by Jeff Carlson
The rat squirmed and clawed at the wire, snapping at its own leg. Ruth looked away from the ugly thing and saw two soldiers approaching. The man in front had unslung his rifle, although he held the barrel toward the ground.
“This is a restricted area, Private,” he said. “You know that. Lunch isn’t for two hours.”
“Yes.” Ruth wore no insignia, so they thought she was a recruit looking for a way to steal or barter for extra food. She was probably lucky she was a woman, or they might have been rougher. McCown had given her a badge that showed her actual status, but Ruth saw no reason to take it from her pocket, which would create a record of where she’d gone.
She tried to smile and turned to leave. Then the soldier noticed the rat and glanced after her, his eyes hardening. He thinks I was planning to take it! she realized. That had been another benefit of the vermin. The rats had damaged crops and food stocks, but the rats had become food, too.
“I’m looking for Barrett’s group,” she said quickly. “Do you know if they’ve been through here today?”
The soldier relaxed slightly. Barrett was one of the leaders of the repopulation project, a civilian leader, although there were also troops assigned to the effort. “You’re late,” the soldier said, gesturing downhill to the west. “I saw some guys with cages at least an hour ago.”
“Thank you.” Ruth walked away. They were releasing the first rats into the old township in the hope that the little monsters would breed and continue down the face of the Continental Divide, clearing the area of insect swarms. It was a crazy idea. It was necessary. Rats were adaptable and cunning, which made them perfect to go up against the insects. Birds would be great, too, if Cam and his friends could ever catch and infect enough mating pairs.
* * * *
Ruth already knew she could make some improvements to the vaccine. She’d begun to work through new sensor models that would bump up its target-to-kill rate, but at Shaug’s insistence she’d set aside her theories to build and culture the snowflake instead. There was no room for moral qualms. The world wouldn’t wait. The United States needed new weapons, because spy planes and satellites showed that the Russians already had close to fifty thousand troops on the ground, along with nearly half that many support personnel and refugees. The distinction was tough to make. During their endless struggle in the Middle East, the Russian population became a war machine, with everyone in combat or preparing for it.
U.S. and Canadian interceptors had begun to have more luck with hitting Russian transports before they reached the coast, but the invaders were flying in from all directions now, down from the Arctic and the Bering Sea, up from the South Pacific— and they could land anywhere, not just in the mountains. Their planes hid and rose and hid again, deceiving North American radar and pursuit.
Two spearheads of Russian infantry had spread into Nevada while California burned. Uncontrolled blazes exploded through the diseased forests, both hindering the invasion and providing them with some cover. Ruth had seen the photos herself. Twice she’d sat down with generals and civilian agents to discuss the vaccine’s parameters and what kind of casualties the enemy could expect.
Ruth estimated the Russians’ short-term losses at 5 percent. Over a period of years, if the technology didn’t improve, there was no question that the internal war between the vaccine and the plague would lead to significant traumas and deaths, but in the meantime the invaders would merely be uncomfortable. Except for anyone who stayed in a hot spot, mostly they’d suffer only minor hemorrhaging and blister rash. Sometimes an unlucky individual might experience a bleeding eye or a stroke, perhaps a cardiac arrest, which could be costly if it was a pilot or a driver who was suddenly incapacitated.
The Russians were willing to pay that price. Their advance was staggered at times, but they’d claimed hundreds of miles, absorbing dead cities and airports, quickly motorizing their troops with abandoned vehicles and American armor—and they must have used the promise of the nanotech to win reinforcements.
The U.S.-Canadian net had detected huge flights of Chinese aircraft rushing across the Pacific to strengthen the Russian foothold. Large naval fleets came behind. The enemy already held Hawaii. They’d attacked the tiny American outpost on Mt. Mauna Loa during the blackout after the electromagnetic pulse, risking an alert to the mainland. The islands were an ideal stepping-stone. The Chinese probably hadn’t thought twice about it. With the vaccine, they could win their fight in the Himalayas even as they helped the Russians take control of industry-rich North America, its superior croplands, its military bases. The new allies could divide everything however they liked, unless Ruth stopped them. The snowflake might be the only way for the U.S.-Canadian forces to regain the West, short of poisoning it with their own nuclear strikes.
She’d done it. She knew exactly how the snowflake killed, but she’d rebuilt it with the same blind will of the rat in the snare. It hadn’t even felt like her decision. Millions of people needed the weapon’s power to survive. Millions more would die. The holocaust would always be her responsibility, but so were the lives she’d save. Her guilt colored everything she did. It affected her sleep. It kept her from approaching Cam even when she needed him more than ever.
The snowflake was more of a chemical reaction than a true machine. It was originally one of several ANN developed by the scientists in Leadville, an anti-nano nano meant to destroy the plague. Composed of oxygen-heavy carbon molecules, the snowflake was intended to disable its rival nanotech by drawing the plague into nonfunctional clusters. Each bunch would recombine around the original seed and shed more artificially weighted grains, which would attract more plague, and so on. The process was termed “snowflaking” by its creator, LaSalle, but he had never been able to limit or regulate the effect.
The snowflake tore apart all organic structures. A single wisp of it would liquefy all living things within hundreds of yards, people, insects, plants, even microbes and bacteria. Fortunately the chain reaction broke down in an instant. The snowflakes tended to glom onto each other as well as foreign mass and became encased in free carbon of their own making.
Cultivating it was extremely delicate work, for which Ruth donned one of Grand Lake’s few containment suits. One mistake could kill her. But the snowflake did not attack rubber or glass.
She was forced to start from scratch. The data index included notes and information stolen from Leadville, but LaSalle’s files had been unavailable. It didn’t matter. Her memory was nearly photographic and she’d helped LaSalle with early models of his baby. In fact, after the president’s council realized the true might of the snowflake, Senator Kendricks had tried to recruit Ruth into LaSalle’s weapons group with the threat of losing a new arms race to the Chinese. At the same time, James Hollister had insisted that the Asians were years behind U.S. research.
Ruth didn’t know who to believe anymore. By itself, the new technology she’d called the ghost was proof enough that other scientists were still at work. The nanotech war had begun, almost unnoticed within the larger conflict. She was afraid they’d already lost. The hundreds of sick people in the medical tents . . . The thousands of others who’d died undiagnosed in the long winter...How many of those casualties could be attributed to some as-yet-unknown effects of the ghost?
In three days she’d spent less than three hours trying to improve the vaccine. The rest had gone into preparing a genocide. It was a real chore to assemble the snowflake by hand with inadequate gear and her first four efforts failed, too imbalanced to retain their purpose. Finally she had a single working snowflake and locked it in a glass cap, carefully exposing it to a handful of weeds inside a larger glass. Breeding more was that easy. The weeds disintegrated and suddenly Ruth had trillions of the killing machines, although many of these new snowflakes were dead or half-strength. Ruth had to discard two hundred before she quit trying to sort through the mess, but during that time she found seven more snowflakes that were whole. Each of them went
into a cap. Then she exposed those seven, too, after which she divided each of her eight teeming glasses into hundreds of smaller vials. Cluster bombs. Fifty vials to a case.
The snowflake would also be effective in stopping the massive fires across the West, she’d realized. If they dispersed the nanotech along the front lines of a blaze, it would smother the inferno by reducing its fuel to dust. Maybe there were other peaceful uses.
If nothing else, she needed the snowflake for testing. Eventually she hoped to design some way to protect people against it, like a weapon-specific ANN, but the damned thing was just too basic. There was no proof that Ruth could imagine. Not yet. In time she might design a supernano that was capable of holding a person together against anything, even a bullet. It would be a form of immortality, an augmented immune system capable of sustaining good health.
Most important to Ruth, it would be the incredible technology to save Cam, using the blueprint of his DNA to restore his body and completely heal his wounds.
* * * *
She found him where the soldier had said, hiking up from the broad valley where the town once stood. Footpaths and crude jeep trails lined the slopes by the hundreds. Mud slides slumped across the barren earth. Here and there, stripped vehicles marred the land, cars and trucks that had bogged down or run out of gas during the first sprint for elevation. They were empty shells. Everything had been ripped away from them, seats, tires, hoods, doors, bumpers. The need for building material had been that severe. Far away, all that remained of the town were the right corners and straight lines of its foundations and streets, a small maze of squares set against the uneven shore of the lake. Several concrete structures remained, as did the fenced-off tarmacs of its three gas stations, but anything that was wood or brick or metal was gone.
Ruth felt nearly as forlorn. She worried at the choices she’d made. She could have had Cam, even for a moment, but she’d run to her work instead. It was the same choice she’d always made, even when one sweet hour together would have left her rested and better focused.
She didn’t want to die alone.
The sun had fallen away from noon in a hazy sky laced with contrails. Helicopters chattered somewhere in the north and Ruth wondered what they would do if the war suddenly fell on top of them. Run down, she thought. Run to him and keep running.
There were more than a dozen people with Cam, but Ruth recognized the way he carried himself even though his body was top-heavy with equipment. He’d slung a rack of wire cages over his shoulder. He wore a pack, too, and there were thick leather gloves tucked into his belt. Her chest lightened at the sight of him so clearly in his element...
Cam was laughing with a young woman. Ruth frowned. She had waited nearly an hour, holding her stone in her left hand, pressing its gritty surface into the soft, tender skin of her palm. She could have trudged down after him instead of staying with her thoughts, but she was sure he would have made the same decision. Be patient. Don’t risk infection.
Ruth tucked her rock into her pants pocket and walked to meet him, ruffling her fingers through her bangs when the breeze tugged at her jacket and her curly hair. She needed a barber. When her hair got too long, it fluffed and made her look like Jimi Hendrix, which wasn’t particularly flattering. Still, the primping was unlike her and she knew it.
“Cam,” she called. He didn’t react. The wind was against her and he walked in the middle of the ragged group—ragged but in good health. Their voices were loud with the satisfaction of a job well-done, and yet Cam only directed his words at one of them. Allison Barrett.
“Next time just drop the cage,” he told her.
“That little fucker wouldn’t have made it anywhere near me and you know it,” Allison said, and Cam laughed again.
The girl was in her early twenties, Ruth thought, with a wide mouth and great teeth that she liked to show in a confident animal smile. Bad skin. Most of it was sunburn but there were threads of plague scarring, too, especially on her left cheek. Her blond hair had been bleached almost white by the sun.
Ruth only knew her because Allison was one of the mayors elected in the refugee camps. After Ruth’s second meeting with Governor Shaug, Allison and three others had waylaid her escort in strident voices, demanding information. Shaug hadn’t dismissed them either, taking the time to introduce Ruth and to settle their questions. The refugees had clout if only because there were so many of them, and yet Ruth suspected the “mayors” had been a large part of Grand Lake’s ability to endure. For example, the trap-and-release project was absolutely genius. It showed the capacity to look ahead instead of allowing their many immediate problems to blind them to everything else.
Allison was clever and tough, exactly like Cam. Like the rats, Ruth thought, but that was uncharitable. She made herself smile as the work crew approached, carrying Allison and Cam along in the middle. Their heads were still turned toward each other. Allison noticed her first.
“Hi,” Ruth said.
Cam hesitated. His body language toward Allison was calm and open, but his eyes grew troubled. It was a complex exchange and Ruth missed none of it.
He said, “Ruth, what are you doing here?”
“I need a minute.”
“Okay.” He set down his cages and his gloves. That he didn’t question her at all made Ruth feel good. They could still rely on each other, no matter what else.
Ruth caught his arm and drew him aside, glancing at Allison to make certain the girl didn’t follow. Stupid. If she and Cam had touched each other—if they were having sex—Ruth would need to test Allison for the ghost, too, but her instinct was to protect Cam and that meant keeping the contagion a secret as long as possible.
She let go of his sleeve. Being close to him evoked more feelings than she was ready for and she was glad to move into the wind.
I’m jealous, she realized, too late.
Ruth had been using samples of his blood and her own because they were the original carriers of the vaccine. It was widespread now, but that was just good science, and a good excuse to see him.
“There’s a problem with your work,” Cam said, watching her. His intuition was straight on the mark and Ruth was suddenly afraid of what else he might see in her.
“Where have you been?” she asked, harried and intense.
“We took some rats into town,” he said. “There’s still a chance—”
“Where have you been, Cam?” Ruth clutched his wrist to make sure she had his attention, searching his brown eyes. He stared back at her, a little frightened now. Ruth said, “In the lab in Sacramento, did you go anywhere? Did you open anything?”
“What are you talking about?”
“There’s something else inside you, a new kind of nanotech. Maybe a weapon. There’s something else besides the vaccine and I don’t know what it is.”
“I—Oh my God.” Cam stepped back from her, staggering. Ruth quickly moved after him, but he brought his forearms up between them, looking at his hands as if he thought he could possibly see the subatomic machines.
“You know I’ll do everything I can,” Ruth said, sharing his fear. It was strange. She felt a very welcome intimacy in the moment. On some basic level, she had learned to associate Cam with tension and pain, and now they were bound together by those feelings again.
Hurting for him, she watched his face. She also was aware of his friends shifting behind her, and she was glad for their voices and the rustle of their boots. Standing apart from them only heightened her sense of rejoining Cam.
“What do you remember about Sacramento?” she asked.
“I don’t think I went anyplace that the rest of us didn’t go, too,” he said. Then, more fiercely, “I didn’t. I swear.”
Ruth matched his quiet tone. “We’ll figure it out,” she said.
Allison intruded. Allison edged past Ruth, walking like a cat. The girl held her body low but kept her shoulders up, her hands ready to grab or punch. It was a posture that she must have learned in
the camps, Ruth thought, light-footed and able.
“What’s going on?” Allison said. Her voice was as full of challenge as the way she held herself and Ruth met it without thinking.
“I’ll need blood samples from you, too,” Ruth said, trying to scare the girl.
Allison only grinned at her. “Is that why you’re here?” Allison asked. Then she took Cam’s hand in her own and stood with the shoulder of her tattered blue sweater against his Army jacket.
“There’s a new kind of nanotech,” Cam said, explaining to Allison.
The two women never looked away from each other. Ruth tried not to let her defeat show in her face—or her respect. Allison was plucky and bold. In fact, the girl reminded Ruth of herself at her best, but she just wasn’t that confident anymore. Allison was willing to rush an opportunity. Ruth was not. Otherwise she wouldn’t have missed her chance before Cam and Allison met.
Watching him with the girl made it clear. Even with his rugged looks, there had been no shortage of attention for who he was and what he’d accomplished, and their acceptance of him was exactly what he’d missed.
And you deserve it, Ruth thought.
Still, she was crushed. Cam must have exhausted his patience with her during their long run, and yet this was the only time she’d known him to veer away from what he really wanted. In some way, Ruth supposed he was trying to punish her. She saw that now. His decision to pair up with Allison was self-destructive, complicating his relationship with the woman he really wanted. Ruth knew that he loved her. Finding someone else, simply taking the opportunity, was an attempt to reject Ruth before she had the chance to say no. But she loved him, too. Couldn’t he see that?
