CHAPTER
8
“Those things,”
Wentz said, “those outlines. They’re handprints, aren’t
they?”
They’d left the
hangar and now sat in a brightly lit in-briefing room, Jones behind
a standard industrial-gray military desk, Wentz and Ashton in
opposing armchairs.
“We don’t call
them handprints, General,” Major Jones explained. “We call them
operator detents.”
Ashton, then:
“Synaptic activity in the brain is processed into and out of the
detents by way of the median and ulnar nerves in the arms and the
collateral nerve branches in the fingers.”
“You’re talking
about thought, aren’t you?” Wentz figured. “I put my hands against
those handprints, think, and the thing flies?”
Jones nodded
yes. “That’s correct, General. It seems that thought conduction on
the part of the operator is effectively converted to operational
commands which are processed into the vehicle’s guidance
system.”
“Fly-by-wire,
only the pilot’s nerves are the wires…”
“Precisely,”
said Ashton.
“And,
hopefully, General, given what you’ve witnessed today, you’ll be
canceling your retirement plans.”
Wentz closed
his eyes and heard a deafening silence. Behind the lids, he saw an
insuperable void, a vastness like looking down from the highest
places on the earth. He saw a pilot’s most fantastic dream come
true, and then he saw the faces of Joyce and Pete…
“I can’t,” he
said. “I promised my wife and kid. I’ve been breaking promises to
them for the last ten years, but I can’t break this one.”
A final tempt,
a final image to maraud his pilot’s ego: he saw somebody else, some
other pilot bestowed with this impossible honor.
It’d be some
punk, he
guessed, probably some boner’d up hot shot Navy kid from Whidbey
NSA or Miramar or, worse, a Blue Angel. Am I really gonna step down
let some cocky F-18 PUNK fill my shoes?
“Shit!
GodDAMN!”
Wentz bellowed.
Ashton and
Jones just looked at him.
“Ain’t
happening,” Wentz said through a painful grimace. Part of him could
not conceive of what he was about to say. “I’m not going to fuck my
family over again. Tomorrow at noon I retire. Get someone
else.”
Jones leaned
forward, amazed. “Are you serious?”
“Right now, I’m
so pissed off I could kick you in the balls so hard they’d fly out
your mouth. Does that sound serious? Do you have any idea how hard
this is for me?”
“General, don’t
you realize what we’ve got here?” Jones induced. “The OEV isn’t
some—”
“Yeah, yeah, I
know, it’s not some balsa-wood plane with a rubber-band prop. I
already got that shtick from her. I know what it is, but I also
know I can’t do it.”
Jones’ brow
lifted. “I admire your resolve, General, but we still haven’t told
you the actual mission.”
Wentz stalled.
“I assumed that the mission is, well, to test fly the
OEV.”
“Not exactly,”
Ashton admitted. “There’s something else you need to know, sir.
It’s much more important than you, me, the OEV—it’s more important
than anything.”
“That’s why we
need you,” Jones added, “and that’s why we need you now.”
A long silence
hung over the office. Wentz sat there, waiting.
“Are you gonna
tell me or do I have to guess?”
It was the
sudden solemness of Jones and Ashton that most bothered Wentz. He
didn’t like the feeling at all.
“Follow me
please, General.”
Wentz followed
Jones out while Ashton paused for the slightest moment then
likewise left the in-briefing room.
Wentz didn’t
see her pop the tiny pill in her mouth.
««—»»
Jones led them
down another antiseptically white corridor lined with white
key-padded doors. A maintenance tech at one of the doors began to
snap to attention but Jones sluffed, “As you were, as you were,
Sergeant.”
The tech was
about to paint something on the door, and Wentz couldn’t help but
notice. Shiny black letters on the door read: BRIGADIER GENERAL W.
FARRINGTON, but then the tech painted over the W. FARRINGTON and
raised a stencil that read J. WENTZ.
“You guys are a
scream,” Wentz said, chuckling. “But I’m telling you, you can
hard-sell me all day long but I’m still retiring
tomorrow.”
Ashton and
Jones said nothing.
Jones unlocked
another door, marked simply CONFERENCE. Inside, Wentz noticed
several chart graphs and murals, as if for a presentation. One
mural seemed to be an artist’s depiction of some sort of
space-flight mission. A bulletin board read:
-QSR4 JOINT JAPAN/RUSSIAN SAMPLE-RETURN MISSION
-SCHEDULE COURSE AND PERIHELIC TRAJECTORY (EST. 62,700,000 MILES).
-PROJECTED COST (US EQ.) $34 BILLION
-PROJECTED TIME EXPENDITURE (IN FLIGHT): 19 MONTHS.
Wentz sat down,
ready to listen.
Jones began,
“When the so-called Mars Meteor, designate ALH-84001, was found in
August, 1996, and…well, you remember the news.”
“Sure,” Wentz
recalled. “Fossilized microbacteria, fairly solid proof that there
was rudimentary, one-celled life on Mars, something like 3.5
billion years ago.”
“Yes. After
which every country in the world with space flight capability began
to draw up plans for further investigations of the Martian surface.
The ultimate end, of course, is a sample/return mission—quite
sophisticated and very expensive, but this would enable a robotic
surface device to collect soil samples, which would later be
returned to earth by way of a staged orbiter rocket sent
afterwards…”
“QSR4 is the
codename for one such plan,” Ashton augmented, “and it’s already in
service—”
Wentz pinched
his chin. “I haven’t heard about any—”
“No, you
haven’t, General, and neither has the rest of the world. The
Japanese agreed to finance the Russian Space Administration on the
mission you see outlined on the mural.”
“Why would the
Japanese bankroll the Russians? Our aerospace technology is better
than theirs.”
“Not so much as
you think,” Jones said, “and, additionally, no other space
administration in the world trusts us. They all think we’ve got
field operatives planting discreet probe-implants and sensors on
all their space hardware.”
Wentz looked
duped. “Why would they think that?”
“Well…because
it’s true. We’ve been doing it for decades—saves us lots of money.
Why send up our own missions when we can tap and
analyze their findings?”
“Cloak and
Dagger is alive and well,” Wentz supposed. “The United States—the
world’s best friend.”
Ashton ignored
the sarcasm. “General, a year ago, the joint Japanese/Russian
mission was initiated. A collection probe—QSR4—landed in the
Tharsus Bulge on Mars and immediately began to relay findings back
to earth—”
“And
to us,”
Wentz finished, “from the taps we secretly planted in their
probe.”
“Yes. And what
the collector discovered was more than bacterial fiber fossils
but…live bacteria.
“You’re not
joking, are you?” Wentz asked.
“No, General,
we’re not,” Jones said. “The mission’s analysis sensors positively
identified the organisms as live. Our own analysis of the data, however, unbeknownst
to the Japanese and the Russians, indicates quite a bit more. Our
own spectrographic survey of the probe’s findings was processed
through CDC and Langley, and the bacteria reveals characteristics
consistent with a cytomegalic mutation.”
Wentz frowned.
“Do I look like a microbiologist?”
Ashton crossed
her legs in the chair. “What he means, sir, is that the CDC
analysis of the molecular specs strongly suggests that the Tharsus
bacteria is host to a virus more hazardous than anything ever found
on earth.”
Wentz stared at
them through a dark interlude.
“In about six
months,” Jones went on, “the return stage of the QSR4 mission is
going to pick up that collector and bring it back to
earth.”
“So tell them
to scrub the pickup,” Wentz made the most obvious suggestion. “I
think if you told them they were bringing a deadly virus back to
earth, they wouldn’t have to think long before they aborted the
entire mission.”
“We can’t do
that, General. That would acknowledge what they’ve suspected all
along—that our own agents have been planting tap-sensors in their
probes. It would ruin foreign relations.”
Wentz almost
laughed. “Well then fuck foreign relations. This is a bit more important,
isn’t it?”
“It’s not that
simple, sir,” Ashton said.
Wentz
considered this. “Fine, then do what you Big Brother guys do best.
Destroy the return stage before it gets back—”
“That’s even
less serviceable,” Jones countered. “It would be plainly detectable
as a hostile attack on the geostatic DPS net. They’d never believe
it was an accident, and since the U.S. is the only country in the
world with the sufficient anti-satellite technology to pull
something like that off—”
“They’d know it
was us,” Wentz agreed.
“And
considering the upcoming trade agreements pending in Congress,”
Ashton reminded, “we’d lose all economic ties with the Japanese
forever, and the Russians would more than likely freeze all U.S.
investment assets currently in place.”
“So you see our
dilemma,” Jones said. “If we sabotage their return mission on its
way back, we risk an economic war that could put us in a true
depression. And if we tell them of our knowledge of the nature of
the bacteria—that we’ve secretly installed the equivalent of
analytical eaves-dropping devices on their space missions, then the
news will hit every wire service in the world, and we’ll lose every
ally we have.”
Wentz couldn’t
believe the knit-picking here. “What are you guys? Republicans? You
consider positive U.S. foreign relations more important than
preventing a potential plague?”
“It wouldn’t be
a potential plague, sir,” Ashton explained. “All the
spectrographic and chromatographic analysis of the data we
intercepted from the QSR4 sample-collector indicates a viral
component with exponential contagion attributes. If that return
stage succeeds in bringing the Tharsus bacteria back to
earth—”
Jones’ voice
grated, “Millions, and potentially billions, could die. A virus like that…could wipe out all
mammalian life on the planet.”
Wentz shook his
head in complete outrage. “So like I just told you. To hell with
foreign relations and the economy. This is
more
important. Tell them. Admit that we’ve been slipping taps on
their space-flight missions and tell them to abort the damn return
stage.”
“Again,” Jones
said, “it’s not quite that simple. Don’t you read the
papers?”
“Hell, no,”
Wentz said. “They’re all bias. I watch Fox News, that’s
it.”
“Well, then,
you might be aware that the Russian parliament is squeezing the
executive branch to sign a non-aggression pact with Red
China.”
“Sure, but
it’ll never happen. Putin would never bend to that. He’d disband
the entire parliament first. He’d shut down the
government.”
“Not if he’s
dead,” Ashton said. “And not if his government is
replaced.”
Wentz’s eyes
narrowed. “I guess you people know something I don’t.”
“Putin’s
government is on the verge of collapse,” Jones said. “The
opposition parties have been trying to kill him for two years. That
last heart attack? It wasn’t natural causes. A radical element of
the GRU managed to get some potassium dichlorate in his food. It
was a U.S. team of cardiologists from Johns Hopkins that saved his
life. The fact of the matter is, Putin won’t last till Christmas;
his government will topple.”
Ashton again:
“And whatever party takes over will sign the pact with Red China
because it’s the easiest way to cut defense funding and pump it
into the economy, avoid a revolution. China is still technically
our enemy, and if they sign a pact with Russia?”
“Russia becomes
a potential enemy again too,” Wentz realized. “And the Cold War
starts all over again.”
Jones stood up,
aiming a wooden pointer at the mural depicting the QSR4’s return
trip to earth. “Exactly, and if Russia and Red China become
allies…what do you think they’ll do if they find out that
return-stage is bringing back a virus deadlier than anything the
planet has ever known?”
Wentz’s eyes
widened to the size of slot-machine slugs. “They
might not abort the stage. They might let it return and
retrieve it.” Wentz’s throat went dry. “They might try to contain
the virus.”
“That’s right,
General,” Ashton said. “They might try to contain it, and preserve
it as a weapon.”
“A weapon we’d
have no defense against,” Jones tacked on.
Ashton looked
right into Wentz’s eyes. “So, General, we’re asking you to
undertake a mission which would circumvent what is potentially the
worst catastrophe in human history, an event that could wipe out
the human race…”