You could still see the aftermath, if you looked with the right eye, but it was harder now. Buildings which had been thrown down by earthquake or giant wave and then buried in volcanic ash had been quite obvious at first, but now there was new life in the geological wilderness. Volcanic ash was fertile and the plants had recolonised as fast as they could push it. Twenty years after the disasters, nature had, more or less, reclaimed the Seattle–Tacoma region, but what nature reclaimed, humans could flatten and reuse. Someone had cleared and flattened the old runway, laid new surface where it was needed. Enough to get an orbit-capable aircraft in the air. As far as the rest of the ‘camp’ went, there seemed to be little change from the photographs Jackson had supplied of the ruined landscape when it had last been mapped.
Then there was the flurry of activity: low-altitude parachute opening and then the pressure of finding a good landing spot, free of too much rubble. Fox sent off a coded burst transmission while she reeled in her parachute and sloughed off her helmet and suit. She had opted for basic fatigues rather than body armour: her body was armoured, and she was there to scout, not engage. Her landing site was east of the airfield, a little north of the camp, across what had once been a major highway of some sort. Getting closer was not going to be a serious problem.
Especially since the closer she got, the less there was to see. No aircraft, purely air or aerospace. There were a couple of ground vehicles: all-terrain transports which looked old and possibly non-functional. There was also a trailer of some sort, clearly designed as a mobile command post: air-traffic control, in all probability. The big radar dish mounted on the top of it was still; they had been using radar here, but not now.
‘Do you think they’ve gone?’ Kit asked.
‘Too early to tell. No guards I can see, in any light spectrum. The electronics seem to be shut down. Are you picking up any kind of radio signals?’
‘Nothing. No network, no signs of analogue or digital radio broadcast. I believe that the small turret-like structure beside the radar dish may be a laser-communications head. They could be utilising that, but I suspect not.’
Nodding, Fox moved in closer. The two vehicles were, indeed, useless: someone had ripped open all of the tyres to be sure of that. At the back of the trailer unit, there was an exhaust pipe.
‘Generator,’ Fox said. ‘Probably anyway. Alcohol-fuelled at a guess and cold. It hasn’t been running for a while and how’d you like to bet me the tank’s dry?’
‘I don’t gamble, especially when I’m sure I’d lose if I bet against you. In case you had not noticed, there appears to be a heat source in the building on our right.’
‘I’d noticed. A sign of life. Maybe.’
The infrared source, fragmented and weak, was too indistinct to identify. It was coming through a crack in the wall of what had once been a large building. There were, in fact, some aircraft near it, but Fox doubted they had been airworthy any time in the last half-century. They were ruined, wrecked, and one of them looked about the right shape for an old bomber from the last century. Maybe even a wartime thing, though it was pretty hard to tell now. Had the building been a museum?
Fox edged up to the crack in the wall, a crack which had probably been put there by the earthquake twenty years earlier, and peered through. There were seven people inside – four male, three female – and all of them dressed in clothes which had seen better days. However, they had not been the source of the infrared emissions. They were gathered around a fire they had built from scavenged wood, set in a pit formed from whatever rubble they had been able to find to form it. Smoke crawled across the ceiling and then filtered away through cracks in the roof. None of the people looked happy, but none of them appeared to be armed. There were a few crates at the back of the room they were in, but none of them looked like weapon cases.
‘Okay,’ Fox said silently. She backed off and looked down the airstrip. ‘We’ll take a walk and check the rest of the area, but I think we missed the party.’
‘I believe that you are right,’ Kit replied. ‘I also think that, for whatever reason, those six people were left behind when the others left. They appear depressed. They have supplies, but not much.’
‘What they could scavenge. Like the fire, they’ve found what they could and they’ve holed up to wait… Not sure what they’re waiting for.’
‘The end of the world?’
‘Well, that’s a cheery thought.’
20th August.
Two transports flew in at dawn, each disgorging ten armed security officers in combat armour to form a cordon around the aircraft and the teams of technicians who followed them out. It was a formality. Fox watched the six inhabitants of the camp, and all that happened when they heard the engines outside was that they wandered out to find out what was going on.
Fox walked out behind them, and they jumped as she wandered through to meet Jarvis and Helen. They were both in combat gear too, but neither of them appeared exactly concerned. Jarvis had his hand on the grip of an assault rifle which was attached to his suit by a tactical sling. Helen’s brown eyes scanned over the area and her hand was on her pistol, but she was relaxed.
‘So, you dragged us out here for zip and six losers?’ Jarvis asked.
‘Six losers who need to be questioned,’ Helen said. ‘And a mobile command centre of some sort that’ll need going over with a nanomesh filter.’
‘This, Ryan, is why she gets the big bucks,’ Fox said, smirking. ‘That trailer’s going to need power and it’s going to need checking before we go near its contents. I wouldn’t put it past them to rig it. We’ve missed the leaving do for this place. Let’s see whether we can find anything among the party scraps.’
~~~
Leaving the techs to get to work on the trailer, covered by Jarvis and his people, Fox and Helen persuaded the six who had been left behind that it would be nicer in one of the aircraft. Plus, there was food which was not preserved ration packs. The two detectives watched as the six of them said grace and then tucked into the food as though it was manna from Heaven.
‘They look like they haven’t eaten properly in days,’ Helen said. ‘I mean, we can’t be that late. A couple of days, tops.’
‘We fasted,’ one of the women said. ‘We fasted to purify ourselves before the Rapture. Still, we were not pure enough.’
Fox raised an eyebrow. ‘What’s your name?’
‘Mary.’ Of course it was. ‘Mary Hopper.’
‘Hi, Mary. I’m Fox. This is Helen. Why weren’t you pure enough?’
‘It was time for all the chosen to go up. There was no space for us.’ Mary smiled a thin smile. ‘God’s way of telling us that we were not fit to rise to Eden.’
‘She is not among the names we got from Tulsa,’ Kit said inside Fox’s mind. ‘None of them match any of the ID graphics.’
‘Where are you from, Mary?’ Fox asked.
‘Nashville. Born and raised among the Gardeners. Lived my whole life knowing I might be one of the chosen. We all did. Nearly made it.’
‘We’re not lost yet,’ one of the men put in. He looked up at Fox, soup still stuck in his thick moustache and dribbling down his equally thick beard. ‘Wilbur Vint, since you’ll ask. We’re here, out of the cities. You’ll do the same if you’ve got any sense.’ His brow furrowed. ‘Even if you are nothing but heathens.’
‘Guilty as charged,’ Helen said. ‘Why would we want to stay here, Mister Vint?’ Fox noted the more respectful use of his name and approved: Vint struck her as the type who would like that. He was older than Hopper by a good few decades, probably well into his fifties and maybe older.
‘When the rider of the red horse is set loose, girl, there isn’t going to be anywhere safe, but the worst of it’s going to be in the cities.’
‘Likely a reference to the Bible,’ Kit said. ‘Revelation. The rider who sits upon the red horse is commonly believed to bring war. One of the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse.’
‘I’ve heard of them,�
�� Fox replied silently. Aloud, she said, ‘War. You think there’s going to be a war.’
‘I know there’s going to be a war,’ Vint replied. ‘It’s coming. Soon.’
‘That’s why the chosen are being taken up,’ Hopper added. ‘To keep them safe in the Lord’s grace. They’ll stand with the Reborn Christ until the time of the Second Coming.’
‘Okay,’ Fox said, nodding. ‘So, where is it that they’re going to be safe with Jesus? Uh, Eden, I know, but where is Eden?’
‘His name is not Jesus this time, though it is the same name so that the chosen will know him.’
‘Uh…’
‘Eden’s up, girl,’ Vint added. ‘Where did you think it was? Eden’s in the heavens and the first humans fell from it when they fell from God’s grace. Don’t you know your Bible?’
Fox sighed. ‘Usually only the parts spouted by religious fanatics before they murder a lot of people. I’m a heathen, remember? I do know someone who’s pretty big into the Bible. Guy named Daniel Berkewitz. He’s a minister or something in the Church of God’s Mind.’
‘Fools and blasphemers.’ To be fair, Vint did not seem terribly acrimonious about the fools and blasphemers. ‘They’ll see their end soon enough. Nothing they can do to stop it. Those found unworthy will be wiped from the Earth, and the Messiah will come, and the chosen’ll inherit the paradise the Lord creates once they’re gone.’
‘It’s a variation of the beliefs of the Seventh-day Adventists,’ Kit supplied. ‘Essentially, after the Second Coming, anyone considered unworthy is wiped out and the world is remade as a paradise.’ She began displaying a number of graphics and articles explaining the eschatology.
‘So, you won’t be expecting to see this paradise, Mister Vint,’ Fox said. ‘You weren’t chosen because the transport company fucked up the logistics, so now you’re doomed.’
‘That’s how it looks to me,’ Helen agreed. Apparently, Kit was sending her the same data. ‘If you’re not up there already, you’ve got no chance.’
Hopper glanced at the older man. ‘Wilbur? You said, maybe, if we could stay here and hole up…’ Vint ducked his eyes away from hers.
‘To be honest,’ Helen went on, ‘I’m not really sure that God needs spaceships to take you up to Heaven.’
‘I have to agree with my colleague,’ Fox said. ‘I don’t remember anything in the Bible about Jesus ascending on a rocket. It’s more like carried on the wings of angels or something. My PA’s doing a quick test scan, but I’m not really hopeful of finding anything.’
‘I’m not,’ Kit pointed out.
‘I’m pretty sure you’ve got the point of sarcasm by now,’ Fox replied, and noted that Kit obviously was talking to Helen as well, because Helen was trying not to smirk. ‘I can’t guarantee there won’t be a war,’ Fox said aloud, ‘but I can say your chances of living out a few years here on the supplies you have are pretty slim. It might seem nice enough now, but the winters around here can be hard. If you don’t want to go back to Nashville, and I can’t say I would, we can arrange to take you to Topeka. I grew up there. There’s a strong Christian community. Maybe not as… fundamental as you’re used to, but they’re friendly.’
‘If we’re all going to die when your Reborn Christ comes anyway,’ Helen said, ‘you might as well wait it out somewhere comfortable.’
‘And you can always protest outside the Church of God’s Mind if you think you need to assert yourself.’
‘Fools and blasphemers,’ Vint said, but he did it sort of through his beard.
‘Yeah, well, they think I’m some sort of messenger from God,’ Fox replied, ‘so I’m not going to argue about the first of those descriptors.’
~~~
‘Have to say, working with these Pythia units is quite a treat.’ Her name was Millicent Hargreaves and she spoke like a character from an old British detective vid set in the twenties, the nineteen twenties. This was fair, given that she was English. ‘One of Ms Martins’ designs?’
‘Yeah, Terri did a lot of it anyway,’ Fox said. They were in the trailer, Hargreaves sitting at a console while Fox stood over her and Kit hovered nearby. Other technicians were working at other consoles, but Hargreaves was the senior tech. Helen was still busy trying to get more information out of the six doomed to stay behind, but neither she nor Fox were hopeful.
‘Polite, efficient, and she doesn’t get in the way,’ Hargreaves said. ‘That’s what I like about Ms Martins’ work. She produces what you need for a given task, but there’s always that little twist of personality to make the interactions more pleasant.’
‘Uh-huh. I’ve no idea where she went wrong with Kit.’
Kit sputtered. Hargreaves bit her lips to avoid laughing. ‘Uh, well, I’m sure Kit is wonderful, but with Pythia’s assistance, I’ve managed to drag out a few things and we’re working on more. We have a complete list of flights out of here, along with their destinations. Low Earth orbit in every case, but there are notations suggesting a rendezvous with at least three different transport craft. From the number of flights, I’d say they’ve moved around ten thousand people through this place in the last month.’
‘Any idea where they’re going from orbit?’
‘Not yet, but there’s more data to dig through. We may get something. We did find some documents which appear to be a disjointed religious treatise. I took a quick look and, frankly, it appeared to be a diatribe consisting entirely of bollocks, but perhaps you can make something of it.’
‘I’ll access the files,’ Kit said, still sounding huffy.
‘My gorgeous assistant will access the files and we’ll take a crack at it,’ Fox said.
‘Don’t think you’ll get around me like that…’
~~~
It read a lot like the kind of manifesto you got when you took religious belief, old-school religious doctrine, and mixed in a liberal supply of alcohol and hallucinogenics. Plenty of Wrath of God stuff which, as far as Fox knew, ran against the teachings Jesus was supposed to have given. There was no forgiveness here.
‘It’s Old Testament, apocalypse text,’ Kit commented.
‘Yeah, well, end of the world.’
‘No, apocalypse is taken to mean that, but it actually refers to an unveiling, a revelation. This is written as a revelation given to some prophet.’
‘Joshua of Eden.’ The name was at the top of the file.
‘Yes. Joshua is an English version of Jesus. Jesus, of course, is an anglicisation of a Hebrew name, but coming through Greek and Latin. Mary Hopper indicated that their messiah was not called Jesus–’
Fox nodded. ‘But he uses the same name. Joshua instead of Jesus, but Joshua of Eden.’
‘According to the text–’
‘I still think I should be able to read faster. You’ve finished the damn thing already, haven’t you?’
‘No. Not quite anyway. The point is, later he goes on about not setting foot upon the Earth until the Tribulation is complete. He gathers his chosen about him, in Eden, and when the Tribulation, which is presumably this war they’re expecting along with a famine that will follow, is done with, that’s when he’ll come down. He’ll bring the chosen along and they’ll repopulate the new Earth.’
Pursing her lips, Fox tapped at them with an index finger. ‘You could get famine after a large war, sure, but… This lot seem fairly sure about the war, so I figure they’re fairly sure about the famine.’
‘Some of the memetic campaigns have been suggesting, or promoting, a conflict in the near future. The Saratoga–Ballston people were setting themselves up to fight in it and survive it.’
‘Uh-huh. So, we’ve probably found out where some of these recent memes are coming from, but the famine… The famine would need some help. I figure some sort of bioweapon. Why not just let that loose? Ah, but we’re pretty good at biotechnology these days. They engineer a bioweapon and it could cause some trouble, sure, but it would be identified and neutralised quickly and efficiently. Hell, with the fab
ricator BioTek have, they could be knocking out some sort of– And we come back to BioTek, which they’ve tried to eliminate. The war, the conflict, reduces the planetside ability to deal with a bio-agent, but they need to control space too.’
‘Hence the “ghost ships.”’
‘Yeah. This is big, it’s organised, and it does not read like some religious nut and his followers. This is money and power. There has to be some insanity in this, but there’s a lot more logistics, planning, long-term commitment.’
Kit’s brow furrowed. ‘An organisation with the goal of ending the world?’
Fox shook her head. ‘An organisation with the goal of destabilising the world, throwing it into chaos, and then stepping into the mess as its saviour. What we’re reading is a world-domination playbook.’
~~~
‘As far as I can see,’ Helen said as she paced back and forth in the back of one of the transports, ‘we’ve got a hodgepodge of ideologies, political and religious.’
‘Hodgepodge?’ Fox asked. ‘Have you been reading or something?’
‘What? I read. Terri has all these books and… That’s not the point! We’ve got anarchists mixed with fundamentalist Christians, and they seem to be in bed with scientists and… I don’t know. Whatever you’d call corporate-world-domination advocates, they’re mixed in too. It would take a lot of money to put something like this together, a lot of expertise. You said yourself that it’s too complex for UA, but the memes have a pretty strong UA style to them.’
‘They do seem to be the kind of thing UA produces,’ Kit agreed. ‘Indeed, they have run this kind of campaign before, on a smaller scale.’
‘More money,’ Fox said. ‘They’ve got backing from somewhere… Kit, we’re looking for a very rich man, or a company, probably largely based off-planet. Probably with a religious background, but nothing hugely overt on record. I’m thinking something in biotechnology, which doesn’t narrow it much since a lot of biotech firms have moved off-world. Likely a competitor in some way to BioTek and that other company that was hit, but that probably doesn’t narrow it hugely either…’
Eden Burning (Fox Meridian Book 7) Page 19