Death Wave Read Free

as it surged between the rock walls of the gorge it had carved.
    What’s he after? Halleck asked herself again. He’s scheduled to report to the Council here tomorrow, and he’s off daydreaming in some miserable scrubland. He certainly doesn’t appear to be troubled by this message of death he claims to be bringing back from Sirius.
    And the woman, this alien from Sirius. She definitely looks human. He claims she’s as human as any one of us. But how can that be true? She’s from another world, circling a different star. He’s fallen in love with her, and love can make the most intelligent man behave like a fool.
    Like Jordan Kell, Anita Halleck had been born more than two centuries earlier. Unlike Kell, she had spent all her years awake and active—except for the few months she had been dead.
    Killed in the crash of a rocket hopper craft on the Moon, Halleck had been saved and restored to life by the medical miracle of nanotherapy. Her body was filled with virus-sized nanomachines that repaired her mangled organs, knitted her broken bones, and guarded her against infections like an almost-intelligent immune system.
    Nanotechnology was totally banned on Earth. While lunar communities such as Selene depended on nanotechnology for their very survival on the airless Moon, the people of Earth—some twenty billion of them—feared the possibility of nanomachines gone wild, devouring everything in their path like an unstoppable wave of mindless destruction.
    Truth to tell, there were plenty of criminals and fanatics and out-and-out lunatics among those twenty billion who would unleash a nanomachine plague for profit or passion or merely the insane notoriety of slaughtering millions. When Anita Halleck recovered from her temporary death, she learned that the nanotech ban meant she could never return to the world of her birth.
    It was Douglas Stavenger, the founder and mastermind of the lunar nation Selene, who convinced Halleck to use her brains and drive in politics. Earth had been hit by a second wave of greenhouse warming, the Greenland and Antarctic ice caps were melting down, coastal cities all across the globe were being flooded, millions of refugees sought shelter, food, hope.
    Bright and determined (some said to the point of ruthlessness), Halleck became a force in Earth’s tempestuous politics. From Selene, on the Moon, she fought her way to the top of the world government.
    And on the day she was installed as chairperson of the governing council, she pushed through a special exemption to the anti-nanotech laws. Anita Halleck would be allowed to live and work on Earth. No one dared gainsay her return to the world of her birth.
    Tall and youthful despite her years, thanks to the nanomachines teeming inside her, Halleck was as slim-waisted and smooth-skinned as a thirty-year-old. She presided over Earth’s painful recovery from the greenhouse flooding. As Greenland and Antarctica melted away, as climate patterns across the world changed drastically and sea levels rose catastrophically, Anita Halleck harnessed Earth’s resources and technologies to feed, house, educate, and build new lives for the hundreds of millions driven from their homes by the relentless floods.
    One of her achievements was a global engineering program to save as many cities as possible from the rising sea level. Dams and weir systems rose like medieval fortifications to protect major cities, the world capital of Barcelona among them.
    Earth’s geography changed, but the people of Earth—helped by their own skills and resources, plus the generous aid from human communities spread halfway across the solar system—managed to stabilize their civilization and survive the worst crisis in human history.
    Then came the realization that Greenland’s melting ice cap was pouring torrents of cold fresh water into the North Atlantic Ocean, threatening to cut off the Gulf Stream that warmed Western