Doom Helix (7 page)

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 hasn’t proved as useful as I’d hoped,” the whitecoat said. “They appear to locate in the body randomly, whether they are inhaled, swallowed, or absorbed through the skin. Once inside a host, they don’t concentrate in any particular organ that can be targeted. They migrate through the tissues and eventually fill all the available empty space inside the torso. This makes removing specters in the endospore stage a very complex, whole-body problem. The level of X-ray radiation
necessary to guarantee their complete destruction would certainly destroy the host.

“As we’ve already determined, the specters are vulnerable after they emerge from the endospores and before they break out of the host’s body. If the host is killed while they are still inside it, the specters also die.”

“But have you figured out why that happens?” Mero asked.

“The reasons for the simultaneous die-offs remain unclear,” Dr. Huth said.

“We’ve been through all this before,” Auriel said, her impatience growing. “Killing every infected host on a planet is logistically and technically impossible. Just as identifying every infected host on an entire planet is impossible. In order to wipe out this threat, we have to be able to destroy the specters in all three of their life stages. To that end what exactly have you accomplished?”

“My attempts to extract tissue and DNA from entities inside the test subjects have so far been unsuccessful,” Dr. Huth said. “The samples only contain the tissue and DNA of the host. The specters seem able to avoid a probe inside the host’s body same way they avoid laser beams after they break out.”

“And what
way
is that?” Auriel said.

“I’m afraid that, too, is unclear at this point,” Dr. Huth admitted. He hurried to add, “I do, however, have some working hypotheses….”

Auriel cut him off before he could elaborate further. “Tell me something you know for certain,” she said.

“Unfortunately, most of what there is to tell is
negative,” Dr. Huth said. “The term ‘endospore’ that we’ve been using to describe the protostage is technically inaccurate. The encystation that contains the initial egg form of the specters isn’t like the protein coat of a bacterium. Instead of being the organic product of DNA, it’s an unusual compound of metallic silica. The fully grown specters appear to have no internal organs or nervous systems, and no external structures such as mouths or eyes. Or at least none that are discernible with the instruments I have at my disposal, and that has become a major focus of concern. These entities are certainly not of this universe, possibly not of any ‘universe’ that we humans can comprehend. They don’t seem to obey the same physical rules as we do. Because of the limitations, perhaps incompatibilities, in our existing technology we may be blind to what’s right under our noses.

“For example, I haven’t been able to determine how the specters acquire raw materials for growth. From the blood tests I’ve completed, they don’t appear to be taking anything from the hosts except a protected, dark, temperature-controlled environment in which to grow. The incubation time from implantation of endospore to breakout varies widely from species to species, and to a lesser degree from individual to individual. They seem to grow and mature faster inside mutants like stickies. Whether it has to do with their higher normal body temperature or their unique biochemistry is unknown.”

“If they aren’t taking anything from their victims,” Mero said, “why do they go on a kill rampage after they break out and divide?”

“That’s another unknown,” Dr. Huth said. “Again, it
could be the fault of the instruments. The specters may be acquiring something that I can’t yet measure.”

It was a poor whitecoat who blamed his tech-gear, Auriel thought.

Her mother had never fully trusted Dr. Huth, perhaps because on their home planet his every breakthrough, his every innovation, had had an unforeseen and catastrophic downside. Auriel had more personal reasons for doubting and despising the man. She could never forget the look on his face was he peered in at her while she, a mere child, lay strapped, helpless in the Level Four isolation tank. The gap-toothed, self-absorbed “genius” had been deaf to her cries of pain and terror as her infant bone, muscle and neurosystem were reengineered, cell by cell. She might as well have been a baby lab rat, or a stickie. And it had been his latex-gloved hands that had excised her nascent reproductive organs. Thanks to Dr. Huth, she would never be a mother, nor even an egg donor.

Thanks to him, she was one of a kind.

Intellectually, Auriel understood the reasons her ovaries had been sacrificed. The male and female sexes each had built-in bioengineering limits, which were dependent upon the amount of body space and chemistry devoted to reproductive functions. Much more of a female’s biological potential—hormonally, metabolically, neurologically—was taken up by reproductive duties. If the biochemical obligations of motherhood were removed, there was room for the system to change and grow, and ultimately to evolve. Because a male’s reproductive functions took up very little of the body’s overall capacity, removing those functions had virtually no
effect on biological potential. In other words, the other half of the human species had long since peaked.

Dr. Huth was a normal, genetic male, and that was part of the problem. Biologically, evolutionarily, he was a dead-ender—and he knew it.

As much as the commander loathed the sight of him, he was the only whitecoat they had, and at this point the only whitecoat they were ever likely to find. Whether his scientific expertise was better than none at all, whether it was worth enduring his continued presence, time would tell.

The seated, mama stickie threw back her head and unleashed a bloodcurdling scream. Neck cords standing out, arms locked rigid, heels frantically drummed on the thermoglass. The infant hung on to one breast as the already bloated belly visibly inflated, the skin stretching and stretching until it shined like polished yellow silk. Then the epidermis began to split: a line of bright green along the central seam of stomach muscles. Like the stickie was about to give birth.

Caesarian.

“Time has run out,” Dr. Huth said.

“Burn it,” Auriel said. “Do it now.”

The whitecoat reached a gauntleted hand toward a pair of switches set in the nukeglass beside the cell’s opening. One of the switches was a button; the other was protected by a safety cover. He flipped back the cover, exposing a red toggle.

Auriel quickly shifted her visor out of infrared mode to keep from being blinded.

Inside the cell, along the left-hand wall stood three silver-metallic canisters. Hoses ran from the valves on
the top of tanks to a rack of stubby nozzles spaced at floor level, knee level and waist level, and they were angled to cover the entire interior, wall to wall, floor to ceiling.

When Dr. Huth hit the switch, mama stickie’s cry of agony was accompanied by the mechanical
clack-clack-clack
of the ignition system. The roar of combustion that followed was as loud as a gyro turbine. Its blast of heat penetrated the force field, and slammed the front of Auriel’s battlesuit, making her take a reflexive step backward. Inside the cell, temperatures in excess of 2000 degrees Fahrenheit evaporated mutant flesh explosively; the stripped skeletons—one large, one tiny—glowed red for a fraction of an instant, then dissolved. In two seconds mama and baby stickie were reduced to smoke.