Overture (Earth Song) (45 page)

The
bigger and slower Chinooks fell in behind. They all took a course west, straight over the mountains, climbing as fast as they could.

“
No can do,” said the pilot, “those Chinooks are slowing us down.”

“
Then leave them behind.” There was a long silence on the headsets. “You have a problem with that, or would you rather we ride through what’s coming in this tin can?”

“
No, sir,” the pilot said and Masciler heard the engine noise increase. He heard the pilots of the Chinooks calling to ask why they were being left behind but didn’t really listen to his own pilot’s reply. He was too busy thinking about what he saw in the bottom of that deep, deep cave. He’d thought the security was rather like that of a nuclear storage facility, turned out he was right. The Chelan Bunker was nothing more than a nuclear storage facility that had never been opened. All they found through that exit was an even larger cavern lined with hundreds of deep concrete tombs to hold expended fuel from nuclear reactors. Of course, as soon as he saw it, he remembered. The facility was constructed to house waste from the Hanford Nuclear Research Site, but never used. It was abandoned decades ago.

True
to the pilot’s word, they raced out of the mountains and into Seattle a half hour before dawn and ahead of the meteor storm. They set down on the roof and raced for the elevator. As the door closed, he asked his pilot about the fate of the Chinooks.

“
They were both destroyed a few minutes ago near Stevens Pass.”

“
Oh,” Masciler said and pressed the security code for the basement shelter. The rest of the trip down was spent in silence.

In one of those bizarre twists of fate, New York City was largely spared from the Lebowski fragments. Mindy spent the two hours of the meteor storm in a basement bomb shelter under City Hall with other important people and scientists from the Portal team. It was once the Mayor’s disaster command center, but he was hiding somewhere upstate, so now it was theirs.

“
It’s hitting,” someone had announced as they settled in only minutes before dawn. Cameras situated all around the Big Apple panned to look for impacts, but all they could see were distant streaks of light and flashes in the dawn’s gloom. Everyone held their breath and watched as the minutes crept by. Three times they saw the cameras turned to find a burning building and once a blast of debris into the sky signaled a bigger impact. There were no more impacts after that. Death moved onward.

“
What if one hit the Portal?” someone wondered.

“
Then we wouldn't be here talking now,” Leo said from his perch on a desk.

“
No one in New Delhi ever knew what hit them,” Osgood agreed.

They
stayed in the stuffy shelter for an hour longer to be sure it was safe, then emerged into the morning air. Mindy crinkled her nose up at the smells of the dying city. Garbage was everywhere now; the military proved unable to get the garbage trucks moving again and abandoned the effort. Despite the lack of major impacts, smoke hung like a fog. Manhattan once held three million people; those who were interested in such things guessed there were no more than a million left. Power interruptions were a daily event, food was getting scarce, and panic was an instant away. The military had likewise been unable to stop the pillaging of small rural communities and farms west of the city. It was a drama playing out all across the country.

They
were eventually returned to Portal City by motorcade and found it unscathed. Everyone picked up work where they left off, everyone except Mindy. She was at a dead end in her attempt to break the alien language, and she was still unable to contact Harold. He hadn’t come home last night to their tiny apartment, nor had he arrived with others at the shelter. Not even the short note from Billy that Leo passed to her managed to improve her mood. Something was wrong and she was powerless to do anything about it.

A
few hours later, she finally decided to try again with the translations. She had just gotten started when Leo swept in unexpectedly. “Come with me to the dome,” he said and left without further word.

“
What’s going on?” she asked as she ran to catch up. It didn’t take a lot to overtake Leo; he was far too old to move that quickly.

“
Hipstitch and some other of his cronies are coming down in a few hours.”

“
I thought we had another day.”

“
We did, until D.C. got pasted.”

“
Oh shit, the meteors?”

“
Yeah, spared us and clobbered them. Five direct strikes, one at least fifty kilotons in yield. It landed just a mile south of The Mall, killed about a hundred thousand all by itself.”

“
Good lord.”

“
Oh, it gets better. The lid’s off the bunker story too. A crowd broke the perimeter on the one in California. Of course they found nothing much. Hundreds of semi-trailer loads of rotting cheese and other crap like that. They slaughtered all of the military personnel, even the ones with no idea what was going on.”

“
It’s starting to come apart, isn’t it?”

“
That would be a yes. There are riots in D.C. and the truth about the fake bunkers was enough to flush out the big wigs. They will be here tonight. You close to cracking the language?”

“
No,” was her simple answer. He stopped to look at her for a second before resuming his rush toward the dome. Was that a hint of fear on his face?

“
What can we do to help get results? I’ve been authorized to do anything and everything.”

“
Well then, get me in touch with Harold. We were doing some work at SETI that will segue into this quite well.” Leo kept walking and didn’t comment until they reached the dome. There were even fewer instruments and technicians than yesterday. One of the massive garage doors had been removed entirely and she could see that perforated steel panels had been laid to make a roadway up to the entrance and leading out toward the main road. “They’re really getting ready, aren’t they?”

“
After this morning you can ask that? You bet they are. This is the big one for you, young lady. If you can make this happen you’re on board. You’re going with us.”

Her
reaction wasn’t what she thought it would be. There was no excitement or sudden release of tension. If anything, she felt a deeper sense of panic. “You say us, so that means you’re going?”

“
Yes, I’m in the final group.”

“
You’ve been going all along, haven’t you?” It wasn’t really a question.

“
Not in the beginning, no. It took some finagling, but I managed it. I got you into the inner circle of my fellow scientists, didn’t I? As soon as I realized what they had here I knew I had to get in as deep as I could to control who would go over. Scientists, academics, people who count, not all military types and politicians. Oh, there will be plenty of them, but as time goes by they will come to depend on us so heavily that we’ll be in charge. They won’t even know what happened!”

“
At what price, Leo?”

“
Huh?”

“
At what price are you willing to go along with this fiasco? Do you know what kinds of junk they are bringing across? Cars, planes, big guns and rockets. They’re planning a war over there, not a viable settlement!”

“
It won’t matter in the long run.”

“
It will matter if we all kill each other! Some of the others from the different Portals are liable to do the same crazy thing. Then we have a bunch of little tribes, ready to blow the hell out of each other. How many of us survive what is coming?”

“
A thousand or so, I guess.”

“
Probably a good estimate. It takes a minimum of a hundred forty-four couples for genetic diversity in the human genome, any less than that and we’ll self-destruct, or worse. We’ll have no more than seventy couples, and that’s only if ‘the big wigs’ as you call them allow enough women to cross over, which I doubt they will. With so few couples, we have no choice but to prepare genetic banks to take with us, frozen sperm and eggs, or to reproduce with other tribes. That’s kind of hard to do if you’re busy killing each other. Damn it, Leo, we’ve been chosen for this, one way or another.”

“
You’ve given a lot of thought to this.”

“
No shit, haven’t you?”

“
Can’t say as I have, been too busy just trying to wheedle as many scientists on board as possible.”

“
You say they’ll depend on us?”

“
Oh, without a doubt. Just compare the brain pans!”

“
I wonder. Think about how things will be there. We’ll be sleeping on the ground, farming, hunting, and killing giant lizards. How many scientists are that rough and tumble? Most of the ones I know get splinters from using chopsticks. A few are wilderness types, but I doubt they’re on your top list. We’re going to be useless over there, utterly dependent on
them,
not the other way around. Besides, we’ll be lucky to have a few microscopes and computers. They’re breaking down trucks to take over in pieces, fifty gallon drums of gasoline, oil, car parts: they haven’t even thought about the fact that the gas will be gone in weeks and there are no signs of local petrochemical reserves. Not that it matters because we won’t have any geological survey equipment to speak of, and no way to drill for the oil even if we did find it. I could see some solar-powered vehicles. What they’re doing is madness!”

Leo
listened to her impassioned appeal before shaking his head and speaking. “What would you have me do, Mindy? They have everything ready to go. You want me to stage a coup with nothing more than a few scientists?”

“
Yes.” Leo gawked at her audacity. “You artfully dodged my request for help from Harold,” she continued, “I’d like an answer. And while I’m at it, I’d like him to go as well.”

“
I can’t do that.”

“
Why not, because he’s a hippie?”

“
No, because he’s dead.”

The
news hit her like a slap across the face. Like Leo, Harold was one of her oldest friends and had always been there. It was impossible to accept that he was dead, especially in the casual way Leo told her, rather like someone would inform a friend they were out of beer.

“
What do you mean dead?”

“
I mean he tried to break out yesterday and was killed by a guard. Harold tried sneaking out of the basement of the office, a hidden access tunnel, but Hipstitch had it covered. When he was cornered, he attacked the guard and was shot to death.”

Mindy
collapsed to the floor, her body wracked with sobs. “Oh God, no!” she cried. “They just killed him?”

“
They had no choice!”

“
He was just an overweight middle-aged hippie, how much of a threat could he be?”

“
To an eighteen year old soldier facing the end of the world, he was enough of a threat to make him pull the trigger. That’s all it took.” Mindy lay there and cried for an unknown time as work proceeded around her. A few stopped to look and wonder what was going on, but no one said anything. Leo eventually put a hand on her shoulder and tried to speak soothingly. “I know how you must feel, Mindy.” She shrugged off the hand angrily.

“
Do you really? Is that why this was kept from me, his best friend, for a whole day? You weren’t even going to tell me, were you?”

“
They only told me a few hours ago, used it as a weapon to threaten me with removing some of the less than political scientists from the team. Harold could have cost us more than his life.”

“
I’m sorry they used it against you, but he was my friend.”

“
He was mine, too. Here, this was his.” Leo went to his small work desk in the dome and brought her a laptop computer decorated with a peace sign sticker. Mindy recognized it as Harold’s machine and accepted it. “Maybe there’s something on there that can help you.”

“
Maybe.”

“
Look, we don’t agree on the way this is going down, but there’s nothing either of us can do about it now. The lots have been cast, so let’s get down to it, okay? Time is almost up.” She didn’t say anything so he walked away to talk with some other scientists. Eventually she got up and dusted her knees off and wiped the tears from her face. So much pain and loss, she thought. It was getting easier to take. She took the computer, sat it on her own desk and turned to look at the Portal. A pair of scientists was kneeling on the top step of the dais to keep the Portal activated while they took measurements. “I hate that thing,” she spat.

“
Everyone hates a savior,” an anonymous technician said as he walked by. Mindy gave a little uncomfortable laugh, then sat down to look through the computer and see if Harold had kept a copy of the encryption program. It was their only hope.