Breakthrough

by James Axler

  "Your system had a fixed starting point in the Totality Concept tower, which made consecutive jumps impossible. If you wanted to go to a different reality from Deathlands, you had to return to our Earth, recalibrate the corridor to arrive at a new destination, then cross over. Every new destination required a step back to Earth. Now the entire generating system moves with us every time we jump. Which means we can go from this reality to another, and another, and another, without every returning to the starting point. The only limit to the number of consecutive jumps is access to power at the terminus."

  Huth stared at the glacier of nukeglass. Then it finally hit him. Power. That's why Dredda had come here. He could only blame physical hardship and a lack of calories for his failure to see it sooner—his mind wasn't working at its normal speed. "Reprocessing bacteria!" he exclaimed. "Of course, you're using reprocessing bacteria!"

  "That's what those units are for." She indicated a pair of six-wheeled trailers standing beside the thermoglass.

  At the ends of the huge boxes were hoppers, where the raw radioactive ore was dumped. They had chutes on their sides, so the rock dust byproducts of bacteria's digestion could be removed.

  Dredda didn't have to explain the technology to him. It was twenty-five years old, developed when his world had been forced to cannibalize the energy contained in its one hundred thousand warhead nuclear arsenal. Inside the black trailers, segregated colonies of bacteria performed a sequence of specific metabolizations on the inorganic material. The result, a concentrated, liquidized fuel, was then pumped through thick hoses into waiting, smaller tanker trucks.

  "There's an enormous supply of raw material out there," Dredda went on. "This world has hundreds of other nuked-out hot spots to exploit. The only limiting factor is having a labor force of sufficient size to extract it."

  Huth noted the lack of any shielding from the ore and the drippings of reprocessed nuclear fuel on the ground. The troopers were protected in battlesuits, but the seated Deathlanders weren't.

  "What about rad hazard?" he asked.

  "What about it?"

  "Your workers are exposed."

  "That's nothing compared to what they're going to soak up in the next few days. But you're going to see that firsthand."

  "I know the technology," he insisted desperately. "You know I know the technology. I can help you maximize your efforts."

  "How? You're nothing but a puffed-up bureaucrat."

  "That's not what your father thought."

  "You don't know what my father thought. He always said you were easy to manipulate because you were so vain. That's why he kept you on a leash all those years. Your techno skills are useless to me here. What I need is slaves."

  Huth couldn't help himself. The words leaped from his throat: "Do you know how many degrees I have?"

  "I'm sure they'll help you dig more ore," Dredda told him. "Now, it's time to start walking. I don't need to warn you about those manacles. Step off the road and you won't be stepping anywhere ever again."

  With that, she roughly pushed him toward the other captives, who rose from the ground en masse at a signal from their guards. The mob of Deathlanders immediately surrounded him.

  "So you're the one to thank for bringing these mutie bastards here?" somebody growled.

  The "thanks" that was dispensed was a blow over the right kidney that dropped Huth to his knees. As he gasped for air, the others began kicking and punching him, fighting one another to get in a good lick. Falling to his side, Huth rolled up in a ball and covered his head with his arms.

  The beating was quickly broken up by troopers, who used the butts of their laser rifles.

  "Start moving," Dredda ordered the lot of them. "You've got eight miles to cover before dark. Any stragglers will lose a hand. As you can imagine, it's very hard to make your ore quota with one hand. No quota, no water. Fall down en route and the ore wags will drive over you. There's only one way to stay alive, and that's to keep walking."

  The ore wags started up and began pushing the crowd toward the beginning of the road. A double row of pulse rifle armed troopers kept them packed together nice and tight. As the others moved ahead, Huth hung back intentionally. He brought up the rear of the long file of humanity, not wanting to turn his back on his fellow slaves.

  At the summit of the road's first low rise, a blare of familiar words and music made him turn and look over his shoulder. On the roof of the psychedelic bus stood Mike the Drunkard and his three lewd friends. The big man waved goodbye with his prosthetic hand, and the sluts blew extravagant kisses.

  Chapter Eight

  An instant before the cave's ceiling dropped, J.B. twisted on his knees and lunged, throwing a shoulder into Ryan's midsection, driving them both through the archway and into the alcove beyond. Ryan hit the sand on his back as the roof collapsed with a bass roar. The resulting rush of wind extinguished the torch, plunging the companions into a darkness filled with choking clouds of grit. The yelling stopped at once, replaced by groaning and coughing. As their eyes adjusted to the reduced light, the superheated rear wall glowed hellishly through the swirls of settling dust.

  "Somebody find the torch," Mildred croaked.

  Fumbling around on the sandy floor, Jak located it and passed it over to J.B., who once again sparked it ablaze. Over their heads, the ceiling of the second chamber had held. The front gallery, on the other hand, had caved in completely; where the archway had once stood was a solid floor to ceiling wall of tightly fitting boulders.

  For the moment, they were safe.

  In the flickering torchlight, Ryan searched the shadows for the face of his son. His forehead and chin powdered with red dirt, Dean blinked backed at him and abruptly sneezed. The others seemed to be okay, too.

  "We got one," Jak said, moving to the barricade of rock. Grunting, he tipped some blocks away from the foot of the wall, where a helmeted head and battlesuited arms and shoulders poked out. The trooper lay face up, two-thirds buried under the fallen ceiling.

  "Guess there's something even a battlesuit can't deflect," the Armorer said.

  "Do you think it's chilled?" Krysty asked.

  Jak snap kicked the head. The arms didn't move. "Mebbe," the albino said with a shrug. "Mebbe not…"

  "Look, it dropped its tribarrel blaster," Dean said. He pointed at the butt of the bullpup-style rifle, which protruded from between two of the wall's boulders. Dean tried to pull it free, but couldn't budge it.

  Ryan gave it a try, but had no luck, either. "The front sight or the pull-down front grip must be caught on something," he said. "Let's take the helmet off and see if the bastard's alive."

  The companions had watched Gabhart and the others get out of their armored suits, so they knew where the helmet release mechanism was and how to operate it. J.B. pressed the small inset button on the outside of the battlesuit's collar and Ryan rotated the helmet. With a click and a hiss, it turned and came away in his hands.

  Dix held the torch close so they could get a good look.

  The trooper's face was pale and the features slack. The hair was cut so close to the head it might as well have been shaved. Blood oozed from the nose and mouth.

  "Is it a man or a woman?" Krysty asked.

  "Can't tell for sure," Mildred said. "Not without seeing the rest of the body."

  Doc peered down and said, "No more extensive observation is needed, dear colleague. I'll warrant the skin on those cheeks has never seen a razor's edge."

  The trooper's eyes opened. The mouth moved, and there was a wheezing rattle of breath. Realizing his or her predicament, the trooper panicked and began pushing and pounding at the rock, thrashing in vain to break free.

  If a battlesuit couldn't repel tons of rock, Ryan thought, it couldn't be crushed by it, either. If the wild arm movements were any guide, the trooper was solidly pinned but not seriously injured,

  Ryan knelt just out of reach. "You aren't going anywhere for a while," he said. "Might as well calm down."

 
; Their eyes met and the trooper exclaimed, "Shadow Man!"

  The unamplified voice was definitely female.

  "She knows you?" Krysty said.

  "No, she doesn't know me," Ryan answered. "She just recognizes me from the vid billboards of her Earth. My face was plastered on them twenty feet tall. It was part of a campaign to sell the migration to Deathlands and quiet the mobs."

  The trooper's gauntleted hand reached up to her throat, her fingers applied pressure to the front of her neck, then she spoke, "We've got seven alive in here. Burn 'em out!"

  "Fireblast!" Ryan snarled. He ripped her fingers away from the throat mike's actuator, then tore it out of the battlesuit.

  He didn't even see her hand move in response, that's how fast she turned the tables on him. Quicker than a cat or a snake strike, the trooper gained control of his wrist, and she used it to pull him closer to her.

  She was amazingly powerful. And not just for a woman, either. Her grip held him like the jaws of a machine. Ryan felt himself being dragged, all two hundreds pounds of him, on his knees over the sand. Before she could get her fingers closed around his throat, he picked up a chunk of rock in his free hand and smashed the flat side down onto her unprotected face. He had to hit her twice more before her grip weakened. He jerked himself away from her, cradling his numbed hand.

  J.B. passed the torch to Mildred and, standing at a safe distance, leaned over the trooper. "She's still breathing," he said. "You just stunned her. Bloodied her nose pretty good but her eyes are opening. I'll be nuked, she's coming around already!"

  "A most curious example of femininity," Doc remarked. "What say you, Mildred? Is this the future of the fairer sex?"

  "She is a strange one," Mildred agreed. "Look at that brow ridge, and the density of the bone in her jawline. I'm sure it isn't acromegaly. There would be much more gross distortion than this at her age. Some other hormonal imbalance has to be involved. Whatever the root cause is, from how easily she got hold of Ryan and controlled him with one hand, she's a very unusual human being, both in her physical strength and her reaction time."

  "She's nothing like Captain Nara Jurascik."

  Krysty said. "Ryan, were there others like this one on the other side?"

  "If there were, I didn't see them, and I wasn't told about them. I think this is something new."

  The creature came to, spitting blood and spitting mad. Her string of unintelligible curses was drowned out by the earsplitting squeal of a laser beam. Almost immediately the companions' side of the cobbled wall of rock started to give off heat; after a few more seconds, it was glowing red in the center at waist height.

  "By the Three Kennedys!" Doc cried, throwing up an arm to shield his face as he backed away.

  The air inside the chamber became scorching hot and difficult to breathe.

  It was obvious to Ryan that their enemy had turned loose something a lot more powerful than the tribarrel longblasters they'd seen before. He had to yell to be heard over the laser's shriek. "When the beam breaks through, we're going to cook! Get under the wall! To the next chamber! Go!"

  J.B. and Jak fell to their knees and, digging like terriers, widened the hole under the rear wall. Dean squirmed under first, followed by Mildred and Krysty.

  Ryan was the last to leave the middle chamber. In the light of the torch, he could see that by pushing with her arms and madly squirming her torso back and forth the trooper was actually starting to pull herself out from under the wall. He could also see why she was so frantic to get free. The glowing spot had grown much bigger, and its reflected heat had become withering. As he watched, its center changed from red to yellow to luminous white. And then the white began to drip, spilling down the edges and angles of the boulders. The drip became a torrent. Rivulets of melting rock cascaded toward the floor and the trapped trooper.

  Her gauntleted hands couldn't protect her from the rain of liquid rock. Beads of it rolled around and between her upraised fingers. She threw back her head and screamed, but it was lost in the screech of the laser and the explosive hiss as the cells of her face, eyes, skull and brain surrendered their water to four thousand degree droplets of quartzite.

  An instant before the beam burned through the rock fall, Ryan squirmed down the hole, passing the torch and his scoped Steyr up to J.B. on the other side. As he climbed out, he found himself in a chamber so low he could only crouch. Then the laser struck the far side of the wall. The heat slammed his back through two feet of solid rock.

  Crawling over the rattlesnakes that Jak had killed, Ryan hurriedly joined the others at the opposite end of the cramped enclosure.

  "What are we going to do now?" Dean shouted over the squeal of the light beam. "There's no place to run. We're stuck."

  Ryan knew that strategically their situation hadn't changed for the worse. He knew it couldn't get any worse. He took comfort in the fact that they had managed to take out at least one of the enemy. But it wasn't the kind of comfort his son was hoping for. Dean wanted a miraculous way out.

  And there was none.

  The facing wall glowed incandescent red. The air boiled. It was like being trapped in a bake oven.

  "All we can do is survive as long as possible."

  Ryan shouted back, "Look for the chance to break free and fight back… and chill as many of the bastards as we can."

  Then the whistling roar stopped.

  Moments later, when their ears stopped ringing, the companions could hear scrambling sounds from the next chamber as troopers burst through the site of the cave-in.

  Another digitalized voice boomed at them, this time from the other side of the hole. "You have ten seconds to crawl out of there," it said. "If you don't come out, we will roast you alive."

  Ryan exited first, blinded for a moment by the headlamps of four battlesuits.

  "Look who it is!" said one of the troopers as he ripped the Steyr out of Ryan's hands. "A celebrity POW!"

  The other soldiers didn't seem impressed. Two of them began extracting the corpse of the female trooper from the melted rubble of the wall.

  "You really shouldn't have done that, Shadow Man," the trooper confided. "It's going to piss off the she-hes, large. I'm supposed to report our battle casualties at once, but I'm not going to warn my CO about this one. She-hes tend to kill the messenger, if you know what I mean."

  Then the trooper shouted down the hole, addressing the rest of the companions. "Everybody else out of there. Now!"

  When Ryan and the others stepped from the cave, they saw what had been leveled against them. The laser cannon on one of three gigantic vehicles was pointed at the entrance.

  At the direction of one of the dozen or so battlesuits, presumably the commanding officer, troopers scanned each of them with a detection device. Their hidden metallic weapons—belly guns, throwing stars, stilettos, straight razors—were located and confiscated. The device didn't manage to pick up Dean's bone blade, however. While they sat on the ground with their hands on top of their heads, the troopers removed the bodies of their comrades from the cave. J.B. glanced at Ryan and winked. They had chilled three in all. Not bad for a first skirmish. The troopers carried out the female last. She was quite a sight. The flesh of her face was horribly bloated, puffed up red and shiny around the blackened craters and pits that had been burned clear through her head. Her brains dripped out the pinholes in the back of her skull, swaying like strands of pink melted cheese.

  The commanding officer let out an animal cry and rushed over to the body as it was carefully lowered to the sand.

  Ryan could see the officer's face as the helmet visor cleared. It was another woman, of the same strange sort. The trooper had called his superior officer a "she-he." Which didn't figure to be an official term or a pet name the battlesuit grunts dared use in front of their superiors. It had a decidedly hostile and disparaging ring to it.

  From the officer's screams and gestures, she was taking this particular death mighty hard. Much harder than Ryan would have expected. No
t only was the scene she was making unprofessional from a military standpoint, but on the world where she came from, he knew a single human life wasn't worth spit. In full view of her command, the officer wailed and sobbed as if the two had been sisters, or mother and daughter. Rising from her knees, she sought a suitable outlet for her rage and grief.

  She seized Jak by a hank of his white hair, jerked him to his feet, then locked her other fist around his throat. Jak's dead white face went pink, then shaded quickly to dark purple, his red eyes bulging from their sockets. The officer clamped her fingers on the top of his head and lifted him from the ground.

  Jak kicked his legs and swung his arms, but his heels and fists bounced harmlessly off the battlesuit's armored plates.

  The companions were already on their feet, but unarmed and facing a battery of laser rifles, they couldn't assist in the fight. They watched helplessly as the officer started to slowly unscrew Jak's head from his neck, like the lid of a glass jar.

  "It wasn't him!" Ryan cried. "He didn't chill her."

  The officer paused in her neck twisting. "Who was it, then?" she demanded.

  "It was me. Shadow Man. I'm the one who croaked your girlfriend." He paused to flash the officer a broad grin. "I got to tell you, it was nuking big fun. Step over here, Jughead, and I'll do it to you, too."

  The officer tossed Jak aside like a rag doll and charged. Six of her own troopers intervened and blocked her path. Straining with all their might, they managed to keep her from reaching Ryan, who resolutely stood his ground, a smile on his face.

  "The CEO will want them in one piece, Captain," a trooper reminded her. It sounded like the same guy who had spoken to Ryan in the cave. "There'll be big trouble for us all if we bring them back dead, and she finds out that you took your own vengeance. If you hand them over alive for her to deal with, there could be a big reward."

  Gradually, this idea seemed to sink in, and the officer stopped straggling in their grasp.

  "The CEO will make them pay for what they did," the trooper went on earnestly. "All of them. And they'll suffer, too. You know how they'll suffer. It'll take them days to die."