Plague Year

by Jeff Carlson

  VIPs couldn’t be expected to walk far, of course. Four dozen vehicles sat at the base of the knoll—army trucks, sport utility vehicles—and there was another camera crew down there, watching this much smaller crowd watch the highway, recording their presence here today. Fine and good. The problem was that James had been classified as Very Important himself. Major Hernandez refused to let him hike beyond this little bump. Hernandez had fought to keep him from coming at all, in fact, but the security chief lost out, with only a few well-placed words from James, because all of the bigwigs he’d contacted had been dead set on coming themselves.

  If nothing else, the Endeavour’s landing was an event. It was historic, even in the midst of the plague year.

  Perhaps three hundred thousand people had come on foot to witness the attempt. James figured they must have started out this morning, despite the still bitter cold. Most of the half-million refugees around Leadville lived in the snaking valleys and hills east of town, in the hundreds of old mine shafts and in shelters built from tailings and debris. No car rides for them, and the nearest camps were four miles away as a bird flies.

  As the shuttle flies.

  James shifted from one foot to the other, like he was trying to balance his fleeting smile to keep it from falling off. He knew with absolute certainty that Ruth had been complaining the whole way down, not because she’d told him that the ride up had been a slap in the shorts, but because the vocal, wise-ass style was her trick for dealing with stress. A wonderful trick.

  They had become good friends. James often rested his hand on the comm equipment when they talked and was slightly embarrassed now to see her in person, as if she’d know somehow and misinterpret the gesture.

  Ruth had flipped—literally flipped, she said—when he relayed the council’s proposed schedule: two more weeks. At first they’d only planned to wait out a spring rainstorm coming in from California, but James had taken the opportunity to spread a few second thoughts.

  Oh, the battle had not been particularly fierce. The convoluted hierarchy of displaced officials was packed with fat egos who strove daily to stay relevant, and James had had zero trouble stirring up a battalion of congressmen to holler for resources to protect their brave astronauts. For all their excitement about committing to the inevitable, they were equally nervous about a disaster. Nobody wanted to be held accountable, and replaced, if something went wrong.

  That was fine and good, as far as James was concerned. No need to tell Ruth who’d shaped their fears together into a ball and started it rolling. She could tough things out for a little longer if it meant she’d get back to Earth in one piece.

  He accepted that to most survivors, the true benefit of bringing down the Endeavour was only an abstract. Maybe they didn’t even believe in it. The general populace was too busy scratching out an existence and the leadership was wholly preoccupied with more immediate threats and with the subbarrier scavenging efforts.

  James had faith that Ruth would jump-start their efforts to develop a functional ANN.

  James knew she might be their last chance.

  During her long exile she had pursued her own concepts for all three ANN still in development, trying to stay sharp, stay busy, and the entirety of her files had never been transmitted because broadcast time was limited. Fresh thinking might be all they needed to advance their research. Her gear alone would be invaluable, with extreme imaging and real-time fabrication that exceeded anything in their hodgepodge collection.

  The crowd rumbled again. The lights had come on.

  James stared out across the basin and admired his handiwork. What had been a narrow, backcountry highway was now something more worthy of what they demanded of it.

  It was April 27th. The highway had been ready for six days. If construction hadn’t gone so well, no doubt some grandstander would’ve proposed waiting for Memorial Day or even the Fourth of July. The NASA folks and Army Corps of Engineers had exceeded all expectations, and James was inspired to see so much accomplished with so little. For fifty-five years he had been an optimist, but this new life was short on pluses and positives.

  The work crews had shown the best of everything human. Ingenuity. Cooperation. They’d ripped the targeting systems out of three M-1 tanks and built a decent radar system on the mountain above him, patching into a radio tower there to use existing power and signal lines. There was also a fully manned AWACS plane in the air to ensure accuracy. As for the highway itself, the army had widened and reinforced the railroad underpass. Embankments had been pushed up, leveled, and packed along the entire three miles—much of it by hand—to provide emergency overruns as well as wide spots for fire trucks, medical trucks, military trucks, and the PAPI equipment.

  The Precision Approach Path Indicator lights were assembled in two groups, one most of the way up the basin, the other much closer to James. Each batch consisted of red and white beacons, as well as generators that had been topped off an hour ago. Some bright boy hadn’t wanted the fuel tanker sitting out there next to the road.

  Calibrating the PAPI system must have been a hassle, though. It was just basic math to figure the layout, of course, but the actual lights were a mismatched selection torn from the high school football field and from the fleet of aircraft parked on the small county strip south of town. The last thing anyone wanted to do was confuse the shuttle pilot. PAPI was a visual aid that showed him if he was in the correct glide angle, depending on whether or not the reds and whites matched up.

  They had done all they could. The last delay was due only to the weather, again, as they waited for mild head winds and a good high-pressure front to settle in. James had seen helicopters struggling at this altitude, and the shuttle would also have minimal air resistance to ease its descent. Would it be enough? Funny, he’d only become unnerved after everything was ready—

  Endeavour came in steep and fast.

  Screams filled the basin, a treble howl. James flinched but didn’t look away from the gleaming craft. They thought it was crashing, he realized. The space shuttle descended at an angle of nineteen degrees, more than six times the glide slope taken by commercial airliners.

  Slowing, its blunt nose up in a flaring maneuver, Endeavour plummeted below the near horizon of white peaks.

  The spacecraft was magnificent. It was their past.

  James Joseph Hollister, respected scientist and middle-aged bachelor, raised both fists and screeched like a beer-blitzed college kid. Another trick he’d learned from Ruth. He yelled for her. He yelled with her.

  Endeavour ripped past in a blink and was below him, its black underbelly becoming the off-white of its fuselage.

  “Shit I missed it!” one of the cameramen shouted.

  The pilot was top-notch. He hit the narrow highway directly in the middle. The stubby white bell of the Endeavour’s wings came down like a dress, a ball gown, unmistakably broader than the road by a good fraction on either side.

  Smoke exploded from beneath the shuttle’s body upon touchdown. Still nose up, its stout body swayed left on its rear tires and James jerked his arms down as he leaned to his right. “Come on, come on,” he chanted.

  Endeavour dropped forward and embraced the ground finally, but continued to drift toward the left edge of the road. The drag chute snapped out and wagged violently, a huge gray blossom.

  At speeds in excess of two hundred miles per hour, the shuttle reached the bridge while James was still caught in his dance. He’d become quite a student of the technology during the past weeks, and had spoken reassuringly to each of his bigwig contacts about carbon brakes and nosewheel steering capabilities. He had been repeating that same mantra to himself all morning but now he kept begging, “Come on—”

  The pilot brought his hurtling craft back from the left margin, back from the dirt embankments and disaster.

  It was that excellent reflex that doomed Endeavour.

  There had been an inch-and-a-half drop from the highway asphalt to the conc
rete slab of the bridge, the result of a repaving effort three years prior. Army engineers noted it while making their improvements. For a car the bump was marginal, barely enough to slosh a cup of coffee, but they had recognized that the shuttle’s weight and phenomenal speed would amplify any defect, and smoothed the surface with fresh tar. NASA pad rats had approved the work and warned the ISS crew.

  Endeavour hit the new patch with its nose wheel slightly cockeyed. Even so the accident was one in a thousand. The front end bounced heavily and the wings were carried up on a gust of wind. The pull of the drag chute increased the drift.

  On a normal runway there would have been room to correct. Instead the shuttle, lurching to the right now, clipped four inches of its starboard wing through the boxy cab of a yellow Colorado Springs fire engine. The roof and doors of the vehicle tore away in a brilliant shower of glass and plastic shards. Endeavour lost only a few white panels of its heat shielding.

  Impact, however, brought the nose of the spacecraft farther to the right. Endeavour plowed through an ambulance and another fire truck before it cartwheeled over the embankment.

  15

  Ruth was the only one who panicked. Gus had her unbuckled before she even realized they’d stopped moving. Her inner ear and every muscle spun with the forgotten sensation of down as terror shot through her laboring heart, which seemed to be trying to jump free from her chest.

  “Get out, Gus, we have to get out!”

  Down felt all the more wrong for the sideways tilt of the shuttle’s crew cabin. She grabbed at him as she flopped forward, weak and clumsy. Her faceplate clunked against his orange pressure suit. They were all fully armored, in case Endeavour’s long wait in vacuum had resulted in subtle damages and the pressure blew out; in case it became necessary to reroute for Denver International, deep within the invisible sea; in case any of a dozen scenarios that the NASA team had game-planned.

  The voices in her helmet were quick, deliberate, too much overlapping jargon to process: “Evacuate not responding control med med power-off.”

  Gus dragged her toward the side hatch, bumping after Deb. Fortunately the floor tipped in that direction.

  His mouth moved and she realized that two of the words resounding through her head were his. “Hang on,” he said, but pushed her away.

  Deb had stepped onto the interdeck ladder, and Ruth caught one of the struts. Deb kept climbing toward the flight deck.

  Ruth looked after her, shocked that she would move away from the exit. She would block the way for Ulinov and Mills and Wallace to get down. “What—” Each shallow breath was an aching. Her breasts and ribs felt like a badly used drum. Reentry had been rough but she was pretty sure the whole shuttle had rolled a few times at the end.

  Impact, Mills had announced on the radio. One word. Ruth guessed there hadn’t been time for more.

  It had been nothing but guessing since she strapped into her chair down here for the initial burn, ninety-some minutes ago. You’d have to be superhuman not to be scared. Mills had kept up a running commentary for their benefit, but Ruth, Gus, and Doc Deb had been relegated to the crew cabin beneath the flight deck, blind in a box, an elevator in an earthquake.

  Ruth was definitely not superhuman. There had been a time, at the height of her success, when she would have accepted a bet to do this alone in radio silence or even strapped outside on the wing, damn it, but that brash steamroller of a girl had left her, giving way to claustrophobia and fear.

  Deborah gasped on the radio: “Derek, oh—”

  “Get back down that ladder.” Ulinov might have been asking for tea, his voice as composed as Mills’s had been.

  Impact.

  Once upon a time, postlanding operations had involved well over twenty specially designed vehicles and a hundred experts whose first action was to test the shuttle’s exterior for toxic and/or explosive residual gases such as hydrogen and nitrogen tetroxide. The astronauts remained inside while a Vapor Dispersal Unit fanned away potential hazards, and soon afterward Purge and Coolant Vehicles began a more thorough job of making the shuttle safe. The payload bay especially, where Ruth’s records and nanotech gear were stored, tended to fill with fumes.

  Leadville had only a jury-rigged wind machine and civilian firefighting trucks. The NASA team had been anxious about dealing with a successful touchdown.

  Ruth was inside a bomb.

  One spark from a sheared wire, or the terrible heat of the engines—it was crucial to escape the vehicle that had saved them. There was no chance Endeavour would be obliterated in a titanic ball of flame, since most of the excess fuel was burned off during reentry as a safety precaution, but a flash fire would still roast them well enough.

  Gus opened the hatch and Ruth shoved against him as the massive coin of the door dropped down, sticking out from the side of the shuttle like a round plank. Normally it would have been ten feet above ground but the Endeavour seemed to have ridden up a hill, so that although this side of the craft tipped down, the gouged earth dropped away to match. Below them were green shrubs, torn and smashed— The peeled-apart tire of a car— And two men in black firefighter jackets, yelling and waving their arms—

  Ruth shoved again but Gus stayed in the opening to deploy the thermal apron, which would protect them from the hot exterior tiles. And in those unbearable extra seconds, the conversation in her helmet at last penetrated her lunatic fear.

  Ulinov: “Evacuate Dr. Goldman now.”

  “Your leg.” Deb again. “Bill?”

  “I’m busy.”

  “Get back down that ladder.”

  Deb said, “I need help up here.”

  “No. Evacuate now.”

  “Okay, go go go,” Gus said, and he went through. The two firefighters had been joined by a soldier and an EMT in white, all of them shouting and waving.

  The bravery of these men was striking. They had run toward the bomb. Without equipment, without any of their plans intact, they had run into danger for her.

  Deb’s voice was matter-of-fact. “I have three wounded on the flight deck, one critical.”

  Ruth could have saved herself. She should have. It was exactly how they’d trained for this moment—yet she hesitated at the brink of safety.

  Like the first responders on the ground outside, the ISS crew had gambled everything for her. They had sacrificed their families and their homes. Gus and Ulinov had abandoned their countries just to serve her. If she left them now, she might never recover from the decision. The impulse to sabotage the space station and force this landing, no matter that she hadn’t acted on it, had damaged her in ways that could never be erased.

  For one instant Ruth gauged the balance inside herself, but there was never really a choice.

  She turned back inside. The men below her wouldn’t be able to help, not immediately. Lord knew where the shuttle had come to rest but clearly it was a disaster outside. They might need several minutes just to reach the hatch.

  Ruth slipped and banged her faceplate against the inter-deck ladder. Her body didn’t work right. It was unbelievable that she’d ever been so heavy. The ladder leaned over her like a wave and she was forced to wedge both hands and one foot into the rungs before raising her other leg to keep climbing.

  “Ruth! Ruth, jump!” That was Gus, apparently on the ground now and looking for her at the side hatch.

  She froze with her head above the floor of the flight deck. She saw glass and dirt blasted over the cockpit—wet crumbly brown dirt—and heaved herself up on a new flood of adrenaline.

  Riding copilot, Bill Wallace leaned past what looked like two bodies to reach the pilot’s panel. Derek Mills had been rolled up in his seat, up despite the downward-tilting floor, by a crumpled shaft of metal jammed through the windshield. It was the twisted roof of the ambulance that the Endeavour had carried over the embankment.

  Blood covered Wallace’s arm, some of which must have been his own. Shrapnel had flayed open the elbow and shoulder of his i
nsulated orange sleeve, wounding the arm he’d extended to complete his work. Emergency power-off. A complete shutdown of every onboard system was their best chance to prevent a fire and the man left with this responsibility had never formally trained as a pilot.

  “Hurry!” Ruth screamed at him, at herself, at all of them.

  “Go back down. Evacuate.” Ulinov was still in his seat, directly beside Ruth at the rear wall of the flight deck. He had also taken shrapnel. His faceplate was partly masked by opaque chips and Deb slapped his gory knee with one hand, hanging on to his seat with the other. The adhesive patch she’d put on his leg bulged as if there were other patches folded beneath it, pushed against his torn skin, a crude but effective pressure bandage despite the bulk of his suit.

  “Get him out,” Deb said to Ruth, gesturing. “Try to hold him so he doesn’t fall down the ladder.”

  Ulinov waved them off. “Your orders are to—”

  “Do it,” Deb said, imperious as ever, before she left Ulinov for Wallace. There hadn’t been time yet for Deb to work on Mills, and Ruth realized that he must be dead. The metal bulk nestled into his lap and chest had hit him hard enough to bend his seat.

  “I gotcha,” Ruth promised Ulinov, grabbing his armrest with one trembling hand.

  Maneuvering on the crowded deck was like a puzzle. She hauled her legs out of the access hatch, then did her best to slow Ulinov as he left his chair and squeezed past her.

  “You go next,” Deb told Wallace, probing at his shoulder wounds, but Bill Wallace stayed in his seat. He slapped at a computer, either because it wasn’t responding or to clear away the debris, but he never even turned his head.

  Ruth hurt her back when Ulinov lost his footing at the top of the ladder. Bracing her feet against the wall on either side of his torso, she clenched his arm with a strength that seemed entirely mental. His blood had rubbed off onto her sleeves.