Polaris (23 page)

While Harkness worked to create the mythology of the cure, Strack worked day and night, too, doing what he could to bring about an actual remedy. He had visualizations on his computer similar to Harkness's, but instead of words and trending topics, Strack dealt with deaths and mortality rates, secondary infections and quarantines. His screens were more difficult to interpret than Harkness's, but he assured Pete that despite whatever level of Alliance bullshit accompanied it, the flu was very much real. And, he said, for the time being, damn near unstoppable.

Pete looked closely at the sporadic communications he got from the rest of Strack's extended team, especially those on Eris Island. The war was making it difficult to communicate, and impossible to get them the supplies they needed. Nonetheless, they were making progress on a cure, the reports said. Harkness dutifully sanitized the reports, elaborated where necessary, and published the results in their weekly meetings. Pete himself began presenting during his allotted five minutes, explaining how they were using their new resources, where the anticipated trouble spots were. He'd adopted Strack's philosophy: they were curing a disease, and no matter what, that was a positive thing.

One morning, Pete came into their new, lavishly appointed office to find everyone hushed. Strack was standing at the front of the group, with Harkness at his side. He held a message in his hand in a red
TOP SECRET
folder.

“We've been waiting for you,” said Strack.

“What happened?”

“They did it,” said Strack, so quietly Pete could hardly hear him. “They've got the cure.”

“And it's just in time,” said Harkness. “They're evacuating the island.”

“What?” said Pete. “Why? That place is a fortress.”

“They're almost starved out. We can't get them supplies, and we've got intel that there might be enemy submarines in the area. Typhon puts commando teams on their subs, this is what they're good at: raids, search-and-destroy missions. If they land a team on Eris Island, those researchers, and everything they've done, could be at risk.”

“They'll never get a detachment on that island,” said Pete. He felt an old pride rising up in him. “It's unapproachable. The drones will get anything on the surface, and shoals on all sides prevent a submerged boat from getting close. That's why we picked it.”

“We can't take that risk,” Harkness said. “The military detachment on Eris evacuated weeks ago. We're sending a small plane out to get the medical team. It's probably already in the air.”

Pete walked across their large new office, to the map of the world that covered almost an entire wall. With his finger, he traced the journey of a West Coast plane to the spot where Eris Island would be, if it showed up on the map. “Flying at night, I hope,” he said, almost to himself.

“They did it,” said Strack. He was brimming with pride. “They really did it! We found a cure!”

“And the information pump is primed,” said Harkness. “As soon as that plane gets back on Alliance soil, the story will start to flow: the Alliance has cured the scourge of our age.”

Harkness walked to his stack of consoles and pushed buttons on a remote until all the major news sites were on-screen. Every channel was talking about the flu. Hospitals were turning away patients in Jacksonville. Schools were closing in Indiana. Public swimming pools had been ordered closed by the surgeon general.

Pete was still staring at the world map. He looked at his watch and did some rough math in his head. “It's almost sunrise on Eris Island,” he said.

 

CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE

Commander Jennifer Carlson was in the wardroom enjoying a rare moment of solitude when the phone buzzed at her knee. She jumped; her instincts were humming.
Maybe it's the storm,
she thought; the rare squall blew through the area around Eris and made the ship rock in a way that she hadn't felt in weeks. The heavy weather seemed to announce that something was about to happen, and she wasn't inclined to ignore her instincts. They had served her well.

Because of her past success, Typhon had grudgingly allowed her vast free rein. Even her marines had stopped asking her when they might form a landing party and start blowing things up. Instead, they just continued to work out in the makeshift gym they'd created in the crew's mess, ate constantly, and cleaned their many, many weapons. Carlson had heard that Alliance boats carried no small arms, some philosophical statement on the purity of the deterrent nature of their submarines. It was typical of their mealymouthed moralism, she thought. Carrying rifles and grenade launchers would be too dirty for them, but nuclear warheads were somehow acceptable.

Almost all blue-water shipping had been eliminated by the scourge of the drones, so other Typhon sub skippers had taken to the brown waters off the coasts, picking off an occasional cargo barge or garbage scow, or lobbing a cruise missile at a factory. She had stayed near Eris Island, certain that at some point, the war would turn on that tiny speck of land. This despite the fact that they hadn't gotten a whiff of anything from the Alliance since she tried to kill that enemy submarine with a life raft.

Once every two days, they came to periscope depth to shoot trash and receive the broadcast from command. Increasingly, those messages were from impatient admirals wondering what she was doing out there. She didn't give two shits. Sooner or later, she knew, the Alliance would try something important at Eris Island. And she would blow it to hell.

“Captain,” she said, picking up the phone as it buzzed a second time.

“Captain, please come to the bridge.” She could hear the excitement in the officer of the deck's voice. It was Lieutenant Banach, and he wasn't prone to overreacting. She rushed to control.

The ship was bobbing at periscope depth, the diving officer and the ship's automated system doing an admirable job of keeping depth control in challenging conditions. They had come shallow as a matter of routine. In addition to shooting trash and transmitting messages, they ventilated briefly, bringing fresh air onboard. She was still wary of Eris and the medical work they did there, so she always insisted that the ship be upwind of Eris Island and at least ten miles away when they took a breath, lest they inhale some dangerous microbe invented by their enemies.

They'd also been delayed slightly by the storm, not wanting to stick their nose up in rough seas. Coming to PD was always fraught with danger. Like an animal at a watering hole, the submarine was at her most vulnerable at periscope depth, slow and exposed. While their titanium hull made them invisible to the magnetic detectors of the drones at periscope depth, if they broached the surface, and the deck of the submarine came out of the water, they would be visible to the drones' other sensors. The swarm would be on them in seconds in a frenzy. But periscope depth was also when you could see the world through human eyes, via the finely crafted lens of the periscope, a sensor far more deadly than any of the electronics they'd been entrusted with. When she stepped on the conn, Banach stepped aside immediately and yielded the periscope.

“Do you see it?” he asked as she focused.

She took a moment, waiting for a rogue splash that had fallen across the lens to fall. And there it was.

“I do,” she said, although it was difficult in the early dawn light: a plane, flying close to the ocean and painted in dappled gray camouflage. Her officer of the deck was to be commended for spotting it. She automatically centered it in the scope, pushed a red button on the right handle, entering its position in the fire control system.

“Alliance?”

“It is,” she said. “A small transport plane, though, not a combat plane.”

“What a fool!” said the OOD. “At that speed and altitude? In this part of the ocean? Permission to ready a missile, Captain.” He had already raised the surface-to-air missile mast, behind the scope.

“Wait,” she said, smiling grimly even as she looked through the scope. She felt the roll of the ship in her feet, rare at this latitude, and it spoke to her. “His low altitude and speed are deliberate,” she said. “He's trying to look like a drone heading for Eris. He wanted to land before sunrise, but was delayed by the storm, just like we were.”

She heard Banach step to the chart and confirm it.

“He's smart,” he said. “An hour ago, it was completely dark, and we would have thought just that: that he was a drone, even seeing it on radar. But I saw the asshole.”

“Hmmmm.”

“Don't we still want to shoot it?” he asked.

It was tempting. At this range, with a clear visual, they would knock that plane right out of the sky. All she had to do was point the missile, and push a button. But something stopped her, a hunter's instinct for a bigger prize, a risk worth taking.

“No,” she said. “Let's wait. If he's going to Eris, he's not staying there—he's going to pick something up.”

“You're sure, Captain?”

“I'd rather shoot down a full plane than an empty one.”

“Aye, Captain,” said Banach. He stepped to the chart and began plotting a course toward the island. “When do you think he might leave Eris?”

“My guess? Sunset.” She smiled. “To the island at ahead flank, on this bearing.”

“Aye, aye, Captain.”

*   *   *

Dr. Manakas waited in the dark for the plane, but it was delayed by a rare bit of bad weather near the island. His mind created images as he stared in the darkness and worried; at one point he thought he saw a man over the hill, watching them. That was impossible, he knew; they were the last human beings on the island, the military detachment having long since left. But he kept staring, and when dawn finally arrived, the man (or mirage) was gone.

The plane landed soon after. The doctors who remained on Eris, eight in all, cheered as it touched down and deftly dodged the pockmarks on the runway. The plane was smaller than Dr. Manakas had expected, painted with splotches of camo, barely bigger than the drones that investigated it curiously before darting away.

They greeted the dashing pilot as a hero, even more so when they learned that he'd brought food: a cooler of steaks, two dozen eggs, potato chips, and real Coke. They'd been living on leftover Army rations and instant coffee for a month. They cooked on the charcoal grill that had been languishing for months for lack of real meat.

“We were expecting you before sunrise,” said Manakas as they ate steak and eggs for breakfast at the picnic table outside the research building. He was careful to say it away from the group, not wanting to convey his concern.

“Bad storm fifty miles east of here,” said the pilot. “Delayed me about an hour while I went around it.”

“See anything out there?”

“Nope,” he said, looking past him to the ocean. “Not a thing.”

But Manakas could hear the note of resignation in his voice.

*   *   *

They were scheduled to leave the island at sunset; they had all day to prepare. But they had long since staged the small amount of personal gear they were allowed to take, stuffed into seabags and dusty suitcases. The results of their research were packed more carefully, in five tightly sealed watertight plastic containers. They were transparent, and you could see the rainbow of hanging files within some, hard drives and carefully swaddled vials and beakers in others. The five plastic containers made a small tower inside the plane, a monument to years of effort. The plane was loaded quickly, so they just sat and waited for sunset, and watched the drones.

The medical team had learned every habit and sound of the drones, as they were the only type of life that could thrive on Eris Island. They knew the buzzing sound of an engine revving up prior to takeoff; they knew the difference in the engine note of an unarmed bird returning to the island and the more baritone sound of a drone fully weighed down by a bomb. They knew the sound of the dance they made in the sky, the herky-jerky noise they made as they moved rapidly back and forth. And they knew the cool, liquid clicking of a drone that was picking up a bomb. The pilot was fascinated as he watched, and asked for explanations from the researchers of drone behavior that they had long since become bored with.

Dr. Manakas, the head of the detachment, was leaving behind a cache of personal effects in his small office; they'd told them that weight would be limited on the small plane. He had packed a few photographs, the ones of his wife and children that had sustained him. He had a shelf full of novels that he loved but would leave behind. A closet full of lab equipment that had served him so well would also be abandoned. He would even miss the view, he thought as he looked through the window behind his desk. It was starkly beautiful, in a way—rocks, water, and sky—and looking in that direction, the view wasn't too polluted by drones or their bombs. He hadn't taken enough time to enjoy that view, he realized. Had been too busy trying to find the cure. But they had done that much, at least.

“Are you ready?” It was his protégée, Dr. Sandra Liston, from Columbia, a brilliant doctor ten years younger than him, who did more for the cure than any of them. She was beautiful, with jet-black hair that had grown long during her two years on the island, and legs that were toned from the hikes she took up the island's leeward hills every day before breakfast. In one of his books along the wall, Graham Greene had written about the “love-charm” of bombs during the blitz in London during World War II. As the noose tightened around Eris Island, Manakas knew exactly what Greene had meant.

Inevitably, after a year on the island, he and Liston had begun sleeping together, a poorly kept secret in their tiny community and a failing that seemed to be largely forgiven by their peers despite their families at home. Somewhat more recently, he had fallen in love with her, and that, he knew, was a better kept secret and far less forgivable. He had told Sandra one night, as they lay on the bed in his tiny room, moonlight washing over them, the sound of surf coming through his open window. She hadn't been able to say it back to him. They both knew that one way or another, the beginning of their escape marked the end of their affair.