Zombie Galaxy- the Outbreak on Caldor

by Scott Reeves

  They turned to head back toward the maintenance building. Joyce Rider moved as if to follow, but Andy stopped her. “Please, stay here,” he said. “You’ll be safer here. Besides, I’m sure they’ll want to examine you, to figure out how you overcame the...whatever it is.” He looked to Mal. “You have a fatline phone, don’t you?”

  Mal nodded.

  Andy reached into his pocket and pulled out his own phone, handed it to Joyce. “Here. Keep in contact with me. Hopefully they won’t confiscate the phone from you. Would you please give her your phone number, Malfred?”

  “I don’t know what the thing’s number is,” Mal said, pulling forth his phone. “I’ve never used one of the fucking things before yesterday.”

  Andy cringed at the young man’s language, then took Mal’s phone and looked up its number. Then he took back the phone he had given to Joyce, programmed in Mal’s number, and showed her how to call Mal by pressing a single button.

  The interchange had taken precious minutes, during which the hatch of the shuttle had hissed open, and crewmen from the starship began disembarking, gesticulating toward Rodor’s waiting people.

  Andy handed his phone back to Joyce. He tucked Mal’s into his own pocket, figuring that since he was the more qualified of the two of them to use it, it might as well stay in his possession. Mal didn’t protest.

  Then he and Mal waved at Joyce and headed for the maintenance shack at double speed. Joyce stood looking after them. “God be with you!” she called after Andy.

  Harlan Fargo

  Aboard the mining ship Gina’s Starry Eyes, Harlan Fargo perched on the edge of his command chair, scrutinizing the megascrapers of Caldor flashing past a few miles below. The cityscape was like a scene from an Antaran War Monk’s wet dream. All across the horizon, clouds of smoke blacker than night, limned from below in a thousand colors by the city lights, roiled against the star-strewn sky. The roiling clouds marked the sites of a smorgasbord of disasters: toppled megascrapers, wrecked starliners, hovertraffic accidents...

  And the skies were ominously devoid of air traffic. Usually, millions, billions, of aerial vehicles swarmed the skies in an insane tangle of crisscrossing flight paths that seemed destined to result in disaster, but which in reality was perfectly safe, orchestrated as it was by Mac, the omnipresent planetary AI.

  If there was no aerial traffic...

  Harlan shook his head at the implications, but didn’t voice his concerns aloud.

  As Gina’s Starry Eyes raced low above the sea of megascrapers, occasionally bursting through one of the massive columns of roiling smoke, Harlan wished, for the first time since he’d owned her, that he’d endowed her with subspace capabilities so they could interface with the planetary networks and find out what the hell had happened here.

  Following that horrific fatline call from his wife, they’d gotten back home from the edge of the Goat’s Horn Nebula in just under ten hours. Engineer Beckor had pushed the engines to the limit, actually managing to squeeze a few minutes of near-c out of the old beasts before they’d blown out and the ship was reduced to old fashioned rocket power for braking maneuvers.

  In the holotank at the front of the bridge, the Murray Building swam into view, looming large. Most of his crew lived in the Murray Building, in the same neighborhood. After the long months they’d just spent in the rocky bowels of an asteroid adrift in the cold depths of space, the sight of the tall silver spire they called home was welcome indeed. If only they weren’t coming back under such bitter, mysterious circumstances.

  An enormous starship hovered above the rooftop of the Murray Building. A battleship/science research vessel commissioned by the Star Union, by the looks of her and the markings on her hull. She’d already landed a shuttle on the spaceport, from which crewmen were just now disembarking.

  “Shit,” Harlan muttered. He could almost feel the pompous eyes of the massive vessel’s captain upon him. Official Star Union ships were never anything but trouble.

  Jayce Michaels

  Michaels watched as the beat-up little ship slowly approached.

  “No response to our hails,” Chet Mith said.

  Michaels glared at the communications officer. “You’d better not be using subspace!”

  Mith shook his head. “No, sir. Just standard ship-to-ship magravity wave frequencies.”

  Anson Torqual raised his head from his jerry-rigged view screen. His eyes were watery, burning, from staring too long at the ancient CRT monitor. With the current proscription on Net interfaces and other subspace technology, he’d been consulting his databases the old-fashioned way. “She’s registered as Gina’s Starry Eyes, a mining ship whose captain, Harlan Fargo, has an aversion to modern technology. Try hailing her on the fatline channels.”

  “Fatline?” Mith snorted. “Savages.” He fiddled with his controls for a moment, then reported, “Fatline open, sir, audio only. You’re on with Captain Fargo.”

  Michaels got up from his throne, peering across at the little ship as if he could see through its hull. “Captain Fargo. This is Captain Jayce Michaels of the Delphic Oracle. Under the authority of the Star Union, I’m declaring Caldor a Level One quarantine zone. You’re ordered to withdraw immediately.”

  “I can’t do that, Captain,” said the voice of Harlan Fargo over the fatline. “We’ve got family in the building below you. We’re not leaving without them, alive or dead.”

  Michaels sighed. “Captain, you might not be aware of the situation on Caldor. Some sort of plague has broken out. As far as we know, the entire planet’s infected. It’s already spreading across the entire Union. I have orders to investigate and contain Caldor. Most likely, I’ll have to destroy the planet in the next few hours or days. You’re ordered to withdraw, immediately.”

  “And go where? If it’s spreading to other planets, tell me where the fuck I’m supposed to go? My ship doesn’t have hyperdrive engines anyway. It would take me years to get anywhere else. Look, Captain, we’re not leaving without our families. We’re going down.”

  “If you go down,” Michaels said, “then you won’t be allowed to leave. Anyway, the transmat system is down. From what we’re learning, it’s where this mess all started. So you won’t be able to get down to them that way. And if you try to berth here on the spaceport to get out and use the stairs, we’ll shoot you. You have no way down, so you’re fucked. Get out now, while you can.”

  “No, thank you, Captain. I guess we’ll just have to use a private spaceport lower down.”

  “Power up plasma cannon and lock on,” Michaels barked to Stevens, the tactical officer.

  Fargo heard the order, which had been Michaels’s intent. “Containment means keeping people from getting out, not in, doesn’t it, Captain Michaels, sir? You want to blast us, go right ahead. But I’m going down to my wife one way or another. Why do you care if I add a very small shipload to the 800 billion victims on Caldor?”

  “I’m warning you, Fargo—”

  “Fuck you, Captain Michaels, sir”

  “He’s closed the channel, sir,” Mith reported.

  Gina’s Starry Eyes was now beginning a descent into the narrow canyon between the Murray Building and the megascraper next to it. Probably going for a landing on the street, ten miles down, or maybe to seek out a private dock in the lower portion of the ‘scraper, as Fargo had said. Michaels watched the beat-up little ship drift downward, like a gnat compared to his own behemoth vessel.

  “Sir?” Stevens prompted, his itchy trigger finger twitching on the firing stud.

  Michaels clenched his fist and gritted his teeth. Fucking arrogant little prick of a nothing little captain! “Stand down!” Michaels shouted at Stevens, who hissed in disappointment, but cycled down his weapon as ordered. “We came to try to help, not to kill random space dogs who just want to come home.”

  Michaels watched as the mining ship disappeared down into the murky, foggy darkness between the buildings. One thing was certain: when he pulled the trigger on Caldor
’s planet crackers, he was going to be thinking of Harlan Fargo.

  Harlan Fargo

  Peering into the holotank, Harlan watched as the rooftop rose upward out of view as Gina’s Starry Eyes sank below the lip of the roof and down into the chasm between buildings. The daylight quickly dimmed into a murky twilight as the mining ship sank ever deeper into the chasm. The murk was broken by flashing neon lights as they passed a floating sign screaming out an advertisement, or perhaps traffic directions to now non-existent hovertraffic.

  Ordinarily upon returning to Caldor, Harlan’s ship would have taken berth on the rooftop spaceport. But not today, not with that Union starship up there. That thrice-damned Union captain would have taken Harlan and his crew into protective custody as soon as they disembarked, Harlan was certain of it. If he hadn’t shot them outright as he had threatened.

  His best bet now was to land on a private landing pad that he knew of, a landing pad belonging to a wealthy aristocrat who was renowned for several floors above and below Harlan’s floor. Harlan was sure the aristocrat would grant Harlan’s ship a temporary berth, for a modest price.

  But as the ship continued sinking slowly downward, the absence of hovertraffic whipping through the air around them spoke volumes. Caldor truly had been hit with a tremendous catastrophe. Surely nothing short of the fall of civilization itself could have put a stop to the usually ever-present hovertraffic. The ship’s running lights occasionally panned over red smears on the walls to either side of the ship. Red smears and gore amidst chalky black burn marks, marking the spots where hovervehicles had crashed.

  “I’d hate to see the streets way down below,” Jacy, the pilot, said. “Can you imagine the vehicular detritus down there? Cars probably dropped from the air by the thousands, like flitting gnats zapped down by an insect vaporizer.”

  “Too bad we don’t have subspace capability,” said Beckor, the engineer. “Mac might be able to tell us what’s going on.”

  “Mac’s obviously lost control of everything,” Harlan told him. “He controls the hovertraffic, and he controls most of the space traffic. Remember? If the traffic has crashed, then Mac has crashed.”

  “Fuck,” Beckor said.

  “Fuck is right,” Harlan said.

  Jacy called out, “Coming up on Babbit’s landing pad. No response to our fatline hails. No landing permission from his automated administrator.”

  “Land anyway,” Harlan ordered. “We’ll get off and have a short look around, to check the state of things inside the building. But I’ve been thinking. If the transmats are down, how the hell are we going to get to our homes? Most of us live in transmat-access-only areas, don’t we?”

  Most of his bridge crew nodded.

  “Then what’s the plan?” Beckor asked.

  “Well,” Harlan said. “I gather from my conversation with that Union captain that Caldor is pretty much fucked at this point. It’s every man for himself. And we’re a mining ship, aren’t we?”

  Jacy nodded.

  “Well, then,” Harlan said, “we’re just going to have to mine our way in to our apartments, and damn anyone who gets in our path.”

  Samala Vintron

  Samala crept stealthily from garbage mound to garbage mound as she tailed the massive machine, stalking her prey through this wilderness of trash.

  She was still completely nude, because she hadn’t been able to find her clothes. If her murderer had tossed them down after her, they had not landed nearby. And the bits of clothing she had come across in the garbage heaps were too covered with muck and slime for her to even consider donning them. But by now, her naked body was so grimy and slick with unidentifiable slimes that she might as well have donned the clothing. Or not. At this point, it no longer mattered.

  She was trying to be covert in her surveillance of the machine, worried that she might be under observation from somewhere in the vast megacity by some human or machine intelligence whose job it might be to monitor this garbage dump. Though why she was trying to avoid observation when she wanted out of this place, she was not certain. Perhaps it was because strange things were afoot in the megacity.

  Of course, she had no knowledge of what might be occurring elsewhere. All she knew was that her father had turned into a slavering beast after emerging from the transmat, she had ultimately been molested and murdered by a disgusting evil man, and she had returned from death only to find a crazed woman gnawing her severed leg like an animal.

  Yeah, right, she thought to herself. Not much to go on, is it? No, surely not enough reason to be slinking through this garbage dump in stealth mode, trying hard not to be seen.

  She laughed again. At least her sarcastic sense of humor had returned from death with her.

  She had first noticed the machines shortly after she had set out from the spot where she had awakened from her murder. The things were everywhere, flitting about the hills and plains of garbage like huge mechanical flies. She had observed them for about half an hour before fastening her attention on this one she was tailing, planning to use it to get out of this dump.

  The machines were basically flying dump trucks, each with a single crane-like arm at the end of which was an enormous clawed scooper. They came swooping out of dark bays high in the distant walls of the cavern-like dump, descending to the floor on curtains of gravito-magnetic energy generated by repellor plates that were the smaller cousins of those used by interstellar starships. They were automated, she was sure, under the control of an AI owned by some private corporation rather than by some human piloting them by remote control from a dark alcove somewhere.

  Each machine would hover about fifteen feet above the trash as it reached down to scoop up clumps of garbage that seemed to be chosen at random, its serrated metal claw jamming into the mushy ground or into the side of a hill and ripping away a huge crumbling chunk of debris, which was then deposited by the crane-like arm into the bed of the truck. This continued until their beds were full, whereupon the machine would swoop back up to the bay from whence it had come, presumably to deliver its load somewhere either to be incinerated, recycled, or burned for energy.

  She had as yet discovered no way to escape from the dump, so right now, these machines were her only ticket out of here.

  She had chosen the machine below for no other reason than convenience: it was the nearest one, and it was almost full. One more scoop and it would probably shoot back up to the bay high in the wall, where, presumably, it would dump its load for further processing.

  She had been stalking it for several minutes now. But she didn’t like the plan that had formed in her mind. In fact, it terrified her. And so she was balking at carrying it out.

  But she was running out of time, because this machine’s bed was nearly full. Soon it would be up and away, and she would have to choose another.

  She took a deep breath. Time was wasting. She needed to get out of here and find Mal.

  When the machine appeared to find a section of garbage that it liked, using some standard that Samala couldn’t fathom because the targeted area looked no different from any other, it lurched to a halt. Like the stinger of a striking scorpion, the flying dump truck’s arm whipped down, spearing into the garbage that covered the floor.

  Samala momentarily wondered how far down the actual floor was. How deep was the garbage? But only for a moment. This was her shot.

  Trying not to think about the danger, she abandoned her stealth mode and ran at the machine. As its claw was pulling back out of the ground, she leapt onto it, scrambling up the jumbled heap of garbage that filled the claw’s bucket.

  She struggled to keep her footing as the garbage shifted beneath her, pitching and heaving as the arm retracted back up toward the hovering dump truck. It was a chaotic mixture of garbage: twisted metal girders; crushed, soggy cardboard boxes; clothing soaked with unidentifiable noxious liquids; thick panels of metal that could have been either doors or sections of walls; half-eaten food; books...just a representative cross section o
f the various types of debris one might expect to be generated by everyday human living, basically the excrement of the monstrously incontinent beast that was civilization.

  She couldn’t find a secure position on the mound of trash. It shifted and writhed beneath her as if it were alive.

  She leapt aside as a riveted metal panel and a girder came crashing together, nearly crushing her between them. But in doing so, her bare foot came down on a shard of broken glass that sliced into her heel like a knife.

  Screaming, she reeled backward, away from the searing pain in her foot, falling against the girder and the panel that had just missed her. She struck the back of her head against the panel, and the sharp edge of the girder impaled her at mid-back on her right side.

  She screamed again, or rather, had never stopped screaming.

  But through the blinding pain, she clung to her plan. Sliding herself forward and off the edge of the girder, she continued her struggle to keep her position on top of the heap.

  Of course, the struggle, from the time she climbed into the claw, only lasted a scant few seconds, but seemed like it lasted an eternity.

  Eventually —seconds after the claw had scooped up the garbage— it upended above the bed of the flying truck, and she went tumbling head over heels down onto a greater heap of garbage, a mote of human detritus amidst a rain of girders, moldy bread and oily rags. Blood streaming from her wounded foot and side marked her passage through the air.

  She landed roughly face down on a jumbled surface of jagged glass, broken pipes and a thousand other bits of debris that pierced her all across her front side, causing new agony to burst through her body. Even through her pain, she thought to wonder at that: her heart wasn’t beating and she wasn’t certain she was actually alive, yet her nerves were still capable of carrying pain signals to her brain.