Plague Year (25 page)

Casualties had been estimated at sixteen hundred, with several dozen more unlucky enough to have survived their wounds. The snowflake tended to liquefy the sinus cavity or lungs first.

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.

With great power comes great responsibility, and the sixteen hundred people killed in White River had been fellow Americans, or could have been again someday. Someday soon.

21

Ruth sat quietly through the short drive, head down, mouth shut. Fortunately, conversation was possible only in a yell. The big truck had no muffler and its shocks were blown. The slat benches in back rammed up or slammed down each time the wheels hit the slightest bump in the road, and she let the bass roar of the engine fill her head.

The airport was a dense and complicated scene, the short county runway surrounded by fat commercial airliners and smaller craft. Waiting on the tarmac now was a single-engine Cessna, civilian white and beige, and a much larger C-130 cargo transport painted olive drab.

They parked beneath the 130’s tail but could have driven straight in. The rear of the plane was open—it dropped down and became a loading ramp—with a jeep, a flatbed trailer, and a bulldozer lined up nose to rear within its long body.

Ruth saw no more troops or specialists waiting to join them among the USAF ground crews, so the expedition would total fewer than twenty. She was the only woman.

Hernandez, the ranking officer, dispatched five Special Forces and an Air Force pilot to the Cessna, then hustled everyone else into the massive C-130. Was he trying to keep on schedule or was he, like Ruth, afraid that a voice on the radio would cancel their mission before they were in the air?

Her fellow techs were Dhanumjaya Julakanti, better known as D.J., and Todd Brayton, both from the hunter-killer development team. Both had helped design the discrimination key.

She got the acknowledgment she needed in their eyes and a nod from D.J., but there was no way to talk. Hernandez insisted everyone sit together close behind the cockpit. The bulldozer, trailer, and jeep were chained to the deck, but if anything snapped free during takeoff, it would drop toward the tail. Smarter to be up front.

A knife of panic bit into her again when the plane lunged skyward. The interior was a long, dimly lit drum. No windows. Too much like the
Endeavour
. Worse, the web seats ran alongside the edges of the deck, facing the opposite wall rather than forward, so that the g-forces drew her stomach sideways.

Finally they leveled off. Always courteous, Major Hernandez unstrapped and knelt before the three techs. Ruth watched his face intently, alert for a wink, a word, a tipoff of any kind.

“I know this all seems thrown together,” he said, “but you’re in capable hands. I don’t want you to worry about anything except your job, okay?”

Hernandez and four Marines had been assigned to the expedition as their personal bodyguards, in addition to the seven men of the Special Forces team and three USAF pilots. Hernandez rattled off introductions, making a point of including the troops in the other plane—and Ruth noted that this handpicked group was all chiefs and no Indians, entirely sergeants and corporals. It also seemed top-heavy, with Hernandez and the Special Forces captain. A lieutenant colonel headed the trio of pilots.

D.J. said, “Seems to me you’re a little shorthanded.”

“No point wasting suits,” Hernandez told him, “or air, or jet fuel. And there isn’t going to be anyone else there, if that’s what you’re worried about.”

No
, Ruth thought.
Not after they dusted White River.
None of the few regions still capable of getting a plane off the ground would dare.

The small Cessna was flying ahead of the C-130, since it required a shorter, narrower space to touch down than the cargo plane. If necessary, the men aboard the Cessna could do whatever possible to improve and mark the landing area.

After a flight of two and a quarter hours, the C-130 would have the fuel capacity to circle or even to return to Leadville in a worst-case scenario, but there was a sufficient stretch of road waiting. Satellite photography, backed by discussions with the Californians, confirmed a near straightaway of 2,500 feet along the slanting plateau of the mountaintop.