Plague War

Hernandez was gaunt and pale. “Doctor Goldman,” he said, quickly locating the most important face in the crowd.

“They trusted you,” Ruth said. “They trusted you more than you think.”

“I don’t understand.”

“Leadville,” she said. “The labs.”

To the west, a clump of explosions †ared up from the black mountains. The booming reached them an instant later as Ruth knelt, too, twisting to protect the wounds in her left hip. Some of the Marines also crouched down and Cam was not surprised by this sudden intimacy. Everyone wanted to hear.

“They were testing nanotech on forward units,” Ruth said, “but they must have been almost certain how well the new vaccine would work. They trusted you.”

“A new vaccine,” Hernandez said.

“Yes.” Her eyes were large and childlike. “There are two nanos in you right now, and they’re both different from anything else I’ve seen.”

Hernandez coughed again, wincing. Beside Cam, one of the Marines touched his own chest and several others glanced down at themselves or ‚dgeted with their hands, afraid of the machinery that they could not see.

“They targeted you deliberately, General,” Ruth said. “They trusted you. We’ve taken hundreds of blood samples and no one else had the vaccine or a working ghost.”

“What does that mean?” a woman asked behind Cam. It was Foshtomi, and he turned to see that she stood away from the group, as if that could possibly save her. But she was loyal and brave. The wind blew Foshtomi’s dark hair across her face and she strode forward with the rush of the breeze, joining them despite her nervousness.

Ruth glanced at the younger woman, then turned back to Hernandez. It might have been Cam’s imagination but he thought Ruth looked at him, too, after dismissing Foshtomi. Why? Because she didn’t like it that he and Sarah were friends?

“How long were you stationed outside Leadville before the bombing?” Ruth asked Hernandez. “Were you above the barrier that whole time?”

“What are you saying — we were immune to the plague?”

“At some point. Absolutely. The atmospheric effects of the bomb had nothing to do with the fact that your troops were able to run below ten thousand feet and survive.”

Hernandez shook his head. “We would have noticed.”

“No. Not if you never tried it. You wouldn’t have launched any attacks below the barrier until after Grand Lake brought you the vaccine that Cam and I carried out of Sacramento, right?”

“We mounted a few strikes. We thought there were still areas where the bombing had wiped out the plague.”

“You were immune. The vaccine out of Grand Lake wasn’t half as good as what you already had.” Ruth laughed, but it was a melancholy sound. “You must have gotten it some time during the two weeks before the bomb. Leadville caught our friends in the Sierras, which is where they got the early model of the vaccine. Then they infected you with an improved version and a spin-off technology to see how the two would interact.”

The soldiers moved uneasily again. “Jesus,” Watts said with his hand at his mouth. It was another protective gesture, no different than the way Foshtomi had hung back from the group. These men and women still thought of the nanotech as a disease.

Ruth said, “Did they give any kind of inoculations or pills? Something they said was a vitamin?”

“No.”

“It could have been in your water or your food. As far as I can tell, the improved model has the same weakness as the ‚rst generation. It only replicates when it’s exposed to the plague, which means the infection would have been sporadic unless you all ate or drank the same thing.” Ruth paused, embarrassed. “After the bomb, when you left your mountain, did you lose anyone?”

“It was chaotic,” Hernandez said. “And dark and very hot.”

Ruth reached for his arm, making contact. “Is there any way to know if some of them died because of the machine plague?”

He looked down at her hand. He shook his head.

“Please,” Ruth said. “This is important.”

“It was chaotic,” he repeated, and Cam marveled at the understatement.

“We have to assume it’s a possibility,” Ruth said. She glanced at Deborah, as if resuming a different conversation. Or maybe she couldn’t bear to face Hernandez anymore.

The general still had his head down, either wrestling with his illness or his grief. He appeared uncharacteristically weak and Cam also turned away. The soldiers had done the same. Their respect for Hernandez demanded it, and Cam wondered what they would do when he was gone.

“I’ll need blood again,” Ruth said slowly. “We need to make sure we get the new vaccine to as many people as possible, and I think… I’m sure the second nano is the only reason you’re alive.”

“They brought us steak a few days before the bombing,” Hernandez said. “Fresh steak. Not a lot. But we were surprised.”

“That was probably it,” Ruth said.

“We’d already started communicating with other units up and down the line. I…We were talking about leaving our posts.”

The emotion in his eyes was both haunted and amazed. Hernandez was glad to be wrong, Cam realized. Despite everything else that had happened, he took comfort in discovering that Leadville continued to rely on him.

“We thought they were punishing us,” Hernandez said. “We thought the meat was only a way to keep us on a short leash.”

“They trusted you.”

“I was already committing treason,” he said, looking left and right at his Marines. He was using his confession to bring them closer to him. He had recovered from his shock, and again Cam was stunned by the man’s abilities. Everything was a lesson to him. His entire focus was on his troops and the never-ending process of improving them — and he was stronger for it. Not for the ‚rst time, Cam envied Hernandez.

“Sir, a lot of us were looking to the rebels,” Watts said, and Deborah added, “It wouldn’t have mattered. You had nothing to do with the bombing.”

“It does matter,” Hernandez said. “I should have stuck it out. What if the president’s council heard some rumor of what I was doing? What if that’s why they didn’t tell me about the vaccine? Think what we could have done with it if we’d known. We could have moved down onto the highways. We could have dug in and stopped the Chinese cold.”

Cam frowned to himself. It was true that a lot of good opportunities had been missed, but it troubled him that Hernandez could ignore the way he’d been used as a test subject. It was a blind spot. His fealty was the real difference between them, and Cam was angry for him. Cam was angry at him.

“You said they gave us two kinds of nanotech,” Hernandez said, coughing again as he turned to Ruth.

She nodded. “We called it the ghost when we found it in Grand Lake. Nobody could tell what it did, and Leadville must have put it through several generations in a hurry. We isolated at least four strains before we got here.”

“But it’s not a vaccine.”

“No. Yes. In a way, yes. I kept thinking that most of the radiation victims we met weren’t as bad off as they should have been, but no one had a real idea how close they were to the blast. No one except you.”

Above them, the night rippled with birds, an unexpected, darting swarm that lifted a shout of warning from one of the Marines. Cam †inched.

Ruth barely reacted to the interruption, her voice hushed and intense. “Sir, you should be dead. The rads you took are off the scale, but you also have the most advanced version of the ghost I’ve seen. It’s some kind of overall booster. I think it’s a prototype that was intended to protect against the snow†ake. Soldiers carrying a perfect version of it could probably hit the enemy with the snow†ake and not see any effects themselves…and I think it’s helping your tissues stay intact despite the radiation damage. It’s gradually cleaning your cells.” She tipped her face