Naked from the waist down under the blanket, Krysty spread her legs wide as he rolled on top of her. He held himself on elbows and knees, poised to strike at the gates of heaven.
In the starlight his lover’s flame-red hair turned a glistening black, and it coiled and uncoiled on the blanket like a nest of maddened snakes. Her eyes were wide open, searching, reading his face. Her fingertips traced his lips. Then their mouths met again, tongues touching.
Ryan drove deep into her, as deep as he could go. Then as her long legs wrapped themselves around the small of his back, he plunged over and over into the searing heat, the exquisite softness.
Below his face, the snakes of hair ceased their writhing and began to tremble. Her back arched up from the blanket to meet him and a soft moan escaped her lips. The shock waves of her internal convulsions were galvanic: before he could draw another breath, he was a goner, too.
In the afterglow of their lovemaking, Ryan sensed Kry
sty’s heaviness of spirit had lifted at least momentarily, replaced by sweet, utter exhaustion. Locked in each other’s arms they drifted off to sleep.
A handful of milling slaves scattered out of Auriel’s path as she advanced on the mine’s main entrance. Haloed by the late-afternoon sun blasting off the massif, the crudely hewn, semicircular opening yawned before her. Twenty feet inside the shaft, her battlesuit helmet sensed the dimming light and automatically switched on its headlamp, illuminating the tunnel wall-to-wall and floor-to-ceiling. The battlesuit’s external microphone picked up and amplified distant, muffled sounds of pickaxes chinking nukeglass, of shovels scraping rubble and a steady, rhythmic clanking.
As she descended deeper into the throat of the shaft, the clanking grew louder and louder, until it drowned out all the other sounds. Then, from around a bend at the extreme limit of the floodlight, the low gray-steel bow of an ore cart appeared. The cart’s wheels bumping over the traction-ribbed floor made the rhythmic noise. At the rear of the cart, Auriel could see the rag-wrapped faces of the slaves pushing it. There was more than just ore in the cargo box—two pairs of human legs hung limply over the sides. They didn’t belong to exhausted workers getting a free ride from their sympathetic comrades. Miners who dropped dead in the traces or were cut to ribbons by cave-ins or ambushed by stickies were
carted out of the depths, and summarily dumped beside the cook pots.
The distance between the cart and Auriel rapidly closed. Five slaves struggled with their load, gasping, heads lowered, backs bent, legs driving, pushing it up the shallow incline toward the light of day. Below the laser cuffs, their rag-wrapped hands were encrusted with what looked like dirt, but it was actually dried blood from a profusion of glass cuts.
As Auriel passed by the miners, they glanced up from their toil.
Wary.
Fearful.
Desperate.
But determined. As if to say, any life—even this unthinkably wretched excuse for one—was better than death.
Perhaps a function of her own exhaustion and stress, at that moment Auriel’s shield of emotional detachment, of indifference, of physical and mental superiority seemed to waver—the parallel predicament of slaves and master struck home. Her prisoners were doing whatever was necessary, to whomever it was necessary in order to survive to see the next sunrise, just as she was. To keep on going, the miners had to drive the idea that they were doomed out of their heads, just as she did.
There was a significant difference, though.
The slaves’ responsibilities were to themselves, to their individual survival, while the fate of all Auriel’s sisters, of their unique species, of her mother’s legacy, and of the advanced techno-culture that had enabled their creation lay in her young hands. She couldn’t turn
her back on the burden nor delegate the responsibility to her sisters or to Dr. Huth. It was hers, and hers alone.
Countless times since Dredda’s death Auriel had asked herself, why me?
Only two answers had ever occurred to her.
Because there was no other; no one else could lead the sisters to safety. Not even Mero.
Because deep in her heart Auriel knew she had been chosen. This battle was her destiny, win or lose.
Around the turn, the tunnel’s downgrade steepened. The light of her helmet’s headlamp turned the walls, ribbed floor and the ceiling an opaque, muddy green. With the hard glare off the glass, she couldn’t see into the depths of the massif, couldn’t see any of the collection of trapped material, the sea of rubbish that hadn’t melted or burned to ash on nukeday.
A quarter mile below ground, branching off on either side of the main tunnel, were much narrower passages, winding crevices with just enough room for a worker to swing a pick. These offshoot seams held the richest pockets of radioactive ore, the main shaft having already been mined out. They were also the places where stickies staged their most effective ambushes.
Her helmet’s beam lit up an ore cart parked in front of a side seam on the left, about seventy-five feet ahead. The lamp’s power obliterated the puddles of weak luminescence cast by overhead strings of widely spaced, nuke-powered lights. The brilliance momentarily froze the crew standing alongside the cart. Then, in unison, they raised their forearms to shield their eyes.
As Auriel approached, the slaves hurriedly resumed work. In the punishing heat, in a twilight intermixed
with the blackness of the pit, with heaps of glass dust glittering around their boot tops, they passed ten-pound and bigger hunks of nukeglass out of the cleft. The last miner in the human chain piled them into the bottom of the cart.
That man was very tall and stripped to the waist, a filthy rag tied over his nose and mouth. His hair had been hacked off in clumps close to his head, perhaps with a knife blade. Wounds were visible on his face and skull, a cross-hatching of shallow cuts from flying glass. His well-muscled torso and arms dripped perspiration. When he turned to accept a chunk of ore from the short, buxom female slave to his right, she saw that a blue black shadow covered his left shoulder and draped down his back. Not a massive bruise or a radiation burn—a tattooed dragon. Under a sheen of sweat, the huge reptile was caught in the act of unfolding its leathery wings.
As Auriel passed the cart, the tattooed slave looked up, as did the female, her cap of auburn hair twinkling with tiny glass fragments. Before averting their eyes in customary deference to the masters, they allowed her to glimpse their pure, ravening hatred. It was an act of defiance that jolted the she-he commander.
So far, there had been no hint of a Ground Zero slave rebellion or mass escape attempt, but Auriel knew they were thinking about it. They had to be after seeing a battle-suited Mero collapse in a heap on the nukeglass. They had to sense a weakness that wasn’t there before.
Every revolt needed leaders.
Auriel marked the insolent Dragon man and his girlfriend for death at the first sign of trouble.
After another ten yards of straightaway the shaft
veered hard right and began to turn upon itself, a single helix boring inexorably downward. This was the most difficult and dangerous traverse for the slaves, a steeply pitched spiral that ended at the very bottom of the mine. The traction grids cut into the floor minimized but couldn’t eliminate runaway or overturned ore carts.
Halfway down, Auriel had to switch off her external microphone. The screams and moans coming from below were too distracting. The noise wasn’t from the miners. Captive, specter-infected stickies were vocalizing their misery and terror, and their gathered, wild brethren were wailing along in sympathy.
At the bottom of the spiral, Auriel walked under the explosive-mined ceiling and down the harshly illuminated tunnel. To conserve battery power, her armor’s computer automatically shut off the helmet’s headlamp.
A person in a full battlesuit stood in front of a cell at the far end of the corridor. Not a warrior—her visor’s sensors identified the armor as belonging to Dr. Huth. On the other side of him, fifty feet farther down the tunnel, she caught a blur of movement. Blocked by the force field, free-range stickies were waving their pale, spindly arms and jumping about agitatedly. There were about thirty of them; it was hard to tell precisely because the rear of the mob faded off into the darkness.
To reach Dr. Huth, Auriel had to pass in front of the row of cells—and their occupants. The naked muties, male and female, all lay on befouled floor on their backs. Pinned to the ground by their mountainous bellies, they were incapacitated except for their screaming, and the aimless, futile thrashing of arms and legs. Their cries
and the limb thrashing coincided with the rhythmic, outward pulsations of their torsos. Pulsations that were visible to Auriel as skin, muscle and tendon ballooned, stretching just short of the splitting point, then shrinking back.
The unspeakably mutated monsters of this earth were about to give birth to even worse monsters.
These poor stickies didn’t have long to live, nor did the horrendous things that slithered among their guts.
A mass burn-off loomed large in all their futures.
As Auriel approached Dr. Huth, she could see his face inside the helmet. The underlighting of its visor’s displays accentuated the deep seams and pits in his cheeks and nose, and the heavy bags under his eyes. He smiled a brittle smile of greeting, which made Auriel shudder.
The survival of her species depended upon this grizzled, toothless old man.
Over his shoulder, down the narrow tunnel, Auriel had a much better view of the berserking stickies. With sucker adhesive streaming from fingertips and palms, they hurled themselves at the impenetrable force field, over and over again, like automatons. Maws gaping, they shrieked in a manic pantomime.
Had Auriel had her external audio turned on, it would have been absolute, mind-numbing bedlam in the confined space.
Dr. Huth gestured toward the opening of cell number seven.
Her battlesuit and body stocking stripped off and flung in a heap in a corner, Mero knelt naked on the cell’s nukeglass floor. The nine hours that had passed since her initial collapse had wrought a horrific transformation.
Drenched in sweat, Auriel’s second in command appeared caught up in the throes of a grand epileptic seizure—her jaws snapping, eyelids rapidly fluttering, powerful arm and thigh muscles quivering in spasm, the tendons in her neck as rigid as cables. And at some point earlier in the fit, her bowels had released. She had soiled herself and the cell floor. After fifteen more seconds of quaking rictus, the seizure finally passed. Still kneeling, her eyes closed, Mero threw back her head and parted her foam-flecked lips.
No sound came forth because Auriel’s audio was still shut off, but the sight of her friend, her sister, her battlemate screaming like that was a sword thrust to her solar plexus, an agonizing, transfixing pain straight to her core. And she immediately flashed back to her own mother’s death, to the detonation—there was no other word to describe the violence of the specters’ mass birthing. When Dredda’s torso gave way to the pressure, it was like a frag gren had exploded inside her. The tremendous outward blast had split her in two crossways and hollowed her out all the way to the backbone, reducing her heart, lungs, stomach and bowels to flying gobbets and blood mist.
Death, when it had finally come, had been instantaneous.
Shakily, Mero rose to her feet and slowly turned toward the opening, her pale blue eyes blank with shock, her close-cropped blond curls matted to her skull. Gray ash, the residue from the immolation of the cell’s previous occupant, had mixed with her sweat and now ran in rivulets down the milk-white skin of her legs. Mero’s pectorals weren’t overlaid with fatty breast tissue,
but rock-solid muscle. The same for her buttocks. The she-hes’ genetic engineering had overbuilt her skeletal structure to support the extra thick sinew and layers of muscle. There was a noticeable bulge in her midsection that hadn’t been there earlier in the day; she looked like she was five months pregnant.
But for that ominous bulge, and the color of her hair, Auriel might have been staring at herself in a mirror.
When their eyes met, Mero seemed to come out of her stupor. There was an instant of recognition in Mero’s face, then crushing sadness and fear.
She was doomed.
And they both knew it.
The psychic sword in Auriel’s stomach twisted, and lances of pain shot down the backs of her legs. Pain, like joy, like love, was part of the invisible bond she shared with her sister-warrior. And this pain was almost unendurable. A true hero—one of the bravest, strongest, most loyal human beings to ever draw breath—was going to live out the last hours of her life in excruciating agony, in this utter shithole beneath the ground, amid the din of mindless, gibbering mutants.
Grief-stricken though she was, Auriel couldn’t dwell on her own anguish. As commander, that luxury was denied her. There were the others to think of. Her sisters still looked to her for hope, for a way out of their predicament, even though it looked like the window of escape was rapidly closing. In two more days they would have stored enough battery power to put Shadow Earth behind them, but only if Mero’s infestation was an isolated incident would they leap universes again.
Otherwise, there was no point to it. They couldn’t escape what was already growing inside them.
If the contagion had spread among their ranks, this was where—and how—everything would end.
“We are cursed” is what Dredda had said.
Because they had tinkered with the mechanisms of their own bodies? Because they had cheated fate by leaping realities? Because in their hubris they had violated some basic underlying principle of existence?
With her mother’s last words echoing in her head, Auriel forced herself to look away from Mero’s face. She keyed the suit-to-suit com link. “How many of us are infected?” she asked Dr. Huth.
“I have scanned everyone,” the whitecoat replied. “And I found no sign of specters. But that falls well short of what I consider to be definitive evidence. It is impossible to locate individual spores inside the body without first tagging them with radiation markers.”
“Can you control Mero’s seizures with medication?”
“No, the convulsions are a result of the tremendous internal pressure exerted by the specters on her organs and nerves. I can dull the pain somewhat, but you do understand that she is going to die harder than any of the stickies because her altered physiology is much more resilient—heavier bones, larger muscle mass. Chances are, it will contain the specters longer before they eventually break out and kill her.”
“So she will suffer like my mother did?”
“Precisely.”
“I can’t allow that. Make her unconscious and incinerate her, now.”
“You’re not thinking this through,” Dr. Huth said.
Auriel stared at the old man. He was smiling that phony, gap-toothed smile of his. It made her want to throttle him until his tongue turned black. Had Mero somehow been contaminated by his precious spore samples and experiments on the stickies? She knew that was highly unlikely given the test protocols—and the sister-warriors had been sealed up in their battlesuits ever since their arrival on Shadow Earth. Apparently, their efforts at sterilization and isolation on the twelfth Earth had been in vain. Either that, or reinfection had occurred during the Null space transit.