Systemic Shock Page 24

  That night Liang Chen holed up far off the road where the bike would not tempt others. He had no food and he worried about that. His fever was worse and his eyes itched so that he found himself rubbing them; but this did not worry him much.

  What worried Liang more was the sight of his fingernails, late the next day, as he pedaled near exhaustion toward a deserted village. He allowed himself to coast, stared at his left thumbnail, saw its edge receding from the cuticle as though eaten by some subtle acid. Truly, it did not hurt much. Neither did his eyes. The damnable pounding headache and the blurred vision bothered him more.

  And then he passed the abandoned truck, saw for an instant the face of a soldier with scarlet eyes and runnels of pus down his cheeks; a face not of the dying, but of the damned. The truck had been deserted; he had glanced into a rearview mirror. Liang Chen sat down by the road and waited for the unending dark.

  Some of Minister Cha Tsuni's records went up with his lab; others were deliberately erased. We may never know whether Staphylococcus rosacea was a DNA-tailored bacillus, a spontaneous strain, or one induced by radiation. Like 5. aureus, S. rosacea thrived asymptomatically in the human nose, so human carriers spread the stuff with every exhalation. But also like other staph, 5. rosacea was not fastidious and could live in a wide range of temperatures, with or without oxygen. Thus the bug could live on airborne dust motes and wait to invade lungs, blood, organs. The best defense was solitude; 5. rosacea did not travel well without a host.

  Once entrenched in a host, the new bacillus released toxins that could lead to pneumonia, meningitis, huge suppurating carbuncles, and septicemia—all potentially lethal if untreated. But S. rosacea set itself apart from older staph varieties in two ways. It was highly resistant even to the potent, problematical vancomycin. And it had a horrifying affinity for keratinous tissue, especially the saline-washed transparent anterior covering of the eye. In plain language, while inflaming surrounding tissue it consumed the cornea, characteristically staining the victim's cheeks with a stain of yellow pus as it prospered and devoured.

  Typically a victim would breathe the bacilli, or airborne staph might invade an open wound. While the disease progressed into pneumonia or a toxin-filled bloodstream the victim became listless, often feverish. He would almost certainly place contaminated hands near his eyes, or walk through his own exhalations.

  Either way, the eyes had it. S. rosacea flourished in the salt tears, eating away the cornea and, to lesser effect, into the nails of fingers and toes. Treatment was at first a matter of administering exactly enough of a powerful antibiotic to quell the bug without generating serious side effects, e.g., renal failure, to kill the patient. This knife-edged balance required constant monitoring and considerable skill by trained medics and, given that edge, only thirty per cent of 5. rosacea victims died. But ninety per cent of the survivors would be sightless after the disease had run its full course.

  The demoralizing effect of a disease that turned one's eyes into pus receptacles and was highly communicable, would be hard to overestimate. Faced with the specter of a future full of blind men, even sighted survivors often chose desertion or suicide.

  The Chinese plague was over a month old before the Allies realized its full pandemic potential and sought a true cure as a blue ribbon top priority. Its horrifying symptoms generated panic far greater than paranthrax ever had, and China thought to share that panic with her enemies. She arranged to cloister a few victims, all palpably learned technical people, in a setting where they would be captured. Since it takes a scientist to adequately interview a scientist, Chang Wei hoped that those few victims might pass the epidemic along from the top.

  But those were prisoners the Allies did not choose to take. Horrifying problems engender horrifying solutions; the RUS pulled back, detonated one last Wall of Lenin that demarcated a zone of lifelessness. While fifty thousand Sinolnd troops perished in the neutron spray, so did ten thousand of ours, including a Canadian armored regiment and two battalions of American infantry. The Fifth US Army bitterly resented this misuse of 'friendly fire', but did not retaliate. Canada reserved her retaliation.

  Then came a signal of utter determination that Chang and Casimiro could not ignore. In an unprecedented burst of candor, the US/RUS Allies sent an open message to the Sinolnd Axis listing over fifty locations. At the first sign of deliberate dispersal of the hideous 5. rosacea, we would hit those locations with our cultures of the same stuff, and more.

  The Allies roamed orbital space at will now. The threat was highly public, and stupefying. The locations list covered all of the most highly populated regions of the Sinolnd Axis: sites in eastern Szechuan, Kiang Su, Hopeh; in Kerala, West Bengal, Punjab, Bangladesh; in the Red and Mekong deltas; near Surabaja and Makasar.

  Because the Allies were better stocked with antibiotics and medical staff, and because their civilian populations were better equipped to take their own hygienic measures, the Sinolnd pundits abandoned their plans to mount a global series of dispersal raids. Instead, they turned their attention to defensive measures.

  Chapter Sixty-Nine

  On receipt of the scholarly paper of Lt. Boren Mills, the Navy's Office of Public Information automatically granted it a 'Confidential' classification. Mills instantly pointed out to Naval Intelligence that the paper had been misclassified, and earned himself a ten-minute interview with a bored commander on Oahu whose eyes were not so sleepy two minutes into the discussion. “You can optimize a persuasive message to an Arms Appropriations Committee," Mills pointed out, "just as you can to the public."

  The commander took Mills to lunch that balmy day in June and, when affixing his endorsement to the 'Top Secret" reclassification, phrased his recommendations carefully. His phrasing implied that he, the commander, had immediately seen applications of the Mills paper that Mills himself had—perhaps—missed. While achievement is nontransferable, the image of achievement can be transferred. This is the one towering secret of management, and the commander managed nicely.

  It was while Mills awaited notice from higher echelons that the tiny submarine washed into the coral off Lehua. The islet of Lehua lies in plain sight of Nühau, one of the many small jewels of the Hawaiian chain that most haoles ignore. Mills had seen it many times. It did not seem likely to offer much in the way of entertainment and, when two Radiomen Third Class returned from a fishing jaunt with the news, Mills tended at first to ignore it.

  But the stubby little craft bore Chinese markings, the two ratings insisted, and had all the earmarks of an unexamined derelict. Mills had seen the orders pertaining to the strange assortment of debris that had been washing ashore in Hawaii during the past month. He grumbled. And then he organized the small patrol that was to change his life.

  Mills and four ratings brought their inflatable ACV to the site of the beached sub at low tide, circling twice before making fast to a hatch fairing hardly larger than a manhole cover. The polymer hull showed bright coral gashes through gray-green paint.

  Radioman Kimball Norton, without much enthusiasm, opened the hatch while one of his fellows stood by with a carbine. Mills, his knuckles white on his carbine, caught the faint smell of decay as Norton stepped back with a grimace. "Anyone alive?"

  "Doesn't smell like it, Sir," Norton called back.

  "Lob a pacifier grenade in," Mills ordered. "It'll clear the air for you down there."

  Norton caught the implication. Mills was perfectly sanguine about ordering a man down that black hole and if he was going to have to do it anyhow, Kim Norton would rather not flaunt his reluctance. He jerked the poptop from the grenade and tossed it down the hole.

  The only response was the paperbag 'thwock' of the grenade. After ten minutes, Norton saw the lieutenant's eye stray to his watch. "Permission to go below, Sir?"

  "Granted," said Mills. Norton was the kind of man who understood the chain of command, and his status as flail at the end of it; and this, Mills appreciated. Perhaps he would do something for Norton.

>   They all heard the "Jee-zas," and the clang of a dropped chemlamp, and two ratings took Norton under the arms to quicken his already sprightly exit. There was nobody alive down there, said Norton, coughing. There were over a dozen deaders there in plastic capsules, though. They were in uniform and looked oriental.

  Mills waited longer for the finely-divided grenade solids to precipitate; donned SCUBA gear with a prayer of thanks to reservist training he had once cursed; made an external survey of the little Chinese sub.

  It had the look of an enormous toy, cheaply mass-produced, and it had no propeller at all. The thing had evidently been powered by the tiny reaction engine at its rear. Though no engineer, Boren Mills knew that this was an unlikely candidate for propulsion. Before surfacing, Mills was aware that this minuscule warship held important information.

  He changed again into his uniform, replenished by its authority, and took a second chemlamp. By now the grenade's chemicals were only a tickle in his nostrils. Mills, alone with instruments and tool kit, toured the little sub.

  The thing held a cargo of human bodies, twenty of them, in plastic cocoons. They wore CPA uniforms; one was a non-com. Umbilicals ran to the cocoons, suggestive of life-support systems for catatonics—but Mills knew putrefaction when he saw it, even through a polycarbonate bubble. There wasn't room in the narrow walkway for twenty men, or even ten; and he found no evidence of battle stations, steering apparatus, or control console. The sub had not been intended for sorties, then.

  Mills recalled the Mendocino Seaquake, cudgeled his memory for connections, and found them. An entire army of Viets had gone to earth near the Yangtze months before—or rather, he corrected himself, had gone to sea. He wondered where the rest would turn up, then wondered why none at all had, before this. Between his sneezes, Mills was smiling.

  The weapons storage near the bow clarified a lot. The biggest items in storage were fifteen-cm, shoulder-fired

  SSM's and, laid down like cordwood, bangalore torps. Munitions for land warfare, for maximum mobility; for a tiny unit living off the land while traversing it. The assault rifles boasted folding stocks. There must have been at least a hundred thousand rounds of 9-mm. ammo in beltpacs. How many other tiny subs had accompanied this one? Mills guessed perhaps a thousand, and missed by an order of magnitude.

  Mills searched for air and food storage tanks. He was pressed inexorably toward the conclusion that, additives and concentrates aside, most of the food and all breathing oxygen were provided by the same subsystem. While he pondered, the young officer traced lines and circuits.

  From his SCUBA survey Mills knew that the sub was propelled, incredibly, by a reaction engine. At great depth it would generate a hiss undecipherable by sonar. The problem, of course, was that the sub would require vast amounts of propellant. Unless the craft were staged with huge jettisonable tanks, it made no sense to Mills. A missing piece of puzzle nudged the elbow of his mind, was thrust aside. Ridiculous.

  His instruments pinpointed a local source of radiation and, for a long hideous moment, Mills pondered the possibility that he stood before a fused fission device. But this part of the system was obviously linked to umbilicals for food, oxygen, and for—something else. Lines leading to small collector tanks, which fed the reaction engine.

  Ridiculous, he thought again. But the evidence was overwhelming; despite the gloomy predictions of the best western minds, Mills thought, he stood beside a plug-in unit that provided endless quantities of oxygen, hydrogen, simple sugars, to permit a small troop-carrying submarine to cross the Pacific without surfacing.

  The key device was not a bomb—unless it was a social bomb. It was small enough to carry under his arm—and it used sea water as input mass. Mills stood before a fusion device; and it synthesized. Endlessly.

  Boren Mills began to perspire.

  During the disassembly, Mills found five occasions to apply quick-setting cyanoacrylate paste. These were occasions when mechanical detents seemed likely to spring up or down. He was to learn that only three of those detents were destruct mechanisms, and that the one electrical booby trap he did not find, had corroded harmlessly. At length he was sure that the tiny cornucopia lay disconnected. No, not quite sure. In any case, he could not haul it up from the little sub without being seen. Mills affixed a USN proprietary tag to the unit and, stowing tools in his beltpac, emerged from the craft.

  "Let's get back to quarters," he said to the men. “Each of you will write a full report and, until our reports are in, this is absolutely Q-clearance stuff. Kim, you can help me word my input. You were down there first."

  Kim Norton was the nearest thing to a friend that Mills could claim among the enlisted men. The others puzzled alone over their reports that night, confined to quarters, while Norton sat uncomfortable in officer country, alone with Mills.

  "If this satisfies you, Sir, it does me," Norton said when their draft was complete. "I wasn't down in that tub for more than a few seconds anyhow."

  "Why don't we drop the 'sir' crap for now," said Mills, knowing he sounded less than genuine. His smile didn't add much. He rushed on, crowning the moment with still another lie. ' "The truth is, I wish you had been down there. I tagged a piece of equipment to bring back—hell, Kim, I mentioned it in the report!"

  "I wondered about that. How big?"

  "Size of a small suitcase. I—just forgot. Can you imagine anything so stupid?"

  Norton juggled the notion of stupidity in Mills, and dropped it with a shrug. "We can get it tomorrow," he offered.

  "Of course, of course," Mills muttered, "but something just occurred to me." While staring at those detents.

  When Norton failed to nibble at the bait, Mills arose and walked to the percolator at the far end of the room. He poured two cups, unobtrusively flicked on his pocket 'corder, and laid it near the percolator. Then he continued their talk. Presently Mills asked, "Did you see much down in the sub?"

  "How could I, coughing my head off in the dark? No, Sir."

  "My name is 'Boren', Kim. Relax. So you don't even recall the piece of equipment I tagged?"

  "I told you before, uh, Boren: no," Norton said with a trace of irritation.

  Now that he had something he needed, the Mills smile was genuine. He sat companionably near Norton on the table's edge. "Do you think you could recognize it if you saw it tonight?"

  Norton was not happy with the idea until Mills hinted at a citation. But reassured that the officer would make the trip worth his while, Norton agreed to the midnight requisition.

  When the rating had gone, Mills strode to the percolator and began to toy with the 'corder. It was only a few klicks from Kikepa Point to the derelict sub. What if there was an honest-to-God fission device, after all, connected to the fusion synthesizer? Well, at least Bonham Base on Kauai would suffer little damage. Mills indulged in this small patriotism, sipped coffee, and avoided looking toward the west. If he could not become a rich man, at least he could avoid blindness.

  Two hours later, the synthesizer sat on the desk before Mills. It looked a bit like a cipher machine from an earlier war, fitted for intravenous feeding.

  "Nothing to it, eh?" Mills extended his hand. "When all this is over, Kim, you'll be remembered." He swore Norton to secrecy and dismissed him. Then Mills generated a new report that made no mention of the synthesizer. He sealed the device in a desiccant-filled bag, placed that in another bag, then buried the treasure near the access road.

  The next morning, Mills and his crew were again at the sub, ostensibly to take exact measurements and photographs for the salvage teams. Mills put two men to work examining the keel, stationed a third on deck to keep the forced-air unit cramming fresh air into the sub, then shifted his big shoulder-bag and went below. He took Kim Norton with him.

  While Norton obediently listed loose personal articles in the crew compartment, Mills selected a package in his bag and placed it in the weapons storage locker. He then took the forage hatchet from his bag and carefully brained Kim Nort
on from behind. He returned to the storage locker to recheck the setting of the timer, then laid his pocket 'corder near the bangalore torpedoes and checked his watch as he flicked the 'corder switch.

  Mills climbed outside empty-handed. "I forgot my fast film," he called down the hatch. "We'll have to get it from the cache on shore." While the three crewmen scurried to the small ACV moored by the hatch, he checked the time again, temporized by inspecting the forced-air unit, then called down the hatch again. "Taking the rest of the crew, Kim. We'll be gone fifteen minutes. Sure you don't want to go?"

  There was the briefest of pauses before, "I told you before, uh, Boren no," said Norton's recorded voice with a trace of irritation.

  "Suit yourself, love," Mills forced himself to say, choosing a phrase least likely to sound premeditated. "But keep your damned hands off those munitions." Then Lieutenant Boren Mills leaped into the ACV. They were nearly to their equipment cache when the submarine disintegrated with two distinct explosions.

  Mills was absolved by the board of inquiry, though he assumed blame for leaving Radioman Second Class Norton behind. Fragments of the Chinese vessel were recovered, some of them quite large, none of them in condition to answer the Navy's most vexing questions. In time, fragments of similar vessels turned up.

  The Navy file characterized the doomed fleet as an official curiosity, but opined that the craft must have had a huge tender, a mother ship. There was never any serious suggestion that the tiny craft were capable of running submerged from a thousand klicks up the Yangtze to the Oregon coast. The only evidence of that lay buried near Kikepa Point.

  During the next two weeks, Mills found a suspicion confirmed: interservice rivalries could not match the complex intimacies of rivalry within the Department of the Navy. During the series of conferences provoked by his scholarship, Mills watched the maneuvering between his superiors in the Office of Naval Intelligence, the Public Information pundits of OPI, and the crusty staff of CNO who only wanted, as one rear admiral said, to cut the crap and convert some senators.