Plague War (38 page)

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 anymore.

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 1
^st
, 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 twisted 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.

Cam followed her. “Goddammit, wait,” he said, looking for Deborah’s eyes instead of Ruth’s. He was slowed by his ribs and Ruth had already limped to the next blowdown, grabbing for handholds among its jagged branches.

She’d been like this ever since Hernandez left them.

“You have to talk to her,” Cam said, striding alongside Deborah, but the tall blond only shrugged, almost indifferent.

“I think she’s right. We need to keep moving.”

“If she breaks her leg,” Cam said, raising his voice.

Suddenly Ruth stopped in front of them. Cam looked out across the hillside. Forty yards ahead, Estey had raised his hand, signaling for them across the snarled trees, mud, and water. In the space between, Goodrich and Ballard also stood waiting. The soldiers made three strong human shapes among the debris.

Cam waved back at Estey and said, to Ruth, “It’s stupid for you to walk in front. We have to get back to the others.”

But that wasn’t what had stopped her. She’d found a bird. “Oh,” Deborah said softly as Ruth knelt and reached for the pathetic creature.

The ‚nch couldn’t have been in the plague zone very long because it was still alive, although its feathers were molting from its belly and neck. It †opped weakly in the muck, trying to escape. It had no strength in its wings and it might have been blind, too. The bird’s eyes were a cloudy blue-white that Cam had never seen before.

“This way!” Estey yelled, and Cam waved again, although he wasn’t sure if Ruth would obey. She hesitated with her gloves on either side of the bird. He thought she must not have seen the bloated chipmunks they’d passed ‚fteen minutes ago, two little bodies that had washed down the mountainside together. The chipmunks would have stopped her, too, and he preferred her wild impatience.

Ruth could be careless of her own safety when she was manic, but it also made her dangerous to anything in her way. They couldn’t afford for her to fall apart. They needed to harness her expertise one more time—and they were still an hour from their rendezvous. Cam hoped to God she’d make it.

“Look at him,” she said. She meant the bird.

“We need to go,” Cam said, and Deborah added, “Ruth, the sun’s coming up.”

“Right.” She didn’t move at ‚rst. “You’re right. It’s just a fucking bird.” Ruth stood up and pushed past them with her trembling, ‚lthy gloves.

They were on foot because Hernandez had driven back to Sylvan Mountain, both to rejoin the base and as a decoy for enemy satellites. His trucks were far more likely to attract attention than a handful of people, especially since his vehicles were moving toward the front. If there was an attack, Hernandez wanted to draw the ‚re to himself. He was buying time. He’d organized a †ight of helicopters to take Ruth north again, but he didn’t want to risk a pickup too close to Sylvan Mountain. The Chinese had too many guns focused on the area. The invaders had also continued to push their advantage in the air war. Helicopters would be vulnerable no matter what he did, but Hernandez intended to lead a massive counteroffensive to push the Chinese back. A diversion.

You just make sure you do your best,
Hernandez had said as Ruth leaned over his forearm, jabbing the inside of his arm with a needle that she immediately sank into her own wrist. That was why she was so upset. It was clear that Hernandez didn’t expect to see the outcome of her work, and Cam thought he would probably ask all of his sickest men and women to follow him in the front waves of the assault. Cam thought they would say yes.

The worst that Ruth faced were scratches or a turned ankle, and she seemed eager to hurt herself, shoving through the branches and mud. They were incubating. They’d dropped below the barrier forty minutes ago and the perfected vaccine would beat out the earlier model, swiftly multiplying as it was ‚rst to disassemble the plague. At the same time, the booster nano should help protect them against the radiation.

Hernandez would give his life for hers. With more time in the labs in Grand Lake, Ruth had the ability to turn the war in their favor by improving the booster nano. There seemed to be no limit to what it could do. Accelerating a man’s capacity to heal was only the beginning. She might be able to double their strength, their re†exes, their sight. But as always the problem was contamination. If they could pass an improved booster among themselves, they would inevitably spread it to the enemy. Supersoldiers would have the advantage only for a short period before the enemy rose up with the same new traits. The United States would need to launch their new attacks in a single coordinated thrust, if there was time—if there were still enough Americans left.