As they neared the base of the pinnacle, Jak could see the surrounding landscape was occupied by more of the ancient ghosts. Legions of them, people of all ages, milled aimlessly until Besup and the others approached, then they parted like a breaking wave, opening a wide path.
Jak saw their faces up close, heard their wretched cries, imagined that he felt their dead breath gusting against his face. For more than a century they had been trapped in this wasteland limbo, their existence ignored, their wailing falling on deaf ears. The gun-post sentries on duty above couldn’t hear them, or if they did, they couldn’t distinguish the lamentations from the sounds made by the shifting glacier.
Jak didn’t want to look at the ghosts, didn’t want to share their pain, but the only way he could avoid it was
to open his eyes. And if he did that, he couldn’t find his way in the dark. Hot tears slid down his cheeks.
“You must steel yourself, White Wolf,” Besup whispered in his ear. “You cannot help them.”
Jak focused his attention on the problem at hand, craning back his head to take in the summit of the towering mountain of glass. To eliminate the gun post they needed to reach the peak, and they had to do it without raising an alarm. Though there were creases and rills all over the pinnacle’s surface, it was far too slick to scale in a free climb. And hacking foot-and handholds into it would give them away.
One thing was certain: the sentries had to have a way to get in and out themselves.
Something pushed against his back. And he felt a feathery light pressure on his arms, insistently urging him to move to the right, around the base of the mountain. The other scouts were moving that way, too. The ancestors were doing the pushing.
Jak scanned the irregular blobs and pillows of glass at the bottom of the slope, looking for anything that might pass for an entrance, and seeing nothing.
Then one of the ancestors broke ranks and ran ahead, waving and pointing.
Jak saw it at once. Maybe four feet off the ground, nestled in a cleft between two massive enfoldings. A rat hole gnawed in the glass, a rat hole big enough for a person to crawl through.
Under the blaze of klieg lights, Auriel Otis Trask hurried across the Ground Zero compound. In front of the mine entrance, about seventy slaves slept packed into a series of bathtub-sized, natural pits or depressions in the nukeglass, their bodies covered with piles of rags, trying their best to keep warm and out of the night wind. If any of them saw her walk by, they kept their heads down.
And that was a very good thing.
Armed with a tribarrel laser rifle, Auriel was in no mood for curious stares. Mero lay on the brink of death; Dr. Huth had just notified her of that fact via com link. It was a message that she had been expecting—and dreading with all her heart. She had to be there, on-station, when Mero died. Standing witness to a fallen sister was her duty as commander, and her honor as a loyal friend.
Before Mero had been sedated, between seizures while she was still lucid, Auriel had explained the dire situation to her. That there would be no mercy killing in her case. That she wouldn’t be euthanized like the stickies before the specters hatched out so Dr. Huth could perform analyses he had up until now been denied. Analyses that might be the key to their survival, and that were in fact their last hope for same. Auriel had explained that the fate of all the sisters hung in the balance.
Ever the stalwart soldier, Mero had responded through clenched teeth, “I would’ve gladly given my life on any of the other worlds to save even one of my sisters. I’m going to die on this one anyway, I know there’s no way around it. This way I might be able to save my sisters. At least my death will have some meaning.”
Mero’s acceptance of her fate didn’t make it any easier for Auriel to bear. Under the circumstances, what else could Mero have said? The situation was no longer in her control. And even though she loathed Dr. Huth as much as Auriel did, she was never one to whine or complain about a tough assignment. Of all the warriors for Auriel to lose, Mero was the least expendable.
It had been a profound relief when Dr. Huth had finally rendered her semiconscious, when Auriel didn’t have to keep looking her in the eye.
As the commander stepped through the mine’s brightly lit entrance, she asked herself for the thousandth time if she was doing the right thing here. For Mero. For the others. Did she have any choice in the matter? Could she trust Dr. Huth not to make a bloody mess of it?
The options were few; the good options were none.
Auriel didn’t blame herself for what had happened up to this point. She had inherited a situation that was a tightrope-walking over disaster. But this decision was all on her.
Unbidden, her mother’s horrific last moments flooded her mind. A recurring flashback that she always did her best to smother. Now she let the tape run in its awful entirety. Auriel had never dreamed she would ever see Dredda, the bedrock of the unit, fall apart so utterly. At first, her disintegration was emotional, due to the pain,
then it was physical—and impossibly violent. The lesson Auriel had learned was a hard one, and it struck deep: sisters might well be superbeings, but they were still subject to human doubt and suffering. They were still all too mortal.
About twenty yards inside the entrance came the first of three newly installed chokepoints. Made of piled, laser-cut blocks of nukeglass, they narrowed the tunnel from both sides so it was just wide enough for a single ore cart to pass down the middle. This created defensible, hardsite emplacements for the sisters who were standing guard belowground. The strategically positioned sets of barricades had become necessary precautions because of the shift in mine operations since Mero had fallen sick. The looming catastrophe of a mass infection had significantly narrowed Auriel’s time window. She and her sisters had to have sufficient fuel to jump realities, and as quickly as possible. Which meant the gloves had to come off. Now two-thirds of the miners toiled underground around the clock. They were allowed just four hours of sleep in every twenty-four, and fed once a day.
The new bottlenecks didn’t impede the steady flow of radioactive ore to the mobile processor aboveground, but they divided and funneled the slave force, eliminating the possibility that in the close quarters of the mine, with their 40-to-1 advantage in numbers, the laborers could surprise and overwhelm their masters, despite all their advanced weaponry and body armor.
As Auriel passed through the gap in the barricade, the sister stationed there shifted her tribarrel rifle to her left
hand, decloaked her visor and raised a black gauntleted fist in solemn salute.
There were tears in the sentry’s eyes. Tears she couldn’t brush away because of the battlesuit helmet.
Auriel felt a twinge of sympathetic pain in her gut. Bright, stabbing pain. Despite their technology, despite their genetic alterations, the sisters weren’t machines. They were mere flesh and blood. They loved. They suffered loss. They grieved. All the sisters had been informed of Mero’s sacrifice; they knew she was dying agonizingly for the cause. That her death was now imminent had been inadvertently broadcast through the com link by that thoughtless bastard Dr. Huth.
Auriel picked up her pace. The knots of miners pushing carts in both directions yielded the center of the tunnel to her, either moving out of the way or bringing the carts to a stop so she could walk around them.
Deeper below ground, past the second chokepoint and under the watchful eye of the sister manning the third, the slaves were hard at work, reducing the massif’s hot spots to portable-sized rubble. Pickaxes in the side seams crashed into walls in a resounding, constant clatter, human chains handed out chunks of ore, and dumped them into the carts lined up on either side of the tunnel. Under the string of widely spaced, overhead lights, the air in the main shaft glittered from the suspended glass dust.
A tall man with an ax stepped through the sparkling cloud, partially blocking her path. He had a rag mask tied over the lower half of his face, and he was naked to the waist. Behind him stood a diminutive woman with
short-cropped auburn hair. She, too, wore a face mask and held a pickax.
Normally, Auriel didn’t permit the features of individual slaves to even register in her consciousness. Given the certainty and unpleasantness of their fate, any form of contact with them was counterproductive. But she
did
remember this man with the enormous dragon tattoo on his shoulder. She remembered his little auburn-haired friend as well. And looking at them now she sensed they had some kind of personal connection. Were they lovers? Brother and sister? Or maybe they had just joined forces in the slave camp in order to survive?
Her visor’s sensors remotely measured Dragon Man’s pulse rate and blood pressure. That information confirmed what Auriel read from his body language: murder was on his mind.
Her murder.
From the way the corded muscles in his arms and chest were flexing and twitching, he wanted nothing more than to rear back and clobber her with his pickax. But the futility of a one-on-one attack was giving him pause.
Seeing his indecision, Auriel knew that the tipping point hadn’t been reached yet. Sometime soon, though, this tattooed slave and all the others would realize that they had nothing to lose by turning on their masters. That they were going to be either worked until they dropped dead, or dragged into the superheated dark and pulled to pieces by packs of stickies.
At present she had more pressing issues to deal with. Because even in the confines of her battlesuit, Auriel could move so much faster than the male slave who
threatened her, he had no chance to step out of the way or deflect the full power of the shoulder strike she delivered to his midchest.
The stunning blow bowled him off his feet and sent him flying backward, spread-eagled. He slammed into the side of an ore cart with his butt, and tumbled head over heels into the half-full cargo box.
The display of sudden violence froze the other slaves close by, turning them into masked, glitter-dusted statues.
Before Auriel could move past the knot of bodies, Dragon Man climbed out of the cart and attacked her, still clutching his ax.
Her patience long gone, she thumbed the tribarrel’s power button. The compact weapon system came to life instantly, emitting a faint vibration that registered in her fingertips even through the battlesuit’s gauntlets.
Ax cocked back, Dragon Man closed the distance. Above the rag mask, the whites of his eyes were a shocking pink, enflamed by the mine’s corrosive dust.
Auriel didn’t particularly want to kill him because she couldn’t afford to lose any more workers at this critical stage of the operation. But she didn’t want the other slaves to get the idea that their lives had somehow gained value, and that because of that they suddenly wielded a new power to influence events. Bottom line, it was pretty much of a toss-up whether or not she cut loose with the laser rifle.
“Out of my way or you’re going to die where you stand,” she told him, her voice booming through the battlesuit’s external speaker, the tribarrel aimed rock-
steady at his chest. “Move aside or I’ll cook your heart to a cinder.”
“No, Ronbo, don’t!” the woman cried, throwing down her pickax and stepping between her friend’s chest and the black weapon’s clawlike flash hider.
A touching display of selfless bravery, but Auriel didn’t allow herself to be moved by it.
“You do realize that you’re not protecting him from anything,” she informed the woman. “The beam from this weapon will slice through both of you like you’re made out of paper.”
“I know that,” the woman said, holding her ground.
“Get out of my way, Ti,” Ronbo snarled. He was bleeding from a nasty two-inch cut on his left temple. When he tried to move her with his free arm, the little woman locked her legs, and lowered her center of gravity, and despite the disparity in size wouldn’t be budged.
Auriel knew at most the pair had another four days of exposure before the rad sickness took hold and killed them. With any luck long before then, the sisters would have safely jumped to another replica Earth.
“I’m going to let you two live,” she told them, “but only if you get out of my way, now.”
Whirling, little Ti pushed Ronbo backward with both hands, then caught hold of and trapped the arm that was still wielding the ax.
Auriel walked past them and as she did so, the other miners averted their eyes and hurriedly resumed their labor so they wouldn’t incur her wrath. She followed the main tunnel to the helix and took the spiral ramp down to the bottom level, and the entrance to the cramped corridor that housed the row of experimental cells.
The shrill, animal sounds echoing down the burrow made her skin on her neck crawl, but she knew they weren’t from Mero’s death throes. Mero was too weak at this point to cry out. At the far end of the corridor, beyond the force field, wild stickies danced and leaped about in apparent celebration. The noise was them mimicking—and mocking—her sister’s suffering.
A battlesuit-clad Dr. Huth stood in front of Mero’s cell, fidgeting nervously with a hand scanner.
The intervening cells were empty but for drifts of ash and pieces of charred long bones, the remnants of Huth’s still-born experiments.
When Auriel looked into the cell and saw the state of her friend, a galvanic shock shot through her. Mero lay on her back. Like the late-phase infected stickies, she was pinned to the floor by a boulder of massive, jutting belly. The skin of her stomach looked shiny, like an overinflated balloon; it had already begun to split, lengthwise, from the tremendous internal pressure. And worst of all, Auriel could see full grown specters moving under her tight skin, sliding back and forth, pulsating in near-unison. Though Mero was unconscious, her eyelids were open and her eyes grotesquely bulged from their sockets. Mero’s face and lips had turned a dusky blue.
Her mother’s face looked like that, right before the end.
“She can’t breathe,” Auriel said to Dr. Huth. “She’s suffocating.”
“The specters have compressed her lungs and are squeezing down on her brain stem as well,” the whitecoat said dispassionately. “I’ve observed this same series of events in my other test subjects. It’s part of the entities’
ingenious hatching process. Slack muscle is much easier to delaminate and split than contracted muscle.”
“This is unspeakable…”
“Any second now,” Dr. Huth cautioned, his voice quavering with anticipation.
There was still time to change the course of events, Auriel told herself. To end this. To destroy the wretched, evil things that were killing her sister.
She reached for the incineration switch set in the tunnel wall. She flipped open the protective cover, and her hand hovered over the red burn toggle. Before she could act, flesh and blood exploded.
It rocked Auriel back on her heels. There was no impact from flying matter; she was jolted by surprise and shock. Red liquid splashed the inside of the force field that blocked the cell entrance.
Mero’s substance dripped ceiling to floor.
No longer able to contain his excitement, Dr. Huth fairly squealed, “Infrared mode! Infrared mode!”
Auriel used the helmet’s GRI to shift her visor view.
The bright arterial-red curtain instantly turned brilliant chartreuse.
A fraction of a second later the force field shrugged off the liquid insult, and what Auriel saw inside the narrow cell dizzied her. Dozens of lime-green specters, like flying eels, whipped around and around the walls and ceiling. They moved in a churning blur, elongating themselves into thin threads, reversing directions, searching every square inch of the cell for a way out. Or for something they could kill. Their frenzy and their ravening hunger were palpable.
Under the frantic light show, Auriel could see what they had done to poor Mero. She was blown virtually in two, a ghastly, gaping wound from throat to groin, from hip to hip, from armpit to armpit, the stubs of her shattered ribs sticking out. Though Mero’s pain was clearly over, frozen on her dead face was a look of astonishment and horror.
Auriel spun on her heel and seized hold of the whitecoat’s battlesuit around the throat. “What have you done?” she demanded, shaking him about inside the armor like a marble in a can. “What have we done?”