Earthfall (Book 2): Earthfall 2 [The Mission Continues]

by Knight, Stephen

  Andrews put a hand on his shoulder. “And like I said—we’re not here to judge you.”

  Buchek nodded and gave him a pained smile. “I hope that doesn’t change,” he said.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE

  Bit by bit, SCEV Five was being reborn.

  Laird, Kelly, Cobar, and Slattery worked at a breakneck pace prepping the new rig. Everything was in perfect operational condition, or in a configuration to be made operational with a minimum of effort. Just the same, Self-Contained Exploration Vehicles were complex pieces of machinery, and the addition of redundant systems meant everything had to be checked and verified not just once, but sometimes three or four times. Once the entire package was put together, it then had to undergo a series of simulated faults so recovery processes and the contingency systems they invoked could be verified as reliable. Failure to pass a test meant the rig couldn’t be certified for field operations, and no matter how much he wanted to get on the road, Laird wasn’t about to attempt anything in a vehicle that hadn’t been fully validated. He and his crew were of no use to anyone if they were dead.

  At the same time, the tediousness of the work was a sudden strain on his patience. There was no replacing it; he and Kelly had conferred with the two crew chiefs, and they had determined that a number of checks could be effectively deleted as they were actually reattempted further down the road. It would save them a few days at most, but the only real way to make great strides in taking to the field was if they worked sixteen-hour days. That was doable, though hardly recommended. While there wasn’t anything else to do in the replenishment site other than work, eat, and sleep, everyone needed a break from the grind of slapping line-replaceable units together and studying outputs on flat-screen displays. The actual mechanical work of inspecting engines, transmissions, pumps, etcetera was a little more fulfilling, but still. Mistakes could be made if people went at it too hard, and Laird made it clear to the others that if anyone needed to drop out just to get some space, they should do it and not worry.

  Some of the items required they work in a group, such as mounting the mission equipment pod and loading up the missiles. Each projectile weighed over two hundred pounds, and while they were powerful weapons of war, they were actually fairly fragile and had to be handled with an excess of care. It wouldn’t do to have one fail to launch, or have it veer off course due to a broken control actuator or damaged seeker head or yaw/axis controller. But once the team efforts were completed, each crewmember had a section of the SCEV to oversee. Cobar was in charge of propulsion, which included the transmission and engines. Slattery would inspect the rig’s electrical system, from nose to tailgate including the various generators, batteries, and auxiliary power units. Kelly would ensure the mission equipment pod was fully operational, as well as mission essentials such as environmental controls and sustainment systems: plumbing, heating, ventilation, air-conditioning, and scrubbers that would keep the rig’s interior full of a breathable atmosphere no matter what conditions existed outside the vehicle. Laird would ride herd on the command systems, including pilotage, tactical sensor arrays such as the radar and infrared, fire control, communications and navigation systems. Each checklist had a multitude of items to investigate, and they all took time to review and certify.

  The days passed slowly, but they were full of activity. For Laird, the passage of time was simultaneously agonizingly slow and slippery fast. The work was progressing, but the advancement was tempered by the notion that Andrews and the others could be in substantial jeopardy, not to mention anyone else who might be out there. He put those thoughts from his mind during the work cycle, as he didn’t have the time to reflect on them. But when the team ate and got ready for rest, invariably the questions would start to rise. Who took the rig? Why? Who were they looking to fight?

  How where they connected to Harmony Base?

  That was the one that Laird got hung up on. To be sure, an installation like Harmony had thousands upon thousands of individual contributors, from design engineers to contractors to security staff to logistics personnel, all of whom would be involved with not just the base, but its supply chain as well. But the individual who had overseen the theft of the rig not only knew the location of the replenishment site, but how to pull a rig out of storage and prep it for the field. It had to be someone with overall knowledge of the base’s existence, and specialized knowledge of the replenishment site and the rigs it contained. Which meant someone senior.

  Former member of the command staff? Laird wondered. Harmony was decades in the making and construction, so several iterations of staff had cycled through the project. And the base itself had existed for a solid eight to ten years before the Sixty-Minute War. The average tour of duty for active military was two years, which included both officers and enlisted. Civilians were a different matter. Some were decidedly short term, while others were essentially life-long designatees, such as Andrews’s father, Jeremy. But Jeremy wouldn’t really know how to pull an SCEV out of storage and equip it for the field. Intellectually, there were many things about the process he could figure out, but there were a host of things that would be beyond him.

  Like getting into the site in the first place. He wouldn’t have access to the passwords. Laird considered that further. Could Jeremy Andrews’s predecessor, or someone like him in a similar position in the base’s development or early years of operation, have pulled out a rig? Laird thought not.

  Which means whoever did it is military. Specifically United States Army.

  That left Laird unsettled. Someone with military experience who had taken a vehicle and armed it to the teeth in what were doubtless lawless lands was definitely something to be worried about. But there was another potential answer. Perhaps the folks who had liberated the SCEV had done so to protect a settlement. That was possible as well, though it posed a different set of circumstances. It meant that Andrews and the crew of SCEV Four were operating in a potentially dangerous environment, one where war was still the watch word of the day. And while Andrews had Mulligan with him, that wouldn’t necessarily tilt the scales in SCEV Four’s favor. Even Mulligan wouldn’t be able to stop an ambush if the rig drove right into it.

  There was nothing to be done, but the worry never subsided. Laird was able to shunt it aside for the majority of the day, but at night his mind would turn toward them like a moth drawn to open flame.

  In the second week of their stay at the replenishment site, the team started conducting initial power-on testing. They switched on the SCEV’s systems in isolation first and reviewed them independently for any sign of fault. When all the systems passed, they were brought up in operational sequence. One hydraulic pump indicated a pending fail state, and one of the actuators for the tailgate seized up. Cobar and Slattery replaced them both in less than an hour, but that meant the testing had to be reset to the last known good starting point. It wasn’t a substantial delay, and the rest of the systems passed their safety and load checks. The rig was ready for its first shakedown in the field.

  Everyone suited up in environmental gear, not just as a precaution but because the decon gear in the site’s deployment bay wasn’t as sophisticated as it was at Harmony Base. That meant the crew would need to manually decontaminate the rig once it returned for the day, and that meant a lot of water, bleach, and deionizing agents. As soon as the rig was loaded and the airlock doors were sealed, Cobar pressurized the vehicle prior to opening the bi-fold doors that would expose the bay to the elements outside the site. Launching an SCEV from the replenishment site was a very meat-and-potatoes endeavor. The site wasn’t nearly as elaborate as Harmony Base, and launching an SCEV was essentially the same as pulling a car out of a garage. The weather had warmed up outside, and the temperature approached sixty degrees under broken cloud cover that allowed for modest sunshine. As the crew strapped into their seats, Laird and Kelly went over the pre-start checklists. Everything was in order.

  “Okay, APU on, please,” he said over the intercom. The star
tup procedures would be run from the engineering station behind the closed pressure door that separated the cockpit from the second compartment. Laird and Kelly would have to settle for monitoring Cobar’s work from the front office.

  “APU coming up,” Cobar reported. A moment later, the small powerplant whined to life. The batteries bumped offline and into charging mode as they shed their load, which was picked up seamlessly by the auxiliary power unit. No lights flickered, and the cockpit instrumentation didn’t miss a beat. The APU ran up to the redline, then rolled back into the normal operating level.

  “Looks good back here,” Cobar said.

  “Yeah, it’s fine. Let’s turn over number two,” Laird instructed.

  “Number two start up underway from engineering,” Cobar said. Laird watched the engineering display as the starter engine ramped up and began spooling up the number two engine. At thirteen percent torque, the engine came alive with a thump as fuel was added to the mix. He watched for any sign of a hot or hung start as the engine’s turbine temperature rapidly climbed, peaking well inside the red zone for an instant before rolling back into the green. In thirty seconds, the turboshaft engine was operating at normal ground idle.

  “Number two up and operational,” Cobar reported.

  “Fire up one,” Laird said.

  Engine one started up successfully, and Laird went through the post-start checklist. They let the engines idle for two minutes, then opened the bay’s bi-fold door. As it rumbled upward in its tracks, Laird grabbed the control column in his left hand, depressed the brakes, and moved the engine condition levers into dynamic demand mode. Cobar and Slattery ran pressurization checks and reported the rig was still fully inflated and exhibiting no signs of leakage.

  “Let’s hit it,” Kelly said.

  “Okay, crew, rig for transit.” Laird eased the control column forward, and the SCEV slowly rolled out of the bay.

  The first test didn’t involve anything very dramatic, and they stayed within walking distance of the replenishment site. Laird drove the vehicle around the general area, testing its controllability as it roamed across rolling fields. It crested one rocky hill, then reversed down its face. The rig’s approach and exit angles were fine, and the suspension handled the shifting load perfectly as its components moved in relation to the change of terrain. Engine performance was normal.

  “Let’s do the autopilot circuit,” Laird said.

  Kelly armed the autopilot and called up the course on her MFD. It was nothing elaborate, only a sweeping turn to the right and then onward for half a mile before turning to the left and heading back to the open deployment bay. The rig’s navigation system already knew where it was, and the millimeter wave radar would tell it where it was going and what was in its way. The vehicle’s two pilots would be the safeties.

  “Ready when you are,” she said.

  “Go ahead and execute.”

  Kelly activated the autopilot. The SCEV rolled into its first turn and accelerated to thirty miles per hour. It was a bit bumpy but not the worst anyone had felt. The SCEV followed the designated course and maneuvered to clear any obstacles in its path without any incident. The rig’s computers maintained headings, adjusted speeds, and avoided potential hazards automatically, just as it had been designed to do. A few minutes later, it returned to the replenishment site and parked itself, idling in front of the open bay doors.

  “That’s the entire testing sequence for today,” Kelly said.

  Laird sighed. There was still so much to be done, but they needed to walk in baby steps. “All right, let’s roll it inside and shut it down.”

  He maneuvered the rig back into the deployment bay and they shut it down. After the doors had rolled closed and the atmosphere was scrubbed, they sealed up their suits and disembarked. It would take another two hours or so to decontaminate the vehicle, and then they’d have to analyze the performance data captured during the run to look for any defects or inconsistencies between monitoring sets. It wasn’t glamorous work, but it was necessary if SCEV Five was ever to return to the field. And the team knew they had to field the rig as soon as possible; a lot was at stake. Too much, as a matter of fact. Laird didn’t want to lose anyone in his team, but he sure didn’t want to lose all of Andrews’s team either.

  Slow and steady wins the race, he told himself as he stepped out of the rig and walked over to the decon station where hoses, long-handled brushes, and ladders were located. At least that’s what they say.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR

  The team spent the better part of the next two weeks surveying the town of Sherwood and the surrounding vicinity. Most of it was done on foot; KC stayed in the rig most of the time, venturing out only when the others returned to rest. Andrews felt sorry for her, as there wasn’t a lot for her to do. But as the least experienced member of the team, she had to remain in the rig. And as the crew chief, the vehicle was her primary responsibility. She’d known that when she became a maintainer, and now she had to live with her decision.

  The people of the walled community still held the crew from Harmony Base at arm’s length most of the time, but there were no longer any signs of outright distrust. Especially after they’d delivered the starter package they carried with them, full of medicine, freeze-dried food, essential garments for six adults and children, batteries, more solar cells, tools, and the crown jewel: a solar-powered water filtration system that could generate a hundred gallons of clean, potable water a day. While they learned that most of the community’s drinking water came from wells that was more or less safe to drink, the watermaker was tasked to further purify the water so the people of Sherwood wouldn’t have to boil it.

  “We had a couple of units a lot like this when things started,” Buchek told them. “They didn’t last for very long. Membranes went south on us. Had a ton of spares, but they didn’t hold up.”

  “Water might be hard coming from wells,” Mulligan said. “The membranes don’t hold up as well unless you can keep them clean. Anyway—a lot more where those came from.”

  Leona spent a day surveying the nearest reservoir the community used for water. It was polluted with a fair degree of toxic runoff that had been deposited from the rains. The water wasn’t horribly radioactive, as most of the heavier components were likely in the mud at the reservoir’s bottom. But it was teeming with microbial life, some of it harmful, such as cryptosporidium. It was also tainted by arsenic. The watermaker could filter those elements out, but Leona passed on that it would be best to treat the water with chlorine even after filtration to ensure the microorganisms were in fact destroyed.

  In the meantime, Andrews was collecting a great list of items to pull out of Harmony. The people of Sherwood were existing, that much was true. But they needed almost every essential and convenience that lay in Harmony’s warehouses. From the most select to the most basic, the community could use everything Harmony could push out. By the time Andrews finally stopped collecting items, the list was over nine hundred lines long. Whereas the survivors in San Jose had been fairly easy to care for, their numbers were less than sixty. Sherwood’s were ten times that, and with the increased population came more varied requests. Privately, Andrews and Leona had whittled the list down to more essential items, but it still exceeded four hundred fifty immediate-need items. It would take multiple trips to fulfill the wish list, and that was with SCEVs hauling trailers full of goods.

  But Andrews had the list, and it was all achievable. Everything the people of Sherwood needed was in Harmony, back in Kansas; the entire fourth level of the base was essentially a gigantic one-hundred-ten-thousand-square-foot warehouse. In time, Sherwood would become not just a collection of survivors struggling to make ends meet in a day-to-day existence, but a functioning society. There was a lot of work to be done between now and then, but Andrews was a hundred percent certain it could be pulled off.

  He shared the results of the field team surveys to date with Buchek and the old Marine, Griffith. None of it was classified
, and the community had a right to know what was going on in the rest of the world. The majority of the news was depressing, but the majority of the nation hadn’t been reconnoitered yet. There was still reason to hope.

  “I’m sorry for the bad news,” Andrews told them as they sat gathered around a table in the small house Buchek shared with Amanda. It was a small two-bedroom affair with a great room. A pellet stove sat in one corner, and a well-used fireplace was directly opposite it. Heavy curtains covered the windows, and lighting was provided by high-intensity rechargeable LED lights. At some point, Buchek had wrapped several of them with amber-colored film to reduce the harsh glare, and the effect was generally positive. The effect made the room seem warmer, making it appear to be a real home as opposed to just a leftover from the Sixty-Minute War.

  Buchek stirred on the worn leather couch he and Andrews sat on. He looked at the tablet in his hands, lips pursed in thought as he paged through the report. He looked up with a sigh and offered the tablet to Griffith. The old man sat in a similarly worn leather chair facing the couch, his hands crossed over the head of his walking cane. He shook his head.

  “I don’t need to see every detail,” he said. “I can already tell what it says just by looking at your face, Stan.”

  “Explains why I always got my ass beat in poker.” Buchek handed the tablet back to Andrews. “Thanks for sharing that, Mike. Yeah, the news isn’t the best, and a lot of people are going to be hurt by it. But it’s also going to provide a lot of closure.”

  “But there’s always the chance we’ll find more survivors,” Andrews replied. He put the tablet on the coffee table and settled back into the couch’s embrace. “We should all still carry some hope, but be as prepared as we can to accept this might be all that’s left.”

  “Never felt any other way about it,” Griffith said. “The war, the fallout, the nuclear winter, the diseases, the fighting with other people just to eat ... didn’t seem like hope was something we should hold on to any longer. The only reason I’m still alive is because of my boy.”