The Orion Plague (14 page)

He lay twitching and unconscious on the
ground, and Jill had to elbow the colonel in the gut and shake
Donovan off of her to get free. “There’s something wrong,” Jill
gasped. “He’s been implanted with something and whatever it is, he
wants us to stop him from using it. He recognized me.” She dropped
to her knees to cradle him in her arms. “Rick! Are you all right?
Did that do it?”

His eyes fluttered, then he started to
struggle as his body rapidly healed the small wounds. “No, I have
to...” He twisted, reaching for a server rack.

“Rick, tell me what it is!”

“No, no, Jill, it's...” His eyes seemed to
clear for a moment, then the pain showed through and he screamed.
“It's making me...I can't...they put something in me! If I complete
my mission I'm expendable. Maybe...bomb,” he gasped, slapping his
chest. “Shock me!” His eyes rolled back and he passed out from the
pain.

Jill understood. “Donovan, hold him here, sit
on him if you have to! Where’s a high-voltage line?”

Colonel Murdo pointed out a thick cable
running behind the racks, and Jill reached to grab it, dragging all
the slack she could toward the fallen man. “Ma’am, go get a medic
right away. Send someone to the hospital if you have to, an
ambulance, something. They’ll need to treat shock, electrical
burns, and maybe restart a heart. Go, fast. I’ll wait as long as I
can.”

“For what?” the colonel asked, then answered
herself, “Never mind, I’m on it.” She bolted out the door.

“What’re you gonna do, Top?” Donovan
asked.

“Whatever I have to. What I don’t know is,
what can take more juice – an Eden, or the cybernetic evil they put
in him.” With that, she pulled out her combat knife, made a bight
in the thick wire, and cut it like a rope.

Her knife flashed and popped as it sliced
through the copper strands, and the smell of seared flesh filled
the room, along with curls of plasticky smoke. “Gah,” Jill cursed
and dropped the knife. The dead end of the wire fell, but she kept
the hot side in her left hand, holding on to it well back from the
fully-juiced severed tip. The bank of servers the wire powered fell
dark and silent.

“The colonel is going to hate me for
this…Donovan, take his hands and tie them to that bare metal rack
with some of this thin wire. Yeah, just pull them out, we’re going
to crash this place anyway. His skin has to be touching it, he has
to be grounded. And rip his tunic open, just pop the buttons. I
need skin! Quick, he’s waking up.”

Donovan looked like he had no idea what was
going on but Jill knew he trusted her enough to blindly follow
orders, so it was the work of a moment for him to do as she said.
“Now back up. This won’t be pretty. I have to do it now.”

As soon as Donovan was out of the way, she
jammed the bare copper wire against the flesh of his chest, where
Doc Horton had said he’d had some kind of surgery. Two and two
still made four and by Jill’s calculation, the only thing dangerous
enough to kill them all had to be hidden in his chest, probably a
block of explosive.

It was a toss-up whether the enormous
electrical charge would trigger the stuff anyway, but she didn’t
see much choice. Without knowing anything about the electrical
pathways, she had to just hope that Rick had known what to do and
had thought the electrical charges of the Needleshock rounds would
do the trick. Well, if they didn’t set it off, this shouldn’t
either.

She held it against his chest for as long as
she could stand it, the smell of his flesh singeing twin to her own
right hand, now reddened and useless. It felt like she was burning
her own self, but she had no choice. Finally she could take it no
longer and pulled the wire away, handing it to Donovan. “Put this
somewhere safe,” she said, and fell to her knees next to the dead
man.

For dead he was, at least at this moment. No
pulse in his neck or wrist could she feel, and she started to clear
his airway with her one good hand before Donovan grasped her
shoulders gently from behind and pulled her out of the way. “I got
this, Top. It’s my job.” Expertly he ran through the steps of CPR,
and that’s how the EMTs found them four minutes later, in full
resuscitation mode.

“Listen,” Jill said to the team leader, “he’s
got some kind of cybernetic implant in his chest and his arm and
who knows where else. He needs emergency surgery to take it out or
it will kill him and maybe other people too. You have to sedate him
as soon as he starts to wake up or whatever’s inside him might
activate.”

“We’ll do our best,” the man said, looking
imperturbable despite the strange instructions. In a moment they
had Rick on a gurney and loaded into the ambulance for the short
trip to the hospital.

***

The handsome young surgeon took Jill out onto
a balcony so he could light up a cigarette with shaking hands. “I
got the bomb,” he said, “and I hope to hell I never have to do that
again. But you did the right thing. The metal in his system carried
the electrical charge to the control unit and burnt it to a crisp,
even though it was insulated. You hit it with enough charge that it
blew right past whatever safeties it had. And somehow the same
charge didn’t set off the detonator. He must have a guardian angel,
it’s a freakin’ miracle.” The man took a heavy drag on the smoke
and let it out slowly.

“What about the rest of the cyberware?” Jill
asked.

“I’m not messing with any more. The scans say
there’s nothing dangerous in there – well, physically dangerous
anyway – and the web woven into his brain is implanted far too deep
for me to want to go in after it. If you want it out I suggest you
fly him to Switzerland or someplace that can get a team of brain
surgeons together with the best microsurgery robots available and
plan the operation for a week.” He shook his head. “Damndest thing.
Who put that in him?”

“Nazi Unionist scum, playing Doctor Mengele.
We cleaned out a lab of theirs up at Pax River. I’d thought his
problems were just mental.” Jill punched the wall gently with her
undamaged fist. “I was wrong. And lucky, thank God.”

“Happy to be of service.” The surgeon looked
at Jill speculatively. “He your boyfriend?”

“Fiancé.”

He shrugged. “Oh, well. Lucky man.”

“More than you know, Doctor. More than you
know.”

The incomprehensibly massive drive system
sat inverted on the desert of the Australian Outback, over a
hundred miles from anywhere. It looked like an enormous bowl one
hundred meters in diameter and one hundred meters tall. More than
anything else right now it resembled a small sports stadium. By
itself it weighed almost one million tons, though smaller than the
main battle module that would eventually mate with it.

Ten times heavier than the largest oceangoing
ship ever built, it had been constructed in place in just under
four months, using the new rail lines and heavy airstrip nearby, a
staggering achievement. Over a hundred thousand men and women
worked on the site, along with innumerable heavy construction
machines. Now, all that equipment and those people were fifty miles
away behind a range of low hills, building pieces of the main ship
to come.

Brigadier Nguyen stood alongside
Under-Minister Ekara, staring at the structure from a distance of
only one mile. The foot-thick crystal of the bunker would not be
enough to stop the radiation and debris thrown off by the ignition
of the drive system, so Ekara ordered, “Close the shutters. Seal
the bunker.”

Servos whined; the bunker housing the control
center closed itself off from the rest of the world and prepared
for the first test. Technicians counted down smoothly, a controlled
chaos of crisp checklists and even crisper responses. Nguyen was
reminded of NASA launches that had so impressed him as a boy.

“D minus one minute. Minister Ekara, please
take your position.” The call shook Nguyen out of his reverie; he
forced himself to remain calm, but inside he was full of concern.
Failure of this project could damage him and Ekara both in the
Committee, as Nguyen originated the idea and Ekara was in charge of
making it work. He watched his counterpart step over to the
console, to hold his hand above the large red button. The final ten
seconds were agony.

“Three. Two. One. Fire in the hole.”

Not “Liftoff,” or even “Ignition.” Most of
the workers here were not rocket scientists – they were nuclear and
high-explosive engineers, and they used their own familiar
terminology. Ekara’s hand dropped, smoothly and precisely, to
depress the large mushroom-like trigger.

For seconds the whole structure shook, but
far less than Nguyen had expected. The test crew smiled nervously
around the room at each other, then looked upward at the thick
bunker roof as a different sound, the hissing whoosh of the first
atmospheric shockwave, came on the heels of the ground shock.

“Test energies within nominal range.
Detonation within specs. No damage to the drive system
detected.”

A cheer went up from the room, the tension
palpably slackening. Nguyen let his breath out. He turned to Ekara
and shook his hand with genuine happiness.

“It appears science-fiction is not a useless
medium after all,” Nguyen said to his fellow Committee member.

Ekara shrugged. “It’s really an old idea,
using nuclear bombs to power a spaceship. Project Orion in the
1950s. Nothing else even comes close to the efficiency of fission’s
fuel-to-energy conversion, until we master nuclear fusion. If the
anti-nuke lobby hadn’t spread such fear and suppressed the
technology, the Americans would have done it long ago. We just have
to accept the risks and radiation.”

“In that case the Eden Plague was a blessing.
Nothing frightening about fallout any more. Chairman Markis was
right; it ended a lot of fears for the common man.”

Ekara looked at Nguyen with open admiration.
Reflected celebrity held sway even over the emotions of Psychos,
and Nguyen exploited his connection to Markis ruthlessly. Many
people still held the Chairman in nearly superstitious awe, Psychos
most of all because he had engineered their deportation to
Australia, in effect giving them their freedom.

The return blast came, the effect of the
displaced air pulled back in by the vacuum and convection at ground
zero. It was barely audible to those in the bunker compared to the
earlier stresses.

The dapper man clapped his hands and called,
“All right everyone, back to work. Tran, let’s go outside and take
a look, shall we? The forces may have panned out but how did the
drive system itself really fare? It’s going to have to stand up to
thousands of these small nukes inside its detonation plenum without
cracking or failing.”

“Half-plenum really,” Ekara continued aside
to Nguyen as they walked up the stairs toward the blast-scoured
surface. “It’s a bowl attached to a deep thick shock absorber
system, like a fat pogo stick. The original Orion concept planned a
flat circular plate of steel six meters thick. We have doubled the
original thickness but dramatically improved the materials using
ceramics and alloys, with nano-assembled coatings. We estimate no
significant ablation until at least ten thousand detonations,
assuming no errors.”

“Errors?” Nguyen stopped to look at his
colleague.

“Of course. If a bomb detonates early – say
inside the gas ejection tube – the ship will be instantly
destroyed.”

Nguyen nodded slowly, seeming to expand with
menace. “Perhaps we should be very, very sure that does not
happen.”

Ekara shrugged nervously, and Nguyen moved
closer to the other man. He hissed, “My friend…there will be room
for an enormous crew. Even observers. Perhaps you should ride on
the first flight of this machine you have built?”

Sweat broke out on Ekara’s face. “Perhaps I
will.”

“An excellent idea. It will
minimize…errors.”

One merely needs to know the proper
levers
.

“I have been monitoring the Species 666
electromagnetic carrier signals,” Executive reported to Commander.
“They mention a large warship under construction.”

“A spacegoing vessel? Is it a threat to
us?”

“Unlikely. They have never lofted anything
into space even a fifth as large as our ship, and their weapons are
primitive. Only their fission bombs could overload our defenses,
and their pitiful delivery systems are too slow to catch us.”
Executive exuded confidence, now that his plan was ascendant.

Biologist brooded in his pool, building a new
phage and exuding fragmentary molecular communication that a human
would interpret as muttering. He kept his silence, finding much to
doubt about Executive’s plan but unable to convince Commander.

“And if by chance we must fight this
warship?” After all, Commander’s proper function was to explore all
possibilities.

“Then the hypervelocity guided projectiles I
have designed will destroy it without difficulty. I have also begun
building armed observation drones.” Executive was, in human terms,
smug.

“You will also ensure the emergency life-pod
is fully capable at all times.” Commander tinged his molecules with
sternness.

“We will not have cause to use it. But,”
Executive went on hastily, tasting its superior’s irritation, “I
will, of course, comply in all things. It shall be done.”

Rick’s mother Cassandra and sister Millicent
were there to greet him and Jill at planeside. The executive jet
had pulled up in a secluded corner of the military airfield serving
the Carletonville, South Africa research complex, and now was
surrounded by a military force that was half honor guard, half
security.