Breakthrough

The scientist let out a whoop and celebrated his good fortune by dancing an ungainly jig. Then he carefully boulder hopped down a steep chute that led to the foot of the mesa, and once there, immediately headed across the plain for the ancient roadway.

Up close there wasn’t much left of it.

Caustic rains had reduced the asphalt to sand, and had badly pocked the concrete layer beneath. Small, delicate white flowers with bright yellow centers grew here and there along the edge of the highway, sprouting from depressions where water and nutrients accumulated.

Huth picked one of the little daisies and gingerly nibbled at the white petals. Their explosive bitterness made him gasp. He spit them out with a curse, then groaned as the vile taste set him to dry-heaving again.

Pale and shaken, he trudged on toward the distant smoke plume. The only sounds were the scrape of his shoe soles on the asphalt sand and the wheeze of his breathing. The day’s building heat made sweat ooze from his forehead. In the flat, shimmering distance lay the first of the dropped overpasses; he made slow but steady progress toward the jumble of concrete slabs.

When Huth first caught wind of the rank, feral odor, he didn’t know what to make of it, except that it wasn’t coming from him. As he continued walking, the smell got worse. Much worse. Only when the pack of robbers started popping up on either side of the ruined road did he understand the meaning of the noxious stench, and by then it was too late to run.

The dirt-caked, tangle-bearded bandits had been lying in wait in shallow hides they’d hacked into the desert hardpan. Their clothes consisted of countless layers of greasy rags; their boots were repaired with overlapping windings of strips cut from plastic bags. They carried battered black-powder shotguns and revolvers, rusting machetes and nail-studded wooden clubs.

As the robbers encircled him and closed in, the huge man who appeared to be the leader confronted him, toe to toe. He bore spiral-shaped brands on his cheeks and forehead. The angry welts of scar tissue looked like the tracks of some parasitic worm burrowing just under the skin. Below a mustache matted with dried saliva, Huth saw the snaggle stumps of yellow-brown teeth. The tip of the man’s wide nose bore a sparse tuft of black bristle, half an inch long.

“Good morning to you,” the scientist said, trying not to show his terror, and failing miserably. “I just arrived here from—”

Without warning, someone booted Huth in the buttocks so hard that his feet left the ground, so hard that his legs went numb and his knees buckled under him when he crash-landed. The bristle-nosed robber reached down and grabbed him by the collar, hauled him upright, then punched him straight in the face, breaking his nose and knocking him unconscious.

Huth came to with a moan as the big man kicked him in the ribs.

“What are these?” Bristle-nose demanded, holding a pair of small, flat objects in front of the scientist’s bloodied face.

“No, please,” Huth gasped, “those are my scientific instruments. Give them back. You can’t operate them. They are of absolutely no use to you.”

“He’s bossin’ me,” Bristle-nose said to the others as he cocked back his massive fist. “This dimmie bastard’s bossin’ me….”

Huth saw another short, straight punch coming at him, but there was nothing he could do about it. At the impact, as his head snapped back, something cracked. A lance of white-hot pain shot through his upper jaw, and his mouth was suddenly littered with sharp shards. In a gob of fresh blood, he spit out the remains of his two upper front teeth.

While Huth thrashed and bled, Bristle-nose showed off his booty. “Looks like predark gear to me,” he said. “Got to be worth a spoon or two of jolt over in Byram ville.”

With that, the big robber turned and started off in the direction of the smoke. The other bandits quickly stripped off the unprotesting scientist’s shoes and pants, leaving their victim his blood-sprayed and scorched lab coat and his tattered, gray-tinged underwear and socks.

Huth waited a long time before he risked uncoiling from a fetal position in the dirt. And he didn’t start walking again until the sun was high overhead. Hobbling slowly toward the shade of the nearest fallen highway overpass, he looked like the survivor of a train wreck. Blood had dried purple black all down the front of his lab coat. He couldn’t breathe through his swollen nose, and every time he sucked air through his mouth, electric needles of pain stabbed into the exposed nerves of his emptied tooth sockets.

As he stumbled along, he wept over the loss of his irreplaceable instruments, his permanent disfigurement and the unspeakable cruelty of fate. He was still sobbing when he reached the collapsed overpass. What he saw there put his suffering—and his predicament—in a new perspective.

At the foot of the largest block of concrete sat a line of sun-bleached human skeletons. He counted fourteen of them, all identically posed, their backs leaning against the block, elbows resting on raised kneecaps. Some were adults, some were small children, some still had isolated patches of hair on their massively caved-in skulls. A couple of feet above the row of drop-jaw grins, someone had chiseled three tall, spindly words into the eroded concrete.

Welkum Too Deflanz.

Chapter One

Fifteen days after a massive explosion destroyed the upper floors of the Totality Concept complex, Dredda Otis Trask stood naked and alone in a windowless stainless-steel room. The small, unfurnished chamber had two doors, both heavily gasketed and airtight. A warm wetness trickled down the insides of her thighs. Not blood, but the remnants of a clear surgical lubricant, melted by her body heat. The CEO of Omnico, one of the most powerful people on the planet, had just had her womb stripped of all its eggs.

In itself, there was nothing unusual about the procedure. On her world, the in-vitro-fertilized eggs of the executive class were routinely carried to term by surrogate mothers conscripted from the ranks of the white collars.

Nor was it strange that Dredda Otis Trask had chosen to have the extraction performed in the secure, private facilities of her own global conglomerate. But Omnico’s CEO hadn’t surrendered all her potential offspring to a test tube merely for the sake of convenience. Given the nature of the dangerous experimental treatment she was about to undertake, it was a necessary precaution.

Above Dredda’s head on a wall bracket was a vidcam, its op light glowing ruby red. A team of faceless, nameless strangers was observing her through the fish-eye lens.

“Please stand beneath the ceiling nozzles,” said a voice through the vidcam’s speaker.

When Dredda stepped over the center-sloping floor’s single drain, the shower spray commenced. The hot water that enveloped her was followed by foaming, pea-green jets of bactericide. After she had rinsed off the foam, vents along the base of the walls blasted her with heated air, drying her to the point of itchiness in a matter of seconds. As she raked her static-charged, auburn hair back behind her ears, an electronic lock snicked and the exit door popped outward a foot.

Through the tiny speaker, the voice said, “Please proceed to Level Three containment.”

Dredda immediately moved into the well-lit, polished metal hallway, which was also windowless. She could have touched the ceiling with a raised hand, and the corridor was so narrow it wouldn’t permit the full spread of her arms. The air hung heavy with a mist of disinfectant that stung the back of her throat. Auto-tracking vidcams mounted at intervals along the ceiling followed her barefoot progress to the next chamber, which was even smaller.

The bioengineering facility’s hazard-containment system consisted of a series of concentric, hermetically sealed, metal enclosures. The more dangerous the biological materials, the smaller the enclosure in which they were stored. Level One’s barrier, which took up an entire subfloor of the Omnico skyscraper, encompassed containment Levels Two through Four, Level Two encompassed Three and Four, and so on. Each of the interiors was reverse-pressurized so that if a seal failure occurred, external air would rush in, keeping contaminants from escaping to the next level.

When she entered the tiny room, the airtight door closed behind her. Sheets of tempered glass covered the walls, ceiling and floor; behind the glass were banks of five-foot-long light tubes. Yet another automated surveillance camera stood watch over her.

“Please put on the goggles hanging on the hook in front of you,” the voice told her.

After Dredda donned the red-lensed eye protectors, there was a loud thunk, and the surrounding lights all came on at once. The intense ultraviolet bombardment lasted fifteen minutes, during which she was directed by the voice to assume various awkward positions that allowed the germ-killing radiation to reach otherwise hidden surfaces. When the bank of lights finally thunked off, she was told to pull on the pair of plastifoil slippers that waited for her by the exit door.

“You may now proceed to Level Four,” the voice said.

The straight steel corridor leading to Level Four had a narrow, bunker-slit window along one wall. Through the three layers of thick glass, Dredda could see dozens of biotech workers in lemon-yellow hazard suits with oxygen canisters strapped to their backs. Because of the glare of the overhead lights off the hoods’ visor plates, she couldn’t see the workers’ faces. And they seemed too preoccupied with their cluttered lab tables and banks of electronic machinery to notice her passing. The corridor ended in a circular bulkhead door, which stood slightly ajar.

The brightly lit Level Four operating suite was the tiniest of the nested defensive boxes—the most deadly and contagious microbial environment on the planet. The hollow steel cylinder was so narrow that the single bed it contained nearly spanned its diameter. On the walls opposite the sides and head of the bed were rows of triple-laminated glass portholes. Directly below the ob ports, from similar heavily gasketed circular openings, rubberized, liver-colored gauntlets hung down in pairs. Shelves packed with medical supplies and equipment ringed all but the foot of the bed.

At the sight of the cramped enclosure, Dredda experienced sudden difficulty in breathing. The observers noted her distress.

“Your anxiety is only natural,” the voice said in a reassuring tone. “But it is best to continue without delay. Please climb onto the bed, and we will make you more comfortable as quickly as possible.”

Dredda forced herself to crawl forward. The door automatically shut and sealed behind her. As she lay back on the bed, she saw movement through all of the portholes. Technicians in biohazard suits took up positions along the outside of the cylinder and proceeded to thrust their arms into the gauntlets, which allowed them to reach over the bed, more than halfway across her body. All those moving arms made the chamber seem even smaller. And no matter how hard she tried, she couldn’t seem to fill more than the top third of her lungs.

To try to calm herself, the CEO focused on her own reflection in the curve of the ceiling. She strained to make out the details of her face, but the brushed metal turned her features into an unrecognizable blur—as if who and what she had been for her twenty-six years had already been erased.

Meanwhile, the pairs of gauntleted hands worked with practiced precision, strapping her down at the chest, waist and knees. Once she was tightly secured to the mattress, the anonymous fingers crawled over her, jabbing the needles for intravenous lines into her arms and inserting a catheter into her bladder. They applied a liquid adhesive to her skin and attached life-signs sensors and neuromuscular stimulators. Finally, gloved hands at the head of the chamber slipped an oxygen mask over her nose and mouth.

Dredda gulped at the hiss of oxygen, which was mixed with a quick-acting sedative gas. It also carried a massive dose of bioengineered virus. After that first deep breath, there was no question of going back. She gladly surrendered to the calm that settled over her.

You are a very brave girl.

Dredda felt hot blood rush to her face and neck. She recognized her father’s voice. It hadn’t come through the operating suite’s intercom speaker; it didn’t exist anywhere outside her mind. Regis Otis Trask, the former CEO of Omnico, had been dead for four years.

Whenever her father had said those words to her, and he’d had the opportunity to say them often, what he’d meant was that she was very brave for a girl. Brave considering that because of her sex, she possessed relatively limited physical and mental strength and endurance. Though she had long understood the reasons for her father’s patronizing attitude, that had never made it any less painful or infuriating.

Dredda’s personal abilities and achievements had very little to do with the power she currently wielded over the lives of tens of billions of human beings. She had inherited her father’s position at the top of the conglomerate’s executive hierarchy, and she had an army of highly capable, highly motivated defenders dedicated to keeping her there. For as long as she could remember, everyone she encountered had looked past her, or through her, and had seen only her father’s awesome legacy.

But Dredda was very much the daughter of Regis Otis Trask. She shared his thirst for conquest and empire, and the need to burn her name deep into the pages of history, desires she could never satisfy as caretaker of a bureaucratic monolith on a dying planet.

For months, preparations had been under way for her unannounced, permanent departure to Shadow World. In secret, Omnico’s top scientists had duplicated the Totality Concept’s reality-jumping technology, and had managed to vastly improve upon it. The transfer of soldiers and matériel only awaited the successful completion of her Level Four treatment, which for security reasons had been postponed until the last possible moment.

Dredda had committed herself to the irreversible genetic procedure shortly after the CEOs’ joint interrogation of the prisoner from Shadow World. The man called Ryan Cawdor had described his Earth as a place of chaos, of perpetual bloody turmoil. Social control did exist, but only in confined areas called baronies, and it was maintained by brute power.

Male power.

To cross over to Shadow World unprepared for that fact would have meant the surrender of everything Dredda had, of everything she had ever dreamed of.

Could Alexander the Great have succeeded if he had been a woman? Could Cortez? Or Napoleon? Her own Earth’s history said no. In times of internal strife, during periods of conquest, males only respected other males, only feared other males. These were the lessons of Shadow World, as well. If Dredda failed to instill absolute terror in her adversaries on the parallel Earth, she knew her relatively small expeditionary force could not prevail.

And she not only had Shadow World males to contend with, but those in her own support units, as well. In a different reality, the old urges of one sex to dominate the other would surely resurface. The selective subordination and subjugation of females was bound to follow. Such an outcome was unacceptable to Dredda Otis Trask.

As her father had so often said, “Chains are meant for other people.”

It might well have been the Trask family motto.

Dredda became aware of a ringing in her ears, the first sign of the spread of the genetically modified virus. Almost immediately, her body temperature began to rise, and as it climbed, the sedation was increased. Long before the infection’s peak, she slipped quietly into a drug-induced coma. She didn’t feel the plastic tube slide down her airway or hear the rhythmic hiss of the respirator begin.

The tailored virus carried a limited set of genetic instructions, which as it replicated, it transmitted to all her cells. These instructions permanently altered the chemistry of her body, reinitiating long dormant physical processes, reactivating the growth plates in the bones of her hips, legs, back, shoulders and arms. Under their new instructions, the targeted cells began rapid, controlled division. As her bones enlarged, cell layer by cell layer, they ached as if they had been shattered by sledgehammers; as they enlarged, the attached sinews, muscles and cartilage stretched to the splitting point. Nerve cells began multiplying in specific locations, as well, which only magnified the intensity of the skeletal pain. The transformation process was so agonizing that it required anesthetic narcosis—early test subjects who were fully conscious had died from the pain within a matter of hours.

Safe in a deep coma, Dredda felt nothing. She drifted in darkness while her body metamorphosed in its stainless-steel cocoon.

Inside and outside the chamber, the atmosphere was anything but tranquil. Biotech teams in three shifts saw to her considerable life-support needs around the clock. Her normal daily calorie intake was quadrupled, and she received constant electrical stimulation of new nerves and growing muscles.

Early on the morning of the ninth day, sedation was terminated. By 10:00 a.m. Dredda was breathing without a respirator. At 1:00 p.m. she opened her eyes. She was still securely strapped to the bed. Empty gauntlets hung flaccidly from the walls.

“How are you feeling?” said the voice through the intercom.

“I hurt,” she said, her throat hoarse from the respirator tube. “I hurt everywhere.”

“That is entirely normal, I assure you. We’re going to release the restraints now. You need to start moving your arms and legs.”

Technicians slipped into gauntlets on both sides of the chamber. Their gloved hands unfastened the straps, which slithered off her. When she sat up, she nearly bumped her head on the chamber’s low ceiling.

“Please be careful,” the voice warned. “You have grown four inches. You are now five feet eleven inches tall. You have gained sixty-three pounds.”

Dredda looked down at herself. Even though she had known more or less what to expect from computer-morphed projections, she recoiled. Her breasts were still there, and the same size and shape, but they looked smaller, flatter because of the expansion of her chest in bone and muscle. The new muscle mass was smooth, quick, not corded or bulked up. Like her breasts, her hips had remained the same size, but they now looked narrow relative to the increased span of her shoulders.

She ran her fingertips over her lips and chin and was relieved to find no sprouting of coarse facial hair. Although her jaw seemed a little heavier, as did her cheekbones and brow, there was no other apparent external masculinization. She had changed into a very tall, very athletic looking female, the tallest, most athletic female the limitations of her existing genetics could produce. Of course, that was just the tip of the iceberg as far as the changes went.

Dredda flexed her right bicep and, despite a twinge of pain in her elbow, was momentarily transfixed by its unfamiliar bulge.

“Based on the previous experiments,” the voice told her, “your lean-muscle mass should continue to increase slightly for a more few days. The new neural connections are already complete, as is bone growth. You aren’t going to get any taller.

“As you know, some experimental subjects, post-transformation, have displayed outbursts of extreme violence. We have only had combat simulations to work from, but it appears that spending long periods of time in a battlesuit under stress aggravates the problem. If you notice any loss of emotional control, you must start injecting yourself with antipsychotic drugs from the battlesuit medikits at once.”

“What are their side effects?”

“Reduced reaction time and increased fatigue.”

“But that would completely defeat the purpose of the procedure!” Dredda exploded.

The voice didn’t respond.

“If I start dosing myself with these drugs, will I have to take them permanently?”

“I’m sorry, but that is impossible to predict,” the whitecoat told her. “No one knows the long-term consequences of the genetic treatment you have been subjected to.”

The slowly simmering anger that had always been part of Dredda’s consciousness was now paired with an entirely different level of agitation, tangible like a hairy-legged insect buzzing, bouncing off the insides of her internal organs. Everything was taking way too long.

“Unseal the door,” she said.

The airlock remained shut, and the faceless whitecoat talked faster. As he spoke, his gauntleted hands made emphatic gestures above her head. “The viral agent we’ve used is extremely infectious and prone to rapid mutation and genetic recombination with other, potentially lethal life-forms. Understandably, we are very concerned about its containment. We strongly recommend that you spend another three days in Level Four quarantine to make sure it has all passed out of your system.”

The other conglomerates that made up FIVE knew nothing of this lab’s existence, nor were they aware of the genetic-engineering project that Dredda had made herself part of. All research connected to trans-reality and bioweapon technology was subject to the terms of FIVE’s founding treaty—only to be pursued as a joint venture. If the alliance got wind of what she was up to, they would turn on Omnico and subject it to a combined military attack that would make her escape to Shadow World impossible.

Moving in a blur, Dredda grabbed one of the whitecoat’s gloved wrists. He tried to pull back, but she held him fast, and as she did, she applied pressure to the slender bones on the back of his hand with her thumb. “Delay of any kind is unacceptable,” she told him.

“I understand your impatience—just do not rip the glove. You must not break the Level Four containment. If you relax for a moment, everything will be fine.”

The other gauntlets rapidly emptied as biotech workers moved out of her reach.

“Let me out of here now.”

“Please, listen to reason….”

There was no reason but hers, no need but hers. Under the ball of her thumb, the small bones snapped like dry twigs. A piercing scream burst through the intercom.

“Open the door!” she shouted. Her booming voice made the walls of the steel chamber vibrate.

Seconds later, the airlock door popped open and she was free.

Chapter Two

Ryan Cawdor stepped over an exposed tree root, slick, dark and as big as a human corpse sprawled across his path. A profusion of bare roots laced the winding trail and made the footing treacherous. The dim light didn’t help matters, either. Though it was high noon, everything was cloaked in shadow, thanks to the dense canopy overhead and the seemingly endless groves of black-barked trees.

In all his travels, he had never seen this type of rad-mutated oak before. Its wood was like iron; hand axes bounced off of it, hardly making a dent. The bark and leaves were chem-rain resistant, as were the parasitic strangler vines that spiraled up trunks and limbs to reach the sunlight.

The forest’s canopy had protected Ryan and his companions from the searing downpours they had endured since their last mat-trans jump, several days earlier. The intense storm activity of the past forty-eight hours had forced them to take shelter in a cave. From the safety of its entrance, they had winced at sizzling nearby lightning strikes and watched methane ice hail, as blue as robin’s eggs and just as big, pound the earth. In scattered heaps, the chem ice had steamed for hours before it finally melted away.

If the local trees and vines had somehow adapted to survive the caustic rains, other types of foliage had not. There was no ground cover to speak of around the trunks, just slippery piles of fallen, blade-shaped leaves that rustled underfoot.

The passing storm front had left the air extremely hot and punishingly humid—it felt equatorial to Ryan. The weather was the only clue where he and the companions had materialized. The cloud cover and forest canopy had made it impossible for them to orient using the stars.