Details— His finger pad on smooth metal, moving for the trigger— The suits across from him now four on five instead of neatly paired— Hernandez and the Marines had used his surprise move to counterattack. One man lay crumpled on the floor. Another guy had been knocked onto his butt. But where was the second rifleman—?
Then a boot punted into the right side of Cam’s faceplate. Impact drove his jaws together and twisted his neck and he dropped the M16, thrown all the way around onto his back. The air tanks bit into his shoulder blades but his pain centered around the unnatural bulge beneath his lip. His dying teeth had wrenched forward from his gums, two lumps, enormous and wrong. They seesawed loosely on their broken roots as he coughed blood against his faceplate.
The rifleman stood over him, M16 pointed into Cam’s body.
“No no he doesn’t know!” Ruth had been just a step or two from the Special Forces soldier but she ran anyway and continued that frantic motion once she’d reached his side, waving her only arm like a wing, elbow out, still clutching her laptop.
She was impossibly brave, confronting the soldier. But her words were strange. “He didn’t know, he didn’t— We need him!”
The rifleman held his pose. Cam also remained motionless, sprawled cockeyed on his tanks, although his hands curled with the need to come to his face and a different fear crashed through his chest and arms. My suit Christ what if my suit is ripped?
The rest of the room seemed quiet too. Cam swallowed blood. Beyond his feet were Todd and Sawyer, Todd hunched toward the wheelchair in a manner that looked protective and
D.J. retreated several paces past the near corner of the hermetic chamber, sidling away from everyone.
Her words didn’t make sense.
“Stop, he didn’t know,” Ruth babbled, and there was a shuf
fling motion on Cam’s other side as Captain Young groped up from the floor, panting audibly in short, choked breaths.
“She’s right,” Young gasped. “We need him.”
A new voice cut in. “Green green, what’s happening—”
“Green two, green two, we’re okay,” Young said. Who was he reassuring, another group of soldiers? Could they have flown in another plane? No, the pilots waiting across town on the freeway had radar and would have warned Hernandez— The pilots—
Right. The pilots were in on the deal and must have shut off the radio relay to Colorado at the first code from Young.
There could only be one thing they wanted, one reason to take over. The nanotech. But what was the point of stealing it? What could they ask for, not money—
Bitch. The sneaking bitch.
Ruth had been using him all this time; she’d even smiled and held his hand and meanwhile she’d known—
Cam arched his head back, a grating spike in his vertebrae. Through speckles of blood, he saw how the struggle had been lost.
The suit crucified limply over its pack was Marine Corporal Ruggiero. He carried a map case on his belt, which is how Cam knew him because the Plexiglas over his face opaqued by fracture lines and a veil of gore. When Cam tackled Young, when the assault rifle discharged, the Special Forces soldier guarding Ruggiero had flinched. Point-blank, the 9mm round exploded Ruggiero’s skull inside his helmet.
The fight was not completely one-sided. The person Cam had glimpsed on his butt, now upright and rubbing his neck, was a Special Forces soldier named Trotter — but with guns already drawn, the Special Forces had rapidly taken control again.
Except that now a man was dead.
The beige suits were in nearly the same positions as ten seconds ago, five on four, but their postures had changed. They leaned away from Ruggiero’s body and Cam felt the same tilting horror. One murder in this tomb of millions, and it changed everything.
“Oh shit,” Olson said. Among them he was alone, unmatched by a Marine prisoner. He held his pistol low beside his hip as if hiding it. “Oh shit I wasn’t— I just—”
Lacking a radio, Hernandez yelled to make himself heard. “What are you doing, Young, going over to the breakaways?”
“We never planned to hurt your guys,” Young said.
“I never figured you for a traitor.”
“Swear to God. We didn’t want anyone hurt.”
Ruth interjected like always. “You don’t understand.” Her pale face shifted away, searching for Hernandez, then quickly returned to Cam. “We had to do this. We’re the only chance there is for people to get the vaccine everywhere.”
Hernandez ignored her. “You’ve got the pilots?”
“I’m sorry, Major,” Young said. “I swear. Don’t give us any more trouble and your guys will be fine.”
It was too much for Cam to separate, the new emotions in his head — alarm and doubt and old, old guilt. In the space of a heartbeat he’d gone from empty to overfull. What the hell could she mean, only chance?
“You won’t make it.” Matter-of-fact, Hernandez sounded like he was the one holding a gun. “All of you better think. Where are you going to go? Anyplace you try for, we’ll have fighters on you. Anyplace you land we’ll bring in troops.”
Young turned from him. “Tape them up, hands to feet.”
“You can’t win.”
“Olson, did you hear me?”
“Y-yes, sir. I got it.” Still contemplating Ruggiero’s body, Master Sergeant Olson stuck his left arm up as if beginning the attack all over again. “We’re on six.”
Olson took charge of the men with the prisoners, switching off the general frequency. They began to disarm the Marines one at a time, unbuckling their prisoner’s gun belts altogether rather than only taking their sidearms.
“Watch them,” Young said, and the rifleman swung his M16 away from Cam’s belly at last and went to reinforce Olson.
Ruth knelt instantly, off-balance. “I wanted to tell you—”
“What a fuck-up.” Young might have been cursing himself. He didn’t look down at Cam until the words were out.
“Leadville was going to keep it for themselves,” Ruth said, but Cam stared at Young instead, unable to look at her. One more murder, and for the wrong reasons. For nothing.
His tongue dug at the hole in his gums, fleshy tendrils, embedded rocks of enamel. Already the cloying soup of his own blood was making him nauseous.
He coughed. “Why would they…”
Young also knelt, so that there was one of them on either side of Cam. He’d drawn his pistol and hefted it now, a silent display, before reaching across Cam’s belt with his other hand.
Ruth said, “What are you doing?” Then her voice was only a mumble. “Let me explain!”
Young had disconnected him, and said, “I can’t have him on the radio.”
“Then how is he supposed to help us with Sawyer? He didn’t know. Let me explain. We have to be able to talk. They’re essential to building—”
“Whoa. We’re not sticking around here. Are you serious? I thought you were just delaying to give us more time.”
“We have to stay. This is our best chance.”
“Dr. Goldman, we’re going to take whatever you tell us.”
“What if something gets broken? What if it turns out we left one little app module we didn’t realize we needed?”
“You know we have to get out of here.”
“Two hours!” she said. “We can stay at least two hours like Hernandez said. Leadville doesn’t know, right?”
Young paused, perhaps aware of how closely Cam was listening. They would never trust him again. And in recounting what had happened, in rethinking his mistake, Cam noted how similar this conversation was to the one she’d already had with Hernandez. Young had even taken the same patient, parental tone in response to her unswerving mania.