Systemic Shock (31 page)

Even when the RUS brought in the fast-scudding armored ACV's to change the rules on him, young Liang reacted quickly, bagged an even dozen. His new conversion tables accommodated the quick lateral capability of an ACV, permitted his battalion to survive the RUS onslaught where others failed, added a deferential note to his unit's phrase 'Xiao Liang'—young Liang. Now, for the first time, he wondered if he would live to be called 'Lao Liang', old Liang. Liang counted the remaining HEAT warheads, wondering when he would see more.

It wasn't just the ferocity of the previous winter, though frostbite had scalloped Liang's ears. Nor the long desperate footsore march to meet the American Fifth Army which had been hurled against the southern face of the Kazakhstan front in the spring. Even the dwindling of supplies and the rumors of a hellish disease to the rear had not, in themselves, sapped the patriotic juices that once surged through Liang Chen. What drained him most was unitary breakdown.

Liang was feeling the surface of a tumor in the military corpus of China. When the supply of antitank missiles was exhausted, Liang's unit melded with a mortar company. When the food ran out, the forty per cent of his company who could still fight managed to attach themselves to a retreating regimental supply group near Birlik, fighting off American air sorties with small arms fire and a few shoulder-fired SAM's.

And when the first of the infected front-line officers began to don dark glasses to hide the signs of that infection, Liang shrugged it off. The CPA would take care of its own, he thought. But units could not prosper when unitary leaders spread horror.

For it was the field-grade officers who first brought plague to the front, men whose duties required round-trips far back into Tsinghai and Sinkiang, men whose necessary contacts meant contact with what Allied medics had labeled Keratophagic Staph. The disease progressed in a human host, and spread to others, with ghastly dispatch.

Liang Chen's devotion to battle kept him from early contact with the ravages of plague. Not until he heeded the call for retreat north of Alma Ata did Liang, gripping his perch on an ancient halftrack, see undeniable evidence that all units, on every level, were breaking down in panic. He saw a red-eyed captain submachinegunned by his own men who cowered more fearful of his corpse than he had been of their weapons. He saw others refuse to join new units, terrified that new unitary contact might chew their faces away. Finally he ripped a patch from a discarded battle jacket, affixed it to his own, and carried off his imposture as a corporal of a Political Solidarity detachment. No one cared much to fraternize with those zealots, and Liang could face down a major with his sham. Meanwhile he made his way back toward Sinkiang alone to find some unit worthy of membership.

The farther he went eastward past Ining, the more desolation he found. Not death, but desolation. Units were becoming crowds of blind men, led to food and shelter by sighted men who might not be sighted for long.

Liang knew intellectually how vast the world was. He knew in his guts that somewhere in it lay safety, and he knew positively that he was developing a cold. Or something. Liang turned north and set Mongolia as his goal. With no unit, no challenge by frightened guards as he pedaled his stolen bicycle toward Ara Tarn, Liang blew roadside dust from his nostrils, wiped a sleeve across his nose. Presently a command car hurtled past, going in his direction; probably, he thought, with the same goal. Liang cursed the dust of its passage, blinked, wiped his sleeve across his eyes.

That night Liang Chen holed up far off the road where the bike would not tempt others. He had no food and he worried about that. His fever was worse and his eyes itched so that he found himself rubbing them; but this did not worry him much.

What worried Liang more was the sight of his fingernails, late the next day, as he pedaled near exhaustion toward a deserted village. He allowed himself to coast, stared at his left thumbnail, saw its edge receding from the cuticle as though eaten by some subtle acid. Truly, it did not hurt much. Neither did his eyes. The damnable pounding headache and the blurred vision bothered him more.

And then he passed the abandoned truck, saw for an instant the face of a soldier with scarlet eyes and runnels of pus down his cheeks; a face not of the dying, but of the damned. The truck had been deserted; he had glanced into a rearview mirror. Liang Chen sat down by the road and waited for the unending dark.

Some of Minister Cha Tsuni's records went up with his lab; others were deliberately erased. We may never know whether
Staphylococcus rosacea
was a DNA-tailored bacillus, a spontaneous strain, or one induced by radiation. Like 5.
aureus, S. rosacea
thrived asymptomatically in the human nose, so human carriers spread the stuff with every exhalation. But also like other staph, 5.
rosacea
was not fastidious and could live in a wide range of temperatures, with or without oxygen. Thus the bug could live on airborne dust motes and wait to invade lungs, blood, organs. The best defense was solitude; 5.
rosacea
did not travel well without a host.

Once entrenched in a host, the new bacillus released toxins that could lead to pneumonia, meningitis, huge suppurating carbuncles, and septicemia—all potentially lethal if untreated. But
S. rosacea
set itself apart from older staph varieties in two ways. It was highly resistant even to the potent, problematical vancomycin. And it had a horrifying affinity for keratinous tissue, especially the saline-washed transparent anterior covering of the eye. In plain language, while inflaming surrounding tissue it consumed the cornea, characteristically staining the victim's cheeks with a stain of yellow pus as it prospered and devoured.

Typically a victim would breathe the bacilli, or airborne staph might invade an open wound. While the disease progressed into pneumonia or a toxin-filled bloodstream the victim became listless, often feverish. He would almost certainly place contaminated hands near his eyes, or walk through his own exhalations.

Either way, the eyes had it.
S. rosacea
flourished in the salt tears, eating away the cornea and, to lesser effect, into the nails of fingers and toes. Treatment was at first a matter of administering exactly enough of a powerful antibiotic to quell the bug without generating serious side effects, e.g., renal failure, to kill the patient. This knife-edged balance required constant monitoring and considerable skill by trained medics and, given that edge, only thirty per cent of 5.
rosacea
victims died. But
ninety
per cent of the survivors would be sightless after the disease had run its full course.

The demoralizing effect of a disease that turned one's eyes into pus receptacles and was highly communicable, would be hard to overestimate. Faced with the specter of a future full of blind men, even sighted survivors often chose desertion or suicide.

The Chinese plague was over a month old before the Allies realized its full pandemic potential and sought a true cure as a blue ribbon top priority. Its horrifying symptoms generated panic far greater than paranthrax ever had, and China thought to share that panic with her enemies. She arranged to cloister a few victims, all palpably learned technical people, in a setting where they would be captured. Since it takes a scientist to adequately interview a scientist, Chang Wei hoped that those few victims might pass the epidemic along from the top.

But those were prisoners the Allies did not choose to take. Horrifying problems engender horrifying solutions; the RUS pulled back, detonated one last Wall of Lenin that demarcated a zone of lifelessness. While fifty thousand SinoInd troops perished in the neutron spray, so did ten thousand of ours, including a Canadian armored regiment and two battalions of American infantry. The Fifth US Army bitterly resented this misuse of 'friendly fire', but did not retaliate. Canada reserved her retaliation.

Then came a signal of utter determination that Chang and Casimiro could not ignore. In an unprecedented burst of candor, the US/RUS Allies sent an open message to the SinoInd Axis listing over fifty locations. At the first sign of deliberate dispersal of the hideous 5.
rosacea
, we would hit those locations with our cultures of the same stuff, and more.

The Allies roamed orbital space at will now. The threat was highly public, and stupefying. The locations list covered all of the most highly populated regions of the SinoInd Axis: sites in eastern Szechuan, Kiang Su, Hopeh; in Kerala, West Bengal, Punjab, Bangladesh; in the Red and Mekong deltas; near Surabaja and Makasar.

Because the Allies were better stocked with antibiotics and medical staff, and because their civilian populations were better equipped to take their own hygienic measures, the SinoInd pundits abandoned their plans to mount a global series of dispersal raids. Instead, they turned their attention to defensive measures.

On receipt of the scholarly paper of Lt. Boren Mills, the Navy's Office of Public Information automatically granted it a 'Confidential' classification. Mills instantly pointed out to Naval Intelligence that the paper had been misclassified, and earned himself a ten-minute interview with a bored commander on Oahu whose eyes were not so sleepy two minutes into the discussion. “You can optimize a persuasive message to an Arms Appropriations Committee," Mills pointed out, "just as you can to the public."

The commander took Mills to lunch that balmy day in June and, when affixing his endorsement to the 'Top Secret" reclassification, phrased his recommendations carefully. His phrasing implied that he, the commander, had immediately seen applications of the Mills paper that Mills himself had—perhaps—missed. While achievement is nontransferable, the image of achievement can be transferred. This is the one towering secret of management, and the commander managed nicely.

It was while Mills awaited notice from higher echelons that the tiny submarine washed into the coral off Lehua. The islet of Lehua lies in plain sight of Nühau, one of the many small jewels of the Hawaiian chain that most
haoles
ignore. Mills had seen it many times. It did not seem likely to offer much in the way of entertainment and, when two Radiomen Third Class returned from a fishing jaunt with the news, Mills tended at first to ignore it.

But the stubby little craft bore Chinese markings, the two ratings insisted, and had all the earmarks of an unexamined derelict. Mills had seen the orders pertaining to the strange assortment of debris that had been washing ashore in Hawaii during the past month. He grumbled. And then he organized the small patrol that was to change his life.

Mills and four ratings brought their inflatable ACV to the site of the beached sub at low tide, circling twice before making fast to a hatch fairing hardly larger than a manhole cover. The polymer hull showed bright coral gashes through gray-green paint.

Radioman Kimball Norton, without much enthusiasm, opened the hatch while one of his fellows stood by with a carbine. Mills, his knuckles white on his carbine, caught the faint smell of decay as Norton stepped back with a grimace. "Anyone alive?"

"Doesn't smell like it, Sir," Norton called back.

"Lob a pacifier grenade in," Mills ordered. "It'll clear the air for you down there."

Norton caught the implication. Mills was perfectly sanguine about ordering a man down that black hole and if he was going to have to do it anyhow, Kim Norton would rather not flaunt his reluctance. He jerked the poptop from the grenade and tossed it down the hole.

The only response was the paperbag 'thwock' of the grenade. After ten minutes, Norton saw the lieutenant's eye stray to his watch. "Permission to go below, Sir?"

"Granted," said Mills. Norton was the kind of man who understood the chain of command, and his status as flail at the end of it; and this, Mills appreciated. Perhaps he would do something for Norton.

They all heard the "
Jee-zas
," and the clang of a dropped chemlamp, and two ratings took Norton under the arms to quicken his already sprightly exit. There was nobody alive down there, said Norton, coughing. There were over a dozen deaders there in plastic capsules, though. They were in uniform and looked oriental.

Mills waited longer for the finely-divided grenade solids to precipitate; donned SCUBA gear with a prayer of thanks to reservist training he had once cursed; made an external survey of the little Chinese sub.

It had the look of an enormous toy, cheaply mass-produced, and it had no propeller at all. The thing had evidently been powered by the tiny reaction engine at its rear. Though no engineer, Boren Mills knew that this was an unlikely candidate for propulsion. Before surfacing, Mills was aware that this minuscule warship held important information.

He changed again into his uniform, replenished by its authority, and took a second chemlamp. By now the grenade's chemicals were only a tickle in his nostrils. Mills, alone with instruments and tool kit, toured the little sub.

The thing held a cargo of human bodies, twenty of them, in plastic cocoons. They wore CPA uniforms; one was a non-com. Umbilicals ran to the cocoons, suggestive of life-support systems for catatonics—but Mills knew putrefaction when he saw it, even through a polycarbonate bubble. There wasn't room in the narrow walkway for twenty men, or even ten; and he found no evidence of battle stations, steering apparatus, or control console. The sub had not been intended for sorties, then.

Mills recalled the Mendocino Seaquake, cudgeled his memory for connections, and found them. An entire army of Viets had gone to earth near the Yangtze months before—or rather, he corrected himself,
had gone to sea
. He wondered where the rest would turn up, then wondered why none at all had, before this. Between his sneezes, Mills was smiling.

The weapons storage near the bow clarified a lot. The biggest items in storage were fifteen-cm, shoulder-fired