View from Ararat (23 page)

24

Baden

Baden

Western Fringes

Edison Sector (Southwest)

6/2/203

MAC

They sit facing each other across the narrow table. Mac looks at the huge frame of Gerry Wilson, then at the map of Baden on the table between them. Wilson is the man behind the defences that ring the town. He is the architect and the leader, and he is worried.

‘It's not nearly enough,' he confides. ‘It'll slow them down, but if they want to get in badly enough, it won't stop them. They're well armed and they're killers. You've heard the stories. We don't have the lasers or the skills to win a firefight. We're miners, my friend, not soldiers.'

‘Precisely!' Mac slams an open palm onto the table. ‘So, we fight like miners. We do the things that miners do best and we use what miners know. We can win, Gerry. All we need is a bit of luck and enough warning. I've got Cindy working on that right now. What's your status with tunnelling equipment?'

Wilson rubs his chin, trying to guess where the question is leading. And failing.

‘Two Tremont five-metre models and an ancient Oldfield three-metre. Most of our work is open-cut quarrying. There's only a couple of deep-seam deposits in the area.'

‘Three tunnellers. I was hoping for a few more.' Mac looks down at the map in front of him. ‘OK, we've got to play the odds then . . . Look, they're going to be confident. Arrogant even. You've heard the reports – nothing but minimal defence has been offered so far. All the towns caved in before them. They're not going to expect anything but token resistance. They're relying on their rep doing most of the fighting for them. That's our ace.'

‘
Our
ace?'

‘Of course.' He smiles at the town leader, hoping that the expression doesn't look as false as it feels. ‘It means they'll take the more direct options when they attack. They won't sneak around through the desert to the west. They'll attack from the north, along the Fringes, or come through the pass in the outcrop of the Ranges to the east. They're the two routes we cover first. If we have time, we'll cover the less likely options, but for now we've got to take an educated gamble. How soon can you bring the tunnellers into operation?'

Wilson looks towards the hills. ‘They're at the compound. We haven't used them in a couple of months. Tomorrow morning?'

‘Make it tonight. And get your best operators. We'll be working around the clock, and we don't need any mistakes. This'll need to be as accurate as we can manage, if the plan is going to work.'

‘And what plan, exactly, would that be?' Wilson leans forward, waiting.

‘Operation Joshua.'

‘Joshua?'

Mac Porter looks down at the map again. ‘As in the Battle of Jericho . . . How much do you know about ancient Old Earth battle techniques?'

Wilson smiles ironically. ‘Why don't you remind me? I might have forgotten a bit since they threw me out of the military academy.'

Baden

Western Fringes

Edison Sector (Southwest)

6/2/203

CINDY'S STORY

Outside, the sky was blue – cloudless and smooth from horizon to horizon. I paused with my fingers poised over the punchboard and looked out at it. Then I closed my eyes, crossed my fingers and tapped in the final command. When I opened them again, the screen of the town's primitive data frame had come to life.

‘Any luck?' Tim Cox had entered the room. He stood directly behind me, watching the changing views on the screen.

‘No luck needed,' I replied, smiling. ‘Just skill.'

‘Sorry, Oh Great One. I forgot I was in the presence of genius.' He ruffled my hair as he spoke, and I smiled to myself.

‘I've ether-linked into the satellite download at the weather observatory outside Elton. It's high in the Ranges and fully automatic, so no one's likely to go there in the near future. It'd take a week to climb up there, there's no food or water, and it's hermetically sealed, so it's still operating in spite of everything.'

‘Bingo!' After days of frustrating failure, any success was good news. It was good to hear him happy. He sat down beside me. ‘But will it work?'

‘Like a dream. It picks up the relay broadcasts from every observation satellite around the planet – the whole weather survey network. All I have to do is a little reprogramming and we can realign the geo-static bird above Edison to keep an eye out for any approaching threats. No one at Meteorology's going to give a damn. There's no one
at
Meteorology any more. Nobody's interested in next week's weather forecast when they don't even know if they'll be alive to worry about it.'

Suddenly he went quiet.

‘What is it, Tim?' I asked. There was something on his mind. He was older than me by a year, but he couldn't mask his emotions half as well as I could.

‘It's what I came in to tell you. The latest figures came through on Internet. The death toll has topped the million already – at a conservative estimate – and the infection-rate is showing no sign of slowing down.'

‘No, well it wouldn't, would it?' I replied.

I already knew. I had the punchboard keyed to give me half-hourly updates, but I didn't let on. He needed to talk it out and I didn't want to risk breaking the mood.

He continued. ‘There's nowhere that's really safe, is there? I mean, it's only a matter of time before it reaches the Fringes. And then . . .' He trailed off. I think he was close to tears, but he managed to control them.

Tim wasn't a coward and he wasn't immature. I guess he just needed a release-valve. I'd watched him with the others. He was so intent on being strong – for the twins and for Krys – that he pulled a mask over his fears and held them in check. But there are times when you need to take the mask off in front of someone else, and I was the perfect choice.

I was close to his age, an intimate part of the group, yet not exactly related. And totally devoid of emotions.

My mask was far more effective than his. I'd spent a lot longer perfecting it.

‘Actually,' I said, ‘the longer it goes, the less chance there is of infected people making it this far. Distance is the big factor. The ones with the transport got out at the beginning and made it to the Fringes, and if any of them did have CRIOS, they're long dead, and their vehicles are abandoned somewhere where no one can get at them.'

I stood up and moved towards the window. The sky really was amazingly clear. I turned and looked at him.

‘It takes over ten days to get here from Edison on foot, and that's the closest major centre. Anyone with the disease is going to be dead before they get anywhere near the Ranges.'

‘Which is why the armies chose to come out here. They'll make it this far south eventually.'

At last I realised what was really bugging him. He was smart enough to work things out. And he was smart enough to realise that Baden was a prime target for a raid.

I looked back out of the window. Not far away, Krys was playing in the sand with the twins. A hole in the ground, a wall of dirt and a few lasers didn't seem all that much of a defence against organised fighters, who were more than willing to make an example of anyone stupid enough to resist them.

‘Let them try,' I said, but it didn't sound anywhere near as confident as I'd hoped.

‘I've never asked,' he said suddenly, in a tone that signalled a change of subject. ‘Tell me to shut up if it's private, but why did they can you? At the Institute, I mean. Someone as talented as you. How could they just cut your Funding?'

I realised that I hadn't thought about the Institute or Research in days – since about the time we'd begun the climb into the Ranges, in fact.

Before Deucalion, before the crisis had exploded around us, there wasn't a day that I didn't regret what had happened to me. Every moment of the time I spent on Ganymede, I'd cursed the Grants Council and the Institute, and my own egotistical stupidity. Every day in the camp I'd dreamed of the moment they'd set us free and I could return to Research where I belonged.

But suddenly I wasn't bitter any more. I didn't miss it nearly as much. I really belonged somewhere else, for the first time in my life. And it felt good.

‘I screwed up,' I began. ‘The world was full of wrongs and the world was run by computers, so I figured, “You're a computer-whiz, why not make a difference?” And I guess I did – for a while, for a few people. It's true if the screen
says
it's true, so I cancelled a few unfair debts, paid off a few loans, opened a few closets and showed the skeletons to the networks, all from the anonymity of my punchboard. But in the end it was just an empty ego trip. You don't change the world with that kind of thing – even if you do make things a little bit better for a few individuals.

‘Anyway, they caught up with me eventually. I got sloppy with one of my efforts and they managed to trace things backwards. They couldn't prove anything – I wasn't that clumsy – so they couldn't prosecute, but they had their suspicions and that was enough. They cut my Funding and I was out.'

He nodded as if he understood, but he didn't try to say anything. He was too smart for that.

NATASSIA'S STORY

By far the most organised and dangerous of the armies that grew up in the early days of the crisis was the Red Brigade, led by Devol ‘Mad Dog' Eldritch.

Originally the second-in-command to Milton Beresford, the Chief of Security, Eldritch had assumed control of the New Geneva Central Command when Beresford accompanied the President aboard the
Pandora
, as part of the ‘War-Council'. As Deputy, he had seen the projected death rates and the scenarios for the spread of the disease, and it is likely that he formulated his survival plans weeks before the Edison outbreak. Nothing else could explain the speed with which he put his strategy into operation.

From his position of power he organised the grounding of all flyers, putting his own men into all the air-traffic control centres. This was an essential step, if he was going to keep the Crystal locked in east of the Ranges, though it did mean he was unable to make use of air-power himself.

This done, he commandeered a fleet of land-vehicles and Security weapons, and with a large group of hand-picked operatives he set out from the capital to outrun the Crystal and set up a new order west of the Ranges.

While other groups had similar ideas, none was as organised as the Red Brigade. This was not a small army of desperate people, taking what they needed by force and terrorising small communities into submission. This was an organised military operation, the likes of which had never been seen on the planet. And Eldritch was prepared to crush all opposition to create his ‘new order'.

Moving south from Neuenstadt, he ‘subdued' town after town in a fifteen-day
blitzkrieg
that carried his troops over a thousand kilometres, defeating in the process a number of the smaller armies who had already staked their claim on some of the unfortunate communities.

At each new conquest he took hostages and left a small contingent in place to ‘keep order', as he moved towards his ultimate goal of ‘unifying the Fringes'.

Finally he set his sights on Baden, a small but prosperous settlement west of Edison and the final minor obstacle to the fulfilment of the master plan.

25

Fleming's Ghost

Genetic Research Laboratory

Carmody Island

Inland Sea (Eastern Region)

7/2/203 Standard

JULES

Kaz is asleep, finally, He places a kiss gently on her forehead and turns out the light. It is early afternoon, but the window tint is turned on full and the room is dark.

It is an unsatisfactory compromise, but it is the best he has been able to manage. For days he has been arguing with her, trying to convince her to go to bed and get a proper sleep, but no one on the team has slept in a bed for the past three or four nights, so a short rest in the back room of the Research centre is the best he can force her to accept.

Besides, she is working side by side with Jerome, and together they are unstoppable. There is a chemistry there that he cannot help but notice, though they are too busy at the moment to be aware of anything but the work. While they operate at fever pitch, that chemistry translates into a closely channelled obsession, but if ever the crisis ends, they will see what he has already recognised.

It will never happen again . . .

As he looks down at her he understands, finally, in his heart, what his head has known for weeks. He closes the door as he leaves.

Galen has his head on his folded arms, leaning over on the console. But he isn't sleeping – just resting while the machine runs another endless search-program. He has such amazing will-power that he makes the others look positively lazy.

Charlie and Jerome have retreated to the kitchen to feed their addictions, and . . .

–
Juuls?
You are busy?

Loef's mind-tone seeps into his thoughts for the first time in days.

–
No, my friend. Never too busy.

–
Then I would speak with you. At the infirmary. If it is not too inconvenient.

–
I'll be right there.

He moves towards the door and leaves the room, just as the light on the communicator begins to flash.

After a few seconds, when no response is received, a high-pitched chime begins to sound in the lab. At the console Galen Sibraa lifts his head and swears at the machine. Then he wipes his hands over his face, thumbs the control on his chair and moves across to answer the call.

Genetic Research Laboratory

Carmody Island

Inland Sea (Eastern Region)

7/2/203 Standard

CHARLIE'S STORY

Fleming's discovery of penicillin was the result of a complete accident, and so was DiBortelli's discovery of the sub-dimensional warp. Accidents are the way that nature finally gives up most of her secrets, I guess.

It was an accident that Maija, Élita and Ramón happened to be outside the camp at the exact moment the blockade was instituted, and that accident had saved their lives, but we were still unable to figure out exactly how it had saved them.

And it was an accident that a party of schoolkids happened to be visiting the Elokoi village of Al-Tiina when the news of the total ban on flyer-movements came into force. If they hadn't been, maybe they'd all have died in New G, without any of us knowing a thing about them, and we'd never have realised the significance of what they were about to reveal to us.

When Galen received the call, he was alone in the lab. We'd been up all night running useless scans, and the enthusiasm we'd felt when we first found the three kids was beginning to take on the familiar tinge of frustration. There was probably fifteen million combinations we could try, and there was only us.

Most Research facilities were on skeleton staffs, if they were functioning at all. We'd lost contact with Roma early in the crisis, and more recently the Edison facility had gone off-line. Of course, with the news of the rioting in the city, and the total lack of a Security presence, it was pretty clear what had happened. Desperate people in search of a miracle had already destroyed the casualty sections of most major hospitals.

It didn't help that there were suggestions on the alternative ‘news' channels that there was, in fact, a cure for the Crystal Death, but that it was in short supply and only being dispensed to the wealthy and the powerful.

In an atmosphere of hopelessness, conspiracy theories quickly become hard currency.

I came back in just as Galen was extracting the information from Eriin, the Healer in Loef's home village of Al-Tiina.

With both Loef and Kaeba living here, she must have felt more comfortable talking to us than to anyone else. She was nervous enough using the strange human machine that lived in the communal meeting-hut. It was there so that Ocra and Capyjou traders could check on the status of their supplies, without the trouble of flying out to the village.

She wanted to tell someone of the two children she had at the village. They had the strange hardening disease that had killed eighteen of their friends and their Teacher, and they had slipped away, beyond sleep. But there was nothing that an Elokoi Healer's arts could do for them, and as Loef had mentioned the human Healing-place on the island of Carmody, she had thought perhaps . . .

For a moment my heart stopped.

CRIOS in Vaana . . . With the Elokoi's communal lifestyle, the whole village could be infected within a day.

‘Are . . .' I hesitated. ‘How many of your . . . How many Elokoi are affected?'

For a moment Eriin stared at the visuals-pickup. Elokoi faces don't show confusion, but she was considering the strange question, and trying to form an answer in the awkward human tongue of which she had only a rudimentary knowledge.

‘Not Elokoi. Children are human. No . . . sick Elokoi. The Hardening Death does not touch Elokoi.'

I could feel the room spinning.

‘
Kaz
!
' I yelled ‘
Jerome!
Get the hell in here . . .'

We had the flyer prepped in record time. It was a special hopper, with a container bay big enough to hold the isolation pod we needed to transport the two kids from Al-Tiina to the isolation I-C unit on Carmody.

JD was about to get some company.

When we arrived it was evening, and Eriin was waiting for us on the Greenspace at the centre of the village. The two kids were lying on woven Ocra-wood stretchers. They were unconscious, of course, and had the same strange pallor to their skin that I'd noticed on JD. But they were alive, and at that stage that was really all that counted.

Jerome and I were already dressed in isolation-suits, and we slid the iso-pod out of the container bay, moving it across to where the children lay.

When they were safely inside, we spent a few minutes questioning Eriin, trying to strike a lucky clue that we could work with, but we didn't want to waste too much time. It was important to get them back to Carmody and run the battery of tests we had prepared for them.

First, we would look for similarities between the two kids and what we already knew about JD, then cross-reference with the studies of Maija, Ramón and Élita. There had to be a common link that we were missing.

Eriin wasn't much help. She hadn't seen the human cubs until they had fallen ill, but she would talk with those who had, and if they remembered anything she would inform us through the talking machine.

We made our way back to the hopper, removed the suits and incinerated them, then we climbed aboard and began the return trip to the island.

When we got back a couple of hours later, Kaz was standing on the landing platform with a smile that was about to split her face in half.

‘Do you want the news now,' she asked, ‘or do you want to wait until I break out the champagne?'

Personally, I was never a big drinker . . .

And suddenly the whole world was changed.

From the moment we touched down with the two kids from Al-Tiina, all the work we'd struggled with for the past months fell into place.

The reason Kaz was so excited when we arrived was that she'd received a call from Raatal a few minutes earlier. According to Loef's mother, there
was
something different about the two kids who had survived. Of all the children in the human party, only the two of them had taken the chance of trying the Elokoi food – Yorum meat and Capyjou.

The jigsaw began to take shape.

During their time in the cave, Élita, Ramón and Maija had lived on a diet of Capyjou and Reyjaa and little else, and there was wild Capyjou growing in the camp, so it was conceivable that JD had come into contact with it too.

Capyjou – a stock-feed, a vile-tasting Elokoi staple, and perhaps the key to salvation for human life on Deucalion.

It explained why the younger kids were holding the Crystal at bay but not destroying it, while the kids from the cave were free of the disease completely. Whatever was in the plant that gave protection was present in small doses after just one meal, but weeks of living on the stuff had increased the levels in the blood to an extent that whatever it was could take control and destroy the invader.

Which was precisely the reason why the Elokoi were all immune to the Crystal.

Simple. But what was it in the Capyjou?

No one had a clue, but at least we had a focus, and we mapped out a battle-plan.

Instead of working blind, we began mapping the common factors in all the items on a checklist:

BLOOD SAMPLES:

Cave kids

JD

Al-Tiina kids

Loef/Kaeba

Control group

CAPYJOU:

Chemical composition

Enzyme structures

Amino-acids

Unique or unusual characteristics

In particular, we looked for any structures present in everything on the list but absent from samples of blood taken from Galen, Kaz and myself, and present in higher concentrations in Élita, Ramón, Maija and the Eolkoi than in the younger kids.

The search took just two days.

Genetic Research Laboratory

Carmody Island

Inland Sea (Eastern Region)

9/2/203

JEROME

Galen stares at the read-out like he has lost the ability to move, while Charlie, who has been standing with her hands resting on the console, sinks backwards onto the chair. It rolls backwards a few centimetres before stopping.

Kaz breathes out as if she has been holding her breath forever.

Behind them Jerome Hamita smiles and feels a small glow of satisfaction.

‘Well, there's our baby.' Finally Galen finds his voice.

On the screen before them the data frame is constructing a schematic of the enzyme they have isolated from all the possibilities. The common link between all the various specimens. The one structure that holds the key. To everything.

‘You were right, Jerome.'

Charlie is on her feet again. She moves towards Jerome, puts her arm around him and draws him into the group.

‘An enzyme.' Galen shakes his head. ‘A simple bloody enzyme.'

‘Not simple, Galen.' Kaz studies the graphic on the screen. ‘Look at the length of the protein strings. They're like nothing else I've ever seen.'

‘So why haven't we picked it up before? I mean, they did tests on Capyjou a hundred and fifty years ago, before they rated it safe for human consumption. They'd have to have picked up something as unusual as this.'

‘Maybe they did.' Jerome leans forward, studying the completed schematic. ‘But remember, they were only looking for stuff that was actually dangerous to humans. This . . . what are we going to call it?'

‘Crystalase?' Charlie has moved across to the data frame console on the far side of the room. She is scrolling through a series of tables, and throws in the suggestion without looking at them.

‘OK, crystalase. Chances are, it enters the system as a zymogen – basically inert, reacting with nothing, running around the system for a time before it gets flushed out as waste. If it did no harm, they wouldn't be concerned with it. Half the enzymes in the body only become active when they react with specific chemicals. Don't forget it's part of an alien ecosystem. I'd be willing to bet that it serves a purpose in the Elokoi metabolism.'

‘So, what now?' Kaz looks at Galen, waiting for an answer.

‘Now we put it through its paces. We start with blood samples, and then, if it works, we try it on JD and the other kids. We know it can't hurt them, and it may just help. We can extract it quite easily, now that we know what we're looking for. The question is, can we synthesise it? I mean, there isn't enough Capyjou on the planet to feed everyone permanently.'

‘Maybe not, but there's enough to give everyone a starting dose – to keep the disease at bay until we find a way of manufacturing the stuff.' Charlie turns back from the console. ‘I've just checked the export/import database. There's a whole harvest waiting in Vaana for shipment to Earth, and another shipment already in a warp-shuttle waiting for departure. The crisis has slowed export procedures somewhat. According to the records, we're talking 40,000 tonnes. It's a pretty good start. If we contact the
Pandora
, we can get things moving. Maybe save a few lives.'

‘Maybe a few million.' Galen moves the chair across to where she is sitting and faces her. ‘Let's do it.'