Polestar Omega

by James Axler

  The other type was almost three times as long, and mostly cargo compartment. It, too, had a clear bubble of cockpit set high on the fuselage, but it was so far off the ground, a full second story up, that Doc couldn’t see inside. The doors to the cargo holds were all open, most were empty, waiting to be loaded.

  With the boss man goading them to hurry up, the convoy crossed over the circular gap in the rows of craft. When Doc looked up, he didn’t see evidence of any mechanism that could either part the roof or slide it out of the way. The roof itself looked to be solid, made up of overlapping plates of sheet metal.

  On the far side of the gap, the man in black waved with his truncheon for them to head for one of the larger wags on the right. Its side cargo door was open. The forklifts raised the pallets level to the edge of the deck, then the workers rolled the barrels off and secured them with cables to eyebolts in the deck. The boss man had a clipboard in hand and directed them where to position each drum.

  “Kind of fussy, is he not?” Doc said to Mildred as they moved a barrel into just the right spot.

  “He’s balancing the load so the ship is easier to fly.”

  The wind streamed over the outside of the roof in an unbroken, singsong shriek. Even inside the craft, it was painfully cold. Doc worked as quickly as he could to stay warm, staying focused on the task. “This cache of food is going to freeze solid in no time,” he said as they cinched down a drum. “I am about to freeze solid, too. How does that man in black stay warm?”

  Mildred didn’t answer. Instead, she nudged him with an elbow, indicating the long boxes that were neatly stacked in the forward section of the hold. “These booger-eaters are serious,” she said.

  Until that moment, Doc hadn’t bothered to pay them any attention. Each of the crates had stenciling on the outside that indicated the respective contents. According to the labels, there were cases of assault rifles and SMGs. The model numbers matched weapons produced at the end of the twentieth century—Heckler & Koch G3, M-16 A-1, and Heckler & Koch MP-5 SD 3. Stacked along with the guns were smaller cases of ammo: 5.56 mm, 7.62 mm and 9 mm. Cases of armored vests, RPGs and high explosives, C-4 and frag grens.

  “By the Three Kennedys, what we need is a crowbar,” he said. Given that it was a cargo ship, it didn’t take him long to find one.

  “No, no,” Mildred said, stopping him with her hand before he could jam the edge under a crate lid. “Not with the overseer watching. Think, you maniac. You’ll get us both killed before we come near touching one of those weapons.”

  “But this is a gold mine.”

  “If we show our hand too soon, it won’t help us free the others and get the hell out of here.”

  “Where did it all come from?”

  “They either inherited it from their predecessors who were here before the bombs dropped, or they manufactured it since,” Mildred said, turning him toward the barrels remaining on the pallet. “We’ve only seen a tiny part of the redoubt. In order to make these aircraft, they had to have raw materials and precision tools—and the skill to use them. Guns and ammo and the rest would be a piece of cake to produce.”

  As they struggled to roll the next drum into place, she said softly, “At least now we know we can arm ourselves. If we can get everyone back here, we can weapon up, blow the roof and maybe use one of the aircraft to escape.”

  “But we do not know if we can fly it,” Doc said.

  “There’s only one way to find out.” Mildred turned to look at the gangway leading up to the cockpit.

  “Ladies first,” Doc said.

  “Not yet.”

  When the cargo deck was completely full, there were still drums of quinoa left on the pallets. The man in black ordered everyone out of the hold, and motioned for the forklifts to continue down to the next aircraft in line. As the other workers scurried to follow, Doc and Mildred hung back, then ducked down out of sight behind the cargo.

  They waited a minute or two, until they were sure they hadn’t been missed. Then Doc trailed Mildred up the steps into the upper deck and cockpit. The space was cramped: six seats in three rows, and a low ceiling of canopy bubble. The control array was highly compressed, with named and numbered switches and levers, and small LED screens. In front of the pilot’s chair was a joystick and foot pedals.

  “No way is this year 2000 technology,” Mildred said. “The engineering here is highly advanced. From the looks of those readouts, an onboard computer does most of the heavy lifting in keeping it airborne.”

  “Can we hope to fly this thing?” Doc said.

  “First we have to find the start switch.”

  When Doc leaned forward, Mildred said, “Don’t touch anything!”

  “I was not going to. I was trying to read the labels.”

  After a few minutes of frantic searching, Mildred gave up. “We’re wasting our time. Maybe J.B. can figure it out.”

  “Seems like a mighty big maybe to me,” Doc said. “If we rescue the others and bring them up here and it turns out we cannot fly this thing, our gooses are cooked. Listen to that wind outside. There is no place to run on foot. Even if we can fly this contraption, we cannot get out of here unless we can open the roof.”

  “Actually, it gives us two options—flying out in one of these aircraft, or arming ourselves and fighting our way back to the mat-trans.” Mildred tipped her head back and looked up through the canopy. “Can’t see much of the roof from here. We can check it out more closely after we climb down.”

  Doc said nothing, but he thought they were a long way from nailing down a viable escape route.

  “We can always take hostages to open the roof and fly us out,” Mildred said. “Hostages would be helpful in other areas, too. We don’t know the range of this aircraft. We don’t know how many crew it takes to fly it. We don’t know where these people are headed. We wouldn’t want to end up in the same place by accident.

  “Those smaller craft look fast,” she added. “We’re going to have to sabotage them or seal the roof after us, otherwise they will chase us down.”

  A creaking sound came from the deck below. It sounded as if someone had mounted the gangway.

  Mildred pantomimed the words, “Oh shit.”

  A second later a black-clad head popped up through the open hatch, with only eyes, nose and mouth showing. The boss man’s eyes looked first startled, then angry.

  “This is a restricted area,” he said. “What are you doing up here?”

  Before either of them could answer, he whipped his handblaster from its holster and Doc was looking down the barrel of a 9 mm semiauto weapon. It looked like a predark Beretta 92, or a good copy of one. Even though Doc was standing slightly bent over, the back of his head grazed the inside of the bubble.

  No weapon.

  No room to fight.

  “Put your hands on your heads,” the man in black said.

  Doc and Mildred obeyed.

  “Now step closer.”

  The old man moved to within two feet of the opening in the deck.

  “This is all a mistake,” Mildred said from behind him. “We didn’t mean—”

  “Shut up!”

  Doc imagined he could see the gears slowly turning behind those eyes.

  “You were trying to sabotage this hovertruck, weren’t you?” the boss man said. “Now you’re going to die.”

  Chapter Seven

  After discarding his clothes and taking a hot shower with a scrub brush, Dr. Lima put on a fresh, well-starched lab coat, clean shirt, pants and shoes. Images of the brown hailstorm and accompanying gagging stench kept intruding on his consciousness. Although there had been similar individual incidents with some of the muties—particular species seemed more prone to throwing or spraying than others—this was the first time it had been part of a coordinated riot. Perhaps
the fine line between starvation and compliance had been crossed, but there seemed little point in wasting perfectly good food on creatures that would soon be sacrificed. The staff wouldn’t be taken by surprise a second time. They would be wearing biohazard suits from now on anyway; it was protocol because the lab rats were going to be exposed to Cauliflower mosaic 4Zc.

  He felt a twinge of pleasure at the thought. There was nothing like an experiment with live subjects to get the juices of inquiry flowing. And all the better when the subjects could frame intelligible sentences. Lima enjoyed the cat and mouse game of half truths and out-and-out lies. There was something undeniably godlike about such trickery.

  Of course there was no “treatment” to cure the gene-altered captives. There never had been. It never had been part of the plan to search for one, and an effective treatment was counter to the plan’s goals. The quickest way to fix the problem in the Deathlands’ captives would have been to sterilize them—that way they couldn’t pass on their crippled seed. But the colony’s goal demanded a different solution.

  There was no longer any risk of transferring the mutated DNA through viral infection. The redoubt’s advance units exploring the tip of South America had confirmed the fact that the nukeday virus was no longer present in the environment; there were no infected life-forms. Although the captives’ DNA was decidedly compromised, they were not in fact contagious, nor had they ever been. They had inherited their mutated genes from their distant ancestors who had been exposed to the virus. The initial accidental release had long since done its dirty work and as all viruses do, it had eventually lost its punch due to acquired immunities and replication errors and random mutation. Otherwise, the number of new mutated species would have continued to expand geometrically, in an insane profusion of combinations and recombinations. Monkey heads on monitor lizard bodies. Bipedal giant flatworms. Superintelligent goldfish.

  The truth was, the only way the existing genetic anomalies could be spread was through sexual reproduction by compatible individuals; and speciation between life-forms was such that the recognizably different mutie types could not successfully interbreed—stickie with scalie, scalie with stumpie, et cetera. It amused Lima that the female human captive who professed some knowledge of genetics hadn’t tumbled to that rather obvious conclusion. Clearly there were gaps in her course of study.

  Or maybe she had slept through that lecture.

  The captives hadn’t been taken so they could be treated for contagion; they had been taken so they could be given contagion.

  The irony was delicious.

  In order to reduce the competition for survival in the wider, untamed world to manageable levels, statistical analysis had determined that the colony had to kill off 60 to 70 percent of all existing organisms. Every individual whose genetics had been altered by the original Cauliflower mosaic 4Zc virus bore the mark of that transformation in its DNA, like a fingerprint. Or a billboard. The newly minted version of that virus targeted only the living things that bore the hidden mark, and it carried a message to every cell in the targets’ bodies: Die!

  By now, the one-eyed man would be producing the lethal virus in buckets. Even as his life slipped away, his kill switch tripped, he had been turned into a disease factory. The experimental design was exquisite. Before the first test subject expired he would be inserted into the mutie zoo. This to allow nature to take its course, the contagion observed as it passed from cage to cage and row to row, species to species, much as a virus would move across territory in the wild. But the sped-up evacuation timetable would not allow a proper scientific examination that could take a week to complete. Lima and his team had only hours to work with. Fundamental questions about the speed of transmission, the order of transmission and the progress of the viral attack in individual test subjects would have to be set aside. There wasn’t even enough time to let them die on their own.

  Though it deeply irked him, their investigation would be limited to cataloging the order, speed and escalation of symptomatology, then the subjects would have to be slaughtered for autopsy and DNA analysis. Although it wasn’t a definitive test of the weapon’s potency, they would know whether the virus was doing its job as predicted, and the death peptide functioning effectively across species’ boundaries. From this quantification they would be able to extrapolate epidemiology and the expected results in the field. Something Lima hoped would satisfy General India.

  Since natural transmission was out of the question, the test subjects would have to be individually and simultaneously infected. The one-eyed man had been double-dosed with the virus loaded in hypos. A similar procedure was going to have to be used on the others. It was the only feasible option, given what Lima had promised the general. The best he could hope for under the circumstances was a convincing infection rate and autopsies that showed evidence of the start of massive cell death.

  The original plan had been to keep the first test subject alive and pumping out the virus as long as possible—this to test the limits of survival and viral production. The ice tank and a cocktail of sedative and metabolism-lowering pharmaceuticals could theoretically keep an infected person hovering on the verge of death in a kind of suspended animation. Again, the revised time frame would not allow exploration of that sidetrack.

  It had become an all-or-nothing situation.

  If the virus spread as predicted and with the predicted results, they didn’t need to keep the one-eyed man alive. They could reproduce enough of the virus by artificial means to begin the South American expedition. If this formulation of the virus didn’t work, there would be no second chance, no follow-up tweaking. Under present, less than ideal circumstances, the Deathlander was as expendable as his companions. His only value was the information that could be harvested from his organs and bones. He was just another lab rat waiting to be euthanized, dissected and dissolved; as such, his life expectancy and that of his companions were roughly the same.

  A firm knock on his office door broke Lima’s reverie. “Enter,” he said.

  One of his female assistants stepped in carrying a white biohazard suit and orange boots. She wore her brown hair cut very short, which made her hollow cheeks look even hollower and her big brown eyes even larger. “Here is the protective gear you requested, Doctor.”

  “Put it on the chair,” Lima said. “We are all going to suit up for the next stage of the experiment. Make sure everyone gets the word.”

  “Yes, Doctor. Is there anything else?”

  Like him, Echo Whiskey was the descendant of a long line of scientists. She looked harried and older than her thirty-odd years. No doubt, Lima thought, a function of reduced calorie intake and increased workload. But all things considered, she appeared to still be in reasonably good health.

  “No, that’s all. I’ll join you in the isolation chamber shortly.”

  As she closed the door behind her, Lima made a command decision. It was less difficult than he had imagined, perhaps because he was in such a jolly, rigorously scientific mood. As pivotal as it was to make certain the viral weapon worked on muties, it was equally vital to make sure it didn’t harm anyone with pure genetics. On paper and in computer simulation, this did not appear to be an issue, but the potential risk was too grave to be discounted without direct, verifiable evidence. They either had to confirm no colonist could contract the virus or that if a colonist did contract the virus the kill switch would not activate. That required one of their own be exposed to the weapon under controlled conditions, and if he or she fell ill as a result, be euthanized and autopsied.

  Lima had decided it would be a she.

  If Echo Whiskey became sick, the house of cards would collapse. Even if it turned out her kill switch hadn’t been triggered, Lima had no doubt that the military leaders would conclude the virus was too dangerous to ever use in the field, and the program would be scrapped. While Lima was left behind to die in an empty, cold, and
unforgiving place, the rest of the colonists would be enjoying the fruits of a new home they had dreamed of for a century.

  A foothold for the invasion had already been secured in Ushuaia, the former capital of Tierra del Fuego, by a unit of advance troops. Initial resistance from the populace had crumbled under the weight of better firepower and training. Six weeks ago they had crossed Antarctica and the Drake Passage in a small squadron of nuke-powered hovertrucks, a distance of two thousand nine hundred air miles. At 150 to 200 mph top speed, it was a fifteen to twenty hours one-way trip, depending on headwinds. Too far to ferry foodstuffs back and forth, or information for that matter, the expeditionary force communicated with Polestar Omega via satellite. Unpredictable weather made it a dangerous crossing, as well. Because of the limits of the hovertrucks’ design, which had been adapted from Ark technology, they flew no higher than fourteen thousand feet. Once the colonists left the redoubt en masse, there would be no turning back.

  Lima knew it was more than just the end of an occupation and the loss of a priceless resource in the Ark. The principles and strictures that had kept the colonists alive would change as a result of the new environment. It was possible, if not likely, that as a people they would devolve, lose their hard-won identity, lose the connection to science and rational thought that had sustained them for a century—and become just another army of marauders and opportunists.

  An army without a future.

  If the viral tool worked, if the orange suits allowed him to tag along, what would be his role in the new surroundings and circumstances? Would he be responsible for selectively reintroducing pure genetic strains of plants and animals to replace those species he had helped to make extinct? It was something he couldn’t see happening in the next five, even ten years. For the foreseeable future, all the resources of the colonists, human and material, would be funneled into the war effort; they would live as the other advancing armies in history had, by pillaging, by hunting and gathering. Unlike most other armies of the past, they were not fussy about where their protein came from—they could and would survive on the flesh of their enemies, human and nonhuman. The need to continue piling up victories and depopulate mutie-held territory would keep the force moving north. There would be no stopping to plant or to harvest, no real science until the task was completed.