by James Axler
"You're right," the officer said, throwing off the restraining arms. She took a step back. "Why let these scum die so easily? Where is the justice in that?"
"No justice at all, Captain," the trooper agreed. "Bind them securely and throw them in the back of my wag."
The troopers pulled the companions' arms behind their backs and tied their thumbs together with thin plastic straps. Then they put larger straps on their legs, linking their captives together at the ankles, so if one ran, they all had to run; if one fell, they all fell. The troops shoved Ryan and the others through the rear cargo door of one of the big wags and made them sit on the floor, alongside the lashed down body bags and the pile of their captured weapons.
As the rear door closed, the soldiers took their places in the jump seats along the cargo bay walls.
There were no windows inside the vehicle. The only light source was the red glow of the instrument panel, which was well forward.
After strapping himself in, the trooper nearest to Ryan cleared his visor and said in a barely audible tone, "You really put your dick in it this time, Shadow Man."
His eyebrows were very dense and very blond. His skin was pale, and there was a tattooed teardrop at the outside corner of his right eye. Looking more closely, Ryan saw that the tear was actually made up of three tiny blue letters. PCS. Population Control Service. Ryan had seen the handiwork of the PCS in the other reality: vast, sealed, underground galleries choked with heaps of human skeletons. Too many bones to count.
"Captain Kira was the first officer to die on this mission," the trooper continued in a whisper. "The other two grunts don't count. They were good soldiers, but they were just regular men. Regular men like us are expendable. We can be replaced by Deathlanders, if need be. You never know, Shadow Man, maybe you'll be wearing my battlesuit someday."
Ryan wondered, and not for the first time, why the trooper was confiding in him. There had to be some personal risk involved. "Your officers are all women?" he said.
"No. Not women like your two friends, there. Not good for screwing or making babies. Like I told you, they're she-hes."
Ryan grimaced, not understanding.
"Genetically modified human beings," the trooper went on. "They aren't female, and they aren't male, either. They're a third gender created by the white-coats specifically for this mission."
Mildred leaned forward. "Made from scratch, you mean? Cloned in a test tube?"
"No, these beauties started out just like you, honey."
The trooper stiffened as the front doors of the wag rose and the driver and captain climbed in. His visor immediately fogged over and he said no more. Like his seven comrades, he sat like a statue in his shock-mounted jump seat.
"It would appear our new friend has a bone to pick with his superiors," Doc said.
"Same old military song and dance, even in jolly Super Techno World," J.B. commented.
Ryan had his doubts about that, but he kept them to himself for the time being. From what the trooper had told them, the separation of officers and enlisted men in the invasion army was absolute and based on genetically engineered differences. The male troopers were ordered into combat by creatures unlike them or anyone else they had ever known. Creatures who, it seemed, could both outfight and out think them. All the talkative trooper knew about his future was that when he was chilled, someone else would inherit his battlesuit. Because of this, Ryan couldn't view the trooper's remarks as the typical grousing and backbiting of the lower ranks. Since when did well-trained, battle-hardened soldiers relate better to prisoners of war than to their own officers?
Once the wag got under way, the reason for the shock-mounted jump seats and cross-chest safety harnesses became painfully apparent. As the vehicle picked up speed, its yawing, pitching motion increased. Ryan and the others couldn't hang on to anything with their arms pinned behind their backs. As a result, they took a pounding on the cargo deck, bumping into one another, as well as the plastisteel floor.
No way could Ryan estimate their speed over ground. But from the vibration and G-force he felt, he knew he was traveling faster than he ever had before.
After what seemed like about fifteen minutes, the wag slowed to a stop. Their bodies numbed by repeated impacts, the companions found it difficult to stand when they were prodded from the deck by the troopers. The rear door opened and they staggered in a teetering file out into daylight.
J.B. scowled at the panoramic expanse of metamorphic nukewaste before them. "Slake City," he spit.
"Behold, the cloaca of the universe," Doc added.
Ryan took in the rest of their surroundings. The old man was right about the nukeglass massif. It was a cosmic butthole. But by Deathlands standards, the otherworlders' encampment clustered beside it was nothing short of magical. Everything was new and shiny. Nothing was cobbled together with rags and sticks and baling wire. There were towering black tractors and semitrailers, as well as other assorted all-terrain wags, and a fleet of attack gyroplanes. The living and storage quarters consisted of maybe twenty black domed structures, connected by sleek tubular walkways. Ryan's rough count of the battlesuited troopers was around one hundred. He also noted the tall stacks of fifty-five-gallon steel drums, every one of which had Baron Jolt's name stenciled on the side.
One of the troopers cut the straps on their ankles and thumbs while two others moved the body bags from the wag's cargo bay to the ground outside. The four remaining troopers held the freed companions at blasterpoint.
"Pick up the corpses," the captain ordered Ryan. "You killed them, you carry them."
One of the troopers poked him hard in the side with his pulse rifle's flash-hider. "Get a move on," he said. "And keep going straight ahead until the captain tells you to stop."
J.B. and Ryan hoisted one of the black plastic bags by the sewn-in handles at either end, and started walking in the direction the trooper had indicated. The other companions did the same.
They were force-marched with their burdens past a chumed-up area of dirt. In one corner of the rectangle, four troopers sprayed carniphage foam from their back tanks onto an already heaping mound of the stuff. Brown goo spread out in a shallow pool beneath the creamy bubbles.
As chewed up as the ground was, it was impossible to miss the litter of severed hands and feet, or the fact that they all had suckers on the palms, fingers and soles. One trooper kicked these grisly relics into a pile for foaming, while another made a neat stack of dull silver bracelets.
"Stickies," Jak said as they passed by. "Lots stickies."
Ryan grunted in agreement.
Stickies were a race of degenerate, crazed chillers with incredible strength. They used the suckers and the adhesive secretions in their hands and feet, and their rows of needle teeth to rip their victims apart. Some people believed they were accidental nuke-spawned mutations; others claimed they had been bred on purpose for hunting sport or sideshows. Regardless of their origin, stickies had first appeared in scattered wild bands decades after skydark. It was hard for Ryan to imagine how so many of them had been caught at once, unless the troopers had interrupted one of their breeding orgies.
When they were within fifty feet of the largest of the black domes, the companions were ordered to stop. "Put down the bodies there," the captain said. "Sit beside them. Do not move." The officer then walked across the compound and entered the dome through a bulkhead door.
As Ryan and the others sat there, waiting for they knew not what, a huge truck appeared over the rise in the thermoglass and rumbled down the road toward them. Its cargo box was heaped to overflowing with tons of gray-green glass. Before the loaded wag reached the encampment, another identical truck departed, its cargo box empty. On the road in front of the second wag were perhaps a dozen spindly humanoid figures, forced to walk ahead of the massive bumper.
Some of the stickies had survived the foam yard.
"I sure don't like the looks of that," Krysty said as they watched the stickies march up the slight gra
de. "There's nothing in that direction but a bastard slow death."
Meanwhile, the loaded truck pulled up beside a tractorless semitrailer and dumped its cargo of glass into a big hopper at one end.
"It's some kind of industrial operation," Mildred said. "Though what they could want with chunks of Slake City, I can't imagine. The invaders must be hard up if they're trying to use stickies as slaves."
"Hard up or just plain dim," J.B. said. "Everybody knows you can't train stickies to do anything. Their instinct gets in the way. All they want to do is eat, fuck and chill."
The bulkhead door in the big dome swung inward, and ten black armored troopers rushed out on a dead run.
"Uh-oh," Dean said.
Ryan leaned close and said, "Our hands and legs are free. Stay focused, son."
Standing between the ten running battlesuits and the body bags were several troopers who were guarding the seated captives. The guards' counterparts bore down on them so quickly they didn't have time to get out of the way. Instead of going around the immobile grunts, the newcomers shoved. And when they shoved, the troopers' battlesuits offered them no protection. The guards' boot soles left the ground and they flew aside, crashing to earth with arms and legs spread wide. The troopers who had narrowly missed being bowled over backed warily away.
The ten newcomers paid no attention to the men they had knocked senseless. They surrounded the body bag with the she-he in it. Dropping to their knees in the dirt, they removed their gauntlets and their helmets. From their speed and strength Ryan already suspected that they were she-hes; seeing their heads confirmed it. They had the same rugged bone structure, the same nearly shaved skulls as the dead thing in the bag.
The bag's zipper was drawn down to reveal the devastated face.
Tenderly, they slipped off the dead one's gauntlets. Then each put a cheek to the already cold fingers.
Ryan could see the tears streaming down their faces, but the only sound was the low grinding noise coming from the semitrailer's hopper. The other, presumably male troopers were giving the she-hes plenty of room to express their grief.
After a few minutes, the officers rose to their feet and turned to confront the captives. At a silent signal, troopers seized Ryan by the arms and dragged him away from the others. He was thrown facedown in the dirt before ten pairs of gleaming black boots.
"I remember you, Ryan Cawdor," said the figure looming over him. "Do you remember me? Dredda Otis Trask?"
Ryan squinted up at a face he vaguely recalled. "You were one of the CEOs of FIVE," he said. "I saw you on a vid screen. You and the others asked me questions about Deathlands."
"Disaster seems to follow wherever you go, Shadow Man. The loss of our dear sister Kira is impossible to measure. She was a resource that can never be replaced. My other sisters want to beat you to death, here and now. But I am in charge. And I have to look past the simple and the pleasurable answers. My responsibility is to our future." She gestured to the troopers. "Bring him inside. Manacle the others."
Ryan was jerked to his feet and hauled across the compound toward the big dome. He didn't struggle as the troopers pushed him through the bulkhead door, which opened onto an anteroom intersected by numerous tubular corridors. The light source was a strip of material that ran like a spinal cord along the top of the hallways. He was marched a short distance, then left alone in a room with the former CEO.
The chamber was dark gray in color. The only decoration was the light strip across the ceiling. The Spartan furnishings consisted of a cot, a rack for a battlesuit, a tier of electronic machinery and a tall silver tank with a locking wheel on the lid.
Dredda set her helmet and gauntlets on the cot.
Seeing the former CEO up close from behind, Ryan was amazed at the breadth of the base of her neck. It formed a wide triangle of muscle that tapered only slightly as it climbed the back of her skull.
"You were never offered the opportunity to join us before," Dredda said as she turned. "I see now that was a big mistake. You could be a very valuable asset. You have abilities and experiences that our own males lack. You could teach us much about your world. And in return we could make you one of its rulers."
Ryan said nothing.
"Doesn't that prospect interest you?"
"I never thought of myself as the ruler of anything but Ryan Cawdor. Always seemed a big enough challenge for me."
"Perhaps I should have explained the alternative first. If you don't cooperate, you and your companions will be marched to Slake City's ground zero, and there perform hard labor until you die."
"What do I have to do to avoid that?"
"Use your knowledge of the people and terrain to help us organize our attack plans. We would prefer to subdue the local populations and consolidate our gains as quickly possible. Once that is done, we will need to replace the existing barony system with something more efficient. When Deathlands is under our control, we will move to the other continents of this world and conquer them in the same manner."
"Seems like a mighty tall order for a hundred or so troops."
"You can help us there, as well," Dredda said. She walked over to the tall canister and put her hand on it. "Inside this canister are my extracted eggs and the eggs of all my sisters. They await fertilization by a suitable male donor. By implanting the fertilized eggs into host mothers, we will reproduce our kind. In a single generation, we can produce thousands of female offspring who, after a chemically accelerated maturation process, will undergo the same genetic transformation we did."
"You want me to fertilize all your eggs?"
"It's not that daunting a task, I assure you. We can store sperm for decades, just as we can store our eggs."
"And the host mothers, where would you get them?"
"From the general population of Deathlands. The two females in your group would make prime surrogates. If they submitted to the procedure, it would save them from Ground Zero. Which one are you sleeping with, by the way? My guess is the red-haired one. Or are you servicing them both, Shadow Man?"
He didn't dignify the question with a response. "What about the males who are with me?" he said.
Dredda shrugged. "Their only use to us is in the mines."
"If I do what you ask," Ryan said, "it'll only make more mutie freaks like you. Frankly, I'd rather chill you all, or die trying."
"Maybe a few days in the mines will change your mind," Dredda said. "Unlike the bumbling idiots who held you on my world, I do not make mistakes. I leave no escape holes. You will cooperate with us, or you and your friends will die."
While Dredda put on helmet and gauntlets, Ryan considered making his move. The opportunity for a one-on-one fight was there, all right, and he had the advantage of being able to launch a surprise attack from behind, but he knew the troopers outside the room would join the action as soon as they heard the sound of a scuffle. After his experience with the she-he Kira, he was pretty sure he couldn't drop Dredda with a single punch or kick. And there were no weapons in the room to help him out. In the end, he decided the situation wasn't right and he didn't have the right tools for the job. Swallowing his fury, he let the former CEO shove him back out the door.
"Manacle this one, too," Dredda told the troopers waiting in the corridor. "Send them all to Ground Zero in the next convoy."
Seconds later, Ryan found himself sitting on the dirt with his companions, his wrists and ankles circled with bands of plastisteel. He shook the wrist cuffs. "What the blazes are these things?"
"They're what chopped off the hands and feet of the uncooperative stickies," Mildred told him. "There's a laser built in. It's activated by remote control."
"Whitecoat guillotines," Doc said. "If you go beyond a preset distance limit, you lose your extremities. The surgery is bloodless, but not painless you can be sure."
"What did the head she-he want from you?" Krysty asked Ryan.
"She wanted me to join them. To act as a guide and strategy maker. And she wanted me to be the father
of all their babies."
The redhead's eyes flashed. "She wanted you to fuck them all?"
Ryan almost laughed, despite himself. "No, it was nothing that personal, lover. Dredda Otis Trask wanted to collect my sperm to fertilize their extracted eggs. Seems to believe I have some kind of special genetic qualities they need in their she-he offspring. Makes me think the ex-CEO has swallowed her own line of Shadow Man advertising bullshit. She wanted you and Mildred to carry some of the babies."
"Forced motherhood?" Mildred asked.
"It's either that or die," Ryan said.
"Die," Krysty said without hesitation.
Mildred nodded. "Die is good."
"They're gonna send us to the same place they sent those bastard stickies, aren't they?" J.B. said, pushing his glasses up the bridge of his nose with a callused thumb.
"Yeah, old friend," Ryan replied, "that's where they re going to send us."
Chapter Nine
The companions had been sitting in the sun for more than an hour, listening to the moaning, crackling sounds of the nukeglass, when the ground began to shake under them. The first tremor was short and sweet, no more than a second or two, and it was followed by a long pause. Then came a fifteen-second skull-rattling quake that sent the guards to their knees, raised clouds of beige dust and turned the domes and the wags into black blurs. As the quake growled on and on, the earth beneath them became plastic, if not liquid. Ryan and the others were lifted, twisted and dropped by the waves passing through it.
Somewhere deep in the bowels of the earth a great switch flicked off, and the shaking was over as suddenly as it had begun. The guards stood, brushed off their weapons and life in the Slake City encampment resumed as if nothing unusual had happened.
"Whew!" Dean said. "That was some ride."
The moaning sounds had turned into a low roar, punctuated by sporadic, dull crashes as distant, damaged sections of the vast glacier collapsed under their own weight.