Price shouted, “Everyone sticks together!”
Sawyer gave no indication that he’d heard, no sound, no movement. They couldn’t even tell where he was looking. Price flapped his arms and opened his mouth again, but Cam spoke quickly over Price’s navy blue shoulder. “So what do you think, what’s the air pressure?”
“The barrier’s down at least five hundred feet, maybe six or seven.” The racing mask muffled Sawyer’s voice but he made no extra effort to be heard. “There’ll be pockets of high pressure, though, fluctuations. Suit up now.”
One thing the resort lodge and cabins had had in abundance were goggles and other ski gear, gloves that pulled way up over jacket sleeves, fabric masks. Equipment designed to repel snow could not be proof against a sea of nanos, of course, but today it was especially crucial to delay and minimize infections.
They had never gone more than three hours before feeling the machines inside them, at which point they’d always started back for safe altitude if they weren’t already climbing.
Today, by that time, they would still be descending.
According to their topography map, the other peak was seven and a half miles due north, down and across and up— and it would be impossible to zip straight over. The roads in the great valley ran mostly west and east, and Cam had estimated that a man on foot would total twelve miles or more as he switchbacked up and down the steepest slopes, avoiding cliffs and hard terrain.
He tightened his gogs and glanced toward the low, oncoming clouds. He wondered again why storms hadn’t washed the world clean, at least the mountain areas. Common sense suggested that rain and snow would press the nanos to the ground, then carry them downhill. Sawyer said he didn’t understand the rule of scale. Nanos weren’t little people. Airborne particles of that size barely noticed the finest drizzle or the thickest blizzard, and gusts of wind and the impact of a storm’s first raindrops would stir up pockets of grounded nanos. Bad weather probably swept away a good percentage of the invisible machines, yet brought just as many or even more up from the lowlands.
“Wait.” Erin laid her hand on Cam’s hip. She’d set her goggles on her forehead and her eyes were a rich violet in the gloom. Several loose strands of her hair, flagging on the breeze, reached out from her hood to Cam’s face as she stepped close. Her smile felt funny when she kissed him.
She was warmth and softness. He moved his hand up under her jacket but was frustrated by its tight fit, and ran his palm down to her crotch instead. She rocked her hips forward to increase the pressure.
All around them, fifteen other human beings were engaged in similar embraces or slugging water from canteens or urinating there on the dirt. Keene had squatted down in a last attempt to move his bowels. After crossing the barrier, they’d keep their armor shut regardless of the body’s needs. No one wanted the nanos inside their clothing, exposing any cuts or bug bites.
In a way, this was farewell. There wouldn’t be another chance to feel bare skin until they reached the other side.
Cam wanted to say I love you, but it wasn’t true. Need was a more honest word. There had been times when taking care of Erin had been the only thing that kept him going.
He said the words anyway, like a prayer. “Love you.”
“Yes.” Her smile broadened so much that the corners of her eyes crinkled. A real smile. “I love you too.”
Then she went to Sawyer, glancing back over one shoulder. But her smile had become that crooked little smirk again and Cam pretended to look elsewhere. He watched her gesture silently, watched Sawyer push his face open, goggles up, mask down. His friend had quit shaving the day after Hollywood came and seemed like someone else now with a patchy beard rounding his long face.
Cam wished he’d gotten the last kiss. Didn’t everyone save their favorite for last?
He turned uphill, thinking that the stay-behinds would have come to the top of the drainage to watch them go. Yet he saw nothing, no movement anywhere except a fleeting dust devil and one quick arrow of a bird.
Anger stabbed through him, not pity. Faulk and Pendergraff should have been running downhill for early juniper berries and fresh greens, for lizards and insects slowed by the cold. He knew they weren’t busy double-checking their rain traps or putting out every spare container because he and Manny had already done that for them… He supposed they’d gone to their hut, reeling from the emotional shock, surrounded now by a new and equally dangerous sea of total isolation.
Somehow Cam was certain they would haunt him much longer than any of the people he’d eaten.
7
Shuttle Pilot Derek Mills shifted his body or grabbed for a new handhold each time Ruth matched his local vertical, a reaction that she thought spoke volumes. Not that the derision in his voice wasn’t clear enough.
“You don’t know what you’re talking about,” he mumbled. “It’s not like landing a plane.”
Ruth bit down on her first response. If you’re really planning to stay up here forever you’d better learn to breathe vacuum, buddy. Instead, she turned to the others, glancing back and forth across the hab module, making a show of raising her eyebrows and sort of shrugging with one upturned palm. The new Ruth was quite ladylike and certainly not inflammatory.
Too bad that rotating after Mills had put her at an odd angle compared to everybody else. They’d all grown accustomed to entering a new section of the ISS and finding someone standing on what appeared to be the ceiling or a wall, but only Gustavo readily conversed with people before wheeling around to share their alignment. The mind balked at making sense of facial expressions turned sideways or bottom-up.
No one acknowledged her attempt at eloquence and she felt a dull frustration as ungiving as the walls. The pale, elongated habitation module was about the size of a racquetball court, just large enough for both Mills and Gus to put five feet between themselves and anybody else, Gus claiming the deep end, Mills hovering by the only exit.
Ruth would have preferred to meet inside the Endeavour— the power of suggestion might have helped her argument — but Mills discouraged anyone from entering the shuttle, which he’d made into his private quarters. Ruth understood. She felt the same edgy possessiveness about her lab and had decided not to risk adding to the pilot’s discomfort. But she was never going to convince him to take his last flight.
She looked at Ulinov. His frown was a warning. Ruth chose not to notice and said, “I know it won’t be a cakewalk without ground support. We can still get down.”
“You wanna ditch her?”
“—ditch the shuttle!”
Mills and Wallace spoke at the same time. It might have been funny if each of them hadn’t interpreted her words in the worst possible way.
Contingencies existed, she knew, for crews to parachute from a damaged or malfunctioning shuttle if it could first be brought to subsonic speeds. There was even a massive lake just two miles west of Leadville — she had been studying a lot of film — and Ruth supposed they could intentionally strike the water to avoid the dense refugee population camped throughout the region. Of course, her computers and MAFM might not fare so well.
“No way,” she said. “The shuttle’s worth too much. We can use the highway north of the city, there’s a stretch that runs straight and mostly flat for almost three miles.”
Mills said, again, “It’s not like landing a plane.”
“But there must be—”
“Why do you keep thinking you know more about our jobs than we do?” Deborah Reece, M.D., Ph.D., sniffed in a way that gave both her words and the set of her chin a haughty, imperial manner. The bitterly dry air had left Doc Deb’s sinuses in a state of permanent irritation and for months now she’d been a walking phlegm-farm. Ruth had suggested that decongestants might be the answer, but Deb replied that her body was generating mucus for a good reason — to protect her aggravated tissues. So she oozed. Constantly. It was just gross.