Plague War

by Jeff Carlson

  “Ma’am,” the man repeated, but Deborah said, “Just do it, Sergeant. Send one of your guys. The rest of you can keep her plenty safe for a few minutes.”

  “My orders are to get her inside, Captain.”

  “I like the air,” Ruth said distantly.

  Cam worried that she might be confused, but Deborah only repeated herself in that haughty way. “A few minutes,” Deborah said. “Go on.”

  The squad leader jerked his thumb at one of his men, who moved off. There were other people passing by, two doctors, two mechanics, a teenager in civilian clothes.

  “What can I do?” Deborah asked softly. “Are you okay?”

  “I’m cold,” Ruth said, still gazing at the horizon.

  Deborah glanced past her at Cam with a worried look and he felt for the first time that they might be friends, too, although it was strange. If he remembered right, the two women had been adversaries before today.

  Deborah Reece, M.D., Ph.D., had been the physician and a support systems specialist aboard the International Space Station. All of the astronauts had worked two or more jobs to maintain the station, and she was a formidable woman. Most impressive of all was that Ruth had last seen her in Leadville. Somehow Deborah had walked away from the nuclear strike, and yet Cam held his tongue, watching the people come and go until Ruth shook herself, coming into focus at last.

  “Deb, what are you doing here?” she asked. “I thought Grand Lake was a rebel base.”

  “It’s not important. Did you get what you went for?”

  “Yes. Yes, we did.” Ruth set her good hand on Cam’s knee and squeezed, although she didn’t look at him.

  Deborah noticed the contact. She glanced past Ruth again, and Cam tried to smile. “We need to know everything about this place,” he said.

  “I’ll tell you what I can.” But mostly Deborah talked about Leadville. She had yet to make peace with it, Cam realized, and that was no surprise.

  “Bill Wallace is dead,” she told Ruth, counting friends. “Gustavo. Ulinov. Everyone in the labs.”

  Nikola Ulinov had sacrificed four hundred thousand people for the Russians, saving only one. Playing on the authority he’d once had aboard the ISS, Ulinov quietly suggested that Deborah volunteer for a combat unit. Her medical training could be of real use, he said, helping the men and women on Leadville’s front lines rather than babying the politicians in town.

  “It was a warning,” Deborah said. “It was the best he could do. If he ran...If our entire crew disappeared, Leadville would’ve known. They would have shot down the plane that brought in the warhead.”

  Cam let her talk, watching the fine wrinkles that appeared at the corners of her eyes and mouth as she struggled with herself.

  “When I think of him waiting,” Deborah said. “When I think of him being sure, but still waiting...” She leaned against Ruth and sighed, blinking back tears even as her eyes sparked with rage.

  “It’s okay,” Ruth said. “Shh, it’s okay.”

  Cam frowned and turned to gaze out across the mountains again, wondering at the man’s determination in bringing such force down on himself. He had seen all kinds of bravery and evil. Sometimes they were one and same. The only difference was in where you stood, and that made Cam uneasy. He believed in what he was doing, but maybe it was a mistake.

  He coughed hard into his palm. Then he touched the back of Deborah’s hand as if to comfort her, infecting her with the vaccine. “I’m sorry,” he said.

  * * * *

  Grand Lake had gone underground. Many of the trailers and huts concealed tunnel entrances. On their way from the medical tent, Cam saw a wide shape of camouflage netting that covered new excavations. Work had stopped for the day, but it looked as if they’d dug a fifty-foot pit by hand and were still hacking at one edge while other teams built wooden frameworks into which they’d pour concrete. He supposed that after the boxy shapes of the walls had set, they’d add ceilings, then pile the dirt back in to hide and insulate the bunker. A wasted effort.

  You can all go back down again, he thought. You should all be able to walk off this mountain.

  That was probably why Shaug sought to control it. If too many people ran, he’d lose his fighting force. A mass exodus down from the Continental Divide could be its own disaster, because without an organized military, they would be helpless against the Russians.

  Maybe the governor was right.

  Cam felt new adrenaline as the squad leader led them to a sun-faded mobile home with a tarp for an awning, hiding its door. Deborah had already left, promising to visit Ruth again before breakfast, and Cam was glad that someone else knew where to find them. What if Shaug meant to lock them in?

  He was unarmed and outnumbered. He went through the door when the squad leader gestured. Inside, the prefab home was little more than a shell, no furniture, no carpet. Most of the wall panels had been torn apart for firewood and to get at the wiring and plumbing. Only two light fixtures remained. The kitchen was gutted of its cabinets, sink, and counters, and in this bizarre scene stood a short-haired Asian woman with a cigarette. The home was only here to cover the stairwell and the ventilation holes in the floor.

  Cam hesitated at the top of the dark stairs. “I need to talk to Shaug,” he said. It was all he could think of.

  “We’ll walk you over in the morning, sir,” the squad leader said.

  Ruth glanced into Cam’s eyes, ready to play along, but the noise from below did not sound like a prison and the woman with the cigarette was disinterested and relaxed. Cam heard laughter as a man shouted, “Five bucks! That’s five bucks!”

  They went down nearly twenty feet. The walls were unfinished concrete lined with a single black wire. Two lamps had been bolted to the ceiling. Eight doorways filled a short hall, hung with blankets, and Cam worried at the damp cold.

  “This is you, sir,” the squad leader said, pointing at the first door. “We’ll be right across, okay?”

  “Yeah. Okay.” Cam led Ruth into their room. It was cramped but private, and equipped with an electric coil space heater. He turned it on. There was also one narrow Army cot and four blankets, although he was too keyed up to sleep.

  Ruth gently touched her fingers against his chest and kissed him. “Thank you,” she said. “Thank you, Cam.”

  He only nodded. There was no anxiety in the moment. That made him feel pleased. She trusted him and he was very glad for his sense of kinship and safety.

  Ruth lay down on the cot and Cam sat awake on the floor, his mind churning. Deborah had vouched for Shaug. I think he’s a good man who’s done his best with very little, she said, and she knew more than he did. She had been here for two days before they arrived, and her medical training had been a ticket straight into the middle echelons of the leadership.

  After the bombing, Deborah’s unit had surrendered to the large contingent of rebels aligned under Grand Lake, the nearest surviving American stronghold. Loveland Pass had burned, too close to ground zero, and White River might as well have been on the moon because of the huge plague zones in between—but Deborah said there had been similar movements up and down the Continental Divide as the American forces rejoined. Grand Lake’s fighting strength was actually larger than it had been before the bombing, although most of the new troops were infantry or light armored units. The surprise attack had done that much good, at least, pushing most of the shattered United States back together once more.

  Now the vaccine would turn everything upside down again, as would the data index. Ruth believed that researchers everywhere must be on the verge of weaponized nanotech like the snowflake. Could her presence here become the boost that Grand Lake’s small lab needed?

  When she kissed him, Cam had seen the haunted, rising dread in her eyes. He finally recognized the distance he’d heard in her voice outside the medical tent. It was the fear of so much responsibility. Given a moment to reassess, given a full lab and equipment, he wondered how Ruth would change the war.


  20

  There was a second nano in Cam’s blood sample, a new machine shaped like a twisted X. Ruth had never seen it before, although she immediately thought of the dead mountaintop etched with thousands of crosses. The emotions in her now were the same—lonely confusion and despair. She leaned back from her tunneling scope and clenched her left fist in her brace, unable to get past the truth. It should be impossible, and yet the strange nanotech existed in his blood alongside the vaccine. His, but not hers. The nanotech was benign for the moment. Ruth expected it was waiting for some trigger.

  Where had it come from?

  “Let me out,” she said suddenly, turning to the microphone on her left. The clean booth was equipped with two open mikes, one to record her observations, the other to keep in contact with the outside because this booth was too small to enter or exit without help. For a laboratory, Grand Lake had built a reinforced steel box too small to hold all the equipment they’d gathered. A rack of electronics partially blocked the door and the bulk of an electron microscope crowded Ruth on her right, but the lab was sterile and well-lit and could draw more power than she needed, even to purge the box.

  They knew the danger in some of what she was doing. The workbench was rigged with X-ray and ultraviolet projectors, which should at least slow an uncontrolled nanobot if not destroy it outright, and the air-conditioning could briefly jump to eighty-mile-per-hour winds if necessary, vacuuming up any stray particles. It didn’t bear thinking about. The radiation would be bad enough for anyone inside the lab. Ruth expected the vacuum would also lift the scopes and machining tools in an upside down rain of metal, hard plastic, and lashing power cords—and of course if that didn’t eradicate any threat, they could just weld the box shut forever. It was like working inside a coffin.

  “Let me out,” she said.

  “What’s up?” McCown asked.

  Ruth touched her white gloves to her mask. “I forgot my notes, I’m an idiot,” she said, fighting to hold down the cold, bright edge of her claustrophobia.

  Most days, that particular fear was only a scratching at the back of her mind. She had been enthralled to return to her work. It was unspeakably good to be in control again and Ruth had always excelled at ignoring everything beyond her microscopes, at least while she was making progress. Sometimes she lacked momentum. More than once her nerves leapt with a memory of planes or gunfire. Another time, she saw ants that didn’t exist from the corner of her eye.

  Ruth thought she had been very brave to step into this cramped box day after day, but now it was all that she could do to keep her heartbeat from affecting her voice.

  “Please,” she said. “I know it’s a hassle.”

  “Why don’t we have somebody get your notes for you,” McCown said. “We can read anything you want.”

  “No.” The word came out too fast. “No,” she said carefully. “I should have worked through a couple ideas before I even bothered today. I was too tired after dinner.”

  “Um. All right.” McCown sounded like he was frowning. “Give us a second.”

  Ruth sagged against the workbench but caught an atmosphere hood with her elbow, a small glass sheath meant to snap onto the tunneling scope. The hood clanged and Ruth jerked and hit her head on a shelf. “Oh!”

  McCown came back on the intercom. “Ruth?”

  “Oh, shit,” she said, with just the right tone of casual disgust. “This place is like a shoebox.” Get me out, she thought. Get me out. Get me out.

  “Five minutes, okay?” McCown said.

  “Yes.” Ruth looked up at the harsh lights in the ceiling and then back and forth at the cluttered walls. Trapped. Then she leaned over the slim, elegant shape of the microscope again. It was her only escape.

  McCown would probably be ten minutes, in fact. First he had to call for power to ramp up the air filters in the prep room outside the lab. Then he’d run his clothes and especially his hair and hands against a vacuum hose before he stepped inside, locked the door, and repeated the process with another vacuum. Next he’d take his clothes bag down from the hooks on the wall and don his hairnet, mask, gloves, and baggy clean suit. It was only after this meticulous checklist that he would unlock Ruth’s door and help her stow her own suit.

  She didn’t want him to see her panic. She needed to bury the feeling deep, but her best-learned coping mechanism left her in direct confrontation with the source of her fear.

  Who made you? Ruth wondered, peering into the scope. The new nanotech was a ghost. It shouldn’t exist at all. Who could have made you, and where was Cam exposed? His blood sample contained only two of the new machines that Ruth had isolated so far, among thousands of the vaccine nano, but the ghost was very distinct. The ghost resembled a bent snippet of a helix, whereas the vaccine was a roughly stem-shaped lattice.

  The ghost was beautiful in its way and Ruth briefly forgot herself, caught in the mystery. She couldn’t help but admire the work it represented. Her quick estimate was that the ghost was built of less than one billion atomic mass units, which was damned small. The vaccine was barely under one billion AMU itself and as uncomplicated as they’d been able to make it. Could the ghost be a failed effort? Maybe the pair she’d found were only fragments of something larger . . . No. The two samples were identical. Even more interesting, the ghost had the same heat engine as the vaccine and the plague, which meant it had been built after the plague year by someone who was both capable of identifying the design work and reproducing it. The heat engine was a top-notch piece of engineering. Like Ruth and her colleagues, the ghost’s creator had seen no reason to reinvent the wheel. He’d put his energy elsewhere. This was obviously a functioning nano and it was biotech just like the vaccine, designed to operate inside warm-blooded creatures.

  But what does it do? Ruth worried. The fear in her head felt like clots and lumps now, straining her ability to think.

  What if the individual ghosts were meant to combine into a larger construct? Its helix shape could lend itself to a process like that. The trigger might be nothing more complicated than a heavy dose. Saturation. Cam appeared to have a low and ineffectual amount in his blood, but what if he absorbed more? Would it activate?

  Whatever the ghost is for, it’s able to function above the barrier, she thought. So there’s no way to stop it. Then the latch in the door rattled and Ruth jumped and turned to shove herself against the heavy steel panel, nearly slamming it into Mc-Cown’s surprised face.

  “Don’t touch a fucking thing,” she said.

  * * * *

  Ruth walked through the cold white sun in her Army jacket and thin pants, needing air, needing him. For the past three days she’d imprisoned herself for hours at a time. She’d barely seen Cam at all, which she regretted. They’d been so close to a relationship, but her schedule was practically nonstop—work, work, collapse, more work. Cam had moved out after the second morning, joining an effort to trap and inoculate rodents and birds in an attempt to reestablish some kind of ecology below the barrier.

  The vaccine was widespread in Grand Lake. Cam had won that battle quickly, even though he’d appeared to be nothing except helpful and obedient. All of his coughing in the med tent. He’d outsmarted Shaug as easily as that, which was sort of funny. He always found a way, and she missed him now that their paths had separated.

  Other people were moving apart, too. The exodus had been limited so far, but McCown said there were deserters in the military and Ruth could see for herself that the refugee camps were quieter than usual. Normally the two peaks across from her were busy with farming efforts. Today one of the terraced gardens was empty, and the work crews on another were definitely understrength. Ruth understood. The temptation was too great. She was surprised that so many stayed. The new supplies were a help. Scavenging efforts had increased beneath the barrier, from organized convoys and helicopter runs to small handfuls of people who carried up as much as possible. Grand Lake had retained most of its population, at least for the short term.
The habit was long ingrained. No one who’d survived would ever trust the world below ten thousand feet again, and the vaccine did not offer complete immunity.

  At meals, she heard talk of relocating everyone to Boulder. Denver was much bigger, but it had taken fallout. There were also rumors that the Air Force would take a more aggressive stance and move a number of their people down into Grand Junction, a hundred and fifty miles to the west. Maybe it was even happening. Fighters and larger planes constantly roared away from the mountain and came back and left again and she couldn’t say if the amounts were the same. Some of them never returned because they were shot down, but maybe others were finding new stations.

  Snap decisions were a way of life up here and Ruth supposed she shouldn’t have been surprised to find herself propositioned by one of McCown’s assistants and then by the man who had the room next to hers in her shelter. They all felt like they had nothing to lose, and she was new and seemed unattached.

  She stopped at the nearest mess hall. Snares and wire cages had been laid along the base of the long tent. A rat thrashed at the end of one line and Ruth stared at it with a weird mix of disgust and something else—her loneliness.

  You got one, Cam, she thought.

  There had never been much living up here, chipmunks, marmots, elk, and grouse and several other species of birds. Nearly all were extinct. The human population had tracked and killed every species beyond the point of sustainability. There might be a few grouse and chipmunks left in the region, but nobody had seen one for months. Occasionally birds still flitted overhead. And there were vermin. Rats were not indigenous to this elevation, but there must have been a few among the endless crates of FEMA and military supplies that were airlifted into the area during the first days of the plague.

  The rats had flourished in the crowded conditions and in the grime. Ruth supposed they should be glad. Had anyone, anywhere, managed to save other kinds of mammals? She wondered again at the bizarre world the next generation would inherit, assuming they didn’t finish what the plague had started with a new contagion. Rats, birds, bugs, and reptiles made for a bleak and virulent environment, and yet it would be more stable than one without any warm-blooded creatures at all. Conservation efforts would become a way of life for centuries. Any dogs or horses or sheep that had survived would be priceless beyond measure. They must be out there in small numbers, hidden or lost on mountaintops around the world, which made it all the more important to preserve every single one.