Plague War

26

Ruth realized she had been right not to trust Cam with the secret of the conspiracy. He was too close to Hernandez. Too bad. She liked him. He tried so hard. But the strength of his commitment was its own liability.

Crammed into the back of the jeep with D.J., writing new code and arguing over every line of it, Ruth managed to ignore her anxiety until the bulldozer began crashing around. Lord knew she had always been able to hide in her work — and using the keyboard and ball mouse with one glove-thickened hand was a real chore, enough to keep her occupied.

“I can’t see when you do that,” D.J. said, reaching across her to steady the laptop. Ruth bumped his arm, grabbing at her belt and changing frequencies.

She needed to hear what Hernandez was saying.

It was unfair to doubt Cam for a choice he hadn’t made, of course. He didn’t know that two sides existed, and it was only natural for him to respond to the resources and the sense of control Hernandez had brought into his life.

He was a good man but profoundly wounded — and so he might disbelieve everything she’d say about the atrocities of the Leadville government. The quickest way for him to be done with this mess was to fly back to Colorado. He would be a champion. He could in some way consider himself whole again. Ruth wasn’t sure he would be able to choose a path that led anywhere else, a path that meant more running, more effort, as they diverted north into Canada and reorganized a working lab and tried to gather enough allies to hold off the inevitable assaults as Leadville pursued them. It was too much to expect.

Nevertheless, tension and guilt had kept her awake most of the night. Her brain ached from the blunt rubber stink of the suit and her body felt heavy with exhaustion even as it twitched with nervous energy, ill and uneasy.

D.J. pulled on the laptop and complained again, a muted buzz outside her suit. She’d caught Hernandez midsentence: “—ooner we get you on the trailer.” He made a sweeping motion in her direction and Cam rolled Sawyer after him toward the jeep.

The bulldozer punched into another vehicle. Ka-rang! One of the car’s tires popped as the ’dozer shoved it sideways, the metal rim digging into the asphalt with a hair-raising wail. It didn’t stop until the car tottered over the embankment at the top of the exit ramp, tumbling down with three distinct impacts.

“Lowrey, Watts.” Hernandez raised his voice only slightly. “We’re lifting this chair up onto the trailer.”

“Yes, sir, I was gonna put him up front against that crate.”

“Fine. Let’s move it. The ramp will be clear in a minute.”

Cam noticed Ruth’s attention and lifted one glove. She thought he might have smiled but the low sun was on his faceplate, obscuring the middle of his expression. She turned away.

In her uncertainty, some part of her actually wanted to find the labs stripped clean. Once they had Sawyer’s schematics, the Special Forces would instigate their takeover — and Hernandez would fight. Ruth was sure of that much.

No matter the odds, Hernandez would fight them.

* * * *

Overall the city appeared only lightly damaged. Commercial buildings loomed above them, impassive weight, a thousand white glints of sunshine on unbroken glass. If they failed, if Sawyer’s files and prototypes were truly lost and the machine plague held sway over the planet forever, this place was a monument that would exist in some form until ultimately the continental shelf rolled into the Pacific Ocean. Concrete and iron would withstand quakes, fires, and weather for eons.

Ruth gazed all around, gripped by dark wonder.

The frozen traffic here surged only one way — west, toward the freeway, every car nosing into the next. They came up onto sidewalks. They diverted through parking lots and hedges and fences. They were full of stick shapes, and the crowded street itself had become the grave of hundreds, color-fast rags on yellowing bone, screaming jaws and eroded fingers, the skeletons of dogs and birds scattered among the human remains like strange half-grown monsters.

The carnage looked even worse in contrast to the commonplace icons of America, most of which survived untouched. Rising on poles, bolted to storefronts, were the garish plastic signs of Chevron and Wendy’s and 24 Hour Donuts.

Their progress eastward was a crawl at first, the jeep hanging back with the big white pickup truck the soldiers had gotten started. The man in the bulldozer had a lonely job. He thrust into the packed cars, always a half block or more ahead of the group, and he was even more isolated by the metal slats that Leadville mechanics had welded to the operator’s cage to protect him from the shrapnel that sometimes crashed up.

With each roar of the bulldozer’s engine, each shriek of metal, echoes rattled against the high faces of the buildings and fled into the silence, sometimes returning to them from odd directions. Sometimes the sounds that came back did not match those that had gone away, lower in pitch or delayed too long.

Ruth wasn’t the only one who kept looking over her shoulder.

Dangerous hooks and teeth lined their path, torn hoods, bent fenders, windshields mashed into opaque spiderwebs.

Debris gritted beneath the jeep’s tires as it advanced, scattered dunes of safety glass and chunks of bone. They rolled over puddles of antifreeze and gasoline — and Ruth instinctively drew a long breath through her nose, though of course she could only smell the thickening odor of her own sweat.

It would be appalling for them to have made it this far only to lose their lives to one spark, fifty cars igniting around them like explosive dominos. The image shocked her, veins of fire throughout the city…but good engineering prevented most of the vehicles from leaking fuel as they were smashed or overturned, and the man in the bulldozer exercised some care when pushing his blade into a vehicle’s underside.

Ruth saw patterns in the devastation. The people who’d left their cars to continue on foot had collected in drifts on the far sides of the standstill traffic. Obviously they’d kept fighting toward the freeway, every skull and arm leaning forward as if to meet her, but why had so many died in groups?

She understood suddenly and was nauseous. Those stained bones, settled now, would have been a real barrier with flesh and muscle on them, stacked waist high in places, slick with fluids, perhaps still moving. Hemorrhaging or blind, thousands of men and women had staggered through the maze of cars until they reached obstacles they couldn’t pass…and it had been bodies that filled the spaces between the never-ending vehicles…

Ruth was glad for her containment suit. At first, in the plane, wearing it had been like wrapping herself inside a small prison, prickles of goose bumps lifting against the rubber skin, but now it helped her feel removed from her surroundings.

Now she knew better than ever that her solitary, stubborn focus on her work had been correct. There was no doubt that she had been right to come here. The hard question was if she would be good enough, smart enough, quick enough.

A distant shriek turned her head again, a living sound, high and ragged. A cat? No. Her gaze darted over the colorful jam of cars, the tall face of an office complex. Was it some trick of the breeze? Then she noticed Cam patting at Sawyer’s shoulder and realized the sound was his, muffled by his suit.

But was the son of a bitch mourning or — it was cruel to think it — was he only frustrated with his suit, his own stink, the isolation of being without a radio?

Hernandez and his Marines made a great business of reporting each landmark and reading quadrants off their maps, as if they might get lost despite moving at a near crawl. The pilots, who’d stayed with the planes, were relaying both the general frequency and the command channel back to Colorado. Ruth supposed the theory was that another team could benefit from their observations if they didn’t make it out.

The constant chatter was also a way to overcome the desolation, concentrating on each other instead.

But it too was a danger. She didn’t think Senator Kendricks would listen himself, not hour after hour; he was too busy, too important, but if she were in his shoes she would insist on regular updates — and her name would be mentioned. It was not an if but when.

Kendricks would know that something was wrong.

After four blocks — after more than forty minutes — they escaped the main thoroughfare and turned north on 35th Street, into residential streets leading nowhere except into a warren of low-rise apartments and duplexes. These narrower roads were spotted with stalls, but the residents here had mostly escaped their immediate neighborhood and left these streets passable. The ’dozer ranged ahead as they pointed eastward again.

“Keep it under thirty,” Hernandez told Gilbride, who sat at the jeep’s wheel. Hernandez himself had picked out a spot on the trailer with his map unfolded, sitting alongside Cam and Sawyer and Marine Corporal Ruggiero, Corporal Watts, and Sergeant Lowrey.

The Special Forces unit followed in the pickup truck, minus Staff Sergeant Dansfield, who was running the bulldozer, and Ruth worried that by segregating themselves they’d alert Hernandez, if only subconsciously. Were they making plans, their radios off? What if he realized they’d shut down their headsets?

She knew they’d made one obvious blunder. When they left the plane, most of the soldiers brought only their sidearms. In this place, guns were just something else to carry. But two of the Special Forces had grabbed their assault rifles, and Hernandez must have noticed—

Ruth squirmed, shifting her cast inside the tight pocket of her chest and making a fist. The strain hurt her still-healing break and helped her center herself. Stop it. Calm down.

Hernandez didn’t know. He couldn’t. If Leadville sent warning he’d confront her immediately, along with D.J. and Todd, or arrest the Special Forces depending on the extent of his information. Only the conspirators had reason to hold back, but if they waited too long and a warning came— If they decided to back out because Sawyer’s lab was stripped clean—

Stop. Just stop. Ruth clenched her fist once more and held it, hurting, furious with herself.

They went nineteen blocks to 55th Street quickly, but then the frozen traffic crowded in again. Weaving south, they managed another block before the road was impassable. As planned, the bulldozer swung into a driveway and crashed through a six-foot fence, then another. They cut across two lots back toward 54th. One yard was a small Eden, ivy, brick, sun chairs. The next was carpeted with dead lawn as dry as cereal. Dusty particles wafted up behind the ’dozer, and Todd, in his fidgety way, brushed his suit clean and then tried to smooth the folds in his sleeves.

“We’re eight minutes over our mark,” Hernandez said. “Not bad, gentlemen.” They had expected to reach this point after three-quarters of an hour. Ruth felt like she’d aged a month.

“How are we doing on air?” Todd asked.

“Lots of time,” Hernandez told him.

“Look at my gauge, okay?” From his gesture, Todd intended these words for Ruth and D.J., directly behind him, but Hernandez said, “I’m not going to endanger you unnecessarily, believe me. Let’s hang on until we reach the labs.”

Ruth leaned forward and put her glove on Todd’s shoulder. Twenty-plus minutes in flight, ten more unloading the vehicles, another sixty to come this far— He was still outside the red, which surprised her. “You have twelve minutes,” she said.

They drove south on 54th and then swung eastward again on Folsom, another main thoroughfare that was comparatively open for several blocks.

The jeep blew a tire just past 64th Street. They had been about to stop anyway, to allow the ’dozer to clear the thickening stalls, and now Hernandez said, “Buddy check, buddy check. We change out the man with the lowest gauge first.”

Two of the Special Forces guys wrestled with a spare tire and car jack, moving deliberately to keep from snagging their suits. Captain Young and two others began switching air tanks, Sawyer first, then Sergeant Lowrey, then Todd. A person alone could not have done it. The hose attachment was shut, leaving the wearer with no more than the air in his suit. Simple brackets held the canisters into their packs, easily freed and easily screwed down again — but the threat of contamination had a complex solution. A semi-rigid plastic hood attached to a compressor pump was fitted over the hose and tank spigots, then taped to secure the seal. The pocket of low pressure destroyed any archos that had gathered there, before Captain Young reopened first the hose connection and then the tanks.

A suit alone contained maybe fifteen minutes of breathable air, but Ruth clenched her fist each time they began the process, no matter that they never took longer than two minutes. She was fourth. She kept from babbling her phobia only with concentrated effort, staring down at an orange shard of taillight plastic rather than the men around her.

The tire change was done before Young finished with her. Meanwhile, the ’dozer had cleared Folsom Boulevard down to Sixty-eighth Street. Hernandez got them organized again and they rolled on through the dead traffic, three more blocks.

Highway 50 stood to the south like an immense wall, forming a straight horizon beyond every gap in the buildings. So damned close. But there hadn’t been any room to land there.

Two hundred yards down 68th Street, the ’dozer bashed its way into a narrow parking lot that was empty except for a red VW Beetle. Dansfield shoved the car into a hump of brush and left his machine in that corner, out of the way. Beyond the small lot lay an L-shaped, two-story structure, both levels banded in dark gray brick and silvered glass.

Inside the nearest wing was the archos lab.

* * * *

Hernandez made her wait. He wanted his men to enter the building first, but renewing everyone’s air supply took priority.

Ruth stepped out of the jeep, stamping her boots and hugging her laptop. She stared at the mirrored face of the building yet did not recognize her reflection or the emotions inside herself. No. This moment felt as if the last flight of the Endeavour had been condensed into one tremendous pulse, faith and doubt, excitement and terror.

Young changed out Dansfield and Olson immediately, because they were in the red, then took care of D.J. and Cam next after the rest of the soldiers volunteered to wait. Still thinking of Endeavour, Ruth also re-experienced the stunning respect she had known for the rescue teams.

These men were astounding, all of them, to have fought across this wasteland with such competence.

It was wrong that they needed to be enemies.

She looked for Sawyer. Watts and Ruggiero had lifted his wheelchair down from the trailer and Sawyer made a flopping gesture with one arm. Ruth started toward them, stopped. She was afraid of her own agitation. Sawyer angered too easily, and he had been like an idiot child all morning. She couldn’t afford to rile him.

The soldiers with fresh tanks approached the building and found the door secured. Its electronic locks had seized when the power went off. The delivery entrance around the side was open — Freedman and Sawyer had left that way — but to get the jeep and trailer there would involve clearing another street. Hernandez elected to go through the wall instead. Along the inner faces of the building’s L-shape, overlooking what had been low-maintenance landscaping of shrubs and river rock, the walls alternated waist-to-ceiling windows of reinforced glass with floor-to-ceiling panes.

Lowrey put four pistol shots through the nearest full-length section at downward angle, aiming his bullets into the floor rather than the lab space beyond. Then they bashed out the weakened glass with tire irons and carefully rubbed the frame clean of shards.

“Let’s bring them in,” Hernandez radioed, after scouting the interior for no more than a minute.

D.J. bumped her armless side, hurrying to be first. Ruth almost clubbed him with the laptop. Instead, she studied her footing as she crossed ten yards of loose rock, Todd matching her step for step with his glove extended, ready to help.

Moving inside should have been a triumph. It felt like a trap. Her eyes, accustomed to daylight, seemed dim and weak.

Ruth assumed the offices and admin were on the second floor. Labs tended to be at ground level because it was silly to haul equipment up and down. That would make their job easier. So would the six-foot hole in the wall. They’d come straight into a large rectangular space, with a glassed-in section filling almost half of the right side. The hermetic chamber. It was a lab within a lab, since the main area was definitely a clean room itself, hard white tile floor, white paneling, the ceiling lined with recessed fluorescent lighting. Ordinary PCs sat along the left wall with an assortment of multimode scopes.

A monitor had been knocked off the end of a counter, a chair overturned. For an instant she thought Hernandez and his men had already begun ransacking the place, but those small signs of disorder had existed for fifteen months now.

Please, God, let us find everything we need.

The glass box was maybe nine hundred square feet, with the long phone booth of the air lock protruding from its left face and bulky steel manifolds scrunched between its right side and the wall of the main room. The box itself was fairly crowded with another set of computers and microscopy gear including the fabrication laser — three squat monoliths in a row.

Ruth strode toward the glass barrier, her radio busy with the soldiers cautioning each other as they carried Sawyer’s wheelchair in behind her.

“Don’t drop him!”

“He keeps rocking around—”

“Science team, listen up.” Hernandez. “We need you to identify everything in this place with a rough score from most important down to least important. We definitely don’t have room to take it all back. Come over here. Sergeant Gilbride has grease pencils you can mark—”

Ruth interrupted. “Look for generators first,” she said. “Major? Have someone look around for generators. There’s an independent power system on-site. We can run a few trials.”

“There’s no time for that.”

She turned from the glass box and quickly spotted him among the beige suits. Hernandez held both arms overhead and waggled his hands, a this way gesture.

“You don’t know what you’re—” Ruth stopped herself, and ended in a hush. “We have to try.” Drawing attention to herself on the general frequency was a terrible risk. Senator Kendricks would be listening now, if at all, to learn whether or not their mission had been worth the jet fuel.

“Dr. Goldman,” Hernandez said, and she cringed at her own name. “We have a limited amount of air and a great deal of heavy loading to accomplish. The drive back will go a lot faster than the ride here, but let’s not count on it.”

She blundered on. “What’s the point of driving back if we’re not positive we have what we came for?”

“I think she’s right.” That was D.J. “We have six hours. I say let’s allocate half of it to test series before you start throwing things on the trailer.”

Lord God, had she sounded even half as arrogant herself? There was so much to think about— Ruth hurried for a more diplomatic tone. “We’re not asking you to waste time standing around, there’s plenty of gear to load up in the meantime.”

“What makes you think there are generators here?”

“Freedman knew what she was working with. Look at this isolation chamber. You don’t build something like this without putting in backup power. The public grid is too unreliable. You lose electricity, you lose containment.”

“All right.” Hernandez adjusted as easily as that, even though his plan must have been like clockwork in his mind, ticking smoothly ever since they’d left Colorado. “We’ll give you two hours. No more. No argument. And one of you starts ID’ing equipment right now so we can get the ball rolling.”

He was a good man, better than Leadville deserved. What had James said? I think he’d give his life to protect us.

Very soon she would betray him because of his integrity.

“Captain,” Hernandez continued, “locate the generators and have your guys look them over. Hermano, how’s Mr. Sawyer?”

The beige suits rearranged themselves and several moved toward the only door out of the lab, Captain Young instructing his team to switch to channel six.

Cam rolled Sawyer forward as he answered Hernandez. “He wants to talk to Ruth, sir,” Cam said.

She was obvious in the group, one-armed, her torso misshapen by the cast. Cam aimed Sawyer right at her. Ruth hunched down and took another deep breath, frantic to compose herself.

Sawyer’s faceplate was marked with odd, ghostly streaks. Finger smudges. He’d dirtied his gloves on the tires of his wheelchair and then tried repeatedly to scratch at his lumpy scars, or to hide from their surroundings, or possibly even to take off his helmet as he forgot himself.

Ruth saw awareness in him now. That one bright eye glared out from his slack, lopsided expression.

“Wuh’ere,” he said, faint without a radio. “Yuhgamme’ere.”

“You got me here,” Cam translated.

That he needed to have it confirmed spoke volumes about his mental state. “Of course.” She made a smile. “We’re going to turn on the power, take your hardware for a little test-drive.”

“Yuh.” He jerked his head in approval.

“I’ve been in nanotech more than ten years and never seen anything like this.” Small talk in the graveyard.

But Sawyer’s head convulsed in a side-to-side motion rather than up and down. He didn’t want coaxing or compliments. He had finally set aside his ego.

“Ubstuhs,” he said, blinking. He’d lost sight of her when he shook his head, and his eye tracked feverishly before he found her again. Was it desperation in his gaze? He grumbled and Cam said, “Look upstairs. Freedman kept dupes everywhere, at home, in her office. I think Dutchess only cleaned out the lab.”

Ruth resisted the urge to turn and go herself, still wary of upsetting him. “D.J.?”

“I heard it. Ask where exactly—”

Sawyer remained cooperative. “Freedman’s office is the second door from the top of the stairs,” Cam said for him. “On the left. Try her desk or her file cabinet.”

D.J. and two Marines hustled away as Special Forces Master Sergeant Olson came back on radio. “Olson here. Looks like the generators ran dry, sir. Probably start up if we refuel.”

“Give it a shot,” Hernandez told him.

Cam spoke again in tandem with Sawyer: “If there’s nothing upstairs, try those computers beside the scanning probe. Dutchess wiped just about everything but a good hacker should be able to reconstruct deleted files from the hard drive. You’ll have at least preliminary designs on the archos components.”

There was motion behind Ruth, as Todd or maybe Hernandez stepped toward those PCs. She kept her attention focused on Sawyer, wondering at the change in him.

He continued to speak and Cam echoed him: “If you have full data, use model R-1077 as your base. R-1077. There’s no fuse and its mass is under one billion AMU. Less than a quarter of that is programmable space but it should hold the rep algorithm and your discrim key.”

You. Your. He was putting everything in their hands. He must have felt that he was losing the war against himself. His unusual strength of will, his rage, his private terror — these were all useless against the wet touch of spittle at the corner of his mouth, the clumsy meat that had been his arms and legs.

He might hang on another five years but in the truest sense he was dying, and he knew it, and in this lucid moment he wanted most of all to escape his own bitterness.

Ruth managed another smile, more genuine this time, and Sawyer’s intense gaze flickered from her eyes to the sad quirk of her mouth. He nodded — and then the lab came to life around them in a cacophony of beeps and buzzing. Many pieces of equipment had still been on when the electricity went out, and the overhead fluorescents winked and then smothered them in furious white.

The distractions broke the wordless communion between Ruth and Sawyer. He glanced away and Ruth saw his expression loosen, tense as he fought to hold on to his thoughts, then ease again as he was overwhelmed by new stimuli.

Already his concentration was fading.

* * * *

D.J. returned downstairs with a small zippered packet of CD-RW discs and a smaller, flat metal case like a gentleman’s cigarette holder. He made quite a show of his finds, proudly holding them out. The Special Forces unit had also returned to the main lab and D.J. created an eddy through the gathered suits as their curiosity led most of them after him for a few steps.

Ruth forgave his self-important grin.

Lined with form-fitted sponge, the case held sixteen vacuum wafers no bigger or thicker than a fingernail. A container intended to be manipulated by human hands was of astronomical proportions for a batch of nanos, even compartmentalized, but the microscopic structures within would be fastened to a carbon surface for easier location under the microscope.

This was not archos. Freedman would never have brought complete, programmed nanos outside the hermetic chamber. But the sectional components would help them to intuit the full potential of this technology later on — and the base prototypes might serve as their vaccine nano with only minor adaptations.

The discs offered more magic. Sawyer perked up again when D.J. showed him the CD packet, which was lurid pink and sported the too-cute, doe-eyed face of a PowerPuff Girl. Somehow, fleetingly, that made Freedman real to Ruth as an individual for the first time, a woman who’d spent a few extra bucks on a vibrant case instead of buying a plain one.

“Series twelve,” Cam said, still diligently translating. “The series twelve discs are the replication program.”

Someone caught Ruth’s arm and she looked up. Beyond the few suits clustered around Sawyer, the rest of the group were now getting ready to haul equipment outside, pushing chairs back into the far corner, unplugging computers and disconnecting keyboards.

The man who’d grabbed her elbow was Captain Young.

“You have it?” he asked, his voice muffled. The Special Forces team leader had shut off his radio. He thrust his face close and Ruth leaned away, startled, but Young pulled on her again and pressed his helmet to hers. Conduction improved the transfer of sound waves.

He spoke more precisely. “Do you have what we came for?”

She hesitated. She nodded.

Young bobbed his head in response and then turned, releasing her arm, reaching for the radio control on his belt. His voice filled the general frequency. “Green green green,” he said, and unslung his rifle from his shoulder.