The ore wag was upside down. Three of its wheels had been broken off by the fall.
Everyone in the cargo box was gone.
As Doc and Mildred watched, a side door to one of the assault wags opened and three tiny human figures crawled out. Some of the troopers had survived, but there was nowhere safe for them to stand outside their crumpled wag. Their weight caused the precariously balanced jumble of blocks to move. And when the blocks shifted, they opened new routes to the yawning emptiness below.
With a grinding roar, the three troopers and a wide section of rubble vanished.
If more of the enemy were alive, they didn’t show themselves.
From the opposite side of the chasm came a shout. Jak’s white mane of hair was unmistakable. He waved them around the lower end of the crevasse, then pointed to the upper end.
“It appears that we are to rejoin the road above the slide,” Doc said.
“We’d better get a move on,” Mildred stated. “We’ve got a long, hot walk ahead of us.”
Chapter Twenty-Eight
Dredda herself supervised the towing of the last two gyroplanes into position inside the pink-flagged transport field. Between the twin fifty-foot-long trailers that housed the trans-reality units was an ellipse of vital gear, most of it self-propelled or at least mobile. When the gyros were parked in their assigned places, she gestured impatiently for the wag drivers to exit their vehicles.
The drivers were men, and they weren’t coming along.
She ordered her sisters to start up the reality-field generators. When the switches were pulled, a low hum emanated from both of the trailers, and the air just in front of and between them seemed to shimmer and blur.
That’s when the trouble started.
The troopers stood anxiously outside the perimeter of pink flags. The she-hes stood inside it, resolute, with gauntleted hands on their genetically engineered hips. Until that moment, it hadn’t occurred to the troopers that they weren’t invited to the next party.
As Dredda locked down her helmet, Mero burst from the doorway of the big dome. She had her battlesuit on and carried her helmet under her arm. Mero rushed up and said, “Shadow Man is here. He freed the red-haired bitch. They’re loose in the compound.”
None of that mattered anymore. They were in countdown mode.
“Put on your helmet,” Dredda told her. “We’re about to make the jump.”
“What about us?” one of the troopers demanded, his voice painfully loud inside her helmet.
She turned down the volume.
“You’re not leaving us here!” the man insisted. “We’ll all die from the bacteria!”
The other troopers shouted their agreement.
Dredda keyed her com link to her sisters. “Be ready for them when they charge,” she said. “We don’t have time to play, now. We must finish the job quickly.”
As the men rushed forward, the sisters stepped through the shimmering curtain to meet them.
The job in question was hand to hand because the EM shields of both sides’ battlesuits rendered lasers useless, even at close quarters. The men were no match for the she-hes in either physical strength or in stamina. The disease the invaders had brought with them had affected all of them more or less equally. If the sisters were weakened, so were the men. And it didn’t matter that the troopers outnumbered their opponents more than two to one.
Dredda joined her sisters in the fight. She couldn’t have stopped herself even if she’d wanted to. Through the cleared visors of their helmets, Dredda could see the rage on the faces of the two troopers who attacked her, the rage and the blood lust. They wanted more than a free ride, more than to merely save their lives. They wanted to reassert their masculinity. It was a sad commentary.
Dredda short-punched the first trooper, ending the blow with a savage twist of the wrist. The breastplate of his armor buckled inward, and there was a loud snapping sound. Her fist had shattered his breastbone, and from the way he dropped, as if all his strings had been cut, the sharp ends of imploding bone had torn his heart to shreds.
The second trooper wheeled around the body of the first, trying to come at her from the side. Dredda let him come, offering him an undefended right hip. The trooper swung a kick into the small of her back. From his expression and the loud grunt he made, it had everything he could put behind it. She absorbed the blow easily, letting it drive her a half step forward, then shifted her weight and kicked, herself. Her heel came down in a slashing arc against the side of his helmet. The helmet cracked.