Day 146 - Babel - Chapter 42 (1723 words)

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BABEL

By Wayne Webb

CHAPTER 42

Nick was staring at the General, though it was a thoroughly assumed title and he had no training or right to call himself that, he took it on himself anyway. They came for him in the woods, he still had little idea on how they found him, but they did regardless. The Lab work was next to useless and he told them that there was no cure, no easy one but it did not seem to matter to them at all. They were fixated on the Alien invasion in the Southern Hemisphere.

Nick Bianni felt control and sanity slipping away and he was not alone in his madness. He toyed with confessing all but he was not even sure that he would be believed any longer. They had come for him in a misguided attempt to cure a disease that was already gone, what they needed was a re-writing of the neural pathways that controlled language, they had been scrambled and rendered useless. In order to 'cure' the effects of the Babel they would need to rewire the brain to program it to read a language again fresh, which was nigh impossible with little or no one else speaking.

This was why it was going to be an effective weapon, one that would wage a near bloodless war on the enemy. Bianni and the company he worked for had such high hopes, they had kept the experimentation as minimal as possible, made sure that the disease was self contained, would die on it's own as fast as possible and keep the containment factor down as much as possible. The carrier phase, the cold was being worked on when the sample came back to him in his lab so long ago now. That had been the cold day when his world turned upside down and it all went downhill after that.

This was never the plan, it was never supposed to be released in the way that it did, it changed the course of human history and he still did not know why. The Babel did exactly what it had been designed to do, it was not called the Babel then, it was still ASHA-3F but that was a matter of semantics for the one in a thousand people who were immune or the lucky few who were isolated during the carrier phase.

This nuclear attack option was madness and there was no way he could think of to stop the attack from going ahead. He could confess that the Babel was in fact man-made, but then there was still an Alien ship doing something to control the Babel infected people down there, and it looked to the maniacal man, the self appointed general and commander in chief of the new America, as there were no states to unite any longer, that it was spreading to Australia from the satellite imagery they were getting. They had tracked a flight, the first one they had seen in a very long time, and it flew from the infected landing point of the invasion, all the way to the most populated centre of Australia.

To Nick the movement of the Babel was organised and communicative and he wanted to badly know how they were doing it. The language centre of the brain was gone, useless and defunct so what were these 'invaders' doing? How were they getting around it? Were they curing the symptoms, rewriting the human brain? Who was to say that the General was not right and these aliens were bad news for humanity?

Though, would they be any worse than Nick had been already in creating and letting the Babel loose unfinished? Technically of course the Babel was doing it's job, there was no more war and there was no organised opposition to Western Democracy any longer. The problem was there was not a democracy to oppose any longer. The more he thought about it the Alien 'solution' if that's what it was, was the purest form of democracy there was, it certainly seemed like everyone was acting together, seamlessly from the top down and silent view of the world that they had.

Maybe that was how they found him? A satellite reconnaissance and some facial recognition software processing what they found. There were no other agency requests, no terrorists and criminals to find anymore. The work of the new America went to the head of the queue, they were the queue really and could re-purpose any and all computational power to their needs. He watched them bend maps, weather patterns, sea currents and projected firing solutions to their plan while he weakly protested that there was no cure and no proof that the Aliens were doing anything bad.

It was like he was a witness to Dr Strangelove coming true in front of his eyes. He became more and more distanced from the farcical parody of life that he was now living. When he spoke he felt like a ghost, unseen and intangible they just carried on with their jobs. He could have taken a gun and tried to force them to listen, but he could not realistically accept the implied suicidal nature of the act itself. He just watched and waited for the play to finish and for the scene to act itself out.

The submarine and it's crew were finally in position and while they had maintained radio silence as per orders until they were within point blank range of the target, they made contact as they were ready to pull the trigger and commence the launch sequence for every missile, every warhead that they had on board.

Nick put his head in his hands as they clapped each other on the back, whooped and hollered a victory before the order had even been given. The General was calm, determined and had a steely smile stamped on his jaw as he pointed to the sky and barked the order to fire down the line to the submarine crew.

“The order is go, gentlemen. It's been an honour and a privilege to stand with you on the precipice of history. Ready the firing solution.” Captain Frank stood back as the two specialists who had said nothing the whole journey up until now took out their keys and locked them into place, still saying nothing.

Frank's skeleton crew made signs and prayed for their souls, or the souls of those who would be joining them soon as the two men did what they needed to do in order to ready the missiles for firing. This close in they would undoubtedly be caught in the backwash, they had to come close to surface to fire and at this distance they would catch hell from the explosions, they would be immediately below “ground zero” which was the under carriage of the saucer itself as they launched every missile they had, each with eight warheads, at the giant ship. The resulting cataclysm would be the largest nuclear event in the history of humankind, it would make the detonations at Nagasaki and Hiroshima look like child’s play, it would take out then entire city behind them, and render the upper half of the country as unliveable for many years to come.

They readied the missiles and with a final look to the Captain who merely nodded to them and then to his crew they turned the keys. The whole boat shook with the launches, one after the other seemingly forever as they deployed and left the boat lying a little less heavy in the water, surfacing just a little more as they arced away from the boat and up towards their destination.

Frank took a drink of his scotch, downing it in one big gulp and drinking more from the bottle while he still had time. The burning sensation watered his eyes as he took another swig and rested his head back on the head of the captains chair and waited for the explosions, they would not see the flash but they would hear the crumple and then feel the shock-wave in the seconds before it ripped the world apart like shredded paper.

Frank took a third swig, this time a little less as the burning had subsided and he wanted to face the apocalypse with his eyes open. They were a few hundred meters inside the perimeter of the Saucer's shadow in a shallow bay where the Ferry's came to dock when bringing tourists in the days before the Babel. The Saucer was a few hundred meters in the air above the crest of Mt Rangitoto, but all in all it was not a long distance for a rocket propelling missile to carry itself.

Frank took a fourth drink and looked at the men who were confused and spoke for the first time that the captain had seen. “Did we set that right? We set that right, right? I know I set it right. I mean it won't launch unless it's set right? Right?”

“Maybe be underestimated these … things?”

Nick waited for the cheering to die pathetically and to allow the awkward silence fill the room before he looked up again. “What is going on?” Again he was ignored, like he was invisible and inaudible.

The men in the room checked various readouts and computers, each looking for varying satellite views of the ship, but they all showed the same thing, an intact and unmarked Alien Ship, from above. As the submarine was directly under the Saucer they could not see the boat, the missiles or what happened to them.

Finally someone got back on the line to the submarine and asked them what was happening only to be fired back the same question to them. No one had been watching out of the periscope or on any of the external cameras because they expected the blinding flash followed by a quick and painless death at the centre point of a nuclear fireball. However the cameras were running and recorded it all. They replayed the launch and watched it the command centre all that same time.

It was not unthinkable that they would have had some kind of defence, but they truly thought they had the drop on the invaders and that they would have the advantage of surprise.

Instead they were surprised.