“You’re saying in a month of contact we’ve already infected the whole damned planet?”
“No, I’m saying that in time, eventually the whole planet will be infected. There’s no way to stop it. The longer you delay leaving this reality, the bigger the risk that you won’t ever be able to leave it. Let me stress that death by this means will not be quick or pleasant. As the organism devours skin and flesh, there will be secondary infections of the open wounds by bacteria.”
“Can’t you do anything about this?” Dredda yelled at him. “Give me one reason, Dr. Genius, why I shouldn’t send you back to the mines?”
“I have done something,” he protested. “I have given you the information you need to survive. I have bought you a few hours with the new ointment. We can confine and successfully treat the problem prior to jumping from this reality, and eliminate it afterward. That’s the best I can do under the circumstances, I’m afraid.”
“A few hours?” Dredda said.
“At best.”
It was all finally beginning to sink in.
“But there isn’t enough energy on hand to move the entire operation! We’d have to abandon most of our equipment because we couldn’t maintain the corridor long enough to get it all through. There’d be no time to send drones through first, to lay the groundwork. We’d be at the mercy of whatever reality we happened to jump to.”
“The battlesuits can withstand antagonistic environments.”
“Only as long as their fuel lasts.”
Huth seemed alarmed at her increasing level of agitation. He glanced nervously back at the door, measuring the distance if he had to make a run for it. “Believe me, it’s not as dire as it seems,” he said, “if you understand the nature and depth of the parallels between realities. The conformities from one universe to the next are very close or we couldn’t travel between them. The corridor wouldn’t hold up. Interdimensional vibration would tear it apart. The bottom line here is, no matter where you jump using this technology, you can expect to find an oxygen atmosphere, a single sun and a class M planet of the same relative age. The details of each environment may be very different, but the general features have to be the same.”
“I need a time frame,” Dredda said. “How long do we have before we have to leave?”
“There is no margin for safety. And this is just an educated guess, but based on the organism’s generation time, I’d say six hours, tops.”
Dredda refused to sag under the weight of that terrible news.
“Mero,” she said, “we have to have hard numbers on the nuke fuel we currently have on hand, and a solid estimate on how much more we can extract from Ground Zero and process in the next six hours. We need fuel to power the jump, and we need fuel to use after the jump. The amount of fuel is going to determine who and what goes with us.”
“I’ll get right on it,” Mero said, heading for the door.
“Before you do that,” Dredda said, “send the word to the troopers at the mines. There is no tomorrow. Work the slaves until they drop dead. I am authorizing the execution of slackers, at their discretion. I want every ounce of ore they can wring out of them.”
Chapter Twenty
Ryan saw Jak burst out of the gloom at the end of the tunnel. The mutie albino was sprinting for all he was worth. A second later, the reason became clear. Behind Jak, at the edge of the range of the klieg lights, a trooper skidded to a stop. As he raised his pulse rifle and fired, someone deeper in the shaft let out a shout.
Jak managed to twist away from the green beam.
It didn’t wink out, but like a 150-foot-long saber slashed across the width of the tunnel at belly height.
Before it could touch him, Jak dived for the floor. As it swept over his head, he rolled and came up on the balls of his feet; he came up running. The laser shot swung wide, and as the beam grazed the side of the far wall, it gouged a long, dripping channel in the glass.