If a single trooper was impatient, if any one of them was too angry or tired or careless, it could force his hand. If someone refused an order, what would he do? He couldn’t spare anyone to put people in custody, much less assign guards. Even if the crisis didn’t break his command, it would kill his effectiveness.
Morale was bad now. Imagine if he had ten people locked down in one of the shelters and a rotation of at least two more holding them at gunpoint day after day.
I need more time.
He couldn’t see Leadville beyond the serrated peaks, although at night there was the faintest glow of electricity like a pink fog seated down in the earth. Still, he stayed. The compulsion was too strong. The need for certainty.
Things had been moving fast since the decision to abandon the space station. There had been rumors of a shake-up in the general staff and Hernandez still wondered what had happened to James Hollister. Did he get away or was he in custody? Or shot for treason? Hernandez suspected the president’s council was afraid of a coup.
He also wondered if the vaccine nano really worked. It must. Otherwise the rebels wouldn’t be pressing so hard, burning through their few resources…and without that immunity, Captain Young and the other traitors wouldn’t have run off into the graveyard of Sacramento and refused to surrender. Would they? Maybe they were dead. Maybe they’d been captured and were being held out in California or in Leadville itself. He didn’t know. That information had been tightly suppressed, because if it got out…If it was true…
The loyalty of the diverse troops surrounding Leadville was tied to the city’s riches as well as the habit of command, but mostly to its riches. There was nowhere better to go.
What if people could walk below the barrier again?
No. It was too easy to blame Leadville for everything. Even if the leadership changed, should they really be doing anything differently? Leadville had the best labs on the planet. They should control and develop the vaccine. Hernandez believed this. If the other new nano weapon was real, they should have it as well. The wars on the other side of the planet could spread here too easily. Habitable ground was too scarce, and there had to be a center to hold.
Not so long ago the president’s council had been true representatives of the people, duly and fairly elected. They had made the best they could out of a very bad hand of cards, and yet… And yet he respected too many of the men and women who’d worked against him, James Hollister and Captain Young, Ruth Goldman and the survivor, Cam.
Hernandez shifted miserably in the cold and saw one dark bird †itting through the wind. He wondered again. How would all of the squares and arrows on his maps begin to rearrange themselves if the vaccine spread? There had been too many atrocities for America to easily reunite as one nation. All of them had seen too many good reasons to hate, and there would still be populations on other continents who were desperate for the vaccine. The only real question was the scope of the con†ict to come, who against who, on what ground, and when. He could almost grasp the shape of it. In many ways the new tide would be as vicious and all-consuming as the machine plague itself, and he was aware that small units like his own could be a deciding factor in the civil war, adding their weight to the ‚nal balance.
Frank Hernandez still had to decide where he would stand.
7
Ruth lifted her binoculars and grimaced, sweating inside her goggles and mask. The three of them had found a patch of shade beside a FedEx truck, but it barely helped. The truck had been soaking up heat all morning and now it radiated warmth as well as the odd, pasty smell of the packages baking inside. Cardboard and glue. The crowded highway was like a stove top. For a day and a half the sky had been utterly still, the clouds forgotten. Spring seemed to be giving way to early summer and the land was hot and windless, the sun like a white torch. They tried to avoid the darkest vehicles. Ruth could feel a black car through her glove or her jacket just leaning against it. Repeated contact had left her good hand feeling raw and pink. The outsides of her thighs were almost as bad, her knees, her hips, anywhere that rubbed constantly in the maze of cars.
Aching, she peered at the rows of homes below the highway. There was only a small chance she’d learn anything, but so far small things had made the difference — and she could not pretend that the ugly fascination in her didn’t exist.
More than a mile away, a steel meteor had furrowed through two residential blocks, hurling shrapnel as it went. At least a dozen houses had exploded or slumped open, leaving only hunks of walls and ceilings and great drifts of white plaster and furniture. Here and there were also torn segments of metal. This was the booming they’d heard the day before, the missiles that had brought the plane down. The aircraft must have been closing on their rendezvous point on Highway 65, although they were not. They were past Rocklin now, farther east and north.
The debris ‚eld was lost in a tornado of bugs. Attracted to the blood and bodies strewn among the wreckage, ants and †ies †ooded the ground and pillared up into the air, lifting and swirling. The three of them had tried to avoid the storm without realizing what was causing it until Newcombe spotted the fuselage within the haze. The largest piece was most of the nose-end of a big C-17 Globemaster III cargo plane. It must be the aircarft that had carried the dead man they’d found yesterday, and it was nearly ten miles from that ‚rst corpse.
Lord God, my God, she thought, trying not to imagine it. The plane coming apart. The men thrown away into the sky. There would be more craters wherever the other parts of the C-17 had slammed down. Even roasting inside her jacket, Ruth felt a chill. It didn’t matter that she hadn’t asked them to come. These men had died for her, and their heroism was something she could never repay.
She closed her eyes. She wanted to pray but she didn’t believe in it. God was only an emphatic word to Ruth. Still, going through the motions made her think of her step-father and his calm faith and then she was angry and jealous and she looked up again, her breath thick in her chest.
She reeked of gasoline and repellent. They all did. Cam had grown uneasy at the number of †ies persisting at them despite the perfume, bumping at their goggles, squirming to get inside their collars and hoods. He’d done the only thing he could think of to further conceal them. He’d soaked their jackets with fuel and entire bottles of bug repellent and it made the pain in Ruth’s head like a dull nail.
“What do you think?” Cam asked. “Forty guys? Fifty?”
“Let’s get out of here,” Newcombe said, hefting his pack. Then, too loudly, he turned back and said, “Yeah. Which means there were probably a hundred altogether.”
Scattered like the ‚rst man we came across, Ruth thought, but she didn’t say anything. She didn’t want to provoke them. Cam and Newcombe were still learning to read each other as well as she understood the two men herself, and they clashed even when the argument was already said and done.
Ruth tried to end it before it started again. She hurried after Newcombe, and Cam fell in behind her. They hiked hard and fast, pushing themselves. Ruth saw the skeleton of a dog and a wad of money and then a red blouse that hadn’t faded at all. Otherwise the carnage was numbing — cars, bones, garbage, bones — and her mind caught in a loop as she struggled on.
A hundred men, she thought. A hundred more, dead for me. She knew that wasn’t fair. Her role had always been defensive, reacting to the holocaust. She could never be blamed for the machine plague, but it felt like the truth. It felt like she should have done more. She should have done better.