by Jeff Carlson
Kendricks nodded, grimly pleased by James’s performance. “Things are too far gone. It’s been total war for too long.”
“There have always been wars,” Ruth said.
“Not like this. Not with whole nations thrown on top of each other.” He flexed his small hands, squinting past her at the window. “Not with armies eating each other’s dead and keeping prisoners like cattle.”
“. . . what?”
His eyes came back to her. “You people aren’t the only ones who’ve been studying the locust, Goldman.” Kendricks had never called her doctor, and now forgot even the questionable honorific of miz. “They’ve been learning over there, too. We’ve been watching them close.”
The spy satellites, Ulinov’s cameras.
“It’s going to be us or them,” Kendricks said, “whichever side can strike first. They’ll wipe out everyone else. I mean everybody.”
One world. One people. She could see how the simplicity of this notion would appeal to a certain mind-set, especially after so much conflict and atrocity—and the chance had never been so attainable, with every enemy reduced to a fraction of their former numbers and gathered tightly together.
The victor could never forget the plague, not with so many animal species extinct and the environment crashing as it sought new balance, but they could forget recorded history.
It would truly be a new start. One culture. One peace.
Year One.
And yet James had made it clear that he did not agree with Kendricks, hinting at further complications. Fuck fuck fuck. Maybe he wanted her taken into the council’s confidence, brought into the weapons labs, only to divert and delay LaSalle’s progress. She could prevent an escalation to nano warfare long enough for the other scientists to beat the locust. Wheels within wheels. Where would it stop?
Ruth turned to her friend. James nodded. So she looked Kendricks in the eye and said, “Okay, I’ll do it.”
20
Her descent from orbit could not match the distances that Ruth had gone within herself. She would never help Kendricks prepare for a first strike. She had put her life into helping people, if for selfish reasons, for career gains, and for her own gratification—and the tragedies of the past year had sharpened this vague altruism into something like a fever.
She thought of Bill Wallace again, his body ripped open, staying at the controls of the Endeavour.
If she’d read James right, if she’d correctly anticipated his plan for her to become a mole inside the weapons labs, it would have been smarter to say nothing more after giving Kendricks her lie. But she had to know.
“What about California?” she asked.
“Well, we all have big hopes.” The tension was noticeably going out of Kendricks and he bobbed his head in one of his contrived, friendly gestures.
Ruth persisted. “This guy is definitely who he says he is? I mean, where’s he been all this time?”
James looked at Kendricks for permission, then turned and grinned, a rare flash of teeth splitting his neat beard. “I talked to him myself. His name is Sawyer.”
She didn’t have to ask if James thought he was for real.
They got rid of her. Kendricks said he wanted to be back in town in an hour and had more to discuss with James.
He offered his hand before she left. They murmured polite nonsense, glad you’re on board and yes, sir, and Ruth found that the charade was easy enough.
She strode back to Lab Four automatically, then almost walked on past. She almost went down to her room, to bed, to close her eyes and sort through her thoughts. But this might be her last chance to do anything productive.
Vernon Cruise cornered her again thirty minutes later, waddling back into the lab with a laptop and several folders. What in the world was this guy’s problem?
Ruth supposed that word had spread. Vernon must have figured it was his final opportunity to show off before she moved upstairs to LaSalle’s group. In a way it was flattering, and the smile she gave the old man was genuine. She wanted him to have his little moment. “Hey there,” she said.
Vernon’s gaze flicked to the other two people in the lab, exactly as Aiko had done to make sure she wasn’t being overheard. Not long ago Ruth might have seen some humor in that. Instead, irritation crept into her feelings of tired goodwill.
“I know you wanted to get an unprejudiced look at the bug,” Vernon said, “but give this a glance.”
“I hear it’s really great.”
Vernon huffed, impatient, and Ruth managed to keep from rolling her eyes as she accepted three hefty folders.
He’d put the memo where she couldn’t miss it, on top inside the first cover, a single page identical to the rest, with the same ordinary computer type, but the first line made her pulse jump up against her ribs.
“If you’re caught with this we’re all dead.”
Ruth stared at him. Vernon’s expression was... scornful? He had tried to establish a conduit of information for her almost from the beginning, though he hadn’t been so bold as now. He hadn’t been so desperate. It was a juvenile trick—No, it had all the sophistication of grade school, passing notes, but the listening devices throughout Timberline couldn’t hear a piece of paper. Too bad she’d been too busy. It was almost funny—it was sad and awful—how often she’d been too busy in her life.
The memo was from James. Ruth was sure of that. She recognized his confident delivery, and halfway through it resumed their earlier conversation about the man in California.
Her heartbeat was in her neck now and in her broken arm. “Absolutely,” she said.
Ruth stayed in Lab Four after Vernon left with her yes, pretending to read through the other folders. She wondered if he’d burn the memo. That seemed too conspicuous, an open flame. The conspirators couldn’t run around routinely torching papers or someone would notice. Maybe he’d go straight to the bathrooms, drop it in the tank. Every week the soldiers hauled away five hundred pounds of scientist poop for the farms. Sure. Vernon was always muttering about his bladder.
She had to believe he’d take care of it. Their lives were both on the line. There was nothing on the paper to identify her specifically if Vernon was caught, but Kendricks would know. What would they do? March her into the courtyard and shoot her?
In another hour it wouldn’t matter.
In an hour she’d be on the plane to California.
James owned more of the truth than Kendricks wanted any of them to know, the least of which was that Gary LaSalle had already developed a crude governor for his snowflake, using Ruth’s ideas and machining gear to complicate its structure.
Because his ANN had no programming, the only way to retard its replication process was to burden it with additional demands. The new, larger snowflakes were more stable than the original. They tended to glom on to each other as well as foreign mass, after which the chain reaction broke down as they became encased in free carbon of their own making—
The assault had gone much as Ruth envisioned, U.S. jet fighters spilling canisters that broke open on impact, a flourish of death that quickly died itself. Almost too quickly. In time, an improved version would be even more powerful. But they hadn’t dusted the Chinese. China was years behind the design teams here in Timberline, and posed a significant conventional threat to its neighbors, yet nothing more.
Yesterday the council had given orders to hit the White River Plateau, the breakaway westward toward Utah.
Yesterday their quiet war had become something else.
Most of the U.S. spy satellites were controlled by Leadville, and coverage overhead was regular if not constant. White River must have known they were inviting an attack by preparing their own flight to the coast. They had no nanotech teams and in fact were short on basics like shelter and electricity, but the man in California would be an invaluable hostage and bargaining chip. They’d obviously decided it was worth the gamble, although they could not have anticipated such a weapon.
After the strike, after ending any race to California, Leadville broadcast a warning to whatever remained of the rebel leadership. Leadville intended the warning for everyone. This man, Sawyer—he belonged in the capital.
White River had been an object lesson.
Ruth stopped paging through the second folder and actually looked at the diagrams there. Vernon hadn’t given her these print-outs for show. This was a working file. The laptop he’d left must be similarly packed with data. She probably had a copy of everything they’d learned about the locust.
That would be too much information for him to have compiled by himself, unless he and James had been hoarding it together all this time, which seemed unlikely. How many others were in on the scam? With only thirty-nine scientists including herself, there couldn’t be many left who weren’t either spies for the council or allied with James and the conspiracy.
There was strength in that thought. She wasn’t alone.
She hadn’t been here long enough to gauge how far things had developed, but her guess was that most would side with James. These people were too clinical in their thinking, too independent, and every mentor in their lives had tried to instill a powerful sense of responsibility in them.
Ruth glanced at her lab mates again as she walked to her computer, but she had no way to know if either of them was aligned with her, no word, no signal.
Computer discs were strictly rationed. Ruth had just three for herself but there were others on a shelf, labeled Iso and Plas286 in a looping cursive. She blanked them both. Then she downloaded her current analysis and everything else she’d done in the past week.
She might have told Vernon yes even if the note had ended with White River’s fate, but there was more. There was worse.
The man in California swore he could beat the locust, given his equipment and a few capable assistants—yet he had no interest in improving their ANN. He had no plans to attack the invisible sea at all. The process of sweeping the planet clean might require years, he said, a figure Ruth couldn’t dispute, and there was no guarantee it could be thorough. To repopulate an environment like that would risk encountering pockets of the locust that the ANN had missed, and new plagues.
He intended to take advantage of the locust’s versatility.
The machine was biotech, as Ruth suspected. Its designers had hoped to teach it to isolate and destroy malignant tissues, dosing each patient with an individually keyed batch inside a sealed chamber—and when its work was done, they would spin a dial and drop the pressure, and out came the patient free of cancer and free of nanos.
He said he could reverse-engineer a new version of the locust, shorn of most of that extra capacity and therefore quicker, more responsive. With the work they’d already done on their discrimination key, he said he could create a model that would live inside a human host, powered by body heat, and disable the original locusts as they were inhaled or otherwise absorbed.
Targeting only the original locust type, using only those specific materials to replicate, it would be like an ANN on the inside, a vaccine, proof against the machine plague.
And it would spread poorly except by direct injection. The council could use this new nano to literally control the world, giving it only to a select population, ensuring loyalty, handing out territory and establishing colonies below the barrier as they saw fit. All of Earth. The prize was too sweet, after too much hardship, and they could secure it as easily as turning their backs, not an effort but a lack of one. Every dissident, every rebel, every other remaining nation—in less than a generation the squabbling, starving millions trapped in the highlands would dwindle into a few grubby tribes unless perhaps they agreed to come down as servants and slaves.
Kendricks would have his one world, one peace, one people.
Aiko almost blew it for them, shouting in the courtyard. “Ruth! Hey, Ruth, you didn’t get tapped, did you?”
She should have known there would be a crowd. It wasn’t that there was much to see—two jeeps and a truck, some different uniforms—but the days here were especially monotonous for the families of the scientists. These people were the lucky ones, well fed, protected, and they fought over the few chores available to them—gardening, laundry, water detail.
The confinement had been hardest on the seven children. The fifty-four civilians were allowed only in their rooms, the gym, the cafeteria, and outside on sixty feet of sidewalk and dirt. Ruth guessed that more than half had gathered along the building, as well as a dozen techs. Damn.
“Wait!” Aiko hollered. “Hey, Ruth, wait!”
She quit edging through the crowd just to get Aiko to shut her mouth. It was noon, the white sun hard on the olive drab trucks and green men, the spectators caught in a band of shadow under the building’s eaves.
Aiko caught up but took an extra step too close. “I told you, didn’t I? I told you.” She seemed to have forgotten that she was mad, her dark eyes glinting with excitement. “Are you going along?”
“With this arm? How could I fit in a containment suit?” Ruth flopped her cast in its sling.
“Then what’s in the duffel bag?”
“Files and a laptop.” That was true. Give her something juicy. “D.J. screwed up and left the diagnostics upstairs, so I get to play nursemaid on the ride down. James wants to make sure they really have everything before they take off.”
That almost made sense, and Aiko loved it. “What a shit assignment. Do you know who the other losers are?”
“I’ll tell you later,” Ruth said, stepping through the boundary from shadow to sun. She didn’t look back.
They should have waited for lunch. With everyone in the cafeteria, there would have been few witnesses—and Ruth was hungry again, always hungry after the small portions. It should have been an insignificant worry, but she couldn’t shake it. Was she going to have to skip a meal?
Unfortunately, James had had no control over the timetable.
James could only shape the situation to the limit of his authority. The expedition would include three techs, and Kendricks had visited this morning in part to confirm names. The council had no reason to rely solely on this man Sawyer. He was an unknown, and he refused to tell them the location of his lab until they’d come for him, and soldiers couldn’t be expected to identify everything of importance among his gear and computers. The dilemma was whom to send. Risking the best and brightest was unthinkable, but sending low-level assistants or the ineffectual was a risk of another sort. They might miss something.
James had haggled with Kendricks over who could be spared versus who could do the job. He had agreed with the senator, and then he had drawn up a different manifest altogether.
“Goldman, check.” The captain’s orders were already well creased, perfectly creased, and he folded the sheet into his chest pocket. “Where have you been, ma’am? We’re running late.”
“Sorry.” She’d hoped to rush out and avoid Major Hernandez. The security chief might wonder why one of Timberline’s premier eggheads had been included and insist on making a call even though she was on the list. “Can you help me up?”
The truck bed was level with her chest. Three of the men in back had quickly stepped forward, taking her bag, reaching for her, but Ruth only had one arm.
Their fatigues were newer and cleaner than any she’d seen yet, and camouflage instead of the olive drab of Timberline’s security detail. Hernandez and the others were Marines, she had learned. These men were Army Special Forces.
The captain half crouched and laced his fingers together over his knee, palms up, making a step for her. When he straightened, Ruth waggled her cast with all the grace of a chicken. She hadn’t expected him to hoist her up, but he did it easily. She would have toppled if the soldiers in the truck hadn’t grabbed her good arm.
“Whoa, hey, we gotcha.” The nearest of them smiled, a light, honest, boy-meets-girl grin.
It didn’t matter that Prince Charming here probably flashed the same look at every female over seventeen. Ruth saw an opening. She couldn’t think of anything clever to say but that didn’t matter, you’re really strong or thanks guys would do the trick, start a friendship. Calculating, she smiled back, but there was a familiar voice behind her—
Major Hernandez. “Do we have it together, Captain?”
“Sir.”
She pushed against Charming, driven by a spike of panic, but of course her sneakers and jeans were obvious among their boots and forest camouflage.
“Dr. Goldman,” Hernandez said.
She thought of the story she’d told Aiko, that she was only riding down to the airport and back. But the captain had just checked her off on the manifest. She could hardly use that lie in front of him, and otherwise her mind was blank.
“We need to reach California before sunset,” Hernandez said, looking up at her, “and nobody wants to wait another day. I’ll expect you to do a better job of working with the group from now on. Understood?”
Ruth nodded dumbly and let out her breath.
They planned to do what White River had not—to keep Sawyer and his work from the council. They planned to divert north to Canada, develop the vaccine nano on their own, then spread it far and wide.
The substitution game would have been impossible for James to pull off alone. He had zero influence over the military command, and three scientists could hardly outfight or escape an escort of elite troops.
Some or most of their escort would be on their side.
James was not alone. Nor was he the top leader of the conspiracy. James had only hinted at this and hadn’t dared to put a name on paper—there had been no names at all—yet Ruth had to believe it was one of the top generals if this person could switch units as he saw fit. At first glance it seemed odd that a military man would object to the council’s actions, but Ruth suspected that career army were indoctrinated with much the same ethics as everyone in nanotech.