“This was bad enough,” Jeremiah said and looked at Maria. “Why do you think this means they got the notes? They had the drive we made to move the C-17. Couldn’t this be from the same one?”
“Yes, it could,” Maria said. “However, the acceleration we witnessed would probably have turned the carrier into a burning meteor.”
“Unless they had it hooked to a drive module,” West agreed, snapping his fingers. Jeremiah shook his head, not following. “The forcefield when a drive module is connected, remember?”
“Oh, yeah,” Jeremiah said, finally understanding. “But I still don’t understand why they hooked it to the carrier and not a boat or a plane.”
“Who knows?” West asked and craned his head to look up. There was no sign of the massive carrier. “But I sure hope it doesn’t come down at the same speed!”
* * * * *
Chapter 3
Evening, Thursday, May 2
County Courthouse
Junction, TX
Vance Cartwright tried clearing his ears for the dozenth time, with the same results. They were all blast-deaf, to one degree or another. Cobb’s improvisation with high explosives had fulfilled its intended purpose—the stairs were gone. The infected had no way to reach them. Of course, there was now a massive hole in the side of the courthouse—almost one entire side was gone.
Mercifully, the fire caused by the explosion had gone out. However, the structure was significantly weakened. It seemed the double whammy of having a huge armored combat vehicle slam into the side and then a pile of C4 explosives detonate inside had been too much. Vance wondered how long they had before the building collapsed in on itself.
The problem now facing them was how to get out of the building before it decided to collapse or the infected mounted a better assault. Because they hadn’t given up, not by a long shot.
“The blast killed at least 200,” Cobb said, glancing over the ruins of the once ornate county courthouse balcony. He moved back and shrugged. “Maybe more.”
“That was a lot of high explosives,” Ann Benedict said. She stood nearby, an arm protectively across her stomach where her and Vance’s child grew. Of them all, she’d been the least enthusiastic about Cobb’s solution to the waves of infected.
“He didn’t have time to plan better,” Harry said. From the look on the former Marine’s face, he rather appreciated Cobb’s response to the infected grizzly and the swarm of infected humans.
“How many down there?” Vance asked Cobb, trying to change the subject.
“Maybe 50 or so,” the army colonel replied.
“What are they doing?” Nicole Price asked.
“Do you really want to know?” The sounds of snarls and ripping flesh echoed around the ruined lower floors.
“Good Lord,” Tim Price intoned. They all nodded.
Vance left the sounds of inhuman carnage behind and walked around the half-destroyed atrium and through the courtroom which was their center of operations. All their guns, ammo, food, and other meager supplies were cached there. They’d been barricading the main door as best they could. A lot of the benches were already gone, though, used to try and stop the infected from getting up the stairwell. It wasn’t an ideal place to make a last stand.
At the other end of the courtroom was the judge’s office. It overlooked the street below. The sun was down and the moon up. It was a beautiful night, and there were fewer infected. Down from a thousand to maybe half. So, only about 100 to 1 odds now. They had enough ammo, if they didn’t miss many shots. He was no combat vet, but they’d been in a few fights since the world went to hell. He knew better than to assume things would go well if they tried to shoot their way out. He looked out again. Not good odds.
He noted that a couple of cars were burning on the far side of the street. He guessed they’d caught shrapnel from the detonation. Neither was fully involved. A small fired burned in the upholstery of one, and the other appeared to have a tire burning. The latter could well turn into a raging inferno. Two infected stood watching the fires, heads cocked curiously.
Something caught his eye, and he looked up. A light was moving across the sky from north to south. Before the world fell apart, such a sight hadn’t been unusual. He hadn’t seen or heard a plane in the sky for days. He thought the lights were from a plane at high altitude, only they didn’t look right. Too bright, too big. It was close. And he couldn’t hear anything. How could something fly so silently?
A growl snapped him out of his reverie. A hand reached up and grabbed him by the throat. A dark shape crawled over the balcony, jumped, and bore him to the floor. Vance tried to yell as strong fingers closed around his neck and squeezed with mind-numbing force. Nothing came out of his mouth as he fell back, the infected on his chest. Red stained teeth reflected the moonlight as they descended toward his face.
* * *
Evening, Thursday, May 2
USS Gerald R. Ford
Approximately 400 miles above San Diego, CA
Kathy Clifford stood on the flight deck for a time, simply taking in the view. How often did a washed-up reporter get the chance to look at Earth from orbit? Especially while standing on the deck of a nuclear aircraft carrier. It seemed half the crew was doing the same. She glanced up at the tall structure they called the island. A walkway on top surrounded the bridge, and she could see several officers standing there, also taking in the inconceivable image of a carrier in space.
She carefully made sure the tiny camera was still clipped to her vest pocket. Nobody would know what it was, she was sure. She used it to record constantly, then she archived the footage to her laptop. She had hundreds of hours of footage, including quite a bit from her ill-fated trip to Mexico where she had gone to investigate the plague before it had turned into a global catastrophe.
Now, weeks later, she didn’t know why she was still recording. She had two hard drives full of video. Hundreds of hours. She hadn’t had time to look at most of it. Maybe she never would. She didn’t know, and hundreds of miles up in space on an aircraft carrier, she didn’t care.
“What the fuck happened?” one of the flight deck crew asked. He wasn’t more than 20 years old, black, and from the sound of his voice, probably from a big city. Kathy thought he sounded on the edge of panic. He wore a red uniform which, she’d learned, meant he handled bombs.
“You tell me, man, I just work here.” The other crewman was slightly older, white, and sounded like he was from Alabama or Arkansas. His uniform was purple, so he handled fuel. Only in the service would you see people from vastly different backgrounds working together.
She spent time wandering around. The uniform (minus insignia) they’d given her and the job of creating news reports for the Flotilla allowed Kathy to move quietly through most of the common areas of the ship. The crew, and those who were temporarily on the ship, took no real notice of her. The general feeling was one of panic. Section chiefs were keeping everyone they could away from the flight deck and hangars to reduce the panic; it left fewer ways to see their situation. It wasn’t working. Everyone knew they were somehow, incredibly, in space.
Kathy was passing one of the mess halls when she overheard a snatch of conversation.
“…Watts fucked around with some confiscated tech.”
“That fat computer geek?”
“Yeah, him.”
She came to a sudden stop in the hallway, causing a pair of rushing crewmen to nearly crash into her. Each mess hall had two crew entrances; she went in through the second one. The normally overflowing buffet steamer tables now carried little fare. Overcooked fish stew was nearly ubiquitous, with potatoes and onions mixed in more often than not. Huge trays of bread were common, along with margarine and jams. Sometimes there was canned pasta and sauce, though that was getting rare.
She moved sideways, bypassing the food line and approaching the other door where she’d heard the conversation. When she was close enough, she listened.
“…idea what he was doing?�
�
“Supposedly, yes. But he started screwing around, and now we’re in fuckin’ outer space.”
“What did they do with him?”
“The old man had him thrown in the brig.”
Kathy took a piece of buttered bread and left, heading down the nearest gangway for three decks. She’d never been to the area herself, so she relied on her memory. Being a reporter required a good memory. She came within view of her destination only a minute after overhearing the conversation.
“Hi, Kathy,” Chris Tucker said.
“They put you in charge of watching him?” Kathy asked.
Chris had come in with Wade Watts, Andrew Tobins, and her. Chris, Wade, and Andrew had used an old gunship to rescue her and Cobb Pendleton from a farmhouse in South Texas just as they were about to be overrun with infected. They’d all ended up at Fort Hood. There, General Rose had reactivated Cobb, and he’d helped the three C-17s escape as the fort fell.
Kathy had fallen for Cobb when the man saved her from infected by following her all the way to Mexico. She wasn’t the kind for casual flings. Their bond had developed quickly, as it sometimes did in life or death situations. When Cobb was left behind after the evacuation of Fort Hood, she’d been devastated. She hoped he was out there, somewhere, still trying to reach the coast.
“Yeah,” Chris replied, shrugging. “They’re pretty short staffed.”
She knew very little about Chris, except that he was a good shot and had been drafted into service on the carrier as part of the security staff. Lacking anything else useful to do, he’d taken the job. She couldn’t help thinking that whoever had him guarding Wade didn’t realize they’d come in together.
“Can I talk to him?” Kathy asked.
Chris screwed up his face as he considered the request. Like her, he wore a uniform of navy-blue camo. Unlike her, he had a black band with SP in white wrapped around his upper arm. They’d never been ashore, of course. Still the shore patrol band gave him the authority he needed to help with security. At least, she figured that was the reason he wore it.
“Well,” Chris finally said, “I don’t know.”
“It isn’t an interview,” she said. “I just want to talk to him.”
Chris looked up and down the companionway outside the Ford’s nominal brig. It was just a line of four small rooms with locks on the outside. Crewmen were moving about, but none took any notice of the occupied brig cell or the two people standing outside it.
“Okay,” he said. “Only ten minutes, though. If the chief comes by, I’ll probably get thrown overboard.”
“Thanks, Chris,” she said. He unlocked the door and opened it for her.
Inside the little room were a bench, a table, and a sink/toilet, like she’d seen in prisons. Wade was sitting on the bench, looking annoyed. “Hi, Kathy.”
“What happened?” she asked, not wasting any time.
“One of the navy chiefs I was working with got me from the comms project.”
“So, they gave up?”
“No,” he said, grinning.
“You licked it?”
“Yup.” His grin got even bigger, then it slowly died. “Well, sort of.” Wade explained how he had found an ancient system that should have been shut down decades earlier and used it to work around the virus that was shutting down the military. He babbled on about the weird menu options in the system. He showed her the notebook and flipped through the pages of data. Kathy made sure her angle was perfect, so everything was recorded in 4k. He was like an excited school child. “Something huge is inside that old legacy system.”
“Amazing,” Kathy said. “But it doesn’t explain why we’re in space.”
“After I got them back online, Chief Kuntzleman hustled me out of the room before I could do any more exploring, and he took me to the electronics repair section where two specialists were messing with the alien drive used to move the C-17.”
Kathy sat on the closed toilet, as it was the only other seat she could find in the small cell. At the mention of the alien drive, she leaned closer. “You saw it?”
“Sure, it wasn’t exactly hidden. It turns out someone also stole a key drive full of OOE data on the alien technology. The specialists couldn’t break the encryption. So, I did it for them. There was a lot of data, and it explained how the alien tech worked, including some stuff that wasn’t incorporated into the version built to move the C-17.”
“What was different?” she asked.
“Have you looked outside?”
“Oh, right,” she said. “Then they threw you in jail?”
“Pretty much.”
“But, if you’re in here, how are we going to get down?”
He scowled. “I think they’re going to try to do it themselves.”
“Do you think they can?”
“The data in the key drive contained a lot of hard math and calibration data. I screwed up; I understand that now.” He shook his head and looked at the deck. “The alien effect travels through metal. The test table was electrically insulated on its feet to avoid making a circuit with the floor, but not the wall. I warned them not to turn the drive off or pull the table away from the wall. But I don’t know if they listened to me.”
“I think I understand,” Kathy said and got up. She walked to the door where Chris had been listening curiously to the conversation.
“Where are you going?” Wade asked.
“To talk to Captain Gilchrist.”
“Make sure they don’t turn the drive off!” Wade yelled after her. Chris watched her leave in amazement.
* * *
The Flotilla
150 Nautical Miles West of San Diego, CA
“Got it!”
Jeremiah threw back the rest of his beer and ran out onto the balcony. A pair of OOE personnel familiar with astronomy had set up a telescope and had been working for hours, trying to find the aircraft carrier, without luck. Then Alex West took over. He’d only been at it for a few minutes before his sharp, pilot-trained eyes found what they were looking for.
“Where is it?” Jeremiah asked.
“Almost directly above us,” Alex said, not taking his eye away from the eyepiece. “It’s got a ball of water around it, just like this ship did.”
“Must have used the data to connect a power module,” Jack Coldwell said from a few feet away. He was smoking a cigarette and obviously savoring it. Jeremiah knew the physicist didn’t have many left, and as he was one of the few smokers on the ship, he wasn’t likely to get more.
“Then they’re all still alive,” Jeremiah said. He looked at his people, and they all nodded.
“At least until one of them unplugs the drive,” Coldwell said.
“Boom!” Alex said, miming an explosion with his hands. “Wanna see?” he asked.
“Sure,” Jeremiah said and moved over to the telescope. The telescope wasn’t overly powerful, but the aircraft carrier filled up about a quarter of the view. The image shimmered because Jeremiah was seeing the ship through the water it ‘floated’ in. “How far up is it?”
“I’d estimate 500 miles or less.” Alex gestured at the telescope. “Hard to be sure with that piece of junk.”
“How about using radar?” Maria Merino suggested.
“The radar on the ship isn’t powerful enough,” Jeremiah said, shaking his head. “We only use the ship for low altitude observations. We rented orbital radar capacities from various sources and NASA.” Jeremiah considered. “How long will their air last?”
“They’ve already been up there three hours,” Alex said. “The interior volume of the forcefield bubble is pretty big. Maybe a day? Probably less, if they’re running any motors; carbon monoxide is a concern.”
“Why haven’t they tried to fly back down?” Alison McDill asked. She’d mostly designed the control interface that allowed them to use the alien drive.
“Afraid to try?” Alex asked. “I mean, they are in orbit. If I were a sailor, I’d be a little freaked out.”
<
br /> “Only a little?” Jeremiah asked. Alex shrugged. “We need to help them,” Jeremiah said.
“What?” Patty said, her voice filled with surprise. “Why the fuck should we care?”
“They’re up there because of us,” Jeremiah said. Patty blanched, but Alex held up a hand.
“No, he’s right.”
“They stole the data,” Maria Merino reminded them.
“Doesn’t matter,” Jeremiah said. He looked around at the group of scientists, pilots, and engineers. None of them looked excited at the prospect of rescuing the carrier. Not at all. He didn’t care. “Get the Azanti ready to fly.”
“The rear airlock is still dismounted,” one of the mechanical engineers reminded him.
“So, weld a damn plate over it!”
* * *
Alex followed Alison through the hatch. He paused to look at the welds. It looked like a junior high school shop class had done the work. But the hatch was airtight, more or less.
“It’ll hold up fine, Mr. West.”
Alex turned a skeptical eye on the man. The welder was a big, beefy guy with hundreds of little burn scars on his arms and skin which was permanently tanned so dark he could pass for native American.
Patty nudged Alex forward and smacked the bulkhead. It rang dully. “Looks stout,” she said.
“It should,” Alex replied. “They cut it off a corridor in the ship and welded it on.”
“As long as the forcefield holds up, we won’t need it,” Alison said. She was already in the flight engineers’ seat, running a systems test.
“I’m more concerned about flying in a ship without any visible means of propulsion,” Patty said. She was examining the controls—the pair of joysticks that replaced the single stick—the empty holes in the control panel, and most importantly, the glowing alien drive components. Maria Merino had added a power supply and a controller earlier, upgrading the tiny spaceship so it would have a forcefield.
Turning Point (Book 3): A Time To Live Page 6