Plague War

27

Cam glanced away from D.J. and Sawyer at the strange announcement, “Green green,” and saw at least half of the men raise their left arms in what appeared to be a choreographed movement, their gloves balled into fists. It was a gesture of identification. Then they stepped toward the other soldiers with their sidearms drawn.

“What—!” he shouted, but the radio filled with chatter.

“Freeze fucking freeze right there crazy what are you freeze hey Trotter hold it don’t move!”

The coordinated action took just seconds. There must have been a prior signal he’d missed. Each of the attackers stood close to one of the others, and none of the attackers had anything in hand, whereas most of the rest were encumbered with a computer monitor, an armload of cords, a stack of electronics.

Each attacker put his Glock 9mm in his opponent’s face and grabbed at the man’s waist, seizing not the man’s holstered pistol but his radio control. Their wiring ran safely inside their suits except for a short length that extended from every left hip to every control box, which allowed their headsets to be unplugged and jacked directly into another communication system like that of a plane. Now the attackers silenced the other men.

Something shut off in Cam as well. Confusion, dismay, anger — the shock wave through his head left him empty and clear, tuned entirely outward. He absorbed details into his body like oxygen. It was the fluid, immediate thinking of an animal, disassociated from logic or emotion.

It decided him. He ducked sideways like a blitzing cornerback angling for position.

During the past hours Cam had become able to distinguish among his companions in spite of the suits — some of them, at least; Dansfield because of his height; Olson with grime on his sleeve; Hernandez because of his clipped stride and his tendency to be the group’s focal point. Instinct said that it was the Special Forces who were taking over and Hernandez who was in trouble. Given time, Cam might have reached the same conclusion with a quick count. The crush of beige suits was five on five and two more attackers hung back with assault rifles, wicked black metal in their suit-thick arms. But he had forgotten numbers. And he knew that they had forgotten him.

The nearest rifleman stood three paces from Ruth, his M16 pointed at the ceiling. Captain Young. His helmet shifted as he reiterated his code, “Green two green tw—”

Cam hit him in the ribs, shoulder to body, and like a cornerback striking a ball carrier he chopped down at the captain’s arms.

“No!” The only female voice.

Then another rise of male shouts: “What did shit look out!”

The M16 rattled, four shots into floor. Spent casings leapt against Cam’s chest as he and Young tumbled together, their momentum increased by the weight of their air tanks.

Another, heavier gunshot reverberated through the enclosed space of the lab. Then they hit the tile, Young underneath him. But the air pack kept Young from falling flat. Its bulk punched his body up as Cam slammed down on top of him, and Young didn’t fight when Cam tore away the M16.

Slipping, crawling, Cam stabilized himself on his left hand and his knees and brought the weapon level. He couldn’t have fired. His fingers were splayed over the flat base of the trigger guard between the rifle’s grip and the magazine.

Details— His finger pad on smooth metal, moving for the trigger— The suits across from him now four on five instead of neatly paired— Hernandez and the Marines had used his surprise move to counterattack. One man lay crumpled on the floor. Another guy had been knocked onto his butt. But where was the second rifleman—?

Then a boot punted into the right side of Cam’s faceplate. Impact drove his jaws together and twisted his neck and he dropped the M16, thrown all the way around onto his back. The air tanks bit into his shoulder blades but his pain centered around the unnatural bulge beneath his lip. His dying teeth had wrenched forward from his gums, two lumps, enormous and wrong. They seesawed loosely on their broken roots as he coughed blood against his faceplate.

The rifleman stood over him, M16 pointed into Cam’s body.

“No no he doesn’t know!” Ruth had been just a step or two from the Special Forces soldier but she ran anyway and continued that frantic motion once she’d reached his side, waving her only arm like a wing, elbow out, still clutching her laptop.

She was impossibly brave, confronting the soldier. But her words were strange. “He didn’t know, he didn’t— We need him!”

The rifleman held his pose. Cam also remained motionless, sprawled cockeyed on his tanks, although his hands curled with the need to come to his face and a different fear crashed through his chest and arms. My suit Christ what if my suit is ripped?

The rest of the room seemed quiet too. Cam swallowed blood. Beyond his feet were Todd and Sawyer, Todd hunched toward the wheelchair in a manner that looked protective and

D.J. retreated several paces past the near corner of the hermetic chamber, sidling away from everyone.

Her words didn’t make sense.

“Stop, he didn’t know,” Ruth babbled, and there was a shuf

fling motion on Cam’s other side as Captain Young groped up from the floor, panting audibly in short, choked breaths.

“She’s right,” Young gasped. “We need him.”

A new voice cut in. “Green green, what’s happening—”

“Green two, green two, we’re okay,” Young said. Who was he reassuring, another group of soldiers? Could they have flown in another plane? No, the pilots waiting across town on the freeway had radar and would have warned Hernandez— The pilots—

Right. The pilots were in on the deal and must have shut off the radio relay to Colorado at the first code from Young.

There could only be one thing they wanted, one reason to take over. The nanotech. But what was the point of stealing it? What could they ask for, not money—

Bitch. The sneaking bitch.

Ruth had been using him all this time; she’d even smiled and held his hand and meanwhile she’d known—

Cam arched his head back, a grating spike in his vertebrae. Through speckles of blood, he saw how the struggle had been lost.

The suit crucified limply over its pack was Marine Corporal Ruggiero. He carried a map case on his belt, which is how Cam knew him because the Plexiglas over his face opaqued by fracture lines and a veil of gore. When Cam tackled Young, when the assault rifle discharged, the Special Forces soldier guarding Ruggiero had flinched. Point-blank, the 9mm round exploded Ruggiero’s skull inside his helmet.

The fight was not completely one-sided. The person Cam had glimpsed on his butt, now upright and rubbing his neck, was a Special Forces soldier named Trotter — but with guns already drawn, the Special Forces had rapidly taken control again.

Except that now a man was dead.

The beige suits were in nearly the same positions as ten seconds ago, five on four, but their postures had changed. They leaned away from Ruggiero’s body and Cam felt the same tilting horror. One murder in this tomb of millions, and it changed everything.

“Oh shit,” Olson said. Among them he was alone, unmatched by a Marine prisoner. He held his pistol low beside his hip as if hiding it. “Oh shit I wasn’t— I just—”

Lacking a radio, Hernandez yelled to make himself heard. “What are you doing, Young, going over to the breakaways?”

“We never planned to hurt your guys,” Young said.

“I never figured you for a traitor.”

“Swear to God. We didn’t want anyone hurt.”

Ruth interjected like always. “You don’t understand.” Her pale face shifted away, searching for Hernandez, then quickly returned to Cam. “We had to do this. We’re the only chance there is for people to get the vaccine everywhere.”

Hernandez ignored her. “You’ve got the pilots?”

“I’m sorry, Major,” Young said. “I swear. Don’t give us any more trouble and your guys will be fine.”

It was too much for Cam to separate, the new emotions in his head — alarm and doubt and old, old guilt. In the space of a heartbeat he’d gone from empty to overfull. What the hell could she mean, only chance?

“You won’t make it.” Matter-of-fact, Hernandez sounded like he was the one holding a gun. “All of you better think. Where are you going to go? Anyplace you try for, we’ll have fighters on you. Anyplace you land we’ll bring in troops.”

Young turned from him. “Tape them up, hands to feet.”

“You can’t win.”

“Olson, did you hear me?”

“Y-yes, sir. I got it.” Still contemplating Ruggiero’s body, Master Sergeant Olson stuck his left arm up as if beginning the attack all over again. “We’re on six.”

Olson took charge of the men with the prisoners, switching off the general frequency. They began to disarm the Marines one at a time, unbuckling their prisoner’s gun belts altogether rather than only taking their sidearms.

“Watch them,” Young said, and the rifleman swung his M16 away from Cam’s belly at last and went to reinforce Olson.

Ruth knelt instantly, off-balance. “I wanted to tell you—”

“What a fuck-up.” Young might have been cursing himself. He didn’t look down at Cam until the words were out.

“Leadville was going to keep it for themselves,” Ruth said, but Cam stared at Young instead, unable to look at her. One more murder, and for the wrong reasons. For nothing.

His tongue dug at the hole in his gums, fleshy tendrils, embedded rocks of enamel. Already the cloying soup of his own blood was making him nauseous.

He coughed. “Why would they…”

Young also knelt, so that there was one of them on either side of Cam. He’d drawn his pistol and hefted it now, a silent display, before reaching across Cam’s belt with his other hand.

Ruth said, “What are you doing?” Then her voice was only a mumble. “Let me explain!”

Young had disconnected him, and said, “I can’t have him on the radio.”

“Then how is he supposed to help us with Sawyer? He didn’t know. Let me explain. We have to be able to talk. They’re essential to building—”

“Whoa. We’re not sticking around here. Are you serious? I thought you were just delaying to give us more time.”

“We have to stay. This is our best chance.”

“Dr. Goldman, we’re going to take whatever you tell us.”

“What if something gets broken? What if it turns out we left one little app module we didn’t realize we needed?”

“You know we have to get out of here.”

“Two hours!” she said. “We can stay at least two hours like Hernandez said. Leadville doesn’t know, right?”

Young paused, perhaps aware of how closely Cam was listening. They would never trust him again. And in recounting what had happened, in rethinking his mistake, Cam noted how similar this conversation was to the one she’d already had with Hernandez. Young had even taken the same patient, parental tone in response to her unswerving mania.

Her bravery and her commitment were real.

“My guess is we probably pulled it off,” Young answered slowly. “They haven’t said anything.”

Ruth hammered at him again. “Then we’re okay.”

“I don’t think you understand the risk. We still need to get back to the planes, we still need to refuel, we need a lot of things to go right before we’re back in the air.”

“This is our best chance. This is— It’s everything we’ve been fighting for. Don’t waste it. Please.”

Cam almost said something too, and Young noticed. Young’s eyes narrowed and he stood up, away from them both. “All right, we stay until we switch out these tanks. That’s it.”

“What? That’s barely an hour and a half!”

“That’s it,” Young told her.

* * * *

But they were still working twenty minutes into a new set of tanks. Young had ordered the scientists to gather their stuff together as he changed them out—“Time to move,” he said— but Ruth and D.J. barely acknowledged him, in the thrall of their own excitement, and Young had wavered.

Cam thought they probably wouldn’t have gotten away with it if Hernandez was still in charge, but now this behavior was a rebellion inside a rebellion. Young could never be the authority that Hernandez had been. He might have shut off the electricity or physically dragged them out, except that he wanted as badly as anyone for them to succeed.

Early on, while Todd and D.J. were still booting up all systems, Ruth shut off her radio and pressed her helmet against Cam’s, her earnest face close as she described the reasons for the conspiracy; the weapons application research under way in Leadville; the sixteen hundred Americans killed in White River; the fear that the Leadville government intended to use the vaccine nano to recolonize the planet as they saw fit.

“That’s genocide the easy way,” she said. “Leave everyone else to die off and they’ll rule forever.”

Cam had pledged his loyalty again — too late. It was a waste of manpower, but Young put Iantuano in the crowded chamber to stand guard, to make sure Cam didn’t reconnect his headset and shout a warning to Leadville, or maybe wrestle down one of the scientists and cause a disturbance that couldn’t be explained.

Red red. At a third signal from Young, the pilots across town reestablished the audio relay to Colorado. There had been only four minutes of silence from the expedition group, and during that time the pilots continued to provide secondhand updates while “working around a bad wire in the relay.” No cause for alarm. The mission was on target, on time, and prepared to stay put for a while.

They had maintained that fiction. Most of Leadville’s attention was on the science team now, prompting or questioning them. D.J., Ruth, and Todd were supposed to describe their every action, yet often became distracted by each other’s commentary or fell quiet as they obsessed with their thoughts. Ruth especially was untalkative, using gestures whenever possible.

The plan was to keep the lie going until early afternoon if possible, until they abruptly pointed their C-130 north from its path back toward Leadville.

On the half hour, every half hour, Major Hernandez spoke to his superiors while Captain Young aimed an assault rifle not at Hernandez but at the rest of the Marines. Young was visibly reluctant, shamed by this role, but he had sworn that Hernandez would watch the rest of his squad die before getting it himself if he said anything wrong.

It was also necessary to make a show for the satellites, despite a forty-minute gap in coverage. The takeover had occurred safely under a roof, hidden from orbit, but once there were eyes overhead again, Leadville would have questioned why they weren’t seeing an effort that matched what they’d been told — so the Special Forces exhausted themselves loading the trailer and bustling in and out of the lab simply to look like a group of twelve men instead of seven.

There hadn’t been time yet for Cam to settle things in his mind. Too much was happening too fast, although they spoke with him less than he’d hoped, questioning Sawyer rarely now.

His disappointment verged on panic. He needed them to need him, but most of the work had already been done, apparently — in Colorado before they’d flown out, late last night on Ruth’s laptop, and more this morning.

Their efforts were going well. That much he knew. That was good. Still, it frustrated him to be pushed aside. He had never been their equal but now he wasn’t even a useful tool. His big contribution had been to confirm Sawyer’s identification of each vacuum wafer. He’d also made certain that they understood two passwords for the computers, powerpuff and Mar12, the birth date of Kendra Freedman’s favorite niece.

Sawyer also seemed afraid of becoming irrelevant, yet devalued himself by burying each bit of worthwhile information in meaningless personal background. The niece’s name. Her visits. He squawked and rambled, rubbing and rubbing at his armrest with his good hand, trying to be a nuisance.

Twice the science team exchanged a round of high fives and several times Ruth laughed, a satisfied, barking ha that carried through her helmet.

Cam watched them and he waited, his torn gum aching, aware of the bruises along his back, arms, chest, chin. Aware of the numb scars covering his face and his body. In many ways the growling in his belly was also a memory, ugly and alive.

The fabrication laser didn’t look like much, three fat blocks like refrigerators that would be a motherfucker to get through the air lock, never mind the wires and pipes joining them together. The third one was missing a shallow inset from its middle, where the gray paneling gave way to a white console that held a display grid, a keypad, and two joysticks.

Nothing the scientists did looked like much, either. They typed. They patiently monitored their equipment. They consulted with Leadville.

Almost two hours ago D.J. had fitted a pair of vacuum wafers into a thin tongue that eased out of the console, exactly like the tray of a DVD player. Retracted into the body of the laser, automatically sealed within an atmosphere hood, the wafers were opened by delicate waldos after a decontamination procedure swept dust and debris from the working space. The laser was also equipped with atomic point manipulators and a scanning probe, and D.J. activated autoretrieval programs that found and then arranged a single proto-archos from the first wafer alongside a heat engine component from the second.

It was a painstaking process. Each wafer held a dozen samples of a common type but with minor variances, since they had been individually machined rather than produced by self-replication. D.J. rejected the first three engine fragments.

Meanwhile, Ruth and Todd solved a protocol issue between her laptop software and that of the lab computers, then began uploading their files. They had also popped in several of Freedman’s discs, ordinary CD-RWs.

The actual beam of the extreme ultraviolet laser, despite its giant name, would have been imperceptible even if it wasn’t hidden inside the machinery. On the video monitor it appeared only as a symbol, a computer-generated slash, even tinier than the lattice shapes representing the nano-structures.

Unable to use a touch pad well with his gloves, D.J. sketched the parameters he wanted with a joystick and then sat there, hands off, as the laser cut unnecessary materials from the engine component, paring it down. Then he gave instructions to graft this nub into the heart of the proto-archos.

He ran adjustments on the same program six times before he had it right. This took eighty minutes.

“Great, looks great,” Ruth said.

Still cutting, the laser began to alter the molecular composition of the nano’s core. By eradicating select atomic particles, they could create a semi-solid state microprocessor encoded with the replication algorithm and their hunter-killer discrimination key, as well as coding for the thermal sensor.

There were two serious complications.

First, it was a sequence that could not be corrected, either done perfectly the first time or, with faults, a waste of their entire effort. Before trying again they would need to build a new nano, and odds were that D.J. would average another six tries to re-create this hybrid structure.

Worse, the second complication was that faults were statistically guaranteed. Even as the laser stuttered and lanced into the nano’s core, free radicals were expected to damage these unimaginably fine pathways.

It would never be a hundred percent.

The question was whether they could fabricate a vaccine nano that retained enough coding to function, and how well, because whatever they created would assemble more nanos with exactly its own limitations — and it was imperative for the vaccine to operate with a low number of flaws. Otherwise it would be overwhelmed by the archos plague. It would be useless.

Twenty-six minutes into their fresh tanks, Young thumped on the glass of the hermetic chamber again. Without a radio jack, Cam couldn’t hear his words at all but the message was obvious.

Get out.

“Soon,” Ruth said. “I promise. We really can’t stop the etching process after—”

Young struck the glass again, his mouth working. Beyond him, Cam saw two of the Special Forces troops bend stiffly to look at the ceiling, although the fluorescent lighting seemed steady. Were they shutting down the power?

“What! When?” Ruth’s voice was high, frightened, and

D.J. stood up from the EUVL console. Young had swiveled his head and Cam realized he was talking to Iantuano now.

That ready animal calm fell over Cam once more but he resisted it, even as he sidestepped away from Iantuano and turned to confront him, making sure his legs were clear of Sawyer’s wheelchair. “What’s going on?”

“Get your buddy out,” Iantuano said. “They’re almost done.”

“Get him out. Two jets just came over the mountains.”