Fallen Stars, Bitter Waters

by Gilbert, Morris

  2) ALL PERSONNEL AT LOWRY AFB, PETERSON AFB, AND FORT CARSON ARMY BASE TO GO TO DEFCON-2 ALERT. SELECTED UNITS TO PHYSICALLY SURROUND NORAD AS A LAST LINE OF DEFENSE AND SET UP SUPPLY AND COMMUNICATIONS LINES.

  3) COMPLETE LOCKDOWN OF NORAD FACILITY, I.E., ALL TUNNEL ENTRANCE/EXIT BLAST DOORS CLOSED AND SEALED, AIR FLOW REVERSED, WITH AIR PURIFIERS ON TWENTY-FOUR HOURS/DAY.

  4) IF SITUATION IS NOT CLARIFIED (WITH SUBSEQUENT RESORT TO ANOTHER PROTOCOL) WITHIN TWENTY-FOUR HOURS, NO PERSON SHALL BE ALLOWED INTO NORAD (IN CASE OF COMPROMISE OF OUTSIDE PERSONNEL).

  NORTH AMERICAN AEROSPACE DEFENSE COMMAND

  CHEYENNE MOUNTAIN, COLORADO

  **********Z PRIORITY EYES ONLY**********

  DIRECTIVE 09096633ZSEP

  **********Z PRIORITY EYES ONLY**********

  Z REF PROTOCOL X

  ******************

  NAADC HAD ALL SORTS of Protocols, for every national emergency that the collective brains could devise: Protocol Touchdown (for Thermonuclear Device); Protocol CAB (for Chemical and B iological Agents); and the favorite of many of the younger staffers and soldiers in the high-tension underground complex, Protocol ICUS, which they called I-CUSS (for Invasion of Continental U.S. ).

  Protocol X was a catchall, a miscellany for the unheard of, the junk drawer of the emergency directives. No one ever actually expected to invoke Protocol X, for no one ever expected that the most advanced society in the history of the world could not determine the exact nature of a catastrophic event that threatened the United States. But for the equinox of the autumn of 2050, Protocol X was all NAADC had.

  On any given day there were about eleven hundred people scurrying around the granite guts of Cheyenne Mountain. More than half of them were civilians: chemical engineers, electrical engineers, computer programmers, mechanics, maintenance staff, cooks, bottle washers.

  Of the five hundred-plus military personnel, only about two hundred of them were NORAD Security, or heavily armed soldiers there for the purpose of defense of the facility. The rest were highly trained and qualified air force personnel who performed the actual job that NORAD was built for: to staff the operational center that kept watch over aircraft, missiles, and space systems that might pose a threat to the United States and Canada. Since the Galaxy Guardian systems umbrella had been expanded, they also kept watch over South America and Israel.

  In NORAD, at the top of the food chain was chief duty officer. The duty officer rotated among the Joint Chiefs of Staff, the director and deputy director of the National Security Agency, and the four assistant secretaries of defense. On the fateful day of the ohm-bug, this unfortunate responsibility fell directly on the shoulders of Dewey Driscoll Wallace, commandant of the Marine Corps.

  General Wallace, a hard-edged man with a jutting jaw and flashing dark eyes, had knife-sharp manners that could freeze an underling’s guts. But as was true with most soldiers of the soul, his truest and best qualities shone through under adverse circumstances. And these days in the vast caves of Cheyenne Mountain were certainly of the adverse kind.

  “Let’s just all relax, shall we, gentlemen?” He searched the anxious faces of the men sitting at the plain wooden table. It was a junior officers’ wardroom and had shining vending machines and a laser-light jukebox. All of them were dark now, the vending machines’ wares long since removed and stored. Wallace had chosen the wardroom to meet with the engineers as a sort of neutral— and he hoped more congenial—meeting place than the tense, semidarkened situation rooms and offices around NORAD’s heart, the Central Control Room. “Port and cigars, anyone?”

  The weak joke brought a smile to the men’s faces. Chief Engineer Kronsky, a burly man who looked a little like Father Christmas, chuckled. No liquor was ever on the premises of NORAD, for any reason. And the idea of anyone smoking in this stale, heavy, odor-ridden air was ludicrous.

  “All right, now for the bad news,” Wallace went on, a shadow passing over his rough features. “My Raiders are gone. No word from any of the teams.” Three air duct tunnels existed, for even the most secure installation must have a fresh air supply. For all the high technologies of the century, no one had been able to make oxygen. One tunnel came out on the east side of Fort Carson, in the rocky plains; one was just to the west of Pueblo, at the base of an unnamed and unnoticeable mountain; and one came out in the Royal Gorge. The three six-man teams of Marine Raiders had left the central complex seven days before. Their handheld walkie-talkies with the 9-volt batteries had reached only about a mile; after that NORAD had heard nothing from them.

  NORAD’s all-seeing eyes had noted, of course, the three Messerschmitt Dagger helicopters searching the areas where the tunnels came out two nights previously, but they couldn’t afford to retask any of the satellites to monitor any more detail than the flight paths. They hadn’t seen the eighteen men die, though Commandant Wallace knew they were dead.

  The four men nodded, and Wallace went on, “Guess everyone knows that already, but this is my official notification to you. Now, Chief Engineer Kronsky, you go ahead and give me your bad news.”

  Kronsky frowned, and the chubby cheeks above his neatly trimmed silver beard reddened with frustration. “Sir, we’re starting to get dangerously high carbon dioxide levels.”

  “Yeah, I’ve noticed that it’s sorta like trying to breathe in quicksand,” Wallace said dryly. “So let’s go over my options again, Kronsky.”

  The older man nodded and said in a neutral voice, “We can divert more power to the air purification systems, sir. I think even with these CO2 levels we could still knock it back.”

  Wallace’s jaw jutted forward ominously. “But that means that we’d risk the Crays, right?” The fragile Cray-5 computers that were the hardware heart of the Galaxy Guardian systems required a constant seventy-degree temperature and microsensing dehumidifiers. Any change in ambient temperature or the tiniest droplet of moisture in either the hardware room or the monitoring Control Center was likely to damage the delicate components of the powerful computers.

  Kronsky shrugged. “Yes, sir, any diversion is likely to result in surges and maybe temporary outages.”

  “No,” Wallace said decisively. “The GG system has to stay up and running. After all, that’s why we’re here, not to do any silly superfluous things like breathing.”

  In his kind manner, Kronsky said, “At most it would give us only two more days, anyway. We never foresaw, sir, that this facility would, in reality, have to run off the auxiliary systems for such a prolonged period.” NORAD had two backup power sources, diesel and battery, and either was supposed to power the complex for thirty days. The installation also had food and water to last for sixty days. It was now the sixty-second day since the autumnal equinox. NORAD was out of food and almost out of air, and the diesel was getting ominously low.

  Kronsky cleared his throat and said uncomfortably, “And, sir, I must remind you that if we let the power go completely down, it’ll probably be months before we can get the system hardware checked and cleared to boot up again. I know you probably have Cray techs advising you about this already.”

  Wallace smiled, a dour stretch of his thin lips tight over his teeth. “Yeah, they’ve been ‘advising’ me about that at the top of their lungs for about three days now. I think those drone-heads would actually give those computers artificial respiration if they thought it would keep them going.” His dark eyes, bleak and unseeing, focused far in the distance. “Well, gentlemen, if we’re out of air and out of power, I guess it’s time to hit the road.”

  The relief on the faces of the four men was almost ludicrous to see. Kronsky, who was the only civilian to dare take conversational liberties with the commandant, asked, “So, we aren’t going down with the ship, sir?”

  Wallace laughed, a harsh, braying sound. “Not hardly, and those navy pukes wouldn’t, either. I just need to know one really important thing, though, Kronsky. If we leave a skeleton crew in here—say, a hundred men, good and true—can they live for a couple of
days? I mean, can they breathe?”

  “Sure, Commandant,” Kronsky replied. “Twelve men won’t take up nearly the oxygen that eleven hundred do. There’ll be plenty. And, sir—if you open the tunnel doors, naturally there’ll be fresh air coming in.”

  “Well, then, that’s it, gentlemen,” Wallace said, rising to his lean six feet. “Let’s go open those doors.”

  In the end, it was that simple.

  The tunnel blast doors were three-foot-thick slabs of concrete and steel, each weighing thirty tons. Commandant Wallace, in the lead with the 336 men and women of the 721st NORAD Support Group, felt immense relief when they slid smoothly open without a sound. His most secret fear was of being buried alive, and that was exactly how he had felt for the last two months in the underground complex. Though the doors were set about a quarter of a mile down the tunnel, he could still see the faint glow of sunlight— real sunlight!—in the immense cavern. By sheer willpower he made himself march calmly toward the light instead of running like a madman.

  Outside, at the tunnel entrance, President Luca Therion and Tor von Eisenhalt waited in an open Vulcan. Because the president was with him, the 721st didn’t fire on Eisenhalt or any of the armed men arrayed behind them.

  With cold dread, Commandant Wallace stopped in his tracks, blinking in the unaccustomed brightness of the morning sun.

  “General Wallace,” Luca said calmly, “step forward, please.”

  Confused, Wallace walked slowly toward the Vulcan.

  Tor von Eisenhalt, with calmness and deliberation that paralyzed the American soldiers, took out his side arm and shot General Wallace in the head.

  Tor’s elite German 571st Mountain Battalion instantly moved up. Out of the 336 American soldiers, only forty-two shots were fired, and only 2 Germans were killed and 1 injured.

  Of the 1,062 men and women in NORAD, not a single person survived.

  PART III

  REDE EMING THE TIME

  Wherefore he saith, Awake thou that sleepest, and arise from the dead, and Christ shall give thee light. See then that ye walk circumspectly, not as fools, but as wise, redeeming the time, because the days are evil.

  —EPHESIANS 5:14-16

  And oftentimes, to win us to our harm,

  The instruments of darkness tell us truths,

  Win us with honest trifles, to betray ’s

  In deepest consequence.

  —BANQUO, FROM MACBETH BY WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE

  FIFTEEN

  AS RILEY CASE emerged from the dense woods, he carried his rifle in his left hand while the other grasped a sack that was slung over his shoulders. When he approached the Mitchells’ cabin, Kyle Saylor came running up, his short legs pumping. “Hi, Wiley!” he called, his doe-brown eyes bright. With his lisp, he couldn’t pronounce Riley’s name correctly, and Allegra had laughed and sometimes called Case “Wile E. Coyote.” Riley pretended not to recall the silly character from the ancient Road-runner cartoons.

  “Hi, boss,” Riley answered. “What have you been up to?”

  “I’ve been helping Mama clean.”

  “Good for you. I like to see a man who stands by his mom. I got some cleaning to do, too.” He nodded toward the canvas sack over his shoulder. “Got some squirrels to clean.”

  “Clean them? Are they dirty?”

  “Uh—sorta. Got to clean them so we can have them for supper.”

  Kyle nodded sagely, which amused Riley. The four-year-old had seen the kills Riley made for their food—deer, squirrels, rabbits, and wild pigs—but he still didn’t exactly connect them to the food on the table. Gets it from his mama, Riley thought with some affection. She’s kinda squeamish about the process . . . but she sure likes the end result.

  Merrill Stanton staggered around the corner of the cabin, his arms filled with firewood. He wasn’t a very good outdoorsman, though he worked as long and hard as Riley Case and David Mitchell did in this frontier world.

  “Grandpa, Wiley’s got some dirty squirrels in that sack,” Kyle told him solemnly.

  “That right?” The older man winked at Riley. “I’ll give you a hand as soon as I stack this wood inside, Riley.”

  “No need, Mr. Stanton,” Riley assured him. “It’s only about a dozen. I can clean them myself.”

  Merrill was secretly relieved, for he wasn’t certain he’d know the upside of a squirrel from the downside. “Okay, c’mon, Kyle.

  Let me put up this wood, and we’ll go out and get some kindling.”

  “Can I bring my wagon?” Kyle asked eagerly.

  Merrill smiled. Riley had made Kyle a wooden wagon, with wooden wheels painstakingly whittled by hand. Riley had even carved Kyle’s name on it and made a little seat for Benny the Bear.

  Riley might be a rather distant and forbidding man, but he was certainly good to Kyle. “Sure, that’s a good idea. We can load it up.”

  Kyle and Merrill disappeared inside the Mitchells’ cabin, while Riley went off to the spot he and David had chosen below the cabin in the thick woods to clean and butcher the kills. It had to be a safe distance away from the cabin. The blood and entrails drew predators—particularly wolves. They heard them howling every night.

  Soon Riley brought the meat back into the kitchen, where Allegra, Genevieve, and Noemi Mitchell were discussing cooking wild game. Genevieve Stanton was a pretty good cook, but all her life she’d cooked only meals that were so preprocessed and pre-concocted and pretreated and preconstructed that they rarely resembled the original food. Allegra was a competent cook, but she lacked flair or whatever the instinctive quality was that made a really good cook. But Noemi had it, and she’d taught both of them much.

  Riley handed Allegra a plain wooden platter piled high with meat cut into small pieces. Allegra made a face. “Thank you, I guess, Mr. Case.”

  “My pleasure, ma’am,” he replied, his dark eyes sparkling. “You still haven’t gotten used to fresh meat, have you, Mrs. Saylor?”

  Allegra stared down at the bloody meat and sighed. “It’s not that exactly. I’m just having a little culture shock. Sometimes my brain lags behind for a few minutes . . . I can’t believe I’m holding a platter filled with pieces of dead squirrels, and I’m going to cook them with a wood fire on a cast-iron stove . . .”

  Genevieve nodded. “Do you know that sometimes when I walk into a room, I still say ‘Lights’ to Cyclops? Sometimes it all seems so unreal, like a dream or a hallucination.”

  Riley Case’s penetrating gaze was still on Allegra Saylor. “Is it like a bad dream to you, too, Mrs. Saylor?”

  “Hmm? Oh. Um . . . I don’t know. It’s not really—a bad dream, no. Not since we got here and found Brother and Sister Mitchell. It’s just that sometimes your mind rebels at the enormity of what’s happened.” She looked up at Riley curiously. “Don’t you feel that way, too, Mr. Case?”

  He shrugged, and Allegra could almost feel the barrier he instantly, always, erected. “It is different. If you ladies will excuse me . . .” In his usual, quaint old-world manner, he nodded to each of them, murmuring, “Ma’am,” and slipped out.

  Noemi looked shrewdly at Allegra, who watched him go with a thoughtful look on her face. “He’s a good hunter, is Mr. Case. Did you know squirrels are about the hardest game to kill? Small target and fast.”

  “No, I didn’t know that,” Allegra said. “And I certainly don’t have the faintest clue how to cook them. Do you, Mother?”

  Genevieve sighed. “No, I can’t say I have any experience cooking squirrels.”

  Noemi smiled. “It’s real easy, especially since Mr. Case has butchered the meat into small pieces. We can have some fried squirrel, and then I’ll show you how to make squirrel dumplings. Now first you get a bunch of flour, and salt and pepper it and mix it up . . .”

  “But—how much flour? How much salt and pepper?” Allegra asked, bewildered.

  Noemi shrugged. “Just a pile of flour, and salt and pepper it.”

  Allegra said with exasperation, “Why do good
cooks always say that? ‘Just some of this, and a little of that, and no, a lot of the other . . .’ Why can’t they tell us food morons how to measure it?

  Like in teaspoons or gallons or whatever?”

  Noemi and Genevieve laughed. “All right, Allegra,” Noemi said, her eyes twinkling. “Take a gallon of flour, a minim of salt, and a peck of pepper . . .”

  As the women cooked, the men sat around the fireplace, talking of the situation with the living quarters. Everyone had been sleeping in the Mitchells’ cabin, but David and Riley had found several other cabins nearby. They were renovating three of them— one for Merrill and Genevieve, one for Allegra and Kyle, and one for David and Riley. Allegra had been working hard on all three cabins, too, cleaning and doing some repair work. Soon everyone would have a house.

  Riley suddenly lifted his head. He seemed to sniff the air, then said, “Somebody’s coming.”

  Instantly he and David got up, grabbed their guns, and went out on the front porch. David squinted in the falling darkness. “It’s a diesel,” he muttered and released the safety on his shotgun.

  “Maybe a Hummer.”

  “Maybe,” Riley agreed in a low voice. He moved over and planted himself beside the cabin as he chambered a shell into the rifle.

  As soon as the outline of the vehicle was visible to his sharp eyes, David jumped down beside Riley and threw his weapon to his shoulder. “That’s a Vulcan. German military utility vehicle,” he said grimly.

  “What do you want to do, Mitchell?” Riley asked.

  David thought for a moment, then answered, “Don’t kill him. Or them. Need to talk first.”

  They waited tensely.

  Riley squinted through the old magnification sight on his .30-.30. “Mitchell, I think it’s that commissar, St. Dymion.”

  Indeed it was Xanthe St. Dymion. She pulled up and jumped out, waving at David and Riley. “It’s okay. It’s just me,” she called anxiously.