Plague Year Read online

  “There is nothing here for us.” Cam kept his voice soft and level. “We’ve barely lasted this long. You know that. Trying for the next peak is a gamble, but it’s our only choice.”

  Price jabbed his index finger at them. “You can leave, we won’t stop you! But you can’t eat all the food!”

  Cam wanted to hate him. It would have been easier. Yet these were good people, mostly, the cream of the crop by definition. Fighters. He had bled with them, shared utensils and huddled for warmth with them. Their sins were the same. So it was right to try to save them.

  It was a way to save himself.

  Cam needed to balance all of the wrong that he had done. If he could start over, live better, he might have some chance at forgetting everything that had happened up here against the cold, open sky.

  But Price looked over his shoulder to face his own faction, exactly as Lorraine had done. “Nobody is eating more than their regular rations!” he shouted.

  Another of the loners, Bacchetti, stepped to Cam’s side before even Sawyer or Manny. “Our food,” Bacchetti said, grungy teeth flashing through his mess of beard. Cam hadn’t heard the man speak in days, had long since written him off, and now his heart leapt with strange pride.

  It was a weakness, a distraction.

  Price kept yelling. “That food belongs to everyone!”

  “Right!” Sawyer was just as loud. “Bacchetti and me and these guys have been killing ourselves hauling supplies up this mountain. We deserve to eat heavy.”

  “Vote! Let’s vote!”

  “We’re eating heavy, Price.” Sawyer shifted his weight forward and Doug Silverstein bent his tall frame in response—

  Cam pushed between them with his hands out. Silverstein gave way but Sawyer was unyielding and Cam shoved him, frantic, swiping his fingertips down Sawyer’s chest. He could not feel the gun under Sawyer’s clothes.

  Price’s breath smelled of bitter stomach acids, but Cam leaned closer and said, “Come with us, Jim.”

  “Let ’em stay,” Sawyer growled again.

  “We can make it,” Cam insisted. “Hollywood’s already scouted out the easiest trail. It will take us less time than he needed. Okay? There are always a few rain showers up here in springtime. We’ll wait until then.”

  Low-pressure systems had pushed the nanos down almost a thousand feet by Sawyer’s estimation, and they’d always gone scavenging during the worst weather. The dangers of hurrying over ice and slick rock in darkness and cold, the possibility of avalanches, of getting lost—it was all worth reducing their exposure.

  “We have to do this,” Cam said. “Don’t you get it? If more than four or five people stay here, you’ll be eating each other by December.”

  4

  Ruth spent her time at the window, day after day, hours at a stretch. Commander Ulinov had ordered her to stop, had pleaded and even joked with her, his attitudes shifting as smoothly as the cloud masses wrapped around the blue Earth below, but the International Space Station was a narrow, sterile world. Ruth needed more room to think.

  Besides, making each other crazy was about the only fun available to them.

  The lab module had a viewport only because its designers intended to conduct free-space fluids and materials tests, and Ruth had long since retracted the twin waldos bracketing the window to improve her view. No one was interested in pure science anymore.

  Prehistoric darkness blanketed the nightside of the planet. Ruth watched patiently, dreaming. Sunrise still enthralled her, although from low-Earth orbit it came every ninety minutes. Each new dawn reminded her of inspiration.

  “Dr. Goldman!”

  She flinched as Ulinov’s voice boomed through the lab. Lately he’d taken to surprising her—not difficult when he could float noiselessly through the neck connecting this module to the main station—the same way her step-dad had attempted to retrain his terrier after Curls began eating the couch. Shock treatment. Lord knew her reaction was irrational but Ruth found herself behaving exactly like that dumb dog, making a contest of it, and she no longer doubted that Ulinov was also playing this small game. The amount of time he spent tormenting her was too great. Their sparring had become the careful flirtation of commander and subordinate, skirting iron-fast rules against fraternization, and the attraction must have been more difficult for him because of his reluctance to undermine his own authority.

  They were hard on each other, strong for each other, and it was wonderful to have any chance to feel amused. Ruth kept her face turned toward the viewport, baiting him.

  “What can you be thinking?” Ulinov demanded. “What haven’t you seen through that hole a million times before?”

  The interior of the lab module would have been impassable in gravity. Her gear extended in bulky towers from three of the cube’s six surfaces, bolted down between the original equipment and computers. It was a monochromatic jumble— off-white walls, gray metal panels. He expertly threaded his way toward her and touched his foot against the ceiling to correct his spin.

  Commander Nikola Ulinov was large for a cosmonaut, his rib cage wide enough to hold two of Ruth, and his square face had spread to epic proportions due to the redistribution of body fluids that occurred in zero gee. He apparently thought his size gave him a psychological edge and often crowded her, like now.

  His odor was how Ruth remembered Earth, a full and textured smell. Good, real. Inviting. She finally glanced at him, wondering why he still bothered to act the gruff Soviet bear.

  He seemed to notice and tried a new tone. Truly he was more of a wolf, nimble and cunning. He spoke quietly now: “Tovarisch, must I cover this hole? Will I assign someone to watch you? Why are you not understanding the importance?”

  The warm spark of mischief in her heart faded. Maybe that was best. “I’ve done all I can.”

  “India transmitted new schematics only yesterday—”

  “I’ve done all I can here.”

  He said nothing. He never did after she insisted she’d been beaten. It was a good trick, letting her stew in her shame and frustration. She used to blurt promises to work harder. Now they hung together in silence.

  At last, Ruth risked another look. Ulinov’s wide brown eyes were aimed not at her but out the viewport, where a vast corona of yellow-white illuminated the dark curve of the planet.

  “The snow’s melted enough,” she said. “Colorado should be able to clear a stretch of highway for us.”

  He was gruff again. “There will be no returning to orbit.”

  Ruth nodded. Plague Year, they were calling it now, changing the calendar, changing history, and the decision felt right in so many ways. Everything was dead and new all at the same time. It had been a very different life eleven months ago when she rode the last shuttle launch out of Kennedy Space Center, the final launch. The supply rockets put up by the Europeans a week later didn’t count.

  “We are remaining as long as we can,” Ulinov said. “The president ordered us with good reason.”

  And you want to stay a part of your war, she thought.

  Ulinov’s motherland, like so much of the planet, must now be unimaginably empty. The remnants of the Russian people had fled to the Afghanistan mountains and to the Caucasus range, a sheer jag of rock thrust up between the Caspian and Black Seas, where they were entrenched in a confused, ferocious struggle against the native Chechens and refugee hordes out of Turkey, Syria, Saudia Arabia, Jordan, and Iraq. It might have been worse except the Israelis had airlifted south to Africa and the high peaks of Ethiopia.

  Peace had at last come to Jerusalem and the Middle East.

  The space station still received sporadic broadcasts from the Russian population, demands for orbital surveillance or American military support or, sometimes, wild declarations of bloodthirst directed at their Muslim enemies. Ulinov transmitted high-res photos every day, weather and orbits permitting, and diligently relayed each request for supplies—and he had sworn his allegiance to the United States.
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br />   As daylight lanced through the viewport, Ruth touched his shoulder. Foolish. Reaction sent them both drifting slightly. She increased her grip to keep them together. The surface of his jumpsuit was as cold as his self-control, but his gaze flicked to her hand and then roamed her face. His expression softened.

  Ruth spoke first. “Zero-gee working conditions aren’t an advantage if I don’t have what I need. I’m past the limit of what I can achieve with reconstructions. Badly translated reconstructions.”

  In the rush to get her away ahead of the invisible tide, ground crews had misplaced her samples of the nano. Most likely someone hadn’t understood why they were loading human body parts. The machine plague was most easily and safely preserved inside chunks of frozen tissue.

  She said, “Colorado’s using an old electron probe and India lost a lot of software. The breakdowns they’re sending are incomplete.”

  Ulinov seemed to shake himself, then pulled free from her. “Every time you report progress.”

  Ruth didn’t know what to do with her hand. “Sure. I’m still learning.” She gestured at her equipment, then jaunted to the machining atomic force microscope, which had always reminded her of a stout dwarf standing at attention. Its smooth body terminated at what would be the shoulders, where low collars protected a working surface—the broad cone of its “hat” contained computer-enhanced optics and atomic point manipulators. They’d had to install the MAFM sideways across the lab, and Ruth had spent so many hours at the device that she oriented herself alongside it by habit, though doing so meant that she and Ulinov no longer shared a local vertical. Impolite. Ruth barely noticed, staring at the MAFM’s blank display grid.

  Lord knew it was wrong to admire the genius behind the nano. This invisible locust had laid waste to nearly 5 billion people and left thousands of animal species extinct.

  Plague Year. It wasn’t just human history that had crashed. The savage effects to the environment would be centuries or more finding balance again, if that was even possible. In many ways Earth had become a different planet and they were only beginning to see what would happen to the forests, the weather cycle, the atmosphere, the land itself.

  “If you are still learning,” Ulinov began, trying a new angle with her, but Ruth said, “The design technique is extremely innovative. I could putz around with my models for another five years if you want.”

  “This is a joke.”

  “No.” She tried to be gentle with the truth. “Colorado’s electron probe is barely strong enough to disassemble a nano of two billion AMU, much less reverse-engineer it, and the glitches in India’s programs make their schematics almost useless. This machine may be the best equipment left in the world.”

  “But yet you have stopped your work.”

  “Uli, I’ve done all I can here.” Ruth had never felt this way toward the same person, real warmth shot through with resentment. It made her nuts. The decision to stay in orbit was not his to make, but Ulinov had always been an outspoken proponent of keeping the ISS crew on-station as long as possible, when he could have added his voice to hers instead.

  She understood his position. She respected his commitment and his code of honor, and honestly believed these traits were her own best strengths. It was the basis of their attraction and at the same time it was probably what would keep them apart.

  Their little slugfest might have gone on longer except that they’d already been knocking heads for weeks now, ever since the snowpack across the Rockies began to fade.

  He left. She kicked back to her window. Watching the patchwork of Earth’s surface roll past engaged enough of her brain that she soon reentered a practiced state of meditation, allowing her subconscious to chew over the locust’s design. It almost felt as if she was outside on EVA, alone in the vacuum, sketching diagrams like constellations and pacing through those intricate shapes, pulling sections apart for closer examination.

  Ruth Ann Goldman hadn’t entered the field of nanotechnology because it promised to revolutionize manufacturing, cure all disease, eradicate pollution, and even scrub the sky clean of greenhouse gases, although she’d always dazzled interviewers with such possibilities before the recruiter from the Defense Department came along and she quit publishing. The truth was more basic. Ruth had an IQ of 190 and was easily bored, and developing functional machines on the nanometer scale proved challenging enough that she often forgot herself.

  At the turn of the millennium, top researchers had been thrilled merely to push, etch, chemically induce or otherwise manipulate atoms—individually or by the millions—into tubes, wires, sheets and other inanimate forms.

  While Ruth was still an undergraduate, sneaking into the lab at night to indent hey good lookin or elvis lives onto her colleagues’ test surfaces, those first crude tubes and wires were fashioned into processors that would power a hyper-quick new generation of computers.

  By the time she’d acquired her Ph.D., those new computers and related advances in microscopy had been used to construct actual nano-scale robots, albeit moronic ones capable only of expending energy as they meandered aimlessly in a sterile bath.

  The most arrogant scientists and most hysterical pundits had long compared nanotech to playing God, but Ruth found this analogy rather goofy—and ironic, that anyone would confuse an ability to direct change on the molecular level with the capacity to create universes. Nanotech was precisely the opposite, a fine, exacting degree of construction—nothing more.

  Ruth chose to focus her efforts on recognition algorithms—brains, essentially. Assembling microscopic robots still posed a catalogue of interesting hurdles, but the groundwork was well established and every Jack and Jill in the world wanted to put together a machine twice as fancy as the next guy’s. Ruth didn’t see how that mattered. Without direction, the most elaborate robot was only a curiosity, not even usable as a paperweight.

  She used her certainty and her considerable powers of sarcasm to obtain grant money and a platoon of grad assistants of her own, then settled in for a lifetime’s work.

  It helped that she was a patient, obsessive freak whose idea of time off was to wedge herself under the sink in the men’s room and wait there in order to scare the bricks out of a rival. She had one affair with a fellow lab rat, more convenience than genuine lust, and banged her stepbrother too at Hanukkah. Meanwhile her efforts earned sixteen patents and ultimately saved her life. She was thirty-five when the man from the Defense Department waltzed through security into her office.

  Government operations tended not to be as flashy as private labs, and Ruth was sufficiently self-aware to realize she’d thrived on the attention that came with publishing her accomplishments. It was fun being hot stuff. She also had qualms about working for the military, clichés about destroying rather than creating, but the man from the Defense Department was either a romantic or a well-schooled actor. He envisioned Ruth as a bold and clandestine vanguard, kind of like Batman, equipped with billion-dollar equipment and more computer power than most small nations, poised to counter the attacks and accidents of enemy labs and garage scientists in colossal duels of talent versus talent.

  He also offered the chance to craft micro- and zero-gravity experiments at the taxpayers’ expense. It had long been theorized that freedom from Earth’s pull would benefit nano design, as it had so many structural sciences. Ruth saw a fat opportunity to stay ahead of the pack. Yes, she said, and enjoyed five months of incredible resources as well as her first NASA classes before the machine plague erupted in California.

  The locust was not military, despite the rumors. Nor did Ruth believe the three or four terrorist fronts who’d claimed responsibility, one of which hastily retracted its statement as the infections spread beyond control. Even if a fringe group possessed the necessary gear and training, the design was far too complex if the goal had been mere devastation.

  The locust resembled a long, viral hook rimmed with cilia, rather than taking a more basic spherical or lattice shape—an
d nearly a third of the locust’s capacity remained unused. The machine as they knew it seemed to be only a prototype, with room left for additional programming. The damned thing was biotech, organic, built to fool the human immune system. Also, a weapon would have been created with a life-clock to keep it from proliferating without end. Instead, the locust had a fuse that was as useless as a control outside of lab conditions.

  The magic number was 70 percent of a standard atmosphere. At that pressure, locusts self-destructed. Unfortunately, 70 percent of atmosphere occurred at 9,570 feet elevation, and normal changes in air density meant that the locusts routinely functioned as high as 10,000. On August 19th, a pristine and sunny day, Colorado had recorded infections up to 10,342 feet.

  Ruth considered 70 percent to be a somewhat peculiar number. Her guess was that the design team had rounded up from two-thirds to avoid the clumsy math of 66.6 percent—and Lord knew how many lives that had saved. At high altitudes, each percentage point covered a lot of ground. Two-thirds of standard atmosphere would have put the barrier well above 11,000 feet.

  It was a small clue to their thinking, part of an overall trend toward brutal efficiency. The locust was brilliant work, representing both conceptual and engineering breakthroughs that exceeded anything Ruth had done to win so many accolades.

  She would need to confront the machine plague face-toface if she was ever going to master its secrets.

  5

  Mission Specialist Wallace, Bill to his friends, unstrapped from the exercise bike as soon as Ruth entered the med/life sciences node. The timer still showed twenty-seven minutes, but he pushed up from the seat and pulled off the wrist cuff and didn’t wipe it clean.