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 piercing 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
