Jack smiled. Like his cohorts, he hadn’t been able to truly let go for months now. When Ayala visited she always insisted on having a glass of wine or three with them, trying to help them let off steam. No doubt it was harder on Neal, as most of the time he was unable to talk openly with anyone in his location. Nodding reticently, Jack replied to the colonel, “A break, yeah. I guess, Colonel. They’re not doing much I can contribute to right now in there so I thought I’d get some fresh air.” The colonel raised an eyebrow and the captain continued, “Permission to offer an opinion, sir?”
“Captain, I think we’re a little past that, don’t you? Besides, you didn’t seem to have any trouble expressing yourself with John Hunt last month.” As he quipped about the captain’s minor confrontation with the Agent, Barrett found he was actually frowning slightly at the memory, reviving as it did his sense of hopelessness about their situation. He would never show that though. Deal with each problem as it arose, strive for the success of the mission. What else was there to do?
But the captain’s melancholy was grown from the same seed, and in a rare moment of candidness he decided to confide in his superior officer, “Sir, I don’t wish to be … pessimistic, but I am afraid to say that I think there may be some … holes in our plan.”
Barrett kept his expression even but inside he was deeply unhappy to hear the captain voice his concerns. Sadly he was also not surprised that the young captain had seen some flaws in their plan, hopefully there were no more than the colonel had already noted himself.
Jack kept his eyes focused on the distant sky, and taking the colonel’s silence as permission to carry on, said, “Sir, if I set aside, for a moment, the problems of getting control of the missile defense system, not an insignificant task I’m sure you’ll agree, there is still the glaring gap in our attack plan around how we are going to handle the fourth satellite. We simply do not have enough munitions in our GBMD system to mount a third attack and maintain security on our borders.” Barrett nodded and went to speak but the captain carried on, “Of course, this does not factor in that we will have to wait to attack the final satellite till it is in range of our missiles, by which time it will be alerted by the destruction of its cohorts.
“Something tells me that if it knows how we took out the other satellites it will be markedly more proactive in its defense than the first two will have been. Colonel, I shudder at the thought of the kind of damage that final satellite will do to our defense network before we can even get our missiles to it.” And with that, Jack did actually shudder. It would have been funny if there were anything even vaguely funny about the thought of a high-powered laser cutting up military targets in Western Europe and the eastern US like a hot knife through so much butter.
The colonel stood firm, baring so little as he always did. He was not insensitive, but he had long ago learned that he must remain resolute in the face of unavoidable casualties, disconnecting his mind from human ramifications in order to focus on whatever role he had to play. But he had considered this at great length, and he had done his share of soul searching, and he would not stop his search for an alternative.
Until one came to them, though, he had reconciled himself to the cost they would pay. But he had developed an even bleaker worse-case scenario than the captain, “Jack, I’ll be frank, it is clear to me that if we leave one of those machines up there, then the remaining components of our missile defense system should be considered compromised. We should assume that if we allow it to, there is a good chance it will obliterate any remaining GBMD arsenal before we can even bring it to bear.
“The only upside is that if we come under attack from space then it will negate the need for secrecy, at which point we can call upon our friends in Russia to launch their A-135s and the Chinese and Indian missile defense systems can also be deployed. If what we know about the satellites is accurate, then that would surely be the end of the fight. Between them, China, India, and Russia have more than treble our defense network, so the upside of our network being decimated would be the eventual destruction of the fourth and final satellite.”
“Assuming John Hunt is able to deploy the HMS
Dauntless
’s munitions, and they are successful.”
“Assuming John Hunt is successful, yes.” Neither of them doubted John’s ability, but to put so much faith in one man and his one ship was not the kind of redundancy upon redundancy that military men were trained to strive for. The fact that the man was John Hunt did make it easier, but even one of Britain’s cutting edge new Type 47 Destroyers had only so much exo-atmospheric firepower.
The captain recapped the conversation so far, “So,
if
we can destroy the four satellites, and that is a big if, we are still left with a best case scenario where the continental United States will, most likely, be left with virtually no long-range missile defense system.”
The colonel shook his head, staring at the ground. He had come to the same conclusion. It was an appalling strategic position for any military man to consider.
Jack looked a little desperately at the colonel and then regained his composure. His back straightening again, he said, “Not desirable, I think you can agree, sir. Even if it is successful, which is far from certain. But Colonel, even that scenario is not the greatest of my concerns.” Jack paused, waiting for his mentor to react to that, but the colonel merely stared off into the distance. So he has seen it too, thought Jack, then continued slightly resignedly, “Clearly Madeline’s work with that machine she is working on is moving even faster than we could have hoped, and that is great, I don’t question that for a moment. No doubt Ayala and Madeline have now begun co-opting the new manufacturing abilities to produce the first prototypes of the antigen.
“But, well, I have thought long and hard about it, sir, and it just doesn’t add up. I just cannot see how we can spread the nano devices quickly enough, and diversely enough, to initiate the immunization of nearly seven billion people in time. It just isn’t possible.”
The colonel stood silently for a moment, looking out at the twilight sky over the base. It was mutely beautiful, its high-cloud grays brought into deep relief by the sharply angled light, the moment’s peace made it all picturesque and peaceful. His planet, so huge, it had seemed so impregnable to him, so vast and so strong. Now it felt so fragile. Everything hung in the balance and the solidity of the ground had gone from under his feet. As he had the last few months, he found solace in his tactical process, thinking through his response to the all too incisive comments of his prodigy. After a moment’s silence, a distant test engine fired, its contained fury a muted roar echoing across the base, and the colonel’s thoughts fired in unison, focus returning to him with a hidden shiver.
Barrett had assumed that many of his fellow conspirators would have done the same calculations he had, but the unspoken rule had always been that they should just do the best they could. “Captain, since you have been candid with me, I shall do the same for you. As you know, my team, of which you are now part, has tried to balance the need for resources, and to mobilize an effective resistance to the threat we have discovered with the constant chance of discovery and destruction. We’ve done this, as I am sure you know, not just because we don’t want to die, but because we have to assume that if we are discovered, our deaths will mean the end of one of Earth’s few hopes of salvation in the coming conflict. Even worse, there is a chance that if a conspiracy as deep as ours is discovered, the virus may be released before we have any of our plans in place.” He left that statement unfinished, the finality of that concept able to speak for itself. Doomsday. Extinction. A mess for the Mobiliei Armada to clean up, no doubt, but that would be no consolation to an eradicated humanity.
“Now, as long as we remain undetected, we have months, maybe even years to do this properly. As we only have one shot at this, we cannot afford to take risks by bringing too many people into our circle. Because of that we have been more … cautious than we may have liked. This will limit the speed with which we can spread the antigen, but weighed against the risks … well, I’m sure you understand.”
“I do, Colonel, I hope you know that I understand that, but …” he caught his breath, clearly struggling with a demon. Reining it in after a moment, his surface calmed again, and he went on, “Colonel, I have reviewed our plans for dispersion of the devices, I know we have to get about a hundred into a person for them to be effective, and I know that once a group of the cells reaches critical mass in a host the antigen will be able to start using our own immune system to start manufacturing duplicates of itself.”
“And no doubt you remember the timeline we are looking at?” asked the colonel. The captain nodded, so the colonel left the topic alone, he knew the captain was not really looking for resolution, only to air his fears. Barrett let him go on.
All of the team had been told that the tiny biomorphic devices worked by identifying the DNA of their host. Once that was identified, they essentially moved through the blood system rooting out foreign bodies and destroying them with a simple but effective cellular lance laced with toxins and a minuscule but relatively potent electric charge that caused the target body to disintegrate at the nuclide level, to be absorbed and reconstituted by the body. Assuming that nearly all communicable diseases were transmitted around the body via the blood, or at least could not effectively attack the host systems without access to the cardio-vascular network, a team of these minuscule bio-constructs patrolling your blood vessels would permanently immure you to everything from the common cold to rabies in about a day or two.
In order to maintain and grow their numbers, the incredible devices also entered and manipulated their host’s bone marrow with a virus of their own, turning immunized bodies into factories for further nano-device production. Within a week of infection, a host started turning out their own defenses, and infecting others with the super-cells. Along with the standard white blood that was produced in the bone marrow under normal circumstances, each human host could also produce enough of the ‘devices’ each week to infect at least one or two more people, who would also then start producing the panacea.
That meant that each week, each immunized group would roughly double in size: two, four, eight, sixteen … from the first infected person. Given enough time, the process would slowly but surely wipe away nearly every infectious disease known to man, while also inoculating us against the lethal virus the satellites had on hand. Given enough time.
But even with exponential growth, the infected group grows very slowly at first. It would take a single starting case eight months to spread to 5% of the population, even though it would then spread to the remaining 95% in just the following five weeks.
More starting hosts sped up the initial stages, but by incrementally smaller amounts. If they started by injecting around five hundred people, for example, they could accelerate through the first four months. But after that, even if you doubled the starting number to one thousand, you only gained one more week. The next week would need two thousand people. That was two thousand opportunities for discovery. So after five hundred, the marginal return of manually infecting people would be far outweighed by the speed of the infection’s natural spread.
So once the drug was ready, they were going to need nine months. No matter what they did, it would take at least nine months to spread to the entire population. And so the danger, as both the colonel and now the captain had seen, was that the vast majority of people would not be immune till the very last stages of the spread. If their plan was discovered just a month before they were ready, more than three quarters of the planet would still be defenseless. That was five billion lives in the balance.
That was equivalent to the population of America, times fifteen. It was four times the entire continent of Europe. These were the odds the team was faced with. Only a week before they were ready and half the planet would die. Six weeks early and it was effectively still genocide.
Even this disturbingly slow uptake did not factor in that the spread would be far from regular. A person could only ‘catch’” the cure if they were near an immunized person who was producing it. It would not leap easily from country to country, and certainly not from continent to continent. So they needed to seed the process evenly across the globe.
If this disturbingly fragile part of the project succeeded before they were discovered, they could then, to some degree, come out of the shadows and be more proactive in their attempts to destroy the satellites, the threat of being wiped out abated.
But if they didn’t …
They both stood stoically, considering all this. Eventually the captain shook his head, the colonel was waiting for him to get it all out. And so the captain decided to finish his thought, now he had started, “There is something else, despite it all, despite the power of the satellites, and that damn superflu they want to drop on us.
“Even if I forget how incredibly easy they seem to find killing all of us, we seem to be ignoring the fact that there are eight of their Agents amongst us even now. And they can pick up fucking planes, Colonel, planes, and that didn’t seem very strenuous for him either.”
The captain shook his head again, and laughed somewhat shakily before continuing in a quiet tone, “I saw the report you had on this Lana Wilson. She is dating Admiral Hamilton’s son. He has personally seen her posted in the Atlantic Fleet Submarine Command in Georgia. That puts her two promotions away from US Missile Command. Plus we have a trainee Rafale fighter pilot taking the French army by storm, the most dangerous terrorist the world has ever seen living in New York, and god knows what their Chinese and Russian cousins are up to right now.”
The colonel placed his hand on the captain’s shoulder. It was a gesture of friendship and reassurance he had never felt the need to show before now. “Jack, I know. I know what it looks like. Trust me, I have wrestled with this for even longer than you have.”