Earthfall

by Knight, Stephen

  “Just do whatever you can do,” Andrews said. “Including getting out and pushing. Choi, give me the numbers?”

  “Electromag interferometer’s pegged at two thousand volts. Distance from leading edge is one thousand meters, rate of closure one hundred thirty-four klicks per hour. It’ll take us down in less than three minutes.”

  “All right, you guys, hang on back there. It’s not going to get any smoother.” Andrews patted the SCEV’s instrument panel once again. “Come on, baby, come on …”

  “Four, this is Harmony. Lift is up and illuminated. Over.”

  “Much obliged, Harmony. We’ll be coming in hot. Over.”

  “Roger that, Four.”

  Daylight ebbed outside the viewports. Swirling dust blew across the thick glass, and Andrews glanced down at the infrared picture in the upper left corner of the functional display. The dust was thick enough to mute infrared images, which meant they would soon be blind.

  So I guess this means all we’ll have left is a compass.

  An alarm chirped, and engine one suddenly came to life, its growling whine slowly building to a crescendo. As soon as it began delivering power to the rig’s transmissions, the SCEV suddenly felt more nimble—or as nimble as a forty-ton vehicle could.

  “Spencer, you’re the man!” Andrews said. “How’d you manage to get it started?”

  “Busted into the engine’s integrated computer and shut down the thermal module,” Spencer said. “I did that because I’m brilliant and all, in case anyone was wondering.”

  From the back came a chorus of jeers. Andrews toned them out as he raised his voice.

  “Listen, folks, sorry, but I’m segmenting the vehicle,” he said. “Embrace the suck.” As he spoke, the two pressure doors that separated the rig’s three compartments slid closed. Andrews and Choi were sealed off in the cockpit.

  “So how’re we doing this?” Choi asked as the big SCEV swayed from side to side. The leading edge of the storm had caught up to it, and the winds were battering the slab-sided vehicle.

  “We run like hell and hope we can make it to the lift before the storm shuts us out,” Andrews said. “But if we screw it up and drive right into the side of the lift, then at least we won’t be around to listen to Walleyes.”

  “If ‘we’ screw it up? Who is this ‘we’ you’re talking about, white man?”

  “Attaboy, Choi, back me up all the way.”

  The SCEV had lost too much ground to the storm.

  Even as it accelerated forward, bumping and crashing over the dry landscape, the storm’s leading edge enveloped the vehicle, shrouding it beneath a shifting, inky darkness that made Andrews think the rig had just been swallowed whole by some sort of land-borne leviathan. Choi activated the rig’s infrared systems, but it was of little help; the swirling dust reduced the amount of heat that could be read by the high-tech device’s super-chilled planar array, rendering it as effective as Andrews’s eyeballs.

  “The suck has arrived,” Choi said.

  “We’re still on course, and the GPS says we should be at the lift in a minute or so,” Andrews told him. “Keep your eyes open.”

  As he drove, Andrews flipped on the SCEV’s array of high-intensity floodlights. They gave him an additional twenty or thirty feet visibility now that the sunlight was being pared down by the storm, but he still couldn’t see comfortably. All he had to go by were the instruments, and even the military-grade GPS satellites that had been launched prior to the war were accurate only to within ten feet. If visibility was reduced much more, they could drive right past the lift without anyone noticing it.

  “There!” Choi said a moment later, pointing out the diamond-matrix viewport. “Right there, I see the strobe! You got it?”

  Andrews leaned forward. The straps of his four-point harness dug into his shoulders as he looked at the heads-up display. Sure enough, there was a very faint winking in the darkness ahead. Bands of dust would obscure it entirely, then lessen for just an instant to allow him to perceive more light. He compared the flashing with the GPS location on the multifunction display. If it was right, then he was nearly on top of the box-shaped lift.

  He yanked back on the sidearm controller and stomped on the brakes. The SCEV slewed crazily as its wheels locked up, sending it skidding across the dry, sandy ground.

  It came to a rest only feet away from the lift’s open entrance. The lights inside the large cubicle gleamed dully, their tepid illumination no challenge to the storm’s all-encompassing darkness.

  “Yeah, I got it,” Andrews said.

  “Could you have stopped a little more, you know, artfully?” Choi asked.

  Andrews released a long sigh. “Probably, but why make it easy?”

  He coaxed the SCEV into the waiting lift. The vehicle bumped slightly as it crossed the threshold, its array of high-intensity fog lights illuminating the big cubicle’s interior. A layer of dust already coated the floor, masking the yellow positioning circle painted on the elevator’s flat floor. Andrews pulled the SCEV into position by memory and triple-clicked the TRANSMIT button on the sidearm controller. The pulses from the rig’s radio were read by the receiver inside the lift, and the elevator’s thick, double-pocket pressure doors slid closed, shutting out the dark, seething fury of the storm as it reached full force. Yellow strobes flashed outside the rig’s viewports as the atmospheric scrubbers came on, venting radioactive dust and other airborne particulates from the air inside the elevator. After a few moments, an alarm sounded over the radio, three strident tones. At the same time, the strobes outside turned from yellow to red. The SCEV bounced on its stiff suspension for a moment as the elevator commenced its descent.

  “Bay Control, this is SCEV Four. We’re secure and on our way down for an in-and-out. Over,” Andrews said over the radio.

  “Roger that, SCEV Four. Welcome back to Harmony Base. Over.”

  “Roger that, Harmony,” Andrew replied. “It’s good to be back.” With that, he and Choi finally relaxed, sinking back into the padding of their seats. Through the pressure door behind them, they could hear the rest of the crew applauding. It was good to be home—even if home was a windowless, subterranean fortress buried over a hundred feet below the Earth’s surface.

  ***

  The SCEV Decontamination Center was their first stop after the elevator doors opened. The chamber was large and well-lit, the floor comprised of thick grating that creaked slightly beneath the vehicle’s weight as it trundled out of the lift. Andrews brought the rig to a halt inside a painted circle in the middle of the room and, once again, yellow strobes flashed. On the way down, Choi had opened the shield doors that separated them from the rest of the crew, and Spencer entered the tight cockpit and crouched between the seats. He examined the instrument panel critically, even though the displays were shown on his own station directly aft of the cockpit.

  “Is there a problem?” Andrews asked the engineer as he looked out the side viewport and verified the rig was dead center in the circle. “Left side, check.”

  “Right side, check,” Choi responded, verifying the SCEV’s position from the right side.

  “Had a few tweaks on one of the differentials,” Spencer said, paging through the system situation display in the center of the console. “I just want to verify it from up here. You mind?”

  “So long as you don’t fart,” Choi said.

  “No sweat, I’m saving it for later.” Spencer paged through the display menus. “Yeah, it registered on this station, too. Looks like I’m going to be tearing this baby apart for the next couple of weeks.”

  “Knock yourself out, little brother,” Andrews said. “We’re not going anywhere soon.”

  “SCEV Four, Bay Control,” a voice said over the radio. “Stand by for external decon. Over.”

  “Light us up, Bay Control. Over. Spencer, any reason we can’t start the recovery checklist, or is there something else you need to do?”

  “Negative, I’m good. Let’s get on the checklis
ts.” Spencer retreated to his station as the strobe lights outside turned from yellow to red. Several robotic arms descended from the decon center’s ceiling, each equipped with a large nozzle. The SCEV crew began their arrival checklists, and the arms sprayed the vehicle with thick streams of detergent-laden water. They weaved about the rig in a complex pattern, hitting it from every angle and blasting away the hazardous dirt and grime the vehicle had accumulated during its run. As Choi read off the checklist items and Spencer verified settings and switch positions, Andrews looked out the viewports, watching as filthy water cascaded down the rig’s sloped nose. SCEV Four was being sprayed with more water than it had encountered in over a month of field time. The thought depressed him. In fact, the entire act of returning to Harmony empty-handed left him feeling hollow. Everyone in the base had been counting on them to return with some good news, with reports that, over a decade after the Sixty Minute War, humanity was flourishing somewhere in what had once been the United States of America. Failing that, people wanted some evidence that Harmony Base wasn’t humanity’s last outpost.

  Andrews hated to be the one to disappoint them.

  “Yo, Captain, you with me?” Choi asked.

  Andrews looked up, surprised to discover he’d zoned out during the checklist procedure. “What?”

  “I said, ‘secondary generator switch to standby position.’ I can see it is, but you know, you have to respond.”

  Andrews sighed and checked the switch both visually and by touch. “In standby.” His voice sounded tired even to his own ears.

  2

  Major General Martin Benchley sat behind his desk and paged through the series of consumption reports on his tablet, reading them without even really seeing them. After years of doing so, he knew what the base’s usual rhythms were, what readings were wrong, and what consumables were being wasted. It was not unusual for him to operate on autopilot. But when he realized he’d scrolled through to the end of the document without retaining anything, he knew he would be revisiting the data once again. Benchley sighed and rubbed his eyes. Other senior officers might have been content to review the executive summary and sign off but, as the commanding general of Harmony Base, he didn’t have that luxury. If something went wrong or if some vital resource was being squandered, he was the last line of defense. His position mandated that he always remain vigilant—no matter what.

  He regarded the array of flat-screen displays that adorned the wall opposite his desk. He could view any common area inside the base from his office, everything from the engineering spaces to the dining facilities to the corridor outside. He had watched the arrival of SCEV Four on one of those very monitors. The dusty rig had made a gutsy run for the elevator despite a last-second mechanical glitch, even though procedure mandated they shut down and wait out the deadly tempest before trying to gain entry to the base. He’d already heard from Colonel Walters, the eternally dissatisfied head of the vehicle maintenance area, who’d ranted for some time about the fact that Andrews was obviously disregarding procedure and putting his crew and their precious, thirty-seven-million-dollar Self-Contained Exploration Vehicle at extreme risk. Benchley shut Walters down as gently as he could. While he was essentially correct—Benchley himself had mandated that procedures be followed to the letter, as they might be the only thing standing between life and certain death—the fact of the matter was, the general was eager to get his hands on the SCEV team’s report. They had concluded the first long-range reconnaissance survey of the central United States since the Sixty Minute War, and Benchley was not alone in wanting to discover what they had learned.

  The base was the last remaining holdover from the old Cold War. Originally initiated during the Reagan Administration, Harmony had been designed to restore the United States after a possible thermonuclear conflict with the Soviet Union. Full of seed stocks, cryogenically suspended animal embryos, staffed with brilliant scientists, engineers, and competent military tradesmen, tacticians, and troops, the subterranean outpost had been designed to be self-sufficient for fifty years. The place was one of the very largest hardened sites ever created. There was enough room for almost a thousand people. Its warehouses were stuffed full of everything that might be needed: freeze-dried and vacuum-sealed foods, petroleum products that had been treated with long-term stabilizers to ensure their combustibility, thousands of books in both paper and electronic formats, tools, building materials, even precious stones and gold, should those become necessary to whatever post-apocalypse society might spread after the bombs dropped. No stone had been left unturned.

  Harmony had fared well, even during the tightest budget periods, when political administrations had been tempted to suspend money for the long-running budget. The base had always had a surfeit of hardcore proponents—in the halls of Congress, the military, and the private sector—to ensure its survival. But the base’s most surprising benefactors turned out to be the terrorists behind September 11, 2001. They had helped renew interest in the multi-billion-dollar installation during a time when America was more interested in the peace dividend caused by the dissolution of the old Soviet Union. The attacks on American soil had galvanized those holding the black project’s purse strings into action, and the money had started to flow once again. Harmony was retrofitted and restocked with the latest technologies, a trend that continued and even accelerated once the diseased Russian Federation finally died, and the progeny of the old authoritarian Communists rose again. The cycle began anew, the United States of America once again faced a monolithic threat.

  When the war finally came, it punished not just America, but the entire globe. The event began without warning, as far as Benchley could tell. One moment, he was contemplating his upcoming retirement, the next, he was ordered to seal the base as the missiles tracked across the sky. As mushroom clouds bloomed across the planet, Harmony was finally good to go on its mission.

  For the past six months, the SCEVs had been setting off into the field, conducting their surveys. After a decade of isolation, it was time for Harmony Base to enact the second part of its charter: Quando mundum finit opus nos incipiet.

  When the world ends, our mission begins.

  What Benchley and everyone in Harmony Base wanted to know: Are we alone? Are we all that’s left? That was all they cared about now, after almost a decade of isolation, biding their time beneath the Earth’s surface and—

  A chime sounded, and Benchley looked up at the bank of monitors again. Four hours after SCEV Four’s arrival, Captain Mike Andrews stood in the corridor outside, flanked by two enlisted MPs. As he watched, a crowd of passersby tried to extend their congratulations to Andrews, so many that the big MPs stood no chance of holding them back. Andrews appeared to accept the attention as stoically as he could. Benchley noted the slump to the younger man’s shoulders and the drawn, almost pained expression on his face when he acknowledged the presumably good tidings extended by the others. Benchley wondered if Andrews’s expression held all the answers he would ever need.

  He feared exactly that.

  Benchley rose and walked to the office door, his powerful stride belying his sixty-six years. He had been ready for retirement before the Sixty Minute War, with only two weeks left on post before rotating out and ending his service with the United States Army. Of course, the launch of several nuclear weapons against the US had put his retirement plans on hold—forever. He opened the metal door and it slid inward on well-oiled hinges. Benchley had no secretary. She’d been on leave before the war struck, and he hadn’t seen any reason to replace her. He crossed the small outer office, opened the door to the corridor, and waved inside the three men waiting in the hall.

  “Come in, Andrews. You men mind waiting in the outer office while I debrief the captain?” The two MPs shook their heads in unison.

  “No, sir,” the senior man said.

  “Thank you. Go ahead and make yourselves comfortable.” Benchley ran a hand over his close-cropped silver hair and motioned to his office. “In ther
e if you will, Captain.”

  “Yes, sir,” Andrews said. He carried a small nylon bag with him as he stepped into the office. Benchley followed him in and shut the door.

  “Have a seat, son. Good to see you home safe and sound. Looks like Mother Nature threw you a last-minute monkey wrench, eh?”

  “Yes, sir.” Andrews settled into one of the visitor’s chairs facing Benchley’s desk only after the general had set himself. “But that’s what happens when you try to keep a schedule.”

  “Indeed. All right, we’ll keep this short. I know you’ve been away for quite some time, and you’re probably eager to get back to life.”

  Andrews opened the nylon bag and pulled out a binder and two thumb drives. He handed the items over to Benchley, who placed the electronic devices on his desk. He opened the binder, which was Andrews’s written log of SCEV Four’s sojourn through the wasteland. The logs kept by every SCEV commander constituted the sole remaining paper in Harmony Base. Benchley flipped through it quickly, scanning the neat print.

  “It’s all collated, sir. Lieutenant Eklund’s analyses are complete, and Engineer Spencer will have the—”

  “Let’s cut to the chase, Andrews. What did you find?”

  Andrews hesitated for a long moment, then released a heavy sigh. “I’m sorry, sir. The mission was a wash.”

  Even though he had been ready to hear it—or thought he had—the news hit Benchley like a physical blow. He sagged back into his chair and looked across the desk at Andrews. For his part, the young captain returned his gaze with forlorn eyes.

  “That’s … damned disappointing, Andrews. I’d hoped a long-range recon would turn something up. We can’t be the only survivors of the war …”

  “And we probably aren’t, sir. We’ve just been looking in the wrong places.” Andrews appeared more animated now, shrugging off the depressing reality of his report in a way that only the young could. “The Pacific Northwest is our best bet. Everywhere from Los Angeles to New York was hit with at least one nuclear device during the war, and anything that wasn’t was covered by the fallout. The winds are still hot outside, even ten years later—the only place anyone could possibly survive outside of hardened bunkers would be in the Northwest. You give the word, sir, and I’ll have my rig ready to roll in three days.”