Arisen, Book Six - The Horizon (15 page)

Ali said, “What about the ship’s magazine?”

Predator grunted. “Yeah. Ha. You remember that really big bang, toward the end of the battle?”

“Not really. I was down in the water.”

“Well, I doubt you could have missed it. That was Ammo City going up. And, not to be too much of a smart-ass, but the thing about Ammo City was that it had almost all the ship’s small-arms ammo in it.”

Without warning, the ship’s tannoy went, squelching and breaking into their little moment.

“All hands on deck. Committal ceremony at the end of the forenoon watch in ten minutes… All hands bury the dead.”

That last line was a bit of a conversation killer.

When they dared speak again, the four Alpha operators had a brief discussion about whether or not to attend this. Special operators in the military are a bit like expensive consultants in the business world: they didn’t have to follow all the rules, do the workaday crap, or attend mandatory meetings.

But it didn’t take them long to decide. Even with all the mission work-up they had to do, this wasn’t something they wanted to miss. And not only because it would be hard to face the sailors later if they skipped it.

They filed out, down the companionway toward a ladder, and up toward the light.

Captain America

JFK
- Flag Bridge Briefing Room

“In other news: CentCom wants us back,” Drake said, after dropping his bombshell about Britain being breached. Eyebrows went up all around the table, but no one else spoke for a moment. “They think Dr. Park and his research data aren’t safe until they’re back in Fortress Britain. I might suggest he’s actually safer here, given current events. But, in any case, they’ve ordered us to steam for Liverpool.”

“Not Portsmouth?” the Air Boss asked.

“Portsmouth's about to be under siege.”

Fick grunted. “This an order you’re inclined to follow?”

Drake shrugged. “I don’t see why we should start listening to them now.” To the best of Drake’s knowledge, he didn’t owe any particular allegiance to CentCom. Still, he knew he needed to try and play nice. Humanity wasn’t going to make it out of this mess if they started infighting, and tearing one another to bits. Still, Drake could feel a showdown brewing. It didn’t seem like CentCom’s ideas about how to save humanity aligned perfectly with his.

What he didn’t yet tell the others was that even if they didn’t go to CentCom, CentCom was coming to them. But he did need to alert the scientist to this fact, and made a note to do so. To the group, he said, “Besides, we’ve got other critical shit to do right now. And we’re by far closest to what appears to be our next objective. Not to mention most capable of achieving it.” He turned to Handon. “Sergeant Major?”

Handon nodded. “Dr. Park has been very clear on this. His vaccine is workable. But to tune it, to make sure it works against a rapidly evolving virus, he needs a sample from an early-stage victim.”

“And we can find that where, exactly?” the CAG asked.

“The origin point of the disease, which was northern Somalia. Probably Hargeisa. And we’re lucky that the area has good deep-water access. From the Gulf of Aden.”

Drake tapped once at a tablet before him and a flat-screen behind him on the wall came to life. It showed a map of the world – the wide blue Atlantic, flanked by the old world and the new one to either side. With a second tap, an animated line extended from the coast of Virginia, the carrier’s starting point, and stretched southeast across the wide Atlantic.

It paused about halfway across, expanding into an avatar of the carrier – their current location. The line then carried on, dotted now, all the way to the southern tip of Africa, around the Cape of Good Hope, and then north up the coast. Finally, it looped around the outstretched Horn of Africa on the continent’s east side, then snaked into the little finger of water between Africa and the Arabian Peninsula.

The Gulf of Aden.

“That’s workable,” said Abrams, who no longer had a warship of his own to command, but whose maritime and surface warfare credentials were unquestioned. “It’s a well-mapped sea route. And a hell of a lot fewer Somali pirates these days.”

Several people grinned around the table.

The CAG chimed in. “And if we anchor there in the Gulf, our air group can definitely provide ISR, mission support, CAS, or CSAR if necessary. All no problem.”

“And we can use the time at anchor,” said Captain Martin, “to try to tackle some of the bigger repairs.”

“Yes, yes,” Drake said, nodding. “And the operators can insert for their mission from there as well. There’s just one small fucking problem.”

He nodded at Gunny Fick to take up the baton.

“No ammo,” said Fick. But instead of elaborating, he nodded at
his
subordinate, Sergeant Coulson, to explain.

Coulson’s handsome and whimsical face was serious, for once. “We are now, ship-wide and unit-wide, red on ammo – that’s critically low. Obviously, we put several shit-tons of rounds downrange fighting off the storm – including from the ship’s heavy weapons systems. But even small arms for the ground units are nearly black. I’m talking 5.62 for the assault rifles, linked 7.62 for machine guns, 30-mil, 20-mil for the CWIS. Grenades, both propelled and hand-deployed. Man-portable rockets.”

Coulson nodded back up the table toward Handon. “This is in no small part because Captain America here blew up most of what we had left, when he turned Ammo City into history’s largest claymore.”

Handon just sighed. Everyone knew, and he knew they knew, that blowing up Ammo City, and taking a couple of acres of Zulus with it, had been a critical part of the last-ditch defense of the flight deck. And, moreover, that it had worked.

The Air Boss added, “That’s not all. We’re also dangerously low on aviation fuel – both JP8 for the jets and avgas for the helos and prop planes."

Abrams exhaled audibly. “And according to the manifests I’ve been tasked with updating, we’re not drowning in food, either. This boat lost a lot of mouths to feed in the battle – but also gained quite a few from my ship. And some crops that should have come up in the Hangar Deck have failed to do so – due to the outbreak, the mutiny, and then later the battle. We’ve also lost some farming expertise along the way.”

Food, fuel, and ammo
, thought Handon thought.
All the combat essentials
. Well, those, along with radio batteries and water. Power they had, and plenty of it, now that one of the nuclear reactors was back up. And the ship’s huge desalination plant was also still churning out hundreds of thousands of gallons of fresh water a day, thank God. Without that, their lifespan would be measured in hours.

“Okay,” Drake said. “So we all know the clock is ticking – for us, and for humanity. But we’re in no position to launch major ground ops without a significant top-up of supplies.”

“So it’s a scavenging mission,” said the CAG. “Where to?”

Drake pointed at LT Campbell, who jumped in. “The West African coast is annoyingly free of military bases. But, as we’re headed for the Cape of Good Hope, my team thinks South Africa is our best bet. They definitely had the most advanced military of any African country, and used a lot of NATO-standard weapons and ammo. Now, most of their military facilities were clustered in or around Cape Town.” She paused for effect. “The problem with that is Cape Town – and its four million inhabitants, all now deceased. So we think our best bet is SAS Saldanha – a South African Navy training base and depot, about a hundred and forty kilometers north of there, in Saldanha Bay.”

She looked over to Drake, who jabbed at his tablet again, causing Saldanha Bay to light up on the map. It was way down on Africa’s west coast, almost but not quite as far south as Cape Town. From the map, it also obviously had the virtue of not being far out of their path of travel.

“There is a town attached to the naval base, but it’s a small one – and the base itself is out on the end of the peninsula, with the town inland. With a little luck, we can pillage the former without disturbing the latter. More importantly, in later years, SAS Saldanha also served as a naval depot for their maritime units in the south Atlantic.”

“So,” said the CAG. “Who goes in, then?”

Handon and Fick looked at each other balefully across the table. They knew there were pretty much only two people there with tickets for this particular lottery.

And they were them.

* * *

Sarah’s brow furrowed as her call went to Drake’s voicemail. She left a message, while Park looked on.

She regarded the young-ish scientist across from her – half horrified, and half impressed, by his deep knowledge of pathogens and microbiology. Finally, she spoke, carefully. “Well, it seems to me that we, or rather Alpha team, at least pulled the exact right man out of the ruins of North America.”

Park shrugged. “I’m not really a virologist. It’s more of an interest.”

Sarah paused. “Nonetheless. It’s got to be you. You’re the one who is going to get this thing.”

Park paused. “That’s almost exactly what Juice told me, on the flight back here.” He looked back up and met her eyes. “It’s kind of a lot of pressure. And if I’m going to pull it off… I don’t know, I feel like I’m going to have to dig down. And find my faith.”

“Faith?”

“Yeah. That humanity can still make it.”

“You feel your faith flagging?”

Park paused again. “It’s not so much what I feel, it’s what I know. Maybe I know too much. Or, then again, maybe it is what I feel. I always knew these facts about the world. But I never felt it, not really, not before all this. But now it’s been hammered home. It’s so obvious.”

“What is?”

His face remained emotionless as he answered. “That life has never been safe from death. That the universe is overwhelmingly a dead, cold, inhospitable place – and catastrophically dangerous to life, in every form. That we, the living, have always been the outliers, the aberration. Only a freak chain of improbable accidents produced the bubble of conditions that was necessary for the rise of life, and our species, in this tiny film of air and water stuck to a rock that’s whirling through the void.”

Sarah just exhaled as she tried to take all that in.

But Park wasn’t done. “And, within that bubble, we're outnumbered billions to one by microbes – bacteria and viruses, most of which are trying to invade and eat us. We survived a long time – not as long as the dinosaurs, but a long time. And now maybe our run of good luck is up. The fact that it’s actually the dead stalking us just makes literal what has always been true: that death has always been stalking us. Every minute. Individually – but, much worse, as a species. Life itself, as a phenomenon.”

Sarah nodded carefully. It was definitely not her way to indulge dark thoughts like these. She never saw the point, preferring to focus on the concrete, on what could be done here and now to make things better. She was tempted to tell him they had immediate problems to solve, and he was going to have to man the fuck up. But she finally decided to be smarter than that – to use his own logic, and ease him back toward a state of mind where he was able to do his job.

She said, “I suppose it’s true that we’ve never found any evidence of other life in the universe. As far as we know, it’s just us. Maybe there are reasons for that. Why life doesn’t make it.”

Park was sort of looking off into the distance. “Maybe we’re all there’s ever been. If so, the universe woke up when it created us. And now it’s on the verge of going back to sleep again.”

“Okay, so maybe it is just us in the universe. Maybe we’re it.” She stepped forward, grabbed his upper arm, and made him look her straight in the eye. “That’s a hell of a lot to fight for, then. Wouldn’t you say?”

And now
, Sarah thought.
Enough with the existential musing – and the self-pity.
It was time to start fighting again.

Park seemed to come back to the room, his eyes refocusing. He nodded sharply. Maybe he was ready for the fight again. Either way, he knew he had to act like he was, and get on with it.

And with that, the wall phone went off. Sarah pulled it from its cradle. But before she could speak, it shouted in her ear.

“Go for Drake!”

“Commander, this is Sar—”

“You’ve got the scientist there? Put him on!”

“Yes, yes.” Sarah started to hand over the handset, then saw a speaker button on the base and stabbed it. “You have talk-through for Dr. Park,” she said, still instinctively using police radio procedure. Couldn’t hurt.

“Dr. Park!”
Drake was still shouting, as if over wind noise. It sounded like he might be out on the flight deck.

“Yes, sir.”

“Be advised that CentCom is sending three of their top bioscience guys out of Edinburgh – to review your findings and build on them. They’ll also be flying in a shedload of expensive biotech equipment.”

Park looked flummoxed. “Flying in?”

“Yeah. You’ve seen that big flat part on top of the ship? Planes land on it. Their ETA is fourteen hundred today. Kindly be up top to help greet them. Got it? Good, Drake out.”

He signed off before Sarah could bring up the matter of them needing a current virus sample. She’d just have to make it happen by another route. But before she could formulate her new plan, a speaker went off overhead – the ship’s tannoy.

It was announcing something that Sarah personally would have liked to attend. She knew a little about fallen comrades. And she wanted to pay her respects. But there was no time for sentiment, certainly not for the two of them.

She could hear the clocks ticking loudly all around them.

Consecrate

JFK
- Flight Deck

“I’m guessing,” Handon said, into the clean open air rushing around them, “that Sergeant Coulson wasn’t in that meeting just to use that cute Captain America line.”

Fick chuckled. The two of them were walking the length of the ship toward the stern, after exiting the meeting and descending the ladder outside the island. “Coulson’s now my senior fire team leader – and effectively my new XO, since Gunny Blane bought it.”