Orbital Decay (8 page)

He had refrained from saying it, but Brendan’s crying was almost certainly an irresistible lure. They jogged through the trees, feet shuffling through the fresh orange carpet. A new scent of rot mingled with the distinctive tang of autumn. Ben could see the shuttle and a small handful of forms were moving around it.

He felt his service revolver being yanked out of his holster. Lise hated guns, but she would have no qualms using one to protect her child. Ben took a closer look at the figures near the shuttle. They were in a rough line facing the trees, carrying shotguns. “Lise, those are the researchers; don’t shoot them.”

“Oh, those are the guys that turned this loose on us?” she asked. “Can’t I just kneecap ‘em?”

“Get aboard!” Abe yelled at the four scientists. “We got rot-monkeys right behind us!”

They scrambled aboard and Abe initiated the engine startup before coming aft again to find the headset that he had thrown in the back a few hours earlier.

“You must be Lise,” Dwight began. “My name is…”

“Dumbass!” She cut him off coldly before turning to press her cheek against the top of Brendan’s head. Ben dropped down on his son’s other side and strapped in as the aircraft lifted off. He pulled down a headset from a panel behind them. “Abe, take us south. I’ll come up later and let you know the details in a little while.”

He pulled the headset off and worked an arm around his small family.

“Are you taking us to that R&D station that got you fired from the NSA?” She looked up at him. “What makes you think they’ll even let us land?”

Ben took a deep breath. “They’ll need what we have, and hopefully Abe’s credentials will help…” He wasn’t really sure who Abe worked for, but he belonged to one of the many shadowy arms of the government and he had to hope it would be enough to get them on the ground at their destination.

Hope was pretty much all they had left.

Book 2 in the Orbital Decay Series

Grounded

Near Belton, South Carolina

B
en eased his foot off the gas. He squinted out the windshield of the
borrowed
SUV. Something didn’t add up. The wounded man waving them down seemed… wrong.

Lise, sitting beside him, turned to pull a med kit from the space between Brendan and Dwight’s seats. “Pull over, Hon. I’ll take a look at him.” She lurched sideways into her seatback as her husband hit the gas. “Ben!”

He had acted on instinct, but he knew he was right. The reasoning found form as he pushed harder on the pedal. “That bastard’s not hurt, Lise. He has blood on his right leg but he’s favoring his left?” He accelerated straight at the man in the middle of the road and, sure enough, he skipped out of the way, nimble as a monkey.

“Down!” Ben screamed as he aimed for the weakest-looking spot in the roadblock. Heads began to pop up from behind it, weapons in their hands. His blood tingled in his veins, every breath feeling like hot lead. He spared a quick glance behind him, seeing that Dwight had pushed little Brendan’s head down.

Behind them, the supposedly wounded man was running back onto the shoulder of the road to aim a revolver at them. He’d obviously forgotten the second vehicle in Ben’s little convoy because Abe slammed him down to the pavement, rolling over the body with the heavy off-road tires, still accelerating to close up with the lead vehicle.

The people behind the barricade stared in shock as twelve thousand pounds of steel and sixteen screaming cylinders bore down on them. Abe had the presence of mind to use his horn. The effect was almost comical as the ambushers broke, running for either side of the barricade. It
would
have been comical if his wife and little boy weren’t at risk of being killed by scavengers.

Ben struck the folding tables in the center of the obstruction and they smashed apart. He flinched as a heavy fragment of plywood hit the middle of the windshield, leaving a spider’s web of cracks.

Riggs had crawled into the cargo well at the back and pushed the rear window open. After a couple of failed tries, he managed to get his G-20 into action, and the researcher poured a hail of fire on the largest of the two scattered groups of attackers. His aim was terrible, but he made up for it with his complete lack of fire discipline.

Rather than controlled bursts, he simply held the trigger down, hitting nobody but scaring the hell out of them all the same. He emptied the top magazine in less than two seconds. He began to fiddle with the weapon, trying to figure out how to bring the bottom mag into play, but they were already clear of the ambush.

Ben kept up the pace for the better part of two miles before easing off on the pedal. He pulled over – a habit he expected would die soon enough – and stopped the vehicle. There was nothing but harvested fields in every direction.

He was still coursing with adrenaline. He felt the urge to go back and fight, or to keep running, but he had to stop and make sure everyone was all right.

Lise was out of her seatbelt as soon as the tires touched the gravel shoulder and she climbed into the second row.

Ben shut off the ignition, turning to see Brendan’s little arms wrapped around his mother’s neck. It’s OK, Mommy,” the little boy soothed. “Daddy told me he has collision through work.”

The four adults in the vehicle cracked up, releasing the tension of the encounter. Brendan frowned for a second, then, deciding the laugh wasn’t at his expense, joined them.

Ben saw Abe climb down from his vehicle so he opened his door and slid down to the asphalt, still chuckling. He shrugged at the curiosity on Abe’s face. “Brendan’s telling us not to worry, we’ve got good insurance…”

A snort escaped from the pilot. “Kids,” he shook his head.

“Everyone’s OK back there?” Ben looked past him to the second vehicle.

 A nod. “Whoever fired from your truck damn near shot our tires out, but he kept the bastards down.” He grinned. “They started to get back up but, soon as Sarah opened
our
back window, they decided they liked the taste of dirt.”

“That was Riggs,” Ben sighed, looking around for any sign of life, or otherwise… “You saved us back there when you took out the gunman in the road.” It wasn’t the first time Abe had proven his worth.

He had thrown his lot in with Ben on Tartarus station, the site where the plague had originated. He’d been a backup co-pilot on the shuttle carrying the euphemistically named
containment team
sent to eliminate the researchers and Chicago Detective Sergeant Ben Marks.

In light of the breakout that had circled the globe in a matter of days, obeying old orders had seemed counter-productive. Ben had the researchers who caused the plague. Dwight Young and Alan Riggs rode in the lead vehicle with Ben and his family while Sarah Mendel and Tim Brown rode with Abe. They were the only people left who understood the disease.

And they had a cure.

The cure conveyed immunity, along with a complete re-programming of the genetic clock. The inoculated would live for centuries, depending on their age at the time of the shot. Their descendants would live for millennia.

Assuming, of course, that you survived the shot.

There was a chance – somewhere in the two-percent neighborhood – that the shot would give you the plague instead of the cure. Then your body would turn into a walking incubator.

Any tissues not needed for that new role were broken down to refuel the essential systems. Skin, fatty tissue and higher brain functions were the first to go.

After helping to rescue Lise and Brendan from the quarantine zone in Chicago, Abe had agreed to get them to a government research station on Petite Tortue Island. They had just flown past Spartanburg, South Carolina,  when the EMP hit.

“Too bad your shuttle wasn’t a diesel.” Ben patted the side of the black SUV.

The military had decided to shut down transportation networks in a desperate attempt to stop the spread of the disease. A series of nukes in low orbit had generated massive electromagnetic pulses across the continental United States. It was a case of too little too late.

For Ben’s small group, it seemed more like too much too soon.

The pulse had killed aircraft and many ground vehicles. Abe’s shuttle, hardened to survive solar flares during operations outside of the ionosphere, had not lived up to the manufacturer’s hype. They crash-landed on battery backup, barely surviving the rapid descent into the middle of Sumter National Forest.

Before the crash, Ben had thought the ordeal was largely over. They would land at the research station and work on producing more vaccine. They were only hours from safety.

Now they were on the ground, nowhere near their destination, and everyone was looking to him for the next move. Abe had found a military beacon on his shuttle’s mapping system, but it was in Anderson – still in South Carolina, but far beyond the forest. First, they would have to reach Clinton.

It had taken the better part of a week to hike the twenty kilometers out to civilization.  By the time they emerged from the forest, the town of Clinton was completely deserted by the living. Only the dead walked its streets now. Leaving the rest of the group at the forest’s edge, Ben and Abe had snuck into town,  where an abandoned dealership gave them the deal of a lifetime.

They had found two large SUV’s sitting inside the maintenance department. The metal structure of the building had acted as a Faraday cage, protecting the fragile electronics from the effects of the pulse.

“Figure we’ve only got another thirty klicks to the unit,” Abe said, ignoring Ben’s gratitude. “Sixty, as the crow wanders…”

Ben looked down at the pavement, hitching his thumbs into his pistol belt. “Yeah well, you saw what happened back there,” he replied after a moment’s reflection. “Folks are desperate, especially now that the pulse has killed the power grids.” He looked up to meet the pilot’s gaze. “Closer we get to big towns, the worse it gets.”

“The longer we wander, the more time folks have to put up barricades,” Abe offered.

Ben shook his head. “No way in hell are we gonna drive through Belton.” He glanced over his shoulder at the open door as he moved in closer, his voice becoming an intense whisper. “We stick to the plan and come around the south to pick up the one-seventy-eight. We’ll follow that into town. I don’t want to risk getting us killed over a military shuttle that might have been knocked out of service by that pulse.”

Abe stared back for a few seconds, then looked away. “They would have known about it,” he muttered. “They would have shut down and waited it out. That unit was still there when we started walking,” he said, looking back at Ben, “but they might pack up and move on at any minute. We need to get our asses in gear.”

Ben nodded. “I’d rather miss catching them than run one of those barricades again,” he replied, reaching out to rest a hand on Abe’s shoulder. “I’d rather see us stranded and alive than dead trying to reach a shuttle that may already be gone.”

Kill or Cure
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I
know it’s an odd move, taking a tangent like this with a science fiction series, but I realized that Jan’s discovery in
The Dark Defiance
was going to open Pandora’s Box. If a species, virtually indistinguishable from humans, had an incredibly long lifespan, it’s a safe bet that folks would want to find out how it works and whether it could be adapted to our own bodies.

It’s also a safe bet that someone would make a complete mess of it.

So now humanity has its prize and they’re paying the price for it. Where does this leave the story? Well, for one thing, there’s still a war going on in the Dactari Republic and our forces are effectively cut off from Earth. Even if they could safely walk the planet’s surface, they still won’t be seeing re-supply or fresh recruits from home world for a very long time.

There’s an old quote attributed to Marcus Tullius Cicero: “The sinews of war are infinite money” and it will become painfully obvious in the next full installment of the
Black Ships
series. The Human/Midgaard alliance will find themselves with no supply chain and no supporting economy. Weapons break down, ships are lost to combat, or accidents and, unless fleet command can find a way to maintain their forces, all will be lost.

As if that were'nt enough – the alliance won’t be going up against clones this time. They’re facing the Dactari internal security forces who’ve been waging a low-intensity conflict against separatists for more than a thousand years. Those guys know a thing or two about asymmetrical conflict.

And we will be learning some hard lessons in the very near future.

So here’s the plan: the next full length
Black Ships
story will come out some time in January of 2013 (if we’re all still here) and a side series of novellas will grow from the
Orbital Decay
line, detailing events on Earth as Ben and his small group try to rebuild.

If you enjoyed the story, please feel free to leave a short review. If you would like to contact me, the bottom link will reach my inbox. I try to answer every email as quickly as possible, except for the ones that tell me there’s an urgent problem with my (insert random bank that I’ve never dealt with) account.

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@AGClaymore

Blog:
http://agclaymore.blogspot.com/

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