Strands of Sorrow (eARC)

by John Ringo

  “The honor is all mine, General,” Steve said. “Would you care to troop the line?”

  “It would be an honor,” Ramos said.

  * * *

  “That was quite the pomp and circumstance,” Ramos said afterwards as they were sitting in Steve’s office.

  “I aim to please, General,” Steve said. “And we rarely get the chance. Being specific, we’ve never before gotten the chance. General Montana turned it down flat the one time I suggested it and Admiral Hiscock arrived so fast we were taken off guard.”

  “I’d heard even before the plague Night Walker was a bit of a character,” Ramos said. “I don’t usually go for full honors myself. But I could see you’d gone to a lot of trouble. The Marines are part of Task Force Charlie?”

  “Roger, General,” Steve said. “Just back from clearance operations in Saint Martins. We really didn’t like leaving those cruise ships behind on the last sweep. They found some survivors. It’s possible some people ran out of stores in the meantime. I just try to ignore that sort of thing.”

  “Understood,” Ramos said. “I had some interesting conversations with your daughters on the way down. Possibly illuminating possibly not. Let me first say, as I’m sure everyone does: Wow! Holy crap on a cracker. Good job, there, Captain.”

  “Thank you, sir,” Steve said. “It wasn’t all me, General. Stacey not only bore them, she was right there raising them. It was a team effort.”

  “I hope to meet her at some point and will add my compliments,” Ramos said.

  “If you’re prepared for it, we’re scheduled for dinner en famille, General,” Steve said. “Up to you.”

  “Again, I’d be honored,” Ramos said. “This…bootstrap has been not only incredible in its drive but competently done. Which was not meant to be an insult. Competence was what was needed.”

  “Much of the competence, as always, relies on others,” Steve said. “Commander Isham, although we did not start out well, was a blessing. Amazingly competent guy. Most of the people we recovered were competent. The conditions tended to sort for those. Incompetence in the compartments was a death sentence as I’m sure you’re well aware, General. Heinlein once said ‘Ignorance is its own death penalty.’ That wasn’t generally true, in fact it was rarely true, in the pre-Plague world. Competence couldn’t save you from the disease but only competence could keep you alive in the sieges afterwards. Even Colonel Downing is too competent to keep at menial tasks indefinitely. There is simply too much to do.”

  “Agreed,” Ramos said. “I’ll have a chat with him at some point.”

  “His response has been very Marine, sir, I’ll give him that,” Steve said. “He agrees that his actions were not the best and based upon both the stresses of relief and ignorance of the post-fall conditions. I don’t actually have him as a stevedore. He’s one of the clerks in the shipping office and, naturally, superlative at it. Faith agrees her actions were not the best. She’s actually kind of mortified even if she doesn’t show it.

  “The truth is, General, that the fault on the incident lies on my shoulders. Both for not implementing the orders regarding determination of competence post-rescue earlier and insisting that the lieutenant and her men take a break earlier. We should have taken the stand-down at the point the Force returned from England rather than later. We live and learn, sir.”

  “Some people do,” Ramos said. “You’re clearly one of them, Captain.”

  “I try, sir,” Steve said.

  “The one bit that was illuminating in my discussions with your daughters was that you indicate a strategic plan for eliminating the infected threat,” Ramos said. “But you are also reticent on specifics. Both of them discussed your planning philosophy. I wrote it down,” Ramos said, pulling out a sheet of paper. “Desires, Intentions, Goals, Concepts, Plans, Actions. Care to lay that out for me? I didn’t ask either one to explain it.”

  “A person has a desire, General,” Steve said. “I’ll avoid alternate metaphors and just talk about this world, sir. My desire, most people’s, is a zombie-free world, sir. That is a fixed point. One item. From there it gets complicated. Intentions are the next step and the alternatives start to expand. Possibilities become fractal. At a certain point, I had an intention to use Bermuda as a staging base. I followed that fractal and discarded it, mentally, before proceeding. Another intention was to use the Canary Islands or the Azores. Again, discarded. Eventually I settled on the intention of using Gitmo.

  “What were the goals that derive from that intention? Sufficient force to clear it was a clear goal. At a certain point I might have chosen to clear PI, early. It was isolated and no more difficult to clear than Gitmo. That was a mental goal at one point which I discarded, again. Fractals branching out, sir. Finally they collapse onto a few clear concepts. Gunboats for clearance. Sweeping methods. At that point you have to start testing them to see if they are functional. Even if it is, again, a thought exercise. Those that have some functionality, you push down to plans. At which point I bring people in on it, sir, and start pushing the work-load down. Does that make it clearer, General?”

  “Yes,” Ramos said. “Where are you on that fractal of clearing the continental areas of the United States?”

  “The mechanicals do not work as well as I had hoped, sir,” Steve said. “So that plan, while not a bust, has been dropped in terms of importance. We’ll continue to use them since they at least reduce infected presence. Some people in the Miami area are self-extracting. The mechanicals have a value especially since they are easy to produce and just keep working. My other main plan, sir, involves what I call bots.”

  “Robots?” Ramos said. “I’m virtually certain you’re not talking about making T-1000s.”

  “No, sir,” Steve said, smiling faintly. “Although if I had the capacity and was sure they wouldn’t turn on us I’d do it. No, sir, the bots are otherwise. I would prefer, though, to let that ride for now. I have a briefing on them set up for you, sir. We have a covert planning and development group over at Camp Delta. It seemed an appropriate spot and it’s possible to keep it away from the main base and base personnel. That something secret is going on over there is known. What I think we’ve managed to keep secret.”

  “May I ask why?” Ramos said.

  “Because if it’s a nonstarter I don’t want people getting their hopes up, sir,” Steve said. “And because if it works it’s going to make me the biggest mass murderer in history, sir.”

  * * *

  “General, Lieutenant Commander Tami Mitchell,” Steve said the next morning.

  Camp Delta, the terrorist detention facility at Guantanamo Bay, was set up in general like a minimum security prison. The design was based on “Club Fed” prisons in the U.S. with an additional “high security” wing for particularly dangerous detainees. There were leaders and followers in the terrorist field as in any other. The followers were in open barracks with access to external yards where they could play soccer and basketball. The leaders were in individual cells designed to prevent “tap code” or other communication and only saw guards.

  All in all, though, it wasn’t by any stretch a horrible place. Set right on the Caribbean, the view was great and the climate was mild. It was the sort of spot you would otherwise put a Sandals resort. Every time the subject of closing it came up, the main complaint of the detainees was they didn’t want to go to either federal Super-max, which was set up with even tighter security than the “High Security” wing, or third party prisons such as Tunisia or Romania. Which was worse was a toss-up.

  And it was remote from the main base, securable and had both a now-cleared hospital as well as a helipad. Throw in some equipment and you had a nice base for clandestine research.

  “Lieutenant Commander,” the general said, shaking her hand. The first thing he noticed about the lieutenant commander was her eyes. He was pretty sure she had not passed the psych profile.

  “Lieutenant Commander Mitchell is the head of Project Subedey, General,” St
eve said. “The bot program. The commander had the unfortunate experience of seeing one of her children killed by infected, sir.”

  “I deeply regret that, Commander,” the general said.

  “Not as much as I do, General,” Mitchell said. “But we’ve got a solution.”

  “A final solution as such,” Steve said. “By the way, General, all of the personnel assigned to Project Subedey have similar experiences to the commander. That is deliberate. I wanted people who had zero compunctions working on this project, sir.

  “The way that these briefings usually go is we have you sit through a PowerPoint presentation which you cut short and ask a couple of questions, then leave. If you will do me the favor of amending that to a short helicopter flight, I think we can skip most of the dog and pony. However, you’ll need to get into a silver suit.”

  “Very well,” Ramos said. “After you, Captain, Commander.”

  * * *

  It wasn’t only the general in silver suits. The helo crew, the people handling the helo and Steve were all in NBC gear.

  The helo took off from Delta and stayed low to the water on exit, heading west.

  “We’re technically violating every bit of Cuba’s territorial rights,” Steve said. “Not to mention, well…treaties, laws, regulations, international agreements, the UN charter and Executive Orders en masse. However, better to test things on Cuban than on U.S. soil.”

  “I doubt they’re going to go to war over…chemical weapons?” Ramos said. “Especially since there is no Cuba. I can see the efficacy but you’d have to spray every inch of the U.S. with them. And that would cause some issues. I don’t have a problem with use of chemical weapons. Contaminating half the U.S. I have an issue with, Captain.”

  “We won’t, sir,” Steve said. “About one percent. Possibly ten percent of urban areas. If I may ask the general to just wait. The flight is short, sir. And it works better as a visual, sir.”

  “I’ll wait,” Ramos said.

  * * *

  They went feet-dry over the sprawling port city of Santiago De Cuba. It was a much better port than Guantanamo in terms of geography, a deep water port cut inland that was highly protected. Also surrounded by a huge city which sprawled all over the hills surrounding the port. There were some mechanicals working in the port. The water wasn’t packed with bodies but they were noticeable even in the dim moonlight from the blacked-out helo. There were so many the sharks had clearly gotten full.

  Besides the moonlight there were four sets of lights showing. They appeared to be rotating spotlights. The helo was headed for one of them.

  The helo proceeded inland to a park, then began circling at about five hundred feet.

  In the park there was a…device. It was lit up bright as day with flashing red lights and spot-lights that looked like car headlights pointed upwards. And there were bullhorn speakers on it. Even from the high-circling helo he could hear some sort of announcement in a female voice but he couldn’t make out the words.

  The lights permitted him to see the general design. Spread legs to hold it upright. Spikes to keep infected off of it. A cup attachment on the top that he suspected had to do with sling-lift. All the gear just below that. Down from that…it had some sort of heavy circular sleeve the purpose of which wasn’t clear and a down-curved circular shield, also quite large. The sleeve looked as if it was designed to drop, which would bring the shield down to just about cover the landing legs. He couldn’t get a good look below the shield. But whatever was below was the smallest part of the system.

  And there were infected. Dozens, hundreds of dead littered the ground around the device and even more were feeding. There were probably ten thousand infected below, with most of the dead being within fifty meters of the device. Some of them seemed…sluggish. As he watched, one stopped feeding and just lay down. A few moments later, another started feeding on him. The pile was getting large.

  “Jesus Christ,” Ramos said quietly. “Radiation?”

  “Gamma radiation to be precise, sir,” Steve said. “Two mostly spent fuel rods from the Jacksonville nuclear power plant with a metal cover to prevent beta emissions. Pilot, back to Delta. I think we’ve seen enough.”

  * * *

  “My first thought was gas, sir,” Steve said as they proceeded back to Gitmo. “I’d come to the conclusion the best choice was Amidol, which is similar to VX but a bit less stable so it breaks down faster. Issues. Yes, it breaks down. It does not break down evenly or quickly unless it is exposed to sea water. It requires the NaCl for the reaction. If it gets into ground water, it breaks down very slowly indeed. We started by trying other chemicals with less permanency. But, well, war gases are war gases for a reason. The efficiency just was not high enough. Not even things like phosgene, which we tried, as well as chlorine and even a carbon monoxide generator. But only the war gases really worked well and ground soil and water tests indicated there would be large contamination zones after their use.

  “Counterpoint: Every city in the world’s ground water is already so contaminated just by having been an industrialized city, I’m not sure it matters. New Orleans, post Katrina and all the way up to just pre-Plague, was still a toxic spill zone that nobody would be allowed to live in were it not for politics. It was a city-wide Superfund site worse than Love Canal. What should have been done with it was level all the contaminated areas and fill in with dirt. Past issues. They’re all back under water, anyway, and back to being a toxic stew. The same toxic conditions exist for most of the cities. Hell, most of the major rivers in the U.S. are not potable at this point. The only thing that’s going to fix it is time. Time heals all wounds, even chemical. Rivers should be useable in five years or so. Point being that contaminating all the cities would not have been an insoluble issue.

  “Killer issue: Production on the scale we’d have to produce it. Models said clearing all the urban areas of the U.S. would require fifteen thousand one hundred and forty-two sorties. Or seven million five hundred and seventy-one gallons of Amidol. Which is a hell of a lot of poison gas, General.”

  “I would have discarded the thought at that point,” Ramos said. “When you talk about ‘millions of gallons’ of complex chemicals in this environment. Infeasible.”

  “I came to the same conclusion, sir,” Steve said, grinning. “What’s that thing about the proof of another man’s intelligence, sir? I had come to the reluctant realization that we were going to have to use pied piper and artillery. Which meant at the least starting up or finding an artillery plant. Nitrates… Etc.

  “Then we found the Nebraska turned over pierside at King’s Bay. And after discussion with various officers who knew more than I about nuclear reactors, we decided we needed to right it and pull the reactor. Which set off a very serious discussion by very serious nuclear engineers of just how deadly dangerous that was going to be and how insanely safe we were going to have to be to keep from killing the salvage crews.”

  “Deadly dangerous being a good thing in this instance,” Ramos said, nodding.

  “The mechanicals are nothing more than a deliberate industrial accident, sir,” Steve said. “So I decided ‘why not a deliberate radiological accident?’”

  “Contamination?” Ramos asked.

  “Very minimal,” Steve said. “The device is filtered for gamma. Gamma rays don’t really leave much residual radiation behind, sir. We did a test of a spot one had been sitting on for two weeks and in another two weeks it was barely above background. They just zip through the infected and somewhat slowly kill them. Biggest problem is secondary contamination from the metals in the bot. Since you can’t feel, smell or touch gamma rays…the infected flock and feed. And die. And die. They’re not even heavily irradiated. But over time they get enough to kill them.

  “We’ll have to dispose of the bots eventually. They are seriously contaminated. But not the ground. And although gammas keep going, they also spread in every direction. They’re basically a nonissue beyond a few dozen meters. Biggest
problem is their limited range and the fact that the closer infected act to absorb the radiation. That one is going to have to be moved soon. What we’re looking at, now that we have some empirical data, is how often they’ll have to be moved to maintain utility. Again, that may turn into a killer logistical issue. There are no easy solutions to hundreds of millions of infected. So far.”

  “You’re going to need a lot of nuclear material,” Ramos said.

  “There are sixty-five nuclear power plants in the U.S., General,” Steve said. “Each has spent fuel rods in cooling ponds available for use as well as their internal fuel rods. That is quite a bit of material. We also have several thousand nuclear weapons in inventory, sir. They, too, can be used. Once you break them down to materials, sir, they’re not useable as nukes of course.”

  “I was the guard commander for a site, Captain,” Ramos said. “I know how hard it is to get a sustained explosive reaction. This may seem ‘old school’ but the materials could be used for terrorism. Dirty bombs…”

  “Until they are done with their work, they are extremely well guarded by infected, sir,” Steve said. “A tough nut for anyone but a military unit to crack. Some people may eventually have helos as well. We’ll patrol the drop points with Gunhawks night and day. That should discourage theft. And approaching from the ground would be…difficult. Gamma radiation goes through just about everything. You noticed the curved shield, sir? The reason there is a shield so you can’t actually see the core from above. If you could, we’d eventually lose crews.

  “When the helo drops a specially designed connector into the cup, that releases the shield which drops and cuts off emissions. It is picked up and carried to another spot and begins again. Refueling the small generator on it is an issue, as is any other ‘maintenance’ on the system. It is very hot. We rotate the crews working on them and they use lead-lined gear. We can also use plutonium from warheads although it takes two warheads to make a good emitter or a couple of fuel rods from a civilian reactor. There are several dozen just in the cooling ponds at the nuclear plant in Jax. There are other sources. We can make at least three hundred with nuclear material currently available or that we can avail ourselves of. One reason we’re going to have to clear the Stennis at some point. We need the rods.”