Jeff Carlson - Plague War

“I know you have a lot of guilt.” He cut through her scorn as easily as that. “Your friends wouldn’t have to know what you were doing,” Hernandez said, and he was right.

He turned her contempt into self-doubt and she immediately reached for Cam. “It’s not true,” she said.

“I know.” Cam covered her hand with his own.

Behind her, Deborah lifted herself on one elbow to gaze at Hernandez. She laid her other hand on Ruth’s waist. It was an affectionate moment and Ruth would never forget their loyalty to her. She was grateful for it, because she still had one secret.

“I came to help you,” she told Hernandez. Her voice was tight with tears. “I came to help everyone,” she said, and slowly Hernandez began to nod in the darkness.

“I’m sorry,” he said. “I had to be sure.”

“You…But we didn’t..”

“I’m sorry.” His hand rose uncertainly, as if to ‚nd a place on her and join the small chain that connected her to Cam and Deborah. Ruth wished he would. Instead, Hernandez lowered his arm to his side. “My ‚rst responsibility is to the people here,” he said. “And your notes are terrifying.”

“Yes.”

They were quiet for an instant, listening to the restless sounds in tent — the rustle of wounded soldiers who were alone and cold despite sharing this nightmare.

“You shouldn’t get in her way,” Deborah said. “Ruth is the best chance we’ve got.”

“We’ll see.” Hernandez stood up.

Ruth reached after him. “Wait. Please.”

“There’s too much to do.”

“I don’t want you to leave like this,” she said honestly. “Please. Just a few minutes.”

“All right.” Hernandez sat again.

Ruth struggled to ‚nd something pleasant to say. “Do you want some of the soup?” she asked.

“No. It’s for you.”

But there were too many important things to know and never enough time. “We thought you were in Leadville when the bomb went off,” she said.

Hernandez nodded. “I was.”

* * * *

His company only survived because of the mountains surrounding the capital. The enemy plane must have been well below those fourteen-thousand-foot peaks when it detonated its cargo. The high ring of the Divide had acted like a bowl, re†ecting the explosion up instead of outward. U.S. intelligence estimated the blast at sixty megatons. A doomsday device.

There was no reason to pile so many warheads into the plane except the Russians must have been concerned they would be turned back or shot down. With an airburst of that strength, they might have leveled the city from ‚fty miles away or damaged it at a hundred.

Hernandez was lucky they’d gotten so close. Aerial and satellite reconnaissance showed nothing but slag at ground zero. There was no longer the slightest trace of anything human in that valley. The land itself was unrecognizable. Untold amounts of earth and rock had been vaporized, and the remainder brie†y turned liquid. The eerie new †at land was studded with lopsided hillocks and dunes. It almost looked as if someone had dumped an incredible †ood of molten steel from the sky. The effect was uneven. The shock wave had roared through every low point and gap, washboarding against the terrain. It was what had saved Deborah. The blast leapt and splashed and bounced, devastating some valleys and sparing others.

Hernandez had been on a south-facing slope away from the †ash. The long series of ranges between his position and Leadville redirected the worst of it. Even then his escape was a near thing. Impact jolted his mountainside sharply enough to close many of his ‚ghting holes like hands snapping into ‚sts. He had ‚ve dead and seventeen wounded in those ‚rst immeasurable seconds. Daylight turned to black. Then the windstorm hit with choking heat and dust.

They ran downhill, abandoning everything but their wounded. They were afraid of the machine plague, but they knew they would smother if they stayed. Later they realized the atmospheric pressure had plummeted over an area of tens of miles as the nuclear reaction sucked air into an immense, superheated column. It was the slightest bit of good fortune. The region was temporarily wiped clean of the plague. Once they reached the base of the mountain, they were able to stay on Highway 24, hurrying along the buckled asphalt. Then the mushroom cloud fell in on itself and collapsed, blanketing them in ash and unseen bands of heat.

Hernandez was sick like so many of his troops, which made it easier for the Chinese to surge northward against them. None of the surviving American forces had been any closer to the strike than his unit, but nearly a third of them had been exposed to the fallout. It ravaged their effectiveness. They were unable to mount the counteroffensives they needed simply to shore up their defensive positions, and the Chinese generals knew it. The Chinese continued to race past American emplacements, leaving their supply routes vulnerable but accepting that risk in exchange for the gains in territory.

The central Colorado army was being encircled. Soon the enemy would reinforce its advance units on I-70 and face Aspen Valley from three sides. There were other U.S. populations throughout the state, but other than Grand Lake, none of them had signi‚cant military strength.

The tipping point was here. That seemed to be why the Chinese gambled. Their need for fuel, food, and tools was part of it. Every small town they absorbed was a help, and they made it tougher on the American Air Force by sprawling out. Widespread targets were harder to hit and had more time to cover each other, but Ruth wondered if the Chinese were also pushing so hard in this area because, like her, they hoped to recover some trace of the nanotechnologies developed in Leadville.

They might have already found it in the American dead. Here and there, they would have taken prisoners, too. In fact, it wasn’t impossible that the U.S. had transmitted the nanotech to the Chinese with their bullets and missiles. Every time a soldier loaded his weapon, each time a ground crew rearmed a jet, their skin, sweat, and breath were tainted with it.

Ruth had no way of guessing if Chinese researchers were outpacing her or if the enemy had already developed new weaponized nanotech themselves.

* * * *

“You know about the snow†ake,” she said to Hernandez. She needed to warn him to be careful of his own planes if it looked like he was losing his ‚ght to keep the enemy from I-70.

If the Chinese †anked the Aspen group, if Grand Lake thought this was the last place to catch the Chinese in a bottleneck before the enemy surged toward the new capital, there was no telling what they might do. The snow†ake was the easy solution. There was no way to defend against it, and after its initial burst, the snow†ake was clean.

“The weapons teams were trying—” Ruth said, but she stopped when she realized she was distancing herself from what she’d done by using the past tense.

“I’ve heard about it,” Hernandez said. “I don’t think Leadville ever let the nanotech out of their control.”

He was trying to help. He thought the snow†ake was gone forever. For a moment, Ruth couldn’t even speak, overcome with self-loathing and embarrassment. His troops had saved her, and in return… “Grand Lake has it now,” she said. “I built it for them.”

His dark eyes stared at her in the gloom.

“I didn’t know what else to do,” Ruth said, and Cam murmured, “Jesus Christ.”

She hadn’t told him. What could he do? It had seemed like the right decision at the time. She’d thought she was providing her country with a powerful new deterrent, and that was still true, but now everyone in this place was in jeopardy.

Hernandez looked away from her even as his hand tightened on the edge of the cot. It was almost as if he swooned. He understood. Ruth saw it in his gray face. He was a tactician, and throughout the civil war he’d seen his people turn on each other again and again.