She had repeatedly demonstrated that she had no scruples, foresight or concern for aftermaths. Huth had privately ranked her as one of the least intelligent of the CEOs he had ever dealt with. This combination also made her one of the most dangerous.
The female standing before him wasn’t the same Dredda he’d seen two months ago. The weight and density of the bones of her face had increased, as had her gross size. He no longer looked down on her; they stood almost eye to eye. Though he knew he was taking a risk in asking for the details, his scientific curiosity got the better of him.
“You’ve certainly changed since I last saw you,” he said.
“So have you,” Dredda said, giving his shambling, bloodstained costume and missing teeth the once over.
“I have been badly abused by the people here,” Huth said. “In order to survive, I have been forced to do things too awful to describe. Being lost in Deathlands has been the most terrible experience of my life. But you? What happened to you?”
“A little genetic engineering,” she said. “I’m bigger, stronger and faster. Smarter, too.”
“Really?”
“I’ve gotten smart enough to know I don’t need you anymore.”
A great lump rose in Huth’s throat. He was flabbergasted. “Surely, my expertise…”
“Is out of date,” she finished for him. “My whitecoats stole your technology, miniaturized it and made it portable. See those two big semitrailers over there? The trans-reality machinery is contained in them.”
Huth looked at the trailers in disbelief. The original system he had developed had taken up an entire floor of a skyscraper. Recovering, he said, “Miniaturization was the next logical step, of course, that and reduced power consumption. Those improvements were already on the drawing board when I had my accident.”
Dredda’s digitalized laugh grated against his eardrums.
“My whitecoats figured out how to do all that six months ago,” she said. “They also figured out how to make the trans-reality jumps consecutive.”
” ‘Consecutive’? I’m sorry, I don’t understand what you mean by that.”
“Your system had a fixed starting point in the Totality Concept tower, which made consecutive jumps impossible. If you wanted to go to a different reality from Deathlands, you had to return to our Earth, recalibrate the corridor to arrive at a new destination, then cross over. Every new destination required a step back to Earth. Now the entire generating system moves with us every time we jump. Which means we can go from this reality to another, and another, and another, without every returning to the starting point. The only limit to the number of consecutive jumps is access to power at the terminus.”
Huth stared at the glacier of nukeglass. Then it finally hit him. Power. That’s why Dredda had come here. He could only blame physical hardship and a lack of calories for his failure to see it sooner—his mind wasn’t working at its normal speed. “Reprocessing bacteria!” he exclaimed. “Of course, you’re using reprocessing bacteria!”
“That’s what those units are for.” She indicated a pair of six-wheeled trailers standing beside the thermoglass.
At the ends of the huge boxes were hoppers, where the raw radioactive ore was dumped. They had chutes on their sides, so the rock dust byproducts of bacteria’s digestion could be removed.
Dredda didn’t have to explain the technology to him. It was twenty-five years old, developed when his world had been forced to cannibalize the energy contained in its one hundred thousand warhead nuclear arsenal. Inside the black trailers, segregated colonies of bacteria performed a sequence of specific metabolizations on the inorganic material. The result, a concentrated, liquidized fuel, was then pumped through thick hoses into waiting, smaller tanker trucks.
“There’s an enormous supply of raw material out there,” Dredda went on. “This world has hundreds of other nuked-out hot spots to exploit. The only limiting factor is having a labor force of sufficient size to extract it.”
Huth noted the lack of any shielding from the ore and the drippings of reprocessed nuclear fuel on the ground. The troopers were protected in battlesuits, but the seated Deathlanders weren’t.
“What about rad hazard?” he asked.
“What about it?”