by James Axler
He dashed madly for it.
"Look out!" someone shouted from behind.
Jak veered away from the tunnel wall just as a thin green beam squealed past him. Trigger pinned, the trooper swung the laser rifle back, trying to slice him in two.
Jak threw himself down and rolled.
Chapter Nineteen
Dredda unbuckled her torso armor and pulled her sleeveless T-shirt over her head. "How is it?" she asked Mero.
"A lot worse," Mero said. "See for yourself."
Dredda looked in the hand mirror her sister changeling held up. The small patch of red had spread from her shoulder to the middle of her back and down her arm. It oozed clear, sticky fluid like a second-degree burn. Even more disturbing, the infection was starting to impact movement and nerve function on the right side of her body.
Mero put down the mirror and picked up a tube of topical lotion. She carefully applied it to the irritated area.
"That stuff doesn't seem to be doing any good, does it?" Dredda said.
"It isn't helping mine, either," Mero replied. "It just keeps spreading and spreading."
There was a knock at the bulkhead door.
"Yes?" Dredda said.
Huth opened the door and stuck his head in. He had shaved his face and his head. He was dressed in clean gray fatigues. His gaze immediately dropped to take in the small, hard-nippled breasts that Dredda didn't bother to conceal.
"What is it?" Dredda demanded of him impatiently. "What do you have for me?"
"I have some preliminary results," Huth said as he slipped into the room. "I repeat, they are preliminary, but I think we can draw some reliable conclusions from them."
When his focus again dropped to her chest, she angrily grabbed her T-shirt and pulled it on. Men, she thought. Hardwired stupidity was standard equipment.
"Let's have it," she said.
"The organism that is causing the problem is everywhere," Huth said.
"Everywhere?"
"Correction. It's everywhere I've been able to examine in the last five hours. I've found it inside and outside the domes. It's inside the wags and gyros. It's in all of the battlesuits. It's in the soil surrounding the compound."
"Do you have a treatment for it that works? The ointment Jann gave us does nothing."
Huth reached in his pocket and took out a white plastic tube. "This formulation will heal your irritations. It won't solve the problem, however."
"Explain."
"This organism will adapt to the formulation," he said. "That is guaranteed. In days, in perhaps hours, it will produce offspring that are immune."
"So, find another formula."
Huth shook his head. "Ultimately, that route leads to total disaster. If we attempt to keep one-upping this organism, in the end all we will succeed in doing is selectively breeding a generation that cannot be stopped by any means at our disposal."
"There is nothing we can do?"
"As I said, there are temporary measures."
"How widespread is the infection now?"
"Almost everyone has it. The transgenic females and the male troopers. The Deathlanders do not seem to be affected, however."
"Because the organism is native to this planet?" Huth frowned. "Evidence on the organism's origin is uncertain. It is difficult to tell whether it is a native species or whether it has spread locally since your arrival."
"You mean we brought it with us? I thought it was unlike anything on our world."
"That's true, but it doesn't eliminate the possibility that it changed, either in transit or after it came here. There is also the possibility that your treatments made you susceptible to a species native to Deathlands."
"But the male troopers didn't have the procedure."
"If the engineered virus wasn't completely burned out of your systems, it's possible that you infected the troopers or the organism, or both. Genes could have been inadvertently transferred."
Dredda recalled her haste to get out of Level Four quarantine, warnings of whitecoats unheeded.
"At present this organism is only attacking the surface layer of skin," Huth went on. "But as the colonies grow on infected individuals, they will begin to penetrate deeper. If they get past the muscle and into the body cavity and internal organs, death is the only foreseeable outcome."
"We did not go through hell to be defeated by something as small and insignificant as this," she told him. "Can't we sterilize the environment?"
"We can clean the battlesuits and the interiors of the domes and wags, but we can't keep the organisms out because they are already too well established locally."
Dredda paused for a second, then said, "What about you? Have you got it, too?"
"That's a critical point," he said. "Currently, I am infection free. And I've been here much longer than you. That adds support to the idea that it was transported here with your forces. Or that your susceptibility and that of the male troopers is the result of the transgenic treatments."
Dredda shook her head in disbelief. "You don't have it," she said. "Everybody else has it, but you don't."
"You do understand the implications, I hope."
"What do you mean?"
"If you brought the organism along with you," Huth said, "you may well have left it behind. Given the thing's generation time, the changes probably occurred before you made your exit. The same thing that's happening here could be happening on our Earth."
Dredda's eyes opened wide. "You mean, this thing could conceivably wipe out all of humanity on our world?"
"Based on my preliminary calculations, it could have already done so."
"We solved the population problem by accident?"
He nodded.
"Too bad there's nothing there to return to," Dredda said. "A dead world full of dead people."
"I think you have to face an unpleasant choice," he said.
"And that is?"
"Having to leave this planet."
"Leave the planet? Why not just leave the area? Go to the other side of this continent? Or go to another continent?"
"Like sterilization, that is a short-term solution. This organism and its spores spread on the wind, and on other hosts who can tolerate it. Like the Deathlanders. Or the native insects. Or birds. Or wild animals. There is no end to it."
"You're saying in a month of contact we've already infected the whole damned planet?"
"No, I'm saying that in time, eventually the whole planet will be infected. There's no way to stop it. The longer you delay leaving this reality, the bigger the risk that you won't ever be able to leave it. Let me stress that death by this means will not be quick or pleasant. As the organism devours skin and flesh, there will be secondary infections of the open wounds by bacteria."
"Can't you do anything about this?" Dredda yelled at him. "Give me one reason, Dr. Genius, why I shouldn't send you back to the mines?"
"I have done something," he protested. "I have given you the information you need to survive. I have bought you a few hours with the new ointment. We can confine and successfully treat the problem prior to jumping from this reality, and eliminate it afterward. That's the best I can do under the circumstances, I'm afraid."
"A few hours?" Dredda said.
"At best."
It was all finally beginning to sink in.
"But there isn't enough energy on hand to move the entire operation! We'd have to abandon most of our equipment because we couldn't maintain the corridor long enough to get it all through. There'd be no time to send drones through first, to lay the groundwork. We'd be at the mercy of whatever reality we happened to jump to."
"The battlesuits can withstand antagonistic environments."
"Only as long as their fuel lasts."
Huth seemed alarmed at her increasing level of agitation. He glanced nervously back at the door, measuring the distance if he had to make a run for it. "Believe me, it's not as dire as it seems," he said, "if you understand the nature and depth of the parallels bet
ween realities. The conformities from one universe to the next are very close or we couldn't travel between them. The corridor wouldn't hold up. Interdimensional vibration would tear it apart. The bottom line here is, no matter where you jump using this technology, you can expect to find an oxygen atmosphere, a single sun and a class M planet of the same relative age. The details of each environment may be very different, but the general features have to be the same."
"I need a time frame," Dredda said. "How long do we have before we have to leave?"
"There is no margin for safety. And this is just an educated guess, but based on the organism's generation time, I'd say six hours, tops."
Dredda refused to sag under the weight of that terrible news.
"Mero," she said, "we have to have hard numbers on the nuke fuel we currently have on hand, and a solid estimate on how much more we can extract from Ground Zero and process in the next six hours. We need fuel to power the jump, and we need fuel to use after the jump. The amount of fuel is going to determine who and what goes with us."
"I'll get right on it," Mero said, heading for the door.
"Before you do that," Dredda said, "send the word to the troopers at the mines. There is no tomorrow. Work the slaves until they drop dead. I am authorizing the execution of slackers, at their discretion. I want every ounce of ore they can wring out of them."
Chapter Twenty
Ryan saw Jak burst out of the gloom at the end of the tunnel. The mutie albino was sprinting for all he was worth. A second later, the reason became clear. Behind Jak, at the edge of the range of the klieg lights, a trooper skidded to a stop. As he raised his pulse rifle and fired, someone deeper in the shaft let out a shout.
Jak managed to twist away from the green beam.
It didn't wink out, but like a 150-foot-long saber slashed across the width of the tunnel at belly height.
Before it could touch him, Jak dived for the floor. As it swept over his head, he rolled and came up on the balls of his feet; he came up running. The laser shot swung wide, and as the beam grazed the side of the far wall, it gouged a long, dripping channel in the glass.
As fast as and as agile as Jak was, it wasn't the kind of game he could keep on winning.
Clad in the stolen battlesuit, Ryan moved away from the interior wall, waving his arms at the kneeling trooper. He had no EM protection because the suit was out of fuel. If the guy saw through the disguise, he was a goner.
The trooper stopping firing.
Ryan grabbed Jak by the shoulder as he rushed past, using the lighter man's speed to twist him around and down. As the trooper trotted toward him, Ryan absorbed a flurry of punches and kicks from the albino. The battlesuit soaked up most, but not all of the impacts. Especially the kicks. They made Ryan feel like a pebble being shaken inside a tin can.
"It's me, dammit!" he growled, pinning Jak to the floor with a knee in the small of his back. The effort of the struggle was making him puff, which in turn was making his visor fog up. He needed more airholes.
"You're not online," the trooper said as he stepped up to Ryan. His amplified voice boomed in the tunnel. "Something's wrong with your battlesuit. A malfunction in the com link."
Ryan pointed a gauntleted thumb at his crotch.
"You're out of fuel?" the trooper said.
Ryan didn't have to gesture an affirmative. J.B., Dean, Doc and Mildred rushed around the fork of the tunnel and gang-tackled the trooper, knocking him off his feet and crashing him helmet first against the wall. Before he could recover, they had hold of his arms and legs and were dragging him to the floor. Once he was facedown, they sat on him to make sure he stayed that way.
The draining of the battlesuit's fuel went even more smoothly the second time. J.B. jammed the bone blade under the armor plate and gave a savage twist. As the fuel gushed out onto the floor, Mildred unlocked the helmet and she and Doc screwed it off.
Fresh air and the reek of nuke fuel brought the trooper to his senses. He started to struggle. His cries for help echoed down the shaft.
Such cries were routine.
And they were never answered by guards.
Taking a measured swing, Doc rapped the man on the side of the head with the flat end of his ax.
The yelling and the struggling stopped.
"Come on, let's get this guy out of his armor," Ryan said, helping Jak to his feet.
They dragged the limp trooper across the floor, out of the puddle of nuke fuel, and began unbuckling his battlesuit.
"Looks like a pretty good fit for J.B.," Mildred said, holding up the front torso section.
Other slaves passing by stopped to stare at what was going on. Some of them were smiling, while others looked concerned. And with reason. There could always be mass reprisals for acts of rebellion.
The companions again used strips of the trooper's underclothes to tie and gag him.
"He's got the rash, too," Dean said. "It's all over his legs."
"Nasty looking," J.B. commented.
"See all the little pustules," Mildred said. "He's got a staph infection working."
"Perhaps the hygiene of our otherworld opponents leaves something to be desired," Doc said.
"The staph is secondary," Mildred stated. "Opportunistic. It moved into the lesions that were already there."
"What are you going to do with him?" said one of the slaves standing around. He pointed at the trooper, who was once again wide awake, but now unable to move, and naked.
"Why?" Ryan said.
The slave glanced at the gaunt, grim-faced men beside him. "We've got something we want to show that guard. Mebbe we could borrow him for a little while?"
The trooper looked plenty scared. His mouth moved behind the gag, but no words came out.
"You can take him," Ryan told the men, "but whatever you do, don't let him get loose."
"Nah, we won't even untie him," the slave said. "You don't have to worry about that."
A couple of the slaves pushed over an empty cart and then four of them lifted the bound trooper inside. A crowd of eight or nine then shoved the sledge toward the gloom at the end of the tunnel. An equal number of slaves stayed behind, unwilling to participate in whatever demonstration the others had in mind.
"Guess that bastard is going to get what's coming to him," J.B. said.
Ryan handed the guard's laser rifle to Jak. Then he took off his helmet and used an ax point to punch out more ventilation holes. When this was done, he addressed the companions and the remaining crowd. "We're going to need a distraction up top," he said. "A major distraction. But you've got to wait until J.B. and I get close to the ore truck." Ryan looked at Mildred and Jak and said, "Don't use the pulse rifles up there, not yet. Stay inside the mine entrance and keep the weapons in reserve. The invaders might shut down the road if they see that we've armed ourselves. We can't let them do that before J.B. and I reach the camp and disable the manacles. If we're going to win this fight, we all need to be free to move."
"How are we going to know when the cuffs are turned off?" Mildred asked him.
"Chances are we aren't going to be able to signal you," Ryan said. "You're just going to have to figure it out by yourselves."
"We could always employ some of our less fortunate brethren," Doc suggested. "After all, what is a hand or a foot more or less to a dead man?"
"Plenty of recruits for that duty," J.B. said.
Jak took hold of Ryan's arm and pulled him aside. "See?" he said, indicating the foot-deep hollow the laser beam had cut in the wall and the puddle of glass drippings on the floor beneath it.
"Yeah. The melting temperature of the glass must be relatively low. It could work to our advantage against the guards."
"Indirect fire with the tribarrels?" Mildred asked.
"You got it. Don't waste your shots on the battle-suits. Their EM shields will protect them. Make the landscape work for you. After we leave, once you and Jak get started out here, the troopers are going to call for help. You can expect enemy r
einforcements from Slake City."
"Road and air," Jak said.
"Afraid so. You've got to capture as many weapons as possible before that happens. Arm yourselves and the other slaves."
"Understood," Mildred said.
"Also," Jak said, bending down and picking up a baseball-sized hunk of glass. He tossed it up and caught it with the same hand. "Nonmetallic. Not bounce off EM shield."
He turned to the group of slaves and said, "Throw at battlesuits, not use axes."
"J.B. makes a striking trooper, doesn't he?" Mildred said.
The Armorer stood there, in full body armor, but still wearing his sweat-stained fedora.
Under his arm, Doc held the matching helmet, which he had already pounded holes through. From behind it looked like a monstrous cheese grater. "I know how attached you are to that well-seasoned headdress, John Barrymore," the old man said, "but it will never fit inside this bubble."
"My lucky hat."
"We know, we know," Ryan said. "Let Dean borrow it for the time being."
Reluctantly, J.B. removed it. The pressure of the sweat band had plastered his hair to his skull in a visible ring. "Take good care of it, boy," he said. "I'm going to be wanting it back in the same condition it was lent."
Dean accepted the fedora. It was too big for him. As he mashed it down on his head, Dix-style, it flattened the tops of his ears.
"Spitting image," Mildred said.
"Gimme the frigging helmet," J.B. growled.
"Your new lucky hat," Doc said, presenting it with a bow and a flourish.
Once the Armorer's helmet was screwed down, he and Ryan started for the mine entrance. Some of the milling slaves ran ahead of them, but most lagged behind, as if their deactivated armor still had some protective capability.
By the time they reached the top of the mine entrance's slope, the insides of their visors were fogged with the heat of their exertion. The condensation limited their vision, but it couldn't be wiped away without taking off the helmets, which wasn't an option. They stepped out into the bright glare of day.
Ground Zero's routine had resumed after last night's disturbances. A dozen guards stood around the klieg-light perimeter. Two troopers checked the loaded carts as they lined up by the ore wags. Another trooper supervised the loading of ore by hand. One guard manned the water tank, making sure the slaves got only one eight ounce cup for their toil.