Turning Point (Book 3): A Time To Live

by Wandrey, Mark

  The steel began to part. Cobb started to yell a completely ineffectual warning. But the damage was done. The rest of the cable parted with a Pwing!

  The entire platform shifted crazily toward the missing cable, and for a terrible second, Cobb was sure it would flip completely over, spilling his entire command into the laps of the zombies. Men cried out in alarm, and everyone grabbed whatever they could to remain stable. The platform only shifted three feet lower on the broken cable’s side, and everyone hung on except one man.

  “Shit!” One of the army soldiers flailed as he was catapulted from the opposite side. Dozens of hands grabbed at him, but none got a good enough grip to hang on. He rolled over the crowd like someone being passed over a mosh pit. He landed in the hands of the ravenous infected.

  “No!” Tango yelled and grabbed the man’s outstretched hand. He caught it, barely. “Grab him, pull him in!”

  The Marines grabbed at him, his face a mixture of hope and terror. A dozen infected’s arms wrapped around him, pulling, dragging, and clawing. The platform continued ascending, and in mere seconds, the man had a thousand pounds dragging him back. The platform teetered on the edge.

  “Anyone who can’t reach him, move to the other corner!” Cobb ordered. Many of the men hesitated, but the platform tipped a little more toward the man hanging on, which was enough to make the rest go in the opposite direction. The platform began to level.

  “Help me!” Tango ordered, and every soldier who could grabbed at the fallen man, creating a tug-of-war.

  “Relief team,” the recovery team called. “Relief team, we’re in trouble here!”

  “Goddamn it,” Cobb said. He holstered his Beretta, and after a couple of tense seconds, located his carbine. Using the night vision scope, he found the distant recovery team. The last generator had just lifted off, with hundreds of infected clinging to and climbing on the framework. “Never a fucking break,” he said and took aim. Using single shots, he picked off the infected one at a time.

  “We’re losing him!” someone yelled.

  Cobb looked. The Marines were using knives, rifle butts, fists, and whatever they could to try and get the infected to let go. A couple snarled and fell off. Another’s throat was cut, bathing the struggling man’s face in blood. Several Marines recoiled from the spray, and with a scream, the soldier fell away into the dark.

  Cobb closed his eyes for a second, taking a calming breath and wishing the man a quick death. “Help me with the recovery team,” he said through clenched teeth. Some of the men raised their weapons to help Cobb, while the rest removed the last of the infected clinging to their platform or pitched bodies over the side.

  “You got them, we’re clear,” the recovery team leader said.

  “I hope it was worth the price,” Cobb replied. The men stood, put their weapons on safe, and holstered their knives and pistols. The 19 men road the rest of the way up in silence. Halfway up, Cobb realized he didn’t know the dead man’s name.

  * * *

  The Flotilla

  150 Nautical Miles West of San Diego, CA

  Jeremiah Osborne climbed down the too-steep, metallic stairway to the technology deck. He’d grabbed a power nap, a beer, and some food, then returned to where the magic was happening. He expected to find his engineers working on their various projects—dissecting alien technology and trying to understand the best way to put it to work. What he found was a dozen overpaid scientists crowding around his new lost boy, Wade Watts. What the heck?

  “…wasn’t too difficult. I just adapted a flight combat simulator’s interface.”

  “What’s going on?” Jeremiah asked. Everyone looked up, some in surprise, some in annoyance.

  “Mr. Watts just rewrote the operating system for an alien drive-controlled ship,” Patty Mize said.

  “What about the interface Alison wrote?” he asked.

  Alison looked up from the computer and shrugged. “The geek’s got game,” she said. “Besides, programming is his thing; mine is electronics.”

  “Where are my programmers?”

  “They all left when the navy evacuated people, along with half my staff,” said Jack Coldwell, the only physicist still on board. He had a few assistants left, mostly grad students.

  “Traitors,” Jeremiah mumbled.

  “You know,” Wade said, “this alien stuff is really weird.”

  “No shit?” Maria Merino said from across the room and laughed. She was eating a SPAM sandwich, the only meat-like material still in plentiful supply.

  “No, I mean the way it takes inputs. Earth technology is pretty standard—a lot of stuff uses 60 hertz because it’s convenient. Not this stuff.”

  “Yeah, I noticed that when I wired the first controller,” Alison said. “I ended up using 30 hertz because 60 kept glitching. Even 30 didn’t work all the time, but I set up a continual input instead of a single pulse.”

  “It makes sense that 30 and 60 didn’t work,” Wade said. He picked up the multimeter he was using, which included an oscilloscope. “The wave form is 2.46 hertz, but in multiple forms. So, 2.46, 7.38, 29.52. You were off by just enough, even at 30, to make your pulses miss intermittently.”

  “Weird,” Alison agreed. “Haven’t seen many harmonics used in electronics.”

  “I wouldn’t expect so,” Wade said. “Once I figured out how it accepted signals, I started looking for some.”

  “And?” Jeremiah asked.

  “I found them.” He spun around a screen displaying a series of squiggly lines.

  “I’m an aerospace engineer,” Jeremiah said, “not an electronics or programming expert.”

  “They’re discreet control feedback signals from the drive, power, and communications modules talking to each other.” Watts pointed to a couple of the traces. They were all colored differently. “These are feedbacks from the drive.”

  “Just guessing,” Alex spoke up for the first time, “but I think those are speed and positional data.”

  “Would have been handy to know in the middle of the solar system,” Alison mumbled. Alex nodded solemnly. If they’d been able to return quickly, Lloyd Behm, one of the pilots on the Azanti’s first flight, might have made it back alive.

  “Some of these signals are very delicate,” Jack Coldwell said. “This one on the power system may be the level of energy available. We compared it to the two power modules we have—the one you took to orbit to rescue the carrier and the one that has been sitting here, on the shelf.”

  “Does it give an indication of how much power the flight took?” Jeremiah asked.

  “Yes,” Jack said. “However, it took an hour of examining the waveform for us to figure it out. It adds up to about a hundred millionth of a percent.”

  “More or less,” one of his assistants said. “It was almost too small to measure.”

  Jack shrugged, then nodded. “More or less.”

  “Of a percent?” Jeremiah asked. The physicist and his assistants beamed. “You’re telling me the power module could make 100 billion trips to orbit and back?”

  “Well, 50 billion,” Alex corrected. “Estimated, because we had a 90,000-ton aircraft carrier hooked to the field on the return flight.”

  “Fuck a duck,” Jeremiah said.

  “Not by policy,” Alex said. “We’ll have to do tests, but it looks like mass may not affect power usage.”

  Someone was yelling up above, so Alex went to see what was going on.

  “We need to run some tests,” Jack agreed. “Bench tests with large weights. Maybe we can use one of the derelict container ships. They weigh about as much as an aircraft carrier. Float it for a day and see how much power it uses.”

  “Two tests would be better,” an assistant suggested. “You know, one with the shield on, and one without?”

  “You have control of the shield function?”

  “Sure,” Wade said. “I’ve isolated several of the signals and inputs. Some are switches, others are more like sliders.”

&nbs
p; “Potentiometers,” Alison offered.

  “Right, whatever,” Wade said, waving a dismissive hand at Alison.

  “You didn’t date much, did you?” Alison asked.

  “None of your…” He turned toward her and noticed she was leaning over the work bench. An impressive amount of cleavage was on display. Wade lost his train of thought mid-stream.

  “Don’t give the young man a heart attack,” Alex said. Alison giggled, and Wade swallowed. The young programmer/hacker opened his mouth to retort but was cut short when a gunshot rang out on deck.

  Several people jumped. Jeremiah looked at the ladder his chief test pilot had ascended a minute earlier. God, not more damned zombies?

  A second later, Alex slid down the ladder with his hands, hitting the deck with bent knees to absorb the impact. “Lock the hatch!” he barked. He had an automatic pistol in one hand.

  Where did he get the gun? “What’s going on?” Jeremiah demanded.

  “We’re under attack.”

  “By whom?” he demanded.

  “Seals.”

  * * *

  Anna Niles jerked slightly at the first gunshot. After all, it wasn’t the first time someone on the Freedom had shot a gun. She’d trained on all three required weapons—the M-16, the M9 pistol, and the M500—when she was promoted to petty officer. Sure, only a few rounds in each, but how many would a UAV pilot need to fire in the execution of her duties?

  So, when the shotgun blast echoed, she stopped dialing the phone to tell the officer of the watch what they’d seen. Then, three more shots boomed out, two shotgun and one pistol.

  “Must be zombies,” Eva said.

  “Maybe,” Anna replied and got up. “Or maybe not.”

  She walked out of the UAV control bay and over to the hangar. Prager was standing next to the Fire Scout, a greasy rag in one hand and a water bottle in the other. He was staring out the open hangar door toward the extra-large landing pad where the Fire Scout had set down earlier.

  “Is the well deck open?” she asked him.

  “Huh?” Prager replied.

  “I said, is the damned well deck open?”

  “Uh, yeah,” he said after a second. “They’ve been launching RHIBs all day.” Yet another shot sounded. This time, it was clear that the shots came from below the landing deck or on the well deck under them.

  Someone below yelled, fired three rapid pistol shots, then screamed. A long, ragged burst of automatic weapons fire sounded. One of their ship’s four M-16s. Oh shit.

  “Someone went zombie?” Prager wondered.

  Anna didn’t wait to find out; she turned and ran back into the bay. She yanked the desk drawer open, revealing the safe inside. It had a three-number punch combination on it. A sound somewhere between a bark and a roar sounded, making the hair on the back of her neck stand up.

  “Get the gun!” Eva said. “Get the damned gun!”

  “What the fuck do you think I’m doing?!” Anna screamed back and punched in the code. She twisted the lock, but it didn’t move. “Shit, shit, shit,” she said and tried to clear her mind. The CPO had changed the code the day he issued the gun. It was right after their sole zombie incident. The gun was locked in the safe where they kept the keys that allowed the Fire Scout to fire live munitions. The CPO had followed protocol and changed the code. What’s the fucking code? she berated herself.

  “Come on, damn it!” Eva said, shaking Anna’s shoulder.

  She shook off the other woman and screamed at her, “Knock it off, I’m trying to concentrate!”

  Out on the flight deck, Dan Prager yelled in alarm. The barking roar came twice in close succession, each one sounding slightly different. The cognitive part of Anna’s brain heard a brief, heavy, tempered metal scraping sound and knew her mechanic had just grabbed a big wrench or a crowbar from an equipment bench. A split second later, he gave a hideous scream which ended in a gurgle, then nothing. She heard more gunfire, this time from somewhere else on the ship. After what seemed like an eternity, the general quarters alarm blared.

  “All hands, general quarters!” the captain said, his voice shaky. “Boarders. I mean, prepare to repel boarders.” Someone near the captain yelled something. “Seals? What?” Glass shattered, and the captain cried out, then dropped the mic. The alarm continued to blare.

  “I remember!” she said and punched 9-9-1 into the lock. She’d thought it was 9-1-1, but the CPO had told her that was too obvious. She turned the lock, and the box popped open. Inside were two red keys, a sealed envelope, an M-9 Beretta semi-automatic pistol, and two magazines. She grabbed the gun and spun before she realized it was too light. Turning it over, she saw that it was missing a magazine. There was a deep repeating reverberation through the deck plates, as if something heavy was being drug and dropped once per second.

  Anna turned back and grabbed a magazine. The reverberations were closer. Her hands were slick with sweat, and the magazine went flying. She watched it hit the floor, dislodging a bullet, then bounce and slide under an equipment rack. “Fuck!” She grabbed the other magazine and turned back just as a monstrous shape blocked the light from outside.

  The beast was so big, it barely fit down the hall. Eva was between her and it, frozen in shock. You didn’t work at Navy Base San Diego without knowing about the seal population. The common harbor seals averaged 300 pounds. They’d sunbathe on buoys, boats, or anything else they could get on. They were tolerant of humans, to a point. The monster in the door was an elephant seal. Elephant seals could be as big as 16 feet long and weigh in at two tons. A score of bullet holes marked the seal’s upraised chest and neck, several of which were bleeding profusely. It took no notice of the wounds as it turned its head and examined the compartment in a most un-seal-like manner.

  Anna gasped. The seal was cunningly evaluating what it had found.

  “What the hell?” Eva asked and took a step back. The elephant seal’s protuberant nose, a characteristic of their species, wobbled as its strange barking roar sounded. It lurched its head forward, snatched PO2 Eva Perone in its blood-dripping mouth, and shook her like a ragdoll.

  Eva screamed piteously, her voice shifting like a passing train, as the seal swung her body back and forth. The animal was so massive, its actions seemed to require little effort. On the third swing, Eva’s head hit the bulkhead with so much force, her skull split. Brains and blood flew. The seal stopped shaking her, its eyes regarding the slightly twitching body for an instant before dropping it on the deck.

  Anna screamed and slid the magazine into the gun. She remembered to release the safety before she pulled the trigger.

  “The first trigger pull will be difficult,” the firearms instructor had warned her. “It’s called double-action. It cocks the trigger and fires in the same pull. After the first shot, firing the gun will re-cock it, and subsequent shots will only require a light pull.”

  The hammer went back and dropped with a loud click. The elephant seal’s head cocked slightly as its black-on-black eyes regarded her. Anna pulled the trigger twice more. Click, click. Her hands shaking, she looked at the seal who looked at her. The doorway into the bay was extra-large to allow the fuselage of the Fire Scout to pass inside for maintenance. The seal fit through with surprising ease. Its huge mouth opened, and it reached for her.

  “Don’t forget to pull the slide back and load the chamber,” her instructor had advised.

  “Oh,” she said as the seal struck.

  * * *

  “Goddamned harbor seals,” Alex West said.

  “They’re cute,” one of Jack Coldwell’s young, female assistants said.

  “Oh? Go pet one. There are about a dozen up on the deck, eating a crewman, right now!” The young girl looked agog.

  “Strain Delta,” Patty Mize said, her eyes narrowed in concentration.

  “Yeah,” Alex said. “You still armed?”

  “You bet your ass,” Patty said and produced her semi-auto handgun. “I’ve only got two magazines left.”
<
br />   “One extra,” Alex said and brandished his much larger Glock. “Anyone else?” The room full of engineers, scientists, executives, and gamer geeks looked at him in fear and anticipation. “Swell.” Something big thumped against the door he’d just closed and locked. He examined it. “Not watertight. Perfect.”

  “No harbor seal is getting through,” Jeremiah observed.

  “There are elephant seals with them,” he said. “They’re working together.”

  “What?” Jeremiah demanded. “As a team?” Above them, on the deck, they heard screaming and the sounds of something heavy being dragged, then banging on metal.

  “Yeah,” Alex said, “like a fucking team. I can see gunfire on every nearby ship as well. It’s an attack across the entire Flotilla.” A massive weight hit the floor just outside the door.

  “What should we do?” an assistant asked.

  The door behind Alex thrummed from a massive blow, bowing inward slightly. Alex looked around for options. There didn’t seem to be any. The door was hit again, and the latch groaned. He and Patty squared off toward the door. Everyone else moved to the back of the work area, as far from the door as they could. The door was hit again and again. It seemed to have temporarily wedged closed.

  Jeremiah searched for a way out. There was a service exit on one side of the room, only the doorway was bolted closed. It would take several men a half hour to get it open. Wade Watts was freaking out. He’d been rummaging around on the parts shelves, no doubt looking for a weapon. He wouldn’t find anything useful on a rack of high-power capacitors, relays, and couplings. He was about to ask the programmer what he was doing with one of the alien power modules when the door screeched.

  Jeremiah spun around in terror, his breath coming in gasps. Fight or flight, only neither seemed possible. A massive, black shape was dimly visible on the other side of the gap that had opened between the horribly disfigured doorway and the untouched, metal frame. Alex took a step sideways, aimed, and a fired a single round. In the metal compartment, it sounded like an artillery shell, making several people cry out and put their hands over their ears.