Plague Year

by Jeff Carlson

  “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. The
n 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.”

  28

  Leadville command had known all along. Ruth should have guessed. James had not been among her counterparts on the radio, advising and encouraging her. Delaying her. He wasn’t knowledgeable about their hunter-killer tech or familiar in any way with laser fabrication, but as the head of their labs, he should have been in the background.

  James’s absence itself was the warning that Leadville had tried to prevent him from giving, and Ruth had been too caught up in her work to understand. It might have cost them everything.

  Young was right. They should have run for the plane.

  Were their suits bugged? No, microdevices couldn’t transmit that far. Hernandez had said something, an innocent-sounding phrase, preset signals for degrees of trouble.

  “Young?” Ruth waved her palm back and forth against the glass wall of the chamber. “Young! You cut the radio relay!”

  Slightly to her left, outside the glass, Young turned.

  “Let me talk to them,” she said.

  “I’ve got it covered, Doc. Move your ass.”

  Cam was already rolling Sawyer through the air lock, pushing Sawyer’s arm down as he grabbed at the wall.

  Ruth said, “Listen to me. We have the ultimate hostage.”

  “No kidding.” Young shook his head, not in disagreement but in harried exasperation. “Iantuano, clear them out.”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “Wait!” Ruth slapped at the glass but Captain Young had already started toward the far corner of the main room, where his prisoners sat against the wall, their boots and wrists bound with silver duct tape.

  He’d sworn he would slaughter them—

  “Young, no! I meant the nanos and all the hardware!”

  He didn’t answer. He’d switched off the general frequency. What channel had Olson used? Ruth grabbed at her controls. Static. Static. Band two was the command channel, and the pilots across town had kept this relay open:

  “—down now, stand down and surrender your weapons to Major Hernandez.” The voice from Leadville was a woman’s, cool, inflectionless. “There’s no reason for more bloodshed.”

  “And I’m telling you.” That was Young. “Back off.”

  “Stand down, Captain.”

  “Back off. We’ll blow it all up first. Understand? We’ve got enough gas cans here to have a real party, so back off. You don’t want to—”

  The sky hammered against the building in two screaming sonic waves as the F-15 Eagles cut overhead.

  Leadville had sent an overwhelming force. That was what they claimed, at least, and the pilots across town confirmed that radar showed another C-130 lumbering after the two fighter jets. Leadville boasted that it held sixty troops.

  Young repeated his only threat—“We’ll blow it up, all of it!”—then instructed the pilots to cut the relay entirely. He said, “Can you block our stretch of highway, put your planes in the middle?”

  “Already moving.” The USAF man did not call Young sir or captain, Ruth noticed. Was that significant?

  The next nearest landing space was the Sacramento city executive airport, five miles south from where they’d touched down, and the roads between were jammed with stalls—and it would be another fifteen minutes before the Leadville plane covered the distance from the Sierras, another ten or more before they were on the ground.

  “We’ll be most of the way back before they even set their brakes,” Young said.

  But Ruth wondered. Even if they weren’t captured on the ground, even if the breakaways mustered air support or if Canadian fighters intervened on their behalf, would Leadville permit anyone else to keep the archos tech? Men driven by greed and fear might not understand that spin-off nano types could be to their benefit as well. Men fixated on war might disbelieve that a vaccine nano would also save them.

  One air-to-air missile, that was all Leadville needed to erase a slow-moving cargo plane forever.

  “No!” Ruth tottered back from Iantuano, struggling ineffectively with her single arm. “Not yet! If we don’t have this we have nothing—”

  He caught her wrist. “Are you crazy? We have to move.”

  “I’m done, I’m done, I’m wrapping up,” D.J. yammered behind her and Ruth shifted back and forth, trying to be larger, trying to block Iantuano from the EUVL console.

  “Let us secure our prototype or all this time was wasted!”

  “Ma’am, we’re moving out.”

  “I’ll go,” Todd said. “Sir? Look, I’m going.”

  “Got it!” D.J. shouted. “Let me extract—”

  Thump bump. Captain Young had come back to the outside of the chamber, his rifle cradled in one arm, his other hand on the glass. At the same time, two soldiers were hustling in through the air lock. Cam had already pushed Sawyer’s wheelchair across the larger room, his head turned over his shoulder to watch.

  “If I didn’t know better I’d say you were playing both sides,” Young said, looking for Ruth’s eyes through the many layers between them, the glass wall, their faceplates.

  She held his gaze. “That’s ridiculous.”

  D.J. stepped to her side and showed Young his fist. “I have it, okay? I have our sample. Let us make sure we’ve got all the software and we can go.”

  “Do it fast,” Young said, making a rolling gesture like a traffic cop. “I want to bring that laser but you’re in our way.”

  The soldiers who’d come into the chamber were pulling a dolly. None of the EUVL components weigh
ed more than two hundred pounds, but the soldiers also had a stubby blue cylinder, not an air tank, connected by a coil of line to a slender, blackened nozzle. The welding torch.

  Ruth said, “You have to be careful how you take it apart!”

  “Doc, anything that’s not on our trailer in fifteen minutes gets left here.”

  “You can’t just cut the cooling lines, we’ll never fix—”

  “Fifteen minutes.”

  “I can minimize the damage,” D.J. said. “Let me show them where to cut and I’ll pull as much wiring as I can.”

  “Sure,” Young answered. Already one soldier was helping the other, Dansfield, fit a heavy welder’s mask over his helmet.

  Ruth hesitated, arguments swarming her brain. The third component—the power supply and computerized electronics— was tied to the others only by a bevy of cables, easily yanked. Unfortunately the second unit—cooling system, fans and filters—was connected to the first by several heavy-duty pipes. If they hacked through those lines, they would lose most of the coolant and badly contaminate the decon system. But better that, she supposed, than to risk damaging the laser optics in the first component by smashing the bolts free.

  She seized her laptop. Todd was gathering up the CD-RWs and D.J. had zipped the case of vacuum wafers into his chest pocket. Ruth bustled into the air lock, Todd close behind.

  There were still so many tests and refinements necessary before they had a dependable vaccine, more than anyone ever could have accomplished within the limits of their air supply.

  They’d probably run through the whole process fifty times. They needed days, even weeks, and she closed her eyes and cursed herself.

  The rationale for preliminary checks had been sound, but they should have stopped as soon as they were sure they had the essentials. Maybe they could have finished refueling at Sacramento International before the jets rose over the horizon.

  Ruth had honestly thought she was beyond pride, beyond anticipating her place in history—yet the temptation to be first had been too great. Temptation and weakness.