London had erupted in a volcano of atomic fire. His flat had vanished, Agri-Inc.’s HQ probably lay flattened, or stood as a burned-out husk of its former self. Nothing that he knew remained. Paris and other cities he had visited likewise lay in ruins, probably still burning, adding smoke to the atmosphere. They had probably targeted Köln – which meant that pretty, compliant, grateful Gretchen had died. He hoped that she had enjoyed her few months at school. Ah, well.
All that remained to him sat in the shuttle. A single travel case, and Kiera. And maybe not even her. Pierre did like the girl, and might ask Sidney to make good on his offer. He recalled the good times they had had. He still wanted her – or someone to replace her. A replacement might not come so easily on a ship where he held no power.
The seeds would buy him something. He might have to take a place on New Brittain, become a member of the landed gentry. Some mail-order bride might welcome a change from the back-breaking toil of an undeveloped world.
“There it is,” Pierre’s voice broke through his reverie.
He opened his eyes to see the forbiddingly barren landscape of Spitzbergen. The shuttle began descending.
“You have all the authorizations?” Pierre asked.
“I have them.”
“They will have heard about war breaking out,” Pierre warned. “You had better have a story ready for them.”
A story. They might try to mob the shuttle, tearing him apart to gain a chance at safety.
“You said you’d have enough space to take everyone off.”
“We have three more shuttles on the way. They sent me the code word, and then went dark. I can contact them, but we’re keeping radio silence. We don’t want to attract any unwanted attention.”
“Unwanted attention?”
“Who knows, the USNA might have a carrier in the vicinity, or at least within range. Someone else might have the same idea that we do, and if they knew about us, they might advance their plans.”
Sidney swallowed. “But you have enough space – with the four shuttles?”
“We’ll have enough space – but only just.”
“Good enough. I can keep everyone calm. Just leave it to me.”
The shuttle lowered its landing gear, and Pierre brought them in gently. “They call me up, asking me who we are. I do not answer.”
“They’ll send down a vehicle.”
“Where are we?” Kiera asked.
“Spitzbergen. The Seed Vault.”
She stared at him. Then understanding came to her. “You’re selling the seeds to Pierre, to his Family. What do you get out of it?”
“We,” he said, emphasizing the word, “get safety. A ticket off the planet. We get sanctuary on one of the Family Ships. A new start on a different world – maybe New Brittain.”
“They’re not your seeds to sell,” she said.
“Whose else’s? Agri-Inc. is gone. The upper management knew something like this might happen. They thought they could ride it out in space, on Euro Alpha and Topside One. But Pierre tells me that those stations are gone. There is no one left. I’m probably the highest-ranking Agri-Inc. employee left. And,” he said in conclusion, “I have authorization to make withdrawals. I’m going to use that authorization.”
“Car coming,” Pierre warned.
“I’m on it. Open the shuttle door.”
* * *
Spitzbergen
Sunday 29 August
Sidney watched the car approach. He breathed a small sigh when he saw Winston climb out. That would ease things. Winston wouldn’t have forgotten him, would know that he possessed authorization.
“Mr Tremblay!” Winston rushed up and held out his hand. “It’s good to see you – well, to see anyone. No one warned us of your coming, and we’ve heard terrible things.”
Sidney shook his hand, then motioned to Pierre and Kiera who had debarked.
“Mr Winston, may I present our pilot, Pierre Fontaine, and my assistant, Ms Kiera West.”
Winston nodded at the two of them, but obviously considered them a distraction. “Pleased, pleased,” he said. Then he returned his attention to Sidney. “What can you tell us? Is it as bad as we’ve heard?”
“I don’t know what you’ve heard, Mr Winston, but it’s bad. World War III – maybe even System War I. Most of the major cities are gone.”
Winston closed his eyes. “We hoped. But when we could no longer contact anyone on the satellite link, and the radio brought in nothing, we feared.”
Pierre spoke. “The war has destroyed most of the satellites. Communications are going to be ... what is the English term? ... iffy.”
Winston looked at the shuttle. “Can you get us to the mainland?”
Sidney didn’t quite know how to proceed. Surprisingly, Kiera stepped into the gap.
“Mr Winston? I’m Kiera West. There’s been a nuclear war, sir. The mainland isn’t safe. In fact, I doubt you can find safety anywhere on Earth.”
He stared at her. “This is why we have the seed bank – in case of disaster. The Doomsday Vault. So, it has all come to pass, just as the builders feared.” He shook his head. “Does this mean we’re all going to die here?”
“No, Monsieur. Agri-Inc. prepared for this possibility,” Pierre said. “But can we go up to the vault? The wind blows cold off the water. I would like to go somewhere warm.”
“Of course, of course.” Winston led the way to his car. Once they set off, he continued. “What has Agri-Inc. prepared?”
Sidney almost laughed. Not a damn thing. They didn’t care about you. Instead he said, “We have more shuttles coming in. The vault is no longer safe. I have authorization to remove what we can, and take it to space for safe-keeping.”
Winston took his eyes off the road long enough to stare at him. “And us?”
“Agri-Inc. takes care of its own. We have room enough to take everyone here who wishes to come up to safety among the stars.”
“Thank God!”
The car pulled up to the stark entrance to the vault. Sidney walked by Winston’s side, with Pierre and Kiera coming up behind him. He appreciated how she had given the matter-of-fact synopsis, allowing him time to think up the words necessary to defuse the problem.
“Let us go up to the tower,” Pierre said from behind them. “I wish to talk to the operator up there. No use broadcasting that we are here, alive and with shuttles on the ground.”
Winston led them into the operations room where he, Sidney, explained again to those on shift just what had happened and what the way forward looked like.
“We can’t just keep on doing this one person at a time,” he told Winston as they walked out of the room. Pierre had said that he would stay there to wait for the other shuttles to land.
“Won’t need to do it but once more,” Winston told him. “Most everyone else is in the lounge, hoping satellite service gets restored so we can get information as to just what’s going on.”
They walked down the hallway of the living quarters – a place that he had not seen before. When they walked through the door to the lounge and the people there saw a new face, they almost mobbed him, asking questions too fast for him to answer.
A pounding on a table quieted everyone down. Sidney looked over and saw that Kiera had done the pounding with her shoe – doing a Khrushchev.
“Listen up,” she said into the sudden silence. “We’re in the middle of a nuclear war. There is no going home. Home for most of us probably doesn’t exist any more. We’re here as part of Agri-Inc. to get you to safety. We’re going to need your aid in this. We need to secure the seed.”
That got everyone’s attention. She had appealed to their reason for existence here: keep the seed secure. Kiera had said the exact right thing.
“Now, Mr Tremblay here has authorization to move the seed to the shuttles that will soon land. They will take the seed and its protectors – that’s you people – to safety.
“So, we’ll be asking you to get the seed to the surfa
ce and loaded in the shuttles. We’ll be asking you to pack a suitcase of the personal belongings that you absolutely need, and to load it in those same shuttles. You will then board the shuttles, and we’ll take you – and the seed – to safety.”
She shut up and sat down.
Sidney had not known that she had that in her. She had obviously overheard everything that he and Pierre had said. She had not been asleep, but simply withdrawn. The noise, the questions, one atop each other, had forced her to the breaking point.
Sidney stepped into the silence. “That’s essentially correct. This may take a few days. We’ll be safe until we can lift. Your safety trumps the seeds. If we feel we’re threatened by – whatever – we’ll lift early.”
“Where is this safety?” an older woman wanted to know.
“Space.”
CHAPTER 30
Spitzbergen
Monday 31 August
No word had come in to Spitzbergen from Earth transmitters since the loss of communications on August 29th.
“Winston, how are we doing?” Pierre asked.
“We’ve another forklift coming up from the vault. It takes time to load the trucks and get them down to the field, and we’re running on adrenaline.”
Pierre looked at his reader. They had one shuttle fully loaded, and the three others had partial loads. The scientists and archivists had done more than their share of manual labour. With the continued silence from above, any resistance to moving their treasure – and themselves – to space had vanished.
Sidney’s presence had proven invaluable. The residents looked to him as the Agri-Inc. representative, as the representative of all the TPCs. With nothing coming from the outside, his word became law.
But Pierre told none of them, Sidney and Kiera included, what he heard on his shuttle channels. Basically, no stations or ships had survived in Earth orbit. The Moon bases had succumbed to plague and chemicals, and the only spot of life left that he knew of was their new station, Haida Gwaii.
He also said nothing of the word he had received that fighting raged on that station between soldier-fanatics of the USNA and the Families, along with the allies that they had accrued.
“Hello, Kiera, how do you fare?” he asked as Kiera walked into the small hanger where they sorted seeds and supplies.
“I’m tired, Pierre, tired.”
“I know. But it will end soon.”
“Why are we splitting the packages up?”
“We send each variety of seed on as many different shuttles as we can. That way, if an accident happens to one, then we do not lose an entire species.”
He had not wanted to say that much, but his Family believed in letting its members know the truth. He considered Sidney and Kiera members of his Family. Sidney had bought their way in with the seed. Not that he felt the man, himself, a great addition to a proud family, but honour dictated that the Fontaines live up to their – to his – agreement with the crooked Agri-Inc. official.
“So,” Kiera said, “you think that not all four shuttles might make it to safety.”
Trust her to see through his optimistic face.
“They might not. The battle above has left much debris in orbit about our planet. We must hope for the best. It will take extra fuel but, to avoid the worst, we will take off over the pole.”
“Chances?”
“Unknown. Good I think, but I have nothing solid to base that on.”
“The people are getting antsy, Pierre. The sooner we leave, the better.”
He sighed. “I agree. But we must take all we can. You asked about chances. Very little chance remains that we shall find it possible to return for a second load.”
She winced at that, knowing what he meant. “Have you taken any radiation levels readings lately?”
He nodded. “Slightly up, but well within the so-called safe range. I do not think that we need worry about them.”
“How can we not? Everyone worries and, with things only going to get worse, the worry increases with each hour. We have to leave soon or you’ll find yourself with a mutiny on your hands.”
He shrugged. “We do what we can.”
The other crews helped immeasurably. With three other pilots, four co-pilots and four flight engineers to back him – for those dropping from space had brought him an engineer and co-pilot – Pierre didn’t worry much about a mutiny. He did worry about the possibility of some naval aircraft coming that way, and wished he could risk a reconnaissance flight.
He looked to the hill, and saw the supply truck coming down, loaded with seed packages. Excellent. They would soon have the other shuttles filled.
* * *
Tuesday 01 September
“Time to go, Kiera,” Sidney said. He shook her awake. She had taken her downshift in one of the visitor cabins.
Her eyes looked puffy. But that went for practically all of the civilians. They had not yet come to terms with the fact that their families lay either dead or dying, that they could never go ‘home’, that the Earth itself would soon become uninhabitable. He, he didn’t like it, but with his new riches and place among the Families, he would survive most admirably.
Kiera rose, and tried to smooth out her wrinkled clothes. She put on the heavy jacket that one of the scientists had lent her.
They joined the other inhabitants in the common room. Pierre had decided to brief them all before they left. Sidney didn’t care about a briefing one way or the other, but as the management representative of Agri-Inc., he had to show up.
“Here is the situation,” Pierre started. “Information from our people on Haida Gwaii suggests that, as well as nuclear weapons, the Earth governments have unleashed biological, chemical, viral, and possibly genetic weapons on each other. We would like to wait here another day or two, but this last information demands that we depart immediately.
“I have the shuttle assignments here.” He handed out the list, and everyone received a copy. “We have a few extra seats, so I have brought these kit-bags.” He indicated six of them. “Everyone can bring a few extra items. Go to your rooms; be fast. We want to get out of here within the hour.”
“While you do the final packing and begin coming down to the shuttles, we pilots will ready them for take-off.”
* * *
Kiera rode down to the airstrip with the last load of employees. Sidney, as the Agri-Inc. official, had stayed behind also, making sure that everyone made it. As he said to her, he didn’t want to, but they expected that, and so he lived up to those expectations. He had also, she noticed, pilfered a couple of bottles of whiskey from the station stores.
“Winston,” she asked the supervisor, “what happens here, now – with no one left?”
“Well, the place runs pretty well on automatic. We don’t use much fuel. We rely mostly on wind, solar, and tidal power. We designed it so it could last at least a year without anyone checking on it. As for the vault, it remains at a constant temperature deep within the mountain.
“We sealed it up as a last step before leaving, and now the automatics take over. Barring something catastrophic – or unwanted visitors, it should remain safe, and ready for us when we return, be it in a year, ten years, or a century.”
“That sounds good.”
Winston smiled. “Yes. We planned for every eventuality.” He frowned. “Except for world-wide extinction due to human stupidity.”
She sighed. Human stupidity counted for just about everything that had gone wrong over the last few centuries.
“There’s the airstrip,” Kiera said. She looked, and saw a group of people appearing like they were having an angry discussion. Others carried seed packs from one shuttle to the others. “Something’s wrong.”
The car pulled up beside Pierre Fontaine, two of the engineers, and a small party of evacuees.
“What’s wrong?” Sidney asked, beating her to the question.
“Shuttle 3,” Fontaine replied. “We have problems. It looks like we’ll have to leave it behind
.”
Kiera felt her stomach knot up. She looked from one person to the next. And she saw the kit bags lying on the ground. She swallowed hard.
“Do we have enough room for everyone?”
Pierre looked at her, face grim. She knew the answer before he spoke.
“No. These are not passenger shuttles. They are work shuttles – for carrying cargo, mostly. We find ourselves three seats short – and that after doing some things that any flight official would deem both illegal and unsafe.”
“And the seeds?” Winston asked.
“We put what extra we can aboard the three operating shuttles, but we will not be able to fit it all in. We need to leave some behind.”
“We should take it back to the vault,” Winston said.
“I regret. I now tell you the final bit of bad news. Radiation levels increase. We need to leave now. It will take us four days to get to the Rendezvous – we cannot count on refuelling now, so we shall have to go slow. And the rendezvous takes place in four days. If someone drops and sees nothing there, they may leave. We have no time to take the extra seed back.”
Kiera felt sick. They would have to leave three people behind to die in this forsaken place. Then she thought the question that probably occupied the minds of each of the others. Who? Someone asked the question, and she wasn’t sure that it hadn’t been her.
“Well, it’s not going to be me,” Sidney said. “These seeds are my payment for lifting off, for getting a place in the Families.”
“What?” Winston stared at him. “You said Agri-Inc. planned this – its emergency plan.”
Sidney sneered at him. “How long have you worked for Agri-Inc.? They don’t care about their employees. I arranged everything. There were no emergency plans. And, apparently, none of the other corporations that own seed had any plans, either. So you have me.”
That didn’t go over well.
Not With A Whimper: Preservers Page 32