Plague War

“Yes. Yes, we did.” Ruth set her good hand on Cam’s knee and squeezed, although she didn’t look at him.

Deborah noticed the contact. She glanced past Ruth again, and Cam tried to smile. “We need to know everything about this place,” he said.

“I’ll tell you what I can.” But mostly Deborah talked about Leadville. She had yet to make peace with it, Cam realized, and that was no surprise.

“Bill Wallace is dead,” she told Ruth, counting friends. “Gustavo. Ulinov. Everyone in the labs.”

Nikola Ulinov had sacri‚ced four hundred thousand people for the Russians, saving only one. Playing on the authority he’d once had aboard the ISS, Ulinov quietly suggested that Deborah volunteer for a combat unit. Her medical training could be of real use, he said, helping the men and women on Leadville’s front lines rather than babying the politicians in town.

“It was a warning,” Deborah said. “It was the best he could do. If he ran…If our entire crew disappeared, Leadville would’ve known. They would have shot down the plane that brought in the warhead.”

Cam let her talk, watching the ‚ne wrinkles that appeared at the corners of her eyes and mouth as she struggled with herself.

“When I think of him waiting,” Deborah said. “When I think of him being sure, but still waiting…” She leaned against Ruth and sighed, blinking back tears even as her eyes sparked with rage.

“It’s okay,” Ruth said. “Shh, it’s okay.”

Cam frowned and turned to gaze out across the mountains again, wondering at the man’s determination in bringing such force down on himself. He had seen all kinds of bravery and evil. Sometimes they were one and same. The only difference was in where you stood, and that made Cam uneasy. He believed in what he was doing, but maybe it was a mistake.

He coughed hard into his palm. Then he touched the back of Deborah’s hand as if to comfort her, infecting her with the vaccine. “I’m sorry,” he said.

* * * *

Grand Lake had gone underground. Many of the trailers and huts concealed tunnel entrances. On their way from the medical tent, Cam saw a wide shape of camou†age netting that covered new excavations. Work had stopped for the day, but it looked as if they’d dug a ‚fty-foot pit by hand and were still hacking at one edge while other teams built wooden frameworks into which they’d pour concrete. He supposed that after the boxy shapes of the walls had set, they’d add ceilings, then pile the dirt back in to hide and insulate the bunker. A wasted effort.

You can all go back down again, he thought. You should all be able to walk off this mountain.

That was probably why Shaug sought to control it. If too many people ran, he’d lose his ‚ghting force. A mass exodus down from the Continental Divide could be its own disaster, because without an organized military, they would be helpless against the Russians.

Maybe the governor was right.

Cam felt new adrenaline as the squad leader led them to a sun-faded mobile home with a tarp for an awning, hiding its door. Deborah had already left, promising to visit Ruth again before breakfast, and Cam was glad that someone else knew where to ‚nd them. What if Shaug meant to lock them in?

He was unarmed and outnumbered. He went through the door when the squad leader gestured. Inside, the prefab home was little more than a shell, no furniture, no carpet. Most of the wall panels had been torn apart for ‚rewood and to get at the wiring and plumbing. Only two light ‚xtures remained. The kitchen was gutted of its cabinets, sink, and counters, and in this bizarre scene stood a short-haired Asian woman with a cigarette. The home was only here to cover the stairwell and the ventilation holes in the †oor.

Cam hesitated at the top of the dark stairs. “I need to talk to Shaug,” he said. It was all he could think of.

“We’ll walk you over in the morning, sir,” the squad leader said.

Ruth glanced into Cam’s eyes, ready to play along, but the noise from below did not sound like a prison and the woman with the cigarette was disinterested and relaxed. Cam heard laughter as a man shouted, “Five bucks! That’s ‚ve bucks!”

They went down nearly twenty feet. The walls were un‚nished concrete lined with a single black wire. Two lamps had been bolted to the ceiling. Eight doorways ‚lled a short hall, hung with blankets, and Cam worried at the damp cold.

“This is you, sir,” the squad leader said, pointing at the ‚rst door. “We’ll be right across, okay?”

“Yeah. Okay.” Cam led Ruth into their room. It was cramped but private, and equipped with an electric coil space heater. He turned it on. There was also one narrow Army cot and four blankets, although he was too keyed up to sleep.

Ruth gently touched her ‚ngers against his chest and kissed him. “Thank you,” she said. “Thank you, Cam.”

He only nodded. There was no anxiety in the moment. That made him feel pleased. She trusted him and he was very glad for his sense of kinship and safety.

Ruth lay down on the cot and Cam sat awake on the †oor, his mind churning. Deborah had vouched for Shaug. I think he’s a good man who’s done his best with very little, she said, and she knew more than he did. She had been here for two days before they arrived, and her medical training had been a ticket straight into the middle echelons of the leadership.

After the bombing, Deborah’s unit had surrendered to the large contingent of rebels aligned under Grand Lake, the nearest surviving American stronghold. Loveland Pass had burned, too close to ground zero, and White River might as well have been on the moon because of the huge plague zones in between — but Deborah said there had been similar movements up and down the Continental Divide as the American forces rejoined. Grand Lake’s ‚ghting strength was actually larger than it had been before the bombing, although most of the new troops were infantry or light armored units. The surprise attack had done that much good, at least, pushing most of the shattered United States back together once more.

Now the vaccine would turn everything upside down again, as would the data index. Ruth believed that researchers everywhere must be on the verge of weaponized nanotech like the snow†ake. Could her presence here become the boost that Grand Lake’s small lab needed?

When she kissed him, Cam had seen the haunted, rising dread in her eyes. He ‚nally recognized the distance he’d heard in her voice outside the medical tent. It was the fear of so much responsibility. Given a moment to reassess, given a full lab and equipment, he wondered how Ruth would change the war.

20

There was a second nano in Cam’s blood sample, a new machine shaped like a twisted X. Ruth had never seen it before, although she immediately thought of the dead mountaintop etched with thousands of crosses. The emotions in her now were the same — lonely confusion and despair. She leaned back from her tunneling scope and clenched her left ‚st in her brace, unable to get past the truth. It should be impossible, and yet the strange nanotech existed in his blood alongside the vaccine. His, but not hers. The nanotech was benign for the moment. Ruth expected it was waiting for some trigger.

Where had it come from?

“Let me out,” she said suddenly, turning to the microphone on her left. The clean booth was equipped with two open mikes, one to record her observations, the other to keep in contact with the outside because this booth was too small to enter or exit without help. For a laboratory, Grand Lake had built a reinforced steel box too small to hold all the equipment they’d gathered. A rack of electronics partially blocked the door and the bulk of an electron microscope crowded Ruth on her right, but the lab was sterile and well-lit and could draw more power than she needed, even to purge the box.

They knew the danger in some of what she was doing. The workbench was rigged with X-ray and ultraviolet