Arisen, Book Six - The Horizon Read online

  “What is?”

  His face remained emotionless as he answered. “That life has never been safe from death. That the universe is overwhelmingly a dead, cold, inhospitable place – and catastrophically dangerous to life, in every form. That we, the living, have always been the outliers, the aberration. Only a freak chain of improbable accidents produced the bubble of conditions that was necessary for the rise of life, and our species, in this tiny film of air and water stuck to a rock that’s whirling through the void.”

  Sarah just exhaled as she tried to take all that in.

  But Park wasn’t done. “And, within that bubble, we're outnumbered billions to one by microbes – bacteria and viruses, most of which are trying to invade and eat us. We survived a long time – not as long as the dinosaurs, but a long time. And now maybe our run of good luck is up. The fact that it’s actually the dead stalking us just makes literal what has always been true: that death has always been stalking us. Every minute. Individually – but, much worse, as a species. Life itself, as a phenomenon.”

  Sarah nodded carefully. It was definitely not her way to indulge dark thoughts like these. She never saw the point, preferring to focus on the concrete, on what could be done here and now to make things better. She was tempted to tell him they had immediate problems to solve, and he was going to have to man the fuck up. But she finally decided to be smarter than that – to use his own logic, and ease him back toward a state of mind where he was able to do his job.

  She said, “I suppose it’s true that we’ve never found any evidence of other life in the universe. As far as we know, it’s just us. Maybe there are reasons for that. Why life doesn’t make it.”

  Park was sort of looking off into the distance. “Maybe we’re all there’s ever been. If so, the universe woke up when it created us. And now it’s on the verge of going back to sleep again.”

  “Okay, so maybe it is just us in the universe. Maybe we’re it.” She stepped forward, grabbed his upper arm, and made him look her straight in the eye. “That’s a hell of a lot to fight for, then. Wouldn’t you say?”

  And now, Sarah thought. Enough with the existential musing – and the self-pity. It was time to start fighting again.

  Park seemed to come back to the room, his eyes refocusing. He nodded sharply. Maybe he was ready for the fight again. Either way, he knew he had to act like he was, and get on with it.

  And with that, the wall phone went off. Sarah pulled it from its cradle. But before she could speak, it shouted in her ear.

  “Go for Drake!”

  “Commander, this is Sar—”

  “You’ve got the scientist there? Put him on!”

  “Yes, yes.” Sarah started to hand over the handset, then saw a speaker button on the base and stabbed it. “You have talk-through for Dr. Park,” she said, still instinctively using police radio procedure. Couldn’t hurt.

  “Dr. Park!” Drake was still shouting, as if over wind noise. It sounded like he might be out on the flight deck.

  “Yes, sir.”

  “Be advised that CentCom is sending three of their top bioscience guys out of Edinburgh – to review your findings and build on them. They’ll also be flying in a shedload of expensive biotech equipment.”

  Park looked flummoxed. “Flying in?”

  “Yeah. You’ve seen that big flat part on top of the ship? Planes land on it. Their ETA is fourteen hundred today. Kindly be up top to help greet them. Got it? Good, Drake out.”

  He signed off before Sarah could bring up the matter of them needing a current virus sample. She’d just have to make it happen by another route. But before she could formulate her new plan, a speaker went off overhead – the ship’s tannoy.

  It was announcing something that Sarah personally would have liked to attend. She knew a little about fallen comrades. And she wanted to pay her respects. But there was no time for sentiment, certainly not for the two of them.

  She could hear the clocks ticking loudly all around them.

  Consecrate

  JFK - Flight Deck

  “I’m guessing,” Handon said, into the clean open air rushing around them, “that Sergeant Coulson wasn’t in that meeting just to use that cute Captain America line.”

  Fick chuckled. The two of them were walking the length of the ship toward the stern, after exiting the meeting and descending the ladder outside the island. “Coulson’s now my senior fire team leader – and effectively my new XO, since Gunny Blane bought it.”

  Handon looked sideways at him, the stiff breeze ruffling his thick hair. “What, none of the guys you took to Beaver Island wanted the job? I thought they were your favorite fire team.”

  Fick sadly shook his head, angled down into the wind. “Nah. From that group, only Graybeard is both alive and unwounded. And he sure as hell didn’t want it.”

  “Smart man,” Handon said.

  “Bet your ass he is. Not by accident is he still alive.”

  At the end of their briefing, it had finally been agreed that Coulson would lead two of Fick’s MARSOC fire teams on the scavenging mission to SAS Saldanha. The Marines were pretty dinged up at this point, plus depopulated. Their force was down to seventeen bodies, having started the ZA with thirty. But this mission was too important.

  Handon had volunteered his own people, and offered to lead the mission himself. But Drake knew, as everyone knew, that Alpha had to rest up and heal up – for the big show, in Somalia. As did Fick’s top fire team.

  Everything depended on it.

  Approaching the stern end of the flight deck, the two of them could see a huge and growing crowd of sailors and officers forming up into ranks. They made a great mass of dark blue and white, crowding and protecting a thin box of brown wood that was front and center.

  It was a single coffin, which would symbolically be interned – for all the heroes they had lost on this mission.

  The flight deck tannoy speakers went off again: “All hands on deck for the committal ceremony…

  “All hands bury the dead.”

  * * *

  They found themselves linking in with Ali, Predator, Juice, and Henno in the rear. Homer was still MIA – but Handon, for one, was prepared to give him whatever time he needed.

  From the back of the formation, Handon could see all of the Marines up front and center. He nodded at the backs of Graybeard, Brady, and Reyes, the survivors of the team that had fought their way through hell to extract him and his people – and who would be going into Somalia alongside them. The worst wounded of them, Reyes, was on his feet – but leaning on a single crutch. He clearly wasn’t about to sit down, and everyone knew better than to suggest it to him. He’d only throw the crutch in the ocean.

  Handon stood motionless, but his eyes scanned the ranks of assembled crew. On one side were the officers and chief petty officers, in their service dress blue uniforms. To the other side, a much bigger group, were the enlisted men and women, in their own dress-blues – the traditional Navy “crackerjack” uniform of dark blue with white piping, triangular flap and rolled kerchief around their necks, and “Dixie cup” sailor caps.

  To Handon, they looked like nothing so much as Frank Sinatra and Gene Kelly in On the Town, the 1949 flick that had them as sailors on shore leave, singing New York, New York as they zoomed around Manhattan.

  Handon’s faint smile faded now. He got the impression it had been a long time since the entire crew had mustered for anything. And it was a hell of a lot smaller now, even with the crew of the Murphy added in.

  Fick nodded to Alpha, then pushed by to join his Marines in the front. They had lost the most men in the battle – if not in absolute numbers, then in percentage of total strength. They were here to say goodbye to their brothers. The corners of Fick’s mouth turned down as he stepped onto the end of the line.

  “How you guys doin’?” he asked, and half under his breath. “This is gonna suck…”

  * * *

  Drake, having changed into his dress whites, ste
pped up on the small platform, which hung slightly over the rear edge of the deck. The JFK no longer had any chaplains in active service. And after the mutiny, probably no one would have looked very kindly on them, had any been around.

  So it fell to Drake.

  He knew the drill. So did the others in the ceremony. He did a quick scan to make sure everyone was wearing the uniform of the day. He nodded at the station firing detail, six NSF personnel with their rifles, bayonets attached – and then at the body bearers and the bugler.

  Finally, he nodded to his adjutant, who gave the call to attention. The massed ranks of men and women snapped to, all chatter ceasing immediately. The only sound was the breeze whipping down from the bow, ruffling uniforms, and snapping ropes and flags, before dropping over the stern. Ordinarily, the ship would be stopped for a burial at sea. But nothing was ordinary these days. And they were still racing against death, even as they paused to acknowledge its terrible cost.

  Traditionally, the ceremony included a reading of scripture (dependent on the faith of the person being buried), prayers (ditto), and the committal itself, followed by a benediction. But, again, religion hadn’t been in real high favor lately. Also, this one coffin was standing in for over 500 who had died – men and women of varied religions, or none. And their bodies had already been swept away, into the great and merciful ocean, as a matter of public health and hygiene. Every corpse, infected or not, was a hazard, and threatened the survival of the carrier – and thus of mankind.

  So overboard they had gone, washed away for eternity. Now they were being committed in a single, symbolic casket.

  Drake spoke into the microphone on the lectern, his amplified voice carrying across the windy flight deck, audible to the back rank. “I feel how weightless my words must be, trying to convey the grief of losing so many of our friends, so many colleagues – buddies, comrades, brothers and sisters, in life and in arms. So instead I read the words of a man who was ten times the orator I am, and a hundred times the leader. I adapt them only a little for today.”

  He paused to look down, unfolded a sheet of paper, and began reading.

  “‘We are met on a great battlefield of war. We have come to dedicate a portion of that field, as a final resting place for those who here gave their lives that this world might live. But, in a larger sense, we can not dedicate, we can not consecrate, we can not hallow this ground. The brave men and women, living and dead, who struggled here, have consecrated it, far above our poor power to add or detract. The world will little note, nor long remember what we say here, but it can never forget what they did here. It is rather for us to be here dedicated to the great task remaining before us – that from these honored dead we take increased devotion to that cause for which they gave the last full measure of devotion – that we here highly resolve that these dead shall not have died in vain – and that this world shall have a new birth.’”

  Drake folded the paper, tucked it inside his tunic, and nodded to the adjutant, who shouted: “Firing Detail, PRESENT ARMS!”

  On that signal, the body bearers tilted up the board that held the casket, until it slid along underneath an American flag and tumbled overboard and down into the sea.

  The adjutant shouted, “Firing Detail, ORDER ARMS. FIRE THREE VOLLEYS.” A bugler standing to the side began to play taps. Cracking over the top of this, the riflemen fired three times. After the last, they remained at the ready position, rifles locked, until the conclusion of taps. Then they saluted. The body bearers folded away the flag that had covered the casket.

  And the adjutant released the formation.

  Drake stepped down, and headed back to his quarters to get changed again. Ordinarily, the names of the deceased would be read before the bodies were committed to the sea. But Drake had decided five hundred names was too many, would have taken too damned long – and would have been just too damned depressing.

  Every member of this crew had a great deal to do, and a hard battle to fight – both to keep their faith, and to carry on the work.

  That’s Lunch

  JFK - Biosciences Lab

  Sarah rolled back into the lab on a wave of focus and energy, finding Park at his laptop where she’d left him.

  “Okay,” she said. “I got five minutes of face time with Abrams, ship’s XO. He pointed out that we’re basically in the middle of the Atlantic right now.”

  “And?”

  “And – I quote – ‘there are, it is ardently to be hoped, no goddamned Zulus left anywhere on this vessel.’ So it looks like the soonest anything can be done about a new virus sample for you is in about sixty hours when we hit the African coast.”

  “So we’re definitely going straight to Africa?”

  Sarah nodded happily. “Yes. You’ve won that argument. But they’re sending ashore a scavenging party before we get to Somalia, near Cape Town. I’ve gotten Abrams to commit to making it part of the mission profile to do a live capture. If that’s the right expression for capturing a dead person.”

  “Awesome. And animal test subjects?”

  “I told him that, too – that pretty soon you’re going to need live vertebrates to test the vaccine on.”

  “You told him mammals if possible, right?”

  “Yep. Mice, rats, or chimps. Though I’m not totally sure how I feel about giving the plague virus to chimps.”

  “How do you feel about extinction of your own species?”

  “Good point. He put it on the list. He said that might be a tougher ticket. But the one thing this planet doesn’t lack for is the walking dead.”

  “Sixty hours?”

  “It’s a big ocean – and Cape Town’s at the same latitude as Santiago. We’ve got a lot of south Atlantic to traverse.”

  “True. The delay’s not ideal, but so little is these days.”

  Sarah smiled. “Excellent. Good to see a little pragmatism and resilience on you. You wear it well.” She changed the subject before he blushed. “So the question now is: how do we make ourselves useful in the meantime?”

  Park took a look around them. “I think the best thing we can do now is inventory this lab – and try to get it set up to do the kind of work I need to do.”

  “Okay. Let’s do it.”

  Park looked back to his laptop and flipped through a couple of screens. “I’ll start calling stuff out. And you dig it up and move it where I want it. How does that sound?”

  “Like a plan.” Sarah rolled up her sleeves.

  * * *

  Drake wasn’t the only person to get himself a change of clothes after the ceremony. Virtually everyone on the ship did. Many of the crew had struggled even to find all the bits of their dress uniforms, so long had it been since they’d had any call to wear them. Getting back into their working uniforms was a relief. And it also signaled that the hard work of running this ship, staying alive, and completing their mission was back on.

  But Juice and Pred changed instead into their PT gear – the same black shorts and gray t-shirts, with “ARMY” emblazoned on them in large black letters, they had run in on their first day on the carrier. Unlike then, though, this was not meant as an F-You to the sailors on board. Now, they had all fought together, sacrificed together, and bled together.

  And they were brothers.

  Now, as Juice and Pred ran the same half-mile circuit around the edge of the five-acre flight deck, they nodded and smiled at the sailors and officers they passed – and meant it. They didn’t in every case get smiles in return. In some cases, actually, people jumped out of their way in fear and alarm. They were both once again wearing their intimidating Oakley wraps, both still bulging out of their t-shirts and “Ranger panties” – as the short PT shorts were universally known – and Juice’s carpet-like body hair was still impossible to miss. He also wore his beloved reversed ballcap, and regularly spat tobacco juice from the center of his Sasquatch beard. They looked like a pair of mythical Norse creatures come alive and run amok on the Kennedy’s flight deck.

&n
bsp; It probably didn’t help that they weighed a collective 540 pounds, and were running six-and-a-half-minute miles. That much wood-hard flesh coming at you that fast would rattle anyone. As another pair of sailors skittered out of their way, Predator said, “Jesus, it’s not like we’re chasing them.”

  Around his rapid and deep breathing, Juice answered, “Well, people are scary.” He paused, then digressed. “Back in the world, I always thought old people were scary – because of their proximity to death. Nobody likes being reminded that soon we’d be standing next to the grave, as well.”

  They cut a wide swath around the wreckage of what used to be Ammo City, turned left at the prow, then turned left again and carried on near-sprinting back toward the stern.

  “Man,” Pred wheezed, “you got a depressing outlook. I’m voting you off the island.” They were now coming up fast on the carrier’s own island, which stuck out of the flight deck like a lonely skyscraper.

  “I voted your mom off the island,” Juice said.

  “I voted to keep yours.”

  Juice considered punching him, but decided to conserve his strength. Also, he would worry about knocking him over. He had no idea how Pred was keeping up this pace with his injured knee. Just gutting it out, probably.

  Juice himself had an absolutely killer headache, almost certainly from the concussions he’d taken being knocked unconscious on each of their last two missions. If afflicted him on and off all day, though he didn’t say anything about it.

  In the movies, people get knocked cold all the time, waking up later with no ill effects. In real life, loss of consciousness due to blunt trauma is life-threatening. As a rule of thumb, if you’re out more than a couple of minutes, someone should be calling an ambulance. You certainly have at least a bad concussion, and possibly a traumatic brain injury (TBI) or cerebral or subdural hemorrhage. Juice’d had some footage of his brain shot at the hospital, and it looked okay, aside from a little bruising.