Allison only grinned at her. “Is that why you’re here?” Allison asked. Then she took Cam’s hand in her own and stood with the shoulder of her tattered blue sweater against his Army jacket.
“There’s a new kind of nanotech,” Cam said, explaining to Allison.
The two women never looked away from each other. Ruth tried not to let her defeat show in her face — or her respect. Allison was plucky and bold. In fact, the girl reminded Ruth of herself at her best, but she just wasn’t that con‚dent anymore. Allison was willing to rush an opportunity. Ruth was not. Otherwise she wouldn’t have missed her chance before Cam and Allison met.
Watching him with the girl made it clear. Even with his rugged looks, there had been no shortage of attention for who he was and what he’d accomplished, and their acceptance of him was exactly what he’d missed.
Still, she was crushed. Cam must have exhausted his patience with her during their long run, and yet this was the only time she’d known him to veer away from what he really wanted. In some way, Ruth supposed he was trying to punish her. She saw that now. His decision to pair up with Allison was self-destructive, complicating his relationship with the woman he really wanted. Ruth knew that he loved her. Finding someone else, simply taking the opportunity, was an attempt to reject Ruth before she had the chance to say no. But she loved him, too. Couldn’t he see that?
She didn’t doubt that Allison’s attraction to him was genuine, but she was suspicious of the girl’s reasons. Allison would always be looking to strengthen her faction here in Grand Lake, and Cam was both a celebrity and a veteran survivor. So the girl had tied herself to him.
“You better come with me,” Ruth said, looking away from Allison to include the others in the group. “All of you. I need blood samples before you go anywhere else.”
* * * *
She turned her back on Cam in a daze. She knew what she had to do. A discovery as criticial as the ghost could not be left for later, so Ruth went forty-eight hours with only a few catnaps and two big meals, hiding herself in the lab.
Was the ghost a Chinese construct? She knew that in Leadville, intelligence reports had put China’s research program at the top of the list after Leadville itself. The plague year had badly confused things, of course, and a nanotech lab could be small and easily hidden, but at the same time, the world had shrunk to a handful of island ranges. There were fewer places to watch. Their list of competitors was very short. China. Brazil. India. Canada. There was a displaced Japanese team on Mt. McKinley, Alaska, and a British group in the Alps. All except the Chinese had been considered friendly. Regardless, Ruth didn’t think any of them except the Chinese were capable of building the ghost, so it must be a threat.
She had been wrong in her initial assessment. The ghost was 15 percent smaller than the vaccine, but more advanced. It was a high-level construct and in its complexity Ruth was able to discern the tiniest changes. Generations. A few blood samples from McCown and his assistants seemed to indicate that it had spread through the local population in waves. An early model was followed by another. Possibly more. Cam had probably gotten it from Allison, and Ruth continued to fear that the ghost was only waiting to reach some critical mass before decimating Grand Lake.
Was it everywhere across the Continental Divide? Shaug allowed her to send radio queries to the labs in Canada, and the answer was no. So where had the technology come from?
The ghost was in Ruth, too. It appeared in her blood on their fourth day, just a half step behind Cam’s infection, which ‚t with her hypothesis. The count in Newcombe’s sample was also low. They hadn’t brought it to Grand Lake. Grand Lake had infected them.
After that, her tactics changed. Ruth insisted on blood samples and basic information from a thousand soldiers and refugees, beginning a crash program to backtrack the ghost’s origins. For two more days she dedicated computer time to the task along with most of McCown’s group and dozens of overworked medical staff. She was ‚ghting her own people. Shaug and the military leaders pressed her for new and better weapons. Ruth refused. It was the wrong priority.
Deborah Reece became a crucial ally and volunteered to oversee the blood work. Ruth let herself be interrupted to monitor the snow†ake production, but mostly she’d handed that effort off to McCown.
The land war was rapidly escalating to the brink. The Chinese naval †eet swarmed into San Diego and Los Angeles and dispersed tens of thousands of infantrymen, armored units, and aircraft, opening a new front against the United States. Meanwhile the Russians continued to push through Nevada — and the invaders were winning the battle for air supremacy. The Russian air force was full of relics and mismatched planes, and the Chinese had similar problems, but even at half strength they dominated the United States, especially as America continued to shuf†e working aircraft into key positions.
Each side tried to protect their planes and fuel supplies even as they sent ‚ghters slashing into each other’s territory. Each side rushed to claim airports and old U.S. bases, destroying some, protecting others, a game of chess with negotiations †aring and failing. The U.S.-Canadian forces threatened full-scale nuclear strikes on mainland China and the Russian motherland if the invaders did not immediately pull back to the coast, while the Chinese swore they’d respond in kind, plastering the Continental Divide at the ‚rst sign of an American missile launch.
It should have been insigni‚cant, but Ruth also had to confront Allison every morning as Cam and Allison helped to deliver the samples and geographical data from hundreds of refugees. Ruth couldn’t help believing that Allison and Cam were a good match, both of them scarred but still young and strong, savvy and dedicated.
In fact, Ruth went to Allison ‚rst after she’d made her decision.
* * * *
She caught her just after sunrise. Cam and Allison were inside a broad tent where they’d set up a dozen benches, a dry-erase board, and four desks to process the refugees who came in exchange for a granola bar or an extra piece of clothing. There was already a crowd forming outside.
Cam had his head together with an Army medic over a clipboard. Ruth walked past them. She felt ill with tension and lack of sleep and Allison grinned at her. It wasn’t a mean gesture. The girl knew she’d won, and Ruth thought she was only trying to be friendly. Possibly there was just the smallest hint of amusement or pity in the way she treated Ruth for being older, too old for Cam.
“Hello,” Allison said.
“We need to get out of here,” Ruth said bluntly. She was angry that anyone could seem so content, and took satisfaction in wiping away Allison’s big smile.
“Oh shit,” the girl said. “Cam told us it was probably a weapon—”
“No. No, I still don’t know.” Ruth shook her head at herself. She had no right to blame Allison. But she had her suspicions about who had designed the ghost. She recognized the work. Every machinist had his or her own style, exactly like painters, writers, and musicians. The ghost wasn’t Chinese. It was American. The new technology belonged to Gary LaSalle, and Ruth said, “I think it came from Leadville. I think Leadville cornered our friends before they made it into the Sierras and then they had the vaccine, too, which means they could have run spin-offs for at least a week and a half before the bombing.”
“I’m sorry,” Allison said. “Who had the vaccine?”
Ruth realized she wasn’t making sense. Cam would have understood, but Allison hadn’t been there. “I need your help,” she said.
“You bet.” Allison nodded, watching her face closely. The girl had ‚nally noticed Ruth’s exhaustion.
“There were two more people with us who made it out of Sacramento,” Ruth said. “A soldier and another scientist like me. They had the vaccine. Leadville caught them. That was about two weeks ago, and Leadville must have started running trials and new versions based on that technology.”
There were four different strains of the ghost. Ruth had solved that much of the riddle without coming any closer to knowing what the ghost was supposed to do. At the same time she’d also identi‚ed, very roughly, four infection points that had since blended as the remnants of Leadville’s armies split and surrendered and migrated away from ground zero. The leadership there had been secretly testing new models of the ghost on their own people. They’d dosed forward units to see what would happen — and yet the ghost was not a perfect vaccine, even though it should have been easy for them to improve the crude, hurried work that Ruth had done in Sacramento.
The teams in Leadville never would have left the vaccine exactly as it was, not bothering to improve it. Ruth
