Ruins

by Dan Wells

  Especially now that there was a nuke on the loose. The stakes had been raised, and the few Partials who knew about it were clamoring to take the fight to the humans. They were already terrified by the thought of the bioweapon—Vale had left Dr. Morgan’s lab partly just to keep the army under control, halting every new plan for retaliation. If he told them the humans were on the way with a nuclear device in tow, he didn’t know if he’d be able to hold them back.

  A Partial soldier named Vinci was waiting in the lobby; he was the one who’d warned Vale about the nuke. He’d been chasing Delarosa all the way from Long Island, but when he’d lost the canny human terrorist in Manhattan, he’d come straight to White Plains to recruit more people to the search. He watched Vale with somber eyes. “Any news?”

  Vale shook his head. “Not here. We’ll talk in my room.” He led him up the elevator to a suite on the top floor, which Vale had converted to a command post. When the door was closed and locked, he turned to Vinci with a solemn look. “We’ve canvassed the Bronx with regular patrols, and put as many spotters as we can on the coast in case she tries to cross by water, but they haven’t turned up anything yet. It was smart of you to come straight to us, but we have to consider the possibility that Delarosa already crossed to the mainland before we established our patrols.”

  “I put the men you gave me on regular routes in and around the city,” said Vinci, acknowledging the possibility that Delarosa was already on their doorstep. “I just don’t know if it will be enough.”

  “What else can we do?” asked Vale. “Everyone left in White Plains is assigned to energy, maintenance, or food production; we can spare them, but do we really want word of this to spread? It’s a nuclear attack, for crying out loud—the last time someone tried to nuke the Partial army, they struck back with the biggest display of overkill in the entire Partial War. I don’t want to cause a panic or a pogrom.”

  “All they need to know is that they’re looking for a human matching her description,” said Vinci. “We don’t have to tell them what she’s doing.”

  “They’ll figure it out soon enough,” said Vale. “They’re not idiots.”

  “Their first assumption will be the East Meadow bioweapon,” said Vinci. “The patrols I organized this morning already think that’s what they’re looking for, though obviously I didn’t confirm or deny it.”

  “Congratulations,” said Vale, “your cunning ruse has struck me speechless. Did you also tell them not to share their suspicions with anybody else? Do you have any faith that they’ll actually follow that order? All it takes is one drunk soldier in a bar tonight, telling his mates about the paranoid snipe hunt he’s been assigned to by the former AWOL traitor now serving under a member of the Trust, and the suspicions will fly and the rumors will grow and who knows what we’ll have in the morning? Not three months ago this city tore itself apart in an involuntary change of leadership, because Trimble was too paralyzed by indecision to confront any of the problems her people were facing. Now Morgan’s doing the same thing, too obsessed with expiration to bother with anything else, and the city’s getting restless. A panic like this—nuke or bioweapon or anything similar—and we’ll have a riot on our hands.”

  “A few Partials dead in a riot is still better than an entire city disintegrated in a mushroom cloud,” said Vinci. “If it takes a public announcement and a citywide search, then that’s what we do.”

  “Another batch dies in two weeks, give or take,” said Vale. “Another fifty thousand people gone, not in the blink of an eye but in a debilitating, agonizing process. Fifty thousand death signatures saturating the air in this city until you can barely breathe without losing your mind to depression or madness. Do you know what that’s going to do to the army here? Do you know who they’re going to blame?”

  “You?” asked Vinci.

  Vale frowned. “They should, but they won’t—even if the Trust’s role in their expiration was common knowledge, killing me wouldn’t be enough. Their problems have always had their root in humanity: the war, the poverty, the oppression, the Last Fleet. Even expiration—Morgan and I pushed the buttons, but it was the human species as a whole who asked for it, who planned it, who paid for it. Now the humans have a bioweapon? They have a nuke? Tell me you believe for one minute that the Partials won’t retaliate with lethal force, falling on that island with everything they have and more. Even with two-thirds of your species dead, you outnumber them ten to one. You have rotors, you have ATVs, you even have a few tanks left—enough for an armored brigade, at least. The humans have survived this long only at your mercy, and that mercy will be gone if word of the nuke gets out. I want to find that nuke as much as you do, but we need to keep it secret.”

  Vale closed his eyes, exhausted and frustrated. There was a squawk from the radio.

  “Arrow Team to General Vale,” said the voice. “Code White, repeat, Code White.”

  “Code White,” said Vale, his eyes snapping open. “They’ve found her.”

  “And Arrow’s one of mine,” said Vinci, a slow wave of fear spreading out across the link. “That means she’s in the city.”

  “Damn.” Vale climbed to his feet and crossed to the radio. “This is General Vale. This line is not secure, repeat, this line is not secure. We will come to you. State your location. Over.”

  “Unsecure line acknowledged,” said Arrow Team. “Checkpoint Seven. Over.”

  Vinci spread a map across the table and scanned it quickly. “Here,” he said, pointing to the western edge of the city. “It’s an old college.”

  “Barely a mile from downtown,” said Vale. “If she sets it off there, it’ll kill every Partial in White Plains.”

  “Then we’d better make sure she doesn’t.”

  Vinci frowned, then pressed the radio button to speak. “Checkpoint Seven: We’ll see you in a few minutes. Over and out.”

  Vale had a small Jeep, fully electrical. The Partials maintained a nuclear power plant that supplied more than enough power—enough that Morgan had siphoned it for years while in exile, powering her secret laboratory. The drive to the old college was short, and when they arrived they found the place swarming with soldiers, far more than a single recon team could account for. Vale swore and climbed out of the Jeep.

  “Report,” he said firmly, and the link carried the full weight of his authority. The sergeant in charge was talking almost before she turned to face him.

  “Sergeant Audra, sir.” She saluted. “We found the human insurgent approximately twenty minutes ago. She attempted to activate her cargo when she saw us, and we were forced to incapacitate her.”

  “You shot her?” asked Vinci.

  “She’s wounded but alive,” said Audra. “Our medic expired last year, but we’ve done our best to stabilize her.”

  Vale nodded; the medics had been among the first to be produced, due to their more advanced training requirements, and thus had been some of the first to die. He looked pointedly at the swarm of soldiers, feeling their nervous energy crackle across the link; they were scared. “Why the crowd?”

  “Don’t worry, sir, they all have clearance. We’re all teams Commander Vinci organized.” She hesitated, and Vale felt another burst of nervous fear. “When we realized what her cargo was, sir, we thought it was wise to bring in extra security.”

  Vale ground his teeth in frustration; the other recon teams did, technically, have clearance, but he’d have preferred if the team that found her were the only team to know what she’d been carrying. “Take me to see it.”

  The sergeant led Vale and Vinci into the main college building, where several soldiers in tech uniforms were milling around just as nervously as the scouts outside. “We’ve been using this facility for weeks,” said Audra, “trying to get the satellite feeds up and working again. That’s how we found her—she was farther north, trying to sneak in through a residential neighborhood, but her movement showed up on a scan from the satellites, and we brought her here, like I said, for security.
We think she probably came up the river and managed to bypass our patrols.”

  “I used to lead a security checkpoint in Tarrytown,” said Vinci. “Was nobody there?”

  “I understand that checkpoint’s been vacant since you abandoned it and joined the humans,” said the sergeant, adding a strictly formal “Sir.”

  Vinci’s irritation steamed across the link, but Vale steered the conversation in another direction before it could escalate. “What do you mean that you found her by satellite?” he asked. “We haven’t had satellite uplinks working since the Break.”

  “Not until a few weeks ago,” said the sergeant, and Vale could sense her pride. “General Trimble had several feeds she used to monitor the faction wars, but her control room was . . . irreversibly damaged in the civil war. This college had a new computer science department, upgraded right before the Break. Our techs have been working on it for a while, and last week we were finally able to tap into Trimble’s old feeds.”

  “You didn’t think that was something you ought to report?” asked Vinci.

  “We’ve reported it to Morgan three times,” said the sergeant. “She never got back to us. We’re lucky we had the satellites, though, since Delarosa was easy to spot against the snow. Here they are.”

  She led them into a heavily guarded room. Marisol Delarosa, whom Vale recognized from the files he had found on her, lay on one side of it, bleeding heavily from her shoulder, with two soldiers leaning over her trying to clean and bandage the wound. In the center of the room sat a small nylon bike trailer, the kind people would use to pull their children behind their bicycles before the Break. Barely two feet across, painted a dull white, it carried a fat metal canister that had gotten an identical paint job. From some scratches on the side Vale could tell it had once been painted green, to better hide it in the forest, and he imagined she must have hurriedly repainted it when Ryssdal’s insane winter storms started up. It was smaller than he’d expected, and while he marveled that she’d gotten so far, he couldn’t deny that such a disguise would have made them phenomenally hard to spot. With as much trouble as the human resistance was making right now, a lone woman with a small package like this could hide in the wilderness almost indefinitely.

  Until she came here, thought Vale, and tried to kill eighty percent of the people on the planet.

  He felt himself sweating. She’d been trying to activate it when they found her. Another minute and we’d have all been dead.

  “Is it really what we think it is?” asked Audra. “A nuclear warhead?”

  Vale could hide his feelings from the link and lie if he wanted, but Vinci’s data would give it away. And they already know anyway. They’ve examined it, identified it, and neutralized the threat. They’ve done their jobs, and I can’t lie to them now. “It is.”

  “Damn bloody humans,” said the sergeant. “Nothing’s ever enough for them, is it? First the bioweapon, and now this.” She gestured violently at Delarosa. “If this witch got this far without us seeing her, how do we know there’s not more of them out there? What are we supposed to do?”

  One of the newly appointed medics piped up from the side of the room; his name tag said Ether, and Vale couldn’t help but be amused by the juxtaposition. “I’ll tell you what we do,” said Ether. “We take that nuke straight back and turn East Meadow into a parking lot.”

  Vale’s amusement vanished.

  Delarosa, bound and bandaged and muzzled by an oxygen tube, made a move to attack Ether, but the other medic held her down.

  “No one’s going to blow up anything,” said Vinci, and Audra’s fury burned across the link.

  “We don’t need a human-lover in here telling us what to do,” she snapped. “After everything they’ve done to us, you’re taking their side in this?”

  “I’m taking any side that’s not genocidal,” said Vinci. “Everything that has gone wrong since the moment we came back from China has been because of one species trying to get the upper hand on the other. We’re not going down that road again.”

  “It’s going to give us some breathing room,” said Audra. “It’s going to give Dr. Morgan time to finish her work, maybe save some of us from expiration.”

  “And what if the cure was coexistence?” asked Vale. He looked around the room, holding each Partial’s gaze before moving to the next one—the sergeant, the medics, the guards. “What if I told you that we could cure expiration right now, just by breathing the same air as that human in the corner.” Delarosa looked at him in disbelief, and the link told him that the Partials were just as incredulous.

  “That’s impossible,” said Vinci.

  “Humor me,” said Vale, but there was no humor in his voice. He looked at Vinci intently, pleading with him, and his sincerity was palpable on the link. “Pretend, for a moment, that she, and every human carrying the RM virus, is the cure for expiration. That they produce a chemical agent in their breath, the same as you do for them.”

  Ether answered first, hesitantly. “We’d . . . have to find a way to synthesize it and . . . make a pill or something.”

  Just like the humans tried to do, thought Vale. Just what I did. He shook his head. “You can’t synthesize it. It’s a two-part biological reaction: You breathe out a particle that renders RM inert in the humans, and then their body alters it and breathes it back out, curing you of expiration. You have to have both species in close proximity, and you have to have living bodies in which the reactions can take place.”

  “They’d kill us first,” said Audra.

  “Not all of them,” said Vinci.

  “It only takes one,” said Audra. “This one smuggled a nuclear bomb right under our noses—one lone woman—and we stopped her with seconds to spare. How is the existence of one or two or even a thousand friendly humans supposed balance that out?”

  “We might be able to harvest it,” said Ether. “We could keep them in a controlled environment—a prison camp, or a smaller island where we can watch them more closely—and then send a few people in every morning to collect the healing particles. Then we could distribute it through the army like an inoculation.”

  Delarosa’s face was livid.

  Now they’re re-creating my own failed plans, thought Vale. “Suppose that doesn’t work,” he said. “Suppose it takes”—he reversed the numbers from the Preserve—“ten humans for every two thousand Partials. One human for two hundred. If we implement this now, today, before losing any more soldiers to expiration, we’d need what, one thousand of them? Fifteen hundred? How do you support that many humans?”

  “They could support themselves,” said Audra. “We’d make it a . . . like a labor camp.”

  “And the Partials that live with them?” asked Vale. “As I said, they need to be in close proximity to Partials in order to produce the particle. Would those Partials live in the labor camp too?”

  “They’d need guards anyway,” said Audra. “We could take shifts.”

  “And what about the other thirty thousand humans?” asked Vale, feeling increasingly repelled by the entire conversation. “What do we do with the ones we don’t need? Do we put them in labor camps as well, or just kill them outright?”

  “Fifteen hundred is already large for a sustainable prison population,” said Ether. “If we want to keep them from attacking us, or escaping and making the whole thing moot, we have to limit the population as much as we—”

  “Listen to yourselves!” shouted Vale. His felt his heart pounding, his blood pressure rising even with a host of gene mods to keep it in check. “They’re not animals! They created you!”

  “And they tried to destroy us,” said Audra. “This prison camp idea isn’t all that different from what we’ve done all along, keeping them isolated to Long Island. But keeping them alive was a mistake. Do you know what else we’ve seen on the satellite? They’re massing in the south—a giant human army, armed to the teeth, gathering for a final push.”

  “Gathering in the south?” asked Vale. “As fa
r away from us as possible?”

  “They’re getting out of the blast radius,” said Audra. “What else could it be? They retreat to the South Shore, send her to trigger the bomb, and then come around Manhattan and up the river to clean up any survivors.”

  “That’s a military plan,” said Vale. “They’re not an army! That’s what you’d do, but not—” But even as he said it, he realized he was caught in a loop of flawed logic generated by racist suspicion, one he could never hope to talk his way out of. “Just . . . get out, all of you.”

  “But—” Vinci protested, but Vale sent a surge of linked authority, and the Partials started filing obediently through the door.

  “I’m going to talk to the prisoner,” said Vale. “Keep the door closed and locked, and resume your patrols, all of you. You are not to mention any of this to anyone.”

  The door closed, and Vale locked it, then wearily walked to the corner where Delarosa lay red-faced and helpless. He pulled an office chair toward her and flopped down in it heavily, making no attempt at ceremony or formality. I’m too tired, he thought, then he said it out loud. “I’m too tired.”

  The woman remained still, watching him with dark, serious eyes.

  “You must just be burning up right now,” he said. “Aren’t you? Caught in a trap by the very people you were looking to kill. And I suppose that includes me. I’m not a Partial, but I’m just as guilty as any of them for what has happened to this godforsaken planet. No, guiltier.” She saw the surprise in her eyes, and nodded. “I’m a member of the Trust, though I don’t suppose you know what that is?”