Mankind's Worst Fear Read online

  MANKIND’S WORST FEAR

  By

  David L. Erickson

  I owe a great debt of gratitude to the writers, both new and experienced, on Critters.org whose detailed critiques were invaluable and inspired me to continue. And to Sandy Chene’ whose hard questions, unflagging support and detailed editing through the first two rewrites pulled this tale together while keeping it uniquely mine.

  Chapter One

  09:15 Hours - July 12, 2057 – Earth

  A tingling itch crawled up George ‘Cap’ Schumer’s spine. He leaned back from the burnished gray communications con. Troubled, his worried scrutiny swept forward along the tapered soft-edge of the console, then up, taking in the satin smooth, seamless and antiseptically white polyfiber bulkhead panels concealing a nest of fiber optics cables, control biopaks, and a myriad thatch of components integral to the control room’s function as Slinker’s nerve center.

  Something was amiss, yet nothing revealed itself as his gold-flecked hazel eyes took in the sub’s forward cabin and belatedly came to rest on the man beside him. Mindless of his captain’s unease, Don Scambini, Seascape’s Chief Environmental Analyst, stared greedily at the environmentals vid, absorbing some arcane bit of data that would, invariably, prove to be useful at some unforeseen moment when success or failure hinged on his dredging it from the seemingly unrelated storehouse of scientific trivia crammed into his vast intellect.

  George’s gaze swept past Don, across the open hatch leading aft through the bunk room, over the helmcon, a near duplicate of the starboard work stations where he now sat rigidly upright, to Farrell Morris: back bent from years of hunching over touchpads to eyeball vid displays. A technological master of the open sea, the youngest among George’s crew of specialists seemed as rapt as Don.

  Could be just an itch. No. Something was about to happen. He closed his eyes and viewed his ship with a mind that remembered every moment of its creation. It took a nanosecond to access his bioneural chip, then interface with Slinker’s bioputer. Search detected no anomalies. He blinked and exited. Ship sounds intruded: the hissing rush of seawater through the magnetron tubes propelling Slinker through the warm mid-Pacific currents, the air circulator’s gentle hush and the low hum issuing from the primary generators. A light cough from the bunkroom just aft, the rustle of bedding. He sniffed, breathed deep. Synthlube, a hint of tangerine, the thin, oily scent of newly molded industrial polyfiber. So, it wasn’t Slinker. Nothing seemed amiss, yet…

  A ripple through the sub-surface currents displayed on his flat screen vid grabbed George’s attention. Puzzled, he squared up and hunched closer. The pattern repeated, then spread like ripples on a still pond, blurring the upper left quadrant. He leaned around to see if Slinker’s navigator saw it too.

  “Hey, Farrell...”

  A warning bleat drew him back to the vid. ‘UFO detected’, flashed in red.

  “Aerial display,” he directed at the screen’s pick-up. The monitor brightened, revealing a digital recreation of an enormous object plummeting through the exosphere.

  “Display available UFO data.” At last. A distraction, but not an NHDA virtual. He had taken Slinker off-net after eluding the Northern Hemisphere Defense Alliance forces the first day out. He considered the hundreds of automated experiments and systems tests currently onlined. No, Slinker’s twin bioputers would notify him if that were the case. The UFO had to be real. The giant space station, Orbital One, crashing into the atmosphere was the only thing he knew that could create that huge a sensor imprint. Or an asteroid. That explained the itch.

  "Display trajectory plane.”

  The vid brightened to pale blue. Altimeter and telemetry readings appeared in a crimson box to the bottom right. From the top left, a black square traced a yellow arc that transected a white blip beneath a dark blue line at the bottom. Training notwithstanding, George gaped. Whatever the damn thing was, it was on a collision course — with Slinker! Before he could verify telemetry, the display dissolved. Variegated patterns swirled and writhed across the screen, rendering useless the data now displayed as a backdrop.

  Something else. Though nothing he could tag, it set every nerve synapse jangling. Even the cabin’s atmosphere seemed wrong, smelled, tasted of ozone. George glanced sharply at Don, but Don, eyeing the odd displacement on his own monitor, merely shrugged, apparently as much at a loss for an explanation as he.

  With a sickening lurch, Slinker lolled to port and stalled. Diffused lighting faded to red. A shudder coursed bow to stern. Slinker nosed upward as if the magnetron tubes and steering motors were biting thin air. Sensors threaded throughout the sub’s composite skeleton set off axial stress alarms, flooding the control room with somber, yet irritatingly effective bleats.

  George closed his eyes and onlined with Slinker. He communed with her, read her sinews, measured her pulse. She revealed to him what the vids could not. His throat constricted as if a giant hand throttled him. He swallowed hard, but it did no good. He was right to be afraid. Something was horribly wrong. He rushed through the possibilities. Nothing jelled. Slinker lurched, wallowed eleven degrees starboard, then sloughed bow up, driving the stern deeper.

  “Autocon off! Reflate stern ballast to one-fifty!” George bolted from the chair and lunged for the helm con, portside and left of Farrell. Thrown off balance by the sudden list, he crashed against the chart table, knocking the wind from him. Gasping for breath, he grabbed onto handholds molded along the table lip and hung on as the deck canted more. His chest and thigh ached from the violence of the contact.

  “Done, Cap.” Farrell glanced up. Terror struggled for dominance beneath a mask of professional detachment that George knew well. In the split second they made eye contact. Had his navigator read the fear in his eyes too?

  Interfacing manually, Farrell’s fingers glided and tapped with an alacrity that belied the system’s linguistic capabilities.

  “Then backflow the tubes!” Clinging tenuously to the backlit table, George sized up his chances of reaching the helm con. None, unless he risked being smashed about. Slinker yawed and surged toward the surface.

  “Backflow at eighty percent and climbing, Cap.”

  The turbulence eased suddenly, then faded altogether. Slinker’s stern surged up and past the bow, slamming George face down. Pain coursed up his thigh where he’d managed to wedge his leg under the table.

  “Autocon on!”

  With digital ease, the bioputers leveled Slinker. George unwrapped his leg and slowly pushed himself off the table, pettily chagrinned he had reacted so fearfully, then admonished himself. After hundreds of hours in Seascape’s Slinker simulator, he thought he’d run about every scenario he could imagine, but the simulator lacked one element: Slinker had two hundred feet of ocean above her.

  Something immeasurable had changed. A quantum shift mirrored in the air, a flux in the magnetic timbre of the motors, the motion of the sea ... He let go the chart table and jerked his head side to side twice to loosen the tension binding his neck. Sweat glistened on his sun tanned face. With some effort, he slowed his pulse and calmed his mind, though resonant murmurs remained, like the ache in his belly. And the itch.

  “What the hell do you think that was?” Dull and hollow. Not like him at all, George thought.

  Farrell ran a shaky hand through his sculpted chestnut hair and looked up at George with eyes wide and imploring. “Damned if I know, Cap, but I can give it a look/see, maybe come up with somethin’ you can use to figure it out.”

  A reassuring nod from George, and Farrell returned to studying the stats accumulating on his vid. He tapped and jabbed, corrected a misskey, grunted, and continued. Despite George’s urging, Farrell, and the rest of Slinker’s crew, had refused the
implantation of an experimental bioneural link.

  George shoved his hands in the hip pockets of his light blue jumpsuit, felt awkward and crossed his arms instead. Perhaps it was understandable that he be so disconcerted. He was a scientist after all, not an adventurer. And nearly two decades had passed since he last crewed coastal trawlers on Lake Superior where winter driven storms could be unpredictable and deadly. He reached over Farrell’s shoulder and poked a red square on the touchpad. The insistent audio warning ceased. He eased into the helm chair and sniffed. Synthlube, tangerines and new polyfiber. No ozone.

  “Puter. All stop.” George disregarded the detailed caution alerts scrolling the bottom of the vid. Instead, he scanned the block-formed red letters fanning across the screen: the status codes of thousands of micro-systems. As the bioputer cleared the programs, the status fan shrank. Warning bands blinked out. Battle illumination brightened to white.

  George noted a subtle change in the ship’s enviros. Slinker had risen to periscope depth, even though he hadn’t requested it. Farrell had guessed his captain’s next move and that was okay by him. They were scientists, after all, not military.

  Absorbed by a legion of calculations, Farrell tapped, waited, tapped, smiled, tapped. Finally, with a small whoop, he lounged back. A cockeyed grin split his face, making him look even younger than his twenty-six years. “All systems online, Cap. Dive parameters nominal. Slinker is undamaged. Continue on same heading?”

  “Current location?”

  “I’ll confirm, but we should be forty-three miles west-south-west of Oregon on a bearing of zero-six-three,” Farrell answered. “We should expect to encounter surface shipping.”

  “Make sure Autoevade is online, then steady as she goes, Mr. Farrell.”

  “Aye, Aye, Cap.” Farrell threw George a sloppy salute. “Steady as she goes.”

  George winked. There were times when he appreciated Farrell’s youthful ways. Reminded him that nothing is worse than we can make it. He rolled his shoulders, tensed his lanky, six-foot-one frame progressively from head to toe, then breathed a long, low sigh. His thoughts lost their alarmist edge. It appeared the anomaly had caused no structural damage, though that welcome revelation failed to quiet the uncertainty gnawing at his belly like a bad cup of coffee.

  Farrell snapped his fingers. “Hey, Cap. I got somethin’.” A self-congratulatory grin twisted his lips. He glanced up, then back at the vid. Lightly tanned and spare of frame, his earnest dark brown eyes alluded to a deep and inquisitive mind.

  “You have it figured out?” George leaned closer to Farrell's vid. A ragged and unknown coastline had appeared in the form of a yellow squiggle top left to bottom right. “Looks like twenty-three miles. Not where you said we were.”

  Doggedly verifying the display, Farrell didn’t look up. “No way you’re going to believe this, but our GPS puts us geographically about six miles east of Eugene, Oregon…smack in the foothills of the Cascade Mountains, Cap!”

  “Nice joke. Now, give me the straight skinny.” Hiring Farrell had come with misgivings. Despite graduating from Annapolis, the young man's social awkwardness sometimes embarrassed George. But despite the young Federation Navy Lieutenant’s immaturity, Seascape had needed a top flight navigator with submarine experience, and Farrell was the best.

  “Not kiddin’, Cap,” Farrell sounded convinced. “Unless our gear got messed up goin’ through that...whatever...the coast sure isn’t where it was a minute ago.”

  Slinker’s bioputers could duplicate everything they’d just experienced, but George wasn’t convinced the programmers at Seascape were that creative. Fervently hopeful the display would transform, proving the readings to be an electronic aberration, George rubbed his weary eyes, then checked again and reached for his touchpad. His hand trembled. He shoved it in his hip pocket and made eye contact with the monitor’s pick-up. “Topographical display.”

  The last time his hands shook like that, he was twenty-two and a first mate aboard a two hundred ton trawler running from a gale on Lake Superior. He’d been in his cabin doing a line of coke when the monster storm slammed into the trawler without warning. He blanched, remembered his wired, cowardly actions that night. He hunched over the touchpad and tapped up a duplicate display while aggressively purging his memory of that night. To quell that old white-powder thirst, he thought of his dad. The only one who had stood by him at the inquest. What would dad think of this? He hadn't seen the old professor in weeks: not since him and mom moved into that cave dad swore was the safest home in America.

  At four of the six polycarbon gray workstations, three to either side of the control room, vids brightened. Elevation lines revealed the distinct, undulating characteristics of foothills receding from the coast. Thirty-one miles inland, peaks dotted the landscape in a procession roughly approximating the coastline. The display faded not far beyond the mountains and ended at the screen edge.

  George stared. “This isn’t funny.” He looked up. “Show heat gradations.” Instantly the display faded to black. The coastline emerged as a yellow squiggle, elevation lines in thin white, but no red or pink blots to indicate heat emanations. His mouth went dry. “Should be cities, power plants...vehicles for god sake!”

  Alarm, uncertainty, flitted across Farrell’s face. His hands came to rest beside his touchpad. “Nothin’ out there, Cap. Least wise, nothin’ puttin’ off enough heat for our sensors to pick up.”

  “Tighten the range and boost the gain.”

  Scattered and faint, red dots appeared. There were small blobs — clustered bios within the radiant field of campfires or small generators — and dozens of mobile dots, most batched by twos and threes.

  “Explanation. Don, Farrell?” George leaned his chair around, but looked to no one in particular. He was sure his colleagues could come up with some darned imaginative, yet plausible scenarios without much effort. “If an earthquake dropped the West Coast into the Pacific...no,” he shook his head, “there were no compression waves, just a few seconds of bumpy water. That couldn’t have been it. This close...would have crushed us. Then, there's that UFO the sensors picked up before the vids went crazy.”

  Don looked up from the starboard science con. Frowned together, his black brows parted, revealing inquisitive, yet troubled, dark-brown eyes. “Maybe an energy weapon that disables power generation?”

  “And we were protected from it?”

  “Possibly, or worse. I’ve analyzed a water sample, Cap” He brushed a nervous hand over his close-cropped pate. His stubby fingers lingered on a purplish four-inch scar below his left ear.

  George caught the now habitual movement. Reminded him of Don’s recent hill climbing misadventure with a gravcycle.

  “Give me what you’ve got,” he rasped harshly, instantly regretting his tone. As much to reassure Farrell as himself, he rested a hand on the young man’s shoulder and focused on Don’s vid across the cabin. He compared the graphs shown with what he remembered of the spectral analysis color charts.

  “Besides some other marginally nasty stuff, I’m measuring heavy traces of Uranium 234, sulfur and carbon. I’m culling new samples, Cap, but regardless, whatever water we’re in, it’s a long way from normal.”

  The sensory data displayed on Don’s vid didn’t make sense. George questioned whether Slinker’s bioputers had been damage, but that wasn’t likely and he wasn’t ready to believe that. Mysteries always have supportable explanations, dad said. Always.

  According to Don’s daily report, the samples taken that morning were statistically identical to the baseline water and air samples taken an hour out from Seascape's base near Astoria, Washington, three days prior. Only minute traces of uranium or sulfur had been detected then.

  “You believe these readings?” George heard his voice rise an octave, and cleared his throat, but it made no difference. Frightening scenarios tumbled through his mind. “If Orbital One crashed, the space station would offline power generation for thousands of square miles and leave
a nuclear signature.”

  Don shrugged and looked past him to the unfamiliar topography displayed on Farrell’s vid. “Doesn’t explain that coastline.”

  George leaned his chair around to see what Don was looking at.

  “There.” Don pointed. “Looks like an inlet...and the varieties are indicative of structures. See...squares, rectangles, a circle... that one on the hill is at least sixty feet high.”

  George recognized several geometric patterns amid the ragged, wavering lines depicting natural elevations. With professional, though uneasy detachment, he studied the display. Intrigued, though no less alarmed, he sensed movement and straightened.

  Lauren Baldwin, Seascape’s chief bioengineer and Slinker's biotech, entered from the bunkroom and laid a thin black palmputer on the chart table, then came to stand between George and Farrell. “All right, what gives, guys? That turbulence took me away from a very pleasant dream.”

  Dressed as the others in a light-blue jumpsuit zipped to the waist, the triangle of her ivory crewneck shirt thus revealed had the Seascape stingray logo imprinted above her left breast. Jade-eyed with auburn hair trimmed to a functional pageboy, her pale skin and spattering of freckles made her look years younger than she would ever admit to.

  “Don't know, Lauren.” George shrugged with his hands. She had four years on his thirty-eight, which made her at least a decade older than the rest of the crew. Of late he’d been tempted to press their relationship beyond their professional association, but desire had fallen victim to his obsession with, and devotion to the Seascape Project and its offspring, Slinker.

  “Farrell says we’re in the foothills of the Cascades and Don says the ocean’s laced with uranium. I’d prefer to think our systems caught a bug.”

  Lauren frowned, mimicking Don, whose expression remained stolid. Arms crossed, she moved closer to Farrell and leaned down. Farrell’s face flushed slightly and he fidgeted, as he always did when she breached his personal space. Worry etched her forehead like ruts in a dirt road.