Polaris

by Todd Tucker

  He came to realize that this was no normal traffic jam brought on by the daily commute; something was going on. Cops at intersections were directing traffic; barricades lined the road. Crowds of people were walking, all in the same direction he was driving, all traveling at roughly the same speed, allowing Pete to track the small groups that walked hand in hand down the sidewalk. It was the same kind of foot traffic you might see before a sporting event, a walk to the stadium—except this was a weekday, and these people didn’t look excited, they looked grim.

  Many of them wore surgical masks.

  He came to a complete stop by a low, brick building: the Germantown Community Recreation Center. Hastily made signs declared that PEOPLE WITH SYMPTOMS SHOULD NOT GET VACCINATED—SEE YOUR DOCTOR. Officials in masks directed people to various lines that came out of the doors and wrapped around the building. They were handing out masks, so everyone in line was wearing one. Paramedics waited lazily by ambulances; volunteers took down information with clipboards. Pete could see, inside the center’s double doors, hundreds of people in a dozen lines, or maybe it was just one line winding throughout the building. On the sidewalk near him, a mother was frantically talking to a bewildered volunteer. Her child, a girl maybe four years old, stared at Pete, only her eyes visible above a mask that was far too big for her small face.

  A car behind him honked. Traffic had opened up. He pulled forward and found his way back to I-270.

  * * *

  Back in the office in Frederick, Pete flipped through Strack’s presentation from that morning.

  “Do you realize you’re looking at my slides?” said Strack.

  “I do,” said Pete.

  “You’re going to ruin your reputation around here if you start participating.”

  “It looks like it’s getting worse,” said Pete, stopping on a chart with the last six months of data.

  “That’s why you’re in charge,” said Strack. “You read a bar graph like none other.”

  Pete smiled. “Is it getting … deadlier? It seems like, looking at these numbers, the mortality rates are climbing.”

  Strack shrugged. “The flu is one of the deadliest diseases in the world. Other diseases—lots of diseases—have higher mortality rates. Like Ebola. Or rabies. If rabies is untreated, you die, almost every time. But year after year, for most of modern history, the flu kills more people than anything else in terms of sheer numbers. And historically, it thrives during times of war, when people are traveling all over the place, food supplies and medical supplies are scarce. The 1918 flu pandemic, a direct result of World War I, might have killed a hundred million people: five percent of the world’s population. So yes … if that’s what you’re asking me. It’s real.”

  “I wasn’t asking that,” said Pete.

  Strack laughed. “Of course you were, don’t be shy. It’s hard to know what to believe right now, god knows. Hell, we’re at the heart of the bullshit machine right here in this office. But I’ve got the data, I’ve been to the hospitals, I’ve looked at the blood. This is real.”

  “But just because it’s real—”

  “Doesn’t mean it’s not propaganda,” said Strack. “Which is why, I’m sure, we’ve been given these luxurious accommodations and a communications specialist. And you.”

  “So it is deadly. But is it anything new?”

  “The flu is always new, that’s the devious nature of it. Each strain is unique. But overall—no. It’s not remarkably different in deadliness or virulence than any flu we’ve seen in the last hundred years. More deadly than some historical strains, less deadly than others. But no question we should be wary of it. Which is how I’m able to get to sleep at night.”

  “How so?” said Pete.

  Strack shrugged. “I’m not a dumbass. I know we’re milking this for propaganda value somehow, keeping the people in a panic. But maybe the work I do—we do—will help prevent the spread of it. Maybe we’ll stumble on something that helps keep influenza at bay from now on—it wouldn’t be the first time that a war effort has led to some concrete, lasting good. So that’s how I sleep at night.”

  “I see.”

  “How about you?”

  “Me?” said Pete. “I don’t sleep at night. Ever.”

  Strack chuckled nervously, but stopped when he saw that Pete wasn’t laughing with him.

  Pete broke the silence and shoved a stack of a paper toward Strack. “Look at this.”

  Strack looked them over. “Evacuations?”

  “Mostly in coastal areas. To prevent the spread of the flu.”

  “Where did you get these?”

  “I’ve been requesting them for weeks, finally somebody slipped up and sent them to me.”

  “But these don’t even … these areas have nothing to do with the flu. There’s no correlation at all.”

  “I know,” said Pete. He’d already made some crude comparisons between the evacuations and Strack’s latest projections.

  But they did correlate to areas that had been hit by drones, at least according to the radical blogs he was following now from Internet cafes across town.

  “Weird,” said Strack. He squinted at the data again, and then back up at Pete, with newfound respect. “So let me ask you a question. As long as we’re being chummy with each other.”

  “Go ahead,” said Pete.

  “Why are you here? I mean, I looked you up. I know you were the hero of the drone program for a while. You’ve done more network news interviews in your life than anybody I know personally. Way more than Harkness, which I’m sure galls him, by the way. So how did you end up in this backwater of the Alliance?”

  Pete thought it over for a long moment. “I think in part they put me here to get me out of the way. They didn’t think they could trust me anywhere near the drones anymore.”

  “But why here, though? Why working on an obscure flu project? You used to be one of the chief badasses in the Alliance. Surely they could use you somewhere else.”

  “Have you ever heard of Admiral Hyman Rickover?” asked Pete.

  “No.”

  “He was the father of the nuclear submarine. An engineering genius. Dreamed it up, fought for a decade to make it a reality while virtually everyone in the Navy and the Pentagon told him he was crazy. He’s a hero of mine.”

  “Did he send you here?”

  Pete laughed, something he didn’t do much anymore, but Strack had that ability. “No. But he once said something I think about a lot. ‘If you’re going to sin, sin against God, not the bureaucracy. God will forgive you but the bureaucracy won’t.’”

  “So which did you sin against to end up here?”

  Pete paused. “Both. But my point is: don’t make the mistake of trying to attribute too much logic to the bureaucracy. There might not be any good reason I’m here. I think they probably thought I could do very little damage here, while at the same time they could keep an eye on me.”

  Strack shook his head. “As much as I hate to admit it, I don’t think you’re giving them enough credit.”

  “How so?”

  “You’re an inventor, right? You invented the drones. Now they want you to invent a flu epidemic. You convinced everybody that the drones were a game changer. They want you to do the same thing with the flu.”

  Pete looked down at Strack’s slides again and pointed.

  “Not me,” he said. “You’re the resident genius here, Strack.”

  The young doctor held his arms up. “That’s what I keep telling everybody!”

  “Are you the only one working on a cure for this thing?”

  He shook his head. “No, not at all. My mission is really the epidemiology—the actual victims, the rates of transmission, things like that. Empirical data about the actual disease.”

  “But somebody’s working on a cure, right?”

  “Of course,” said Strack, shuffling through some papers on his desk. “Teams everywhere, in every Alliance country. But if you ask me, based on the reports I’m g
etting, the most promising work is being done here.” He handed Pete a black-and-white aerial photo of an island. “This is our most productive research station. They’re working in almost total isolation, and we have reason to think they’re getting close.”

  Pete stared at the photograph of the barren island. The photograph was old, taken before his work there, before they’d carved out the airstrip and erected their tower. But he still recognized the kidney shape, the rocky bluff at the northern end, and the two flat buildings on the other side.

  “I’m waiting for them to send me there,” said Strack. “Maybe they’ll send all of us, the whole team.”

  “I’ve already been there,” Pete mumbled in shock.

  “You have?” said Strack, confused. “When?”

  Just then the door burst open and Harkness walked in, his blue suit immaculate, a broad smile on his face.

  “Hello, team! What are you guys up to?”

  “Defeating the enemy,” said Strack, turning back to his computer.

  “Good,” said Harkness, failing to read the sarcasm. “I’ve got good news … they just doubled our funding. And they’re moving us across the hall to a bigger office, getting three more people on the team!”

  “What happened?” said Pete.

  “West Coast governors are freaking out. Two hundred people have died in San Diego this month.” He was beaming.

  CHAPTER TWENTY

  The new office reflected the rising importance of their project, with twice as many desks and even a small kitchen. The smells of fresh coffee and new carpet blended together pleasantly, along with the murmuring of the new team members, whose names Pete struggled to remember. Strack’s tattered world map had been replaced by a digital Mercator projection of the world that took up an entire wall, with red pinpoints of light to indicate flu hotspots. Harkness’s single flickering monitor had been replaced by a bank of six flat-screens against another wall, all of which he controlled and watched with rapt attention.

  Pete came upon Harkness on one of those first days, watching the news on an Alliance-friendly channel as the anchor recited the dangers of the flu and the strides the Alliance was taking to defeat it. Pete was fascinated to see that Harkness was practically mouthing the words as she spoke, as if reading a script that he had written.

  Pete watched for a few moments before speaking. “Do they…?”

  “Work for us?” Harkness said matter-of-factly, not taking his eyes from the screen. “No, not anymore. We used to do that. But we found that the really fire-breathing Alliance guys in the media did a better job on their own. Honestly, they are purer and more driven to the party line than guys on our payroll were.”

  In fact, the woman on the screen did stare at the camera with studied intensity as she spoke. She was blond with blue eyes, red lips, and teeth so white that they seemed almost predatory. She was stunningly beautiful. Harkness, pleased by Pete’s interest, grabbed a remote and turned up the volume so they could listen.

  “Travelers returning from Hong Kong should be quarantined,” she said. “It’s just common sense. Our soldiers have to observe twenty-one days of isolation when returning from hot zones. If it’s good enough for them, why not for the rest of us?”

  The camera turned to a tired-looking academic type who started to respond but was soon cut off by the gorgeous anchor.

  “Here, look at this,” said Harkness, pointing to a screen right below the newscast. Against a black background, fifty words were jumbled together like a huge crossword puzzle, except all the words were changing in size and position. The biggest word, in large red letters in the middle of the screen, was FLU. Around it were dozens of associated words, like PANDEMIC, OUTBREAK, STOCKPILE, and INFECTION. Suddenly, HONG KONG appeared in small letters at the edge of the cluster. Harkness eagerly tapped the screen.

  “There, see? It’s trending now.”

  “Is this a representation of the words in her broadcast?”

  “No,” said Harkness. “It’s all the terms associated with influenza discussions, across the whole Web. These are the top fifty words, so you can see Hong Kong just broke through.” As he spoke, the words grew bigger and moved closer to the center of the cluster.

  “Just because she said it?”

  Harkness shrugged. “It was trending before, we knew that. But it doesn’t hurt. A mention by her, on a broadcast like that, all the chattering voices want to chime in.”

  “And that’s good for us?”

  “Absolutely,” said Harkness, nodding vigorously. “We need people to be aware of the dangers, and these dangers necessitate quarantines.”

  And quarantines have other uses, too, thought Pete. They allow people to be gathered up and locked away without trials or lawyers. They keep people afraid, and compliant. But he kept those thoughts to himself.

  Pete stood there for a little longer, watching the cloud of words shift and change in front of them—there was something hypnotic about it, all these flu-related words moving around each other, forming patterns, growing and shrinking as the whole world tried to figure out what to do about the epidemic.

  * * *

  Harkness worked tirelessly as the epidemic spread, always carefully inserting the story of a potential cure. The war (and by implication, the enemy) had brought them the flu, the storyline went, but the Alliance would bring them the cure. For all his faults, he was the perfect man for the job, a relentless worker coupled with ruthless ambition. Pete soon learned how to read those screens along the wall, and saw that their work was having the desired effect, keeping people at once terrified and hopeful, and convinced that only the Alliance could save them.

  While Harkness worked to create the mythology of the cure, Strack worked day and night, too, doing what he could to bring about an actual remedy. He had visualizations on his computer similar to Harkness’s, but instead of words and trending topics, Strack dealt with deaths and mortality rates, secondary infections and quarantines. His screens were more difficult to interpret than Harkness’s, but he assured Pete that despite whatever level of Alliance bullshit accompanied it, the flu was very much real. And, he said, for the time being, damn near unstoppable.

  Pete looked closely at the sporadic communications he got from the rest of Strack’s extended team, especially those on Eris Island. The war was making it difficult to communicate, and impossible to get them the supplies they needed. Nonetheless, they were making progress on a cure, the reports said. Harkness dutifully sanitized the reports, elaborated where necessary, and published the results in their weekly meetings. Pete himself began presenting during his allotted five minutes, explaining how they were using their new resources, where the anticipated trouble spots were. He’d adopted Strack’s philosophy: they were curing a disease, and no matter what, that was a positive thing.

  One morning, Pete came into their new, lavishly appointed office to find everyone hushed. Strack was standing at the front of the group, with Harkness at his side. He held a message in his hand in a red TOP SECRET folder.

  “We’ve been waiting for you,” said Strack.

  “What happened?”

  “They did it,” said Strack, so quietly Pete could hardly hear him. “They’ve got the cure.”

  “And it’s just in time,” said Harkness. “They’re evacuating the island.”

  “What?” said Pete. “Why? That place is a fortress.”

  “They’re almost starved out. We can’t get them supplies, and we’ve got intel that there might be enemy submarines in the area. Typhon puts commando teams on their subs, this is what they’re good at: raids, search-and-destroy missions. If they land a team on Eris Island, those researchers, and everything they’ve done, could be at risk.”

  “They’ll never get a detachment on that island,” said Pete. He felt an old pride rising up in him. “It’s unapproachable. The drones will get anything on the surface, and shoals on all sides prevent a submerged boat from getting close. That’s why we picked it.”

  “We can�
�t take that risk,” Harkness said. “The military detachment on Eris evacuated weeks ago. We’re sending a small plane out to get the medical team. It’s probably already in the air.”

  Pete walked across their large new office, to the map of the world that covered almost an entire wall. With his finger, he traced the journey of a West Coast plane to the spot where Eris Island would be, if it showed up on the map. “Flying at night, I hope,” he said, almost to himself.

  “They did it,” said Strack. He was brimming with pride. “They really did it! We found a cure!”

  “And the information pump is primed,” said Harkness. “As soon as that plane gets back on Alliance soil, the story will start to flow: the Alliance has cured the scourge of our age.”

  Harkness walked to his stack of consoles and pushed buttons on a remote until all the major news sites were on-screen. Every channel was talking about the flu. Hospitals were turning away patients in Jacksonville. Schools were closing in Indiana. Public swimming pools had been ordered closed by the surgeon general.

  Pete was still staring at the world map. He looked at his watch and did some rough math in his head. “It’s almost sunrise on Eris Island,” he said.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE

  Commander Jennifer Carlson was in the wardroom enjoying a rare moment of solitude when the phone buzzed at her knee. She jumped; her instincts were humming. Maybe it’s the storm, she thought; the rare squall blew through the area around Eris and made the ship rock in a way that she hadn’t felt in weeks. The heavy weather seemed to announce that something was about to happen, and she wasn’t inclined to ignore her instincts. They had served her well.

  Because of her past success, Typhon had grudgingly allowed her vast free rein. Even her marines had stopped asking her when they might form a landing party and start blowing things up. Instead, they just continued to work out in the makeshift gym they’d created in the crew’s mess, ate constantly, and cleaned their many, many weapons. Carlson had heard that Alliance boats carried no small arms, some philosophical statement on the purity of the deterrent nature of their submarines. It was typical of their mealymouthed moralism, she thought. Carrying rifles and grenade launchers would be too dirty for them, but nuclear warheads were somehow acceptable.