She seemed to understand what he wanted to ask next. Will you people be able to fix me someday?
“It’s very possible,” she said, and reached for him in the chill darkness. Her fingers bumped his forearm, traced down and clasped his hand. But she let go before he could react.
The gesture, small as it was, stunned him utterly.
Cam had lost the hope that anyone could ever be so casually intimate with him again.
* * * *
The morning sky had a color that he didn’t remember, a rich, placid blue. Sacramento, nearly at sea level, lay beneath 10,000 more feet of atmosphere than the mountaintop they’d left just thirty minutes ago. Standing beside Sawyer’s wheelchair, Cam glanced up into this deep tint again and again. Sunlight detailed the fine gray whorls of two fingerprints that someone had left on his Plexiglas faceplate, and he smeared the delicate grease away with his glove.
Tension beat in all of his weakest points, his hands, his ruined ear, the dying teeth at the upper left of his mouth. That he was unable to rub or scratch these wounds only increased his restless fear.
It was an alien place. The cargo plane had no windows, and to step from the rough mountain onto a freeway eight lanes wide had been startling. Bracketing this elevated stretch of midtown Business Loop 80, the buildings of Sacramento formed a dense, unrelenting jigsaw of flat surfaces and lines, block after exacting block. There was no horizon on this level earth.
His suit and radio headset deafened him to anything outside himself, and he was glad. Outside was only silence. Amidst miles of concrete and glass and steel, they were alone.
But the city lived for Cam in a way that could not be shared. He had been here before many times. Sacramento was only an hour’s drive east from his childhood home, and he wondered if any of his brothers had made it this far during the exodus to the mountains—
“For Christ’s sake, just cut them both. We aren’t taking the ’dozer back with us anyway.” Hernandez overrode the exchange of voices on Cam’s headset, uncharacteristically terse. The soldiers had already backed out their jeep but the chains securing the bulldozer to the flight deck were snarled.
“Sir, we can probably just snap ’em if we rev it up.”
“You might snap the brake lines or something too.” The massive vehicle had heavily ribbed monster tires instead of tank treads. “Find the bolt cutters.”
“Yes, sir.”
Major Hernandez had not objected to Cam’s sitting in on his briefing this morning, had in fact solicited Sawyer’s opinion through him. And on learning that Cam knew the area, he’d questioned him as well. Hernandez definitely seemed like the right man for the job. In the predawn his troops had set out three crates of supplies he’d chosen to leave behind, and fifteen minutes after sunrise he’d downloaded his first orbital photographs via commsat link.
The greater Sacramento metropolis had been home to 1.5 million people, congested, smoggy, crime-ridden — and with an unparalleled abundance of parks and wildlife areas. The urban sprawl was interrupted nicely by two rivers, several freight canals, and a dozen lakes both natural and man-made.
Cam was certain that the river channels still teemed with life, no doubt the larger parks and playgrounds as well, and he had warned Hernandez of his encounters in the valley with the mosquitoes and the grasshopper swarm. Ant colonies numbering in the millions might have filled every apartment complex and grocery store, prospering first on bodies and decaying food, then on carpet glue and upholstery. The expedition members probably wouldn’t attract insects, being scentless in their containment suits, but if they walked into a horde they could have trouble. He needed Hernandez to be alert for strange threats.
The city might kill them in a hundred ways, collapsing structures, slow leaks of flammable gas. This place was silent but not at rest — and everywhere around them, swirling with every step and movement, was the invisible sea.
He felt too close to success, after so much pain and loss, not to dread that this might also be taken from him.
Last night everything in Cam had changed. Until last night his greatest goal had been somewhat external — to help others in a late, hopeless effort to balance all the wrong that he had done. Now it was more personal. Now the chance existed, however slight, that archos could to developed into a new-generation nano capable of making him whole again, and the possibility alone had influenced his mood.
The larger goal was still real. He would always owe a debt for surviving, but it was the personal hope that was the loudest in him now.
He did not want to end up like Sawyer, ruined and helpless. The damage to his own body would become crippling as he aged — he might only have another five or ten years — and this morning his impatience and his caution felt like a collision in his mind.
Dehydration would be another hazard today. Cam was already moist with sweat, skin sticking on rubber, even though he was wearing little inside his suit, and as the morning warmed his outfit would become a body-shaped oven. They didn’t have enough air to periodically cool themselves by purging the suits.
Each person wore a rigid pack of twin oxygen tanks, narrow cylinders weighing more than ten pounds apiece. Sawyer’s hung from the handles sticking out from the rear of his chair.
One tank, one hour, unless they used it up more quickly in exertion or in fear. Leadville had game-planned for an average of fifty minutes per cylinder. There were six extra tanks for each person, but eight hours total struck Cam as a dangerously thin margin of error.
It was difficult to put his faith, his fate, completely in the hands of these strangers.
As the capital of a world-class economy, Sacramento had no less than three airports and a major U.S. Air Force base. All were near the city’s outskirts, though, which was unfortunate since their target lay within the core of downtown on 68th Street. The expedition planes would need to refuel before heading back to Colorado, but the nearest airport was five miles from the lab and the streets were hopelessly clogged.
This open stretch was an unusual find. As quarantine efforts failed, most of Sacramento fled for elevation. So had the 5 million people living farther west in the heavily urbanized Bay Area, yet in this case a blockage worked to their advantage. A northbound tractor trailer had tangled with two cars and rolled, and a third car plugged the only opening between the big rig and the median divider when its driver did a poor job of shooting the gap. Nearly all of the vehicles that were already past had continued up the highway to a cluster of traffic, leaving a half mile of generally free room.
The Cessna had landed first again, its crew removing five cars, then cutting two overhead signs with a welding torch.
They were still thirty-eight blocks from their destination, but instead of asking Hernandez to bulldoze straight across, military analysts had mapped out a jigsaw path through residential back streets and, at one point, across two neighboring yards. The detail work was impressive but Cam thought their estimate of seventy minutes to target was bullshit.
They hadn’t even started moving yet.
“Got it!” The Marine’s shout was a relief and Cam turned from staring into the thick blue sky.
“Okay, clear the axle—”
“—reach across?”
Their headsets broadcast and received continuously, which made for some confusion on the general frequency yet left their hands free from toggling send buttons.
“All right, saddle up.” Hernandez again. “Hermano, that’s you, let’s move it out.”
“You bet.” Cam had rolled Sawyer’s chair ten yards from the cargo plane, out of the way, positioning him to face back toward the aircraft instead of the dead city.