by Jim Rudnick
If someone had this code phrase and its subsequent answering phrase, then the AI was to treat that person as crew—with all authority and verifications intact. So part one of the AI insurance plan was in effect. Only part left was to now insert those two phrases into the cadre AI back at the Maxwell courthouse with the time-delay sub-routine.
He nodded.
All done.
He looked over at the five members of the cadre who were waiting to leave and smiled.
“Been my home, the Drake, for over a year almost. Will miss her,” he said as he checked his big backpack he’d dug out of storage and ensured he had all the items he’d need.
Ammo, check. Jerky bars, check. Extra socks and clothes, check. First aid kit, check. A couple of drone balls, check, with extra batteries too, Sleeping roll, check. And a host of other little items too like a pack of gum, a waterproof set of markers and paper, and a quick-fire starter too.
Dunno what I’ll need, so a bit of most of these should do, he thought and smiled at the cadre members.
“Right—let’s go,” he said.
Javor and the group went out the front airlock door as he took the lift down with Bixby. At the bottom, he carefully instructed the Drake AI to close her up—and that he’d see her in a couple of months. He also made sure that the reactor—the real power of the Drake that drove their engines and FTL—was closed down. The fuel rods were slowly retracted from the core by the AI, and Javor watched the display as the eight rods were all stored in their own heavy water baths and the core shut down. He saw the solid orange bars across the display noting that the Drake was now on full battery power—and at this level of power requirements, the batteries would last at least nine months.
He grunted and said, “Thanks, AI.” The AI didn’t understand such comment, but they’d be recorded and archived for whoever might come next.
He smiled one more time as he looked up at her.
Damaged sure, but still the explorer ship, my ship—the Drake …
#####
Back at the cadre headquarters, Sue was buttoning up the contents of their important documents and papers and the like. As she tucked the last stack into the big folder, Jimmy was hoisting up the final receiver and amplifier that had been all hooked up for their ham radio station.
Javor followed them both, carrying the three table mics and a huge coil of network cabling too, as they went out of the room up on the mezzanine that they used as their administration center and down the hall to the larger rear area room. They walked across the tiled floor, went around and behind the large reception counter to a wide-open vault door, and entered the vault.
“The vault had been used,” Sue said, “for the courthouse to store items in—and that’s exactly what the cadre does too.” All of their secure items were now stored in some of the shelves inside the big steel box, and as she closed the huge door, she spun the wheel at the same time.
“Combination is the day the bombs fell for us here on Bones—four, twenty-five, ninety-three—and it’s always right, left, then back to right too. Figured as you’ve left your own AI insurance to the Drake, we can do the same. No telling who’s gonna make it back to Maxwell—this is one hell of a hike,” she said and smiled.
She was right, Javor knew, but then surely six of them, heavily armed, capable, and knowing the land and infrastructure could make it with minimal hardship. Surely, he thought, and we have Bixby too. Better ears and a sense of smell too that could work for them.
He nodded and smiled back, and then they all went down the main stairs in the foyer.
Sue and Jimmy both did some kind of manual entry of data to the courthouse AI, and then they both looked at him.
“Passwords—good only in 120 days, mind you—please?” Sue said.
He nodded and half-smiled. “First one is my birth date, which, for those of you who are mathematically challenged, was fifty-two years ago. It’s six, thirteen, twenty-two forty-nine. That one needs to be entered first, correct?” he asked.
Sue nodded back to affirm that.
“And the second one is the color of my first-ever flyer that I got on my sixteenth birthday—and the color was orange. That’s the challenge question, right?” he asked, as Jimmy typed in both the query and the correct reply, and then he nodded to Sue.
“Right. Birth date to open up the access gate—followed by the query from AI about the color of your first flyer. If not followed by the word orange, then the access port shuts down. Three tries in five minutes is all that’s allowed, too … to prevent the brute force type of attack. We’re good,” she said as the courthouse AI chimed three times and the lights on same went to green with a couple set to amber too.
She looked around and shuffled her backpack up and onto her shoulders, once again shuffling it to get a good weight balance.
“Jimmy, Bruce, Rick, and Wayne. Anything else? Have we forgotten anything?” she asked.
“Just that there was supposed to be fresh fish again tomorrow evening,” Jimmy said wistfully, and that got a chuckle from her.
“And yes, it’s rations for the next month and some. But we know that the food in Arlington is better than what we get here, now don’t we,” she said, and that got some nods too.
“Let’s get a move on,” she said. “Would like to get at least ten miles done today.”
As they all turned to walk out of the foyer, the sun appeared and the pink light of dawn lit the grounds ahead. Sue turned back to yell at the AI with her administrator password code, and AI closed the doors behind them. A solid locking mechanism could be heard too.
The courthouse was buttoned up pretty well, Javor thought, at least from scavengers and the dumb zombie types. Someone with smarts could still gain access, but the AI and its ability to enforce security from the foyer and lobby of the building could not be avoided. A sign reading enter at your own risk could have been left out front, he thought and then shrugged that away. Better to let someone enter and then get AI on its case.
He noted that Bixby was close to him as if he could tell that this was somehow a different day, and he smiled and ruffled the dog’s neck.
He smiled a bit at Wayne who had coupled up with him to follow Sue who took point, and they walked down the courthouse walkway, through the hedge opening, and left toward the river.
Four blocks later, they hit the main street in Maxwell that ran parallel to the river but a few blocks west. Many cars, trucks, and even a streetcar partially filled the street, all with the same fire-blackened exteriors.
“Okay, split up—I’ll keep Wayne and Javor—you guys take the far side,” she said and Rick, Bruce, and Jimmy trotted across the empty intersection to walk down the far side of the street’s sidewalk.
“We do this when there’s ambush areas that we’ve not yet checked out,” Sue said as she led the way down the sidewalk in front of them. She again took point, while Wayne dropped back behind him, leaving him in the second spot.
“That way, only half of you could get attacked, leaving the other half to come to their aid, correct?” Javor asked.
Sue nodded, which he also took to mean shut up and so he did.
They moved steadily down the street. Every so often, he glanced across to see the others making about the same time too.
In front of a small neighborhood bodega, a huge pile of grocery baskets that someone had stacked neatly at one time had now fallen over, and the three of them had to climb up and over, making a lot of noise as the plastic broke beneath their feet. He was a bit worried about all that noise, but nothing jumped out at them from the cars out in the street, so they continued on.
At the first cross street ahead, the number of cars still in the street ahead lessened drastically. Sue whistled and the other three joined them. Bixby, who had preceded his group all along, dropped back for a moment and then bounded out into the street as a rabbit or something like a rabbit bolted from a pile of rubble in the gutter.
A sharp whistle stopped the dog in mid-chase,
and he returned, went around Javor, and then matched his pace.
Good to know too, Javor thought, that a simple whistle would bring him back even if he was chasing food. Food, he thought and then reached up into his top left wide pocket on his vest, and taking a jerky bar out, he peeled off the wrapper and handed the bar to Bixby who was all eyes at this point.
It took him a minute to chew it up, and he caught up with the whole group who now had taken back the middle of the street to move along. Bixby pranced ahead too on occasion to investigate a single car or a pile of rubbish at the gutter.
“Dog helps a bit,” Sue said and Javor nodded back. Did help a lot.
As the group moved street by street, sometimes on the sidewalks and sometimes right down the middle, they made good time, but it wasn’t as quick as Javor had thought it would be.
As the street curled slowly to the east ahead of them, the river could now be seen with a lone bridge across it in the near distance. Not a car, truck, or wreck of any kind was on the bridge, and as they reached the edge of the bridge, Sue stopped them.
“Okay, this is the Coombs Bridge, final one across the river here in Maxwell. We go across her, take the eastern side of the far street, and then in a few miles, get on the interstate to the power station at the Adair Dam. Last time in Maxwell is now, I’d say,” she offered and waved back over their shoulders.
Javor took a quick glance backward but not at Maxwell per se. He tried to see if he could find the Drake on the far shore up on the ridge line, but it was too far away, he figured.
So he waved. See you soon, he thought.
And like the rest of the group, he walked across the bridge, out of Maxwell, and toward the interstate, whatever it was …
#####
Bixby noticed something, sat down well ahead of the group, and howled.
Something, Javor knew, had been different enough for him to notice and then set off his howling.
Long howls, he noted too, as if he was trying to let the whole county know something was up from where he sat.
They caught up to him at the top of the roadway as it dipped down toward a valley, which extended a few miles ahead of them and was at least a mile or two wide. Javor could only guess Bixby had been concerned because the valley was out of sight below them. Enormous concrete ramps stretched out hundreds of yards ahead of them, slowly curving onto the fully elevated interstate highway.
Javor put a hand on Bixby’s head and said, “Thanks boy, good dog,” and Bixby quieted immediately.
What had been a well-maintained highway long, long ago now stretched out across the whole valley like a suspended line of concrete and steel littered with the remains of cars and trucks. It was old and what would be called wrecked in anyone’s language. Yet with its size and breadth as well as miles of it stretching off into the distance, it was an impressive part of the old Ceti4 infrastructure. Not so much about Bones, Javor thought, but then time did play havoc on many things.
Supporting those wide concrete lanes were massive concrete pylons, mostly now covered with ivy or undergrowth that crawled up the hundred feet or so. There was one every three or four hundred feet, each one old and tired. He wondered how long they’d hold up the spans that went from one to another as far as he could see. At the foot of those pylons, the weeds, shrubbery, and undergrowth was so thick you almost couldn’t see the bottoms of them.
The on-ramps and off-ramps that had allowed the traffic to get on and off the highway still remained. They slowly rose the hundred feet or so in a slow curved path. Some, like the one ahead a bit, had a few cars on it, while others had none. A few ahead too had what looked like some kind of encampment—most likely abandoned long ago. Javor looked for smoke, which would indicate fire, something that would be needed by anyone who was living in that kind of campsite.
He looked both north and south, up and down the valley, and saw only train tracks—two sets with a spur line far to the east. In between the shining rails, he saw grass, weeds, and overgrowth—things that would never happen if there was any kind of rail traffic. Well east of that spur, he saw some cars that lay like they’d derailed perhaps, but it was too far away, and he didn’t bother digging out his binoculars to check.
“The valley itself is mostly farmland, well, it once was. The interstate, as you can see, starts here just outside of Maxwell and goes all the way to the power station at the Adair Dam about seventy-five miles if we can believe the signs,” Sue said as she pointed to one of the official highway signs. It was leaning to one side and had been fired upon with what looked like shotgun blasts, but it still read that the Adair Dam was seventy-five miles away.
Jimmy nodded and then pointed at the on-ramp below them a few hundred yards away.
“So, do we take the interstate ‘til we can’t anymore, or do we stay on the ground?” he asked and that got Javor thinking.
If they took the interstate and ran into trouble—zombies or the like—then there was no way around those troubles. If they took the land route, then there could always be a way around troubles ahead.
“Depends,” Sue said, “if we need to make time, then we take the interstate, else we walk underneath,” she said. and that got nods all around.
Javor also knew that this was most likely the best thing for them—the balance of safety versus speed of travel.
The six of them all got in a one-two-two-one formation; Sue was on point, Javor and Wayne next, Jimmy and Rick next, and on the tail end was Bruce. He hefted the new gun he carried and said, “Could probably take down a zombie a mile down the interstate with this.” While that was most likely a stretch, he still exuded confidence.
Sue led and after a while, she pushed out from being directly under the long concrete spans above them to run parallel about a hundred feet away. For a reason that nobody knew, the undergrowth directly under those spans was thicker.
Jimmy had the best guess and said, “Most likely, the run-off of rainwater comes right down below via some kind of ductwork, so it’d get better irrigation below the spans … or maybe not.”
At least, Javor thought, that did make sense, and he grinned when he realized there was no one to ask.
Bixby really had the lead, as it was his senses once again that made him return to Javor’s side and growl.
At his feet, Javor looked down and saw some kind of tracks—fresh tracks—in the small muddy part of the trail they’d been following. The tracks were of a four-legged animal of some kind and larger than Bixby’s tracks. Not good, Javor thought as he looked at his dog.
Bixby walked stiff-legged, and that meant something was up. Or coming. Or lying in wait, Javor noted for Sue, and she called a halt just ahead of a thicket of shrubs ahead that was deep and blocked their way.
Sue pointed as she said, “Thicket ahead is like two hundred yards wide, so it’s either all the way to the top of that rise to the right or through.”
She looked at each of them, and there was not a word said, as one by one they all pointed up the rise to the right. Deflecting a threat, even a perceived threat, just from what might be great cover for an ambush was always a good idea.
“Course,” Javor said, “we do have a time line—and every single one of these small off-track safety jaunts costs us time. But yeah, let’s go right,” he said.
He wanted to argue that firepower was on their side along with real live brains instead of dumb zombie brains, but this was the first morning of the first day. To the right it was, and he, like the rest of them, fell in behind Sue as she took to the right, and they slowly climbed up the rise.
It wasn’t heavily covered with weeds and undergrowth, but still, it was tougher getting to the top than any of them had anticipated. Bixby was already up there, at the top of the rise, still doing his stiff-legged walk, but the growl was gone. As they all reached the top and stood half-hidden among the tall sumacs that lay around them, they looked back toward that thicket and Jimmy whistled.
Buried inside that thicket, near the left side,
was what looked like a small camp. There were a few containers that had been turned into what looked like some kind of home—there were a few women in front of the camp, doing what looked like laundry duty, while two kids were playing. Laundry hung on some lines off to one side and a couple of caches of food items were bound and hung in cages well above the ground.
He looked at Sue. “Basic encampment, shelter, laundry, women, and kids. But note, not a single man. Wonder where they are,” he said and noted Bixby still was acting like there was imminent danger. Not enough to howl or growl at—but still close. Bixby was becoming a great asset, as long as you could read his cues.
“Bixby is still worried, though,” he added, and everyone else looked at the dog walking stiff-legged ahead a bit and turned every few steps to look back at Javor.
“Noted,” Sue said and looked forward once more into the valley.
Ahead lay a long downhill slope toward the next massive concrete support pylon for the interstate off to their left. The pylon’s base was also buried in that same thicket as the encampment, which was not something to worry about, and farther—
“Shh … down,” Bruce said as he dropped down into a deep crouch and his new gun came up to rest on his shoulder.
They all dropped quickly, and Javor noted Bixby mimicked them as well.
Off to their right, farther away from the interstate and the encampment, a file of what looked like about twenty people were coming toward the rise but veering off to their own right. That way, Javor could see, they’d avoid him and his group and yet still get around to the other side of the rise.
Jimmy whispered, “Do you think that they’re from the encampment?”
The leader of the file was a woman. She had a bow strung on her back and carried a pack that looked pretty heavy. From what Javor could see, they were all women. Each was armed with bows and quivers of arrows. And each looked like they were loaded down with heavy items in their backpacks, and some carried shoulder bags that were also jammed with something.
