You are a very brave girl.
Dredda felt hot blood rush to her face and neck. She recognized her father’s voice. It hadn’t come through the operating suite’s intercom speaker; it didn’t exist anywhere outside her mind. Regis Otis Trask, the former CEO of Omnico, had been dead for four years.
Whenever her father had said those words to her, and he’d had the opportunity to say them often, what he’d meant was that she was very brave for a girl. Brave considering that because of her sex, she possessed relatively limited physical and mental strength and endurance. Though she had long understood the reasons for her father’s patronizing attitude, that had never made it any less painful or infuriating.
Dredda’s personal abilities and achievements had very little to do with the power she currently wielded over the lives of tens of billions of human beings. She had inherited her father’s position at the top of the conglomerate’s executive hierarchy, and she had an army of highly capable, highly motivated defenders dedicated to keeping her there. For as long as she could remember, everyone she encountered had looked past her, or through her, and had seen only her father’s awesome legacy.
But Dredda was very much the daughter of Regis Otis Trask. She shared his thirst for conquest and empire, and the need to burn her name deep into the pages of history, desires she could never satisfy as caretaker of a bureaucratic monolith on a dying planet.
For months, preparations had been under way for her unannounced, permanent departure to Shadow World. In secret, Omnico’s top scientists had duplicated the Totality Concept’s reality-jumping technology, and had managed to vastly improve upon it. The transfer of soldiers and material only awaited the successful completion of her Level Four treatment, which for security reasons had been postponed until the last possible moment.
Dredda had committed herself to the irreversible genetic procedure shortly after the CEOs’ joint interrogation of the prisoner from Shadow World. The man called Ryan Cawdor had described his Earth as a place of chaos, of perpetual bloody turmoil. Social control did exist, but only in confined areas called baronies, and it was maintained by brute power.
Male power.
To cross over to Shadow World unprepared for that fact would have meant the surrender of everything Dredda had, of everything she had ever dreamed of.
Could Alexander the Great have succeeded if he had been a woman? Could Cortez? Or Napoleon? Her own Earth’s history said no. In times of internal strife, during periods of conquest, males only respected other males, only feared other males. These were the lessons of Shadow World, as well. If Dredda failed to instill absolute terror in her adversaries on the parallel Earth, she knew her relatively small expeditionary force could not prevail.
And she not only had Shadow World males to contend with, but those in her own support units, as well. In a different reality, the old urges of one sex to dominate the other would surely resurface. The selective subordination and subjugation of females was bound to follow. Such an outcome was unacceptable to Dredda Otis Trask.
As her father had so often said, “Chains are meant for other people.”
It might well have been the Trask family motto.
Dredda became aware of a ringing in her ears, the first sign of the spread of the genetically modified virus. Almost immediately, her body temperature began to rise, and as it climbed, the sedation was increased. Long before the infection’s peak, she slipped quietly into a drug induced coma. She didn’t feel the plastic tube slide down her airway or hear the rhythmic hiss of the respirator begin.
The tailored virus carried a limited set of genetic instructions, which as it replicated, it transmitted to all her cells. These instructions permanently altered so the chemistry of her body, reinitiating long dormant physical processes, reactivating the growth plates in the bones of her hips, legs, back, shoulders and arms. Under their new instructions, the targeted cells began rapid, controlled division. As her bones enlarged, cell layer by cell layer, they ached as if they had been shattered by sledgehammers; as they enlarged, the attached sinews, muscles and cartilage stretched to the splitting point. Nerve cells began multiplying in specific locations, as well, which only magnified the intensity of the skeletal pain. The transformation process was so agonizing that it required anesthetic narcosis—early test subjects who were fully conscious had died from the pain within a matter of hours.