Breakthrough - James Axler

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wilderness and then I ended up in this place, in very sorry circumstances. My name is Dr. Huth. I am somewhat famous where I come from. Maybe the others talked about me? Or mentioned my name in passing?”

      “Nope,” Mike said.

      “One thing’s for certain,” Huth continued, “you have become their puppet. Those laser cuffs can turn you into a victim in a hurry. Without hands and feet you’d be a big lump of warm, helpless meat that anyone could play nasty with. How much chain did they give you? Fifty miles? A hundred miles? Go one step farther, break the transmitter’s signal, and zap! All fall down.”

      “You better not queer my pitch here,” Mike warned, poking Huth hard in the chest with a huge finger. “I got a quota to make.”

      “Take me back with you. Take me back to my people.”

      Mike gave him a dubious look.

      “That’s all I want. Really.”

      The big man’s eyes glittered. “No problem,” he said. “You can ride with me all the way to Slake City.”

      Overjoyed, Huth started to throw his shovel out a window.

      “No, keep that,” Mike told him. “It’ll come in handy later. I got to go outside now. I got to make my closing pitch before these triple stupes start to sober up.” He dug under a seat and removed a big yellow plastic tub. He patted the tight-fitting lid and said, “The deal clincher.”

      Huth remained inside the bus while Big Mike stepped out and addressed the crowd. “I’m looking for a few good folks who aren’t a-scared of rumors,” he said. “And I’m willing to sweeten the pie a little. I know you’ve all got a taste for what’s in here.” He opened the tub and showed them the heap of white crystalline powder it contained. “This is the real thing, people. One hundred percent pure jolt. It’ll make you feel ten feet tall. And you’ll screw my pretty sluts like a pack of slag heap weasels. Don’t push, now. One at a time, now. Come and get it.”

      Using a battered teaspoon, he laid a heaping dose of powder on every outstretched palm. Though some people licked it, most of them snorted it. The powerful drug took hold quickly, with alarming effect. It made eyes bug out and sweaty faces grimace spastically. To quench their suddenly raging thirsts, the revelers guzzled more free joy juice, and they all fell into a slow-spinning, half-speed dance.

      At a signal from Mike, the music abruptly stopped and the three whores climbed down from the roof with the boom box. They entered the bus and walked past Huth, heading straight for the pile of mattresses in the back.

      “Come on, people,” Mike urged, gesturing toward the bus’s entrance. “The real fun is starting. Slip and slide. Slip…and…slide.”

      As stoned as they were, most of the Byram ville folks didn’t fall for his spiel, but they were in no shape to try to stop the few who did. Four men between the ages of twenty and thirty, and a heavyset, thirtyish woman mounted the bus’s steps. As the woman passed Huth and turned down the aisle for the rear, she jerked her black sleeveless T-shirt over her head and tossed it aside. Her huge soft breasts swayed pendulously as she struggled with the zipper on the front of her dusty BDU pants.

      “Hey, it’s okay if you don’t want to come with me now,” Mike assured the rest of the crowd. “I’ll be back by here in a week or two. Give you all some time to think it over. Maybe I’ll even bring back your friends for a visit. You can hear firsthand what you’re missing.”

      With that, he climbed back in the bus, started it up and U-turned for the checkpoint. Huth took a seat up front, right behind the driver, as far away from the goings-on in the back as he could get.

      After they had cleared the gate, Mike double-clutched and shifted the bus into high gear. “How about some driving music?” he said over his shoulder. He poked the boom box, which sat perched on the dash. The 1999 song started up again at top volume, canceling out the grunting, whimpering racket from the rear.

      Big Mike, clearly feeling the effects of all the joy juice he’d drunk, threw back his head and falsetto-screeched along with the vocalist.

      For his part, Huth was content to bob his head and tap out the now-familiar beat with the toe of his size-13 jogging shoe. He watched the flat, parched landscape roll past the grimy window, toothlessly grinning while tears streamed down his face.

      Chapter Four

      Dredda Otis Trask deepened the tint of her helmet visor to shield her eyes against Slake City’s blinding, panoramic glare. From the history of her own Earth, she knew that there had once been a vast body of water in this place, the last remnant of an ancient inland sea. In Shadow World’s reality, on a late January day more than a century past, Great Salt Lake had been vaporized by a multiwarhead nuclear strike. And a fraction of an instant later, the sands of the exposed lake bed and the shattered metropolis of Salt Lake City were melted together, fused into a boiling, hundred-square-mile sea of thermoglass. As the infernal heat was sucked up into the atmosphere, towering waves of glass solidified in a nightmare snapshot, their peaks capped with a foam of rusting, fire-blackened litter. Massive, shock-blast-tossed fragments—skyscraper I-beams, sections of railroad track and metal utility poles—stuck up from the wave troughs like the masts of a drowned navy.

      It was a place long dead, but it was neither silent nor still.

      Between howling gusts of wind, the external microphones of Dredda’s battlesuit picked up what sounded like the scattered, desperate cries of abandoned infants. There were no lost babies out there. The phenomenon had to do with the nukeglass’s structural weaknesses, which were caused by mineral impurities, and by the pulverized debris and air bubbles it contained. Extreme changes in day-night temperatures caused hairline cracks to appear in the matrix, and as the splits spread and ran, they made the shrill, disturbing sounds.

      Occasionally, there were much louder noises. As the fine cracks branched out, they became networks of fissures that eventually crashed down the roofs of hidden hollow spots. Some of these collapsed air pockets were the size of amphitheaters.

      Dredda focused her attention on a distant column of human figures moving away from her, over the gray-green surface. The group of freshly captured slaves walked a road that ended at Ground Zero, some eight miles away from Slake City. A pair of huge black vehicles dogged the rear of the file, herding the work crew replacements.

      Building a road across the nukeglass that could support heavy vehicle traffic had been dangerous work. Even with side-scanning sonar to point out the larger crevasses and voids, sudden cave-ins were frequent and nearly always fatal to the natives. The broken chunks had razor sharp edges and often weighed hundreds of pounds. Trying to pull trapped slaves from the cave-ins had turned out to be wasted effort: the shifting sections of thermoglass either sliced them to rags, or chopped them into pieces.

      In the week that it had taken to complete road construction, Dredda had sacrificed half of the Shadow World work force she had pressed into service. Most of the slaves were young men who had been mining their meager living from the dead city. They used crude hand tools to hack holes in the surface and crawled into the hollow places in search of undamaged, pre-Armageddon odds and ends, which they then traded. As a rule, these independent scroungers only worked the outer edges of the nukeglass, where the lingering radiation was the weakest. Even so, after a few years of digging, most had developed angry sores and large, visible tumors.

      At Ground Zero, tissue destruction proceeded much more briskly. After a few days in that high-dose radioactive environment, weeping blisters appeared on unshielded hands, faces and feet. Based on the rad exposure alone, the working life span of a slave was no more than two weeks. Because of other dangers related to large-scale mining in thermoglass, actual survival time was half of that. From Dredda’s point of view, this wasn’t entirely a negative: there was no need to feed slaves who were only going to live a week.

      Her own survival, and ultimately the conquest of Shadow World, depended on the exploitation of local energy sources. The recon satellite’s first mission, postlaunch, had been

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