Never Again Read online

  Chapter Twenty-Two

  Burt gazed across Carol Chance’s ornately carved mahogany desk and studied her expression as she read the report he’d handed her. As the Secretary of Agriculture, the trappings of her job filled the walls of her office in the USDA’s headquarters: a motley assemblage of pictures of tractors, cows, and giant fields of wheat, along with a collection of seemingly random certificates and diplomas.

  Carol wore her dark hair in a tight bun, and just behind her on a credenza rested a small ceramic pot filled to nearly overflowing with what looked like wooden shavings. Burt sniffed and presumed that was where the strong scent of cinnamon potpourri was coming from.

  She suddenly let out a sigh as she lowered Burt’s report. “That much? Really? You do realize that by asking for two years’ worth of food for every man, woman, and child within our borders, it will completely deplete all of our stockpiles. What then?” The middle-aged woman kneaded her hands together and asked with a tremor in her voice, “Doctor Radcliffe, are we going to survive this?”

  Leaning forward in his chair, Burt reached out and placed his hand over hers, giving her hands a reassuring squeeze. “Carol, believe me when I say that we’ll be fine.” He paused, pursing his lips in thought and leaned back in his chair. “I can give you a little insight as to what will happen, if it will put your mind at ease. However, you must understand that I’m sharing this under the restrictions of the Indigo project, so no further discussion with others, understood?”

  “Of course.” Carol’s voice suddenly sounded confident, but her trembling hands gave away her inner turmoil.

  “Carol, there’s really nothing to worry about. You were at the briefing when Doctor Holmes described in broad strokes what we’ll be doing. Let’s just put it in the simplest terms, we’ll be traveling for just about nine months. At the end of this admittedly mind-blowing journey, we’ll park ourselves just over twelve light years away, around a new star called Tau Ceti.”

  “Amazing.” Carol breathed out the words as her eyes widened, giving her an owl-like expression. It was as if she hadn’t truly considered that they’d be leaving the solar system. “B-but Doctor Radcliffe, if it will take us nine months, then why do we need two years’ worth of food?”

  Burt paused, unsure if he wanted to admit that there was some uncertainty to his estimates. The secretary seemed the fragile type, and he’d seen enough grown people crying with fear when he talked to them privately in their offices. Letting out a deep sigh, Burt admitted, “I’m afraid some of my estimates reflect that I’m a bit uncertain on some things. Yes, we’ll be traveling for nine months. The sun’s influence on us will be gone very quickly, so we’ll not be getting any natural light, per se, during our trip.” Burt pointed at the ceiling to emphasize his next point. “When DefenseNet gets activated, it will give off a light. Exactly how bright it will be, and if it will be strong enough to grow crops from, I can’t be sure. Also, when we do arrive at our destination and have the light of a new star shining on us again, I can’t be sure how long it will take for the crops to adjust and the growing season to restart. So that’s why the two years. Just in case. I’m sorry I can’t be more precise.”

  “Oh, thank God.” Carol’s expression visibly relaxed as she wiped the tears that had welled up and dripped onto her cheek. “I’m sorry, it’s just that I’m so worried about screwing things up for everyone. It’s not just my kids, and my new baby granddaughter; it’s everyone looking to me for things that they’ll need to keep them alive. It’s having people’s lives in my hands that I’m so unused to. And my poor grandbaby, Alicia. She’s just now teething and ready for food—”

  “Carol, your granddaughter will be fine.” Burt spoke the well-rehearsed words he’d used with many people in DC. “Just imagine what new things she’ll grow up learning. Imagine how many new opportunities there will be for her. When we begin our lives anew around Tau Ceti, she’ll be able to say that she was born around another star. Alicia will have travelled across interstellar space. With the president’s and the other world leaders’ new investments in the sciences, we’ll see a much brighter future, one that holds nothing but wonder and beauty. I just wish I were her age, so I could appreciate what will come in the next fifty years. I look forward to the future; it’s going to be incredible.”

  Carol dabbed her nose with a tissue, stood, and extended her hand. “Doctor Radcliffe, thank you so much for being as thorough as you are. It makes me feel better knowing that you’re being conservative about everything. I’ll keep you in my prayers. Thank you so much.”

  Burt shook hands with the woman and left her office, feeling a bit troubled. He’d given many politicians and even some of the military’s top generals the same pep talk. Yet so many of them looked forward to the future, not for themselves, but for their children and grandchildren. He’d been an only child, and his parents were now dead. Burt’s one regret in life was that he’d never gotten remarried, and had children.

  Climbing into his car, Burt immediately typed the address for the White House into the navigation system: 1600 Pennsylvania Ave. His thoughts shifted to his next meeting, which was with the president. The image of her young son toddling around the Oval Office the last time he’d met with her left Burt somehow feeling hollow. While the car zoomed through the traffic, Burt leaned his head back and sighed as he contemplated having kids and again rejected the idea. “It’s one thing for someone like Margaret Hager to have kids at her age, she’d been married for fifteen years. If I can’t do something great for my kids, at least I can try to do something fantastic for the world. If nothing else, I want to be able to say that I’ve made a difference. The question is, what will that difference be?”

  ###

  Standing inside the cordoned off area in front of the Port Authority Bus Terminal, Stryker scanned the crowd of evacuees.

  The place was swarming with uniformed officers as some in the crowd yelled about their destination vouchers and how members of their family were being separated. Others cried inconsolably and the rest just stared vacantly, as if in shock.

  Despite the president’s speech, many had expected evacuations to begin in a few months. Most people were hoping that there wouldn’t be any need to evacuate.

  They were both wrong.

  Several members of the NYPD shouted loudly as they corralled the crowd into a semblance of order. In some cases, the officers resorted to physically escorting people into the different lines they belonged in.

  It was controlled chaos, and it took all they could do to prevent the panic that was threatening to erupt.

  Stryker’s men were stationed at the edges of the crowd, and it was on them to keep those who hadn’t yet been called for evacuation out of the vicinity.

  Seeing a flash of red hair in the crowd, Stryker rushed into the chaos and yelled, “Jessica!”

  The redhead didn’t respond as an officer guided her to one of the lines. Disappointment washed over Stryker as he realized it wasn’t her.

  “Jon!”

  Stryker turned to his right, and his sister waved at him as two officers led her, his ex-wife, Isaac, and Emma in his direction.

  With a surge of relief, he rushed toward them as a uniformed cop smiled and yelled through the chaos. “Stryker, I figured you might want to handle these yourself.”

  With a huge grin, he waved his thanks at the officer as Emma and Isaac slammed into him, tears streaming down their faces.

  Pushing aside his rifle, Stryker knelt in front of the kids and wiped their tears away. “No need to cry. This is going to be an adventure.”

  “But, Dad,” Isaac sniffled, his chin quivering with barely controlled emotion. “Peter at school said we’re all going to die just like the dinosaurs did.”

  Pressing his lips together, Stryker shook his head as his chest tightened with worry. He leaned his head forward and whispered, “Well, Peter is an idiot. Can I tell you two a secret? You have to promise not to tell anyone else, o
kay?”

  Both kids nodded as Lainie and Jessica approached and stood behind them.

  “You heard the president talking about something called DefenseNet? Well, I happen to know that some of the best scientists in the whole world have made that to keep us safe. I heard them say it’s almost like a magic shield to keep things that might hurt us far, far away. You’ll all be safe.”

  Emma frowned and stuck out her lower lip. “Daddy, there’s no such thing as magic. DefenseNet is scientistic.”

  “You’re right.” He wrapped his arms around both of them, squeezed them as hard as he dared, and leaned his head against theirs. He inhaled their freshly-scrubbed scent and leaned back to drink in their worried expressions. “I promise that you’ll be safe. You have nothing to worry about. It’ll almost be like going to overnight camp, and you both love going to camp, right?”

  Both kids wiped their faces and nodded, the first hints of smiles blooming on their faces.

  “Daddy, are you coming with us?”

  He looked up at Lainie and asked, “All four of you are going to the same place, right?”

  She wiped at the corner of her eye and said nothing.

  Jessica patted the kids’ shoulders and said, “We’re all assigned to the Poconos Evacuation Center.”

  He turned to Emma and gave her a kiss on her forehead. “I can’t go right now, I still have a job to do. But once I’m done, I’ll see about getting over to where you’re at. Okay?”

  “Promise?” Emma asked with a suspicious expression.

  “I promise.”

  A pang of guilt knotted his stomach as he spoke the words. In fact, he had no idea if he’d be allowed to go to their evacuation site.

  One of the uniformed officers came over. “The first round of buses are about to board. They need to go.”

  Stryker nodded and turned to his family. “Okay, one last set of hugs.”

  The kids and Jessica gave him their goodbyes, but Lainie couldn’t meet his gaze as tears wet her cheeks.

  Before he could figure out what the issue was, they were rounded up by the officers who’d begun clearing the front of the bus terminal.

  Stryker swallowed hard against the lump that had formed in his throat as he watched his family board the bus.

  He took a deep, shuddering breath and prayed that everything was going to be okay.

  ###

  From within the Oval Office, Burt sat next to the president and watched the controlled chaos coming from the image projected into the center of the room. It was some local news reporter out of South Florida, flying over what looked like a traffic jam.

  “This is Jose Luis Ballart reporting from the WSVN weather copter as we hover over the I-95 corridor. The mass exodus of 2066 has now officially begun. As you can see, the north-south corridors are at capacity, yet moving smoothly. As of right now, all of the outlying islands in the Keys and the southern tip of Miami-Dade County have been evacuated. Unlike some of the major delays being experienced by L.A. and some of the other major population centers, we are enjoying a rather smooth evacuation process, thanks to the Florida taxpayers and the recent upgrade of the Automated Vehicle Routing system. If it weren’t for that, we might be seeing the half-day stalls that other parts of the country have encountered....”

  The president sighed. “So much work to do....” She made a swiping motion with her hand, and the image immediately shifted to one that Burt recognized as coming from one of the cargo shuttles flying high above. An engineer in a spacesuit was busy pulling a long ribbon of graphene from a giant spool and attaching it to a landing rover. The president glanced at Burt and noted, “This is one of the video feeds from above the lunar surface. I know what I’ve told everyone about us possibly getting hit by a giant rock and the tidal waves and all that crap, but tell me again why the Moon matters so much? Why are we spending so many resources in bringing it along with us?”

  Burt tried to keep the frown off his face and swallowed the bile rising in his throat. He hated giving answers he was uncertain about, especially to the president. “Madam President, I—”

  “Damn it, Burt!” The president groused as she frowned in his direction. “You’re starting to piss me off. I’ve told you a thousand times, you can just call me Margaret when we’re alone.”

  Burt glanced over his shoulder at the Secret Service agent standing at the doorway and thought better than to argue with her. She was clearly losing her patience and certainly had enough stress without him annoying her. “Well, Margaret, I’ve told you that the Moon has an effect on our tides. And the best I can tell is that within seconds of us activating the gravity bubble, its influence on us will vanish, causing a sloshing effect as the tides flatten out. Kind of like when you move in a bathtub.”

  “Right, and that’s why we’re evacuating everyone so they don’t get adversely affected. But if that’s inevitable, why bother taking it with us? I just don’t get it.”

  Trying to ignore the former Green Beret’s intense stare, Burt hitched his thumb to the video feed still playing from above the lunar surface. “There’s two reasons why we’re doing that. The first one I don’t think is a short-term concern whatsoever. It’s believed that the Moon keeps our angle of rotation relatively steady. For instance, right now our winters and summers are what they are because of the steady tilt of the Earth, and it doesn’t vary as we rotate around the sun. Without the Moon, the Earth’s tilt may end up varying wildly over long periods of time. Meaning that at some point in our future, we could see the Earth tilt much more severely than ever before. Imagine a scenario in which our entire northern hemisphere could face the sun for months on end, while the southern hemisphere goes into an extremely deep winter.”

  As Margaret frowned, Burt shook his head and remarked, “Truthfully, that’s likely something that could happen over hundreds of thousands of years from now or even longer. However, I personally found some of the marine biologists’ worries a much more credible and immediate threat. There’s a concern that without the tidal activities that the Moon provides us, we’d see a sudden and maybe irreversible falloff of all life in the oceans. Their concern is based on their knowledge that the tides act as a churn for the nutrients from the surface. And in that natural agitation, the nutrients seed much of the food and necessary minerals into the water as part of the biological food chain. You can imagine that if the tide suddenly goes away, the nutrient level in the oceans may drop off and the food chain might be severely altered. It’s a credible concern that we can’t truly know the effect of, but I’d hate to risk it, considering that Doctor Holmes had already done most of the work up on the lunar surface already.”

  “That makes sense.” The president’s deliberate words and pensive expression clearly indicated her mind was preoccupied with what she’d heard and possibly other concerns as well.

  Margaret suddenly swiped her hand to the left several times, and the video feed switched repeatedly to different images, many of which Burt didn’t recognize.

  “Burt, where are we at with Holmes’ work?”

  The video suddenly switched to what was obviously a military signal coming from somewhere in the ocean. Some of the numbers running along the bottom of the video image were clearly GPS tracking numbers, and before Burt could ask, Margaret volunteered, “That’s a video feed coming from one of Doctor Holmes’ security details.”

  Burt quickly swiped the numbers into his phone and the image of the globe flashed onto his handheld PC. “Well, it looks like he’s about 2750 miles southeast of Hilo, somewhere near the middle of the Pacific Ocean.” Burt tapped on the map to overlay the longitude and latitude values and nodded. “He’s on the equator, as I’d expected, approaching 120 degrees West. That means at his current pace, he’ll be done in under two weeks. We should be seeing—”

  “A giant concrete structure pushing out of the ocean,” the president finished, pointing at the image floating five feet in front of them.

  Burt r
ecognized the building as one of the electrical substations the IDF had built along the equator. “Yes, ma’am.”

  Margaret’s eyes narrowed as Burt continued rambling.

  “That’s actually one of the largest water-borne structures ever built, and it’s anchored to the ocean floor 14,500 feet below.” His attention was immediately drawn to the large flotilla of guided-missile destroyers, military cruisers from a variety of countries, and even one US aircraft carrier. “Why does it look like a war zone?”

  “Because it is.”

  A chill raced through Burt as the president gave him a grim stare. He’d been stunned into silence. He could have sworn that all of the world’s countries had formed a treaty of non-aggression. Now he wasn’t sure how to respond.

  “Put it this way, Burt. We’ve gotten credible threats on each and every one of these anchor sites. More information about Indigo has leaked. We don’t know how much has leaked, but we’ve had attacks on some of the more remote stations. No harm was done, but we’ve built small armies around each of these things.”

  Burt’s eyes widened, and Margaret matter-of-factly remarked, “There are some who don’t want us to succeed in combatting the threat of Indigo. That’s why we’re protecting those sites.”

  Giving the president an incredulous stare, Burt stammered, “I ... I don’t understand. Why would someone attack one of the electric substations? There’s nothing even valuable there. Is it that Brotherhood group?”

  With a grim expression, the president responded with a raspy edge to her voice. “They’re fanatics. A death cult. Some intelligence reports assert they might think of Indigo as a sign of the biblical Armageddon and that the Messiah will come as long as we don’t interfere with God’s plan.”

  The previous warning he’d received from the British Prime Minister about the death cults rose prominently in Burt’s mind as he groaned. “I can’t believe they’re looking to commit suicide!”