“Would everyone please exit the shuttle so I can perform a test?” he requested. The medical staff stepped out of the shuttle but left the hatch open to watch. Seeing that the boy was no longer agitated, the surgeon rubbed the hair on the boy’s head, which seemed to soothe the wobbler.
“Nurse, did you see what I did? I want you to come in by yourself and see if he allows you to do it.” The surgeon exited, and as the nurse entered the room, the boy became highly agitated again, trying to get out of his restraints.
“I have a feeling when you look at his blood under maximum magnification on your microscope, you’ll find he has nanites in his system,” the surgeon ventured. The nurse handed the syringe to a technician, who set up a sample of the blood and slid it into a device that projected it onto a huge monitor. The blood was indeed infected with nanites.
New Mississippi, planet Dixie
7 November 2128
Master Sergeant McGuire checked in on the trooper she’d injected with the nanites. He pleaded with her to be let up so he could take his morning piss and return to duty.
“Okay, honey. I guess you’re good to go. Want me to hold it for you?” McGuire laughed a hearty laugh, as did her troops, who all expected a comment like that from her. The young trooper looked shocked at the suggestion.
“Hurry on, boy. I have plans for you when you get back into uniform.” Five minutes later the trooper reported to McGuire and she did a simple ‘follow me’ with her finger. They walked up to a window and McGuire wrapped on it. The wobblers went to the window but only seemed curious.
“Okay, sweetie, send one of your friends over here.” As the other trooper approached, the wobblers started to become agitated. McGuire waved for him to follow her inside the school.
In the office, the young woman was talking to troopers through the glass. “When can I get out of here? Something smells bad in here,” she said, holding the front of her dress together as she talked. Whenever it slipped, both troopers pretended not to notice.
“You can come out now, honey,” McGuire answered, opening the door. As the young woman walked toward her, McGuire handed her a safety pin. Though initially confused by the gesture, the woman quickly understood as she felt her exposed nipple harden from the cool air in the hall. The troopers turned their gaze toward the ceiling and tried to look invisible as McGuire gave them both a dirty look.
GP forward command post, planet Dixie
7 November 2128
General Black was drinking his morning coffee. It was going to be a damn good day. One of his dearest old friends he had served with in the old army had contacted him with the cure to the pandemic. His old friend had been a master sergeant in the infantry. When she had been forced to retire, she went back to college and became a career nurse.
Black smiled as the GP chief surgeon and his equivalent, the US chief surgeon, entered the tent together. Both men smiled in satisfaction at their discovery during their long night’s work. He waved them to his table as he took one last sip of his coffee.
“Well, gentlemen, do you have a cure for our pandemic?”
The GP surgeon was the first to reply after being stunned by such a direct question this early on, when it was such a complicated problem. He decided to ignore the question and give the general the brief he had already planned.
“General, we have found what we believe the source of the pandemic is—”
“Doc, I asked if you had a cure yet. The correct response is either yes or no. Now just give me that answer before your horse and pony show!” Black didn’t try to hide his annoyance. The day before he had joined the Gray Panthers, the doctors were going to operate on his cancer, knowing it would most likely kill him.
“General, I don’t need to—”
Black interrupted the petulant officer. “Shut up and sit down. I’ll decide later whether to court martial you for failure to obey an order in a combat zone and disrespecting a superior,” Looking at the other officer, he continued.
“Do you have a cure yet, doc?” Black asked, his eyes drilling into the uncomfortable officer.
“No, sir, we do not have a cure,” the officer replied. He was sweating, even though the morning was cool.
“Well, gentlemen, I have the cure. A US trooper was infected yesterday and was immediately treated by one of my senior NCOs in the field. The same senior NCO then treated a contaminated civilian. The next morning, the civilian was cured. We also have an inoculation against the pandemic. The nanites we use to keep our troops healthy and young fights off the disease. Those who are sick do not even try to infect them. The same nanites cure those who are infected—”
“I’ll see that enlisted scum brought up on charges for practicing med—”
“Doc, that was the last damn straw. You will spend your days sitting on the edge of your bunk until I can convene your court martial. That enlisted scum spent over thirty years as a nurse, after a twenty-year career in the infantry. It was my favor to let her to go back to a line outfit instead of going into medicine with the GPs.” Black started to cool down from his anger as he continued.
“The senior ranking medical officer shall assume command of the medical detachment. They will contact you, doctor, with how we plan to get the cure out there. We will also need it for the Dixie fleet, so they can examine the enemy ships they captured and see if the ships are holding any civilian prisoners.”
GP forward command post, planet Dixie
7 November 2128
Scotty and the scouts found themselves on the sidelines, ignored. The Libra device Scotty had found and then dropped when they’d been attacked by wobblers kept popping up in his memory, frustrating him.
“Hey, Sam, can I borrow a vehicle? I want to go back and examine what I thought was a cattle prod. When the Red Coats rounded up all the wobblers that got out, they didn’t use force. They just guided them with ropes. So what the hell was that thing used for?”
“Sure. Let’s take the whole team. Everyone’s restless and pissed off about not getting to help retake the city. This’ll give ’em something to do, at least.” Sam was relieved to give her scouts something to do that didn’t smell of make work.
The scouts were on the road in ten minutes. They drove through the checkpoint at forty miles an hour and then opened up to sixty on the road. The blowing wind and the minor act of rebellion served as a tonic for their morale.
The field outside of the city with the flotsam of humanity took their spirits down a notch. The scouts got out of the vehicles, except for one crew that watched over the others with their heavy machine gun to provide cover if needed.
Scotty soon triumphantly held up the stick, and more were discovered. The scouts stood in a circle trying to figure out the purpose of the devices, which were all located near where the scouts assumed the wobblers had been loaded into enemy ships. But Scotty had seen the wobblers herded without the sticks, so they had to have another use.
“I got it!” one of the scouts hollered out, as if in place of shouting ‘eureka’! He jumped into one of the vehicles and drove toward a lone cow munching on grass. Jumping from the vehicle, he walked up to the innocent cow and used the device on its rump. The cow turned her head, looking at the scout with her big brown eyes, and let out a soft moo before slowly walking away.
Driving back to the others, the scout thought it all out. After rejoining the group he explained his idea.
“This is just a wild-ass guess on my part, but here goes. The Libra infected the city, I’m guessing through the water supply. Everyone turns into wobblers and the Red Coats come in and take over. When they take the wobblers to the shuttles, the sticks are used as some kind of a cure so that they don’t have to deal with wobblers fouling up the shuttles and their ship. This stick barely even annoyed old Bessie over there when I used it on her, so it must be a light charge. There’s only one way to be sure.” The scout stuck the end of the stick against his leg.
“Ow, ow, oww! That hurt! But it didn’t knock me on my a
ss or send a jolt through me.” The scout rubbed his leg as Sam got over her surprise.
“You damn fool. What if they use that to infect folks with wobblers disease?” Sam started to scold him further, but stopped.
“Dammit. I don’t want to write a letter saying I watched you kill yourself on a hunch. Let’s get a ride into the city and see if we can test your theory.”
Scotty used his wrist computer to test an idea. “Connect me with Lieutenant Peters.”
“Peters here,” the lieutenant answered, not seeing who was calling him on the device.
“Peters, this is Scholl from the academy. Remember? My flight beat your flight’s ass in the sim?”
“I remember you guys cheated. What can I do for you, Scholl?”
“I’m on the ground here but not part of the operation. I need a lift into the city to check out a theory on the wobblers,” Scotty asked straightforwardly.
“Sorry, man. Can’t help you out—”
“You get me in the city and be my driver for today, and I’ll try to get you out of being a bus driver and in with our fighters. We lost Miller and haven’t replaced him yet.” Scotty regretted the lie as soon as it left his lips.
“Where are you located? I’ll pick you up now. My shuttle was assigned to a US outfit that’s guarding wobblers in a school.” Peters’s heart raced at the prospect of flying fighters. After the heavy loss of shuttles during combat, it had been decided that shuttle pilots would only fly troops and avoid combat in space.
Twenty minutes later Scotty and Sam were in the back of Peters’s shuttle, along with five scouts. They were heading for the school that housed the wobblers.
“So, you can get me in to fly Darts then, huh?” Peters asked while landing in the school’s grassy area.
“Go ahead and send a request to Andrews, and I’ll recommend that he take you. You’ll love the Darts. Almost no computer. You really learn to fly those things. They’re already expecting heavy casualties, so it should be easy to get you in, especially with our new missions coming up.”
“Uh, no computer? Heavy casualties, you say?” Peters began to feel sick.
“Not a problem. If you get unlucky, you’ll never even know it. It’s over that fast if you get hit in a Dart.” Scotty tried not to laugh as he piled it on. “I have to go now. Thanks for the ride. Just send me a copy of your request and I’ll see that Andrews takes you in!” As he got off the shuttle, the scouts took up position around him.
“I don’t have time to play peekaboo! Who’s in charge here?” Scotty shouted in frustration.
“That would be me, sir. How can I help you?” Master Sergeant McGuire asked as she turned her suit off so she could be seen.
“I need to see a wobbler to try an experiment on.” Scotty said anxiously, He had no orders if he were challenged.
“What’s this experiment you have? These are still innocent civilians, under the stink and the wobble.”
“I think this stick is how the Red Coats cure the wobblers. They press it up against them and then put them in their shuttles after they’re cured. We tested it on a cow and a scout, and neither was hurt.”
“We have a cure already. We’re just waiting for it to be implemented. We’re using GP nanites to fight the Libra nanites the population’s infected with,” McGuire asserted.
“That explains why my theory works. Imagine if this device deactivates the nanites with a low electrical charge?” Scotty said excitedly.
“Okay, hon. You come with me and we’ll try it out.” McGuire opened the door to the school. Scotty and his group felt the urge to puke as the smell washed over them.
“That’s refreshing,” Scotty said with a sarcastic laugh, the taste of bile in his throat.
The classroom held twenty wobblers, most of them kids. Scotty opened the door hesitantly, since he was wearing no protection. The wobblers ignored him as he walked through the classroom pressing the stick into their sides.
Retreating from the classroom, Scotty watched through the door. Slowly, one by one, the wobblers either sat down or dropped to the floor. Some appeared awake, while others were obviously out.
Scotty beckoned to one of them to come to him, but she just stared at him, confused. As Scotty opened the door to check her condition, she looked around the room as if she were seeing it for the first time.
“Ma’am, are you okay?” Scotty asked softly.
“The aliens, they found a way in. Everyone was screaming and running around. Someone shoved me into this room. Later, the door opened and I was attacked. When I woke just now, you were the first person I’ve ever seen. I was born blind.” The young woman broke down and cried as several children around her awoke.
“Ewww. It stinks in here,” one of them said.
“Miss Abrams, why are you crying?” a little girl asked, and then she squealed, “You can see me!” She grabbed the woman around her waist and hugged her. Some of the other children joined them in a group hug.
Sam began to tear up. She looked over at McGuire and saw that she was softly crying in both relief and happiness. Clearing her throat, Sam had another task she knew she should do.
“Master Sergeant McGuire, the school is connected to a public shelter system. My troop had a child in this school and knows where the entrance is. We should check it out to see if anyone is down there and if they are infected.”
“Do you want backup, ma’am?” McGuire was returning to her old self, with just a short sniffle here and there.
“We should be able to handle it. Could you let your chain of command know about the sticks? It’d probably go faster through you than me.”
“Yes, ma’am, I’ll take care of that,” McGuire replied, thinking, You don’t know just how fast it’ll get to Black Jack!
New Mississippi, planet Dixie
8 November 2128
“Montgomery, you have the point.” Sam stood at the top of a wide concrete staircase that went steeply down into the dark. They’d borrowed a beamer to cut the lock that secured the huge metal double door.
“Yes, ma’am.” Montgomery bent over as she inched down the stairs. All she could see was what the light on her carbine exposed. Reaching the bottom of the stairs, she swung the beam from one end of the hall to the other. There was no light switch to be found.
The hall was ten feet wide, the ceiling ten feet high. The light from the carbine wasn’t bright enough to reach all the way to the end of the hall. Montgomery’s grip on the carbine grew moist as she began to perspire. She started to imagine monsters stalking her in the dark, as the very blackness seemed to touch her shoulders.
The soft sound of footsteps reached her as the rest of the team continued down the steps. More beams of light pierced the darkness as the other scouts formed behind her.
Scotty mentally berated himself. I should have requested to be attached to a shuttle unit, he thought as he nervously checked the power setting of the beamer. The optical sight on the beamer allowed him to see the entire hallway as if it were daytime.
The sharp clatter of a bouncing metal ball pierced the quiet. A couple of the scouts caught a glimpse of it, black against the white beam of their lights.
“Down!” was all Montgomery had time to yell. The scouts all hit the ground and the chemical grenade exploded in a brilliant flash as it melted Montgomery’s entire torso. The rest of the team was blind from the flash.
Scotty realized what he had to do. “Everyone flat, now!” he shouted from on his knees. Unable to see, he fumbled with the beamer, hoping that he was putting it on the second setting and changing the power to three. He aimed down the hallway and fired, first at what he estimated was waist-level, then chest-high. The beamer fired silently. From down the hall the sound of howls like an army of angry cats mixed with cries of pain and surprise. A haunting quiet ensued, and the smell of burnt hair and charred meat wafted through the dark. No one from the team moved. They could see only white from the explosion, their ears still ringing from the concussion as they st
rained to hear anything at all.
The Gray Panthers were first on the scene, and they were horrified at what they saw. Thirty or forty Red Coats were strewn about the deck, each one in no fewer than three pieces from Scotty’s beamer fire.
Scotty and the scouts were scattered on the ground a short distance from the huge pile of gore, blind and deaf and ready to open fire in defense. McGuire reached for the hand of the first scout she found and did her best to reassure him as she helped him safe and then sling his weapon. Another Gray Panther then walked him to the surface, and the procedure was repeated until the last of the team was safely out of the tunnel.
Scotty let himself be guided from the skirmish site. He was happy to be led away from the smell of the eviscerated bodies. His balance was off, and he tried desperately to hear or see anything other than the bells and bright white light. The breeze felt good as he was directed to sit in the soft grass, and the sun warmed his face.
Dixie ship Texas, Dixie space
9 November 2128
Captain Perkins was relieved as the reports came in from Dixie. The pandemic was curable. The Gray Panthers were sending four shuttles and forty Gray Panthers for him to reclaim the Atlanta. The addition of the Gray Panthers calmed his fear of the entire fleet becoming infected. Now they could take real action.
Master Sergeant Marty Epstein was eager to get on board the ship and get started. He’d managed to hide the fact that he was claustrophobic. His only desire was to get out of the shuttle.
“We have docked with the Atlanta. You may open the hatch.” The announcement had barely finished before Epstein rushed through the hatch. Their orders were to proceed to the bridge from the docking station and help every crewman they could.
The ship was lit only by emergency lighting, so the Gray Panthers donned their special optics to better see in the dark. The air had a thick, putrid quality, making it slightly uncomfortable to breathe.
Gray Panthers: Dixie Page 12