The overwhelmed Navy colonel was acting CO, and he hadn’t known what to do with her except to give her anything she needed, medical attention, food, rest, and a quiet space for the microscopy gear they’d recovered with her. No one had time to babysit.
The badge was supposed to give her top clearance, which suited Ruth just fine. Speaking was an effort. In addition to hurting her teeth, she’d chewed her tongue and the insides of her cheek while she was infected, possibly because she’d been tied and her body couldn’t find any other way to respond to the mind plague’s commands to
move.
“This isn’t a good idea,” the captain said. “Not without containment suits.”
Ruth didn’t answer.
“I know what you’re feeling,” he said, “but we don’t know what they might be carrying. What if there are other strains of nanotech?”
Only a few of his words rang through her anxiety.
You don’t know what I’m feeling,
she thought.
I should have been
there. But the captain was right, if not the reasons he’d stated. The landing pad was a zoo whenever new birds arrived. After everything that had happened, it would be idiotic for her to be squished by a chopper or run over by their ground crews.
“I’ll move out of the way,” she said, enunciating slowly through her swollen mouth.
“Thank you, ma‘am.” The captain hesitated, trying to meet her eyes, but Ruth couldn’t look at him. She couldn’t look at anyone. They wanted so much from her.
She’d used that need against them. Everyone was afraid of another contagion, something else cooked up in Los Angeles, but Ruth had convinced Colonel Beymer to send a helicopter after her friends nevertheless. Kendra Freedman was the name she’d cited.
We have to find her,
she’d said, and that was true, but she was less interested in saving Freedman than in discovering if Cam and Deborah were alive.
Ruth walked across the landing pad and sat down on a supply crate, picking one fingernail through the splintered edge of the box. It was good to be out of her lab. Even her mouth hurt less outside. The tent was small and dark, and Ruth was more disturbed than ever by small and dark. The waiting was worse. Ten minutes ago, Beymer had sent a man to say that his team was inbound from L.A.
I should have been there.
The thought would always haunt her. How much differently would things have played out if she could have helped them? Would she be dead, too?
Ruth had come back to her senses in a residential home in the flood-ruined old town of Tabernash, twenty miles south of the V-22 hanger. Ingrid was with her in a locked bedroom, but Ingrid was infected and only one of Ruth’s hands was partially untied. Ingrid must have seen the others fall sick before running to free Ruth. She wasn’t fast enough. Ruth was still tied to the bed. Coaxing Ingrid to her had been impossible. Ruth had screamed and begged in the darkness, hungry, bleeding, and alone except for the senseless ghost of her friend. She watched Ingrid roam back and forth against the walls for hours, never finding the door, until the older woman finally stumbled close enough for her to grab her belt. Ruth was weak. Ingrid was clumsy. She fell on Ruth, then rolled away, but Ruth had already dragged the pistol from Ingrid’s hip. Her wrists were bound too close together to aim the gun at those ropes, nor did she want to shoot at her feet, but she was able to use the weapon as a tool to pry herself free. Then she found her way to their radio.
Earlier today, Ruth had successfully modified the first vaccine for the mind plague to outpace the counter-vaccine, thus creating an antidote. Reprogramming the antidote so it wouldn’t replicate except in specific conditions was more difficult, but they wanted to keep it from spreading to the Chinese—not until the enemy was gathered into prison camps. Ruth had devised a governor that limited the antidote to replicating only in high oxygen atmospheres. This was an artificial environment within her ability to create, especially at Sylvan Mountain’s altitude, using precious medical supplies. It meant she was able to cultivate the antidote in small doses. Then she secured it in vials of blood plasma for injection into one person at a time.
Ingrid, Emma, and General Walls were now in a private tent, recuperating. The rest of these heroes had vanished. From the data on Walls’s laptop, they knew who else had survived, but Bobbi Goodrich must have wandered away from their safe house before Ruth got free. Bobbi was missing. Nor had they been able to locate the other squad of immunized soldiers led by Lieutenant Pritchard. Wherever the USAF commando had gone into hiding, his men were infected, maybe starving or hurt, and Ruth hoped someone would find them before it was too late. As far as she was concerned, the places they’d earned in history were paramount even to her own, because it was these people, not her, who’d struggled on through the end.
Agent Rezac was another complication. Ruth’s antidote carried some of the same risks as the mind plague itself. Within seconds of her injection, Rezac had stroked out. She was dead. The same problem had crippled or killed dozens more just here in Sylvan Mountain as they awoke from the plague. It wasn’t fair.
The first reports out of Los Angeles were even worse. The recovery team said they’d found Deborah and Kendra dead in a parking lot outside the Chinese labs. The women’s bodies lay side by side, Kendra’s arm outstretched, Deborah’s hand pressed against her own face with a substrate in her mouth.
They’d done it. Even as they were overrun by Chinese troops, they’d won. From their bodies, the counter-vaccine had drifted to the enemy—and Cam.
He was alive. He was in the second stage of infection when the recovery team found him burrowing in the ruins. His body was in some indefinite form of hibernation. It had saved him. Most likely he hadn’t moved more than a few inches during the first, agitated phase of the mind plague. He was nearly dead from blood loss, but they’d done their best to increase his vital signs. They were rushing him back to Sylvan Mountain for surgery. Except for two Chinese prisoners taken on site, Cam was the sole witness to what had happened in L.A. Medrano was dead, too, as were a pair of Russian soldiers in the rubble—allies of the Chinese?
Cam might know something about Kendra’s design work or other labs or American survivors, but, in truth, there was no reason for Ruth to stop her own crash programs to wait for his helicopter. He’d never regained consciousness. Even if he opened his eyes, he was a zombie. Cam would have a better chance of pulling through if he was responsive, if he wouldn’t fight his restraints, but his body didn’t need any more immediate shocks. The doctors wouldn’t inject him with the antidote until he’d improved.
Ruth had only come to the landing pad because she needed to see him one more time before they took the chance of killing him like Agent Rezac.
She hoped she was
pregnant. It seemed unlikely. They’d only made love once, but she would have been ovulating, so it wasn’t impossible. She wanted his child. Some part of him would carry on.
They both deserved that much, didn’t they?
Ruth leapt to her
feet as two F-35s soared overhead, the recovery team’s escort from the West Coast. Where was the helicopter? Long seconds passed before a black dot materialized out of the sunset,
whup whup whup whup,
the drumbeat of its rotors slapping at the mountainsides.
Their mission had been delayed by the chopper’s need to refuel in Utah, California, and then in Utah again. Its flight into L.A. had been an exacting game of leapfrog, working with fighter escorts with far greater range and speed, but there were no more VTOL planes available. Ruth was grateful just to have been able to reach into California at all.
She broke her promise to stay off the pad as the Black Hawk entered its final approach.
“Dr. Goldman, wait!” the captain yelled. He ran to intercept her but Ruth shrugged him off with her head on a swivel, looking up, looking left, trying to anticipate where the chopper would land. She dodged a jeep loaded with wire. Then she bumped into two mechanics taking apart an engine and kicked through the parts spread on the ground.
“Hey!” one man shouted.
“Sorry—” The scattered metal at Ruth’s feet seemed like a bad omen and she wavered, fidgeting. She almost stooped down to help them sort through the jumble, but medical teams had emerged from the low buildings beside the field. Ruth hurried to join them even as the captain grabbed her sleeve.
“Goldman, wait.”
She stared at the much larger man. “Get your fucking hands off me,” she said. He hesitated. She pulled away. It wasn’t his fault—he was protecting her—but Ruth was no longer interested in being shielded from anything.
Somehow she controlled herself enough to make room for the medics and their gurneys as a soldier jumped from the Black Hawk. At her side, her fist clenched and unclenched.
The first man they lifted from the flight deck was unrecognizable, wrapped in blankets with his face obscured by an air mask and bandages. The blades overhead were still winding down. Ruth pressed into the crowd. “Cam!” she yelled. “Cam!” But the man’s dumbstruck eyes were Chinese. A prisoner.
“Where is Corporal Najarro!?” she yelled.
They were unloading someone else from the other side. Ruth shoved her way past the Black Hawk’s nose, joining the confusion as they strung IV bags above his gurney. She needed to touch him. She felt the power in her shaking hands. The two of them were a circuit that must be closed again, even if it was only for this instant.
Cam wore an air mask like the other man. One side of his beard had been scorched down to stubble, but she recognized his hair and the muscles along his neck, even though his dark skin was gray and shiny like wax.
“Miss, you can‘t—” someone said.
Her hand reached Cam’s shoulder as she burst into tears. Her grief was a lover’s and a friend‘s, wretched and deep. Stay
with me,
she thought.
Be with me. We haven’t had our turn yet. Please.
There was nothing in his eyes except the slack, uncaring look of the plague, so unlike his anger or his strength. Ruth turned away even before another medic said, “Let us get him inside.” She nodded. It didn’t matter if they saw her head move or not. She was already retreating and the gesture was as much for herself as anyone else.
The gesture was his, tough-minded and succinct.
She would fight on with him or without him. She owed them that much, but she honestly wasn’t sure how far to take the next generation of nanotech. Where did self-defense become something more? Was it possible to draw the line at healing people when she knew how easily new advances would spread to everyone in the world?
As she walked away from the helicopter, the soldiers on board were met by two jeeps and more men. If anyone recognized her, they didn’t say. They were following orders, unloading carefully bagged computers, lab gear, and paperwork. Sorting through the material would be a colossal chore. Ruth wasn’t looking forward to it. The job would keep her mind off of Cam, but maybe worrying about him would have been better.
I can’t go back to that tent right now,
she thought.
I should. I have to.
Instead, she walked onto the rutted earth beyond the chopper pads, drinking in the sky and the cold. Her body was as restless as her head.
I can’t.
Ruth had considered killing everyone else on Earth. She’d always thought her role was defensive, but what if it was time for her to launch her own attacks? She could become the planetary warlord that men like Senator Kendricks had envisioned as themselves.
Like earlier technologies, the mind plague and its vaccines were available for anyone to use. Soon enough, there might be yet another plague unless she preempted every enemy. No matter how vigilant they might be, there was no way to know who was becoming a threat. Russia. India. Japan. Brazil. Even on her own side, there would be people who insisted on developing their own weapons without her. Steve McCown was dead, killed in Grand Lake, and Meghna Katechia was missing, possibly taken by the Chinese, but there must be other survivors with at least a rudimentary knowledge of nanotech. Overseas, there would be more.
The same curiosity and ambition that made
Homo sapiens
such an appealing success was also a weakness. Their intelligence was a double-edged sword. Ruth believed the next step in their evolution must be to grow beyond their own suspicion and greed. Maybe they were already too late. The environment was in tatters. War had become a reflex. Her faith was the only thing that had grown stronger.
None of what happened needed to be in vain. All of them had done well, achieving more than anyone had a right to expect. That was also true of their opponents among the Chinese.
Ruth was feeling superstitious. She could almost grasp the pattern that had unfolded. Her premonition of losing Cam had even come true, though differently than she’d expected.
Deborah and Kendra’s places in the puzzle were undeniable. Ruth only wished she knew where to find Sarah Foshtomi. In a sense, Foshtomi had saved Ruth by causing the accident that infected her. Maybe the young woman had been instrumental in helping Cam, too? Ruth hoped so. Like so many people, Foshtomi was missing, probably dead, but her life hadn’t been without consequence.
Ruth would never have imagined a new mind plague if there hadn’t been another war—and without the war, she wouldn’t have possessed this next-generation technology.
What if that was why she was still alive?
She had failed the responsibilities that came with her education. Now she had another chance, and even greater tools at hand. Freedman’s mind plague offered an intriguing possibility. Ruth did not doubt that some people would argue for doing to the Chinese exactly what had been planned for them, turning their enemies into laborers and slaves.
