Old Glory Prologue 4

The shattered ship dominated the plains like a fallen monument. Measuring three miles from prow to stern and a mile high at its tallest spine, it had split on descent and burned through the air, then struck and survived. Its sterilization field had erased every living thing in Kansas City, down to the smallest bacteria, earning it the ominous moniker of the Kansas City Killer. In the aftermath, the wreck became a fortress laboratory under federal control. Wrapped in a security cordon a dozen layers deep, it became the beating heart of the worldwide effort to fight the Plague. Work crews moved through the opened decks in sealed gear, searching something, anything, that could fight the Plague as the world wore itself out against the tide that had followed the other half of the ship to ground.

The beings who had flown the vessel had not understood the Plague that ended them. Their records that survived the impact spoke in fragments about symptoms and rules. They had listed the ways flesh changed and the order in which minds failed. They had described quarantine procedures and the limits of containment. They had not identified a first cause. They had not mapped a point of origin or a cure. The storage arrays that held their data were partly mechanical and partly something else.  Much of it had been ruined by the crash. The sterilization that followed had scoured other sections clean. The result was a fragmented puzzle with many missing pieces and the best hopes and guesses of the people trying to put it together.

Scientists read what they could and then read it again. The Plague acted like a hive rather than a single organism. It learned from failure and adapted with . It moved through contact, needing blood, fluid, a bit, a scratch, sometimes just a brush against bare skin. It rebuilt cell layers and activated long disabled genomes in DNA strands, then caused rapid, cancerous growths that would act like stem cells, creating new, deadly mutations. Talons, fangs, claws, barbed hooks and stingers, tentacles, acid blood, and more. The list of possible horrors seemed endless. It pushed the infected to be violent, flooding their bodies with adrenaline and cortisol, driving them into a frothing rage, and one singular directive. Spread.

As Asia and Europe slowly collapsed, the years and casualties mounted from the millions, to the billions, each fresh corpse was one more mass of flesh to be rebuilt and reformed. Governments fell silent one by one. The global network that the world had once relied upon vanished overnight as factories resource sites were overrun. The front edge of the war crept toward the Americas with every town, city and nation that went silent under the onslaught. So the question for the Kansas City Killer became brutally simple. What did the ship hide, and how could it be used against the Plague?

Warnings that the clock was running out had come long before the fall of Asia. American warships had reported odd returns on sonar that refused classification. Search aircraft had seen massive creatures and strange shapes under the waves. Beach patrols had found growths clinging to pilings that released a sour fog, and made the water smell like sewage and toxic waste. Lifeguard posts logged shapes in the surf that stood and then slipped away. Divers and swimmer began vanishing, and deep sea facilities went dark. Trawlers had been found with decks coated in a corrosive film and no crew on board. At first the incidents were treated as scattered events, but as the days passed into weeks and then months an uneasy pattern began to emerge.

When whales began washing up on shore, their bodies mangled and mauled, the quiet panic of the first years of the infestation became much more pronounced. Schools of fish were found floating on the surface of the water, covered in oozing pustules, and sea birds became rarer and rarer, it was clear that something had gone profoundly wrong in the depths of the ocean.

The Fifth Fleet recorded the first attack off the coast of southern China. A cruiser signaled hull damage below the waterline during a routine patrol. The ship shuddered as it was dragged to a stop. Searchlights revealed barbed cords wrapped around the plates. Within moments the strange tentacles had broken the water line, writhing and shifting as they wrapped around the deck, dragging anyone who tried to force them off under the surf. The engines screamed as the ship struggled to pull free, but the fleshy cables held fast. It was then that the first of the creatures breached the ocean. Human shaped but with the heads of sharks and eels, carrying strange weapons made of coral and woven seaweed. The crew fought valiantly, but the creatures were unnaturally resilient. The cruiser was lost with all hands. 

It wasn't the only casualty. By the end of the incident, a frigate and two destroyers had suffered similar fates. It wasn't until the ships were put to the torch, their brethren in the fleet opening up with depth charges and cannonfire that the boarders and their strange, living craft fled, but the damage was done. It was then that coastal support missions were called off, and the might of the navy pulled back to enforce it's steel cordon.

The change in policy was marked with sweeping, militant changes. Convoys replaced single-ship transits. Helicopters flew tighter orbits hunting for signs of incoming threats, and all ships, peaceful and wartime, were authorized to carry arms. Unidentified swimmers were treated as hostile, and often fired upon first and questioned never. These measures saved ships but did not change the fact that the war had a new front.

South America began seeing incidents sprout up in cities and slums with alarming regularity. Outbreaks appeared along the fractured coastal cities and spread inland through markets and bus stations. Cartel forces and private armies had long since replaced government forces, but they were woefully unprepared.  Reports of mass mutations arrived in clusters from crowded districts, and entire neighborhoods changed over a weekend. The northern command hardened annexed Mexico into a buffer against the south as quietly as possible, at first to hold back the waves of refugees, in numbers too vast and too constant to properly screen, but eventually the decision was made to begin mass purges.  It was only a matter of weeks before active bombing and missile strikes began against the former South American nations.

The signs in the far north arrived with a whisper that quickly grew into a roar. Alaska and the Canadian coast began seeing bulbous growths along coastal beaches and cliffs. They swelled like bladders, releasing a strange, toxic gas that killed everything around them. Burning out the infected pustules was became a full time job, with roving teams working all day every day to stymie the constant growth, to little effect. The pods set down roots deep into the dirt and stone, and grew back almost as fast as they were destroyed.

All of this bled into the meetings at the highest levels of government. Pressure was mounting on the KCK team to find something, anything that could help. The wreck still held technology that could be used, devices that functioned, and even the rare database that could be plundered. The first major discovery came through when a group of technicians and engineers discovered generators the size of small buildings tucked away in the depths of the hull. Each one generated enough energy to power the country yet operated using no fuel, and seemingly defied all known laws of physics in the process. Power came from somewhere, but the best guess anyone had was that it was from 'somewhere else'. Despite the lack of understanding, manipulating the tech was almost disturbingly easy. The system seemed able to self-regulate both the output and the draw on whatever system was attached to it, and almost seemed eager to be used.

The second finds were emitters. These were the devices that had cast the field that erased all life from the city. From a size perspective they were relatively small, each the roughly the mass and diameter of a small car. They operated in tandem, single emitters capable of generating an output that multiplied exponentially the more that were added, and could project everything from waveform energy to solid light projections. The power draw was immense, sucking up the equivalent of a nuclear fusion plant's output every second, but when paired with the generators they handled the thirst for energy with ease.

But the real prize came in 2074, when a researcher came across what seemed to be the personal notes of one of the science staff, or at least it was assumed to be, detailing how to program the emitters to operate like a form of stasis system. The math was exotic to say the least, the nature of the tech both labyrinthine and in some cases requiring entirely new terms and numbers to explain, but in essence, it was how the aliens made deep space voyages. Instead of fanciful cryostasis or some kind of strange hibernation device, they simply... slowed down the time inside the ship.  To the point where a thousand years outside would barely be a second inside, and what's more, the bubble, once active, would in essence cut off the outside entirely, functionally phasing it into a sort of null-dimension.

Simple tests revealed that those living inside the orb would only feel moments pass, even as weeks did in the real world, the variable dilation effect easily programmed once the proper protocols were added. those who volunteered felt as if no time had passed at all, speaking as if they had only experienced moments between one breath and the next. It was also how the ship managed to sterilize everything around it. Nonliving organisms like metal, rock, even things like cloth or wood, would be put into functional stasis when the field activated. Anything living would be subject to the slowdown, or, in the case of the purge system, sped up. This was how the system cleansed the ship and everything around it. By speeding up time in everything touched by the stasis field, rendering Kansas City to age, decay, and turn to dust in nanoseconds while not allowing anything inside, almost but not quite creating a vacuum.

The tragedy was that the system was designed specifically to not be used that way, and making the emitters act in such a way again was impossible without a much deeper understanding that they just didn't have time to study. At least, if the warnings were as they implied, not without taking on a risk of turning the planet itself into a barren husk, or a black hole, depending on which system failed first.

But, despite that frustration, there still existed the pieces of a thought, an idea, and a plan. The site counted sixty eight working emitters and seven generators that could power them. Each emitter could cover several dozen feet in all directions, and when combined, that number ballooned to several thousand. Using this realization, the engineering team sketched a platform that could carry an emitter at its core and the weight of a small city above it. The only vehicles that could bear such a load were the old crawler transports that had once carried rockets to their pads nearly a century earlier, the originals scrapped, but the blueprints remaining. Six crawlers would carry each platform like a moving foundation, a hexagon of twenty four caterpillar treads armored and reinforced to give a literal moving city traction.

Factories and refineries would rise on the decks, producing not just parts, but tools, weapons, ammunition, and equipment. Plans were drawn up for mass biofarms, all fully automated, to grow genetically designed nutrient rich superplants and vat-grown proteins capable of feeding hundreds of thousands. There would be a full armory and an airport on the topmost plates, purpose built to launch a small fleet of aircraft and drones. The platform would carry water stores and workshops and clinics, whole sections of sleeping decks and schools and kitchens, and enough supplies to restart civilization over thrice. The goal was one hundred thousand colonists inside each dome of dilated time. Seven platforms, seven arks, seven hopes for the future.

But for all that, the only question was who would be going forward. Early on in the pandemic, it was discovered that a small percentage of people were, for one reason or another, functionally immune to the Plague. Genetic markers that reached back millions of years offered, through the sheer randomness of luck, around two percent of the population was considered immune.  Of the five hundred and eighty million living in the United States at the time, that left a paltry eleven million to choose from. What was worse, the likelihood of being immune was completely random. Rarely was a singular family even entirely immune, and the members could be the fittest, most well educated, or the most decrepit and drug addled, it didn't matter.

This cut the numbers of viable candidates to a third immediately, age and health issues automatically screening many out. Many more were unwilling to leave their families, their friends, their lovers and children to die while they lived, gutting the pool even more. What was worse, the ones that would have been ideal candidates, the scientists, the soldiers, the leaders, were rarely immune, and the fear of accidentally setting off the Plague a second time was one that nobody was willing to risk.

Realizing that there was little time to retrain those who would be aboard the arks into something useful, the decision was made to implant all viable applicants with a system called Skillwire, a novel brain implant that had been still in it's testing phase before the sighting of the original Martinez-NAAS Asteroid. The system was simple, a plug and play program that could be used to download the core technical knowledge of any skillset, from doctors to soldiers to scientists, giving those with it the ability to functionally learn all the basics of a craft in an instant. There were problems with the system of course, from seizures to addictive behaviors to psychosis, but overall those were niche cases, and the technology was considered 'safe enough'.

The technical work moved forward in steps. The generators were anchored in cradles deep in the frames. The emitters were mounted in wells where vibration would not break them, and shielding wrapped the power lines so that the field didn't short its own heart. Each massive caterpillar tread was painstakingly constructed from composite supermetals and wrapped in engines designed to work nearly indefinitely without maintenance. The infinitely complex devices built into the automation bays were drafted and measured so that not one iota of precious space was wasted, and as the pieces all began to come together, the herculean project went underway.

But for all that the economic juggernaut of the United States was capable of building these massive machines, the one damning factor always remained. The human one. Many refused to believe that they were disqualified, and therefore doomed to die when the arks all launched. Others accused the government of trying to fell the nation and the world like rats escaping a sinking ship. The ultra rich and the ultra wealthy tried to finagle spots on the arks using a network of money and favors they'd accrued over a lifetime of hoarded power, and when that failed, when all of these things failed, violence broke out.

On the dawn of New Years Day, 2077, only three of the arks were nearing completion. The fourth and fifth had been stalled out due to rioting workers, and the sixth was still a skeleton. The seventh hadn't even begun construction. Order was enforced at gunpoint, often with punishments resulting in either death, of forced labor, which also lead to death in many cases. It was later found out that one of the generators and a series of emitters was somehow smuggled to the moon base, despite the immense cost, taking with it many of the influential and political elite, to hide in the life raft built on Luna.

In the end as the Mexico Line collapsed and the Plague flooded in from Alaska and Canada, in all of it's unfathomable horror, only four arks were finished.  Their populations, and eclectic mix of soldiers, farmers, office workers, and more, were hurried on and readied for their final journey into the future. Ark One, named Eden, was launched mid-2077, amid violent riots and active insurrection, with roughly two thirds of it's compliment. the wave of monsters nearly overrunning the site in a tide of darkness.

Ark Two, known as Babylon, managed to launch with it's own compliment intact, but intercepted transmissions had implied that a large number of additional, non-immune people had also gotten on-board after a coup had killed the construction facility's leadership and seized the reins of the machine for themselves. The last message anyone had received from Babylon only consisted of incoherent rambling about fairness and justice and a damning, scathing string of accusations against the government and everyone in it, as the craft was absorbed by it's bubble and vanished.

Ark Three: Olympus had faced a number of crushing setbacks in both it's preparation and it's launch. As the ark closest to the Mexico Bulwark, when the Plague finally overran the walls and defenses, it was forced to launch prematurely, with barely half it's crew compliment and a fifth of it's supplies. It vanished just as the remnants of the government ordered a nuclear scouring of the southern half of the continent, an effort, ultimately, that did little except add to the fallout and debris that chocked the planet.

Finally, Ark Four, named Valhalla, found itself at the precipice of being launched. Every remaining man, woman and child not slated to board had been given a weapon and told to hold the line, as supplies, equipment, tools, and the most precious cargo of all, people, were herded into the living quarters of the massive land ship, the flashes of explosives and the rattle of gunfire echoing over the horizon as the horde pushed ever inwards, towards the last site itself, built in the shadow of the Kansas City Killer, or, what might more aptly be named, the Death of Mankind, for the writhing doom of flesh and ravenous teeth that it had brought to the cradle of humanity.

On February 6th, 2078 Valhalla successfully activated it's time dilation bubble, and vanished from the Earth. One month later, the sun rose over a world consumed by the Plague, and all of it's horror besides. Huddled on the moon, and in bunkers once built to survive the impact of a world-slaying asteroid, the remnants of the people of earth all waited for a future without them.

But that is another story.