The Freezer (Genesis Endeavor Book 1)

by David Kersten

  Marcus shook his head and sat heavily in his chair. He leaned back, closed his eyes, and took a long breath. Jack waited patiently for him to talk.

  “I bet when you walked in here you didn’t expect this to happen.”

  Jack laughed. “No, sir, I didn’t. I expected Theodore to go after your job, but my only intention was to make sure I wasn’t the tool he used to try to do that.” Jack leaned forward on his chair and rested his elbows on the table in front of him. “Did you ever think to ask me if I was interested in being the leader of New Hope?”

  Now it was Marcus’ turn to laugh. “Jack, I suspected you would take my job back when I gave the order to have you brought back, and I knew you would the moment I met you. I had been looking for someone exactly like you for four years. Things have certainly moved faster than I expected, I figured I would have at least a few years longer to get things ready, but Theodore has forced my hand. You have already proven to me without a doubt that you are perfectly suited to lead this community, and you already have the support of at least thirty percent of the population. I don’t want this to be won by a slight majority, however. I fully expect you to win over at least ninety percent of the people. Much less than that and you will have a divided community on your hands, and this is hardly the time to deal with that.”

  “What do you have in mind?”

  “You need to finish what you started.”

  Jack slumped in his chair. “There might be a little problem there. In case you forgot, we are missing a key component in this operation. Last night’s failure was quite a blow.”

  “You will come up with something. That’s why I picked you. Besides, don’t count out Thomas quite yet. He was my first choice, but he turned out to be a little too passive to be my successor. He is still a very resourceful person.”

  “Sir, in all likelihood, Thomas is dead.”

  “I don’t think so. I think he is trapped in the control center, but not dead. I gave them the code to disarm the system, but I was too preoccupied with this political situation to think it through. The code can be used to disarm and re-arm the system, but then the code changes. It was designed so that nobody could steal the code from me or any other council members and gain complete control of the system. If Thomas is still alive, he will figure out a way to contact me, and if he does, I will give him the code and he can complete the mission.”

  “That’s a big ‘if’, Marcus. I like Thomas, and I hope to God you are correct about him, but quite frankly I don’t think we can risk the future of New Hope on him being alive and accomplishing those tasks. We need another plan.”

  Marcus smiled. “That’s what I like to hear. Don’t forget, we have to have this done before the election.” He frowned a little but didn’t say anything.

  Jack prompted him by asking, “What?”

  “I am worried that if Theodore thinks he is sure to lose, he will do something stupid like strike a deal with Cali. He is pretty rattled by my response this morning, and he might not be thinking clearly.”

  Jack decided he could trust Marcus. It was possible that the man was still involved in some elaborate scheme, but if that is the case, whatever he was planning was so many steps ahead of Jack that he was already a dead man. At some point you just had to take a leap of faith. Might as well give him the benefit of the doubt. “Marcus, I need to tell you something that is of particular importance. Is it safe to talk in here? I mean is there any chance someone can hack the system and be listening in?”

  Marcus consulted the screen set in the table in front of him. He looked up after a moment and said, “No, this room is safe. We have a special system in here that can determine if anything is bugged, and there are no cameras or microphones in the room. What is it?”

  Just like pulling off a band aid, it was best to just do it quickly. “The other day, when I encountered that group of Mutes, I learned more than I told you.” Jack hesitated for a moment and Marcus motioned for him to continue. “Someone from Cali contacted the Mute leader about the location of the scavenging team. It turns out they were told about forty five minutes before the team landed. The Mutes knew exactly where and when to ambush them.”

  Marcus didn’t look particularly surprised, just disappointed. “Are you positive of the timing?”

  “Yes. When the scavenging crew was rescued, they confirmed it. The Mute they met and befriended was an outcast from that clan, and it turns out he’s a pretty smart guy. He’s been listening in on communications with the clan, hoping to keep them from raiding some more families that are living in Idaho. He overheard the whole exchange between Cali and Farnak, the clan’s leader.”

  Now Marcus was surprised, but not about the security leak. “Are you telling me that this Mute has knowledge of more surviving humans in Idaho?”

  Jack nodded. Marcus sat back and seemed to lose himself in thought for a minute. Finally he spoke again. “Thank you for trusting me with this, Jack. I imagine given the circumstances that you just now decided it wasn’t me who fed that information to Cali.”

  “I had my doubts, but they mostly hinged on me being a threat to your position here. You kind of eliminated that as an issue today, however.”

  The councilman smiled, but it was a grim smile, given the revelation of a traitor in New Hope. “How many people know about this?”

  “Enough.” Jack trusted him, but not with his friend’s lives, not yet anyway.

  Marcus nodded. “Understood. Do you suspect anyone in particular?”

  “Of course, but I have no proof.” They both knew who he was referring to.

  “You are definitely the man for this position, Jack. Let me do some digging. I happen to have some resources here that I trust implicitly, and I will find the traitor. In the meantime, I suggest you get your people together and come up with a way to get this mission accomplished.”

  Chapter 36

  Jack made a few calls, and soon Chuck and Wendy were in the council chambers with him. Marcus had left to work on some things, but gave the clearance codes to Jack to access the room, as well as show him how to make sure it was free of eavesdroppers. He made it clear before leaving that while it was a safe room, the computer here logged every person coming and going from the room.

  Jack informed his two trusted friends of the events of the morning. When the initial shock wore off, Chuck asked, “Did you tell him about the traitor then?”

  Jack nodded. “I figured I could trust him, at least for the most part. We have a bigger issue to work on though. I need to make this mission happen, despite the problems we had last night. We need to rally our people and brainstorm this. Let’s get all the group leaders in the strategy room right away. We need to figure out how to get hold of a bulldozer.”

  * * *

  “Thank you all for coming to meet me here. I’m sure everyone is aware of last night’s mission and its tragic results. Despite this setback, we need to press on. Before we get started, are there any questions or issues, besides that of the missing bulldozer?”

  In the room were the leaders of each group they had assembled at the start of this operation. Tiny, Chin, and Chuck were seated together at the front of the room. Scott, the engineer, Nick, the head of maintenance, George, the old scavenger, and Wendy were in the next row. Jack had requested that Red attend as well, being as he had the most insight into the failed mission last night, but he was not there yet.

  “What’s the story behind the announcement for a community vote?” The question came from George, which didn’t surprise Jack, the man had lived here all his life, all three of his lives, and he was not young.

  “In two weeks we will hold an election. At this point the candidates are me and Theodore, but who knows what the next two weeks might bring. I promise you that after we settle on a course of action here, I will answer any questions you have, George. Right now we need to focus on this operation. Can I get a status update?”

  George spoke first. “Everything on the list has been found, and in the pro
cess, we came across some great resources for later. If these guys need more aluminum or copper, I can come up with another couple tons of scrap, but it will need to be melted down and recast.” This was the first piece of good news Jack had heard today. He turned to the engineer, Scott.

  “The cold rooms are ready to go. We just need the liquid nitrogen. The bins for transport are being fabricated right now, and the tech part of it is done. As long as they are in the big plane and moving, we can maintain the temperature without difficulty. The cooling system doesn’t work so well on the ground unless we have some way of moving a lot of air around the cooling fins. They will be good for about four hours before we start running into complications.”

  “Is that four hours before and after the flight back, or four hours total?”

  “Once you get those cooling fins up where the air is cold, and move the air over them, the system will stabilize. So you have about four hours from the time we turn them on until we get the big plane in the air, then four hours to get them unloaded once we are back here.” Jack was relieved, that should give them plenty of time.

  At that moment, the door opened, and Teague walked in with a man Jack had never met. “Good morning Jack, I would like you to meet Bruce. He is our latest reborn. I figured he might be able to help out here.” Teague took a seat next to Chuck.

  Jack shook Bruce’s hand and gestured for him to have a seat. “Welcome, Bruce, I imagine you have had an interesting past few days?”

  “You could say that. I’m still trying to figure out if this is some sort of elaborate joke. Three days ago I was in Afghanistan, heading to a new site to build a school. Teague here tells me that my vehicle ran over an improvised explosive device, and I ended up in a coma for six weeks.” George and Teague were the only two people in the room who hadn’t had a similar experience with waking up in a foreign world. Each of the other’s introduced themselves, and offered words of sympathy.

  “So Teague gave me a little background on your current mission, and I figured I might be able to offer up some help.”

  “I heard you were in the engineering corps? What kind of experience did you have?” Jack worked with the engineering corps in the army for over ten years, and after spending some time in the private sector, he had come to the conclusion that if the army had done one thing right, it was the engineers.

  “Yes, sir. I was with engineering for about eleven years before...” It was always awkward to talk about your own death. “Anyway, I was involved in everything from bridges to school houses. I saw a little action in Iraq and Afghanistan, but I didn’t do any fighting, just building or taking down structures mostly.”

  “Well, right now we’re trying to figure out how to acquire a bulldozer, so unless you can help with that, there’s probably not much for you right now, but please feel free to interject if you have an idea.”

  “Have you thought about building one?”

  It was an option he was planning on presenting to his team, but didn’t think they had the time to accomplish it. “I was just about to get into that. Have you ever built a bulldozer from the ground up?”

  Bruce smiled. “No, but I have used them a lot in the past, and I have built a lot of robots that use similar concepts. Given the time and materials I bet I could come up with something.”

  “Robots?” In Jack’s time, a robot was something from a science lab or in a science fiction story, although he had read that robots were starting to replace factory workers.

  “Sure, have you ever heard of “robot wars”?” A few of the reborn chuckled at this, but Jack was lost. Apparently Bruce noted his confusion and said, “Must have been after your time. My hobby was building little remote controlled machines that were built to “fight” other machines. It was loads of fun, and I even placed in a national tournament.” Seeing he had still lost Jack, he continued on. “My point is, I built robots with skid steer drive systems, so tracked vehicles are something I am very familiar with.”

  Jack nodded, finally understanding what he was getting at. He looked to Scott and asked, “Do you think it’s possible to do?”

  Scott mulled it over for a moment, then said, “It’s possible, but there are a couple things holding us up. First is the lack of that much iron. We need a lot of iron and steel to make a bulldozer. Second is the casting and refining capabilities we have. Our refining system is fairly small scale. We have traded ore with Cali for a long time, and refined it ourselves, but it would take us weeks to refine a few tons of iron. Usually when we cast something in iron, steel, copper, or aluminum, we use a machine called a rapid prototyper, which takes a three dimensional design from the computer and creates it in a plastic material in a matter of hours. Then we usually do a sand casting from that prototype, and mill the final product where necessary. The whole process takes time. We had to cast the body for our pumping system for the cold rooms, and it took two days to cast and machine all the parts. That was just for one pump. The other challenge with casting is the larger pieces on the bulldozer, like the arms, the blade, or the frame itself. We can’t rapid prototype those pieces, they are too large, so we would have to make a casting by hand. I just don’t see it happening short of a month, three weeks at best.”

  This was what Jack figured. Time was the enemy here. He didn’t really care about the election, but the longer they waited, the more likely the chance that Cali would find their buried treasure in Montana.

  “I don’t know much about the technology here, but Teague did take me out to see your aircraft, and it occurs to me that the conventional ideas of a bulldozer are not necessarily what you need here. You don’t necessarily need a big heavy iron frame, because you don’t have to support a huge diesel engine. The small power units you have here combined with a bunch of high torque electric motors would work. You don’t have to make the blade so heavy because from what I understand of your goal, you are just going to do one job with this, so blade wear is a minor concern. Hydraulics shouldn’t be an issue; I saw a pile of spare parts in by the planes with plenty of hydraulic pumps, tubing, and pistons.”

  Scott spoke before Jack could even process what Bruce was saying. “The heavy iron serves for more than just support of the engine or wear and tear, you need weight to push a lot of dirt around.”

  Wendy jumped in with, “If it’s ballast you want, we can come up with tons of that, literally. I could have ten tons of scrap metal and concrete here in three hours.” The room seemed to come alive as everyone was into this idea now.

  Jack may not be an engineer, but he had a lot of experience overseeing projects where huge amounts of dirt had been moved, and he knew a thing or two about it. “Tiny, the area we picked out for the runway, it’s pretty flat, right?”

  Tiny had been listening intently to the conversation and was caught off guard when Jack called on him. “Uh...” His deep voice silenced the people conversing back and forth. “Yeah, which is why we picked it. There are a couple high and low spots, and there is a lot of brush and grass we want to clear away. There are a few rocks, but none bigger than a couple feet in diameter. I don’t know much more detail, just because the engineers were going to do that part. I can get the boys in that worked on that part if you want.”

  “Not just yet. It sounds like this won’t require much preparation. I know from experience that the ground up there is mostly clay, but if we don’t have to dig too deep, the top soil will be fairly loose, especially this soon after the spring thaw.”

  Scott had his datapad out and was punching in some information. Bruce and Tiny moved to the second row to sit with him. Wendy was talking to Nick and George about where they could pull some hydraulics from various equipment, if necessary. Jack sat next to Teague while the others worked, and motioned for Chuck and Chin to gather around.

  “How bad do you think it will be if I try to get another group together to make another run at S.C.? Theodore is going to be using my failure there as a tool to promote himself.”

  Teague mulled it over for
a moment. “He already is. It’s risky. If you sent more men out there and they failed, he would make it look like you are, to use an unpleasant term, a Freezer Burnt Idiot. If there is an alternative, I suggest you use it.”

  Jack nodded and switched gears. “How well do you know Red?”

  “Not too well. He runs in different circles than I do.” Teague looked at Chuck and Tiny. “Have either of you two worked with him?”

  Chuck shook his head. “I offered to run patrols with him, but he sticks with his own men. All of them are native born. He has never outright said anything, but I get the idea that he doesn’t like the reborn.”

  Jack looked at Tiny and said, “You worked with him for a few days, learn anything?”

  “Only that the guy is an asshole. He showed a little more respect after our little run in, but overall he didn’t contribute a lot to our part of the mission. I never worked with him before this.”

  Things were starting to add up, and Jack didn’t like the direction it was going. “Look, I don’t want to make any accusations here, but I still don’t see how this operation failed like it did. Red reported that he was overwhelmed by the mutes and had to pull out, but there was no record of communication with Thomas’ group after that. I have a hard time buying that after nearly thirty minutes of holding off the Mutes with zero casualties, he was suddenly overwhelmed just after Thomas had deactivated the central computer’s ground defenses, and just before they succeeded in turning off the air defenses.”

  Chuck was nodding along. “I noticed the same thing, but I have seen things go wrong at awkward times, so I didn’t read too much into it.”

  “Yeah, you’re right Chuck, maybe I’m just getting paranoid. Maybe I am just opening my eyes too. Either way, Marcus seems to think Thomas and his crew could be trapped inside the control center. He figured that when the Mutes suddenly appeared they reactivated the defenses and couldn’t turn them back on.”

  “If we went back in, it should be pretty easy. From what the recon pictures told us, there are only a handful of Mutes left there. We might be able to fly right over the Mute camp and drop in at the outside of the sensor range. With a few troops guarding our back from stray Mutes, it should be a walk in the park. Assuming of course we can turn the defenses off again.”