“We’re still trying to get a chopper,” one of the of‚cers replied, extending his hand to help Estey down.
“Please!” Ruth craned her neck to see.
Then the scout/sniper captain stepped off the back of the truck. Estey and Goodrich followed. The warehouse echoed with voices and movement. Somewhere a door banged and a distant set of artillery ‚red several rounds, and Ruth heard none of it.
She knelt clumsily in the truck to bring herself level with Frank Hernandez. A spasm went through the gashed muscles in her hip, but it was the surge of emotions that nearly made her fall, remorse and joy and a powerful sense of déjà vu. She stammered, “Huh, how did you—”
“Hello, Doctor Goldman,” he said in his smooth way.
Ruth had ‚rst met Hernandez from the back of an ambulance in Leadville, faint from the pain of a newly broken arm and the body-wide shock of returning to Earth’s gravity. For a brief time they had been allies. She respected him more than he might have believed, even after she betrayed him. He was a good man, but too loyal, supporting the Leadville government without question. They’d last seen each other in the lab in Sacramento, at gunpoint. Newcombe’s squad had killed one of Hernandez’s Marines before leaving him and three others immobilized deep within the invisible sea of nanotech, tied with duct tape, their radio cords severed, with less than two hours of air inside their containment suits.
Ruth and the other traitors had not intended for him to smother, and the death of his Marine was a mistake. They told Leadville forces where to ‚nd Hernandez, using him as a decoy as the ‚ght began for possession of the vaccine…and Ruth had always hoped that he made it out, although later she assumed that if he was rescued, he must have perished in the U.S. capital when the bomb went off.
It was like ‚nding Deborah. It was like ‚nding family. This was the second time she’d rediscovered someone she thought was dead — until she realized that to some extent she’d been right. His appearance was very different. The man she’d known had been as neat as the U.S. Military Code, healthy and trim. He was skinny now, and the brown hue of his skin was tinged by an ugly gray pallor. The mustache he’d worn was a full beard and it concealed burns that reached up his left cheek like dribbles of pink wax, though he wore his ‚eld cap low as if to hide his scars.
Blinding tears ‚lled Ruth’s eyes and she didn’t even try to hold her feelings back, allowing the droplets to fall into the narrow space between herself and Hernandez. “You.” She hesitated, then lightly set her ‚ngertips on his uniform. “I never thought I’d see you again.”
He smiled. He could have responded in so many other ways, but perhaps he felt the same welcome sense of familiarity. He could have blamed her for everything and Ruth would not have disagreed. What if he’d taken the vaccine back to Leadville? What if the president’s council had been able to deal with the Russians from a position of absolute strength, rather than scrambling to put down the rebellion in the United States at the same time they were negotiating overseas? And yet his smile was genuine. It touched his dark eyes and softened his posture, too.
It felt like forgiveness, so Ruth was surprised when Hernandez stepped back and let another soldier lift her down from the truck. Was she wrong? No. His gaze †icked away from her with something like embarrassment.
Hernandez wasn’t strong enough to hold her weight. The burns. His bad color. He had radiation poisoning, but he swiftly covered the moment by looking past her at Cam and Deborah.
He didn’t seem to recognize Deborah — they’d barely known each other — but Deborah moved protectively to Ruth’s side while Cam crouched at the back of the truck with his left arm tucked against his ribs. One of the Marines helped Cam down and Hernandez said, “Hey, hermano.”
Brother. The two men had their Latino heritage in common, when so many of the other survivors were white, which had formed an additional bond between them.
“Mucho gusto en verte,” Cam said.
Ruth didn’t know what that meant. She was hardly listening anyway. She had touched Hernandez with such care, thinking her own tentativeness was for other reasons, although it was obvious once she realized how his clothes hung on him.
“I’m glad you’re okay,” she said.
He was dying.
“Yes. You, too.” Hernandez surveyed her tears before he smiled again. “Let’s get you patched up. You can rest. Then we need to talk.”
“I want blood samples from everyone here,” Ruth said.
“You can start that later, okay?”
“You do it,” Deborah told him. “Sir. You do it while we’re with the doctors. Otherwise there might not be time.”
Hernandez said, “You’re the astronaut. Reece.”
“Yes, sir.”
He rubbed at the gray hollows under his eyes and shook his head. “Grand Lake didn’t say who was coming. A tech with an escort. If I’d known, I would have moved more people to try to run off the Chinese, but they’ve got us outnumbered almost everywhere.” He said, “I’m sorry about your friends.”
Ruth nodded. While they were safe, Somerset lay bleeding out on the mountainside, but Grand Lake had kept quiet about their mission because there was such a concentration of electronic surveillance focused on the Rockies. It would have taken just one slip. One clue. If the Russians or the Chinese learned she was on the move, the enemy might have redirected their entire force to kill or capture her.
“The people we left behind,” she said. “Can you get them?”
“I sent another truck hours ago. We don’t know if they’ll be able to drive through a few places, but if the terrain’s too hard they’ll hike the rest of the way to your guys.”
“Thank you.”
“I’ll get some teams on the blood samples. Can you tell me what we’re looking for?”
“Nanotech. I—”
“I know that. Otherwise you wouldn’t be here.” Hernandez let them see some of the warrior inside the gentleman, challenging her with a stare. “But we already have the vaccine, and you weren’t driving around out there because you didn’t rate a helicopter—”
Ruth interrupted, too. “I don’t need more than a drop from each man. Needle pricks are ‚ne. Just make sure you isolate each one and make sure you tag them with the man’s unit, where he is now, and where he was before the bombing.”
“Before the bombing,” Hernandez said.
“Yes.” Ruth cleared her throat. She didn’t want to hurt him any more, but he deserved the truth. “Leadville was testing new technology on its own people,” she said.
* * * *
They were led to a crowded tent and her sense of déjà vu continued. She almost laughed, but that would have been crazy. Too many times she’d found herself surrounded by medical staff, like a damaged race car that had to return to the track. She hoped she’d never need this sort of attention again, and yet more blood was all she saw in her future. Kill or be killed. What else would end the ‚ghting? Surrender? She didn’t know if the enemy would even allow that.
A man helped her undress and then gingerly scrubbed at the smoke-blackened earth and blood on her hip. Ruth wore only her T-shirt and socks and wasn’t embarrassed except for the xylophone of ribs that showed when she lay down on her good side and her shirt rode up. Nearby, Deborah was topless, stripped to her undies as they assessed the wounds on her back — and even after so long on minimum rations, Deborah looked good. Really good. She was long and smooth-skinned with small, perfect breasts.