The Far Side (49 page)

Now they were nearly done, and the time line had stretched to nearly eight weeks.  Kurt appeared, with Jacob at  his side, a surprise, because they’d been working on the night shifts.  “We talked to Linda,” Kurt told him.  “We’re going to have an initial team of four, and backups after that, set in pairs, up to the twelve.”

He grinned wolfishly.  “I’m a licensed firearms dealer, and I’m authorized to possess and own automatic weapons.  We know Ezra took along a P90, plus a 9mm Glock.  It’s my understanding that Andie had a 9mm Beretta that she gave to Kris.”

“That’s what Kris told me,” Oliver told him.

“Well, we’re going in assuming the worst case... of course, the government would freak if we took what I’d like to take.  So we’ll have full P90s -- it is, we understand, Andie’s favorite weapon.”

“The ones they used on Star Gate?” Oliver asked.

“That’s the one.  Frankly, it’s a good choice.  It’s light, reliable and puts a lot of rounds downrange.  Nine hundred rounds a minute, although you only have a fifty-round magazine.  These have sights that don’t rely on ambient light, plus they’re a generally all around good weapon.

“We won’t have RPGs or grenades.  The government would shit a brick, and they would be pretty sporty underground.  We will have some flash bangs and some concussion grenades, which are, mostly, non-lethal.

“In addition, we’re going to bring along more MREs and water first.  Linda is a trooper, Ollie, a real trooper.  She remembered how Kris and Andie staged the supplies through before anything else, and we’ll do that as well.  She made what she calls the ‘Gate Room’ large enough to have that to hand.  A quick insertion team to look around -- two of us and her.  You understand that the odds are good that they aren’t going to be waiting right there for us?”

“I know.”

“Yeah. After the first three of us, including Linda, go through, if we don’t find them right quick, we’ll come back and the first four guys will hump supplies until we have everything on the Far Side.  Linda gets an exemption from that.”

“And they all have signed releases, saying they understand the risks and that they will be quarantined when they get back?” Oliver asked.

“Yeah.  The I’s are dotted and the T’s crossed, Ollie.  No sweat.  Jacob, Linda and I are going through first, with Bill Cassidy and Sean Patrick up second.  Once anyone goes in the ‘Gate Room’ they’ll get a dollop of indelible paint on their hands and won’t be allowed out of containment until the docs clear us.

“Once we’re through, we’ll have to play it by ear.  Best hope is that they’ve stayed close to the cave, and it’ll take a minimal time and just the initial team to return them.  After that -- well there are so many scenarios that it’s hard to guess what they could be.

“Ollie, like I said, I have to plan for worst cases here.  We’ll have twelve guys on site, with releases signed, ready to go on a few minutes notice.  Once Linda opens the door, no one can leave the Gate Room without going through the quarantine.  You made it clear, Ollie, that you don’t want any cheating.”

“Helen doesn’t think that it’s a big risk, but even she admits that there is some risk and it would only take one pathogen to ruin humanity’s existence.  So, we will be careful as we can be.”

“Just so you know.  I have another thirty guys on standby, their releases signed and weapons for them.  None of that is in the Gate Room, but I do have 20,000 magazines for the P90s.”

“A million rounds?”

“Yeah, you can’t get that many without a special order and some delay, so I thought, better safe than sorry, and I can always sell it at cost anywhere -- half the military and police forces in the world use these weapons.”

“Okay.”

“Once again, yeah.  Like I said, the government would shit a brick if I stocked anything heavier, ready to go.  If more than twelve men are needed, it will have well and truly hit the fan.  I have people within radio range, and we’ll send a message back with our requirements.  If the morons for the government stay cool, we won’t get rough and will keep to the quarantine requirements, although we’ll have to build a quarantine site on the other side, based on that cave.”

“It sure sounds like you’ve prepared well,” Oliver told him.

Kurt laughed.  “Eight gets you ten, we’ve forgotten something simple that will bite us in the ass if things go in the toilet...”  He paused and laughed.  “See how easy it is to fuck up in this business?”  He took a small memo recorder on a lanyard around his neck and said into it.  “Lots of TP; check with some ladies about tampons and what not.”

Oliver laughed.  “I see that, indeed I do.  Helen will know what Kris uses.”

Kurt gave him a thumbs up, and then led Jacob off to see about a secure storeroom where Otto’s garage used to be.  There had been a lot of egg breakage in the neighborhood, Oliver thought as he looked around.  The government had bought out the neighbors before he’d gotten out of jail and he’d made the government an offer they couldn’t refuse about the property.  With luck, he promised the land back to the original owners for what he’d paid for the properties.

Two days, that was what Linda had told him earlier.  How was it that time had seemed to rocket past until now, and now it was dragging?

Chapter 19
:: Gray Dawn

Oliver shook Linda Walsh’s hand, happy to see that she’d tossed her crutches -- her casts had gone a week before.  She, Kurt Sandusky and Jacob Lawson were standing in a group, just outside the containment area.  Oliver shook the other two men’s hands, then shook hands down the line of others who, if they were lucky and so was Oliver, wouldn’t be needed.

He’d wanted a glass wall, but the government bureaucrats had nixed it.  So, they had video cameras, and there was both a radio repeater and video repeater that would go through the Far Side door if everything worked.

“The machine is up and running, all is nominal,” Linda told them a short time later.  “Ah!  The door is forming!”  Linda turned to a rather husky brunette, visible in the monitor and mock saluted her.  “Jo -- it’s all yours now!”

“I’ll gi’ ya all she’s got, Cap’n!” the woman replied in a badly done Scots accent.

They watched the door form and Linda’s voice was calm and collected.  “No hazards detected.  Kurt, your turn.”

Kurt Sandusky walked up to the blue rectangle carrying a temperature probe in his hands.  “There is a steady breeze blowing from this room into the Far Side.  Looks like Linda got the atmospheric pressure pegged.  Wait one.”

He leaned forward, flashlight in hand, and his head vanished through the door.

Oliver was frustrated after a second when Kurt stepped through the door.  The video feed was showing nothing but bare rock, and Oliver thought he’d scream.  Kurt reappeared carrying a handful of yellow notebook paper.  He made a cut off motion to Linda who stared at him for a moment, and then began shutting things down.

“Houston!  We have a happy face!” Kurt told them on the commlink.

“Then why shut it down?” Oliver asked, trying not to let either his anger or frustration show.

“Because there was a thick wad of paper sitting under an air horn.  Look at the top sheet.” He held it up to the camera, and there were three words, all underlined, with a large exclamation mark at the end.  The paper said simply “
Read Me First
!”

Kurt waved the papers.  “Assuming the girls aren’t stupid, I thought we should read this first.  About half of the water is gone, as are all the MREs.  There is no conceivable way that three people could have eaten them all in ten weeks, unless they were pigs.  Even after ten weeks, there should have been something like four hundred pounds of rations left, which three of them couldn’t carry off.

“All things considered, I came back.”

He waved the papers.  “Is someone recording this?”

“You bet,” Oliver told him.

“And it’s going out live on the web,” Linda added.  No one had ever found out how she’d gotten audio of her captivity out, but the fact was that she had.  The government had x-rayed her, run CAT and MRI scans on her -- all without success.

“Okay,” Kurt told them, “taking this from the top.

“’I am Andie Schulz, inventor, of Los Angeles, California, the United States of America, found on the planet Earth.  According to my watch it’s a few m
inutes after 8 pm on June 17th.

“I’m sitting in a cave, writing by the light of a Coleman lantern.  Kris, Ezra, and I are well and in no immediate danger -- however, that’s now.  In a short while we’re leaving here and heading north.  There is a group of people about two miles southwest of our location who already have expressed their intent to harm us.  Kris killed one and captured another -- we’re fairly sure that they won’t be happy about that.’”

Oliver looked at Helen who had blinked.  “Kris?” she mouthed.  Oliver nodded.

“This is a small chamber that is part of a larger complex of rooms that has, to put it mildly, a varied history.  Unfortunately, our earthly prejudices are going to screw up your perceptions of what we’ve found.  Take everything you know about political correctness and file it under ‘not objective reality.’

“I don’t know the name of this planet, but the people who live here call this the ‘East Finger.’  They also have a ‘Middle Finger’ and a ‘West Finger,’ each are south-running peninsulas some hundreds of miles long.  On the bottom of this stack is a word map of this ‘East Finger.’  Making a map here is considered treason -- you have no idea how hard it was to convince them to let us describe it even with words.

“We’d been here less than a day when we ran into some of the local people.  I hope Mrs. Boyle and the other scientists won’t freak out, but while this isn’t the Star Gate universe, the people here are people.  Erect, bipedal mammals, with male external genitalia and breasts on the females.  Good luck figuring out how that’s possible!

“I might add, no matter how much I like Star Gate, the TV show, everyone speaking English was just too much to swallow.  The people here speak something very different, and I don’t think Daniel Jackson or anyone else would recognize it.

“And, speaking of recognition, we have some video tape for you on the rock with this.  The shot we made of the night sky isn’t as good as Kris hoped it would be, but there is one important fact: there is no Milky Way here -- so this might be Oz, but it’s not Kansas.

“Okay, we met some people and invited them over to the cave.  This caused a little consternation among the locals.  They didn’t know the cave complex existed, but they recognized the components of its history.

“Before you go outside, make sure you never forget to check the sky in all directions every few minutes.  Dinosaurs never died out on this planet, and there is an aerial predator that stands about eight feet tall and has a wingspan of fourteen or sixteen feet.  They also have a mouth that’s two or three feet long and lined with razor-sharp teeth...”

Andie’s report was a dry dissertation of events ending with their impending evacuation of the ancient rookery.  There were final reminders about the possibility of hostile natives just outside the door and her early analysis of Chain Breakers, Dralka, and the other fighting groups.

Of course, the information opened up another can of worms.  Half the government experts were wetting their pants about “first contact situations undertaken by amateurs,” others were panicked about “cultural contamination” as much as they’d earlier worried about bacterial contamination.

Oliver could only sigh.  He had contributed a fair degree to the current paralysis of decision-making at the Federal level.  The President was facing an imminent investigation by a joint committee of the Senate and House of Representatives about his money dealings with various entities.  Everyone knew that the representatives in the House were bringing the action in a hurry in an attempt to escape similar scrutiny themselves.  Senators were threatening filibusters, personal holds -- every tactic that the Senate had devised in a long and devious history of such tactics, to slow any action on anything, particularly on its own members who couldn’t withstand the scrutiny.

However, government or not, they had to deal with Linda Walsh, who had become the Scarlet Pimpernel of the 21st Century.  Conversations of senior politicians started showing up posted online.  The NSA spent thousands of man hours looking for bugs, and almost uniformly didn’t find any.  The few they found were older and not the ones doing the damage.

One thing that Oliver had learned early in the movie business was that if something is working, doing what you want, don’t try to tinker with it.  Sometimes just calling attention to it was enough to make it break, so he let Linda have her head.

Much faster than he thought would be possible, the government appointed Paul Tobias, a minor NASA engineer who also had a degree in political science, as a representative of the government who would advise the intrepid explorers on the Far Side.

To put it mildly, that didn’t work well.  Oliver could see the man was pale and trembling, and as he went through the decontamination process he was barely able to walk.  When he was handed a P90, he promptly wet his pants.  Kurt patted him on the shoulder and gave the fellow over to the medics to sedate.

Linda just laughed and turned on the door, then five of them moved pallets of food, water, gear, and an entire pallet of ammunition for the P90’s through.

The additional eight men were alert and geared up, waiting only the word to go through.  Oliver had asked one of the men earlier, tall and blonde, good looking and appearing confident, if he was scared.  The man had laughed.  “Hey, think about it!  Which would you rather do: go out the ass end of a C-130 at thirty-two thousand feet in the dark over Indian country?  Or go into a teenage girl’s walk-in closet in the early light of dawn?  Knowing her father isn’t home?”

The absurdity of the comparison had brought a smile to Oliver’s lips and laughter to the other men of the teams.

Then Kurt and Jacob moved ahead in front, with Linda bringing up the rear, with radios and a camera with a direct feed through the door.

The explorers went into the larger room beyond the Far Side Gate Room and looked around.  “I see the secondary exit,” Kurt said, shining his light upwards.  It was hard for Oliver to see much except shadows, but he accepted the information.

They went into the main room, and it too was deserted.  Still, the camera dwelled on the fire ring and then on the barracks room and the prisoner’s quarters.  Oliver snorted.  The media were already exercising political correctness on the story.  The people held in that room hadn’t been slaves and had suddenly become mixed genders, even though Andie had said that they’d have all been women.  Nope, according to the newspapers and TV nightly news, prisoners -- men and women -- had been held there.  It was insane!

Only Kurt went forward to explore the main entrance, and he returned after five minutes.  “It’s still sealed, and the stone with the white dot is still facing the outside of the cave, so it looks to have been undisturbed.  I’m going up to the OP to see what I can see.”

Linda followed him across the main chamber, and both Kurt and Jacob scrambled up the ropes much more quickly than Oliver ever could have.  A moment later Kurt was back down.  “We’ve got trouble in River City, Oliver.  Andie said about ninety of them, and one wrecked ship that they were breaking up for shelters.

“Well, there are two large ships offshore now, and there are a couple of hundred people on the beach.  Ummm... about two-thirds of them fit that physical description of the Tengri that Andie gave us.”

That is, they were tall and black.  Color had been dropped in the news reports and the height and weight had been changed to “slim and above average in height.”

“Oliver, if those guys are really hostile, the only way we can get more than one or two people past them will be to shoot our way through -- we’re talking a hundred or two hundred people.  There is certain to be collateral damage as a result.”

“Could you go back up and use the camera,” Linda asked.  “So we can let people see what it is we’re facing?”

Kurt agreed, and he and Jacob went back to the spy holes.  It must have been difficult for Linda, standing alone in the dark, only being able to hear Kurt’s description, and would only be able to view the pictures later.  For Oliver it was exploration as history would never have imagined it.

It was impossible to tell how far away the people outside were, but it looked like several miles.  There were a lot of people working on something on the ground, something that Oliver had no clue what it could be.

The two ships anchored offshore looked like typical 18th or 19th century ships, each with three masts and, at the moment, bare of sails.  One was significantly larger than the other, and Oliver had no idea how many people it could carry.  Certainly there were a lot of people on the beach.

And, as Kurt had described earlier, a lot of them were willowy-tall and black, while most of the people doing the work were white.  He idly wondered how the NAACP would react to black people holding white folks in bondage.

After ten minutes, Kurt and Jacob returned to where Linda was waiting.  This time it was hard for Oliver, who could only hear Linda, Kurt and Jacob talking on the radio and couldn’t see the pictures.

Finally, Linda started talking to everyone directly again.

“I didn’t want to say anything, because who am I?  A math nerd from Caltech.  You guys are supposed to be the experts.  When I heard Kurt describe two ships here, I was curious.  Now I’m more than curious -- I’m concerned.  Mr. Boyle, you’re going to make sure we have a couple of broadband shortwave receivers with the next group that comes through.”

“Shortwave?” Oliver asked, mystified.

“Yeah, I mean we take it for granted, so maybe it’s not the surprise for you as it is to me, and maybe you don’t understand the implications for Andie, Kris, and Ezra.  The question I had to ask myself was how did those ships get here?  The description of the first party was that they were castaways, their ship badly damaged and being salvaged for firewood and shelter.

“That map said the peninsula is four hundred miles long -- if those ships were blown here by a storm, how would they have known where to find each other?  More importantly, how would they know to look for the third ship?  I think they have radio.”

Oliver frowned.  “Sailing ships and radios?”