James Axler - Doom Helix

“Are we all agreed, then?” Ryan asked, looking from face to shadowy face. “We fight them?”

The answer was unanimous and in the affirmative.

“When we last met, the she-hes took us by surprise,” Ryan said. “That’s why we ended up at Ground Zero in laser manacles. We’re going to make sure that doesn’t happen again. They still have their tribarrels and EM armor, but from what Big Mike said, they don’t have near as many wags as they did before. And mebbe only the single attack aircraft for backup.

“It’s not going to be easy, no way around that, but we know where they are, and they don’t know we’re coming. We can’t let any of them slip away. We’ve got to chill them all.”

After a moment of silence, Mildred said, “They were gone from this universe for a long time. I can’t help wondering where they went after they left.”

“Wherever it was,” Ryan assured her, “we’re gonna make them wish they’d stayed there.”

Death Lands ®

www.mirabooks.co.uk

But I can tell you what your folly and injustice will compel us to do. It will compel us to be free from your domination, and more self-reliant than we have been.

—John H. Reagan

1881–1905

This world is their legacy, a world born in the violent nuclear spasm of 2001 that was the bitter outcome of a struggle for global dominance.

There is no real escape from this shockscape where life always hangs in the balance, vulnerable to newly demonic nature, barbarism, lawlessness.

But they are the warrior survivalists, and they endure—in the way of the lion, the hawk and the tiger, true to nature’s heart despite its ruination.

Ryan Cawdor: The privileged son of an East Coast baron. Acquainted with betrayal from a tender age, he is a master of the hard realities.

Krysty Wroth: Harmony ville’s own Titian-haired beauty, a woman with the strength of tempered steel. Her premonitions and Gaia powers have been fostered by her Mother Sonja.

J. B. Dix, the Armorer: Weapons master and Ryan’s close ally, he, too, honed his skills traversing the Deathlands with the legendary Trader.

Doctor Theophilus Tanner: Torn from his family and a gentler life in 1896, Doc has been thrown into a future he couldn’t have imagined.

Dr. Mildred Wyeth: Her father was killed by the Ku Klux Klan, but her fate is not much lighter. Restored from predark cryogenic suspension, she brings twentieth-century healing skills to a nightmare.

Jak Lauren: A true child of the wastelands, reared on adversity, loss and danger, the albino teenager is a fierce fighter and loyal friend.

Dean Cawdor: Ryan’s young son by Sharona accepts the only world he knows, and yet he is the seedling bearing the promise of tomorrow.

In a world where all was lost, they are humanity’s last hope….

Prologue

Chapter One

Chapter Two

Chapter Three

Chapter Four

Chapter Five

Chapter Six

Chapter Seven

Chapter Eight

Chapter Nine

Chapter Ten

Chapter Eleven

Chapter Twelve

Chapter Thirteen

Chapter Fourteen

Chapter Fifteen

Chapter Sixteen

Chapter Seventeen

Chapter Eighteen

Chapter Nineteen

Chapter Twenty

Chapter Twenty-One

Chapter Twenty-Two

Chapter Twenty-Three

Chapter Twenty-Four

Chapter Twenty-Five

Epilogue

Dr. Huth strained to see past the force-field barrier, which his helmet visor’s infrared sensor had turned a ghastly, translucent lime green. Outside the shimmering containment dome, backdropped by the megalopolis’s skyline, jumbled shadows dashed, darted and swooped. Discharging automatic weapons winked at him like strobe lights, grenades flashed a blinding chartreuse, but the only sound inside the battlesuit was the violent thudding of his own heart.

Dr. Huth had long since shut off the armored suit’s external microphone. The force field didn’t completely block the passage of sonic waves, and the sounds that filtered through—the screams, the wild volleys of gunshot, the explosions and the tearing, bursting, bone-snapping sounds—made it impossible for him to think.

From the frantic movement at or near ground level, slaughter continued apace, and in 360-degree-surround.

Blood and death.

On a scale that was almost incomprehensible.

Through the soles of his boots, Dr. Huth felt the rumble of the jump engine’s power-up. The familiar vibration knotted his stomach with dread. A lifetime of intellectual effort, of unparalleled accomplishments, of sacrifice in the name of Science had all come down to this: there was either enough nuke energy left in the storage cells to leap universes one more time, or he was going to be stranded in hell’s darkest pit. Stranded with less than two hours of force-field power supply remaining; after that, his only protection would be the battlesuit.

Whose power in turn would fail.

And when that happened, the armor would become his coffin.

A female voice crackled through the battlesuit-to-battlesuit com link. “Commander, the jump perimeter will be enabled in three minutes. Repeat, we’ll be jump-ready in three minutes.”

“There’s no point holding anything back, Mero,” said another voice, also female. “Divert the force-field batteries to the jump. Make sure you drain them dry.”

Com link static hissed in Huth’s ears as the consequences of the leader’s order sank home.

All or nothing.

A split second before they leaped realities, the containment domes would collapse. If this universe wasn’t slipped on the first attempt, there’d be no temporary respite; they would be left exposed, unshielded in the middle of the city’s vast main square, in the middle of the mayhem.

Dr. Huth knew it was the logical decision, the only decision from a strategic point of view, but it made the knot in his guts cinch tighter.

After a pause Mero responded, “Roger that, Commander. We will be jump-ready in an estimated seven, repeat seven minutes.”

Dr. Huth lowered his head and set off across the force-field enclosure in short, deliberate steps, beelining for the sterilization chamber. Moving quickly in the battlesuit was difficult for him. Nothing fit properly: his arms, legs, torso and head banged around inside it. The intelligent armor fit the others like a second skin, but they were Level Four, genetically enhanced females, the ultimate warriors of his native Earth. As a relatively uncoordinated Homo sapien male, Dr. Huth could only utilize a few of the battlesuit’s basic functions. And it wasn’t just a matter of body size and strength differential; his unmodified nerves and synapses couldn’t fully interface with the suit’s controls or handle the speed and volume of data transfer.

The sterilization unit was a ten-foot-long section of corrugated cylinder laying on its side, tall enough and wide enough to admit a single warrior dressed in full battle gear. Decontamination had been part of their pre-jump regimen ever since Shadow World, the first parallel Earth targeted for conquest.

Unlike their own exhausted and dying home, Shadow World had had bountiful, untapped natural resources on land and sea, and a relatively tiny, technologically stagnant human population that was easily subdued. But before the invaders could gain a foothold, infection by an indigenous lethal microbe forced them to make a hasty exit to another parallel Earth. Dr. Huth had solved the immediate crisis by killing the bacteria with bursts of X-ray radiation, but the replica Earth on which they had rematerialized was long dead and worthless to them. So, they had had no choice but to jump again.