Pantheocide

Chapter Eight

Air Crash Investigation Group, Wright-Paterson AFB, Dayton, Ohio, February 2009

“Well, look at that.” It was more the level of bafflement in the speaker’s voice that drew attention than the words themselves.

“What’s the matter Rich?” Gail Claiborne looked up from the X-ray pictures of a wing spar she’d been studying.

“I’ve been listening to the contents of the cockpit voice recorder tapes from Blue-861.” Doctor Rich Arden was using words loosely here. In this case, “listening to” meant hearing the words certainly, but also studying the oscilloscope readings and examining the various tracks the system had recorded. It was a much more complex subject than it sounded and outsiders only guessed at the wealth of information the tapes contained.

“Did the pilot say anything?”

“Apart from some fascinating obscenities as his plane disintegrated, not really. Russian’s a good language for swearing. The really curious bit is elsewhere. Come and have a look.”

Gail walked over to Arden’s work area and pulled up a stool. “Show me maestro.” Before getting into this line of work, Rich Arden had been the road manager for a heavy metal rock band and his stories of the escapades he and his group had got up to were legendary. They had also resulted in his nickname (and flight callsign) ‘Maestro’.

“So, we have the cockpit flight recorder tapes and we play them. Nothing very interesting in the words so lets take them out.” He manipulated the computer controls and the speech pattern of the pilot flying the ill-fated Blue-861 were removed. “Now, what we have left is the cockpit background noise.”

“What’s that?” Gail put her finger on a spike a split second before Blue-861 had fallen apart in mid-air.

“Now that’s what I asked. There were two ways of looking at this, one was to start eliminating known sounds, air flow, engine noise, radar sound-effects and so on. The other was to get a cockpit take from a flying Su-35, eliminate speech from it and use that as a template. Fortunately the Russians sent us copies of the cockpit flight recorder tapes from Blue-863 as well and I eliminated the pilot’s speech and got a clean trace of the cockpit noise. So I subtracted that trace from the message of Blue-861 and lookee here.”

“Oh my.” Gail was stunned. “Well, look at that.”

“Now somebody else is going to say ‘What’s the matter Gail?’ and I’ll have to go through the whole thing again.” Arden looked around catching one of the investigators with his mouth half open. The investigator in question promptly looked guilty and tried to hide behind his equipment. The rest of the room had been covertly listening, more in hopes of hearing a new heavy metal band story than anything else. “No? Well, we have something here that I don’t think has ever been recorded before. Want to have a look?”

Arden’s work area filled up as the investigators crowded around to look at the display. The green line left on it was remarkable. The baseline showed a small amount of grass, random noise that couldn’t be predicted or ever quite eliminated but the spike that was left had, quite definitely never been seen before. It was a straight line, up and down.

“There’s no sidebands, no resonance, no echoes nothing.” Gail’s voice was awed. “It’s a completely pure note.”

“That’s right. Every musical note there has ever been has been mixed up with all sorts of distortions. Look at them using this equipment and it’s a ragged peak. It goes up in a jagged line, there’s a plateau at the top that shows cyclic variations and it goes down in a jagged line. Then there’s side-bands and resonances at different frequencies. Lots of them. All the energy transmitted in the note is spread across the area under that line, dispersed, weakened and generally dissipated. Even so, sound’s got a lot of punch, we broke things with it quite regularly.”

“Like theater manager’s hearts?”

“Those too, although most of them deserved it. Some of them never even read the contract, hence the no-green-jellybean rule. Anyway, that’s not the case here. The sound is one perfect pulse. Straight up, point, straight down. A perfectly pure note and all the energy is concentrated in that note. Talk about a slam, the energy here,” he tapped the screen with a switchblade, “is incredible. This thing, its coherent sound. It’s the sonic equivalent of a laser and I’d guess that its just as destructive. It’s got about as much resemblance to a musical note as a high-powered laser has to a flashlight.”

“And the walls came tumbling down.” Gail spoke almost dreamily.

“Sure. Sound travels faster, the denser the medium is. In air, this thing shook an Su-35 apart and tumbled the gyros on two missiles. What it would do if transmitted in water or rock, we can only guess. A lot of we-wish-that-hadn’t-happened would be my guess.”

“Write all this up.” Doctor Peptuck, the team leader, spoke sharply. “Write it up in as much detail as possible. The brass need to know about this as quickly as possible.”

Conference Room, Fort Detrick, Maryland, USA, February 2009

“You’re quite sure about this?” Another investigation, another place, same disbelief mixed with a tinge of fear.

“Of course.” Connor MacLeod was quite emphatic. “It helped that we knew we were dealing with inhalation anthrax and that gave us a baseline to work from. It also gave us a puzzle to answer. Why were so few people showing symptoms? If anthrax spores had been dumped over an inhabited area, a high proportion of the population would be dead or dying and there is no cure for inhalation anthrax. We can immunize, and it looks like we might have to, but we can’t cure. And yet the death toll was a few here, a few there, a disproportionate number on military bases yet even there only a handful. As information came in from all over, that was the worldwide pattern. A few dead, isolated infections. Unprecedented.”

“And it was this Baines guy who gave you the answer?”

“In a way, yes. DIMO(N) were interested of course and Baines knows Revelations and all the derivative material intimately. Unhealthily intimately in my opinion, but he’s the best we’ve got for tracking down this sort of thing. He pointed out that Revelations contains the following prophecy. ‘Then I heard a loud voice from the temple, saying to the seven angels, Go and pour out on the earth the seven bowls of the wrath of God. So the first angel went and poured out his bowl on the earth; and it became a loathsome and malignant sore on the people who had the mark of the beast and who worshiped his image.’ Well, anybody who has seen people dying of anthrax knows the ulceration is certainly loathsome and malignant so that fitted. That left us with trying to work out what the mark of the beast was.

“We started out by thinking that it was poetic or descriptive and was a reverse truth. In other words, we thought it was the writers assuming, not that the disease was infecting people with a particular characteristic but that everybody who was infected was assumed to have the mark of the beast. You know, the old line, ‘they must have done something bad to deserve it.’ But that didn’t correspond to the infection patterns, nowhere close. So we had to think that there was something about these people that made them vulnerable to the disease. That led us to ask what the mark of the beast could be. You know why sensitives are sensitive?”

“Because they are nephilim, they are descendants of humans who mated with the Baldricks.”

“Exactly, and they retain a tiny amount of Baldrick DNA in their make-up and that makes them detectable to the Baldricks and capable of pushing messages the other way. The more Baldrick they have in their DNA, the more effective they are as sensitives. The odder they are as well by the way. With computers and our own transmission equipment, we can boost those contacts to the point where we can open portals. Now, doesn’t having Baldrick ancestry sound like ‘the mark of the beast’ to you?”

“And so you compared lists?”

“Of course. With our own list, the congruence was perfect. All the reported anthrax infections we had have been people we identified as Nephilim. They’re sick and pretty much all of them are going to die. Our portal engineering capability has been hit hard, I’d guess that about a third of our sensitives are dead or dying. The same picture is emerging worldwide but there’s an interesting little side-note. It’s pretty obvious from the infection pattern that our allies are not telling us about all the Nephilim they found.”

“Oh.” The word was filled with emphasis.

“Exactly. I would say that, while they are all contributing to the main portal engineering program we run on behalf of everybody, they all have their own national programs as well. From these lists, I would say that Russia, China, Britain, France, Germany, Japan, India, Israel and Singapore are all running their own portal program and have kept back some of their sensitives, probably the best ones, for that program.”

“I think that’s very likely.” Team Leader Chris O’Farrell sounded more than slightly amused by the idea.

Connor MacLeod looked at him sharply for a moment and then the implication sank in. “And we’re doing the same?”

“Of course. Have you noticed that kitten and all the other really top-rank sensitives aren’t on the sick-list? We’ve got them tucked safely away. Navy’s doing a lot of work, they’re refitting Enterprise right now to generate her own portals. Can you imagine that as a naval tactic? Got some anti-ship missiles coming in? Easy. Open a portal, step through and close it. Then, wait a few minutes, open another and reappear a few dozen miles away. Or open a portal over and enemy city and drop a nuclear device through it. The possibilities are endless. Anyway, back to the anthrax. So, the enemy has developed an anthrax derivative that only infects Nephilim. That’s a hell of a genetic engineering achievement. Are really they that good?”

“Well, that’s what we thought. This was a new strain of anthrax bred especially for this attack and that’s a scary level of biological warfare capability.” Both men looked grim, nobody knew better than the workers at Fort Detrick just how dangerous biological warfare could be. “Anyway, we got samples of the anthrax bacillus from the casualties and had a look at it. We started off on the wrong foot, thinking this was a new variant and that wasted a day or so. Have you heard of mitochondrial dating?”

O’Farrell shook his head.

“Well, basically mitochondrial DNA doesn’t change. It does mutate at a known rate but it doesn’t change. So, we can track the age of a sample as compared with its baseline by noting the number of changes. It’s a bit like counting tree rings in a way. We got a surprise, the samples we have showed a lot of changes. That meant either the samples were a long way down the line from our baseline or our baseline was a long way down the line from our samples. Normally, we’d take the second possibility because we don’t get things from the future but nothing’s taken for granted these days.

“Now, anthrax is a very old disease, its possible it’s one of the oldest still-extant diseases. There’s anthrax spores been found in the wrappings of Egyptian mummies and there’s even a theory that the so-called curse of the Pharaohs is the result of inhaling those spores. Anyway, we got some spores from the Egyptians, ran the tests and guess what, they’re a lot closer to the samples from our victims than our baseline is. So, this isn’t a new variant, it’s a very old one, one even older than the Egyptian baseline.

“Norman Baines has suggested its possible that anthrax was a disease specifically intended to kill nephilim and its spread amongst humans and animals is a result of a mutation. He’s got the theory that sometime in the past there was a concerted effort, presumably by Heaven, to kill off the nephilim. That would explain why they are so rare. But, be that as it may, I think we have a handle on the first of these so-called ‘Bowls of Wrath’. Oh, by the way, there’s an upside to all this; since this is a very old variant of anthrax, possibly the original variant, our antibiotics should work fairly well against it.

“Very well, I’ll send all this information back. It looks like Bayer is going to make itself another fortune.”

Bacup Police Station, Bacup, Lancashire.

Inspector Kate Langley looked up from her desk towards the metal bucket that was catching the leak in her office roof. It was hard to concentrate on her paperwork with that infernal noise going on all the time, the sooner they moved into the new police station and out of this rickety Victorian relic the better. A knock at the door brought her back to the present.

“Ma’m, there’s been a serious landslide at the top of the town.” Sergeant Parrish said gravely. “Looks like several houses have been buried. Our mobiles, the fire service, ambulance and Civil Defence Corps are already on the way.”

Langley stood up, reflexively taking her revolver out of the desk drawer and grabbing her yellow fluorescent jacket and hat. “Right, Sergeant, get as many bodies out there as you can and put a call to H. Q for assistance. We’ll need all the help we can get.

“I’m going to head out there myself to take charge; I’ll need you to coordinate things from here.”

“Not a problem, Ma’m; I’ll get Sergeant Beck to go with you.” Parrish replied.

The scene that greeted Inspector Langley and Sergeant Beck on their arrival at the landslide was one of utter devastation. It looked like half of the hillside had simply given way and had come crashing down on a quiet residential street, smashing it to rubble. Where there had once been houses, trees and grass there was now nothing but black, glutinous mud.

“It’s like Aberfan.” Beck muttered, deeply shocked.

Langley stepped out of the car, putting on her wet weather gear, though by the time she had done so she was almost soaked to the skin. The three fire appliances from Baccup Fire Station had already arrived, as had a couple of ambulances and some vehicles from the re-established Civil Defence Corps. The firemen and civil defence workers had already started to dig amongst the rubble at the edge of the landslide, hoping to find someone alive. As the fire service would have primacy in this case Langley sought out the senior fire officer to offer what help she could.

“What can we do to help, Derek?”

“It’s a damn disaster, Kate.” Station Officer Derek Clarke, commander of Red Watch, replied. “I don’t think there is much you can do here, other than traffic control. I’ve requested that the brigade’s Urban Search and Rescue Unit be sent to us, but I don’t think that they will be doing anything other than pulling out bodies.”

Clarke paused to take a look at the bare hillside; it didn’t look too stable.

“Bronze Command to all units, withdraw now. The hillside looks like it’s about to go again. Over.” He said into his Personal Radio. “Kate, there is one thing you can do.” He said turning back to Langley. “This slip is going to be even bigger by the looks of things, we’ve got to get people out from under its path.”

Langley nodded and sprinted back to the car as she would get better reception from its radio than from her PR.

“Juliet Bravo to Control, urgent message, over.”

“Go ahead, Juliet Bravo.” The voice of Sergeant Parrish said from the radio handset.

“There’s going to be an even bigger landslide, Sergeant and we need to evacuate everyone who may be in its path immediately. Get every spare body onto it immediately, and see if Captain Morrison can spare some of his Home Guards to help out. Over.”

“Understood, Juliet Bravo. Out.”

Inspector Langley held on to the radio handset for a moment, rain running down her face. She looked skywards, oblivious to the rain now running down her neck.

“Damn you!” She called out. “Don’t think you’re going to get away with this! First, we’re going to get up there somehow then we’ll kick your arse.”