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 to pinpoint the nearest, hottest nuke zone, a place that could provide the suitable raw material for her reprocessing units. The energy reprocessors utilized strains of genetically engineered bacteria that feasted on irradiated inorganic matter and secreted usable nuclear fuel. Every critical component of Dredda’s invasion force, from gyroplanes to battlesuits, was powered by this recycled material.
The skirmish Dredda had planned for this day would easily gobble up one-third of the precious little fuel that had been harvested from Slake City so far, but she had no choice in the matter. To stabilize the energy stockpile in the short term, she had to expand her mining operation, and to do that, given the life expectancy of her workers, she needed a much larger labor pool.
Behind her, eight huge landships waited, their nuke turbines humming at idle. Gleaming black and windowless, with smooth, aerodynamic contours, the 6X6s were the core of her ground force, able to traverse at high speed the most difficult terrain thanks to their seven-foot-diameter wheels, each with its own independent drive train and suspension.
As Dredda turned for her flagship, its right front door rose up like the wing of a great bird. Sunlight washed over the high-backed copilot seat, over a ceiling tangled with exposed conduit, wiring harnesses and gray Kevlar pipe. A fine film of desert dust coated the gangway’s steps.
Sitting in the other cockpit’s other chair, behind the steering yoke, was Mero. Her pale blue eyes gleamed through her battlesuit’s transparent visor; her close-cropped blond curls were partially hidden by a red skullcap. Like all the officers of Dredda’s invasion force, Mero was the product of Level Four genetic engineering. The experimental procedure had made her face less round, and her chin more square and prominent. The look of supreme confidence in her eyes, an expression that four tours with the dreaded Population Control Service hadn’t dimmed, was now reinforced by additional bone structure and dense layers of muscle.
Dredda understood exactly what Mero was feeling at that moment. Excitement. Impatience. And an intense curiosity about the future. The two women, indeed all the Level Four females, shared a bond that went deeper than their rank or sex, or the war upon Shadow World they were about to wage. They were all sister changelings, birthed in the same stainless-steel womb, explorers of a new universe without, and an equally mysterious and promising one within.