This corridor was even grimmer and grittier than the one above: the ceiling a low arch, the walls narrow. It reminded Huth of an animal’s burrow. The tunnel stretched off into the distance; past the floor lights, past the force field barrier on the far side of the cells, it disappeared into the bowels of the glacier. Overhead, the sheer volume of the massif was a constant, crushing presence.
It was the darkest, deepest of dark, deep places. And it was blistering hot. Hot as the lowest pit of hell.
Dr. Huth passed by the nuke generators that powered the force-field, illumination and fail-safe systems. When his body moved in front of the string of floodlights, it cast flickering shadows over the entrances to the cells carved into the left-hand wall. The stickies imprisoned inside began to moan.
He strode past the first half-dozen cells. The naked occupants tried their best to make themselves invisible, cowering in the farthest corners. The cells were all the same: bare walls and floor; no bed; white plastic, five-
gallon buckets for toilet, water and food. The only other furnishings were the incineration apparatus along one wall and a foot-wide silver dome mounted in the center of the ceiling that held the vid cams and a remote-controlled, wireless stun unit. The rotating dome had a 360-degree sweep of the entire cell. Test subjects were forcibly confined by its robotic stun gun, allowing their safe feeding and watering.
Dr. Huth stopped in front of the seventh cell. On the floor against the rear wall, a pale creature lay curled in a tight ball behind the latrine bucket, its backside facing the entrance. Stickie Number Seven appeared to be the one closest to specter breakout, the prime candidate for an “accident.” Dr. Huth shifted his visor to infrared mode and pointed the hand scanner. Blood pressure, body temperature, respirations all registered, but because of the bucket and subject’s body position he couldn’t see inside the torso.
He turned on his battlesuit’s loud-hailer and cranked up the volume. “Get up!” he bellowed at the creature.
The command echoed down the shaft.
Raising its bald head an inch or two, the stickie peered up at him from behind a spindly forearm. Dr. Huth noted the bloody sucker fingers, torn to shreds trying to scratch through the nukeglass. The stickie knew what was coming; by now, they all did. It raised its head higher, the black eyes begging for mercy.
Mercy was out of the question.
Dr. Huth reached for the switches set in the tunnel wall. This time he ignored the covered toggle and pressed the button with his thumb.
The ceiling’s dome rotated sixty degrees, then stopped.
A blue arc of high voltage, a mini-lightning bolt snapped from the dome to the creature huddled on the floor. The stickie screamed and jerked like it had been lashed with a whip, but it didn’t rise. It curled into an even tighter ball, hiding its head under its arms.
Dr. Huth pushed the button again and held it down. Another blue bolt slammed the mutant. Then another.
The third time was a charm.
The creature sprang to its feet, howling in pain as it hopped wildly from one foot to another. Though decidedly male, it looked nine months pregnant. The massively protruding belly didn’t bounce or quiver as the mutant jiggered about, but stuck out rigidly, like it was inflated with high pressure air. The stickie’s cries set the other captives shrieking in their cells.
Dr. Huth aimed his scanner at the bloated stomach. Under skin, muscle and bone, three-inch-thick, lime-green oblongs oozed back and forth. As the headless, tailless entities slithered, their entire lengths pulsated, almost doubling in volume before shrinking back to their original size. The throbbing was disorganized, each specter expanding and contracting on its own cycle, each still jockeying position inside the torso to find the necessary structural weak point. Once the soft spot was located, once the pulsations of the entire clutch were synchronized, the simultaneous, rhythmic heaving would blow open the host, gonads to chin. Based on past observations, Dr. Huth guessed that outcome was less than three hours away.
His visor’s movement sensor flashed a warning. He turned to his right and saw lemon-yellow, humanoid shapes cavorting in the corridor beyond the last of the
cells, on the other side of the force field that blocked off that end of the tunnel.
Free range stickies.
The force field was the only thing that could keep them out. Born with the ability to compress their bodies—this thanks to an unusually high proportion of cartilage to bone—the creatures were able to slip through extremely narrow spaces. And there were plenty of such spaces to be had: the complex fracture planes of the massif were in constant flux, glass screeching on glass.
Dr. Huth had no way of knowing how many stickies were loose in the mines. Dredda Otis Trask had picked them for slaves because they were less susceptible to the hazards of Ground Zero: they had a high tolerance to radioactivity and to inhaled abrasive dust. But the she-hes couldn’t make stickies work, and couldn’t keep them confined. When they were mixed in with human slaves, they attacked their fellow miners in packs, tearing them apart with their sucker hands, and fighting over the rags of flesh.
Somehow, they had managed to survive and breed in the hellish mines. There was food: rats aplenty, mind-burst mushrooms, and the fallen and the weaklings among their own ranks. There was water, too. Cracks in the nukeglass allowed rainwater and snowmelt to penetrate and accumulate underground. Theirs was a very small ecological niche, complicated by isolation, darkness and limited resources. Why hadn’t the stickies just left? Most of them probably had. Under different circumstances, those that remained would have been
the basis for an interesting research study on adaptation under extreme natural selection pressure.
Looking at the frenzied mob of mutants, a few dozen feet from their imprisoned brethren, Dr. Huth wondered if they were really trying to mount a rescue. If so, were the degraded creatures reflecting human ideals like love, devotion, sacrifice? Or perhaps was he just anthropomorphizing? Understanding Deathlands’ mutant psychology hadn’t been a priority of the initial Slake City mission. What had been established was that stickies’ lust for food and helpless victims allowed them to be easily manipulated and trapped. It was assumed they were ruled by instinct, not emotion.
A little test was in order.
The stickie in cell number seven held its trembling arms raised and spread in surrender, its dead black eyes streamed tears, its nose holes streamed mucous.
Dr. Huth pressed the stun button again.
With a blistering crackle and snap, blue flame spanned the distance from the ceiling dome to the back of the stickie’s hairless head. The force of the blow slammed the shrieking creature face-first onto the floor.
At the far end of tunnel, the other muties jolted violently and screamed as if they, themselves, had been zapped.
As he stared at them, Dr. Huth explored his empty tooth sockets with the tip of his tongue.
In blind fury, in apparent desperation, the stickies threw themselves at the invisible force field, which sent them bouncing backward into the darkness. Over and over they hurled themselves at it, with the same result.
Dr. Huth leaned hard on the stun button. Blue arc-
light winked like a strobe inside the cell. The silver dome turned, its brilliant bolts nailing the mutant as it tried to flee. No matter how the creature dodged and ducked, the computerized targeting never missed. Booted around the cell by lightning, the stickie waved its scrawny arms and pissed itself.
Dr. Huth wasn’t paying attention to test subject number seven, nor was he listening to its screams. He was watching the wild ones jerk in sympathetic pain, watching them fall to their knees, listening to their shrieks of agony and outrage; and as he did so, he got a sudden, pleasurable tickle down in his chest. The paroxysm rippled up his gullet and burst from the back of his throat.
He had almost forgotten how good it felt to laugh.
Tribarrel pistol grip in a gauntleted fist, Auriel Otis Trask moved upwind of the clouds of steam pouring off open-topped, fifty-five-gallon steel drums. The caldrons straddled a hissing row of burners that shot flames halfway up their blackened flanks. Three men, naked to the waist, the coating of grime on their hairy backs and arms streaked through by rivulets of sweat, stirred the boiling contents with long-handled shovels.
The camp chefs.
On either side of them stood blaster-wielding, human traitors. A dozen in all, they formed the compound’s internal police contingent. For the price of easy duty, for the promise of riches and power in the future, they had turned on their own kind and with relish helped the she-hes enforce slave-camp order.
In front of the cook station, a column of roughly two hundred rag-clad men and women stretched off across the swath of nukeglass, awaiting their morning meal. At the far end of the line, people were yelling; the pushing and shoving had started. Everyone wanted more than what they were about to receive. No one wanted to be last.
Slaves and their black-armored masters stood gathered at the epicenter of the Slake City blast crater, which on nukeday had backfilled with a tidal wave of melted
desert sand and vaporized megalopolis. There wasn’t a scrap of vegetation on the surface of the hardened massif.
No wildlife.
No soil, just glass dust.
No water source, save seasonal rain.
Without the protection of a battlehelmet visor, the sun’s glare off the gray-green surface thrust straight into the brain like a dagger.
Ore extraction operations focused on a pancake-flat depression, five hundred feet across and dimpled like the rind of an enormous, moldy orange. A battery of klieg lights ringed three wag-sized holes bored into the glass—the main shafts of the mine. A cylindrical metal tank on stilts held the site’s drinking water. There was a railed walkway around the bottom of the tank, and rung steps up one side to the top. To keep miners from freezing to death when the sun went down, open-flame heaters were stationed near the shallow divots in the surface where they curled up and slept in piles like prairie dogs. No one dared spend the night underground because of the bands of stickies roaming the tunnels.
The ore processor, a self-propelled wag with wheels taller than a human being, was parked in front of a sloping mountain of gray-green rubble. Manual labor transferred the chunks of radioactive nukeglass to the processor’s hopper. A cluster of thick cables connected it to the gridwork of storage batteries laid out on the ground. On the far side of the processor, inside a force-field dome, was the jump machinery, which emitted a steady, low hum. Since the specters first appeared, their jump gear was never completely shut down but kept in a
minimal-power resting state to avoid a time-consuming, complete reboot. Beside it were a cluster of black plasteel milspec huts—the she-hes’ living quarters.
Auriel looked down the long file. Every slave clutched his or her personal food container: tin cans, handleless ceramic mugs, cut-down plastic milk jugs, chipped enamel sauce pans. Some of the workers covered the lower halves of their faces with scraps of filthy cloth, makeshift masks to block the abrasive dust from their lungs. Others wore rag masks with narrow slits cut out for their eyes to keep from being struck blind by glare.
The commander, all her sisters and Dr. Huth had turned out for the midday meal, but they weren’t there to eat it. In gleaming black battlesuits, they bracketed the column of slaves, five to a side, with laser rifles at the ready and clear firing lanes. The twice-a-day feeding times emptied the shafts of starving workers. A full show of force was required to maintain a semblance of order when the aroma of food hung in the air.
Under Auriel’s mother’s regime, the miners hadn’t had it so easy.
Dredda Otis Trask had made her slaves forage for their own food underground, in the belly and bowels of the glacier. Her rationale had been simple: there was little point in feeding workers who would die in ten days or less from rad sickness, anyway. But foraging the tunnels was no longer an option. Human and stickie predation had driven the radiation-resistant rat population to near-extinction. Although the mind-burst mushrooms that flourished in the humid darkness of the shafts were edible, and the mainstay of the rats’ diet, their psychoactive chemicals induced violent hallucinations in Homo
sapiens and set the miners attacking one another with pickaxes, shovels and bare hands.
If the gear Dredda’s expedition abandoned at the edge of the glacier had survived, Auriel and her sisters would have had other, much better options to choose from. But the wags, shelters and stockpiles of matériel had vanished. In their place deep craters had been blasted into the hardpan, catch basins for stagnant water. Whoever had orchestrated the base’s demolition had been thorough. Fragments of plasteel lay scattered for hundreds of yards in all directions.
That destruction had forced Auriel to move their processor to Ground Zero and to bivouac there with her sisters while the batteries repowered. The strategic decision meant that additional supplies had to be transported across thirteen miles of nukeglass. Their surviving gyroplane was of no use. An attack aircraft, it carried just two passengers, including the pilot. The roadbed leading from the southern rim of the massif to Ground Zero was subject to shifting, cracking, or falling away entirely—all without warning. The more round trips to the perimeter their handful of irreplaceable, nuke-powered wags made, the more likely it was that disaster would strike.
Resource conservation had become the central focus of the third expedition to the hellscape.
Twice a day, the miners lined up to eat a watery stew of meat and marrow bones, seasoned with a dash of salt and a mild dose of narcotic painkiller. The protein was harvested from their own rad-contaminated dead, and from the mine’s wild stickies, who were hunted down
or live-trapped. Humans and muties alike were skinned out and chunked into bite-sized pieces.
The trio of cooks merrily jostled and elbowed one another as they stirred the kettles. They had reason to be happy. Although they did have to butcher their own species, perhaps even people they knew, they didn’t have to slave underground, and they got double rations of the narcotic-laced stew. Food was food, whatever the source.
The miner waiting at the head of the line was both skeletal and stooped. A wiry beard sprouted around the edges of his rag mask; grease and sweat matted his long hair to his sunburned skull, his eyes were feverish and bulging. Flying glass chips had inflicted dozens of cuts on his hands, arms and face. Most of them looked infected. Behind him, downwind of the kettles, the other conscripted miners shifted anxiously from one foot to another, furtive eyes on the prize.
They all knew what they were about to consume.
And it didn’t matter.
As the shovel blades churned the drums’ contents, they revealed not just cubes of indistinguishable, boiled gray meat—swept to the surface of the thin soup before being drawn down by whirlpools were severed human fingers.
The weak of body—and of will—ended up in the cook pots. Those too fastidious to partake of the stew starved to death.
Auriel could muster little sympathy for the assembled Deathlanders; it was more than just the steely resolve of a unit commander, putting the survival of her fellow warriors first. Her experience had given her a unique
perspective on life, and its value. Not only was she über-human—faster, stronger, tougher than any man or woman naturally born and bred—but she also had, in her brief existence, witnessed the deaths of entire worlds. And she had glimpsed the apparently endless, distorted mirror images of Earth, the variations on preordained, global annihilation.
In the grand, disinterested scheme of things what did a few hundred more human lives matter?
That said, Auriel didn’t eat from the communal stock-pots herself. None of her sisters did, either. The she-hes subsisted on high-energy, low-residue, battlesuit-compatible food pellets they had brought with them from the twelfth Earth.
Auriel looked beyond the column of slaves, at the rad-blasted mountains on the horizon, well beyond the north rim of the glacier. There was more to Deathlands than this island of nukewaste and those distant, barren mounds of brown dirt. Dredda had told her about the data recovered from the initial satellite survey of the planet. Unlike the other eight Earths Auriel had known, this one wasn’t desertified. Not a frozen ball of ice. Not entirely poisoned. Not in the midst of an all-out war of mutually assured destruction. Deathlands had many other Ground Zeros from which to mine nuke power. There were vast, untapped concentrations of natural resources, small centers of resurgent human population, and established agricultures and trade routes.
If Auriel felt nothing for the victims of her ambition, she felt the unmistakable pull of this particular replica Earth. A magnetism that was more than simply the promise of a future for her kind; it was more personal,
more magical than that, like the discovery of a limb or an organ she hadn’t known she was missing—a part of her that now had a name and a reality. Seeing it, touching it, walking it, breathing it, tasting it for the first time she understood the concept of “home.”
This was where she belonged.
As she watched, one of the camp chefs attempted to serve the first miner in line with a shovel blade that held nothing but a pint or so of greasy, gray broth and a few rubbery rings of crosscut windpipe.
Quickly pulling back his container, the slave snarled up at the cook, “Dip down deep, you stingy motherfucker! Gimme some nukin’ meat!”
Glowering, the chef plunged his shovel into the depths of the cauldron.
After the portion, which now included a few small morsels of flesh and fat, was sluiced into the battered pot, the miner covered it with a forearm and scuttled off toward the shallow, dished-out pits in the surface. As he did so, a half-dozen of his fellow slaves broke from the line and crossed the nukeglass on a dead run toward him. Seeing the pursuit, he immediately squatted down, hunching over the steaming pot, trying frantically to gobble all his grub before it was taken from him, scalding his mouth to assuage his hunger, so that he might live to see another sunrise in hell.
The desperate hope he and the other slaves clung to—for eventual escape, for a return to a normal life—Auriel knew was false. None of them was going to survive the sojourn at Ground Zero.
Six men surrounded the crouching slave, all of them much bigger than he was. The leader of the pack was
biggest of all: over six and a half feet tall, with massive shoulders, arms and thighs. Wild hair framed a decoratively scarified face. His jutting, bony forehead, thick neck and bulging biceps looked like they’d been branded by red-hot strands of barbed wire.
Size and strength didn’t always translate into more ore in the processor’s hopper; often it meant just the opposite. The she-hes couldn’t stop friends and relatives taken as slaves from joining together in defensive groups, nor could they prevent packs of coldheart predators from forming. Some of these associations were beneficial to the enterprise—slaves working the mines in teams extracted more ore—but the criminal gangs ran the same operations at Ground Zero as they had in the wider world. They robbed, raped and killed the industrious and the weak whenever it served their purposes. Behavior that stretched an already precariously balanced system to the limit. Conscriptees who actually worked, who mined the ore, needed sufficient food to keep them going until they dropped dead.
The wire-branded pack leader tossed aside the pickax he carried and seized the seated man by the hair, which he used like a handle, to jerk him to his feet. The little fellow let out a howl of pain, tucking the hot pot close to his chest and covering it with both arms. Arm muscles bulging, Barbwire lifted his feet clear of the ground, and held him suspended by his scalp, but the stubborn bastard refused to hand over his meal. Dropping his victim, the big man swung down a balled fist, putting his full weight behind it, pounding the top of the unprotected head.
A potentially neck-breaking blow.
The smaller man’s eyelids snapped shut, his knees buckled and his death-grip on dinner weakened. As he slumped unconscious to the nukeglass, blood squirting from between his clenched teeth, Barbwire wrenched the pot away.
Only a little of the stew spilled out onto the ground. Turning away from his victim, Barbwire raised the pot to his mouth by the handle, pursed his lips and blew on the surface to cool it.
Not surprisingly, no one rushed forward to come to the unconscious man’s aid, or to take up his cause. The turncoat Deathlanders bracketing the cookpots didn’t raise their weapons or move to intervene. Their job was to protect the food, not individual prisoners. The other slaves didn’t want to lose their places in line, or be injured in a fight and end up in pieces in the cook pot, themselves.
Auriel grimaced. Wolf packs of predatory cowards and masses of weak-souled rabbits—this was the gene pool that had produced the other half of her DNA. Could her paternal contributor, her “father”, be one of these conscriptees? Perhaps Barbwire himself? From what little Dredda had told her about Ryan Cawdor, that was highly unlikely. Though an ignorant primitive like his fellow Deathlanders, he had proved himself a worthy adversary, a hero who had, against all odds, escaped imprisonment on an alternate Earth and recrossed realities to return home—this home. Because of his intelligence, his mental and physical strength, and his fighting skills, Dredda had chosen his seed to artificially fertilize her harvested eggs. Unfortunately, no vid of him survived.
Who he was, whether he was even still alive, remained a mystery.
Having regained his senses, the battered miner, blood sheeting off his chin, lunged up at his tormentor, trying to knock the pot out of his hand.
Barbwire held it out of reach above his head and snap-kicked the smaller man in the chest. It wasn’t a full power blow, but it sent the poor bundle of bones hurtling backward, crashing onto his butt and skidding across the slick ground.