Pandemic i-3

by Scott Sigler

  He sat back, gave his bald head a quick, damp rub. “The only way anyone could steal our alien technology, which we haven’t even secured yet, would be to invade the United States of America and occupy Michigan, Wisconsin and Minnesota.”

  The man knew his business, no doubt, but after all this time he still didn’t get the big picture.

  “I’m not talking about stealing it,” Murray said. “I’m talking about touching it. We just lost a nuclear sub, a destroyer, a cutter and over four hundred brave men and women. That didn’t happen by accident. If the wreckage was somehow contaminated with any of the contagious shit that forced us to nuke Detroit, then the Chinese don’t have to get the thing out of the country, they just have to be dumb enough to go down and try. That alone could be enough to goat-fuck us right in the ass.”

  “That’s enough,” President Blackmon said.

  Murray didn’t know if she’d had that voice of unquestionable authority before she took over as commander in chief, but she sure as shit had it now.

  “This briefing is over,” she said. “I think Director Vogel has clearly illustrated that the site is protected against espionage. He’s doing his job. Murray, you do yours. Find out what turned the crew of the Los Angeles into traitors, and find out fast.”

  DAY THREE

  NIGHT FLIGHT

  Margaret’s belly wanted to be sick, but Margaret was in charge of such things and she was not going to let this helicopter ride make her throw up.

  She’d spent most of the last three years sequestered in her house. Now here she was, at 4:00 A.M., in a loud-as-hell helicopter streaking across the black surface of Lake Michigan, strapped tightly into an uncomfortable seat and wearing an ill-fitting helmet. Her soon-to-be-ex husband sat next to her, a constant reminder of her failures as a wife.

  How had Murray talked her into this?

  Maybe it hadn’t been Murray at all. Maybe it was because the infection had returned, and she couldn’t stand aside while others fought that evil for her.

  Before “Project Tangram,” before she and Amos stumbled onto something that would turn out to be one of humankind’s biggest and worst discoveries, she had been an epidemiologist with the CDC. She hadn’t been a “nobody,” by any stretch, but no one had really known who she was.

  The infection changed all that.

  She moved from a back room to the front line. She had become the one, the person who figured it out, who stopped it. Doing so had cost so many lives; it had destroyed hers as well.

  She should have been a celebrity, a hero. She should have been an icon of the scientific world. Instead, she had suffered so much in the past five years. Lost so much. She wasn’t going to let that be for nothing.

  You will not win. I WILL beat you.

  The pilot’s voice came over the headphones built into her helmet.

  “We’re coming up on the task force,” he said. “We’re on high alert, so this will be a slow approach as they make sure everything is okay. If you look out the port side, you can see the task force coming up pretty quick.”

  Margaret readjusted her loose helmet as she looked. Rain pounded against the helicopter’s windshield. She could see no stars, nothing but black above and below. Then, in the distance, she saw the glow of lights.

  Warships, on the Great Lakes. And the concept of lake didn’t really register — she couldn’t see land in any direction, not even the distant sparkle of cities or towns.

  As the helicopter closed in, the faint lights of the four gray ships became more clear. The ships were big… so big they seemed to ignore tall, black, undulating swells that could have dragged normal boats to the bottom. The longest of the gray ships looked boxy, like a cargo hauler. Two others were nearly as big but had the sleek lines of combat vessels. One rode tall in the water, pristine and impressive, while the other listed slightly to port, parts of its superstructure blackened and twisted. It took her a moment to realize the two ships were identical, a before-and-after image representing the effects of combat. The smallest of the four didn’t look like any ship she had ever seen.

  Margaret pulled on Clarence’s sleeve and pointed at the identical pair’s undamaged ship. She tried to lean into him and cracked her helmet against his. He reached up, tapped the helmet’s microphone sitting directly in front of her mouth.

  “Oh,” she said. “Sorry.” She didn’t need to yell over the helicopter’s engine to be heard. She pointed out again. “What is that?”

  “That’s the Pinckney,” Clarence said. “Arleigh Burke class guided missile destroyer. It’s the flagship of the flotilla. The one that’s listing is the Truxtun. The one that looks like a tanker is the Carl Brashear. That’s where we’re headed. It’s about seven hundred feet long, so your motion sickness should settle down once we’re aboard.”

  She hadn’t told him she felt ill. He just knew.

  Margaret gestured to the final ship, the smallest of the four. Its long, thin, pointed nose widened near the base, flaring out into the superstructure, which itself led to a flat, square back deck. The ship’s steeply sloped sides reminded her, somewhat, of the old Civil War ironclads, and yet the vessel’s overall appearance was that of a spaceship from a science fiction movie. On the back deck, she saw two helicopters, ready and waiting.

  “That’s the Coronado,” Clarence said. “It’s new. It’s called a littoral combat ship.”

  “So it literally does combat?”

  “Not lit-ER-al, lit-OR-al,” he said. “It means close in to shore. That’s where SEAL Team Two is.”

  Guided missile destroyers. Littoral combat ships. SEALs. This was the equivalent of putting a floating flag in the middle of Lake Michigan and telling the rest of the world this is ours, and if you even look this way, you’re going to get a black eye.

  How typical. Five years after what could have been the extinction of the human race, and her government chose to rattle its saber instead of working with other countries to share the biggest scientific discovery in history.

  And yet as impressive as three of the four ships looked, she realized that just a day ago there had been a total of seven: two more on the surface, one below. Somehow, the infection had taken them out.

  I will beat you.

  The helicopter suddenly plummeted, an elevator with the cable cut. Just as quickly the drop ended with a hard rattle that bounced her in her seat and jostled her loose helmet.

  “Sorry about that,” said the pilot’s voice in her earphones. “The wind is pretty tricky. Turbulence is going to be rough as we come in to land. Hold tight.”

  Something seemed to slap the helicopter’s left side. Margaret’s stomach let out a brief-but-intense prepuke warning. She started to look for something to throw up in, but Clarence was already offering her an open barf bag.

  Margaret held it to her mouth as she discovered that she was not, after all, in charge of such things. She kept throwing up as the helicopter descended toward the Carl Brashear.

  MUTUALLY ASSURED DESTRUCTION

  Steve Stanton stood at the rail of the Mary Ellen Moffett, wondering if the phrase “freezing your nuts off” was less a figure of speech and more an accurate scientific possibility.

  He stared out at an endless black surface, not that he could see all that far at 5:00 A.M. on a starless morning. November wind tore at his raincoat. Five-foot swells slapped against the hull, splashing icy spray into his face. He’d been out on the lake dozens of times while testing the Platypus, but until this moment he had never, in his entire life, been in a place where he couldn’t see land. He felt like a shivering speck in the middle of nowhere, like a satellite surrounded by the expanse of space.

  Bo Pan stood next to him. The old man had already thrown up over the rail once. He looked like he might soon do so again.

  It was hard to believe that just twelve hours earlier, Steve had been sunning himself in a lawn chair. As soon as the Mary Ellen Moffett left the dock, the temperature had plummeted twenty degrees. The growing wind dragged it d
own at least another fifteen. The Gore-Tex foul-weather gear he’d bought (with some of Bo Pan’s wad of cash, thank you very much) was rated for temperatures well below this, and yet still Steve felt wet and cold. When he got back, he’d write a stern letter of complaint to the manufacturer’s customer service department.

  Steve found himself caught between excitement and fear. Despite years of preparation, it seemed impossible to believe that he was here — to possibly acquire a piece of something created by an extraterrestrial race.

  “Bo Pan,” Steve said in a whisper that was lost on the wind. He leaned in closer and spoke louder. “Bo Pan, do you really think the location is accurate?”

  Bo Pan shrugged. He looked miserable, but resigned to the misery, like a wet sheep patiently waiting out a hailstorm. Bo Pan hawked a loogie, spit it over the side. The man had cornered the market on phlegm.

  “I do not know,” he said. “I was told to bring you here, and to launch your creation that way.” He pointed starboard, to the north.

  Steve stared out. Maybe his destiny was out there, nine hundred feet below the surface. He could be the one to find it, to bring it back for the glory of China. If what lay on the bottom provided new technology, if it was or helped create a weapon, his country needed it. Hard times were coming to the world. America would not give up her place at the top without a fight. The People’s Party had spent decades preparing for that final shift to ascendancy — it wouldn’t be fair if a chance find gave America some kind of accidental edge.

  Steve knew his history: when America had an advantage, it used that advantage. The atom bomb against Japan. Logistics and manufacturing against Germany. A superior air force against Iran, Libya and Bosnia. The shock and awe tactics against Iraq. When America fought with one hand tied behind its back, as it had in Vietnam and Korea, it lost. When it used everything it had, when it let the generals decide strategy, America always won.

  China was gaining, gaining fast, but America still had the best tanks, the best planes, the best ships. Chinese armed forces claimed technical superiority, but as an engineer Steve knew such claims were a steaming pile of bullshit. Even with the largest manufacturing base in the world and an entire government dedicated to developing a high-tech military, China was still a decade away from being able to fight on equal terms. If war came, America would use everything it had: including alien technology, maybe even that psycho disease President Gutierrez had talked about.

  Sure, Gutierrez had warned everyone to be on the lookout for symptoms. Steve remembered the president’s endless “T.E.A.M.S.” public service commercials, the acronym that told the populace to watch for triangles, excessive anger and massive swelling. People knew what to look for, yet the disease had never reappeared — at least as far as the public knew. Did America have it stored away somewhere, like the anthrax or smallpox it also wasn’t supposed to have?

  If America possessed a weapon, America would use it.

  The only way to keep the balance, to properly protect the land of his ancestors, was to make sure China had the same weapons. If Steve found something his nation could use to defend itself, he would become a legend. In America he could get rich, sure, but he’d always be thought of as nothing more than that smart Asian guy. In China, they would build statues of him.

  He would be a national hero.

  Bo Pan gagged, then leaned over the rail and threw up again. Steve grabbed a handful of the older man’s coat, just to make sure he didn’t tip over and drop into the water. After a few heaves, Steve pulled Bo Pan back.

  The man wiped the back of his mouth with his sleeve. “Sorry,” he said. “Sorry.”

  Steve wished he could have come alone. Or, if they had to send someone with him, maybe someone better than this useless, seasick messenger.

  Noise came from farther back on the deck. Cooper Mitchell and a short Mexican man named José were following Jeff Brockman around the deck. Bo Pan had been agitated that Cooper and Brockman brought another crewmember. Steve couldn’t figure out why — you had to have enough people to run the boat, after all.

  José was all of five-foot-five, wiry, with a heavy mop of black hair and a face so happy it looked like he had to concentrate to show anything but a smile. He seemed to look up to Brockman, both literally and figuratively.

  Brockman was always first to laugh, first to scowl, first to talk, as if he felt compelled to drive every conversation and every action. He was fun to be around, but Steve suspected that Cooper was the only reason Brockman had a business at all.

  The three men checked the straps securing a pair of long, custom-made shipping crates. The bigger of the pair was five feet high and wide, fifteen feet long. Inside lay Steve’s baby, the Platypus. The second crate was smaller, only about four feet long and lower to the deck. It held another of Steve’s creations, one he hoped he wouldn’t have to use.

  Bo Pan watched the commotion as well. “How soon can we put your machine in the water?”

  Steve’s brain automatically looked for a reason not to do that, checking for something he’d missed, something he’d forgotten, but there was nothing. He was prepared.

  “Right now, I suppose,” he said.

  Steve watched Brockman and Cooper. He waited for something to happen. After a few minutes, he realized he was waiting for Bo Pan to tell Brockman to get started. But Bo Pan wasn’t in charge.

  Steve was.

  It was all on him, and him alone. Now he really wished Bo Pan’s handlers had sent someone else. As strange as it felt, Steve was now a real-life spy — the future of his country might actually rely on how well he handled the situation. No pressure, right?

  He cupped his hands and shouted. “Hey!” The men looked at him. “Can we get it in the water?”

  Brockman looked out at the horizon, as if gauging the wind and the waves, then he glanced at Cooper. Cooper nodded.

  Brockman gave Steve a thumbs-up. “We’re on it, boss!”

  They started unstrapping the crate.

  Steve spoke, and three men jumped into action?

  Maybe being in charge would be kind of fun.

  LITTLE GREEN MEN

  Clarence Otto sat in a chair in front of the captain’s desk, waiting for Captain Gillian Yasaka to arrive. Margaret sat in a chair to his left. She stayed quiet, kept her thoughts to herself. Clarence couldn’t blame her.

  The trip from the landing deck to this tidy office had been disturbing, to say the least. The wounded seemed to be countless. Every open space held prone sailors stretched out on tables, on cots, even lying on the floor with nothing more than a thin blanket to give them some padding. Some of the wounded slept. Others moaned, tossed and turned, overwhelmed by hideous burns on hands, arms and faces. Some of these men would be scarred for life.

  Margaret had tried to stop a half-dozen times, her years as a medical doctor compelling her to do something, to help those in pain. Clarence had had to keep her moving, gentle steady pushes that reminded her she had to think of the bigger picture — there wasn’t enough time to help any of them, let alone all of them.

  The Brashear’s overcrowding made Clarence nervous. People packed that tight would speed the spread of any contagion. One infected person would quickly turn into ten, into a hundred. Maybe that was why Margaret was staying quiet, because she was worried about the same thing.

  Yeah, right.

  If the woman he’d married was still in there, somewhere, Clarence didn’t know how to find her. He’d tried. He’d tried to understand her, to help her, tried to deal with years of constant crying, constant sadness, the obsessive reading of blog posts and comments. He had tried to stay calm while being her endless punching bag, the target of a rage she couldn’t control. He had tried to be there for her, guide her through all of it.

  At what point does a man say I’ve had enough?

  Did he have to give up any chance at happiness in exchange for spending his short life watching her wither away? For better or worse looked great under the showroom lights. Once
you drove it off the lot, it was a different story.

  He couldn’t fight for Margaret if Margaret wouldn’t fight for herself.

  She sat in her chair, stared straight ahead. Did she still love him? No, probably not — truth was she hadn’t loved anything for years. She still needed him, absolutely, but the way a crippled man needs a crutch, or the way a drunk needs a bottle. Still, as messed up as she was, Clarence knew that Margaret Montoya was the person for the job. The only person. His love for her had faded, but not his belief; she could figure this out, she could stop it.

  He would play his role. He’d make sure she ate, make sure she slept, because she forgot to do both when she lost herself in research. He’d fetch her coffee. He’d clean her clothes. Whatever it took; when the real shit hit the fan, Margaret Montoya took center stage, and Clarence was fine with that.

  Captain Yasaka entered. Clarence stood up instantly, faster than he would have liked — leftover reactions from his days in the service. At least he didn’t salute.

  Margaret stayed seated.

  Captain Yasaka — actual rank of commander, but operating under the honorary title of captain like the commander of every ship in the navy — was as neat and clean as her stateroom. Her graying black hair was pulled back in a tight bun, and her dark-blue coveralls looked like they had been pressed and then hung on a mannequin protected behind a plateglass window. Her belt buckle was the only thing that outshined her shoes. She stood all of five-six, but Clarence could tell that she had the presence needed to make tall boys quake in their boots if they failed in their duties.

  All her meticulous grooming, however, didn’t hide her exhaustion, a certain slackness to her face. Yasaka looked like she hadn’t slept in days. She probably hadn’t.

  “Doctor Montoya,” she said. She shook hands with Margaret, then Clarence. “Agent Otto.”

  Clarence nodded. “Captain.”