“It was necessary,” Dr. Huth assured her.
“If they ever get out…”
Dr. Huth finished the sentence for her: “We will have to jump realities again, and very, very quickly.”
In disgust, Auriel shoved him away. She stared at the captive, lime-green whirlwind. “Will they replicate while sealed up in there?” she said. “Will there be even more of them soon?”
“That’s one of the things I hope to find out,” Dr. Huth told her. “Understanding and breaking their cycle of reproduction could be a way to eliminate them. I also need to analyze the before-and-after data to see what, if anything, was taken from Mero upon the instant of her death.”
“And if nothing was taken? Then what?”
“Then I have to start over fresh, with a new set of hypotheses, rejecting the premises I’ve employed so far. Premises that were based on a detailed understanding of the mechanisms of earthly biology. Ultimately though, I may even have to reject the application of biology to this problem.”
“You’ve lost me, Dr. Huth,” Auriel said with impatience.
“From the beginning,” he went on, “I have been proceeding on the assumption that these entities bear some faint resemblance to ourselves. That they process some kind of raw material for the energy to power themselves. That they reproduce with some variant of or alternative mechanism comparable to our DNA. That they grow in the same sense other living creatures do—from a few cells to many, from simple to complex internal function. So far, I’ve been unable to find evidence to support any of those assumptions.”
“If all of those assumptions are wrong,” Auriel said, “what are you going to replace them with?”
“I have to think in a completely different direction,” Dr. Huth said. “And I have already begun that process. For example, the endospores we have identified as alien may not be these creatures’ eggs after all.”
“Why not?”
“Because I can find nothing inside their protective shells. No genetic material. No DNA. No RNA. They aren’t bacterial. They aren’t viral. They aren’t, in any sense I can understand, alive. Nor do they seem to have the capacity of ever becoming alive.”
“Then how are they connected to the specters?” Auriel asked. “What purpose do they serve?”
“They may not be connected at all. Their presence could merely be coincidental. They could be unrelated artifacts.”
“Then we are left with nothing.”
“Not quite,” Dr. Huth said. “I first assumed the spores were living entities like the bacteria we are familiar
with, but constructed of compounds of metallic silica instead of carbon. It is also possible that they are much simpler than that, in structure and in function.”
“Simpler?”
“It has occurred to me that the spores’ relationship to the specters may have more to do with direction than point of origin.”
“Spit it out, Dr. Huth.”
“They could be some kind of microscopic tracking or targeting devices.”
“That makes no sense to me at all,” Auriel said in exasperation. “Where are the new clutches of specters coming from, if not from inside the spores? How are they getting inside their victims?”
“Those are the questions I need to answer.”
“And you had better do it fast,” Auriel warned him.
As she turned to leave, a skewering pain doubled her over and dropped her to her knees. It was like being run through with a lance. Burning, tearing pain.
“Are you all right?” Dr. Huth said, hurrying to kneel beside her.
For a moment she couldn’t answer him. She had no air. Then as the initial wave of agony subsided, she felt it—the same sensation she’d felt before. Only this time it wasn’t a faint wriggling, a vague twitching. This was no muscle spasm. This was no sympathetic fantasy. There was something inside her, something alive and it was moving, crawling around in her belly, pushing aside her organs, poking around blindly, curiously, indifferent to the excruciating pain it caused her.
“What is it?” Dr. Huth said. “What’s wrong?”
A second locus of pain, this one much higher, blos
somed just under her heart. Electric pain spread across her chest and shot down the insides of both arms. The vagus nerve, was her panicked thought. It was nudging on her vagus nerve. As the paralyzing intensity of the ache slowly subsided, there was a sliding pressure across the front of her right lung. When she inhaled she could feel the hard outline of the intruder, she could feel it slither, momentarily trapped between her lung and chest wall.
“Answer me!” Dr. Huth shouted.
Her heart thudding, Auriel swallowed her panic and her nausea and snarled back at him through gritted teeth. “Scan me, you asshole. Scan me quickly.”
Dr. Huth drew his hand scanner and waved its sensor back and forth over the outside of her battlesuit.
Auriel watched his expression stiffen as he took in the results. In the yellow backwash of his visor’s GRI, the whitecoat suddenly looked a thousand years old.
“Well?” she demanded.
“You’re infected,” he replied woodenly, as if shellshocked. “I counted more than a dozen of them inside you.”
For a second, Auriel thought he was actually mourning her fate. Then he spoke and shattered that illusion.
“There’s a good chance we’re all infected.”
Dr. Huth’s concern, as always, was only for himself.
As if they had heard, as if they understood the words and the consequences, the mob of wild stickies on the other side of the force field danced their joy, mock-weeping and moaning even louder.
Jak, Besup and the other three scouts cautiously moved closer to the blaster position’s entry hole—a vertical slit, less than three feet across at its midpoint. When they were within ten feet of it, they were enveloped in a pungent, all too familiar odor. The scouts exchanged looks of utter disgust.
“Triple nasty smell,” Jak whispered.
“Roof is sentries’ shitter,” Besup hissed. “Watch where you step.”
“And breathe through mouth,” Jak muttered.
The traitors in the blaster emplacement above were using the lip of the predark roof as their privy, probably because climbing up and down from the five-story perch was such a time-consuming hassle. They were tossing—or excreting—their solid waste off the summit and letting it fall straight to the ground. Maybe they thought the addition of a little personal fertilizer might encourage plant growth and embellish the landscape.
At least they had enough brains not to let fly directly above the hardsite’s only entrance.
The ancestral ghosts took point, disappearing one by one into the hole in the buried building’s flank.
When Besup started for the opening, Jak followed close on his heels. Before dropping to hands and knees and ducking his head to enter, the albino teen opened his
eyes for a split second. Even though the lip of the hole and the side of the pinnacle were within easy reach, all he could see front of him was a wall of solid blackness. Jak closed his eyes and crawled forward, into a passage so narrow that it brushed against both his shoulders and grazed the top of his head.
Under his fumbling fingers and sliding knees, the floor and walls of the tunnel felt ridged or striated. In his mind’s eye he could actually see the linear tool marks left behind by its construction. The sentries—or more likely some unlucky slaves—had pickaxed and chipped their way into the heart of the ancient tower block.
The other scouts crawled in after him. Jak could hear their whistling breath in the enclosed space. He hoped no one else could. The five of them were jammed into the passage in a daisy chain, like a cork in a bottle. Once inside it, there was no easy or quick way of going back. Not only was there no room to turn, but there was also no way to coordinate a unison retreat. The scouts were at the mercy of whoever or whatever was waiting for them at the far end.
At least, Jak thought, the Bannock-Shoshone ancestors could give them some warning if there was trouble ahead.
He followed Besup up what seemed like a gradual slope for forty or fifty feet, then the tunnel ceased to be a tunnel, and opened onto a much wider, much taller space. As Jak crawled forward, he “saw” Besup standing full upright. In front of him were the bright edges of a flight of steps. These steps weren’t crudely hacked into the glass. And they were trimmed in metal. Definitely original; definitely predark.
It made perfect sense. The rat hole passage led to a stairwell entrance, and the stairs led up to the roof.
The nukeglass inside the well amounted to little more than a thin coating, a solidified ooze over the walls and stairs. Jak guessed that air pressure in the stairwell, and perhaps some substantial interior doors, had impeded the influx of molten liquid. The lower door had since been removed from its hinges and was left leaning against the wall of the landing. Above it, hammered into the wall above the staircase, was a crude metal stanchion that held an unlit torch.
Jak pushed up from his knees and got to his feet. At least the climb to the top was going to be easier.
With the seven ghosts in the lead, and Jak and the four scouts following, they moved upward to the next landing. Figuring two landings per floor, they had eight more before they reached the roof.
Everything went smoothly until they approached the third floor above ground. The ancestors stopped on the steps, then turned, blocking the way.
Jak leaned around Besup’s hip to see what was going on. The ghost closest to the landing was waving a finger at them. A “no-no” finger. He then pointed at something on the deck of the landing.
Whatever it was, Jak couldn’t see it from his vantage point.
“Danger on the landing,” Besup said, addressing Jak and the scouts below him. “Walk only in my footsteps.”
Then they started up the stairs, in a tight single file.
When Jak saw the white stones, or eggs, all of the same size and shape, arranged in a careful pattern on the
landing floor, he knew exactly what they were. Though he had never encountered the jump-up, laser antipersonnel mines in person before, Krysty and Mildred had. It happened years ago, during the first invasion. And after their narrow escape they had warned the other companions about them.
Instead of being armed with a conventional explosive and ball-bearing projectiles, these AP mines combined laser beams, reflective mirrors and the ability to hop in sequence to various heights above the ground. When one of the cluster of white eggs’ infrared sensors was triggered, they all jumped up in the air and discharged their cutting beams, which created a multiblade, multiangled, bandsaw effect that turned the unwary into a pile of steaming, bloodless chunks.
The path Besup took was the one laid out by the ancestors. Jak stepped precisely where he stepped, moving up the inside of the stairway, climbing onto the bottom rail of the steel bannister, then swinging over to the far side of the landing.
The rest of the stairway was undefended. The scouts moved quickly and without incident to the uppermost landing, where again, the door had been taken off its hinges. Jak heard voices coming through the doorway, from out on the rooftop. He was straining to make out what they were saying when Besup lightly touched his eyelids.
Jak flinched at the contact, then opened his eyes.
It took a second or two for them to adjust. A faint, flickering light filtered into the top of the stairwell, through the doorless doorway.
When he regained his focus, he saw that Besup had
his back pressed against the wall not two feet away, and was grinning at him, wide-eyed with excitement. The whiteface warrior then reached down to his waistband and unsheathed a long, slender shadow. He held it up for Jak to see. The predark dagger’s six-inch-plus blade was coated with a black substance, probably titanium nitride—all but the razor-sharp double edge, which caught and reflected the weak light in a fine, bright
V.
This wasn’t the same knife Besup had thrown campfire target practice with. This blade had only one function: piercing living flesh and bone. It was designed for chilling.
Jak stuck a hand under his shirt and palmed a pair of leaf-bladed throwing knives.
There would be no blasters. No noise in this fight, if they could help it.
The warrior ancestors were nowhere to be seen, with eyes open or closed. Jak figured they were already out on the roof, walking among the blaster emplacement’s oblivious sentries. While the ghosts could be observed and heard by their own kind, and could touch their flesh, they were invisible to everyone else. They couldn’t directly interact with the objects of the living world.
The way the light from the rooftop kept fading in and out, Jak knew it had to be from the fire he’d seen with his mind’s eye. The voices outside the well continued their dialogue. He counted three men talking. Jak carefully edged closer to the stairwell’s opening, so he could make sense of what was being said.
“We’re sitting in the catbird seat,” one man announced with pride. “There aren’t anywhere near enough she-hes to try and run all of the Deathlands. Them cockroaches
are going to have to use homegrown folk to govern and police and milk the sweet stuff from their new territory. They’re going to have to use people like us, who have proved their loyalty from the start. The rewards are gonna be bigger than any of us ever dreamed possible. Imagine skimming the cream off every ville in Deathlands.”
“Question is, what are we gonna to do with all the cream that we skim?” said a second sentry.
“It’s gonna be a string of gaudies, for me,” the third man said. “Stocked with only the best, hand-selected talent. Set up my stable of sluts in old semitrailers all up and down the interstate. Ring the compounds with barbwire. Charge an arm and a leg to get in the front gate, but from then on everything’s free. Take as much as you want, any way that you want. Do it until your damn pecker falls off.”
“You know,” the second man said, “starting a high class jolt-a-teria has always been in the back of my mind. Not one of those dirt-floor, cardboard shanty, puke-in-a-puddle dumps. I’m talking about the kind of place where an ordinary sodbusting shit-kicker could go, kick back and get himself petrified with the best brain-melter in the land.”
“Me,” the first speaker said, “the first thing I’m going to do is open up a traveling fun fair, like a carny only featuring games of skill and complimentary joy juice for old and young. My philosophy has always been, if you’re old enough to swallow, you’re old enough to get hammered.
“I’d go from ville to ville in a caravan of monster-big wags, give the folks a once-in-a-lifetime chance to chill
caged and helpless muties for a price. You know, scalies, stumpies, stickies, the odd droolie—anything that looks so comical butt ugly that you’d pay good jack to kill or maim it. I’d charge so much per bullet. So much per arrow. So much per whack with a nail-studded club or stab with a blade. I tell you, folks are going to damn well eat it up.”
Warm holes, jolt, joy juice, blasters and wags.
The familiar hard currency of Deathlands.
To Jak, the sentries sounded like nothing more than run-of-the-mill, coldheart chillers. The kind of road scum who would sell out their own mothers for a bit of strange tail, a few hits of jolt and a quick peek from the top of the shit-heap. He transferred one of his knives to his left hand. The other he positioned between his thumb and first two fingers, ready for instant release.
Because his eyes were open, if the ancestors gave a signal to begin the attack, Jak didn’t hear or see it. Besup nodded to him and the other scouts, then ducked through the empty doorway.
Jak flew out after him.
The campfire threw plenty of light to fight by. It was built in a cut-down, fifty-five-gallon steel drum, which was positioned near the emplacement’s machine gun. The M-60’s bipod front legs were resting on the edge of the roof, muzzle pointed downrange toward the Ground Zero road. The buttstock sat on the holed-out, foam seat of a predark office swivel chair.
Three of the six sentries were curled up in blankets, asleep on the sheet of nukeglass on Jak’s side of the fire. The other three—the talkers—were sitting in swivel
chairs on the far side of the drum, with their backs to the M-60 and the road.
“Yeah, it’d be like therapy for them,” one of them cackled.
“You should charge extry for blastin’ them really big, flab-ass scalies,” the guy beside him said. “Three-hundred-pounders and up.”
“Yeah, I’ll charge ’em by the squeal.”
All three brayed with laughter, which caused the sleeping men to stir and groan in complaint.
Because the talkers were looking right into the flames, they couldn’t see anything beyond the red glow. This allowed Jak and the scouts to advance unnoticed across the rooftop toward them.
Although the fire blinded the sentries to their approach, it gave the attackers a perfectly illuminated view of the intended targets. The trio was bundled up to keep off the night’s chill. They had black caps pulled way down low over their ears. They wore layer upon layer of clothing, fingerless gloves and had makeshift, insulating lap robes of black plastic bags. Their boots propped up on chunks of nukeglass so they could absorb the fire’s heat. The boot soles and tops were wrapped with, and presumably held together by, overlapping turns of silver duct tape. Beat-up, rust-barreled AK-47s rested against the sides of their chairs, close to hand. The guy in the middle, the carny man, had a remade handblaster laying across his lap.
As four disembodied white faces suddenly appeared in the fire’s glow, not ten feet from where they sat, their laughter faded away and the row of nasty grins turned to
slackjawed astonishment. Snarling curses, they pushed back their chairs and lunged for their blasters.
But it was already too late for that.
As Besup’s arm shot forward, Jak also let fly.
The leaf-bladed throwing knife struck first. The head of the man in the middle jerked back from the stunning impact of the steel blade into his left eye socket. A point of the half-buried, four-lobed blade penetrated the weakest spot in his skull, spearing deep into his forebrain. The crunching wallop sent him and his wheeled chair rolling backward in a blur. The blaster he was trying to raise tumbled from his fingers. When the chair’s rear wheels hit the lip of the roof, its seat-back tipped over the edge, spilling out its occupant. The silver tape on his boot soles flashing in the firelight, the middle man backflipped off the rooftop.
Only then did he start to scream.
Like a steam whistle.
A scream cut off short when seconds later he crashed into the ground.
Even as the head of the man in the middle was slammed by the leaf-bladed knife, Besup’s pinwheeling dagger sank to the hilt in the chest of the man on the left, just beneath his sternum. His eyes slitted with pain, he flopped back onto the seat of his chair, clutched the knife’s grip in his gloved hands and began pulling on it with all his might. In a rush the dagger came free, and when it did, it released a spray of arterial blood that hissed and steamed when it hit the side of the fire-drum. His heart pierced by a diamond-shaped wound that would never close, he lost consciousness at once,
and was dead in seconds. Besup’s bloody knife clattered to the rooftop.
The third seated man took a knife hit at the base of the throat as he swung up his AK, trying to bring the muzzle to bear. The muzzle dropped as his mouth gaped open, then opened and closed, opened and closed as if he was trying to say something, or to scream. But the blade had severed his vocal cords. Blood pouring from his lips, he fell to his knees, then his face on the ground beside the firepit.
The sleepers meanwhile had been awakened by the curses and the scream, and reacting to the sounds of alarm, rolled for their weapons.