Jeff Carlson - Plague War

Ruth wondered what Cam and Allison had done together. Had they limited themselves to oral sex and hands or had they engaged in full intercourse? Ruth wanted to be better. She wanted him to want her more than the younger woman, and she thought of Ari and the fun little kinky things they’d played at, stroking each other, licking and kissing. The memories made her uncomfortably aware of Deborah sleeping against her back. She pressed her thighs together as snugly as the stitches in her hip would allow, trying to contain the warmth there.

She thought she’d been more hesitant with Cam than she might have been with anyone else because he’d seen her at her worst, but there was always something else holding her back. It would be frivolous. It would be wrong. She didn’t feel like she deserved the relief, much less any pleasure, when it was her mistakes that had led to the war and killed a tremendous number of people across the planet.

Ruth bit her lip and watched the man in the next cot, an Army trooper with gashes on his chin and nose. She’d seen a nurse changing bandages along his collarbone, too, before replacing his blankets. His skin was yellow-gray in the dark, but his breathing was steady and Ruth tried to wish as much of her own strength into him as he needed.

Hernandez came slowly through the gloom, stopping to murmur with someone a few rows over from her. He stopped again before he reached her cot, peering down at the three of them.

“I’m awake,” Ruth said.

Hernandez nodded. He had a plastic canteen with him and held it out. Ruth felt the bottle’s heat even before she touched it. “Soup,” he said.

“Thank you, General.”

He didn’t react to what she’d meant as a compliment. He glanced at Cam again, who was still sleeping, and then to the trooper on the next cot. He seemed as reverent as a man in church. He was de‚nitely not impressed himself. More than anything, Hernandez was unwilling to disturb their rest, and Ruth knew very well the crushing sense of connection that she saw in everything he did.

Sergeant Estey had also checked in with her an hour ago. Ruth appreciated the update, even though Estey was all business. The two of them had never had any reason for small talk and Ruth knew that attitude to be an excellent coping mechanism. Still, she’d tried to soften him. She wanted to be more than a job to Estey. She’d asked him to give her best to Hale and Goodrich, but he only nodded and moved on to other useful data.

Frank Hernandez was now a one-star general. He had become third-in-command of the central Colorado army, in part because there was no one else left, but also because he’d succeeded when the situation demanded it. Hernandez had been instrumental in reorganizing the area’s ground forces in time to meet the enemy. Many of the Guard and Reserve of‚cers who technically outranked him had stepped aside.

It was his decisions that won or lost many of the battles along Highways 50 and 133. Whether an infantry company was in the right place or an artillery unit had the tools to maintain its guns, Hernandez was the key in every equation. His ability to anticipate the terrain and the capacities of his own people made every difference to hundreds of thousands of lives.

He was inextricably tied to them. Ruth thought it was this sense of obligation that had really brought him to the front line. Hernandez wasn’t supposed to be here. Sylvan Mountain had experienced a huge increase in attacks as the Chinese pressed north, spearing toward I-70. Local U.S. command was hidden deep in the Aspen Valley in a larger, more secure base. Hernandez had risked his life to drive across. He’d insisted on meeting the survivors of the Ranger squad, but he couldn’t have been sure that Ruth was among them. It was an excuse. He needed to see the troops he’d known only as numbers on his maps, and she respected him for it.

He spoke in a whisper. “We’ve started taking your blood samples right here in the tents.”

Ruth nodded. Good. This is where the bulk of their medical staff could be found, along with the few rosters and charts they’d kept despite being overwhelmed.

“What else do you need?” he said. “We’re refrigerating the needle pricks, but I don’t know if we’re capable of building a clean room for you.”

“Don’t waste the refrigerator space. Room temperature is ‚ne, and any work space is great. It doesn’t have to be much. I’ve been getting a lot of my work done from the back of a jeep.”

“Then I’d like to move you tomorrow. Their planes are hitting us everywhere, but this base gets too much artillery. I’d rather have you somewhere farther back.”

“Okay. Thank you.” Ruth wasn’t going to pretend to be so brave that she didn’t want protection.

He looked for her eyes again in the shadows. Then he set his hand on the cot near her face. The gesture was almost aggressive, she realized, a display of his ability to corner and control her. “What am I up against?” he asked.

“General—”

“I need to know, Ruth.”

She winced. Hernandez had never used her ‚rst name before and the informality was at odds with his little show of strength. He was trapped. He had to help her and yet he remained suspicious, either because of her treason in Sacramento or because of the staggering power of nanotech. Probably it was both. Ruth might as well have been a witch from the way that Hernandez treated her, with a mix of reverence and mistrust. He understood men and guns. She represented a different threat.

“I don’t have an answer for you,” Ruth said. “I swear. But I don’t think the ghost is a weapon. I think Leadville was experimenting with new vaccine types.”

“That’s the only reason you’re here?”

“Of course!” She forgot to keep her voice down and Deborah stirred against her, drowsy and soft. Cam was already awake. His eyes had turned to study Hernandez, and Ruth said, “What are you really trying to say?”

“We’ve been through your notebooks.”

“A lot of that is speculative.” She sounded defensive even to herself.

“I need to know about the saturation trigger.”

Ruth stared at him, her mind racing. What guesses had his people made from her numbers and shorthand? It seemed unlikely that Hernandez had anyone trained in nanotechnology. Had he simply asked combat engineers or computer techs to ‚gure out her notes as best they could? Based on its helix shape, Ruth had theorized that the ghost might be designed to coalesce into larger structures after crossing some threshold of density in a population…but that idea was still nothing more than an idea.

Firmly, she said, “If you read everything, you know I had serious questions about that line of thinking. And I gave it up days ago.”

“That’s not what my people tell me.”

“Then they’re wrong.”

Cam said, “What is he talking about?”

“Doctor Goldman has considered a way of stopping the Chinese army that would also kill everyone in these mountains,” Hernandez said. “Some kind of critical mass.”

“You don’t believe that,” Cam said, taking the argument upon himself.

“I believe Grand Lake would do anything to win,” Hernandez said, and Ruth ‚nally grasped the sheer depth of the changes he’d been through. He was the one who’d lost in Sacramento. He was the one who’d watched Leadville vaporized. Hernandez was testing her. If she failed his questions, if he truly believed that Grand Lake intended to destroy him, the American civil war might erupt again when they could least afford it. Even joined together, the forces in Colorado were barely holding a line against the Chinese.

“You think we came all this way just to die?” Ruth asked with biting sarcasm. “Like we thought a suicide mission was our best choice?”