World War Z

For all our enhanced optics, nothing had quite the same impact as the naked eye. To just look through the view port down on our fragile little biosphere. To see the massive ecological devastation makes one understand how the modern environmental movement began with the American space program. There were so many fires, and I don’t just mean the buildings, or the forests, or even the oil rigs blazing out of control-bleeding Saudis actually went ahead and did it-I mean the campfires as well, what had to be at least a billion of them, tiny orange specks covering the Earth where electric lights had once been. Every day, every night, it seemed like the whole planet was burning. We couldn’t even begin to calculate the ash count but we estimated it was equivalent to a low-grade nuclear exchange between the United States and former Soviet Union, and that’s not including the actual nuclear exchange between Iran and Pakistan. We watched and recorded those as well, the flashes and fires that gave me eye spots for days. Nuclear autumn was already begi

It was like looking down on an alien planet, or on Earth during the last great mass extinction. Eventually conventional optics became useless in the shroud, leaving us with only thermal or radar sensors. Earth’s natural face vanished behind a caricature of primary colors. It was through one of these systems, the Aster sensor aboard the Terra Satellite, that we saw the Three Gorges Dam collapse.

Roughly ten trillion gallons of water, carrying debris, silt, rocks, trees, cars, houses, and house-sized pieces of the dam itself! It was alive, a brown and white dragon racing to the East China Sea. When I think of the people in its path… trapped in barricaded buildings, unable to escape the tidal wave because of the Zed Heads right outside their doors. No one knows how many people died that night. Even today, they’re still finding bodies.

[One of his skeletal hands balls into a fist, the other presses the “self-medicate” button.]

When I think about how the Chinese leadership tried to explain it all away… Have you ever read a transcript of the Chinese president’s speech? We actually watched the broadcast from a pirated signal off their Sinosat II. He called it an “unforeseen tragedy.” Really? Unforeseen? Was it unforeseen that the dam had been built on an active fault line? Was it unforeseen that the increased weight of a giant reservoir had induced earthquakes in the past and that cracks had already been detected in the foundation months before the dam was completed?

He called it an “unavoidable accident.” Bastard. They had enough troops to wage open warfare in almost every major city, but they couldn’t spare a couple of traffic cops to protect against a catastrophe waiting to happen? No one could imagine the repercussions of abandoning both the seismic warning stations and the emergency spillway controls? And then to try to change their story halfway through, to say that they’d actually done everything they could to protect the dam, that, at the time of the disaster, valiant troops of the PLA had given their lives to defend it. Well, I’d been personally observing Three Gorges for over a year leading up to the disaster and the only PLA soldiers I ever saw had given their lives a long, long time ago. Did they really expect their own people to buy such a blatant lie? Did they really expect anything less than all-out rebellion?

Two weeks after the start of the revolution, we received our first and only signal from the Chinese space station, Yang Liwei. It was the only other ma

We’d been trying to contact them for months. We weren’t even sure if there was a crew. All we got was a recorded message in perfect Hong Kong English to keep our distance lest we invite a response of “deadly force.” What an insane waste! We could have worked together, traded supplies, technical expertise. Who knows what we could have accomplished if we had only chucked the politics and come together as human bloody beings.

We’d convinced ourselves that the station had never been inhabited at all, that their deadly force warning was just a ruse. We couldn’t have been more surprised when the signal came over our ham radio. It was a live human voice, tired, frightened, and cutting out after only a few seconds. It was all I needed to board the Verne and head over to the Yang.

As soon as it came over the horizon I could tell that its orbit had shifted radically. As I closed the distance, I could see why. Their escape pod had blown its hatch, and because it was still docked to the primary airlock, the entire station had depressurized in seconds. As a precaution, I requested docking clearance. I got nothing. As I came aboard, I could see that even though the station was clearly large enough for a crew of seven or eight, it only had the bunk space and personal kits for two. I found the Yang packed with emergency supplies, enough food, water, and Q2 candles for at least five years. What I couldn’t figure out at first was why. There was no scientific equipment aboard, no intelligence-gathering assets. It was almost like the Chinese government had sent these two men into space for no other purpose than to exist. Fifteen minutes into my floatabout, I found the first of several scuttling charges. This space station was little more than a giant Orbital Denial Vehicle. If those charges were to detonate, the debris from a four-hundred-metric-ton space station would not only be enough to damage or destroy any other orbiting platform, but any future space launch would be grounded for years. It was a “Scorched Space” policy, “if we can’t have it, neither can anyone else.”

All the station’s systems were still operational. There had been no fire, no structural damage, no reason I could see to cause the accident of the escape pod’s hatch. I found the body of a lone taikonaut with his hand still clinging to the hatch release. He was wearing one of their pressurized escape suits, but the faceplate had been shattered by a bullet. I’m guessing the shooter was blown out into space. I’d like to believe that the Chinese revolution wasn’t just restricted to Earth, that the man who’d blown the hatch was also the one who had attempted to signal us. His mate must have stuck by the old guard. Maybe Mister Loyalist had been ordered to set off the scuttling charges. Zhai-that was the name on his personal effects-Zhai had tried to blast his mate into space and had caught a round in the process. Makes for a good tale, I think. That’s how I’m going to remember it.

Is that how you were able to extend your endurance? By using the supplies aboard the Yang?

[He gives me a thumbs-up.] We ca

Before we finally abandoned her, we laid our friend Zhai to rest. We strapped his body into its bunk, brought his personal kit back to the ISS, and said a few words in his honor as the Yang burned up in the Earth’s atmosphere. For all we knew he might have been the loyalist, not the rebel, but either way, his actions allowed us to stay alive. Three more years we remained in orbit, three more years that wouldn’t have been possible without the Chinese consumables.

I still think it’s one of the war’s great ironies that our replacement crew-ended up arriving in a privately owned civilian vehicle. Spacecraft Three, the ship originally designed for prewar orbital tourism. The pilot, with his cowboy hat and big, confident Yankee grin. [He tries his best Texas accent.] “Anyone order takeout?” [He laughs, then winces and self-medicates again.]