Plague War (10 page)

Hernandez had only limited information, which he knew was intentional, another kind of leash. He was a career man and he smiled thinly at the traditional foot soldier’s complaint:
I am but a mushroom. They keep me in the dark and feed me bullshit
.

Leadville wanted him to have no other options. Leadville had seen far too many deserters, so they not only intended to keep every ‚eld commander short on food and dependent on them. They also wanted their people to know as little as possible: the reasons for the war, and whether it was being won or lost. Hernandez had been ordered to maintain radio silence and quarantine, supposedly to prevent the rebels from discovering his location, but also to deafen him to the other side’s propaganda. They were all American. They all had the same equipment. The leadership had put Hernandez and other southern front commanders on frequencies once used by the Navy, yet it would be simple enough to listen to the enemy. To talk.

Lucy McKay was here to decrypt any messages received from Leadville and to encode their own reports. Back in town, there were a thousand techs like her combing radio traf‚c across the continent for patterns and clues. A thousand more studied intercepts from all over the world. Most of the civilian and military communications satellites were still up there above the sky and Leadville was top-heavy with personnel from agencies like the NSA, CIA, DIA, FBI, and smaller intelligence groups like those of various state police.

The rebels had those experts, too. Hackers on both sides had fought to lock out, retake, or destroy the satellites. The information war was just as real as the bullets and bombs.

Sitting beside Gilbride, Hernandez was careful not to turn and look at the radio. Was it possible that McKay had heard something she wasn’t supposed to? Could she have made transmissions? He left the tent for hours at a time and there was so little for anyone to do in this goddamned place. The temptation must be huge. All of her training, the whole reason she’d been assigned to his command, was to be a radioman—and there was no question in his mind that she and Gilbride had a secret.

Hernandez breathed in from his mug, reluctant to ‚nish it. The coffee had cooled but its taste was a luxury, as was the rich, bitter smell. In a way its goodness hurt. It touched the lonely feeling in his chest that he constantly fought to ignore.

He waded into the silence again. “We’ll do okay,” he said. “We always have, right?”

Gilbride only nodded, protecting his ragged throat.

“You know this hill is about the most forgotten corner of the map. It’s a vacation.” Hernandez laughed suddenly. The notion was absurb. “Hell, this is a garden spot,” he said. “We’ll probably sit out the whole war.”

He was babbling. He was scared, and Gilbride looked away from him as if ashamed.

There was real dissent among their Marines. The question wasn’t if there was a problem, but how bad was it? That it had reached the command tent told Hernandez a lot.

Over at Bunker 5, Gilbride had probably saved him from a confrontation he’d only begun to worry about. His troops were close to outright de‚ance. The injury to Kotowych could have been a catalyst. The more they saw themselves becoming hurt and sick, the quicker it would go. Tunis had said what many of his troops must be thinking. They wanted to stop working. They wanted to get out of here. Hernandez was lucky that word had spread in time for Gilbride to run to 5 and pull him away.

He drained his mug and stood up, losing the heat of his friend’s shoulder. Then he stepped to the door †ap, wrestling with his disappointment. He did not take a weapon. “Thank you,” he said cautiously, looking at the green fabric instead of Gilbride’s face. He tried to put as much meaning as possible into those two simple words.

“Sir,” Gilbride began, rasping.

Hernandez interrupted. “I need some air,” he said. “Just for a minute.”
I’m sorry,
he almost said, but there were too many ways to interpret an apology. Gilbride’s little sit-down had been an overture. Hernandez was sure of that now.

He drew open the tent’s zipper and ducked through, wincing at the change in temperature. A breeze had come up and the invisible cold swirled in and out of the rough shape of the trench. Then he closed the †ap, half-expecting Gilbride to follow. But no. Thank God. And there was no one waiting outside to stop him. So it was just an overture.

Frank Hernandez hiked away from the bunker, feeling very much like a man making an escape. At best it was only a delay, and quite likely a mistake. He didn’t want Gilbride to misunderstand.
It’s a mess.
But he didn’t go back. Not yet.

There were more troops out than usual, the work crews just returning. Laden with shovels and rock, they moved in twos and threes, heading for their shelters. Hernandez had no trouble avoiding them. He was trudging up while they were going down, but it felt like the wrong decision. Normally he went out of his way to exchange a few words or a smile, anything to bridge the space between of‚cer and enlisted.

He could see how the insurrection might have started. Each of his sergeants had three bunkers to supervise. That was as many as eighteen troops each, many of whom were on their own every night and for most of the day. If all of those men and women felt a certain way, one voice in opposition would not be enough, especially if that one person spoke up too late. It was a smaller model of what was happening to him now. The in†uence from below was too strong. A smart leader only chose directions in which his followers were willing to go. Pull too hard, and they might break away.

But what choice do we have except to stay?
he wondered.
Where else do they think we can go? Back to town?
They were under orders. They had a job to do, no matter how unlikely it was that they would actually be of use in the air war.

Hernandez stopped beside a hunk of granite. There was a thin, warmer spot against its face and he worked to slow his breathing, taking in the empty sky again. Then he turned and hiked to the nearest summit. The wind tore into him, humming over the low, storm-blasted nubs of rock. His pantlegs and sleeves slapped like †ags.

Talk to Gilbride,
he thought.
Settle him down. If I can convince him ‚rst, then the two of us can work on everyone else in the command tent. If there’s still time.

If a single trooper was impatient, if any one of them was too angry or tired or careless, it could force his hand. If someone refused an order, what would he do? He couldn’t spare anyone to put people in custody, much less assign guards. Even if the crisis didn’t break his command, it would kill his effectiveness.

Morale was bad now. Imagine if he had ten people locked down in one of the shelters and a rotation of at least two more holding them at gunpoint day after day.

I need more time.

He couldn’t see Leadville beyond the serrated peaks, although at night there was the faintest glow of electricity like a pink fog seated down in the earth. Still, he stayed. The compulsion was too strong. The need for certainty.

Things had been moving fast since the decision to abandon the space station. There had been rumors of a shake-up in the general staff and Hernandez still wondered what had happened to James Hollister. Did he get away or was he in custody? Or shot for treason? Hernandez suspected the president’s council was afraid of a coup.

He also wondered if the vaccine nano really worked. It must. Otherwise the rebels wouldn’t be pressing so hard, burning through their few resources...and without that immunity, Captain Young and the other traitors wouldn’t have run off into the graveyard of Sacramento and refused to surrender. Would they? Maybe they were dead. Maybe they’d been captured and were being held out in California or in Leadville itself. He didn’t know. That information had been tightly suppressed, because if it got out...If it was true...

The loyalty of the diverse troops surrounding Leadville was tied to the city’s riches as well as the habit of command, but mostly to its riches. There was nowhere better to go.

What if people could walk below the barrier again?

No. It was too easy to blame Leadville for everything. Even if the leadership changed, should they really be doing anything differently? Leadville had the best labs on the planet. They should control and develop the vaccine. Hernandez believed this. If the other new nano weapon was real, they should have it as well. The wars on the other side of the planet could spread here too easily. Habitable ground was too scarce, and there had to be a center to hold.

Not so long ago the president’s council had been true representatives of the people, duly and fairly elected. They had made the best they could out of a very bad hand of cards, and yet... And yet he respected too many of the men and women who’d worked against him, James Hollister and Captain Young, Ruth Goldman and the survivor, Cam.

Hernandez shifted miserably in the cold and saw one dark bird †itting through the wind. He wondered again. How would all of the squares and arrows on his maps begin to rearrange themselves if the vaccine spread? There had been too many atrocities for America to easily reunite as one nation. All of them had seen too many good reasons to hate, and there would still be populations on other continents who were desperate for the vaccine. The only real question was the scope of the con†ict to come, who against who, on what ground, and when. He could almost grasp the shape of it. In many ways the new tide would be as vicious and all-consuming as the machine plague itself, and he was aware that small units like his own could be a deciding factor in the civil war, adding their weight to the ‚nal balance.

Frank Hernandez still had to decide where he would stand.

Ruth lifted her binoculars and grimaced, sweating inside her goggles and mask. The three of them had found a patch of shade beside a FedEx truck, but it barely helped. The truck had been soaking up heat all morning and now it radiated warmth as well as the odd, pasty smell of the packages baking inside. Cardboard and glue. The crowded highway was like a stove top. For a day and a half the sky had been utterly still, the clouds forgotten. Spring seemed to be giving way to early summer and the land was hot and windless, the sun like a white torch. They tried to avoid the darkest vehicles. Ruth could feel a black car through her glove or her jacket just leaning against it. Repeated contact had left her good hand feeling raw and pink. The outsides of her thighs were almost as bad, her knees, her hips, anywhere that rubbed constantly in the maze of cars.

Aching, she peered at the rows of homes below the highway. There was only a small chance she’d learn anything, but so far small things had made the difference—and she could not pretend that the ugly fascination in her didn’t exist.

More than a mile away, a steel meteor had furrowed through two residential blocks, hurling shrapnel as it went. At least a dozen houses had exploded or slumped open, leaving only hunks of walls and ceilings and great drifts of white plaster and furniture. Here and there were also torn segments of metal. This was the booming they’d heard the day before, the missiles that had brought the plane down. The aircraft must have been closing on their rendezvous point on Highway 65, although they were not. They were past Rocklin now, farther east and north.

The debris ‚eld was lost in a tornado of bugs. Attracted to the blood and bodies strewn among the wreckage, ants and †ies †ooded the ground and pillared up into the air, lifting and swirling. The three of them had tried to avoid the storm without realizing what was causing it until Newcombe spotted the fuselage within the haze. The largest piece was most of the nose-end of a big C-17 Globemaster III cargo plane. It must be the aircarft that had carried the dead man they’d found yesterday, and it was nearly ten miles from that ‚rst corpse.

Lord God, my God,
she thought, trying not to imagine it. The plane coming apart. The men thrown away into the sky. There would be more craters wherever the other parts of the C-17 had slammed down. Even roasting inside her jacket, Ruth felt a chill. It didn’t matter that she hadn’t asked them to come. These men had died for her, and their heroism was something she could never repay.

She closed her eyes. She wanted to pray but she didn’t believe in it.
God
was only an emphatic word to Ruth. Still, going through the motions made her think of her step-father and his calm faith and then she was angry and jealous and she looked up again, her breath thick in her chest.

She reeked of gasoline and repellent. They all did. Cam had grown uneasy at the number of †ies persisting at them despite the perfume, bumping at their goggles, squirming to get inside their collars and hoods. He’d done the only thing he could think of to further conceal them. He’d soaked their jackets with fuel and entire bottles of bug repellent and it made the pain in Ruth’s head like a dull nail.

“What do you think?” Cam asked. “Forty guys? Fifty?”

“Let’s get out of here,” Newcombe said, hefting his pack. Then, too loudly, he turned back and said, “Yeah. Which means there were probably a hundred altogether.”

Scattered like the ‚rst man we came across,
Ruth thought, but she didn’t say anything. She didn’t want to provoke them. Cam and Newcombe were still learning to read each other as well as she understood the two men herself, and they clashed even when the argument was already said and done.

Ruth tried to end it before it started again. She hurried after Newcombe, and Cam fell in behind her. They hiked hard and fast, pushing themselves. Ruth saw the skeleton of a dog and a wad of money and then a red blouse that hadn’t faded at all. Otherwise the carnage was numbing—cars, bones, garbage, bones—and her mind caught in a loop as she struggled on.

A hundred men,
she thought.
A hundred more, dead for me.
She knew that wasn’t fair. Her role had always been defensive, reacting to the holocaust. She could never be blamed for the machine plague, but it felt like the truth. It felt like she should have done more. She should have done better.