Plague Year Page 7

  Anger stabbed through him, not pity. Faulk and Pendergraff should have been running downhill for early juniper berries and fresh greens, for lizards and insects slowed by the cold. He knew they weren’t busy double-checking their rain traps or putting out every spare container because he and Manny had already done that for them... He supposed they’d gone to their hut, reeling from the emotional shock, surrounded now by a new and equally dangerous sea of total isolation.

  Somehow Cam was certain they would haunt him much longer than any of the people he’d eaten.

  7

  Shuttle Pilot Derek Mills shifted his body or grabbed for a new handhold each time Ruth matched his local vertical, a reaction that she thought spoke volumes. Not that the derision in his voice wasn’t clear enough.

  “You don’t know what you’re talking about,” he mumbled. “It’s not like landing a plane.”

  Ruth bit down on her first response. If you’re really planning to stay up here forever you’d better learn to breathe vacuum, buddy. Instead, she turned to the others, glancing back and forth across the hab module, making a show of raising her eyebrows and sort of shrugging with one upturned palm. The new Ruth was quite ladylike and certainly not inflammatory.

  Too bad that rotating after Mills had put her at an odd angle compared to everybody else. They’d all grown accustomed to entering a new section of the ISS and finding someone standing on what appeared to be the ceiling or a wall, but only Gustavo readily conversed with people before wheeling around to share their alignment. The mind balked at making sense of facial expressions turned sideways or bottom-up.

  No one acknowledged her attempt at eloquence and she felt a dull frustration as ungiving as the walls. The pale, elongated habitation module was about the size of a racquetball court, just large enough for both Mills and Gus to put five feet between themselves and anybody else, Gus claiming the deep end, Mills hovering by the only exit.

  Ruth would have preferred to meet inside the Endeavour— the power of suggestion might have helped her argument—but Mills discouraged anyone from entering the shuttle, which he’d made into his private quarters. Ruth understood. She felt the same edgy possessiveness about her lab and had decided not to risk adding to the pilot’s discomfort. But she was never going to convince him to take his last flight.

  She looked at Ulinov. His frown was a warning. Ruth chose not to notice and said, “I know it won’t be a cakewalk without ground support. We can still get down.”

  “You wanna ditch her?”

  “—ditch the shuttle!”

  Mills and Wallace spoke at the same time. It might have been funny if each of them hadn’t interpreted her words in the worst possible way.

  Contingencies existed, she knew, for crews to parachute from a damaged or malfunctioning shuttle if it could first be brought to subsonic speeds. There was even a massive lake just two miles west of Leadville—she had been studying a lot of film—and Ruth supposed they could intentionally strike the water to avoid the dense refugee population camped throughout the region. Of course, her computers and MAFM might not fare so well.

  “No way,” she said. “The shuttle’s worth too much. We can use the highway north of the city, there’s a stretch that runs straight and mostly flat for almost three miles.”

  Mills said, again, “It’s not like landing a plane.”

  “But there must be—”

  “Why do you keep thinking you know more about our jobs than we do?” Deborah Reece, M.D., Ph.D., sniffed in a way that gave both her words and the set of her chin a haughty, imperial manner. The bitterly dry air had left Doc Deb’s sinuses in a state of permanent irritation and for months now she’d been a walking phlegm-farm. Ruth had suggested that decongestants might be the answer, but Deb replied that her body was generating mucus for a good reason—to protect her aggravated tissues. So she oozed. Constantly. It was just gross.

  “Look,” Ruth said, trying again, “sooner or later we have to leave. We have to go down.”

  Ulinov’s frown never changed. “The president ordered us.”

  “Orders are to beat the locust. Your orders are to support me in any way. That’s all that’s important.”

  “So quit wasting time,” Deb said behind her.

  In the beginning Ruth had been vaguely glad to have another woman aboard. She’d even smiled when Deb and Gustavo became an item. Then Gus broke it off in a storm of silence. The two of them got back together, swore it was over, reunited again. Ruth recognized the pattern. They just needed something to do.

  Maybe what happened next was inevitable, given the close quarters and their complete separation from any normal society. Deb had bounced to Derek Mills. Back to Gus.

  Ulinov tried to stop it. He talked to each of the men and he made jokes about American customs and he threatened to inform Colorado. Sexual promiscuity went against all their training, and rightly so. It had turned each of them, in different ways, into the components of a time bomb.

  Ruth was hardly conventional, and she was not a prude. In her junior year she had been among the girls in the dormitory who stripped down to their underwear for most of spring semester after the air-conditioning blew out. Some years later, on an apartment balcony just three floors above the Miami traffic, she had given her stepbrother a hand job with SPF 45 coconut sunblock. More and more she had taken to contemplating the line of Ulinov’s shoulders and the breadth of his hands, the smooth, ruddy bump that was his lower lip.

  Amazing, that six people hurtling around a dying planet in a tiny metal shell could find new ways to torment themselves— but whether Deborah Reece with her blond hair and her neat little hips had acted out of boredom or a physician’s urge to heal, the truth was that Wallace had burrowed deeper into his grief as Mills became distracted and hostile. Poor Gus, always a churning supply of words, developed a stammer in Deb’s presence.

  “Wasting time, you, do you have an appointment?” he asked. “Let Ruth say what she has to.” Gustavo had folded himself into the corner like a crab, shying away from open room, and Ruth worried how he’d react back on Earth, exposed to miles of sky and land. It made her appreciate his support all the more—

  Deb snorted and kicked toward the exit. Mills, blocking her path, grabbed new handholds with a neat pull-and-push movement that carried him aside to clear her way yet also backed him farther from the group.

  “Stop.” It was risky, but Ruth had nothing left except a blunt assault. “You’ll be back,” she told them. “You’ll all be able to come back here again.”

  Mills looked directly at her for the first time, a mix of emotion cutting across his face.

  Ruth said, “I can beat this thing, I swear it, but I need to be on the ground.” Then she lost eye contact with Mills as Deb moved between them, and fought to keep from raising her voice. “We’ll have spaceflight again in no time! There was hardly any industrial damage, they’ll want the most experienced crews . . .”

  Deborah turned to stare and missed her handhold, but Mills caught her waist—and despite everything that had or hadn’t happened between the doctor and the pilot, neither reacted to each other’s touch. The ungodly echoing drone of the air circulators made their silence all the louder.

  Too far. Ruth had gone too far and she knew it, and she’d barely touched the surface of what she felt was the real problem—their pride, their vanity. She should have been flown down to join the other scientists in Leadville a month ago or even earlier, as soon as the snowpack could be cleared, yet Colorado had kept them in orbit for the same reasons that the astronauts wanted so badly to stay, prestige, power, a reasonable fear that the human race might be trapped in the mountains forever and only look at the moon and stars with fading memory.

  She also had no doubt that the crew was terrified of being without purpose. Couldn’t they see that they’d actually have more value on the ground? Engineers, pilots, radiomen, doctors, these were everything that would allow Ruth and her colleagues time to defeat the locust
.

  Ulinov broke the quiet, thumping his big palm against a supply cabinet. “We are following orders to stay,” he said.

  Ruth shook her head. “There’s nothing more I can do here.”

  “What if you are wrong?”

  “I, but— What if you’re wrong?”

  “New data comes up every hour. Tomorrow they may find what you need, what only works in zero gee.” His frown wavered as he watched her face, but then he struck the cabinet again. “I decide,” he said. “I tell you no.”

  Seventeen days hadn’t been enough for Ruth. Since learning of the FBI’s new data pinpointing the locust’s birth, she’d ramped up her campaign to sway opinions in Leadville, making as much of a nuisance of herself as possible for someone in orbit. Unfortunately, at best she was 250 miles above Colorado. At worst there was an entire planet between them. And the men and women down there had no reason to engage in a conversation they didn’t want to have if they could win simply by not talking to her.

  Yesterday her fears and frustration had reached a new pitch.

  Yesterday, Gus had intercepted a series of transmissions between Leadville and a C-130 cargo transport on its return flight from California. They’d done it. They’d sent a team of Army Rangers west in search of the lab where the locust had been created—and the soldiers had remained in Stockton for more than five hours after their air tanks ran out, refusing to accept failure. One young man had been partially blinded. All for nothing. They hadn’t found a single clue and Ruth could still hear the last words of the recording Gus had played for her, the terse exhaustion of the soldier’s voice: “No go, it’s no go.”

  What if Leadville chose not to risk more men, more equipment, more jet fuel? What if they stuck to the conservative path that had trapped her up here for so long and let their greatest opportunity slip away?

  Ruth decided she’d been working on the wrong people. It was too easy for everyone on the ground to ignore her—but if she could convince the astronauts, everything changed.

  There wasn’t anything Leadville could do to stop them from abandoning the ISS.

  Derek Mills had fled to the Endeavour, and Ruth cornered him there. He sat in the low, cramped flight deck, strapped to his chair, the rattle of his laptop’s keyboard masking her approach through the interdeck hatch behind him.

  She froze halfway out of the floor. He’d dimmed the up-lights but didn’t seem to notice her shadow laid over the console before him, until she knocked and quickly moved closer.

  Mills tilted one glance up at her, his jaw set. Ruth didn’t bother with words. She passed him the bound sheaf of photographs she’d wanted to share back in the hab module. The station’s cameras were incredible stuff, worthy of James Bond, able to count the legs on a bug.

  She’d clipped the picture of the Leadville county airport to the top of the stack because she wanted to stir his interest. She needed to engage him with the challenge of it.

  Two bulldozers and several hundred people both in and out of uniform were expanding the lone runway, fighting into the hill on the south side because a big DC-10 had sunk into the mud fifty yards beyond the north end. They were also bringing in a crane to deal with the wreck, but it was having trouble maneuvering through the jam of other aircraft.

  Mills barely looked at the picture and he did not look at her. He held the stack out for Ruth to take back.

  “I know it’s not enough room,” she said.

  A ten-minute drive from town, the county airport offered less than 5,000 feet of runway. It was never intended for large commercial flights, much less space shuttles careening down at 220 miles per hour. If they’d begun construction the previous spring, Ruth supposed there might have been something usable by now—but she didn’t have the right to blame them for being too busy.

  “It’s never going to be enough room,” she told him. “Not before we’re out of air.”

  Mills jiggled the stack with an irritated grunt, about to drop it. Ruth reached in quickly but was careful to touch only the top picture, peeling it back.

  “Here,” she said. “We land here.”

  From above, the terrain around Leadville resembled a giant bathtub that had been filled with clay and left under the shower for eons. The Continental Divide ran nine miles east of the city and curled around to wall it in on the north as well. Just six miles west of downtown stood another immense range, and most of the area within this vast, bent tub was a jumble of hills and lumps and gullies, scoured by the unimaginable amounts of rain and snowmelt that formed the headwaters of the Arkansas River.

  A railroad track and two-lane highway ran north together along the river, until the highway dodged east into Leadville, where it split in two. From town, Highway 24 shot north again to rejoin the railroad in a wide marsh basin.

  Colorado roads tended to swerve through the shapes of the land, but this basin covered four square miles and some tired draftsman must have simply laid down his ruler. The highway cut straight through.

  “It’s perfect,” Ruth said. “We can come in out of the southeast like we were hitting Runway 33 at Kennedy.”

  Mills finally looked her in the face.

  “The angle’s almost exact,” she said. “Look at it. And the prevailing winds are out of the north just like you’d want.”

  “This hill at the south end could be trouble,” he answered, and Ruth fought down a hopeful laugh and let him continue. He held the photos in both hands now. “The road isn’t wide enough, either,” he said. “What is it, sixty, seventy feet? The wingspan is almost eighty.”

  The runways at Denver International, where Leadville planned for them to touch down eventually, were twice as wide as Highway 24 yet still only half the breadth of the strips at Kennedy Space Center. All in all, if they did try to land without permission, without ground support, Denver International might be slightly less risky than Highway 24—but then what? The Mile-High City wasn’t high enough. They could only hit Denver if there was a plane ready to fly them up to Leadville.

  Ruth moved closer and tapped one finger on the photo. “We can overshoot that hill,” she said. “There’s plenty of room.”

  “There’s a bridge over this fucking railroad right in the middle. No way. It’s fifty feet wide at the most.”

  She had been relieved that the tracks ran under the highway instead of vice versa. Obviously you didn’t want to squeeze the shuttle beneath a train trestle at any point during a landing—but Ruth had figured that the overpass was no different than the highway itself. “What’s the problem, the guardrails? Our wings will clear them easy.”

  “It’s not like landing—”

  “Yeah, yeah, it’s not a plane, stop saying that! I know more about this than you think. If you come in on target we’ll zip straight down the center. And if you’re off a bit, the nosewheel can pull us back in line.”

  The approach was everything. The shuttles had long been compared to flying bricks. They were not only clumsy in atmosphere—unlike conventional aircraft, the Endeavour would be unpowered during touchdown. Essentially the machine became a hang glider that was too heavy for the updraft of its body and stubby wings. Worse, the shuttles had no go-around capability. A pilot who didn’t like what he saw did not have the option of goosing his jets and regaining altitude to circle back. Once committed, it was do or die.

  “You’ll have to pull off the best fucking touchdown in history,” she said, making herself use his favorite swear word and afraid it sounded forced.

  He didn’t answer. Ruth hoped he was visualizing his approach. Derek Mills was something of a hotshot, or had been a year ago. That was why he’d been sent up here, like all of them, and she knew he’d kept himself as sharp as possible, running simulations, talking through an occasional exercise with Leadville. Maintaining hand-eye coordination had been his excuse for playing video games instead of cleaning or doing inventory.

  Mills shook his head before he spoke, then swept his hand over the photo from left to rig
ht. “There’s a rainstorm coming out of California right now, and another one behind it.”

  He had been prepping for the situation himself!

  Ruth felt a wave of adrenaline and involuntarily bent both arms into her chest as if to contain the feeling, aware of that wild laugh bashing at her insides again.

  Mills was the key. Building a majority vote would be impossible, given her relationship with Doc Deb and the hard discipline shared by Ulinov and Wallace. But if she could tempt Mills onto her side along with Gus, it would be three to three and she’d have the tiebreaker. She’d have the pilot.

  He said, “We can’t do anything in weather.”

  “It’ll pass.” Ruth could almost feel his desire, feel him wavering. Should she say something more?

  “That’s just the top of the checklist,” he continued.

  Her heart wouldn’t quit. She was afraid to let him fall back on the methodical caution that NASA had ingrained into his thinking, but she’d already played her best card, the legend he could become among fliers everywhere.

  “The big problem is FODs.” He said it as one word, fauds, Foreign Object Debris.

  “Birds won’t be an issue here like at Kennedy.”

  “I’m thinking cars. People.”

  “I’ve got more pictures,” she said. “You can see there’s almost no traffic at all. And they’ll know we’re coming. It’s ninety minutes minimum for reentry, right? Or as much as we want if we announce before we leave the station.”

  Mills flipped through the next several photos, stopped when he reached the shots of the other tiny airports in Eagle-Vail and farther north near Steamboat Springs. Ruth wished she hadn’t said anything about an early announcement. Was he worrying over what Ground Control might say? His career? Leadville could block the road and force them to stay...

  “If we give them an hour,” she said, “they can walk a thousand people over the highway picking up every piece of everything. You know they’ll do it. They’ll have to.”