Gates of Rome

CHAPTER 10

2070, Project Exodus, Cheyenne Mountain, Colorado Springs

Who was it that once said, ‘A week is a long time in politics’? Well, that was a pretty good observation to take note of, if not to adapt very slightly.

Rashim stared at the news-stream from New London, in the north of England.

A week is a long time with a pandemic.

This particular media feed had been running uninterrupted for two days now; a digi-streamer dropped on its side on the street by some panicked cameraman, had still been broadcasting powered by its own hydro-cell battery pack. The signal was being streamed round the world, no doubt watched by millions of other frightened people like Rashim.

The street had been full of people running from faint blooms descending from the sky like flakes of ash from a bonfire of paper. The blooms — viral spores — landing lightly on scalps, backs of hands, faces had an almost instantly lethal effect. The street had been full of stampeding people, and screaming voices… Then, five minutes later, after the camera had dropped and settled on its side, it was silent and full of corpses.

Twenty-four hours ago, he’d been shaken by the sight of a solitary young girl staggering into the static view of the digi-streamer. A girl no more than eleven or twelve, collapsing to her knees, whimpering with fear and agony as her left arm dissolved and bacilli-like growths, like veins on the surface of her skin, snaked past her elbow and spread to her shoulder, her neck, her face.

She’d collapsed into a huddle very quickly, quite dead. And over the next six hours transformed into a pool of reddish-brown liquid and a bundle of empty clothes.

He’d watched with increasing horror as the puddle had grown slight protrusions, like humps, almost mushroom-like, that eventually opened to reveal fluffy spore heads like those of dandelions.

A fresh breeze had carried those away long ago.

Somewhere in a refugee camp in Kazakhstan, his parents most probably looked like the girl now. A tangle of clothes and a puddle of liquid.

‘Rashim!’

It had all happened too quickly. The city lockdowns, quarantine. The complete shutdown of transportation systems. None of it had managed to stop the Kosong-ni virus.

‘Dr Anwar!’ He looked away from the holo-projection above his desk. Dr Yatsushita was leaning over the top of his cubicle partition. His tie loose and his top shirt button undone, his sleeves were rolled up and his lab coat dispensed with days ago. He’d taken to sleeping on a camp bed among the cubicles. As all of them had, working in ceaseless shifts to get things ready for T-Day.

‘I must have those figures now!’

Rashim felt disengaged from the hustle and noise of activity going on around him. The hangar floor was now filled with people, equipment and machinery being brought in. He could see on one side of the concrete floor some famous faces he recognized: the vice-president, Greg Stilson, and the defence secretary. A few dozen yards away a Saudi prince and his family; next to him the bulk of some Central African dictator whose name he couldn’t quite remember and his three young wives. Rashim suspected he must have spent the last of his nation’s wealth to buy a place for himself on Exodus.

There were other faces he vaguely recognized: old men with young wives. The rich and powerful.

‘The figures! Rashim!’

Rashim nodded slowly, and palmed the data off his screen and floated it on to Yatsushita’s infopad. ‘It’s not even close to accurate,’ he muttered absently.

‘We have no more time,’ Yatsushita said, lowering his voice. ‘They will have to take their chances.’

So many of the carefully selected and vetted candidates for Exodus had not made it to the Cheyenne Mountain facility. Some of the B-list candidates had managed to be flown in, but there were many grid spots now either empty or filled with last-minute replacements. No longer the great and the brilliant, rocket scientists and geneticists. But a motley random collection of people — army truck drivers, clerical officers, project technicians — and, of course, a handful of politicians, billionaires, dictators; the well-connected who’d caught wind of Project Exodus’s last-minute chance to negotiate themselves on to the transportation grid.

Not exactly the best representation of twenty-first-century society to send back into the past to make a new start.

Rashim looked up at Dr Yatsushita. ‘You said “they”. They will have to take their — ’

‘I am not going.’

‘Why?’

The old man shook his head sadly. ‘I cannot… not without my family.’

‘Still no news?’

Yatsushita shook his head. He had managed to get his wife and daughter on a flight from Tokyo to Vancouver. But there they’d been stuck. No commercial or military flights left. Not even using leverage as the senior technician on Exodus was going to get them over here.

The old man looked over his shoulder at the chaos on the grid. ‘Anyway, this is not the project I signed up to lead.’

Rashim knew exactly what he meant by that. This frenetic, undignified scramble away from the sudden and messy end of mankind was not what Project Exodus had been about. Even though it was a flagrant breach of ILA Ruling 234, known informally as Waldstein’s Law, there was something worthy to it. The idea of rebooting civilization back in a time before man had begun to suck the world dry; the idea of bringing back twenty-first-century knowledge and enlightenment to an ignorant world that believed in gods and omens, repression and slavery. There was a germ of hope in all of that.

Hope. Something there seemed to be precious little of in this poisoned and dying world.

But these weren’t the specially selected candidates, quietly informed over a year ago to settle their personal affairs and be ready to be collected and taken to the Exodus facility. It was a random collection of the rich, the connected… and, in a few cases, the plain lucky-to-be-grabbed-at-the-last-moment. A poor cross-section of candidates to be sending on such an important mission.

‘So you’re staying, Dr Yatsushita?’

He nodded.

‘You’ll die.’

‘We all die eventually, Rashim.’

‘I’ll stay with — ’

‘No! There needs to be a project technician with them. As senior technician on the grid, you will have full authority! I will make that official with a data entry.’

Rashim shook his head. ‘Me in charge of them? Look, I’m just a — ’

‘There is a mission protocol. Mission jurisdiction. They are all aware of this and signed contracts of agreement to come along. They must accept you as Project Exodus leader.’

Rashim looked across at the vice-president.

‘Yes,’ said Yatsushita, ‘even he must accept you as his…’ The old man paused, smiling. ‘… as his boss.’ He nodded at the vice-president, the prince, the dictator and a handful of others — all of them clearly elated to have made it into the facility before the security lockdown.

‘Don’t let any of those parasites become leader, Rashim.’ He smiled sadly. ‘Let this be a proper new beginning for mankind. Eh?’

Rashim nodded, stood up, pushed his chair back on its castor wheels. Beyond the calm of the small enclave of cubicles, the hangar was a riot of noise and activity. Voices raised in confusion, fear, excitement. The clattering of two dozen military combat units weighed down with carbon-flex body armour, weapons and equipment. The whirring of exoskel-kinetic loaders depositing heavy crates of supplies into specially holo-flagged grid markings. The deep rumble of three Mobile Command Vehicles backing into their large grid slots.

Dr Yatsushita reached a hand out and grasped one of his tightly. ‘The military units are programmed to follow the Exodus protocols. They will accept your authority, Rashim, once I’ve logged you in as my replacement.’

‘Dr Yatsushita, please, you have to come. I’m not ready for this.’ Rashim looked at the dictator, the prince, the politicians and the billionaires. ‘I can’t lead them… they won’t accept that.’

The old man smiled. ‘They don’t have any choice in the matter.’

‘You’ll die if you stay. Please, you really need to come — ’

‘Everyone who remains behind will be dead, Rashim. This…’ He turned to look over his shoulder at the frantic activity going on behind him. ‘For what it is, this is our only future now.’

‘This is crazy!’

‘You have to go, Rashim. And you have to remain in charge of Exodus.’ He smiled again, an almost paternal smile. Odd that, coming from the elderly Japanese man. Rashim had always got the impression that Dr Yatsushita hadn’t liked him; that he disapproved of his maverick ways, his disorganized virtual workspace, the messy desk, his personalized lab assistant.

‘I trust you, young man; you… far more than I trust any of them. ’

Rashim swallowed anxiously. He could feel his stomach churning and a desperate need for a toilet visit. ‘OK… O-OK. I’ll… uh… I’ll try.’

Dr Yatsushita clapped him on the shoulder. ‘You’ll do fine.’