Season of the Harvest

by Michael R. Hicks

  The reports from other parts of the world were just as bad, if not worse. Despite the televised claims of the faux Gregg Thornton laying responsibility for the attacks on the Earth Defense Society, India was blaming China for the destruction of their seed vault in Ladakh in the far north of the country. It had been near the Line of Actual Control, a disputed boundary since the war India fought, and lost, with China in 1962. China, in its turn, blamed India for the destruction of their genebank in Beijing, asserting that if India had not committed the act itself, it had acted as a conduit for the terrorists who had. There had already been two minor skirmishes between army units patrolling the borders, with three reported fatalities.

  It’s going to get really ugly, she thought, and she wasn’t sure how they would be able to stop it, if they could at all.

  That was when it struck her: You’re in charge, a little voice in her mind, the one she had hated since she was a child, whispered. It sent a chill down her spine, because she had never considered herself a leader. She was strong-willed and as tough as anyone, but she was a follower and always had been. But now…

  Gregg was almost certainly dead. Naomi and Jack were fighting for their lives on some God-forsaken island in the Arctic, and the world was quickly going to hell around them. She knew she couldn’t wait much longer for certain things to be done. Get some balls, woman, she berated herself. We’re at the tipping point now. You can pray all you want that Naomi and the others will make it out alive and hopefully succeed. But you have no idea when that will be, and certain things have to be done now, or it may be too late.

  That’s when she looked up and saw the others in the command center looking at her expectantly. They had all come to the same conclusion, and knew that they had to prepare for what Gregg had intended the base to do: act as an ark to help guarantee humanity’s long-term survival in a war that was finally erupting into the open. The biggest problem was that what they were about to do would raise the base’s signature to anyone looking closely for them, drastically increasing the chances that they’d be discovered. If that happened too soon, the game would be over.

  “Shit,” she muttered. “Get the Phase One protocols going,” she ordered. “Send out the personnel recall. Burn the single-use phones.” Every EDS member was supposed to carry at all times a special phone whose sole purpose was to receive a single text message, a unique code sent to each of them informing them of an emergency recall, after which the phone was to be destroyed. Many members would be coming to this base, but Gregg had purchased and renovated several other Cold War missile facilities across the country as survival shelters for the other EDS teams and their families. But this base was the only ark, the only seed vault. “And get the nitrogen tanker in here. We’re going to need to top off the coolant for the vaults. What’s our diesel fuel level?” she asked the woman at the logistics station.

  “We’re at a hundred percent,” she said. “The tanks were topped off last week just after the weekly generator test. All the other power systems are on-line, backups are ready. Food stocks are at ninety-eight percent, and I’ve already scheduled a delivery to bring that up to one hundred within two hours. The deep water wells are in the green, with the water tanks continuously topped off. Everything else – spares, weapons, ammunition, equipment, medical supplies – is ready.”

  “Intel?” Renee asked.

  “Aside from the world going down the toilet, as you well know,” a young man said, nodding his head toward the newscast, “we’ve had a huge spike in web searches for EDS and our leadership staff, mostly from U.S. government agencies, but also from computer IP addresses located in several other countries. But there haven’t been any active pings or attempted intrusions against our networks so far: hiding behind the front company firewalls seems to be working. As long as nobody knows where to look for us, they’re going to have a hard time finding us.”

  “Good. But just make sure you keep a damn close eye on outbound activity,” Renee cautioned him. He was a bright kid, but tended to get a little cocky. “They turned Ellen against us. It’s possible it happened to someone else, too, and I don’t want anybody giving away the show. I limited transmit access from the network to the machines here in the control center, so if you see so much as a single damn packet going out from any other machines, or anything fishy from here, I want to know about it right away. Ditto for phone calls, cans and string, whatever. Got it?”

  “Yes, ma’am,” the young man said, nodding.

  Cocky, maybe, but he took his job dead serious, she told herself. As we all need to now. “Security?”

  “Nothing unusual going on topside,” drawled a middle-aged man with receding hair who carried a long-barreled .44 magnum revolver in a shoulder holster. “The ground sensor grid is active with one hundred percent coverage, with all sensors up and functioning properly. I just did a manual check of the blast valves: all of them checked out fine, and the base is in hard condition.” In the Cold War days, “hard” meant that everything was closed and locked down in case of a nuclear blast. Any time the blast valves or the portal doors topside were open, the base was “soft,” where the overpressure from a blast could potentially destroy the base. While all of them hoped that they would never have to worry about nukes, the principle was still the same: the site would be a lot tougher to get into with all of the topside doors and valves closed. “I also checked the hardened sensor array and the external camera: they’re ready to go, too, if we need ‘em.” The base had a set of large tubes, about a foot in diameter that contained a variety of instruments. They normally were kept retracted, flush with the concrete at ground level not far from the portal entrance. The original sensor arrays had been designed so they could be raised like periscopes to take samples of the atmosphere after a nuclear attack. The old instruments had been replaced with far more sophisticated devices that could not only measure nuclear radiation, but could take biological and chemical samples, as well. The camera the man had referred to was in a similar retractable tube. They normally never used it, because it was actually inside the truck repair shed above them, which had its own video cameras in various places for surveillance of the portal entrance area. This camera would only ever be used for real if the sheet metal building above them was blown away.

  “Okay, then,” Renee breathed, nodding her thanks to the man for his report. “Let’s get our people inside and button up. Make sure everyone is armed and has a basic load of ammunition.” The others nodded gravely. “In the meantime,” she eyed the seemingly endless stream of bad news on the main display panel, “let’s see how this crap plays out.”

  As the others went about their tasks, she turned her attention back to what had stymied her since Jack’s arrival: Sheldon’s damnable super-encrypted file. She hated to think of how many of her brain cells had probably died trying to figure out this riddle, and grinned in dark-humored amusement as she imagined millions of her neurons hurling themselves into frustrated oblivion.

  She stared at the pass phrase Jack had given her. She had already tried everything else she could think of to transpose the letters or words of the quote into a pass phrase that would actually work.

  “It had to be something Sheldon could have done in his head,” she muttered to herself as she stared at the screen. It would have been something tough, maybe impossible, for someone without his knowledge to do. But he was...had been incredibly smart. “And it has to be something he thought I could figure out.”

  She glanced up at one of the smaller monitors on the front display that showed various figures about the base’s status. It contained a table, columns and rows of numbers.

  “Wait a minute,” she whispered, trying to suppress the tingle that had suddenly sparked into life in her lower spine. The table reminded her of the ASCII, or American Standard Code for Information Interchange, which were numbers that represented text characters in computers and communications equipment. Every letter had a corresponding ASCII number, starting with 65 for capital A and running
through 122 for lower-case z.

  She tried a direct substitution for the pass phrase, typing in the numbers instead of the letters for the pass phrase, but that didn’t work.

  “Shit!” she cursed. She knew she was close. She had to be.

  Then something Jack had said came back to her: Sheldon had wanted the quote on his tombstone…

  Tombstone. Sheldon had written a song with that title. He’d given her a copy of all of his scores, because she enjoyed music (including his, they had both discovered with some surprise), and had once been half-decent on the piano herself. She remembered Tombstone as one of the few songs he’d written that she had absolutely hated.

  “Sheldon, you son of a bitch,” she whispered to herself. “This had better be it.” She quickly looked up the musical score for the song, pulling it up on her screen.

  Try addition, she thought, quickly setting up a spreadsheet with the letters of the pass phrase, then transcoding them into ASCII numbers. Below the numbers, she put the number of the notes, from 1 to 7 for A through G, corresponding to the notes at the beginning of the song. Since most of the notes went with words, not individual letters, she had to make some educated guesses, carrying the additive numbers across several letters to line up with the corresponding musical notes, or in some cases having several notes for a single word to match the song. She had the spreadsheet add the two numbers, then punched them into the password box for the file.

  Access Denied, it told her.

  “Okay, be that way, you son of a bitch,” she said. “I’m not done yet.”

  She ran the same thing again, but used subtraction instead, taking away 1 through 7, depending on the note, from each ASCII character.

  Holding her breath, she carefully typed in the resulting numerical sequence into the password box.

  The box disappeared, and the encrypted file opened to reveal that it wasn’t just a file, but a folder containing several documents.

  “Hot damn!” she cried. She’d finally done it.

  ***

  Vlad stepped into the biohazard room, carefully closing and sealing the door behind him. Everything seemed normal, with the four biosafety containment chambers just as he had left them last.

  He moved over to the one containing the rhesus monkey and peered through the Lexan panel into the animal’s living space. It was empty. Then he noticed that the Lexan, an extremely tough polycarbonate plastic, wasn’t just clear, it was gone. Vanished.

  “Not possible,” he breathed as he quickly opened the chamber, then stepped back as it fell apart in his hands. Everything should have had thick rubber seals, and there had been a variety of plastic parts: all of them were gone. All that was left was bare metal and various little bits and pieces that weren’t made of plastic. Peering inside at the electrical connections, he could see bare copper wires, with all of their insulating coatings gone. He caught a glimpse of something in the bottom of the systems cabinet that should not have been there. It was a small, greasy-looking pool of liquid that had a foul, chemical odor. It clearly wasn’t feces, but he had no idea what it was, and he wasn’t about to touch it.

  “Gdye vy?” he called to the monkey. “Where are you?” The room was small and it couldn’t have gotten far.

  He checked the other chambers, and was shocked to discover that they were in exactly the same condition as the first: all the plastic components – everything that contained a significant quantity of carbon, he realized – was simply gone.

  He stood in the middle of the lab, hands on hips, completely bewildered. That’s when he saw that the computer at the workstation in the corner of the room was now nothing more than a jumble of metal, wire, and circuit boards, as if all the plastic had been dissolved away. Just like in the first biosafety chamber, there was a puddle of foul-smelling, viscous liquid on the table.

  “Chyort voz’mi,” he breathed, unable to comprehend where the monkey had gone, and wondering what had happened to the equipment in the room. “You cannot have just disappeared...”

  He searched among the neatly stacked boxes of medical equipment and disposables like rubber gloves and replacement modules for the chambers, again noting that everything made of plastic or rubber was simply gone.

  And there was no sign of the monkey.

  There were no other places to look, and he knew from the monitor logs that no one else had accessed the door. There was no other way out of the room than the door through which he’d entered. The only other access points were the small airlock for food items and the vent in the ceiling.

  The small airlock wasn’t an option for a simian escapee, as it was locked and opened only from the outside. That left the ceiling vent and its filtration system.

  Frowning, he looked up...and screamed as a shapeless mass dropped onto his face from the vent above, where it had just feasted on the rubber seals of the biological filter.

  No one heard Vlad’s brief, tortured struggle in the closed room.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR

  Jack’s satellite phone chimed as they all stood near the hangar, watching the industrious Rudenko use a bulldozer to scrape away the last bits of the smoldering Il-76 from the runway so the Falcon could take off.

  “Shit,” Jack muttered as he took the phone out of his parka and looked at the calling number in the display, one of the numbers they used through one of the front companies that masked the call’s true origins. “It’s Renee.” He had meant to call her earlier, but he had completely forgotten in their headlong rush to get back to the airport and clear the runway so they could leave before any other military forces showed up.

  Jack turned away from the noise of Rudenko’s bulldozing so he could hear what Renee was trying to tell him.

  Watching Jack for his reactions, Naomi continued her conversation with Mikhailov and Halvorsen. She had been trying to convince them to come with her. “If you stay,” she said, “the harvesters won’t let you live. We don’t believe there are very many of them, and for them to have sent so many of their kind here was an indicator of just how important this place was to their plans. There may be more of them among the relief forces that are coming.”

  “Perhaps,” Mikhailov told her. “But if we leave, who will explain what happened here?”

  “More importantly, perhaps,” Halvorsen said, “who will explain what did not happen.” He glanced at Mikhailov. “Russian troops did not shoot down our plane, nor did they kill my men.”

  “And the Norwegians were not responsible for the deaths of my men, or the destruction of our transport,” Mikhailov added. “But other troops and aircraft that come will not know this. If we leave, more good men will die, fighting over a lie. It is worth risking our own lives to save theirs.”

  Naomi couldn’t argue with their logic, or their courage. “I understand,” she said. “I had to ask.”

  “You will take the live creature back, then?” Halvorsen asked, nodding toward the tightly wrapped man-sized bundle that Naomi’s surviving team members were shoving into the Falcon’s small baggage hold. “You should leave it here. Let the world see it and know them for what they are.”

  “They’d only see the lie,” Naomi told him. “Just like I did the first time. Even if you see it transform before your eyes, the first time you simply can’t believe it’s possible. And on television? No one would believe it was anything but a hoax using special effects.” She shook her head. “They’re too dangerous to place in the hands of anyone who doesn’t really know them.” We’ve had to learn that lesson ourselves the hard way, she thought bitterly.

  “And they will believe a dead one?” Halvorsen asked without sarcasm. They had brought back what was left of the thing that had impersonated Solheim to show the incoming troops. “Some fools will claim these creatures washed up from the depths of the arctic sea.”

  “I know,” Naomi answered. “No one will believe it at first. But if enough people see it, a few reputable scientists might come forward to challenge what they’ll think is a fake. You’ve ju
st got to do whatever you can to get it in front of the media. And keep yourselves alive.”

  Mikhailov snorted. “The first should not be difficult. I am not so certain about the second.”

  “At least this one won’t kill anyone else,” Halvorsen said quietly, looking at the Solheim-thing.

  “Listen,” Naomi told them as Ferris gestured impatiently from the door of the Falcon. The plane’s engines were already spun up, and he was impatient to leave. “If you ever need to contact us, you can reach us through these email addresses and telephone numbers.” She handed both men small slips of paper with the information written in her neat script. “Just dial the number, leave your name, then hang up, or send an email with just your name. We’ll find you.”

  Halvorsen accepted the piece of paper gratefully. The future, not just for himself, but for his country and perhaps the world, had suddenly become very uncertain, and he was happy to have any allies he could.

  By contrast, Mikhailov took his with obvious skepticism. “How will you find me in Russia?” he asked, as if his country were in fact on a different planet.

  Naomi smiled. “We have people there, too,” she said as Jack finally rejoined them, his face locked in a neutral expression that worried her. Holding out her hand, she shook Mikhailov’s hand, then Halvorsen’s. “Good luck to you and your people.”

  Jack shook their hands as well. “Watch your backs, guys,” he told them. The two soldiers both nodded gravely in return.

  Rudenko strode up to the two captains as Jack and Naomi boarded the plane and turned to wave. The three soldiers waved back, then watched as the two Americans disappeared inside the jet and the door retracted closed behind them. A few moments later, the sleek Falcon roared down the runway, then gracefully lifted into the sky.