Death Wave (2 page)

“Yes, I suppose so.” Still, he felt dissatisfied.

Aditi said, “You promised to show me the gorge.”

“Yes, I did, didn't I?” He took Aditi by the hand and together they walked out onto the bridge.

It was just as Jordan Kell remembered it—almost.

Leaning against the bridge's anti-suicide fence, he looked down. Far below, the river still cut its way through the cliffs as it had for millions of years. The faithful sun still beamed its warmth across the desert scrubland that stretched to the horizon in every direction.

But where once sagebrush had perfumed the summer air, and at dusk elk would amble through, browsing, while prairie dogs would pop out of their snug burrows to forage among their antlered neighbors, now the land was covered with the white domes of prefabricated homes and bare concrete streets that formed a grid among them. A new city was growing on land that had once been held in trust by the Bureau of Land Management.

Suddenly a hawk plunged down from behind him and dove deep into the gorge before swooping up again and heading for the sky. Jordan felt his heart sing.

Turning to Aditi, Jordan said, “This is one of my favorite places on Earth.”

The glare-blocking contact lenses she wore had turned dark, yet he saw the question in her eyes. Pointing down into the gorge, Aditi said, “There's certainly nothing like this on New Earth.”

“Your Predecessors built New Earth,” Jordan replied. “This old Earth has been shaped by natural forces, over billions of years.”

She arched a brow at him. “It seems to me that you humans have done your share of changing your planet.”

“True enough,” Jordan admitted ruefully. “True enough.”

He looked out at the growing city of gleaming white solar-powered homes. They were being built for the tide of refugees displaced by the global climate shift. To Jordan they looked like an invading alien army that had come to claim the once-inviolate emptiness.

Leaning over the bridge's rail again, he stared down into the gorge and at the river glittering far below. Nearly two hundred years had passed since he'd last been at this spot, Jordan told himself. So much had happened. So much was changing.

Jordan smiled down at the river. Sadly. Despite the climate shifts that had drowned seacoasts and flooded cities all over the world, despite the new towns built for the refugees, the Rio Grande still flowed its age-old course from the mountains to the distant Gulf of Mexico—which had grown into an inland sea that was threatening to split North America in two.

Age cannot wither her, Jordan quoted to himself, nor custom stale her infinite variety. Not so, he realized. Even the Rio Grande would soon be changed to suit the needs of the people driven from their homes, their lives, by the greenhouse floods. They're going to divert the river to provide aqueducts and drinking water for the newly built cities, so that the newcomers can water the lawns they were going to plant and flush their toilets.

With a shake of his head, Jordan straightened and turned to his wife.

“Seen enough?” he asked.

“I suppose so.”

“Let's go, then.” Eyeing the growing line of stopped traffic, he added, “Before things turn ugly.”

As if in answer, a car horn bleated angrily from down the line.

With Aditi at his side he started walking back to his car—and his responsibilities. He had traveled to a planet circling another star to find her and rebuild his life. Now he had returned to Earth to tell the people of his birthworld that there were other intelligent creatures scattered among the stars. And that they all faced an implacable wave of death sweeping through the stars toward them.

Jordan turned to one of the security agents that walked a respectful few meters from him and Aditi. “Let's get to the airport; we've caused enough bad feelings here.”

The young man—trim, athletic, wearing an off-white summer-weight jacket and tan chinos—glanced at the line of waiting vehicles. “You're an important person, Mr. Kell. They can wait until you're ready to go.”

“I'm sure each one of them feels that he's important, too.”

The security officer shrugged and said, “Yeah, maybe so.” Then he sprinted ahead and opened the door of the unmarked sedan they were approaching.

Jordan stopped at the parked car and looked up into the bright, cloudless sky. He knew that death was racing toward planet Earth at the speed of light.

How did it come to this? he asked himself. How can I save them all?

 

BARCELONA

Anita Halleck watched Jordan Kell's impulsive visit to the Rio Grande Gorge from her office in the palatial headquarters of the world government.

Alone in the imposing office, she leaned back in her sculpted desk chair and stared intently at the three-dimensional viewer built into the opposite wall.

The satellite cameras showed the man and his alien woman clearly enough, and the smoothly competent team of security men and women escorting them.

Why did Kell want to see this particular place? she asked herself. Not merely view it holographically, but actually, physically go there. With the woman. What's he up to?

Halleck had taken pains to ensure that Jordan Kell and his alien wife were insulated from the world's news media. Everything about the returning interstellar explorers was carefully controlled. They were guarded night and day, protected from the prying eyes and excitable voices of the news media. And the ignorant public. Already there were fanatics babbling their fears of an alien invasion.

And there was Kell, strolling like a stupid tourist through the rough semi-desert country baking under the cloudless sunshine of New Mexico. He seemed to be searching for something as he peered down from the bridge into the river, which glinted in the sun as it surged between the rock walls of the gorge it had carved.

What's he after? Halleck asked herself again. He's scheduled to report to the Council here tomorrow, and he's off daydreaming in some miserable scrubland. He certainly doesn't appear to be troubled by this message of death he claims to be bringing back from Sirius.

And the woman, this alien from Sirius. She definitely looks human. He claims she's as human as any one of us. But how can that be true? She's from another world, circling a different star. He's fallen in love with her, and love can make the most intelligent man behave like a fool.

Like Jordan Kell, Anita Halleck had been born more than two centuries earlier. Unlike Kell, she had spent all her years awake and active—except for the few months she had been dead.

Killed in the crash of a rocket hopper craft on the Moon, Halleck had been saved and restored to life by the medical miracle of nanotherapy. Her body was filled with virus-sized nanomachines that repaired her mangled organs, knitted her broken bones, and guarded her against infections like an almost-intelligent immune system.

Nanotechnology was totally banned on Earth. While lunar communities such as Selene depended on nanotechnology for their very survival on the airless Moon, the people of Earth—some twenty billion of them—feared the possibility of nanomachines gone wild, devouring everything in their path like an unstoppable wave of mindless destruction.

Truth to tell, there were plenty of criminals and fanatics and out-and-out lunatics among those twenty billion who would unleash a nanomachine plague for profit or passion or merely the insane notoriety of slaughtering millions. When Anita Halleck recovered from her temporary death, she learned that the nanotech ban meant she could never return to the world of her birth.

It was Douglas Stavenger, the founder and mastermind of the lunar nation Selene, who convinced Halleck to use her brains and drive in politics. Earth had been hit by a second wave of greenhouse warming, the Greenland and Antarctic ice caps were melting down, coastal cities all across the globe were being flooded, millions of refugees sought shelter, food, hope.

Bright and determined (some said to the point of ruthlessness), Halleck became a force in Earth's tempestuous politics. From Selene, on the Moon, she fought her way to the top of the world government.

And on the day she was installed as chairperson of the governing council, she pushed through a special exemption to the anti-nanotech laws. Anita Halleck would be allowed to live and work on Earth. No one dared gainsay her return to the world of her birth.

Tall and youthful despite her years, thanks to the nanomachines teeming inside her, Halleck was as slim-waisted and smooth-skinned as a thirty-year-old. She presided over Earth's painful recovery from the greenhouse flooding. As Greenland and Antarctica melted away, as climate patterns across the world changed drastically and sea levels rose catastrophically, Anita Halleck harnessed Earth's resources and technologies to feed, house, educate, and build new lives for the hundreds of millions driven from their homes by the relentless floods.

One of her achievements was a global engineering program to save as many cities as possible from the rising sea level. Dams and weir systems rose like medieval fortifications to protect major cities, the world capital of Barcelona among them.

Earth's geography changed, but the people of Earth—helped by their own skills and resources, plus the generous aid from human communities spread halfway across the solar system—managed to stabilize their civilization and survive the worst crisis in human history.

Then came the realization that Greenland's melting ice cap was pouring torrents of cold fresh water into the North Atlantic Ocean, threatening to cut off the Gulf Stream that warmed Western Europe. Soon the climate of the British Isles and much of Europe would be plunged into Siberian cold and desolation. Every effort must be made to dam up the melting waters, including their underground flow.

The World Council faced another global challenge of frightening proportions. Halleck led the massive geoengineering project to meet this new challenge.

And on top of that Jordan Kell and his companions returned from New Earth, with this alien woman and a warning of a still-deadlier catastrophe rushing through interstellar space to destroy everything.

 

ALBUQUERQUE

Slouching back on the sofa of his basement studio apartment, Hamilton Cree sipped on an energy drink as he watched a rerun of last year's World Cup finals on his wall screen.

It had been a long, frustrating day. First the traffic detail up north of Taos, then a raid on a drug house in Española, and finally the long drive home to Albuquerque.

The drug raid had been a farce: a half-dozen pimply kids cooking up some recreational junk in the kitchen of one of the new prefabs that had been set up for the flood refugees. City kids, from back east, snotty and yelling about their constitutional rights. Thought they'd masked all the surveillance sensors in their miserable little government-furnished house.

The robots burst into their hangout and tranked them while Cree and the other live officers waited outside and watched on the remote cameras. Drones circling overhead, the whole nine yards, just to bust some teenagers who had nothing better to do.

His phone buzzed. Almost glad of the interruption, Cree saw on the ID screen that it was his brother, from Nashville. He told the phone to put the call on the wall screen. He'd thought about getting a 3-D viewer, but decided to save the money and stick with the flat screen.

Brother Jefferson was eleven years older than Hamilton, but he still looked like a kid: he could afford rejuve treatments.

“What's happening, Hambone?” asked Jeff, with his vid-star smile.

Hamilton hated his childhood nickname. Wearily he replied, “Same old shit.”

Jeff was the oldest of the family's four boys and he had a real job as a bank supervisor in Nashville. Plus a wife and two kids of his own, a girl and a boy.

“Got a promotion,” Jeff said brightly.

“Yeah?”

“Yeah. I'm gonna be manager of our branch office in Hendersonville.”

“Good for you, Jeff.”

For the next half hour Hamilton listened with a growing mixture of envy and resentment as Jeff bragged about his latest step toward a happy retirement.

At last Jeff asked, “So what about you? Still guarding the highways of New Mexico?”

“Not for much longer,” Hamilton said, feeling the way he had when the school year was nearing its end.

“Anything interesting?” Jeff prodded.

So Hamilton told him about the star traveler. “Held up traffic for more'n half an hour, just so he and his alien gal could see the gorge.”

Jeff seemed impressed. “He's been to another star. He's met aliens.”

“She looks pretty human.”

“They claim the New Earth people are just as human as we are,” Jeff said. “But I don't see how. They're aliens. Aliens aren't human.”

“I guess.”

“You know, Hank's working in Chicago now, for the firm that sells those energy screens.”

“He is?”

“Yep. He's going to send me one to put in my car. Like an airbag, only it's stronger and protects the whole insides of the car, even if it's totaled.”

“The energy screens are alien technology.”

“That's right. One of the star travelers opened his own company to sell 'em. He's rich!”

“From alien technology,” Hamilton muttered.

The brothers chatted for a few minutes more, then Jefferson said, “Gotta go now. Dinner bell's ringing.”

“Okay. Say hello to Gina for me.”

“Sure. Whyn't you come over here sometime and see us? The kids'd love to see their Uncle Hambone.”

Hamilton forced a grin. “Sure. Soon's I get the chance. Got a three-day weekend coming up; maybe then.”

“Good. See ya then.”

“Yeah.”

Hamilton cut the connection and the wall screen went back to the World Cup. He leaned back on the sofa once more, thinking, Those damned star travelers. They get rich, they get to block traffic, they make us feel like little insects.