At the End of the World

by Charles E Gannon

  “Sounds like we go in by river, then,” Steve observed.

  “Yes. If we can.”

  Jeeza raised an eyebrow. “And what, exactly, does that mean?”

  Prospero sighed. “It means that Kourou is no different from any other place on this planet; we have no way of knowing how much it has changed, or how much damage has been done.”

  Rod was staring at the map. “So how big is French Guiana’s third biggest city?”

  Prospero’s prominent Adam’s apple bobbed. “Just over twenty-five thousand.”

  The table was silent. Then Jeeza shook her head and said, “That’s insane.”

  Prospero looked puzzled. “You think the population estimate is incorrect?”

  “No, I think the idea of going there at all is nuts! God only knows how many stalkers are still prowling around. Probably still in packs.”

  Even Chloe looked worried. “Damn, I’m not even sure we have enough bullets. Assuming we could bait them all to us. Which doesn’t seem likely.”

  Rod was frowning. “Man, I dunno, Prospero. When you said the ESA facility was remote, I was imagining that it was, you know, out in the boonies. But this…” He looked at the map; the little rocket-ship symbol was right next to the red circle denoting Kourou. “It looks like we’d have to go through Stalker Central to get there.”

  Prospero cleared his throat. “The percentage of surviving infected might be considerably lower than we expect.”

  “Why’s that?”

  “Because, as I told you at the outset, the Third Regiment of the French Foreign Legion was permanently assigned to ensure the security of the launch facility. Logically, they would have inflicted heavy losses on any stalker hordes.”

  Chloe sneered. “You mean the way the military units on Ascension Island took care of business there? The same units that actually became the majority of the stalkers we had to deal with? The same kind of units that weren’t able to stop the stalkers anywhere in the whole world? You mean those military units?”

  Prospero looked at me, desperate.

  I shrugged. “She’s right. Nothing indicates that military units were any less susceptible to the virus than civilian communities. They probably spread it more than they contained it; they were engaging the infected at close range before anyone understood just how easily the virus was transmitted.”

  “But if we don’t help preserve the GPS sys—”

  I held up a hand. “Prospero, why are you bringing up Kourou now?”

  He blinked like an owl. “Isn’t that why you initiated the CQC training? To improve mission readiness?”

  I could have kicked myself. “Yes, eventually. But look at what happened at Fernando de Noronha. And that was a cake walk compared to what we’ll run into at Kourou.

  “I’m not saying we shouldn’t continue to plan for the mission”—Jeeza looked at me like I had lost my mind; she might have been right—“but look around.” I indicated the table. “Six of us. Yeah, we’ve got more guns, better armor and are eating a damn sight better than we were four weeks ago. But against a city of twenty-five thousand? Without direct water access or a vehicle to plough through hordes of infected, how are we even going to get to the launch facility?”

  Prospero looked slightly grey. “So what are you saying?”

  “I’m saying we need to get more information—”

  “—It’s there in the folder,” he objected. “For anyone to look—”

  But I didn’t stop: “—and we need more resources. Maybe we’ll find the access is easy. Or protected, like a tunnel. Or maybe we’ll find a working armored personnel carrier in our travels. Or there will be some other change in the tactical equation. Because I am still sold on the importance of going to Kourou. I am convinced that keeping GPS alive may be a crucial factor in keeping humanity alive. But as we are today?” I shook my head. “Until things change, we have no way forward. For now, this is the end of the line: we have to table Ephemeral Reflex.”

  Prospero just nodded, didn’t try any other arguments. I suspect he understood why I had jumped in and closed down the discussion: the longer the debate continued, the more the others were going to dig in against the plan. In the end, they might have turned their backs on it permanently. That’s what happens when you push people to agree with you when they’ve already decided they don’t. They just become more and more opposed. And frankly, the mission to Kourou didn’t just seem impossible; it sounded like suicide.

  An alarm rang up in the pilot house. Rod reached over and powered up the radio; time to do our daily frequency sweep.

  I looked around the table. Nothing but long faces. And I knew there was no way to ease the pain of the wound we’d just suffered.

  I don’t mean the bruising that any group gets from a sharp argument. I’m not even referring to the deeper cut of telling Prospero that, no, even though we’d agreed to take him to Kourou, we’d changed our minds—at least for now. No, we had just amputated, and thereby killed, our best hope for a fast track back to a better world.

  There had never been any argument about whether GPS was as important as Prospero said it was. I mean, how could there be? With it, you always knew where you were and got where you were going and avoided the places that you shouldn’t go near. Without it, you were blind in a world filled with the infected, which was simply a death sentence with an unknown date of execution.

  So in killing GPS, we’d killed all the unspoken hopes we’d placed in it. Sure, we might eventually find more people like us, and (if we could trust them) maybe one day we’d have the numbers, and the resources, to take on Kourou.

  Except, by then, GPS would be gone. Which I had purposely glossed over to preserve the one thing we did have left: us. A group of people who not only worked well with, but cared for, each other. But we wouldn’t have remained that way if we had kept arguing over whether or not to commit noble suicide by going to save GPS.

  Ending a meeting on a note of despair or defeat is a really bad idea, so after a few seconds of silence, I side-shifted topics: “In the meantime, we keep training for Kourou.” I turned to Steve. “Speaking of training, you are a bad mutha with a pistol. But you don’t even bother to tell us?”

  He shrugged. “I guess that’s why you call me Silent Steve.”

  Oops. He’d heard that?

  He smiled. “As nicknames go, it isn’t bad. I learned about pistols from my dad. At our cottage.” He shrugged. “We bonded over plinking. Sorta.” His smile became brittle. “I was a disappointment.”

  I didn’t know if he meant a disappointment as a marksman or more broadly. But that wasn’t my business, and even if it had been, it was hardly the time or place to ask.

  Instead, it was time to listen to this week’s Top Forty selection of static, automated distress beacons, and occasional coded exchanges that Prospero was sure were military. Sometimes we heard snatches of speech, but it was so garbled that we couldn’t even tell what language it was. On the one hand, it was nice to know that there were people alive beyond Ascension and St. Helena. But on the other hand, there was no way of telling if those people on the radio were potential friends or just more pirates like those we’d fought at Husvik.

  So we pretty much lost our shit when, precisely thirty minutes after the hour, we heard the pattern of squelch-breaks that was the “we’re okay” code we’d arranged with Willow.

  November 10 (second entry)

  “Damn,” Chloe breathed, “is the send-time correct—?”

  “It is,” I said.

  The squelch pattern repeated.

  Jeeza was literally biting her nails. “Aren’t you going to answer?”

  “Not yet,” I muttered. “It might not be them.”

  “Who else would it be?” Jeeza asked, nails forgotten.

  I swear, Chloe’s glower could be used as a weapon. “Maybe some bastard pirates. Maybe they followed behind the bunch we killed at Husvik. Could have tortured Willow and Johnnie, got the code. If so, they’re just tryi
ng to lure us back.”

  Prospero lifted his chin from where he’d rested it in his palm. “So let’s set a trap for them.”

  “A trap?” Steve asked. “How?”

  “By responding as they expect; we try to set up a rendezvous. But when we make the inevitable exchange of coordinates, we give a false string. In fact”—a malign grin slowly curled his lips—“if they are pirates, we might be able to trick them into making our lives a little easier.”

  “What do you mean?” Jeeza said with a frown.

  “You’ll see. For now, let’s just respond. Rod, would you do the honors?”

  Rod was already hovering near the radio; he jumped to comply.

  “Remember,” I warned, “If they’re pirates trying to con us, they won’t want us to go back to South Georgia. They’d have to be pretty desperate to wait that long.”

  Steve shrugged, gestured to the world around us. “You see any shortage of desperation lately?”

  “Fair point,” I nodded, discovering that my palms were sweaty. I could not afford to allow myself to believe that it was really, really Willow—and probably Johnnie, too. Because if it wasn’t them, it would be like scaling yet another high mountain of hope just to get pushed off. I wasn’t sure if I could handle that twice in one day. But if it was them? Oh, if it was, then—“Send the coded response, Rod.”

  He did so.

  We waited several seconds, and then Morse code started coming in. Fast.

  Way faster than Willow could signal. And Johnnie had never learned how.

  “It’s not them,” Jeeza whispered, her eyes growing red.

  Prospero, eyes closed as he listened, spoke the message aloud as it came in. “Authentication received. Please send secondary authentication.”

  “What?” said Rod. “There is no ‘secondary authentication.’”

  I nodded. “Send that.”

  He did.

  The dits and dahs streamed back at us. Prospero spoke each word as it completed. “‘Very good. Now, what’s my bra size?’” His left eyebrow curled sharply.

  We looked around at each other. Rod frowned. “How the hell would we kno—?”

  “34 B,” Chloe muttered. “We rotated laundry, remember? Guys, then girls? She was such a twig.”

  Rod, his own eyebrows raised, tapped that information in. A short wait—then a torrent of Morse code: “‘So it is you! Where are you? We are totally, totally overjoyed!’”

  Chloe rolled her eyes, but her voice was thick. “She is such a ditz.”

  “Yeah, a ditz who would have been a doctoral candidate by the time she was twenty-five,” Rod said, grinning. Then he saw my face, frowned, looked at Prospero’s, frowned more. “What? What’s wrong?”

  “Whoever is sending that signal hasn’t given us any way to verify that it is, indeed, Willow,” Prospero murmured like someone announcing a death in the family. “If they have her, they have her underwear.”

  Rod gulped, looked from him to me. “So—what do I send?”

  I glanced at Prospero. “What’s your plan for that trap?”

  His evil smile was back. “To get them do some of our work. At Kourou.”

  Rod looked shocked. I just smiled at Prospero. “Go to it, then.”

  Prospero dictated the message slowly, carefully. “Happy to hear you, too. In French Guiana. Currently four miles upriver from Kourou, anchored at safe-haven near ESA facility.”

  The silence after that send grew longer and longer still. I nodded at Prospero. “Nice try, though.”

  He shrugged. “It is, as you Yanks say, a ‘win-win.’ At this point they will either start shedding their charade or will ultimately stroll into Kourou and do some of our dirty work for us.”

  “It’s a long way to come,” Steve pointed out.

  “That assumes they’re still in South Georgia, rather than just a few days away.” He hooked a thumb at the radio. “We’ve no way to gauge range, much less direction.”

  Rod nodded—just as a new stream of signals gushed forth.

  Prospero translated. “‘Alvaro, you are being very silly. Ask us anything about you that we could reasonably answer. Or about anyone that is still’”—a long pause—“‘there.’”

  “How’s life at Husvik?”

  The reply was fast; you could almost hear the indignant, schoolmarm scolding: “Alvaro! We agreed never to send that word in the clear!”

  Prospero nodded at me. “Good strategy you two came up with. She could have given any normal answer and a captor would have no way of knowing that it was code signifying that she wasn’t speaking as a free agent.”

  I nodded. “But it’s not decisive.”

  Prospero shook his head. “No, it’s not. I can’t think of anything that would—”

  Jeeza got up. “Rod, send this very slowly. Big gaps between each word.”

  “Uh—okay. But why?”

  “Because you need to give her the chance to interrupt you.”

  “Huh?”

  “Rod, darling: just do it.”

  Rod nodded.

  Jeeza closed her eyes. “Willow. Do. You. Remember. What. You. Told. Me. About. The. First. Time. That. You. Saw. Johnnie. Naked?” Pause. “Do. You. Remember. What. You. Said. About. His—”

  The radio vomited out a rush of signals so swift that I couldn’t keep up with them—and I’m no slouch.

  But Prospero could, grinning as he went: “‘Stop right there, Jeeza! Choose another question. Anything.’” A pause. “‘Please.’”

  “No need for any more questions.” Jeeza opened her eyes, smiling like an impossibly smug Cheshire cat. “That was proof positive.” She noticed our curious stares and made an “ewwww!” face at us. “Private between the girls, jerks. Back off!”

  We made various placating gestures as Rod typed in Jeeza’s reply and then added his own flood of greetings, happiness, disbelief, and eagerness to rejoin—

  A sharp spurt of code interrupted him. “Further messaging in the clear is unwise. Our monitoring indicates various ships active your part of the world.”

  Our part of the world? I blinked. “Where—how—the hell did they get directional- and range-gauging comms?”

  Prospero nodded, but leaned closer to listen to the continuing message.

  “Sending three strings, using day of week codes. Choose one of the values to indicate closest location.”

  The strings started coming in. Prospero looked up. “I have no way to know what they mean. Is it—”

  “Hush,” I told him as I listened. “They’re sending coded coordinates.” We’d set up a cypher that used a changing mix of navigation, trig, and log tables, specific to different days of the week. That gave us one set of values that we then converted (using yet another day code) into latitude and longitude values. Chloe pulled out a paper and pencil and nav map. Rod jumped up to get the code books. But I could see the day’s tables floating in my mind. Sorta.

  I converted the tabular references. “Seven degrees fifty-six minutes south by fourteen degrees twenty-five minutes west.”

  Chloe slid the grid arms. “Ascension Island.”

  Jeeza nodded. “She and Johnnie knew we were headed there.”

  The next string was, “Fourteen degrees fifty-four minutes south by twenty-three degrees thirty minutes east.”

  Chloe had to move slightly to locate that one. “Further north. Cape Verde.”

  Steve frowned slightly. “We never said we were going there.”

  “No,” I agreed, “but if their comm array shows them basic range and direction, they may simply be listing off likely rendezvous points, going from east to west.” More code came in; I translated. “Three degrees fifty-three minutes south by thirty-two degrees twenty-six minutes west.”

  “Bingo!” Chloe looked up with the most radiant smile I had ever seen on her face. Maybe any face. “Fernando de Noronha. Yup; they were checking likely coordinates, running east to west.”

  I nodded to Rod and discovered that my calves were
trembling. This was really happening. We were really going to see Willow and Johnnie again. And I guess the trawler. A part of me wanted to head straight toward them, not take any chances. I tamped that down. “Rod, indicate we confirm option three.”

  “Acknowledged,” Prospero translated. After a pause, a shorter set of signals rolled out of the speaker.

  Eyes turned toward me. I converted the two strings into values—a smaller and a larger. I divided them by twenty-four and announced, “ETA is between twenty-two and twenty-four days from now.” No one said anything. “Rod, confirm that we’ll be there.” I smiled. “Waiting with open arms.”

  He sent. A pause. Then: “Acknowledged. Will resume daily squelch check as per original calendar. Will convey ETA adjustments by original preset changes in squelch intervals. Counting the days. Bringing friends. Message ends.”

  The radio fell silent. We did, too. We stayed motionless, waiting, listening, for five seconds.

  Then Jeeza screamed and grabbed Rod; I couldn’t tell if she was hugging or mauling him. Chloe came over so slowly and quietly it reminded me of the way I was taught to enter a church as a kid. Her eyes opened wider and she whispered. “I don’t believe it.”

  I hugged her—one of my favorite activities—and smiled. “Believe it; they’re really coming.”

  “No, stupid. I know that.” She glanced over my shoulder. “I mean them!”

  I turned. Steve was hugging Prospero. And then I realized that wasn’t just because he was the closest person. And then I realized how often Steve and Prospero stood close to each other. I think my mouth started to open with a mute “ohhhh—” of realization, but I snapped it shut.

  Prospero was facing me over Steve’s shoulder. First he looked abashed; I don’t think Prospero is a PDA sort of guy, regardless of the situation. Then he looked defiant, and then, when he didn’t spot anything but surprised smiles, he kind of melted and looked as though he might be as happy as he had ever been in his whole life.

  There was a lot of noise. Steve slid down the companionway, running forward to get celebratory carbs; Twinkies and Hershey bars, I think. Prospero scooped up the cold fish cakes, ran out the pilot house’s starboard door and started flinging them to the birds, kind of dancing as he did.