Chapter 7

They were in a rugged canyon in the foothills of the Sierra Nevada mountains, a canyon cut by what the mapping software called the American River. It was late spring and that river was running high and fast, a raging torrent of whitewater that bounced and tumbled over the rocky riverbed toward the valley below. The flow was not natural, however. It was release water from the large dam that blocked the north and the middle forks of the river, thus storing water for recharge of the mountain homers’ aquifers and protecting the Norcal homers downstream from yearly flooding.

Gath and the four marines with him were half a kilometer downstream of the dam, sequestered behind some large boulders amid the evergreen trees some thirty meters from the riverbank. They could see the dam before them, a huge expanse of solid gray reinforced carbonized concrete rising two hundred and twenty meters above them and stretching for nearly six hundred meters from canyon wall to canyon wall. It was called the Auburn Dam and the water that rushed down the river channel was blasting out of a series of gates a third of the way up the structure from the river level. The water ran down angled spillways and into the riverbed at a rate the computer assured them was exactly one thousand cubic meters per second, about one fourth of the dam’s maximum discharge capacity. Gath, being Gath, was having a little fun by explaining a few facts about the dam to the spaceborn marines.

“Just think,” he said. “The water level on the reservoir side of the dam is one hundred and ninety meters deep and the reservoir stretches for more than forty klicks down two forks of the river. Do you know what that means? We’re sitting here just half a klick from more than two trillion liters of water and that dam is all that is holding it back.”

“Yeah, thanks for reminding us, Gath,” said Corporal Cistio, aka Cyst.

“Two trillion liters?” said Private Maggrelli, Mag. She did not sound like she was in awe of this number. She sounded terrified of it. “That’s a lot of torkin water.”

“Purg yes, it is,” Gath said. “Don’t worry too much about it though. What are the odds that the dam would break right now?”

“Exactly,” said Cyst.

“I mean, the thing has been standing here for more than eleven hundred years now, right?”

“Eleven hundred years?” said Private Barker, known as Blast.

“That’s right,” Gath said. “The homers built it in the final decades of their civilization, back during the height of the corruption and inefficiency that led to their collapse.” He looked up at the structure appraisingly, as if giving it the onceover. “It seems like maybe they did a good job on this project at least, although it takes a long time for design flaws in carbon fiber material to manifest themselves. Sometimes eight hundred to a thousand years.”

“Hume, I don’t like this slag,” Blast almost moaned, his own terrified gaze now on the base of the dam, searching for water leaks or crumbling concrete.

“Relax, Blast,” said the voice of Taz. “He’s just torkin’ with you. It’s what he does.” She was in the cockpit seat of their hover, which was circling high above, fifteen kilometers away—close enough to monitor the surrounding terrain and zoom in to provide air support or rescue if necessary, but far enough away to keep the homers they were here to meet from knowing she was there. She sounded amused at his antics.

“So that dam wasn’t really built eleven hundred years ago?” Blast asked.

“No, that slag is true,” Taz replied. “I’m just saying the thing probably isn’t going to break in the hour or so we’re here.”

“That’s what I said, isn’t it?” Gath asked innocently.

“Yes, but you were implying it’s on the brink of destruction and could go at any moment,” Taz said.

“It has to break some time, doesn’t it?” he asked.

“Let’s talk about something else,” said Cyst, who was in charge of the ground phase of this particular operation. “Taz, my map is showing our friends approaching the top of the canyon ledge. Is this accurate?”

“It’s accurate,” replied Taz, who was in charge of the overall operation. “Sensors are updating your maps in real time.”

“So ... what do you think, Gath?” Cyst said. “You’re the groundie and you people do slag like hiking in Whoverforsaken canyons. How long for these slagholes to work their way down to us on foot with a wagon?”

The slagholes in question were a group of four homers who had been spotted by satellite sensors working their way out of the foothills toward the dam a metric hour before. They were taking turns pulling a small wheeled vehicle with a barrel attached to it. They were mountain homers—members of the group that Dizza called the Shiloh—and it was strongly suspected that they intended to dump the contents of their barrel into the river. The marines were there to stop them from doing that if that was their intention. Gath was there to analyze the contents of the barrel and confirm it was what they thought it was.

Over the past five weeks there had been a rash of illness related deaths among the Norcal homers living along the banks of the American River twenty kilometers downstream of the Auburn Dam. These particular homers were gatherers who scavenged in the ruins of what had once been the Sacramento area’s eastern suburbs. Instead of collecting rainwater in large tarps as most of the other gatherers did, they took their drinking and bathing water directly from the river. When an epidemic of severe, uncontrollable diarrhea erupted among these homers, sickening almost everyone in their community and killing dozens, the first suspicion was water borne gastrointestinal infection despite the fact that such things had been thought extinct in this part of the homeland. A postmortem examination of a few of the bodies had confirmed the culprit as the bacterium Vibrio cholera, which caused the disease known as Cholera. Since Cholera was usually spread by the practice of dumping raw sewage into a drinking water supply and since even the most ignorant of homebody communities made sure to keep their bodily wastes far from flowing water, a minor mystery was declared as to how the nasty little organism was getting into the American River. This led to a review of recent satellite overhead videos with the computers reprogrammed to look for things they had initially not been concerned with, and that had led to the discovery of the groups of mountain homers making their way to the river’s edge with wagons and barrels on four separate occasions and dumping something into the water. And now that the homers were embarked upon the latest such round of suspicious behavior, Billion Team—as they had been designated—were waiting in the canyon to meet them.

“Maybe fifteen minutes,” Gath said with a shrug. “It depends on the terrain, how steep the trail is and how much weight is in that barrel.”

“Fifteen minutes,” Cyst said thoughtfully. “I guess we do some more waiting.”

“Whoever willing and the dam don’t break,” Taz said.

“That’s not torkin’ funny!” Cyst barked back at her.

“It is when you’re up here,” Taz replied, a chuckle in her voice.

Gath smiled behind his helmet and then stretched his legs out in front of him, getting his circulation moving a bit. The armor was not the most comfortable thing to sit around in, especially with bent legs.

“Hey, Gath,” said Blast. “Doc Bookender is your boss, isn’t he?”

“He’s the big boss of all medical personnel in the Sol,” Gath said, “and that includes me. Why do you ask?”

“I was wondering if you heard anything about how his meeting with the whiteshirts in the AZ went. He’s been back almost three weeks now and nobody’s heard slag about what happened there.”

“What makes you think I would have heard anything about it?” Gath asked. “I’m just a grunt medic. It’s not like he briefs me on his meetings.”

“I thought you medics all talked to each other,” Blast said. “Someone has to know something, don’t they?”

“I’m sure someone somewhere knows something,” Gath said, “but it isn’t me. Bookender hasn’t even officially said where he went when he left. He still says it was just a routine vacation.”

“A likely torkin’ story,” Taz said. “He and the regional Fleet commander leave on a fast minesweeper and are gone to the AZ for seven weeks? Doesn’t sound like a vacation to me.”

“Tork, it does to me,” said Mag.

“Have either one of them even admitted they were in the AZ?” Blast asked. “Or are they trying to say they were touring the supernova remnants at Levencross Five or some slag like that?”

“They never said where they went,” said Taz, who had somewhat of the inside track on this subject, “but my husband knows for certain that both of them were on that fast sweeper ship and he personally saw the flight plan in the tracking log. That vessel went to Scarborough Fleet Operations Complex at AZ Prime.”

“And there isn’t any reason for a minesweeper to go to SFO unless someone is meeting with some Fleet whiteshirts,” said Cyst.

“Or the executive council itself,” added Blast.

“Or both,” added Taz. “I’m telling you, Bookender and Admiral Mooz were there trying to change Homeland Policy. There’s no other reason.”

“So, what the tork happened then?” asked Cyst. “They were all over the holos about changing policy before they left but haven’t said a Whoever damned word about it since they came back. Both of them have been shut up in their offices polishing their missiles and keeping their mouths shut.”

“I’m guessing they got shot down,” said Gath.

“Shot down?” said Blast. “What the purg does that mean?”

“It means he thinks they were V-wasted,” Taz said, translating his groundie analogy into a proper spaceborn analogy.

“V-wasted?” said Blast. “Why the purg would the execs V-waste a change of Homeland Policy after Bakersfield and South Africa and Egypt?”

“And after the data on Mortimer?” added Cyst. “There isn’t any Whoever damned reason to keep dying for these torkin’ slagholes since they’re all gonna be gone themselves in a few generations anyway.”

“Doesn’t the council give a tork about the marines dying in this slaghole?” demanded Blast. “I mean, seriously? They have to respond to that, don’t they?”

“Not when you factor in seventy billion groundborn who think we should keep protecting the homers,” said Gath.

“That’s just asinine,” said Cyst. “Sorry, Gath. No offense intended, but your people need a torkin’ reality check, you know what I mean?”

“Yeah, Cyst,” Gath said with a sigh. “I know what you mean.”

The dig on Gath’s people served to end the casual conversation and they went back to simply watching their map displays to track the progress of the homers. They were making their way down the trail fairly quickly, probably because it was not the first time they had come down it. As they approached the bottom—and thus the edge of where they might be able to be directly view the people watching them—Cyst broke the silence.

“All right,” he said. “Let’s start getting ready for this. How about we all disappear now?”

They switched their armor over to chameleon mode, rendering them nearly invisible to the unaided human eye. Everyone looked at someone else, front and back, checking to make sure the software and the hardware were working properly. Gath checked Cyst, looking her armored form up and down. Since she was only two meters away and since his visual display was placing her name just above her head, he could easily tell she was there, but the effect was still quite good. Looking at Cyst was looking at a two-dimensional view of the rocks behind her. The illusion was not perfect, of course. She still cast a shadow upon the ground and around the edges of her the picture was a bit distorted, but had he not known she was there and only glanced past her, he might very well have missed her.

“Looking good, Cyst,” he told her.

“You too, Gath,” said Blast, who was looking him over.

“All right then,” said Cyst. “Weapons out and let’s start heading over. Standard line spread, five meters between, move slowly. Gath, you take rear guard.”

“Oorah,” Gath said.

“Weapons on pain sweep as primary, but don’t be afraid to flop them if they try to fight through it. We don’t let these slagholes get within five meters of anyone.”

They moved out, the four marines spreading out and advancing across the rocky terrain toward the rushing river. Gath took up position ten meters behind them, roughly in the middle of their formation, and matched speed. He stepped carefully as he walked across the rocky ground. Though he was heavily armored and his boots were form fitting and stiffly supporting, he had seen plenty of ankle fractures on plenty of marines from just such terrain.

“I got direct visual on them now,” reported Mag when they were forty meters from the water’s edge.

“Me too,” said Blast. “They’re just nearing the bottom of the trail.”

Gath looked over and caught his first actual glimpse of the four Shiloh. They were three hundred meters away, two on either side of the wagon, moving cautiously but quickly. He zoomed in his optical in order to get a better look at them. All four were men with young but weathered faces and long black hair that hung in stringy ropes down past their shoulders. They wore tattered synthetic cotton clothing over their torsos and tattered blue synthetic denim on their legs. The wagon they towed was an old and battered device made out of carbon fiber water pipes and wooden wheels. The barrel that rested in it was a standard forty-liter liquid barrel of the sort that had been supplied to the homebodies with their shipments for generations. It was strapped down with a pair of elastic straps—materials also supplied to the homebodies in their shipments—that had seen better days.

“If we can see them then they can see us,” Cyst said. “Find cover right now and hunker down until we figure out what they’re up to.”

Everyone did as they were told without speaking. Gath moved two meters to his right and squatted down behind a boulder, placing it between him and the approaching homebodies. He trained his weapon out over the terrain, loosely pointing it in their direction, his thumb resting next to the firing button.

The Shiloh reached the bottom of the trail and then paused, stretching their arms and legs and backs. They held a conversation with each other, pointing several times at several different places on the river bank as they spoke. Ordinarily the helmet audio enhancement could have been directed to focus on them and pick up what they were saying but the roar of the river made that an impossibility in this location. Even so, it seemed quite obvious what they were talking about. They were trying to decide what would be the best location to dump their cargo into the river.

“Whoever wept,” Mag said, impatience in her voice. “What the tork are we waiting for? Why don’t we just take them down now?”

“Because it’s still technically possible they’re innocent homers on an innocent mission,” said Cyst. “Our orders are to make sure they’re about to dump their cargo in the river before we move on them.”

This did not impress Mag. “Torkin’ whiteshirts and their torkin orders,” she grumbled.

They waited. Soon, the Shiloh came to a consensus and began to move again, heading across the rocky ground toward the river’s edge, their trajectory one that, if they continued upon it, would result in them passing within thirty meters of the waiting Team Billion.

“I guess we’ll see how effective the chameleon mode is, won’t we?” asked Cyst. There was not much concern in her voice. She had gone undetected by passing homers much closer than these ones.

The Shiloh continued on their path and passed directly in front of the team, their collective concentration more focused on keeping the wagon steady as it passed over the rocks than watching their surroundings. None of them so much as glanced in the direction of the marines. As they got within twenty meters of the river their going became worse because of the larger rocks so they stopped and held another conversation. Again, they reached a consensus. One of them undid the restraining straps on the barrel. Once they were free, two of them got on either side of it and picked it up. They continued on their path, leaving the wagon behind. It was obvious by watching the two carrying the barrel that it was quite heavy.

“All right,” Cyst said. “I’ve seen enough. It seems quite clear to me that they intend to dump whatever is in that barrel into the river. Let’s move in.”

“About torkin’ time,” Mag grunted.

“Weapons ready,” Cyst ordered. “Keep the spread so we can contain them against the river. And remember, do not let them get closer than five meters no matter what.”

The four marines stood and moved forward, weapons out before them, armor still in chameleon mode. They spread out to form a loose semi-circle that would leave no avenue of escape for their quarry. Gath stood and walked behind them, acting as rear guard and a final obstacle to be overcome if one of the homers did somehow manage to slip out of the net that was being cast.

The four Shiloh never saw them coming. They continued lugging the barrel over the rocks toward the river’s edge. The two who were not carrying the load stayed close to those who were, occasionally steadying one or the other with a hand on the shoulder or the back. They never looked around to check their rear or their flanks and soon the four marines had closed to within ten meters.

“All right,” Cyst ordered. “Let’s do this thing. Everyone go visible now.”

The four marines and Gath all switched back to normal armor mode within two seconds of each other. This got the Shiloh’s attention immediately as their peripheral vision picked up the unnerving sight of four armed and armored Overseers, or whatever they happened to call the star people among themselves, suddenly materializing out of thin air. The two on the flanks turned and stared, their eyes flitting back and forth, looking for an escape path. The two carrying the barrel dropped it to the ground and tensed up to run.

“Stay right the tork there, mothertorkers!” Cyst barked at them, her weapon leveled on the closest of them, her external transmission speaker amplifying her voice loud enough to boom over the sound of the river and echo off the canyon walls.

They hesitated for the briefest of seconds, long enough to pass a terrified look among themselves, and then they made a break for it, each of them running in a different direction.

“I don’t torkin’ think so!” said Mag as she opened up with her painer, sweeping it over the homebody in front of her. He screamed shrilly and began to twist and turn, trying to get away from the invisible fire that was crawling over his skin.

Blast fired next, sweeping the one who was trying to break for the left flank. He too screamed but he was smart enough to throw himself to the ground in surrender. Blast stopped paining him the instant he did so.

Cyst opened up on the homebody in front of her. He screamed as well but his response was a bit more organized. Instead of twisting and turning he tried running to the left to get away. This was to no avail as Cyst simply followed his motion and kept the painer trained on him. His screams grew louder and his sense of deliberate action seemed to quickly fade. In a panic, he turned directly toward Cyst, probably intending to attack the source of the pain to make it stop. He only made it three steps before Cyst switched her weapon to flash mode and hit him with a debilitating light burst that overwhelmed his brain. He dropped instantly to the ground, his arms and legs convulsing in seizure, his jaw biting at his lip as foam ran from his mouth.

Jizz’s homebody was the smart one. He ran only two or three steps and then saw the fate of the others. He stopped in his tracks and threw his hands in the air.

“Down!” Jizz barked at him. “Grab some torkin’ rock, mothertorker! Now!”

The homebody grabbed some torkin’ rock, throwing himself to the ground in a terrified heap.

Mag’s homebody, meanwhile, was still turning and twisting back and forth, screaming in a high-pitched voice that seemed to shout to his ancestors, but his feet remained on the ground so Mag kept the painer trained on him and active.

“You like that slag, torkhead?” she was yelling at him, glee in her voice. “How much can you take?”

“Put him down, Mag,” Cyst said.

“What the tork for?” Mag asked, continuing to pain him. “Let’s see how tough these torkers really are.”

Gath had seen enough. He switched his own weapon to flash mode and stepped forward, aiming directly at the screaming homebody’s face. A push of the firing button and it was over. He fell flopping to the ground, seizing next to his companion.

“Aww, Gath,” Mag said, a pout in her voice. “Why’d you have to do that slag? I wanted to see how long that slaghole could take it.”

“You might’ve killed him from adrenal overload if you’d kept it up,” Gath said. “How would that have made you feel?”

“Like queen of the torkin’ world,” she replied. “That torker would’ve killed me if he had a chance. You too.”

“Undoubtedly,” Gath agreed, “but we’re supposed to be the ones on the moral high ground here, remember?”

“Hey, tork you, groundie,” Mag spat at him. She grabbed the crotch of her suit contemptuously. “I got your moral high ground right torkin’ here. Did you forget these animals killed some marines a little while back?”

“Yeah, Mag,” he said. “I do seem to remember that, since I was torkin’ there and had to look at them.”

“Then why do you give a slag what happens to them?” she demanded.

“I don’t,” Gath said, “unless what happens is a marine torturing them for fun. That’s where I start to care.”

“I wasn’t torturing him,” Mag said, more than a little defensiveness in her tone.

“All right,” Cyst said. “Enough of this slag. Blast, get some restraints on these slagholes so Gath can check out the contents of that barrel and we can get the purg out of here.”

“Right, Cyst,” Blast said. He safed his weapon and then pulled a bag of low technology plastic zip ties from his combat bag. “I’ll do the conscious ones first. Keep me covered.”

“You got it,” Cyst said. She switched back to amplification mode. “Listen up, homers. You are going to have your hands restrained behind your back while we check out what’s in that barrel. Do not resist or you will be pained again. We will release you before we leave.”

Neither of the conscious Shiloh gave any indication that they understood her words, but they offered no resistance when Blast came up behind them and secured their hands behind their backs. Once the two conscious ones were secured he walked to the two that had been flopped and secured them as well.

“That should do it,” he said.

“Right,” Cyst said. “Gath, let’s go check out that barrel. Mag, Jizz, you’re on overwatch to the rear. Blast, you keep an eye on our friends.”

Gath stowed his weapon and approached the barrel carefully, stopping two meters away from it and looking it up and down. It seemed an ordinary barrel, somewhat worn by time but not leaking. Its lid was tightly affixed and without cracks, its base had a few chips and scuffs around the perimeter but was also intact. There were a few black-brown smudges just below the point where the lid was affixed, as if something had spilled there while it was being filled and had then been wiped away.

“The residual spectrometer is reading no traces of explosives,” said Cyst, who was holding a small scanning device. “At least none that are escaping from the interior.”

“That’s comforting,” said Gath. He reached into his side pocket and pulled out a mechanical folding knife. With a flick of the button a twelve-centimeter blade slid out. He walked forward, still stepping carefully, until he was next to the bucket. He leaned forward and grasped the top of it, pulling it upright. It was heavy and a liquid sloshing sound could be heard when it was shifted.

“What do you think?” Cyst asked.

“Definitely liquid contents,” he reported. “Filled almost completely to the top. I’m getting a smell through the air filtration of the helmet. It smells like fecal matter.”

“Like slag,” Cyst said. “That would go along with the cholera theory, wouldn’t it?”

“It would,” he agreed. “I’m going to open it up now.”

“Right.”

He slid the tip of the knife into the crease between the lid and the edge of the rim. With a small prying motion the lid came upward, separating. He slid the knife in further, widening the opening until the entire lid came free of the securing crease. He then slid his fingers under it and lifted it up. The smell washed over him the moment he did so, the powerful, thick stench of human feces mixed with a swamp gas kicker.

“That is torkin’ disgusting,” Cyst said as she caught the odor too. “Is it just a container full of infected slag?”

“No,” Gath said, staring down at the barrel’s contents. “I don’t think so. It’s liquid. I don’t see any solid matter in it at all.”

“Liquid slag?” she asked. “You mean like diarrhea?”

“Not exactly,” he said. The liquid he was looking at was brown-black, just like the smudges on the barrel, but it was uniformly liquid and uniformly the same color, with no particulate matter, no coagulation, no foam. “It almost looks like some kind of concentrate.”

“Concentrate?” she asked. “You mean like a torkin’ bouillon cube of diarrhea?”

“Something like that,” he said. “Let me analyze a sample.”

“Right,” she said. “And do it fast so we can get the purg away from that smell.”

He reached into his medic bag and removed a handheld chemical analyzer. This was a small machine with a handle and holographic stage on one end, a processing chamber in the middle, and a long, narrow straw on the other end. He turned it on, waited for it to go through a series of self-checks and calibrations, and then slipped the end of the straw into the liquid. He pushed a button and a small amount was drawn up into the machine.

ANALYZING, blinked the display on the holo stage.

“Checking it now,” Gath said.

ANALYZING changed to a lengthy alphanumeric display which listed the components of the solution in descending order of volume. Water, glucose, oxygen, and carbon dioxide were the first four things on the list. The fifth was biologically active Vibrio cholera bacteria. A little ways down the list, at number twelve, was a protein complex called cholera toxin.

“Whoever wept,” Gath whispered, mostly to himself but loudly enough that his words were picked up by Cyst and the other.

“What is it?” Cyst asked.

“It’s cholera all right,” he said.

“Just like we thought,” Cyst said. “They’re using biological warfare on the other homers.”

“And how,” Gath said. “The volume fraction of cholera bacteria in the sample ... it’s unbelievable.”

“What do you mean?” Cyst asked.

“It has a VF of more than eighty-two thousand mics per liter.”

“Okay...” she said slowly. “That’s a lot, then?”

“It’s more than ten times the concentration typically found in an active stool sample from an infected person,” he said. “And then there’s the glucose content. It’s almost a hundred thousand mics per liter. There is no reason for there to be that much glucose in this concoction unless someone deliberately added it to facilitate and support the growth of the cholera bacteria.”

“So, they’ve figured out how to feed the little germs?” Cyst asked.

“They have,” Gath said, “but it’s more complicated than that. There are twelve thousand mics per liter of cholera toxin in here as well.”

“Cholera toxin?” Cyst asked.

“That is what actually causes the symptoms of cholera, and it is only secreted by a small percentage of naturally occurring cholera bacteria. They have to have a specific type of genetic mutation in order to produce and secrete the toxin.”

“Okay,” Cyst said. “I think I’m following you here. What are you getting at?”

“The sheer amount of toxin in this container strongly implies that whoever produced this concoction was able to isolate the mutated bacteria that produce the toxin and grow them exclusively.”

“Whoa ... wait a minute here,” Taz cut in. “Are you suggesting that these ignorant torkers have some sort of biological warfare lab running over in that slaghole they call home?”

“I don’t think they have a lab in the sense that we would define it as one,” Gath replied, “but I am suggesting they have some basic knowledge of microbiology and have managed, somehow, to separate and isolate a strain of a specific bacteria and encourage its growth by using some sort of glucose source.”

“No torkin’ way,” proclaimed Cyst. “These torksticks don’t even know how to wipe their backsides after they take a slag. You expect me to believe they engineered a biological weapon?”

“Somebody sure as purg did,” said Gath. “The proof is right here in this sample. It’s almost exclusively the toxin producing strain of Vibrio cholera, it’s been provided with a proper growth medium, and it has been concentrated down to more than four times the potency found in its most potent form in nature. I wouldn’t believe it myself if I wasn’t seeing it with my own two eyes, but I am and there is no other conclusion to make.”