by James Axler
He had had the foresight to survey the landscape from this position in daylight, and had mapped it in his mind, marking and memorizing all possible access routes to the cave’s back entrance—routes he would have taken if the mission was reversed, if he was the stalker, moving in for the quiet chill. He’d seen no evidence that the cave or the paths to it had ever been used by people, or by animals bigger than chipmunks. Which came as no big surprise. The plain was littered with similar hidey-holes.
As Jak systematically checked and rechecked each of the routes, looking for movement he couldn’t otherwise identify and for the glint of starlight reflecting off eyeballs, J.B. was doing the same thing, on the far side of the sinkhole. They had both drawn the second watch.
Despite what had been said in front of Big Mike about their not being followed, nobody had argued when Ryan suggested they post sentries throughout the night. Though pursuit by coyotes and sec men was a longshot, a bivouac in hostile, unknown territory demanded they take customary precautions. They’d been caught off guard before.
If the darkness, cold and wind challenged Jak’s skills as a scout, they also challenged his endurance. As strong as he was, as battle-hardened as he was, the effects of exhaustion and lack of sleep, of days of walking under a blazing sun on low rations with minimal water, were taking their toll. His mind kept wandering from the task at hand to his discomfort, and from his discomfort to replays of recent events, including the action plan the companions had discussed and all agreed upon.
They were heading deeper into the turf controlled by the flame-throwing baron and the freshly loaded ammo they carried was a prize he would surely covet. If Burning Man wasn’t in a trading mood when they crossed paths, he’d surely try to take it from them by force. Either way, parting with the ammunition wasn’t an option. They were going to need every round once they got to Slake City. The only answer was to avoid contact, to bypass the baron’s toll bridge and find another way to cross the river to the west.
“Even if we have to build our own barge…” Ryan had told the others.
A buffeting gust of wind jerked Jak back from the vivid memory. He had no idea how long he had been wool-gathering—a second, a minute, five minutes? To wake himself up, he pressed his kneecap into a sharp rock, leaning down with more and more weight until the pain made his red eyes water.
Below him to the right, low on the cinder cone’s slope, something moved.
A silent, silver blur against the blackness. There for a second, then it vanished.
There were no straight lines of approach up the cinder cone’s slope. Long sections of the winding routes, like the cracks and the gullys, were either sheltered from his view or from the starlight.
Tumbleweed, he told himself. Wiping his eyes with the back of his hand, he watched for it to reappear.
It didn’t.
Maybe it fell in a gully, or got pinned against rock slab, he thought.
Holding his breath, Jak strained to hear over the howl of the wind, to pick up the scrape of boot soles, the scratch of claws.
Nothing.
A whole lot of nothing.
Jak found himself wishing for one of the she-he’s tribarrel blasters. With one of those babies, he could have lit up the lower slope in an emerald-green flare. He could have also heated a nearby slab of rock to keep himself warm.
Once again, seemingly of its own volition, his train of thought—and his attention—strayed.
He recalled how the companions had turned captured laser weapons against the invaders. Tribarrels didn’t work against the battlesuits’ EM shields, so they had used them to alter the nukeglass landscape, to collapse roads that crossed the deep crevasses, taking the invaders down with them.
The captured tribarrels’ nuke batteries had soon run out, and with the she-hes having fled to some other universe, repowering them was impossible. Even if they could have recharged the weapons, the tribarrels were designed for one purpose: chilling large numbers of tightly packed human beings. They weren’t any good for hunting game. The effect of three laser beams pulsing slightly out of sync produced grievous but cauterized wounds which, if they didn’t cause instant death, brought on intense shock. As the animal struggled to escape, nasty-tasting juices were released into the flesh.
A clattering rock slide somewhere on the slope below pulled Jak back into the moment. His hand instinctively dropped to grips of his holstered Colt Python, fingertips tingling from the adrenaline rush.
Fully alert, he strained all his senses trying to locate the source of the sound in the darkness, to pick up the slightest hint of movement. He heard nothing over the wind’s wail, saw nothing, smelled nothing. And yet he felt a vague pressure, a presence closing in on him from all sides. His pulse began pounding in his throat and the short hairs on his arms stood erect. The big, predark Magnum blaster came up in his hand, seeking targets, but there was nothing for him to aim at.
Seconds slipped by and the rush of adrenaline faded, leaving him even more exhausted than before. The sense of building pressure, of being stalked, faded as well. Mebbe he had imagined it because he was so tired? After all, a silent approach over broken, uphill terrain on a moonless night was next to impossible. Must’ve been the gusting wind that caused the slide, he told himself.
Just as he was about to reholster his blaster, it appeared as if out of thin air in front of him, not five feet away: a face as snow-white, as stoic as his own, blazing reflected starlight. For an instant it was like he was looking into a mirror.
Then the impasto of war paint cracked around a grinning mouth.
The sheer impossibility of it—that someone had scaled the slope, gotten so damned close, without his seeing or hearing anything—momentarily froze him. Before Jak could recover and sweep the Python’s muzzle three feet to the right, onto the target, the butt of a longblaster came out of nowhere and caught him full on the opposite cheek.
The crunch of impact made lightning flash inside his skull, then everything dissolved into black.
Chapter Five
The naked stickie sprang from a low crouch, its needle teeth bared, sucker fingers outstretched, nostril holes streaming mucous. It hurled itself at Auriel Otis Trask, a blur of lemon-yellow in her battlesuit visor’s infrared mode. As the creature reached for her faceplate, it collided with the force field blocking the entrance to its cell. The stickie bounced off the invisible barrier and crashed onto the mine shaft’s dusty, thermoglass floor. As it fell it cradled its infant under an arm, taking the full brunt of the impact on its opposite side.
For an instant a smear of snot and sucker adhesive hung in the air like a puff of green smoke, then it was vaporized by the force field.
With its offspring clinging to one stringy teat, the spindly-limbed mutant jumped up and screamed at its tormentors.
Not words.
It emitted a shrill, piping sound, like a blast from a steam whistle. The baby stickie mimicked its mother, adding its even higher-pitched shriek.
Auriel had seen human babies on other replica Earths. Although this infant was bipedal and stereo-optic, it wasn’t quite human. There were no cute rolls of fat on its arms and legs; its pale, wrinkled skin sagged in loose folds at the back of its bald head, its buttocks and behind its knees. Its hands and feet were disproportionately large, and the death-grip suckers were already evident on both. As the terrified little stickie pissed a thin arc, Auriel noted the odd—and distinctive—configuration of its male genitalia: a two-horned glans, like a miniature devil’s head.
This little mutant had come into the world with a full array of black-edged, needle teeth. Blood dripped along with the clotted secretions from torn nipples, striping its mother’s grotesquely distended belly. Because the blood and milk were cooler than Mama’s skin, the visor’s heat sensors rendered the stripes in bright lime green. There were matching, tiny, circular sucker marks on the flap-jack dugs and upper arms.
The mama stickie drew in a deep breath, preparing to unleash another pierci
ng screech. Under the taut skin of its stomach, Auriel saw movement.
Not the kicking of an unborn stickie.
This was a crossways, sliding movement.
The mutant’s black doll’s eyes clamped shut, its face twisted in a grimace. Still clutching its infant, the creature doubled over, dropped to its knees and began to moan piteously. The little stickie bawled a counterpoint.
Auriel turned toward Dr. Huth, who stood on the far side of her second in command. Like her, both Dr. Huth and Mero were in fully enabled battlesuits and helmets, self-contained, impermeable microenvironments. Opening the com link she said, “How close are they to hatching?”
The whitecoat handed her a compact instrument with a knurled pistol grip. “Have a look,” he said.
Auriel aimed the miniaturized, full-body scanner, holding the four-by-four-inch LCD screen at arm’s length so both she and Mero could peer inside the mama stickie and its baby. There was nothing unusual about the infant’s innards, but its mother’s torso contained something in addition to the expected organs and bones. Something that appeared to be independently alive.
Coils of fluorescent green thicker than the stickie’s biceps slid over one another, reversing direction effortlessly—like they had heads at either end.
For the moment, the tightly packed clutch of monsters was contained by thin layers of muscle and dermis, caged by ribs and spinal column. When they were ready to venture into the wider world, they would expand their volume, ballooning in all directions, until the tremendous outward pressure literally blew their host’s torso apart. That had been the awful fate of Auriel’s mother, while she and her sister warriors helplessly looked on. Once the specters had burst out, once they had unlimited space at their disposal, they would divide, and in minutes the divided segments would regrow to full length, and then divide again. And again. On and on.
In a matter of days, the initial twenty or so specimens could easily become two hundred thousand.
And the air would pulsate with their wakes.
As the commander stared at the enemy through the scanner, not ten feet away, she felt a jumble of sensations: cold fury, frustration and, worst of all, bottomless dread. It appeared that all the pain she had endured while undergoing the Level Four enhancements, all the specialized battlesuit training had been for naught. Maximized physical strength and sense perception, accelerated reaction time, even hard-won technological advancements had proved useless against this unique foe. An enemy that was capable of inconceivable violence, like an asteroid’s impact with a planet’s surface—merciless, indiscriminate slaughter-to-extinction.
And the bitterest pill to swallow: they had brought the slithering horror upon themselves. They had blindly, inadvertently opened the gates of hell.
Auriel couldn’t help but remember her mother’s final pronouncement, hissed into her ear through clenched, bloodied teeth: “We are cursed.”
She hadn’t shared those last words, not even with Mero, who had been Dredda Otis Trask’s closest confidante, and was now hers. There was nothing to be gained by the disclosure, and everything to lose. The warriors under her command had already been humbled by the specters, decimated, hounded, chased like rabbits across the realities. Despite calamity and dogged pursuit, their spirit remained strong. Without it Auriel knew they didn’t stand a chance. Her sole task was to keep them focused and unified, fighting on until they either escaped this enemy or took their last breaths.
“As you can see,” Dr. Huth said, “the specters are about to emerge from this test subject. We will have to abort the experiment momentarily or risk loss of containment.”
“Loss of containment” was whitecoat-speak for a repetition of what had happened on the tenth, eleventh and twelfth Earths.
Against her own gut instinct Auriel had agreed to let him bring the seeds of destruction, a tiny sample of the endospores, along with them when they reality-jumped back to Shadow World. In the hectic final minutes on the twelfth Earth, his reasoning had been impossible to argue. They couldn’t be certain they had completely sterilized themselves before leaving. The external X-ray treatment might have been insufficient, or they might have already ingested spores, which were so small they were impossible to find. And they couldn’t be certain that by jumping universes again, by exposing themselves to the Null again, they wouldn’t be recontaminated.
Under strictly controlled, laboratory conditions deep in the mines at Slake City’s Ground Zero, Dr. Huth had infected more than a dozen of the indigenous humanoids. If he succeeded in breaking the specters’ code with his experiments, if he succeeded in finding a way to destroy them, the warriors wouldn’t have to reality-jump again. They could remain on this Earth and establish a permanent power base in Deathlands. If the experiments failed, they would be on the run until their equipment and energy supply were exhausted—one misstep short of annihilation.
“Give me a progress report,” Auriel said, lowering the scanner. “Have you found another way to kill them?”
“Tracking the planted endospores with radiation markers hasn’t proved as useful as I’d hoped,” the whitecoat said. “They appear to locate in the body randomly, whether they are inhaled, swallowed, or absorbed through the skin. Once inside a host, they don’t concentrate in any particular organ that can be targeted. They migrate through the tissues and eventually fill all the available empty space inside the torso. This makes removing specters in the endospore stage a very complex, whole-body problem. The level of X-ray radiation necessary to guarantee their complete destruction would certainly destroy the host.
“As we’ve already determined, the specters are vulnerable after they emerge from the endospores and before they break out of the host’s body. If the host is killed while they are still inside it, the specters also die.”
“But have you figured out why that happens?” Mero asked.
“The reasons for the simultaneous die-offs remain unclear,” Dr. Huth said.
“We’ve been through all this before,” Auriel said, her impatience growing. “Killing every infected host on a planet is logistically and technically impossible. Just as identifying every infected host on an entire planet is impossible. In order to wipe out this threat, we have to be able to destroy the specters in all three of their life stages. To that end what exactly have you accomplished?”
“My attempts to extract tissue and DNA from entities inside the test subjects have so far been unsuccessful,” Dr. Huth said. “The samples only contain the tissue and DNA of the host. The specters seem able to avoid a probe inside the host’s body same way they avoid laser beams after they break out.”
“And what way is that?” Auriel said.
“I’m afraid that, too, is unclear at this point,” Dr. Huth admitted. He hurried to add, “I do, however, have some working hypotheses….”
Auriel cut him off before he could elaborate further. “Tell me something you know for certain,” she said.
“Unfortunately, most of what there is to tell is negative,” Dr. Huth said. “The term ‘endospore’ that we’ve been using to describe the protostage is technically inaccurate. The encystation that contains the initial egg form of the specters isn’t like the protein coat of a bacterium. Instead of being the organic product of DNA, it’s an unusual compound of metallic silica. The fully grown specters appear to have no internal organs or nervous systems, and no external structures such as mouths or eyes. Or at least none that are discernible with the instruments I have at my disposal, and that has become a major focus of concern. These entities are certainly not of this universe, possibly not of any ‘universe’ that we humans can comprehend. They don’t seem to obey the same physical rules as we do. Because of the limitations, perhaps incompatibilities, in our existing technology we may be blind to what’s right under our noses.
“For example, I haven’t been able to determine how the specters acquire raw materials for growth. From the blood tests I’ve completed, they don’t appear to be taking anything from the hosts
except a protected, dark, temperature-controlled environment in which to grow. The incubation time from implantation of endospore to breakout varies widely from species to species, and to a lesser degree from individual to individual. They seem to grow and mature faster inside mutants like stickies. Whether it has to do with their higher normal body temperature or their unique biochemistry is unknown.”
“If they aren’t taking anything from their victims,” Mero said, “why do they go on a kill rampage after they break out and divide?”
“That’s another unknown,” Dr. Huth said. “Again, it could be the fault of the instruments. The specters may be acquiring something that I can’t yet measure.”
It was a poor whitecoat who blamed his tech-gear, Auriel thought.
Her mother had never fully trusted Dr. Huth, perhaps because on their home planet his every breakthrough, his every innovation, had had an unforeseen and catastrophic downside. Auriel had more personal reasons for doubting and despising the man. She could never forget the look on his face was he peered in at her while she, a mere child, lay strapped, helpless in the Level Four isolation tank. The gap-toothed, self-absorbed “genius” had been deaf to her cries of pain and terror as her infant bone, muscle and neurosystem were reengineered, cell by cell. She might as well have been a baby lab rat, or a stickie. And it had been his latex-gloved hands that had excised her nascent reproductive organs. Thanks to Dr. Huth, she would never be a mother, nor even an egg donor.
Thanks to him, she was one of a kind.
Intellectually, Auriel understood the reasons her ovaries had been sacrificed. The male and female sexes each had built-in bioengineering limits, which were dependent upon the amount of body space and chemistry devoted to reproductive functions. Much more of a female’s biological potential—hormonally, metabolically, neurologically—was taken up by reproductive duties. If the biochemical obligations of motherhood were removed, there was room for the system to change and grow, and ultimately to evolve. Because a male’s reproductive functions took up very little of the body’s overall capacity, removing those functions had virtually no effect on biological potential. In other words, the other half of the human species had long since peaked.
