“You can leave them,” Buchek said. “We’ll just take them with us when we leave. Unless you want to wash them for us,” he added, with a gleam in his eye.
“First coffee service, now laundry?” Andrews asked.
Buchek spread his hands. “Hey, what can I say? Maybe we do need you guys!”
Andrews laughed. “Coffee’s coming up.” He drew two cups and filled them with coffee, then placed them on the table before the father and daughter. He added sugar and cream from the refrigerator, and Buchek’s eyes widened.
“Is that ...?”
“Light cream,” Andrews said.
“It’ll turn you into a female,” Mulligan added as he closed the inner airlock door.
“So that’s why you’re on a monthly cycle,” Leona said.
Buchek added both cream and sugar to his cup. “I usually only drink it black, but since I haven’t had either in so damned long ... why not.”
Andrews handed him a spoon, and Buchek used it to stir his coffee. He brought the cup to his lips and sipped it. Tentatively at first, then with more gusto on the second pass.
“God damn, this is good,” he said. “Try some, Amanda.”
Amanda slowly raised her own cup and sampled some of it. She nodded a bit. “Not bad,” she said, almost grudgingly.
“Is this all of you?” Buchek asked, looking around. He saw KC and waved. “Oh, hi there. Stan Buchek.”
“KC Winters, sir.”
“She’s the crew chief,” Amanda added.
“Ah, the wrench turner!” Buchek said with a smile. He turned to Andrews. “Hey, Captain, can I look up front?”
“What, the cockpit?” Andrews considered it. “I guess so. Lee, take right seat, all right? Mulligan, you come back by KC.”
The pair did as instructed. Andrews faded back a bit so Mulligan could walk past him, then indicated Buchek should move forward. This left Amanda covered by both Mulligan and KC, and with Leona sitting in the cockpit, there was little chance Buchek could do something foolish before she and Andrews shut him down. Buchek walked to the cockpit and leaned inside, taking in the instrument panels.
“Clean setup,” he said. “Nice and ergonomical. Odd to see sidearm controllers in a ground configuration, though. What data bus are you guys running? Can’t be the old fifteen fifty-three B series, right?”
“You know about those things?” Andrews asked, surprised.
“I have some experience,” Buchek said.
“The underlying architecture is IEEE seventeen thirty-four, block seven,” Andrews said. “It replaced the old fifteen fifty-three years ago, I’m told. Same data bus architecture was used by NASA and the last batch of military weapons systems that were spooled up before the war.”
“So it’s a fault-tolerant network. What’re you running for propulsion? Has to be variable blade turbines, right? Two, three variable stator stages and feathering vanes?”
“Yes, sir. Twin Honeywells that deliver nine hundred shaft horsepower each. How do you know about these things?” Andrews asked.
“I built airplanes for a living,” Buchek said. “General aviation aircraft, ninety percent composite that leveraged the same kind of technology you guys have right here. We’d just certified a single-pilot corporate jet that had an avionics layout just like this one, using the same OLED displays. Never thought I’d see anything like this again, not after the EMP fried everything and erased a few decades of technological history. Quite the surprise, I have to say.”
Andrews and Leona exchanged glances. Leona raised her brows in surprise. “Really. Wow, I’m just as surprised to hear that as you are to see the front office,” Andrews said.
Buchek leaned forward, peering at the radar imagery. “That fidelity is simply incredible. And the feed from the UAV is crystal clear.” He shook his head. “Who was the total integrator?”
“General Dynamics. Base vehicle was provided by Oshkosh.”
Buchek shook his head and straightened up. He turned to Andrews, and there was something odd in the man’s expression. Like painful mourning.
“Never thought I’d hear those names again,” he said. “Funny how things as silly as that suddenly become important as a guy gets on in years.”
“So you’re a pilot?” Andrews asked.
“Huh? Oh, yeah. Flying was my thing. I mean, I started off as a banker, then got pissed off and tired of that race and started up my company. Took up flying at fifty-one years old, went all the way to my ATP. Cost a lot of sweat, blood, and money, but the company was turning a profit right here out of Oregon. So hell yeah, aviation was my life after the hell of finance.”
“I’d always wanted to learn how to fly,” Andrews said, suddenly wistful. He then felt foolish at the admission, as if he were abruptly confessing to some cardinal sin.
“Do you now.” Buchek looked at him directly. The sadness had fled from his face, displaced by an intensity that made Andrews feel suddenly uncomfortable. That look was familiar somehow, though it took him a moment to place it. He’d seen this look before. From Mulligan. From Benchley. From Baxter. Even from his own father. The set of the jaw, the furrow of the brow, the vigor in the gaze that all came together when the Old Guard decided it was time to do something, and to do it now.
“I did,” Andrews said.
“Well then, Captain. You know what I think?”
“What’s that, sir?”
“I think that if your people and my people put our heads together, we might be able to make that happen.” Buchek waved toward the cockpit. Not at the instruments, but at the land outside the view ports. “If we can work as a team, we’ll be back in the air in ten years. Maybe five. And in thirty? We’ll be back in space.”
“You telling us you’re interested in what we have to offer, Mr. Buchek?”
Buchek snorted. “I’m asking you if you’re interested in what we have to offer, Captain Andrews.”
Andrews looked down at Leona, sitting in the copilot’s seat. Her eyes were bright. She nodded to him. Andrews turned and looked back at the others. KC looked from him to Amanda. Buchek’s daughter still sat at the dinette table, her face blank. So was Mulligan’s. But a moment after their gazes met, the crow’s feet around Mulligan’s eyes deepened slightly as he gave Andrews a sly smile.
Andrews turned back to Buchek. “Sir, we’re here for you. No matter what.”
Buchek clapped him on the shoulder. “Then let’s get this rig moving. You have a lot of people to meet.”
CHAPTER TWENTY
Buchek rode in the SCEV while Amanda returned to the group that waited up the road. He gave directions to Andrews as he backed the rig down the road and to a turnoff farther up the highway that tracked north, then west, then finally curved to the northeast. It was an old fire trail, and from the furrows in the ground, Andrews could see it had been used fairly often. The drone ranged ahead, surveilling the territory through which the rig would transit. For the most part, all it saw were trees, brush, tall grass, and a winding river. At one point, it caught sight of a lake the color of silt. Narrow creatures stalked its banks. Herons, Buchek said, casting about for whatever fish still remained in the lake’s dirty waters.
“How diverse is the biosphere?” Leona asked. She sat in the copilot’s seat as Andrews hand-drove the SCEV while Buchek kneeled in the cockpit doorway, hanging onto padded handrails. Though Andrews drove slowly, the terrain was still rough, and the rig swayed from side to side.
“Oh, it’s rebounding quite nicely,” Buchek said. “A lot of domestic animals died off. Cows, horses, dogs. Cats managed to hang on, and they cause a fair amount of problems for us. Rabies is an issue. Deer seem to have managed to hang on also, and they’re proliferating like crazy. Some elk and mountain goats too, in the higher elevations. We’ve seen bobcats and lynx, and I’ve heard tell of mountain lions and bears being sighted, but I’ve never seen them. Yet.” He paused. “Oh yeah, you might find this interesting. Bats. Lots of bats. Especially down in Bend, they like the bu
ildings.”
“Bats are good,” Leona said. “Depending on the species, they help control pests. Mosquitoes, things like that.”
“Bugs are everywhere,” Buchek said. “Especially things like centipedes and spiders. A lot of the old buildings are infested with carpenter ants and termites. You’d have thought a nuclear war would have taken care of those things for us, but no. And lots of mice and rats, again down in Bend, but we do see them up here.”
“They also eat insects,” Leona said.
“Really? Gee, now I feel guilty for eating them for years,” Buchek said.
Andrews made a disgusted sound. “Jesus, really?”
“Andrews, you ever eat rabbit?” Buchek asked. “Same thing, and easier to catch.”
“Do you have doctors?” Leona asked.
“We do. Some high-flight ones, too.”
“Stan, that mass grave in Bend ... what happened down there?” Andrews asked.
“Track right along that trail there,” Buchek said. “You see it? There’s that gap in the juniper.”
“Got it.” Andrews slowed the rig and turned it to the right. He heard rocky scrabble crunching beneath its tires.
“Yeah, the Great Bend Die-Off,” Buchek said. “The city did pretty well initially. Obviously, it wasn’t a target, or at least not one the bad guys could hit in the time they had. By the way, who was it? The Chinese? The Russians? Not the North Koreans, I hope?”
“Russians,” Andrews said. “Well, mostly. The Chinese actually got in the act too, but only after the Russians opened up. No one knows why, but they were probably afraid they’d get hammered too, so they let their birds fly.”
“Well, fuck,” Buchek said. “It’s my fault. I turned down two offers from the Chinese to buy my company, and I put off a Russian company that wanted to build stringers for my planes. Oops, my bad.”
“About Bend,” Andrews prompted.
“Yeah. Bend.” Buchek took in a deep breath. “The community was coming together. People in this part of the country, they take things like community seriously. They were working together, trying to figure out how to keep the basic necessities flowing, and they were making some pretty good progress. Then the epidemic hit.”
“Epidemic?” Leona asked.
“Some sort of superflu. Don’t get me wrong, a lot of the population was already sick—there was a lot of fallout moving through the area, and the winter lasted for almost two straight years. That alone caused a big die-off, and if I recall correctly, we didn’t see sunlight for almost six months straight. That happens up here from time to time, but usually it’s from the rainy season. This time though, it was snow. And the snow was radioactive, right? Falling through the atmosphere, picking up everything that was in the air as it fell to earth. So a lot of folks were either sick or outright dying from radiation poisoning. But then there came the flu. Severe respiratory infections. Started off slow, and then ramped up. Literally killed thousands every week. Including Amanda’s mother.”
Andrews thought of the flowers. “So that bouquet we found ...”
“Amanda’s remembrance,” Buchek said. “Amanda was ten when the bombs fell. Her mother and I were divorced when she was eight. She was with me when the war happened, and I kept her pretty much under lock and key until the nuclear winter had passed. But by then, her mom was gone. We presume she’s in the mass grave you found.”
“I’m very sorry, Stan,” Andrews said. “Even though you guys were apart, it still must’ve been tough as hell to go through that.”
“It was not easy, that’s for sure,” Buchek said. He fell silent for a moment, perhaps reliving memories that had lain dormant for years. “Anyway ... anyway. Bend was a plague city for a few months. There was limited ability to treat the sick, and the flu was very contagious. By the time people tried to leave, they were almost all infected. They might have made it out of the city, but they didn’t get far. We still come across corpses, even today. Entire families, dead alongside the roads.” He paused for a long moment. “Lots of pain. Lots of suffering. It was hell. Everyone lost someone important. Everyone you people are about to meet, they’ve all lost someone they cared about, and a lot of them still feel like the bottom’s dropped out of their lives.” He pointed out the view ports. “Barricade a half mile ahead. Amanda should have it clear by now, but if it isn’t, I’d like you to come to a stop and wait. Someone will be along.”
“Drone shows the path is clear, but there are several people ahead,” Leona said. She tapped one of the active windows in the display before her, and Buchek looked over.
“Wow, I can recognize those folks. That big black guy there? That’s Griff Two. He’s good people, Andrews. You’ll like him, a composite engineer and sharp as a tack.”
“Stan, how many people are in your community?” Andrews asked.
“Started off with about eleven hundred, and there are about six hundred seventy remaining,” Buchek said.
“Whoa,” Andrews said.
“The flu hit us too, but we knew how to quarantine people,” Buchek said. “Also lots of radiation sickness. A lot of folks have died from different types of cancers, something which continues to be a problem. Been meaning to ask you, what kinds of medicines do you have aboard?”
“Nothing terribly unique,” Leona said. “For radiation treatments, we do have a small store of ThyroShield, DTPA, and Prussian blue. All of us on the field teams have stores of bone marrow that was grown in Harmony, but that depends on us getting back to the base. As far as treatments for advanced symptoms of radiation sickness, we have several packets of red blood products as well as pain management meds, anti-diarrheals, and antibiotics. We have more advanced treatments in storage, and at Harmony we can introduce nanite treatments that are extremely effective. But nothing like that is transportable, as those are hyperbaric treatments.”
“Prostate and uterine cancers are pretty endemic in our community,” Buchek said, “along with various lung and GI tract cancers. Colon cancer is especially prevalent, because we have to start living off the land now. We’ve used up all our prepackaged stores.”
“How do you treat them?” Andrews asked.
“Surgically wherever possible,” Buchek said, “but a lot of times, it’s too late. We’re a bit short on a lot of diagnostic capability. I guess that even when you’ve seen one cancer, it means you’ve seen one cancer. They’re all different, and by the time symptoms manifest themselves, it’s usually too late.”
Andrews nodded. “We get it. We’ll do what we can. We have chemotherapy drugs in storage, but advanced treatments will require transport to Harmony.”
Buchek looked at Andrews. “How big is this base of yours, Andrews?”
“Big enough to take your entire community and still have room left over,” Andrews said. “The base itself is half-populated. No one knew how long we’d be underground, so it was built as a multi-generational installation.”
“No kidding.”
“No kidding. But the scenery isn’t as nice as it is here, and trust me ... you think you’ve got environmental problems up here? Down in Kansas, you step outside without protection, you’re going to be dead in two days.” He motioned to Leona and himself. “We were exposed to the elements for about three hours, with full environmental gear. A storm came up, and it passed a shitload of particles right through us. We went through nano treatments for two weeks straight after the fact, but the reality is, it shaved five years off our lives.”
“Well. Life technically ends at forty,” Buchek said. “Trust me on this. I’m seventy-one.”
“Try not to pass that on to Mulligan,” Andrews told him.
“He probably already knows. Slow down, now.” Buchek raised his walkie-talkie to his lips. “Griff, we’re coming through.”
“Yeah, we hear you,” came a voice over the handset’s speaker. “Kind of tough to miss. We’re ready for you to head all the way down to Roberts.” There was a pause. “Ah, word’s getting out, so I hope you didn’t want
to keep this a secret. Plus, that little drone’s getting a lot of attention. It’s right over us.”
“No, no secret,” Buchek replied. “Have Griff One secured, all right?”
“Been done.”
“Okay, have you in sight.”
“Yeah. Damn, likewise!”
The SCEV bore down on a small checkpoint that had been set up. A more robust barricade had been established here, but portions of it were removable. Behind that was a tall wall made of old shipping containers, and the wall seemed to go on forever. The SCEV slowly trundled through the opening in the barricade, but it was perhaps a tad too small. The personnel manning the checkpoint had been expecting a vehicle of roughly the same dimensions as an Army five-ton. The SCEV was a bit wider, and Andrews caught glimpses of the men and women fighting to widen the gap before the rig passed through.
“Sorry in advance for any damage,” Andrews said.
“Ah, it’s okay. We have more jersey barriers we can bring out,” Buchek said. “Keep going straight down. You’ll come to a fork in the road about a mile down, and you’ll want to take the road to the right. Don’t go over the bridge that crosses the river. It won’t take your weight, and there’s nothing out there but an old RV park anyway.”
“Roger that,” Andrews said. He glanced at the drone feed that was still being transmitted onto one of the MFDs. The little aircraft was now overflying a small community, and he saw battered houses dotting the landscape. A main drag was directly ahead of the rig, paralleling a sooty-colored river. Hundreds of people were already gathered there, most in woodland-patterned clothing, but some wearing reds, yellows, greens. The drone was already marking individuals with flashing icons. Those people carried enough metal to be designated as weapons, which were visible to the drone’s millimeter wave radar. The weapons weren’t really a cause of concern for Andrews, at least not yet. He expected most of the community’s population to be armed. But he was momentarily overwhelmed by the sheer vastness of their numbers.
“So many,” Leona said from the copilot’s seat. Her voice was small, awed.
Earthfall (Book 2): Earthfall 2 [The Mission Continues] Page 20
