Sooner Dead (Gamma World) - Mel Odom [11]
The mutie-coyote lay husked out on the collapsible table. One of the ATVs carried a generator that hummed quietly as it supplied power to Colleen’s tools.
After a moment, Colleen put one of the laser knives down and looked up at Hella. “Would you like to come closer?”
“Not really.”
“You may never get a chance to see something like this again.”
Curiosity finally pulled Hella under the canopy. She gazed at the corpse and almost felt sorry for the creature. Killing it while fighting for her life was one thing, and field dressing it to eat was another, but what Colleen Trammell was doing was almost obscene.
“You really do think this thing is from another time line?” Despite herself, Hella was interested.
“Not from another time line.” Colleen picked up an instrument that offered numerical readouts. “Another world. I’ve never seen genomes like this.”
“Another planet?”
Colleen shook her head and absently pulled hair back from her face. As a result she tracked blood through her hair. “No. I think this animal came from another version of our world.”
Hella was familiar with the concept. Some of the people Stampede talked science stuff with brought up ideas such as “string theory.”
“You’re familiar with the idea of multiple earths?”
“Sure. String theory. Dozens of different worlds just one second or genetic breakthrough out of step with the world we know.”
“A layman’s point of view, but it will suffice.” Colleen removed a mass from the dead animal.
“Why are you taking it apart?”
That stopped the woman for a moment. “To study it, of course.”
“Why?”
“Because that’s what I do to learn things. You’ve learned to take animals apart too. I’ve watched you do it.”
Hella and Stampede tended to their own meals. They’d guided expeditions in the past that had charged them for food they’d thought was free. And once they’d even been poisoned by a client. They didn’t trust anyone if they didn’t have to. They also took half the payment up front and hid it before they left.
“I take animals apart to eat them.” Hella gazed disdainfully at the hollowed corpse. “There’s not anything on that thing I would eat. Unless I was really hungry. And I haven’t been that hungry in a long time.”
“Didn’t you ever take an animal apart to see how it worked? How the legs functioned? Where the heart, liver, and lungs were?”
“No.” Hella shivered at the thought. Watching Colleen do an autopsy the first time a few days earlier had almost unnerved her and made her sick. She didn’t get sick easily, especially not when fighting.
“Do you know how your hands become weapons?”
Thinking Colleen might have been interested in cutting up her hand since the day Hella had first revealed why she didn’t carry pistols made her a bit anxious. She thrust her hands in her pockets. “Sure. I think them into guns. The nanobots do the rest.”
“Where did you get those nanobots?”
“I don’t know.”
Interest lifted one of Colleen’s eyebrows. “What do you mean?”
“I never knew my parents. Since the earliest I can remember, I was on my own. Till Stampede made me his partner.”
“Then how did you learn you possessed the ability to transform your hands and process materials through your body.”
“The first time was an accident.” Hella still remembered the old man’s wrinkled face as he’d pawed at her in the trade camp. He’d caught Hella raiding the trash bins out back of the tavern, and he’d put a knife to her throat, telling her he would kill her if she didn’t stay quiet. Fear had filled her mind with screaming insanity, and she could remember wishing she had a pistol to defend herself. Then she had and she’d killed the man. She still remembered his hot blood raining down on her. But she’d retained enough composure to steal everything of value from him before fleeing. “After that, Stampede took me to a man he knew—a professor of science, like you—and he told me I had nanobots inside me.”
“Couldn’t he identify them?”
The uncomfortable feeling inside Hella multiplied. She’d made a mistake accepting Colleen’s invitation. “No. When he tried