Scarcity

by Robert Calbeck

  Luthor blotted some more, trying to see the wound clearly. “What do you think?” he asked Vika.

  William moaned softly in pain as she held pressure on his side.

  “Tie it,” she said simply.

  “Smog-it.” Luthor wasted no time. He cinched the blood-restricting knot just above the wound and William bit off another cry of pain.

  “It’s all right, kid. You’re going to make it,” Luthor said.

  “Are you sure?” asked Michael. “He looks like he’s lost a ton of blood.”

  “I’m sure,” Luthor said definitively, though his infused confidence was more for William’s sake than for his own surety. For some reason men tended to be far more likely to survive if they believed they were going to live. William was much closer to that fine line between life and death than Luthor wanted to admit. The kid could use every advantage he could get.

  “For God’s sake, man,” Luthor said, interrupting Michael’s pathetic attempt to stare without getting caught, “give the lady your shirt.”

  Chapter 23:

  Eleven years ago: Titan Dome, Antarctica

  Luthor jumped over another gaping crack that splintered the floor of the artificial ice-canyon. It fell to unknowable depths in the multi-mile thick ice. His stomach fell in each time he traversed one. The feeling became worse each time. How easy would it be for him to slip and fall forever into one of them? He would almost rather be stuck down here than jump over another one. It was just so deep. He and Chaz helped the very gimpy Garcia make the same leap.

  “I still just can’t believe they would do this,” Chaz said in his never-ending diatribe against the Asian Axis.

  “Believe it,” said Garcia. “The greedy bastards were the only major power to oppose Paris 2. We both know they couldn’t give a shit about the earth, so long as they can profit from it.”

  “Paris 2 and blowing a goddamn hole in Anti are a little different, don’t you think? Seriously, why don’t they just launch their nukes and call it a day? That would end the world even faster than flooding it.”

  “The Chinese wouldn’t dare. They know their arsenal can’t match ours. Even if only one in ten missiles hits, we would nuke them into the stone age.”

  “It doesn’t look like they care too much about that. Fucking failsafe my ass,” he muttered. “Besides if we do nuke them, we will also nuke ourselves into the stone age.”

  “Will you two shut up?” shouted Luthor. “I don’t really care right now about the environment, nuclear winter, or this bullshit war. I want to get out of here before my heat cells are gone. Or before I slip into one of those goddamn cracks!”

  They walked on in silence.

  After searching the endless stretch of ice-trench, they found a jagged path to the surface and were finally able to use their skis.

  Luthor’s heating coil expired an hour later on the windswept plateau. The others’ winked out soon after. No one had spoken since their batteries died. It was too hard to hear anything without a functioning communicator. His shivering was all that kept him awake. He knew it wouldn’t be long before he collapsed and became a permanent fixture of the landscape.

  In Antarctica, shelter was preeminent above all other needs. Not only the coldest place on earth, but the high glacial plateau of Titan was one of the windiest. The combination of the two could sap a man’s heat in hours without a heating coil. And they weren’t dressed for a long deployment, they were dressed for agility, for attack. They needed to find the shelter they had built when they’d rendezvoused before the assault, and soon.

  “Damn, its hot,” mumbled Chaz. He started to take off his mask.

  “No, you idiot! No!” Luthor screamed, restraining his friend.

  “But it’s so hot! Just let me get some fresh air,” Chaz fought him, but Luthor restrained his arms and forced him to keep skiing.

  Chaz had entered the last, most dangerous stage of hypothermia before he froze to death. His body had begun to give up on the extremities and used all its blood and heat to keep the vital organs from freezing. The result was a wave of heat to the chest and head, which drove men to delirium and the uncontrollable urge to strip and cool down. Many men who froze to death in Anti were found in nothing but their skivvies. It was imperative that he keep his clothes on and conserve his warmth.

  Luthor grabbed either side of his best friend’s mask and yelled into his face. “Focus! Exposed skin will freeze. Get a hold of yourself!”

  His eyes abruptly rolled back in his head and he fell backward onto the windswept ice.

  Luthor tried vainly to rouse him, but he wouldn’t budge. Not another one. Not you. No more good men should die on this damned continent.

  He quickly strapped Chaz to his skis and started pulling him like a sled. Luthor knew with his injured leg, Garcia couldn’t help. He needed to keep going to save Chaz before it was too late. But this was Titan; they were on top of a three-mile thick slab of ice and 13,000 ft above sea level. The air was very thin here. Luthor started huffing immediately. Garcia grabbed the gun and skied ahead to scout.

  Interminable minutes passed as Luthor lugged his unconscious friend across the frozen landscape. Garcia had disappeared into the distance. Luthor found himself mumbling through his heaving breaths. “Don’t give up on up me now buddy. We’re almost there. Don’t die on me. Please.” Luthor didn’t know if was talking to Chaz or himself.

  Garcia began shouting. All Luthor heard was a mumbled gasp in the wind, but skied forward as fast as he could manage and found Garcia pointing to a green flag, the rallying sign.

  Luthor couldn’t believe his eyes. They had found shelter Foxtrot.

  Luthor sprinted the last few hundred yards to the flag and heaved Chaz inside the ice shelter. A few dozen paratroopers huddled around a command cube. Two meters to a side, it was little more than a massive air-dropped battery. Men used it to charge their suits and power the equipment used to create a shelter.

  Upon seeing the unconscious Chaz, they rushed into action running charging cables from the cube to his suit’s heating unit. They rubbed his arms and legs to promote circulation. The newly recharged AED in the suit then began its work informing the men to begin compressions.

  Luthor tried to catch his breath and could only watch as the men cared for his oldest friend.

  It wasn’t looking good. The AED could only send the requisite volts to shock his heart back into rhythm, if it had a rhythm. The screen showed nothing. No quantity of electricity could change that. Other men rotated in to continue compressions. Luthor knelt next to Chaz’s head and heard Garcia take charge.

  “Anyone have a battle pad?” he barked.

  A timid man produced one. “I found it on the lieutenant… he didn’t make it… after the explosion. I thought it would be important.”

  “Good work, soldier.”

  “We didn’t have the codes to operate it,” another added.

  Garcia did. He punched in the codes and dialed command.

  The battle pad crunched through the encryption protocols. After Garcia explained the situation to a staff sergeant, a blocky man with crew-cut white hair pixilated on the screen. It was General Stutsman.

  “Lieutenant Hopkins?”

  “Sergeant Garcia, sir. Hopkins is KIA.”

  “Goddamn it man, it’s good to see somebody that ain’t been blown up yet. Tell me some good news to brighten up this clusterfuck,” Luthor leaned in to watch the broadcast.

  Garcia glanced around, “sir we have 50 paratroopers that have retreated to staging area Foxtrot in need of evac. A number are wounded and most of us have some level of frostbite.”

  Stutsman spat from a large dip of chewing tobacco. “You want evac for fifty men?”

  “Yessir. But I believe more will be arriving.”

  “You’ve got to be out of your goddamned mind.”

  Luthor’s mouth fell open. Garcia stared at the screen. “Sir?”

  “Did I stutter sergeant?” Stutsman spat.

  “Sir
, our men will die here without rescue. It’s a thousand kilometers to the Shackleton Base and we only have a few unbroken skis. Even if we had enough, with our gear and provisions we wouldn’t survive two days out in the elements. It’s the dead of winter! There are injured—”

  “Sergeant. Strap on some balls and figure it out.”

  “With all due respect sir, we just air dropped behind enemy lines, assaulted a heavy defensive line, and eliminated Chinese air support. Don’t you think that warrants an expenditure of resources to help us?"

  It might have been the most politically correct tongue lashing Luthor had ever heard. He began his turn at compressions. 1, 2, 3, 4 stayin alive. Stayin alive. Come on Chaz!

  Stutsman shouted through the pad. “Our biggest offensive of the war just went to shit. I mean totally fubar. We lost our entire third armor, 7th tunneling has been captured! We don’t have any goddamn resources, and if we did, I wouldn't spend them to rescue a handful of stranded paratroopers.”

  “Sir, please—”

  “Make peace with whatever god you like. There’s no help coming.”

  “Damn you, General!” Garcia yelled. “You can’t do this!”

  “I just did,” he said with a straight face, “and I would do it again.”

  “You just sentenced us all to death! Because you won’t spend the fucking oil?!”

  “Bingo. All of your lives combined aren’t worth the tank of gas it would take to save you. This conversation is over. Good luck.”

  The battle pad winked out, displaying “Session Terminated” in red letters.

  Luthor continued his compressions. The medic tried to tell him it was too late. Chaz was already dead. Luthor didn’t listen.

  #

  Bill’s Apartment, Chicago, United States of the West

  To Tanya, it felt like they were back in New York: insurmountable odds, everything going wrong. Like nothing they had done mattered. Their only chance at breaking free of this mess was now being scraped off the pavement with a shovel.

  At least everything finally made sense. They hadn’t been fighting some rogue splinter cell, they had been fighting against the carbon enforcement itself. So naturally they would have access to Eli’s phone call with Luthor, because they had access to every phone call. They could easily manipulate the media if they wanted. Of course they could send Sabers to America; they were in every country.

  They were screwed.

  The man who wanted to destroy Luthor’s research and kill all of them had the entire resources of CPI at his disposal. They might as well be fighting against God himself.

  Vika brooded even more deeply than her usual wont. Dimarin’s revelations about the Saber’s connection to CPI seemed to have sapped her usual composure. She paced the small apartment shouting intermittently, alternating between her several languages. “How could I have been so stupid?” she yelled, having now switched to English.

  “How were you supposed to know?” Michael asked. “They tried to hide it from everyone. Not just you.”

  “I served for years! I thought I was protecting people, not working to keep carbon enforcement in power. All those years I was just another carp, I just had a bigger gun and more permission to use it.” She then let loose a string of obscenities in French which Tanya had no desire to translate. Michael smiled at her, though she didn’t seem to notice, while flexing his abs. Do you think we can’t tell what you’re doing? Tanya thought. You aren’t impressing anyone. Go put on a smogging shirt.

  “You protected us today,” he said, “without your help we never would have escaped.” It didn’t exactly cheer her up, but Vika brooded with slightly less intensity.

  “I don’t even know how we did escape,” Tanya asked. “When Luthor dove on William, the Sabers all just smashed against the wall.”

  “It was Michael’s idea. We both threw our BOGs against opposite walls simultaneously, but saved two to get us to the ceiling hatch.”

  Michael seemed pleased with himself. “But ducking down behind the couch and whispering would have looked pretty damn suspicious, don’t you think? But if I could get them to hit me and knock me down next to her, they wouldn’t think twice.”

  “The Sabers were closer to the walls, so they were trapped there,” Vika added. “The rest of us were in the middle of the room so we fell up.”

  “The gravity on each wall cancelled out in the middle, so we were only affected by our BOGs on the ceiling.”

  “I appreciate you volunteering to be their punching bag,” William said weakly.

  Bill chuckled and ruffled William’s hair. The man watched over his wounded son as diligently as the most meticulous nurse. Fortunately, the gunshot to his side hadn’t been deep enough to graze any organs. On the other hand, his leg wouldn’t be long for this world without care. In spite of that, William insisted on staying out of the hospital. Being admitted always required a Mark scan and since Dimarin undoubtedly had access to the whole CPI system, the poor kid knew he would be shot on sight.

  William squeezed Bill’s hand as he eased his head back on the couch. He might lose a leg, but it looked like he had gained a father.

  “Getting hit didn’t feel too great, but it worked. I knew we would need at least two of us to be throwing BOGs at the same time for us to have a chance. And I have to thank you for the idea of the gravity bomb,” he said to Luthor.

  “You used 126 to kill people,” Luthor said flatly.

  Tanya offered a weak smile, “but it saved all our lives.”

  “What does it matter?”

  “Try to stay positive, maybe a building that got wadded up like a piece of paper will make the news.”

  “It did,” William said pointing, “the news is already on.”

  Allen Wilcox sat with his hands folded over his notes, somber and sober as ever and continued the broadcast “… bright spots in this city. A new artist-turned-architect has begun trying to revitalize the Midway neighborhood. Using condemned buildings, Aaron Lichtenhaus is creating works of art.” The camera panned around the now roughly spherical structure that had been the USNN safe-house hours before. A reporter began to interview the man who supposedly created the ‘work of art.’

  “Those bastards,” Michael breathed. “They even found somebody to act like it was their idea.”

  “Somebody has to notice the gravity around that thing,” Luthor said.

  “One phone call from Dimarin will get a hoard of carbon agents to keep people away,” Vika said. “The only people that will notice it are the few Markless who saw it happen.”

  “And who’s going to believe a Markless?” Bill said. “Just one more conspiracy theory that everyone but me will discount. I’m telling you, the things that this government has covered up… It would make your skin crawl.”

  The anchor continued. “… tragic news tonight that hits very close to home for us here in at USNN Chicago. One of our longest tenured producers, Cathy Bernal was found murdered in her home tonight. She was dead before emergency crews arrived. Cathy has been working for USNN since it was founded, nearly 20 years ago.”

  Images of carps and emergency workers combing through the aftermath of the gruesome crime played across the screen. “We now go to the scene, with Tom Bishop.”

  A man about William’s age held a microphone in slightly wavering hands, apparently shaken by the events. The high-rise where Bernal lived loomed behind him. “This is a terrible tragedy for anyone who has relied on USNN for their news. Early this afternoon, Bernal appeared to be the victim of a robbery gone wrong. The perpetrators broke into her home while she was still there. After a struggle, she wound up dead, but there are two other blood samples recovered by Chicago’s finest. After cross-referencing with the CPI database, it should be possible to identify her assailants.”

  He paused and dabbed his eye with a handkerchief.

  “Somebody needs to punch that guy in the balls,” Bill said.

  “Why?” asked Qwiz.

  “So he’d have some
real tears to sop up. My son would never fake something so badly for the camera.”

  “Many expensive items were stolen and her apartment was ransacked. Unexpectedly, 2180 was found tagged on her door. The investigators suggested it is likely a retaliatory strike by terrorist Luthor Tenrel for the USNN exposè on his crimes earlier this week.”

  Luthor threw up his hands. “I have no words.”

  “Stalker thought of everything, didn’t he?” Qwiz said.

  “He managed to murder my boss and get the carps to blame it on 2180.” William grabbed his side in pain, “it’s all my fault! If I had been more careful, she wouldn’t have died.”

  “It wasn’t your fault,” Tanya said. “She is the one who made the call, not you.”

  “But it was my story she was getting permission for! If I hadn’t told her, she would still be alive. And for that matter, I wouldn’t have been shot!”

  “I’m sorry,” Bill said, a tear leaking down his cheek, “I should have never gotten you involved.”

  Tanya felt for the strangely loveable old man. He had been trying for years to reunite with his son and right when things were beginning to turn around in their relationship, William’s leg did an unwilling impersonation of William Tell’s apple. It had been one polluted day.

  “Dad, believe it or not, I don’t think a whole bunch of Sabers breaking into our safehouse is your fault.” Bill patted his son on the arm.

  “No, it’s my fault,” Luthor said.

  “Don’t say that—” Tanya began, but Luthor cut her off.

  “If you want to trace this back to its inception, and assign real blame, then it has to go to me. You see, I didn’t die in Antarctica like I was supposed to.”

  “Damn it, Tenrel. Don’t talk nonsense,” Bill said.

  “Not nonsense. You see, if I had died like smogging General Stutzman intended, I wouldn’t have been alive to discover how to make 126. And I sure as hell wouldn’t have the motivation to give it away to the world.”

  “Fault is irrelevant,” Vika said, “this is pointless.”