Plague War

15

Ruth was the only one who panicked. Gus had her unbuckled before she even realized they’d stopped moving. Her inner ear and every muscle spun with the forgotten sensation of down as terror shot through her laboring heart, which seemed to be trying to jump free from her chest.

“Get out, Gus, we have to get out!”

Down felt all the more wrong for the sideways tilt of the shuttle’s crew cabin. She grabbed at him as she flopped forward, weak and clumsy. Her faceplate clunked against his orange pressure suit. They were all fully armored, in case Endeavour’s long wait in vacuum had resulted in subtle damages and the pressure blew out; in case it became necessary to reroute for Denver International, deep within the invisible sea; in case any of a dozen scenarios that the NASA team had game-planned.

The voices in her helmet were quick, deliberate, too much overlapping jargon to process: “Evacuate not responding control med med power-off.”

Gus dragged her toward the side hatch, bumping after Deb. Fortunately the floor tipped in that direction.

His mouth moved and she realized that two of the words resounding through her head were his. “Hang on,” he said, but pushed her away.

Deb had stepped onto the interdeck ladder, and Ruth caught one of the struts. Deb kept climbing toward the flight deck.

Ruth looked after her, shocked that she would move away from the exit. She would block the way for Ulinov and Mills and Wallace to get down. “What—” Each shallow breath was an aching. Her breasts and ribs felt like a badly used drum. Reentry had been rough but she was pretty sure the whole shuttle had rolled a few times at the end.

Impact, Mills had announced on the radio. One word. Ruth guessed there hadn’t been time for more.

It had been nothing but guessing since she strapped into her chair down here for the initial burn, ninety-some minutes ago. You’d have to be superhuman not to be scared. Mills had kept up a running commentary for their benefit, but Ruth, Gus, and Doc Deb had been relegated to the crew cabin beneath the flight deck, blind in a box, an elevator in an earthquake.

Ruth was definitely not superhuman. There had been a time, at the height of her success, when she would have accepted a bet to do this alone in radio silence or even strapped outside on the wing, damn it, but that brash steamroller of a girl had left her, giving way to claustrophobia and fear.

Deborah gasped on the radio: “Derek, oh—”

“Get back down that ladder.” Ulinov might have been asking for tea, his voice as composed as Mills’s had been.

Impact.

Once upon a time, postlanding operations had involved well over twenty specially designed vehicles and a hundred experts whose first action was to test the shuttle’s exterior for toxic and/or explosive residual gases such as hydrogen and nitrogen tetroxide. The astronauts remained inside while a Vapor Dispersal Unit fanned away potential hazards, and soon afterward Purge and Coolant Vehicles began a more thorough job of making the shuttle safe. The payload bay especially, where Ruth’s records and nanotech gear were stored, tended to fill with fumes.

Leadville had only a jury-rigged wind machine and civilian firefighting trucks. The NASA team had been anxious about dealing with a successful touchdown.

Ruth was inside a bomb.

One spark from a sheared wire, or the terrible heat of the engines — it was crucial to escape the vehicle that had saved them. There was no chance Endeavour would be obliterated in a titanic ball of flame, since most of the excess fuel was burned off during reentry as a safety precaution, but a flash fire would still roast them well enough.

Gus opened the hatch and Ruth shoved against him as the massive coin of the door dropped down, sticking out from the side of the shuttle like a round plank. Normally it would have been ten feet above ground but the Endeavour seemed to have ridden up a hill, so that although this side of the craft tipped down, the gouged earth dropped away to match. Below them were green shrubs, torn and smashed— The peeled-apart tire of a car— And two men in black firefighter jackets, yelling and waving their arms—

Ruth shoved again but Gus stayed in the opening to deploy the thermal apron, which would protect them from the hot exterior tiles. And in those unbearable extra seconds, the conversation in her helmet at last penetrated her lunatic fear.

Ulinov: “Evacuate Dr. Goldman now.”

“Your leg.” Deb again. “Bill?”

“I’m busy.”

“Get back down that ladder.”

Deb said, “I need help up here.”

“No. Evacuate now.”

“Okay, go go go,” Gus said, and he went through. The two firefighters had been joined by a soldier and an EMT in white, all of them shouting and waving.

The bravery of these men was striking. They had run toward the bomb. Without equipment, without any of their plans intact, they had run into danger for her.

Deb’s voice was matter-of-fact. “I have three wounded on the flight deck, one critical.”

Ruth could have saved herself. She should have. It was exactly how they’d trained for this moment — yet she hesitated at the brink of safety.

Like the first responders on the ground outside, the ISS crew had gambled everything for her. They had sacrificed their families and their homes. Gus and Ulinov had abandoned their countries just to serve her. If she left them now, she might never recover from the decision. The impulse to sabotage the space station and force this landing, no matter that she hadn’t acted on it, had damaged her in ways that could never be erased.

For one instant Ruth gauged the balance inside herself, but there was never really a choice.

She turned back inside. The men below her wouldn’t be able to help, not immediately. Lord knew where the shuttle had come to rest but clearly it was a disaster outside. They might need several minutes just to reach the hatch.

Ruth slipped and banged her faceplate against the interdeck ladder. Her body didn’t work right. It was unbelievable that she’d ever been so heavy. The ladder leaned over her like a wave and she was forced to wedge both hands and one foot into the rungs before raising her other leg to keep climbing.

“Ruth! Ruth, jump!” That was Gus, apparently on the ground now and looking for her at the side hatch.

She froze with her head above the floor of the flight deck. She saw glass and dirt blasted over the cockpit — wet crumbly brown dirt—and heaved herself up on a new flood of adrenaline.

Riding copilot, Bill Wallace leaned past what looked like two bodies to reach the pilot’s panel. Derek Mills had been rolled up in his seat, up despite the downward-tilting floor, by a crumpled shaft of metal jammed through the windshield. It was the twisted roof of the ambulance that the Endeavour had carried over the embankment.

Blood covered Wallace’s arm, some of which must have been his own. Shrapnel had flayed open the elbow and shoulder of his insulated orange sleeve, wounding the arm he’d extended to complete his work. Emergency power-off. A complete shutdown of every onboard system was their best chance to prevent a fire and the man left with this responsibility had never formally trained as a pilot.

“Hurry!” Ruth screamed at him, at herself, at all of them.

“Go back down. Evacuate.” Ulinov was still in his seat, directly beside Ruth at the rear wall of the flight deck. He had also taken shrapnel. His faceplate was partly masked by opaque chips and Deb slapped his gory knee with one hand, hanging on to his seat with the other. The adhesive patch she’d put on his leg bulged as if there were other patches folded beneath it, pushed against his torn skin, a crude but effective pressure bandage despite the bulk of his suit.

“Get him out,” Deb said to Ruth, gesturing. “Try to hold him so he doesn’t fall down the ladder.”

Ulinov waved them off. “Your orders are to—”

“Do it,” Deb said, imperious as ever, before she left Ulinov for Wallace. There hadn’t been time yet for Deb to work on Mills, and Ruth realized that he must be dead. The metal bulk nestled into his lap and chest had hit him hard enough to bend his seat.

“I gotcha,” Ruth promised Ulinov, grabbing his armrest with one trembling hand.

Maneuvering on the crowded deck was like a puzzle. She hauled her legs out of the access hatch, then did her best to slow Ulinov as he left his chair and squeezed past her.

“You go next,” Deb told Wallace, probing at his shoulder wounds, but Bill Wallace stayed in his seat. He slapped at a computer, either because it wasn’t responding or to clear away the debris, but he never even turned his head.

Ruth hurt her back when Ulinov lost his footing at the top of the ladder. Bracing her feet against the wall on either side of his torso, she clenched his arm with a strength that seemed entirely mental. His blood had rubbed off onto her sleeves.

Ulinov collapsed at the base of the ladder, on the floor of the crew cabin. Ruth stepped on him and fell.

They crabbed out into the awful white sun together and Ulinov swan-dived from the round plank of the hatch. Ruth screamed, but caught her breath. He hadn’t fallen — he’d jumped, turning to protect his leg — and the knot of people below them had become a group of forty or more, uniformed in black or olive drab or blue or white. Ulinov’s big orange body knocked down a wide swath of them.

The men had their arms up for her, too. Nearly every face was bearded, which looked strange, rough, animal. Ruth knelt to minimize the distance but slipped off before she could kick outward. Three guys dived to break her fall.

No one bothered to set her on her feet. Half a dozen arms clamped around her boots and armpits and elbows, hoisting her up, and a confusion of silhouettes in caps and firefighter helmets bobbed above her faceplate as they carried her.

“Wallace,” she said. “Wallace!” But the radio chatter in her ears was only a confusion again.

Someone at her left shoulder tripped and they dropped her, two bodies slamming into her midsection. She might have grayed out. She lost her thin breath altogether.

Then she was upright, suddenly, propped on the low bumper of an army jeep. A rangy Santa Claus in dirty paramedic whites squinted at her through sun-darkened wrinkles and bushy eyebrows. His hands fumbled with the seals of her helmet. Ruth stared past him. But the panorama of sky and mountains was too big for her and she deliberately lowered her eyes, reeling, even as curiosity forced her to glance up again.

They were about a hundred yards from the Endeavour, north up the highway, and she froze as she realized the mountain face was alive with bodies. Lord God. There must be miles of people up there watching—

The shuttle had gone off the highway between her and the impossible crowd, its path marked by the wreckage of two or more fire engines. Other emergency vehicles had come up the road to that point, lights winking, horns blaring, trundling through the swarm of firefighters and soldiers and NASA pad rats.

Then they pulled off her helmet and the radio chatter in her ear was replaced by a less immediate, more chaotic hubbub of yelling. Ruth winced at the sun, and the sweet fragrance of the air made her close her eyes.

Savoring it, she remembered Derek Mills. Impact. His last word, warning them. She looked up.

“Dizzy?” the medic asked, putting his palm to her cheek and thumbing down on the skin beneath her eye. “You’re not bleeding, are you?”

“It’s just his,” she said.

They’d seated Ulinov next to her while she was catching her breath. Two medics, one also in dirty whites and another in combat fatigues, had knifed open the leg of Ulinov’s suit to wrap gauze over his thigh. Another busy cluster of medical personnel had formed at the back of an ambulance across from them, and Ruth caught glimpses of an orange suit. Gus.

“Are they out?” she asked. “The astronauts?”

“I think—” The medic jerked and lifted his head.

Then the rifle shot reached them. Ruth wouldn’t have noticed the distant clap amidst the engines and hundreds of voices, except that his motion alerted her and the general din instantly went quiet.

She thought to wonder how the medic had heard a sound before it existed. Then he took his hand off her cheek and reached for his side. Blood seeped there through the medic’s grimy white shirt. His beard parted with a question.

Then he sagged away from her as the voices roared. People everywhere belly flopped onto the ground or ran for cover behind the many vehicles, hiding from the great eastern slope. The mountainside itself undulated as three hundred thousand refugees fled in conflicting, colliding masses.

“Sniper!” yelled the soldier kneeling before Ulinov, seizing Ulinov’s arm to haul him down.

Ruth didn’t make sense of it, didn’t realize that her bright orange suit was the target, even after a ricochet whined off of the jeep’s hood not two feet away. She gawked at the riot surrounding her until Nikola Ulinov hit her in the side.

His bulk drove her into the asphalt like the heel of God’s boot and snapped both bones in her forearm.