The helicopters that followed to assist, if needed for an ocean rescue, landed on the carrier and began taking off the hundreds of evacuees, injured first. While big, the carrier couldn’t absorb that many additional souls.
Only 23 people were hurt in the landing, none seriously. The C-17 was in good shape, and currently tied down in the center of the flight deck. Andrew couldn’t bring himself to suggest they drive it over the side. The bird had saved too many lives. Logistics teams were considering their options.
A helo took the senior staff, along with Andrew and General Rose, to a conference aboard the USS Ronald Reagan, the only fully operational carrier that hadn’t undergone the Globemaster maneuver as the carrier crews were now calling it. Andrew sat behind General Rose at a big conference table, deep below decks of the Gipper. All the carrier commanders, the Carrier Strike Group commanders, and a few of the larger surface ship commanders were also present. The Commandant of the Marine Corps joined via a satellite link.
“I took the initiative, when command authority broke down in Washington, to evacuate all non-infected Marine personnel, and grab as much in the way of materials as possible,” the Commandant said. “I also got the Chief of Naval Operations to sortie all the assault ships except the Bataan, which was in dry dock at Norfolk. All said, about 90 percent of the Marine Corps combat teams are now on assault carriers or holding Pensacola as our last stateside base.”
“Is there any word from the civilian command authority?” General Rose asked, having been out of contact the longest.
“We got flash traffic from the Pentagon 27 hours ago,” a two-star admiral in charge of one of the strike groups said. “It was muddled, and we received no confirmation. All attempts to contact the secure bunkers have failed. All satellite traffic is coming back with a failed connection. We don’t know if this is at the node level, a satellite problem, or something else. My people are working on it.”
Andrew had already found out the entire U.S. military was communicating via the civilian Iridium satellite phone network. They’d been able to contact units here and there through simple telephone calls, though shockingly few.
The admiral continued, “We’re monitoring UHF and VHF civilian traffic and have found next to nothing. Worldwide shortwave isn’t much better. We’re getting some traffic out of South Africa and some out of Australia. That’s it.”
“So, we’re talking a global loss?” General Rose asked. All the brass in the room looked at each other, then down at the table. It was the most depressing scene Andrew remembered seeing in a group of high-ranking military leaders. “Now what the fuck do we do?”
“Take it all back,” the Marine Commandant said. Everyone stared. “Seriously, that’s our fucking job! We can’t let these zombie things win!”
A colonel entered and leaned down to whisper into General Rose’s ear. As the senior ranking military officer, he was in command. Though he couldn’t order the Navy or Marines around, they listened to him and respected his rank. Everyone looked at him, knowing he’d just gotten some news.
“The resident civilian expert on the plague is here,” he announced.
“Someone from the CDC made it?” an admiral asked.
“No,” Rose admitted, “but I think we should listen to her.” He held up a hand and gestured. A black woman wearing a lab coat entered. She was somewhat overweight, and she had her hair tied back in a conservative braid. The logo on her coat was a braided DNA double helix with the letters HAARP on it. “This is Dr. Lisha Breda, director of HAARP. Her facility is on that oil platform to the west.”
“HAARP,” the senior admiral said. “What is that?”
“It stands for the Human Advancement and Adaptive Research Project,” Lisha said. “We had initial contact with Strain Delta over a week ago, long before the WHO or CDC isolated it. And I’m the one who confirmed its extraterrestrial origin.”
The room buzzed with conversation and more than a few laughs. She stood, hands on hips, and waited calmly until Rose raised his hand, and the room settled. Then he spoke.
“I’m sorry Doctor, did you say ‘extraterrestrial?’”
She nodded.
“So, we’ve been invaded by zombies?”
“No, General, I’m saying the virus that causes people to turn into zombies is an alien one. As in, not of this world.” She produced a jump drive from her pocket. “Can you have someone display this, please?”
Rose nodded, and an A/V technician projected the presentation on all the flat panel screens around the room. She’d assembled the 20-minute presentation from all phases of her research, from the strange hybrid fox she’d seen to the infection of Grant Porter, her researcher. It showed her removing part of his brain, and his walking around afterward, seemingly unaffected. She talked about the second outbreak, and her realization that all the fish were infected.
The presentation then covered emails and conversations with Dr. Curry at the CDC. When his face appeared, and they saw his reaction to her information, the smiles went away, especially when the two scientists acknowledged it was in the air and all their bodies. You could have heard a pin drop.
The show concluded with electron microscope images of the virus in its three known versions, finishing with the strain the zombies carried. The final slide was a before-and-after PET scan of the human brain of an infected. Lisha appeared on the presentation. “As you can see, it fundamentally restructures the human brain. To what purpose, we don’t understand, though the result is a cannibalistic and highly violent animal, with none of its residual logic functions remaining.”
The lights came up, and the room sat in numb silence until Rose spoke. “So, how do we fight this?”
“We don’t,” Lisha said. “It’s already won.”
“We can’t clean it out of the food, or something?” another admiral asked.
“You can make fresh food safe, if you cook it hot enough and long enough,” she said. “But it’s hard and risky. One mistake, and the food is full of the lethal precursors to Strain Delta. Vegetable matter is trickier. We’re still trying to figure out how risky. For now, cook it the same.”
“So, what do we do?” General Rose asked.
“Hold what we’ve got,” she said with a shrug, “and find more scientists. And try to find a way to kill this thing. I don’t have enough people any more. Many of my best and brightest were infected or eaten. I need more people. Maybe, with enough people and time?” she shrugged. “For now, the only safe food is anything preserved more than 30 days ago and things that are cooked through at more than 300 degrees. You must treat water similarly, but my people have already come up with a boiler to do that. Your desalination plants should do the trick. We’ve designed simple enzyme tests we can give you to test your water. You should test it every six hours. Gentlemen, we’ve lost the war against this thing. Now we need to find a way to live with it.”
No one knew what else to say.
* * *
“Any luck with the phones?” Jeremiah asked over his intercom. The boat had pulled up anchor an hour ago and turned back toward San Diego. They’d been so busy, no one had realized there hadn’t been any contact with the shore. The launch had taken place more than 100 miles out to sea to avoid public scrutiny, so no communications were possible, even via satellite. Now that they were closer, they should have reacquired at least the satellite communications, but so far, they had nothing.
“No, sir,” his assistant said. “A couple of the crewmen caught a huge grouper. They want to have a fish fry.”
“Sure,” he said absently and waved a hand. Someone might as well have some fun. A little fresh fish sounded good. They’d been eating out of cans for a couple of days.
After they’d lost contact with the Azanti, everyone went into overdrive to try and reestablish communications. It was 12 hours before Jeremiah gave up and decided to allow his people to contact NASA for help. By then, either the satellite phones weren’t working, or NASA wasn’t answering. He didn’t lik
e either of those possibilities. When they lifted anchor, he went back to his office, had a drink, and examined his saved news feeds. What he saw left him stunned.
“Zombies?” he’d laughed. The world was going insane. Then he glanced at the dead uplinks and scratched the stubble on his chin. The remains of an alien ship sat in a research lab several decks below him, and he had a weird creature frozen in a Ziploc bag. “Zombies,” he repeated.
Two hours later, his intercom rang.
“Phones back?” he asked.
“Sir, this is the captain. We have a U.S. Coast Guard patrol plane circling us that is trying to hail us.”
“Oh shit,” he groaned, “I’ll be right up.”
On the bridge, he could see the twin-engine aircraft circling slowly, its white fuselage and red U.S. Coast Guard logo clearly visible. The radio was squawking.
“OOE Venture, this is the U.S. Coast Guard, please communicate immediately.” Jeremiah nodded, and the captain spoke.
“This is the captain of the Venture. What is the problem?”
“You are steaming toward San Diego. The city is not secure. I repeat, the city is not secure. Heave to and come about to one-niner-seven to rendezvous with The Flotilla.”
Jeremiah gave the captain a ‘what the fuck’ look and saw the older man return it.
“Coast Guard, what do you mean, not secure?”
“Venture, where have you been the last several days?”
“We were conducting an orbital launch,” the captain said. “We lost comms.”
“I see,” the man in the plane responded. “I don’t know how to tell you this, but the mainland is overrun by zombies.” The captain sputtered and laughed. Jeremiah took a step back and slumped into the pilot’s chair. “And whatever you do, do not under any circumstances eat fresh meat or food preserved less than 30 days ago. It will spread the infection. Repeat, it will spread the infection!”
At the back of the large open deck of the ship, there was the sound of music and laughter. Jeremiah turned and looked that way. “Fresh fish,” he said, just as someone screamed. He grabbed the microphone from his Captain.
“Coast Guard, I think we need help!”
* * *
Alison floated backward out of the panel, wiping conductive paste on her pants. She closed it back up. “Okay,” she said, “I think we’ve got it.” She grabbed one of the Capri-Sun enhanced water pouches and took a sip. At least, she hoped she had it. They’d taken off over two days ago, planning for a four-hour test flight. She was beginning to feel like Gilligan, minus the island and coconuts.
“Roger that,” Lloyd said as he brought the main flight controls back on line. “Wake up, Alex,” he said, nudging their senior pilot, who’d been floating in the middle of the cockpit. The older man woke up and spun, dislodging one of several feces-filled Ziplocs from the wall. Alison made a face and tried not to look as Alex taped it back in place. A four-hour test flight meant they hadn’t installed a toilet. Besides, when the drive was off, there was no gravity. NASA’s zero gravity toilet came in somewhere north of $100,000.
“Everyone strap in,” Alex said. After two days, they were all functioning pretty well in microgravity. It only took them a minute to maneuver into their seats and strap in. “Lloyd, what’s the reading on the fuel cells?”
“Twenty-six percent,” the man replied. “And CO2 is up another notch.”
Alex nodded. One way or another, they’d better figure it out soon, or they’d either freeze or die of CO2 poisoning. The jury was still out on which way death would claim them.
They’d estimated they were around 100 million miles from Earth by flipping the ship around and looking. Earth was about as big as it was in pictures taken from Mars. The question of whether they’d broken Einstein’s ironclad rule was moot. The alien space drive was much more than a miraculous anti-gravity pusher. Once far enough from a planet, it was a full-fledged faster-than-light, or FTL, star drive. Worse, it had a mind of its own.
They’d carefully pulled the power after almost five minutes of watching the stars streak by like those in an episode of Star Trek. Gene Roddenberry would have been proud he’d gotten the look right. The Azanti dropped back into normal space with no fanfare.
None of them knew how fast they’d been going, but after eventually finding and observing Earth for several hours, they concluded they had stopped, because if they were going just below the speed of light, they’d have seen the blue-green spot of light get smaller. So, the alien drive had taken them from faster than light speed to a relative stop in an instant. It boggled the mind and defied imagination.
They’d oriented the little hash marks etched into the window glass so they pointed directly at Earth, a distant bluish pinpoint of light, and turned the drive back on. The ship spun 180 degrees and shot away again, quickly blurring the stars to faster than light.
They realized the drive was pre-programmed to go somewhere else. For two days they’d tried, over and over, to vary power connections and frequencies to get a different result. Considering they were out of food, almost out of water, low on power, and the CO2 scrubbers were becoming saturated, this might be the last attempt. It was looking more and more like the test flight was beyond overly optimistic.
This time, Alison hit upon the idea of inverting the power inputs. Since the drive worked in that sort of manner, perhaps they could use it to override the auto-pilot.
“Everyone set?” Alex asked. He got a roger from the other two. “All right,” he said. He visually verified the ship was pointed at Earth, and hit the button. The drive came alive, and they “fell” into their seats with a whump. A few bags of waste dislodged with a plop; Alison hoped none of them had ruptured. The ship started to move toward Earth. Then there was the telltale streak of light from the stars, and they were going faster than light. And they were heading in the right direction! “I think we got it!”
They cheered and slapped high fives as the starlight streaked by. Then, after the initial jubilation died down, Alex jerked as he realized something he’d completely forgotten in all the desperate attempts to turn them around.
“Quick,” he said, “start a clock!” The others were surprised, but responded almost instantly. Lloyd snagged a small digital timer off its holder on the control console and thumbed it to life, before looking at Alex quizzically. “We’re shooting at Earth, going more than 186,000 miles per second!”
“Oh shit!” Allison gasped, and she looked out the window as if she expected to see her home planet race past them at any second. Alex knew that, at their current speed, something the size of a planet would go from almost-too-small-to-see to in-their-faces in seconds, perhaps too quickly for a human to react. He’d also kept a pretty careful log of their outbound flight, and knew they’d accumulated almost exactly four minutes, 52 seconds of FTL time outbound from Earth.
They watched him and the timer as the seconds added up, hoping Alex’s numbers were accurate so they didn’t plow into the planet of their birth like a nuclear missile. Lloyd had studied more than enough physics to know what their return would look like if that came to pass.
As the timer reached four minutes, Alex eased up on the power control, and the Azanti instantly dropped below light speed. He kept the drive partially powered to maintain gravity. For a moment, they stared at the darkness of space and felt fear grip them. There was no Earth in sight. If they’d missed it somehow and continued to fly four light minutes in random directions, they would never find their way home.
“There it is!” Lloyd called and pointed 20 degrees to their left, and 90 degrees up from their flight path. They saw the bright blue-green marble of Earth. Never had they seen anything more beautiful. “Looks like we’re inside the orbit of the Moon. Damned fine seat-of-the-pants navigating.” Alex nodded in thanks.
Now, he was able to coax a little more speed out of the drive and still keep them below the speed of light. “Kind of like driving a drag racer on a city street,” he joked. “You have to b
e real gentle on the throttle.”
“You do that,” Lloyd encouraged his fellow pilot. The Earth was becoming huge in the window. “I think we’re probably in radio relay range. How about some music?”
They’d all neglected to bring even the most basic entertainment, figuring it would be such a short flight. The thought of some music to welcome them back to Earth sounded great. Alison took control of the radio and began searching, her face beaming at the thought of being home and getting some food, a shower, and a toilet! Hoping this was their last FTL transit trip, she’d been holding it for a while.
After a few moments, her smile began to fade. Then it turned into a frown, and slowly, a look of horror.
“What?” Lloyd asked, seeing the expression on her face. “Did you miss your soaps?”
“No,” she said, the humor going over her head. “Listen.” She flipped a switch and removed the headset, and the cabin filled with the sound of a British radio announcer, in mid story.
“-to stay clear of all major centers of population. Royal Marines around Canterbury have reported that the evacuation center suffered a major outbreak. Lieutenant Myers, in temporary command of the 2nd Royal Fusiliers at Westminster, has reported that they have moved Her Majesty onto the carrier battle group Ark Royal as it has been determined that the mainland is all but lost. All civilians are advised to get to an evacuation center with all expediency…” she changed the channel. This voice was American.
“Philadelphia is holding, I repeat Philadelphia is holding. Everyone who has a gun and ammo needs to get themselves to the perimeter as soon as possible! We are fighting, we can win!”
“What the fuck?” Alex asked aloud.
“It’s like this on every channel I find,” Allison said, “and there aren’t many channels left.”
“Look,” Lloyd said and pointed out the cockpit window. “Dear sweet Jesus, help us.” Everyone looked. They’d continued to approach the Earth, and the terminator moved below them, the planet half in light, half in dark. The dark part was almost all of Europe. When they’d left, the view of Europe from space was an endless matrix of gossamer cities, linked by strings of lights. Hundreds of millions of humans pushed back the night with their electric lights. Now, the continent was a threadbare patchwork of functioning illumination.
Turning Point (Book 1): A Time To Die Page 45