How long had he been listening?
“You,” Ulinov said. His broad face was a deep bloody brick color, so much uglier than his frown that at first she didn’t even see his expression. Then she noticed his stance. He had not secured himself with one easy grip. He’d wedged himself to the floor by pushing back from his handhold, ready to launch himself with both feet.
It was a combat pose.
Ruth managed to force a sound past the earthquake of her heart. “Look—”
Ulinov dismissed her with one shrug of those beautiful shoulders. He addressed Mills, his English as bad as she’d ever heard. “You, I think better. Professional knows better.”
There was a noise beside her as Mills shifted in his seat and Ruth wanted to look, maybe encourage him with a gesture. But there was no way to pull her gaze from Ulinov.
“Your photographs,” Ulinov said. “Now. Pushing them over.”
She said, “It was me—”
“No.” His shoulders twitched again. He didn’t even want to hear a confession.
How long had he been listening? Fuck. The only way to salvage anything would be to take the offensive, act like a nano. Fuck fuck fuck. She had to be relentless. “Commander—”
“Enough. Do your orders.” Ulinov sounded more tired than angry now, and might have relaxed a fraction.
“The war you’re trying to fight. Ushba. Shkhata.” She named the peaks where the Russians had failed to hold a line against their Muslim enemies. “You can help them more by putting me on the ground before we lose our best chance to beat the plague. Otherwise they’ll fight forever.”
“What is it wrong with you? Do your orders.”
“They’ll fight until they’re all gone, Uli.”
“No. There is no mutiny.”
Strange that the word hadn’t even occurred to her. But it was accurate. Mutiny. “That’s not, I was just. .”
Ulinov watched her wind down before he turned to Mills. “Push me the photographs,” he said. Then he looked at Ruth again and said, “You do not come back to the shuttle.”
* * * *
Her pulse refused to calm and chased so rapidly through her thoughts that she felt disassociated from herself. She’d retreated to her lab after Ulinov escorted her from the Endeavour, both to placate him and because she didn’t want to show herself to the others. Because she hoped to find some safety and comfort.
It might have been better to face them. Here there was only the rattle of her own fear.
Ruth knew how she could force an evacuation of the ISS.
There wasn’t any other way. The Russian Soyuz docked to the station as an emergency lifeboat wasn’t something she could pilot herself. The whole crew had to leave together or not at all.
She intended to dig under the insulation somewhere away from her lab, create a pinprick pressure bleed. The damage would be attributed to a micrometeorite strike. Wallace had already gone on EVA twice to repair their solar panels. The concept of total vacuum was an illusion. There were constant hazards, dust and debris, human garbage left in orbit.
All the more reason to get out of here, before a random strike killed them all.
Ruth had decided the curse of guilt was an acceptable price — and it would not be a small burden. No matter what the crew thought, she respected the knowledge and effort that had gone into establishing a permanent human presence in space more than most of her own work. Partly that was a casual respect for any challenge successfully met. Mostly it was in recognition of the Cold War notion that Earth was much too fragile a basket in which to place all of humankind’s eggs.
The locust was more proof than anyone needed that they’d better spread throughout the solar system and farther if possible as soon as they got the chance, before a disaster even worse than the plague left humankind extinct.
But first they needed that chance.
Ruth tore through her personal effects in search of a tool and laughed at a box of tampons. Four pencils. Nothing. She tried to jaunt across the lab without clearing her foot from the open locker door, and momentum flung her down against a bank of computers. She whacked her thigh, then her forearm, and hurt her neck straining to keep her face from the console.
Somehow she bounced in the direction she’d intended to go, toward the hatch. She caught herself there. She didn’t think she’d suffered worse than bruises, but the shock of it had cleared her head. She rubbed her leg.
She had to wait, of course. The timing would be suspicious if it happened right away—
The thump of hands and feet ignited her heart again. Someone was coming. Ulinov? He’d already shown an uncanny ability to predict her actions.
Ruth backed away. Her eyes went briefly to the viewport. But it was Gustavo who filled her tiny space. “The radio, your friend James,” he yammered. “They said yes!”
“Yes…”
“It worked! Everything you’ve been telling them, the ANN, getting you on the ground, they said yes!”
He stuck out one hand in congratulations and Ruth grabbed him instead, shouting right in his face. “Aaaaaaaah!” There were no words to express the depth and complexity of her triumph.
She was going back to Earth.
8
Chair 12 had an alien look against the broken mountainside. All of the lifts at Bear Summit were painted dark green, to blend with the environment, but nothing could soften the giant straight lines of these structures. Cam always felt an ambiguous thrill when he emerged from the gorge between the base of their peak and the highest point of the ski area. In another life this had been among his favorite places. Now it was strange and deadly.
The big metal box that housed the gears perched fifteen feet in the air, looming over a glass-faced attendant’s booth. Two hundred identical, evenly spaced chairs dangled from a cable that ran along both sides of a series of massive poles, plunging out of view beyond a ridge and the first pine trees of any height.
The chairs rocked against the gray sky, heralding the storm, creaking, weeping. Sometimes when the wind was right this sound had carried over their peak for hours.
Cam looked away and turned to Erin, close beside him. She was also staring. “Watch your feet,” he said. Nosing up from the hardpack were low veins of granite, mostly smooth but peppered with toe-catching nubs and hollows.
He tried not to think about the nanos that must be puffing upward with every step, unseen dust. Grasshoppers sprang out of their path constantly, the same tans and grays as the dirt and rock. There were more of them now than ever and their irregular bursts of motion made the ground seem unstable— constant flickers at the corner of the eye.
Sixty yards ahead, almost racing each other, Sawyer, Manny, and Hollywood marched three abreast. Erin had protested when Sawyer pulled away from her, but Cam was glad. They needed pacesetters. The bulk of the group seemed to be hanging back, and this ridge they were traversing was the easy part. They’d come just three-quarters of a mile, heading west into the damp wind.
Cam glanced over his shoulder. Bacchetti wasn’t far behind but everyone else actually seemed to be moving slower, faces tipped up, all eyes on the chairlift.
Lorraine caught her foot and flailed into the ground. Cam lost sight of her as most of them bunched around, yet he could see that she didn’t get up again. He started back to help and Erin said, “Cam, no.”
The storm clouds had muted both the sudden dawn and the few colors of this world. His polarized goggles, designed to highlight white-on-white features in the snow, made the forest below seem almost black. Then he pushed into the blues and reds of everyone’s jackets and saw that Price had pulled Lorraine’s ski mask down from her cheeks.