* * * * *
Chapter 4
Early Morning, Friday, May 3
Private Spaceship Azanti
Approximately 400 miles above San Diego, CA
Alex had hoped that with the addition of more advanced alien components, the Azanti would be more controllable. It wasn’t. It was still like trying to fly an F-18 with oven mitts on his hands and beer goggles over his eyes. Clearly, the alien drive was designed to be operated with a considerable amount of automation. The last thing he wanted was to accidentally end up going faster than light again, so he played the controls as lightly as he could.
Once they reached orbit, it took hours to find the supercarrier. He’d thought it would be easy, but he’d made the rookie mistake of not following the bearings he’d gotten from the ground. By the time he realized his mistake, they were hundreds of kilometers up and had to resort to Mark 1 Eyeball reconnaissance. The radar didn’t work through the damn forcefield. He made a note for the engineers.
The first spotting turned out to be a false alarm—a big old satellite they’d almost plowed right into. After that he took the time to really look at a target before heading toward it. By the time they actually located the ship, sunlight had covered the coast of California far below.
He overshot his first approach and had to circle back, slower this time. When he finally got the Azanti within a kilometer of the Ford, the ship’s clock said they’d been in the vessel for seven hours. He took his hands from the controls and sighed, rubbing his eyes and massaging the bridge of his nose.
“Tired?” Patty asked.
“You know it,” he replied.
“Shoulda gotten sleep before we went up,” Alison suggested.
“The longer we waited, the more likely someone on the Ford would have pulled the plug to see what would happen,” Alex replied.
Patty took the little telescope Jeremiah Osborne had loaned them from his swank office and focused it on the floating aircraft carrier. She snorted and shook her head. “It’s like something out of a Japanese cartoon.”
“Anime,” Alison corrected. Patty glared at her. “Japanese animated shows are called anime.”
“Whatever,” Patty mumbled as she focused again. “It’s just hovering there, in the water,” she said. “Like a ship in a bottle.”
“Any signs of life?” Alex asked her.
She moved the telescope back and forth with tiny movements as she examined the ship. “I don’t think so…wait, yes, I can see colors moving around.”
“Deck crew,” Alex said. “They haven’t tried turning the drive off and on or anything.”
“Wouldn’t the water be gone if they had, even for a second?” Alison asked.
“How am I supposed to know? This alien shit makes no sense to me.”
“Woah!” Patty suddenly said.
“What?” Alex asked.
“Something exploded right next to the carrier.”
“Inside with it?” Alison asked.
“No,” Patty said. “Outside.”
“Maybe a satellite,” Alex said. “Any signs of damage to the carrier?” Patty said no. “Then we can’t worry about it right now.” He took a breath and resumed the controls. “Okay,” he said. “Here we go.” He mumbled curses under his breath as he moved the joystick ever so gently, pushing the forward velocity control upward. As they zoomed toward the carrier, it grew at an alarming rate.
“Shit!” Patty cried.
Alex moved the control to neutral, and they instantly stopped. He guessed they were less than a hundred meters away. “Okay,” he said. “Now that we’re closer, Alison, can you fix the stupid sensitivity?”
“It was fine until they hooked the drive module to the cluster,” Alison said and opened the little metallic box that housed the flight control systems. “We need a more sensitive potentiometer. I’ll turn this one all the way down.”
“Keep an eye on the systems while I see if I can raise anyone,” Alex told Patty. She nodded and settled into the task. Alex put on his headset and keyed in the common fleet frequency. They’d tried contacting them just before taking off, but they received terse warnings from other US warships about not using the frequency.
“USS Gerald R. Ford, this is private spacecraft Azanti calling in the open. Do you read? Over.”
“Private spacecraft?” Patty asked, laughing.
“What the fuck would you call us?”
“Alien technological kludge,” Alison replied.
“Doesn’t have the same ring to it,” Alex said under his breath, then repeated the call. On the third try, he got a reply.
“USS Gerald R. Ford, who is this?”
“We’re a privately owned spacecraft, operated by OOE. You know, the ones you stole the key drive full of data from? The key drive which let you fucking idiots accidentally stick an aircraft carrier in orbit? Get me the captain, and we might be able to get you back on the water in one piece.”
He must have struck pay dirt, because the radio was silent for over five minutes. Finally, a stern sounding, confident man, not the younger person he’d spoken to before, came on the radio.
“This is Commander Tobias, XO on the Ford. Who am I speaking to?”
“This is Captain Alex West, on the Azanti.”
“I don’t recognize the ship’s name, but I do recognize your’s. You were with the group who brought the artifacts aboard.”
“If you mean the alien spaceships, you are correct.”
“What else did you do while you were here?”
“I flew the C-17 off the deck using one of the alien drive modules. Probably the one you foolishly hooked to the ship’s superstructure which turned the carrier into a spaceship.”
“I wish I could say you were mistaken. Sadly, I cannot. Captain Gilchrist sends his regards, but he is unavailable at this time.”
“If he can’t talk, we’ve got a problem. It would behoove you to be frank with me, Commander.”
The line was silent for a time, then Tobias came back. “We’re having reactor problems. Bad ones. We are afraid it’s linked to the alien drive.”
“Don’t turn it off!” Alex said loudly.
“We’ve been warned,” Tobias said, his voice sounding sour. “It’s a long story, but we threw the idiot who did this in the brig after he screwed around with the thing without talking to anyone.”
“What a moron,” Alicia said.
Alex glanced back and noticed her working on the control panel, while it was live, and shook his head. What would some alien think if they could see you now?
“How can we help you?” Alex asked. “You’ve been up here a long time, so we guessed you’re at a loss.”
“We are. Since we borrowed your notes, can you help us better understand how to operate the interface?”
“Borrowed,” Alison growled.
Alex waved her off and replied. “We have remote video capabilities. Hold on, our electronics engineer, Alison McDill, will provide the video connection details.”
“Looks like we have another eight hours of life support,” Patty said. “Hope you guys can figure things out by then.”
“I’m not sure we have that long,” Alex said and pointed. Inside the invisible globe where the Ford floated, the water next to the hull was boiling. Clearly, something was desperately wrong with the warship. Time was running out.
* * *
Morning, Friday, May 3
Somewhere Over North Texas
Ann Benedict had stopped crying sometime in the last hour and finally fell into a slumber in Nicole Price’s arms. The survivors of the group who had saved Vance looked devastated. He had been their leader, the one who’d kept them alive through a combination of ingenuity and resourcefulness Cobb had seldom seen. The man would have made a wonderful army officer. He commanded respect and loyalty, which he rewarded by sacrificing himself at a critical moment.
Cobb had shot the former leader when Strain Delta took him. He could see the crushing burden on the fac
es of the other survivalists, so he lifted it from their shoulders. After all, Cobb hadn’t known the man more than a few days. It had been long enough for him to learn to respect Vance, and it was with that respect that he pulled the trigger and watched the body drop into the night.
The sun lit the big Texas sky for them. A few clouds drifted by lazily, not far above them. Cobb wasn’t a pilot, but he guessed the ship’s height was around 5,000 feet—high enough that it was cooler, on the verge of chilly. It felt like the time he’d taken a hot air balloon ride with his late wife.
Damn it. He wished he hadn’t thought about Jen. He hadn’t thought about her in days. Lately he’d thought more about Kathy than his late wife, and it bothered him. Jen had only been gone some two years. The memory of her wasting away from late stage breast cancer was one of the most painful in his life. Seeing Kathy fly away on a C-17 while he sat on the ground in a Stryker armored combat vehicle battled for supremacy with his other painful memories.
His time with Jen had been measured in decades, his time with Kathy in days. Still, his feelings for both were strong. The reporter had found her way into his heart far faster than he’d thought possible. Not a single woman had interested him after Jen passed, until Kathy. She’d hit him like a lightning bolt out of the blue. Now, she was probably dead.
Flying to the west coast had been a desperation move. Shortly after the armada of planes left, he’d tried repeatedly to reach another unit with his army radio. Any unit. It was like they’d all disappeared. So, he’d driven his Stryker west with the silly idea of reaching her. He made it all of 150 of the 1,700 miles before everything had gone to shit.
“I knew Vance for almost 20 years.”
Cobb looked up from his ruminations at Bisdorf who was standing next to him. “Don’t you have to fly this thing?”
Bisdorf looked confused, then shook his head. “Naw, you just set the direction and the speed. We have a couple of electronics whiz kids who McGuyvered up some modifications to the plans we intercepted.” The big man shrugged, then grinned an infectious smile. “It’s pretty damned amazing, especially since they figured out the forcefield.”
“I’m sorry, the what?”
“Forcefield,” Bisdorf repeated. “Like Star Trek. Light and radio waves go right through it, but bullets and bombs don’t.” He got a queer look on his face. “No air, either…isn’t that strange?”
“Strange doesn’t explain it,” Cobb said. “Why don’t you explain it to me?”
Bisdorf relayed a story about how they’d intercepted the radio transmission about the alien ships, where they were located, and how to take them apart. Cobb had heard some of it before Vance succumbed to the plague. Hearing it again put things in context. Then Bisdorf dropped a bomb.
“We’ve recovered six of the alien ships so far, and we found a dead alien on one of them. When we hooked up with a someone who’d been doing work for the CDC, he said they think the plague came from an alien on one of those ships.”
“No shit,” Cobb said. “An alien zombie plague?”
“Yup,” Bisdorf said. He tried to look serious, but he was grinning.
Crazy bastard thought it was cool. “You can’t make this stuff up.” Bisdorf shook his head. “So, what kind of safe place do you have? Must be hard to keep the infected away.”
“Not as hard as you’d think,” the other man said and pointed. “There it is. We call it Shangri-La.”
Cobb followed the other man’s arm and saw what he thought was an optical illusion. A strange shimmer on the northern horizon. Over the next minute, his eyes adjusted to the light, and he realized it wasn’t an optical illusion; something was hovering over the Texas sky. The sun, still low in the east, was reflecting off multiple surfaces, making it hard to focus.
“What is it?” he asked.
“You might call it a junkyard. Except, junkyards don’t fly.”
Cobb grunted and continued to watch. “Can’t we go faster?”
“We’ve had a hard time controlling the speed. Almost ended up in space once, so now we keep it under 200 mph.”
“We’re going 200 miles per hour?”
“Yeah,” he said. “Remember the forcefield I mentioned? I can turn it on and off.” Birdorf showed Cobb the controls, which appeared to be using an Xbox controller and a video game throttle body. The forcefield sounded like sci-fi, except Cobb could see the ground whizzing by a couple thousand feet below, and he felt absolutely no air flow.
“How can we breathe? Does air go through it?”
“No,” Bisdorf replied. “I have to shut the shield off every hour.” He showed Cobb his watch with a timer running down. “Of course, I have to slow down first. Almost tore the damned pilot cabin off the other day!”
“This isn’t real.”
“My best friend is dead,” Tim Price, who’d come up during the discussion, said. “It’s pretty damned real to me.”
Cobb had forgotten the group who’d rescued him were long-time friends. Vance might not have been a soldier, but he’d inspired his friends to follow him. He’d managed to keep them alive in the middle of a fucking zombie plague. Cobb had lost his whole Stryker crew, and they’d all been experienced combat vets.
In the time they’d been talking, Shangri-La had come much closer. It had more shape and definition. In particular, Cobb could see that it was primarily constructed from Conex cargo containers. Hundreds, no, thousands of them. They formed the base of the structure. On top was a fleet of mobile homes and trailers, both bumper-pull and big fifth wheels. There were buses, cars, trucks with campers, semi-trailer style bunkhouses, and a big paddle wheel boat.
“That’s got to be the craziest assortment of vehicles I’ve ever seen,” Harry Ross said. The big former Marine had joined them in the cockpit to observe the approaching spectacle.
“How many of those…” Cobb struggled to say it. “…those alien drives does it take to keep it in the air?”
“One,” Bisdorf said. Cobb gawked at him, and Bisdorf nodded. “I know, right? Yeah, just one. Since we don’t have to worry about zombies, we don’t bother with a shield. Just a drive, and it’s run by a solar panel and a lithium ion battery.”
“Take a lot of voltage?” Tim asked.
“I think 12 volts, less than an amp.”
By now, they were less than a mile away, and their host was slowing his flying houseboat. It was obvious Shangri-La was bigger than an aircraft carrier. Longer, wider, and thicker. Cobb guessed two or three times bigger, in fact. He thought it was floating about 500 feet above the countryside and was slowly moving north. A series of five cranes had been mounted around the perimeter of the roughly wedge-shaped craft.
“What are the cranes for?” Tim asked, voicing Cobb’s question while he struggled with what he was seeing.
“Salvage, of course.” Bisdorf pointed. They could see a lot of people now. “We have over 2,000 people to feed, after all.”
“Who’s in charge?” Cobb asked.
“Ann Taylor,” Bisdorf said.
“You mean…”
“Yeah, the Lieutenant Governor of Texas. We picked her up a few days ago from the top of a building in Austin. She had some staff and a bunch of state patrol officers with her.”
“Tough broad,” Cobb said. “I voted for her.”
“Vance didn’t like the way she kept pushing for an income tax,” Tim said. “But she was firm on guns.” He chuckled and shrugged. “With Vance it was always all or nothing.”
They were only a few hundred yards away, so Bisdorf slowed to a crawl. Cobb could see everything now, and the dizzying variety of construction made him speechless. The base was five containers thick, and some of the top was built from tankers. They were situated in groups with tubes connecting them and running off to huge generators, which were also mounted on Conex bases. “Whoever put the thing together was a damned genius.”
“A lot of containers,” Tim said.
“Metric shit ton,” Harry agreed. “All empty, I p
resume?”
“Oh no,” Bisdorf said. “Most are full. We loaded up in Houston after we had the basic structure, which came from a container yard in San Antonio. One of our people worked for customs; he had files on almost every container in the south—where it was and what was in it. We’ve been working non-stop to fill all the containers with canned or preserved food which was manufactured more than two months ago. I think we have a billion packages of ramen noodles!”
“I like ramen,” Tim said.
“You won’t in a couple weeks,” Bisdorf said and winked at him. “We have a couple dozen refrigerated containers with beef, pork, and chicken.” The other three men looked at him in alarm. “It’s from China, and we checked the date. All butchered months ago. But we have someone from the CDC office in Corpus Christi who developed a test for the virus.”
“Wow, amazing,” Cobb said. “Never heard about it in the military.”
“You wouldn’t have; they only worked it out a few days ago.”
“I think I need to talk to the governor,” Cobb said.
“Why?” Bisdorf asked.
“I’m a US Army colonel, reactivated, and I know where a whole lot of soldiers were heading.”
Bisdorf stared at him for a second, then nodded. “Okay. Let’s land, and I’ll take you to her.”
* * *
Private Spaceship Azanti
Approximately 400 miles above San Diego, CA
“Well, that was a bad idea,” Alison said, holding a bandage to her bleeding forehead.
“Certainly a surprise,” Patty agreed.
“Can we keep the seat belts locked from now on?” Alex asked.
Alison nodded. “The stupid fake gravity was rock solid for half a light year away and back, why did it choose to go ape shit when I wasn’t buckled in?”
“We hit the carrier’s field,” Alex said. “At least I think we did.”
After talking with the Ford for a time they were unable to walk the sailor in charge through the process of fixing the Ford’s alien drive. Chief Kuntzleman was knowledgeable, as were the two sailors helping him, Seaman Bond and Seaman Apprentice Dodd, however they couldn’t figure out what was wrong.
Turning Point (Book 3): A Time To Live Page 9
