Free In The Falling Light by John L. Campbell Page B

joining the call?”
    “Not this time.” Joanna took her seat at the
head of the conference table. She and Peck were the only ones in
the room.
    “Don’t you think he should be?”
    “If they wanted him on the call, they would
have asked for him. Besides, I have all his data.”
    “Still, Joanna…”
    She looked at him. “That’s enough,
Major.”
    Spencer Peck held his commander’s gaze a
moment longer than was polite, then shuffled through his own files.
He was a West Point graduate the same as her, they had both been to
the War College, but of the two of them, he was the only one with
combat experience. A tour in Afghanistan followed by another in
Iraq should have put those silver oak clusters on his shoulder
boards, not hers.
    The wall screen flickered and the message
STAND BY came on. Joanna was reminded of the words RECORDED EARLIER
and felt a chill. She wished she had taken the time to get some
Advil before the call. She had a headache that wouldn’t quit.
    A moment later the screen changed to a
conference room similar to Joanna’s, though containing more people
and a lot more brass. Colonel Ferry, her immediate boss was there,
and he quickly made introductions at the Pentagon end. It was an
assortment of senior Navy and Army officers, several civilians and
a handful of scientific types. General Laurents thanked Ferry
brusquely and took over, pre-empting any further pleasantries.
    “Lt. Colonel Bishop, we are three days into
the outbreak, and I want to be perfectly clear on what you role is
at this point. Your mission is now simply to keep the facility, and
specifically the lab, on lockdown until Dr. DeVries can reverse
this. Are we clear?”
    “Yes, general.”
    “And where is Dr. DeVries? I expected he
would be at this meeting.”
    Joanna caught Peck’s smug look out of the
corner of her eye. “Dr. DeVries was not requested, and I made the
call that his time would be better spent in the lab working.”
    There was come conversation at the Pentagon
table that she couldn’t catch.
    “And you’re absolutely certain the lab has
not been compromised?”
    Joanna nodded. “One-hundred-percent,
general. The lab is secure.” She told the lie with a straight
face.
    “I want DeVries on the next call, Bishop. Be
sure he’s linked in.”
    “Yes sir.”
    And for the next two hours that was the last
input Joanna had, the fact that she was not giving the briefing
putting a fine point on any question about her career. Men and
women at the Washington end took turns providing their own updates.
L-2207 had gone aerosol, escaping through an unsecured ventilation
duct (Joanna’s responsibility, a fact reinforced by the way Colonel
Ferry looked down at the table and how General Laurents shot a
quick but hard glance towards the camera), making its first stop at
the VA hospital adjacent to the Groton facility. The bug (and
wasn’t that an ironic term for it?) had unanticipated side effects
which quickly had their way with the 3,700 patients and staff. It
wasn’t a simple transmission of fatal disease, as L-2207 promised,
but a different class of infection. Within twenty-four hours the
growth acceleration nature of the formula caused a complete,
physiological change within its victims.
    Those car-sized ticks scrambling over the
expressway had once been human.
    Infected females quickly mated and began
laying eggs at thirty-six hours, around three thousand eggs each,
and at forty-eight hours they were hatching. Newly hatched larva
females reached maturity twelve hours later, mated and quickly
produced their own eggs. It didn’t take a mathematician to see how
rapidly the crisis was exploding. All that was needed for the ticks
to continue populating was a single blood meal, and the population
of Southern Connecticut was providing plenty of those.
    An Army Colonel read off civilian casualty
figures to date.
    Another detailed the units mobilized to
combat the infestation.
    A Navy officer gave a detailed account of
what