This time she didn’t drag her face across the metal decking. She turned and executed a messy shoulder roll. She landed on her back and had a great view as Grant ran in great, loping strides toward her. I’m dead.
A booming shot took half of Grant’s head off in an explosion of bloody fluid. He fell to his knees, and his bony hammer-hands slammed against the metal decking. He shook his head, blood spraying, then struggled back to his feet.
Lisha craned her neck and saw Oz standing there, a big revolver in his left hand, blinking in confusion when he saw that Grant wasn’t down. “I took part of his brain out!” she screamed.
“I shot him in the fucking head!” Oz said incredulously.
“Shoot him again!” she screamed.
Oz blinked, then leveled the gun. Boom! A bullet punched through Grant’s shoulder with no effect. Boom! A bullet tore a great chunk from Grant’s neck. Blood sprayed like a fountain. Grant strode onward, his eyes never leaving Lisha.
“Fucking die,” Oz yelled, grasping the gun with two hands and squeezing the trigger. The other half of Grant’s head, the one with intact brain matter, exploded. Grant dropped and smacked the deck like a sack of potatoes.
Lisha realized she was gasping for breath. A hand fell on her shoulder. She screamed and rolled away.
“Doctor, it’s Oz. Take it easy.”
She focused on his face, his visual and audio cues finally penetrating her terror-strewn consciousness. “My God, he got through the plexiglass.”
“Never thought your little science experiment was a good idea,” Oz said. He held out his hand and she took it. He easily pulled her to her feet.
“I guess this answers the question about what to do with him,” she said.
“You want me to get someone to dump him overboard?” he asked.
“No, don’t worry about it. We’re leaving anyway. It’s kind of fitting he remains behind.” Oz nodded. The intercom buzzed. She went over and pressed the button to activate it.
“Is someone shooting up there?”
It sounded like one of Oz’s techs. “No, no problem here,” she lied, keeping her voice even. “That all you need?”
“No, ma’am. Is Oz there?”
“Right here, Weasel. What’s up?”
Weasel? Do any of these people have normal names?
“You wanted the results of those last scans? The material Dr. Breda gave you?”
“Yeah, is the data ready?”
“No, something’s wrong with it.”
“Shit,” Oz said. He opened his revolver, dumped the empty brass and reloaded. “I’ll be right there.”
“I’m coming with you,” Lisha said, her eyes straying to the twitching corpse of her former research assistant. “I don’t want to be alone.”
“No problem,” Oz said. “But we need to find a first aid kit and clean up your face.”
She reached up and felt her face, then yanked her hand away and hissed in pain. From what she could tell, she was missing some skin. “Later. Come on, let’s go.”
She followed Oz down the ladders to the deck where the supercomputers and other IT assets were stored. She hadn’t been down there since the celebration marking the supercomputer’s acquisition and its first operational day. A lot of the equipment was already gone, a disturbing amount wasn’t. Dozens of big, padded cases stood open along the walls, waiting to be loaded with supercomputer parts for safe keeping.
Only one person was there, a balding, middle-aged man with thick glasses and a scraggly beard. Lisha thought he’d look more at home in an online gaming parlor than a computer room. “Weasel?” she asked.
“Dr. Breda, good to meet you at last. Sorry it’s under these circumstances,” Weasel said with an infectious smile. “You can call me Paul, if you’d rather.”
“If you like Weasel, Weasel it is.”
“What happened to your face?”
“Long story,” she said. In a flash, he produced a first aid kit and handed her some gauze and antibiotic ointment. “Thanks,” she said and made a quick bandage. Weasel grinned.
“What’s up, buddy?” Oz asked.
Weasel pointed to a series of monitors. “Test results.”
Oz walked over and fell into a chair with the kind of casual comfort that spoke of many hours spent there. Weasel joined him, and they talked in their own tech speak. Lisha passed the time by examining the room. Gaming posters, some questionable pics of women, a bunch of gun advertisements, and a no-shit, neon Heineken bar sign hung on the walls.
“Are you completely sure the sensor is working?”
Lisha turned back to Oz and Weasel. “What’s up?”
“The results of the scan. You know I’ve been isolating the electrical impulses from samples of the former Mr. Grant’s brain?”
“Former?” Weasel asked.
“I blew out what brains he had left; he tried to eat Dr. Breda.”
“Oh, that was the shooting. Tell me about it.” Weasel had a gleam in his eye, and Lisha moved in.
“Later, Oz, continue.”
“Oh, sure. Anyway, even the biopsies were remaining alive a long time. I was able to get signals from them for hours. If we kept them in the nutrient fluid your lab guys gave me, they stayed alive as long as we wanted.”
“Right, it’s supposed to do that.”
“Okay, so Weasel set up a radar signal system. Transmit/receive.”
“Why?” she asked. “Radar?”
“I was spitballing,” Weasel admitted. “I thought we might be able to get something on the radar frequency? You know, alien nanobots talking to each other?”
“You guys have seen too much sci-fi,” Lisha said.
“Maybe,” Weasel admitted, “but I did it anyway. I was getting a little something. I’m not sure what. The gear was having a hard time reading it. So, I pulsed the sample, a wide range shot from 20 centimeters down to 1 millimeter.”
“Microwave range?” Oz asked.
Weasel shrugged. “I cobbled the unit out of junk from the old oil rig trash pile. It wasn’t very delicate. The point is, no results.”
“No improved signals?” Lisha asked.
“No. No nothing.”
“I don’t understand.” She leaned forward and looked over the data. Radiation wasn’t her thing. They’d tested Strain Delta to see if microwaving food would kill it, with no result. By the time it was gone, they’d turned anything except water into desiccated, inedible trash. Only extreme heat, about 400 degrees, did the trick. “Did you roast it?”
“Just a five-millisecond pulse.”
Lisha stared at the screen. The sample number was there along with an electromagnetic reading of 2.46 hertz, the same as Grant’s pounding rate on the wall. It was the processing speed of the nanovirus. Afterward, there was no electric stimulus.
“Do you have more samples?” she asked. Weasel pulled out a box and put it on the table. A dozen petri dishes with slices of Grant Porter’s brain were inside. “Run another.”
“But…”
“Just do it, please?”
Weasel looked at Oz, who shrugged. So, he selected a petri dish and entered the data from the label into his computer. Then he opened his test rig. It looked like it had started life as a microwave oven. Now, it was missing its metallic cover and wires went everywhere.
“How do you know how to do this?”
“I have an undergrad degree in nuclear physics from IUPUI,” Weasel said.
“I thought you were just a tech.”
Weasel shrugged as he worked.
“Weasel doesn’t play well with others,” Oz explained.
Maybe the name has a deeper meaning, Lisha thought.
“Ready,” Weasel said, closing the door.
Lisha eyed the rig suspiciously. “I don’t want my brain to get microwaved.”
“You won’t,” he said. “The magnetron is modified, and I changed out the capacitor. It can only fire a pulse every millisecond, and the frequency oscillates.”
“Wait,” she said, “can you set it up so we can see what happens while you bombard it?”
Weasel stared at the rig for a second, snapped his fingers, and started digging out parts. “I like her,” he said.
“He enjoys being challenged,” Oz whispered to her.
“Remind me to keep him away from my lab.”
Within five minutes, Weasel had modified the rig and was again ready to go. More wires came out of it, and an additional window on the computer display showed the familiar 2.46 hertz. “Confirmed it’s still alive,” Weasel said. “Ready to fire. Three…two…one…”
Lisha tried not to cringe as the transformer came on and the ‘test machine’ made a sound somewhere between that of a traditional microwave and an old-style camera strobe charging. Instead, she watched the monitor. She heard a snapping sound, and the electrical readings from the brain tissue sample were gone.
“See, just like before.”
“Oh, my God,” Lisha said, putting a hand to her mouth.
“What?” Weasel said, looking around.
She turned to Oz. “Get Joseph to pack all this up. Carefully. Have Weasel stay with it. I want this in my new lab on the ship ASAP.”
“Okay, sure,” Oz said, pulling his Zombie Squad two-way radio from his belt. “Why?”
“Weasel just found a way to kill Strain Delta without cooking it to a crisp.”
“I did?”
“You did.”
“Oh, cool.”
A few minutes later, she was on the dock watching a couple of Joseph’s big, burly, logistics guys carrying crates marked “Weasel” to the ship. She knew she might be able to duplicate what the mad scientist had done, but why start from scratch? His crazy science project had narrowed down the target. She’d never considered trying anything as simple as radar waves.
A microwave was a sort of radar. They used to call microwaves Radar Ranges, until they learned to isolate the frequencies at a much higher range. Cooked better. Anyway, military radars were still dangerous. You could get seriously injured standing in front of one when it was operating. The power levels Weasel was working with were tiny, and the results were instantaneous. Damn it, he had stumbled upon something big.
It was now infinitely more important that they get away from the old HAARP facility before something went drastically wrong. This needed to get out. Weasel might well have saved the world.
The rear half of the huge ship floated against the dock, gangway in place to provide access to the men carrying gear. The ship was too big to safely back under the platform. The name on the stern in weather-worn, white paint was Helix, Falkland. How a ship like that had gotten from the Falklands to San Diego was anybody’s guess. Lisha thought the name was perfect.
Something caught her eye, and she looked up. “That’s something you don’t see every day,” she said. A carrier was slowly descending from the heavens like a gift from God. She’d only heard anecdotal accounts of the carrier exploding upward into space, though she’d heard and felt the shockwave in her laboratory while she was packing. Despite weirdness heaped on top of weirdness, the ship’s ascent wasn’t the strangest thing she’d experienced in the last few weeks. Though seeing the ship ‘flying’ back to the ocean might have been.
It settled onto the water, an invisible dome under it, like a forcefield, holding the ocean back. Then there was a massive BOOOM! and the dome disappeared. The water flew inward, breaking against the carrier in a wave. The entire bulk of the ship dropped a short distance and smacked into the water, sending a wave several meters tall racing away from it. “Huh,” she said. Meanwhile, the loading continued.
* * *
USS Pacific Adventurer
150 Nautical Miles West of San Diego, CA
Lt. General Leon Rose had commanded the US Army III Corps after a long and distinguished career dating back to just after Vietnam. He’d been too young for that conflict and thought he’d missed his chance to command troops in wartime. Then along came Saddam Hussein, and he had gotten his chance.
He’d earned his first star during the buildup to and subsequent Desert Storm. He’d earned his second for Iraqi Freedom. Finally, he’d earned his third and command of III Corps after several years in Afghanistan. Thousands of soldiers had made careers working under his command, and he was widely considered one of the best commanding officers in the service. A fourth star and a stint on the Joint Chiefs would have been a great end to his career. Alas, it would never be.
“Is this how my time as a soldier ends?” Rose asked. The ocean spread out before him. The ocean and ships. A yacht, once worth millions, burned a short distance away. “I hate the ocean.”
Behind him, his assistant, Captain Mays, remained quiet. Rose knew the younger man wasn’t happy on the water, either. Yet, what was to be done?
He’d picked the bridge wing, which extended out past the hull, because it gave him a better view and because it was away from that smug, little shit, Sampson. Rather, Captain Sampson. Rose snorted. Captain, right. Trumped up O-2, little better than a butter bar.
The door to the bridge slid open, and the captain spoke. “General, the John Paul Jones reports there’s activity on the oil platform those scientists are using.”
“Thanks,” Rose said and lifted the binoculars he was using to his eyes.
“Two o’clock, General,” Sampson said.
Rose grunted an annoyed thank you and turned to focus. The little shit could be less useful, it would make it easier to hate him. The former oil platform was easy to spot; it was much taller than the supercarriers. There were usually a lot of ships around the oil platform’s four, huge legs. Like chicks hiding under a mother goose, they hung around for the security it suggested. However, few docked with the platform, and the navy had been providing security for the scientists there.
Now, a not-so-small ship was docked there. It looked like a civilian version of the transports the navy used to move tanks ashore. A RORO, roll on, roll off. It also had cranes and a big mid-deck for cargo.
“Captain Sampson, do you know what ship that is?”
“It’s a private merchant vessel named Helix. Logistics on the John Paul Jones states it arrived 36 hours ago, and the crew transferred to one of the temporary housing cruise ships, the Fun on the Sea. There were infected aboard, though no report on how many.”
“Looks like Dr. Breda got tired of her oil rig,” Captain Mays said.
“So it would seem.” He turned to his ship’s captain. “What does the John Paul Jones want me to do?”
“In the absence of a naval flag officer, you are the highest-ranking military presence, sir. Since you’ve met with the HAARP staff, they’d like you to find out what’s going on.”
“So, I’m a detective now?” The young captain shrugged. “Okay, why not. Mays, get an RHIB over there, will you?”
“Right away, sir.”
Rose raised the glasses and looked again. Yeah, they were transferring gear to the Helix. Lots of it. Did the quirky scientist know something he didn’t?
“Holy shit!” someone on the bridge yelled loudly enough for Rose to hear.
He turned and looked. The three sailors inside the bridge were all looking out the wide glass windows and up. He followed their gaze and saw a ‘flying’ aircraft carrier.
“Well, that’s not something you see every day,” Mays said behind him.
One of the sailors happened to be recording on his phone when Gerald R. Ford blasted into the sky the previous evening. Rose had been in the officer’s mess drinking coffee and talking to his senior officers. He’d been working contingencies when Grange and the Boutwell didn’t return, forcing him to begin considering other options for a land base. When the Mach shockwave rolled over Pacific Adventurer, then the wave of water, he’d bee
n quite surprised. Everyone had watched the cell phone video afterwards.
He squinted at the carrier as it slowly descended. It’s not falling, he realized. That’s good, at least. Maybe someone from the ship could tell him what the fuck was going on. Flying aircraft carriers? What was this, a Marvel movie?
The Ford settled into the water on an invisible forcefield, which shut off with a huge explosion that let water rush in. Rose grunted at the spectacle. Might be nice to have some tanks with those kinds of defenses. He walked over and rapped on the bridge window. Everyone jerked and looked at him.
“Can you find out what that is all about while I’m gone?” He hooked a thumb in the direction of the now settled Ford. Sampson nodded. For a change, he was at a loss for words. Rose nodded in reply and turned to Mays. “Come on, lets go see Dr. Breda before things get even more complicated.”
It only took a few minutes for them to get a boat. The navy had been nice enough to loan him and his ship full of grunts a trio so they could move about and help as needed, though the Marines seldom asked. Now that there were a whole lot less Marines, he wondered if they’d be tapped for more jobs.
The three junior sailors who operated the boats were talking when Rose and Mays appeared on the boat deck. None of the three immediately noticed them.
“What’s going on?” Rose asked in his command voice. All three sailors, two young men and a young woman, almost jumped out of their skins.
They immediately came to their senses and attention. But when they saw him in camo instead of navcam, they seemed uncertain what to do. Eventually, they saw the stars sewn on his epaulets and saluted. He returned it. “So?”
“Sir,” the woman answered. “There’s so much going on—the Ford flying, ships sinking, and missing RHIBs.”
Turning Point (Book 3): A Time To Live Page 12