“Sounds reasonable,” Dredda said. She faced the noncom and said, “I want you on the road to Ground Zero in two minutes with fifty troopers in four of the attack wags. I want that compound secured in half an hour and the ore wags rolling again. If you can’t accomplish that, don’t bother coming back.”
The trooper started to say something, but thought better of it. He saluted, then turned stiffly and left the room.
Dredda called in the pair of sister gyro pilots who had been waiting in the corridor.
“We’ve got a major crisis on our hands,” Dredda told them. “There’s been a slave revolt at the mines. The troopers stationed there haven’t been able to get it under control. The flow of ore to the processor has been cut off, which means we can’t maximize our fuel stockpile before the jump. It means we will take even less equipment with us.”
“What do you want us to do?” asked the taller of the two transgenic females.
“I want you to attack Ground Zero from the air. I want you to break the back of the rebellion with a minimum loss of life and limb on the workers’ side. It can’t be an indiscriminate slaughter because we need the slaves to mine the ore. If you injure too many, the operation becomes pointless.”
“Understood.”
“Now, listen very carefully,” Dredda said, “this is most important. If anything happens that eliminates the possibility of recovering more ore from the mines I want you to break off contact immediately and return here. Is that clear?”
“If the supply line break looks permanent, we come back at once,” said the taller pilot.
“That’s right. If no more ore can be extracted, there’s no use burning additional fuel, not to mention risking your lives and the two gyroplanes. At that point it becomes a cut-our-losses situation. We’ll have to make do with what we have.”
“And the troopers on the ground?” the other pilot asked. “What’s going to happen to them if we withdraw?”
“I hadn’t planned on taking any of the males with us, anyway,” Dredda said. “There isn’t enough fuel to transport both them and the gear we need. They’re just extra baggage. We will jump without them.”
As the pilots hurried out of the room, Dredda felt a gnawing pain in the pit of her stomach. Other reality jumps had always been part of her master plan. Eventually, each of the original sisters would have her own Shadow World to rule. And their unique kind would disperse through the limitless, near-mirror-image parallels in time-space, proliferating themselves in each reality, using up the available resources before moving on. Always moving on. She had never considered the possibility that their first jump might end so prematurely, in such disarray, in such a nightmare of unforeseeable circumstances and inexcusable blunders.
Dredda looked over at Huth, who stood with his arms folded across his chest. “What are you smiling at?” she demanded.
Chapter Twenty-Four
Gradually, as Ryan and J.B. climbed away from Ground Zero and the bottom of the nuke’s crater, a ribbon of the real world reappeared on the horizon on all sides. Snow-covered mountaintops peeked above the rim of glass, then familiar red mesas. The sense of oppression that both men had felt began to lift.
They had been traveling about fifteen minutes when another ore wag rounded a curve in front of them. This one was empty, and headed back to the mines. It eased over onto the right-hand side of the road so the vehicles could pass without a collision. The two men flattened themselves on the glass until after the truck went by.
“That trooper’s in for the shock of his life,” J.B. commented.
“Damned well better be,” Ryan said.
When their wag reached the last rise leading to Slake City, the driver shifted into low gear and they crawled up the grade. Minutes later, as the wag finally cleared the top of the rise, Ryan looked down the long slope that ended in the invaders’ compound. Even from a distance of fifteen hundred yards, he could see the intense activity that seemed to be concentrated in a small section of the plain. The tiny black figures were running to wags, which were parked in formation beside the cluster of domes. As he watched, a pair of gyroplanes lifted off from the landing strip and one of the wags started up and headed toward the entrance to the road.