A Time to Die (26 page)

“Holy shit!” he heard Chris over the intercom.

“Oh, just wait,” Andrew said, grabbing the two outer throttle controls by spreading his hand wide, he pushed them up and forward and the Allison engines began to roar.

The RPM meter reached the midpoint. Andrew gave it another ten percent and felt the plane start to slide on the slick hangar concrete. The first of the crazies was through, looking up at the camouflaged plane in wide-eyed dementia. Andrew stabbed the intercom. “NOW!” he yelled into the mic.

The sound of the M-16 firing was almost inaudible over the roar of the two turboprops in such a contained space. Out in the hangar it looked like a live action version of the tornado sequence in the Wizard of Oz. FOD of all imaginable types were flying around. He gritted his teeth and hoped a turbine didn’t ingest someone. That would deadline another engine. Clipboards, paper, a shirt flashed across the cockpit and he saw it turned to confetti by the four-bladed prop to his left. “Jesus Christ!” he said when an aluminum lawn chair careened off his side window.

Pop, pop, pop, went the M-16. He had a little camera view out the back and the doors were still closed. “Chris, mother fuck man, get it done!”

In the back Chris was gritting his teeth as he fired several rounds. Standing in the doorway of the plane, its entire fuselage bucking up and down as it skidded backwards towards the door, was like trying to shoot from a ship jumping over waves. It was impossible. He tried to guess how many shots he’d fired. Seven, eight? He had no fucking clue. All the while the plane was getting closer to the doors. He knew if the tail crashed into those doors, it wasn’t going to be a flyable aircraft any more. “CHRIS!”

Chris snarled. “Fuck it,” he said and flipped the selector down, braced against the door, and squeezed the trigger. The gun fired on fully automatic. The first three made the gun climb surprisingly. He cursed himself for not expecting that, regained the target, and pulled the trigger again. The magazine fired out in a long rata-tat-atat-atat, barely audible over the earsplitting roar of the plane’s engine only a few feet away.

He didn’t know if he actually hit the rope, or if it was flying metal debris from the shredded metal wall. But the tie down rope severed and the contraption flew into action.

The rope was tied to the lock. When the rope severed the lock flew open. The other end of the rope restrained two five-gallon buckets of gear lubrication grease weighing thirty-five pounds apiece. They in turn were connected to the electrical door cables. Without power, those cables had no motor to make them retract the doors. The buckets did a decent job of it. The doors started to slide open.

“Thank god,” Andrew intoned as he saw the doors begin to slide open. There were half a dozen crazies already through the rapidly disintegrating back doors. Worse, they were walking against the hurricane force winds of the two engines, and about to reach the plane. Andrew snarled as he pushed the throttles to 80%. The result was rather spectacular.

The full force of the backwash propelled the six men and women backwards like meat rockets, and into the bay doors. The combination of half a ton of meat and bone along with hundreds of tons of restrained air blew the doors out like they’d been hit by a bomb.

The brakes were barely restraining the plane. The squeal of tires on concrete was clearly audible over the straining engines. The plane started to yaw to starboard. Andrew decreased that engine a notch and it straightened out. He glanced at the doors behind. They were almost open all the way. He hoped it was enough and punched the brake release with his foot, and yelped as he was jerked forward. His face smashed into the control yoke.

“Shit!” he said, putting a hand to his face and having it come away bloody.

The plane fairly rocketed backwards. He had a half a second to worry about the wings clearing the doors. That was all the time it took for the plane to fly through the doors and out onto the taxiway. Andrew applied some brake and the tires screamed, smoke flying they tried unsuccessfully to bite into the concrete. It took him a full second to come to his senses, the plane careened over the taxiway and halfway across the runway before he grabbed the throttles and yanked them to neutral. `He jammed the brakes on and the plane actually skidded to a stop on the opposite taxiway.

As the turboprops reduced to a dull roar, Andrew could hear the calls of consternation from the back. It sounded like the passengers had been tossed around fairly well during his…unconventional maneuvers. He feathered the props and glanced over the instruments quickly to make sure he hadn’t damaged anything. But as his eyes passed glanced at the gauges on the overhead he caught movement out of the corner of his eye and looked. There were hundreds of the crazies racing right at them.

He keyed the intercom. “Hang on back there!”

“Could have said that earlier,” Chris came back. He could hear the sound of them dogging the door over the speaker.

Andrew reached down, changed the pitch forward a hundred percent, and gave it some throttle. At the same time, he flipped the cross over and ignited #1 Engine, glancing out the window to see the prop starting to spin.

“We’re going to have company!” Chris yelled over the intercom.

Andrew craned his head and saw several dozen crazies only a few meters behind the tail of the plane. He gave it more throttle and spun the front wheel control, turning them on the tarmac towards the end of the runway. He looked out the left and saw the hundreds who’d assaulted the hangar now sprinting after the plane. The hangars were about midway down the runway. Either way he went it was going to cost him concrete. He gave it more throttle, sending them up to almost seventy miles per hour on the taxiway. He realized he was driving into the wind and felt that feathery sensation on the yoke. The plane was trying to take off!

He looked toward the end of the taxiway. About three hundred meters, no more. There was a perimeter fence about a hundred meters beyond that, and then a radar dome that stood at least three stories tall. “I’m fucking nuts,” he realized even as his hands went to the controls. He flipped the flaps control to 40%, surprised at how quickly they deployed, and then shoved all three running engines throttles to the firewall.

The plane leaped ahead. It might not be an F-35, but the acceleration was still noticeable. He gave it some rudder to compensate for the yaw from the missing engine and watched the ground speed sweep past a hundred miles per hour. He kept the nose down for another second, gaining speed and looking up at the rapidly approaching end of the taxiway, and a dozen crazies racing out of a maintenance building right into his path.

“Great,” he grumbled and pulled back on the yoke. The plane’s nose came up just as he ran into the crowd. He felt a couple thumps as a few bounced off the nose gear and one was rode under to be pulverized by the big wide trucks under the fuselage. It was one big dude who had to be a football player, or something, that Andrew watched. He’d been a little behind the others and that put him square under the starboard wing. The massive four-bladed prop, spinning at well over 2,500 RPM, hit the man square on and turned him into meat confetti.

Streamers of meat and bone splattered against the plane’s fuselage. Andrew pulled his head back as a few bits actually flew through his window and a fine red mist floated in. “Ewww!” he groaned. The starboard engine’s RPM dipped a fraction and recovered.

The plane came up into a surprising angle of attack. Andrew watched the airspeed continued to climb and nodded in appreciation. The thing really was a beast. He cleared the radar dome by at least fifty feet and banked into a wide turn to port, looking out and down at the runway almost covered in crazy fucks. If he’d come around and used the runway he wouldn’t have hit a half a dozen, he would have had to plow through dozens, if not hundreds.

“That was insane!” Chris yelled over the intercom. Andrew could hear the other passengers cheering as well.

He nodded and checked the instruments. All three engines were in the green. With one more check on consumables he slid the cockpit window closed, wiped the blood from his hand, and set a course north.

Chapter 20

Sunday, April 22

Interlude

The Surgeon-General had asked for two days, five had gone by. Elements of the Third Army Regiment out of Fort Hood were sent to Mexico, at the request of their government. The regimental commander informed them that they’d set up a defensive line west of Monterrey, assisting Mexican Army units. Then word that a wave of refugees were coming through telling crazy stories about murder and cannibalism. Twenty-four hours ago, all contact had been lost with them. Within hours, NORAD reported solid evidence of nuclear detonations within Mexico, backed up by satellite imagery.

And now the UN knew about the blast and the story was about to break on the international news. The Mexican government was dark; no official communications went in or out. And the Border Patrol was going crazy, their detention facilities were filled with hundreds of thousands of illegals. The order by the CDC to isolate them only made it worse. The chief of staff was reading a report from the Nogales section reporting that an ‘incident’ had happened in their detention facility. More than a thousand were dead.

“We can no longer deny that a mass exodus of infected from Mexico are on their way here,” the man in the computer window in front of the chief said. He had the look of someone who wasn’t used to being argued with. “We’ve controlled the outbreaks here—”

“We don’t know that,” the chief of staff said, looking up from the printout. “There are reports of scattered outbreaks.”

“Nothing like Mexico,” the man insisted.

“The SG reported, just before he had his stroke last night, that they had yet to isolate the source of the infection.” He glanced at another printout. “There is evidence of multiple vectors.”

“Experts I know say that isn’t possible.”

The chief of staff shrugged. “That doesn’t change the fact that there is evidence.” He found another piece of paper and read a line. “Some researcher at the New Mexico State University, down in Las Cruces, guy named Amstead, has been making noise about aliens too.”

“Aliens?!” the man said incredulously.

“Yes, aliens. He says he has evidence and wants to convene some group calling themselves Genesis.”

“That group put together for alien contact,” the other man mumbled, turning away from the pickup on his side. “Might be a useful distraction.”

“You should know that advisers of the POTUS are suggesting he activate the internet kill switch to keep the Mexican news from getting out.”

“That would take quite a cover story.”

“There are always some terrorists to blame,” the chief smirked.

“Russians?”

“Works as good as any of them.” The chief was quiet for a moment as he thought. Maybe the whole alien crap could be crafted with the internet shut down? “Speaking of Russia, what about the news of the outbreak in the Ukraine?”

The other man consulted his own documents. “Their own disease control agency relayed through the WHO that they had contained it inside the city of Pivne. According the WHO, that makes five sites now under control. It looks like only Mexico is in complete meltdown.”

The man nodded. “What about that CBP officer, the one bit by the cow?”

“CDC has him in their Dallas facility. He’s going to be transferred to Atlanta this afternoon. They got him out of the Nogales hospital before there was any spread.” The chief read from a green paper with the CDC logo on the bottom. “The cattle from that train were all quarantined and blood samples taken. A few apparently got loose. The local police are looking for them.”

“I suppose you want me to take care of the cows too?”

“Don’t be funny,” the chief of staff said. “Continue coordinating the disinformation. And stay out of trouble.”

The chat session ended and the man closed the lid on his laptop. Outside his hotel in Laredo he could hear people partying as the sun was going down. He’d tracked another outbreak here

He grabbed the remote and turned the TV on to GNN. There was some nonsensical story about a group in Congress pressing for laxer immigration laws. He chuckled and shook his head. They’d be lucky if any of them survived thanks to the current incredibly lax laws. His job would continue until either they won, or the bug did.

Chapter 21

Monday, April 23

Morning

Three delays had pushed the test into the early morning hours. The sky behind the Laguna Mountains was already turning blue and Jeremiah Osborne was almost out of time. If this didn’t happen soon, another day was wasted. And worse, more money he didn’t have. “What’s holding it up?” he asked into a handheld radio that he hadn’t put down for hours.

“A general lack of understanding?” was the exasperated reply. A hundred yards away floated a tug that had seen better days. Once named DBB Prosperous, Jeremiah had gotten it for scrap though it still had a functioning generator and could manage (with some coaxing) about five knots. It leaked like a sieve and smelled like a barrel of oil mixed with bad whiskey. The electrical system was prone to failure and if you left the pumps off for more than a few hours the engine room would be up to your knees in water. But it was built like a tank and exactly what they were looking for.

On the tug, renamed Angel One, Alison McDill put the radio down and couldn’t resist giving it the finger in disgust. One of her techs just chuckled as he tried to get the computer to do what they wanted it to do. The radio out of the way, she settled down to try and understand why the machine wasn’t doing what it was supposed to do.

She was the nominal captain of Angel One for the test. A test that thus far had been a complete dud. Jeremiah had handed over the machine to her forty-eight hours ago with the task of getting it to work. When she’d succeeded in a bench test and suggested the next step, maybe a small car or a trash dumpster, Jeremiah jumped the shark and bought a 149-ton trash-heap that was once a working tug.

“What’s the power reading?” she asked the tech.

“We’re pushing nearly 2 kilowatts into it,” he said.

Alison looked at the gauge that most interested her, a modified stress meter wired into the tug’s keel. It stubbornly hadn’t budged. On that now infamous bench test, it had taken less than 1-milliwatt to lift the metallic ammo can. The metallic component proved vital. But the machine worked, it took ferrous metal to transmit its ability. Thus a small fiberglass sailboat was out of the question. That test operated with a nine-volt battery for hours. However, from twenty-five pounds to almost 300,000 was a bit of a jump. Only five orders of magnitude. Even with that astounding jump in size, she’d estimated it should have only taken 300 watts to lift the tug. The hypothesis hadn’t been born out.

“Temperature from the interface?” she asked.

“Holding steady at 150,” another tech told her. Interfacing with the machine to transfer power turned out to be a challenge. They had ended up using a rare earth nearly-superconductor. Though it would degrade with use, it proved to be the best choice at the time.

Alison grumbled and looked at her screen. The temperature of just a little over one and a half over the boiling point of water confirmed that power was moving through the interface. However neither of the stress meters were moving, which means the machine still wasn’t doing its job, even at eight times the power it should have taken.

“Try varying the input polarity,” she ordered. There were four power input points, and from the bench test they knew that it took power flowing through all four to make the device work. Even after the machine activated, removing power from any of the four stopped it. It was also particular about the type of power. It had to be 240 volts, with no more variation than 0.1%. She’d manufactured that power supply from scratch. It had to be DC, and two of them positive and two negative. The bench test wattage was so low and the amperage was almost nonexistent.

For a few minutes they varied the input polarity of some very scary wattages of current with no results. She was sure the machine was ‘working’, but it wasn’t producing any measurable results.

“Maybe it can’t handle something this big?” a tech suggested. “Didn’t it come out of a ship the size of a sofa?”

Alison nodded, she’d said as much when Jeremiah had pushed for the jump in scale. He hadn’t really listened. A lot of people said it was one of Jeremiah’s few problems. He went off rather halfcocked sometimes, maybe a little more than halfcocked?

One of the techs made a joke Alison didn’t hear, prompting several to laugh. One hard enough to slap the desk, and hit his computer keyboard. The computerized stress gauge let out a squawk and the ship MOVED. It didn’t move left, or right. It didn’t move forward or backwards. It unfortunately didn’t move up either. It went down.

Metal groaned like a wounded monster as 149 tons of rusted, aging tug was shoved under water like a little toy in a baby’s bath. The acceleration was so precipitous that for a long moment they left an air wake behind them, like a bullet shot into a water barrel. Inside the ship, they felt nothing. Not the slightest hint of momentum or acceleration.

Alison gasped from the sudden movement of the gauge, then three things happened. The light in the room turned blue, then green, a girl screamed, and the air pocket collapsed. Water crashed in against the upper superstructure with a resounding boom! It had been a chilly morning in San Diego, thank goodness, so all the portholes were closed. Even so, many began spraying high pressure water as the tug shot downward. It took her another half second to understand what was happening. In that time the tug slammed into the bottom of the bay with a bone-shattering crunch.

“We’re flooding!” someone yelled, one of the qualified seamen who was overseeing the operation of the tugs nautical systems.

“We sank!” someone else screamed.

Alison was dimly aware of the sound of rushing water and some of her instruments began to fail. “Cut power!” she ordered.

“What?” said one of the techs, turning to look at her with confusion and fear on his face.

“I said cut the God-damned power!” she yelled. He just stared at her like she’d suggested ordering pancakes for dinner.

Alison vaulted the desk she’d used to supervise the experiment and shouldered the confused man out of the way. Abandoning all subtlety, she reached to the back of the laptop he used to control and ripped out the connections.

The machine died instantly, and so did the motive force that was holding them against the bottom of San Diego Bay. Angel One’s life as a tug required horsepower and buoyancy, two things it had possessed in spades. The impact with the rocky bottom fractured her spine and sent water flooding into the substantial bilges. If Alison had delayed any long, that buoyancy might have been gone, and the entire crew drowned. However, her quick action saved the day.

The tug pulled free of the rocks and muck of the bottom and rocketed upwards, swaying violently from side to side as it ascended. This time everyone aboard felt it all in living color. The ship rocked violently, threatening to capsize on the way up. Alison later remembered never having a more exciting ride, despite being a lifelong rollercoaster enthusiast.

They broke the surface at better than ten knots, slightly tail first, and listing about twenty degrees to port. The stricken tug jumped and nearly cleared the surface before splashing back down like a flat rock dropped in a pond. Everyone aboard was sent flying around like leaves in a hurricane.

“Holy fucking shit!” someone screamed, and the control room erupted in people screaming for their lives and others celebrating the return of light outside. The numbers were almost equally split between the two camps.

“Yeah, we’re sinking,” the head of the ship’s operating crew told her when she finally got his attention.

“Can you keep us afloat with the pumps?”

“I don’t know how you did that or even what really happened, but we’ve fractured the hull pretty severely.” He glanced at a couple of displays again. “We’ve got three feet of water in the bilge and more coming in. I can slow it down, but not stop it.”

“Understood,” she said and went looking for her handheld radio. The floor was a jumble of broken computers, upended monitors, chairs and vomit. Who the fuck puked all over the place, anyway? She found the radio, thankfully not covered in puke, and keyed it up. “Jeremiah, this is Angel One!”

“What the fuck was that all about?!” he demanded in his typical piggish authoritarian voice. “I said take her up a few meters not turn it into a God-damn submarine!”

“Not our plan either, I assure you. Might have been nice to scale up instead of going to a huge ship immediately, right?” Silence answered her and she grinned evilly. “Look, we can argue about this later. The ship is fucked. We hit the bottom and broke something. Your guy says we’re sinking.” She ignored his howls of protest and for the first time heard cries of pain. “Just shut up and get help over here, now. We need to evacuate, and we have injured. Unless you want your fancy toy and all the data I got at the bottom with the tug?”

It took every boat he had available, and even then the tugs operating crew had to throw rafts over the side and jump for their lives as Jeremiah watched Angel One return to the depths with a loud sucking sound and leaving behind a huge swirling mess of flotsam and jetsam. A siren sounded and a Coast Guard ship came careening around the jetty, lights flashing.

“God, what else?” Jeremiah asked the skies as the coastguard began deploying lifesavers and all other manner of disaster response equipment. A couple of frogmen jumped over the side as their ship came abreast of the now sunken Angel One. “Oh, don’t do that,” he moaned.

It was almost noon before the very pissed Coast Guard Lieutenant-Commander left his office in OOE’s San Diego office. There had been complaints, admonitions, and threats of prosecution as well. All in a day’s work, he grumbled. Then someone knocked on his door. “For the love of God, fuck off?”

“You might want to talk to me,” came the voice of Alison through the door.

“Why, so you can bust my balls some more about my not following your scientific procedures?”

The door opened and she came in. Jeremiah made a mental note to remember to lock it when he wanted to hate himself in peace. “No, because you want to see this data.” She held a nondescript SD data chip in her hand. He felt a glimmer of hope.

“Is it good?”

“We’re all getting Nobel Prize kind of good,” she said and his eyes got wide. He took the chip and plugged it into his personal computer. A self-activating PowerPoint came up on the huge 80” LCD next to his desk. “As much as it pains me to admit it, you were absolutely right about the machine.” She gestured at the display that showed a series of graphs.

“Like we showed in the bench test, it has the ability to neutralize gravity, which is really annoying because we don’t really even know how gravity works.”

“Thought you physicists had it all figured out with that Hardon Collider and stuff?”

“Hadron Collider,” she corrected with a chuckle, “I don’t even want to think about what you called it. And no, that sort of particle physics often creates more questions than it answers. I’m an electrical engineer, that’s what you hired me for on the shuttle out there,” she said and gestured to where it still sat suspended from its harness, ready to be mated to a booster. He’d never been happier she’d talked him out of using it in the experiment. “Theoretical physics is more of my hobby. It’s hard to find a paying job in the field, especially when you can’t piss standing up.”

“I never cared how you piss as long as you produce results.”

“That’s where industry kicks academia’s ass regularly,” she said. “But building spaceships isn’t as sexy as giving the universe a colonoscopy.”

“I’ll take your word for it,” he said. “So what does all this mean? It looks like lift statistics but there are no aerodynamics.”

“Exactly,” she said. “We knew it neutralized gravity from the bench tests, but we couldn’t figure out how to apply that other than as an anti-gravity generator. Now granted, that alone would make us all as rich as Bill Gates, but there has to be more. The thing came out of a spaceship, right?”

He nodded. “Yes, and a spaceship with no obvious motive power.”

She also nodded. “So everything pointed to this being both lift, and thrust. So, how to get it to behave? We’re sure there were no data inputs. Well, if there were we didn’t know how to recognize them. All we had were those power inputs. Stood to reason they were the source of data control points as well.”

“But nothing worked at the low power settings,” he said.

“Right, and nothing was working on the high power either, as I kept telling you.”

“So what happened to make you suddenly go all Voyage to the Bottom of the Sea?”

“One of the morons you gave me told a dirty joke. Never did find out what it was. He was so pleased with himself, he slapped the table and hit the computer controlling the power input.” He tapped his keyboard and the screen changed to show four power grids moving across the screen, time stamps indexing their movement. Set in a window on the bottom was another graph, this one with positive and negative values. The trace stayed on zero. Suddenly one of the four input power traces began to fluctuate up and down in a graceful but quick waveform.

“He changed it from DC to AC?”

“Bingo,” she said, shaking her head.

“But we tried that in the lab,” he complained.

“We tried minor square wave alternating power. You have to realize we were working with such small power levels, that it’s harder to do this sort of thing. The higher the power, the more wiggle room you get to mess with frequencies. This input was just under 200 kHz. Once I got everyone dried off back in the lab I hooked it up to a bench rig again and started pumping power into it. We were sure it wasn’t going to explode anymore.”