The older woman sat in a hollow in the grass, leaning forward on her M16. It was an uncomfortable position that forced her to stay awake. She’d fall over if she didn‘t, and Cam smiled to himself.
She turned and nodded.
Cam approached and held out his good arm. “How about breakfast?”
Ingrid took his hand but didn’t rise beyond a few inches, trying to work some life back into her legs. The cold had hurt her. “Where is Ruth?” she asked. Maybe she was only trying to cover her infirmity, but Cam owed her an honest answer.
“I let her sleep,” he said.
“Good.”
Something else went unspoken as she studied him through the yellow lens of her goggles. Ingrid knew they’d made love. She seemed pleased by it. Ingrid lived alone, and Cam supposed she wasn’t so old that she hadn’t found some enjoyment in the lives and romances of the other women in the village.
They walked down the hill together, Cam sidling in close to support her arthritic frame.
“I’ll talk to Bobbi if I can,” Ingrid said. Her tone was matter-of-fact, and Cam was glad he didn’t have to hide anything from her.
As they neared the jeep, they saw that she was awake. Ruth leaned across the fender with her M4, an unkempt silhouette. Was there some kind of power source behind her like a flashlight? Her jacket was open and her goggles, uselessly, were pushed back into her curly hair.
“It’s us, we’re okay,” Ingrid called.
Ruth lowered her carbine. Cam was glad for his own goggles and mask as her brown eyes shifted from him to Ingrid and back. “Where’s Bobbi?” Ruth said, hesitating beside the jeep. Then she laid her hand on Cam’s elbow with newfound intimacy. The light he’d seen was her laptop. She’d placed it on the ground. The screen was divided into three windows, a big white one that was full of text and two smaller graphics. Nanotech schematics.
“Bobbi’s in a fighting hole, asleep,” Cam said. “I think she’s okay.”
“I can wake her up,” Ingrid said.
“I’ll get her,” Cam said. He was angry with himself for feeling so much like a schoolboy, but a lot of his self- consciousness was brought on by the age of the two women. They weren’t old enough to be his grandmother and his mother — Ruth would have been a very young teenager when he was born — but Ingrid especially could have been his mom.
He told himself he wanted to conserve her strength. They were still fifteen or twenty miles from Grand Lake with a lot of rough country in between. Cam estimated the hike at two days if they were lucky, and they’d already done a poor job of protecting Ingrid, keeping her up all night.
“Stay here,” he said. “Drink what you can.”
Mostly he just wanted to get away from Ruth. Maybe Ingrid could say the right things for him. The anguish he felt was unbearable. He was torn between his memories of Allison and the living woman in front of him, but if Ruth was hurt, his terse attitude didn’t mean as much to her as something else she’d learned.
“Cam,” she said. “Wait. I have preliminary numbers. This nanotech is much bigger than it needs to be. My guess is that at least 50 percent of its bulk is unused — maybe more.”
Her words went through him like another bullet.
“What does that mean?” Ingrid said.
Ruth didn’t answer. She was waiting. Cam turned at last and they exchanged a long glance of nervous, wondering horror. “The machine plague had that same handicap,” Cam said to Ingrid. “I mean the original
“It was a prototype,” Ruth explained. “Freedman and Sawyer built it with the extra capacity to hold advanced secondary programs. They wanted to be prepared for making it better, and I think the Chinese designed this contagion in the same way. It doesn’t look like it’s done. It’s not ready.”
“Maybe they planned to upload new programs after we’re all sick. The way this thing affects people right now might only be the first stage of the attack.”
“But it’s empty coding,” Ruth said. “As far as I can tell, it’s just bulk.”
“You don’t know how far they’ve progressed,” Cam said like a challenge. It was heartless, but there was a part of him that believed every implication in his words.
Her voice rose to match his. “The new plague would replicate even more rapidly if it was smaller,” she said. “It would function more cleanly and be less likely to…” Ruth faltered, but then her eyes flashed, responding to his cruelty. “It would be less likely to kill,” she said.
“Both of you,” Ingrid said. “Stop.”
Cam’s stomach was clenched like a fist.
“This isn’t accomplishing anything.” Ingrid stepped between them with her hands on their shoulders, connecting them, but Cam swung away to conceal his rage.
“I’ll get Bobbi,” he said.
“I’m sorry!” Ruth said. “Wait. I didn’t mean—”
They were caught by the sun. Shadows appeared beneath them and Cam’s gaze flickered toward the horizon. Across a sprawling, open valley to the north stood the thirteen-thousand-foot wall of the Never Summer Range. Those white peaks glared in the rosy-yellow light. Dawn was spectacular. There were no clouds, but the ever- present haze in the atmosphere acted like a dark prism, refracting and holding the light. Sunsets could be equally gorgeous. Cam and Allison had watched hundreds of these displays together, taking as much solace as they could find in their lives.
Earth was experiencing the first small effects of nuclear winter. It seemed more than possible that global warming had been checked or even reversed. Three years had passed since there were tens of thousands of power plants and factories burning around the world, nor was the total daily traffic any greater than perhaps the equivalent of pre-plague Miami.
At the same time, the atmosphere was dense with smoke and pulverized debris. Some estimates put the bomb in Leadville at sixty megatons. There had also been at least ten detonations on the other side of the planet. The Chinese had been brought to a stalemate in their other war in the Himalayas when India nuked the front lines of their own territory. India had been cautious to announce what they were doing. Nor did they harm the Chinese armies. Their bombings were a defensive maneuver, separating themselves from China with wide swaths of lethal, useless land — and so the Chinese turned their attention elsewhere.
It wasn’t unlikely that India’s victory in stopping the enemy had led China to accelerate their efforts in North America. If the Chinese had fared better in the East, maybe they wouldn’t have felt it necessary to compete directly with the U.S. in the race for weaponized nanotech.
Staring into the light, Cam shook off these thoughts before they paralyzed him. He was exhausted and irritable and he said, “Let me get Bobbi and we’ll eat. We need to get moving.”
“Cam, I—” Ruth said.
“Sweetheart, he knows,” Ingrid said. “Please. Both of you. Don’t fight. You both know you’d never say anything against Allison.”
The sunrise fluttered. There were two gigantic strobes beyond the horizon, then a third and a fourth and a fifth. The light was supernatural. It ate the sky, beating against the mountains like a silent wall that jumped up and vanished and jumped up again. Cam had seen it before. He bent and jammed his arm across his eyes — but even then, he was aware of more flashes.
“Get down!” Ingrid yelled as Ruth said, “Oh. God. Oh no. Oh no, oh God.”
There were planes in the darkness to the southwest. Jets. Cam opened his eyes. The sky sparkled with reflected sunlight and then a phalanx of bright shapes slashed overhead. Only then did the engines’ noise hit, dragging over them like a wave. Cam threw himself into the ground, no matter if the fighters had been moving too quickly to spot a few bodies on a hillside.
