Plaguelands (Slayers Book 1)

by Jae Hill

  “What if I don’t want to go?” I asked. “What if I want to stay and fight?”

  “You and what army?” he sneered. “I’m taking everyone under the age of eighteen in stasis over the next week to Mars—or beyond—to extended family that they might have on other worlds. Anyone over eighteen can choose to stay, but that doesn’t leave you with a whole lot of able-bodied recruits.”

  “Can you spare anything?” I asked. “Any hardware at all? Dropships? Weapons? Orbital support?”

  “We’re leaving behind most of what’s in the Armory on Kit Island. We don’t have the need for it or the space for it. If we ever do come back, we might take it with us, but if you can put it to good use before then, it’s yours. Weapons, armor, a few older model dropships, even a handful of old fast-movers, but it’s not enough to hold off the Horde. You saw what they did at Cheyenne Mountain. You know what Persephone has the capability to do. Add in nuclear weapons to the equation and you’re going to die senselessly. The entire power of the Republic couldn’t stop the onslaught.”

  “I will leave you with one thing,” he added, “a squadron of ships. Halberd will be leading a task force of six other standard cruisers, and all but two of those are MAC-equipped. They’re to stay on station and report everything that happens until Able-Victor. They’ll be available to you for reconnaissance and for orbital support, as soon as the comm web is back online.”

  “Thank you, sir.” I said. “But I’ll need one more thing, please, Marshal.”

  “You don’t ask for much do you?” he laughed. “What is it?”

  “I need to know everything about the Kergueleni.”

  The tiny servos in his robotic face dropped and he made the closest thing to a scowl I’ve ever seen in an enhanced-form adult.

  “How do you know about that?” he hissed.

  “Ebenezer told me some,” I said quietly. “Maybe they can help.”

  “You can tell no one about them,” he said in a tone that almost sounded like a snarl through his voice modulator.

  “They might be able to help. Them. The Californians. Maybe even who is left in the Ozarks or Taos.”

  “It seems that old dog didn’t keep any of his goddamned cards close to the table,” the marshal fumed. “Pirate scum.”

  “Maybe they’ll stand to fight,” I reiterated.

  “No,” the marshal said, regaining his composure. “No they won’t. They had their chance. The Kergueleni ran away and have hidden on their island for the last four hundred years. We tried to make contact. We tried to make amends. We needed their help in the beginning. Instead, they have never responded to our messages, have shot down our aircraft, and occasionally laser-flash our optical surveillance satellites to render them useless.”

  “Wait,” I said, startled. “They’re still there?”

  “Oh yes, definitely,” the marshal replied. “Their nation is the bright spot of the Southern and Eastern hemispheres. You can’t see it from LEO or GEO because it’s on the exact opposite side of the planet, but I’ve seen it out the porthole of more than one orbiting starship. It’s little more than a city-state. They built the whole nation eighty meters above the ancient sea-level so that when the world flooded, they’d have seafront property. They’re thriving.”

  He reached into his coat and pulled out his small digibook. After tapping on the screen a bit, he handed it to me and I saw some satellite images. Huge glass-domed buildings. Skyscrapers. Tree-lined streets. Canals. An old airport with the rusted hulks of ancient aircraft parked along one runway, and crazy metal bat-like craft parked along another. A shipyard filled with sleek, multi-hulled vessels.

  “How many people live here?” I asked him.

  “Millions,” he said. “At least five million, as far as we can tell. They have huge hydroponic gardens that feed most of their people. They stay on their island except to mine heavy or rare-earth metals in South Africa, to fish in the sea around them, or to occasionally venture to one of the surrounding continents for artifacts and supplies.”

  “Artifacts?”

  “They, like we did after the Plague outbreak, have collected treasures and historical artifacts from around the world. They have more original artwork and music in their library, more plants and animals in their parks, and more precious metals in their vaults than any civilization on the history of the planet. Let me tell you, Pax. They have matter disruption technology that we still can’t figure out. They have materials engineering that supposedly surpasses anything we have. They’re all-knowing and all-powerful gods, but content to sit on Olympus and not concern themselves with the problems of mere mortals. I was a lieutenant aboard Seventh House when they shot down one of our dropships trying to communicate with them. We were unarmed, trying to reach out to them. They couldn’t have cared less, and I lost good friends and shipmates.”

  “If I can save the Northwest Territory of the Cascadia Republic,” I interjected, “can I make it in my own way?”

  “What do you mean?” he asked.

  “I just want to know that if I go through all the trouble of raising an army and fighting off an invasion of undead monsters, that I’m not going to be forced to undo everything when the Republic decides to come back.”

  “You won’t own it,” the marshal said cautiously.

  “I want to be able to make changes here. Reintegrate the Outcasts and the far-flung communities of the wastelands. Restore positive relations with California. Build a human race again instead of just a single nation. The only way we’re going to save this planet is as a human united front, which is why we failed so miserably four hundred years ago.”

  “Pax Faustus, Commander of Biological Forces, Defender of the Republic,” Marshal Burnham announced, “thy will, be done. But you’re a fool for wanting to stay here to die.”

  I rendered the salute of our Fleet, that ancient Roman gesture. The marshal smiled briefly, then returned the salute. It was custom for the senior officer to drop his fist from over his heart first, but he held it there for a moment longer, smiling slightly at me.

  “I wish you safe travels and the best of luck,” he said, dropping his salute as I did the same. “May we meet again.”

  I turned to leave.

  “Oh, Pax,” he said.

  “Sir?”

  “We’ll be watching from afar. If they detonate a nuke in the capital or overrun your forces anywhere, we’re going to glass the planet and start over. Contingency Protocol Able-Victor was created a hundred years ago in the event that the zombie outbreak ever consumed the Earthly territories of the Republic, and its use is mandated by law.”

  “You’ll kill everyone,” I muttered.

  “If the zombies win, you’re already dead.”

  I left quietly, hurrying out of the presidential estate. Out front, a car was parked with its door open. Cyrus, one of my squadron commanders from the BRF, was standing next to it.

  “What are you doing here?” I asked.

  “Well, everyone under eighteen is being rounded up and put in stasis tubes,” he muttered. “I just turned eighteen last week. And I don’t want to go.”

  “You’re a fool not to,” I laughed.

  “Are you leaving?” he asked me.

  I shook my head. “I guess I’m a fool, too.”

  “There are a few more fools, Commander. A few of us that aren’t giving this up. Our parents….” he stopped as tears formed in his eyes. “Our parents will be interred here. On this rock. On this planet that they and their ancestors have tried to save since their ancestors’ ancestors screwed it all up.”

  “How many refused the stasis?”

  “There’s only about fifty or so cadets who had the legal right to refuse,” Cyrus said, scratching the scruff on his face. “A few more that hid and will come back out of hiding when they’re not being rounded up.”

  “A pitifully small army,” I said.

  “And after seeing what they did to an army of robots at Cheyenne, boss….” he trailed off. “Any b
ig ideas?”

  “There’s help out there,” I smiled weakly. “We’re gonna find it.”

  INVENTORY MANAGEMENT

  Kitsilano was an ancient neighborhood of Old Vancouver. The sea-level rise had cut the neighborhood and surrounding area off from the rest of the mainland. If it hadn’t been so far from the mainland, the resulting “Kit Island” might have been repopulated, but there was little interest in living so far out when all of the population was either west on Vancouver Island, east on Burnaby Island, or north of the harbor in the capital. Kit Island had basically been a wasteland from the early 2200’s until the Republic repurposed it as a weapons manufacturing facility and military base in the mid-2300’s. The rest of the city had crumbled and fallen into ruin, which Fort Kit made for interesting training grounds for the Vanguard.

  Our boat from the capital docked at the pier next to a Fleet Coast Guard ship, a sleek modern vessel that now stood quietly at anchor. The base, just as Marshal Burnham had indicated, was now abandoned.

  In the distance, across the bay and beyond the grey towers of Old Vancouver, we could see dropships taking off from the capital, headed for the waiting fleet in orbit. The landing craft were carrying the cryostasis-frozen children of the Republic—including many of the kids who had fought side-by-side with me at the BRF. They were also leaving the planet with the vital artifacts from the museums and libraries in the capital; though the electronic records could be transmitted digitally, the physical works of art or historical inventions had to be saved.

  It was an endless stream of dropships, like a silver rain, punctuated by the thunder of more craft returning through the atmosphere.

  “We’ve got one more boat coming this afternoon with some more food stores,” I said, staring at a chart on my digibook, “and a few dozen more cadets from the BRF. The zombies are still pushing north and west. They’ve broken up into smaller groups. We lost the fast-movers when the neural web went down, so we can’t hunt them from the air. The existing groups are too small to MAC. The marshal has decided that, environment be damned, he’s going to open up the MAC on as many large clusters of them as he can.”

  There was a silence from the assembled team, until Rebekah spoke up.

  “What about Magic Valley?”

  “Slightly less than a quarter of the Horde’s forces will be trickling through there over the next week,” I said solemnly. “It will be overrun.”

  I expected a more emotional outburst from her at knowing that the very last of her kin would die, but she had already lost so much that it didn’t faze her outwardly.

  “Can we help them?” she asked.

  “I did have an idea,” I replied. “Decades ago, they chose to go across the highway bridge east of Magic Valley. We know now it’s because zombies can’t swim very well. They lack the coordination, body fat, and so on to really make it work. So they’re probably going to try to use bridges. The marshal is dispatching some technicians aboard dropships to set charges on as many major bridges as they can find. It’s going to force the zombies to spread out to find new ways to push west and might slow their advance. But if we can cluster up the large groups long enough—block the long line of forces in one spot—we should be able to concentrate them enough to make a MAC hit on them worth it.”

  “But that don’t help Magic Valley,” she countered.

  “Oh, but if you’ll remember when they kidnapped us they drove us across the river. They forded it. It’s not deep enough to need a bridge there. They can just walk across there. So if we can bottle them up at the river here-“ I pointed on my display “-then we should be able to hold Magic Valley and take them out with an orbital strike.”

  “Who,” Cyrus asked, “is going to hold back the Horde? We’re out of drones. We’re out of Vanguard. We’re even out of enhanced forms.”

  “We’re going to use the Outcasts and the Plaguelanders and whoever else can pick up a gun,” I said resolutely.

  “Do we have enough of any of those things?” asked Morgana.

  “Oh, guns, we have plenty,” said Vili. “I just saw that in the warehouse.”

  “But we need people to pull the triggers, we need dropship pilots to move things around, and we need a plan to use all this stuff right. So I’m splitting everyone into teams. Morgana, you were training to be a pilot before this, right?”

  “Well, yeah, I mean I technically am a pilot,” she stammered.

  “You are a pilot,” I affirmed. “Go figure out the scramjet on the flightline of the base. I’m going to need you to take me on a trip.”

  I turned to Cyrus. “You need to take the cadets who get here later and do a complete inventory of the weapons, armor, supplies, and other gear in the warehouses. Vili, you need to check out the electronics gear and make sure it all works. Night vision. Scopes. Power units. All of it. Shai and Kaelis, I need you to figure out those older-model dropships in the hangar and take them out for a test run.”

  I was trying to draw on their strengths I had learned in the BRF. I doled out other assignments.

  “Rebekah,” I finally spoke to her, “I need you to get some people to help load the dropship with gear as soon as it’s all checked out. How many people of fighting age and strength in Magic Valley?”

  “I mean, everyone can shoot since they’re like four, Pax,” she chuckled.

  “So how many sets of equipment should we send?” I asked.

  “Probably about a thousand that ain’t old or crippled too bad to fight,” she surmised. “Maybe two thousand if you include people outside town and in some of the other towns nearby.”

  “Alright, then see if we can spare two thousand sets of guns, armor, ammo, and the like. Take it with you in the dropship. Tell them that the zombies are coming and they need to hold them at the river. No matter what. Hold the zombies at the river.”

  “What are you going to be doing, Pax?” Morgana asked.

  “We’re going to Olympus to see the gods.”

  ACHIEVEMENT UNLOCKED

  Kissing Rebekah good-bye had been difficult. She was headed east toward the fight and I was headed to uncertainty on the exact opposite site of the planet. Seriously the opposite side: I looked on the globe and the planetary antipode for Montana was the lost isles of the Kerguelen Archipelago. Maybe they were not lost geographically, but definitely lost culturally. No one had spoken to the Kergueleni in almost four hundred years. Maybe they didn’t speak English anymore. I might not even make it back alive.

  I straightened my dark blue Fleet officers’ uniform and entered the jet. Morgana was also in uniform and already at the controls, familiarizing herself with this model of aircraft.

  “This jet will do most of the flying for me,” she said, smiling, “but I still have to tell her what to do.”

  I nodded and quickly buckled my seatbelt in the co-pilot’s seat next to her.

  Morgana eased the scramjet off the runway and over the Pacific Ocean, into the sunset. I could see another stream of dropships to the south, headed skyward with the remaining residents of the Seattle Isles. Another stream to the east in Kelowna. Another far to the south near Portland Heights. This was a full evacuation of the Republic to include millions of children and countless Outcasts. I wondered how they found time to freeze them all efficiently and safely into stasis.

  The scramjet furiously breathed air and, once past Mach 4, the hypersonic engines screamed to life. I was pushed back in my seat as Morgana both grunted and giggled. Soon we were ripping along at Mach 11. It would only take three hours to get to Kerguelen, on the other side of the globe.

  The marshal had thankfully unlocked every bit of intelligence the Republic had on the Kergueleni, which I pored over. Morgana put the jet on autopilot and kicked her boots up on the dashboard.

  “You know, I heard a rumor they don’t really welcome visitors,” she said coldly.

  “I know. I’ve heard the same thing,” I said, unfazed.

  She frowned. “You know I’ll follow you, but I need to know
what you expect.”

  “I expect a cold reception,” I said, stroking the scruffy growth on my chin. “I expect I’m going to have to beg and plead for their help. I expect I’ll probably have to make amends for the sins of our fathers’ fathers, and then make promises our children will have to keep, and….”

  I trailed off and stared out the window. We were flying so fast, faster than the rotation of the Earth, that the sun was rising in front of us in the West.

  “Unless the sun rises in the West….” I muttered, repeating Persephone’s words, hoping there was some prophecy in them.

  “What?” she asked.

  “Oh,” I said dazedly, “just something…she said.”

  “Pax?” Morgana seemed confused.

  “Sorry,” I replied. “Don’t worry about it.

  We both continued reading our digibooks on the history of the islands and of the Kergueleni people who had landed on that remote, windswept island during the early half of the Twenty-First century. For them, the writing was on the wall that the world as they knew it was ending, so instead of trying to fight against the outside forces of climate change and corrupt governments, they ran. As soon as the C-virus outbreak struck, they locked themselves away on the islands, forbidding all travel to or from the nation. The Dominion soon severed all contact with the outside world.

  Apparently, during the fifty or so years the nation existed before they isolated themselves, they became exceedingly wealthy by becoming the banking and trading capital of the world. Their duty-free ports were the transfer point for oil from the Middle East, raw materials from the Americas, and finished goods of all types from Southeast Asia. The Dominion pioneered shipbuilding techniques and soon owned the world’s largest shipping fleet. A city with 50,000 people was built underground and became home to the world’s largest computing center where most of the planet’s data was stored or processed. Their list of accomplishments continued. They handled most of the international banking transactions on the planet. They built the space elevator. They built the first starships capable of interplanetary travel. They even sent the first colony ships to Mars, and beyond, to the solar system. Then they just disappeared.