The Lies (Zombie Ocean Book 8)

by Michael John Grist

  The woman glared. To her credit, she didn't dissemble or deny anything Anna had said. If anything her signal shone brighter. "You don't even know me."

  "I know what I've seen," Anna said firmly, "and that's enough. Look around you. We need to do this together or we're all going to die, and I think you might grasp that. Inchcombe couldn't see past her own nose. Montcliffe can't see anything except revenge. Did you know they're carting the corpses only a few hundred yards away? They're not thinking clearly, not beyond the next emergency, while I'm talking about surviving the line, and the bunkers and the lepers, and the years that come after that. Stop fighting me and start helping, and help your own people."

  The woman's eyes hardened.

  "What do you mean, the bunkers? We are the bunkers. We're all part of the SEAL."

  Anna snorted. "That's what I'm talking about. I said it to Inchcombe and she didn't listen, but maybe you will. You're not in the SEAL anymore! Think about what you did to us when we were offering a treaty, just because we were outside their shields. You're outside their shields now too, which makes you just as infected as us. It doesn't matter that this is a gap in the line; in a few months enough of it'll creep in and you'll flip to zombies, just making more of the enemy. You really think they won't strike here first, with another nuclear bomb?"

  The woman paled, but gritted her teeth. "You really think…"

  "What's your name?" Anna asked.

  "I- it's Helen. You're Anna."

  "I'm Anna. I'm telling you this because I know the bunkers in ways you can't. I guarantee that they are not sending aid convoys to help you as we speak. Rather they are planning how to blast you off the map, to cut off the infected limb, just like they did with us. We need to delay that for as long as possible, then we need to round up and contain the lepers before they hit Brezno and kill three thousand more, and I can't help with that if I've got Inchcombe half-assing things or Montcliffe trying to kill me. And after we get that done, we'll need to spin up a mobile shield or find another way to cure your people so we can get out of here, and I need someone like you for all of that, Helen. I don't trust anyone else not to try and lock me up or shoot me down. You're the first person I've seen from below who's kept her humanity, so let's do this. Can I rely on you?"

  Helen's pale, pretty features shifted. Her face set with a new resolve.

  "Montcliffe's coup. You stopped them by doing that thing in the air, in our heads, just when you were collapsing? Did you take them out alone?"

  Anna nodded.

  Helen drew herself up, gaining another inch so she actually stood taller than Anna. "You have to stop doing it. Whatever it is. No more, just like you wouldn't fire a gun, because it's obviously a weapon. It stops here."

  Anna nodded sharply and held out her hand. "Deal, as long as no one draws a gun on me."

  Helen reached out. Her arm was slender and willowy but her grip was strong.

  "Deal."

  "Then come on," Anna said. "We need to pull this place into order."

  Helen looked around at the ward, doubtless seeing a dozen patients who needed her immediate attention, putting the cap on her decision. She was leaving them now, and perhaps a few more of them would die because of it, but if they saved two thousand for the sacrifice? There were other doctors and nurses, and she could save more by getting them the help they needed.

  She nodded.

  Anna led her out. The real work began.

  INTERLUDE 8

  The raids blew a smoking hole in James While's control of the SEAL.

  First thing on his jet, rising up out of the Alps and the attention trap of Olan Harrison's mutilated corpse, he savagely cut back his inner circle, throwing up fresh walls of security around every secret facility and classified information silo. There was still a giant enemy infrastructure out there, bent upon shredding the SEAL and leaving James While holding the tatters, and he had to respond.

  His response only shredded the SEAL further, but there was no choice. Tens of thousands of staff, associated with only the slightest hint of possible collusion, were lopped off like rotten branches. Root and branch he scoured the organization, dissolving the sixteen current departments along with their Heads, raising only a handful of people he trusted most to positions of czar-like power.

  There were twelve of them, each responsible for the Ark bunker in their global geographical slice; building it, staffing it, stocking it, hiding it from the world. The world was shifting and the SEAL's old priorities of environmental protection, famine-mitigation and war-reduction no longer mattered. What mattered was the Ark project. If he couldn't protect that, and build that, and stock it with enough people to restart civilization once the threat was past, then nothing would survive the apocalypse to come.

  He drafted in army, navy and air force units from a hundred nations, under the guise of emergency preparedness operations he'd laid the groundwork for years earlier. He dispersed logistical delivery as broadly as possible, to keep the locations of the Arks as secret as possible. He doubled down on interrogations of all the suspected SEAL staff he still had in custody, but as the hours and days passed by, he expected less and less.

  He barely slept; catching an hour or two at a time as his jet circled the Earth one, two, three times, refueled in mid-air. He paced round the empty cabin, bringing up screens and data, trying to narrow the focus for an investigation into what had happened, where his people had been taken, what was coming next. The loss of Rachel Heron was stinging, leaving him with only the lower echelons of seniority from the Logchain to draw information from, though he had one trump card left.

  Joran Helkegarde.

  They talked frequently, in brief bursts and updates at all hours of the day and night. Joran had transformed himself in the days since his Array erupted; diving deeper into the hydrogen line than ever before, bringing in experts on the T4 and genetic splicing, exposing for the first time the brittle points of contact between the T4 and the hydrogen line of research, all the while searching for a unified theory on what was happening, and how to stop it.

  He had taken over the running of both the Istanbul and Bordeaux bunkers in large part, turning swathes of their limited real-estate over to outsourced labs and research bays, stocked with staff drawn from across the dissolved Arrays, the Logchain and the Apotheo Net. James While saw no choice but to trust him fully, sharing everything with him about Olan Harrison and Rachel Heron.

  Joran asked for Rachel's 'samples'. His scientists and tech-experts went to Sakhalin with overwhelming military guard, where they raided the remnants of Rachel Heron's data, gathered the earliest expressed samples, the gray and the red ones, and brought them back to Istanbul, where Joran ordered up destructive testing.

  In one update eight days in to While's two-week sojourn around the world, Joran announced he may have unlocked a means to shield the twelve Arks. On the video screen his eyes shone like fevered jewels, high on any number of illicit substances. His lab coat was rumpled and smeared with blood samples. At that pace he would be dead within a month, While recognized, but he took no action to slow him down. They might not even have a month.

  "The people in comas," Joran muttered rapidly, his eyes flickering back and forth from James While to whatever readouts lay in front of him. "There's something different about their signals on the line, a flattening aura that extends to anyone within a few feet of them, meaning they provide a kind of buffer from the signals sent on the line, which may explain why-"

  "How can we use that?" While interrupted. Joran frequently rambled off into explaining the depths of his research.

  "Use it?" Joran blinked as he refocused. "We can't yet, not yet, but with the Prime Array coming I've got twenty fresh subjects slow-baking, transmitting data signals up a spine, and I'm recording results in a full double-blind trial, and the results are positive so far."

  James While often lagged behind when Joran was on a roll. He'd authorized the Prime Array, Joran's idea for a final massive Array perhaps a thou
sand minds strong, to be located in the middle of Eurasia, and satellite facilities for testing, but the rest of it was new to him.

  "Positive in that they're providing a shield, something we can use? Will it be enough to block another infection signal?"

  "Another infection?" Joran asked, again briefly confused as his train of thought was redirected. "Well yes, no, but perhaps. Not as is, but with augmentation?" His eyes zipped multiple times to the readouts. "Look at what they've been doing in the Logchain, James, to restrain their samples, some combination of magnets and DNA manipulation? We can't use them for that, because there's no way to get in and change the DNA so much, but with some? Their brains are special, they have the buffer, so we could use them and blow them open, but that would mean personality death, suspending core brain function, and scrubbing off the gray matter, if we-"

  James While focused on the key question, because the details were lost in Joran's flow. "You're talking about blowing open human brains. Killing people."

  "Of course I am!" Joran snapped. "I can extract the coma brains, the bits we need, or expand them, and marry that with whatever magnetic resonance amplification I can create, then it may be possible to extend the protective buffer wide enough to cover ten feet, even a hundred, a bunker. This is how we can water-proof your Arks."

  "So you're talking about sacrificing twelve brains?" James clarified. "Twelve people turned into shields?"

  Joran shook his head. "Much more than twelve. Twelve for the core, perhaps, but most likely twenty-four at minimum, maybe thirty-six, forty-eight, so they can function in unison. And before that, I'll need probably a hundred or so for experimentation. There's too much we don't know, too many variables; we need to learn to rewrite the personalities out, remove the humanity to make for purely mechanical protection. It's all happening at the core, James, as if we were always wired for this, but-"

  While cut him off again. "You're asking for permission to round up and kill two hundred people in comas. Is that correct?"

  Joran frowned, as if that was obvious and no moral quandaries came attached. "At least. Right away. Now."

  "Do it. Spread your acquisition distribution, I don't want the balance in any one area depleted too much."

  Joran frowned. "Of course." He'd been the one to explain the necessity of an even spread of coma sufferers around the globe, when James had first asked him why they shouldn't just gather them all up and kill them at once, to stop whatever fuse was sizzling within them from going off. Apparently they were on some kind of parallel dead man's switch.

  "I've already sent out scouts," Joran said. "I expect-"

  While cut the transmission.

  * * *

  The investigation powered on.

  James While tore into the mountain of evidence with a team of thousands; digging through paper trails, money flows, logistical logs dating back decades, affidavits from hundreds of interrogations, satellite evidence, SEAL records and witness testimony, but little concrete emerged; bare slivers that led to dead ends. The trail of every raid ultimately vanished down the rabbit hole, lost in blind spots in global coverage, tucked into obscure folds in the world, spiraled into disintegrating hearsay.

  For all the mustering of the SEAL's resources, he had no answers.

  So he dug into Olan Harrison.

  DNA analysis back from Harrison's body suggested extensive gene therapies had already been conducted, pressuring his cell walls nearly to mush. In the Alps facility's storage old samples showed catastrophic attempts to lengthen his telomere strands via a dozen different methods, thereby extending his life, though all had failed. Deep tissue analysis of the scars in his skull showed that Apotheo Net transponders had been inserted deep into the gray matter of his brain multiple times, through eleven holes drilled in the bone, and a complete picture of his working mind had been captured.

  That picture still existed. Most likely it was another rabbit hole left behind for James While to stumble down, but there was nothing else to go on. He ordered Apotheo Net staff to compile the data into a working AI personality, which he then spun up within an offline server in his jet's cabin. At the press of a button, this copy of Olan Harrison would express itself into the real world as a holograph.

  James While pressed the button.

  He looked young, as he had forty years ago when first riding his meteoric rise to mastery of the world's communications; a vital and strong man with a full head of tousled golden hair. He blinked 'awake', taking a moment to look around himself, though that was an affectation; movements of the holograph's head didn't change the angle of the single camera lens While had allowed him to 'see' through. Still he looked down at his own hands, then last of all looked up at James While.

  "Hello, James," he said.

  To hear his own name in Olan's voice, absent the crackle of old age, brought a swell of sadness mixed with anger. This was the man who had betrayed his own legacy.

  "Tell me this wasn't all you, Olan."

  Harrison smiled. "I imagine you're very confused now. Angry. I understand that."

  "But you did it. Tell me who joined you. Tell me where they are."

  The holograph looked around, taking in the curved walls of the jet.

  "I see we're on your jet. You're running me disconnected from any network. Very astute."

  "Tell me who killed you."

  Olan frowned. "He's dead? I see, that's a pity. But I'm not a live copy, James. However the real Olan died, I wasn't present for it."

  "But you know who was close to him. You must have suspected what they were planning."

  "Did you know what I was planning, James?"

  While paced. Looking at Olan made him angrier. That they'd left this copy behind was an insult to him.

  "Why didn't they erase you? When they killed Olan why didn't they delete your file too?"

  "I couldn't say. Perhaps they thought I would misdirect you? I doubt your people could pick out a rogue command in the complexity of this personality program, even if they knew it was there."

  James While paced faster. Every avenue was closed to him. It felt like the world was made of mirrors, only reflecting back the world he already knew. There had to be a way through, but he couldn't find it. There was no pattern to crack, or at least none he could see.

  He cut the holograph, and with a gesture sent the file down to several research teams below. If there was anything inside Olan's code, they'd pick it out. Probably they'd only waste their time. He didn't have a choice but to try.

  In his plane he paced.

  Back and forth.

  Back and forth.

  Back and forth.

  * * *

  Joran Helkegarde stumbled upon the pattern by accident.

  He didn't see it at first. In his efforts to gather the first hundred coma victims for his shielding experiments, drawn evenly from across the whole of the world, he had to make a register of all the sufferers out there.

  Bordeaux was already tracking four hundred and thirty-four. His own estimates, based on existing distribution patterns, put the global number somewhere between seven hundred and two thousand. That left three hundred to sixteen hundred unaccounted for, and that was an untenable ignorance.

  He chartered a jet to Bordeaux. Sovoy joined him, as he joined him in everything now, as if by clinging to Helkegarde's shirttails he might absolve himself of his own guilt and responsibility.

  He found Bordeaux in shambles.

  The bunker was ancient; once a nuclear weapons silo, all metal gantries and waterlogged basements. The tech for tracking coma sufferers was ridiculously outdated, with little automatic transfer between precise GPS coordinates as transmitted by monitoring teams on the ground, often necessitating hand-passed lists of data to be entered into joint servers before popping up on a disorganized rabble of big screens.

  James While hadn't been here himself, too lost in the big picture up in the sky. The SEAL Heads had been fired, erasing any sense of oversight. Bordeaux was a headless beast, f
lailing uselessly at a level of institutional incompetence that would have seen the Multicameral Array broken within a week.

  Here, with no one knowing what a success condition even was, following a directive that no one understood or knew how to enforce, they just muddled along. In many areas Joran's own expansion of research activities had shoved monitoring into smaller, less well-equipped spaces. In one room they scratched coordinates onto chalk slates while paddling through inch-deep drip water. The best minds had already been fired, or shifted at Joran's own command into his research stream, gutting the original intent of Bordeaux. The data at its very source was corrupt.

  "Shit in, shit out," Sovoy said.

  So Joran cracked the whip. High on a diet of stimulants from James While's own supply, barely sleeping and living at a frantic minute-to-minute pace, he snapped Bordeaux into shape while also juggling the progress in Istanbul, construction of his thirteenth Prime Array, and setting up prep for the buffer experiments.

  He kicked out his own Multicameral, Logchain and Apotheo Net teams, sending them off to satellite facilities and re-dedicating Bordeaux to its original purpose; tracking the spread of the infection through the global population. He installed hundreds of networked systems keyed into glass display panes running down the spine of twin grand halls on the upper level. He oversaw code that allowed statistical analysis of the influx of data on a dozen different parameters, while at the same time sending out new iterations of line-detecting equipment and rigorous checklists for monitoring teams to follow. He set Sovoy in place as the Bordeaux Head and authorized him to whip consent however he had to.

  Within days the quality of the data improved exponentially. Coma subjects who had fallen through the cracks were now registered, as working teams formed organically and the true importance of the mission seeped into the minds of the people working there.

  Sovoy gave stirring speeches from the top gantry, about the future and global survival, and with that the doors above were sealed. Working shifts spun around the clock. Data poured in, and at last Joran began to see meaningful trends. The magnetic reading equipment he'd manufactured based off the shielding pods in the Logchain gave simplistic hints at hydrogen line activity, measuring more its impact on other factors like brain wave, barometric pressure, true North orientation and radiation, but the data was there.