by James Axler
How that singular horror had come to pass, he had no way of knowing, but certainly the goal of firing the missile back through the corridor had been to destroy the connection between parallel worlds. Given the fuel capacity of the missile, and the fuel's volatility, there was every reason to expect the strategy had worked.
Huth had a much less distinct recollection of being sucked through the reality portal in the backwash from the rocket's exhaust, like a dry leaf caught in a whirlwind. That memory was jumbled with a nightmare of horrible punishment and death. Thinking about it made his mind wheel violently, so he forced himself to stop and pushed up on an elbow.
He was surrounded by an open space that stretched unbroken to the horizon in all directions. The sudden absence of physical boundaries, of human-scale walls and ceilings, filled him with heart-pounding panic, but he resisted the urge to bury his head under his arms.
Above him, the dome of the cloudless sky was still tinged with the rose-pink of dawn. The sparkling air felt strangely light in his lungs, and so dry it tickled inside his nostrils. He sat near the edge of a broad, flat table of rock the color of dried blood, elevated above the surrounding plain by several hundred feet.
The mobile missile gantry was nowhere in sight. Also missing were the five explorers who had preceded him through the passage. If this was Deathlands, and he had no reason to doubt that it wasn't, he had been deposited in a different spot, perhaps near the original landing site, perhaps not. Huth could only surmise that either the missile's full-power reentry into the passage or its subsequent explosion at the heart of the Totality Concept complex had distorted the shape of the reality corridor, shifting its terminus at this end.
Huth rose stiffly to his feet and took stock of himself. The left sleeve of his lab coat was fire-blackened from cuff to elbow, but he wasn't bleeding anywhere and he had no apparent broken bones. He patted his pocket and was relieved to find the instruments he'd slipped into it moments before the disaster. Both the microcomputer, which was the size of a playing card, and an equally small electron microscope seemed to have made the journey intact. The other scientific tool he'd brought along he carried locked away in his brain, and that was the Twenty-five Theories, which linked all human knowledge. With just these three artifacts, he was confident that he could reconstruct most of the advanced technology of his Earth.
Though the timing of the crossing had been accidental, Huth had been on the verge of departing his reality, with or without FIVE'S approval. The most recent computer projections gave nine-to-one odds that the predicted mass die-off of humanity would occur within the next three months. Based on past experience with the CEOs, he couldn't be one hundred percent certain that they would let him use his own invention to escape. That decision had been taken out of FIVE'S hands, and thanks to what he carried in his pocket and brain, Huth was in a position to become the most powerful man in the history of either Earth— as he saw it, a combination of Leonardo da Vinci, John D. Rockefeller and Joseph Stalin.
Huth stepped to the edge of the deeply rilled, red rock mesa. There were more mesas in the distance on the other side of a wide desert plain, and far behind those table rocks loomed a range of snowcapped mountains. Bisecting the plain were remnants of a prenukecaust highway, a ribbon-straight ghost of four-lane interstate. Lying across the old highway at odd intervals were great, tilted slabs—the fractured remains of fallen overpasses. At the horizon line to the northwest, the sun glared off something shiny. A body of water, perhaps. If the passageway's terminus hadn't shifted very far, it occurred to him that it might even be the remains of the Great Salt Lake.
As he continued to scan the landscape below, Huth saw white smoke rising in a thin column in the dead still air, indicating a human presence, if not a settlement of some sort, not more than ten miles away.
The scientist let out a whoop and celebrated his good fortune by dancing an ungainly jig. Then he carefully boulder hopped down a steep chute that led to the foot of the mesa, and once there, immediately headed across me plain for the ancient roadway.
Up close there wasn't much left of it.
Caustic rains had reduced the asphalt to sand, and had badly pocked the concrete layer beneath. Small, delicate white flowers with bright yellow centers grew here and there along the edge of the highway, sprouting from depressions where water and nutrients accumulated.
Huth picked one of the little daisies and gingerly nibbled at the white petals. Their explosive bitterness made him gasp. He spit them out with a curse, then groaned as the vile taste set him to dry-heaving again.
Pale and shaken, he trudged on toward the distant smoke plume. The only sounds were the scrape of his shoe soles on the asphalt sand and the wheeze of his breathing. The day's building heat made sweat ooze from his forehead. In the flat, shimmering distance lay the first of the dropped overpasses; he made slow but steady progress toward the jumble of concrete slabs.
When Huth first caught wind of the rank, feral odor, he didn't know what to make of it, except that it wasn't coming from him. As he continued walking, the smell got worse. Much worse. Only when the pack of robbers started popping up on either side of the ruined road did he understand the meaning of the noxious stench, and by then it was too late to run.
The dirt-caked, tangle-bearded bandits had been lying in wait in shallow hides they'd hacked into the desert hardpan. Their clothes consisted of countless layers of greasy rags; their boots were repaired with overlapping windings of strips cut from plastic bags. They carried battered black-powder shotguns and revolvers, rusting machetes and nail-studded wooden clubs.
As the robbers encircled him and closed in, the huge man who appeared to be the leader confronted him, toe to toe. He bore spiral-shaped brands on his cheeks and forehead. The angry welts of scar tissue looked like the tracks of some parasitic worm burrowing just under the skin. Below a mustache matted with dried saliva, Huth saw the snaggle stumps of yellow-brown teeth. The tip of the man's wide nose bore a sparse tuft of black bristle, half an inch long.
"Good morning to you," the scientist said, trying not to show his terror, and failing miserably. "I just arrived here from—"
Without warning, someone booted Huth in the buttocks so hard that his feet left the ground, so hard that his legs went numb and his knees buckled under him when he crash-landed. The bristle-nosed robber reached down and grabbed him by the collar, hauled him upright, then punched him straight in the face, breaking his nose and knocking him unconscious.
Hum came to with a moan as the big man kicked him in the ribs.
"What are these?" Bristle-nose demanded, holding a pair of small, flat objects in front of the scientist's bloodied face.
"No, please," Huth gasped, "those are my scientific instruments. Give them back. You can't operate them. They are of absolutely no use to you."
"He's bossin' me," Bristle-nose said to the others as he cocked back his massive fist. "This dimmie bastard's bossin' me…"
Huth saw another short, straight punch coming at him, but there was nothing he could do about it. At the impact, as his head snapped back, something cracked. A lance of white-hot pain shot through his upper jaw, and his mouth was suddenly littered with sharp shards. In a gob of fresh blood, he spit out the remains of his two upper front teeth.
While Huth thrashed and bled, Bristle-nose showed off his booty. "Looks like predark gear to me," he said. "Got to be worth a spoon or two of jolt over in Byrani ville."
With that, the big robber turned and started off in the direction of the smoke. The other bandits quickly stripped off the unprotesting scientist's shoes and pants, leaving their victim his blood-sprayed and scorched lab coat and his tattered, gray-tinged underwear and socks.
Huth waited a long time before he risked uncoiling from a fetal position in the dirt. And he didn't start walking again until the sun was high overhead. Hobbling slowly toward the shade of the nearest fallen highway overpass, he looked like the survivor of a train wreck. Blood had dried purple black all down t
he front of his lab coat. He couldn't breathe through his swollen nose, and every time he sucked air through his mouth, electric needles of pain stabbed into the exposed nerves of his emptied tooth sockets.
As he stumbled along, he wept over the loss of his irreplaceable instruments, his permanent disfigurement and the unspeakable cruelty of fate. He was still sobbing when he reached the collapsed overpass. What he saw there put his suffering—and his predicament—in a new perspective.
At the foot of the largest block of concrete sat a line of sun-bleached human skeletons. He counted fourteen of them, all identically posed, their backs leaning against the block, elbows resting on raised kneecaps. Some were adults, some were small children, some still had isolated patches of hair on their massively caved-in skulls. A couple of feet above the row of drop-jaw grins, someone had chiseled three tall, spindly words into the eroded concrete. Welkum Too Deflanz.
Chapter One
Fifteen days after a massive explosion destroyed the upper floors of the Totality Concept complex, Dredda Otis Trask stood naked and alone in a windowless stainless steel room. The small, unfurnished chamber had two doors, both heavily gasketed and airtight. A warm wetness trickled down the insides of her thighs. Not blood, but the remnants of a clear surgical lubricant, melted by her body heat. The CEO of Omnico, one of the most powerful people on the planet, had just had her womb stripped of all its eggs.
In itself, there was nothing unusual about the procedure. On her world, the invitro fertilized eggs of the executive class were routinely carried to term by surrogate mothers conscripted from the ranks of the white collars.
Nor was it strange that Dredda Otis Trask had chosen to have the extraction performed in the secure, private facilities of her own global conglomerate. But Omnico's CEO hadn't surrendered all her potential offspring to a test tube merely for the sake of convenience. Given the nature of the dangerous experimental treatment she was about to undertake, it was a necessary precaution.
Above Dredda's head on a wall bracket was a vid-cam, its op light glowing ruby red. A team of faceless, nameless strangers was observing her through the fish-eye lens.
"Please stand beneath the ceiling nozzles," said a voice through the vidcam's speaker.
When Dredda stepped over the center sloping floor's single drain, the shower spray commenced. The hot water that enveloped her was followed by foaming, pea-green jets of bactericide. After she had rinsed off the foam, vents along the base of the walls blasted her with heated air, drying her to the point of itchiness in a matter of seconds. As she raked her static-charged, auburn hair back behind her ears, an electronic lock snicked and the exit door popped outward a foot.
Through the tiny speaker, the voice said, "Please proceed to Level Three containment."
Dredda immediately moved into the well-lit, polished metal hallway, which was also windowless. She could have touched the ceiling with a raised hand, and the corridor was so narrow it wouldn't permit the full spread of her arms. The air hung heavy with a mist of disinfectant that stung the back of her throat. Auto tracking vidcams mounted at intervals along the ceiling followed her barefoot progress to the next chamber, which was even smaller.
The bioengineering facility's hazard containment system consisted of a series of concentric, hermetically sealed, metal enclosures. The more dangerous the biological materials, the smaller the enclosure in which they were stored. Level One's barrier, which took up an entire subfloor of the Omnico skyscraper, encompassed containment Levels Two through Four, Level Two encompassed Three and Four, and so on. Each of the interiors was reverse pressurized so that if a seal failure occurred, external air would rush in, keeping contaminants from escaping to the next level.
When she entered the tiny room, the airtight door closed behind her. Sheets of tempered glass covered the walls, ceiling and floor; behind the glass were banks of five-foot-long light tubes. Yet another automated surveillance camera stood watch over her.
"Please put on the goggles hanging on the hook in front of you," the voice told her.
After Dredda donned the red-lensed eye protectors, there was a loud thunk, and the surrounding lights all came on at once. The intense ultraviolet bombardment lasted fifteen minutes, during which she was directed by the voice to assume various awkward positions that allowed the germ killing radiation to reach otherwise hidden surfaces. When the bank of lights finally thunked off, she was told to pull on the pair of plastifoil slippers that waited for her by the exit door.
"You may now proceed to Level Four," the voice said.
The straight steel corridor leading to Level Four had a narrow, bunker-slit window along one wall. Through the three layers of thick glass, Dredda could see dozens of biotech workers in lemon-yellow hazard suits with oxygen canisters strapped to their backs. Because of the glare of the overhead lights off the hoods' visor plates, she couldn't see the workers' faces. And they seemed too preoccupied with their cluttered lab tables and banks of electronic machinery to notice her passing. The corridor ended in a circular bulkhead door, which stood slightly ajar.
The brightly lit Level Four operating suite was the tiniest of the nested defensive boxes—the most deadly and contagious microbial environment on the planet. The hollow steel cylinder was so narrow that the single bed it contained nearly spanned its diameter. On the walls opposite the sides and head of the bed were rows of triple-laminated glass portholes. Directly below the ob ports, from similar heavily gasketed circular openings, rubberized, liver-colored gauntlets hung down in pairs. Shelves packed with medical supplies and equipment ringed all but the foot of the bed.
At the sight of the cramped enclosure, Dredda experienced sudden difficulty in breathing. The observers noted her distress.
"Your anxiety is only natural," the voice said in a reassuring tone. "But it is best to continue without delay. Please climb onto the bed, and we will make you more comfortable as quickly as possible."
Dredda forced herself to crawl forward. The door automatically shut and sealed behind her. As she lay back on the bed, she saw movement through all of the portholes. Technicians in biohazard suits took up positions along the outside of the cylinder and proceeded to thrust their arms into the gauntlets, which allowed them to reach over the bed, more than halfway across her body. All those moving arms made the chamber seem even smaller. And no matter how hard she tried, she couldn't seem to fill more than the top third of her lungs.
To try to calm herself, the CEO focused on her own reflection in the curve of the ceiling. She strained to make out the details of her face, but the brushed metal turned her features into an unrecognizable blur—as if who and what she had been for her twenty-six years had already been erased.
Meanwhile, the pairs of gauntleted hands worked with practiced precision, strapping her down at the chest, waist and knees. Once she was tightly secured to the mattress, the anonymous fingers crawled over her, jabbing the needles for intravenous lines into her arms and inserting a catheter into her bladder. They applied a liquid adhesive to her skin and attached life-signs sensors and neuromuscular stimulators. Finally, gloved hands at the head of the chamber slipped an oxygen mask over her nose and mouth.
Dredda gulped at the hiss of oxygen, which was mixed with a quick-acting sedative gas. It also carried a massive dose of bioengineered virus. After that first deep breath, there was no question of going back. She gladly surrendered to the calm that settled over her.
You are a very brave girl.
Dredda felt hot blood rush to her face and neck. She recognized her father's voice. It hadn't come through the operating suite's intercom speaker; it didn't exist anywhere outside her mind. Regis Otis Trask, the former CEO of Omnico, had been dead for four years.
Whenever her father had said those words to her, and he'd had the opportunity to say them often, what he'd meant was that she was very brave for a girl. Brave considering that because of her sex, she possessed relatively limited physical and mental strength and endurance. Though she had long underst
ood the reasons for her father's patronizing attitude, that had never made it any less painful or infuriating.
Dredda's personal abilities and achievements had very little to do with the power she currently wielded over the lives of tens of billions of human beings. She had inherited her father's position at the top of the conglomerate's executive hierarchy, and she had an army of highly capable, highly motivated defenders dedicated to keeping her there. For as long as she could remember, everyone she encountered had looked past her, or through her, and had seen only her father's awesome legacy.
But Dredda was very much the daughter of Regis Otis Trask. She shared his thirst for conquest and empire, and the need to burn her name deep into the pages of history, desires she could never satisfy as caretaker of a bureaucratic monolith on a dying planet.
For months, preparations had been under way for her unannounced, permanent departure to Shadow World. In secret, Omnico's top scientists had duplicated the Totality Concept's reality-jumping technology, and had managed to vastly improve upon it. The transfer of soldiers and material only awaited the successful completion of her Level Four treatment, which for security reasons had been postponed until the last possible moment.
Dredda had committed herself to the irreversible genetic procedure shortly after the CEOs' joint interrogation of the prisoner from Shadow World. The man called Ryan Cawdor had described his Earth as a place of chaos, of perpetual bloody turmoil. Social control did exist, but only in confined areas called baronies, and it was maintained by brute power.
Male power.
To cross over to Shadow World unprepared for that fact would have meant the surrender of everything Dredda had, of everything she had ever dreamed of.
