“We’ll find a way,” Emily said gently, laying what she hoped was a reassuring hand on the man’s shoulder. “Commander?”
“Yes, Emily? Is everything okay down there?”
Now there was a question. Everything was far from fine, but compared to the crew of the ISS, trapped in that tin can circling the world, the survivors encamped here on the Stockton Islands were just peachy-keen, thank you very much.
“We’re fine, Commander, just ironing out some problems is all.” An idea had begun to form in the back of Emily’s mind, hell, she might even classify it as a plan. “Tell me, Commander, apart from the obvious changes to the landscape that you can see, is there anything else you can tell us? Do you still see cities? Any other sign of human life?”
There was a delay before the commander replied. “It’s hard to be exact, but we see some cities along the coasts of most countries that appear to be somewhat unaffected by whatever this red…stuff…is. But it’s really rather difficult to be sure from up here. We haven’t seen any distinguishable signs of any human activity though. If there is anyone else alive down there, they’re keeping quiet about it.”
“Okay, okay. That’s good.”
Everyone else in the room looked at her as if she had lost her mind. “Good?” said MacAlister. “By what stretch of the imagination can that possibly be classified as ‘good’?”
“Bear with me on this: Look, every alien life-form I encountered—from the spiders right through to the trees they constructed—seemed to me to be a small piece of a much bigger…machine, or…” she hesitated, looking for the right word to describe the sense of what she had seen, “or a part of a plan, yes, part of a plan. I mean, think about the progression we saw: The rain created the spider aliens, they made the trees, the trees made the dust, and the dust created the storm. Now that the storm is done, doesn’t that mean that whatever-the-hell plan was being implemented is probably done too? Ding! Ding! Ding! The timer on the stove is going off, because everything down here is cooked to perfection. I mean, that makes sense right? Tell me if I’m wrong?”
“It makes a strange kind of sense, I suppose,” said Jacob. “When you described your experiences to me there seemed to be a very definite progression of effects. Even the creatures that attacked you in the woods outside Valhalla could have been there protecting or maybe tending to the things growing in the white orbs. And the alien that attacked you and Rhiannon’s family—” Jacob paused and glanced at Rhiannon, measuring his words carefully, “—from the way you described the creature, it seemed very purposeful in its actions. It obviously had some kind of rudimentary intelligence, at least enough to be able to mimic the speech patterns of its prey—I mean, Rhiannon’s father. The fact that it didn’t just kill Simon outright, instead using him as a lure for the children and you, does suggest that it was following some kind of program or plan. Yes, I think you might be on to something, Emily.”
She hadn’t given that much thought to the motivation behind the takeover of the planet, and truth be told, there could be any number of reasons for the actions of the alien that had killed Simon and Benjamin, starting with it was just downright fucking evil, but Jacob’s theory of its motivation seemed as possible as any other. After all, every alien she had encountered had seemed…single-minded in its actions, designed for a very specific, even obvious, task.
“So, if the storm has truly ended and whatever changes it was designed to make have run their course, then the world should at least be safe again, right?” she said with a little more hope in her voice than she actually felt.
“Define ‘safe,’” said MacAlister. “Just because the aliens you encountered may have executed their programmed plan, doesn’t mean they aren’t still out there, either in their original form or maybe they’ve changed again. Or that there isn’t still another stage yet to come.”
Emily shook her head at that. “No, it’s over. Everything about this event has been so efficient, so incredibly neat, so precise in its execution. Whatever is behind this, its plan has succeeded. I can feel it.”
Jacob considered her words for a time. “If you’re right, then maybe we can start over again. Assuming the commander is correct and at least the coastal cities are free of this red ‘stuff,’ then there must be years’ worth of food and supplies left in some of those cities. All we have to do is find it. Who knows? Maybe we can find an island, preferably one that’s a little warmer than this one, and settle down. If there are other survivors out there, we can find them, and with enough determination and the right men…and women,” he added quickly, “we can start all over again.”
It was a beautiful dream, the idea of a second chance for humanity, a chance to get it right this time, but was it a plausible plan? The only way to find out would be to try, but they were painfully short of options: stay on this island and last as long as the food did or travel with the Vengeance and see what was waiting out there.
But what that really boiled down to was a simple choice: give up or forge ahead.
It was all starting to make sense to Emily, but as she said her farewells to the commander and headed back to her room, there were still far too many unanswered questions eluding her. But she needed two answered most of all: Why? Why had all of this happened? And if all the events had been part of a plan, then whose plan was it?
Commander Fiona Mulligan tried to quash her growing excitement, she had to remain professional after all, but damn it, the news that there were other survivors, and a submarine crew of all things, was just so wonderful.
There was a chance for them up here. Some of them, at least.
She had a secret that she had held back from Emily, not wanting to cause her anymore undue distress than the poor girl had already gone through, but now that the Vengeance had shown up, she had new hope.
Mulligan shifted her body and maneuvered herself with practiced skill through the narrow spaces between modules, floating down to the Destiny module. For the third time since she had said good-bye to Emily earlier that day, she repositioned herself in front of the round observation port. Through the window she had a clear view of the rest of the station’s modules. And there it was. Their last and only chance. Locked onto the side of the space station, between the two Heat Rejection Subsystem radiators, was another spacecraft: a single Soyuz-TMA escape vehicle.
The Soyuz-TMA was a specially redesigned version of the Russian spacecraft used to ferry loads, supplies, and crew back and forth to the ISS. But this iteration of the craft had been specifically reengineered by NASA to act as an emergency escape vessel from the ISS. Normally, there were two of these space lifeboats docked with the station, enough to accommodate all of the crew. But just two weeks before the red rain had arrived, a life-threatening injury to an astronaut had proved too much for the medical facilities available at the station, and with no resupply craft scheduled for several months it meant one of the spacecrafts had been used to return the critically ill astronaut back to Earth. No replacement craft had ever arrived.
After the rain came, there seemed little reason to even consider the capsule. The commander and her crew had discussed it, of course, but the single escape pod could accommodate only three astronauts; the remaining would be forced to stay on the ISS, doomed.
The craft was programmed to land on the steppes of Kazakhstan in central Asia, but it was feasible to override that programming and to use the manual guidance system to navigate the spacecraft for the majority of the two-and-a-half-hour trip back to Earth to any location. This latest edition of the Russian craft, while designed specifically to place the astronauts safely on land, did have the capability for a water landing. It could last up to three hours at sea before the crew either were rescued or abandoned it, forced to take to the inflatable emergency life raft.
And right there had been the sticking point for the crew.
Even if they did make it back to Earth safely, with no recovery crew
to pick them up, whether they splashed down in the middle of the ocean or managed to survive a landing somewhere in that strange spread of red that now covered the majority of land, they would still face almost certain death.
Her crew had chosen to remain together.
Emily, she was such a sweet girl, so strong, but she had faced her own trials and problems, so Commander Mulligan had chosen not to tell her about the one escape route they had. There had been no reason to trouble her even more than she already was, but with the arrival of the Vengeance and its crew, there was a chance for half of her crew to escape.
When she got off the radio with Emily and Jacob she had immediately called her crew together and told them the news.
There had been arguments about who should go and who would stay. Her crew, as always, had made her proud, each volunteering to remain behind, insisting that someone else should take one of the three precious seats available, but eventually, they had resorted to the time-tested short-straw pick. And, with only one spot left, it had come down to herself and Muranov, the Ukrainian astrochemist, and two straws (actually, plastic toothpicks). Muranov had drawn the short one.
The commander had insisted that the Ukrainian take her place on the Soyuz, but he had refused.
“My family is gone,” he said in his heavily accented English. “I stay here, join them when I am ready.”
And so it was settled; they had a way off of the station and back to Earth. Now all she needed to do was persuade Captain Constantine that the three of them were worth risking his crew and craft to collect.
They began work on repairing the submarine that very same day, right around the time the first of the most seriously injured crew was back up and on his feet, to cheers from his remaining, still less badly injured colleagues. His name was Parsons and he was the Chief Engineer for the boat. Emily assumed he had a first name, but nobody ever seemed to use it. Hell, for all she knew Parsons could be his first name. After a quick meeting with the captain, he emerged from the office and immediately rousted up three of his men, flexing his burn-scarred hands.
The fire had gutted several areas before the crew had managed to get it under control, and, while those areas had been destroyed beyond repair, a preliminary survey by Parsons showed there was no permanent damage to any of the submarine’s critical navigation, weapons, or propulsion systems. The real problem was the smoke damage. It was everywhere. With such a severely diminished crew onboard to fight the fire, watertight doors that should have been closed had remained wide open and the smoke had quickly penetrated throughout the boat, coating everything in a sticky black tar that gunked up controls and obscured vital computer screens. It was all going to have to be cleaned off before the craft was seaworthy again.
Parsons was a short, gruff Welshman with a thick beard and a habit of yelling at anyone beneath his rank, and occasionally, a few above him. He reminded Emily of the belligerent dwarf from The Lord of the Rings movies, but he had developed a soft spot for Rhiannon during his recuperation and would slip the little girl chocolate bars from a private stash he kept in his cabin. He had taken to calling her his little cariad, which he said was Welsh for love.
The cleanup took just under a week to complete. The Vengeance had to undergo a seaworthiness test, and then, if everything was “shipshape and Bristol fashion,” as Captain Constantine put it, they would be ready to leave at a few hours’ notice.
“We’re just going to take her for a short jaunt out to sea, make sure there are no holes or leaks,” said the captain straight-faced. “Would you like to come along?”
Emily laughed. “I think I’ll take a rain check until you’re sure the submarine’s not going to spring a leak and sink.”
“Oh, but that’s exactly what we’re supposed to do,” said the captain, smiling broadly this time. “Sinking is what that sub does best.”
Hours later Captain Constantine and his selected crew members returned from the sub’s test run and met with the rest of his crew in their quarters. The boat had a few minor kinks that needed to be ironed out but otherwise she was seaworthy, he explained, to a rousing cheer from the assembled men.
“She’s ready to put to sea whenever we are,” Parsons added. “So you lazy buggers had better not get used to this cushy life or you’ll have me to answer to.”
There was a smattering of laughter at the comment, but Emily wasn’t sure Parsons was joking.
“And that leads me to the next item, and why I’ve invited our hosts to join us in this meeting.” The captain gestured to Emily, Rhiannon, and Jacob sitting at the table across from the crew who were either standing or sitting on one of the now unoccupied hospital beds.
“I don’t need to tell any of you that our situation would have been far more…uncomfortable, if it had not been for the kindness shown by our new friends, and for which I would like to officially thank you on behalf of both myself and my crew.”
A round of cheers and applause rose up from the assembled crew and Emily found herself smiling while she hugged a beaming Rhiannon to her side. Even Jacob, who had taken to secreting himself away for long periods, and, Emily suspected, begun drinking on a regular basis, had joined them. Looking embarrassed, and a little too pale, he raised a hand in acceptance of the crew’s thanks.
“It was never our first choice to remain here on this island,” the captain continued, “but given the circumstances and the information we’ve received from both Emily and Commander Mulligan of the ISS, I think it’s time for us to discuss what we will do next.”
The captain paced back and forth in front of his men, stroking his beard as he spoke.
“We have enough supplies to last us for several months, but after those supplies are gone we are going to be up that proverbial creek without any kind of a paddle. So, bearing that in mind, we need a plan for survival. So, if we are to survive…if the human race is to survive…then we must work together and we must do so smartly, with a plan. And that means we have to leave here and find somewhere where we can regroup, recuperate, and reorganize. I know we all hold out hope that there will be other survivors, but we have to assume that, for the foreseeable future at least, we are alone. And, while you are all still members of Her Majesty’s Royal Navy, and subject to my command, this is not a decision I can make alone. It’s your lives that are at stake, and humanity has become the rarest of resources on this planet. So, I ask for all of you to speak your mind. Speak freely.”
There was a moment of silence as the crew looked at each other, unsure of just how much they could say. Finally a lanky seaman toward the back of the room Emily thought might be named John stood up.
“Sir. Why not just stay here? No offense to Miss Baxter, but all we have is her word for what’s going on out there. Who’s to say she’s not lying—again, no offense, Miss—but we don’t know her from Adam. Don’t you think we should check out other options first?”
Emily smiled at the young sailor, he couldn’t have been more than twenty. “No offense taken, but it’s not just my word, is it? You’ve all heard from the captain and MacAlister what Commander Mulligan has seen happening,” she said.
“And what options do you think we should aim for exactly?” the captain asked. “Where do you think we should go?”
“Well,” the sailor hesitated, “if these aliens are as affected by the cold as she says, then maybe we should stay right here? Or maybe stay in Canada at least? I mean, didn’t Miss Baxter say that they couldn’t survive in the cold?”
“That’s not entirely correct,” Emily said. “From my experience, all the cold seems to do is slow them down. Extreme cold seems to stop them in their tracks, to the extent that they are unable to thrive, but the same applies to us, right?”
“Emily’s correct,” said MacAlister. “And think about it for a second: Where would our food come from? We can’t grow anything here and there’s only so much food we can scavenge from the area.
So that would mean regular trips out to locate supplies. We’ll need to become self-sufficient as quickly as possible, which means we have to find somewhere we can support ourselves. There’s no guarantee we’ll find anywhere that’ll support us, but we have to try. Besides, if you’re going to meet your maker, wouldn’t you prefer to do it in the sunshine?” Jimmy gave the room one of his devastating grins and Emily couldn’t help but smile right back. The man had a way of making even the most depressing of positions seem hopeful.
“Sergeant MacAlister is correct…for a change,” said Constantine, with a smile of his own. “We have to look at the big picture, long-term planning. If we are it for the human race—and God help us if we are—then we have to be smart. We need to find somewhere we can be safe and start afresh, grow our food, and settle down. Raise families and begin over.”
“Yeah, but if there really are aliens out there still, what then? How are we supposed to defend ourselves?” the sailor pushed.
“Son, we have a nuclear bloody submarine at our disposal,” the captain said. “I think we can handle a few aliens, don’t you?”
This brought a roar of agreement from the crew.
“So, let’s see a show of hands then. All of you in favor of finding someplace warmer than this island, hands in the air.”
The vote was unanimous.
Captain Constantine smiled like a happy father at his crew. Emily doubted that he had ever had any worries how the vote would turn out. In the time she had spent with them, it had become obvious that his crew had nothing but respect for the older captain of the boat. Most of them were still on the right side of twenty, by the looks of them, so the captain really was a father figure to most, she was sure.
Revelations (Extinction Point, Book 3) Page 5
