Old Ironsides

by Dean Crawford

  ‘The Germans didn’t think about that when they started using mustard gas in the trenches during the First World War,’ Nathan pointed out.

  ‘Nor did the United States of America when it dropped a nuclear bomb on Japan,’ Havok replied, surprising Nathan with his grasp of human history. ‘If the stakes are high enough warring factions will go to extraordinary, perhaps even suicidal lengths to assure victory. We think that your people are about to be betrayed by one of your own. The question is, whom?’

  ‘Why not take this to the CSS?’ Nathan challenged, ‘if you’re so sure of yourselves?’

  ‘Because they would not take us seriously.’

  ‘Then why am I here?’

  ‘Because you’re a part of our plan, Ironside,’ Havok said. ‘You’re the only one who can stop the plague.’

  ‘And how the hell would I be able to do that?’

  Havok glanced across the bridge to one of the work stations, and there Nathan saw an Aleeyan warrior feeding the blood they had taken from him into a cylinder of some kind that was arrayed with flashing lights.

  ‘You’ll see,’ he said. ‘You’re our ticket out of another apocalypse, Nathan Ironside, and you don’t even know it. You’re not ID chipped, so you can move freely and cannot be tracked by your own people.’

  ‘That doesn’t give me a chance in hell of figuring out who might be behind all of this, if not you.’

  ‘Yes, it does,’ Havok assured him, ‘because you haven’t been told everything about your past.’

  ‘I know enough,’ Nathan replied. ‘I know what happened to my wife and daughter.’

  ‘Yes, I don’t doubt it, but what happened after that?’

  Nathan found himself momentarily stuck for words. ‘What does it matter? My family are long gone.’

  ‘Yes they are,’ Havok said, ‘but their legacy lives on. You know nothing of what happened in the wake of your death all those hundreds of years ago, do you?’

  ‘My family became philanthropists,’ Nathan shot back defensively, ‘they devoted their lives to saving others.’

  Havok gestured to the holographic image of Nathan’s father. ‘Your father, he made a promise to you on your deathbed didn’t he.’

  Nathan stared at Havok. ‘Yes.’

  He recalled his father’s final words to him, even as he was slipping away. I’ll do everything, son, everything I can to bring you back.

  ‘He wanted to find a cure,’ Nathan said. ‘He wanted to save my life.’

  Havok nodded.

  ‘Your father never gave up on that promise,’ he said. ‘Although your wife and daughter did indeed become philanthropists, they still stewarded your father’s company even after his death. They used the profits to continue the research he had begun, employing scientists to study the exotic life forms found in the atmosphere of Earth. Their hope was that just as in nature on the surface, where there is a killer there’s a cure, they thought that perhaps there would be an antidote to the illness that had killed you floating in the atmosphere as well.’

  Nathan raised an eyebrow. ‘Did they find anything?’

  ‘Not in their lifetimes,’ Havok replied. ‘Upon their passing your daughter’s son, your grandson, sold your father’s company in order to found a new one involving his own passion of sailing. The sale, however, included a stipend ensuring that a percentage of any profits be directed into further study of exotic interstellar lifeforms and viruses as and when they might be found.’

  Havok gestured to the holoscreen, and Nathan saw his father’s familiar company logo suddenly change.

  ‘Ironside Industries was rebranded as Chemitech, an advanced chemical research lab based in a remote laboratory in Colorado,’ Havok explained. ‘The research into advanced and exotic chemicals had become more profitable than the company’s original work, that started by your father, and so it began developing agents designed for use on the battlefield.’

  Nathan felt almost sick. ‘It became an arms manufacturer?’

  ‘Ironic,’ Havok growled. ‘Yes, Chemitech specialized in using exotic chemicals not to kill, which would have been against what was then known as the Geneva Convention, but to immobilize. The plan was to be able to halt an army’s progress without firing a single shot using airborne chemicals alongside other non-fatal weapons such as sonic rifles and cannons.’

  Nathan saw footage of chemicals being tested on apes and then humans, and advanced looking rifles that fired bursts of sound so intense they caused the targets to double over in pain or vomit copiously and collapse onto the ground.

  ‘So far, so abnormal,’ Nathan said.

  ‘Then, The Falling arrived,’ Havok said. ‘The collapse of civilization was the end of conflict in some ways, and the beginning in others. Major wars vanished to be replaced with feudal kingdoms and bands of thugs owning the streets of major cities. There was almost no natural immunity to The Falling – it was just a matter of who was struck when.’

  ‘So this company, Chemitech, they kept researching while the plague was in progress and eventually found the cure?’

  Havok sprawled in the captain’s chair of the ship as he replied.

  ‘Eventually,’ he said. ‘Chemitech formulated a vaccine for The Falling, but with the rest of the world in anarchy and sparsely populated it took time for the vaccine to find its way into the general population. Mostly, they started by immunizing people living closest to their laboratory in New York City.’

  Nathan thought of the New York City he remembered so well, and the clinical maze of steel and glass he had witnessed so soon after his reanimation.

  ‘So, again, why am I here?’

  ‘Because Chemitech did not immunize the population without a great deal of encouragement,’ Havok added. ‘It was only through public outcry that they eventually made the cure universally available around the globe, and only then at a price.’

  Nathan’s blood ran cold. ‘At a price?’

  Havok’s cruel eyes seemed to become somewhat vacant, as though he were recalling some scene of horror that Nathan knew he could not have witnessed himself.

  ‘Many who were infected with plague suffered terrible disfigurement before their immunization,’ he said. ‘Limbs were lost, faces warped until they were barely recognizable, eyes blinded, internal organs mutilated by the ravages of the disease.’

  Havok gestured again to the holoscreen and Nathan saw images of human suffering so appalling that he was forced to look away, the sight of children in such torment too much for his soul to bear.

  ‘But they were cured, right?’

  Havok slowly shook his head. ‘Those in control of the vaccine in New York decided who should live and who should die. It was decreed that anybody who had contracted The Falling and survived should not be able to breed, as the condition could be passed on to their children. There was a war, Ironside, between those who had evaded infection and those who had endured it. The sick, the weak, the disfigured and the desperate were cast aside and the healthy and the fit immunized in their place, to preserve the purity of the human race, to protect those who had already been protected.’

  Nathan heard the bitterness in Havok’s voice, the pain and the injustice.

  ‘That’s eugenics,’ he said finally. ‘Selective breeding and population control.’

  ‘That’s right,’ Havok said. ‘The few were favoured over the weak, and in desperation the weak rebelled. Wars were fought over access to the vaccine, Ironside. Thousands died, perhaps millions, despite so many having died before.’

  Havok stood and looked about them at the bridge of his warship. ‘Look around you, and you see the descendants of those poor souls who were cast aside by the founders of your great and glorious CSS. We are the Aleeyans, and our founder was a man left with one arm, one leg and a single eye before he was cured of The Falling using a sample of the vaccine stolen from a CSS laboratory during a raid in which some sixty freedom fighters died. He went on to distribute that vaccine to the millions of people who ha
d been denied it, and saved countless lives. It is his name that we chose to represent our species, and his kindness that allowed us to live at all, but they don’t teach that in the schools on New Washington or down on the surface. They tell only that we left the solar system and waged war on mankind.’

  Nathan began to realize that he might have uncovered the truth behind the spread of the new plague.

  ‘But space travel did not occur for a century after the end of the plague,’ he pointed out.

  ‘No,’ Havok agreed, ‘and for all that time our people lived in the wastelands between cities as mankind rebuilt society, or at least the part of it they wanted. After almost two centuries of abandonment we had grown in number. Millions of us lived in cities of our own, not as advanced as those in New York and London, but sufficient none the less that the CSS was forced to accept and recognize our presence. Then, we were made an offer that we could not refuse: a home of our own.’

  Nathan saw the holoscreen display the image of Aleeya, in orbit around its dwarf star.

  ‘By that time, many of our people had adopted black market bio-enhancement,’ Havok explained, ‘our fighters more durable and faster moving than those of the CSS. Their solution, which we accepted, was a new home among the stars. The Aleeyans were the first to colonize a planet outside of the Solar System.’

  Nathan looked at the image of what appeared to be a jungle-like world in close orbit around the fearsome star.

  ‘And you never looked back?’

  ‘None of us did,’ Havok assured him. ‘We were cast aside once again, abandoned to our own devices and what the humans of the time no doubt hoped would be our doom. We ourselves feared that mankind would return to destroy us, our fate lost to history far from home, so our ancestors took the colony ship and modified it for war. But the humans never returned and we built our own society on Aleeya.’

  ‘Until the wars,’ Nathan said.

  ‘Until mankind expanded far enough that we crossed paths once again,’ Havok confirmed. ‘War was the result, likely of unfounded fear on both sides, but by then we looked different enough that even I can understand why mankind would have feared an attack by our species.’

  ‘But what if everything you’re telling me is itself an untruth?’ Nathan challenged him. ‘What if your story is the one that is false?’

  Havok grinned. ‘That, my new friend, is why you’re here. You are a police officer, a detective, correct?’

  ‘I was,’ Nathan nodded.

  ‘Then if somebody on Earth is responsible for what has happened, for the return of the plague, then they would have made certain that two factors were in play before they could reasonably be expected to have unleashed that new plague upon humanity: one, that there was somebody else to blame for the conflict that would surely result, which would be us, the Aleeyans: and two, that they have a cure already in place.’

  Nathan rubbed his temples. ‘You think that somebody down there is repeating the eugenic experiment that the CSS performed on the ancestors of the Aleeyans?’

  Havok nodded.

  ‘They tried to wipe out all of humanity once before, and they’ll do it again,’ he said, ‘and I have proof that they already tried.’

  Nathan frowned, but at that moment Havok reached down into a steel box that Nathan had not noticed was tucked behind the captain’s seat. Havok pulled out a metallic device and tossed it to Nathan.

  Nathan yelped in shock but managed to catch the drone as it landed in his hands, metallic antennae and horrible black legs touching his skin, cold and hard. The hornet-like drone hung in his hands as he looked at Havok.

  ‘Look at the underside,’ Havok said.

  Nathan looked down and turned the drone over in his hand, and there he saw the same logo he had seen on the drones that had attacked him on Earth, but this time he could read the entire logo and not just C-I-C.

  ‘Chemitech?’ he asked Havok, who nodded.

  ‘It was they who launched swarms of those drones to finish our ancestors off where they hid in the wilderness,’ Havok said. ‘And it was Chemitech, the only major corporation to survive The Falling, that became the arms developer for the CSS. They built the warships, founded the Marines, constructed the fleet that will be here any moment to destroy us.’

  Nathan held the cold drone in his hand and felt dread creep up his spine.

  ‘They wanted me dead,’ he whispered. ‘Why?’

  ‘Because they’ve scoured history of the truth,’ Havok said, ‘and they don’t want anybody getting the word out. They fear that you’re the only link with the past, the only person who might be convinced by our story because you didn’t know about us, because you haven’t been twisted by prejudice, propaganda and lies. If you can be convinced, then their lies will be undone and the wars we have fought will be over.’

  ‘How can I be convinced?’ Nathan protested. ‘What could you possibly say that would change my mind about any of this? My partner is sick with the plague!’

  ‘Foxx,’ Havok said.

  ‘You know about her?’

  ‘We have eyes and ears among the humans, even in CSS,’ Havok said. ‘We know what happened, and that in itself is the proof.’

  ‘How?!’ Nathan asked in exasperation.

  ‘Foxx is already sick and yet she boarded the station only hours ago. The plague never worked that fast before.’

  ‘It could have evolved, over time,’ Nathan replied.

  ‘And your orbital cities, the plague is already spreading there too,’ Havok pointed out. ‘Which means that somebody must have already been spreading the disease.’

  Nathan’s mind began to slow down. ‘I’ve been there for a couple of days.’

  ‘Yes you have,’ Havok nodded slowly, ‘walking the streets, mingling with the masses.’

  ‘But I was cleared,’ Nathan protested again. ‘Doctor Schmidt said I wasn’t infected.’

  Havok leaned closer to him. ‘One does not have to be infected with a disease in order to carry and spread it.’

  The color drained from Nathan’s face and he felt his chest flutter as his heart seemed to miss a beat, skipping erratically. ‘A carrier?’

  ‘You’ve been used, Nathan,’ Havok said. ‘Your resurrection was no accident, but a well-timed event. You are immune to the plague, my friend, because you’re carrying it. All biological roads will lead back to you.’

  Nathan gasped in horror. ‘But why?!’

  ‘Because your body was used for centuries to formulate a cure that fully protected only Earth’s elite,’ Havok replied, his voice almost sombre. ‘The rest, the masses, were given a reversible vaccine, something to protect them that could be undone. The distribution of the drug Shiver was designed to weaken the population to a new plague, carried by you. Those who were creating the permanent cure needed a test subject, and that man was you, Nathan. You’re permanently immune to the plague, thus you alone can carry it without infection. Now, the people behind this want you dead to remove any trace of what they’ve done.’

  Nathan sat in silence and fought a growing nausea in his guts as Havok went on.

  ‘I suspect that there will be a stockpile of the permanent cure, somewhere on Earth, ready for the saviours of mankind to distribute once the majority of the lesser population have expired. Find that, Nathan, and you’ll prove both your own innocence of this crime and ours.’

  Nathan dropped the metallic drone onto the deck. He felt as though he were made of stone, his limbs numb and his heart forcing cold blood through his veins with each soulless beat.

  One of the Ayleeans, the one handling his blood, looked up at Havok.

  ‘It’s him,’ he growled. ‘He’s carrying antibodies to the plague. I will need time to synthesise them, but I may be able to produce a cure for us also.’

  Havok looked at Nathan, the crocodilian grin still twisting his features. ‘Our species’ survival is assured, my friend. But yours…?’

  Nathan clenched his fists as he thought of Foxx, Vasquez an
d Allen. ‘I don’t believe it. They wouldn’t do this, nobody would.’

  Havok stood from the captain’s seat. ‘Then your species will die, because we will not wait for the humans to come to our world and wage war on our people. We will not wait for their plague to decimate our populations again, for we already know how little your people will do for us if we become infected: we were left to die when we still lived on earth, so the hope of any help for us on Aleeya is futile.’

  Havok stood down from the captain’s seat and looked around him at his crew.

  ‘We will fight the human fleet here in battle, and we will advance to earth and annihilate every last breathing human being. We will stop this plague the Aleeyan way! We will decimate you as you once decimated us and we will not stop until the human race is nothing but smoldering ash across earth’s plains!’

  The Aleeyans on the bridge roared their approval as Havok gestured to two of them.

  ‘Take him away!’

  The two guards grabbed Nathan and hauled him away to the bridge exits.

  ***

  XXXVIII

  New Washington

  Vasquez dashed into the office and looked around for Allen, who was poring over a data display, the flickering screen illuminating his features in a ghoulish green glow.

  ‘How bad is it bro’?’

  Allen didn’t look up from the screen as he replied. ‘Bad as it gets,’ he said. ‘The governor’s personal transport just took off with his staff on board and they didn’t worry about letting the people see it. The docks just got overrun and we’ve got six men pinned down there by the crowds.’

  Vasquez looked around the office. Of the forty or so officers usually on duty at any one time, there were maybe fifteen still at their posts. Most wore furtive expressions, their gazes fixed upon the main data screen overlooking the office. Vasquez looked up and saw the display split into four, each showing a different sector of the district. All were filled with running people, crowds surging and protesting, people with holographic placards hovering above their heads calling for peace or war or justice or vengeance with equal passion.