by Mike Kraus
Leonard McComb | Rachel Walsh | Marcus Warden | Nancy Sims
2:25 PM, April 5, 2038
Moving as quickly and quietly as possible, the group hugged the wall of the police station, circling around the wing and into the front courtyard. The front façade had been shattered by the car that the creatures had thrown through the front entrance, but Leonard’s Jeep was intact, sitting right where he had left it.
“Hurry, get everything in there now!” Rachel hissed at the others to move, and they quickly went forward, taking their backpacks off and loading their supplies, ammunition and spare weapons into the far back of the Jeep. By the time they got done loading everything, the Jeep was crammed so full that there was barely enough room to sit in the two front seats. The back seats were completely filled, and Leonard looked at Rachel, wondering what to do next.
Leonard offered up a suggestion. “How about you and Nancy ride in the front. Sam can sit in the back, on top of the supplies, and Marcus and I can stand on the back bumper and hold on to the top frame. If the base is close by, I’m sure we can manage to stay on for that long, eh Marcus?” Marcus grinned and slapped Leonard on the back as the two of them climbed onto the back of the Jeep and found good handholds and footholds to keep from being thrown off the bumper.
“I’ll try not to knock you guys off. No promises, though.” Rachel’s voice had a touch of humor to it despite her stress.
With the entire group loaded into the Jeep, Rachel started the ignition and took off through the parking lot, weaving slowly between the cars that had been dislodged by the activity of the creatures. Marcus and Leonard each held on to the Jeep with one hand while keeping a pistol in the other, scanning the area around them for any signs of trouble.
With the knowledge that there were still multiple creatures left alive, everyone in the group was on edge. Passing slowly enough through the city to keep from losing supplies – or one of the men hanging on the back of the Jeep – left the entire group vulnerable, a fact Rachel was keenly aware of. As she drove along, she tried to remember how she had gotten from the military base to the police station. The Jeep was on a different path than she took originally, but as she wound through side streets and highways, she eventually saw an open field in the distance with the tents and large camouflage netting nearby.
“There we go!” Rachel shouted at the group and pointed ahead to their destination.
Ten minutes later, Rachel pulled up next to the camouflage netting and cut off the engine. Marcus and Leonard hopped off the back and circled the netting, checking the area for recent foot traffic. Rachel looked up from helping Sam off and called out to Marcus, who was stepping inside each of the tents, pistol drawn, ensuring that the base was free of intruders.
“No, Marcus! Don’t go in th–" Rachel’s warning came too late, and Marcus backed out of the tent, holding his hand to his mouth and nearly stumbling as he tried to get away from the smell and sights he had just encountered.
“Is that… is that what I think it is?” Marcus choked back the vomit that threatened to bubble in the back of his throat and Rachel nodded grimly.
“Remains of people. I think they’re the ones that the swarms didn’t turn. They must have put up a fight.”
“Christ… that’s horrible.” Marcus swallowed deeply, fighting back the bile in his throat. He grabbed his backpack from the Jeep and ducked under the camouflage, desperate to forget the sight in the tent.
Inside the area covered by the netting, Rachel jogged up to each of the APCs, checking to make sure they still ran. Both of the vehicles roared to life at a flip of the switch, and Rachel hopped out after checking and turning off the second one, dusting her hands off as she approached the group.
“So, I’m thinking we should take both of these with us up to Washington. I know it means splitting up, but if one of them breaks down or gets into trouble, we’ll have a spare. I’ll drive one and someone else can drive the other, okay?”
Leonard stepped forward, tossing his shoulder bag and backpack next to the giant rear tire of the second APC. “I’ll take the second one. Who wants to ride with me?”
“I can go with Rachel, if she doesn’t mind.” Marcus patted Sam’s head as he talked, revealing his true motivation for wanting to ride with Rachel.
Nancy shook her head in response. “No problem here; I’ll go with Leonard.”
“Then it’s settled. Let’s divide up the gear, get loaded up into the APCs and get moving before those things decide to hunt us down again.”
Rachel turned back to the first APC, moving to close the door when she spotted a small unit attached to the underside of the dashboard. Rachel barely stifled a squeal as she leapt back into the vehicle and pulled out the unit, an ear to ear grin on her face.
“What’s up, Rachel?” Leonard walked next to her along with Nancy while Marcus hopped in the passenger seat of the APC.
“It’s a radio! Long range, from the looks of it.” Rachel looked up from the unit, smiling at her companions in joy. “Don’t you see what this means? We might be able to contact the lab with this! The transmitter is bound to be much stronger than those police radios!”
Rachel pushed the power button on the front of the unit, happy to see that it – like most of the other military equipment – had survived the EMPs thanks to its hardened state. As she turned the volume up, she began to scan through bands, trying to locate the transmission that David sent. After a moment of searching, Rachel heard David’s familiar voice break through with the repeating message.
Looking nervously at the others, Rachel depressed the button on the microphone of the radio, speaking as slowly and calmly as she could.
“David? Are you there? Please pick up.”
Rachel released the radio button and the repeating transmission came through again. She waited for several seconds, though it seemed like hours, wondering if David was still alive and whether or not he could respond. Disappointment was just starting to set in when the message stopped abruptly in the middle of a sentence, replaced by static and the sound of fumbling in the background.
“Hello? This is David Landry. Please identify yourself.”
Leonard McComb | Rachel Walsh | Marcus Warden | Nancy Sims
3:04 PM, April 5, 2038
Rachel covered her mouth with one hand as she thumbed the radio button. Her voice was shaking and she could barely hide the emotion in her voice.
“David? Is that really you?”
“Who is – wait, Rachel? No, it can’t be. Is it?” David’s voice grew in emotion as well, and she began to speak rapidly, trying to cram as much information into the discussion as possible.
“Yes! I’m here with a few other survivors. We heard your broadcast! I’ve been trying to get to the lab ever since the bombs fell, but, well, Georgia’s pretty far away when there aren’t many working vehicles.”
“Christ… Rachel, I can’t believe you made it. How many more are with you?”
Rachel gave David a brief rundown on her three companions, along with where they were all located and what was going on.
“I’m still having trouble believing it’s you, but for four of you to make it is absolutely incredible. I guess those long nights of whitelisting actually paid off. A few of those sequences must have been more common than we realized, and–” David began to ramble when Rachel cut him off.
“David, there’ll be time for that when we get to the lab. We’re loading our supplies into an armored transport we found here in Richmond at a military base. We’ll head in your direction as quickly as we can. We heard your broadcast about defeating the swarms.”
There was a long silence on the radio. When David finally responded, his voice was noticeably less boisterous. “I’m afraid it’s not that simple.”
A long moment passed while Rachel considered the possible implications of David’s words. Afraid to ask what he meant, she hesitated to thumb the microphone key again. “David, what are you talking about? Surely we can just redeploy Bert
ha. I’m pretty sure the swarms are massing in the South somewhere. If we can get Bertha down there, then it’s game over, right?”
“Bertha’s offline, Rachel. It never deployed in the first place.”
Leonard interrupted the conversation with a confused look on his face. “What’s ‘Bertha’?”
The microphone was still active when Leonard spoke and David responded before Rachel. “A massive electromagnetic pulse generator located in the bottom of the facility. It’s got enough power to push a pulse through the entire underground structure and knock out every electronic device within fifty miles of DC. It was supposed to activate during an emergency at the lab, but it didn’t. The swarms must have disconnected or destroyed it.”
“If you’re whitelisted, why can’t you go down and check to see what’s wrong?” Rachel broke in again.
David’s sad, quiet chuckle was barely audible over the radio. “The same reason I haven’t been able to go anywhere or do anything else: half the building collapsed and I’m trapped. Even if you all were to come up here, it could take days of digging just to reach me, and then we’d have to figure out how to get to Bertha through all the rubble and collapsed floors below us.”
Rachel sat in silence again, trying to wrap her head around the significance of what they were facing. The entire time she was trying to get to Washington, her plan was to use Bertha as a tool against the swarms. Finding out that their best weapon against the swarms could have been destroyed or buried under a thousand tons of rubble was inconceivable.
Built specifically for use against the nanobots should something go wrong with them, Bertha was the most powerful electromagnetic pulse generator ever designed. Radical new design techniques and breakthroughs had culminated in a device that was no larger than a refrigerator but could generate a pulse that would pass through three miles of solid rock. This ensured that not even the deepest known caves on the planet could hide rogue nanobot swarms should the unthinkable happen.
“It’s not all doom and gloom, though.” David’s voice came through the radio again, offering a glimmer of hope to their situation.
Leonard McComb | Rachel Walsh | Marcus Warden | Nancy Sims
3:19 PM, April 5, 2038
The winds had shifted once again in the city, blowing smoke and ash to the west. Each of the APCs had two front seats, a thick partition, and then a set of uncomfortable metal benches in the back for troops to sit on while they were being transported into battle. With Marcus and Rachel in the first APC, Nancy and Leonard hopped into the second one parked just a few feet away. The thick side windows in the front of the vehicles had small portholes which could be opened, allowing the two groups to hear each other and communicate. After a few moments of fiddling, Leonard finally figured out how to operate the radio and switched it on, making it easier to listen in on the conversation between Rachel and David.
“Since I’m trapped in the lab, I haven’t been able to check on the physical status of Bertha, to see if the system is still functional or not. It could be that the swarms merely disabled the network feeds and that the device itself is fully operational. If it’s not, then I may have found a second option. You’re not going to like it, though, I promise you that.”
Rachel looked over through the window at Leonard and Nancy, who seemed as concerned as she did. “Well?” Rachel pressed David to continue, though he hesitated to speak.
“Look, I have no way of confirming this. We’ve lost communication with most of our satellites, all ground-based sensors are offline and it’s a miracle I’ve still got any emergency power here.” David’s voice was strained as he defended himself. “I’ve been spending nearly every waking moment keeping these last two birds in the sky and transmitting.”
“David, it’s okay. We understand. Just tell us what the second option is, please.”
David sighed and the group could hear keys being rapidly tapped in the background as he spoke. “A few days ago I got a link reestablished with two satellites in orbit that hadn’t been disabled or fallen out of sync during that time. One of them is a pretty powerful imaging satellite that one of the agencies uses for detecting nuclear material – among other things. Obviously it’s picked up a lot of hits in the upper atmosphere, but last night I found something new.
“Off the coast of Alaska, in the Bering Strait, there was a particularly high reading of nuclear materials just two miles from the city of Wales. Now, at first I thought it was just an extra thick cloud of contamination caught in the waters or the atmosphere there, but after a few passes by the satellite, I confirmed that it was too centralized to be anything but a contained signature.”
“Contained in what?” Leonard broke through on the radio now, no longer content to simply sit and listen.
“Who is this?”
“This is Leonard McComb, with Rachel and the others. Sorry for interrupting.”
“No, no it’s no problem. It’s nice to hear more voices out there.” David paused for a moment and then continued. “Understand that I’m still unable to confirm this, but I think there’s a chance that the nuclear signature is from a group of nuclear missiles inside a submarine parked in the strait.”
No one responded to David’s revelation, so he continued. “I take it by your silence that you’re as surprised at this as I am.”
“David, it’s Rachel again. How could there be any nukes left? I would have thought the swarms would have found a way to activate them all at once.”
“Ahh, I have a theory on that. Most of the nuclear weapons in the world were detonated, and there’s a good reason for that: they were all networked together in their respective countries. What I’ve been able to tell from these damned limited resources is that the artificial intelligence wasn’t just contained to the swarms, but that it actually moved into other computing resources as well. Any type of nuclear device that was mentioned or connected in an electronic fashion was fair game. The AI either broke in and took control of the missiles through network access or used the swarms to access the missiles that had no hardline connections with the outside world.
“Only weapons that weren’t mentioned or connected in electronic records would have been spared. If this is an older submarine that was on a training mission or something, its nuclear capabilities might never have been part of an electronic record. This is why I think Bertha might not be completely offline. Bertha’s true purpose was never a part of our records, so if the AI didn’t consider it to be a threat, then it might have treated it as just another piece of machinery, shutting off its power supply without causing damage to the unit itself.
If these really are nuclear missiles in the Bering Strait aboard a nuclear submarine, then there’s only one country I know of that would still carry nukes aboard a boat ancient enough to keep it safe from the AI.”
Rachel mouthed the word at the same time as David said it.
“Russia.”
Bering Strait
March 26, 2038
The gateway between the Arctic and Pacific oceans is not an easy place to travel. Thick ice floes cover the area nearly year-round and winter storms are brutal. In the narrow strait between the United States of America and the Russian Federation, only fifty-three miles separate the two nations from each another. On the American side sits the forty-ninth state, Alaska, while the Russian side merely contains a well-patrolled military zone, designed to keep out tourists.
Surface passage through the strait is made difficult by the thickness of the ice, though this is of little concern to those who pass under the water. Below the surface, the water is calm, with the brisk ocean currents no match for a vessel of sufficient magnitude. The serenity of this underwater retreat masks the power of the foreign object that now glides noiselessly along, invading the peaceful sanctity of the strait.
Commander Artem Alexeyev stalks through the hallways of the Arkhangelsk, muttering under his breath. The air here is stale and thick, with the smell of his crew hanging heavy in the passages. He stumbles as he
passes through a doorway, spilling a quarter of his coffee onto his shoes and pants.
“Chto za huy! Damned command, giving us this piece of shit boat.”
Alexeyev continues to curse to himself as he walks into the control room of the Typhoon-class submarine. Measuring nearly six hundred feet long and seventy-five feet wide, it is the largest submarine ever manufactured, along with its five sisters. The open space of the submarine does not sit well with Alexeyev, who prefers the warmth and comfort of his desk in Moscow.
“Sir!” The officer on deck salutes smartly to the commander, who nods and dismisses the gesture with a wave of his hand. After spending so many years on land, Alexeyev has tired of life at sea, and wants their mission to be over as quickly as possible.
“Any news from command?”
“No sir. We’re still following radio silence, as per your instructions.”
“Good, good. What’s our location, please?”