“General—”
“I need to know, Ruth.”
She winced. Hernandez had never used her ‚rst name before and the informality was at odds with his little show of strength. He was trapped. He had to help her and yet he remained suspicious, either because of her treason in Sacramento or because of the staggering power of nanotech. Probably it was both. Ruth might as well have been a witch from the way that Hernandez treated her, with a mix of reverence and mistrust. He understood men and guns. She represented a different threat.
“I don’t have an answer for you,” Ruth said. “I swear. But I don’t think the ghost is a weapon. I think Leadville was experimenting with new vaccine types.”
“That’s the only reason you’re here?”
“Of course!” She forgot to keep her voice down and Deborah stirred against her, drowsy and soft. Cam was already awake. His eyes had turned to study Hernandez, and Ruth said, “What are you really trying to say?”
“We’ve been through your notebooks.”
“A lot of that is speculative.” She sounded defensive even to herself.
“I need to know about the saturation trigger.”
Ruth stared at him, her mind racing. What guesses had his people made from her numbers and shorthand? It seemed unlikely that Hernandez had anyone trained in nanotechnology. Had he simply asked combat engineers or computer techs to ‚gure out her notes as best they could? Based on its helix shape, Ruth had theorized that the ghost might be designed to coalesce into larger structures after crossing some threshold of density in a population…but that idea was still nothing more than an idea.
Firmly, she said, “If you read everything, you know I had serious questions about that line of thinking. And I gave it up days ago.”
“That’s not what my people tell me.”
“Then they’re wrong.”
Cam said, “What is he talking about?”
“Doctor Goldman has considered a way of stopping the Chinese army that would also kill everyone in these mountains,” Hernandez said. “Some kind of critical mass.”
“You don’t believe that,” Cam said, taking the argument upon himself.
“I believe Grand Lake would do anything to win,” Hernandez said, and Ruth ‚nally grasped the sheer depth of the changes he’d been through. He was the one who’d lost in Sacramento. He was the one who’d watched Leadville vaporized. Hernandez was testing her. If she failed his questions, if he truly believed that Grand Lake intended to destroy him, the American civil war might erupt again when they could least afford it. Even joined together, the forces in Colorado were barely holding a line against the Chinese.
“You think we came all this way just to die?” Ruth asked with biting sarcasm. “Like we thought a suicide mission was our best choice?”
“I know you have a lot of guilt.” He cut through her scorn as easily as that. “Your friends wouldn’t have to know what you were doing,” Hernandez said, and he was right.
He turned her contempt into self-doubt and she immediately reached for Cam. “It’s not true,” she said.
“I know.” Cam covered her hand with his own.
Behind her, Deborah lifted herself on one elbow to gaze at Hernandez. She laid her other hand on Ruth’s waist. It was an affectionate moment and Ruth would never forget their loyalty to her. She was grateful for it, because she still had one secret.
“I came to help you,” she told Hernandez. Her voice was tight with tears. “I came to help everyone,” she said, and slowly Hernandez began to nod in the darkness.
“I’m sorry,” he said. “I had to be sure.”
“You…But we didn’t..”
“I’m sorry.” His hand rose uncertainly, as if to ‚nd a place on her and join the small chain that connected her to Cam and Deborah. Ruth wished he would. Instead, Hernandez lowered his arm to his side. “My ‚rst responsibility is to the people here,” he said. “And your notes are terrifying.”
“Yes.”
They were quiet for an instant, listening to the restless sounds in tent — the rustle of wounded soldiers who were alone and cold despite sharing this nightmare.
“You shouldn’t get in her way,” Deborah said. “Ruth is the best chance we’ve got.”
“We’ll see.” Hernandez stood up.
Ruth reached after him. “Wait. Please.”
“There’s too much to do.”
“I don’t want you to leave like this,” she said honestly. “Please. Just a few minutes.”
“All right.” Hernandez sat again.
Ruth struggled to ‚nd something pleasant to say. “Do you want some of the soup?” she asked.
“No. It’s for you.”
But there were too many important things to know and never enough time. “We thought you were in Leadville when the bomb went off,” she said.
Hernandez nodded. “I was.”
* * * *
His company only survived because of the mountains surrounding the capital. The enemy plane must have been well below those fourteen-thousand-foot peaks when it detonated its cargo. The high ring of the Divide had acted like a bowl, re†ecting the explosion up instead of outward. U.S. intelligence estimated the blast at sixty megatons. A doomsday device.
There was no reason to pile so many warheads into the plane except the Russians must have been concerned they would be turned back or shot down. With an airburst of that strength, they might have leveled the city from ‚fty miles away or damaged it at a hundred.
Hernandez was lucky they’d gotten so close. Aerial and satellite reconnaissance showed nothing but slag at ground zero. There was no longer the slightest trace of anything human in that valley. The land itself was unrecognizable. Untold amounts of earth and rock had been vaporized, and the remainder brie†y turned liquid. The eerie new †at land was studded with lopsided hillocks and dunes. It almost looked as if someone had dumped an incredible †ood of molten steel from the sky. The effect was uneven. The shock wave had roared through every low point and gap, washboarding against the terrain. It was what had saved Deborah. The blast leapt and splashed and bounced, devastating some valleys and sparing others.
Hernandez had been on a south-facing slope away from the †ash. The long series of ranges between his position and Leadville redirected the worst of it. Even then his escape was a near thing. Impact jolted his mountainside sharply enough to close many of his ‚ghting holes like hands snapping into ‚sts. He had ‚ve dead and seventeen wounded in those ‚rst immeasurable seconds. Daylight turned to black. Then the windstorm hit with choking heat and dust.
They ran downhill, abandoning everything but their wounded. They were afraid of the machine plague, but they knew they would smother if they stayed. Later they realized the atmospheric pressure had plummeted over an area of tens of miles as the nuclear reaction sucked air into an immense, superheated column. It was the slightest bit of good fortune. The region was temporarily wiped clean of the plague. Once they reached the base of the mountain, they were able to stay on Highway 24, hurrying along the buckled asphalt. Then the mushroom cloud fell in on itself and collapsed, blanketing them in ash and unseen bands of heat.
Hernandez was sick like so many of his troops, which made it easier for the Chinese to surge northward against them. None of the surviving American forces had been any closer to the strike than his unit, but nearly a third of them had been exposed to the fallout. It ravaged their effectiveness. They were unable to mount the counteroffensives they needed simply to shore up their defensive positions, and the Chinese generals knew it. The Chinese continued to race past American emplacements, leaving their supply routes vulnerable but accepting that risk in exchange for the gains in territory.
The central Colorado army was being encircled. Soon the enemy would reinforce its advance units on I-70 and face Aspen Valley from three sides. There were other U.S. populations throughout the state, but other than Grand Lake, none of them had signi‚cant military strength.