Arisen, Book Six - The Horizon (20 page)

“Delta Nine Zero. I want to see that line coming down before I climb out of here, and that is a fucking order, over.”

Silence for a moment.

“Roger that, Helix, will comply.”

A moment later he saw a line descending. He checked his gun, making sure it was ready to fire, pushed open that side door – now effectively the roof door – and pulled himself up, pushing off from broken seating.

He was already outside, and standing up, when he nearly dove back inside in sheer terror. There weren’t just a few dead surrounding the crash site, there were hundreds. They crawled over one another, scrambling to get to the prize inside, but they weren’t looking up at him. They were jammed into the gap under the helo. Several dozen were crammed underneath the wreckage and clawing at one another to get through.

He stood perfectly still, waiting, the effort to keep his breathing slow and steady almost more than he could bear. But eventually the line came down within reach, and he shoved his arms through the straps and gave the rope a tug.

It was when he looked back down, just after his feet had lifted into the air, that one of the things struggled out of the crowd below and launched itself at him.

Grews saw it coming, but could do very little to stop it. He could only watch as the creature climbed out of the pile of writhing bodies, scrambled across them like they were solid ground, climbed up the side of the helicopter, and then leapt into the air.

The wind swept across his face as the Puma rushed skywards, dragging him with it, while Grews watched, as if in slow motion, the corpse barreling through the air toward him. It reached out, fingers grasping, its mouth wide and full of broken and jagged teeth covered in black gunk. He felt his trouser leg rip as it tried to latch on, to grab hold of him before he was out of range, but the fabric tore, and it plummeted back toward the ground, landing headfirst out at the edge of the heaving crowd, which Grews could hear roaring even over the noise of the engines thrumming above him.

Then it was up again, and chasing across the open field, following the Puma’s path even though the bird was climbing quickly. Grews felt several hands grab him from above, and he was unceremoniously yanked inside. He lay there on the metal deck, taking deep breaths for a moment, before sitting up and looking down at his trouser leg. The bottom half had been torn clean away, but that didn’t matter. He was looking for much worse than a ruined uniform.

But there were no scratch marks, and no blood on his leg, so he collapsed back to the deck, drawing breath, relieved to still be alive.

Seeing an ICS headset nearby, Grews pulled it onto his head with shaking hands, and caught the tail end of traffic between their pilot up front, and CentCom on the other end.

“Affirmative, Central. Helix Actual has been recovered. We are inbound to rally point four. Delta Nine Zero out.”

Fluids

JFK
- Biosciences Lab

Ten minutes after Park and Sarah got back to the lab from lunch, Lieutenant Commander Walker, CO of the hospital, stuck her head in. “Just want to see how you two are getting on.”

Sarah was on her back behind a cabinet, re-plumbing the pipe on a water purification system, nearer to where Park needed it. He was sitting at his laptop, as usual.

“Good timing,” Park said, turning to face the door. “I’m going to need a pretty significant volume of both scintillation fluid, and solvent – toluene, ideally, but benzene or phenol will do. So far, we can’t find any in the lab.”

“If we do have any, it’ll be down in Stores. Not the kind of thing we use every day. Hang on.”

Her head disappeared out the hatch again. Two minutes later, a compact man in blue overalls and a ginger crewcut appeared. “Hiya,” he said. “I’m Dietz. Lab tech. You need some solvent? Benzene, that kind of thing?”

Park nodded, as Sarah climbed out from under the bench, dusting her hands on her thighs.

“Not the kind of thing we use every day,” Dietz said.

“We heard that,” Sarah said.

“Any stocks we have are going to be down in Stores.”

Sarah restrained herself from saying they’d heard that, too.

Dietz cocked his head. “How much, you figure?”

“At least five or ten gallons,” Park said. “Probably all you’ve got, realistically.”

“Okay, no problem,” Dietz said. “But we’re short-handed today. Hell, who am I kidding, we’re short-handed every day. I could use some help carrying. Or else loading up the cart, if by some miracle the cargo elevator’s working.”

“Sure,” Park said, hopping off a stool and to his feet.

“Not so fast,” Sarah said. “You’re expected up top in forty minutes, to meet the British scientists when they land.”

“No problem,” Dietz said. “We’ll be back before then.”

Sarah didn’t move. It took her a second of introspection to realize the time wasn’t what she was worried about. She pinned Park with her cagey eye. “You’re also still the most important man in the world. And I like you locked away in this nice, safe lab.”

He looked a little crestfallen. Maybe he’d been looking forward to the walk. Maybe he didn’t enjoy feeling like he was under house arrest, or in protective custody. As if he were some precious and fragile object, rather than a human being.

Dietz said, “Don’t even worry. The ship’s totally secure now.” Sarah still hesitated. Dietz lit up, put one finger in the air, said, “Hang on,” and disappeared out the hatch. He returned ten seconds later – with a Remington pump shotgun slung over his shoulder.

“That put you at ease?” he asked. “’Cause I am gonna need at least one of you if the elevator’s still out.”

Sarah considered. She could go herself, and probably should. But there was also something to be said for keeping Park in her sight at all times.
Screw it
, she thought. Looking seriously at him, she said, “Okay. But you stay behind him, and in front of me, at all times. Got it?”

“Got it.”

* * *

As the three of them descended ladder after ladder, heading toward the very bottom of the ship, Dietz chatted happily. To Park, he said, “Is that sort of an English accent you got?”

Sarah realized she had noticed it, too. Park sounded a bit like the expat Hong Kongers she knew back in Toronto, with traces of the British Empire clinging to their speech. But she was pretty sure he wasn’t from there.

She said, “Dr. Park’s Korean – right?”

He nodded up in front of her, his head bobbing as he descended. “Korean-American. Not tough to guess, from my last name. But after my PhD, I did a long post-doc at a lab at Cambridge. But then I worked for two years at a biotech in Germany.” He paused while they hit another landing, then resumed descending. “And my parents spoke only Korean at home when I was a kid. So my accent’s kind of a mess.”

This was a world far beyond the experience of an enlisted sailor – even one with a Medical Laboratory Technician rating, who had joined the Navy and seen the world. “So I guess you must speak German?” he asked.

“Not really,” Park said. “It’s an old joke that most educated Germans speak better English than most Americans. Anyway, it was only English spoken in the lab. We had a lot of international people – and English, as usual, was the one language everybody had in common.”

Sarah smiled. “Another global soul – or post-national. I knew a lot of people like you in Toronto.”

Park shrugged and smiled. “I feel American. Even if I got bullied a lot in school…”

“Too smart?”

“Too much of a smart-ass.”

And with this, they ran out of stairs – they were now as low as they could get without actually lying down in the bilge tanks. As Dietz pushed through a dark hatch, Sarah noticed one of those fire/damage control stations built into the wall just beyond it. Dietz carried on, leading them down a short stretch of empty companionway, maybe forty feet, and then through one last hatch. As they emerged through that, Sarah clocked another stairwell (or “ladder” as the sailors called them) to their left – one that presumably didn’t go where they were coming from – and then a wide open space. And, crossing that in a just a few seconds, they finally plunged into it proper.

The great, sprawling maze of ship’s Stores.

* * *

Nearly a hundred feet above them, Drake was trying to get out of the Flag Bridge, but had been buttonholed by a slightly belligerent Master Chief Petty Officer. Drake outranked the man – every officer outranked every enlisted man – but, then again, nobody ever really outranked a Master Chief.

Master Chiefs ran the entire Navy – surface vessels, subs, port facilities, SEAL teams. And everyone knew this, including and in particular Drake. So he was listening, for approximately the hundredth time today, to a long story about a set of intractable problems – organizational problems or supply ones or logistical or manpower or mechanical – that were in urgent need of some action by Drake or his senior leadership team to get fixed.

Drake, his expression sagging, checked his wristwatch, realized he was out of time – and decided this set of problems was going to have to fix itself. Or, at any rate, it was going to have to get fixed by someone other than him. When the Master Chief paused to draw breath, Drake leapt in.

“Well, Chief,” he said brightly, “You know what Rick said.”

“What? No. Wait – Rick who?”

“Rick said: ‘Everybody in Casablanca’s got problems. Maybe yours will work out. Now, if you’ll excuse me…’” And with that, Drake physically pushed by the man, whose barrel chest took some pushing by, and stepped out of the island into the clean air up above the flight deck. Beneath him, and a little over halfway up the carrier’s kilometer-plus length, he could see colorfully-shirted flight deck crew preparing for aircraft recovery operations. And he could also see a growing knot of spectators milling around the end of the angle deck, waiting for the show.

There was an aircraft inbound.

And they didn’t get a ton of visitors here.

As he lightly descended the outside stairs, Drake wasn’t sure how thrilled he was about the arrival of these ones. Basically, all he knew was that CentCom was fobbing off a team of bioscientists on them to coordinate with Dr. Park. Since Drake had previously ignored their order to leave his sub in Portsmouth, and had more recently declined to follow their instruction that he bring Park back to England where they could get their hands on him, he was afraid this latest move was a power play. Basically, the British command was making sure they maintained some kind of positive control over the research and the vaccine.

But, then again, he was fair-minded enough to consider that maybe it just made good sense. All of humanity was on the line, on the brink actually, and they needed all the resources they could bring to bear. He was also educated enough to understand that science very rarely progressed on the back of one man. The lone scientific genius was a staple of the popular imagination, but the Einsteins of history were the exception. Big breakthroughs were almost always the result of a team effort – as you could tell from all the joint Nobel prizes, and the thick pages of citations in the backs of research papers and scholarly journals.

These thoughts were interrupted as Drake hit the flight deck’s “non-skid” surface, and his feet went out from under him.

“
What the fu—?!
”

He caught himself before he went down. Regaining his balance and composure, he squatted down to examine the deck, where he found a thick coating of viscous liquid. Putting two fingers to it and sniffing them, he recognized it as hydraulic fluid. He shook his head and cursed under his breath. The last time this deck had been slick with this stuff, it had caused a three-ton forklift to crash into a gigantic ammo supply point. And it had ended with Drake charging at a burning crate of grenades, and shoving it overboard to prevent the death and destruction of everything and everyone on the entire fucking flight deck.

So this was a bit of a sore subject with him.

He briefly tried to decide whether this issue made his mental shit-list of very urgent problems that someone was going to get torn a new orifice for. He decided it did. He shouted at the nearest anybody, a small female ensign who was trotting by, and whose head now snapped on her neck as she jerked to a stop.

“Yes, sir!”

Rising to his full height, Drake pointed at the spreading puddle. “
This! This is why we can’t have nice things!
”

“Sir?”

Drake breathed deeply and tried to calm himself.
Jesus
. In a more normal voice, he said, “Put together a detail to get this spill cleaned up.”

“Aye aye, sir.”

Drake didn’t dismiss her. He said, “C’mon, can’t we go out there and make some new mistakes? Mistakes are inevitable, but it pisses me off when we make the same ones over and over again.”

“Roger that, sir. New mistakes.”

Drake dismissed her with a hand wave. As he turned and started walking up the flight deck, he immediately found himself falling in with Gunny Fick and CSM Handon, both of whom had just rocked up and evidently had the same destination Drake did. These two stony hard men just nodded at him, he nodded back, and they all carried on walking briskly, heads slightly lowered against the wind.

But then Fick looked upward, squinting off toward the horizon, shielding his eyes with a bladed hand. A small gray speck, not even buzzing yet, could just be made out in the distant sky to the northeast.

“Huh,” Fick grunted. “The Redcoats are coming.”

* * *

“I’m pretty sure it’s going to be in one of the small storage rooms in the rear,” Dietz said. “If the manifest can be trusted.” As he walked, he juggled his shotgun, a flashlight, and a clipboard. Evidently, area lighting was supposed to come on as they passed through. But a lot of it didn’t. Maybe bulbs hadn’t been changed. Maybe there were no more bulbs.

Stores was a great cavernous space – not as big as the 700-foot-long, three-story hangar deck, but much bigger than any other compartment, with a higher-than-usual overhead. It was also extremely jumbled, crowded, and maze-like. Crates, clear-taped pallets, giant duffle bags too big for any one person to carry, and great hulking ruins of machinery sat in piles ranging from waist-height to ceiling height, forming rows and aisles that snaked off into the dimness. Some of the bigger aisles were straight and continuous, for use by the forklift trucks and carts. Others were narrow, crooked, or led to dead-ends.