The rats had †ourished in the crowded conditions and in the grime. Ruth supposed they should be glad. Had anyone, anywhere, managed to save other kinds of mammals? She wondered again at the bizarre world the next generation would inherit, assuming they didn’t ‚nish what the plague had started with a new contagion. Rats, birds, bugs, and reptiles made for a bleak and virulent environment, and yet it would be more stable than one without any warm-blooded creatures at all. Conservation efforts would become a way of life for centuries. Any dogs or horses or sheep that had survived would be priceless beyond measure. They must be out there in small numbers, hidden or lost on mountaintops around the world, which made it all the more important to preserve every single one.
The rat squirmed and clawed at the wire, snapping at its own leg. Ruth looked away from the ugly thing and saw two soldiers approaching. The man in front had unslung his ri†e, although he held the barrel toward the ground.
“This is a restricted area, Private,” he said. “You know that. Lunch isn’t for two hours.”
“Yes.” Ruth wore no insignia, so they thought she was a recruit looking for a way to steal or barter for extra food. She was probably lucky she was a woman, or they might have been rougher. McCown had given her a badge that showed her actual status, but Ruth saw no reason to take it from her pocket, which would create a record of where she’d gone.
She tried to smile and turned to leave. Then the soldier noticed the rat and glanced after her, his eyes hardening.
“I’m looking for Barrett’s group,” she said quickly. “Do you know if they’ve been through here today?”
The soldier relaxed slightly. Barrett was one of the leaders of the repopulation project, a civilian leader, although there were also troops assigned to the effort. “You’re late,” the soldier said, gesturing downhill to the west. “I saw some guys with cages at least an hour ago.”
“Thank you.” Ruth walked away. They were releasing the ‚rst rats into the old township in the hope that the little monsters would breed and continue down the face of the Continental Divide, clearing the area of insect swarms. It was a crazy idea. It was necessary. Rats were adaptable and cunning, which made them perfect to go up against the insects. Birds would be great, too, if Cam and his friends could ever catch and infect enough mating pairs.
* * * *
Ruth already knew she could make some improvements to the vaccine. She’d begun to work through new sensor models that would bump up its target-to-kill rate, but at Shaug’s insistence she’d set aside her theories to build and culture the snow†ake instead. There was no room for moral qualms. The world wouldn’t wait. The United States needed new weapons, because spy planes and satellites showed that the Russians already had close to ‚fty thousand troops on the ground, along with nearly half that many support personnel and refugees. The distinction was tough to make. During their endless struggle in the Middle East, the Russian population became a war machine, with everyone in combat or preparing for it.
U.S. and Canadian interceptors had begun to have more luck with hitting Russian transports before they reached the coast, but the invaders were †ying in from all directions now, down from the Arctic and the Bering Sea, up from the South Paci‚c— and they could land anywhere, not just in the mountains. Their planes hid and rose and hid again, deceiving North American radar and pursuit.
Two spearheads of Russian infantry had spread into Nevada while California burned. Uncontrolled blazes exploded through the diseased forests, both hindering the invasion and providing them with some cover. Ruth had seen the photos herself. Twice she’d sat down with generals and civilian agents to discuss the vaccine’s parameters and what kind of casualties the enemy could expect.
Ruth estimated the Russians’ short-term losses at 5 percent. Over a period of years, if the technology didn’t improve, there was no question that the internal war between the vaccine and the plague would lead to signi‚cant traumas and deaths, but in the meantime the invaders would merely be uncomfortable. Except for anyone who stayed in a hot spot, mostly they’d suffer only minor hemorrhaging and blister rash. Sometimes an unlucky individual might experience a bleeding eye or a stroke, perhaps a cardiac arrest, which could be costly if it was a pilot or a driver who was suddenly incapacitated.
The Russians were willing to pay that price. Their advance was staggered at times, but they’d claimed hundreds of miles, absorbing dead cities and airports, quickly motorizing their troops with abandoned vehicles and American armor — and they must have used the promise of the nanotech to win reinforcements.
The U.S.-Canadian net had detected huge †ights of Chinese aircraft rushing across the Paci‚c to strengthen the Russian foothold. Large naval †eets came behind. The enemy already held Hawaii. They’d attacked the tiny American outpost on Mt. Mauna Loa during the blackout after the electromagnetic pulse, risking an alert to the mainland. The islands were an ideal stepping-stone. The Chinese probably hadn’t thought twice about it. With the vaccine, they could win their ‚ght in the Himalayas even as they helped the Russians take control of industry-rich North America, its superior croplands, its military bases. The new allies could divide everything however they liked, unless Ruth stopped them. The snow†ake might be the only way for the U.S.-Canadian forces to regain the West, short of poisoning it with their own nuclear strikes.
She’d done it. She knew exactly how the snow†ake killed, but she’d rebuilt it with the same blind will of the rat in the snare. It hadn’t even felt like her decision. Millions of people needed the weapon’s power to survive. Millions more would die. The holocaust would always be her responsibility, but so were the lives she’d save. Her guilt colored everything she did. It affected her sleep. It kept her from approaching Cam even when she needed him more than ever.
The snow†ake was more of a chemical reaction than a true machine. It was originally one of several ANN developed by the scientists in Leadville, an anti-nano nano meant to destroy the plague. Composed of oxygen-heavy carbon molecules, the snow†ake was intended to disable its rival nanotech by drawing the plague into nonfunctional clusters. Each bunch would recombine around the original seed and shed more arti‚cially weighted grains, which would attract more plague, and so on. The process was termed “snow†aking” by its creator, LaSalle, but he had never been able to limit or regulate the effect.
The snow†ake tore apart all organic structures. A single wisp of it would liquefy all living things within hundreds of yards, people, insects, plants, even microbes and bacteria. Fortunately the chain reaction broke down in an instant. The snow†akes tended to glom onto each other as well as foreign mass and became encased in free carbon of their own making.
Cultivating it was extremely delicate work, for which Ruth donned one of Grand Lake’s few containment suits. One mistake could kill her. But the snow†ake did not attack rubber or glass.
She was forced to start from scratch. The data index included notes and information stolen from Leadville, but LaSalle’s ‚les had been unavailable. It didn’t matter. Her memory was nearly photographic and she’d helped LaSalle with early models of his baby. In fact, after the president’s council realized the true might of the snow†ake, Senator Kendricks had tried to recruit Ruth into LaSalle’s weapons group with the threat of losing a new arms race to the Chinese. At the same time, James Hollister had insisted that the Asians were years behind U.S. research.
Ruth didn’t know who to believe anymore. By itself, the new technology she’d called the ghost was proof enough that other scientists were still at work. The nanotech war had begun, almost unnoticed within the larger con†ict. She was afraid they’d already lost. The hundreds of sick people in the medical tents. The thousands of others who’d died undiagnosed in the long winter…How many of those casualties could be attributed to some as- yet-unknown effects of the ghost?
In three days she’d spent less than three hours trying to improve the vaccine. The rest had gone into preparing a genocide. It was a real chore to assemble the snow†ake by hand with inadequate gear and her ‚rst four efforts failed, too imbalanced to retain their purpose. Finally she had a single working snow†ake and locked it in a glass cap, carefully exposing it to a handful of weeds inside a larger glass. Breeding more was that easy. The weeds disintegrated and suddenly Ruth had trillions of the killing machines, although many of these new snow†akes were dead or half-strength. Ruth had to discard two hundred before she quit trying to sort through the mess, but during that time she found seven more snow†akes that were whole. Each of them went into a cap. Then she exposed those seven, too, after which she divided each of her eight teeming glasses into hundreds of smaller vials. Cluster bombs. Fifty vials to a case.
The snow†ake would also be effective in stopping the massive ‚res across the West, she’d realized. If they dispersed the nanotech along the front lines of a blaze, it would smother the inferno by reducing its fuel to dust.
