Plague Zone

walked into the base.

Jia regretted the look of his makeshift command center even more than his own poor showing. It had been necessary to escape the ash. They’d moved everything they could salvage to a second-level barracks with its ceiling and walls intact, using the bunk beds to hold their electronics, display screens, and paper notes. The place was a madhouse. Forty men knelt or sat on the floor to access their consoles while a dozen more acted as runners, stepping over an unsecured mess of cables and power cords. The noise was staggering. So was the smell. The ash had stolen into the room with them, and everyone was bloodied and sweat-stained and sour with dehydration and fear.

Silence touched the barracks as Jia met Qin at the door. It vanished again in the busy voices, but everyone was aware of the change. The new arrivals looked as if they’d walked straight out of mainland China, unsullied and neat, and their authority was all the greater for their cleanliness. They had been protected while everyone else in California burned.

“Where are your SATCOM personnel?” Qin demanded.

“Here, sir.” Jia pointed.

“These officers are now in command,” Qin said as his two subordinates moved past him into the barracks, a major and a lieutenant. Each man held a briefcase. The major also carried his own laptop.

Jia felt a flash of resentment. We’ve done well, he thought.

“There is someplace we can speak undisturbed,” Qin said, making his words a statement, not a question.

“Yes, sir. Let me leave instructions with—”

“My officers are in charge,” Qin said.

“Yes, sir. This way, sir.” Jia didn’t even glance back into the room to signal the two survivors from his command team, Yi and Renshu. Instead, he walked from the barracks with the first of Qin’s bodyguards close at his back. His stride was brisk. It was important to Jia that he wasn’t shot within hearing of his troops, and Qin would afford him no more mercy or ceremony than he had given Dongmei.

The corridor stirred with soot and debris, open to the night at one end. Each breath tasted of failure. Then the general emerged from the barracks himself with a second bodyguard. Jia’s relief was unfounded, perhaps — would they arrest him? — but he couldn’t repress a sense of victory, which made him resentful again. He loathed them for making him afraid.

The door shut and left them in darkness. One of Qin’s bodyguards turned on a flashlight. Above, Jia heard shouts from his engineers and the dozens of soldiers pressed into duty as laborers. They had worked all day to secure the base and would continue all night. He was proud of them.

Jia led Qin and his bodyguards past two doors, the second blocked by a hunk of concrete and rebar. Insignificant pieces of grit littered the floor, difficult to see in the ash. Qin moved elegantly in the pool of light cast from his bodyguard’s hand. Nevertheless, Jia saw an opportunity to show respect.

“Watch your step, sir,” he said.

The third door led to a supply room that had been locked until the wall buckled in the quakes, fracturing the door and its frame. Otherwise Jia would have forced it open. No one had recovered the keys, but the children’s boxed juices and the canned goods inside had been all that kept his troops going since sunup.

Jia sidestepped into the doorway and hit the light switch, illuminating the empty concrete. Nothing was left except one garish blue wrapper with a smiling red dog on it. Jia stared at the cardboard. Would it share his tomb?

No, he realized. They weren’t even looking at him.

“Sir, I don’t like this,” the bodyguard said, tracing his flashlight up the exterior of the doorframe.

“A few cracks in a wall are hardly the greatest risk we’ve seen today,” Qin said. “Leave me. Guard the hall. I only require a few minutes.”

What does he want?

Jia faced Qin as the older man entered the room alone. Qin hadn’t even bothered to have Jia’s sidearm confiscated, which spoke of his power and his toughness. Clearly he was also familiar with Jia’s MSS files. Qin expected obedience. Jia would give it to him. He only wished he looked the part. He felt conscious again of the blood and filth on his uniform— yet he also gloried in it. There had never been time to hunt up a new set of clothes. Nor was it likely that there were new clothes, certainly not enough for everyone, and Jia was disinterested in making himself more comfortable when his troops could not share the same improvement. His tattered uniform spoke well of his own conduct.

He’d pushed his men harder than ever. It had taken them hours to establish their new command center and reconnect with the few radar stations left in southern California. During all that time, they were helpless, their borders unmonitored and unpatrolled. The majority of their surviving planes had been returning from enemy territory, scattered across North America. A few aircraft were tucked away here and there in California, but lost their runways in the holocaust or their pilots or their ground crews.

Jia’s base was among the first to come online again. Until early afternoon, in fact, he had been the senior officer in charge of the People’s Liberation Army. Radio was intermittent. Landlines were gone completely. He was able to form up some infantry and several armored units in a dozen locations, but to what point? None of them could reach each other, nor would they have been any use against enemy fighters.

It was even more crucial to watch for missile launches, either China’s own or another American attack. He needed to know. Yet he was unable to reconnect with their satellites.

His first useful command had been to redirect their planes into Russian territory, where the air fields were free for the taking. This decision seemed even more farsighted when he learned that a second wave of Chinese ICBMs blasted Montana and the Dakotas, destroying the last of the American silos. He’d preserved their air strength, which otherwise might have suffered further casualties in the missile strikes. Then he set patrols above California again.

There were two counter-attacks. Three F/A-18s flew out of Flagstaff and knocked down five Chinese fighters before falling themselves. A single V-22 Osprey rose out of Colorado and, using Chinese codes, pierced deep into California before it was shot down, too. There were also several American planes that ran for the East Coast or overseas. They were pursued and killed. Perhaps a few escaped.

The fight was won, but the cost had been too steep. Jia was even rightly to blame, not a scapegoat, and honor demanded that the men who’d set the war in motion take responsibility for their losses. Qin would assume command of this base — that much was obvious.

I was glad to serve, Jia thought as he drew his sidearm and presented the weapon to Qin, grip first. With the same motion, he also bowed.

“Twenty minutes ago, our nanotech labs failed to check in on schedule,” Qin said, surprising him.

“Sir?”

“Perhaps their radio failed,” Qin said. “Their buildings might have fallen in an aftershock. Or there may be a larger problem. We need to be sure.”

There may be weaponized nanotech drifting from the site, Jia thought, completing the fear that Qin left unmentioned.

“I considered diverting my helicopter,” Qin said, “but my mission here is critical and we were only seven men including our pilot. I believe you’ve gathered a second helicopter at this base, correct?”

“Yes, sir.”

Before the plague year, the PLA had begun a major new initiative to increase their helicopter fleet. Even so, they’d lagged far behind more modern armies. Only a handful of Z-9 and Z-10 birds came with their invasion force, and they lacked enough pilots to fully take advantage of the helicopters they’d gained in the war. A functioning, crewed helicopter was priceless, but earlier today Jia had ordered one of the very few aircraft in the region to himself in hope of salvaging more electronics from other bases. They’d seen limited success, yet this decision also seemed well fated, so he risked a question.

“Are the nanotech labs nearby?”

“They’re less than an hour from this base — in San Bernadino, against the mountains,” Qin said.

This information had been kept from Jia. He’d only seen reports on the scientists’ progress, but he understood why he’d been closer to the program than he’d guessed. There had been quarantine protocols in case of disaster. He was inside those lines. Before the missiles fell, he would have been able to reach the labs if