Lady Grace & the War for a New World (Earth's End Book 2)

by Sandy Nathan

  “Are ye alive, ye shit-eating …”

  Jeremy pantomimed screaming and acting as though he were choking. He indicated that the new man should roll back way from the edge.

  “Sam” did as directed and began gasping and shrieking as though he were dying.

  As the man writhed in mock agony, Jeremy took the pick and struck the rope where it passed over the metal edge of the tube. It took two blows to sever it. The sound was covered by the other man’s screams.

  When “Sam” was free, Jeremy grabbed the guy’s arm and his stuff and ran for his hideout. The voice from the hole continued.

  “Wha’s this? Th’ rope’s cut? Whadya do, ye bastard whoreson?” Screams and growls from more voices floated up. “Are ye alive? C’n ye breathe?”

  The wolves’ chorus resounded. The animals’ baying was louder than the obscenities boiling up from the underground.

  “Wha’ the fuck is that? Shut ‘er down, Rupert.”

  The metal lid clanked as the hatch was sealed.

  4

  Her eyelids fluttered. Something moved inside her. She had no thoughts and couldn’t name what was happening in her body. She heard whispers of air entering and leaving. They became gasps as her eyes opened wide. She jerked, half sitting. She was dying; she knew that instinctively. Her finger pulled the trigger without conscious effort. Her eyes closed and she fell back.

  A slender metal arm deployed from the side of her chamber. It positioned itself to the left of her breastbone, between two ribs. A hypodermic needle emerged from the arm and slipped through her flesh. It shot its payload into her heart and retracted quickly.

  Her eyes shot open and she jolted, hands moving to her throat. She gasped and began to fight for her life. She could hear her heartbeat on the monitor. Erratic pulsations. Veronica Piermont Edgarton lay back and gave herself another shot of adrenalin.

  She gasped and struggled. She would live. She would live. Her heartbeat settled down, hammering steadily. Her breathing became rhythmic and strong, though her body’s responses to her will were sporadic. She couldn’t remember how to open the vessel that held her. She lay back, resting. Sleeping. Jerking awake again. She didn’t know how much time passed.

  When she remembered where she was, Veronica sat up with a jolt, hitting her head on the glass dome covering her capsule. She clawed at the side panels. Panic almost took her. She had to get out of there.

  Forcing herself to think, she found the controls. She pushed a couple of buttons and pulled a lever. The glass top opened like a casket and the right side swung out and down. She sat up for the first time in how many years? She didn’t wonder, didn’t look at the chronometer behind her.

  Her bare feet found the slippers left for her, and the uniform. She wore the distinctive garb of the general’s guard when she was clothed, except that her uniform had been tailored to accommodate her voluptuous figure. She didn’t go to the wall to activate the solar heat in the frigid space; she went directly to her husband’s vault and looked in.

  His eyelids were fluttering. He’d awaken soon. She pushed the manual control to activate the adrenalin. The steel arm came out and positioned itself exactly where it belonged. She pushed the trigger.

  The general jerked and his eyes opened wide. His head turned and his eyes locked on hers. She pulled back, below his range of sight. And then she pushed the arm’s control again, and again, and again. The trigger kept pumping, loading and emptying the syringe. Each time she hit the control, she felt a wild terror. Each time she punched the button, her face contorted with rage. She couldn’t kill him often enough.

  She heard him struggling, attempting to rise, gasping. Trying to get out. Clawing at the glass, pawing the side of the chamber. But that wonderful Russian technology held. That thin arm of the steel syringe was designed to keep doing its job, even if the patient fought. It kept deploying the drug until all of it had been injected. Finally, he was quiet.

  She slumped to the ground. Was he really dead? Panic arose inside her. What if he wasn’t dead? He saw her. He’d know who did it. She stood up and looked at him. Eyes bulging, tongue protruding, face and chest bright red, limbs rigid. He looked dead.

  But was he? She groped her way to the wall and turned off his life support systems. He would get no oxygen and none of the circulating vapors that had kept them alive. She turned his chamber’s temperature to its lowest setting, twenty degrees below zero.

  Was that enough? Had she killed him? When the thermostat hit its lowest point, she felt safe enough to creep away from his vault and close the steel doors around it. He couldn’t survive that, could he?

  Her mind was functioning now. They had brought two storage units with everything people starting a new world would need. The first was full of medicines, supplies, tools, clothing—all sorts of necessities. The second was loaded with weapons. She went to the second container and pulled out an automatic rifle. She loaded it and took off the safety. He would never get her again.

  She began to explore the bunker. Eight of them had made the trip. Their home was a compact room with vaults built into the walls of the cement bunker. She and the general had the biggest spaces, and the two most advanced cryogenic set-ups. They were the only units that had been able to go the distance, as she quickly discovered.

  The people in the bunker were supposed to repopulate the Earth; of necessity, more women than men had been included. They had brought two physicians, both women. The doctors were dead. They and the others had been assigned older technology cryogenic units. The female computer/communications officer had died. As had the two munitions specialists. Warriors, the general called them. Murderers who didn’t need any excuse to kill. A man and a woman. Both dead, thank God.

  Veronica laughed at what she’d thought. God. She knew perfectly well that God did not exist. When she looked at the dead occupant of the last cubicle, her mouth tightened.

  Beautiful Zhanna, as porcelain-skinned and delicate as a tsar’s daughter. She was the Tsar’s daughter, joining their happy family at the general’s invitation.

  “She is nothing to me, Veronica, Nothing. We’re bringing her as a breeder, that’s all. You are my favorite.” She must have been his beloved; he gave her the best cryogenics. You’d never know it from how he acted. He and the eighteen-year-old Zhanna had flamed every night. Veronica had welcomed their intimacy. As long as he was besotted with the girl, he stayed away from her. Had Zhanna been anything but a vicious power-monger as trustworthy as a viper, Veronica would have welcomed her.

  She and Zhanna married the general two days before the conflagration. No matter that two wives were illegal in the old world. The old world would soon be gone. They were wedded and bedded, then locked into the units that would save them forever a few days later when the bombs stopped exploding. She looked at Zhanna’s peaceful face in frozen repose in its glass case and spit at it. She shut the doors of the vaults quickly. She turned off the automatic releases, locking them in forever.

  Veronica leaned against the wall, shaking. She had to get out of there. As she moved around the lab, she kept thinking that she could hear him moving in his crypt. That he would get out. She wanted to level her gun at it and blow it to hell.

  But she was in hell.

  Hunger hit her with visceral force. She went to the first container and opened the door. Carefully engineered metal storage compartments filled it to the ceiling. Packs of military rations were crammed into the unit closest to the door. She pulled two packages out and made herself eat them slowly.

  When she was finished, Veronica headed for the communications center. Their computers were programmed to communicate with every satellite in operation. Also with every country on the planet and every alien world that anyone had any notion might exist. Banks of computers filled the room, which formed a large L off the cryogenics lab.

  The bunker had a digital periscope, a tiny thing that would insert itself through anything, from snow to bedrock. It could peek out and give a 360-degree view o
f whatever was up there. They didn’t know how long they might be in cryogenic sleep, or what would be happening above when they came to life. She and the general had worked through all sorts of scenarios, from finding themselves under a city of the future to an icepack hundreds of feet deep. Veronica activated the device and it began to deploy its arm.

  The periscope disclosed ice. She raised it higher. Ice as far as she could see. No sign of life. When she entered the bunker, the land above it had been the planet’s most productive source of timber. The Ice Age had returned. Veronica’s heart raced. She had food enough to last years. The temperature would be OK—they were far below the permafrost. But she couldn’t stay in a cement hole with seven corpses.

  Veronica turned on the computers and the satellite connection. She could feel the controls humming. Still working. Good old Russian technology. While her computer booted up, Veronica thought.

  How long had they been there, frozen? She had looked at the chronometers over each body before folding the steel doors. They said different things, indicating that from 120 years to 2753 years had passed. Her own timepiece was shattered and hanging off the wall, as was the general’s. They had the most reliable timepieces of the bunch, but they had both broken. Why had their cryogenic mechanisms worked, but their clocks failed?

  She had an eerie feeling that someone had broken into the vault and changed the clocks and broken theirs. And turned off the others’ cryogenic machines. The general and her machines were better than the others’, but not that much better. At least one should have survived.

  The idea that someone had broken in was crazy. The general had been obsessive in his security while they built the bunker. Who could get in? Who knew the codes? The general’s son was the obvious answer. But why would he leave them alive? He hated his father. Who else could it be? She didn’t know.

  If someone was outside, their instrumentation would have registered the little periscope she’d raised. They’d notice the systems below starting up. She jumped up and turned off the heat. The satellite connection she couldn’t shut down. She needed that.

  Veronica looked around frantically. She had to get out of there and find her son.

  She knew something about where he was. Veronica knew that Jeremy had gone off world to escape the atomics. Everyone in the bunker knew it—they had watched on computer screens as Jeremy and the others had left.

  Jeremy’s spectacular departure had filled the bunker with cries of dismay and amazement. The eastern sky around the estate had lit ultra-bright, and a huge, shimmering golden ball had docked against the cliff. Veronica had watched them leave: a lovely girl, a dancer, leading the way. Jeremy followed, yelling “Geronimo!” when he jumped into the ship. Mel Adams, Jeremy’s teacher from the Hermitage Academy, and his partner were next, holding hands. And Henry and Lena. Her chest caught even thinking of them. Henry was her first husband Chaz Edgarton’s half brother. He and Lena had watched out for Jeremy for most of his life.

  The last time she’d seen him, Jeremy had bragged about his surveillance skills, saying he had “the village wired for sound—and sight.” He would be surprised to know that he wasn’t the only one. The entire estate was hooked into the general’s system, including the interior of the underground shelter. Because of that, Veronica and the others had eavesdropped on the tour of the shelter Jeremy gave the night before everything blew up.

  How could she contact the golden planet to get him back? Veronica had a few tricks of her own. She’d had Jeremy’s room at the academy bugged for years—and had had the contents of his computer sent to her in Russia. It was the only way she could keep track of her reclusive son.

  Veronica pulled a transparent cylinder from a hidden pocket of her uniform. Though tiny, the apparatus held the contents of Jeremy’s personal computer and all of its internal settings. It essentially was Jeremy’s computer. Jeremy’s driver and guard, Arthur Romero, secretly had made the cylinder and had it smuggled to her before she went into cybersleep.

  Inserting the tube into a port in one of the lab’s computers, Veronica waited a few moments for it to download. An icon labeled “Jeremy’s Computer” appeared on her screen. She double clicked it and read down the contents. Sure enough, he’d recorded the coordinates to which he’d broadcast and the number of times he’d sent messages to each.

  Now all she had to do was contact outer space.

  5

  Veronica straightened her hair and put on the expression she wore for public appearances. Quickly adjusting the focus of her computer’s camera, she broadcast to the top frequencies from Jeremy’s list.

  “Hello, people of the golden planet. This is Veronica Edgarton of the planet Earth,” she said into the microphone. She used the famous Veronica Edgarton voice, which had conquered almost the entire male gender and made her a broker in world power. Her cultured, upper-class voice was something that only a thousand years of genetics and upbringing could create.

  “I want to thank you so much for taking care of my son, Jeremy Edgarton, and his friends all these years. You were so good to respond to his pleas for help and lift him and his friends to your world.

  “I’m afraid I have a request of my own. As you know, we’ve had a nuclear war here and have lost the planet that we knew. I’m in a desperate situation.

  “I’m in a bunker close to the north pole with seven dead bodies. It’s not very pleasant, I must tell you. I have enough supplies to last for a while, but my husband’s son could break in at any time and make off with me.

  “I ask you to look into your hearts and hear a mother’s plea. Reunite me with my son … please.”

  She dropped her voice and leaned closer to the screen. “I need to be very frank with you. I’m terrified that the general’s son will find me.” Anguish crept into her voice and onto her face. “He’s always fancied me. I don’t want to spend the rest of my life as a concubine to a sexual pervert.

  “So please, please, take me to my son. I have two storage containers here that are filled with things we’ll need to start a new world. If you could transport them with me, I would be more grateful than I can say.” Tears of desperation and fear sparkled in her blue eyes.

  “Signing off,

  “Veronica Edgarton.”

  She set the machine to rebroadcast her message every half hour. Then she went into the first storage container and made herself a nest just inside the door. She fell asleep and dreamed of Jeremy.

  Veronica awakened in a panic and clawed her way out the container’s door. The bunker’s cement interior greeted her. The golden planet had either received her message and decided against helping her. Or they were still making up their minds. Or—they didn’t get her message.

  She stared at the screen, studying the frequencies Jeremy had used. Using a simple statistical program, she graphed their distribution. The graph was a bell-shaped curve, rising in the middle with the most popular addresses and tapering to tag ends on both sides. She’d sent her message to the middle range of coordinates, the ones Jeremy had used most. Why didn’t it work?

  Veronica sucked in a breath. What did she know about the way her son programmed? Jeremy never made anything easy. Everything he wrote was encoded and password protected. Had she used a password to enter his computer and download his data? No. Had she used a password before using the data and sending her message? No again.

  She’d opened “Jeremy’s Computer” assuming that it was what it purported to be. Would her son ever put confidential information into something so obvious? No. She was lucky the file hadn’t been booby-trapped, destroying all the data because of her unauthorized usage. She pulled away from the console, horrified. She might have ruined her only hope of escape.

  Veronica also knew that if Jeremy didn’t want someone to get into his files, they wouldn’t be able to. He could create algorithms that only a genius could break. If he was being sloppy, he might write code that an intelligent person could crack if he or she was lucky.

  She gasped as sh
e remembered the worst. He built lockdowns into all of his work. Someone trying to break into one of his systems would find themselves locked out with three incorrect tries. Or fewer. When the machine locked down, only Jeremy would be able to open it.

  Her heart pounded as though a frantic bird was trying to break out of her chest. Her hands grew icy. She looked around the cement bunker, eyes moving from the steel doors enclosing the corpses, to the computers, storage units, and weapons bays. Panic threatened to overwhelm her. She had one chance left. Veronica wanted to scream and throw herself on the floor.

  Suck it up, soldier. The voice came from inside. She stiffened and pulled herself erect. Do the job you trained to do.

  Veronica wasn’t in the general’s bunker because she was beautiful and a great lay. The general could have chosen thousands of women with those qualifications. It wasn’t because he loved her so much. He didn’t love anything.

  She earned her place by working for it, by beating teenagers and women in their twenties and thirties. Beating the crap out of them on training courses and martial arts fields. She had been included in the cryogenic chamber with the general because she was the best.

  Veronica walked to the cabinets at the far end of the computer lab. Eight superbly conditioned athletes had entered the bunker. Except for Zhanna, all were commandos. They expected to be confined to the bunker for an unknown time after awakening, and expected to use it for a home base for longer than that.

  The cabinet doors swung open, revealing a recess jammed with gym equipment. She pulled out a long platform about seven inches high and set it in the aisle between the bays containing the frozen bodies. She selected two ten-pound dumbbells, gripping one in each hand.