Page 9 of Resolution
Trying to absorb his shock at the general’s threat to kidnap the Millersville citizens, Jeff refrained from disputing the general’s caustic assessment of Mayor Wyler, although he personally had great admiration for the man and had in fact helped the town defeat a warlord who was attacking them. Fortunately the general continued with his own train of thought.
“My responsibility is to look after the civilians in my charge,” he said. “Up until now I’ve been prioritizing Glastine but since we’re up and running smoothly, I can direct my attention to outreach. We’ve been passively accepting refugees such as yourself, but in the coming weeks the posture will change.” He opened a drawer in the table and withdrew a tablet, which he pushed across the gleaming surface to Jeff. “I need you to draw what you observed while you were there. A man like you, a keen observer, would naturally see details others would miss.”
“I’ll do my best, sir.” Detaching the stylus, Jeff began sketching a rough schematic of the gate through which refugees passed into and through the periphery of Millersville. He subtly altered details here and there to make it appear more defensible than it actually was. He’d given the mayor a set of detailed instructions about how to improve their defenses and he omitted all of those enhancements. He wondered if the general had made this request of other refugees previously and whether his own sketch would be tested against theirs for accuracy. When the drawing was complete, he docked the stylus and slid the pad to the waiting officer.
Quantike didn’t pick it up but examined it cursorily. “As I expected, crude and cobbled together. The average refugee wouldn’t be able to breach these walls but it’ll be no obstacle to our firepower.” He glanced at Jeff. “If the mayor remains stubborn and refuses to surrender peacefully of course.”
“Of course, sir.”
A probing interrogation about what else he might have observed at Millersville followed but Jeff stuck to his story of only being allowed through the edge of town.
“Very good, captain,” the general said at length. He looked at Briskinn, who’d been silent through most of the meeting. “Get our new recruit a proper uniform, rank of captain and assign him where you need him most.”
“I’ll have him shadow me for a day or two, get him up to speed on how we operate here,” his subordinate replied, “And then rotate him into the roster.”
“Dismissed.” Quantike rose and moved to his desk as the two captains saluted and made their exit.
“Next stop is the supply depot,” Briskinn said to Jeff as they descended the stairs. “Get you kitted our and then we can do rounds. I have a zip cart assigned to me so we don’t have to walk—this place is about seventeen acres, you know. You did a good job with the general by the way. He was impressed—I could tell. I’ve served under him practically since he arrived on Randal Four and he’s a good man. The people here are lucky he was in charge. About the only thing the authorities did right when the infected outbreak hit.”
The chatty captain rambled on as they stopped in his office for the initiator to his vehicle and then as they drove away from the building toward the huge supply warehouse. Jeff kept up his end of the conversation easily but in his mind he was turning over the possible reasons Quantike would want to even attempt to bring hundreds more people into the camp, against their will. What he ought to be doing is figuring out a way to thin out the infected swarming around this place. It’s a disaster waiting to happen.
* * *
“This place is odd,” Melly said as she and Tamsyn ate dinner with Jeff that night in a remote corner of the general commissary where they couldn’t be overheard.
“How so?” he asked.
“My first eight patients were pregnant. None of them were in relationships or married— they all said they’d enrolled in the camp’s maternity program to earn the extra rations and benefits.”
“Like I told the doc today, there’s a big push on to have babies,” Tamsyn chimed in. “The dormitory is plastered with colorful recruiting posters for all of us to participate and help repopulate the planet with uninfected. Three of the girls in my sleep pod are pregnant and one’s trying.”
Melly nodded. “Patient number nine was an artificial insemination. Dr. Sharpton handled it and I observed. It strikes me as a strange use of scarce resources to encourage women to opt out of work details and to receive extra rations and privileges at this point in the apocalypse. Not to mention the workload when all these babies are born. I was told there’s going to be a community nursery where the mothers can work.” She stabbed her unoffending vegetable stalk with the fork. “The whole thing is creepy. As if the purpose of the camp is really to breed humans.”
“I mean, the camp isn’t even stable, no matter what Quantike says,” Tamsyn said. “We’re ringed by thousands and thousands of infected. Shouldn’t the emphasis be on solving that problem before we bring a whole bunch of helpless babies into the situation?”
“I agree with you there,” Jeff said out loud, adding over the subaural com. And Quantike wants to bring in a whole lot more people. Keep this to yourselves but he’s thinking of invading Millersville with the goal of kidnapping the citizens.
Melly was rocked by the disclosure, barely keeping herself from exclaiming out loud. Why?
He thinks they’d be better off here. I disagree with his assessment of course but it does beg the question of what his motivation might be. It’s early in the planning stages, thank goodness. I sent Cody an order to warn the mayor trouble could be coming. The town’s defenses can’t stand up to the military hardware I saw on my tour today. Nothing that could take us out in the APC’s but the damage Ruger did with his relatively puny armaments is nothing compared to the destruction Quantike could dial up.
“My tenth patient?” Melly said after a moment of uneasy silence, “Feelgood overdose. Fatal. Nothing to be done. From what the nurses told us, it’s an increasingly serious problem here. People feel hopeless, not to mention the issue of the infected constantly pushing on the force fences.”
“Where do you suppose they’re getting the feelgoods?” Jeff asked.
“People always find a way,” Tamsyn replied. “Although the nurses also said there’s an order of immediate execution for anyone caught selling or distributing illicit feelgoods. She said we missed a public execution last week.”
This place is definitely off kilter, Melly said on the com. Knowing what we know in just one day I’d never recommend anyone come here. She reached over and squeezed Tamsyn’s hand as her friend was downcast. “You didn’t have any idea when you sent the school buses off to find this place. You did save their lives.”
But what we don’t know yet, Jeff commented, is whether there’s anything more behind the problems besides one man’s twisted views. Or if the problems here have anything to do with how the outbreak began. There are several mysteries I want to get to the bottom of, top amongst them being those strange black bracelets the general’s top men and women are wearing. Definitely not any kind of tech I’ve ever seen before.
Chapter Four
Highly motivated to find the answers Jeff was after so they could escape the camp, which frankly was a terrifying place to be in her opinion, Melly reported to work at the clinic the next day determined to use every minute she could to snoop through the records and try to get access to Dr. Sharpton’s desktop system. She’d have to be careful not to raise his suspicions or those of the nurses, who were quite devoted to him. Fortunately she had an excellent excuse to peruse the patient records, since she was the chief care provider currently. Dr. Sharpton spent most of his day in the locked laboratory, running tests on blood samples.
Melly didn’t dare risk an attempt at getting into his office though. Not while he was on the premises and might catch her in the act. Cody had given each of them a tiny device which if they could insert it into any part of the camp’s IT systems would allow him to begin hacking his way into the databanks. So far neither she nor the others had been allowed anywhere near a systems interface. Those were few and far between and always in heavily guarded offices. She knew Jeff was considering asking Tamsyn’s friend Devora to carry out the task. As a key member of the camp’s admin staff she had access to the machines in order to do her job. Melly doubted Devora could get into the most secure databases but if she could place Cody’s bug for them he’d do the rest. They didn’t know her well enough yet to take the risk of revealing their true mission. Tamsyn vouched for her but couldn’t say if Devora was now an ardent supporter of General Quantike’s vision. It would be a disaster if they were betrayed as spies, whether the general had any involvement with the outbreak’s origins or not.
Her patient load today was heavy with obstetrical patients in various early stages of pregnancy, a few people with mild food poisoning, and a couple of agro workers with an allergic rash. Things slowed to a trickle of patients after the lunch hour, most with minor ailments and she was reading through records in her tiny office when Dr. Sharpton knocked.
