Broken Mirror: Apophis 2029 (22 page)

  "Oh, they are good..." Thorn blurted under his breath in admiration of the trap.

  "Keep quiet and throw down your weapons," the mysterious voice instructed from beyond the veil of fog sifting between the dark maze of the trees.  We complied, hoping that our captor wasn't as desperate as we were. 

  After a long moment, three masked figures emerged from the mist, each wearing goggles and ragged camouflage ponchos.  Their gear was light except for the high tech scoped rifles they carried.  Any additional weapons they may have carried were well hidden under the loose cloaks they wore.  Thinking about it, I guess we all looked outrageously out of place wearing our one-tone jumpsuits, and were starting to realize we should have taken a measure of effort to blend into our environment.  Any scout must have seen us coming from a mile away, allowing them ample time to bait this trap. 

  "Who are you, and why are you here?" the figure on the right demanded, their voice seemed mechanically altered by some device in the mask filter they wore.  Beatrice just looked at us with sullen eyes, feeling a bit guilty about her mistaken display of bravado that got us all into this fix.

  "We found a map in the mill over by the lake, we thought we could find shelter here," I answered, hoping the truth would settle their suspicions.  The sniper on the left stepped forward and took our weapons that were lying among the pine needles and moss; and eyed their function with noted scrutiny.  Holding one of the pulse pistols up for their comrades to view for a minute, then quickly disappeared beneath the hidden folds of their cloaks. 

  The sniper in the center looked us up and down for a moment with tinted goggles hiding any expression as to what they were thinking.  Slinging their rifles in turn, they removed their masks; admitting we were a little surprised to see that they were all women.  The oldest of the three with brushed raven black hair spoke up.

  "She asked you a question!" the female demanded, eying our strange attire.  We were not quite sure if we should say anything about Fallhaven, or even if its mention would mean anything to them.  If pressed about it, our story of what had transpired in the underground facility would likely not be believed in the slightest; so I kept my mouth shut.

  "Our clothes had become contaminated, so we took these ones we found in a storage building a few days walk from here," Thorn spoke up in my place, noting just how suspicious we looked wearing our mostly clean uniforms and complete lack of gear out here in the wild, while armed with only a pair of weak stun pistols as our only defense.

  "You came in contact with any Ghouls?" the other one inquired, who was a quite attractive dark skinned girl with shoulder length hair.  I assumed that was their nickname for the infected victims.

  "Do you mean Weepers?" I answered, "No, we're not sick,"

  The girl in the middle was younger than the other two, with matted dirty blonde hair and freckles stepped forward, taking a device that looked like a penlight that had an intense blue beam and aimed into each of our eyes.  Satisfied that we were safe, she put the UV light away, back under her poncho. 

  "It will be dark soon," she noted with unease, "Ava, get them inside and keep an eye on them," the young girl ordered the woman with the wavy black hair; who promptly pulled out a dangerous looking automatic pistol from her belt and issued us towards the nearest cabin.  Meanwhile, the other two women began kicking dirt into the pit and smothering the smoking fire in the center of the seated decoys. 

  "No sudden moves and we'll get along just fine," Ava warned with a motion of her firearm towards the building.  By the way these three girls carried themselves, we suspected they had military training.  It was obvious that their weapons were high tech, especially in comparison to the average citizen.  Their firearms were clean and well oiled and not of standard design.  In fact, their outfits and gear were well matched for the woodland environment, which made me suspect that they had been located here for some length of time.  Ava ushered all four of us into the cabin where we found stacks of crates and boxes, along with a few cots and a
sparse but ample assortment of laboratory gear. 

  Moments later the other two women barged in and locked the door behind us.  They toured the room and made sure the thick curtains were shut tight before lighting the oil lanterns that sat upon the tables; they also kept their pistols handy, just in case we were having second thoughts. 

  "That is Kel," the young girl motioned to the dark skinned woman across the room, "...and Ava," gesturing to one who led them into the cabin, "I'm Tasha," she finished coldly as she watched us with her intense pale blue eyes.  Haiti stuttered in first with an introduction.

  "Aye, they call me Haiti," he gave a half cocked smile, "this is Thorn and Caity," he mentioned nodding towards us both, "and this here is Beatrice," he finished.

  "Betty will do," the old woman suggested to our captors with a thin lipped grin, "and what about you ladies," she added, "how did you come to be here?"

  Tasha stalled in her response for a slight moment, then winced as she took a step forward.  There was something mature about her far beyond her age; which in a strange way, made her appear slightly more seasoned than her fellow cohorts she commanded. 

  "Shortly after the asteroid broke apart in the atmosphere, recovery began from the decimation of the resulting earthquakes and tsunamis near the impact zones, including the global storm fronts created by the debris kicked up into the atmosphere.  The authorities found themselves in the middle of a battle against the MN4 plague that created these ...these diseased ghouls, or '
Weepers
' as you so put it," she offered with a gesture towards me, "My father led a mercenary backup team for the local military.  It was only one of several that took up the slack of the failing militant divisions that were assigned to quell the unrest and reassign the civilian population."

  "...Reassign?" Thorn questioned suspiciously with a raised brow, not being a word any of us would have used or an agenda we were faintly familiar with.

  "It was a term used after martial law to divide and corral civilians from quarantined sections into designated temporary camps depending on their skills or influence, per se," she added rubbing her fingers together as a gesture of money being the source of influence she was referring too.  "The homeless and destitute were acquired and sent to razor wired fenced shelters in the red zone and assigned to work brigades to fortify those camps that required manual labor, while anyone newly infected were expedited to the nearest hospital detention facility for sterilization."

  "You mean..." Thorn began.

  "Yes,
that
kind of sterilization," Tasha cut him off in mid sentence, as she made a gesture of a throat being cut, "Civilians who had fled the cities to escape the outbreaks were placed in similar facilities which began to thin the resources of the military response to a dangerous level.  Thus, security contractors such as my father’s were hired to perform special operations assignments as an additional arm of the acting authority," she addressed to us.

  "You keep on mentioning your father, is he here?" Betty spat out with a snip, wanted to speak to someone in command, instead of this smart mouthed teen.

  "That was six years ago, along with several other squads who ran these special operations errands, we believe he died during one of those runs," Tasha added with a harsh stare towards Beatrice, then just as quickly broke her gaze without a hint as to what she was thinking.

  "Who is left of your division?" I had to ask.

  "Just us," Kel answered from behind where we stood as she opened a latched crate and pulled out a handful of vacuumed packed rations, tossing one to each of us to catch.  We were so hungry that we didn't even bother to read what was stamped on the silver foil.  I ended up with something that tasted like tuna fish, though looking at it for a moment it sure didn't look like any fish meat I had ever seen.

  "Have you three been here all this time?" Thorn inquired in disbelief. 

  From the exterior, the buildings looked quite unused, and from what he could tell of the interior room they occupied, it didn't appear to be either.  There were certainly stockpiles of rations, supplies and other gear, and who knows what else was in the stacks of bins crowding the small cabin.  With proper training and precautions, it was possible they could have survived here for that long; but something seemed a little out of place here.

  "Originally, there were twenty four of us in our squadron, we are all that's left," Ava answered in return to Thorn's question. 

  "A few months after the impact, my father was heading a convoy escorting a military scientist and his secret package to a nearby base; they had secured him here during a bad storm on one leg of the trip before they disappeared," Tasha informed her guests, "it wasn't long thereafter that we were overrun by a handful of scavengers which in turn, had drawn a large horde of infected to our detachment which were attracted by the gunfire during the engagement," she paused as her eyes drifted for a moment in thought, "only a handful of them survived, the rest of us were lost over the years during scouting missions or isolated incidents while traveling to our winter camps."

  "You mentioned a secret package," Haiti had to ask, in response to our collective curiosity. 

  Tasha strode over to a wide table at the edge of the room where a square metal box sat, and she unbuckled its hinges.  Carefully unfolding its, sides we were all shocked to see what lay suspended within the glass canister beneath the protective outer case.  Within it sat a jagged stone scorched and melted from atmospheric entry, mottled with patches of crystal slag.  We could see a small engraved plate was attached to its base.  In the dim light of the lamps, the four of us made out what it read at the same time, Apophis #99942.

  "Is that a piece of the...?" Haiti began with a stutter, but Tasha had a notable talent for finishing other people’s sentences.

  "Yes, but its only a small fragment of debris from the core of the asteroid that rained to Earth during the initial event," she answered, "it's safe while its sealed within this shielded case," Tasha assured us while she patted the top of the capsule.

  This warped stone came from the hunk of rock that was the cause of all our sorrows; and it was a mixed feeling of both anxiety and awe to grasp that only a thin sheet of and glass lay between us and this small piece of Hades itself; which had caused a global pandemic and turned our world inside out.

  I had once read a story written several centuries ago about a pirate crew that was being chased by a Man-of-War sailing ship, crewed by soldiers of the Kings Crown.  These marauders were outmatched and outgunned, and knew if they were ever caught that every man would receive the gentle kiss of a noose upon his neck.  In effort to escape their pursuers on the high seas, the pirate ship heading straight into the squall of a violent storm; facing the risk of losing their own sails.  During the storm, these two opposing vessels became separated for a brief time, but after the gales subsided and the rolling seas calmed the chase began anew.

  The Admiral of the Kings ship kept pace with the enemy vessel on the horizon, as their own military warship was the larger of the two and had more sail yard to catch the wind.  During the chase, the military ship passed a lone vessel with folded sails that flew two flags high upon the mast.  Flapping in the salty wind were the blazing the colors of yellow and black; designating the solitary vessel as a plague ship.  Upon their approach to the craft, they noted there here were no hands on deck, but only lifeless gray bodies that could be seen slumped across the rails. 

  An hour before, the Admiral had watched through his spyglass when the brigands had passed this vessel on the horizon during their pursuit, and observed that the pirates slowed as they neared the blighted vessel, but had immediately raised full sail to escape out of fear of the pestilence from the accursed ship.  It was prudent of the Admiral to continue the chase at hand and gave a wide berth to the dead ship as they continued their advance upon the fleeing pirates.  It was far into the day when the Kings navy finally laid its grapple onto the ship of delinquent cutthroats that flew their ragged black flag of skull and bones. 

  The soldiers at arms where confused as to why the vagabonds weren't following orders to stand down, nor fire their cannons as the gun ports were propped to the read.  After many tense moments, it wasn't until they boarded the vessel to find several corpses had been strung to the lines and wheel, propped up by a tangle of dowels and rope.  The pirate crew had vanished, along with any charts and their manifest.  They discovered the Captains quarters had been stricken bare, along with all the galley rations.  Within the ship's belly, they found no sign of bounty, stolen or otherwise; and scratched their heads in confusion when they realized they had been chasing a ghost ship across the open sea.

  It took longer than it should have to concede how they could have fallen for such a ruse, which took its time to soak into the white talc wig of the admiral and his boggled men.  The present cadavers left behind had all been tied up like puppets on a string to be used as decoys while the sails had been unfurled and the rudder fixed on a wide curve away from the plague ship they had left adrift many leagues away.  The entire crew of rogues had abandoned their own ship for another, though the Admiral was bewildered at the boldness of their most devious escape to risk taking sail of a blighted ship, for they surely must have been the most desperate of men.

  Now safely beyond the horizon, the sun set upon the ocean where a lone plague ship sat adrift in the rolling seas.  The pirate crew tossed over the bodies of the merchant ship they had captured days before and had transferred what supplies and rigging they could onto their newly acquired vessel.  The brigands made use of the poor chaps they had relieved of their lives and cargo, by propping a few corpses upon the decks in various assumed positions of death after rubbing their exposed skin with ash.  They then used the remaining deceased which they placed on their own ship and secured them to the riggings; and further completed the hoax by placed pair of false quarantine signal flags on the high mast of the merchant ship they now held. 

  They all hid below deck while a skeleton crew crept back aboard and baited the Navy vessel with their rogue ship, and set a course to graze by the stationary merchant vessel once the military warship gave pursuit.  The pirates had the advantage of distance while the meager crew secured full sail and braced the wheel before they hastily abandoned ship and swam to the concealed side of the fake plague ship, and discreetly climbed aboard via nets left placed at the open cargo ports on the blind side of the hull.  Whereupon, seeing no activity on deck the decoy ship, the Kings Navy was led off on a merry chase.

  I remembered that story because it was based on false flags and relied on a great many assumptions.  Even as wild as they had seemed, it was perfectly plausible that the course of event had happened exactly as it was written.  You see, the Pirate Captain had prior knowledge he was being hunted, and finding a lone merchant ship between unfriendly ports, he saw an opportunity to devise this most devious plan.

  The presumptions relied heavily that the timing would be right and the Royal Navy ship would arrive where it would be expected; and that the wind would allow for him to use his own ship to intersect with the one he left adrift with his supplies and men many days prior.  This also assumes his men were loyal enough not to just mutiny at the first opportunity and take the decoy ship for themselves once he was out of sight. 

  It also lays a great deal of risk that the pursuing military vessel would fail to board or even fire upon and scuttle the plague ship as they passed it while the pirate crew hid inside.  It also assumes the soldiers notice anything suspicious and call the bluff.  Lastly, it further assumed that the King
’
s authority would be so eager to catch the fleeing pirate ship, that they would be reckless if not shortsighted in chasing their prey.  The situation even trusts that the makeshift rigging would hold and that the Navy wouldn't catch the wayward ghost ship too soon and see through the hoax and turn around to seize the small unarmed merchant craft before it disappeared into the starry night.

  This was an actual historical account.  The story, being slightly elaborated or not, spoke about how to view strategy from two entirely different perspectives.  For one, the thin-lipped Admiral had grievously underestimated the bravado of his foes, but no way of knowing the shifty pirates could manipulate their assets at hand.  Two, it was a sound decision on his part to keep in hot pursuit on the trail of the pirate vessel before they could escape into the darkness of nightfall, especially while his ship clearly had the greater speed and were gaining against them as the sun waned towards the horizon.  Three, in that time period, anyone in their right mind would avoid a diseased vessel left adrift.  Fears of sickness where high in those times and men in service were aware of their own mortality.

  Given the circumstances, the Royal Navy ship acted in arrogance, it did followed proper protocol by giving chase to their quarry just as they should have.  They avoided an afflicted ship in kind, just as the pirate vessel had, or so it appeared.  The Admiral also chose not to waste time and ammunition to sink the derelict ship because of time limits considering the tight window of opportunity of wind and weather.  However, most readers of this tale would shake their head in dismay that the King's soldiers had actually cornered their prey while they played possum on an unarmed derelict ship.  The Admiral had them, but let them get away because of the complete efficiency of the misdirection and disguise.  The lesson in the end was that it was all about appearances.

  Now I looked at this narrative in a different way than most.  In my point of view, the Royal Navy in the storyline could be seen here as representing our modern Military.  The marauders could be regarded as Citizens and Survivors, in replacement of the outlaw pirates as described; and the basic reason they got away was that the Authority was far too presumptuous and eager to exercise its control.  Our modern police state pushing their overly oppressive authority were too blood thirsty to make a bust, too hungry to make the kill, too impatient to scrutinize the situation or question the facts, too narrow-minded to calculate the chances or outcome.  Straight down the chain of command, our soulless government minions, our overly aggressive law enforcement and military personnel blindly followed orders and usually made no effort to think for themselves; and got sloppy.

  This is what I thought of Military soldiers and Mercenary lackey's like Tasha's father and his crew, who were usually too small minded and only concerned with saving their own skin and that of their kin, rather than honoring their oath to protect the public at large.  In the first years after the asteroid strike, it was those who were wearing the uniforms and the badges that revealed themselves as the true terrorists amongst us.  They abused their authority, confiscated firearms, food rations and supplies from the destitute civilians who were merely trying to survive.  It showed just how ugly mankind can get by asserting who had the right to live and by exercising
one man’s will over another by nothing more than a mere uniform.  

  Though I detested their type, I had to give Tasha and her companion's due credit when they offered to let us have the classified files that accompanied the meteorite sample.  After moments of shared reading between us, I finally got the documents into my hands and was left bewildered by what lay within those ivory white pages.  There were references to a counteraction resulting in the asteroid impact, not from it.  The documents referenced another mysterious file as its companion for further relevant data.  Searching through the folder several times there was no other paperwork; the file itself was missing.

  "What does all this mean?" I asked our female captors, "and this mention of the 'VEIL project' resulting in a code orange?"  The two older mercenaries kept silent, letting their younger colleague bear the weight of explaining the situation to their inquisitive guests.

  "As you can imagine, this ore sample is biologically volatile," Tasha noted to the rock behind the glass, "but it appears from the information that you hold in your hands, that is not its normal state," she breathed, adding to our confusion.

  "What do you mean?" Thorn responded.

  "I'm no scientist, but I've read that document several times, and it looked to me as if the dormant microbes within the sample were originally inert and harmless in their natural form; but had gone through an acute viral mutation once they had been irradiated," she added.

  "Irradiated by what?" Haiti chimed in as Tasha strolled to the other end of the table and unrolled the map she had confiscated from us. 

  "The answer to that question is here," she whipped back, pointing to the upper corner of the chart where a small region of the map had been left blank.

  "There's nuth'in there..." Haiti barked in response.

  "Actually, it's common practice to void out military locations and base facilities on civilian maps.  There's
something
there alright!" Tasha snapped back with a pen in her hand as she marked in a string of buildings to update our map.  Tasha and her crew had scouted the area around this site for many years.  On several occasions they had considered abandoning the camp to find other survivors, but their decisive factors to remain here was that they had a significant store of food and ammunition stashed here, which they had been unwilling to part with.  However, those supplies were beginning to dwindle near their end.  Most of the containers stacked about the room now sat entirely empty.

  "My father's squadron had been on strict governed orders to protect this package," Tasha noted as she gestured to the meteorite glinting in the flickering light of the lanterns, "it was supposed to be a key sample towards breaking the genetic code of the virus." 

  We could understand her analogy, since the untainted original DNA chain would provide vital information in formulating a viable antidote.  The base organism in its pure form could reveal clues as to how its structure reacted, including testing of any biological and environmental conditions as the primary catalysts that triggered such mutations.  In the right hands, its possible applications towards aiding the medical response for a vaccine were literally invaluable.

  "But if that's the case, why..." I stammered while the blonde girl kept in character of anticipating our questions.

  "...Why haven't we delivered it already, in my father
’
s stead?" she asserted, "Because we couldn't," she answered after a noted pause.  

  "It's a week
’
s trek to get there by foot," Ava added, "its not the distance, but the terrain that presents an obstacle."

  "A few years back it was our plan to honor the people we lost in our squadron and finish the mission, but here," Kel advanced to the map and pointed to the road as it extended into a cliff side, "...the tunnel here has collapsed, and carrying that sample between the three of us across that steep ridge would be far too risky," she noted, outlining the high cliffs surrounding the base.

  With a glance back over to the rock sample, wee understood they weren't really worried about themselves, but about danger of either losing or breaking open the capsule in its fragile glass case.  The box shaped container it was encased in, was not exactly the most convenient shape to be transported by hand.

  "What happened to your convoy vehicles from the original escort?" Betty finally nosed herself into the conversation, after appearing uninterested from its inception.

  "Those trucks had built in shielding from the magnetic pulse waves, as most military vehicles do, but our team couldn't shield themselves from a mountain crushing them," the dark skinned girl answered.  I guess Tasha could tell by the tilt of my head and look in my eye as to what my response was going to be, and ask if it was the unfortunate result of an earthquake that collapsed the access tunnel to the base; so she answered it for me without hesitation.