“Yes; that’s why we sent her. We wanted to know what happened out there.” Now we want to know more than ever, I admitted to myself.
“Admiral Hauser ordered autopsies on the Explorer’s crew, but I’m not sure what it will accomplish,” I said.
“They’re doing it now. Do you want in on it?” I asked. The bodies showed no signs of violence, and we knew what caused those clones to die. We needed to know what tripped their death reflex. “Do you have any suggestions for the coroner?”
Tasman said, “I wouldn’t know what to look for. Harris, I don’t have any more medical training than you.”
CHAPTER
TWELVE
MacAvoy called later that afternoon. He looked pale, and his eyes were bloodshot. His sinuses had become so congested that he sounded like he was pinching his nose. He said, “I know why you beat the Unies so specking easily.” He coughed. Peppered sludge drink or no peppered sludge drink, that cold had him by the balls.
I said, “You weren’t there. It wasn’t that easy.”
He said, “We’re starting to decode some of their high-level communications. Get this. ‘You’re sure it will work?’ ‘Positive.’ ‘Maybe we should withdraw and come back when they’re dead.’ ‘I wouldn’t do that, not unless you want to make them suspicious. If you pull out, they’re going to wonder why. They might figure out what we’re doing.’ ‘How the hell would they do that?’”
“What are they doing?” I asked.
“It’s an eviction notice,” MacAvoy said, then he coughed. His cough produced a rolling throaty sound, as if he had to fight for breath. He put up a finger and stammered, “’Scuse me a moment,” then he bent to the side as if trying to hide from the camera. He hadn’t bent far enough. I watched him hock a slug-sized wad of phlegm. He might have spit it into a wastebasket or jar of some kind. Maybe he spit on the floor. I couldn’t tell; nothing below his shoulders showed on the screen.
When he turned back to the camera, he said, “Tasman found out about Mary Mallon. She’s not a spy, she’s a code name. I’m betting Mary is another name for your girlfriend.”
“For Sunny?”
“There was a real Mary Mallon six hundred years ago. They used to call her ‘Typhoid Mary.’ Ever heard of her?”
I had indeed heard that name, but I had no idea what or who she was. I said, “I’ve never heard of her.”
“Want to guess what made her famous?” MacAvoy asked. “She spread a disease called typhoid without ever getting sick herself,” said MacAvoy.
I said, “Oh speck.”
“Yeah, and I helped that bitch off the transport. At least I didn’t lock lips with her, but I bet I got the bug off her hands.”
“What about Watson and Emily?” I asked. “Is that what turned them into the walking dead?”
“I doubt it. I think they were dehydrated. Tasman was in the same transport as her, and he’s fine. Now my staff . . . half my officers called in sick today.”
As I thought about my front office, I realized it was light a few aides as well.
I asked, “Have you contacted Hauser?”
“Yeah, there’s a bug going on around his ship. I had him make some calls, and he says it’s specking fleetwide.”
Sunny couldn’t have done that, I thought. Then I remembered the ghost ship, the Explorer. Before boarding, they would have run tests for bombs and biological agents, but would that have included germs? A flu bug? As far as I knew, the only way to test for something like that would be to take an actual air sample.
“You’ve had this for a few days now,” I said. “How bad is it? Is it bad enough to kill you?”
He raised a glass so I could see it, so I could see the orange sludge inside it. He said, “I got a lot of aches and pains, every specking inch of me hurts, but no damn flu bug is going to kill me.”
He coughed more, and we hung up.
I sat in my office and thought about colds. MacAvoy had had a cough and a runny nose two days ago. If this bug was designed to kill clones, I didn’t think his flu-fighting drink would save him.
How would I spread the disease? I asked myself. Sunny couldn’t have been the only Typhoid Mary. They probably had dozens of carriers, maybe even hundreds, people who could visit military bases, maybe strike up conversations with clones on the street.
I decided that Sunny must have already been infected when she saw the convoy driving Watson and Emily, but what was she doing in that area? How stupid had I been? Watson had captured Rhodes the day before, Rhodes and the encryption bandit. As far as she knew, the area was secure, but Rhodes had vanished. She must have gone to Coral Hills looking for Rhodes.
She had probably gone out looking for Rhodes, seen the convoy, and put two and two together. She might not have known that Watson and Tasman would be in that APC, but she knew enough to recognize a free ride to the LCB and possibly even a chance to recover the encryption bandit.
I switched the screen on my communications console to a menu of military bases and made several calls, starting with the Marine Corps base in Kaneohe, Hawaii, the place I had gone to live during the weeks after Sunny and Nailor had tried to brainwash me.
The base operator patched my call directly to the base commander; the four stars on my collar and the title “Commander in Chief” come with certain privileges.
Colonel Ian Masters answered my call himself. He must have expected one of my aides on the other end of the line, a lackey who would say, “Please hold for General Harris.” Without looking at the monitor, he said, “If he’s planning on flying here on vacation, tell him we’re all booked . . .” He glanced at the monitor, saw me staring back at him, and said, “Sir.”
He saluted.
I smirked and returned the salute.
Doing the sitting version of standing at attention, clearly wishing he could turn back time for about ten seconds, he asked, “What I can I do for you, sir?”
I said, “At ease, Marine. We’re not on the parade ground.”
He said, “Yes, sir,” then he let out a deep breath, relaxed his back and shoulders, and answered the question I had yet to ask. He coughed. It was just a slight cough, but he had a cough.
I asked, “You getting a cold, Masters?”
He said, “There’s something going around.”
“How bad?” I asked.
He smiled, and said, “Everybody is getting it. Nothing that a few miles running in the hot sun won’t fix.”
I remembered my time in Hawaii. I always traveled to Oahu, never bothering with the other islands. I heard they were prettier, less populated. Oahu had enough mountains and beaches for me. I didn’t think jogging in the sun would save Masters any more than I thought MacAvoy’s toxic concoction would save him.
We joked about bars we both knew and talked about finishing off the Unified Authority. I chatted with Masters for another minute, but I had already switched my attention to deciding the next base I would call.
I called Camp Lemonnier next. Lemonnier was the single smallest Marine base left on Earth, a single security detachment—less than two hundred troops—in a tiny corner of Africa known as Djibouti. If the empire had a base the Unifieds might ignore, I thought it might be Lemonnier.
The camp commandant took my call. Unlike Masters, this stressed-out major didn’t have a staff to answer his phone. He saw me on the screen and saluted.
He seemed healthy enough. He didn’t cough. The whites of his eyes showed no reddening.
He said, “Sir, what can I do for you, sir?” Good old “sir” sandwich, I thought, trademark of a fully functional Marine.
“Have you come into contact with any of the locals?” I asked.
“No, sir.” He barked the answer, so I told him, “At ease, Marine.”
“Yes, sir.” Still too loud.
“Your base is supposed to be isolated, is that right . . .” I looked up his name as I spoke. “Is that right . . . Major Hawkins?”
“No, sir. We do not allow civilians on our
base, sir.”
I generally like hearing strings of sir sandwiches from my subordinates, but this boy, he took it to an uncomfortable extreme. Hawkins appeared to be in his forties, making him at least ten years older than me.
I said, “Marine, under no circumstances are you to open your gates to anyone not wearing khaki.”
“Sir, yes, sir. General, sir, may this Marine inquire about your concern?”
“Just rumors right now. We don’t have any solid intel.”
“Sir, yes, sir.”
“Major, you’re not in trouble. A simple ‘yes, sir,’ will suffice.”
“Yes, sir.”
“Are you healthy?”
“Yes, sir.”
“Are your men healthy?”
“Yes, sir.”
“I’m glad to hear that,” I said. “All of your men are healthy?”
He hesitated. “Well, General, sir, we had to close supply a few hours early. The corporal in charge called in sick. Nothing major, sir. Just a bug . . . the flu bug, maybe.”
“A bug. I see. Has that man been away on leave, maybe recently transferred in?”
“No, sir. He’s been on base for three months now. We don’t allow our men off base, not in Djibouti. Camp policy is that all liberty is taken on base or out of the country. Corporal Tanner hasn’t been on leave yet, sir.”
Maybe it is a cold, I thought with a growing sense of relief. It was possible he stepped off base without informing his superiors. I’d known men who went absent without leave; usually there was a woman involved.
I laid my cards on the table, and asked, “Is there any way he’s banging some girl in town?”
“The nearest town is fifty miles away, sir. He’d need a vehicle from the motor pool.”
That sounded good. I said, “Major, do not allow anyone on or off your base until I personally tell you otherwise. Do you hear me?”
“Are we under attack sir? Should I raise our . . .”
I said, “If the Unifieds were going to attack Djibouti, I think they would have done it by now.”
This was good. This was very good. It ensured our survival on some level. If the rest of us died, we’d still have a few hundred clones carrying on the tradition. I would quarantine that base. We would run autopsies, create a vaccine, and inoculate those men.
Hawkins coughed. It wasn’t much of a cough, maybe the result of a parched throat.
I asked, “What was that, Major?”
“Sorry, sir, I coughed.”
“You coughed? Is that the first time you coughed today?”
“Sir?” he asked, clearly confused.
“DAMN IT MARINE, I ASKED YOU A QUESTION!” I shouted the words. Hell, I screamed them. “IS THIS THE FIRST TIME YOU HAVE COUGHED TODAY?”
The fine Marine on the other end of the conversation jumped at the suddenness of my screaming. He said, “Sir, yes, sir. Sorry, sir. Sir, no, sir, this is not the first time this Marine has coughed, sir. This Marine’s throat is slightly hoarse, sir.”
I took a deep breath, held it as I calmed myself, and asked, “Does Corporal Tanner receive shipments?”
“Yes, sir; he is in charge of receiving.”
I sighed.
It had spread like a cancer; no, more like necrosis. Maybe we could have stopped it with a few amputations had we caught it early on, but by the time we became aware of the danger, our well-oiled circulation system had already spread it too far.
In my mind, I wrote my Corps off as a total loss, like troops in an invasion that have been obliterated. The Air Force and the Army would share our fate. Maybe the Navy stood a chance . . . just a slim chance.
There had been a time when we looped our communications through gigantic satellites armed with broadcast engines. We called those satellites “broadcast stations.” Capable of transporting ships to any specified location instantaneously, broadcast stations could also translate and transfer communications across millions of light-years in an instant. We’d had those satellites until just a few years ago. Those had been the trophy years, an era in which I could speak with officers on the other end of the galaxy as easily as I could chat with the aides outside my door.
* * *
I coded my message URGENT and sent it to Hauser. It took six minutes and twelve seconds for the message to reach his ship. He responded five minutes later, and six minutes and twelve seconds later, I received his response. At that moment, I missed the old Broadcast Network more than ever before.
In his message, Admiral Hauser asked, “Did I mention what the rescue team found when they entered Magellan?”
I wrote, “No,” and sent my message off.
It took just under fifteen minutes for my message to reach Hauser and for him to respond. Let me clarify, that wasn’t all that we said in our messages, though it was the only part of our conversation I actually cared about. My point was this, my communications with Hauser, who was floating somewhere near Mars, had the snappy rhythm of a world-championship chess match.
He told me that someone had left a hot water spigot open on Magellan. No big deal, I thought. That showed how little I knew about microbiology. In his message, Hauser said that germs or viruses, whatever that flu was before it entered its victims, thrived in warm, moist environments. The regenerated air in most spaceships is sixty-five degrees and dry, a good atmosphere for killing off germs.
The crew sent to investigate Magellan had probably towed the ship back to Earth or docked with a fighter carrier. The corpses would have been placed in climate-controlled body bags and turned over to some unlucky coroner who performed an autopsy.
I said, “They may have kept those germs alive on Magellan, but they had other carriers on Earth. The flu has spread through all of my bases. MacAvoy’s caught it. The poor son of a bitch looks like he’s ready to die.”
Hauser sent me a steady stream of meaningless dribble between real messages. My comments about the extent of the outbreak hadn’t reached him yet, so he continued boring me with scientific trivia about cultures and sterile fields. He sent me a dissertation explaining the difference between dormancy and death for germs. He wrote about inoculation and said it was too late to inoculate our men. Like General Strait, Tom Hauser considered himself smarter than common ground-pounding clones. Neither of them were as smart as they considered themselves, and us lowly ground-pounders weren’t as dumb they thought we were.
MacAvoy might have been as dumb as they thought.
MacAvoy, I mused. If anyone could have won this war, it would have been you. Now it looked like he might be the first to die.
“Far as I can tell, every fighter carrier and battleship has been infected,” Hauser said in his next message. I’d spent years assigned to U.A. ships; men and supplies shuffled between ships on a regular basis. Hauser added, “Maybe some of the cruisers and frigates are still clean.
“The sick bays are past capacity on the big ships. There haven’t been any deaths, yet. I don’t know how long it takes. Magellan was missing six days before we found her.”
Six days. Six days, I thought. Sunny had given me the bug two days earlier; Perry MacAvoy came into contact with it one day ahead of me. Three days, and he has one foot in the grave. Was he halfway dead?
“I think I’m coming down with it,” I said. “I woke up feeling like an old man. How are you?”
Time passed. Six minutes and twenty seconds passed before he read my question. He answered simply, then six minutes and twenty seconds passed, and I read his response. He said, “Harris, I feel like hell.”
CHAPTER
THIRTEEN
Nobody died of the flu on August 21, at least, no one that I heard about. Now that I kept alert to it, I noticed a lot of sick clones as I walked through the LCB.
I had two civilian secretaries, both women, both fine. I had one officer, sort of an attaché with civilian organizations, who specialized in running interference for me when politicians came to complain. One of my most overutilized staff members, he’d report
ed for work that day looking pale. I saw him later that afternoon huddled up with a large mug and a box of mixed teas on his desk. I didn’t know the poor guy’s name. He was chubby and old for a Marine, making him the perfect man for dealing with angry civilians. He came across as more sympathetic than the young and fit killing machines who manned our bases.
His face looked puffy and pale. He must have been hitting the tissues, too; the bottom of his nose had become red and raw. I walked over to him and read his name tag. He, of course, rose to his feet and snapped to attention.
The guy’s name was Chambers, Lieutenant Timothy Chambers. I asked, “Chambers, you feeling okay?”
“Yes, sir. Fine, sir.”
“You look like you’re battling a cold,” I said. “Why don’t you call it a day and get you some rest? Maybe you could swing by the infirmary on your way out.” I didn’t know which base he called home, but it would have an infirmary, and every infirmary had pills and nasal sprays. Nothing could cure him, but they might make him more comfortable.
I raised my voice and spoke to the rest of my staff, “That goes for the rest of you. There’s a flu going around. If any of you are under the weather, go home, take care of yourselves.” They didn’t make me repeat myself.
One of my natural-born secretaries rose to her feet as well. I decided I’d fire her when she returned to work the next day.
I went back to my desk to wait for the autopsy results. I thought I knew what the coroners would find. They’d cut open the Magellan corpses and find that those men had all had the flu. Assuming they cut into the bodies quickly enough to take a successful culture, they would incubate the virus, analyze it, and in another few weeks, they might even come up with a vaccine.
On the other hand, an old acquaintance of mine might already have all of that information. I thought about attacking the Unifieds with every able man under my command as I searched for Sunny, but that would only cause them to scatter. This operation called for both a scalpel and a hammer. I would handle the surgical part of the operation, slipping in behind enemy lines and searching for people and files; MacAvoy’s troops would handle the blunt-force trauma—smashing rats as they ran for cover.
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