Plague Zone

“I can’t do it again!”

“I won’t.”

“That’s a direct order, Lieutenant,” Deborah insisted, cradling her friend’s waist with her arm when she should have pushed her away.

Emma was a slight, pretty woman much like Deborah herself, although Deborah was taller. A classic blond, Deborah knew she was very pretty, but Emma more than held her own against her. Emma was a carrottop — orange hair, orange freckles — with a shy but ready smile. They complimented each other well, neither outshining the other, and Deborah had been pleased when they became confidants.

“I know I can trust you,” Deborah said.

Emma nodded and shook her head in the same uncertain movement. Even her body moved left and right in denial like a fox in a trap.

“Draw your weapon,” Deborah said as coolly as if she was working through any checklist. “Get as far back as possible. If you see us fall down or start to twitch, stop it before it gets to you. Shoot us.”

“Deborah, please—”

There were shouts at the other end of the hallway. A deep clang reverberated from the walls. Deborah pulled Emma aside and raised her gun, protecting her friend.

The far door looked as if it had been thrown open before Mendelson reached it. He’d yelled as the other men and women jumped aside. One of them stumbled to his knees, grasping at the laptop and paper files in his arms.

For an instant, Deborah thought the nanotech had spilled all the way through the complex from the other side. Then a new squad barged through her people. These men were identical in their green containment suits, their heads misshapen by hoods and masks with heavy eyepieces like insects’ eyes. Air tanks thickened the lines of their shoulders. The two in front also bristled with carbines and a flashlight, which winked and glared, even though the overhead lights were on. Grand Lake’s primary power source was the hydroelectric station in the river much farther down the mountain, but it could be destroyed. There were also diesel generators inside the complex, although their fuel reserves were dismal and would be dedicated entirely to the command center.

My God, Deborah thought. What are we going to do if the lights go out?

“Clear a hole! Clear a hole!” someone screamed.

There was nowhere to go. Deborah tried to flatten herself against the wall, only to bump against Emma. By then, the first man had reached them. The hard edge of his M4 caught Deborah in the shoulder — accidentally, she thought — and his weight drove her sideways with exploding force.

“Oh!”

Somehow Emma and another soldier caught her, rucking her uniform up against her neck. Deborah glanced after the suited man, weeping in pain.

Then her eyes stung again from a new emotion. The suited men were combat engineers, sent to burn the door at last. One of them clutched several rods of dark welding metal in his gloves. Behind him, two others wrestled with the pipe-stem nozzle of an acetylene welder and two fuel tanks. One man also carried an oversized helmet with a black-glassed visor.

Deborah’s efforts might have delayed the plague just long enough to preserve this hallway and most of her command. But as she regained her feet, she turned her back on Emma’s shaken eyes and stared at the blank surface of the door instead. They were safe.

They were safe, and it hurt.

“Deborah?” her friend asked.

Why wasn’t there anything on the intercom? she wondered. Then, angrily, What if I’d listened to Mendelson?

Her team had lost contact with the command center when they ran for the hallway. Would things have been different if she’d waited five minutes? Her team could have abandoned the other room instead of trying to hold that door, and then the engineers would have arrived before anyone else died.

Deborah’s breath returned at last. Her chest loosened and she gasped inside her face mask, hurrying away from the engineers. Their welder hissed to life. Everyone else winced at the incandescent blue light. Deborah did not, striding purposefully through the hallway to turn herself in to General Caruso.

“Let’s go! Move!” she said.

A few of her people had gone through the far door, but the others either seemed to be in shock or were collecting papers from the floor. A Navy officer said, “These are the Russian SITREPs from—”

“Move!” Deborah barked, shoving past him.

She hated to cry, but each inhalation was cathartic and sweet even as she shuddered with tears, trying to hide her face with her arm. As a member of the last crew aboard the International Space Station, as a physician and an infantry officer, Deborah Reece had seen more death than she could truly understand, but she had never killed before.

Deborah had spent the plague year in low Earth orbit, watching from the ISS as the world’s cities went dark and stayed dark. The ISS circled the planet every ninety minutes, and, on the nightside of the globe, prehistoric blackness covered every part of the world except for a very few strong-holds that burned like weak, fading stars. Leadville. Fuji. Kathmandu.

Her job had been to monitor and maintain the health of the crew. That she became rivals with Ruth Goldman was incidental. For one thing, they were the only two women aboard, and Deborah was the first to find comfort in the arms of their pilot, Derek Mills, whereas Ruth never did resolve her quiet attraction with Commander Ulinov.

The larger challenge was that while Deborah was intelligent, like all of NASA’s people, Ruth’s genius could make her difficult to reach. Ruth probably had forty IQ points on any of them, and, in her mania to reverse the plague, she exhausted herself and let her moods carry her for days on end. Her jokes were as deft as a scalpel. She cut everyone without trying.

Deborah was unlike Ruth in another way. She lacked Ruth’s imagination, which seemed to her to be a good thing. She thought if people were too smart, they lost sight of how to be normal or never understood the basics of social behavior in the first place. As long as she’d known her, Ruth had been a polarizing figure, either drawing people to her or repelling them. Like Deborah, some people had both reactions at once, binding themselves to Ruth but unable to personally identify with her intensity.

Deborah wanted to be friends. They took some steps in that direction. Then Ruth cut her even more deeply. When the ISS crew returned to Earth, it was on a highway too narrow for the shuttle. The Endeavour went off the road, killing Derek and injuring most of the rest. Ruth was needed in the nanotech labs — but eight days later she disappeared, joining the conspiracy to hijack the mission into Sacramento, California, where they’d hoped to recover the original designs of the machine plague.

Deborah never expected to see her again. When she did, she was thankful just to find a familiar face. It had taken no less than two miracles to bring them back together. Deborah was not surprised that Ruth had the tenacity to walk all the way from Sacramento to the edges of the Nevada desert, yet somehow she’d also evaded the enemy landings in California. More unlikely, Deborah herself drove out of Leadville only days before the bombing. Ruth’s would-be lover, Nikola Ulinov, was also a top Russian diplomat and a friend of Deborah’s. Playing upon the authority he’d long held aboard the ISS, he urged Deborah to make something of herself again.

U.S. Command was only too happy to add a physician to their ranks when Deborah volunteered. Even without military training, she had been handed the rank of captain, able to give orders yet equally bound by directives from above. It was a neat trick. Deborah didn’t mind. She thought Ulinov was right, and she knew she could handle herself even in a combat zone.

That was exactly where they sent her, even if she was a celebrity. Maybe they did it because of the small glamour of being associated with the space station, and if her status was some help to morale, all the better. Deborah was attached to an artillery company on the thin line of Leadville’s northern border. She felt some guilt for leaving the other survivors of the ISS crew, but Bill Wallace had been recovering nicely, and Gustavo and Ulinov were both deeply involved with the highest levels of the American government.

Now they were all dead.