Krysty glared at Dredda. “What are you?” she said. “What kind of thing are you?”
“You and I are not that different, actually. We have much of the same body chemistry. We have exactly the same emotions. The same yearnings. I just took advantage of an opportunity. I made a conscious choice to never be a victim.”
“That’s not something anyone can control,” Krysty said. “Turnabout is the nature of the universe. All universes.”
“I realize you think we have done you an injustice, if not an injury,” Dredda said. “But we have the need to reproduce. It’s biological, it’s built-in, and just like you, we can’t do it alone. We had to have his seed.”
“You’re not really human anymore. The only way you can reproduce is in a jar.”
“We had to have our eggs extracted,” Dredda said. “The genetic procedure we underwent would have damaged the eggs. In order to change ourselves, we had to give up motherhood, and the normal way of achieving it. That doesn’t mean we can’t love our offspring the same way you do, or that we don’t want to see them grow and prosper.”
Krysty glowered at her.
After a pause Dredda said, “How would you like to help us in another way? It could be beneficial to you.”
“I know, you want me to carry the thing you’re going to manufacture. No, thanks.”
“It would be half his.”
“It’s the other half that turns my stomach. Like I said, no, thanks.”
“There could be rewards.”
Krysty shrugged.
“For one thing,” Dredda continued, “you wouldn’t have to go back to the mines. You could avoid that horrible death. And if you are cooperative, there may be another benefit that you haven’t considered. You are a remarkable female specimen. Both Jann and I agree on that. You could join us. Become the first sister from Deathlands.”
“You’d adopt me?”
“Not exactly. You would take a dose of the same virus that we did. You would undergo the same physiological changes. You would come out the other side a force to be reckoned with. No man could ever stand up against you. You would wear the battlesuit and wield its full, awesome power. We sisters are more than female, and you could be, too.”
“More than a woman,” Krysty said. “And all I have to do to earn this honor is to bear…how many of your brats? Four? Eight? Twelve? Do you kill the male babies before or after they’re born?”
“You don’t understand what we are doing, where we are headed. Sacrifices have to be made. You can’t possibly appreciate that until you walk in our shoes, until you become one of us.”
“Just being in the same room with you makes me want to puke,” Krysty snarled. “You don’t deserve the joy of offspring. You deserve to be made extinct.”
“Have the guards take her to one of the holding cells,” Dredda told Jann. “Let her think about it for a while.”
The doctor grabbed Krysty by the arm. She twisted and fought, but she couldn’t break Jann’s viselike grip unless she called on Gaia. And at that moment, she wasn’t prepared to do so. There was no point.
As Krysty was dragged to the door, Dredda picked up a slim, stoppered vial of pearly fluid and waggled it at her. “Thanks again for the help. There is enough Shadow Man here to make us an army.”
Chapter Seventeen
Shortly after the gyro took off from Ground Zero, there was another confrontation between the slaves and their battlesuited keepers.
The cry went up from the doomed miners, “We want water! We want water!”
To emphasize their point, some of the slaves at the back of the crowd hurled their pickaxes at the trooper standing watch on the water tank. The flying axes clanged harmlessly off the fifteen-by-fifteen-foot metal cylinder and the stout steel framework that raised its bottom four feet above the glass.
“No ore, no water,” the trooper announced.
This was the normal routine. No one got water in the morning until they returned with a load of ore.
Emboldened by the troopers recent failure to act, some of the slaves tried to take matters into their own hands. They rushed the water tank.