by Jeff Carlson
Cam had to be careful. He’d made a mistake the last time they were in this situation. When Ruth disappeared into her lab in Grand Lake, he’d found Allison.
“Okay, let’s pack up,” Goodrich said. He slung two of the M4s over his shoulder and Cam and Foshtomi stood with him, gathering their own carbines. Sunset was giving way to night. In thirty minutes they were on watch.
As he walked with Foshtomi to the second truck, Cam could not stop himself from gazing at Ruth’s tent. It was a †imsy structure in which to house their best hope. They could never protect Ruth from artillery or planes, whether there were twenty soldiers here or ‚ve hundred, and he knew that he was the least useful of all, with minimal training, one good ear, and the quiet animosity between himself and the Marines.
He might have left on his own if he had anywhere to go, if only to get moving again. The urge ran that deep. He recognized the feeling for what it was, nerves and doubt and old trauma, but he wondered if he would ever be able to settle down. Even if Ruth gave him the opportunity, or Allison or anyone, Cam wondered if he would always be trying to get away from himself.
* * * *
“There she is,” Foshtomi said as lantern light spilled through the gorge. Two silhouettes held open the side of the tent, Deborah and Ruth.
Directly in front of the two women, a Marine ducked his head, pinned in the yellow light. Hernandez had ordered a total blackout. “Hey!” someone shouted. Ruth’s shape hesitated, but Deborah’s taller ‚gure let go of the tent †ap.
Cam set down his canteen and started toward them, blinking to regain his night vision. “Cam, wait,” Goodrich said. He didn’t stop. If the sergeant pressed the matter, he would say he hadn’t understood because of his ear.
“Where is General Hernandez?” Deborah asked the soldiers in front of the tent. She was supporting Ruth as well as speaking for her. Ruth stood awkwardly, protecting her hip, and Deborah kept one arm around her waist. Cam edged through the few Marines to reach her side. One of them said something that Cam only caught part of, “—ight now,” but the man pointed as he spoke and that was enough. Cam was more interested in trying to assess Ruth’s health in the dark.
She noticed him and smiled.
“How are you?” she asked. Then they were separated again as Deborah guided Ruth forward, walking through the Marines. Ruth looked back once, her curly hair like a soft tangle in the moonlight.
What did you ‚nd? Cam thought. He knew her moods well enough to recognize this exhausted pleasure. Good news. It was good news, and that meant none of their losses had been in vain. The thrill of it made him grin as he strode after the group. The wind sifted through the gorge, cold and alive. Cam was aware of another kind of motion around them as other soldiers got up and paced alongside them. Most of the twenty-six Rangers and Marines were in foxholes outside the gully, but Ruth drew the remainder to her in twos and threes.
Like the trucks, the jeep was also draped in netting. Hernandez slept beside the vehicle and its radio. A Marine corporal sat nearby, leaning against a tire with his submachine gun in his lap. He woke Hernandez, who coughed and pushed himself up. Then he coughed again, uncontrollably.
Deborah let go of Ruth and knelt close to him, laying her hand on his back as he rasped for air. “General,” she said.
“I’m ‚ne.” He choked the words out.
Deborah stayed with him. She was obviously trying to gauge the strength of his breathing and Cam didn’t like the obvious tension in her shoulders. Shit. Hernandez had hidden his respiratory problems from them, but even if it was just a cold, not radiation sickness, the man was in dangerously bad shape to be ‚ghting off a virus.
Hernandez was gaunt and pale. “Doctor Goldman,” he said, quickly locating the most important face in the crowd.
“They trusted you,” Ruth said. “They trusted you more than you think.”
“I don’t understand.”
“Leadville,” she said. “The labs.”
To the west, a clump of explosions †ared up from the black mountains. The booming reached them an instant later as Ruth knelt, too, twisting to protect the wounds in her left hip. Some of the Marines also crouched down and Cam was not surprised by this sudden intimacy. Everyone wanted to hear.
“They were testing nanotech on forward units,” Ruth said, “but they must have been almost certain how well the new vaccine would work. They trusted you.”
“A new vaccine,” Hernandez said.
“Yes.” Her eyes were large and childlike. “There are two nanos in you right now, and they’re both different from anything else I’ve seen.”
Hernandez coughed again, wincing. Beside Cam, one of the Marines touched his own chest and several others glanced down at themselves or ‚dgeted with their hands, afraid of the machinery that they could not see.
“They targeted you deliberately, General,” Ruth said. “They trusted you. We’ve taken hundreds of blood samples and no one else had the vaccine or a working ghost.”
“What does that mean?” a woman asked behind Cam. It was Foshtomi, and he turned to see that she stood away from the group, as if that could possibly save her. But she was loyal and brave. The wind blew Foshtomi’s dark hair across her face and she strode forward with the rush of the breeze, joining them despite her nervousness.
Ruth glanced at the younger woman, then turned back to Hernandez. It might have been Cam’s imagination but he thought Ruth looked at him, too, after dismissing Foshtomi. Why? Because she didn’t like it that he and Sarah were friends?
“How long were you stationed outside Leadville before the bombing?” Ruth asked Hernandez. “Were you above the barrier that whole time?”
“What are you saying — we were immune to the plague?”
“At some point. Absolutely. The atmospheric effects of the bomb had nothing to do with the fact that your troops were able to run below ten thousand feet and survive.”
Hernandez shook his head. “We would have noticed.”
“No. Not if you never tried it. You wouldn’t have launched any attacks below the barrier until after Grand Lake brought you the vaccine that Cam and I carried out of Sacramento, right?”
“We mounted a few strikes. We thought there were still areas where the bombing had wiped out the plague.”
“You were immune. The vaccine out of Grand Lake wasn’t half as good as what you already had.” Ruth laughed, but it was a melancholy sound. “You must have gotten it some time during the two weeks before the bomb. Leadville caught our friends in the Sierras, which is where they got the early model of the vaccine. Then they infected you with an improved version and a spin-off technology to see how the two would interact.”
The soldiers moved uneasily again. “Jesus,” Watts said with his hand at his mouth. It was another protective gesture, no different than the way Foshtomi had hung back from the group. These men and women still thought of the nanotech as a disease.
Ruth said, “Did they give any kind of inoculations or pills? Something they said was a vitamin?”
“No.”
“It could have been in your water or your food. As far as I can tell, the improved model has the same weakness as the ‚rst generation. It only replicates when it’s exposed to the plague, which means the infection would have been sporadic unless you all ate or drank the same thing.” Ruth paused, embarrassed. “After the bomb, when you left your mountain, did you lose anyone?”
“It was chaotic,” Hernandez said. “And dark and very hot.”
Ruth reached for his arm, making contact. “Is there any way to know if some of them died because of the machine plague?”
He looked down at her hand. He shook his head.
“Please,” Ruth said. “This is important.”
“It was chaotic,” he repeated, and Cam marveled at the understatement.
“We have to assume it’s a possibility,” Ruth said. She glanced at Deborah, as if resuming a different conversation. Or maybe she couldn’t bear to face Hernandez a
nymore.
The general still had his head down, either wrestling with his illness or his grief. He appeared uncharacteristically weak and Cam also turned away. The soldiers had done the same. Their respect for Hernandez demanded it, and Cam wondered what they would do when he was gone.
“I’ll need blood again,” Ruth said slowly. “We need to make sure we get the new vaccine to as many people as possible, and I think… I’m sure the second nano is the only reason you’re alive.”
“They brought us steak a few days before the bombing,” Hernandez said. “Fresh steak. Not a lot. But we were surprised.”
“That was probably it,” Ruth said.
“We’d already started communicating with other units up and down the line. I…We were talking about leaving our posts.”
The emotion in his eyes was both haunted and amazed. Hernandez was glad to be wrong, Cam realized. Despite everything else that had happened, he took comfort in discovering that Leadville continued to rely on him.
“We thought they were punishing us,” Hernandez said. “We thought the meat was only a way to keep us on a short leash.”
“They trusted you.”
“I was already committing treason,” he said, looking left and right at his Marines. He was using his confession to bring them closer to him. He had recovered from his shock, and again Cam was stunned by the man’s abilities. Everything was a lesson to him. His entire focus was on his troops and the never-ending process of improving them — and he was stronger for it. Not for the ‚rst time, Cam envied Hernandez.
“Sir, a lot of us were looking to the rebels,” Watts said, and Deborah added, “It wouldn’t have mattered. You had nothing to do with the bombing.”
“It does matter,” Hernandez said. “I should have stuck it out. What if the president’s council heard some rumor of what I was doing? What if that’s why they didn’t tell me about the vaccine? Think what we could have done with it if we’d known. We could have moved down onto the highways. We could have dug in and stopped the Chinese cold.”
Cam frowned to himself. It was true that a lot of good opportunities had been missed, but it troubled him that Hernandez could ignore the way he’d been used as a test subject. It was a blind spot. His fealty was the real difference between them, and Cam was angry for him. Cam was angry at him.
“You said they gave us two kinds of nanotech,” Hernandez said, coughing again as he turned to Ruth.
She nodded. “We called it the ghost when we found it in Grand Lake. Nobody could tell what it did, and Leadville must have put it through several generations in a hurry. We isolated at least four strains before we got here.”
“But it’s not a vaccine.”
“No. Yes. In a way, yes. I kept thinking that most of the radiation victims we met weren’t as bad off as they should have been, but no one had a real idea how close they were to the blast. No one except you.”
Above them, the night rippled with birds, an unexpected, darting swarm that lifted a shout of warning from one of the Marines. Cam †inched.
Ruth barely reacted to the interruption, her voice hushed and intense. “Sir, you should be dead. The rads you took are off the scale, but you also have the most advanced version of the ghost I’ve seen. It’s some kind of overall booster. I think it’s a prototype that was intended to protect against the snow†ake. Soldiers carrying a perfect version of it could probably hit the enemy with the snow†ake and not see any effects themselves…and I think it’s helping your tissues stay intact despite the radiation damage. It’s gradually cleaning your cells.” She tipped her face up toward Cam, then looked back at Hernandez and said, “It’s rebuilding you.”
“But I’m sicker than ever.”
“I don’t think it can keep up. It’s an early model.”
Hernandez didn’t say anything else, although his mind must have been racing. Cam was still trying to make sense of everything they’d heard and he hadn’t just learned that he belonged in his grave.
“I’m sorry.” Ruth reached for Hernandez again, and the general took her hand.
She could ‚x us, Cam thought.
“I’m so sorry,” Ruth said, but Hernandez pressed his lips into a thin smile and said, “They kept us alive longer than we had any right to expect.” He meant himself and the survivors from his company. He was still drawing connections between himself and Leadville, taking comfort in the past.
“Can you save him?” Cam asked, because it would have been awful to say what he really wanted to know. Can you ‚x me? He was ashamed to be so sel‚sh, because Hernandez continued to put everyone else ‚rst. Hernandez wouldn’t plead with her, not for himself — but his troops spoke on his behalf.
“Make the nanotech better,” Watts said. “Please,” Foshtomi added, as another man said, “The thing already works pretty good, right?”
Ruth ducked her head. Every day she seemed more humble, which was strange in someone so masterful. Her little habit of turning away came frequently now and Cam remembered the gesture especially from the day she’d ‚rst met Allison, avoiding the younger woman. Ruth was learning to evade challenges, which was dangerous for all of them, and Cam shared some of the blame for her indecisiveness.
“Maybe,” she said at last. “Yes. The potential here is incredible. The model you have inside you represents the best work of the top people in nanotech, ‚fty researchers with full machining gear and computers.”
She meant that she was alone. She was still hedging her words, as if there were any possibility they wouldn’t back her into this corner. Their lives depended on it. More importantly, her work would shape the outcome of the war. Mankind would rebuild on North America. There was no question of that, but the color of the natives’ skin and the languages they spoke would depend on Ruth’s success or failure.
The ability to move freely in the plague zones was only the beginning. A nanotech capable of healing even serious wounds would make them unstoppable.
Cam †exed his ruined hands and glanced at Deborah, Ruth, and Hernandez, all of them hurt in different ways. What if they were able to stand up again after being shot or burned? They would be superhuman, and Cam tried to form a prayer to all of the scientists who had been killed in Leadville.
Help her, he thought. You can help her somehow. Shouldn’t they be able to talk to Ruth through their work? There would be clues and other evidence in the nanotech, obvious problems to ‚x and improvements to be made.
“You’ve done it before,” Cam said.
“I’ve seen it,” Watts agreed.
In the lab in Sacramento, Ruth had quickly drawn together and improved the work of four science teams, building upon the original archos tech to create the ‚rst working vaccine. Of course, she had also had the help of two specialists, D.J. and Todd, both of whom were either dead or hopelessly lost.
“A lot of people are depending on you,” Hernandez said.
Ruth wouldn’t look at them. “I need time,” she said. “Maybe too much time. And I don’t have any equipment here.”
“You do in Grand Lake,” Hernandez said.
“Yes. Some.”
“We can get you there.”
* * * *
They ran northeast on the morning of July 1st, moving downhill before the dawn lifted over the horizon. The mountains in the east topped out at fourteen thousand feet, hiding the sun. Cam felt his gaze drawn again and again to those peaks. It was dif‚cult to tell in the brilliant new light, but those mountains looked unusually smooth along their southern edges. They were melted. Their bulk was all that had spared Aspen Valley from the bombing, channeling the worst of the blast away. Even so, Ruth’s escort had quickly hiked into an area where the ground was a marsh, still waterlogged from the †oods of snowmelt, and yet the fallen trees were brittle and dry.
“Watch out.” Foshtomi stopped Cam from following Mitchell. Mitchell had stepped over a dead gray stump into an ordinary-looking puddle, but the surface was deceptive. Mitchell sunk to his hip. He twiste
d to grab the stump and Foshtomi splashed forward to help, both of them coated with the spotty black muck of eroding bark. “Hang on,” Foshtomi called.
Cam looked back. They were in the middle of the group to assist Ruth while most of the squad ranged ahead, but Ruth was already looking for another way through, talking with Deborah. She pointed and moved left.
“Wait!” Cam said, hustling to join her.
A few trees still jutted into the sky, lea†ess and broken. This long mountainside was covered with blowdowns. Fortunately the spruce and aspen forest had been thin at ninety-‚ve hundred feet, because moments after the blast wave knocked them over, the †oods had locked the shattered trunks and branches together in a treacherous puzzle like pick-up sticks.
The undergrowth was a different matter. Most of the brush and grass had survived the heat and the windstorms. In many places, they weren’t drowning either. The trees and rocks formed thousands of small dams, directing the water into rivulets and swamps — but even where the ground bumped up, the brush was sickly. When he touched one, the leaves crumbled away like confetti. Every minute on this ruined slope, Cam was sure they were absorbing radiation.
He reached for Ruth’s arm as she began to crab her way over a pair of logs after Deborah. “You have to wait,” he said.
Her dark eyes †ashed at him. They no longer wore their goggles and masks. There was no need, so he got the full brunt of Ruth’s expression. “Let go,” she said. “Let go of me!” She climbed across, peeling bark away in clumps beneath her damp gloves and boots.