Plague War

5

Major Hernandez moved carefully, trying to keep the weight on his shoulders from riding him sideways down the hill. It would be easy to turn an ankle, especially with his legs and body encumbered in gear.

Up on the Continental Divide, above thirteen thousand feet, even a sunny May afternoon was icy and brisk — and the nights were lethal. Weapons jammed in the cold. Dental work and glasses and rings could burn. Like all of the troops in his command, Hernandez dressed thickly, wearing more layers than ‚t well inside his olive drab jacket. They would rather be uncomfortable than dead. But it made them clumsy.

“Gaaaah—” A man screamed behind him, and Hernandez heard a clang of metal. His pulse jumped, yet he caught himself, hefting his canvas sling away from his back before he let go of his rock. The forty-pound boulder crashed down as Hernandez stepped away from it, looking for his trooper.

Private Kotowych was on his knees against the wall of the gorge, squeezing his arm. Hernandez saw a dark splatter on the ground and a crowbar that had instantly congealed with blood and skin. “Hey!” he yelled at Powers and Tunis, who’d also hurried over. There were only eight of them in the gorge and Hernandez glanced at Powers.

“You’re my runner,” Hernandez said. “Go tell the doc. But go slow. We don’t need to pick you up, too, understand?”

“Yes, sir,” Powers said.

“The fucking bar went through my hand,” Kotowych groaned.

Susan Tunis lifted her own pry bar like a club. “You can’t make us keep working like this,” Tunis said. Her breath came in short, heavy gasps and the steel bar rocked in time with her body.

Kneeling beside Kotowych, Hernandez gazed up at her without moving. “Why don’t you help me,” he said.

“We should be using explosives instead of digging like this!” Tunis said.

Hernandez looked past her for support, but he barely knew any of these soldiers and none of his noncoms were present. His T/O was a mess. His table of organization was devoid of company-level of‚cers — he had only himself, three sergeants, and a corporal — and he wanted to make at least six ‚eld promotions if he could identify the right people.

He couldn’t ignore the insubordination. He stood away from Kotowych and held Tunis’s eyes. “Get your head straight, Marine,” he said.

Her face was white with tension.

“Help me.” Hernandez was careful not to make it an order. If she said no, he would have to enforce it. So he tried to divert her. He shrugged out of his jacket and swiftly removed one of his shirts. Kotowych had nearly stopped bleeding as glassy red ice formed outside his ‚st, but it was still important to apply pressure. If they didn’t, he might continue to hemorrhage inside his arm.

Hernandez put his jacket back on before he felt for breaks in Kotowych’s ‚ngers and wrist. There were none, but the hand was a disaster. Hernandez used his knife to cut his shirt into three strips. He folded one into a square and forced the bandage into Kotowych’s palm, then wrapped the other two as tightly as he could.

“That’ll have to do,” he said. “Can you walk? Let’s get you down the mountain.”

“Yes, sir,” Kotowych said, gritting his teeth.

Tunis echoed the word suddenly. “Sir,” she said. “I’m sorry, sir. It was. We.”

“You were upset,” Hernandez said, giving her an out. Tunis nodded. He let her ‚dget under his gaze for another instant, then looked away from her and called, “The rest of you get back to work. But for God’s sake, pay attention to what you’re doing.”

The men hesitated. Hernandez almost snapped at them, but he hid his frustration — and he realized he didn’t want to leave Tunis with them. She was trouble.

“Take his other side,” he said.

Supporting Kotowych, Hernandez and Tunis worked their way from the gorge into a bleak, moss-softened rock ‚eld. Nothing grew taller than the coarse grass and a few tiny †owers. Mostly there was only the spotty brown carpet of moss among pale rock darkened by lichen. A lot of rock. Rock and snow. In many places, in fact, the snow never melted completely.

Up here, the air was frigid and thin. Every survivor had acclimated to elevation or they hadn’t survived, but headaches and nausea were very common among the population in Leadville, and that was down near ten thousand feet. More than half a mile higher, any physical effort made it necessary to gasp to get enough oxygen, breathing too fast to let the air absorb any warmth in the sinuses. It didn’t take much to scar your lungs or even freeze from the inside out, dropping your body core temperature almost before you knew it. Anxiety was also a common side effect of hypoxia. Not getting enough oxygen, the brain naturally created a sense of panic, which did nothing to help people who were already under a lot of strain. In fourteen months, Hernandez had seen a lot of soldiers ruined as outposts and patrols sent their casualties back to Leadville.

These mountaintops were dead and ancient places, never meant for human beings. The orange-gray rock had been worn smooth and broken and worn smooth again. The elements could do the same to them in far less time. Hernandez had issued orders to dig and build only in the few hours of midday, and only on staggered shifts. No one worked every day, no matter how urgent their situation. His command had reached this slope just forty-eight hours ago. Already he had three troops on sick call, plus Kotowych, and there was little sense in having superior ‚ghting holes with no one capable of ‚ghting from them.

That goes for you, too, he thought. His back hurt, as did his hands and shins. Frank Hernandez was barely on the wrong side of forty, but the cold made everyone arthritic.

He was committed to doing more than his share of the grunt work, rather than sitting back and passing out bad jobs. He was too worried about morale and too many of his Marines were strangers to each other, thrown together from the remnants of ‚ve platoons. There were too many rumors and fears.

“We’re almost there,” he told Kotowych.

Their bootsteps faded into the clear, brittle sky. Hernandez kept his eyes on his footing, but the mountainside fell away so dramatically that it was impossible not to see the immense up-anddown horizon, a collision of dark peaks and snow and far open spaces. It was a distraction. Panting, Hernandez glanced west. There was nothing to see except more mountains, of course, but he imagined reaching across the basins of Utah and Nevada to the heavily urbanized coast, where everything had gone wrong for him in one minute.

By necessity, the American civil war was mostly an air war. The urgent struggle to claim and scavenge from the old cities below the barrier was dependent on the ability to maintain their helicopters and planes. Infantry and armor could only cross the plague zones if they were †own over, and yet this patch of ground he’d been ordered to hold was still a frontline assignment, when just a week ago he’d been the security chief for Leadville’s nanotech labs and a liaison between the scientists and the highest circles of the U.S. government. Hernandez had been tapped to lead the expedition into Sacramento because they relied on him, because that con‚dence was more valuable than food or ammunition. Now he was on the outside. The hell of it was that he understood.

Their mission hadn’t been a total loss. They’d returned to Leadville with a stack of computers, paper ‚les, and a good deal of machining hardware. The hidden cost was the conspiracy itself. All except ‚ve of the ‚fteen traitors had been accounted for — six dead, four captured — but their betrayal screamed of larger problems.

Who could be trusted? The rebellion had ‚nally reached the innermost circles of Leadville itself, although no one had said anything so blunt to Hernandez. He’d seen the doubt in their eyes. The fact that he hadn’t been called in to meet with General Schraeder or any of the civilian leaders was also telling. The top men had distanced themselves from him. They couldn’t help but suspect the possibility of his involvement. His friendship with James Hollister was too well-known. As the head of the labs, James had been instrumental in substituting the wrong scientists aboard the plane. Worse, Hernandez’s Marines failed to put down the takeover by the Special Forces unit.

No one in the leadership had anticipated their betrayal either. That was beside the point. Hernandez had been the man on the ground, and if he’d kept the vaccine, the rebels almost certainly would not have launched their new offensives against Leadville.

Hernandez had been the linchpin. Resources were too scarce to waste an of‚cer, however, especially with the sudden surge in the war. The irony of it annoyed him. The ‚ghting had saved him. There were no courts-martial. There was not even an outright demotion. Instead they’d given him nearly twice as many troops as before, a mixed infantry-and-artillery detachment of eighty-one Marines supported by a Navy communications specialist and a priceless medic, a conscript who had been a ‚re‚ghter in another life.

The rebels in New Mexico were said to be mounting an invasion by helicopter and ostensibly that was why he was here, ready to rain ‚re down on choppers or ground troops coming through the pass. It could be seen as an opportunity to prove himself again. They were positioned on a southern face nearly twenty miles from Leadville — twenty miles as the crow †ies, which in this upheaval of land was more than twice that distance on foot. The trucks that brought them to the base of this mountain were long gone. Hernandez had a lot of independence out here. He wanted to believe that the leadership wanted to trust him. Realistically, though, his people were only a speed bump. A small deterrent. They might launch a few shoulder-mounted missiles at incoming enemy aircraft but then they would be irrelevant or dead, either passed by or devastated by bombs or rocket ‚re. And his troops knew it. They had been condemned to hard labor and a potential death sentence for no other reason except that they were infantry and therefore disposable.

“Hey! Hey!” A man yelled below them and Hernandez saw four troops hustling across the slope, including Powers and the medic. They carried extra jackets and a canteen.

“Nice work, both of you,” Hernandez said to Tunis and Kotowych. Then the others closed around them.

“What happened?” the medic asked.

“Let’s get him back to the shelters ‚rst,” Hernandez said. “I’ve stopped the bleeding.”

“That gorge is fuckin’ killing us,” another man said.

Hernandez stiffened, but this wasn’t the time to assert himself. They’re frightened, he thought. You have to let them complain. And yet he couldn’t allow open dissent.

They were excavating rock from far up the hill because he didn’t want to mark their position with a ‚eld of open scars. It required more effort but their shelters blended in fairly well, piles of granite among piles of granite. The waiting was the hardest part. They had a few decks of cards and one backgammon set and he knew his troops had taken to drawing names and pictures on themselves with ballpoint pens. It was better to work. Lugging rocks wasn’t much of a challenge, but it made them plan and it made them cooperate. It gave him a chance to evaluate them. He could have ordered the use of more explosives, and he supposed it might still come to that. The ground here was like concrete, hardened by eons of short thaws and long winters. The only way they’d gotten their bunkers started was to detonate too many of their AP mines facedown against the earth, but he wanted to save as much ordnance as possible.

It was a threadbare camp that Hernandez saw as they helped Kotowych over a low ridge — a few scattered troops, a few green tarps nearly lost on the mountainside. Their shelters would never be enough. Even if New Mexico attacked somewhere else, their tents and sleeping bags could not protect them from the cold inde‚nitely. Still, Hernandez felt pride. He felt as good as he thought was possible. They’d built this together and that counted for something, although he couldn’t help surveying their positions and reanalyzing the distribution of heavy machine guns and Stinger missiles.

The troops were right to worry. Fortunately, helicopters always had dif‚culty at this altitude. The weather was their ally. They could expect New Mexico to wait for a high pressure front to get as much lift as possible. The terrain was their friend as well. It would channel any approach into the pass below, where the slope tumbled away into a valley lined with the †at, winding ribbons of Highways 82 and 24.

They took Kotowych to Bunker 5. Two more soldiers emerged from inside and one of them said, “I’ve got him, sir.”

Hernandez shook his head, wanting to stay with Kotowych.

The soldier insisted. “Please, sir.”

Sergeant Gilbride surprised him. Gilbride appeared from the downhill side of the bunker, †ushed from exertion. His bearded face was red in his cheeks, nose, and ears. He looked like he’d jogged all the way across camp and Hernandez felt a bright tick of alarm.

“Major, I need for you a minute,” Gilbride said.

“Fine.” Hernandez separated himself from Kotowych. “I hope you’re all right,” he said.

“Yes, sir.”

Gilbride had already started down the hill again and Hernandez went after him. Then he heard two high, clean notes of a woman’s voice. He glanced back. Powers and another man were watching him and quickly averted their eyes.

They didn’t want me inside, Hernandez realized. Damn.

Nearly all of his troops had been garrisoned inside Leadville before being redeployed. They’d lost lovers and friends along with any sense of safety. His noncoms reported that there were at least three women smuggled in among his eighty-three troops— three women who were not Marines — but Hernandez had kept quiet. Only eleven of his troops were female themselves, so the disparity was bad. There hadn’t been more than a couple ‚st-‚ghts, though, and Hernandez didn’t want to start a battle of his own, being heavy-handed about fraternization. The extra mouths were a demand he couldn’t meet, but he also didn’t think he could afford to take away the few good things in their lives, even if he was afraid of where it would lead. They couldn’t deal with pregnancies.

He kept hiking, his face bent with a frown. He’d left someone behind himself, a younger woman named Liz who was fortunate enough to have a job in town. Liz was a botanist, in charge of an entire †oor of greenhouses protected within one of the old hotels. That was a big deal, but when he thought of her, what he remembered was her tawny hair and the way she tucked it behind one ear, showing off her neck and the long, perfect line of her collarbone.

He wondered again if he should have brought her out of Leadville. Would she have come if he asked?

“Stop,” he said, reaching for Gilbride’s shoulder. They were halfway to the command shelter, alone in the slanting ‚eld. Hernandez saw no one else except a lone sentry at the edge of Bunker 7. “I get it,” he said. “There was somebody in 5 they didn’t want me to see.”

Gilbride shook his head and gestured for him to follow.

“No,” Hernandez said. “I have to make at least one more run for more rock.”

“Please, sir.” Gilbride’s voice was rough and wet. His sinus tissues had reacted to the desiccated air by generating mucus, which was choking him.

That wasn’t what made Hernandez search his friend’s eyes. Sir. The formality was unlike Gilbride. He knew it wasn’t necessary when they were alone. Nathan Gilbride was one of the four Marines who’d †own into Sacramento with Hernandez, and even before then Gilbride had earned every privilege. They’d been together through the entire plague year. The guilt that Hernandez felt went deep, shot through with anger and more. Gilbride didn’t deserve to be out here, but Hernandez was glad to have him, which made him feel guilty in a different way. He trusted Gilbride even if the leadership in Leadville did not. He knew Gilbride was a good barometer of how the troops were doing, and Gilbride was nervous.

“You’re no good to us if you’re exhausted,” Gilbride said reasonably. “Come on. Take a break.”

Hernandez knew better than to ignore him, but he dug into a jacket pocket to check his watch. 1:21. It was early to quit for the day, and if he did, he’d have to get a runner out to tell everybody to stop. And then tomorrow’s shift had better be short, too, or people would bitch, which meant he’d lose two afternoons’ worth of work. Damn. “All right,” he said. “But then we need to pull everyone in.”

“Not a problem,” Gilbride said.

The command bunker was no different than the rest. It was simply a trench with two tents stitched together, surrounded by rock. They hadn’t been given lumber or steel. There had been an impossible amount of stuff to drag up the mountain anyway, so the bunkers had no roofs. That made them more vulnerable to rockets and guns — and snow. At this altitude, it wasn’t uncommon to see storms at any time of the year.

There was one bene‚t to the cold. As they laid down their rock walls, they shoveled dirt into the gaps and then poured urine on it. The freezing liquid cemented earth and stone together. Drinking water was too precious, even though they’d found eight good trickles and seeps in the area.

“I pulled some coffee for you,” Gilbride said, unzipping the †ap of the long tent.

Their home was dim and crowded with weapons, sleeping bags, a bucket for a toilet that gave off almost no smell at all in the thin, biting air. Still, Hernandez was surprised to see only Navy Communications Specialist McKay inside, sitting with a tattered paperback close to her face. It was torn in half to allow another trooper to read the other part. She barely glanced at them, but then looked up again. Hernandez realized there was something like fear in her brown eyes.

“Sir. Afternoon, sir,” she said.

“Was there a call on the radio?”

“No, sir.”

But she’s jumpy, too, he thought.

Their furniture consisted of steel ammo boxes and a wooden crate that served as his desk and their kitchen. Gilbride had their stove out, a civilian two-burner Coleman. It was unsafe to cook inside, not only due to the ‚re hazard but because of carbon monoxide poisoning, but no one stayed outdoors if they weren’t on duty. Hernandez hadn’t tried to enforce this rule, either, although he encouraged his noncoms to constantly harass the troops about opening a few vents before lighting a stove.

“McKay, I need a runner,” Gilbride said, rasping. “Tell everyone to knock off for the day. Short shift.”

McKay nodded. “Aye aye, Sarge.”

She’s too ready to go, Hernandez thought. And where is Anderson? He knew that only Bleeker and Wang were up the hill, mining rock. Gilbride was too ef‚cient. The setup was too perfect and now Hernandez was nervous himself.

It’s bad news, he thought.