Final Dawn: Season 1 (The Thrilling Post-Apocalyptic Series) (40 page)

Leonard McComb | Rachel Walsh | Marcus Warden | Nancy Sims

3:04 PM, April 5, 2038

Rachel covered her mouth with one hand as she thumbed the radio button. Her voice was shaking and she could barely hide the emotion in her voice.

“David? Is that really you?”

“Who is – wait, Rachel? No, it can’t be. Is it?” David’s voice grew in emotion as well, and she began to speak rapidly, trying to cram as much information into the discussion as possible.

“Yes! I’m here with a few other survivors. We heard your broadcast! I’ve been trying to get to the lab ever since the bombs fell, but, well, Georgia’s pretty far away when there aren’t many working vehicles.”

“Christ… Rachel, I can’t believe you made it. How many more are with you?”

Rachel gave David a brief rundown on her three companions, along with where they were all located and what was going on.

“I’m still having trouble believing it’s you, but for four of you to make it is absolutely incredible. I guess those long nights of whitelisting actually paid off. A few of those sequences must have been more common than we realized, and–”  David began to ramble when Rachel cut him off.

“David, there’ll be time for that when we get to the lab. We’re loading our supplies into an armored transport we found here in Richmond at a military base. We’ll head in your direction as quickly as we can. We heard your broadcast about defeating the swarms.”

There was a long silence on the radio. When David finally responded, his voice was noticeably less boisterous. “I’m afraid it’s not that simple.”

A long moment passed while Rachel considered the possible implications of David’s words. Afraid to ask what he meant, she hesitated to thumb the microphone key again. “David, what are you talking about? Surely we can just redeploy Bertha. I’m pretty sure the swarms are massing in the South somewhere. If we can get Bertha down there, then it’s game over, right?”

“Bertha’s offline, Rachel. It never deployed in the first place.”

Leonard interrupted the conversation with a confused look on his face. “What’s ‘Bertha’?”

The microphone was still active when Leonard spoke and David responded before Rachel. “A massive electromagnetic pulse generator located in the bottom of the facility. It’s got enough power to push a pulse through the entire underground structure and knock out every electronic device within fifty miles of DC. It was supposed to activate during an emergency at the lab, but it didn’t. The swarms must have disconnected or destroyed it.”

“If you’re whitelisted, why can’t you go down and check to see what’s wrong?” Rachel broke in again.

David’s sad, quiet chuckle was barely audible over the radio. “The same reason I haven’t been able to go anywhere or do anything else: half the building collapsed and I’m trapped. Even if you all were to come up here, it could take days of digging just to reach me, and then we’d have to figure out how to get to Bertha through all the rubble and collapsed floors below us.”

Rachel sat in silence again, trying to wrap her head around the significance of what they were facing. The entire time she was trying to get to Washington, her plan was to use Bertha as a tool against the swarms. Finding out that their best weapon against the swarms could have been destroyed or buried under a thousand tons of rubble was inconceivable.

Built specifically for use against the nanobots should something go wrong with them, Bertha was the most powerful electromagnetic pulse generator ever designed. Radical new design techniques and breakthroughs had culminated in a device that was no larger than a refrigerator but could generate a pulse that would pass through three miles of solid rock. This ensured that not even the deepest known caves on the planet could hide rogue nanobot swarms should the unthinkable happen.

“It’s not all doom and gloom, though.” David’s voice came through the radio again, offering a glimmer of hope to their situation.

Leonard McComb | Rachel Walsh | Marcus Warden | Nancy Sims

3:19 PM, April 5, 2038

The winds had shifted once again in the city, blowing smoke and ash to the west. Each of the APCs had two front seats, a thick partition, and then a set of uncomfortable metal benches in the back for troops to sit on while they were being transported into battle. With Marcus and Rachel in the first APC, Nancy and Leonard hopped into the second one parked just a few feet away. The thick side windows in the front of the vehicles had small portholes which could be opened, allowing the two groups to hear each other and communicate. After a few moments of fiddling, Leonard finally figured out how to operate the radio and switched it on, making it easier to listen in on the conversation between Rachel and David.

“Since I’m trapped in the lab, I haven’t been able to check on the physical status of Bertha, to see if the system is still functional or not. It could be that the swarms merely disabled the network feeds and that the device itself is fully operational. If it’s not, then I may have found a second option. You’re not going to like it, though, I promise you that.”

Rachel looked over through the window at Leonard and Nancy, who seemed as concerned as she did. “Well?” Rachel pressed David to continue, though he hesitated to speak.

“Look, I have no way of confirming this. We’ve lost communication with most of our satellites, all ground-based sensors are offline and it’s a miracle I’ve still got any emergency power here.” David’s voice was strained as he defended himself. “I’ve been spending nearly every waking moment keeping these last two birds in the sky and transmitting.”

“David, it’s okay. We understand. Just tell us what the second option is, please.”

David sighed and the group could hear keys being rapidly tapped in the background as he spoke. “A few days ago I got a link reestablished with two satellites in orbit that hadn’t been disabled or fallen out of sync during that time. One of them is a pretty powerful imaging satellite that one of the agencies uses for detecting nuclear material – among other things. Obviously it’s picked up a lot of hits in the upper atmosphere, but last night I found something new.

“Off the coast of Alaska, in the Bering Strait, there was a particularly high reading of nuclear materials just two miles from the city of Wales. Now, at first I thought it was just an extra thick cloud of contamination caught in the waters or the atmosphere there, but after a few passes by the satellite, I confirmed that it was too centralized to be anything but a contained signature.”

“Contained in what?” Leonard broke through on the radio now, no longer content to simply sit and listen.

“Who is this?”

“This is Leonard McComb, with Rachel and the others. Sorry for interrupting.”

“No, no it’s no problem. It’s nice to hear more voices out there.” David paused for a moment and then continued. “Understand that I’m still unable to confirm this, but I think there’s a chance that the nuclear signature is from a group of nuclear missiles inside a submarine parked in the strait.”

No one responded to David’s revelation, so he continued. “I take it by your silence that you’re as surprised at this as I am.”

“David, it’s Rachel again. How could there be any nukes left? I would have thought the swarms would have found a way to activate them all at once.”

“Ahh, I have a theory on that. Most of the nuclear weapons in the world were detonated, and there’s a good reason for that: they were all networked together in their respective countries. What I’ve been able to tell from these damned limited resources is that the artificial intelligence wasn’t just contained to the swarms, but that it actually moved into other computing resources as well. Any type of nuclear device that was mentioned or connected in an electronic fashion was fair game. The AI either broke in and took control of the missiles through network access or used the swarms to access the missiles that had no hardline connections with the outside world.

“Only weapons that weren’t mentioned or connected in electronic records would have been spared. If this is an older submarine that was on a training mission or something, its nuclear capabilities might never have been part of an electronic record. This is why I think Bertha might not be completely offline. Bertha’s true purpose was never a part of our records, so if the AI didn’t consider it to be a threat, then it might have treated it as just another piece of machinery, shutting off its power supply without causing damage to the unit itself.

If these really are nuclear missiles in the Bering Strait aboard a nuclear submarine, then there’s only one country I know of that would still carry nukes aboard a boat ancient enough to keep it safe from the AI.”

Rachel mouthed the word at the same time as David said it.

“Russia.”

Bering Strait

March 26, 2038

The gateway between the Arctic and Pacific oceans is not an easy place to travel. Thick ice floes cover the area nearly year-round and winter storms are brutal. In the narrow strait between the United States of America and the Russian Federation, only fifty-three miles separate the two nations from each another. On the American side sits the forty-ninth state, Alaska, while the Russian side merely contains a well-patrolled military zone, designed to keep out tourists.

Surface passage through the strait is made difficult by the thickness of the ice, though this is of little concern to those who pass under the water. Below the surface, the water is calm, with the brisk ocean currents no match for a vessel of sufficient magnitude. The serenity of this underwater retreat masks the power of the foreign object that now glides noiselessly along, invading the peaceful sanctity of the strait.

Commander Artem Alexeyev stalks through the hallways of the Arkhangelsk, muttering under his breath. The air here is stale and thick, with the smell of his crew hanging heavy in the passages. He stumbles as he passes through a doorway, spilling a quarter of his coffee onto his shoes and pants.

“Chto za huy! Damned command, giving us this piece of shit boat.”

Alexeyev continues to curse to himself as he walks into the control room of the Typhoon-class submarine. Measuring nearly six hundred feet long and seventy-five feet wide, it is the largest submarine ever manufactured, along with its five sisters. The open space of the submarine does not sit well with Alexeyev, who prefers the warmth and comfort of his desk in Moscow.

“Sir!” The officer on deck salutes smartly to the commander, who nods and dismisses the gesture with a wave of his hand. After spending so many years on land, Alexeyev has tired of life at sea, and wants their mission to be over as quickly as possible.

“Any news from command?”

“No sir. We’re still following radio silence, as per your instructions.”

“Good, good. What’s our location, please?”

Commander Alexeyev smiles as the officer springs forward, retrieving a chart to show their position. The crew of the Arkhangelsk is new and inexperienced, fresh out of the academy. Their eagerness to follow protocol is but one of the many irritations Alexeyev has had to put up with for the last two weeks, but he still enjoys watching them jump at his every word.

“We’re approaching the Beringov proliv, sir, just three kilometers out. We’ll pass through the strait on the American side, near the coastline, then proceed down as ordered, sir.”

The Commander sips on his coffee, the wetness of his pants slowly disappearing in the heat of the control room. He contemplates the events of the last few weeks that brought him here, on a vessel staffed with a skeleton crew, sailing in foreign waters in a craft that is decades out of date. A training exercise is what they called it, but Alexeyev suspects that there is something more. His orders were given to him just an hour before they left port. Proceed through the Bering Strait, crossing over into American waters. Ride the coast of the USA down to the lowest point of California, staying no farther than five miles offshore.

Taking such risks in an ancient craft like the Arkhangelsk was suicide, but orders were orders. Still, the Commander had a few tricks he could pull out from his years of experience. Cutting the engine speed to its slowest would delay them, but it would also keep them silent as they passed through the ocean. After crossing the Bering Strait, he would keep the sub just a few meters from the ocean floor, taking advantage of their slow speed to ensure they would not hit the bottom or be easily detected. If all went well, he would signal command once he reached international waters past California and could return to port.

“It’s a training exercise all right, a training exercise to see how quickly the Americans can blow us out of the water.” Alexeyev looks up from sipping his coffee. His second-in-command does not respond to his grumblings, giving the Commander no small measure of disappointment. “Still, though, with our complement of missiles on board, if the Americans do attack, we can certainly defend ourselves.”

This comment elicits a noticeable reaction from the officer, who flinches, nearly turning to face the Commander. In his mind, Alexeyev begs the officer to break from his duties, to turn and ask what the Commander is talking about. When the officer does not respond further, Alexeyev sits back in his seat, turning his attention to his duties, still disappointed at the lack of entertainment from his crew.