by D. A. Hill
“Love?” he asked incredulously.
“Yes Cyrus, love,” Manny answered. “Don’t you think the parents were as horrified by this as you? More. They had to pull the trigger. Yet they did. Why? Because they decided out of love for their children that they had to, that this was better than waiting for the coming apocalypse, better than a lingering death by starvation if they were lucky, and a much more horrible death and possibly worse if they were not. I would do the same thing for my daughter in their situation.”
Intellectually Cyrus knew Manny was right, but as devoted as he was to logic, reason was having difficulty overcoming his revulsion. The emotional centers of his mind wanted to find some reason to object. “But it’s such a horrible, barbaric way to do it.”
“It’s messy, but it would have been quick,” Manny answered. “I agree, cyanide capsules would have been better, if the government had continued distributing them. I’m glad we secured our supply when we did. What choice did they have once the President caved in to the public outrage over government sponsored suicide?”
“I couldn’t do it,” Cyrus moaned.
“You can and you will if it comes to that,” Regina Lopez said trying hard to hide any hint of sympathy in her voice; Cyrus needed to face the truth no matter how abhorrent. “When the time comes, you will have to if you care about the boy.” She paused and fixed him in her gaze. “We’ll both have to.” That was as close as she could afford to come to compassion for him, much as it hurt her to force him to confront it.
Cyrus looked at her disbelievingly. As he realized what she meant, his heart sank. He knew she was right.
—o—
James Newton stood in the interface room with a group of passengers, people they had selected for Newton’s Ark, people who did not know they were about to become EMs. He had insisted on keeping for himself the task of interacting with them—he was completely comfortable with the morality of deceiving them to save them, but he was not sure about the others. He would prefer they not have the opportunity to get cold feet.
There were seven passengers, three generations of the same family: grandparents, parents and three children. “Welcome everyone,” he said. “Let me explain the process before we start,” Newton said. “You’ve all completed your psychological screening with Major Lopez. The next step is to to run some scans on each of you, two at a time using these special chairs. These will determine whether you are physically suitable for the program or not—I must warn you now that many of you will fail. Should you pass, we will immediately transfer you for the trip to the space station. You will be sedated for the launch.”
“Why is that necessary?” the mother asked.
“Because we don’t have time to put you through astronaut training,” James Newton replied. “It is the best way to ensure the launch is as trouble free as possible.”
“Are you sure it’s safe?” she asked.
“Perfectly,” James replied. “Certainly much safer than having an untrained civilian bouncing around in the launch vehicle.” That seemed to satisfy her.
“What happens when we get there?” the father asked.
“You will be met by an advance member of the crew, Emmanuel Smith. He’ll help you get settled in, find your quarters, get oriented to the station. There’s nothing else for you to do until the rest of the crew and passengers arrive. There will be plenty of work to do once they get there, so I suggest you just relax and enjoy yourself until then. Think of it as a cruise without shore excursions.”
They all laughed nervously at Newton’s joke.
—o—
“What do you mean we all failed?” the grandfather asked Newton angrily. All seven passengers were assembled in the debriefing room.
“You didn’t all fail,” Newton answered. “Only some of you failed.”
“Tell us which ones failed,” he insisted. “You can still take the ones that passed.”
“We can’t do that. We can’t break up a family.” What was he going to tell them, that they had all passed and were already aboard the station, only as EMs on a virtual station? “I’m sorry, there’s nothing else we can do,” he added as he began directing them out of the facility, back to whatever remaining life their physical selves had left. His only regret was they would eventually die not knowing that their virtual selves still lived.
chapter 11
March 2046
President Harry Branston was angry beyond words—the woman responsible for the Asteroid Papers was the sister of one of Newton’s key people and the FBI had had been sitting on this information for three months! Apparently some agents from the Denver field office had been stupid enough to let that traitorous bitch Lopez scare them off, and then their supervisor had been incompetent enough to sit on the case.
The FBI said they had no reason to believe Newton was involved, but as far as Branston was concerned he must be guilty by association. He was harboring traitors. That made him a traitor. Simple. His policy on James Newton and Major Lopez had until now been one of benign neglect; as long as they stayed out of his way he had been willing to let Newton continue to pursue his ridiculous plan. But now? Now it was time to deal with Newton and Lopez once and for all, with the added bonus of dealing with that damned Asteroid Papers journalist at the same time. Traitors, that was what they were, all of them. There was only one way to deal with traitors. And he knew just where to find them. His instructions to the Colonel commanding Delta Force were clear; no survivors.
—o—
Tyra Martin and her team had taken a truck and trailer from the ranch—the Humvee was far too conspicuous—and loaded them with as much food as they could carry. She had thought about bringing the fifty-caliber gun—they had plenty of small arms but the fity-cal was pure intimidation and very effective against unarmored vehicles—but when it came down to a choice between the gun and more food, reason prevailed. They did not have enough fuel to get them all they way to Colorado, but they did have enough food to last at least a month, with some left over to trade for fuel and whatever else they needed.
They drove south, sticking to minor roads wherever possible, hoping to pick up information along the way on where they might find Newton’s Ark, or at least some proof that it existed. They stopped at every small town as they drove through Montana and Wyoming asking in gas stations and diners and stores, hoping that someone might know something about Newton’s Ark. A few people mentioned a tall dark-haired woman who had come looking for people willing to join a private ark. They had mostly assumed it was a scam and sent her on her way. None had any details of who she was or where she came from.
Finally, just outside Laramie they found what they hoped was a lead. A woman in a gas station told Tyra that her brother had been raving about some private ark and had disappeared for a few days. When he returned he refused to explain where he had been.
As they pulled up outside the address that had cost them two pounds of beef, Tyra Martin hoped that they had not been taken for suckers by the woman.
“AJ, stay with Angela,” she said as she climbed out of the truck. “Hawk, you’re with me.”
Tyra pounded on the door of the house where the woman had told them her brother lived.
“What is it?” the man asked as he opened the door a few inches.
“Carl Hansen?”
“Who’s asking?”
“Your sister said you might have some information that’s of interest to us.”
“I don’t know anything about anything,” he said as he began to close the door.
Tyra Martin put her shoulder against the door and pushed. Hard. Hard enough to knock him to the ground. She put her knee in his chest. Carl Hansen, five eight and one hundred fifty pounds of skin and bones was no match for Tyra Martin, six feet tall and one hundred eighty pounds of well fed muscle. “I ain’t got time to play games Carl,” she said. “Tell me what you know about Newton’s Ark.”
“OK, OK,” he said as she pulled him up off the floor by the front of his
shirt. “I know where it is.”
“How do I know your information is reliable?”
“I have the GPS co-ordinates,” he replied.
“They gave them to you, just like that?” she replied skeptically.
“No. They were going to a lot of trouble to hide the location—they blindfolded us and threw us in the back of an enclosed van. But I managed to hide a GPS unit in my clothing.”
“You’ve been there?” she asked incredulously. “So what the hell are you doing back here?”
“I failed the screening,” he replied. “Or so they said. I reckon that Newton guy just didn’t like me because I’m white. Probably prefers his own color. People like you.”
Tyra ignored the racism implicit in Hansen’s comment. Racists were so few and far between these days they deserved nothing more than pity. Something clicked in Tyra Martin’s mind. James Newton, wealthy African-American defense contractor. That must be where the name Newton’s Ark came from. If Hansen was making this up, he was doing a damn good job filling in all these details on the fly. Maybe he was for real. “Tell me,” she demanded.
“It will cost you,” he replied. He should have been afraid of this Amazon, even if she had not been with a guy who was even bigger, but clearly this information was worth a lot to her. He was not going to just give it away. “You got any food to spare?”
“A little,” she replied, not wanting to weaken her bargaining position by indicating just how much they had. “Some beef.”
“Fifty pounds,” he said.
Tyra Martin laughed derisively. “Five,” she replied. “Or I could just shoot you.”
“You’re not going to do that,” he replied. At least he hoped she was not. He was counting on her wanting the information more than she wanted to hurt him.
“Apart from the fact that I don’t have fifty pounds of beef, even if I did I wouldn’t give it to you. Five pounds is enough food for two weeks Carl. That’s my final offer.”
“Then you may as well shoot me,” he replied, calling her bluff. “Unless you want to sweeten the deal,” he added with a lecherous smile.
Tyra understood his meaning immediately. So did Hawk who moved towards him menacingly. “It’s OK Hawk,” she said placing her hand on his arm. “Watch the door.”
“Ty you don’t have to do this,” he replied protectively. She was like a sister to him. Actually she was more like a brother. A brother who just happened to be female.
These were desperate times and you had to use what you had. Who knows how long their food would need to last. “We can’t be giving all our food away Hawk,” she replied as she followed Carl Hansen to his bedroom.
“This information better be good,” she said pulling her bowie knife from its scabbard. “Because if it’s not, I swear I will come back here and make sure that this is the last time you will ever do this,” she added waving the knife menacingly at his groin. “And when I’m done with you I’ll go visit your sister.”
He ignored her threat, not because he thought she did not mean it, but because he knew his information was good. “I guarantee satisfaction,” he replied in anticipation.
“We’ll see about that,” Tyra Martin replied as she put her knife away and began to undress.
—o—
“Here goes nothin,” Tyra Martin said as she entered the numbers into the vehicle’s GPS. “One hundred seventy miles guys. Three or four hours,” she said trying to contain her excitement. She hoped they would not need to return and make good on her threat. They would know soon enough. “Let’s go.”
—o—
Regina Lopez sat with her back to the wall of the building as she adjusted her running shoes. She had come outside—topside they had taken to calling it, as if they were in a submarine—to get some exercise. She could not really afford to burn the extra calories, but she desperately needed a workout. She also needed to clear her head and a five mile run would be just perfect for that. She did not know how the argument with Cyrus Jones had started. All she knew was that he had an inexplicable ability to somehow get under her skin.
In the distance she noticed the telltale cloud of dust that indicated an approaching vehicle—probably her father and James Newton returning from Fort Morgan where they hoped to be able to collect their food rations. Regina prayed they had succeeded, but the government’s distribution of food was growing increasingly unreliable. She was finding herself thinking more and more about food as the cumulative effects of restricted rations kicked in. Manny had managed to shoot the occasional deer that wandered by, but as welcome as the meat was, all that was doing was keeping them alive. And they were cutting their own rations even further to ensure the children did not go hungry. Regina had experienced short rations when operating behind enemy lines, but that was only ever for a week or two at a time. This open-ended, slow and steady starvation was much worse.
Regina looked at her wrist-pad and checked the time as she stood to get a better view of the approaching vehicle. She could recognize the vehicle now; yes it was Newton and her father. They had made good time; she had not expected them back for at least another thirty minutes. While she had already tried to prepare herself for disappointment, her spirits still fell as she realized the early return almost surely meant they were coming back empty handed.
Regina watched the dust cloud grow closer before she spotted the vehicle turning off the main road. Only at that point did she realize there was something going on that was much worse than no food. The pickup flew along the gravel track, the tail end threatening to break loose at any minute, the vehicle becoming airborne on every hump in the road. Her father was an old fighter jock—put him in any type of machine or even on a bicycle and he just wanted to go fast—but Regina knew this was more than that. He was driving right on the edge, as if his life depended on it.
The pickup drew to a screeching halt twenty feet in front of her in a large cloud of dust and spraying gravel. “Quick, inside, lock the door,” her father yelled as he and James Newton sprang from the vehicle and started running.
Regina Lopez did not have to be told twice. If her father was this panicked there was a damned good reason. She followed them as they charged through the building and into the elevator. She could feel her heart pounding in her chest as it seemed to take an eternity to reach the bottom.
They quickly put their backs against the massive blast door and pushed as hard as they could to close it. Fortunately it was counter-weighted or they would not have moved it at all, but the inertia of its ten ton mass meant it was still hard work. Her father and James Newton slumped to the floor, catching their breath as she spun the wheel counter-clockwise four times, ignoring the sign saying very clearly CAUTION DO NOT SPIN WHEEL, and driving the locking pins into place. “What the hell was that about?” she asked when she was done.
“We were at the food distribution point and there was the normal grumbling, and then the soldiers came out and told the crowd to go home, that there was no food left,” Newton answered. “The crowd was about to disperse when some idiot started shouting about speculators hoarding food.”
Manny picked up the story. “We could see it was getting ugly—we were already starting to leave ourselves—when I heard someone say they’d seen a whole lot of activity out at one of the missile silos and that’s where the food must be.”
“People are crazed enough with hunger to believe anything,” Newton explained. “Before we knew it the crowd was turning into an angry mob, loading into pickup trucks and waving guns.”
Manny finished the story. “So we hit the afterburners and hightailed it out of there as quickly as we could. Nice driving even if I do say so myself!”
“Lets go,” Newton said leading them away from the blast doors and deeper into the bunker. “We need to make sure we’ve got this place locked down tight. Despite Manny’s nice driving I think we’re going to have company real soon.”
—o—
“The door isn’t going to hold indefinitely,” Manny
Smith said. He and his daughter Regina had just returned from inspecting the blast door that separated the underground facility from the world above, a door that a mob of desperate people were trying to break down in the mistaken belief that the bunker contained a huge stash of food. As Regina had already pointed out, the door like the rest of the facility was well suited to resisting the blast of a first strike nuclear attack. It had not been designed for an up close and personal assault like the one it was undergoing now. And there were other ways in if the mob looked hard enough.
“Then we have to launch immediately,” Newton said.
“We can’t,” Cyrus said desperately. “We haven’t finished modifying the launch control system. It still needs two people to turn the keys.” Nuclear missile launch facilities had always been designed that way so that a single rogue officer could not accidentally start World War Three. The plan was to rewire the system so that they could initiate the command from inside the computer once they were all loaded as EMs. With his focus on getting the virtual environment finished first, Cyrus and Graham Blake had not had time to build the necessary interface from the computer to the missile control systems. Leaving that until last was perfectly logical, but Cyrus could not help blaming himself for not having it done.
“Then we’ll have to do it the old-fashioned way,” James Newton replied. “Unfortunately I’m going to need a volunteer to turn the other key.”
“We have to get you down to the interface room and upload your EM first,” Manny said.
“We won’t have time to load everybody,” Newton replied.
“James you can’t,” Cyrus pleaded with the man whom he no longer thought of as his boss but more like his mentor and friend. “This is your program. It was your vision and foresight that made this possible.”
“Cyrus, this was never about saving my skin, it was always about the survival of humanity. I’m old. Quite a bit older than you probably think. My wife is gone, I never had any kids and my sister refuses to come. I’ve had my time. What more satisfying end to my life could I ask for than accomplishing the most important thing I ever set out to do? You, all of you, will be my legacy.”