by Jeff Carlson
“Out where?” another man asked.
“You heard the lady,” Walls said. “We’ll go for the north tunnel.”
“Jesus Christ,” the same man said, but the group was already in motion.
This is crazy, Deborah thought, even as she whirled to reevaluate the nanotech gear. The AFM was more versatile, but Emma seemed to have adhered a sample of the mind plague to the test surface of the MRFM.
“We need both of these,” Deborah said to Bornmann.
“You got it.” He gestured for his men and said, “Sweeney, Pritchard, load ‘em up. I’m on point with Lang. General Walls, I need you and everyone else to carry more air tanks, sir.”
“Right.” Walls accepted the order without protest.
The tanks on their suits were only good for another forty minutes. Deborah didn’t want to be a problem, but she wondered how they could have any chance at all if the mountain was covered in enemy troops and nanotech. What if this was another mistake?
Then the power failed and left them in blackness.
Deborah was competitive. She had a hard time understanding anyone’s failure, especially her own — and she’d changed her mind about General Caruso. The truth was that he’d misjudged the situation in delaying his launch against the Chinese. He was reluctant to hit U.S. soil. That much was forgivable. They all hoped California would become American territory again someday, and San Diego and Los Angeles were vital cities on the coast.
Before her small group left the command center, Caruso had reversed his diplomatic efforts. He tried to negotiate their surrender. He was willing to lose if he could extract a few conditions from the Chinese before standing down, and it took an awful kind of bravery to broker a cease-fire. It was the same sort of courage Ruth must have summoned to end the previous war. Caruso would always be remembered as the man who capitulated. He’d even fought to take that role, wresting power away from the secretary of defense because he thought he could better manage the job.
He should have known better.
The problem was that every word needed to pass through his translators to the Chinese and back again, sometimes twice or even three times to be certain. Their failing communication links only intensified these delays as Caruso switched from satellite phones to radio bands and the very few hard lines between the Rockies and southern California.
The enemy had strung him along expertly. The Chinese were masters at stonewalling. They kept promising top-level contacts even as they claimed that each of these officials were already engaged with other members of the U.S. military. Each time, Caruso’s teams scrambled to reach those Americans themselves. Too often, they verified that these people were cut off or infected or dead. Confronting the Chinese with this information only led to more contradictions and excuses, all of which needed to be translated as well.
The Chinese had only meant to slow him until their missiles fell from the sky. Caruso would have been better off with a limited strike on his own ground, much like India had done in the Himalayas. If he’d destroyed southern California, mainland China might have backed off, either suspending their operations in North America or shutting off the mind plague altogether — but the enemy must have seen his hesitation as cowardice.
Deborah had been doubly wrong about him, which made her feel like her loyalty was misplaced.
“Hold it!” Bornmann yelled on the radio.
Pritchard stopped the group. His black suit was the first Deborah could see in the gloom. They had only two flashlights and a battery-powered lamp. Most of them were only shadows, except for Rezac and Medrano, whose yellow bodies were brighter in the dark.
Thirty yards in front of Pritchard, a single beam rocked in another room. Bornmann and Lang had run ahead of them, leaving Pritchard to pace the group. He brought up his M4 as Deborah heard a short, furious scuffle ahead of them. Then it was done.
“Clear,” Bornmann said.
“Okay, move,” Pritchard said. He carried the AFM in a sling on his side — his air tanks prevented him from carrying the microscope on his back — keeping his M4 and flashlight at the ready. Did he think Bornmann and Lang would miss an infected person in the dark?
Deborah glanced through the doors and offices on either side. Far away, the complex crackled with gunfire. More than once, they’d heard another small boom, and there was a dim, irritating whine that rose and fell at the edges of Deborah’s hearing depending on the walls and open spaces around her. The Chinese were drilling through blast doors or straight down from the surface. Even a slight hole into the command center would infect it with the plague.
From the fighting, they were sure the main entrance and the south gate had been overrun. If the north tunnel was blocked, too, this would be the shortest escape attempt of all time. Deborah tried not to think about it. She had enough problems jogging in her suit with her arms wrapped around an extra air tank. It weighed twenty pounds. She was embarrassed she couldn’t carry more, but the suit alone was like swimming in glue with forty pounds on her back. She just didn’t have the upper body strength.
They entered the next room, which had been personnel quarters. It was neat and square with tall bunk beds, low foot-lockers, and two bodies in a heap. They had been bludgeoned by Bornmann and Lang. Both men carried rifles, but gunshots would be another kind of risk.
“Oh, God,” Emma mumbled. She looked away. Deborah did not. She thought the two soldiers — their own soldiers — were deserving of her horror. She stopped without intending to. Walls bumped against her and she fell onto one knee, grasping at the aluminum cylinder in her arms. They’ll hear you! she thought. The tank would hit the concrete like a gong, increasing the likelihood of drawing every infected person in this wing.
Walls caught Deborah’s sleeve clumsily. He wore a backpack sideways over his air tanks, humping two laptops and a sat phone in addition to two spare tanks in another sling.
“I’m okay,” she said.
“We’re almost there.”
He said it like they were going to stop and rest, and Deborah nodded at the lie. “Yes, sir.”
Behind him came Rezac. All of them rustled and clanked.
Rezac carried their Harris radio, one spare tank, and an M16. Medrano held two more tanks and their lamp, a white star near his hip, where the light puddled on the floor among the fat, sagging tubes of their legs. Sweeney brought up the rear with an M4, bent nearly in half beneath the MRFM.
As they trotted through the empty rows of beds, Deborah thought again how lucky she was just to be alive. It also occurred to her that General Caruso must have known the risk he’d taken in holding onto his missiles. Maybe he’d been right after all? The composition of this small unit was proof of his intent to fight in any way possible without resorting to a planetwide nuclear holocaust. Caruso hadn’t only put them in suits to access the nanotech gear. With the few people he’d chosen, Caruso had created a backup command group. That was the only explanation for assigning General Walls to a squad of eight people.
Walls was meant to assume Caruso’s role as the supreme U.S. commander if Complex 1 was breached. Rezac was his signals intelligence specialist. Medrano, an engineer, served as the team’s mechanic, and Bornmann and the other commandos were their might. Staff Sergeant Lang doubled as their linguist. Like the other translators she’d seen, Lang was Chinese American and all the more valuable for his heritage and verbal skills. Deborah wouldn’t be surprised if others in the group knew some Mandarin, Cantonese, or Russian themselves. This was a top-level unit, which left only Deborah and Emma as their pathetic science assets… And yet what could Caruso honestly hope for them to accomplish? If they escaped and regrouped with other survivors, what use were a few hit-and-run attacks against the Chinese? Even that seemed unlikely. Their air wouldn’t last two hours.
“We’re there! We’re there!” Pritchard shouted, grabbing Emma’s shoulder to help her. They’d reached a blast door. Beyond it was a narrow vertical shaft with a spiral metal staircase. Their boot steps thr
ummed on the steel.
Stupidly, Deborah looked up. There was no end in sight. The height of it nearly defeated her. She lowered her head, but the climb was endless. Her muscles ached. Then her thighs turned rubbery. Then there was a heavy clung above her and suddenly the shaft was in twilight.
Deborah looked up again. Bornmann had thrown open a hatch at the top. Deborah saw a square of light, but it looked like it was another full story above her.
Keep going, she thought. Keep going.
Finally, she threw herself through the hatch into the unexpected silence of an Airstream camper. All of their doors to the underground were covered by RVs, huts, and trailers. Other top priority areas were strung with camouflage netting to prevent surveillance by spy planes and satellites. This shaft was no exception. The gutted shell of the Airstream sat above the stairwell. The netting outside was ripped and burned, hanging in brown mats across the shattered windows on one side. The sky was black. It reverberated with the long lines of sound from two jets and somewhere Deborah heard other, deeper engines, but she was shocked by the quiet that otherwise surrounded her.
Bornmann and Lang stood against the wall with their M4s. Bornmann gestured for everyone to get down as they emerged from the stairwell, but Walls joined the two commandos and Deborah continued to peek outside.
She saw fires and dust and the eerie shapes, everywhere, of people staggering through the haze. No one ran for cover. They walked upright. There should have been screaming. One man limped badly. Another’s face was blackened by fire and blood except for the jutting white gleam of his cheekbone. He didn’t seemed to notice, casting about in the smoke with his only remaining eye.
They were infected. These men and women would never grasp the danger of the Chinese assault — and they provided her group with some cover as Bornmann led them out of the calm space of the Airstream. The mob enveloped them. Lang brought up his M4 when several people turned, but didn’t shoot. There was no telling how close Chinese soldiers might be.
Bornmann and Lang clubbed five Americans to the ground as they ran into a maze of destruction. Some of the buildings and trucks that coated these mountains hid the antennae and dishes sprouting above the command complex. Their eyes and ears had been distributed as widely as possible to mask their signals, but the enemy must have strived to triangulate each source of electronic noise ever since the war. It was these points that had been targeted by the Chinese fighters, not the people themselves or even the gun emplacements.
Bornmann led their squad past burning campers and an overturned jeep. Debris lay everywhere, a mix of dark earth exploded from the hillside and lighter material blasted out of walls and furniture and people. Camouflage netting sagged from the structures or twisted on the ground in curls and lumps. Deborah saw a dismembered arm and a shoe and a field of broken glass.
She realized her uncertainty was pointless. She was one of the lucky ones. She reminded herself of it with every step. Even if she and Emma ran away, where would they go? Agonizing over it was a waste of energy.
Just do your part, she thought.
Deborah resolved her self-doubt as easily as that, and she was grateful. She felt like the eye of a hurricane, composed and intact despite the carnage all around her, even because of it. The chaos was exactly why she needed to remain pure. That was how she wanted to be remembered — competent and reliable — and no one would ever know otherwise if she kept her secret and followed orders to the end.
Suddenly they could see past the sprawl. The mountainside fell away to the northeast, where a familiar trio of peaks were lost in the filthy sky. Dark clouds crashed against the land in a billowing conflict of wind and heat.
The fallout will reach us, she thought.
“You’re going for Complex 2,” Walls said on the suit radio, breathing hard, and Bornmann answered, “Sir, we have to get out of the open. Then we’ll run for Complex 3 and resupply.”
“Rezac,” Walls said. “Any contact with 1?”
Rezac had been chanting to herself as they worked through the ruins, calling for Complex 1 or any allied assets. “No, sir,” she said. “Even if there are hardened units who survived the blasts, the sky is for shit. I’m getting nothing but static.”
“Your call sign is Viper Six,” Walls said, undeterred. “Authentication Hotel Golf India Sierra India X-ray. I want—”
“Missiles,” Pritchard said.
“Get down!” Bornmann shouted. “Where?”
“They’re at two o‘clock. Outgoing. I see three. Four. I think they’re ours.”
Within the turmoil to the northeast, yellow-white sparks raced into the sky. Deborah saw three flecks streaking intermittently through the haze. The rocket trails hurt her eyes, rising, rising… “Yeeaaah!” Pritchard cheered. His voice was savage and Deborah felt herself respond the same way, meeting his pride with a keen new predatory feeling of her own.
Smash ‘em, she thought.
The blinding white sparks were U.S. missiles intended for enemy targets.
16
Eight hundred miles west of Grand Lake, Colonel Jia Yuanjun walked alone through an empty hallway. The silence was bewitching. Solitude was so unlike his daily life. Part of him welcomed it even as he felt the hair on the back of his neck prickle with anticipation.
You shouldn’t be here, Jia thought, but this sublevel was a familiar place. He knew every corner. He went sixty paces into the damp, echoing shadows and moved left out of the corridor. This basement was always quiet. The architect who’d designed these bunkers had overdrawn his plans, no doubt hoping to impress his superiors, and their construction efforts had stopped long before completing the lowest floor. In many areas, the walls showed naked rebar. In others, there were no walls at all. Farther down the corridor, Jia knew there was a great room in which nothing stood except load-bearing pillars and scrawls of white paint to indicate where plumbing and electrical lines were never laid. The lighting consisted of only a few bulbs clipped to the ceiling. Nor was there heating or fresh air.
They’d built this base on the outskirts of Los Angeles, northeast of Pasadena, where the badlands had long since reclaimed the suburban sprawl, raking the streets and abandoned yards with sand. Beneath the sun-baked desert, however, the earth was cold, and the hundreds of people inside the compound were forever exuding moisture. Most of their breath, sweat, and cooking smells evaporated through the exits or dried up in the insufficient circulation of their fans, but Jia believed it was the living vapor of his fellow soldiers that made this sublevel so chilly. It smelled of people and earth, yet not in an evil way, mixed with the tang of concrete and iron. Jia was in the belly of their Army. He supposed that was exactly where he wanted to be. It was peaceful. He felt as if he belonged — and yet he’d risked everything by coming here.
A boot step ticked in the darkness.
What if you were followed? Jia thought. He sidled back against the wall, leaving the dim light entirely as the boot steps moved closer, gritting on the floor. One man? Two?
I was ashamed, he thought, rehearsing the same lies he’d planned for months. Why else would anyone hide themselves down here except to mourn their failures or their lost families? Access to this level was forbidden, but one of its entrances sat directly beside Jia’s quarters. The rooms below were used as storage space, giving him a plausible excuse to walk down here, and the crowded barracks were no place to show emotion.
If necessary, Jia would confess one weakness to conceal another. He had often done that to bind another man to him. He’d learned that if he volunteered one candid thought to a colleague or a rival, they felt empowered. Sometimes they would trust him enough to share their own truths. Less often, they reported him. Either way, he gained new relationships, either with the men who opened themselves to him or with the superiors who interrogated him and then saw his drive, his intelligence, and his humanity.
Neither the Communist Party nor the MSS wanted robots if they could have dedicated minds working for them instead. Automa
tons were easy to find. Men with initiative were not. This was how Jia had survived, but he’d always recognized that it was a double-edged sword.
One day, he would die on the wrong side of the blade. Today?
You shouldn’t have come here! he thought. Then he realized the boot steps were in front of him. The walking man had emerged from deeper within the basement. Jia allowed himself a small measure of relief. He had been pressing his shoulder blades against the hard concrete but now he leaned forward into the light, masking his nerves with an alert expression.
“N ho,” he said. Hello.
The other man jerked in surprise, then glanced left and right before saluting. With anyone else, his poor form would have earned a reprimand, but Jia was touched by the fear in Bu Xiaowen’s eyes.
“Colonel,” Bu said. “Are you… I didn’t think…”
“I needed a moment to compose myself,” Jia said. Then he added, “None of my team have slept since yesterday. General Zheng excused us.”
They both listened to the silence. Somewhere, a far-off noise resonated through the concrete. Pang. But there was no one else in the basement and Jia stepped forward and grabbed the front of Bu’s uniform. He pulled Bu’s open mouth against his own for a fierce, exciting kiss.
Jia had not chosen to be the way he was. He certainly did not celebrate his sexuality, but the attraction between himself and men like Bu Xiaowen was undeniable. They never needed words. They just knew. Jia supposed it was the same way in which heterosexual men and women felt a mutual spark. Their bodies were simply calibrated that way, and Jia and Bu had watched each other for weeks before they first discovered a chance to exchange a few words, unheard and unseen, in one of the stairwells.
He lowered his hands to Bu’s hips. He could not feel them beneath Bu’s gun belt, and yet he enjoyed the frustration of it because undressing each other was usually their only fore-play. Their sexual encounters were always rushed.