, which meant the she-hes had nothing left to lose, Auriel Otis Trask wasn’t likely to give him permission for a laboratory-controlled hatching out.
Dr. Huth grinned to himself, grizzle-chinned and gap-toothed.
Accidents did happen, of course.
And a full-blown disaster always had the potential of being a great learning opportunity.
An opportunity that might never come again.
If an accidental release occurred, he would have the chance to study the specters in close captivity, to test their reactions, gauging not just their physical properties, but their behavior. Even if there was no evidence of extracted host material inside the specters, no evidence of specters’ organs or bodily functions, there was certainly evidence of what seemed to be organized activity on their part—the simultaneous expansion of volume within the host, a combined outward pressure leading to their bursting free of the torso; subsequent coordinated attacks on their victims and, afterward, the mass, aerial swarming.
The attacks, posthatching, had always followed the same pattern. The specters were able to change their shape, to draw themselves out into the thinnest of threads. In this superelongated state, they entered
their victims through any available orifice, pouring into ears or nose, eyes, rectum or mouth. When one of them gained entry, others nearby seemed to home in on the struggling quarry, penetrating it in the same way by the dozens, a flood tide of invaders, whose substance was invisible to the naked eye. Once inside the host, they expanded in volume until the combined hydraulic pressure literally blew the victim apart. Instead of death occurring in a matter of weeks, as was the case in the infestation process, this killing took only seconds. And when it was done, the entities javelined off in search of new lives to steal.
At least superficially, it seemed some kind of communication had to be at work.
The other viable explanations for the
apparent
group phenomena—chemical, magnetic, electrical—needed to be closely examined and eliminated from the equation. Dr. Huth reasoned that an analysis of the specters’ behavior—if it was behavior—might provide him a window into what they were, and how they could be destroyed.
Their reproductive cycle was another mystery that had him thoroughly stumped. From a distance, the aerial swarming behavior they exhibited looked like mating, but he had found no evidence that specters produced spores. They increased their numbers after hatching not by sexual reproduction, but by simple division. Which left open the question: What had created the spores? And what was its relationship to the specters?
Dr. Huth caught himself.
His mind was racing in circles.
And he was holding his breath.
He forced himself to exhale slowly, and with an effort, once again managed to clear his thoughts. He faced a complex knot of problems, all of them intimately, perhaps functionally, related. He had to focus on one tightly defined issue at a time, or end up chasing his own tail.
He shut off the computer program and returned the screen to the live feed from aboveground cameras that randomly scanned all of Ground Zero. Moving under the roughhewn ceiling of gray-green nukeglass to the opposite side of the lab, he stepped over the sheaf of power cables that led from a nuke generator to the row of electronics and banks of lights. Rummaging around on a littered sawhorse table, he picked up his hand scanner, then exited the doorless cell.
When his battlehelmet’s headlamp swept over the corridor’s walls, embedded debris glittered back at him. The millions of occlusions were metallic, fragments of a lost civilization caught up in the matrix like bugs in amber—pull tabs, rivets, washers, crushed aluminum cans. They were objects that the extreme high temperatures of nuclear fission couldn’t melt or evaporate. Buried deeper in the nukeglass glacier, at the far edge of the headlamp’s penetration, were the hulking shadows of larger, unidentifiable objects.
As he trudged through the drifts of sparkling dust on the floor of the tunnel, the ultrafine material swirled upward, around his knees. When inhaled, the glass dust acted like micro-razors. Since it was highly radioactive as well, it was a toss-up whether the mine slaves would die of shredded lungs or rad poisoning.
Dr. Huth was protected from dust and radiation by his artificially intelligent battle armor, but there were
downsides to wearing it for extended periods. Despite the formfitting, bodystocking cushion he wore under the plasteel plates, weeping sores had appeared at the hinge and pressure points. No matter how carefully he walked, the accumulated scabs tore loose from knees, elbows and shoulders. To ward off infection he had to dose himself with antibiotic four times daily. Because of the suit’s inexact fit and his inability to fully interface with the controls involved in feeding and excretion, the stench he wallowed in was oppressive.
Exposed nerve ends burning at his every step, Dr. Huth started down a ramp at the end of the passage. The thirty-degree incline persisted for fifty yards, then the corridor took a hard right turn, and began to spiral downward at a much steeper pitch. Texture had been laser-cut into the floor to grip boot soles and cart wheels.
As he corkscrewed deeper and deeper into the massif, he could make out a dim light below. As he descended, the glow grew brighter and the external temperature steadily climbed. When he reached the spiral’s bottom and the entrance to yet another horizontal corridor, his visor’s temp sensor read 135 degrees Fahrenheit. Sheathed in the climate-controlled armor, he didn’t notice it.
Just inside the shaft’s entrance, harshly illuminated by a string of floodlights that ran along join of floor and walls, the ceiling was marked by row upon row of three-inch-wide bore holes. Each of the bore holes was packed with a powerful explosive charge. A spiderweb of drooping wires connected the charges, ensuring simultaneous detonations. An identical bank of explosives had been set on the far side of the clustered lab cells. They
were the experiment’s fail-safe. A breakdown or breach of the force fields blocking the cell entrances would automatically trigger a massive double blast, dropping thousands of tons of nukeglass, sealing off the shaft at both ends.
Because the specters could stretch themselves into thin filaments, sooner or later, like curls of smoke, they would find a route up through the cracks and fissures to the surface. The mile-deep deadfall wasn’t a permanent solution to a loss of containment; it was a delaying tactic that bought the she-hes and Dr. Huth time to make good an escape.