by Mark Wandrey
“Huh?” he asked, looking confused. “No,” the man said. “Why?”
“Nothing,” Jeremiah said and flopped into his expensive chair. A decanter full of Tennessee bourbon sat at his elbow; he decided to ignore it. “What do you want?”
“I thought you’d want to know; we’ve figured out some of the communication system.”
“A radio? On the ship?”
“Yes,” Coldwell said, then his brows furrowed. “Well, sort of.”
“Speak up man, is it a radio or not?”
“I guess you should come and see.” Jeremiah eyed the bourbon one more time then got up to follow the aging man. Down in the bowels of the converted ship, they came to one of the many workshops and labs. The scientists and techs all seemed to move around between them, where the alien ships’ innards were spread out and being studied, depending on what was most interesting at the time. As a simple aeronautics engineer, a lot of it was beyond him. Considering the ship had had no obvious means of propulsion or seemed to care about lift or aerodynamics, Jeremiah was beginning to feel like his profession had just taken one on the chin.
On each of the doors was a hand-printed label. “Life Support” read one, and another said, “Hull Material.” Both were currently empty. They passed one that had a couple of men inside staring at a series of computerized oscilloscopes; the label read, “Avionics.” Coldwell went through a door labeled “Communication,” and they found the rest of the research staff.
“Where’s everyone else?” Jeremiah asked. The techs and scientists working in the room looked up and around at their fellows. Coldwell looked back and spoke.
“Aside from a few in Avionics and a couple others who are asleep, this is it.” Jeremiah looked horrified, and Coldwell spread his hands in resignation. “Quite a few got eaten, and a few others left with the Marines.” Jeremiah cursed, and everyone looked uncomfortable.
“It’s okay,” he said after getting control of himself. He didn’t want to chase off the few he still had left. “Thanks for staying.” Many mumbled platitudes. “What did you find?”
Coldwell picked up a pointer and gestured to the piece of alien machinery that’d been extracted from its ship. Like most of them, it looked nothing like a machine, more like a piece of crystalline artwork. It had leads attached in various places to instruments and power sources. He saw that it had other components from the ship hooked back up to it, though perhaps in ways that weren’t in the original configuration.
“We’ve begun to understand some of the methodology of systems-integration for the alien craft,” Coldwell explained, confirming what Jeremiah had been thinking. “Life support is a done deal, though we’re uncertain how it does a couple things, and we have a handle on propulsion.”
“Wait,” Jeremiah said, “I thought propulsion was a dead end, since it flew off into space and never came back?”
“No,” Coldwell said, “that was just one of the drive units.” The other researchers all looked at each other and nodded. “Haven’t you been reading the reports we filed this afternoon?”
Shit, Jeremiah silently cursed, I’ve been too busy dealing with the military after the disastrous fucking zombie attack. He’d seen the internal emails on the ship’s intranet but had figured it was mundane progress reports.
“So fill me in on that, real quick?” A woman moved up, and he remembered she was a flight specialist. It looked like she was one of the last of them. Luckily for him, she introduced herself.
“Maria Merino,” she said and looked a little shy. She was a cute black lady with her hair in delicate braids. “After we lost the Azanti and started to take the alien ship apart, we found two more of those drive clusters! We were really surprised, since they’re each so powerful.” She gestured to a bench nearby that held two metal hard-cases. Someone had printed, “Alien Lifter Drive,” on them. Creative. “We don’t know if it’s redundant, or what. But there they are.”
“Damn,” Jeremiah said and went over to put a hand on them. He began to consider more tests. Maybe he could get the military interested? Then he cringed, realizing what would happen if they found out he had a dissected alien ship in his possession. Zombie apocalypse or not, it probably wouldn’t be good.
“Do you want to hear about the radio?” Coldwell asked.
“It’s not a radio,” one of the other older techs said. Coldwell made a shushing/dismissive gesture and the other man let it drop.
“We have more drives, is it that important?” Jeremiah asked, still half-distracted by that turn of events.
“We think so,” the tech who’d corrected Coldwell said. Coldwell himself nodded, as did the others. Jeremiah considered, if most of my remaining brains are all in here instead of the other labs, maybe they have something?
“Okay, show me.”
Coldwell nodded and began. “Well, sir, we had this particular piece of alien machinery. It was linked to avionics, the drives, though not all of them.”
“Which ones?” Jeremiah asked. Coldwell looked at another tech, who snatched a tablet from the bench then walked over to pull a whiteboard on wheels closer. On it was a simple drawing of the ship. Each of the main components were labeled, with connective lines leading to each section of research, and where the component was removed from. He could see where the drives were originally located, and in turn where those drives were connected. After the man consulted his tablet and the whiteboard, he spoke.
“The communications system was linked to the drive removed and lost in space, and this one,” he said and pointed to the ship drawing of the rear of the tear-shaped fuselage. The drive they’d removed was in the center behind the cockpit. The other two were on either side, about in the middle. Jeremiah scratched his chin absently and noted that the drives were spaced out in a cross pattern, then waved for them to continued. Coldwell did so.
“All the components were hooked to the central power source, which we can’t do anything with because it’s depleted, and we can’t figure out how to recharge it,” he said. Everyone nodded, looking defeated. “So we repowered it,” he said, pointing to the device they’d decided was a communicator, “and started working with it. It integrated with one of the cockpit displays just like everything we’ve messed with, even though it didn’t originally.”
“You mean it wasn’t hooked into the displays in the ship?” Jeremiah asked.
“No,” Coldwell agreed, “and that’s why we came to the conclusion we put in the email.” Jeremiah cocked an eye, and the other man remembered Jeremiah hadn’t read the email. “Oh, right. Well,” he said and went over to the white board. He took a marker and rubbed out “Alien Ship” with the heel of his hand and wrote instead “Alien Lifeboat” before capping the pen dramatically and putting it back on the tray with the other pens. Jeremiah looked at the words, and his eyebrows went up.
“Really?” Everyone in the room nodded. “Okay, sell me.”
“Too many things point that way,” the other older tech said. He began ticking them off on his hands. “One, the redundant drives. Two, the extremely-limited power source.”
“Three,” Ms. Merino took up, “the drives are each hooked into different systems, with only two able to be controlled by the pilot; the other is out of the pilot’s control.”
“Four,” Coldwell said, “the radio.” The other man opened his mouth, but Coldwell forestalled him with a finger. “Communicator,” he corrected and pointed. “It had an interface in the cockpit, but no display. Suggests that it’s meant to be used in a preprogrammed fashion.”
“Like an emergency transmitter,” Jeremiah said, and again they all nodded. There was an emergency radio in each of the lifeboats on the ship. They’d all had the required Coast Guard orientation. The radios were simple to use, preset to a specific frequency. You pressed a button and it transmitted on the emergency frequency. It had a speaker so you could hear incoming transmissions. They also had another function. “Wait, if this is a lifeboat, does it transmit a mayday?” All the resear
chers were grinning ear to ear now.
“Yes sir, it does!” Coldwell said. Jeremiah smiled and nodded, then thought.
“OK, you said it wasn’t a radio. How do you know that?”
“Well, it transmits,” Coldwell explained, “and it receives. As you can see, we hooked up a display.” On the alien screen, not really all that different from an LCD display, though maybe more like e-ink, a strange text was flowing across like what was written in places in the now-dismantled cockpit. It reminded him of a cross between Arabic script and Japanese kanji. “We’ve established a translation matrix for the alien language.” Jeremiah gawked, and Coldwell looked sheepish. “It wasn’t hard once we figured out the controls. We’re about seventy percent…” he looked at a younger man questioningly.
“Maybe seventy-five percent,” he said.
“Seventy-five percent,” Coldwell corrected, “certain of the translation. Anyway, once we had that, we could work on an interface.” He gestured to a laptop that was sitting next to the alien display, with a webcam aimed at the strange text.
“While this is amazing and fascinating, how do you get from that to knowing this is transmitting, or even receiving?”
“Well,” Coldwell said and tapped a key on the computer, “because we’re getting other signals.” The screen on the laptop changed to a view of Google Earth. On it were a series of glowing red points. Several dozens of them. One was right off the California coast.
“Are you saying there are more alien ships on the planet?” he asked. They all looked at each other, then turned to him and nodded.
“Yes,” Coldwell spoke for the group, “that’s what we’re saying. At least 26 others.”
“Well, fuck me running.” Jeremiah remembered his friend Theodor Bennitti from NASA contacting him and putting him on the trail that led to finding the spaceship, now apparently lifeboat. A researcher named Ken Taylor had been in Texas looking for meteors. A whole storm of them had been observed a few weeks ago, and a couple had come down in America. The ship had been one of them. He began to reconsider calling the military. What were the odds it was a coincidence that a couple dozen alien lifeboats arrived on Earth at the same time a crazy zombie apocalypse broke out? Yeah, about zero. He thanked the team and headed for his office. He needed to think this over. As he walked, he went over what he’d found out.
It was a lifeboat; that seemed certain. But something was nagging at him, something that didn’t add up. Oceanic Orbital Enterprise’s ship had a dozen of the open-ocean lifeboats. Each one could hold 40 people, with provisions for as many. The alien ship was tiny, even for its diminutive occupant. His team guessed there might be room for two of the aliens, and if they crammed themselves in there, four. A lifeboat with all those redundancies and only room for maybe two occupants? He was still shaking his head and mumbling when he reached his office. He sat in his chair and tried to think.
* * *
North of Austin, TX
Night had fallen, but Cobb didn’t want them to stop. They were traveling along County Road 241 at about 10 mph, running dark and quiet. The situation wasn’t good.
“Gauge says empty, Colonel,” Colbert called over the gentle rumble of the diesel engine. He was up in his commander’s hatch; the civilians were all below being looked after by Sgt. McDaniels. The Sergeant was having trouble keeping the scratch wounds on his cheek from bleeding, despite a liberal application of QuickClot. Bennet stood on a couple of ammo cans in the back hatch to keep an eye out. “We’re walking any minute now.”
“How far to Highway 183?” Cobb asked the driver.
“Maybe two miles,” he said. They’d been unable to stop. The area was sparsely populated, with just occasional farm houses, but every time they’d stopped, the fucking infected came out of nowhere.
They rumbled along at a few miles per hour for a couple more minutes as darkness fell. Cobb thought about how he was going to get his three men and the eight civilians on their feet when the fuel ran out. It seemed like an impossible task to protect them, even with four guns.
“How you doing, Sarge?” he asked down the hatch.
“Not feeling too good, Colonel,” the man replied, his words sounding a little slurred. His injury had only been a couple hours ago; how could he be getting sick this quickly? But what if the infected who’d scratched him had somehow transferred the disease? The reports from intel suggested it was transmitted via a food borne vector, nothing about it being like the popular zombies from TV and books. What the fuck would they do if it was transmitted by bite? Was it airborne? He’d just begun to consider the implications of that when the driver yelled again.
“Lights ahead!” Cobb pulled himself back to the here and now and scanned ahead. Power wasn’t out in most places, though most businesses and homes were dark. He’d suspected that an Army unit or the state patrol had rolled through and evacuated. Up ahead was the distinctive glow of artificial lights, concealed by the setting sun until just recently. It wasn’t the kind of light you’d see from a parking lot; it was more like super-bright stadium lights.
“Anything on the map?” he asked below.
“No sir,” Colbert replied. “What do I do? This thing’s running on fumes.”
“Hold the course,” Cobb decided. He was going to bet that the lights were a good sign. A minute later, his bet paid off. The glow was from a pair of M-3 Bradley fighting vehicles blocking the road.
“Stop and identify yourself!” an amplified voice called out.
“Stop here,” Cobb said and slid down the side to land on his feet once the Stryker was no longer moving. He’d served in the Gulf and recognized the sound of battle-shaken men. He raised both hands, holding them out and away from his body as he walked toward the light. Someone pointed one right in his face, blinding him completely. He closed his eyes and walked forward while calling out, “Colonel Cobb Pendleton, United States Army. I have three men with me and eight civilian survivors.”
“Any of them infected?” the same voice asked.
“Negative,” he called back, “but we lost several trying to rescue them from a whole bunch of those infected crazies.”
“Come forward, sir.” Cobb noted they didn’t say he could lower his hands, so he didn’t. He walked forward, and the light stayed centered on him until he was between the hulking forms of the combat vehicles. The predecessors to the Stryker, they were like miniature Abrams tanks, tracked, with a 30mm cannon and room for six troops. They were loud and slow compared to the Stryker and carried fewer men. The 30mm Bushmaster cannon was pointed squarely at his Stryker. The eight-wheeled APC was tough, but not that tough.
Two men came out from behind the Bradley to the left, one with his carbine held crossbody, the other with hands empty. The latter spoke up, his voice familiar from the loud speaker.
“Turn around sir, slowly.”
“No problem, son,” he said in his best, soothing command voice. These guys were jumpy, considering the infected didn’t seem able to handle guns. After he’d finished a full 360 he saw the other man had lowered his rifle.
“Can I see your ID, sir?”
“Of course,” Cobb said and, slowly, got his wallet out and retrieved his common access card, or CAC. “Is there a reason for the security? The infected don’t act in a coordinated manner, they just scream and attack.”
The man, a sergeant, examined the card, and glanced to up at Cobb’s face before answering. “Says you’re a retired light colonel, sir.” He gestured to the eagle on his camos. “Reason for the difference?”
“General Rose at Ft. Hood pinned the birds on me when he accepted my reactivation because of the fucking zombie apocalypse. So you going to maybe answer my question?” The sentry didn’t answer, but he did finally salute as he handed the CAC back to Cobb.
“Sorry, sir,” he said as Cobb returned the salute. “We were coming through with evacuees from Austin, heading for a rendezvous with the rest of our battalion near Leander. When we came down this road we found a group s
et up here. Seems they were self-evacing out of Georgetown, coming south, and got stuck here when one of their buses broke down. Well, they pulled into this construction company yard just up the road to do repairs, when a bunch of bandits attacked them.”
“Bandits?” Cobb asked incredulously, “we living out Robin Hood now in addition to Dawn of the Dead?”
“Seems so, sir. Bunch of gangers out of San Antonio, we think. Came in here and started roughing up these people; we have accounts of beating and rape. Killed one guy who had a gun. Well, they were just settling down to some serious Somali-style amusements when our scouts spotted what was going on. So we intervened.”
“Care to define intervene?” Cobb asked, aware that this choice of words likely meant they’d killed the shit out of the bandits.
“Not really, sir. Suffice it to say the bad guys aren’t a factor anymore.” There was the barest hint of a smile on his face. Cobb suppressed a shudder. How long had it been since US troops had killed American civilians?
“Okay, it’s not relevant, considering. These infected are technically non-combatants.” The sergeant nodded in agreement. “Where’s your commanding officer, Sergeant?”
“Major Johnson,” the man said and gestured down the road. “We’ll radio you’re coming in.” Cobb nodded in thanks.
“Do you have fuel?”
“Plenty. We have two fuel trucks with us. What we don’t have is much transport.”
“Understood.” The lights moved away, and he gestured to his Stryker, hoping it had enough fuel to get to the tanker. As the lights allowed him to see the Bradleys better, he could see the markings. Texas National Guard. He’d hoped they were Regular Army, but with the older Bradley combat vehicles, he’d figured they were either Reserve or Guard.
He climbed in, and the Stryker made it to the construction company’s vehicle park. It was even more chaotic than he’d expected it to be. All the heavy earth-moving equipment had been moved to one end, except for a bulldozer parked next to a big humped up pile of dirt. Heavy duty mercury-vapor lights were lit up around the compound, and big, black, slightly-moist patches of mud were scattered here and there. It hadn’t rained here in weeks. Some of those patches sported drag marks, and they were all toward the freshly made mound. It didn’t take a detective to figure out what that meant.
