Plague Year (33 page)

The tire change was done before Young finished with her. Meanwhile, the ’dozer had cleared Folsom Boulevard down to Sixty-eighth Street. Hernandez got them organized again and they rolled on through the dead traffic, three more blocks.

Highway 50 stood to the south like an immense wall, forming a straight horizon beyond every gap in the buildings. So damned close. But there hadn’t been any room to land there.

Two hundred yards down 68th Street, the ’dozer bashed its way into a narrow parking lot that was empty except for a red VW Beetle. Dansfield shoved the car into a hump of brush and left his machine in that corner, out of the way. Beyond the small lot lay an L-shaped, two-story structure, both levels banded in dark gray brick and silvered glass.

Inside the nearest wing was the
archos
lab.

* * * *

Hernandez made her wait. He wanted his men to enter the building first, but renewing everyone’s air supply took priority.

Ruth stepped out of the jeep, stamping her boots and hugging her laptop. She stared at the mirrored face of the building yet did not recognize her reflection or the emotions inside herself. No. This moment felt as if the last flight of the
Endeavour
had been condensed into one tremendous pulse, faith and doubt, excitement and terror.

Young changed out Dansfield and Olson immediately, because they were in the red, then took care of D.J. and Cam next after the rest of the soldiers volunteered to wait. Still thinking of
Endeavour
, Ruth also re-experienced the stunning respect she had known for the rescue teams.

These men were astounding, all of them, to have fought across this wasteland with such competence.

It was wrong that they needed to be enemies.

She looked for Sawyer. Watts and Ruggiero had lifted his wheelchair down from the trailer and Sawyer made a flopping gesture with one arm. Ruth started toward them, stopped. She was afraid of her own agitation. Sawyer angered too easily, and he had been like an idiot child all morning. She couldn’t afford to rile him.

The soldiers with fresh tanks approached the building and found the door secured. Its electronic locks had seized when the power went off. The delivery entrance around the side was open—Freedman and Sawyer had left that way—but to get the jeep and trailer there would involve clearing another street. Hernandez elected to go through the wall instead. Along the inner faces of the building’s L-shape, overlooking what had been low-maintenance landscaping of shrubs and river rock, the walls alternated waist-to-ceiling windows of reinforced glass with floor-to-ceiling panes.

Lowrey put four pistol shots through the nearest full-length section at downward angle, aiming his bullets into the floor rather than the lab space beyond. Then they bashed out the weakened glass with tire irons and carefully rubbed the frame clean of shards.

“Let’s bring them in,” Hernandez radioed, after scouting the interior for no more than a minute.

D.J. bumped her armless side, hurrying to be first. Ruth almost clubbed him with the laptop. Instead, she studied her footing as she crossed ten yards of loose rock, Todd matching her step for step with his glove extended, ready to help.

Moving inside should have been a triumph. It felt like a trap. Her eyes, accustomed to daylight, seemed dim and weak.

Ruth assumed the offices and admin were on the second floor. Labs tended to be at ground level because it was silly to haul equipment up and down. That would make their job easier. So would the six-foot hole in the wall. They’d come straight into a large rectangular space, with a glassed-in section filling almost half of the right side. The hermetic chamber. It was a lab within a lab, since the main area was definitely a clean room itself, hard white tile floor, white paneling, the ceiling lined with recessed fluorescent lighting. Ordinary PCs sat along the left wall with an assortment of multimode scopes.

A monitor had been knocked off the end of a counter, a chair overturned. For an instant she thought Hernandez and his men had already begun ransacking the place, but those small signs of disorder had existed for fifteen months now.

Please, God, let us find everything we need.

The glass box was maybe nine hundred square feet, with the long phone booth of the air lock protruding from its left face and bulky steel manifolds scrunched between its right side and the wall of the main room. The box itself was fairly crowded with another set of computers and microscopy gear including the fabrication laser—three squat monoliths in a row.

Ruth strode toward the glass barrier, her radio busy with the soldiers cautioning each other as they carried Sawyer’s wheelchair in behind her.

“Don’t drop him!”

“He keeps rocking around—”

“Science team, listen up.” Hernandez. “We need you to identify everything in this place with a rough score from most important down to least important. We definitely don’t have room to take it all back. Come over here. Sergeant Gilbride has grease pencils you can mark—”

Ruth interrupted. “Look for generators first,” she said. “Major? Have someone look around for generators. There’s an independent power system on-site. We can run a few trials.”

“There’s no time for that.”

She turned from the glass box and quickly spotted him among the beige suits. Hernandez held both arms overhead and waggled his hands, a
this way
gesture.

“You don’t know what you’re—” Ruth stopped herself, and ended in a hush. “We have to try.” Drawing attention to herself on the general frequency was a terrible risk. Senator Kendricks would be listening now, if at all, to learn whether or not their mission had been worth the jet fuel.

“Dr. Goldman,” Hernandez said, and she cringed at her own name. “We have a limited amount of air and a great deal of heavy loading to accomplish. The drive back will go a lot faster than the ride here, but let’s not count on it.”

She blundered on. “What’s the point of driving back if we’re not positive we have what we came for?”

“I think she’s right.” That was D.J. “We have six hours. I say let’s allocate half of it to test series before you start throwing things on the trailer.”

Lord God, had she sounded even half as arrogant herself? There was so much to think about— Ruth hurried for a more diplomatic tone. “We’re not asking you to waste time standing around, there’s plenty of gear to load up in the meantime.”

“What makes you think there are generators here?”

“Freedman knew what she was working with. Look at this isolation chamber. You don’t build something like this without putting in backup power. The public grid is too unreliable. You lose electricity, you lose containment.”

“All right.” Hernandez adjusted as easily as that, even though his plan must have been like clockwork in his mind, ticking smoothly ever since they’d left Colorado. “We’ll give you two hours. No more. No argument. And one of you starts ID’ing equipment right now so we can get the ball rolling.”

He was a good man, better than Leadville deserved. What had James said?
I think he’d give his life to protect us.

Very soon she would betray him because of his integrity.

“Captain,” Hernandez continued, “locate the generators and have your guys look them over.
Hermano
, how’s Mr. Sawyer?”

The beige suits rearranged themselves and several moved toward the only door out of the lab, Captain Young instructing his team to switch to channel six.

Cam rolled Sawyer forward as he answered Hernandez. “He wants to talk to Ruth, sir,” Cam said.

She was obvious in the group, one-armed, her torso misshapen by the cast. Cam aimed Sawyer right at her. Ruth hunched down and took another deep breath, frantic to compose herself.

Sawyer’s faceplate was marked with odd, ghostly streaks. Finger smudges. He’d dirtied his gloves on the tires of his wheelchair and then tried repeatedly to scratch at his lumpy scars, or to hide from their surroundings, or possibly even to take off his helmet as he forgot himself.

Ruth saw awareness in him now. That one bright eye glared out from his slack, lopsided expression.

“Wuh’ere,” he said, faint without a radio. “Yuhgamme’ere.”

“You got me here,” Cam translated.

That he needed to have it confirmed spoke volumes about his mental state. “Of course.” She made a smile. “We’re going to turn on the power, take your hardware for a little test-drive.”

“Yuh.” He jerked his head in approval.

“I’ve been in nanotech more than ten years and never seen anything like this.” Small talk in the graveyard.

But Sawyer’s head convulsed in a side-to-side motion rather than up and down. He didn’t want coaxing or compliments. He had finally set aside his ego.

“Ubstuhs,” he said, blinking. He’d lost sight of her when he shook his head, and his eye tracked feverishly before he found her again. Was it desperation in his gaze? He grumbled and Cam said, “Look upstairs. Freedman kept dupes everywhere, at home, in her office. I think Dutchess only cleaned out the lab.”

Ruth resisted the urge to turn and go herself, still wary of upsetting him. “D.J.?”

“I heard it. Ask where exactly—”

Sawyer remained cooperative. “Freedman’s office is the second door from the top of the stairs,” Cam said for him. “On the left. Try her desk or her file cabinet.”

D.J. and two Marines hustled away as Special Forces Master Sergeant Olson came back on radio. “Olson here. Looks like the generators ran dry, sir. Probably start up if we refuel.”

“Give it a shot,” Hernandez told him.

Cam spoke again in tandem with Sawyer: “If there’s nothing upstairs, try those computers beside the scanning probe. Dutchess wiped just about everything but a good hacker should be able to reconstruct deleted files from the hard drive. You’ll have at least preliminary designs on the
archos
components.”

There was motion behind Ruth, as Todd or maybe Hernandez stepped toward those PCs. She kept her attention focused on Sawyer, wondering at the change in him.

He continued to speak and Cam echoed him: “If you have full data, use model R-1077 as your base. R-1077. There’s no fuse and its mass is under one billion AMU. Less than a quarter of that is programmable space but it should hold the rep algorithm and your discrim key.”

You. Your.
He was putting everything in their hands. He must have felt that he was losing the war against himself. His unusual strength of will, his rage, his private terror—these were all useless against the wet touch of spittle at the corner of his mouth, the clumsy meat that had been his arms and legs.

He might hang on another five years but in the truest sense he was dying, and he knew it, and in this lucid moment he wanted most of all to escape his own bitterness.

Ruth managed another smile, more genuine this time, and Sawyer’s intense gaze flickered from her eyes to the sad quirk of her mouth. He nodded—and then the lab came to life around them in a cacophony of beeps and buzzing. Many pieces of equipment had still been on when the electricity went out, and the overhead fluorescents winked and then smothered them in furious white.

The distractions broke the wordless communion between Ruth and Sawyer. He glanced away and Ruth saw his expression loosen, tense as he fought to hold on to his thoughts, then ease again as he was overwhelmed by new stimuli.

Already his concentration was fading.

* * * *

D.J. returned downstairs with a small zippered packet of CD-RW discs and a smaller, flat metal case like a gentleman’s cigarette holder. He made quite a show of his finds, proudly holding them out. The Special Forces unit had also returned to the main lab and D.J. created an eddy through the gathered suits as their curiosity led most of them after him for a few steps.

Ruth forgave his self-important grin.

Lined with form-fitted sponge, the case held sixteen vacuum wafers no bigger or thicker than a fingernail. A container intended to be manipulated by human hands was of astronomical proportions for a batch of nanos, even compartmentalized, but the microscopic structures within would be fastened to a carbon surface for easier location under the microscope.

This was not
archos
. Freedman would never have brought complete, programmed nanos outside the hermetic chamber. But the sectional components would help them to intuit the full potential of this technology later on—and the base prototypes might serve as their vaccine nano with only minor adaptations.

The discs offered more magic. Sawyer perked up again when D.J. showed him the CD packet, which was lurid pink and sported the too-cute, doe-eyed face of a PowerPuff Girl. Somehow, fleetingly, that made Freedman real to Ruth as an individual for the first time, a woman who’d spent a few extra bucks on a vibrant case instead of buying a plain one.

“Series twelve,” Cam said, still diligently translating. “The series twelve discs are the replication program.”

Someone caught Ruth’s arm and she looked up. Beyond the few suits clustered around Sawyer, the rest of the group were now getting ready to haul equipment outside, pushing chairs back into the far corner, unplugging computers and disconnecting keyboards.

The man who’d grabbed her elbow was Captain Young.

“You have it?” he asked, his voice muffled. The Special Forces team leader had shut off his radio. He thrust his face close and Ruth leaned away, startled, but Young pulled on her again and pressed his helmet to hers. Conduction improved the transfer of sound waves.

He spoke more precisely. “Do you have what we came for?”

She hesitated. She nodded.

Young bobbed his head in response and then turned, releasing her arm, reaching for the radio control on his belt. His voice filled the general frequency. “Green green green,” he said, and unslung his rifle from his shoulder.

27

Cam glanced away from D.J. and Sawyer at the strange announcement, “Green green,” and saw at least half of the men raise their left arms in what appeared to be a choreographed movement, their gloves balled into fists. It was a gesture of identification. Then they stepped toward the other soldiers with their sidearms drawn.