Polestar Omega

“Looks like uncooked egg white to me,” Mildred said.

“It’s pengie egg,” the server said, as if that information explained everything.

“So?”

The woman shot Mildred an exasperated look. “Pengie egg,” she repeated slowly as if to a small child. “The white never sets. It always looks like that, no matter how long you cook it or at how high a temperature. It’s protected by some kind of natural antifreeze. Don’t worry it’s fresh...”

Her words were lost in a sudden, grinding roar. Then everything began to shake. A Klaxon blasted a series of hair-raising pulses, obliterating the symphonic version of a Barry Manilow classic.

“Hang on!” the server shouted at them.

Mildred and Doc grabbed for the serving rails to keep from being thrown to the floor, which undulated in waves, as if it had turned to liquid. Gray dust rained down from the ceiling. The glass counter windows rattled violently in their steel frames. No one screamed, no one abandoned their food. As quickly as it had begun, it was over.

“Just a little icequake,” Oscar said. “Nothing to worry about. You’ll get used to them.”

Then he turned to the server and said, “Give them each a full portion. They’ve got a lot of work to do today.”

Mildred protested the show of generosity, but to no avail. A full portion is what she was handed.

When Doc received his plate, he stared in horror at the pâté of glistening, smashed, predigested fish.

The man in line behind them had to have read Doc’s expression because he leaned in and said, “Hey, if you’re not going to eat that...”

Chapter Three (#ulink_a42df2af-03d7-5a5b-8d04-e4ad96465ff5)

Doubled over from the sucker kick to the groin and gasping for air, Ryan didn’t hear the door shut behind Lima and his entourage. The pain would have dropped him to his knees but for the fact that his wrists were tethered behind his back to the wall.

“You okay, lover?”

“Yeah, yeah, just give me a minute.”

“Bastards,” Jak gritted, his red eyes flashing with hate.

“Only thing you can trust them to do,” J.B. said, “is stab you in the back. And they’ll do it every time.”

Backstabbing was only one in a long list of their crimes. With their soft, uncallused hands, whitecoats had engineered and facilitated the destruction of civilization. They were the cause of suffering on an unimaginable scale, despised by all Deathlanders, norm and mutie. These spineless puppet masters hid behind their high principles—objectivity, accuracy and the search for pure knowledge—like their shit didn’t stink, but in reality they were no different from any other lying, thieving coldheart scum. They had promised humanity a glorious, ever-expanding future, but it was a sham, a carny hoax to suck up power, resources and wealth. It turned out what the population prior to 2001 had bought and paid for was murder and devastation on a global scale. Ryan slowly straightened up, grimacing.

“Do you believe we’ve been changed by something triple bad like Lima said?” Krysty asked him. “Something we could pass on?”

“Who knows?” Ryan replied. “If you think about it, the head whitecoat didn’t tell us much. He never explained why we’re here. Or how they got us here. He changed the subject right away to what’s wrong with us.”

“Did you notice he gave us his name but didn’t ask for ours?” Krysty asked. “Like we weren’t going to be around long enough for it to matter.”

“Yeah,” Ryan said, “not a good sign.”

“What are they going to do to us now?” Ricky asked.

“We don’t know what the ‘treatment’ Lima has in mind is all about,” Krysty said. “Or how long it will take. And if we’re lucky enough to survive it, we don’t know what they’ll do to us afterward.”

“Or even if there is a nukin’ treatment,” J.B. said. “Could be a way to keep us cowed until they get what they want out of us.”

Ryan nodded his agreement. It was just more of the same as far as he was concerned, telling people what they wanted to hear. Work less. Cheaper food. Cheaper housing. Longer life. If you get sick, no worries, we’ll fix you. Why change the line of bullshit when it always worked?

“I think there’s a good chance we’ll be separated,” he told the others. “That would make us a lot easier to control. If it happens, remember that Mildred and Doc are already in the redoubt, and if they haven’t freed themselves by now they soon will. You can bet on that. If we just hang tight, even if we’re separated they’ll find us. And no matter what these bastards put you through, remember you’re not alone. Everyone else is looking for a way to regroup and escape. We survived Oracle and sailing around the Horn. If we bide our time and stay sharp, we’ll survive this.”

“Where’s the food they promise?” Ricky asked.

Like most teenaged boys, Ricky Morales’s stomach was a bottomless pit.

“They’re holding out the carrot,” Ryan said, “which keeps us off-balance. Like there’s a chance they’re still going to play nice.”

“And mebbe not chill us,” J.B. added.

“It’s been a long time since we’ve eaten,” Ricky said. “Carrots sound good to me.”

By Ryan’s reckoning they shared a meal a little over twelve hours ago. They had stopped for a quick bite before checking out a redoubt near White Sands, New Mex. There was only one item on the menu: jackrabbit. The critters had screamed like scalded babies when struck by Jak’s throwing knives, jumping six feet in the air, turning mad somersaults and pinwheeling sprays of blood. Ryan and J.B. had cut off the heads so no one had to look at their faces, which were pink and hairless save for long whiskers and bushy eyebrows. Their two-foot-long ears were likewise off-putting, so riddled with needle wormholes they looked like brown lace.

Skinned out and roasted on spits the jackrabbits were a bit gamy and tough, but the companions laid into them until there was nothing left but a pile of stripped bones. After they had finished eating, they lit their torches and headed for the redoubt’s mountainside entrance. Some nameless, probably long dead joker had scratched a message into the stone above the gaping entrance: For Sale by Owner, Needs Work. It wasn’t the first time they’d seen graffiti; the same kind of message had decorated the entrances of one or two other plundered redoubts across the hellscape. Because the joke was so old, none of the companions bothered to comment.

It turned out the place was occupied by squatters—a colony of stickies had taken up residence; the corridors were crawling with the spindly pale creatures. The companions descended five floors beneath the surface and stumbled on a writhing, ten-deep, stickie clusterfuck. Something had triggered a mating frenzy. There were too many to chill, and they couldn’t reverse course because the way out was blocked by arm-waving bodies, sucker fingers and needle teeth.

A running fight to the death ensued, down the dark corridors and seemingly endless staircases. Before they were overrun, they managed to find and reach the redoubt’s mat-trans unit. If it had been out of commission, the game of survival they had played for so long would have been over.

Permanently.

But the mat-trans had powered up, and they slammed and sealed the door behind them. Faint shadows on the armaglass walls indicated that the anteroom on the other side of the chamber was packed with leaping, shrieking muties. The last thing Ryan saw before jump sleep overtook him were what he took to be the smears of sucker juice on the opaque armaglass.

From frying pan into fire, he thought.

The door opened and Lima reentered, this time with two men in black coveralls at his side. They all wore respirators.

The whitecoat kept his distance from Ryan, apparently fearing reprisal. “Each of you will be quarantined and receive separate treatment,” he told them. “The procedure is necessary to avoid accidental recontamination.”

Lima turned to his lackeys and said, “The one-eyed man will go first.”

The black suits quickly unshackled Ryan from the wall. As they led him out, he glanced back at Krysty. Her prehensile mutie hair had once again curled into tight ringlets of alarm.

They didn’t bother to hood him this time, which was something Ryan saw as another bad sign: they didn’t give a damn what he saw. One way or another, alive or dead, they figured he wasn’t going anywhere.

Lima brought up the rear as they moved down the corridor. At the end of the long hall they made a left turn onto another straightaway, at the end of which they made another left turn. To Ryan it seemed as though they were tracing the perimeter of the redoubt. There were doors on both sides, but they were unmarked. What he presumed was the exterior wall was cracked in places, and there were puddles of standing water on the floor. The air so reeked of ammonia that it made the inside of his nose and the back of his throat burn. The caustic fumes were another reason the residents wore respirators. What wasn’t clear was whether the ammonia was some naturally occurring irritant, or whether it had been introduced into the corridors as a sterilizing agent. The lights overhead flickered occasionally, but the power plant’s hum remained steady. He was looking hard for some wiggle room, a weak spot that could be exploited, and so far there wasn’t any.

He had to go with the flow.

They passed through a pair of double swing doors, the lower halves of which were covered with scuffed metal kick plates, and entered what looked like Whitecoat Heaven. The floor was carpeted in dark red; there were ceiling tiles, and chairs and couches along the white walls. In front of them, and partially blocking their path, was a curving counter behind which a half dozen men and women in lab coats sat working at comp stations. They all wore respirators.

“Do you ever take those breathing masks off?” Ryan asked Lima. “Or were you born with them?”

“The respirators are because of you and your friends. We can’t risk spreading your contamination to the redoubt core. Everyone there is unaltered.” Lima gestured for the men in black suits to enter a room on the right.