Jeff Carlson - Plague War

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 ‚ercely, “I didn’t. I swear.”

Ruth matched his quiet tone. “We’ll ‚gure 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 con‚dent 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?

She didn’t doubt that Allison’s attraction to him was genuine, but she was suspicious of the girl’s reasons. Allison would always be looking to strengthen her faction here in Grand Lake, and Cam was both a celebrity and a veteran survivor. So the girl had tied herself to him.

“You better come with me,” Ruth said, looking away from Allison to include the others in the group. “All of you. I need blood samples before you go anywhere else.”

* * * *

She turned her back on Cam in a daze. She knew what she had to do. A discovery as criticial as the ghost could not be left for later, so Ruth went forty-eight hours with only a few catnaps and two big meals, hiding herself in the lab.

Was the ghost a Chinese construct? She knew that in Leadville, intelligence reports had put China’s research program at the top of the list after Leadville itself. The plague year had badly confused things, of course, and a nanotech lab could be small and easily hidden, but at the same time, the world had shrunk to a handful of island ranges. There were fewer places to watch. Their list of competitors was very short. China. Brazil. India. Canada. There was a displaced Japanese team on Mt. McKinley, Alaska, and a British group in the Alps. All except the Chinese had been considered friendly. Regardless, Ruth didn’t think any of them except the Chinese were capable of building the ghost, so it must be a threat.

She had been wrong in her initial assessment. The ghost was 15 percent smaller than the vaccine, but more advanced. It was a high-level construct and in its complexity Ruth was able to discern the tiniest changes. Generations. A few blood samples from McCown and his assistants seemed to indicate that it had spread through the local population in waves. An early model was followed by another. Possibly more. Cam had probably gotten it from Allison, and Ruth continued to fear that the ghost was only waiting to reach some critical mass before decimating Grand Lake.

Was it everywhere across the Continental Divide? Shaug allowed her to send radio queries to the labs in Canada, and the answer was no. So where had the technology come from?

The ghost was in Ruth, too. It appeared in her blood on their fourth day, just a half step behind Cam’s infection, which ‚t with her hypothesis. The count in Newcombe’s sample was also low. They hadn’t brought it to Grand Lake. Grand Lake had infected them.

After that, her tactics changed. Ruth insisted on blood samples and basic information from a thousand soldiers and refugees, beginning a crash program to backtrack the ghost’s origins. For two more days she dedicated computer time to the task along with most of McCown’s group and dozens of overworked medical staff. She was ‚ghting her own people. Shaug and the military leaders pressed her for new and better weapons. Ruth refused. It was the wrong priority.

Deborah Reece became a crucial ally and volunteered to oversee the blood work. Ruth let herself be interrupted to monitor the snow†ake production, but mostly she’d handed that effort off to McCown.

The land war was rapidly escalating to the brink. The Chinese naval †eet swarmed into San Diego and Los Angeles and dispersed tens of thousands of infantrymen, armored units, and aircraft, opening a new front against the United States. Meanwhile the Russians continued to push through Nevada — and the invaders were winning the battle for air supremacy. The Russian air force was full of relics and mismatched planes, and the Chinese had similar problems, but even at half strength they dominated the United States, especially as America continued to shuf†e working aircraft into key positions.

Each side tried to protect their planes and fuel supplies even as they sent ‚ghters slashing into each other’s territory. Each side rushed to claim airports and old U.S. bases, destroying some, protecting others, a game of chess with negotiations †aring and failing. The U.S.-Canadian forces threatened full-scale nuclear strikes on mainland China and the Russian motherland if the invaders did not immediately pull back to the coast, while the Chinese swore they’d respond in kind, plastering the Continental Divide at the ‚rst sign of an American missile launch.