Orbital Decay by Malcolm Cross

Author:Malcolm Cross
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Science Fiction
Publisher: Rebellion Publishing Ltd

“THIS IS BE-SIXTY-SIX-KL. Is IG-Twelve-TK out there and listening? Over.” Alvin clung to the amateur radio set like an anchor. It had been two days. Two awful, awful days.

Charlie had been right about the pandemic’s mortality rate. The first night after the assault the tally had gone up to an estimated hundred and sixty thousand. The second night it edged up to the nice round number of four hundred thousand. Tomorrow it would be eight hundred thousand, the day afterward, one million six hundred thousand. And every day after that... Alvin didn’t want to think about.

Kennedy had re-established contact. Given them the Ku band satellites and given them time to call their families, read the news, read and respond to e-mail, stare at the photographs of bodies piled like cordwood outside a hospital crematorium in London, a man in yellow hazmat gear torching the bodies with a flamethrower, because the crematorium would be just too damn slow. And, of course, read about the rioting as what was left of the True Patriots rampaged through suburban Houston, burning down power and phone lines.

Marla’s cellphone had stopped ringing the day before—just out of charge, Alvin prayed—but it left her out of contact, and the quarantines had been extended to their part of Houston.

“This is BE-Sixty-Six-KL. Is IG-Twelve-TK out there and listening? Over.” Alvin stared at the set, and dared hope. He didn’t use the station’s amateur radio call sign, NA-One-SS. Even on a night like tonight, with the streets burning in a dozen cities across the United States, as people who thought the True Patriots had the right idea screamed and rose up against the government, Space Station’s call letters drove the ham radio operators down there into a frenzy trying to make contact.

At last, the signal buzzing, Alvin heard an unfamiliar voice call back to him. “BE-Sixty-Six-KL, this is MT-Seven-One-LW. I have a message to relay for you from IG-Twelve-TK. Do you read? Over.”

Alvin’s core went frozen, his heart not quite stopped as he bit down on the side of his tongue, fighting the nervous crackling ache of tin-foil at the back of his throat. “I read. Go ahead, over.”

No thirty second pause, just the brief delay of someone reading a note out loud. “IG-Twelve-TK relays to BE-Sixty-Six-KL: Neighbourhood has no power, Lenny sick but will keep trying to transmit. Marla yelled message over fence, she is not sick yet, loves Alvin very much. End of message. Over.”

Tears brimmed over the corners of Alvin’s eyes and built up, thicker and thicker until they wobbled like jello over his eyelids when he blinked, left him just about blinded and unable to do more than pull up his shirt and wipe them dry, only for the tears to build all over again.

He sobbed, spluttered. Shook his head.

Leonard was a saint. An ex-astronaut in a suburban neighbourhood full of them, a good neighbour, an amateur radio buff, and a saint.

There wasn’t time to cry, though. He had no idea who or where MT-Seven-One-LW was,

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