Plague Zone

times she wore it instead of her hospital scrubs. They’d even hauled a washer/ dryer unit to the village and installed it in their shower building solely for the use of her scrubs. Everyone else did their laundry in the creek, even the new mothers. All of their precautions, every ounce of determination and grit… Would it be enough?

What if she was the weak link?

That’s not true, she thought, arguing with herself. It’s not! If nothing else, we need to get moving before more sick people stumble into town. They want to believe it can’t happen, but it will.

Ruth picked up the walkie-talkie. She’d turned it down to hear Cam through the wall, because it was still rattling with other voices. She interrupted them, upping its volume as she hit the SEND button. “This is Goldman.” She hadn’t planned to speak formally, but the old habit came back easily and she used it like a weapon, covering her remorse with a tone full of steel. “I’m coming out.”

“Wait!” Greg said. “Ruth, wait.”

“I want to dictate my findings so far.”

“What is she talking about?” one woman asked, as another female voice said, “Let me find some paper! Ruth? This is Bobbi. Let me find some paper first.”

“You have to stay inside,” Greg said. “No one else can do this for you.”

“He’s right,” Cam said.

“I’m coming out!” Ruth said, but this time she heard less conviction in her own voice. Most of her attention was still on the words she couldn’t say to Cam.

I’m sorry, she thought. I miss Allison, too.

In the next room, Patrick convulsed again, rustling and banging. Ruth wondered if he was dying. Was she honor-bound to go see? What if she could stop him from choking or if he was bleeding again? “I’ve already done most of what I can with this equipment,” she said. “Please believe me. If there was more—”

A different man cut in. “What about Linda and Michael?”

“Someone else can have my suit if they want to go back inside. You should fill the air tanks again, and meanwhile—”

“Ruth, that’s a huge waste of time,” Greg said.

“Meanwhile, I can run more analysis on my laptop! That’s exactly what you want me to do, and it’s not safe in here!”

The other man protested. “Linda would never—”

“I’ll bring my computer and the AFM, but you need to get me out.”

It was Cam who spoke against her next. “You said the lab’s contaminated,” he said, warning the others.

Oh, Cam, she thought. I need to be able to count on you.

“What does that mean?” someone asked, and Greg said, “Ruth, the nanotech’s loose in there, too?”

“You’re going to need awhile to get some tools together anyway. I’ll sterilize things in here, and while I’m doing that I’ll tell you what I’ve learned.”

“There’s no way to know if you’re clean,” Cam said.

“There is.”

“Ruth, can’t it wait?” Bobbi asked. “Pay attention to what you’re doing. Tell us what you can after you’re outside.”

“No, I’ll tell you now,” she said, struggling again with her claustrophobia, but it filled her voice with emotion. “I’m going to take off my suit before you open the wall,” she said, “so there’s a good chance I won’t make it out of here without being infected myself.”

Ruth knew who’d built the mind plague. She recognized the work, even though most of it was based on the same breakthroughs of the machine plague and every other nanotech that followed. The first plague had been a gateway. Once opened, it pointed the way for everything else.

Of course, its design team hadn’t meant it as a plague at all. The people behind the archos tech, a duo named Kendra Freedman and Al Sawyer, intended their device to be a cancer cure — and they’d succeeded in two of the three major challenges to nano-scale machines. For an energy source, the archos tech used the body heat of its host. To create enough nanos to accomplish any significant chore, it contained a wildly efficient replication key, allowing a single nano to become two, which became four, which became sixteen — in seconds.

The vaccine was only the same technology refined. It was no more intelligent than its brother. That was why the early models were imperfect. The vaccine had only the slightest capacity to discriminate between the plague and other molecular structures. That changed when the science teams in Leadville improved the vaccine’s ability to think. It was a real chore to bestow the faculties of awareness and decision upon machines this size without crimping their operational speed, but as soon as the vaccine was able to outpace its rival, U.S. forces gained a small advantage over the Russians and Chinese.

Unfortunately, the nanotech was too ethereal for the U.S. to keep to themselves. The final version of the vaccine spread as inexorably as the machine plague itself. Whenever a soldier loaded his weapon, each time ground crews rearmed a jet, their breath, sweat, and blood were thick with microscopic machines — and so another benefit was carried to the enemy, too.

Days before the bombing, Leadville also developed a nanotech called the booster. Again, its core was based on what they already knew. The booster used the same heat engine, and it made more of itself only by disassembling the machine plague, but this nano had the true beginnings of intelligence. The discrimination key that served the vaccine so well was at last becoming something more profound.

The booster was intended to read its host’s DNA and to reinforce that information. Ultimately, it would even correct and maintain those codes. A man who received a perfect booster in his twenties would always be in his twenties, immune to viruses and infections and protected from the slow deterioration caused by age, poor diet, or genetic miscues like diabetes, heart disease, and cancer. The first model of the booster was light-years short of this magic, but it had given Ruth, Cam, and many others some protection from radiation poisoning on the outskirts of the Leadville crater.

Again, the nanotech had spread. The booster was now worldwide exactly like the vaccine, available for everyone to use and study. Ruth knew there was also a fourth fully functional nano, because it was hers.

The parasite had no benign features whatsoever. It was a violently simplified model of the booster combined with a new discrimination key, a rough, bare bones machine designed to attack the vaccine instead of the machine plague. This was the doomsday weapon she’d created in Grand Lake. It would have left everyone vulnerable to the machine plague again, laying waste to the armies on all sides as they scrambled for elevation.

Ruth couldn’t say what avenues were being pursued by other allied researchers. As for herself, she just didn’t have the stomach for more killing. She’d set aside her own efforts at weaponized nanotech to develop new spin-offs of the booster, pursuing medical technology that would not only prevent disease — it should also heal wounds such as Cam’s old, body-wide injuries. There were hundreds of thousands of people with plague scarring, and thousands more still struggling with radiation sickness or burns. Ruth wanted to help. Now that decision seemed like a criminal error. The other side had pulled far ahead when she might have been the one to destroy them first.

“The nanotech is Chinese,” Ruth said, calling to the walkie-talkie. She’d set it on the desktop to free her hands as she worked a UV lamp over her equipment. “The style is too similar to everything else of theirs I’ve seen. That wasn’t much, but Leadville was studying enemy programs as closely as possible.”

“You’re sure, Ruth?” Greg said.

“Yes. The nanotech is Chinese.” She tried to irradiate every nook and seam, which was especially difficult among her paperwork, her laptop, the two microscopes, picoamme ter, and power cords. She had to ruffle through her gear with one hand as she held the lamp with the other.

The light seared her eyes even though she kept her face half turned, using her helmet as a shield. The purple-white heat felt like a small sun. It was no accident that she targeted her gear and the desk first, because the lamp might compromise the material of her suit. In fact, it could melt through the plastic sheeting if she wasn’t careful.

Ruth heard another thump and lifted her head. Had that noise come from outside? She turned back to her desk. Every drawer was suspect. She opened the first one and shone the light inside, pushing her other hand