by Morgan Bell
The recording stopped.
∞
At 07:00 Blaise and the rest of the team arrived at the mall. Blaise had made good on his promise and had grabbed a croissant, a hardboiled egg and an orange juice for Jamie. By 07:11 they had made their way down to the HDMP substation. After being scanned in they asked after Dr. Baxter.
“There have been some strange noises from the med bay,” the duty officer informed them. “But Dr. Baxter hasn’t come out at all.”
Blaise knocked on the door. There was no response. “Dr. Baxter?” Blaise knocked again. “Dr. Baxter, it’s Captain Blaise. Please open up.”
Blaise stopped as he thought he heard something. There was silence and then he heard it again; it sounded like a rattling gasp.
“Dr. Baxter!” Blaise struck the door.
“Blaise,” a faint voice spoke. “Is that you?”
Blaise stopped pounding. “Yes, Doc, it’s me. Can I come in?”
“You can, but just you.,” Jamie said.
There was a sound as the electric bolt retracted. Blaise walked cautiously into the med bay. He saw a figure lying on his side, breathing hard.
“Doc.”
“Not invincible,” the voice rattled in the man’s chest. “But not dead either.”
“Doc, what happened?”
“I can’t feel my legs.”
“How?”
There was a howling sound and Blaise looked over to see a man foaming at the mouth, strapped to a chair.
“What happened to that KV?” Blaise asked.
Jamie shook his head. “Not a KV. I destroyed all the KVs with different frequency broadcasts.”
“Then what the hell is that?” Blaise pointed at the man.
“That’s Chad Pollick, and he is very much alive and very suicidal,” Jamie rasped. “He was with me when I finally perfected a shutdown signal for the KVs. Unfortunately…it has…affected him.”
“Doc, we’ve got to help you and him.”
Jamie shook his head again. “He can’t be helped and I…I need breakfast. Did you bring me breakfast?”
“Yes, sorry Doc, here I got you a croissant, an orange juice and a hardboiled egg.”
Jamie looked up at him with pathetic, blood shot eyes. “Jelly? Did you get me jelly?”
“What…no, I don’t think -”
“Just give me what you brought, please,” Jamie said, and took the package in his trembling hands.
He tore open the package, downed the orange juice in a single gulp, ate the croissant in four bites and the hardboiled egg in two. He drew a deep breath and pulled himself up from the med bay floor. “I’m sorry,” he gulped. “I spent too much time with this…no breaks…no food and too much time.”
Jamie went over to the med bay cabinet, opened it and took out a stainless steel cylinder. From another shelf he retrieved a glass vial with a seal. “I remembered what Rosen told me about my ‘overhaul.’”
Blaise thought about it. “That we don’t all get an overhaul?”
Jamie nodded his head. “Dr. Gottfried said they hadn’t done a complete ‘reset’ on me. I wondered what that meant. Then, when I was working through the KV neutralizing broadcasts it occurred to me that he was talking about telomeres and cells. Resetting them back to an earlier phase, adding time.”
He held out his hand to Blaise. The flesh was still tight, and stretched over enlarged muscles, but there were small dots of white, nearly scale-like tissue, raised and smaller brown dots gathered around the white.
“What’s happening to you?”
“Cells are failing. It’s just a few clusters of damaged keratinized epithelial cells forming these patches. But if this is happening to my skin, I can only imagine what is happening in my body,” Jamie said, and screwed the glass vial to the metal cylinder until the seal was broken.
“What are you doing?”
Jamie, with a quick motion, jammed the cylinder into his leg. There was a clicking noise and Jamie grimaced. “I’m not stable. Gottfried balanced out the hormones, but he left me at my cellular age. Which means that the overhaul is starting to tear my cells apart. I think last night working in here accelerated it. “
“We will get you to a health campus,” Blaise said.
Jamie shook his head. “No.”
“Why not?”
Jamie went over to the panel and pulled up the report from the Cronus file they retrieved. “Look at Gottfried.”
“So? He looks old.”
“Fifteen years ago. He looks the same today. He said he couldn’t ‘reset’ me because there might be something special about my genetics. But I think I was built to fail. He is the only one of the three not dead. Cyber Warfare Base is compromised; Cronus had operatives inside, and Gottfried is still alive; I don’t think that’s a coincidence,” Jamie said. “If I show up at any health campus, he will know about it.”
Blaise was quiet for a moment. “Doc, what can I do for you?”
“Besides remembering jelly next time? Nothing. I’ve just injected myself with a stabilizer that should give me another day or so before the cell errors accelerate,” Jamie told him, putting down the injection unit. “There is some good news. I’ve found the broadcast signal to shut down all KVs.”
∞
“Data room,” Blaise addressed the group that stood waiting outside the med bay. “Fenwick, pull up the municipal grid and locate the interchange hubs for Detroit.”
“What’s going on with Doc?” Rosen asked.
“He’s got the answer, but it took a lot out of him,” Blaise said, and ushered everyone into the data room.
Fenwick had the data station up and the municipal grid on display. “We’ve got six interchange hubs…and only two are operative,” he informed them.
“That’s Detroit for you,” Agent Drake observed.
“No, that’s not it. Four of the hubs were blown out by KVB attacks in the last eight hours,” Fenwick countered.
“And nobody noticed that?” Blaise asked, stepping up to the panel to examine the map.
“There were a lot of attacks. But none of the attacks that knocked out these data hubs were made at the level of the data hubs,” Fenwick said, highlighting where the actual attacks had happened.
Blaise traced the red dots that were bright and clustered.
“Hubs have feedback mechanisms that keep them from being hacked externally. But the attacks,” Fenwick lit up the common grid points, “created a wave summation. It blew the hubs clean out. It’s like someone knew exactly the pattern to use.”
“Or like someone who had experience killing brains was applying the principle to the grid,” Agent Drake said.
“Where are the remaining two hubs?” Agent Ganos asked.
“One is near the old Comerica Park and the other is just below the Detroit Public Library,” Fenwick replied, and lit up the two points.
“Okay,” Blaise addressed the group. “Doc thinks he’s figured out how to shut down the KVs. He has a broadcast signal that, if he is right, will shut down every KV and might even shut down the KVBs. We need to get him to a municipal hub so that we can test it. Detroit is, as the president has said, expendable. We’ve got the Comerica hub, which will be the easiest for us to access. We will set up there, transmit and see what happens. Any questions?”
Rosen raised his hand.
“Yes, sergeant?” Blaise asked.
“How will we know if it works?”
“Detroit KVs will stop and drop where ever they are.”
“How many are we thinking?” Rosen followed up.
Fenwick pulled up some data. Blaise looked at it, then looked Rosen in the eye, “Based on the infection estimates for Detroit, about 300,000.”
“So success is 300,000 bodies on the streets, in their cars, and in their places of work?” Rosen asked.
“Failure is the entire population dead in the streets, in their cars and in their places of work,” Blaise said.
The room fell silent. There was a knoc
k at the door. “Come in,” Blaise called.
An HDMP officer came in. “Sorry, sir, but you are the senior officer on duty and I need to report an incident.”
Blaise gave the officer a look of annoyance. “Can’t you report this to Sergeant Wolinski?”
The officer swallowed hard, but remained standing before Blaise. “That’s the thing sir. The incident is Sergeant Wolinski. He’s dead, sir.”
CHAPTER 19
CLASSIFIED HDMP INCIDENT ROCHESTER ROAD
HDMP ground forces had cordoned off the block around the residential neighborhood and rerouted traffic. A regional command officer greeted Blaise and his team when they arrived in their transport. “Lieutenant, I was told to expect you.”
“What happened?” Blaise asked.
“I’ll walk you through the incident scene,” the regional command officer said courteously.
Blaise, Rosen, Agent Ganos and Agent Drake were led past the officers standing guard around the incident scene and past the vehicle barriers. What they saw was the blackened, smoldering remains of the Mustang, strewn across more than a block. “What we’ve got is strange, sir. Stone age almost. An ancient car with Sergeant Wolinski in it was heading south bound toward Big Beaver Road and was intercepted by another ancient car.”
The command officer pointed to a pair of burn marks on the road twenty meters in front of where the remains of the Mustang were smoldering. “Street level surveillance systems failed for an area of five blocks. But with distance surveillance systems,” he pointed to some of the taller buildings that could be seen from the street, “and regional drone recordings, we’ve got a fairly good idea what happened. The thing is…it doesn’t make much sense.”
“What have you got?” Blaise asked.
“Well, now I know you’ll think this is crazy. But it looked like a guy in an ancient limo used an antique rocket propelled grenade to blow up the red car.”
“You have the recordings?” Drake asked.
“Yes,” the command officer said, and handed them a viewer.
The recordings showed the Mustang sailing down the street, and then it showed the presidential limo, being driven by Lieutenant Marshall, cutting it off. Marshall had the top off and he had a weapon on his shoulder.
“What do you make of it?” the commander asked.
“That wasn’t an RPG. That was a shoulder mounted missile system,” Drake said.
“And the guy in the limo?” the commander asked.
“No idea who he is,” Rosen replied, “but the limo is the one Kennedy was shot in.”
“They guy who won the civil war?” the command officer asked.
“Something like that,” Blaise said. “What about Wolinski?””
“Killed instantly.”
“Any idea where the limo went?”
The command officer made a face. “The rest of the surveillance systems crashed and then we picked him up on an interstate monitor. He’s heading toward downtown…we think.”
∞
Marshall was smiling as he sped past the amazed passengers and drivers in the e-cars that were strung out along the highway. “Pow, pow, pow,” Marshall said, making a gun with his finger and pointing at individual drivers.
“What the hell was that?” a disembodied voice asked from a satchel he had sitting on the seat next to him.
“Like it? I thought there was a certain karmic balance to it,” Marshall observed cheerfully.
“You were supposed to draw them down to us,” the voice said.
“I did.”
“I told you to hit the mall, blow up the substation. That’s why we gave you the missile.”
“You know, you are getting a little bit controlling. We never picked you as leader,” Marshall said.
“This has nothing to do with being a leader. We have the plan, the plan we all agreed on.”
“A plan always changes when it is put into action. You want them down there. They will be down there. On schedule. Don’t tell me how to do my part and I won’t tell you how to be a megalomaniacal fuck,” Marshall snapped.
“We will talk after this.”
“Sure Dad, looking forward to it. But first I’ve got to add some urgency to this.”
“What are you doing now?”
“We will talk after this,” Marshall said, and pulled the car to the shoulder of the road.
∞
The team was silently working in the transport that Blaise was driving. The presence of all the tech was making everyone, except Jamie, edgy. Jamie was fine tuning settings in a data array and measuring peak signal levels.
Rosen broke the silence. “You really think you’ve got it, Doc?”
“Hmm?” Jamie muttered distractedly. “Oh…yes, I’ve got it. I can shut down all the KVs. I’ve just been tweaking it and running it through some language loops.”
“Captain Blaise says we will drop 300 thousand KVs in metro Detroit if we can get the transmission done,” Rosen said.
“At least that many,” Jamie said.
“Doesn’t that worry you?” Rosen asked.
“The KVs? No, not really.”
“But the public doesn’t even know about them. They are going to freak the hell out.”
Jamie shrugged.
“So no worries at all?”
“About the KVs or public opinion? No.”
“About what then?”
Jamie looked at the frequency peaks. “Collateral damage.”
∞
If the municipal surveillance and defense systems were working, they would have registered the flash and the spiraling path of the missile as it streaked across the Detroit skyline into one of the city’s oldest and tallest buildings. A series of defenses would have been mobilized and forward based drone systems would have intercepted it. Instead, drones hovered in hibernation mode around the city when the first explosion reverberated throughout downtown. The second and third explosions, with walls of debris sent raining down on the open streets, saw the emergency response units trying to activate response systems, transport units, and traffic management protocols. Nothing was working. A group of fire responders, in frustration, broke into an antique display of 20th century firefighting tools and tried to open the transport bay doors with axes. The doors, designed to survive level seven terror attacks, could not be budged. Three more missiles struck downtown. Then, as quickly as it had begun, it stopped. There was fire, there were the delayed and small explosions in the buildings that were struck by the missile attack, and there were the screams and cries of humans terrified and injured. What there weren’t were sirens or sounds of emergency vehicles.
On a section of highway, east of downtown, an ancient car rejoined the flow of traffic and made its way south to the old Comerica field.
“Are you happy now?” the disembodied voice in the satchel asked.
“I’d have been happier if this were Dallas,” Marshall said.
∞
“Hold tight!” Blaise yelled, and wheeled the transport sharply to the left.
“What’s happening?” Agent Drake asked.
“The grid is locked south to downtown,” Fenwick answered. “There was a missile attack and the entire municipal grid shut down. No shield, no responders, nothing. It’s all just burning.”
“We’re getting off the street level and running south,” Blaise said. “Fenwick, do what you can to take us off system.”
“I’m on it,” Fenwick replied.
“Damn, now what?” Blaise asked, as traffic came to a stop.
“Get into the priority transport lane!” Fenwick shouted.
Blaise maneuvered the transport from the halted traffic. In car after car he could see terrified people trying to get out of their vehicles.
“Municipal response systems are still offline,” Fenwick reported. “But it looks like the transport suppression codes were issued. E-cars and non-priority transports are all shutting down.”
“We’ve got trouble ahead,” Blaise announced.
“Give me heat signatures. I count fifteen. I need to know. Are they alive?”
Fenwick pulled up the scanner. In the street ahead of them was a group of people, angry, with communications tech, and they were all rushing at the transport.
“Signatures are all still in the high reds,” Fenwick reported.
“Turn on the announcement system,” Blaise said.
Fenwick brought up the crowd dispersal announcement system.
“THIS IS HOMELAND DOMESTIC MILITARY POLICE, YOU ARE ILLEGELLY ASSEMBLED AND IMPEDING OFFICERS; DISPERSE IMMEDIATELY!” The system broadcast was at nearly deafening levels.
“What the hell was that?” Blaise asked.
“I don’t know,” Fenwick said. “I think it’s the pre-programmed crowd response protocol. But I didn’t activate it.”
“Fix it!” Blaise yelled.
“I’m trying!” Fenwick said, and entered information into the data stream furiously.
“SURRENDER IMMEDIATEY! YOU ARE PLACING HOMELAND OFFICERS IN A STATE OF APPREHENSION AND WE WILL BE FORCED TO USE LETHAL MEANS IF NECESSARY,” the system broadcast.
The crowd grew larger and was now swarming forward at the immobile HMDP transport.
Agents Ganos and Drake drew their weapons. Sergeant Rosen was crouched near the transport exit, ready to spring out at anyone who might be on the other side of the door. There was a deafening explosion, and another, and another, and then the sound of gun fire. The transport shook.
“They’re shooting at us?” Rosen asked.
“No! The vehicle is shooting at them!” Blaise yelled out over the sounds echoing through the transport.
There was silence. Before the transport were the torn and bloodied bodies of over thirty people. The panels lit up and the face of Lieutenant Marshall appeared. “HDMP has all the best toys, don’t you agree?” he said. “So, Team Lemming, are you starting to figure this all out?”
“Damn!” Blaise exclaimed, hitting the panel near him.
