Schraeder had witnessed more destruction and failure up close. He was usually as tense as Ulinov, and today it showed. The general was stiff and quiet. He was a henchman.
Since the ‚rst days of the plague, Kendricks had never been farther than eight slots from the pinnacle of the American government. A helicopter accident had killed the president in the evacuations out of the East Coast, the vice president assuming that role himself, and in the chaos the Speaker of the House ended up in Montana, which soon went over to the rebels.
The end of the world had been good to Kendricks. And if there was a coup attempt that was put down in recent days, the senator appeared to have come out of it even more perfectly positioned. Kendricks and Schraeder already held two of the seven prized seats on the president’s council, and Ulinov suspected the top leadership had recently been pared down to four or ‚ve. In his prior meetings he’d sat down with the whole group, but two days ago that had changed.
Kendricks was adept and opportunistic, extremely sharp beneath the show of being a lazy cowboy.
“Well, it looks like it’s as bad as we were thinking,” Kendricks said at last, rapping his knuckles on his desk and then gesturing with the same hand at Schraeder. “We can’t afford to give you any planes right now.”
“It is dif‚cult,” Ulinov agreed blamelessly.
“Still, there’s no question that it’s in our own best interest to help your folks way over there,” Kendricks continued, folding his hands. “It’s just a matter of how many planes we can dedicate to the job. How many and when.”
Ulinov only nodded this time, struggling with his resentment.
He’d known this was coming. Two days ago Kendricks had given every signal that their deal would change, calling Ulinov in to lecture him on the problems presented by the rebel uprising… and yet the American civil war was a tri†e compared to what Ulinov’s people were facing.
Their motherland had been abandoned almost completely. The tallest peaks in the Urals fell short of even two thousand meters. Otherwise Russia possessed only a handful of icy mountains very close to the Chinese and Mongolian borders, plus a few small safe zones in deepest Siberia and along the Bering Sea. From the ‚rst reports out of California to the time that the machine plague swept into Europe, the Russians had barely a month to relocate their entire nation even as dozens of other countries claimed and then fought for elevation.
By accident, humankind had begun global warming in time to do themselves a lot of good. There was evidence that the trend was at least partly natural, easily blamed on volcanic activity and a pendulum-like cycle from warmer eras to ice ages and back again — but eighty years into the greatest population boom the world had ever seen, endless gigatons of smoke and exhaust had tipped the balance in the atmosphere.
It was the upper reaches of the planet that began to show the effects ‚rst. There were still cold spikes, but by the late 1990s the evidence was too conspicuous to disbelieve. Snowfall became rain. Frozen ground relaxed and thawed. There were also more landslides and †oods, but the acceleration of greenhouse gases had made every difference between life and death in the plague year. The warming created more useable ground for survivors even if it was just a few meters at a time.
All of Europe clashed in the Alps. China and India rose over the central Himalayas like human tides. There were also safe zones within Iran, and Russia had economic and political ties there, but the Iranians detonated fourteen dirty bombs along their borders to beat back their Arab neighbors. The wind was wrong. Fallout left too much of the Iranian high ground contaminated, not at lethal levels but deadly in the long run.
The Russians †ed to the mountain ranges of Afghanistan and to the Caucasus, a sheer jag of rock thrust up between the Caspian and Black Seas. They were outnumbered in both places by refugee hordes from across the Middle East, but at the same time, they were correct in believing they would outgun their enemies. It didn’t last. Air superiority meant nothing without reliable maintenance, fuel, and ordnance. Their tanks and their artillery also wore down. On some fronts the pitiless land war was already being fought with rocks and knives, and the Muslims’ numbers quickly gave them the advantage.
Negotiations with the Americans had begun months ago, still in the heart of winter. Everyone was aware of what the spring thaw would bring — new ‚ghting, new horror — and the Russians were both distributed badly and surrounded everywhere. Let the Afghanis, Chechens, Turks, Kurds, Jordanians, Syrians, Lebanese, Palestinians, and Iraqis battle among themselves. The Russians had bargained their way out, offering their veteran armies to India in exchange for a sliver of real estate in the Himalayas as a buffer against the Chinese.
That would be a brutal ‚ght itself, of course, but with only one front instead of twenty. Their hope was to establish a stalemate, a cold war with entrenched borders. But to get there, they needed many more planes and fuel.
The United States had been spared as always by its geographical isolation and, ironically, by the fact that the plague broke loose in California and spread across North America ‚rst. They only had themselves and the Canadians to save as the rest of the world stayed back. Other countries waited and hoped, and then it was too late. Even close allies like the British, with no high ground of their own, had been forced to airlift themselves into the crowded war in the Alps after the nanotech was suddenly everywhere.
There were a few other somewhat calm zones. In fact, most of the South Pole was safe. Antarctica had endless ranges and plateaus above ten thousand feet. The freezing weather also came with low pressure fronts, leaving vast, high stretches of ice that were often free of the plague. But it was just ice. There was nothing to sustain anyone there.
Greenland took in some of the Norweigans and the Finns and their militaries, establishing a separate peace. The survivors out of Australia joined with New Zealand, and Japan still held a few peaks at the heart of their island.
Elsewhere the ‚ghting was mixed and savage. In Micronesia, millions of people fought for a handful of island peaks. The entire population of Africa tried to shove up onto Mt. Kilimanjaro and the very few other high points on the continent even as the Israelis airlifted south into Ethiopia and burned clear several peaks for their own.
Ulinov often wondered if the Russians should have planned to run farther themselves, but it was hard. They’d wanted to stay close to their cities, their industrial base, their military stockpiles — and they were not without experience in ‚ghting on Muslim land. He knew they were using their few remaining jets and helicopters to scavenge beneath the barrier, desperate for weapons and food.
The weight of it was like hundreds of years pressing down on him, millions of lives, the history of an entire nation. His people had been pushed to the last extreme. Their existence itself was at risk. There were still more than ‚fteen million of them alive, but unless the ‚ghting saw a dramatic turnaround, they would be lost, utterly gone except perhaps for a small collection of slaves and a few scattered souls like himself, bred out in a generation. And here he sat in his plush chair with a Coke.
“What we need is everybody on the same page,” Kendricks said, making an open gesture with one small hand. “We need to work together if we’re ever going to get things straight again. Right now it’s up to India to make the right choice. We’ve told ’em that.”
“And what did they say?”
“Well, they’re playing hardball. They think they’re doing enough by giving you people some land, and that’s a good deal for you. Sure it is. Them, too. But what about us?” Kendricks tipped his head forward, bringing the peak of his hat down in an aggressive posture. “What do we get for all those pilots and planes and the guns we’ll bring over? Maybe even some food. Why are we sending our boys all around the world when we’ve got a whole stack of problems of our own?”
“The nanotech,” Ulinov said, like a good pupil.
“Exactly. That’s it exactly.” Kendricks smiled. “India’s got some good folks and they’ve got a lab full of gear or two. But they’re exposed. The Chinese could ruin what they’re doing at any time, and they’re way behind what we’re doing here anyway.”
“So you consolidate their labs with yours.”
