“Hah, I could take any five Edens,” boasted Holden.
“That’s what we designed the nanites for. But that also means you’re going to be sent on formerly impossible missions and you’ll be up against high odds.”
“Nothin’ to it, sir!” Miller chirped.
Captain Tyler looked sideways at Skull, who took the cue. “That’s enough already, get it on like the Captain said.” He traded looks with Huff, then walked over and began to don the gear.
Tyler stalked out.
Skull spoke to Huff in a low voice. “Funny how we’re getting orders from the lab’s Chief of Security.”
“Yeah. Maybe that weasel is off the reservation, I’m thinkin’.”
Skull shook his head. “Not yet he’s not, but I think he just tipped his hand. Daddy doesn’t know everything that’s going on, and Junior there resents his subordinate position. If the President isn’t fully in charge, and General Tyler isn’t fully in charge, then…politics abhors a vacuum.”
“Hah. You think JT makin’ his play?”
“Not yet. But he will, just as soon as we are on our way.”
Huff chuckled. They’d become almost buddies since they had established their arrangement. “Gotta get us out of the way, huh? Because we’d back the General.”
“Right. So just think about that over the next couple of days. Might help determine which way we jump when the time comes.”
Huff nodded, silent, as they fitted their armor.
-45-
Markis found himself once again, as far too often these days, in front of his teleconference equipment, talking to the world. In fact, he found himself talking to the open meetings of world leaders more than the Free Communities Council. So far no one had challenged him from running things his way; even the most pugnacious of governments seemed to be relieved to have someone else to blame for any problems. And blame they did.
“Everyone please listen up. Ladies and gentlemen…Ladies and gentlemen…” He held up his hands, hoping this would help. Slowly the motion and dialed-down chatter ebbed until Markis thought he had most of their attention.
“Ladies and gentlemen, it is now three days until the Demon Plague Two probe is due to release its biological weapons. Our analyses indicate that no more than half the Earth’s normal, non-Eden population has been given the vaccine. Some nations are doing well, with more than eighty percent of their people immunized and still increasing, but some of you have barely started. Don’t you understand that anyone who had Demon Plague One that contracts Demon Plague Two, will reduce their intelligence to that of an animal?” Markis voice was almost shrill, and he controlled himself with difficulty. He poked his finger at the icon for France with relief, not trusting himself to say more.
“I would like to point out,” the French Prime Minister said, “that the great French people is skeptical on the whole, and also individually, about this vaccine. With no time to test it or see what are its long term effects, many have exercised their rights and refused the injections. I believe many in other nations, particularly in the United States, have done the same. How can you expect us to take this all on faith, the word of this alien being and the word of the one who started this entire, what is the word, this fiasco in the first place!” The Frenchman sat back and mopped his brow, as if this outburst took all his energy.
Markis raised his voice. “If you do not immunize, your people will turn into savages! They will act like wild apes and worse, they will loot and rape and steal and kill. If you do not wish to force these people to take the vaccine, then give them the Eden Plague and then hide, stay indoors in quarantine.”
The Frenchman shook his finger at the camera, Markis and the rest of those watching. “Like you forced the Eden Plague on the world? You are just doing it again, you are playing God and no matter how much it seems good, you cannot save people by force. It is their own decision.”
Dear God, this is how you must feel every day, watching us squabble down here, yet still respecting our choices to ignore You? What a pain in the ass.
Markis ground out, “Three days, ladies and gentlemen. Three days. The Free Communities have used the nanobots to immunize key Eden personnel, and everyone else has been moved out of the infection path or will ride out the initial plaguefall in sealed shelters. All normals in Free community nations have been immunized, by force if necessary. I know that is morally questionable. No one feels that more than I do, but you know what? Out of a billion or more people in the Free Communities, we only expect to lose a few thousand. Some of you will lose millions, and may never recover. May God have mercy on your souls.” Markis stabbed the mute button angrily. There was no mercy in his heart at all right then. “Fools. Fools with power.”
“Power is a funny thing, isn’t it, Daniel? Kind of warps your perspective.” Cassandra rubbed her thumb along the arm of the chair, her face hidden in the waterfall of her hair. She threw it back over her ears to reveal an angry pinch across her nose.
“You’re mad about this too; don’t tell me you’re not.”
“Of course I am. But I’m just angry with you sometimes.”
Daniel stared at her in surprise. “What, at me? Why?”
“For the same reason everyone else in the world is angry with you! Because you upset the applecart ten years ago, and everything that has happened has proceeded from that like dominos! And no matter how much the logical part of me says that you saved millions or billions of lives, these changes have also caused, or instigated, or whatever you call it, many more horrible things. The road to hell is paved with good intentions! Causality…one thing leads to another, and it’s unpredictable, but at least back then we thought we had a handle on things.” She shook her head as if trying to shake off her thoughts.
“Mom…that’s not really fair.” Rick looked back and forth from his mother to Markis.
“I know it’s not fair, I’m just venting. I’m frustrated. I’m afraid for Elise and Shawna and the team, out there playing doctor and trying to sell the vaccine to people that don’t know which way to jump. I’m also afraid of the next unknown unknown.”
“You mean the Demon Plague Two?”
“No,” she answered. “Raphaela is pretty sure about that one and what its structure will be. In fact, we are ahead of the game for a vaccine – if the people will accept the first one. This is just shadows and echoes of the vaccine scares of the twentieth century – people thinking they caused autism, or refusing to be treated for AIDS in Africa, or the Taliban forbidding polio vaccines – madness. No, I’m actually more afraid of the Black Swan.”
All the people in the room stared at Cassandra – Rick and Daniel and Millicent and several techs and staff members. “Black Swan?”
“Yes, what that old SecDef called the ‘unknown unknowns.’ It was one of the few things he got right – what mathematician Nassim Nicholas Taleb called the ‘Black Swans.’ Events so unpredictable that we can’t even conceive of their existence, much less figure how to calculate them into our risk models. Eden Plague. Demon Plagues. Aliens showing up. Nuclear War. Vesuvius and Pompeii, Krakatoa, Tsunguska – whatever.”
A moment of silence passed. “Wow, mom, that’s kind of depressing,” Millicent said.
Cassandra shrugged. “What it means, I’m sorry, but what I think it means is that we just have to realize that nothing will turn out as well as we hope, and we better be ready for more bad news. Daniel, that means you. You’re the glue that’s keeping things together right now. Without your leadership – symbolic or real – it will get a lot worse.”
“It’s going to get a lot worse,” Daniel sighed. “I’ve been preaching hope but the numbers don’t lie. Half the Russians are going to be turned into mad dogs because their government won’t take any sort of leap of faith. Ditto with smaller pockets around the world. And what happens then? A lot of them are going to be gunned down by people defending themselves. If they’re lucky they will be rounded up like ‘Planet of the Apes’, voiceless animalistic
humans in cages. If they are really lucky we will be able to cure them of they combined Demon Plagues, and re-teach them how to be people again.”
The conference room fell silent, all grim with their own thoughts.
Markis sighed. “Come on, people. Plug me back in again, Rick. Someone bring me some strong coffee, and let’s…let’s do what we can.”
“No. Go to bed, Daniel,” Cassandra ordered. “You’re about to fall over.”
“How can I sleep while millions more are…devolving, and dying.”
“You just lay down, close your eyes, and count sheep, that’s how.” She led him by the elbow to his office and his sofa. Guiding him down, she threw a jacket over him. “Come on, sleep. You’re useless right now.”
-46-
Newly-minted Major JT Tyler and the nine men of Fortress Team One stared at the imposing presence of the B2 Spirit stealth bomber, its bay doors open and rotary launcher lowered, ready to receive its deadly cargo.
“Listen up, men. Your mission orders just came through, so take a look at these packets, study them, then get ready. All your gear is here, you got one hour then you’re being loaded.”
Skull opened his mouth to speak but Huff beat him to the punch. “Uh, Major, sir, oh, congrats on your promotion, sir, but uh, didn’t you say General Tyler was going to brief us on our mission?”
Cutting with sarcasm JT replied, “Sorry, Chief Master Sergeant Huff – congrats on your promotion too, by the way – the General had some more pressing business and he couldn’t make it, so he delegated the task to me. Now you’ve practiced with the drop pods and all the gear, now you’re going to have a chance to put it all to use on behalf of your country.” Major Tyler turned on his heel, cutting off further protests.
The nine commandos looked at each other, then turned as one toward the corner of the hangar where the intelligence people had their systems set up. A few minutes later they gathered in the locker room, Miller on lookout to ensure they were not disturbed or overheard.
“What the hell kind of mission is this?” asked Huff, for once lacking his usual bravado. “There’s no extraction plan!”
Skull laughed, humorless. “Sure there is. Fight our way to the coast and a sub will pick us up.”
Huff spat, “With no signal annex, no codes, no radios compatible with Navy comms, hundreds of miles of enemy territory to cross, and if we do what they want us to do, the best we can expect is to get caught and put in solitary confinement for eternity plus one. Does this seem right to you?”
“Nope.” Skull drew his lips back and hissed, a momentary rictus.
“It’s a setup!” Banson hissed. “A suicide mission! I knew we were expendable!”
“Damn right it’s a setup,” Skull said firmly. “But if everyone sticks together we can work out a plan. Let me and Chief Huff talk it over, then in a few minutes we’ll tell you what we come up with. I don’t intend to die for whatever Tyler Junior’s got going. Miller, you keep watch on that door.”
“Why don’t we just bust out right now?” Marquez growled.
“Wouldn’t you rather disobey orders a long, long way from HQ than right here at home?” responded Skull. “Just wait, we’ll figure something out.”
He and Huff retired to a corner to argue. Fifteen minutes later they had a plan. Thirty minutes later Fortress Team agreed. Fifty minutes later they loaded aboard the aircraft.
Just before they did, Skull secretly handed an envelope to one of the B2’s maintenance technicians and whispered a word in her ear. She nodded, slipping the paper into her pocket.
***
Plaguefall.
Demon Plague Probe Two took the same orbit, inserting itself far outside of any interception, sending in its dispersal packages careening along paths similar to the first set.
The Russians sent up a barrage of missiles, nuclear warheads among them. The dispersal package dodged them all, moving far too fast to intercept. All they succeeded in doing was spreading some more radiation and expending more expensive weapons.
The other five overflew their paths without incident, spreading their phages, then dropped to Earth just as the last ones had, into the waiting arms of exploitation teams.
-47-
The B2 crossed into South Africa about the same time the Demon Plague Two probe entered Earth orbit. This was intentional; all eyes, such as Earth had, would be straining skyward toward the approaching danger, not looking for one solitary long-range aircraft sneaking through the empty atmosphere of a battered Earth.
Fortress Team One, hurriedly encased in their bomb-shaped drop pods, woke within a few minutes of each other from precisely metered drugged sleep by even more precisely metered stimulants. Recorded messages whispered in their ears, reminding them not to panic or struggle, that they would soon be released into the air above their target, there to parachute to Earth and accomplish their assigned mission.
In his casing, Skull wondered whether his final message to Commander Forman had gotten through. He figured there was about half a chance. Half a chance he had signed his own death warrant, his own personal Kobayshi Maru scenario, if he couldn’t somehow change the rules.
He wondered why he did it. It wasn’t like him, to risk himself for – for what? Or maybe not for, but just against something one more time, against another opportunistic slimy son of a bitch trying to seize power for himself, just another petty Fuhrer. Maybe that was why Skull favored Markis in spite of everything – he hadn’t seized power for its own sake. He’d been thrust into it, and was just trying to do the best he could.
Eight miles above Carletonville, over the Free Communities’ consolidated biological laboratory, the internal bay doors opened and the rotary launcher powered up.
Nine nano-infused casings wrapped nine nano-infused men. The treatment on the casings were to ensure there was no evidence after the drop; every bit of the pods would be disassembled to dust by the tiny machines.
The mechanism spun on its axis, flinging the nine men Earthward in a tight vertical stream, a ladderlike stack of cylinders with stubby fins ensuring their orientations. Halfway down, at an altitude containing enough oxygen, casings disintegrated, flaking off in chunks and pieces that became bits and then dust, eventually to fall inside raindrops or drift as particulates across the landscape. Thus revealed and set free, drogue chutes deployed, small stabilizers that slowed and guided the armored Nanos until they could assume their hard arches and their body-flight positions, to loose the tiny puffing bits of nylon and dacron and silk until they linked up in formation, guided merely by the glow of their chem-lights.
Air rushed past them and because of its everpresent susurration fell silent, not literally but in their own perceptions because it filled their worlds, this rushing in the blackness, the stars above and the lights edging up toward them from below. They checked their altimeters on wrists or bellies as they preferred, watching the inexorable and hypnotic sweep of hundreds and thousands of feet, second-hands of death-clocks counting down toward oblivion, if only they allowed it to reach them as it reached for them.
Nanobots inside them insulated their psyches like speedball ricochet, wrapped them in warm cocoons of invincibility, whispering in their ears like lovers as they had come to know in the last few days of their training, seductive, orgasmic, promising and delivering the adrenaline rush of the ubermensch. Skull kept a grip on his sanity at the expense of joy and the happiness, or giddiness, that the others displayed. They were deadly puppies, all teeth and tackles, all but Huff, who always kept one eye on Skull, waiting for the inevitable wrong move.
Somewhere during the dive the drugs burned themselves out and the fall settled down to an ordinariness that disappointed, Skull most of all as it was seldom that he allowed himself out of his own head for fear of the loss of control. Sanity had its price and tonight that price was paradise lost.
He checked his altimeter, blazing through ten thousand feet. Thirty seconds or so and they would deploy their ram-air wings, thirty more
seconds to think about what was before and what is ahead. The first rip and pop startled Skull out of his almost-fugue and he released his own pilot chute that dragged his main from its tightly packed stowage.
These parachutes were large and slow and gentle, giants that would set them down as if on pillows even with sixty pounds of gear. Thirty pounds of armor, twenty of weaponry, ten of miscellaneous stuff, no nonsense. Some food, some water, knives and lights and all those things combat troops festoon themselves with.
They had practiced with these loads, and Skull had hardly felt them. Not only was his body supercharged, but his confidence followed, a dangerous invincible feeling stronger than any happy-drug, manufactured by his own brain in no way related to the nanobots other than his own beliefs, the high of a rock star on stage or a lottery winner.
Their boots struck the rocky mountainsides right after their combat equipment bags and they danced, dragging down their canopies until they collapsed like slashed jellyfish in the southern hemisphere’s autumnal zephyr, to follow the capsules into nanite dust. Nine men assembled as three teams of three, only then switching on their HUD-equipped helmets.
The sensor-equipped brain-buckets, like the pioneering smartphones of decades before, coated the world with a virtual overlay, identifying any anomaly it could, marking those it couldn’t, all displayed on the inside of bullet-resistant clear synthetic crystal of the Heads-Up Display.
“Listen up,” Skull said over their private secure network. “Change of plan. I’m taking Objective One. Huff, you got Two, Miller, you got Three. Get to it.”
The Demon Plagues Page 27
