After the strike, after ending any race to California, Leadville broadcast a warning to whatever remained of the rebel leadership. Leadville intended the warning for everyone. This man, Sawyer — he belonged in the capital.
White River had been an object lesson.
* * * *
Ruth stopped paging through the second folder and actually looked at the diagrams there. Vernon hadn’t given her these print-outs for show. This was a working file. The laptop he’d left must be similarly packed with data. She probably had a copy of everything they’d learned about the locust.
That would be too much information for him to have compiled by himself, unless he and James had been hoarding it together all this time, which seemed unlikely. How many others were in on the scam? With only thirty-nine scientists including herself, there couldn’t be many left who weren’t either spies for the council or allied with James and the conspiracy.
There was strength in that thought. She wasn’t alone.
She hadn’t been here long enough to gauge how far things had developed, but her guess was that most would side with James. These people were too clinical in their thinking, too independent, and every mentor in their lives had tried to instill a powerful sense of responsibility in them.
Ruth glanced at her lab mates again as she walked to her computer, but she had no way to know if either of them was aligned with her, no word, no signal.
Computer discs were strictly rationed. Ruth had just three for herself but there were others on a shelf, labeled Iso and Plas286 in a looping cursive. She blanked them both. Then she downloaded her current analysis and everything else she’d done in the past week.
* * * *
She might have told Vernon yes even if the note had ended with White River’s fate, but there was more. There was worse.
The man in California swore he could beat the locust, given his equipment and a few capable assistants — yet he had no interest in improving their ANN. He had no plans to attack the invisible sea at all. The process of sweeping the planet clean might require years, he said, a figure Ruth couldn’t dispute, and there was no guarantee it could be thorough. To repopulate an environment like that would risk encountering pockets of the locust that the ANN had missed, and new plagues.
He intended to take advantage of the locust’s versatility.
The machine was biotech, as Ruth suspected. Its designers had hoped to teach it to isolate and destroy malignant tissues, dosing each patient with an individually keyed batch inside a sealed chamber — and when its work was done, they would spin a dial and drop the pressure, and out came the patient free of cancer and free of nanos.
He said he could reverse-engineer a new version of the locust, shorn of most of that extra capacity and therefore quicker, more responsive. With the work they’d already done on their discrimination key, he said he could create a model that would live inside a human host, powered by body heat, and disable the original locusts as they were inhaled or otherwise absorbed.
Targeting only the original locust type, using only those specific materials to replicate, it would be like an ANN on the inside, a vaccine, proof against the machine plague.
And it would spread poorly except by direct injection. The council could use this new nano to literally control the world, giving it only to a select population, ensuring loyalty, handing out territory and establishing colonies below the barrier as they saw fit. All of Earth. The prize was too sweet, after too much hardship, and they could secure it as easily as turning their backs, not an effort but a lack of one. Every dissident, every rebel, every other remaining nation — in less than a generation the squabbling, starving millions trapped in the highlands would dwindle into a few grubby tribes unless perhaps they agreed to come down as servants and slaves.
Kendricks would have his one world, one peace, one people.
* * * *
Aiko almost blew it for them, shouting in the courtyard. “Ruth! Hey, Ruth, you didn’t get tapped, did you?”
She should have known there would be a crowd. It wasn’t that there was much to see — two jeeps and a truck, some different uniforms — but the days here were especially monotonous for the families of the scientists. These people were the lucky ones, well fed, protected, and they fought over the few chores available to them — gardening, laundry, water detail.
The confinement had been hardest on the seven children. The fifty-four civilians were allowed only in their rooms, the gym, the cafeteria, and outside on sixty feet of sidewalk and dirt. Ruth guessed that more than half had gathered along the building, as well as a dozen techs. Damn.
“Wait!” Aiko hollered. “Hey, Ruth, wait!”
She quit edging through the crowd just to get Aiko to shut her mouth. It was noon, the white sun hard on the olive drab trucks and green men, the spectators caught in a band of shadow under the building’s eaves.
Aiko caught up but took an extra step too close. “I told you, didn’t I? I told you.” She seemed to have forgotten that she was mad, her dark eyes glinting with excitement. “Are you going along?”
“With this arm? How could I fit in a containment suit?” Ruth flopped her cast in its sling.
“Then what’s in the duffel bag?”
“Files and a laptop.” That was true. Give her something juicy. “D.J. screwed up and left the diagnostics upstairs, so I get to play nursemaid on the ride down. James wants to make sure they really have everything before they take off.”
That almost made sense, and Aiko loved it. “What a shit assignment. Do you know who the other losers are?”
“I’ll tell you later,” Ruth said, stepping through the boundary from shadow to sun. She didn’t look back.
They should have waited for lunch. With everyone in the cafeteria, there would have been few witnesses — and Ruth was hungry again, always hungry after the small portions. It should have been an insignificant worry, but she couldn’t shake it. Was she going to have to skip a meal?
Unfortunately, James had had no control over the timetable.
James could only shape the situation to the limit of his authority. The expedition would include three techs, and Kendricks had visited this morning in part to confirm names. The council had no reason to rely solely on this man Sawyer. He was an unknown, and he refused to tell them the location of his lab until they’d come for him, and soldiers couldn’t be expected to identify everything of importance among his gear and computers. The dilemma was whom to send. Risking the best and brightest was unthinkable, but sending low-level assistants or the ineffectual was a risk of another sort. They might miss something.
James had haggled with Kendricks over who could be spared versus who could do the job. He had agreed with the senator, and then he had drawn up a different manifest altogether.
* * * *
“Goldman, check.” The captain’s orders were already well creased, perfectly creased, and he folded the sheet into his chest pocket. “Where have you been, ma’am? We’re running late.”
“Sorry.” She’d hoped to rush out and avoid Major Hernandez. The security chief might wonder why one of Timberline’s premier eggheads had been included and insist on making a call even though she was on the list. “Can you help me up?”
The truck bed was level with her chest. Three of the men in back had quickly stepped forward, taking her bag, reaching for her, but Ruth only had one arm.
Their fatigues were newer and cleaner than any she’d seen yet, and camouflage instead of the olive drab of Timberline’s security detail. Hernandez and the others were Marines, she had learned. These men were Army Special Forces.