Huth saw another short, straight punch coming at him, but there was nothing he could do about it. At the impact, as his head snapped back, something cracked. A lance of white-hot pain shot through his upper jaw, and his mouth was suddenly littered with sharp shards. In a gob of fresh blood, he spit out the remains of his two upper front teeth.
While Huth thrashed and bled, Bristle-nose showed off his booty. “Looks like predark gear to me,” he said. “Got to be worth a spoon or two of jolt over in Byrani ville.”
With that, the big robber turned and started off in the direction of the smoke. The other bandits quickly stripped off the unprotesting scientist’s shoes and pants, leaving their victim his blood-sprayed and scorched lab coat and his tattered, gray-tinged underwear and socks.
Huth waited a long time before he risked uncoiling from a fetal position in the dirt. And he didn’t start walking again until the sun was high overhead. Hobbling slowly toward the shade of the nearest fallen highway overpass, he looked like the survivor of a train wreck. Blood had dried purple black all down the front of his lab coat. He couldn’t breathe through his swollen nose, and every time he sucked air through his mouth, electric needles of pain stabbed into the exposed nerves of his emptied tooth sockets.
As he stumbled along, he wept over the loss of his irreplaceable instruments, his permanent disfigurement and the unspeakable cruelty of fate. He was still sobbing when he reached the collapsed overpass. What he saw there put his suffering—and his predicament—in a new perspective.
At the foot of the largest block of concrete sat a line of sun-bleached human skeletons. He counted fourteen of them, all identically posed, their backs leaning against the block, elbows resting on raised kneecaps. Some were adults, some were small children, some still had isolated patches of hair on their massively caved-in skulls. A couple of feet above the row of drop-jaw grins, someone had chiseled three tall, spindly words into the eroded concrete. Welkum Too Deflanz.
Chapter One
Fifteen days after a massive explosion destroyed the upper floors of the Totality Concept complex, Dredda Otis Trask stood naked and alone in a windowless stainless steel room. The small, unfurnished chamber had two doors, both heavily gasketed and airtight. A warm wetness trickled down the insides of her thighs. Not blood, but the remnants of a clear surgical lubricant, melted by her body heat. The CEO of Omnico, one of the most powerful people on the planet, had just had her womb stripped of all its eggs.
In itself, there was nothing unusual about the procedure. On her world, the invitro fertilized eggs of the executive class were routinely carried to term by surrogate mothers conscripted from the ranks of the white collars.
Nor was it strange that Dredda Otis Trask had chosen to have the extraction performed in the secure, private facilities of her own global conglomerate. But Omnico’s CEO hadn’t surrendered all her potential offspring to a test tube merely for the sake of convenience. Given the nature of the dangerous experimental treatment she was about to undertake, it was a necessary precaution.
Above Dredda’s head on a wall bracket was a vid-cam, its op light glowing ruby red. A team of faceless, nameless strangers was observing her through the fish-eye lens.
“Please stand beneath the ceiling nozzles,” said a voice through the vidcam’s speaker.
When Dredda stepped over the center sloping floor’s single drain, the shower spray commenced. The hot water that enveloped her was followed by foaming, pea-green jets of bactericide. After she had rinsed off the foam, vents along the base of the walls blasted her with heated air, drying her to the point of itchiness in a matter of seconds. As she raked her static-charged, auburn hair back behind her ears, an electronic lock snicked and the exit door popped outward a foot.
Through the tiny speaker, the voice said, “Please proceed to Level Three containment.”
Dredda immediately moved into the well-lit, polished metal hallway, which was also windowless. She could have touched the ceiling with a raised hand, and the corridor was so narrow it wouldn’t permit the full spread of her arms. The air hung heavy with a mist of disinfectant that stung the back of her throat. Auto tracking vidcams mounted at intervals along the ceiling followed her barefoot progress to the next chamber, which was even smaller.