Gao remained impassive. “Yes, ma’am.”
Fan nodded. “You may have to shoot down Chinese citizens again today, but this time, they’ll be shooting back. Do you understand?”
Gao stood more sternly at attention. “Yes, ma’am!”
“Good. Let’s get these copters fueled and gone.”
Moments later, Fan returned to her copter.
Julissa asked, “How did it go?”
Fan reconnected her helmet. “Well, I think. We shall soon see.”
As the copters approached Beijing with Gao’s squadron flying top cover, a harsh voice blared over Gao’s radio. “Peel off or die.”
At that moment, Gao’s infrared sensors picked up a dozen targets just lighting their afterburners. Gao shook his head at no one in particular. His Identification Friend or Foe said, of course, Friend. If they got into a firefight, it would be a disaster of the first order. “Stand down,” he barked back. “Fire and be fired upon. If we don’t get to the city, twenty million people will die.”
The voice continued sternly. “You leave me no choice.”
Gao listened as his systems sounded a soft alarm when targeting radars zeroed in on him and his people. “Furthermore, unless you’ve re-established contact with the Joint Battle Command bunker, I have the only surviving member of the Politburo flying with me.”
Gao could virtually hear the other pilot hesitate. He pushed the opening. “Form up in front of me and clear the way, or our whole society will fall.”
As Gao was about to start lighting up his targeting radars, the other captain shut his down.
And on they soared.
The copters spread out in a not-too-ragged line on the outskirts of Beijing and started spraying the city with a fine mist. Matt had dropped another cargo capsule filled with antivirals for a second pass, much to the further consternation of the Air Force, on the north side of Beijing. Fan got involved in a yelling match with a general who wanted to drop a nuke on the BrainTrust spaceport ship that had launched it. Miraculously, the capsule landed, and no ICBMs took off.
Julissa dropped Fan’s copter out of the line as they approached the city center and landed in the designated traffic circle where she was supposed to meet the colonel in charge of the quarantine. This time Julissa spoke almost as if she were making a demand of her mistress. “Fan, you must keep your helmet on this time.” She gulped. “Please. You’re the only leadership we have left.”
Fan pursed her lips and changed the topic. “You keep yours on whatever happens, understand?” Annoyingly, Fan had become fond of the girl over the nearly two years since Jam had left the Fuxing and Julissa had started working for her. Fan said as much to herself as to Julissa, “You’re the only pilot I have left.” With that, Fan hopped once more from the copter.
The colonel was nowhere in sight, but trouble could be seen in plenty. As she watched, a family came out of a corner grocery store, knowingly breaking the martial law curfew, trying with comical futility to sneak down the street.
Fan ran toward them, yelling and waving, “Get back inside! Back inside!”
The father looked at the moonsuited figure and blanched. It was impossible for him to know she was the Acting President, but he recognized authority nonetheless and dragged his family back into the store.
Fan chastised herself for not having a better command to give, muttering, “Great. Now they’ll infect anybody else in the building.”
She started to turn and saw a street urchin, undoubtedly a hukou peasant in the city illegally, probably waiting for her father or mother to return with some scraps of food to the alley where she sat. Fan approached her, and she leapt up to run. Again Fan yelled. “Get inside!”
The little girl looked around wildly, then jumped into the dumpster a few feet farther down the alley.
Fan stood still, fighting the desire to scream and cry at the same time. Twenty-five million people, and she had just done her best to help five of them. All five would probably die, though.
She heard a truck behind her and turned to yell at whoever was driving to get inside.
But the truck was Army. It stopped a few feet away from her, and a colonel jumped down from the passenger’s side. “Member Liu ?”
When she nodded, he snapped off a salute. “ My name is Colonel Zhang. I have set up roadblocks and checkpoints throughout the city. My men have orders to shoot to kill anyone who breaks quarantine. All residents are being told to shelter in place, wherever they may be.”
Fan saluted back as best she could in the moonsuit. “Excellent work, Colonel. Have you heard anything more from the command bunker?”
The colonel cocked his head. “Could you repeat that, please?”
The damn helmet was acting like a muffler. Fan once again controlled the urge to scream.
More than a dozen soldiers, perhaps two dozen, now stood around her, listening to her while looking in every direction in case a threat to the Acting President arose.
Fan fought off a sense of dizziness. They all stood there in their uniforms, inhaling air saturated with the Sky Rubola and the cocktail that didn’t really kill the virus; it merely made the virus vulnerable, so the UV radiation flooding the city from space could kill it, too late for any of these men.
Yet the colonel and his men were still here on the streets protecting the city, protecting her, knowing they were already dead.
Could Dr. Dash cure this disease before it killed everyone here? Might the cocktail and the UV irradiation have made this section of the city safe at this point? Fan muttered Lenora’s words. “True leadership requires risks.”
She pulled off her helmet.
The colonel gasped in dismay. “Ma’am. Please put your helmet back on. It’s too dangerous out here.”
Fan glared at him and sucked in a lungful of the contaminated air.
The air felt thick with moisture—not the Sky Rubola, which settled in too fine a mist to be tasted, but the cocktail spread by the copters in a dense pattern.
Colonel Zhang saw her breathe the mist and asked hopefully, “Is the mist a cure? Might we have a chance to…” He forced himself to choke off the next words.
Fan shook her head sadly. “I’m afraid it’s not that simple,” she said more sympathetically than was perhaps appropriate for the Acting President. The thickness of the air encouraged her, however, for her own sake. Though the mist had come too late for these men, it had undoubtedly stripped the local airborne Rubola of its UV protection, and if the SpaceR satellites were working as planned, perhaps this square had been blasted clean.
Hope was always a good thing.
Colonel Zhang went back to the topic at hand. “What else can we do, ma’am?”
Fan hardly had time to consider the question before her phone rang with an unknown number. She struggled with the suit to get her headset to take the call. “Yes?”
An older male voice answered her. “The President for Life would like to speak with you.”
Fan practically wept with relief. “Hallelujah. Put him on.” The Chinese President for Life was elderly but spry and sharp as a tack. He was Fan’s model of what she wanted to be when she grew up: ruthless and cunning, with pragmatism of such calculating coldness that practicality was his only moral code.
The phone connected to a new voice—a slow, cynical voice that sounded nothing like the President. “Fan. So glad you’re still alive.”
Fan’s eyes bulged when she heard her ex-boyfriend’s voice. “Guang! What’re you doing on this line? He said he’d put me through to the President!”
Guang paused for a moment before he drawled, “Yeah, well. I’m here in the bunker, and almost everybody’s dead or dying. You know my dad is—was—the third member of the Standing Committee.”
Fan felt another sinking sensation when Guang confirmed her sudden fears. “Well, I seem to be the highest-ranking survivor. Congratulate me; I guess I’m the new President for Life.”
Fan breathed in the stew of chemicals and vi
ruses of the Beijing air and tried to order her thoughts. The size of the disaster for China was too overwhelming to grasp. She focused on something personal. “My parents?”
Guang hesitated, almost as if he could feel sympathy for another person. “I’m sorry.” As she digested this, he continued. “On the bright side, you inherit the position. You’re an official member of the Politburo now, so I guess congratulations are in order for you, too.”
Fan’s head throbbed. How had Guang survived, of all people? It could have been just a wild statistical anomaly, of course. But on reflection…Guang had always been as skinny as a bean pole, no matter how much he ate, no matter what he ate, no matter how he indulged himself. Could he have a genetic characteristic that made him look to the virus like he suffered from malnutrition, despite everything?
As the throbbing in her head grew, she wondered for a moment if it was a symptom of Sky Rubola. She forcefully insisted to herself that it was just Guang. She realized his capacity for being insufferable had just been jacked up beyond what the human mind could comprehend.
Guang interrupted her thoughts. “Hey, I’ve got a great idea. We’re short-handed here. How would you like to be on the Standing Committee? You can be number two.”
Another voice came over the phone, muffled. “You can’t really do that,” the voice offered with great deference.
Fan could practically hear Guang roll his eyes. “You hear that? He’s the Standing Committee’s legal counsel. We had over a thousand people down here, only a couple dozen are still alive, and wouldn’t you know? One of them had to be a lawyer.”
The phone crackled as Guang did something. “Colonel, would you please shoot this idiot?”
The sound of a gunshot echoed from the bunker to her phone. Guang spoke with satisfaction. “So much better. A little peace and quiet at last. Colonel, you’re a general now. You okay with that?”
After a muttered, “Yes, sir,” Guang turned his attention back to Fan. “There. So, you’re now number two on the Standing Committee. Where are you? Can you make it here to the bunker?”
Fan swallowed hard. “I’m in central Beijing, organizing the quarantine. Colonel Zhang here has it pretty well set up, and we’re forcing everybody to stay in their homes.” At least, she thought, I’m forcing the ones with homes to go to to stay there.
Guang sounded shocked. “Downtown Beijing? In the middle of the infected area? Are you mad?”
A couple of soldiers were herding a gaggle of thin, dirty children down the street. More hukou peasants.
Fan frowned and answered Guang distractedly. “Remember, I came from the BrainTrust. They stuck me in a moonsuit before they let me leave.”
Guang sounded relieved. “Thank the ancestors.”
A moment of perverse contrarian humor made Fan respond, “But I couldn’t talk to Colonel Zhang with it on, so I pulled the helmet off.” She chuckled. “Be glad you’re not here. If you thought the air of Beijing was polluted before, you should try it now.”
Guang responded, “So you are mad. Fan, get out of there now! And put your goddam helmet back on! That’s an order from your President for Life and your boyfriend!”
Down the street, the soldiers had broken out ration packs and were offering candy bars to the not-quite-emaciated children.
She suddenly understood how to save the city. “Guang, gotta go,” she replied as she hung up on the President for Life.
She started running down the street toward the soldiers, shouting, “Colonel Zhang, come with me!” She turned back to the soldiers. “Halt! Do not give those children food!”
The soldiers froze in amazed alarm. The children, looking at the candy with hollow eyes filled with hope, turned and looked at her in horror.
When they were all together, the colonel gazed at her with a certain amount of horror as well. “You would have us let these children starve?”
Fan shook her head. “Don’t starve them to death. Starve them almost to death.” She stepped back to address the soldiers. “The virus only kills those who don’t suffer from malnutrition. Colonel Zhang, you are hereby ordered to prevent as many people as possible from eating for at least the next forty-eight hours.”
Colonel Zhang showed remarkably fast uptake. “Yes, ma’am. My soldiers as well, I presume?”
Fan smiled. “Very good, Colonel.” She spoke loudly enough to ensure everyone heard. “If you see a soldier sneaking a bite of food, shoot him.” She looked at the men. “If you go symptomatic with this virus, getting shot will seem like mercy, believe me.”
She looked down at the children. “You can give them water while I’m figuring this out.”
As the soldiers moved to obey, she conferenced Lena and Chance on her phone. “Dr. Chance, are these children suffering sufficient malnutrition to be immune to the virus?” She waved her camera over the kids with their new water bottles.
Chance answered after a moment. “They’re probably safe. You still shouldn’t let them have anything to eat for the next couple of days, though.”
Fan continued to sweep her camera. “What about the men?”
Chance answered doubtfully, “I just don’t know if fasting will help them, Fan. We might be too late.”
Fan snapped off the camera. “Any better ideas?”
Chance sighed. Then her voice came through harsh and decisive. “Do it. Starve the city. It might work well, despite my doubts. It will certainly work for some of them, and it can’t hurt.”
Fan shifted her attention. “Lenora, can you work with Chance to get a module into Accel that will teach people how much fasting to do to be safe without starving to death?”
Lenora replied, “Already got people standing by to work on whatever you need.”
Fan smiled. “You saw where this was going. Excellent. I want that module and the Accel app on every phone in this city.”
Fan tried to visualize Lenora saluting, but the image broke down quickly since Fan knew Lenora would never do that.
Lenora continued hesitantly, “Ah, Fan, my module authors earn their keep with royalties from usage. You’re talking about twenty million users for that module.”
Fan laughed. “Of course. Send me the bill. The Politburo will pay for it.”
Lenora sounded surprised. “You’ve got their authorization?”
Fan’s laughter took on a hysterical edge. “I’m number two on the Standing Committee.”
This gave Lenora considerable pause. “Number two? Who’s number one?”
Fan winced. “Guang.”
This made Lenora take an even longer pause. “Omigod.”
Fan shook her head. “It’s under control for now. Prioritize.”
Chance interrupted. “Lenora, I’ll hook up with you when this ends. Let’s see if we can get a module out there today.”
Lenora assented, and they both hung up.
Fan turned to Zhang. “You heard the expert. Starve everyone, yourself included.” She smiled. “Who knows? You and I may yet survive.” She pointed down the street at the store she’d commanded a family into earlier. “Start there. Toss the food into the street. Keep the people inside. Explain to them that eating will kill them.”
As Zhang’s soldiers hustled into the store, Zhang started radioing orders to his troops all over the city.
What else was there for Fan to do? She went back to where she’d landed and opened the dumpster where the first child she’d found had hidden. “Get out,” she demanded.
The little girl got out. She stared at the ground, trembling.
Fan rolled her eyes and knelt on the ground next to the girl. “Go join the children down there. We won’t have anything for you to eat for a couple of days—” Or maybe they would, Fan thought. This one might be close enough to starvation that she could safely eat something now. “But then we’ll have a feast.”
The little girl looked at her uncertainly. Fan pointed down the street, and the girl ran off obediently.
As Fan stood up, she muttered to hersel
f. “Of all the people I’ve met here, she’s the only one I’m sure will survive.” She exhaled hard. “The first of the next generation of Beijing residents. I should probably make it legal for her to be here.”
Her phone buzzed at her again. Guang’s voice chewed her out. “Fan! Did you just cut me off?”
Fan blew out a breath. “I’m trying to save the city.”
“Yeah, sure, but what about me? I need you here.”
For just a moment, Fan considered flying to the bunker and shooting Guang herself. She had a sinking feeling that if she didn’t do it now, she’d have to do it later.
Prioritize. “Guang, I’m already infected. My best shot at surviving is to go back to the BrainTrust and get the cure as soon as they’ve got it.”
Guang grumbled but let her go.
One more interruption impeded her progress. Colonel Zhang approached her, more diffidently than before. “Ma’am, you’re from the Fuxing fleet, is that correct?”
Fan raised an eyebrow. “Quite right, Colonel. I’m going there as soon as I can get disentangled from here.”
Zhang winced. “Do you happen to know a woman named Jam? A commando?”
Fan blinked. This was unexpected. “How do you know Jam, Colonel?”
He looked into the distance. “I met her when she flew the village of Baotong to the BrainTrust. A remarkable woman.”
Fan smiled. “That she is.”
Zhang squared his shoulders. “I was wondering if you could pass her a message. Tell her I found the rest of the teacups. I would be happy to present them to her if she desires.”
Fan suppressed a laugh. Was the colonel caught in the toils of romance? How did she feel about such an interest, anyway? The colonel here was clearly brave and good and deserving of a fine woman. Jam, of course, was also brave and good and deserving of the best. Despite that, she couldn’t see it.
On the other hand, she clearly wasn’t the right person to offer an opinion, having taken on Guang as a boyfriend.
Fan looked at him sternly. “Come to the BrainTrust and tell her yourself, Colonel. After this crisis has ended. If we survive.”
Braintrust- Requiem Page 9
