by James Axler
Literally, under their noses.
Its torso blew apart with a resounding, hollow whump! And hot gore splattered the walls and ceiling, and sprayed across Ryan and his newfound friends.
The other stickies, the ones trapped by the miners, started screeching and bleating, and then their legs gave way and they collapsed onto the floor. Ryan saw that they, too, had horribly bloated bellies. Looking closer, their heads appeared swollen much larger than normal. Then one by one they exploded—in exactly the same way as the first, like they had all swallowed frag grens.
Only afterward it didn’t smell anything like burned RDX.
It was over, start to finish, in less than fifteen seconds. Blood and bowel contents dripped from the ceiling, and from the faces and chests of the stunned spectators.
Backhanding the sewage from his cheek and chin, Ronbo exclaimed, “Nukin’ hell, what is going on!”
His mouth was still hanging open when he jolted violently head to foot, as if something large had just leapt down his throat.
Then again, and again, and again, the tall man jerked, backstepping, dropping the tribarrel to the floor.
“Ronbo!” Ti cried. “What is it? What’s wrong?”
His eyes bugging out, he clamped both his hands around his throat as if trying to squeeze it shut, or strangle himself. Choking himself blue, he turned, his long legs quivering.
Suddenly he wasn’t doing the rictus dance solo.
Others in the crowd were choking, gagging, reeling, convulsing. Miners and whitefaces, alike.
The affliction appeared to be completely random. The slaves who weren’t stricken tried to back away from those who were.
Under the light of the corridor, Ryan could see the tattoo on Ronbo’s back, and his rib cage violently expanding. Not from an inhaled breath; more like it was being pumped full of something. His torso kept on growing outward, stretching the skin until the dragon’s detail was completely lost, until it looked like an enormous pale blue birthmark. When Ronbo turned toward them again, his bare stomach had become a huge, weighty protuberance, the skin stretched to translucence, and both his eyes had popped from their sockets.
“Ronbo!” Ti screamed.
As she started to rush to his side, Ryan seized her by the shoulder. He didn’t understand what was happening, but he knew getting too close wasn’t a good idea. It looked like something very deadly was passing rapidly from one person to the next.
“There’s nothing you can do for him,” he said, holding her fast in his grip.
And as if to prove this point, the tattooed man blew apart in a ballooning red mist, shreds of his flesh and shards of bone peppering them.
“We have to get out of here,” he told her. “We have to go now.”
Then the others started exploding.
“Run, damn you!” Ryan said, pushing the little woman ahead of him down the spiral. “Run!”
Together they sprinted down the helix, around the winding turns, past more holes in the walls created by the massif’s shifting plates. Above them, there was screaming and sporadic gunfire.
“He’s dead, he’s dead,” she muttered through her tears.
Even as Ryan ran, he was trying to connect what had just happened to the dead she-hes. Did whatever it was make them explode inside their battlesuits? Did that explain the gore that coated their visors?
“We’ve got to fight back!” Ti said. “They chilled Ronbo…”
“Fight what?” Ryan said. “Fight who?”
Ti glared up at him, but kept on running. Evidently she didn’t have an answer, either.
The bottom of the spiral opened into a narrow, low hallway, lit by widely spaced bulbs. Ryan’s attention wasn’t focused down the dank corridor; he was staring up at the wires that festooned the ceiling.
“Tell me that isn’t what it looks like,” Ti said.
“They’ve mined the ceiling with explosives,” he said.
“I’m not going under there,” she told him. “If those charges blow, we will be squashed flat.”
“We don’t have a choice,” Ryan said. “We can’t hide from whatever it is in this hallway.”
When she refused to move, he said, “Look down the passage, in front of the cells. What do you think that wet gunk is on the floor and on the walls? Whatever killed Ronbo, it’s already been here. Which means it could come back at any time.”
Ti squinted down the corridor into the weak light, at the litter scattered on the floor. “Were they stickies or people?”
“Doesn’t matter. Come on, let’s move it. And triple-time. Keep your weapon up and ready to fire.”
They started past the row of niches that had been laser-hacked into the nukeglass, leapfrogging each other from one side of the hall to the other. The first crude cells were empty, save for the bracketed cylinders along the walls and the heaps of ashes and bits of charred bone on the floor.
When Ti looked into a cell about halfway down the line, she froze with her AK shouldered and aimed inside. Poised to fire the autorifle, every muscle tensed, she exclaimed, “I’ve got one! I’ve got one!”
Ryan brought his SIG to bear on a figure standing slumped against the interior wall. A figure clad head to foot in shiny black battle armor.
A gasping, amplified voice said, “You don’t want to do that….”
Chapter Twenty-Three
Ryan sensed that Ti was about to cut loose on the unarmed cockroach, at point-blank range.
“It won’t do any good,” he told her. “You open fire and that thing’s EM shield will just deflect the bullets. All you’ll accomplish is getting us both caught in the spray of ricochets.”
The little woman lowered the Kalashnikov’s muzzle, swung the weapon around and tried to bash the she-he in the head. The steel-shod butt never got within two feet of its target. The rifle bounced back, apparently off thin air, and with a force that sent her arms flying backward.
“There’s a force field blocking the entrance to the cell,” the cockroach said slowly and with considerable effort.
It was nearly as tall as he was.
Ryan felt the creature’s eyes on him, burning into him, but he couldn’t see them—or the face—through the opaqued helmet visor.
“At least for the time being,” the she-he said, “this space is free of them.”
“‘Them’?” Ryan said.
“The specters. If they have a name for themselves, we have never discovered it.” The she-he paused for breath before continuing. “The force field is what’s keeping them out of this cell. It’s the only safe place for you on this level of the glacier.”
Again, a pause for breath, and when the she-he resumed speaking, her voice was tight and full of pain. “I’ll lower the field, so you can come inside, but you have to move quickly. I can’t risk leaving it down for more than a second.”
Ryan glanced down at Ti and she nodded. As grim and dead-ended as it was, it looked like their only hope.
The cockroach slowly raised a gauntleted hand. “On the count of three—one, two, three…”
The air in front of the cell shimmered, and Ryan and Ti stepped through it. It was like walking under a warm waterfall. Then they were inside, in the dank, cramped space, ankle-deep in ashes.
Whatever the she-he did unseen, inside the glove, she undid the same way, with an extended, armored index finger. The air at the entrance stopped shimmering.
“What are these ‘specters’?” Ryan said. “We can’t see them. Where are they from? What do they want?”
“They’re invisible in full spectrum light,” the she-he said. “They attached themselves to us during a reality jump. We’ve jumped replica Earths four times since then, and haven’t been able to shake them.”
Amplified breath sounds filled the cell, gasping sounds.
“Don’t believe her, Ryan,” Ti said. “It’s some kind of trick…”
When the she-he reached for a compact electronic device attached to the waist of the battlesuit, Ti should
ered her weapon again, cheek to buttstock, her finger on the trigger.
Ryan caught the barrel behind the sights and firmly pushed it aside and down. “No good,” he repeated.
The cockroach offered the device to him. “Here, have a look through this. All you have to do is hold it up to the entrance and look at the screen.”
Ryan angled the gizmo so they both could see the LCD.
Lights.
Fluorescent green.
Brilliant oblongs, like flying snakes, shot back and forth down the hallway. They moved so fast and so erratically that they blurred in Ryan’s vision.
When he looked above the little device’s screen, the hall was empty; when he looked at it again, the lights had gathered in the hall in front of the cell, a mass that swarmed in midair like a nest of levitating eels.
“Nukin’ hell, what are they?” Ti said.
“We don’t know,” the she-he replied. “Now that they’ve targeted you, they won’t leave, not until you’re blown apart.”
“But you brought them here?” Ryan said.
“Yes.”
“Why did you bother to save us?” he asked. “You could have just let us die.”
“There’s no point in my fighting on. All the battlesuit life-sign transponders are transmitting flatlines. I’m the only sister left. The last of my kind. And there’s another, even better reason…”
The she-he reached up and touched buttons on either side of the armor’s raised collar; there was a whoosh of depressurization, then she began to unscrew the helmet.
Lifting it off her head, she said, “Hello, Ryan Cawdor…”
The shock of seeing his own features in her face—the same long black hair, icy blue eyes, even the set of his chin—rocked him to the core.
“No,” he said. “No, it can’t be.”
“But it is,” she said. “You can’t look at me and deny it. I am Auriel. Auriel Otis Trask.”
Ti looked back and forth between them. “Are you brother and sister?” she asked. “How is that possible?!”
“Not brother and sister,” Auriel said, grimacing, biting out the words.
“Too long a story to explain now,” Ryan said.
“Never thought I’d meet you face-to-face,” Auriel told him. “Never imagined that if it ever did happen it would be like this.” Then she whimpered, struggling to breathe, hanging on to the wall with a claw of a gauntleted hand. Her eyes were racked with incredible pain, but she shed no tears.
Seeing her so twisted up in agony sent a sympathetic pang shooting right through him. If he had any doubts that she was the flesh of his flesh, in that moment they were erased. “What’s wrong with you?” Ryan said. “Are you wounded?”
It took more than a minute for her to recover enough to answer him. “There’s one more reason I let you through the force field,” she said. “The things in the hall are inside of me. They’re about to burst out. After they do, you will be trapped in here with them, and they will surely kill you, too.”
“I don’t understand,” Ryan said.
“The only way to keep them from bursting out is for you to kill me first. They will die along with me, and you’ll be safe behind the force field. You have to do this, Father, before they blow me apart. I watched my mother, Dredda, die that way. I don’t want to go like that.”
Ryan’s fingers tightened on the grip of his blaster, but he didn’t raise it from his side. It suddenly felt like it weighed ten thousand pounds. Shooting one’s own child, even a child who was a stranger, was like committing suicide.
“Then give me your gun,” Auriel said, holding out her hand to him, “and I’ll do it myself.”
Ryan didn’t move.
“You’ve seen what they will do to you,” Auriel said. “They’ll do the same thing to every living creature on your world. You’ve got to end this. End my suffering and save your own lives. Save your glorious Earth.”
And still he hesitated, her eyes pleading him to do the last thing he ever wanted to do. This was the beautiful, brave daughter he would never know.
An ear-splitting bang rocked the cell. Auriel’s head jerked back and the rear of her skull exploded, spraying brains and bone over the back of the cell. When her lifeless body hit the floor, it raised a cloud of fine ash.
“I didn’t think you were going to do it,” Ti said as she lowered the AK.
Chapter Twenty-Four
As J.B. prepared to send fragments of Burning Man’s skull seventy feet in the air, he heard Mildred’s voice behind him.
“Look around, J.B.,” she said urgently. “Before you pull the trigger, look around…”
Raising the muzzle higher, making the baron stand almost on tiptoes, he glanced over his shoulder. Mildred stood with her back to him, her Czech wheelgun raised in both hands. She was aiming at the whitefaces who were sighting in on her. The other companions all had the same problem: outnumbered three to one, weapons ready to fire, they stared down the barrels of their former allies.
Even Jak, the whiteface scout, was under the gun.
“We’re not going to win this one, J.B.,” she said. “There’s too many of them and they already believe they’re the walking dead. Look at them—they’re smiling at us. They don’t give a shit.”
Then, from across the nukeglass, Krysty yelled to him, “Ryan could still be alive. We have to find him. Every second counts…”
J.B. eased off the pressure, letting Burning Man come down off his toes. When he removed the M-4000’s muzzle from under the baron’s chin, it left a 12-gauge-diameter ring indent in his flesh.
Burning Man flipped his goggles up onto his forehead.
“You made the mess,” J.B. said. “How do we clean it up? We can’t dig them out with our bare hands.”
The light in the man’s eyes made J.B.’s skin crawl. It wasn’t the look of a man who’d just nearly had his head blown off. It was the look of a man on the verge of completing his life’s holy mission.
“Scrounge up the dropped tribarrels,” Burning Man said. “Use them to cut through the cave-in. Have to be careful and go slow, or you’ll saw up the survivors, or burn ’em to death with melting glass.”
“Everybody!” Mildred shouted. “Weapons down! Right now! Let’s find some laser rifles and get to work.”
As the companions holstered their blasters, the whitefaces lowered their blasters, too. Standoff over.
“You can help us look for the cutting tools,” J.B. told the baron.
“There’s something else that has to be done first,” Burning Man replied. He pointed behind them, at the other side of the ore processer. “The jump zone,” he said. “That needs to be destroyed immediately. It’s the she-hes only way out of here. We can’t let any of them escape. And we can’t leave any of their technology intact.”
“Go ahead, we’ll start without you,” Mildred said
“Let’s do it, then,” J.B. told the baron. “And let’s be triple-quick about it…”
Burning Man took a satchel of pipe bombs from one of his warriors and broke into a run. J.B. followed him to a crude circle etched into the nukeglass. At the circle’s center was a squat bank of electronic machinery, a single black cabinet the size of a small wag, with its own set of batteries.
The steady hum of the system was audible. “It’s running,” J.B. said.
“They’re keeping the apparatus ready, so they can jump at a moment’s notice,” the baron said. “Better stand well clear. This will only take me a second.”
J.B. backed away as Burning Man stepped inside the circle.
Crossing the empty space at a trot, the baron knelt on the glass beside the machinery, opened the loaded satchel and took out a single pipe bomb. J.B. saw him light the fuse. When he had it sputtering, he dropped the bomb into the open bag, alongside the rest of the explosives. Then he shoved the pack hard up against the black cabinet, positioning it to do the most damage.
As J.B. turned to put even more safe distance between himself and the ensuing
bang, he glanced back at the baron, who was sprinting away from his handiwork, full-out. He got only as far as the perimeter of the jump zone, the crudely etched circle. When he reached it, his head lowered, arms and legs pumping, he slammed into an invisible wall and bounced back into the circle like a NOMEX-clad rag doll.
As a thin haze of residual, mixed smoke and dust swept across the jump zone, J.B. glimpsed the domed outline of a force field. Somehow the baron had managed to accidently enable it.
J.B. watched spellbound as Burning Man scrambled to his feet and raced back to the satchel. He had the bag open, and was frantically searching around inside, when the whole package blew up.
With a muffled, baritone boom, the inside of the force field dome bloomed white-hot, and the nukeglass shuddered underfoot. In the overturned bowl, white turned to orange as the air itself ignited.
The force field held its shape for five or six seconds, then it dissolved before J.B.’s astonished eyes. When it did, black smoke boiled upward and a shower of crimson spatters fell onto the ring of charred nukeglass.
It was all that was left of Burning Man.
And at the same instant, the power to the kliegs surged, their brilliance momentarily blinding.
As if in final salute.
Chapter Twenty-Five
Ryan swept the hall beyond the cell’s entrance with the scanner for the tenth time in as many minutes. “They’re gone,” he announced.
“Are you sure?” Ti said.
“See for yourself.”
The little auburn-haired beauty took the device and had a look. As she lowered the unit she said, “Just because they’re not right out in front, doesn’t mean they aren’t waiting for us somewhere around the corner.”
“Auriel said they wouldn’t leave before they’d infected us and blown us apart like the others,” Ryan said. “Something had to have made them move from their station out there. For all we know it even chilled them.”
Ti gave him a scowl.
