Death Wave Read online

  Truth to tell, there were plenty of criminals and fanatics and out-and-out lunatics among those twenty billion who would unleash a nanomachine plague for profit or passion or merely the insane notoriety of slaughtering millions. When Anita Halleck recovered from her temporary death, she learned that the nanotech ban meant she could never return to the world of her birth.

  It was Douglas Stavenger, the founder and mastermind of the lunar nation Selene, who convinced Halleck to use her brains and drive in politics. Earth had been hit by a second wave of greenhouse warming, the Greenland and Antarctic ice caps were melting down, coastal cities all across the globe were being flooded, millions of refugees sought shelter, food, hope.

  Bright and determined (some said to the point of ruthlessness), Halleck became a force in Earth’s tempestuous politics. From Selene, on the Moon, she fought her way to the top of the world government.

  And on the day she was installed as chairperson of the governing council, she pushed through a special exemption to the anti-nanotech laws. Anita Halleck would be allowed to live and work on Earth. No one dared gainsay her return to the world of her birth.

  Tall and youthful despite her years, thanks to the nanomachines teeming inside her, Halleck was as slim-waisted and smooth-skinned as a thirty-year-old. She presided over Earth’s painful recovery from the greenhouse flooding. As Greenland and Antarctica melted away, as climate patterns across the world changed drastically and sea levels rose catastrophically, Anita Halleck harnessed Earth’s resources and technologies to feed, house, educate, and build new lives for the hundreds of millions driven from their homes by the relentless floods.

  One of her achievements was a global engineering program to save as many cities as possible from the rising sea level. Dams and weir systems rose like medieval fortifications to protect major cities, the world capital of Barcelona among them.

  Earth’s geography changed, but the people of Earth—helped by their own skills and resources, plus the generous aid from human communities spread halfway across the solar system—managed to stabilize their civilization and survive the worst crisis in human history.

  Then came the realization that Greenland’s melting ice cap was pouring torrents of cold fresh water into the North Atlantic Ocean, threatening to cut off the Gulf Stream that warmed Western Europe. Soon the climate of the British Isles and much of Europe would be plunged into Siberian cold and desolation. Every effort must be made to dam up the melting waters, including their underground flow.

  The World Council faced another global challenge of frightening proportions. Halleck led the massive geoengineering project to meet this new challenge.

  And on top of that Jordan Kell and his companions returned from New Earth, with this alien woman and a warning of a still-deadlier catastrophe rushing through interstellar space to destroy everything.

  ALBUQUERQUE

  Slouching back on the sofa of his basement studio apartment, Hamilton Cree sipped on an energy drink as he watched a rerun of last year’s World Cup finals on his wall screen.

  It had been a long, frustrating day. First the traffic detail up north of Taos, then a raid on a drug house in Española, and finally the long drive home to Albuquerque.

  The drug raid had been a farce: a half-dozen pimply kids cooking up some recreational junk in the kitchen of one of the new prefabs that had been set up for the flood refugees. City kids, from back east, snotty and yelling about their constitutional rights. Thought they’d masked all the surveillance sensors in their miserable little government-furnished house.

  The robots burst into their hangout and tranked them while Cree and the other live officers waited outside and watched on the remote cameras. Drones circling overhead, the whole nine yards, just to bust some teenagers who had nothing better to do.

  His phone buzzed. Almost glad of the interruption, Cree saw on the ID screen that it was his brother, from Nashville. He told the phone to put the call on the wall screen. He’d thought about getting a 3-D viewer, but decided to save the money and stick with the flat screen.

  Brother Jefferson was eleven years older than Hamilton, but he still looked like a kid: he could afford rejuve treatments.

  “What’s happening, Hambone?” asked Jeff, with his vid-star smile.

  Hamilton hated his childhood nickname. Wearily he replied, “Same old shit.”

  Jeff was the oldest of the family’s four boys and he had a real job as a bank supervisor in Nashville. Plus a wife and two kids of his own, a girl and a boy.

  “Got a promotion,” Jeff said brightly.

  “Yeah?”

  “Yeah. I’m gonna be manager of our branch office in Hendersonville.”

  “Good for you, Jeff.”

  For the next half hour Hamilton listened with a growing mixture of envy and resentment as Jeff bragged about his latest step toward a happy retirement.

  At last Jeff asked, “So what about you? Still guarding the highways of New Mexico?”

  “Not for much longer,” Hamilton said, feeling the way he had when the school year was nearing its end.

  “Anything interesting?” Jeff prodded.

  So Hamilton told him about the star traveler. “Held up traffic for more’n half an hour, just so he and his alien gal could see the gorge.”

  Jeff seemed impressed. “He’s been to another star. He’s met aliens.”

  “She looks pretty human.”

  “They claim the New Earth people are just as human as we are,” Jeff said. “But I don’t see how. They’re aliens. Aliens aren’t human.”

  “I guess.”

  “You know, Hank’s working in Chicago now, for the firm that sells those energy screens.”

  “He is?”

  “Yep. He’s going to send me one to put in my car. Like an airbag, only it’s stronger and protects the whole insides of the car, even if it’s totaled.”

  “The energy screens are alien technology.”

  “That’s right. One of the star travelers opened his own company to sell ’em. He’s rich!”

  “From alien technology,” Hamilton muttered.

  The brothers chatted for a few minutes more, then Jefferson said, “Gotta go now. Dinner bell’s ringing.”

  “Okay. Say hello to Gina for me.”

  “Sure. Whyn’t you come over here sometime and see us? The kids’d love to see their Uncle Hambone.”

  Hamilton forced a grin. “Sure. Soon’s I get the chance. Got a three-day weekend coming up; maybe then.”

  “Good. See ya then.”

  “Yeah.”

  Hamilton cut the connection and the wall screen went back to the World Cup. He leaned back on the sofa once more, thinking, Those damned star travelers. They get rich, they get to block traffic, they make us feel like little insects.

  But he didn’t really feel like an insect. He felt like a man, a man who had somehow been left behind. A man who was filled with a growing, simmering resentment.

  TAOS, NEW MEXICO

  Once-sleepy Taos was booming, thanks to the government housing construction that was changing the face of the desert. The city’s airport was expanding to accommodate the loads of materials and construction workers being ferried in daily from all across the country. Jumpjet cargo carriers lowered themselves on roaring streams of hot exhaust gases along the airfield’s perimeter aprons, while bigger jetliners bored in to land on the newly extended runways, then raised their hinged noses to allow trucks full of men and materials to trundle out.

  Rocketplanes were still fairly rare at the Taos airport, but the security people who escorted Jordan Kell and his wife had requisitioned one for them. Local workers and travelers gaped at the sleek, swept-wing craft as it took off like an ordinary airplane, then fired its rocket engines to arrow it high above the atmosphere. In little more than a half hour the plane was gliding in for a landing at Chicago’s sprawling Banks Aerospaceport.

  A blank-faced team of World Council security agents guided them to an unmarked door. Outside, a sleek, low-slung limousine was waiting for Jordan and Aditi, with still more security people positioned around it. The two of them ducked inside, and the limo pulled away from the curb.

  It was an air-cushion vehicle, and Jordan felt some alarm when the driver accelerated past the teeming highway traffic in a special lane reserved for government and emergency vehicles.

  The security woman driving for them seemed as happy as a fighter jock as she blasted past the wheeled cars at blurring speed. Jordan saw that there were separate lanes for private automobiles, and still others for trucks and buses.

  “We don’t touch the roadway,” their driver was bragging. “Wheels up, jets blasting, and away we go straight downtown, past all these dawdlers!”

  Jordan wondered what would happen if a private car tried to cut into the restricted government lane. Can’t happen, he told himself. Those private vehicles are controlled by the traffic management system: everything kept safe and orderly. Humans don’t drive their own vehicles anymore—except for this speed-happy would-be jet jockey.

  There were no safety belts. The driver assured them that they weren’t needed. “This car’s equipped with energy screens that’ll protect you from anything,” she assured her passengers.

  “Really?” asked Jordan. He pushed both hands into the seemingly empty air in front of him and, sure enough, felt a slightly spongy resistance.

  “Even a full-speed head-on collision!” the driver enthused.

  Trying to put the picture of a high-speed crash out of his mind, Jordan turned to Aditi, who was sitting beside him, looking equally tense.

  “It’ll be good to see Mitch again.”

  “Yes,” she agreed, her eyes flicking at the cars they were passing. “And Paul.”

  Mitchell Thornberry and Paul Longyear were the only others who had returned from New Earth with Jordan and Aditi. Jordan’s brother, Brandon, and the rest of the eleven scientists had elected to remain and continue their studies of the world that had been constructed by aliens to resemble Earth almost exactly, and peopled with humanlike beings.

  Thornberry was a thoroughly Irish robotics engineer, Longyear a Native American biologist. Both had been staggered by what they’d found and learned on the alien-built planet circling the star Sirius. Back on Earth, though, Thornberry had accepted his round-the-clock security detail as a status symbol he had earned; Longyear found it oppressive and fled to the reservation in North Dakota where he’d been born, as far from cities and prying eyes as he could get.

  A pair of security agents, wearing dark jackets over white turtleneck shirts, were waiting for them when they pulled up the driveway of the New Ritz Carlton Hotel. Though the hotel was more than two centuries old, its façade looked unchanged to Jordan. The lobby was still an elegant, understated work of art, with a completely automated registration desk, together with a smaller desk manned by human receptionists, for the old-fashioned. Humanform robot bellmen stood in a silent row, ready to carry luggage without expecting a tip.

  Still more World Council security agents smoothly whisked Jordan and Aditi up to the hotel suite reserved for them, where they changed for dinner: from the travel bags waiting for them. Jordan pulled on a light blue suit, with a silver and turquoise bolo tie at his throat; Aditi chose a softly flowing dress of coral that complemented her auburn hair nicely.

  The security team waiting in the hallway led Jordan and Aditi to a private dining room that the World Council had reserved for this little reunion, then stayed discreetly outside. The walls of the room were comfortably decorated with three-dimensional digital viewers that were programmed to show picturesque scenes from many spots on Earth, plus views from the Moon and planets, as well as art displays from the world’s most prestigious museums, public and private.

  Thornberry himself was standing by the side table laden with bottles and finger foods as Jordan and Aditi stepped in. He was a solidly built man, just about Jordan’s own height but thicker, heavier in the torso and limbs. The quizzical little smile that had once lit his face was gone now, replaced by a more sober, almost puzzled expression.

  “Ah, there you are!” Thornberry said heartily as he turned to greet them.

  Jordan blinked at the man. On New Earth, Mitch had always worn comfortable, casual clothes—almost to the point of sloppiness. Now he was wearing a perfectly fitted plum-colored velour jacket, precisely pressed white slacks, and a crisp pale blue long-sleeved shirt.

  As he grasped Thornberry’s extended hand, Jordan said, “Mitch, you’re a fashion plate.”

  “It’s these adaptable fabrics, don’t ya know. They adjust to fit you. Make anybody look good.”

  “Well, you look like a million international dollars.”

  “Make it a hundred million,” Thornberry said, his beefy face smiling broadly. “More like three hundred million, in fact.”

  “You are a wealthy man?” asked Aditi.

  “Thanks to you, m’dear. And your technology. Those grand and lovely energy screens your people invented. I filed a patent application for ’em as soon as we started back for Earth, don’t you know. By the time we got home I was rich! No more academic life for me. B’god, university presidents are coming to me to beg for money!”

  Jordan laughed.

  “You know, they’re using energy screens to dome over whole cities to protect ’em from the weather,” Thornberry nattered on. “And reinforcing dams and levees. We’re even working on developing ’em for propulsion!”

  Jordan said, “I had no idea.”

  “It’s been a busy three weeks, let me tell you,” said Thornberry. “Imagine me, a wealthy nob.”

  “Has it been only three weeks since we returned?” Jordan mused. “It seems much longer.”

  “Three weeks tomorrow,” Thornberry confirmed.

  Nodding, Jordan said, “The World Council meeting is tomorrow morning.”

  “That it is,” said Thornberry, sobering. He gestured toward the dining table. “Come on now, let’s eat. Or would you rather have a drink first?”

  “A little sherry. Amontillado, if they have it.” Turning to Aditi, Jordan joked, “I haven’t had a sip of amontillado in more than a hundred and fifty years.”

  “Paul’s not here yet,” Aditi pointed out.

  “He can’t make it,” said Thornberry. “Some sort of family commitment. It’ll be just the three of us.”

  Jordan felt his brows knit. With his Native American heritage, Paul Longyear had been especially sensitive about meeting an alien race. Despite all that Aditi’s people could do, the biologist remained suspicious of their motives. And once he had returned to Earth, the constant security bodyguards of the World Council had unnerved him.

  “Too bad. I was looking forward to seeing him again,” Jordan said.

  “You’ll have to settle for just me.”

  “Good enough,” said Jordan.

  Dinner was exceptionally delicious, Jordan thought. Fine wine and excellent food. Robot waiters catered to their every whim. Yet the world beyond their dining room weighed on Jordan.

  “The entire planet’s geography has changed,” he commented between bites of roast lamb.

  “That it has,” said Thornberry. “Sea level’s still rising.”

  Shaking his head, Jordan murmured, “I thought they had stabilized the global climate.”

  “So did everybody. Fusion energy finally replaced fossil fuels.” Thornberry’s beefy face darkened into a scowl. “But it was already too late. The Greenland and Antarctic ice caps are melting down. Nothing we can do to stop ’em. Too much heat stored in the oceans.”

  Aditi glanced back and forth at their somber expressions. Trying to brighten things, she suggested, “Perhaps we should go to North Dakota to visit Paul.”

  “Perhaps,” Jordan conceded.

  “I’m not sure he’d want to be visited,” said Thornberry. “All this security the World Council has attached to us has upset him.”

  “It is rather unnerving,” said Jordan, “having these security people surrounding us wherever we go.”

  Thornberry’s beefy face broke into a smile. “It’s not that bad.” Gesturing to the room around them, he said, “This is a lot grander than sitting in the public dining room, don’t you think?”

  “You’re getting spoiled,” Jordan half-joked.

  “We’re important people, Jordan, m’lad. And you, Aditi, you’re an alien from another star. Of course they’re guarding us, protecting us.”

  Jordan nodded. But he said, “It’s still rather unsettling.”

  As dessert was being served, their conversation finally turned to the next day’s meeting.

  His face utterly serious, Thornberry asked, “You’re going to tell them about the death wave?”

  “They already know. It’s all in the report I submitted to the Council.”

  Waving a thick-fingered hand, Thornberry warned, “Ahh, they’re politicians. They don’t read, they have aides do their reading for them.”

  Jordan looked into his friend’s sky-blue eyes and saw a great sadness there. “You don’t think they’ll act?”

  “On a threat that’s two thousand years away? Get real, Jordan. They’ll put it off, sweep it under the rug, kick the can down the road and hope it gets lost.”

  Aditi spoke up. “But there are other intelligent species much closer to the death wave. We’ve got to help them.”

  Thornberry huffed. “Don’t count on it, m’dear. Don’t count on politicians rising to the challenge.”

  WORLD COUNCIL HEADQUARTERS

  Twenty-one men and women sat around the Council table, representing every power group on Earth and beyond. They made a colorful lot, some wearing Western suits and dresses, others in Eastern saris and robes, kimonos, caftans, even one woman in a flowered sarong. Hardly a gray hair among them; they were all youthful and vigorous, no matter what their ages, thanks to rejuvenation therapies.