by Ginger Booth
I didn’t hear the words in the angry clangor that rose all around me in the mess room. Many were sobbing in fear for loved ones on the West Coast.
But I was wondering if it was possible to intentionally generate those earthquakes, and decimate the huge population of California, with a well-placed bomb or three. And furthermore, what someone might do to obliterate Chicago or Philadelphia. Because culling Houston, New York, Los Angeles, and San Diego already accounted for four of the ten largest cities in the U.S.
Chapter 19
Interesting fact: UNC was the fourth ark to be liberated. The complex was built in central Tennessee, shared by UNC and two other media conglomerates, with berths for only 4,000, including executives, members of the boards of directors, star television news anchors and commentators, and their families. They were killed with a gas attack, which dissipated to leave the facility, equipment, and food stores safe for use. Most of the ark’s defense staff survived, and likely conspired in the attack.
“Alex! I’m so glad to reach you!” I cried on the phone. It was no mean trick, getting a phone line out. Cell service doesn’t work out in the Atlantic. I spent half the evening talking my way onto this phone, in a communications chamber under the conning tower of the ark. “Is everybody OK at home?”
“Sure, why not? Where are you, anyway?”
“I’ll tell you when I get home. Should be Wednesday, maybe Thursday.”
“Cool.” There was a long pause. Alex wasn’t much for conversation. “Oh. Mangal wanted to talk to you. I’ll patch him in.”
Unlike most people, including most of my UNC subordinates, Alex knew how to operate his phone to call other people and smoothly add them into a three-way call.
“Hey, Dee! How’s the cruise?” Mangal greeted me.
“A bit cramped. The hydroponics are awesome. What’s up?”
“Did you hear about the waves out west? Good. No one else did. There seems to be a kink in the hose.”
It took me a moment, but I got it. Somehow the information feed from the National Weather Service – the real one – to Amenac, hadn’t included any tsunami warning. “That’s interesting,” I agreed. “How are the other hoses?”
“Hard to say all. Can definitely say several are kinked.”
“Completely blocked, or just filtered? Like a trickle of extra clean water?”
“Blocked.”
“OK. Well, I need to make another phone call. Mangal? You be sure and take care of yourself and the kids, right? Don’t worry about me.”
Silence from the other end.
“Mangal? Did you hear me?”
“I heard you,” he agreed. “But let’s wait to unkink the hoses after you get home.”
No one had needed to die in Hilo, Hawaii. Tsunamis travel fast, but no faster than a jet plane. We’d had nearly 5 hours to warn Hawaii. A simple warning could have saved thousands, perhaps hundreds of thousands of lives. Their shades called to me from watery graves.
“I think it’s more urgent than that,” I replied reluctantly. “It’ll be alright.”
“Take care, Dee,” Mangal said, and hung up.
Alex and I chatted a little longer about the latest guinea pig and rabbit happenings, and signed off too.
“Just one more call?” I begged the communications tech. “I’ll keep it brief.”
Unfortunately, Jean-Claude didn’t answer his phone. I didn’t leave a message. Probably just as well, I thought. A naval aircraft carrier wasn’t the smartest place to commit treason.
-o-
“Hey! I was looking all over for you,” Adam greeted me, back at our berthing. He rose to give me a kiss.
If a kiss is exploratory in nature, it’s obvious when you don’t really return it. Adam shrugged and sat at one of the desks.
“Do you want me to return to my own berth?” he asked.
“No. I just… You saw the news about the west coast earthquake and tsunami?”
“No, I was inside a pump at the time. I heard about it, though. I’d like to see the replay, but I don’t have a screen in here.”
“Will a phone do?” I pulled out my phone. “You have Internet in here?”
“Sure.” He gave me a brief searching look, then told the phone to remember the wireless user name and password he entered. “This is the Navy news site,” he said, and bookmarked it for my later use.
Adam’s ordinary good cheer evaporated as he watched the news report, with me watching from the bunk beside him. His face went especially blank watching Captain Amatrudo’s statement afterwards. He opened Amenac for Hawaii and looked at the weather feeds for today. No tsunami warning.
I was glad to see there was already an Amenac database up for people searching to report the missing and the known dead, and their locations, for Hawaii at least. That was quick work. I’d have to praise the database and server team. The known dead count, just from the database, was already over a thousand, with the missing count much higher. I was surprised Amenac had so much traction already in Hawaii.
My fingers itched to flip the Amenac display to California, but Adam turned off the screen. He flipped the phone around in his hands idly, thinking. Which left me more curious about him than about California.
“Are you going to be happy here?” I ventured.
He reached a hand over and traced the side of my face, tucking a lock of hair behind my ear. He smiled sadly. “I think… I’ll miss you. But like Captain Amatrudo, I’m getting tired of sitting on the sidelines while the world goes to hell. Playing with you is a very good distraction.” He let his hand drop back to his lap.
I reached over and kissed him, sincerely this time. “I’ll miss you, too. Thank you for inviting me here, and offering me an ark berth. But I ought to return this.” I fished his mother’s ring out of my pocket, and folded it into his hand. “I can’t sit on the sidelines. And I’m no good at obeying orders. I’d just get you into a pile of trouble here.”
Adam laughed. “I bet you would,” he agreed. “It’s late. Maybe tomorrow we could –” This was interrupted by his buzzing walkie-talkie again. This was a text message instead of a voice call. “Maybe tomorrow I won’t be here,” Adam amended himself, after reading it. “Niedermeyer is requesting my transfer to a Coast Guard ship.”
“Are you going to say yes?” I asked, surprised.
“Ah, that was a courtesy copy. The XO gets to say yes or no, not me.” The device buzzed again with another text. “And there’s my summons to see the XO.” He thought a moment. “Come with me?”
“What, now? OK.” Once we were off and threading the pipe-lined corridors again, I asked, “Are you friends with the XO?”
“I barely know the XO or the Captain. They were just installed, with the Navy running crew, a couple weeks ago. Niedermeyer I’ve known for years. He’s a friend.”
We found our way back to the conning tower, and a couple levels up, to some sort of situation room. Adam placed me by the hatch and asked me to wait there, while he waded into the center to meet the executive officer. Tall, grey-haired, and forty-something, this man was glowering at a number of displays, while minions alertly monitored other displays, all in a dark chamber lit mostly by the equipment.
There was one fairly simple display board high on a bulkhead labelled ‘Countdown.’ It showed two glowing red numbers, both rounded: 6.25 billion, and 296 million. The most obvious numbers I knew of, in those magnitudes, were the population of Earth at almost 8 billion, and of the U.S., at around 340 million. Or, they were. While I watched, a blue jumpsuited sailor walked over and updated the numbers, to 6.15 billion, and 294 million. She looked up at the numbers to verify her work, and crossed herself Catholic-fashion, before returning to her perch at a workstation.
I told myself firmly that those populations couldn’t be what those numbers meant. That I didn’t know what those numbers meant. And it wasn’t possible anyway. Two billion people couldn’t just… could they? And – countdown to what?
Adam spoke with the
XO for nearly ten minutes, mostly both standing with arms crossed on their chests, but occasionally leaning into a display for details. I studied a matched pair of Marines standing near me, just outside the hatch. They didn’t return my curiosity. Eventually Adam pointed at me. The XO took one glance in my direction, and said no. And apparently that was that.
Adam collected me at the door and pulled me along into an elevator back down. Once the doors closed, he explained. “They’re sending a chopper. I’m transferring over to the Coast Guard tonight. The XO won’t let me take you with me. Dee, I’m sorry. I need to grab my stuff from my berth, and be at the helipad in an hour. If you come with me, we could see the hydroponics garden at night for ten minutes, maybe. Or I could just drop you by your berth.”
“I’ll come with you.”
I got only a brief peek into Adam’s cabin as he slipped in to pack. Several guys were sleeping in there, with one working at a small glow on a desk. It had the same nine-bunk, two-desk layout as the bunk we’d commandeered. When Adam re-emerged in his greatcoat, rolling his footlocker, two of the men shook his hand warmly, quietly saying good-bye.
I was glad he had friends here. I encouraged him to talk about them for small talk, as we made our way up to the midnight hydroponics greenhouses on the deck. It was really all one greenhouse, but hatches and glass-like walls between sections limited the scope of accidents. Adam led me out from the pumping chamber below into a new area, far more open due to banks of baby plants interspersed with the older ones. There were Marines on guard here and there, but for the most part, the gardens were dark and gurgly and deserted.
Adam led me to a corner. A little area, maybe 6 feet square, was clear of plants here, around an airlock chambered door to the outer flight deck. To one side, we could see the conning tower and helipads, with several helicopters parked silent in the dark. The other side showed an open view onto the Atlantic, quietly heaving pewter below, glimmering softly with starlight.
Adam dumped his footlocker, and sighed, leaning onto a railing that kept people away from the greenhouse wall. “Not how I would have chosen to say good-bye. I was hoping to take you out for a meal in Groton before you left Wednesday.”
He drew me into a long hug. We watched the Milky Way between ragged scudding clouds. I wasn’t entirely sure in the dark, but the sky looked like it might be doing the green tinge with blue spots thing again, the pattern I’d come to think of as ball lightning weather. But no lightning appeared in the miles of oceanic empty.
“You’ll be safe with your friends in the Coast Guard?” I asked.
He didn’t answer immediately. “I think their main job around here at the moment is to keep Long Islanders and Rhode Islanders away from Connecticut. Enforcing the borders at water’s edge.”
“You mean they fire on refugee boats.”
“Yeah.” He kissed my forehead. He whispered, “I’ll be safe enough. But I never wanted to do that again.”
“Do you have to?”
“Fire on them? Not me personally, no. I’m a civilian now, so I just keep the boat in good repair. And the guns.”
“I meant, did you have any choice about going.”
“Not if the Navy says I don’t. It doesn’t matter. Better to stay on good terms with them. Their guns are a whole lot bigger than ours. And if I leave peaceably, they’re more likely to invite me back when something needs work.”
The chopper arrived, and hovered its way down to the deck. Adam drew me into his arms for a long, hard hug. “Good-bye, Dee. Get back to Totoket safely, you hear?”
“Will do,” I said. “You really were a great time, Adam.”
He muffled laughter and let me go. “You, too,” he said, as he opened the first airlock door. There was no need for him to wait in the airlock, as the air was breathable out on the cold deck. He waved one more time from outside the door, then made his way head down toward the helicopter.
And I watched Adam fly away.
A couple months ago I’d cried because my employee’s mother accused me of making her son commit suicide. A couple hours ago I’d stared dry-eyed at some numbers that suggested a seventh of the country, and a quarter of the human race, might be dead.
I didn’t cry as Adam flew away. I just wished him luck finding his way off the sidelines. He was a good man, with important skills. He’d find things to do that mattered.
-o-
Back in my berth, with a 9-person cabin all to myself, I changed for bed, palmed my phone, and pulled my privacy curtain closed. I took a moment to satisfy my curiosity on the Amenac site about California. Over ten thousand confirmed dead, nearly a hundred thousand missing in the database. But that was just reports from Amenac users, and only ones who could still get online. How to scale up to the whole population, I wasn’t sure. At least a factor of four. Maybe ten or twenty.
I set that aside, and rummaged weather data feeds at sample spots across the country. They’d all stopped updating at the same time, a few hours before the L.A. earthquake. Coincidence? Probably not.
I could try logging in to the unadulterated National Weather Service directly. But that could get Adam in trouble if I did it using his Navy Internet credentials. All Internet traffic was monitored to some extent, but it would be monitored thoroughly here. The computing aptitude exam I took earlier in the day gave me a good idea of just how pervasive their spying was on the crew. I didn’t want to risk it, nor emailing Mangal, or Dave at Amen1.
I could try Jean-Claude again. I could get the phone to do a voice-over-Internet call. And for better or worse, I’d already used that number from the communications room, so they had it. But I hadn’t gotten through. No, it was better to leave that one alone.
I’d just have to play good cooperative passenger until I got off the ship on Wednesday morning. And it was already the wee hours of Tuesday morning. It would have to do.
-o-
I set my alarm to wake me 30 minutes before the all-passenger wake-up call at 6:30, which I was afraid I wouldn’t hear in this cabin. I hadn’t heard any announcements out of its squawk box. And Adam said we only had the room for one night. I figured it would be easier to slip back into the good little passenger stream if I rejoined my original berth with the Aoyama-Agrawal family. So I packed up my stuff and got over there right before morning announcements.
Little Charity Aoyama, at least, was happy to see me again. Her parents Tom and Beth looked a little pinched. But they knew they’d eventually share the tiny chamber with two more people, one of them wheelchair-bound. They rose to the occasion with friendliness, and promptly excavated my lower bunk, which had already become that horizontal surface by the door that accumulates books, toys, walkie-talkies, jackets, and everything else you dump on the way in or out.
That limited-calorie diet had all of us eager for that 7:00 a.m. breakfast mess, but the orientation crew had impressed on us that we should not arrive early and slow the exit of the previous mess seating. Teeth fresh-brushed, Charity told me all about how she was already in school and loved her new teacher.
Dennis had the same new teacher and called her a dildo. I was fairly confident he didn’t know the meaning of the term. Apparently Tom agreed, and ordered him to look it up in an online dictionary. Beth rolled her eyes at that suggestion. Charity mimicked the eye-roll. I bet Beth would regret that in a few years.
I liked this family.
“And how are you two fitting in, Tom? Beth?” I asked.
“I’m alright,” said Beth. “My lab is already here, and I’m getting it all unpacked and running. It’s cramped, but I’m eager to pick up my research again. I haven’t been able to do anything since we left Cambridge.” At my look of inquiry, she added, “Uh, biochemistry.” A hand-wave stood in for further elaboration.
“I’m mopping corridors,” Tom offered with false cheer. “Everyone should know how to clean a floor properly. Right, Dennis?”
“Uh, yeah, Dad.” Dennis appeared deeply disturbed by the definition of ‘dildo.’ He wa
s looking up secondary terms. He shot an occasional worried glance at me and his mother. Beth was doing her level best to ignore this. Daddy broke it, Daddy can fix it.
“I work with infectious disease,” Tom explained to me. “I can’t set up my lab until all my hazmat equipment is on board. Maybe next week.”
I nodded understanding. “I’m on salad prep,” I offered. “Apparently a dozen years of professional programming didn’t prepare me to do anything useful with Navy computer systems.”
Tom snorted appreciation. Beth, followed by Charity, rolled their eyes again.
“Did you see the news last night, Dee? About California and Hawaii?” Tom asked, suddenly dead serious. Beth pursed her lips and bent to making beds.
“I did,” I agreed. “The Captain’s announcement was very interesting, after.”
“Christ,” said Tom. “I didn’t sign up to do nothing –”
This was interrupted as the hatch banged open. A large Marine squeezed himself in, sideways and head ducked down. He demanded, “Dee Baker?” After a brief survey of the room, his eyes landed right on mine.
“Yes, sir?”
“Grab your gear and come with us, Ma’am.”
I stared at him a few seconds. “And what is this about?”
“Grab your gear,” he repeated. It was hard to see around him, given his size and the room’s lack of it, but there were at least two more Marines behind him.
Beth wordlessly retrieved my overnight bag up from the lockers at the back of the cabin and passed it toward me. The Marine intercepted the bag and handed it back to the guys in the corridor.
Tom glared at his wife. “See here,” he cried to the Marine, “you can’t just barge in and take a passenger without any explanation! What’s this about?”
