Season Of The Harvest (Harvest Trilogy, Book 1) (41 page)

It’s going to get
really ugly
, she thought, and she wasn’t
sure how they would be able to stop it, if they could at
all.

That was when it
struck her:
You’re in
charge
, a little voice in her mind, the
one she had hated since she was a child, whispered. It sent a chill
down her spine, because she had never considered herself a leader.
She was strong-willed and as tough as anyone, but she was a
follower and always had been. But now…

Gregg was almost
certainly dead. Naomi and Jack were fighting for their lives on
some God-forsaken island in the Arctic, and the world was quickly
going to hell around them. She knew she couldn’t wait much longer
for certain things to be done.
Get some
balls, woman
, she berated herself.
We’re at the tipping point now. You can pray all
you want that Naomi and the others will make it out alive and
hopefully succeed. But you have no idea when that will be, and
certain things have to be done now, or it may be too
late.

That’s when she looked up and saw
the others in the command center looking at her expectantly. They
had all come to the same conclusion, and knew that they had to
prepare for what Gregg had intended the base to do: act as an ark
to help guarantee humanity’s long-term survival in a war that was
finally erupting into the open. The biggest problem was that what
they were about to do would raise the base’s signature to anyone
looking closely for them, drastically increasing the chances that
they’d be discovered. If that happened too soon, the game would be
over.

“Shit,” she muttered. “Get the Phase
One protocols going,” she ordered. “Send out the personnel recall.
Burn the single-use phones.” Every EDS member was supposed to carry
at all times a special phone whose sole purpose was to receive a
single text message, a unique code sent to each of them informing
them of an emergency recall, after which the phone was to be
destroyed. Many members would be coming to this base, but Gregg had
purchased and renovated several other Cold War missile facilities
across the country as survival shelters for the other EDS teams and
their families. But this base was the only ark, the only seed
vault. “And get the nitrogen tanker in here. We’re going to need to
top off the coolant for the vaults. What’s our diesel fuel level?”
she asked the woman at the logistics station.

“We’re at a hundred percent,” she
said. “The tanks were topped off last week just after the weekly
generator test. All the other power systems are on-line, backups
are ready. Food stocks are at ninety-eight percent, and I’ve
already scheduled a delivery to bring that up to one hundred within
two hours. The deep water wells are in the green, with the water
tanks continuously topped off. Everything else – spares, weapons,
ammunition, equipment, medical supplies – is ready.”

“Intel?” Renee asked.

“Aside from the world going down the
toilet, as you well know,” a young man said, nodding his head
toward the newscast, “we’ve had a huge spike in web searches for
EDS and our leadership staff, mostly from U.S. government agencies,
but also from computer IP addresses located in several other
countries. But there haven’t been any active pings or attempted
intrusions against our networks so far: hiding behind the front
company firewalls seems to be working. As long as nobody knows
where to look for us, they’re going to have a hard time finding
us.”

“Good. But just make sure you keep a
damn close eye on outbound activity,” Renee cautioned him. He was a
bright kid, but tended to get a little cocky. “They turned Ellen
against us. It’s possible it happened to someone else, too, and I
don’t want anybody giving away the show. I limited transmit access
from the network to the machines here in the control center, so if
you see so much as a single damn packet going out from any other
machines, or anything fishy from here, I want to know about it
right away. Ditto for phone calls, cans and string, whatever. Got
it?”

“Yes, ma’am,” the young man said,
nodding.

Cocky, maybe, but
he took his job dead serious
, she told
herself.
As we all need to
now
. “Security?”

“Nothing unusual going on topside,”
drawled a middle-aged man with receding hair who carried a
long-barreled .44 magnum revolver in a shoulder holster. “The
ground sensor grid is active with one hundred percent coverage,
with all sensors up and functioning properly. I just did a manual
check of the blast valves: all of them checked out fine, and the
base is in hard condition.” In the Cold War days, “hard” meant that
everything was closed and locked down in case of a nuclear blast.
Any time the blast valves or the portal doors topside were open,
the base was “soft,” where the overpressure from a blast could
potentially destroy the base. While all of them hoped that they
would never have to worry about nukes, the principle was still the
same: the site would be a lot tougher to get into with all of the
topside doors and valves closed. “I also checked the hardened
sensor array and the external camera: they’re ready to go, too, if
we need ‘em.” The base had a set of large tubes, about a foot in
diameter that contained a variety of instruments. They normally
were kept retracted, flush with the concrete at ground level not
far from the portal entrance. The original sensor arrays had been
designed so they could be raised like periscopes to take samples of
the atmosphere after a nuclear attack. The old instruments had been
replaced with far more sophisticated devices that could not only
measure nuclear radiation, but could take biological and chemical
samples, as well. The camera the man had referred to was in a
similar retractable tube. They normally never used it, because it
was actually inside the truck repair shed above them, which had its
own video cameras in various places for surveillance of the portal
entrance area. This camera would only ever be used for real if the
sheet metal building above them was blown away.

“Okay, then,” Renee breathed,
nodding her thanks to the man for his report. “Let’s get our people
inside and button up. Make sure everyone is armed and has a basic
load of ammunition.” The others nodded gravely. “In the meantime,”
she eyed the seemingly endless stream of bad news on the main
display panel, “let’s see how this crap plays out.”

As the others went about their
tasks, she turned her attention back to what had stymied her since
Jack’s arrival: Sheldon’s damnable super-encrypted file. She hated
to think of how many of her brain cells had probably died trying to
figure out this riddle, and grinned in dark-humored amusement as
she imagined millions of her neurons hurling themselves into
frustrated oblivion.

She stared at the
pass phrase Jack had given her. She had already tried everything
else she could think of to transpose the letters or words of the
quote into a pass phrase that would actually
work
.

“It had to be something Sheldon
could have done in his head,” she muttered to herself as she stared
at the screen. It would have been something tough, maybe
impossible, for someone without his knowledge to do. But he
was...had been incredibly smart. “And it has to be something he
thought I could figure out.”

She glanced up at one of the smaller
monitors on the front display that showed various figures about the
base’s status. It contained a table, columns and rows of
numbers.

“Wait a minute,” she whispered,
trying to suppress the tingle that had suddenly sparked into life
in her lower spine. The table reminded her of the ASCII, or
American Standard Code for Information Interchange, which were
numbers that represented text characters in computers and
communications equipment. Every letter had a corresponding ASCII
number, starting with 65 for capital A and running through 122 for
lower-case z.

She tried a direct substitution for
the pass phrase, typing in the numbers instead of the letters for
the pass phrase, but that didn’t work.

“Shit!” she cursed. She knew she was
close. She had to be.

Then something Jack had said came
back to her: Sheldon had wanted the quote on his
tombstone…

Tombstone
. Sheldon had written a
song with that title. He’d given her a copy of all of his scores,
because she enjoyed music (including his, they had both discovered
with some surprise), and had once been half-decent on the piano
herself. She remembered Tombstone as one of the few songs he’d
written that she had absolutely hated.

“Sheldon, you son of a bitch,” she
whispered to herself. “This had better be it.” She quickly looked
up the musical score for the song, pulling it up on her
screen.

Try
addition
, she thought, quickly setting up
a spreadsheet with the letters of the pass phrase, then transcoding
them into ASCII numbers. Below the numbers, she put the number of
the notes, from 1 to 7 for A through G, corresponding to the notes
at the beginning of the song. Since most of the notes went with
words, not individual letters, she had to make some educated
guesses, carrying the additive numbers across several letters to
line up with the corresponding musical notes, or in some cases
having several notes for a single word to match the song. She had
the spreadsheet add the two numbers, then punched them into the
password box for the file.

Access
Denied
, it told her.

“Okay, be that way, you son of a
bitch,” she said. “I’m not done yet.”

She ran the same thing again, but
used subtraction instead, taking away 1 through 7, depending on the
note, from each ASCII character.

Holding her breath, she carefully
typed in the resulting numerical sequence into the password
box.

The box disappeared, and the
encrypted file opened to reveal that it wasn’t just a file, but a
folder containing several documents.

“Hot damn!” she cried. She’d finally
done it.

***

Vlad stepped into the biohazard
room, carefully closing and sealing the door behind him. Everything
seemed normal, with the four biosafety containment chambers just as
he had left them last.

He moved over to the one containing
the rhesus monkey and peered through the Lexan panel into the
animal’s living space. It was empty. Then he noticed that the
Lexan, an extremely tough polycarbonate plastic, wasn’t just clear,
it was gone. Vanished.

“Not possible,” he breathed as he
quickly opened the chamber, then stepped back as it fell apart in
his hands. Everything should have had thick rubber seals, and there
had been a variety of plastic parts: all of them were gone. All
that was left was bare metal and various little bits and pieces
that weren’t made of plastic. Peering inside at the electrical
connections, he could see bare copper wires, with all of their
insulating coatings gone. He caught a glimpse of something in the
bottom of the systems cabinet that should not have been there. It
was a small, greasy-looking pool of liquid that had a foul,
chemical odor. It clearly wasn’t feces, but he had no idea what it
was, and he wasn’t about to touch it.

“
Gdye vy?
”
he called to the monkey. “Where are you?” The room was small and it
couldn’t have gotten far.

He checked the other chambers, and
was shocked to discover that they were in exactly the same
condition as the first: all the plastic components – everything
that contained a significant quantity of carbon, he realized – was
simply gone.

He stood in the middle of the lab,
hands on hips, completely bewildered. That’s when he saw that the
computer at the workstation in the corner of the room was now
nothing more than a jumble of metal, wire, and circuit boards, as
if all the plastic had been dissolved away. Just like in the first
biosafety chamber, there was a puddle of foul-smelling, viscous
liquid on the table.

“
Chyort voz’mi
,” he breathed, unable to comprehend where the monkey had
gone, and wondering what had happened to the equipment in the room.
“You cannot have just disappeared...”

He searched among the neatly stacked
boxes of medical equipment and disposables like rubber gloves and
replacement modules for the chambers, again noting that everything
made of plastic or rubber was simply gone.

And there was no sign of the
monkey.

There were no other places to look,
and he knew from the monitor logs that no one else had accessed the
door. There was no other way out of the room than the door through
which he’d entered. The only other access points were the small
airlock for food items and the vent in the ceiling.

The small airlock wasn’t an option
for a simian escapee, as it was locked and opened only from the
outside. That left the ceiling vent and its filtration
system.

Frowning, he looked up...and
screamed as a shapeless mass dropped onto his face from the vent
above, where it had just feasted on the rubber seals of the
biological filter.

No one heard Vlad’s brief, tortured
struggle in the closed room.