The Last Run: A Novella (10 page)

“No,” Mulligan said immediately.

“Then you might want to cool your heels here for a few minutes. Zero eight hundred tomorrow, Mulligan. Be there.”

Benchley left. From up front, Mulligan heard the SCEV crew going through final shutdown checklists. A moment later, the APU’s whine spooled down. There was a momentary flicker as the rig went on external power. The crew finished their procedures, and slowly shuffled out of the vehicle, not talking to each other. Mulligan pulled himself into a seated position, keeping his head low so he wouldn’t bang it against the padded bottom of the bunk above. He tried to think of what to do. He didn’t want to see anyone, talk to anyone, even be recognized by anyone.

He wanted to be alone, but he couldn’t stay in the rig forever—a maintenance team would come aboard and start the post-mission teardown. He had single occupancy quarters because of his status, and while the thought of spending his time in a room that measured nine feet by twelve feet wasn’t spectacularly appealing, he knew no one would bother him there.

So with nothing else to do, he clambered to his feet like an old man and disembarked.

The atmosphere in the prep bay was muted. Long faces were everywhere, even though Mulligan didn’t really look around to take a social temperature check. Walking gingerly, he descended the three step gangway leading from SCEV Seven’s airlock and turned to his left, aiming for the main exit. His quarters were three decks below. All he had to do was put one foot in front of the other until he made it to the elevator, press two buttons, and then walk another twenty feet or so to his quarters. Once he got there, he’d figure out what he would do next.

He didn’t look forward to that.

Rounding the rig’s slanted nose, he almost walked right into Benchley and Rachel Lopez. She was all of ten years old, and looked every bit like CJ, with her father’s dark complexion and soulful eyes. There was no sign of the bodies of her parents. Benchley was consoling her as well as he was able, and Mulligan thought that had to be a tough thing to do, to try and give comfort when there was none for yourself. Benchley looked at Mulligan with a hollow expression while holding Rachel, patting her shoulder gently, repeating platitudes like, “We’re going to get through this, Rachel.” That struck Mulligan as almost funny.

Yeah, we’re all going to get through this like one big, happy family.

Rachel looked up then, her dark eyes awash with tears. She saw Mulligan, and her expression changed. Something roughly akin to hope crossed her features, cutting through her grief like a searchlight illuminated a fog-filled basin on a dark night. She looked at Mulligan, and he knew she wanted him to comfort her. Him, the guy who had always been a friend. Him, the guy who had gently teased her, never going too far because he knew she was at the vulnerable age, when a girl was ramping up to begin the transition to woman, and when she felt her most self-conscious. Him, the guy who had last seen her parents alive.

Him, the guy who had killed them.

Mulligan cast around, trying to find his heart.

Where is it…where is it…

Only darkness remained. Without saying a word, Mulligan stepped past them, lumbering toward the elevator. The technicians in the area stepped out of his path, suddenly mindful he was among them, as if they were a school of fish and he was a hungry shark. Mulligan ignored them like he had ignored Rachel Lopez. Overhead, a banner was mounted to the bulkhead above the elevator bay. It read:

Quando Mundum Finit, Opus Nos Incipiet.

When the world ends, our mission begins.

It was Harmony’s mission statement, and it could be found almost everywhere in the base. Mulligan snorted to himself. He’d bought into it when he’d first arrived at Harmony, and had believed in it until just a few hours ago. Now, the motto had no special meaning for him, it was just a string of words designed to elicit a response that was forever beyond him.

He stalked toward the waiting elevator, and didn’t turn around until after the doors had closed. He didn’t want to see Benchley trying to mend a young girl’s heart, any more than he wanted to confront the fact that he had failed to complete the mission that mattered most to him.

The United States, and perhaps even the entire world, had come to an end.

And so had Scott Mulligan.

EARTHFALL

by Stephen Knight

© 2013 by Stephen Knight

http://www.amazon.com/dp/B00BJBI2VS

CHAPTER ONE

T
HE WASTELAND WAS
as dry and barren as the surface of the moon. Over the course of decades, the topsoil had been bleached by the sun’s searing rays, the soil converted to chalky dust. No vegetation remained, for no life could exist in a land where the earth and air had been poisoned by nuclear weapons. Sandy ridges and wind-carved rock stood mute sentinel to the passage of time. Despite the fact the land was completely lifeless, the casual observer—had there been one—might still have considered the wasteland austerely beautiful.

Hidden beneath a pulsating brown-black mass, a vast cloud stalked across the forbidding wasteland like some hungry beast stirring after a long hibernation, the horizon but a memory. Tens of miles across, the ferocious sandstorm grew larger by the second, illuminated by sporadic flashes of lightning. Riding the stiff breeze, the storm’s top rose almost seventy thousand feet into the dry air, which no longer enjoyed the benefit of an ozone layer to strip away harmful radioactive particles emitted by the distant sun. The storm surged forward at more than sixty miles per hour, devouring the land before it, ravaging the wasteland even further with cyclonic winds full of debris that could strip a man’s flesh from his bones in minutes.

Despite the hostile environment, the powerful storm, and the radiation—both man-made and heaven-sent—there was life.

A gigantic, eight-wheeled, all-terrain vehicle bolted across the gently rolling landscape, trailing a rooster-tail of dust. While the vehicle raced away from the storm, it became briefly airborne as it crested a small ridge before it slammed back to the parched earth, rocking on its heavy-duty suspension. The rig’s turbine engines roared as they propelled Self-Contained Exploration Vehicle 4 along at almost sixty miles an hour. It wasn’t fast enough. The monstrous storm continued to close, and the gap between its amorphous leading edge and the dirty vehicle slowly narrowed.

Strapped into the driver’s seat, Captain Mike Andrews kept his eyes rooted on the desert landscape outside the thick viewports. His left hand kept the rig’s control column pushed fully forward, and the system’s drive-by-wire technology translated the action into full power to the rig’s large, knobbed tires. The ride was far from comfortable, of course. Even though the SCEV had been designed to withstand harsh punishment in the field for months at a time, there was a limit to what suspension technology could dampen. Hurtling along at old highway speeds across broken terrain was one of the things it couldn’t handle.

“Hey, listen, the temperature’s going through the roof on number one,” Choi said, squirming slightly in the copilot’s seat beside Andrews. He was a few years younger than the vehicle commander, but his even temper and genuine likeability made him an asset in the field during the long reconnaissance runs they made four times a year. Now, though, Choi was obviously agitated, and not just from the SCEV’s violent progress over the landscape that had once been western Kansas. It wasn’t the close proximity of the storm causing him discomfort, either. Andrews knew the chance the vehicle might be forced to spend days waiting out the storm within only a few miles of Harmony Base was getting to Choi. Hell, it was getting to him as well. After thirty-three days in the field, all Andrews wanted was to get back to Harmony and soak in the small bathtub in his quarters. The SCEV’s accommodations were fairly excellent, but confining eight people inside a vehicle that had less than four hundred square feet of living space for a month was enough to make anyone long for privacy.

Choi pointed out the temperature tape on the multifunction display set in the instrument panel between the two men. Andrews only glanced at it, but he could see the number one engine’s temperature had spiked dramatically over the past few minutes.

“Listen, if you don’t back off soon, you’re going to blow number one,” Choi said.

“Like hell, Tony. The computer’ll shut it down first. But so what? That’s why we have two engines in these things.” Andrews patted the lip of the SCEV’s gray instrument panel. “Hang in there, babe. Almost home, just hang in there.”

“Yeah, that’s gonna work.”

Andrews looked at the weather radar display. “It’d better, man. That storm’s a hot one, and if it catches us, we’ll lose the base’s homing beacon. No way I’m backing off now—this is our only shot.”

“So what are we going to do if number one shuts down? The storm’ll catch us for sure.”

“Spencer!” Andrews shouted.

“What up?” A small, squat man appeared in the door that separated the SCEV’s cramped cockpit from the not-so-cramped work area in the center of the vehicle. By regulations, the pressure doors separating the three compartments were supposed to be closed, but with the vehicle lurching and bucking across the terrain, Andrews just didn’t have it in him to make what already felt like a coffin even smaller. If he was in the back, he’d have a tough time not blowing chow all over the place.

“One’s getting close to thermal shutdown, but I need it,” Andrews told the crew chief. “What can I do about it?”

Spencer looked at the multifunction display, then tabbed through the couple of screens. He grunted and returned the display to the main situation page. “Particle separator’s shitting the bed, which means the engine’s taking in dirty air. I can suppress the alert and raise the shutdown threshold, but the engine’s gonna fry. Walleyes won’t be happy about that,” Spencer added, referring to the commanding officer of the base’s vehicle section by his informal—and completely impolite—nickname.

Andrews considered his options. So far in his career, he’d been able to steer clear of Colonel Larry Walters’s wrath, which he had visited upon every other SCEV commander over the past decade since the Sixty Minute War. Walters was a ticket-punching chump, one of the Old Guard, and Andrews didn’t much care for him. But he was a superior officer, even if he was far too old to be a full-bird colonel. But there was no retiring to Tampa or Sun Valley or Bangkok anymore, which meant Andrews and every other SCEV skipper would have to deal with Walters’s shit until he dropped dead from old age or was relieved of command.

In the end, Andrews figured that if he was going to have a run-in with Walters, it might as well be over something fairly major, like burning up the core of a precious SCEV powerplant.

“Do it,” he told Spencer. “A direct order, and if you want me to use my code to access the vehicle engineering module, I’ll be happy to do it.”

“Nah, I got it. Just back me up when someone tries to nail my ass to the wall. Gimme a sec, I’ll use the station back here.” With that, the swarthy crew chief returned to the multipurpose workstation located only a few feet away. Choi looked back at him, then at Andrews.

“You’re putting him on the line, Mike,” he said softly.

“He’s not doing shit, I’m the one who doesn’t want to be out here in this storm,” Spencer said. “You see the size of it? That thing’ll last for a week before it blows out, and frankly, this thing smells like a can of farts. And I want out.”

“The fart smell would be mostly
your
fault, Spencer,” Leona Eklund said, her voice carrying to the cockpit over the roar of the rig’s engines and the various creaks, groans, and scrapes caused by the vehicle’s transit over the rough terrain. Andrews had to grin. It was true; one of the biggest drawbacks to crewing with Todd Spencer was the fact he emitted an exceptionally vile amount of swamp gas, no matter what he ate, and no matter what medication had been prescribed to prevent it. Whatever foulness lurked inside him, Spencer’s body tried valiantly to eject it through his sphincter.

“Yeah, yeah, too bad all of us can’t fart potpourri like you do, princess,” Spencer said. “Captain, I’ve raised the threshold on number one, but listen, you’ve got maybe three, four minutes until it fails. Keep that in mind.”

“Roger that, Spence. Thanks.”

An alarm went off then, sharp and strident—the lightning strike indicator flashed in the corner of one primary display as the storm behind them fired off great discharges of electrostatic energy, one of the things that made the great sandstorms that plagued the former Midwestern United States such a terror for the SCEV teams to deal with. Not only did they pack hurricane-force winds, they also cast off powerful cyclones and great bolts of lightning that homed in on virtually anything metallic. Despite the vast amount of advanced technology that went into insulating the SCEVs, they were still comprised of a good deal of metal.