Scott Sigler - Contagious

Somewhere in those twenty-five options was a way to save Officer Sanchez and stop this whole thing in its tracks.

There had to be.

“All right,” Margaret said. “Let’s find out what kills these little bastards.”

Charlie Ogden watched the Winnebago’s little TV. Every word the newscaster said seemed to increase his anger, his desire to kill the enemies of God. If only he’d arrived sooner, stopped Jenkins from making that McDonald’s run.

“This is footage from this morning,” the newscaster said. “Police were investigating two bodies found on Orleans Street. We have unconfirmed reports that one or both of these bodies had the flesh-eating bacteria that has been found in several places in Michigan, including Gaylord, where it caused at least two deaths. Homeland Security has elevated the alert status to orange, although they say there is no evidence of terrorist involvement. The no-fly zone over Detroit is still in effect, and we will bring you live aerial pictures as soon as that ban is lifted.”

Ogden turned off the volume. He just stared at the image of Orleans Street, dozens of police, white CDC vans, and two semi trailers.

Chelsea’s lovely voice in his head: Why does this make you so angry?

He pointed to the screen, his fingertip tracing an oily mark on the glass.

“These two trailers,” Ogden said. “It means they found Jenkins. The people in those trailers, Chelsea… they work for the devil.”

Are they coming for us?

Not yet. They couldn’t. Sending troops to a town like Gaylord was one thing; a major city was a different story.

“I think we have enough time,” Ogden said. “We just have to make sure we stick to the timeline. You’re sure the gate will open exactly when you say it will?”

When Mickey’s big hand is on three and his little hand is on one.

Thirteen-fifteen. Just eighteen hours away.

That spot is only a few blocks from here. If the trailers make you angry, destroy them.

“They moved them,” Ogden nodded. “I sent Sergeant Major Mazagatti out in street clothes, and the trailers are gone. They have to be around here somewhere, but we can’t send people out to search. It’s too risky.

The longer we stay quiet and unnoticed, the better.”

You’re so smart, General.

He felt his face flush red. “Thank you, Chelsea.”

But tomorrow, once things begin, we should find the trailers and kill the people inside.

Ogden nodded. “Absolutely, Chelsea. I’ll send Mazagatti and my personal guard to make sure it happens. We just have to find them first.”

Captain Patrick “P. J.” Lindeman felt ridiculous G-forces smash him into his seat, and he wondered if his ass would explode.

Well, not his ass per se, but the HTV-6Xb hypersonic fighter in which his ass was currently sitting, the same fighter that had that same ass hurtling through the night sky at Mach 10.

Mach motherfucking 10 .

Seven thousand miles per hour.

That shattered the official record for manned flight that had stood since 1967, when Major William J. “Pete” Knight took his X-15A-2 to Mach 6.7. Put that in your pipe and smoke it, Pete.

Knight’s flight had been very different. For starters, Knight’s X-15 dropped from the bottom of a B-52 bomber, while Lindeman’s HTV-6Xb took off under its own power from a military airbase at Groom Lake, Nevada. Knight’s X-15 was basically a rocket with wings and a cockpit.

Lindeman’s plane used fairly standard turbojets for takeoff and landing, combined with scramjets to hit such obscene speeds. The most important difference? Knight’s plane was built for speed only. It couldn’t fight.

The HTV-6Xb was a bona fide war machine.

Known by its nickname, “the Wasp,” the HTV-6Xb was the world’s premier air-superiority weapon. The world didn’t know of its existence, of course, but that didn’t change the fact it could eat a couple of M16s for breakfast, wash them down with the best Mirage the French had to offer and then casually pick its teeth with an F-22 Raptor. The Wasp could reach any target zone faster than anything on the planet and outfly anything it found in that airspace.

This particular combat mission didn’t require a great deal of skill. Lindeman had taken off on a northwest heading, flown to ten thousand feet, then came around in a slow turn that pointed his nose toward South Bend, Indiana. The conventional jet-turbine engines drove the Wasp to Mach 2. At that speed, the turbines’ air inlets closed off, forcing that same air intake into the scramjet engines. The turbines had to shut off, because once the plane reached Mach 3 or so, air friction would melt the spinning intake fans. The scramjet portion, however, acted more like a funnel—it had no moving parts. Air shot in at supersonic speeds, compressed, mixed with a gaseous fuel and ignited in a highly controlled reaction that drove the plane to Mach 10.

Lindeman’s record-breaking flight would take him from Groom Lake to South Bend in fifteen minutes. Almost seventeen hundred miles. In fifteen minutes.

Twelve minutes into the flight, Lindeman released an ASM-157 antisatellite missile. His speed of Mach 10 wasn’t even half that of the ASM-157, which would max out at Mach 22.7—fifteen thousand miles per hour.

Aircraft normally come nowhere near Mach 5, let alone Mach 10. As a result, anyone or anything watching the skies for unusual flight patterns would notice the Wasp. Hard to miss something like that.

Which was precisely the point.

There was noway the Orbital could track every plane in North America. It couldn’t even track all the military planes in that area—far too much traffic to monitor. It did, however, try to keep tabs on particular military bases. So when the HTV-6Xb took off from Groom Lake, the Orbital noted the flight and marked a subroutine to watch its direction.

When the HTV-6Xb turned and accelerated to Mach 1, that didn’t merit the Orbital’s primary attention. At Mach 2 the Orbital changed the marking status to potential threat. By the time it hit Mach 5 and was flying straight for South Bend, the Orbital knew it was under attack. When the jet launched a missile, it was only 350 miles away.

At Mach 22, traveling 350 miles—the distance from San Francisco to Los Angeles—takes just under a minute and a half.

The Orbital ran through protocols, checking the decision tree for responses. As it did, it picked up another inbound threat.

Military engineers builtthe NFIRE satellite to do two things. The first was the difficult task of tracking intercontinental ballistic missiles. The second was even more complex—shooting those missiles out of the sky.

The NFIRE orbited at an altitude of 240 miles. It targeted an ICBM’s apex, typically about sixty miles above the Earth. The part of the NFIRE that actually shot down an ICBM was known as a kill vehicle, a small missile that got close to a target, then launched a high-speed spray of dense shrapnel. In basic terms, the kill vehicle was a high-tech, $560 million exoatmospheric hand grenade.

Certain senators, however, objected to putting a kill vehicle in the NFIRE. Such an act would open up a new arms race, they said. It would begin the “weaponization of space,” and that was something the world could do without.

Defenders of the project said Congress was a bunch of myopic, tree-hugging hippies who deserved to die the radioactive death they would surely bring upon all freedom-loving Americans. The defenders said that only to themselves, of course. What they said publicly was that the kill vehicle had a range of only four miles, a minuscule distance compared to the vast ranges of space, so the kill vehicle could really only be used to shoot down a rocket aimed directly at the NFIRE. It was strictly for self-defense, and how could that be a bad thing?