James Axler - Polestar Omega

For the doctor and the other residents, the aches in their stomachs were a matter of pride and cultural bonding. From its inception, Polestar Omega had a unique tradition, grounded in extreme physical and psychological hardship. The first whitecoats who inhabited the redoubt had been chosen for their ability to meet the challenges and deprivation of multiyear Antarctic assignments, the same selection criteria as the astronauts on the orbiting space station. Over the decades postnukecaust, the redoubt’s population had proved over and over how Spartan and how ingenious they were. If, as the saying went “you are what you eat,” they could and did live on anything that contained essential nourishment. They had exploited all the polar desert had to offer, gathering new information and using it to adapt and thrive in the most desolate place on the planet.

What could such a people, with their determination and advanced technology, accomplish in a wider world? Were there any limits on what they could do? They had known this day would come for more than a century, and for the past fifty years they had been developing a plan to take back their birthright, to leave their icebound prison, to cleanse and repopulate the Earth with a new and improved humanity and a human society based on scientific principles.

Lima moved against the flow of wheeled carts on the main floor, turning through a double doorway into the redoubt’s amphitheater. Below him and the curving rows of empty seats, on the proscenium stage two men and a woman in orange coveralls sat at a long table, attended to by scurrying staff, likewise clad in orange. The theater was the nerve center of redoubt, once the locus of scientific debate and decision making. Priorities had changed. It had been renamed the War Room twenty years ago.

The entire back wall of the stage was covered by an enormous, electronic Mercator projection map of Earth with infrared overlays from the satellite they had launched a decade ago. The missile and its satellite had been part of the research station’s infrastructure, defended from the nukeday e-mag pulse by deep burial in the glacier and massive concrete shielding. Reprogrammed from its original function, the satellite now tracked prevailing wind patterns and identified and monitored the planet’s most dangerous radiation zones and surviving population hubs. It also provided GPS and a vital communication link between forces in the field.

General Charlie India, his bald pate gleaming in the shifting, multicolored lights of the map display, looked up from the folders spread out before him, and locked eyes with Lima as he mounted the steps to the stage. The general’s orange coveralls accentuated his ice-tan: pale forehead, ears, cheeks and lower face where they had been shielded by a coldsuit’s tight-fitting hood; skin reddish and windburned looking around exposed eyes, nose, mouth and brows.

General India and the two other orange suits at the table, Commander Mike Romeo and Commander Quebec Sierra, were the military officers in charge of staging the evacuation of Polestar Omega and the invasion of the closest continental landmass to the redoubt, nearly three thousand miles distant at Tierra del Fuego, Argentina.

“I hope to hell you’re not here to tell us the icequake has stopped progress on viral deployment,” India said. “We’re tired of your excuses and delays. They will no longer be tolerated.”

“No damage was reported, sir. None at all, sir.”

Lima deeply resented the implication that the units under his command were somehow dragging their feet, or worse—scientifically incompetent or methodologically overmatched. His was by far the most technically demanding element in the plan for conquest. Yet he knew explaining that to military leaders was an exercise in futility, as was expecting them to fully fathom the tragedy of what they were being forced to leave behind. Though the facility’s original staff had all been scientists—university-trained PhDs in biochemistry, genetics, physics, mathematics, cybernetics and space science—and were focused on a single challenge with ramifications for all of humankind, a century of fighting for survival had forced a branching of personality types, intellectual and physical capacities, and job specialization, which in turn had led to the current, highly stratified society and a color-coded division of labor with hot orange at the apex.

“Have you extracted what you need from the new test subjects you acquired?” Commander Sierra asked.

Though she filled out her tailored coveralls admirably, front and rear, her hatchet face, hard, dark eyes and discolored teeth were not material for sexual fantasies—even in Antarctica.

“The process is well underway,” Lima assured her. Cracking the code to switch on a universal mutie death gene remained the key missing piece of the puzzle—he didn’t feel compelled to clarify that tiny detail. The bioengineering section had already crafted the viral transfer mechanism. All they needed was the magic bullet.

“Can you give us an updated delivery date?” Commander Romeo said. He was the youngest of the three, his face prematurely weather-seamed, his hair flecked with gray above the ears.

“I should have a result in the next twenty-four hours,” Lima said with as much confidence as he could fake. Before they abandoned the redoubt, it was vital that the infectious lethal agent be in full-scale production and ready for deployment when they made landfall. Leaving the redoubt before the magic-bullet genetic research was complete would mean constructing new isolation chambers and DNA labs in South America. The trio of military leaders had steadfastly refused to devote limited resources to that kind of duplication of effort.

They needed the kill switch, and they needed it quickly.

The expressed goal was to be sitting at the southern border of Deathlands in five years, and to have consolidated all the territorial gains in between. It was a tall order no matter the size of the army, no matter how determined or well equipped they were. That’s where the viral cleansing came in. They planned to move their main force up the remnants of north-south, predark highway corridors, spreading the death gene with hovertrucks and aerial sprayers as they advanced. They didn’t have to deploy it very far past the roadbeds; the virus and its lethal switch would move from mutie to mutie, jumping species and geographical boundaries, destroying the genetically compromised.

Although Lima deemed this was not the time to raise the subject, there were still a lot of unknowns. What was the effective range of transmission? Could it spread as predicted from plants to animals and vice versa? Could it really span a continent? Would the death gene remain functional after the virus had traveled through a series of very different hosts, or would the infectious agent mutate as it was passed until the desired effect fizzled out? Did some mutie species already have immunity to the viral tool, or could they quickly acquire it through natural selection? These questions had no answers at present, and finding the answers was unlikely given the time constraints. The viral technology would no doubt undergo revision and further refinement after the weapon was released and its effects on the mutie population quantified. Small mobile labs under Lima’s direction could reengineer and test revised viral delivery systems on the go; the peptide kill switch would theoretically remain the same.

Lima looked up at the huge map and the pinpoints of red that indicated population areas. Deathlands, the former United States, had been long believed to be the source of all mutation in North and South America. It was the last on their list of immediate conquests. And not simply because it was the most distant, land-accessible target.