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Late Evening, Thursday, April 28
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The Flotilla, 150 Nautical Miles West of San Diego, CA
General Rose watched the moonrise over the fantail of the USS Ronald Reagan. He thought it was an amazingly beautiful sight, considering it was the end of the world. More than a hundred military and civilian ships were nearby, clustered around the carriers. Thanks to the skill of some pilots and the no-holds-barred tenacity of Navy crews on three supercarriers, he’d gotten a lot of soldiers, equipment, and civilians evacuated from Ft. Hood as it was being overrun by ravening hordes of fucking zombies. But he’d lost men getting out, including a newly-reactivated colonel who had led a small team in a Stryker to seal a breach, which had enabled them to get away. He was still out there, and the general wanted him back. The problem was, the colonel was more than 1,200 miles away, and the general had no air assets he could call on. No, he was stuck in squid-land, and he couldn’t even order lunch without some Airedale admiral’s okay.
A three-star general had influence. Well, if it wasn’t for the zombies, they had influence. Rose had spent a very long career making allies and connections. Before everything had gone to complete shit, he could’ve made a call and gotten an air mission to look for the lost men. Of course, part of the reason he’d lost his command was his higher ups.
“Mother fucking president,” he said, shaking his head.
“Sir?” asked Captain Mays standing behind him.
“Nothing,” Rose said. A second later, the deck rumbled as an F-18 was catapulted off, and it climbed into the sky with a roar. “Just lamenting the end of most of our communications infrastructure.”
“The kill switch,” Mays said, and Rose nodded. They’d put it in place during all the cyber-terrorism fears of the early 21st century. It was a way to keep terrorists from destroying the country’s cyber infrastructure and the military’s too, by isolating all the nodes and cutting down communications. The fucking President went and did it—shut it all down. Cut off the fractured military commands from each other with a thousand conflicting orders racing around. He was the general formerly in command of III Corp, with only a battalion total strength left, at most, afloat in a sea of sailors, with the Marines moving in. Fucking Marines.
How to put this all together, he wondered as he stood on the gently-rolling deck. It was a nice night, but still windy with the water being whipped up into low white tops. One of the Reagan’s escorts, a destroyer, he thought, pitched up and down in the waves. He understood why so many liked serving on these supercarriers. The smooth ride. He wished he could go back to his office at Hood, overseeing the day-to-day operations of an Army brigade, with almost 100 men and women in his general staff to handle all the small stuff. Smooth ride. He’d been the carrier. Now he felt like the destroyer. A little further out a fishing boat rode violently up and down in the swells, actively fighting to stay afloat in the waves. Was that his next stop?
For a minute he considered just leaving. Get his surviving people together on a couple willing civilian ships and set out for parts unknown. At some point, his small contingent would be superfluous. Hell, maybe they’d be stood-down and rolled into the Marines, who appeared to have survived in large numbers. Or worse, they could be relegated to grunt work. Security in the rag-tag colonial fleet? He grinned at the private sci-fi joke. He guessed landing on the carriers had ultimately been a mistake. But where else could he have gone?
They needed a home; people needed a home. There had to be somewhere nearby they could hold from the damned infected. At least until Dr. Breda came up with the cure. He looked over at the converted oil platform, roughly at the center of the flotilla. The good doctor was there with her Frankenstein research operation. The little speech she’d given them had scared the shit out of him. Still, he couldn’t help but wonder if his own fucking government had cooked up the goddamned virus. Delta sounded too much like something they’d brewed up during the cold war. Turn the commies into cannibalistic zombies. He chuckled.
“Heavy seas developing,” the PA barked over the bustle of the deck. “Secure for heavy seas.” All around him, hundreds of multicolored uniforms raced about doing their different jobs. He shook his head in amazement. The squids liked their special jobs with special titles, even gave the swabbies special uniforms to match. The oil platform was more than 100 feet above the water, so the growing white tops weren’t a fraction of the height needed to reach the working deck. He needed backing and people to help think this through.
“Capt. Mays?” the general said.
“Yes sir,” he replied immediately.
“Thomas, how long have you been with me?”
“Nine years sir, except that brief tour at the Pentagon.”
Rose nodded. “I guessed about eight. Thomas, we need to work out a strategy. Get me one of them little boats they use...”
“A RHIB, sir?”
“Yeah, that’s it. I want to talk with Dr. Breda at the drill platform.” The wind blew across the deck, hard enough to make the general shift his stance. Out over the water, a twin propeller-driven plane was lining up with the carrier. Its lights were clear in the night as it approached. A flight control crewman glanced their way to be sure they were still clear of the foul line before it started its approach. “And make it soon; a storm is brewing.”
* * *
“I wish you’d move him to the lower containment.” Dr. Lisha Breda looked over at her assistant, Beth Unger, and gave her a rueful smile. The subject of her assistant’s consternation growled and thumped on the heavy plexiglass. Grant Porter had been one of her best research assistants prior to becoming infected with Delta and turning into a cannibalistic psychopath who’d killed four of her people before being subdued. Way back when Delta was just beginning to go pandemic, there was an early outbreak at the facility. The US Coast Guard had come to the panicked call for help from her staff. Luckily by then, her people had gotten it under control.
She’d had no clue that the virus they’d only just begun to study was global. When Grant was infected, Lisha had realized that the infection was much more complicated than originally thought. That was a lot of research experiments ago. But it had only been, what, a week or so? She shook her head in amazement. Days for a world to end.
“It’s useful to keep it here,” Lisha said, reluctant to address it as a human being. Besides, she’d studied it in great detail. It didn’t act like a human anymore. Even its brain wasn’t organized like a human’s. Delta had rewritten its cerebrum. The CDC had been working on a cure when it all fell apart, but she knew what a waste of time that was. There wasn’t enough left of the human who’d been Grant Porter to bother. “We’ve learned a lot from him.” The younger woman made a face and went back to organizing samples. Besides, Lisha thought, I owe it to who he was to try and make progress using what he’d become.
The intercom buzzed. “Dr. Breda?” a voice asked.
“Go ahead,” she replied.
“There are some Army guys here to see you.”
She walked into the small conference room, its whiteboard still covered with complicated chemical formulae and taped pictures of the different phases of the Delta virus. General Rose was looking at one of the pictures when she walked in.
“General,” she said.
“Doctor,” he said and pointed to the picture. “That thing is our little bug?”
“It is,” she said, “or at least one part of it. Like I explained, Delta is a sort of binary agent. Add a couple parts together and it mutates, or rather metamorphoses, into the active variety.” He grunted and looked at it again.
“You said in the meeting that it can’t live outside of a host. Then how come preserved foods are harboring it?”
“I didn’t exactly speak artfully in that line,” she explained. “It can’t reproduce. It goes into a dormant state. Introduced into a living organism, it both goes into a highly active state as well as causes any latent vectors within that body to metamorphose into the same state.”
“Can you translate that?” the general asked with a chuckle. She smiled and nodded.
“It means that we all have a form of Delta inside us now; we got it from the air. It’s not actively reproducing.” She pointed at one of the images. It looked subtly different from the others, but they all reminded him of a snowflake crossed with a bicycle rim. “When the metamorphosed phase contacts these undifferentiated types, it triggers them all to change in an extremely fast transformation.” The general was listening with narrowed eyes. When she was finished he nodded in understanding.
“So that’s why some transform so quickly?”
“Yes,” she said. “Ingesting contaminated food can trigger it, but more slowly. A bite from a person who’s undergone a full transformation results in the rapid changes you’re talking about. It can be quite dramatic.”
“So I’ve seen.”
“While I don’t mind giving the lesson in Delta,” Lisha said, “I doubt you came over here for that.”
“You are correct, Doctor.” The general looked at the images for another moment, then turned his complete attention to Dr. Breda. “Your discussion about learning to live in this new world; do you believe it’s possible?” She looked at him, cocking her head slightly in that sort of deep thinking that scientists did when they were considering something.
“It could be,” she said finally, “but it won’t be easy. We don’t fully understand this thing yet.”
“I thought you had a serious handle on it,” he said and gestured at the whiteboard with all its chemical formulae and photos of the virus. He looked at a photo again. “Hey, that Delta virus is super small, right?” She nodded. “So how’d you get a picture of it?”
“Those?” she asked and pointed to the same pictures. It was his turn to nod. “That’s an image using x-ray crystallography. Viruses are so small you can put about a thousand on the point of a pin.”
“Must be a huge machine, and expensive.”
“It is,” she agreed. He looked at the high-tech conference room and thought about the entire facility he was standing in. How much would it take to convert an oil platform into something...
“Dr. Breda, what exactly were you doing here?” he asked.
“Talking to you,” she said. He narrowed his eyes and spoke again.
“No, I mean this place. I can’t guess how much it cost to build this, staff it, put the kinds of machines to do that, x-ray crystal...”
“X-ray crystallography,” she provided.
“Sure. That stuff all costs serious money, not to mention keeping doctors and stuff out here.” She gave him that considering look again, then reached into her lab coat and pulled out a pack of chewing gum.
“Want a piece?” she asked. He shook his head, and she helped herself. “This project is called HAARP. Before you ask, it stands for the Human Advanced and Adaptive Research Project. We’re pushing the envelope in evolved gene therapies.” Rose suddenly snapped his fingers and pointed at her.
“I knew the name was familiar,” he said. “You guys got chased out of Virginia, right?” Lisha made a face but nodded.
“Yes, a certain coalition of particularly loud, anti-science, interest groups. They didn’t like our research, and we were shown the door. It was just beginning to show promise, too.”
“You were getting close to curing cancer.” She nodded enthusiastically. “Those people you mentioned, the anti-science types, they made you look pretty stupid.”
“Tell me about it,” she glowered.
“So, this is where you went, out into the ocean?”
“International waters,” she said with a nod. “Our board is almost as well funded as those short-sighted politicians who were out to play to their low-information constituency. Plus, our funding is international.” She held out her hands to take in the entire facility. “We were out here working away when Delta dropped in from outer space.”
“You really do ascribe to that theory?” he asked.
“Yes, I do. I didn’t talk about it at the meeting, but shortly before Delta went pandemic I was in Arizona. I was called in to examine what I found to be an extraterrestrial organism.” She explained what she’d seen and the conclusion she and others had come to about the organism’s origin. “Given the combination of that information, and how all the experts said the Delta virus was constructed, I concluded that the two events were connected.”
“Do you think we were attacked?” he asked, his general’s mind considering. Delta was a damned effective, if indiscriminate, weapon. That look again. She was either carefully considering her answer or had encountered a new question. It turned out to be the latter.
“That’s a very good question, General. If I were to venture a guess, I’d have to say possibly. Delta certainly does seem like a weapon. Its construction is elegant and brutal. However, a dead or simply disabled enemy would be preferable to a psychotic alive one.” She shook her head after discounting some internal dialogue. “Either way, we can’t deal with it on its own terms, that’s for certain.”
“What do we do?” General Rose asked.
“We get out of its way, with whatever and whoever we can take with us, while we try to figure it out and maybe beat it someday.”
“And how exactly do we do that?” General Rose wondered aloud. For once, Dr. Alisha Breda couldn’t produce an answer.
* * *
It was somewhat ironic that Andrew Tobin, an Air Force fighter pilot with the callsign “Switchblade,” ended up living aboard the nuclear aircraft carrier USS Gerald R. Ford. He shared the compartment with two civilians, the ones he’d spent a couple of insane, blood-filled days with running from Mexico. Wade Watts, a professional video gamer, and Chris Brown, a champion shooter, had been his companions as he fled from the zombie infestation.
Of course, his adventure hadn’t been finished. After reaching Ft. Hood, General Rose had pressed Andrew into service piloting one of the three C-17 transports. They were going to be overrun, and the general had no intention of letting that happen. So they’d flown away with all the surviving uninfected personnel.
It had been Andrew’s idea to land the massive C-17 transports on the carriers. A desperate, crazy idea born out of their desperate, crazy situation. Two of the carriers were set butt-to-butt to make a larger landing surface, and two of the C-17s successfully landed. However, there was too much damage to land his, the last plane, onboard them. So, the commander of the brand-new USS Gerald R. Ford cranked his boat up to a crazy speed, and he’d managed to bring the plane in without a scratch.
Andrew sipped a cup of decent Navy mud and looked at his handiwork. The moonlight shone off the waves and reflected from windows on dozens of brightly lit ships all around the carrier. It also provided enough light to see the plane. The C-17 was tied down on the nose of the carrier, still in perfect shape. If they could figure out a way, he would be able to fly it away under its own power.
The ship’s captain had been just as reluctant as Andrew to shove it over the side, unlike the other two, which had been damaged in their landings. Besides, the Ford lacked its air wing, having only helicopters, so there was no need for flight operations. The flattop was currently serving as a helicopter base. Even though the catapults were blocked, almost half the deck was free, as well as all the elevators, which was more than enough.
“Admiring your handiwork?” Chris Brown, who had his own cup of coffee, asked. “Hell of a landing.”
“I was lucky.”
“Regardless, there it is.”
“What’s Wade doing?” Andrew asked.
“Believe it or not, I don’t know. Captain Gilchrist has him doing something classified.”
“Not setting up a videogame arcade, I hope? I doubt the captain would approve.”
“No,” Chris chuckled at the thought, “he’s screwing with the military network.”
“What?!” Andrew asked, almost spitting out his coffee.
“Yep. He’s acting like he’s onto some kind of conspiracy. The big guy is happy as a pig in slop, no pun intended.” They both nodded, Wade’s physique could best be described as rotund.
Andrew wondered for a moment if Wade was right. Losing all communications between military units, federal agencies, and other countries just as the virus went into all out ‘destroy everything’ pandemic mode had changed it from a mortal danger to the end of the world, fast. There were hundreds of civilian and military satellites whizzing around up in space, which were as useful to the survivors as the moon. All they had was line-of-sight and high-frequency-band radio. Ships hadn’t had to rely on it for long range communications and logistics for decades.
“Lt. Andrew Tobin, please report to Flight Operations,” the deck’s PA announced. “Lt. Tobin, report to Flight Ops immediately.”
“Wonder what you did?” Chris asked.
“In the military, it can just as easily be what you didn’t do. See you around.”
Andrew entered the island through the hatch and went up to Flight Operations. It was kind of like being in an airport’s control tower. Glass panels were covered with the deck’s layout where combat aircraft could be moved around and staged for takeoff or recovery. Very little was going on, although a group of officers and enlisted were clustered around a wall of radio gear. A Navy commander, what he’d consider a lieutenant colonel, beckoned him over. He wore a shirt with “Mini Boss” printed on the back, so Andrew knew he helped control the normally hectic flight operations on the Ford.
“Lieutenant,” he said as Andrew saluted. He gave Andrew a wave; the Navy didn’t salute indoors.
“Sir, what can I do for you?”
“We’ve got spotty coms with a bird that’s talking your language.”
“An Air Force plane? What, fighter or transport?”
“That’s complicated,” the man said. At a gesture, a radio operator handed Andrew a set of headphones which he placed over his ears. “Playback what we got,” he ordered. A minute later his eyes were wide, and he was shaking his head.
“So is that what we think it is?” the Mini Boss asked. Andrew nodded as he took off the headphones.
“Yeah, that’s an E-4B transmitting in the clear.”
“You sure? I don’t want to wake up the skipper for some commercial flight or another.”
“I’m sure. I flew escort for one once, years ago. They must be under EWO, Emergency War Orders.” The men looked at each other. “They’re not calling themselves Air Force One because they’re calling in the clear. Better get your captain, he’ll want to talk to the president, himself.”
* * *
International Space Station
Docking the Azanti had been a little like backing a dump truck through a McDonald’s drive through, without proper mirrors, and without tearing the shit out of the building or the truck. Only the building was as delicate as a snowflake and the dump truck responded poorly to controls. ISS, the International Space Station, was a collection of dozens of solar panels and modules in a roughly flat configuration, with plenty of fun extrusions sticking out in all the wrong places. Jeremiah Osbourne, in his infinite wisdom as CEO and chief designer at OOE, had installed a standard docking collar on the Azanti. He’d installed in in the craft’s butt, as Capt. West described it.
“Fuck me,” Lloyd cursed from the copilot seat. His job was to help maneuver the craft backward and provide another set of eyes. “We’re down to 40% on the hydrazine.”
“Thanks for nothing,” West grumbled. They’d already bent some extrusions on their second approach, which caused much wailing and teeth gnashing from Faye Richardson on the ISS. “I know it’s not Jeremiah’s fault. This ship was never designed to actually dock. The port was a safety precaution; that’s it. Simpler to build it in from the beginning, and he could get away without an actual airlock and space suits. But jumping Christ, this thing is impossible to maneuver with any precision.” The alien drive wasn’t controllable in that manner. It had gotten them up to orbital intercept speeds and matched the station’s low orbit, but approaching it had all been up to the hydrazine-based orbital maneuvering thrusters.
“How you doing out there?” the commander of the ISS asked. The station’s only means of escape, a Russian Soyuz capsule, was docked only a few yards away. One serious mistake could hull the Azanti and take out the station’s only lifeboat. Everything in Commander Richardson’s voice spoke of regret at letting them attempt to dock.
“I think we got it this time,” West lied, then killed the VOX on his mic. “Let’s just line up and push at it,” he suggested to Lloyd. “One little nudge, and maybe another little push at the last second if we’re off.” They were going to be off, there was little doubt. The thrusters weren’t placed optimally for this. They were adequate for maneuvering in space on all axes, but not for precision backward maneuvers. He’d made a page of notes for the engineers back on Earth...if they made it back.
“It looks like the big problem is the impulse timing,” Alison said. Besides holding her pee for hours now, she’d been watching the operation carefully. “Each time you trigger a burst of the thrusters, they give a little bit different bump?” The two pilots looked at each other then gave a shrug/nod.
“That’s as good a description as any,” Lloyd agreed. The captain concurred.
“Okay, then can you take it off line for a minute and I’ll fix it?” They both looked startled. “And before you ask if I can, I figured out the alien drive control, didn’t I?” They didn’t have a rebuttal for that, so they agreed.
“ISS, we’re going to hold off a minute to tweak our systems a bit,” Alison said over the radio.
“Roger that, Azanti,” the station replied. West flipped a couple toggle switches and a series of lights went from green or amber to red.
“Okay, all yours,” he told her. She unbuckled and floated free, grabbing her toolkit and pulling herself between the pilots to access the maneuvering controls. She had the panel off in seconds, and a tablet computer hooked to the ships computer that controlled those functions just as quickly. After a minute she clucked. “Whatcha got?”
“Like I suspected, they didn’t really finish this system.” She pointed to a schematic she’d pulled up. “The thrusters are designed for pinpoint control; there are feedback sensors and everything that should be capable of giving you very precise thrust. Only they never connected them.” She examined the back of the panel and begun cutting and reconnecting wires. Both pilot’s eyes bugged out as she snipped the vital controls without hesitation.
The rewiring done, she took a roll of tape from her bag and stuck a piece over the four switches she’d re-tasked and wrote on them with a Sharpie from her toolkit before explaining.
“These are incremental. First one will provide a very small thrust, and progressively onward. The fourth switch will give about the same amount of thrust as you’ve been getting so far. I don’t have time to control individual thruster power, so these switches control the power for all of them.” She gathered the hundreds of wires up and jammed them into the recess before pushing the panel back in place and setting the screws. The entire operation had taken less than 10 minutes.
“You’re sure about this?” West asked. She paused from pushing back into her seat to smack him on the back of his head. “Ouch!”
“Guess that’s a ‘yes.’” Lloyd said and chuckled at the gentle good-boy pat on the head Alison gave him as she clicked her seat straps back into place. He saw his captain was hesitant, so he reached over and repowered the maneuvering system himself. The panel came alive, including the four switches she’d added. They were labeled 1 through 4, and Switch #1 was lit up green, the least powerful. “Give her a test,” Lloyd encouraged.
West glanced back to where Alison was waiting expectantly and resisted rubbing the back of his head. He grabbed the four-axis maneuvering joystick and gave it a single pitch bump. They all felt the little ‘thump’ from the hull as the hydrazine thruster fired. An almost imperceptible amount of pitch began. He did it again, and the motion sped up. After letting them pitch forward about 20 degrees, he gave two reverse bumps and they came to a perfect stop. He flipped Switch #2 and gave a single bump of reverse pitch. It seemed to be exactly the same amount of motion as two bumps on Switch #1. A few seconds later he bumped again, and they were right back where they’d started.
“Huh,” he said.
“Well done,” Lloyd told her.
She just smiled and activated her radio. “ISS, we’re ready to try again.”
“We’re standing by,” Richardson replied, the trepidation still obvious in her voice.
“Here we go,” West said. He flipped the fourth switch and pushed them back toward the space station. Just as she’d said, it felt like it used to feel; he guessed about equivalent to eight bumps on Switch #1. They were moving about two meters per second.
“Got a little starboard roll,” Lloyd said. West flipped Switch #1 and gave a port bump. The roll stopped. “Perfect,” he said. For a half a minute they drifted back on line. Lloyd eyeballed the simple camera that showed them their lineup on the station’s docking port. “We’re off about a meter down and a bit more to port.”
It was obvious West had the feel for the new controls. He flipped Switch #2 and gave a bump, and switch 1 and gave another on different thrusters. A couple seconds later he reversed the sequence.
“That’s got it,” Lloyd crowed. “Ten meters out.” West flipped Switch #3 and gave a bump, and they slowed by half, creeping up on the station.
“Whatever you did it looks great from here,” the station commander said, surprise and relief in her voice.
“Five meters,” Lloyd said. A single bump from Switch #1 and they were creeping. “Three...two...one.” The Azanti jarred to a stop. They felt mechanical scraping transmitted through the hull and a display on the console that had been blinking red turned to green. “Hard dock!”
All of them cheered and exchanged high-fives.
“I’m sorry I doubted you,” West said to Alison. She smacked him in the head again. He cringed and then laughed. “I deserved that.”
“Yes, you did,” she agreed, then leaned forward to kiss the bald spot she’d smacked. “Apology accepted.”
“Equalizing,” Lloyd said and there was a hiss of air between the two vessels. “We’re good.”
Alison keyed her mic. “ISS, we have a good dock and equalized pressure. You are good to open.” They heard mechanical sounds, and a second later a liquid-filled telltale on their rear hatch showed light through. There was pressure on the other side.
“Clear on this side,” the station said. Alison was behind the pilot, so she unhooked and spun around to release the hatch. A second later, it swung out into the station. A burst of air entered the Azanti, metallic smelling with a hint of flowered scent. It smelled great. Two people floated just inside, wearing the standard NASA jumpsuits. She’d seen the commander, Faye Richardson, on TV before. She smiled at them, her teeth bright against her dark complexion, her hair short but bound up in a carefully-controlled bun. Behind her was the station’s only other occupant, Dean Thorson from the ESA, or European Space Agency. He was a big man with a goatee and a head of bright blonde, short-cut hair. Richardson offered a hand to her, then Thorson did as well.
“On behalf of NASA and the ESA, welcome aboard the ISS,” she said. Alison shook the hands warmly. They handed her through the lock after seeing she wasn’t very good in microgravity. Captain West and copilot Behm, both experienced astronauts, needed no help.
Richardson remained and glanced into the now-empty ship. She immediately took note of the rather haphazard layout of the controls and the bulkheads festooned with human waste bags. Even with it being sealed in bags, the ship emitted a distinct odor of fecal matter.
“Good lord,” she said, scrunching up her nose, “why didn’t you space all of that?”
“No overboard dump,” West admitted and gestured to his ship. “We’re a bit like the SS Minnow. We were only up for a three-hour tour.”
“Correct me if I’m wrong,” Thorson said in heavily Nordic-accented English, “we estimated your initial transmission as being well outside of Earth orbit, toward the moon?” All the Azanti crew members nodded. “So if you were only supposed to be in space for a few hours, how did you get that far out? More importantly, how were you supposed to get back?”
Richardson nodded and continued. “We had a good look at your ship as you came in. It looks identical to the one your boss at OOE designed. I saw pictures of it. Your craft has no power beyond whatever a booster attached would give it. You matched our orbit in less than an hour. I know quite well how much delta-v that would take.” Her look was a mixture of curiosity and accusation. “What the fuck is going on?”
They’d discussed this scenario on board before docking. They’d had to, it was a question well beyond the obvious. They hadn’t all agreed on what to say, though.
“You’re looking at the first faster-than-light drive,” West said, and gestured back to the lock. Richardson and Thorson looked at each other, then burst out laughing. All three members of the Azanti crew floated and watched until their hosts stopped laughing.
“Wait,” Richardson said, “are you serious?”
* * * * *
