Alone in the briefing room she leaned back, rubbing her temples. They were already gray hairs there, she knew. Not even thirty and she had gray hairs!
This had been planned as the longest survey trip the fledgling Federation had launched, to last two years. Now, not even eight months into it, the voyage of discovery was going to be cut short.
Her thoughts turned back to current events. There were quite a few anomalies, places where the others had varied from what had to be good procedure even for fanatic nutcases.
Why had the tanker suicided? To protect the other ship? The problem with that was that the crew of the other ship, which should have been a lot sharper, had been asleep at the switch. If they’d have gone to High Fan within a second or two of when Valley Forge had, they’d have been undetected. Instead, they’d waited for more than half a minute and had been detected.
The tanker had fired a ballistic missile at them and another at the base on the ground. Was the missile directed against Valley Forge a nuclear weapon as well? The missile aimed at the base? Why was a tanker armed with multiple nuclear weapons?
She shuddered at the thought. To martyr the base? That seemed to be the logical conclusion. What about the other ship? It had gone to fans from near where the tanker had initially gone to fans.
Why martyr a colony? To blame it on the Federation? That was probably the simplest explanation, but the hardest to accept on a personal level. There had been terrorist atrocities now for decades, each time striving to shock the world. She sniffed. They would have messed this up, because the weapon would have been typed and identified as to where it had come from.
She contemplated what they’d find on the surface, running various scenarios through her head. The colony would talk to them or not. If not, that might change if she mentioned the missile that had been targeted at them. If they didn’t want to talk, that was fine. Dick and his men would watch them, and would surely detect any landings.
She leaned forward and flipped her phone up. “Commander Graham,” she said and the person on the other end agreed that’s who she was talking to. “I want you to pull a passive sensor sat out of storage and have it prepped to launch as we approach dash II. I want it in a geo-synchronous orbit over the colony.”
“Yes, Admiral. Two hours.”
“One,” Stephanie told her. “Get with the navigator, Commander Navarro, and have the ship’s course altered. I want that satellite in orbit with the barest hint of a baby’s kiss a heartbeat after we arrive.”
“Aye, aye, Admiral.”
Stephanie leaned back, rubbing her temples once again. She played the petty tyrant well. In fact too well. But at times like this it came in very handy. Very handy indeed, but it was a difficult thing for her to take pleasure in, no matter how well she did it.
It took two hours to get into position to drop the sensor sat and she spent the time napping fitfully in her “worry” seat.
From that altitude the pictures of the surface showed a number of vague blurs that she suspected were pre-fab buildings at the site the missile had been aimed at. While they had decent optics, synchronous orbit was still too high to make out very much detail.
Stephanie listened to her specialists review what they saw on the pictures, but her attention only partly on them. It was one thing to stand in front of someone like the President of the United States, or even Admiral Delgado, and say she wouldn’t have any problem pulling the trigger. She suspected both men knew that it was a hollow threat.
Yet, she’d been prepared to order it and only the suicide of the other ship had prevented it. Now, over what was clearly an illegal colony, she was not prepared to shoot preemptively, even if technically she could have. Maybe they’d been right after all.
The consensus around the conference table was that they would have to approach closer to get any information. She sniffed loudly, when they told her that. “As soon as we dropped from High Fan, a shuttle with a landing party was launched. Even now they approach the surface. We’ll go lower, say five thousand kilometers above the surface and send the colony a ‘How do you do?’”
They dropped lower and the message was sent. There was no reply. Since they were now in a lower orbit, they were only over the site for twenty minutes every two hours and going much faster. They could see that the colony was laid out in a rectangular grid, with a lot of buildings of uniform size.
Dick reached the surface and the biologists were running tests to see if they needed environmental suits or not. There was still no word from the colony. After six hours, reluctantly, Stephanie ordered her husband to approach cautiously.
The news was not just bad, but disastrous. They’d gone out with environmental suits, because the atmospheric tests were incomplete. The planet seemed more benign than the one Ad Astra had first discovered, but that was because Stephanie had to think Gymnosperms didn’t have much in the way of pollen and there weren’t very many things that walked or crawled on the land.
The problem was the colony. It was, Dick reported, a graveyard.
“We have yet to find any survivors,” he told her. “The biologists say they appear to have suffered from a disease.”
Charlie Rampling was there and asked for symptoms, but Dick couldn’t tell her much beyond, “Everyone is dead.”
An hour later one of the biologists reported back. “We found a bio-war lab, Admiral. We didn’t do more than look at it, but that’s what it had to be. Jack and I did a quick autopsy on three people. Their intestines are jelly and so are their lungs. It looks like they inhaled a flamethrower into their guts and into their lungs. The lesions closely resemble burns.”
“Put Dick on,” Stephanie said levelly.
“Stephanie, we can’t lift. Not with this stuff. We all have to be contaminated.”
“And I can’t afford the wait,” she told him. She felt Charlie grab her arm, but there wasn’t anything she could do about that. “I ordered our departure from orbit a few moments ago, Dick. We’re going to have to hustle to reach Earth in time.”
“I know. Steph...”
“Yeah, I know, too. I love you, big guy. Here’s your mother.”
She got up and walked away, heading straight for her quarters. Not even Doubting Thomas could console her as they broke orbit, accelerating enormously, but not too enormously as they had to have the right velocity vector at Earth.
* * *
Good things, Stephanie found as the pulled into orbit around Earth very much before they were expected, do not come to those who wait. Four days before Valley Forge’s arrival a ship had dropped from High Fan directly between the Earth and the moon. The ship had a vector that was a good fit with Earth’s and they went straight down before anyone could stop them, landing in Teheran, Iran.
The President of the Federation Council, formerly the Prime Minister of Australia, plus the new President of the United States of America and the new President of Germany, the Prime Ministers of England, France, and Australia were all on the circuit as she closed with the planet as well as Admiral Delgado, the commander of the Fleet.
“Embargo Iran,” she told them.
“You have no proof,” the German President said.
“Of course not. But if you don’t close Iran’s borders you will soon have all the proof you need. You don’t want that. Trust me, you don’t want that.”
“Admiral Kinsella,” Admiral Delgado spoke firmly, “there are political realities here.”
“Well, I have a political reality for you. If I don’t hear a vote on closing Iran’s borders from you in the next ten minutes, I’ll broadcast my report, in the clear, to the entire planet.”
“We will not be subject to blackmail,” the new American President told her.
“You stupid moron, what you’re going to be subject to is the summary justice of the people of our country when they find out you’ve condemned millions of them to death. The Iranians had a bio-war lab on that planet. They hit the bio-war jackpot! Do you really want to find out if tha
t ship was infected?”
There was a wash of static that interrupted all of the signals, and then another face was on the wall of Stephanie’s command center. He was Hsu Chien, Prime Minister of China.
“Admiral Kinsella, I regret to meet you under these circumstances. I understand I have you to thank for a vinegar-stained shirt.”
Stephanie recoiled. “Ah...”
The Chinese Prime Minister nodded somberly. “I owe you for that, as you say in America, big time.”
He turned to scan the others, seeing what she saw, Stephanie thought.
“We maintain diplomatic relations with the Islamic Republic of Iran. Until today, China has been unapologetically in support of that regime, since it is a huge impediment to the West, particularly the United States and now the Federation.
“I advised from the beginning that we should come to an accommodation with Federation, but I was unable to secure the support necessary. No longer.
“Earlier today the Politburo broke ties with Iran. The vessel Admiral Kinsella speaks of landed several days ago at a military field outside of Tehran. It came in on automatics -- all aboard were dead -- something that the Iranians weren’t aware of because they are simple morons who permitted a ship that did not respond to any attempt to communicate to land seventeen kilometers from the heart of their largest metropolis.
“Our agents report that about two thousand people have been hospitalized in Iran in the last two days, showing symptoms of something that faintly resembles cholera, but also closely resembles pneumonic plague. The number of cases is increasing at a log-log rate, which my scientists tell me bodes very ill for the human race.
“China votes for an immediate closing of the borders of Iran, with lethal force to be used on any who try to leave.”
There was a hushed silence, broken only by someone appearing over the shoulder of the French President, handing him a piece of paper.
After a few moments, Nikolas Sarkozy lifted his eyes look at the rest of them. “I ordered the DGSE to check to see if any Iranian aircraft had landed within the last seventy-two hours. I am informed that two have, one of them carrying a seriously ill member of the Iranian government, who expired a short time ago. The cause of his death is yet to be determined, but the doctors say his lungs and digestive tract were heavily compromised, although they believe the death itself was by a heart attack.”
“China has closed it borders, across the board,” Hsu Chien repeated. “While I wish to cooperate, government to government, and above all, science for science, but there is no way we can permit traffic in and out of our country. My science advisor will be in touch -- there are things I have to do.”
The meeting turned to damage control, only Robert Campbell, ex-Prime Minister of Australia and now head of the Federation Council spoke against it.
“The time for damage control has come and gone. Even Admiral Kinsella wasn’t in time, although I’m sure as I can be that she strained every iota to get here sooner. You are talking about publicity control. Prime Minister Chien was correct -- we needed to do a different form of damage control.
“We need to create isolated labs, right this instant. Lock them down and get the best people we have into them as fast as humanly possible -- unless there is any chance they have been exposed to this disease.”
The German President sniffed in derision. “You are children, frightened by shadows.”
Stephanie flicked a switch and talked to the Federation President privately. “Have I ever given you a bum steer?”
He laughed. “You’ve been at the front end of the steer every time anyone ignores you, making, ah, bums of the rest of us.”
“You have broad executive powers, although most of the more dramatic ones require a vote of the Council to confirm. Decertify Germany. Right now, pending a re-examination by the membership committee.”
He whistled low. “My goodness! Won’t that cause a fuss!”
“Perhaps, Bob, a fuss right now might raise a little awareness that might not have been raised otherwise.”
“Stephanie, I have to ask this. Are you sure?”
“Bob, I left my husband back on that planet. By now, they’ve run out of bottled oxygen and have had to rely on whatever decontamination procedures they had. I’m at least a month from returning.”
“I take it, that’s a yes.”
“Yes. Charlie Rampling hates my guts for leaving her son behind.”
He sighed, nodded and then the wall went back to the way it had been before.
Bob rapped on his table. “I have reached a preliminary decision, in the name of the Federation.”
The conversation stopped and all eyes went to him. “As of this moment, all Benko-Chang traffic in the Federation is grounded. All aircraft on Earth, Benko-Chang or not, are grounded in all Federation states, nor may those states receive traffic from states outside the Federation.
“Oh, one more thing. Germany is decertified, pending a re-examination by the membership committee, because of their patent obtuseness.”
Patent obtuseness? Stephanie was impressed!
“I agree,” Sarkozy said. “I am ordering French airspace closed.”
“The United Kingdom.”
“Japan.”
“Australia.”
Belatedly the new American President said, “We will close our borders until the matter can be further evaluated.”
The German President sat shell-shocked. “I don’t know what to say...”
Sarkozy laughed bitterly. “About now, my good friend, it is time to wave the white flag of surrender and do what is in the best interests of your people. Iranian oil has too long been a drug that has weighed heavily against our best interests. Now, we pay the price.”
“But this is precipitate action,” the German President protested. “We can’t be sure.”
“Mr. President,” Stephanie told him. “This disease killed, so far as we could tell, every last man, woman and child on the Iranian off-world colony. It killed everyone on the ship that landed in Tehran. There are still no reports of survivors.” She took a deep breath. “Do the math.”
Chapter 2 -- Early Returns
It could have been worse, Stephanie mused a month and a half later. It had taken just three weeks to find a vaccine and the word had spread like wildfire. A good thing, too, because in those three weeks two hundred million people around the globe had fallen ill. Alas, the vaccine didn’t treat the disease, but some of the antibiotics had proven effective enough.
And, even though vaccine production had ramped up quickly, it had still taken another two weeks to distribute and administer, and the final number of infected was close to eight hundred million. Literally, without treatment, less than one in five thousand survived, and half of those suffered significant lung damage or intestinal damage. Those that had both, of course, hadn’t survived. Eight hundred million people had been infected with the disease; barely two million survived it.
Iran had been disproportionately affected, as had a few other Islamic republics who had scoffed at the first reports. It took three days of incubation before a person was highly infectious -- but ten days for them to die. Because of the quarantines, and because no one felt particularly grateful to Iran for slaughtering thousands and millions of their citizens, no one had gone to their aid. Less than one percent of the Iranian people had survived the plague; most of them government officials who had bunkered up early.
When that became known, the survivors had broken into the shelters and slaughtered the government officials and their families. Fanatic extremist Islam had died out in less than two months. The fanatics had screamed about plots and Satan, but the fact was that it had been the democracies of the world that had worked to save those afflicted and the shock had been too sudden, too swift to develop any sort of spin or propaganda explanations.
* * *
Forty-two of Stephanie’s two hundred and ten crew members had elected to return to Earth, to be with loved ones during the crisis.
Everyone senior in the Federation Fleet had been furious at her for letting them go, but she’d stood her ground. A person’s place should be with their loved ones, if that was what they wanted. She stood on the bridge as she ordered Valley Forge away from Earth and back to the planet where her husband and his team had been left behind.
She’d ordered one gravity, but the navigator had told her the crew was comfortable with three and a half. It would only save an hour on the other end, but it was the crew’s expression of their regard.
Charlie Rampling was one of the crewmembers who stayed aboard, but she no longer spoke to Stephanie.
The trip took weeks, and when they dropped from High Fan closer to the planet than they should have, there were no responses to the calls down to the surface.
Stephanie stood on the docking deck when the shuttle returned from the surface, bearing the bodies of those who’d done their duty.
Stephanie had stood there, expressionless, watching the bodies carried from the shuttle, to be placed in a cargo pod that would be decontaminated before their return to their home.
She finally turned away to run into Charlie. “You killed my son,” she told Stephanie.
“An Iranian moonbat molecular biologist killed Dick.”
“You could have gone back.”
“No, I couldn’t, Charlie, and you know it. They were contaminated by then. If it got loose on the Valley Forge we’d have come in dead, just like the Iranians.”
“We bought them less than four days!”
“Four days, Charlie. Log-log growth, right? The Earth lost a nearly a billion people. If they’d lost those days it might have been half of every man, woman and child on Earth. And there wouldn’t have been services to produce and distribute the vaccine. If we hadn’t arrived when we did, the Earth’s population today could well be only a few million. I don’t know if that would be enough to end the human race, but it could have.
“He was going to die, Charlie. Once they walked around the colony, he was dead. So were the men and women with him. They’re going to give them all medals, back home.”
Rescue Branch (Kinsella Universe) Page 29
