by Jeff Carlson
Ruth gently touched her ‚ngers against his chest and kissed him. “Thank you,” she said. “Thank you, Cam.”
He only nodded. There was no anxiety in the moment. That made him feel pleased. She trusted him and he was very glad for his sense of kinship and safety.
Ruth lay down on the cot and Cam sat awake on the †oor, his mind churning. Deborah had vouched for Shaug. I think he’s a good man who’s done his best with very little, she said, and she knew more than he did. She had been here for two days before they arrived, and her medical training had been a ticket straight into the middle echelons of the leadership.
After the bombing, Deborah’s unit had surrendered to the large contingent of rebels aligned under Grand Lake, the nearest surviving American stronghold. Loveland Pass had burned, too close to ground zero, and White River might as well have been on the moon because of the huge plague zones in between — but Deborah said there had been similar movements up and down the Continental Divide as the American forces rejoined. Grand Lake’s ‚ghting strength was actually larger than it had been before the bombing, although most of the new troops were infantry or light armored units. The surprise attack had done that much good, at least, pushing most of the shattered United States back together once more.
Now the vaccine would turn everything upside down again, as would the data index. Ruth believed that researchers everywhere must be on the verge of weaponized nanotech like the snow†ake. Could her presence here become the boost that Grand Lake’s small lab needed?
When she kissed him, Cam had seen the haunted, rising dread in her eyes. He ‚nally recognized the distance he’d heard in her voice outside the medical tent. It was the fear of so much responsibility. Given a moment to reassess, given a full lab and equipment, he wondered how Ruth would change the war.
20
There was a second nano in Cam’s blood sample, a new machine shaped like a twisted X. Ruth had never seen it before, although she immediately thought of the dead mountaintop etched with thousands of crosses. The emotions in her now were the same — lonely confusion and despair. She leaned back from her tunneling scope and clenched her left ‚st in her brace, unable to get past the truth. It should be impossible, and yet the strange nanotech existed in his blood alongside the vaccine. His, but not hers. The nanotech was benign for the moment. Ruth expected it was waiting for some trigger.
Where had it come from?
“Let me out,” she said suddenly, turning to the microphone on her left. The clean booth was equipped with two open mikes, one to record her observations, the other to keep in contact with the outside because this booth was too small to enter or exit without help. For a laboratory, Grand Lake had built a reinforced steel box too small to hold all the equipment they’d gathered. A rack of electronics partially blocked the door and the bulk of an electron microscope crowded Ruth on her right, but the lab was sterile and well-lit and could draw more power than she needed, even to purge the box.
They knew the danger in some of what she was doing. The workbench was rigged with X-ray and ultraviolet projectors, which should at least slow an uncontrolled nanobot if not destroy it outright, and the air-conditioning could brie†y jump to eighty-mile-per-hour winds if necessary, vacuuming up any stray particles. It didn’t bear thinking about. The radiation would be bad enough for anyone inside the lab. Ruth expected the vacuum would also lift the scopes and machining tools in an upside down rain of metal, hard plastic, and lashing power cords — and of course if that didn’t eradicate any threat, they could just weld the box shut forever. It was like working inside a cof‚n.
“Let me out,” she said.
“What’s up?” McCown asked.
Ruth touched her white gloves to her mask. “I forgot my notes, I’m an idiot,” she said, ‚ghting to hold down the cold, bright edge of her claustrophobia.
Most days, that particular fear was only a scratching at the back of her mind. She had been enthralled to return to her work. It was unspeakably good to be in control again and Ruth had always excelled at ignoring everything beyond her microscopes, at least while she was making progress. Sometimes she lacked momentum. More than once her nerves leapt with a memory of planes or gun‚re. Another time, she saw ants that didn’t exist from the corner of her eye.
Ruth thought she had been very brave to step into this cramped box day after day, but now it was all that she could do to keep her heartbeat from affecting her voice.
“Please,” she said. “I know it’s a hassle.”
“Why don’t we have somebody get your notes for you,” McCown said. “We can read anything you want.”
“No.” The word came out too fast. “No,” she said carefully. “I should have worked through a couple ideas before I even bothered today. I was too tired after dinner.”
“Um. All right.” McCown sounded like he was frowning. “Give us a second.”
Ruth sagged against the workbench but caught an atmosphere hood with her elbow, a small glass sheath meant to snap onto the tunneling scope. The hood clanged and Ruth jerked and hit her head on a shelf. “Oh!”
McCown came back on the intercom. “Ruth?”
“Oh, shit,” she said, with just the right tone of casual disgust. “This place is like a shoebox.” Get me out, she thought. Get me out. Get me out.
“Five minutes, okay?” McCown said.
“Yes.” Ruth looked up at the harsh lights in the ceiling and then back and forth at the cluttered walls. Trapped. Then she leaned over the slim, elegant shape of the microscope again. It was her only escape.
McCown would probably be ten minutes, in fact. First he had to call for power to ramp up the air ‚lters in the prep room outside the lab. Then he’d run his clothes and especially his hair and hands against a vacuum hose before he stepped inside, locked the door, and repeated the process with another vacuum. Next he’d take his clothes bag down from the hooks on the wall and don his hairnet, mask, gloves, and baggy clean suit. It was only after this meticulous checklist that he would unlock Ruth’s door and help her stow her own suit.
She didn’t want him to see her panic. She needed to bury the feeling deep, but her best-learned coping mechanism left her in direct confrontation with the source of her fear.
Who made you? Ruth wondered, peering into the scope. The new nanotech was a ghost. It shouldn’t exist at all. Who could have made you, and where was Cam exposed? His blood sample contained only two of the new machines that Ruth had isolated so far, among thousands of the vaccine nano, but the ghost was very distinct. The ghost resembled a bent snippet of a helix, whereas the vaccine was a roughly stem-shaped lattice.
The ghost was beautiful in its way and Ruth brie†y forgot herself, caught in the mystery. She couldn’t help but admire the work it represented. Her quick estimate was that the ghost was built of less than one billion atomic mass units, which was damned small. The vaccine was barely under one billion AMU itself and as uncomplicated as they’d been able to make it. Could the ghost be a failed effort? Maybe the pair she’d found were only fragments of something larger. No. The two samples were identical. Even more interesting, the ghost had the same heat engine as the vaccine and the plague, which meant it had been built after the plague year by someone who was both capable of identifying the design work and reproducing it. The heat engine was a top-notch piece of engineering. Like Ruth and her colleagues, the ghost’s creator had seen no reason to reinvent the wheel. He’d put his energy elsewhere. This was obviously a functioning nano and it was biotech just like the vaccine, designed to operate inside warm-blooded creatures.
But what does it do? Ruth worried. The fear in her head felt like clots and lumps now, straining her ability to think.
What if the individual ghosts were meant to combine into a larger construct? Its helix shape could lend itself to a process like that. The trigger might be nothing more complicated than a heavy dose. Saturation. Cam appeared to have a low and ineffectual amount in his blood, but what if he absorbed more? Would it
activate?
Whatever the ghost is for, it’s able to function above the barrier, she thought. So there’s no way to stop it. Then the latch in the door rattled and Ruth jumped and turned to shove herself against the heavy steel panel, nearly slamming it into Mc-Cown’s surprised face.
“Don’t touch a fucking thing,” she said.
* * * *
Ruth walked through the cold white sun in her Army jacket and thin pants, needing air, needing him. For the past three days she’d imprisoned herself for hours at a time. She’d barely seen Cam at all, which she regretted. They’d been so close to a relationship, but her schedule was practically nonstop — work, work, collapse, more work. Cam had moved out after the second morning, joining an effort to trap and inoculate rodents and birds in an attempt to reestablish some kind of ecology below the barrier.
The vaccine was widespread in Grand Lake. Cam had won that battle quickly, even though he’d appeared to be nothing except helpful and obedient. All of his coughing in the med tent. He’d outsmarted Shaug as easily as that, which was sort of funny. He always found a way, and she missed him now that their paths had separated.
Other people were moving apart, too. The exodus had been limited so far, but McCown said there were deserters in the military and Ruth could see for herself that the refugee camps were quieter than usual. Normally the two peaks across from her were busy with farming efforts. Today one of the terraced gardens was empty, and the work crews on another were de‚nitely understrength. Ruth understood. The temptation was too great. She was surprised that so many stayed. The new supplies were a help. Scavenging efforts had increased beneath the barrier, from organized convoys and helicopter runs to small handfuls of people who carried up as much as possible. Grand Lake had retained most of its population, at least for the short term. The habit was long ingrained. No one who’d survived would ever trust the world below ten thousand feet again, and the vaccine did not offer complete immunity.
At meals, she heard talk of relocating everyone to Boulder. Denver was much bigger, but it had taken fallout. There were also rumors that the Air Force would take a more aggressive stance and move a number of their people down into Grand Junction, a hundred and ‚fty miles to the west. Maybe it was even happening. Fighters and larger planes constantly roared away from the mountain and came back and left again and she couldn’t say if the amounts were the same. Some of them never returned because they were shot down, but maybe others were ‚nding new stations.
Snap decisions were a way of life up here and Ruth supposed she shouldn’t have been surprised to ‚nd herself propositioned by one of McCown’s assistants and then by the man who had the room next to hers in her shelter. They all felt like they had nothing to lose, and she was new and seemed unattached.
She stopped at the nearest mess hall. Snares and wire cages had been laid along the base of the long tent. A rat thrashed at the end of one line and Ruth stared at it with a weird mix of disgust and something else — her loneliness.
You got one, Cam, she thought.
There had never been much living up here, chipmunks, marmots, elk, and grouse and several other species of birds. Nearly all were extinct. The human population had tracked and killed every species beyond the point of sustainability. There might be a few grouse and chipmunks left in the region, but nobody had seen one for months. Occasionally birds still †itted overhead. And there were vermin. Rats were not indigenous to this elevation, but there must have been a few among the endless crates of FEMA and military supplies that were airlifted into the area during the ‚rst days of the plague.
The rats had †ourished in the crowded conditions and in the grime. Ruth supposed they should be glad. Had anyone, anywhere, managed to save other kinds of mammals? She wondered again at the bizarre world the next generation would inherit, assuming they didn’t ‚nish what the plague had started with a new contagion. Rats, birds, bugs, and reptiles made for a bleak and virulent environment, and yet it would be more stable than one without any warm-blooded creatures at all. Conservation efforts would become a way of life for centuries. Any dogs or horses or sheep that had survived would be priceless beyond measure. They must be out there in small numbers, hidden or lost on mountaintops around the world, which made it all the more important to preserve every single one.
The rat squirmed and clawed at the wire, snapping at its own leg. Ruth looked away from the ugly thing and saw two soldiers approaching. The man in front had unslung his ri†e, although he held the barrel toward the ground.
“This is a restricted area, Private,” he said. “You know that. Lunch isn’t for two hours.”
“Yes.” Ruth wore no insignia, so they thought she was a recruit looking for a way to steal or barter for extra food. She was probably lucky she was a woman, or they might have been rougher. McCown had given her a badge that showed her actual status, but Ruth saw no reason to take it from her pocket, which would create a record of where she’d gone.
She tried to smile and turned to leave. Then the soldier noticed the rat and glanced after her, his eyes hardening. He thinks I was planning to take it! she realized. That had been another bene‚t of the vermin. The rats had damaged crops and food stocks, but the rats had become food, too.
“I’m looking for Barrett’s group,” she said quickly. “Do you know if they’ve been through here today?”
The soldier relaxed slightly. Barrett was one of the leaders of the repopulation project, a civilian leader, although there were also troops assigned to the effort. “You’re late,” the soldier said, gesturing downhill to the west. “I saw some guys with cages at least an hour ago.”
“Thank you.” Ruth walked away. They were releasing the ‚rst rats into the old township in the hope that the little monsters would breed and continue down the face of the Continental Divide, clearing the area of insect swarms. It was a crazy idea. It was necessary. Rats were adaptable and cunning, which made them perfect to go up against the insects. Birds would be great, too, if Cam and his friends could ever catch and infect enough mating pairs.
* * * *
Ruth already knew she could make some improvements to the vaccine. She’d begun to work through new sensor models that would bump up its target-to-kill rate, but at Shaug’s insistence she’d set aside her theories to build and culture the snow†ake instead. There was no room for moral qualms. The world wouldn’t wait. The United States needed new weapons, because spy planes and satellites showed that the Russians already had close to ‚fty thousand troops on the ground, along with nearly half that many support personnel and refugees. The distinction was tough to make. During their endless struggle in the Middle East, the Russian population became a war machine, with everyone in combat or preparing for it.
U.S. and Canadian interceptors had begun to have more luck with hitting Russian transports before they reached the coast, but the invaders were †ying in from all directions now, down from the Arctic and the Bering Sea, up from the South Paci‚c— and they could land anywhere, not just in the mountains. Their planes hid and rose and hid again, deceiving North American radar and pursuit.
Two spearheads of Russian infantry had spread into Nevada while California burned. Uncontrolled blazes exploded through the diseased forests, both hindering the invasion and providing them with some cover. Ruth had seen the photos herself. Twice she’d sat down with generals and civilian agents to discuss the vaccine’s parameters and what kind of casualties the enemy could expect.
Ruth estimated the Russians’ short-term losses at 5 percent. Over a period of years, if the technology didn’t improve, there was no question that the internal war between the vaccine and the plague would lead to signi‚cant traumas and deaths, but in the meantime the invaders would merely be uncomfortable. Except for anyone who stayed in a hot spot, mostly they’d suffer only minor hemorrhaging and blister rash. Sometimes an unlucky individual might experience a bleeding eye or a stroke, perhaps a cardiac arrest, which could be costly if it was a pilot or a driver who was
suddenly incapacitated.
The Russians were willing to pay that price. Their advance was staggered at times, but they’d claimed hundreds of miles, absorbing dead cities and airports, quickly motorizing their troops with abandoned vehicles and American armor — and they must have used the promise of the nanotech to win reinforcements.
The U.S.-Canadian net had detected huge †ights of Chinese aircraft rushing across the Paci‚c to strengthen the Russian foothold. Large naval †eets came behind. The enemy already held Hawaii. They’d attacked the tiny American outpost on Mt. Mauna Loa during the blackout after the electromagnetic pulse, risking an alert to the mainland. The islands were an ideal stepping-stone. The Chinese probably hadn’t thought twice about it. With the vaccine, they could win their ‚ght in the Himalayas even as they helped the Russians take control of industry-rich North America, its superior croplands, its military bases. The new allies could divide everything however they liked, unless Ruth stopped them. The snow†ake might be the only way for the U.S.-Canadian forces to regain the West, short of poisoning it with their own nuclear strikes.
She’d done it. She knew exactly how the snow†ake killed, but she’d rebuilt it with the same blind will of the rat in the snare. It hadn’t even felt like her decision. Millions of people needed the weapon’s power to survive. Millions more would die. The holocaust would always be her responsibility, but so were the lives she’d save. Her guilt colored everything she did. It affected her sleep. It kept her from approaching Cam even when she needed him more than ever.
The snow†ake was more of a chemical reaction than a true machine. It was originally one of several ANN developed by the scientists in Leadville, an anti-nano nano meant to destroy the plague. Composed of oxygen-heavy carbon molecules, the snow†ake was intended to disable its rival nanotech by drawing the plague into nonfunctional clusters. Each bunch would recombine around the original seed and shed more arti‚cially weighted grains, which would attract more plague, and so on. The process was termed “snow†aking” by its creator, LaSalle, but he had never been able to limit or regulate the effect.