Immediately, the scout dog started whimpering in excitement, pulling on the lead, trying to break free.
“Caught a scent,” Ti said.
The dog suddenly became more agitated, snarling and snapping its jaws and rearing up on its back legs.
“Let it go,” Ryan told the warrior.
When he released the lead, the animal shot away, vanishing around the next turn.
Shortly thereafter they heard the now-familiar sounds of canine attack, the growling, the grunting—the shrill cries of a captured prey.
Ryan hoped it wasn’t another unlucky slave.
When they rounded the bend, weapons up, he saw the dog had a young stickie pinned to the ground, jaws buried in its face. The pale sucker hands had already pulled off clumps of its fur and bleeding divots of its flesh, but the dog would not relent. Flexing the powerful muscles of its neck and back, it shook its head and ripped off half the mutie’s face, from eye socket to chin, then sank its fangs into the unprotected throat. Big dog, little mutie—it was over in a blink, with one more whipcrack of the head, like killing a rat.
Then the dog was off on the hunt again before anybody could grab it.
They circled around the spiral, a complete 360 in space. As they did, Ryan noted freshly opened cracks in the walls. Cracks wide enough and tall enough for a small person to slip through.
Somewhere not far below them, the loose dog snarled, then yelped in pain. Faintly at first, but rapidly growing louder came the muffled sounds of bare feet slapping against the nukeglass.
The tramp of lots of feet, coming up fast.
“Shit!” Ryan cried, swinging up his blaster. “Get clear firing lanes!”
There was hardly time to do anything of the sort. A mass of stickies raced around the bend, filling the corridor wall-to-wall with their bodies. Leaping and waving spindly arms, they charged right into the muzzles of the waiting blasters.
Ryan, Ti and the warriors opened fire in the tight space, chopping down some but not nearly all of the muties. There were too many, they were too fast, and they were already too close for blasterwork. The muties who weren’t struck down by the initial salvo didn’t respond with the maniacal attack typical of their species; instead they brushed past and dashed around easy victims, and kept on running. Ryan and the others turned and reaimed their weapons, but had to hold fire because the stickies plowed headlong into the press of miners who were bringing up the rear.
At that moment Ryan realized that bloodlust wasn’t driving the stickies. This was panic. Blind panic.
Even though the miners bludgeoned with shovels and pickaxes, and Ronbo applied the butt of his tribarrel, the muties didn’t attack them. They threw themselves at the shoulder-to-shoulder slaves blocking their escape from the spiral, and in a desperate frenzy actually tried to climb over them.
Ryan could see nothing close behind, nothing pursuing them up the passageway. What were they running from? he asked himself. And why were they pissing themselves to get away?
One of the stickies stopped by the packed slaves reversed course and charged right at him. As it ran its mouth opened wide and it let out a piercing screech of agony. For the first time he got a good look at the thing’s belly. It was huge. About to give birth. To quintuplets, at least.
It was also very obviously male, which was a considerable puzzlement.
It didn’t seem to notice or care about the four blasters
aimed at its head. Before Ryan, Ti and the four warriors could fire, the stickie exploded.
Literally, under their noses.
Its torso blew apart with a resounding, hollow
whump!
And hot gore splattered the walls and ceiling, and sprayed across Ryan and his newfound friends.
The other stickies, the ones trapped by the miners, started screeching and bleating, and then their legs gave way and they collapsed onto the floor. Ryan saw that they, too, had horribly bloated bellies. Looking closer, their heads appeared swollen much larger than normal. Then one by one they exploded—in exactly the same way as the first, like they had all swallowed frag grens.
Only afterward it didn’t smell anything like burned RDX.
It was over, start to finish, in less than fifteen seconds. Blood and bowel contents dripped from the ceiling, and from the faces and chests of the stunned spectators.
Backhanding the sewage from his cheek and chin, Ronbo exclaimed, “Nukin’ hell, what is going on!”
His mouth was still hanging open when he jolted violently head to foot, as if something large had just leapt down his throat.
Then again, and again, and again, the tall man jerked, backstepping, dropping the tribarrel to the floor.
“Ronbo!” Ti cried. “What is it? What’s wrong?”
His eyes bugging out, he clamped both his hands around his throat as if trying to squeeze it shut, or strangle himself. Choking himself blue, he turned, his long legs quivering.
Suddenly he wasn’t doing the rictus dance solo.
Others in the crowd were choking, gagging, reeling, convulsing. Miners and whitefaces, alike.
The affliction appeared to be completely random. The slaves who weren’t stricken tried to back away from those who were.
Under the light of the corridor, Ryan could see the tattoo on Ronbo’s back, and his rib cage violently expanding. Not from an inhaled breath; more like it was being pumped full of something. His torso kept on growing outward, stretching the skin until the dragon’s detail was completely lost, until it looked like an enormous pale blue birthmark. When Ronbo turned toward them again, his bare stomach had become a huge, weighty protuberance, the skin stretched to translucence, and both his eyes had popped from their sockets.
“Ronbo!” Ti screamed.
As she started to rush to his side, Ryan seized her by the shoulder. He didn’t understand what was happening, but he knew getting too close wasn’t a good idea. It looked like something very deadly was passing rapidly from one person to the next.
“There’s nothing you can do for him,” he said, holding her fast in his grip.
And as if to prove this point, the tattooed man blew apart in a ballooning red mist, shreds of his flesh and shards of bone peppering them.
“We have to get out of here,” he told her. “We have to go
now.
”
Then the others started exploding.
“Run, damn you!” Ryan said, pushing the little woman ahead of him down the spiral. “Run!”
Together they sprinted down the helix, around the
winding turns, past more holes in the walls created by the massif’s shifting plates. Above them, there was screaming and sporadic gunfire.
“He’s dead, he’s dead,” she muttered through her tears.
Even as Ryan ran, he was trying to connect what had just happened to the dead she-hes. Did whatever it was make them explode inside their battlesuits? Did that explain the gore that coated their visors?
“We’ve got to fight back!” Ti said. “They chilled Ronbo…”
“Fight what?” Ryan said. “Fight who?”
Ti glared up at him, but kept on running. Evidently she didn’t have an answer, either.
The bottom of the spiral opened into a narrow, low hallway, lit by widely spaced bulbs. Ryan’s attention wasn’t focused down the dank corridor; he was staring up at the wires that festooned the ceiling.
“Tell me that isn’t what it looks like,” Ti said.
“They’ve mined the ceiling with explosives,” he said.
“I’m not going under there,” she told him. “If those charges blow, we will be squashed flat.”
“We don’t have a choice,” Ryan said. “We can’t hide from whatever it is in this hallway.”
When she refused to move, he said, “Look down the passage, in front of the cells. What do you think that wet gunk is on the floor and on the walls? Whatever killed Ronbo, it’s already been here. Which means it could come back at any time.”
Ti squinted down the corridor into the weak light, at
the litter scattered on the floor. “Were they stickies or people?”
“Doesn’t matter. Come on, let’s move it. And triple-time. Keep your weapon up and ready to fire.”
They started past the row of niches that had been laser-hacked into the nukeglass, leapfrogging each other from one side of the hall to the other. The first crude cells were empty, save for the bracketed cylinders along the walls and the heaps of ashes and bits of charred bone on the floor.
When Ti looked into a cell about halfway down the line, she froze with her AK shouldered and aimed inside. Poised to fire the autorifle, every muscle tensed, she exclaimed, “I’ve got one! I’ve got one!”
Ryan brought his SIG to bear on a figure standing slumped against the interior wall. A figure clad head to foot in shiny black battle armor.
A gasping, amplified voice said, “You don’t want to do that….”
Ryan sensed that Ti was about to cut loose on the unarmed cockroach, at point-blank range.
“It won’t do any good,” he told her. “You open fire and that thing’s EM shield will just deflect the bullets. All you’ll accomplish is getting us both caught in the spray of ricochets.”
The little woman lowered the Kalashnikov’s muzzle, swung the weapon around and tried to bash the she-he in the head. The steel-shod butt never got within two feet of its target. The rifle bounced back, apparently off thin air, and with a force that sent her arms flying backward.
“There’s a force field blocking the entrance to the cell,” the cockroach said slowly and with considerable effort.
It was nearly as tall as he was.
Ryan felt the creature’s eyes on him, burning into him, but he couldn’t see them—or the face—through the opaqued helmet visor.
“At least for the time being,” the she-he said, “this space is free of them.”
“‘Them’?” Ryan said.
“The specters. If they have a name for themselves, we have never discovered it.” The she-he paused for breath before continuing. “The force field is what’s keeping
them out of this cell. It’s the only safe place for you on this level of the glacier.”
Again, a pause for breath, and when the she-he resumed speaking, her voice was tight and full of pain. “I’ll lower the field, so you can come inside, but you have to move quickly. I can’t risk leaving it down for more than a second.”
Ryan glanced down at Ti and she nodded. As grim and dead-ended as it was, it looked like their only hope.
The cockroach slowly raised a gauntleted hand. “On the count of three—one, two, three…”
The air in front of the cell shimmered, and Ryan and Ti stepped through it. It was like walking under a warm waterfall. Then they were inside, in the dank, cramped space, ankle-deep in ashes.
Whatever the she-he did unseen, inside the glove, she undid the same way, with an extended, armored index finger. The air at the entrance stopped shimmering.
“What are these ‘specters’?” Ryan said. “We can’t see them. Where are they from? What do they want?”
“They’re invisible in full spectrum light,” the she-he said. “They attached themselves to us during a reality jump. We’ve jumped replica Earths four times since then, and haven’t been able to shake them.”
Amplified breath sounds filled the cell, gasping sounds.
“Don’t believe her, Ryan,” Ti said. “It’s some kind of trick…”
When the she-he reached for a compact electronic device attached to the waist of the battlesuit, Ti shoul
dered her weapon again, cheek to buttstock, her finger on the trigger.
Ryan caught the barrel behind the sights and firmly pushed it aside and down. “No good,” he repeated.
The cockroach offered the device to him. “Here, have a look through this. All you have to do is hold it up to the entrance and look at the screen.”
Ryan angled the gizmo so they both could see the LCD.
Lights.
Fluorescent green.
Brilliant oblongs, like flying snakes, shot back and forth down the hallway. They moved so fast and so erratically that they blurred in Ryan’s vision.
When he looked above the little device’s screen, the hall was empty; when he looked at it again, the lights had gathered in the hall in front of the cell, a mass that swarmed in midair like a nest of levitating eels.
“Nukin’ hell, what are they?” Ti said.
“We don’t know,” the she-he replied. “Now that they’ve targeted you, they won’t leave, not until you’re blown apart.”
“But you brought them here?” Ryan said.
“Yes.”
“Why did you bother to save us?” he asked. “You could have just let us die.”
“There’s no point in my fighting on. All the battlesuit life-sign transponders are transmitting flatlines. I’m the only sister left. The last of my kind. And there’s another, even better reason…”
The she-he reached up and touched buttons on either side of the armor’s raised collar; there was a whoosh
of depressurization, then she began to unscrew the helmet.
Lifting it off her head, she said, “Hello, Ryan Cawdor…”
The shock of seeing his own features in her face—the same long black hair, icy blue eyes, even the set of his chin—rocked him to the core.
“No,” he said. “No, it can’t be.”
“But it is,” she said. “You can’t look at me and deny it. I am Auriel. Auriel Otis Trask.”
Ti looked back and forth between them. “Are you brother and sister?” she asked. “How is that possible?!”
“Not brother and sister,” Auriel said, grimacing, biting out the words.
“Too long a story to explain now,” Ryan said.
“Never thought I’d meet you face-to-face,” Auriel told him. “Never imagined that if it ever did happen it would be like this.” Then she whimpered, struggling to breathe, hanging on to the wall with a claw of a gauntleted hand. Her eyes were racked with incredible pain, but she shed no tears.
Seeing her so twisted up in agony sent a sympathetic pang shooting right through him. If he had any doubts that she was the flesh of his flesh, in that moment they were erased. “What’s wrong with you?” Ryan said. “Are you wounded?”
It took more than a minute for her to recover enough to answer him. “There’s one more reason I let you through the force field,” she said. “The things in the hall are inside of me. They’re about to burst out. After
they do, you will be trapped in here with them, and they will surely kill you, too.”
“I don’t understand,” Ryan said.
“The only way to keep them from bursting out is for you to kill me first. They will die along with me, and you’ll be safe behind the force field. You have to do this, Father, before they blow me apart. I watched my mother, Dredda, die that way. I don’t want to go like that.”
Ryan’s fingers tightened on the grip of his blaster, but he didn’t raise it from his side. It suddenly felt like it weighed ten thousand pounds. Shooting one’s own child, even a child who was a stranger, was like committing suicide.
“Then give me your gun,” Auriel said, holding out her hand to him, “and I’ll do it myself.”
Ryan didn’t move.
“You’ve seen what they will do to you,” Auriel said. “They’ll do the same thing to every living creature on your world. You’ve got to end this. End my suffering and save your own lives. Save your glorious Earth.”
And still he hesitated, her eyes pleading him to do the last thing he ever wanted to do. This was the beautiful, brave daughter he would never know.
An ear-splitting bang rocked the cell. Auriel’s head jerked back and the rear of her skull exploded, spraying brains and bone over the back of the cell. When her lifeless body hit the floor, it raised a cloud of fine ash.
“I didn’t think you were going to do it,” Ti said as she lowered the AK.