containment dome. Liquid dripped down the impenetrable curtain in rivulets of brilliant lime green.
Hot blood, as seen in infrared.
The gouts of gore splattered the surface of the force field, hung there for an instant, then were gone, vaporized as the barrier shrugged off the insult.
Similar slaughter was raining down upon the planet’s entire surface, upon living creatures even less prepared to defend themselves.
Megadeath.
It had followed their leap from the tenth Earth to the eleventh, and now from the eleventh to the twelfth, seemingly homing on the chemistry of their blood and marrow, using them not only for transport, but also as guides to suitable targets, to like-worlds prime for annihilation.
Working frantically in the 18-to-21-day windows of calm between rematerialization and all hell breaking loose, Dr. Huth had gathered a scant handful of facts. It appeared that the creatures first entered the bodies of their hosts as microscopic entities, drawn into the lungs with breath, into the stomach with food and water, and into the soft tissue through breaks in the skin. Like bacterial endospores, their incredibly tough, shell-like outer covering protected them from the hazards of deep space and presumably, those of the True Void. Like endospores, these entities had a lethality threshold.
Under strictly controlled laboratory conditions, he had destroyed them with direct heat in excess of 2000 degrees Fahrenheit, and with maximum-power X-ray exposure. The direct heat method was not applicable in the real world; those temperatures would have flash-cooked the warriors in their battlesuits. Whether the X-ray radiation level and coverage in the sterilization chamber was sufficient to cleanse them of all microscopic contamination was an open question.
Even more unsettling, he hadn’t discovered a way to kill fully matured entities after they burst out of their living hosts. It seemed that once they attained quasi-spectral form, they were immune to the effects of radiation, laser, gun shot, explosive, fire and poison. They were as untouchable, and as insubstantial, as they were insatiable for living victims. Dr. Huth needed additional time to unravel the mystery, and once again time had run out.
He glanced down the visor screen’s right-hand display, pausing for a second at the function tab he wanted to initiate. The software’s Graphic Retinal Interface—GRI—automatically shifted the view mode from infrared to “normal.”
The commander’s voice crackled through the com link. “Status report.”
“All systems online,” Mero replied. “We are ready to initiate jump on your order.”
“Close ranks.”
At the center of the jump zone Dr. Huth and the black-helmeted warriors formed up in a tight circle facing one another, battlesuits shoulder-to-shoulder.
On the ring’s side opposite him, a visor decloaked. Dr. Huth gazed upon milk-white skin, cascading black curls, a full-lipped mouth, strong chin and, even through the visor’s polarizing tint, eyes the color of blue ice.
For a split second the whitecoat felt a chill of recognition. Under extreme stress, in his most vulnerable moments, those eyes, that uncanny resemblance, had the power to transport him to the land of recurring nightmares, of savage punishments. And for the thousandth time Dr. Huth came face-to-face with the possibility that a grievous, fundamental error had been made.
An indelible mistake.
The being that stood opposite him had been assembled, egg and sperm, in a petri dish, grown in the belly of an unwilling slave surrogate mother, genetically enhanced and artificially matured on worlds pulled apart at their seams. Auriel Otis Trask had known eight different versions of Earth in her short lifetime, all of them endgame catastrophes. The combination of that unique experience and her altered DNA had made Auriel harder than vanadium steel, harder than either of her gene donors.
Auriel’s female component had been harvested from Dredda Otis Trask, the former CEO of Omnico, board member of FIVE, the ruling conglomerate of Dr. Huth’s overpopulated, overexploited Earth. Ever the visionary, when Dredda had realized that human life was on its last legs, that there was no hope for her world, she had used Level Four bioengineering technology to remake herself and create a cadre of genetically enhanced warriors, creatures fit to jump universes and conquer entire planets, starting with Shadow World. After Dredda’s horrible demise on the eleventh Earth, Auriel Otis Trask had inherited command of the expedition—and the responsibility of leading it out of its desperate plight.
Her plan was to jump back to where the odyssey had begun, back to Shadow World. This in order to gain time, to repower their nuke batteries and recover the gear left at Slake City; and if the specters still followed, to find a way to kill them or leave them behind, once and for all.
Dr. Huth ran the tip of his tongue over the empty sockets formerly occupied by his front teeth. Deathlands was a place he had hoped never to see again. Within hours of his initial arrival there, he had been set upon, robbed of all his possessions, beaten and mutilated. Though the memory of that traumatic event remained fresh, its irony was lost on him.
In a long and storied scientific career he had never once worried about the consequences of his own actions on the powerless. As a young whitecoat, then as director of the Totality Concept’s trans-reality program, he had always looked for the Big Picture. The fate of the tens of billions left to starve on his native Earth after it had been scraped clean of sustenance hadn’t troubled him. He had seen firsthand what the scourge could do, but he wasn’t concerned about the fate of the Shadow Worlders, either. In his experience, other people’s suffering was the price of knowledge.
And at that price it was always a bargain.
“Initiate the sequence,” Auriel said.
“Counting down from thirty,” Mero said. “Prepare for jump.”
As Dr. Huth watched the red digits fall on the lower edge of his visor’s faceplate, all he could think about were the consequences of failure. If there wasn’t enough power for the jump, he was going to slowly suffocate inside the ill-fitting armor. The horror and the unfairness of that fate unmanned him: his lower lip began to quiver and his eyes welled up with scalding tears. There were so many things yet to do, so many discoveries yet to be made, accolades that would be denied him.
When the scrolling numbers hit zero, the double force fields imploded with a jarring whoosh, and the suddenly expanded perspective seared an image deep into the recesses of his brain.
Specters zipped through the air, crisscrossing like flying javelins, streaks of luminous green moving faster than the eye could follow; tightly packed masses of them writhed ecstatically above the mounds of ruptured corpses that clogged the city’s plaza. Except for the specters, everything that he could see, for as far as he could see, was dead.
Then the jump machinery engaged and the air overhead began to shimmer, then spin. It morphed into a vortex, flecked with glittering points of light. As the tornado whirled faster, the light from within grew brighter and brighter. Staggered by the blasting wind, Dr. Huth looked across the ring and realized the commander was staring at him. On the cusp of their destruction, Auriel Otis Trask was smiling.
With a thunderclap that rattled his every molecule the towering cyclone vanished; it was the sound of the universe cracking open. A narrow seam, a fissure without bottom, divided the center of their warrior circle, gaping wider and wider like a hungry maw.
Once the passage between realities was established, all struggle was futile; the forces unleashed
