“Burritos ... one day, you will all be mine,” he said.
In the end, he had the spaghetti and meatballs and said it wasn’t bad. KC ate her casserole at the command intelligence station, which had more desk space than her engineering console afforded, and she didn’t seem at all put out by it. Andrews sat across from Mulligan and Leona and tried not to watch them as they ate, but he found himself regarding them anyway. If Mulligan noticed, he gave no indication.
Leona wasn’t as subtle about being examined, however. She looked at him directly, catching him in the act. “Mike, if you want to ask something, go right ahead.”
“What? Oh no, I’m cool.” A bolt of embarrassment coursed through Andrews.
“My intentions are entirely dishonorable, if it means anything to you,” Mulligan said as he twirled some spaghetti onto his fork.
Leona turned to him. “I’d thought as much.”
KC burst out laughing then looked embarrassed when they turned toward her. “Oh, I’m so sorry.”
“About what, Winters?” Mulligan asked. “Everyone plays grab-ass on an SCEV. Figuratively speaking, of course. Anyway, don’t worry about it. If you can’t laugh at the people you’re crewing with, it’s going to be a dark and bitter life. Trust me. I know all about that.”
“Heavy, Sarmajor,” KC said.
“You get a philosopher’s stone with all those chevrons and rockers, Mulligan?” Andrews asked.
Mulligan blinked. “Son, you even know what the philosopher’s stone was?”
Andrews considered it for a moment. “Ah ... something to do with philosophy?”
“Alchemy,” Leona said.
“What?”
“Alchemy,” Mulligan repeated. “The philosopher’s stone was supposed to be able to turn base metals into gold. It was the holy grail for alchemists through the Middle Ages. Of course, just like pay equality and free health care, it never existed. And unless greed is the cornerstone of philosophy, it has nothing to do with what it’s named after.”
“Well, shit. Do me a favor and stop teaching lessons, Sarmajor.”
Mulligan shook his head. “No can do. That’s what the chevrons and rockers are for, my boy.”
“Wow, the stuff you can learn over chow in an SCEV,” KC said.
Mulligan inclined his head toward the young crew chief. “Happy to continue educating the masses whenever and wherever I can. Just remember: do as I say, not as I do.”
“All right, all right.” Andrews speared a meatball. “Sorry if I was staring, guys. But the two of you do make an oddball couple.”
Mulligan stirred a bit. “She doesn’t like burritos. It’s hell.”
“I love burritos, but I hate your farts,” Leona said. “Can’t have one without the other when you’re around.”
Mulligan shook his head. “I repeat: it’s hell. Anyway, Captain, we all squared away for departure tomorrow?”
“Unless this thing doesn’t start, we’re good to go. Short shifts for everyone—we’ll only travel twelve hours a day and spend the remainder resting and doing maintenance. Be the easiest run I’ve ever been on.”
“Easy?” Mulligan looked at Andrews with a stern expression then peered at Leona and KC. “Easy? You guys think this is going to be an easy run, no problems, no issues? A Sunday drive? Didn’t San Jose teach anyone anything? If we happen to find survivors, they might be like Law and his group—it’s been more than a decade since things came to a halt, and anyone who’s alive today has been through hell and back. They’re probably predators themselves now, because it’s the only way to survive. Don’t think that anyone we come across is going to greet us with open arms. And the things those people had to do and the things they had to learn to stay alive aren’t going to go away—they’ll definitely want what we can give them, and if that means killing us for it, they’ll do it. But even if they don’t try to take everything from us, will they deserve what we can do for them? Just because they were vicious enough to survive in the aftermath of a nuclear war? These are questions we’ve occasionally asked at the command level after making contact with Law’s people, but they’ve never really been answered. So what are we doing now in San Jose? We’re essentially sponsoring a band of thugs, criminals, murderers, and cannibals. They had to do things that way, with or without Law’s leadership. And as bat-shit crazy as that fucker was, he probably saved all of them by taking things straight to ground level and living like a predator. Sustaining people who adapted that way probably wasn’t what folks had in mind when they came up with the charter for Harmony Base.”
His gaze returned to Andrews once again, and Andrews could see that the old Mulligan he’d once known still lurked in the depths of that hard brown-eyed stare. The command sergeant major might have experienced an emotional reawakening as of late, but that didn’t mean he’d abandoned decades of training and practical experience just to stop and smell the roses every now and then.
Mulligan’s voice was a low, ominous rumble when he continued. “The only easy day was yesterday. And tomorrow’s going to be a hundred times harder than today. You troops would do well to remember that.”
CHAPTER TEN
The SCEV started up normally the following morning. As Andrews and Mulligan went through the checklist and activated first one engine then the second, KC monitored everything from the engineering station. RPMs spiked then fell to their normal idle range as they always did, pumps indicated proper pressures and flows, and temperatures slowly climbed into the normal range despite the rig having been powered down overnight. The external temperature was forty-two degrees Fahrenheit, so Andrews and Mulligan were content to let the rig idle and warm up a bit before conducting their run-up checks and setting off.
Laird indicated that everything was fine inside the replenishment site. The four members of SCEV Five had everything they needed, and if for some reason they couldn’t get one of the four rigs inside operational, they could hold station and wait until Andrews and the others came back for them. If, however, SCEV Five was to become disabled on the way, Laird and the others would sit and wait for Four to return—a risky proposition, as there was reduced opportunity for the rigs to communicate once they were over the horizon. High-frequency radios were still largely ineffective due to the active contaminants in the atmosphere and all the communication satellites that had been spun into orbit before the war had destroyed everything. Conditions might improve with elevation, but for the most part, the two rigs would be out of contact with each other. If Four had to deviate from the course and couldn’t achieve the rendezvous site, or found that the site was inhospitable for rig operations, then they would have no way to inform SCEV Five. The two rigs could keep missing each other. In the event they couldn’t link up, then the plan was for SCEV Four to return to the replenishment site and hold station until SCEV Five arrived. If it never did, then Andrews would have to decide whether to restock and start a grid-by-grid search or head back to Harmony and return with more assets.
Andrews mentioned this to Laird again over the radio. “A little worried about this one, bro. You in a new rig and all. If something happens because you guys had to deviate off track, we might not be able to find you.”
“Mike, we’ll be fine. If I’m not happy that any rig we try to stand up can’t survive a few hundred miles of overland travel, then I’m not going anywhere. Trust me on that,” Laird replied. “Besides, we have everything we need right here. We’ll be fine.”
“Roger that,” Andrews said. “We’ll only be about four hundred miles north, so if you can’t boogie, cool your heels and just hang out. We’ll be back. Four people can live for years on what you guys have in house.”
“Yeah, that’s true. We’ll be fine, Mike. You guys get gone, and we’ll catch up in a month.”
“Roger that. SCEV Four rolling. Out.” Andrews released the microphone button on the control column and looked across the cockpit at Mulligan. “All right, Sarmajor. You ready—” He stopped when he caught a whiff of something f
oul. “Jesus, man, is that from you?”
“I, uh, helped myself to a burrito last night during the sleep cycle,” Mulligan said. “I guess I forgot to bring some Bean-O with me.”
Leona appeared in the doorway and peered in. “Gentlemen, good luck. Mike, you might want to mask up and go on emergency O2.” With that, she closed the pressure door that separated the cockpit from the second compartment.
“No, Lee! No!” Andrews smiled, and he heard her cackle in response over his headset. “Mulligan, goddamn it, man! That freaking reeks! I mean, I’m afraid to open my mouth just in case I might taste it!”
“Good God, kid. Please, you’re acting like you’ve never smelled a fart before. You were practically blasting a hole in your seat the day before yesterday—I had to make sure it wasn’t wet before I sat in it during shift change.” He pointed at the face mask hanging from a clip on the sidewall to Andrews’s left. “But if it’s such a burden for you, Eklund’s right—you do have life support available to you. Or I can open the side port. Ha.”
Andrews shook his head. “The radiation count’s too low to kill me before the farts do.” Farting in an SCEV wasn’t something new, but Mulligan’s were so bad he was afraid the computers might crash. It was time to get back to business. He firmed his grip on the control column, stepped on the brakes, and put his right hand on the number-one engine’s engine condition lever. “All right, let’s do the run-up. Transmission disengaged?”
“Red lights on the tranny, all differentials are unlocked.”
“KC, we’re doing the run-up,” Andrews said over the intercom.
“Roger run-up,” the crew chief replied immediately. “Transmission’s disengaged.”
Andrews brought the number-one engine condition lever out of idle and advanced it to the full-power setting. The engine spooled up until it was shrieking, putting out almost one hundred percent power. Backed by KC at the engineering console, he and Mulligan took in the turbine output temperature, torque, oil pressure, intake, and bleed air pressures—everything was normal. Andrews rolled back the power and put the engine back in idle. He repeated the process with engine two, and it passed as well. After cross-checking with both Mulligan and KC, he advanced the ECLs to the variable setting. That would ensure the engines would provide power on demand, spooling up and down as Andrews advanced or pulled back the control column in his left hand. In older days, turbines had run at one speed and consumed as much fuel in idle as they did under full power. The variably pitched blades in the SCEV changed that paradigm. With proper power management, the SCEVs had a fueled range in excess of a thousand miles. The rig shuddered minutely as the transmission engaged and locked.
Mulligan locked the levers in place so they couldn’t be moved out of position by accident and studied the engineering display for a moment. “Engines synced.” He then called up the area map on the center display, which showed their position and the route they were to take.
Andrews glanced at it then nodded. “Roger. We’re ready to roll.” Over the intercom, he said, “Crew, rig for transit. We’re rolling.”
***
The journey to the northwest wasn’t without some difficulty. The terrain there was quite different from what the team was used to. Whereas they had great experience with rocky ridges and scrubland, there the foliage was much thicker, more vibrant than what was found in the center of the nation or around San Jose. It seemed as if that part of the country was fighting hard for renewal. The bands of lethal radiation were reduced, as well. While some areas were absolutely fatal to anyone who emerged from the SCEV without protective gear, the team did encounter zones where the rad count was so low that a human could actually exist in an unprotected state for a matter of time. Andrews knew the trick of the gulfstream caused that. While the initial attacks had killed everything in the immediate blast radius, the prevailing winds had carried the fallout in a southeasterly direction. Then there had been the rains. While the team hadn’t experienced any yet, the lush vegetation indicated that rainfall—laden with radioactive elements or not—was prodigious in that part of the country.
The journey was slowed by the fact that the rig had to travel overland more often than not. Most of the infrastructure in the area was severely degraded, and while stretches of interstate were still passable, Andrews would never cross an aging bridge in a multiton vehicle when the span hadn’t seen maintenance of any sort for years before the war had begun. They stopped and started a lot, and even with the terrain mapping radar system to help guide them around the larger obstacles, things always impeded their progress—thick stands of trees that they couldn’t reasonably bulldoze their way through, steep inclines, even full-on rivers that they had to ford and carefully pick their way across. The crew hadn’t seen this much running water in the field in a long, long time. Andrews found it puzzling.
The towns and small cities they passed through were all devastated. Redding was particularly painful to see, as there were still human remains lying in the streets. Thousands of people had died seemingly at once, though no direct nuclear attack had hit the city. The streets were broken and weed covered, and half the buildings seemed to have been set on fire, while the other half had been demolished. It could have been from lightning or a wildfire that couldn’t be contained, or even from civil unrest among the survivors. Just the same, the roadways were littered with the scattered remains of human beings. They’d seen such a thing before but still found it depressing and demoralizing. It made Andrews cringe. Maybe Harmony had found all that was left of America down south, in San Jose. Maybe people had survived for years after the war, as Redding might have, only to die off from a plague or some other incident. At any rate, Andrews and his team were years too late to save them. Harmony Base had done nothing to ease their suffering.
“Looks like the Shasta Lake dam failed,” Mulligan remarked. “Anyone who was left alive down here was wiped out by the flood.”
“That would explain the sudden die-off.” Andrews pointed at a mass of cars and trucks bunched up in an intersection. The rusted hulks were piled high. He’d thought it had been a shockwave or maybe an earthquake or something that had caused the destruction. But Mulligan’s insightful comment made it all clear—those folks might have been able to survive for years after the war, only to be wiped out when the six-hundred-foot-tall dam to the north finally failed.
By the time they called a halt on their first day of travel outside a small town called Shasta Lake, they had traveled less than one hundred seventy miles after almost twelve straight hours of transit. It was paltry. During mission planning, it had seemed so easy. Andrews had thought two hundred to two hundred fifty miles would be easily obtainable. He’d known that even Northern California was heavily populated and that they would have numerous obstacles to overcome, both natural and man-made, but to have the first day’s advance held back by a good fifty-plus miles was disenchanting.
“We’ll be moving even slower when the terrain really starts to rise,” he lamented as he reflected over the day at dinner.
“It’s not a race,” Leona told him. “And we’ve got a month before we have to start worrying about SCEV Five.”
“I know. I’d just been hoping for more progress.” Andrews picked at his meal. He had meat loaf that night, and it didn’t taste too bad.
“Don’t worry, sir. We’ll make up some time tomorrow,” Mulligan said. “Alternatively, we might only make it fifty miles. Either way, it’s an accomplishment. Don’t sweat it.”
Andrews sighed. “You’re such a beam of light and hope these days, Mulligan. Don’t you go changing.”
Mulligan barked out a laugh. “Look, once we deviate east, we’re going to be passing through some fairly unsettled territory. We probably won’t have to worry about dead caravans of vehicles clogging the roads or anything like that. We’ll have opportunities to make up some time. So again—don’t sweat it, sir.”
“Sarmajor, did you spend any time in this area?” KC asked.
One
positive thing about the journey to date was that the young crew chief was coming out of her shell a bit. Like everyone else, she’d been initially cautious around Mulligan—highly cautious—but she’d at least become able to initiate conversation with him. Andrews noted that and put it in the win column. Young Sergeant Winters was learning to look beyond mechanical and electrical systems and interface with people in a meaningful way.
“Not really. San Francisco, yes. Seattle, yes. But out here in the California Central Valley? Nah, nothing out here for me,” Mulligan said. “It’s funny—you think this stuff is going to be around forever, then a pesky nuclear war and a flood changes all of that.” He shrugged his massive shoulders. “Hey, who knew?”
“The fallout is substantially reduced here,” Leona said. “I think we’re on the right track. Still lethal, but people could survive. Not for very long outside, but if they had enough presence of mind to fortify their shelters and follow basic decon procedures ... it’s possible, even down here.”
“Could there be people here now?” KC asked.
“We found them in San Jose,” Andrews said, “and that place was basically a nuclear oven.”
“More like they found us,” Mulligan interjected. “But yeah, they were and are obviously still alive.”
“What was it like, when you first contacted them?” KC asked. She looked at Andrews then Mulligan and Leona. She hadn’t been part of the crew then and had heard about the San Jose adventure through mostly secondhand sources.
“It was brutal,” Andrews said. “They attacked us because they’d been living under a psycho.”
“And they’d been attacked themselves,” Leona said. “Law did mention that. People from the north. I guess they were raiders.”
“Could have been folks displaced by the flood after the dam let loose.” Mulligan stroked his chin thoughtfully, staring at the padded bulkhead around the airlock. “That makes sense. No reason for people up here to push south unless they had to. Can’t imagine how they managed to do it. The trip must’ve been a major ball buster.”
Earthfall (Book 2): Earthfall 2 [The Mission Continues] Page 8
