The plane landed soon after. The doctors who remained on Eris, eight in all, cheered as it touched down and deftly dodged the pockmarks on the runway. The plane was smaller than Dr. Manakas had expected, painted with splotches of camo, barely bigger than the drones that investigated it curiously before darting away.
They greeted the dashing pilot as a hero, even more so when they learned that he’d brought food: a cooler of steaks, two dozen eggs, potato chips, and real Coke. They’d been living on leftover Army rations and instant coffee for a month. They cooked on the charcoal grill that had been languishing for months for lack of real meat.
“We were expecting you before sunrise,” said Manakas as they ate steak and eggs for breakfast at the picnic table outside the research building. He was careful to say it away from the group, not wanting to convey his concern.
“Bad storm fifty miles east of here,” said the pilot. “Delayed me about an hour while I went around it.”
“See anything out there?”
“Nope,” he said, looking past him to the ocean. “Not a thing.”
But Manakas could hear the note of resignation in his voice.
They were scheduled to leave the island at sunset; they had all day to prepare. But they had long since staged the small amount of personal gear they were allowed to take, stuffed into seabags and dusty suitcases. The results of their research were packed more carefully, in five tightly sealed watertight plastic containers. They were transparent, and you could see the rainbow of hanging files within some, hard drives and carefully swaddled vials and beakers in others. The five plastic containers made a small tower inside the plane, a monument to years of effort. The plane was loaded quickly, so they just sat and waited for sunset, and watched the drones.
The medical team had learned every habit and sound of the drones, as they were the only type of life that could thrive on Eris Island. They knew the buzzing sound of an engine revving up prior to takeoff; they knew the difference in the engine note of an unarmed bird returning to the island and the more baritone sound of a drone fully weighed down by a bomb. They knew the sound of the dance they made in the sky, the herky-jerky noise they made as they moved rapidly back and forth. And they knew the cool, liquid clicking of a drone that was picking up a bomb. The pilot was fascinated as he watched, and asked for explanations from the researchers of drone behavior that they had long since become bored with.
Dr. Manakas, the head of the detachment, was leaving behind a cache of personal effects in his small office; they’d told them that weight would be limited on the small plane. He had packed a few photographs, the ones of his wife and children that had sustained him. He had a shelf full of novels that he loved but would leave behind. A closet full of lab equipment that had served him so well would also be abandoned. He would even miss the view, he thought as he looked through the window behind his desk. It was starkly beautiful, in a way — rocks, water, and sky — and looking in that direction, the view wasn’t too polluted by drones or their bombs. He hadn’t taken enough time to enjoy that view, he realized. Had been too busy trying to find the cure. But they had done that much, at least.
“Are you ready?” It was his protégée, Dr. Sandra Liston, from Columbia, a brilliant doctor ten years younger than him, who did more for the cure than any of them. She was beautiful, with jet-black hair that had grown long during her two years on the island, and legs that were toned from the hikes she took up the island’s leeward hills every day before breakfast. In one of his books along the wall, Graham Greene had written about the “love-charm” of bombs during the blitz in London during World War II. As the noose tightened around Eris Island, Manakas knew exactly what Greene had meant.
Inevitably, after a year on the island, he and Liston had begun sleeping together, a poorly kept secret in their tiny community and a failing that seemed to be largely forgiven by their peers despite their families at home. Somewhat more recently, he had fallen in love with her, and that, he knew, was a better kept secret and far less forgivable. He had told Sandra one night, as they lay on the bed in his tiny room, moonlight washing over them, the sound of surf coming through his open window. She hadn’t been able to say it back to him. They both knew that one way or another, the beginning of their escape marked the end of their affair.
“I’m almost ready,” he said to her. “Go ahead. I’ll be right out.” She nodded and left him to say goodbye to his small office.
He sighed and waited until he saw everyone board the plane — he had to make sure he was the last one to leave. What he was about to do might well be construed as treason, and he didn’t want to implicate anyone else, although he was at peace with it. He pulled out a thick manila envelope from his desk, one that was filled with a sheaf of papers that summarized their work and a flash drive that contained all the key findings and DNA sequencing. It wasn’t everything, but it was enough, a summary of the trickiest parts, and should be enough for a skilled team of doctors to replicate their results. He just could not, as a doctor and a man of science, see their entire body of work leave Eris Island on a small plane in the middle of a war zone. If what he left behind fell into enemy hands, then so be it. At least it might still cure somebody. He looked at the envelope and tried to think of a way to label it, so that anyone coming into the office would know it was worth salvaging. Finally he pulled out a red marker and wrote across it in large letters: THE CURE.
He left it centered neatly on the middle of his otherwise empty desk.
Commander Carlson called the submarine to battle stations an hour before sunset, ordering the officer of the deck to stay on the scope continuously. They weren’t within sight of the island, but they were close enough to be wary of drones. If their scope was spotted, and attracted a swarm, that might be enough to alert a clever transport pilot. Carlson had positioned them right along the flight path on which the transport plane had come in, and there they sat, going in a slow clockwise circle, waiting for the sun to set. She’d checked; it would be nearly a full moon for them that night, a lucky break. And a curious decision by the Alliance, to fly any kind of important mission with visibility so good. They must be in a hurry, she thought. Or confident that no enemy subs would venture this close to Eris Island. The control room was blood red, all the regular lights turned off to aid the officer of the deck on the nighttime scope.
She saw something, a glint of the dying sunlight on a wing. She blinked, and flipped the scope to high power to confirm.
“Contact,” she said, pressing a button on the scope to mark the direction.
“It’s on the bearing to the island,” said Banach, excitement in his voice.
“Raise the missile mast,” she said, and heard the switch thrown behind her.
She turned the scope and watched the mast rise up: a black, thick tube with concave oblong hatches on either end of it. It looked something like a nineteenth-century cannon, but was really just a watertight container for the three surface-to-air missiles inside. It looked wildly out of place, as if it had been bolted onto the submarine. Which, indeed, it had. Historically, submarines had always been vulnerable to attacks from the air, especially from helicopters, which turned the predator into prey. Choppers could dip sonar into the water, blanket the sea with sonobuoys, kill submarines with airdropped torpedoes and depth charges. A fast submarine went 30 knots; a slow helicopter could travel at 150 knots. Helicopters were the only natural enemy a submarine had.