Breakthrough

by James Axler

  Once Jak, Dean and the slaves moved onto the flat, they came under the cannons of the back pair of assault wags.

  The tortured squeals of air ripped asunder arrived a half second after the energy pulses impacted. Even though Jak anticipated the barrage and guided the men around the back side of the ridge, it offered no real cover. The blasts of big-bore laser light burned four-foot-diameter holes through the glass, sending sprays of molten droplets flying. The beams continued on, flat and straight, through the next ridge, seventy-five yards away.

  Dean managed to avert his face from the mist of liquefied glass. It sizzled against the back of his coat. Two of the former slaves weren't so lucky. They turned to look at the explosion above them, and the fall of scorching droplets burned through their eyelids and into their eyes. Screaming, hands over their faces, they staggered back the way they had come.

  "Stop them!" Dean cried. "Somebody stop them!" When no one moved to help, the boy scrambled up from the glass.

  Jak grabbed him by the collar and pulled him back.

  "No," he said, "can't save."

  They watched from the ridge as the blinded, pain-mad men blundered, stumbling into the maze of cracks. First one, then the other was swallowed up by the glass.

  "THE BOY WILL BE all right," Doc told Mildred. "What is done is done. Jak will watch over him."

  "I'd feel better if he was with us."

  The cannons hit the ore wag's EM shield again. Mildred reacted by thumbing the speed button.

  "We are going to have to get out," Doc said after their truck had recovered from the impact.

  "If we get out," Mildred countered, "they'll push the wag off the road. And we need it for cover."

  "May I suggest that you advance up the grade. Halve the distance between ourselves and our enemies. If they persist in firing upon us, that will buy us precious minutes before our chariot is overthrown."

  Mildred drove the wag forward seventy-five feet.

  "Let's move," she said as she set the brakes, "quick, before they blast us again."

  The two of them each seized a pulse rifle from the floor and jumped out of the driver's side of the wag's cab. It was also the cliff side. As they raced to the rear, Mildred glanced into the void. She saw sheer, striated walls angling together five hundred feet down. They met in a bulge of glass that wasn't the bottom of the crevasse, but a second, narrower opening to a much deeper chamber.

  As she and Doc climbed up the sides of the cargo box, the wag took another double laser blast. They hung on as the truck slid backward, wheels crunching on the glass. Accompanying the flare of brilliant green light was a wave of withering heat. Something they had not felt inside the protection of the cab.

  To the five armed slaves who greeted them in the box, Mildred said, "Use your pulse rifles. We've got to try to keep the troopers in their wags."

  As they lined up along the front edge of the box, just above the cab's roof, she knew they had their work cut out for them. The assault wags' EM shields and the soldiers' battlesuits would deflect their laser blasts.

  "Shoot at their feet," she told the others. "If they come out, shoot at their feet."

  Another blaze of green followed by a blast of heat made them duck back behind the cover of the box. The wag skidded down the road, its rear end twisting closer to the edge.

  Then the rear pair of enemy wags opened fire. Not on them, but on Jak and the others, who were sprinting around the end of the chasm. The beams screamed across the road and slammed into the ridge top opposite.

  "Bastards!" Mildred said. She popped back up and fired, using a sustained beam to define the limits of the forward wags' EM shields. She had found it, some fifteen feet in front of their bumpers, when a pod on the roof of the left-hand wag opened and a barrel emerged.

  "What now?" Doc said.

  There was a loud bang and a projectile shot out. It flew almost straight up. It was very slow moving; they could track it easily with their eyes. It arced high over the cab's EM shield, before dropping toward the cargo box.

  "Oh, shit," Mildred said, covering her head with her arms.

  Then the projectile banged again, disintegrating in midair. As it did, it send a volley of smaller projectiles raining on them. The flechettes hissed like angry insects, their needlepoints plinking off the blocks of glass, off the rim of the cargo box, and slapping into flesh and bone.

  The wounded, Mildred included, cried out in pain. Wincing, she looked at the plastisteel missile embedded in her forearm. It had a fringe of black synthetic feather to make it spin as it fell. The long, thin point was stuck in her flesh only half an inch. She pulled it out and threw it away.

  The other slaves who could, did likewise, either yanking the flechettes out themselves, or if they had been hit in an awkward spot, allowing someone else to remove them. Those already grievously wounded or comatose or dead just lay there like human pincushions.

  As the rear wags continued to pound Jak and Dean's position, a loudhailer from one of the lead wags bellowed at them, "Surrender now, throw out your weapons, or you'll get another dose of darts. And they'll be full power next time."

  Mildred shouted back a twentieth-century profanity.

  She wasn't sure they'd understand it because she didn't know if they had mothers, but they had to have gotten the gist because almost at once another of the slow-flying warheads came arcing their way.

  Doc used his pulse rifle to pick it off like a clay pigeon. As it crossed the path of the emerald-green beam, the warhead exploded, sending its deadly flechettes spraying in all directions but theirs.

  When the assault wag tried the same trick again a third time, the warhead had seven green beams to contend with. It blew up at the top of its arc.

  "Look!" Doc said. "The wags in back!"

  Troopers in black were piling out of the rear doors of both of the wags, clearly heading around the upper end of the crevasse to intercept Jak and Dean and the others.

  "Shoot them!" Mildred cried as she sighted down on the running men.

  The concentrated fire of seven laser rifles did no good. Their initial shots veered off the EM shields of their targets' battlesuits. The troopers were moving too fast to aim for their feet.

  Then the forward wags fired their cannons again.

  At the energy flare, the ore wag lurched backward violently, throwing Mildred and Doc onto their butts onto the heap of glass blocks. The wag continued to slide this time, and as it did it twisted sickeningly, turning the unprotected side of the cargo box toward the pair of cannons.

  CANNON FIRE FROM the other side of the chasm drove Jak and Dean from the ridge top. Joining up with the four surviving slaves on the back side, the mutie albino said, "Another hundred yards, then we cut away the road."

  With Jak in the lead, they ran along the side of the slope, harassing fire from the cannons sending chunks of the ridge avalanching around them. The distance as the buzzard flew was closer to sixty yards, but the ridge line didn't run straight. It wound back and forth in a serpentine of glassy talus, gaping splits and sheer drop-offs.

  Because of the twists and turns, because they were out of sight of the road, they didn't see the troopers coming at them until it was too late.

  Jak reacted to a glimpse of black moving among the green-gray blocks of glass on the slope ahead. He jumped aside, taking Dean with him. A flurry of laser beams sliced through the space where the two had just been. They sliced through the man following behind. He toppled, suddenly in five large pieces, arms, legs, head bouncing in different trajectories down the side of the ridge.

  The slaves in back of the dead guy dived away and were missed by the through and throughs.

  "Aim for ridge above them," Jak shouted to the others. "Drive them back."

  It was a stalling action, at best.

  They sent energy pulses hammering into the ridge, which melted the glass, and sent it rushing downhill in a torrent. The troopers were unable to fire back because they were too busy retreating from the gla
ss flow. They moved up the side of the slope, trying to get as high as possible to keep the same thing from happening again. They scurried up until their backs were against the brittle fin of eroded glass.

  The increased altitude exposed the troopers to the slaves' fire, but they were relying on their battlesuits' EM shields to protect them. The higher elevation gave them much better positions to shoot from. And they put them to use immediately.

  Screaming beams bracketed the slave who was farthest down the slope. They melted the glass around him as they sawed through his body. The first slash bisected his torso from right shoulder to left hip. The others chopped him into much smaller pieces. His remains sizzled and smoked along with the bubbling puddle of glass.

  "Over the top!" Jak cried. "Everybody goes! Mass your fire, drop the road! I'll cover!"

  Dean scrambled up the slope along with the others. Every step they took reduced the angle of advantage the troopers had. Behind him, Dean heard the squeal of Jak's laser rifle returning fire. There was no time to look. He picked his way over the glass rubble near the summit, found a gap in the ridge's fan and threw himself belly down.

  Before him, the road stretched out straight. The forward wags were punishing the ore track, driving it backward toward the abyss with double pulse after double pulse. He could see the people in the cargo box. They fell each time the EM shield was hit. As he shouldered the laser rifle and dropped the safety, the ore wag was hit again and the impact turned it sideways in the road, offering its unprotected flank to direct fire.

  Dean pressed the trigger, holding it down as he fanned the point of the green beam over the fattest part of the road's supporting glass. The other slaves opened fire at almost the same instant. Their combined beams melted back the layers of glass, in seconds creating a roaring waterfall more than a hundred feet wide. The entire section of road shifted with a short, shrill shriek that could be heard over the lasers' whine.

  Its facing edge dropped down a foot.

  Then another, as Dean and the slaves burned back the top of the undercut ledge.

  The resulting shriek was lost in a tremendous, ear-splitting crack as the road gave away. In slow motion, the four black wags slipped downward, along with a hundred feet of road and ten thousand tons of nuke-glass rubble. The wags tumbled, crashing against the sides of the chasm.

  Dean looked over at the only vehicle remaining on the road, their ore wag. People were standing up in the cargo box, waving their arms excitedly. What they couldn't see, or hadn't noticed was how close they were to the edge of the cave-in.

  As he opened his mouth to yell a warning, the road under the uphill side of the wag began to slough off, tipping the box toward the abyss. As the box tilted over, it spilled bodies and ore down into the crevasse. Then, with a groan, it slid off the edge of the road.

  "Jak!" Dean howled, looking behind him for the albino.

  The albino teen wasn't there. He was hurriedly mopping up the troopers near the ridge. Having dropped big sections of the fan of glass on top of them, he walked among their trapped bodies, removing helmets one by one, and cooking their brains with short, single pulses of his energy weapon. At Dean's shout, he looked over from his grim duty.

  "Mildred and Doc!" the boy cried. "What about Mildred and Doc!"

  MILDRED AND DOC WATCHED with delight as the road gave way and the attack wags dropped from view.

  They were celebrating along with the other slaves as the cargo box began to tip.

  "Jump!" she shouted to the others.

  Over the grinding roar of the collapsing roadway, no one heard her.

  As she jumped to the rim of the box, Doc launched himself ahead of her, stretching to the utmost, his skinny legs churning to reach the lip of solid ground that remained downslope. Mildred landed half on, half off the ledge. Doc turned and pulled her up by her armpits.

  Their toes inches from the edge, they looked down into the chasm. Clouds of dust rose up as the ground rumbled underfoot. Like sand through an hourglass, big chunks of glass slipped through the dark slot below them. Bodies slipped through them, too, limp bodies cartwheeling into the void. The wags themselves were too big to fall through. They lay wedged between the edges of the second crevasse.

  The ore wag was upside down. Three of its wheels had been broken off by the fall.

  Everyone in the cargo box was gone.

  As Doc and Mildred watched, a side door to one of the assault wags opened and three tiny human figures crawled out. Some of the troopers had survived, but there was nowhere safe for them to stand outside their crumpled wag. Their weight caused the precariously balanced jumble of blocks to move. And when the blocks shifted, they opened new routes to the yawning emptiness below.

  With a grinding roar, the three troopers and a wide section of rubble vanished.

  If more of the enemy were alive, they didn't show themselves.

  From the opposite side of the chasm came a shout. Jak's white mane of hair was unmistakable. He waved them around the lower end of the crevasse, then pointed to the upper end.

  "It appears that we are to rejoin the road above the slide," Doc said.

  "We'd better get a move on," Mildred stated. "We've got a long, hot walk ahead of us."

  Chapter Twenty-Eight

  Dredda herself supervised the towing of the last two gyroplanes into position inside the pink-flagged transport field. Between the twin fifty-foot-long trailers that housed the trans-reality units was an ellipse of vital gear, most of it self-propelled or at least mobile. When the gyros were parked in their assigned places, she gestured impatiently for the wag drivers to exit their vehicles.

  The drivers were men, and they weren't coming along.

  She ordered her sisters to start up the reality-field generators. When the switches were pulled, a low hum emanated from both of the trailers, and the air just in front of and between them seemed to shimmer and blur.

  That's when the trouble started.

  The troopers stood anxiously outside the perimeter of pink flags. The she-hes stood inside it, resolute, with gauntleted hands on their genetically engineered hips. Until that moment, it hadn't occurred to the troopers that they weren't invited to the next party.

  As Dredda locked down her helmet, Mero burst from the doorway of the big dome. She had her battlesuit on and carried her helmet under her arm. Mero rushed up and said, "Shadow Man is here. He freed the red-haired bitch. They're loose in the compound."

  None of that mattered anymore. They were in countdown mode.

  "Put on your helmet," Dredda told her. "We're about to make the jump."

  "What about us?" one of the troopers demanded, his voice painfully loud inside her helmet.

  She turned down the volume.

  "You're not leaving us here!" the man insisted. "We'll all die from the bacteria!"

  The other troopers shouted their agreement.

  Dredda keyed her com link to her sisters. "Be ready for them when they charge," she said. "We don't have time to play, now. We must finish the job quickly."

  As the men rushed forward, the sisters stepped through the shimmering curtain to meet them.

  The job in question was hand to hand because the EM shields of both sides' battlesuits rendered lasers useless, even at close quarters. The men were no match for the she-hes in either physical strength or in stamina. The disease the invaders had brought with them had affected all of them more or less equally. If the sisters were weakened, so were the men. And it didn't matter that the troopers outnumbered their opponents more than two to one.

  Dredda joined her sisters in the fight. She couldn't have stopped herself even if she'd wanted to. Through the cleared visors of their helmets, Dredda could see the rage on the faces of the two troopers who attacked her, the rage and the blood lust. They wanted more than a free ride, more than to merely save their lives. They wanted to reassert their masculinity. It was a sad commentary.

  Dredda short-punched the first trooper, ending the blow with a savage twist of the wr
ist. The breastplate of his armor buckled inward, and there was a loud snapping sound. Her fist had shattered his breastbone, and from the way he dropped, as if all his strings had been cut, the sharp ends of imploding bone had torn his heart to shreds.

  The second trooper wheeled around the body of the first, trying to come at her from the side. Dredda let him come, offering him an undefended right hip. The trooper swung a kick into the small of her back. From his expression and the loud grunt he made, it had everything he could put behind it. She absorbed the blow easily, letting it drive her a half step forward, then shifted her weight and kicked, herself. Her heel came down in a slashing arc against the side of his helmet. The helmet cracked.

  It cracked in a circle of spider-shattered plastisteel.

  The shock of the impact killed the man, like a sledgehammer to the side of the head.

  Dredda took a moment to look around the field of battle. Her sisters were acquitting themselves splendidly. Jann held a trooper overhead, a hand on his suit collar and a hand on his crotch, then dropped his back onto her upraised knee. His battlesuit didn't protect him. The cracking of his spine resounded like a gunshot across the compound. Other sisters pounded their opponents into the beige dust, snapped their arm and leg bones and then finished them off with elbow strikes to the heart.

  Only Mero seemed to be having trouble. Three troopers surrounded her, and although they couldn't bring her down, Mere couldn't defeat any of them, either.

  It was the disease, Dredda thought as she closed the distance between them. It had to be the disease. Poor Mero had a more advanced stage.

  One of the troopers turned away from the three-on-one attack in time to glimpse the battlesuited figure bearing down on him. He didn't have time to get out of the way, or to avoid the hands that gripped his helmet. Dredda used both arms and the power in her legs to crank him off his feet, sending him spiraling sideways across the compound. His windmill flight ended at the feet of two other sisters, who immediately took charge of him.