Crime Zero (48 page)

Outside the Womb a crowd of scientists had gathered, frozen by the scene in front of them.

"How strong's the glass in here?" he asked.

"Very," said Kathy.

Before Naylor had a chance to react, he moved his good arm, took aim at the red metal button on the SDU and fired. For a moment Naylor's concentration was broken, and Kathy tore herself from the distracted Naylor's grip. She reached for the door. Naylor threw herself at Decker, her eyes narrow with rage, her voice shrill like a wounded beast. "No," she screamed. "No."

He only had time to see the green light go on beneath the keypad, telling him that the data had been sent, before Nay-lor was on him. She tore at him as though possessed, pushing him to the floor, knocking the gun from his hand. Behind her he could hear Kathy press the release button on the door's dead bolts and call to him, "Luke. Luke."

"Go," he shouted, "leave me."

Pushing Naylor back with his good arm, he raised himself to his knees. To his left he saw the small bomb. A minute remained on the timer's countdown. In anger he reached for it, clutching the black box in his gloved hand, and then, as Madeline Naylor came for him again, he brought it crashing down on her faceplate and smashed it. Rising to his feet, he could hear her screams mingle with the hiss of air escaping from her helmet. Kathy was beside him now, pulling him toward the door.

"Come on," she shouted. "I'm not leaving without you."

Behind him he could see Naylor staggering to her feet, her demented eyes already red from the contaminated air. In her right hand she held a shard of glass from her faceplate, which she wielded like a knife. He had to reach the door, but he knew just one rupture in his suit from her blade would mean death. Kathy had the door to the Womb open, knew that only seconds remained on the bomb. Making one final surge, he pushed forward, sweeping Kathy ahead of him, through the doorway and into the corridor beyond. Allardyce and the others were there pulling them out and away. Turning back for a split second, he saw Naylor make a final grab at him, her eyes ablaze with hatred, missing by inches as the door sprang shut, crushing her outstretched arm.

Madeline could not believe it. Sitting on the floor of the Womb, she wheezed in the foul, contaminated air and stared at her crushed arm. She didn't care that she had only seconds left before the bomb detonated.

This wasn't how it was supposed to be. Her vision of Crime Zero was now ruined. Many men would still die-- millions even--but not all of them.

To her mind, if just one adult male survived Crime Zero, the purity of her vision was tarnished. Eradicating all men was a great deed that would ensure the survival of the species. But to kill some was little more than a sordid act of murder.

She was suddenly racked with remorse not because she had killed so many men but because she had killed so few.

As she heard the bomb's detonation switch click, she cried out in pain and frustration, realizing that she had changed nothing.

But even as her body was ripped apart by the explosion and TITANIA sealed off the Hot Zone, purging it of all life with chemicals and heat, Madeline Naylor was wrong.

She had changed everything.

*** As he catapulted himself out of the Womb, Decker was dragged by Allardyce down the corridor toward the door leading out of the Hot Zone, to the decon room and safety. The steel door seemed to take an age to open and even longer to close again. But standing beside Kathy and the others in the decon room, he heard and felt the explosion rip through the center of the complex and saw TITANIA instantly bring heavy black screens down over the door through which they had just come, sealing in the Hot Zone before purging it from within.

Decker's last image as Kathy began to spray bleach on his suit in the decon showers was of Naylor's two eyes staring at him. He would remember the hatred he saw there for the rest of his life.

Chapter 49.

Pentagon War Room, Arlington, Virginia. Sunday, November 23, 11:06 A.M.

The vast chamber of the Pentagon War Room dwarfed the Smart Suite at ViroVector. The floor was filled with rows of computers at which sat uniformed men and women processing information. The vast front wall, which seemed to curve like the horizon, was more than fifty feet high and twice as wide. It was tiled with screens. The central one, ten feet wide by eight feet tall, showed a projection of the world.

The other, smaller screens had legends beneath them indicating the locations. Many showed United States Air Force fields both in the States and abroad. There were shots from the news networks around the world, but the rest showed the air forces of other nations, including Britain, France, Israel, and even Iraq, all focusing on one shared mission.

Since the Reprieve vaccine had been dispatched to all the production sites across the world six days ago, all subsequent test and production trials had been successful. Under Major General Allardyce's stewardship the necessary bomblets were produced to the correct specification. And pending approval, a global armada of aircraft was assembled to distribute the vaccine.

Three days previously at a UN meeting in New York,

Pamela Weiss had outlined the risks and benefits of the planned vaccine to all the world leaders. She had also announced the latest death toll from the airborne Crime Zero. Globally it was already in the millions, a generation of young men just out of puberty. No country had been spared.

There was some debate about the long-term implications of the side effects, but all agreed that the benefits far outweighed the risks. For the first time in the history of the United Nations every country without exception, regardless of politics, religion, or historical enmity, had signed the resolution. Following the proposal, agreement was reached in a record fourteen minutes.

No precise figure was placed on the global armada, but it was confidently estimated to exceed half a million commercial and military aircraft. It was the largest bombing mission the world had ever seen. Many optimists predicted it would be the last.

As the first bomblets were dropped, the map on the vast central screen erupted with tiny red pinpricks. London glowed red, and Paris, followed by most of mainland Europe. The United States and Canada were soon the same, as were South America and the vast tracts of Africa and Asia. The dots were small on these larger, less populated lands, concentrating on the major cities. But the dots grew and were distorted in line with the prevailing winds, spreading the vaccine far and wide. Soon the dots were merging into one another, creating almost blanket coverage.

As Kathy Kerr stood with Luke Decker at the back of the chamber in the raised viewing area, she shook her head in disbelief.

Nothing would be the same again. Just as the spreading red represented salvation, so it represented a revolution--or perhaps a self-inflicted evolution.

Man had changed irrevocably, had been forced to evolve, in effect creating a new species. Homo sapiens was dead. A new man was being born.

"What will the future bring, Kathy?" Decker asked, staring at the screen.

She took his hand and smiled at him. "I don't know, but I hope it's good."

He squeezed her hand in his. "God! So do I. So do I."

EPILOGUE:

San Francisco.One Hundred Years Later, November 23, 2108

The man was old, but the house was older. He laid down the violin and moved his chair closer to the open windows that overlooked the bay. The celebrations were starting in earnest now. The sky was a riot of fireworks that lit up the night. The children had probably already joined the crowds down by the bridge. He could have gone too, but he preferred to stay here and look up into the skies.

He turned and wheeled the telescope by his side to a better angle. As he looked through the glass, the multicolored explosions were almost blinding in their intensity. It seemed strange to celebrate the Pax Centennia, the hundred years of peace, with explosions. There had even been talk of digging up the ancient armaments and building huge bonfires--bea-cons of peace.

With stiff legs he stood from his chair and walked to the ancient piano. Of all the photographs, one stood out. It showed a smiling couple holding a baby in their arms. An old church loomed in the background, and a striking, familiar-looking woman stood beside them. The picture made him smile with pride. Not many people could claim to have had a U.S. President at his christening. He studied the picture and wondered what they would have made of the last hundred years--his hundred years.

There had been much talk this year on the centenary of the Change. Not so much of the costs: Eighteen million young men had died, the equivalent of three Holocausts. That was ancient history now. Instead many of the World Council made presentations evaluating its benefits. Most were happy to have enjoyed an unprecedented period of global peace and prosperity. However, some lamented that technological progress wasn't what it used to be without the catalyst of war, that Blake had been right when he'd said there could be no progress without conflict.

His father, Luke, used to tell him stories of a different world, of hunting down men so evil he could only imagine them. But he also used to talk of adventure and courage and the honorable desire to fight for what was right. Even his mother, Kathy, often spoke of the need at times to fight for what you believed in.

He moved back to the telescope and pointed it to the heavens, past the puny human pyrotechnics to the majestic planets beyond. He focused on Venus and then the nearest star, Proxima Centauri, a mere twenty-four million million miles away. He imagined what someone there would see if he aimed his telescopes at Earth: A medium-size planet orbiting around an average star in the outer suburbs of an ordinary spiral galaxy, itself one of a million million galaxies.

A shadow passed over Proxima Centauri, and his old shoulders trembled. Suddenly he saw the universe as no more than a vast world: the galaxies, its continents; the planets, its countries.

In his mind's eye he looked at Earth from space again. He saw a lone planet, rich in resources.

A peaceful, decent planet that had risen above the base need for aggression.

He saw a planet that no longer knew how to defend itself.