Plague Year

by Jeff Carlson

  19

  “They’re sending another search team to California,” Aiko said, propping her hip and both hands against the work counter too close to Ruth.

  Ruth tipped back in her chair. “Where did you hear that?”

  “Everywhere. It’s for real. And this time a few of us have to go with the soldiers—they’re deciding who right now.”

  Aiko Maekawa was a gossip, soft-voiced but insistent. Timberline had an incomparable rumor mill—too many big brains, Ruth supposed, all of them trained to hypothesize— and Aiko seemed to pride herself on being one of the main vectors of information. It let her be first, let her act the discoverer with each new person she approached. Lord knew she wasn’t adding much to the development of the ANN.

  The girl was very bright, and tireless and accomplished, and she had lost her mind all those months ago when her parents and two sisters didn’t make it out of Manhattan.

  That was the dirt on Aiko, at least.

  This morning was Ruth’s eighth day in the labs. She usually just nodded and let Aiko talk at her. Any remarks only prolonged the disruption, because Aiko confused attention with approval and enjoyed repeating the highlights of each story—and Ruth didn’t always think it was smart to be talking.

  The labs were riddled with listening devices.

  Most of what Aiko had to say was harmless—Ted had a thing for Trish, a married woman; the onions mixed into last night’s pasta were fresh, from below the barrier—but even then Ruth resented the distraction.

  The makeshift labs were already chaotic, overcrowded, every surface jammed with machining hardware, PC and Mac monitors arranged in stacks, all of it steel and chrome and plastic.

  Prominent in the cleared space before Ruth now stood a multimode scope fitted with an atmosphere hood. These glass sheaths were designed for experiments in gaseous environments, but in this case had been connected to a simple air compressor. It also contained a fluid-heating unit set at body temperature.

  She sat within inches of active, living locusts.

  “You know what happened to the last mission, right?” Aiko glanced across the lab at Vernon Cruise, to make sure he wasn’t eavesdropping. Aiko would go through her little song and dance as many times today as possible.

  “They ran out of air and barely got off the ground,” Ruth said, hoping to avoid a gory rehash.

  It was an uncharitable thought, but she suspected Aiko’s love of bombshells stemmed in part from her looks. Beautiful girls grew up differently than everyone else. The way they were adored had a distinct formative effect, turning many of them into show-offs of one kind or another. Aiko was fairly disgusting about it, always trying to position herself in front of her victim, man or woman.

  Ruth resembled a white pillow person in her wrinkled lab suit, with no discernible breasts and only a trace of hip. Aiko was too willowy to show anything either, yet she had a long sculpted neck and almond skin and dark, exotic eyes. A contest between her and Doc Deb would have been no contest.

  “At least two of us have to go,” Aiko said. “This week for sure, as soon as possible.”

  “What happened?” Ruth asked despite herself. “I mean, why now?” Maybe the FBI teams had reworked the sales records and pinpointed a new location.

  “There’s already a big stink in the parasite team,” Aiko continued, teasing out her information. “They’re sure some of their people will get picked since they’re the farthest behind.”

  Ruth frowned. The situation in Timberline was remarkably like things had been aboard the space station, divisive and cold. During the past week she had seen many of the scientists here act as cruel to each other as only family can be, deriding rival concepts, trading insults over who was to blame for disorder or contamination in the shared labs.

  Ruth tried not to care. Ruth had done her best to close herself to it all, using a smile and easygoing humor like a lab suit against the interpersonal grime.

  Maybe if things had gone better with Ulinov, she would have felt differently. Maybe if...

  But it was easier to limit her vision to the microscope. Easier to limit herself and stay uninvolved. She’d rather be lonely. She was used to that, at least.

  She’d even ignored a conspicuous slap in the face.

  While she was still in the hospital, Gary LaSalle and his development team had downloaded her files and begun examining everything they thought they could use. Before she was shown around Timberline, they’d run the first of several new refining trials on her machining atomic force microscope.

  Ruth wouldn’t have waited either. That wasn’t the issue. She had hoped to solidify her name and reputation by formally presenting her research, and by showing off the MAFM and customized application modules—but she’d realized it wasn’t safe to complain. She’d always meant to share her work anyway.

  LaSalle wasn’t sharing. The council had awarded him exclusive round-the-clock rights to her gear, at least initially, as well as first access to her records.

  It was a rejection of everything Ruth had done.

  Since the first days of the plague, she’d aligned herself with the hunter-killer group. In concept the HK ANN was a true weapon, specific and controlled. They had yet to perfect their discrimination key but the HK worked, if inefficiently.

  As much a chemical reaction as a machine, LaSalle’s “snowflake” ANN operated on natural atomic bonding. It disabled locusts by pulling them into nonfunctional clusters. Each compacted bunch then recombined around the original seed and shed more artificially weighted grains, which would attract other locusts—and since early April, LaSalle had conducted nineteen successful tests in lab conditions.

  The HK ANN also tested out in prearranged environments, but with a best target rate of 58.8 percent. LaSalle’s bug simply clotted everything within the test chamber.

  Ruth had not been the only one to point out the obvious danger. Other prominent names in Timberline had raised the same objections, yet LaSalle insisted his snowflake would only affect locusts because it was fundamentally incapable of exerting force on larger, more complex molecular structures. Ruth didn’t understand how he could make that claim, although she hadn’t seen schematics of the snowflake since early March.

  No one outside his group had seen anything recent either.

  The development teams had normally been open with each other, because peer review was their only safeguard. That had changed, however, after the council gave LaSalle priority two months ago. A reorganization of the labs had isolated LaSalle’s group on the third-floor wing, which they now claimed entirely. His people couldn’t avoid the other scientists in the residence hall, yet they were close-mouthed about their progress.

  Ruth didn’t believe the council would be overconfident, not after everything that had happened. Their decision implied that LaSalle had indeed run favorable tests with rats or weeds and other things exposed to the snowflake.

  Still, she trusted her instincts. LaSalle’s bug could not work as advertised. It might disrupt the molecular integrity of all organic beings—mammal, insect, plant, even bacteria. Nothing would ever live on this world again.

  She needed a breakthrough now more than ever. There was no other option. It was too easy for nontechnical people to hear only what they wanted, and without something new to wow the president’s council, without any shred of progress, she might never make them listen.

  She glanced pointedly at her scope but Aiko was still reciting complaints. “It’s not fair. All of us are busy. If someone has to go, it shouldn’t be—”

  Ruth ducked her head so that eye contact was impossible and made a business of worming her index finger into her cast. The itch of her unwashed skin was real but Aiko’s reaction was more important.

  Aiko raised her voice, trying to recapture Ruth’s attention. “They’re talking to somebody out there on the radio.”

  Ruth looked up.

  “It’s true. I swear.” Aiko’s dark eyes were intent on Ruth’s face. “
A guy who helped put the locust together managed to get to a mountain with a radio. He’s alive, just barely, but his story totally checks out and he swears he can lead us to their records, their gear, everything.”

  “Holy shit.”

  Aiko laughed. “I knew you—”

  “Vernon,” Ruth called, “hey, Vernon, have you heard anything about this?”

  Aiko blinked, her lips parting in surprise and hurt. Then she took a step back as if to shield Ruth from their colleague as he turned his head from a pressurized isolation system.

  Vernon Cruise was a smallish man, five-nine, with thick sandy hair and glasses. He acted the grandfather to many people here, being old enough to retire, and was rightly proud of his contributions in mapping the locust’s structure. Too bad he’d tried to tell Ruth all about it on her third day, and again on her fourth, pushing his laptop and his printouts in her face when she was hot to familiarize herself with the bug on her own.

  They could have been friends, but Ruth remained leery. It wasn’t just the monitoring devices—any of her lab mates might be doubling as a spy for the president’s council, to stay in favor, to earn extra food or cigarettes.

  Ulinov had done her a favor. Ulinov had made it all too clear where she stood in this place.

  “The army’s sending another plane to California!” Aiko blurted, before Ruth could say anything else. “The guy who built the locust is still alive.”

  Vernon’s eyebrows went up but Ruth didn’t bother to contain a rude sound. “Hah.” Already this mystery man had gone from being a member of the research team to the lead designer, and so the rumor would grow.

  “I hope it really is him,” she said.

  Hurrying to James’s office took most of her strength. If he’d been on a different floor, Ruth would have needed to sit and rest. She had been in physical therapy for six days now, mere stretching at first, then light weights and a treadmill. She hated to break up her afternoons but recognized that she’d better rebuild her stamina if she was going to be mentally effective for more than a few hours at a time.

  “Not now—” James called as she pushed through his door.

  He was at his desk, spine straight, hands clasped together among the few papers set before him.

  Senator Kendricks sat in the only other chair, also stiffly. “Well, speak of the devil,” he said, turning his head and his white cowboy hat.

  Beyond them was a gorgeous day, a clean blue sky and the near horizon of snow-topped peaks. The windows in the labs were all boarded over, and Ruth still felt confused whenever she walked in here during the day and found a rectangular hole in the wall full of sunshine and mountains.

  “Dr. Goldman,” James said. His formal tone was a warning. “My office has a door for a reason.”

  “No, no.” Kendricks waved her in. “Might as well get her side of it.” He stood, gesturing to his chair. “Please. I know you’re still getting your legs back.”

  She didn’t object. Let him do this tiny favor. Were they talking about California?

  “Missed you the other day,” Kendricks said.

  Ruth smiled, a loathsome new reflex. She found herself being more and more false. “I hear it went great.”

  There had been a parade after all, two days ago, but Major Hernandez suggested it wasn’t worth the risk of driving her into town and Ruth was glad not to waste the time. She was glad, too, to avoid Ulinov and Gus and Deb. It would have been satisfying to thank Bill Wallace personally, but he had yet to be released from the hospital.

  “It was more than great,” Kendricks said. “It was— It was something. Everybody cheering. Everybody coming together.”

  She nodded and forced another smile.

  “You should have been there. All of you. Might have done your hearts some good, see what you’re working for.”

  Pep rallies during the apocalypse. Crap. But it was possible, even likely, that Kendricks understood people better than Ruth. Morale inside the labs was erratic at best, and they had enough to eat and showers and lights and the chance to ignore the world beyond these guarded walls. How much worse was it in town, in the tents and trailers, in the mines? It was damned cynical to assume that the council had staged a celebration for the sole reason of bolstering their own leadership.

  And yet she’d also had a new thought about their decision to change the calendar, declaring this Year One. Plague Year. The phrase was sensible and right and deeply manipulative all at the same time, if you looked at it from a certain angle—and Ruth found herself doubting everything now.

  It was top-notch public relations, deceptive and smart. It played on expectations and fear and hope. It was a way to give the Leadville government even more legitimacy, to make themselves ever more necessary and important.

  “I think everyone in the labs is getting close to some real success,” she said, thinking to steer the conversation toward Aiko’s rumor. “I honestly do. We just need a few more pieces to fall into place.”

  “Well, that’s what we were talking about. Putting things in place.” Kendricks rolled his head toward James and said, “Gary LaSalle has a high opinion of you, Miz Goldman, and James here has been saying the same thing for a long time.”

  Oh Lord. Ruth cut her gaze away from Kendricks for one instant but James didn’t react, his watchful brown eyes framed by his short brown hair and short brown beard.

  Kendricks said, “We’d like you to join Mr. LaSalle’s team.”

  “No way.”

  James winced, a barely perceptible shift of posture, but Kendricks just shrugged. “I know you’re not on the bandwagon, Miz Goldman. But I want to appeal to your patriotism.”

  “Sir, that has...” She shook her head. “I worked for the Defense Department with full clearance. It’s not fair for you to...” It didn’t matter what was fair. She tried again. “I’m totally committed to our work here.”

  “That’s what we need. Total commitment.”

  “LaSalle’s bug is wildly dangerous, sir. I’m not the only one who’s been saying it.”

  James interjected, leaning over his desk, in a tone that remained uncharacteristically formal. “There are some aspects of the situation you’re not aware of, Dr. Goldman.”

  Kendricks turned on him. “Don’t you say another word.”

  “If it’s about the guy in California,” Ruth said, “the rumor’s already going around.”

  James shook his head. No.

  Kendricks continued to watch him for a moment before looking back at Ruth. “We’ll see how California plays out, if that man can do what he says. But we have bigger problems.”

  “How could— Bigger? Than beating the locust?”

  “The Chinese have developed weapons application nanotech,” Kendricks said. “You’re not okayed for any of this but Jesus Christ, I wonder what goes through your mind that you won’t cooperate with us after everything that’s happened. Do you realize we barely survived the plague year at all?”

  That phrase again. He used it intentionally, like a gun, threatening and prodding her.

  She was right. She had always been right. LaSalle’s snowflake would not function as an ANN, affecting only the locust, and the council no longer intended to use it as such.

  It would be a matchless weapon, given a strict governor to keep it from proliferating without end—and in her records, among the things she’d worked out during her endless wait aboard the space station, had been the basics of a control.

  Ruth tried misdirection. “I couldn’t help LaSalle even if I wanted to. My expertise is in a completely different field. It’s apples and oranges.”

  “Now that’s not true,” Kendricks said, tilting his head again. “He says your ideas have been a big help.”

  So she would always own a part of it, if something happened. Lord God. The perfect weapon of mass destruction, more killing power than a nuke and no fallout or contamination.

  It would be easy to safely deliver the snowflake, capsules kicked out of a helicopte
r, bomblets from a jet, American aircraft low over occupied Himalaya with a hundred thousand people reduced to jelly in each thundering wake . . .

  Her heart beat so hard she felt her upper body rocking, a palsy of rising shame and anger.

  Kendricks said, “I know you two aren’t friendly. Let’s say we don’t put you directly under LaSalle. Work together, but be your own boss.”

  As if her ego was the problem.

  “That’s crazy. You’re crazy.” She didn’t regret the words. “When we beat the locust it’s over, all the fighting. We save everybody and the fighting stops everywhere. We don’t need nano weapons! We can all go back down again.”

  Kendricks just looked at her, the lines in the tanned skin around his eyes deepening slightly.

  Ruth raised her voice. “We can all go back down again.”

  “I think it was a mistake,” Kendricks said, slowly, “to overprotect you people. The Chinese sure aren’t babying their technicians.” He turned to James, his chin and long hat brim aimed down in an aggressive posture. “Make her see. Tell her everything, whatever she needs to hear. This has got to happen.”

  James was respectful. “You’re a hundred percent right, Senator. Shifting gears like this, all at once, nobody here is ready for it. Our entire focus has been defensive since the beginning.” He glanced at Ruth. “It’s a lot to take in.”

  She tried to play along. “I just don’t understand. We’re so close. It’s crazy— It seems crazy to take us away from beating the locust now.”

  “You might be surprised,” James said, “to hear that the council evacuated the space station sooner than necessary not because of you but for Commander Ulinov.” His expression never changed, and Ruth marveled at his daring. She nodded quickly. She didn’t trust herself to sound convincing. He said, “We’re joining the war in Asia, flying the Russians in to invade the Chinese before they complete their weapons tech. The Russians insisted on having Ulinov here as their representative.”

  “But so what? What does any of that matter if we can all live below ten thousand feet again?”

  James made his shrugging sound, mm-mah, signaling her that he didn’t really believe what he was about to say. “First, there’s no guarantee we’ll ever beat the locust. And second, the council has good reason to believe the fighting won’t stop even if we do.”