“Your family, Rick, are going to die unless we get this situation under control. So will my family, so will the families of everyone stationed here and so will the families of everyone in this fabulous place we call America.”

Rick pushed back in his chair slightly and shook his head. “Intimidating me to try to get me to help you isn’t going to work, Colonel. I don’t know you, I don’t know what’s going on and I’m certainly not going to agree to go be part of some think tank and sit around twiddling my thumbs while my family’s out there in this mess. Frankly, I find this whole business of you dragging me in here and getting pissy when I refuse to help you do something I don’t know anything about to be more than a little bit concerning.”

“Then consider this your final chance.” Leslie pointed at the document still in front of Rick. “That offer is your only ticket out of here.”

Rick shook his head. “Once I know my family is safe I’ll be happy to help you. Until then, though, they’re my only priority.”

Colonel Leslie stood back up. He reached under the table and pressed a small button. A few seconds later the door to the conference room opened and two military police walked in. “Holding area three.” The Colonel nearly growled the words

as he glared at Rick. “Once you think it over, hopefully you’ll change your mind.”

“What the hell?” Rick struggled as the MPs grabbed him by the arms and dragged him from the room. “You can’t do this! I’m a citizen! Hey, you can’t do this you—” The door closed and the Colonel sat back down in his chair. He sighed wearily before flipping back through the paperwork and photographs in front of him. The orders to detain any civilians with skills or suspected skills that could potentially be leveraged to stop Damocles had, in fact, come down from the highest levels of government. The suspension of habeas corpus and the effective implementation of martial law meant that Rick could, in fact, be held indefinitely.

While the Colonel suspected—based on Rick’s questions on his ride back to Nellis—that Rick had some passing familiarity with computer systems similar to Damocles, if he had known Rick’s actual credentials related to the field he would have had Rick on a plane to Washington twenty minutes after having him hauled into his office. For his part, Rick was starting to understand the gravity of the situation even more as he struggled to remain upright while being pulled down the halls of the base.

In truth the situation was far grimmer than Rick could have imagined. With Damocles having infiltrated and damaged so many vital systems there were virtually no more satellite networks operational. While the satellites were still in orbit and functioning they were nonresponsive to commands from the ground, having been locked out by Damocles. Newer test aircraft and vehicles linked together in experimental systems had also been affected. Each vehicle and aircraft had to be hand-checked and have its firmware flashed and run through a series of offline diagnostics before they could be cleared for use. Of all the scenarios Rick could imagine, none up until that point had been as terrible as reality.

As Rick sat in the brightly-lit cell somewhere in the bowels of Nellis, he contemplated the events that had led him there and began trying to assemble the facts and speculations he had gathered.

“It’s a virus,” Rick mumbled to himself. “I knew that already. But it’s a smart virus. A learning virus. More than a virus, really. It’s affected everything… even the military can’t fight back against it.” Rick snorted. “They sure as hell can’t fight it if they’re trying to pick up people off the street who sound like they know anything about a computer. Why, though?”

Rick thought back to the piece of paper the Colonel had placed in front of him. The content of the letter was matter-of-fact and got straight to the point. A piece of weaponized computer code that could evolve and change to adapt to a wide variety of situations had been loosed on the country and the world at large. The US government was looking for people with any sort of computing experience to lend their knowledge towards helping find a weakness in the virus so that it could be stopped.

At the bottom of the letter, after a paragraph-long impassioned plea for help, sat the signature of the President of the United States. Rick had nearly laughed upon seeing it, thinking it was some sort of elaborate joke, but the more he sat and thought about it the more he realized that the letter was completely serious.

Rick continued mulling over the conversation between himself and Colonel Leslie when he remembered a detail that had completely escaped him at the time. Mount Weather. Virginia? Rick jumped up from his seat at the edge of his metal bed and ran to the door of his cell. He started beating on the bars with his fists while shouting at the top of his lungs. “Hey! Hey, you! Get the Colonel!” Rick shouted and pointed at an MP who stood down the hall. “I’ll do it! I’ll do what he said!”

“Shut up down there!” The MP took a few menacing steps forward as he shouted back down the hall.

“No, really! The Colonel said—”

“You’re about to find out what he said to do to anyone who doesn’t listen!”

Rick backed away from the cell door, clenching his fists into a ball. While he hadn’t realized it at the time of the conversation, he had suddenly remembered that Mount Weather was in Virginia, just outside of Washington. He figured that, if he was smart and played his cards right, he could use the Colonel’s offer to get to Mount Weather and then slip away down south to reunite with his family.

“Dammit!” Rick hissed to himself as he sat back down at the edge of his bed. Thirty minutes prior he had been handed a golden opportunity to get across the country to within a stone’s throw of his family and he had turned it down without realizing it.

Chapter 16

Nellis Air Force Base

Las Vegas, Nevada

“That’ll be all. Thank you, ma’am.” Colonel Leslie nods to the young woman. She stands up, nods back and quietly leaves his office. Outside, an MP accompanies her down the halls, up a flight of stairs and to a small tent. In a few hours she’ll be strapped into a seat in the back of a C-130 on a flight bound for a shelter city set up hundreds of miles to the east.

As Leslie goes back over the notes of his conversation with Jane, he is interrupted a short time later by the phone on his desk. He picks it up and listens intently, his brow furrowing and his expression darkening with each passing second.

Although Colonel Leslie wasn’t originally the highest ranking officer at Nellis Air Force Base, the redistribution and deployment of much of the base’s assets have left him as the de facto base commander. In addition to looking out for his men, dealing with the disaster caused by Damocles and trying to get enough planes in the air to meet the constant battery of orders coming his way, Colonel Leslie has had to task a large portion of his men with helping to care for the civilian population.

As thousands upon thousands have come seeking shelter, the Colonel has had to balance caring for them, watching after the men under his command and trying to keep the peace in a situation only ever dreamt of in far-off conference rooms. Finding the proper balance between the extreme of kicking every civilian off the base and denying all aid and the opposite extreme of allowing any and everyone onto the base has been difficult.

The phone call has made things even more difficult. After a few curt replies Colonel Donald Leslie puts the phone back on the receiver and leans back in his chair. He has been at Nellis for eighteen months, but in that amount of time he has grown fond of it like no other assignment he has ever had. The order to abandon the base comes as a shock to him and he struggles to try and process what the implications could be.

A few hours pass, and the Colonel is still in his office drinking another cup of coffee as he works on plans for the withdrawal from the base. The phone rings again and he answers. His eyes grow wide and he slams down the phone, picks it up again and dials another number. After a few minutes of playing phone tag he is finally in a conference call with other Air Force officers. The conversation is fast, furious and more than a little heated.

The discussion and disagreement centers around what to do about the growing population of unruly civilians just outside the base. Other officers are in favor of using lethal force to prevent anyone from making unauthorized entry onto the base. Others, like Colonel Leslie, are unhappy with that option and refuse to fire upon their own countrymen, no matter how bleak the situation may be.

In the end, as the one in command, Leslie makes the decision and hands down the orders. The civilians outside the base are to be kept out for as long as possible. If they do manage to break through the gates and start rioting and looting, the base assets are to be immediately locked down until the people calm down. No one is to fire upon an unarmed civilian unless their life is in immediate danger, and every soldier and airman is to do everything in their power to prevent harm from coming to anyone on and around the base.

Tags: Mike Kraus Surviving the Fall Science Fiction
Source: readsnovelonline.net