Her bravery and her commitment were real.
“My guess is we probably pulled it off,” Young answered slowly. “They haven’t said anything.”
Ruth hammered at him again. “Then we’re okay.”
“I don’t think you understand the risk. We still need to get back to the planes, we still need to refuel, we need a lot of things to go right before we’re back in the air.”
“This is our best chance. This is— It’s everything we’ve been fighting for. Don’t waste it. Please.”
Cam almost said something too, and Young noticed. Young’s eyes narrowed and he stood up, away from them both. “All right, we stay until we switch out these tanks. That’s it.”
“What? That’s barely an hour and a half!”
“That’s it,” Young told her.
* * * *
But they were still working twenty minutes into a new set of tanks. Young had ordered the scientists to gather their stuff together as he changed them out—“Time to move,” he said— but Ruth and D.J. barely acknowledged him, in the thrall of their own excitement, and Young had wavered.
Cam thought they probably wouldn’t have gotten away with it if Hernandez was still in charge, but now this behavior was a rebellion inside a rebellion. Young could never be the authority that Hernandez had been. He might have shut off the electricity or physically dragged them out, except that he wanted as badly as anyone for them to succeed.
Early on, while Todd and D.J. were still booting up all systems, Ruth shut off her radio and pressed her helmet against Cam’s, her earnest face close as she described the reasons for the conspiracy; the weapons application research under way in Leadville; the sixteen hundred Americans killed in White River; the fear that the Leadville government intended to use the vaccine nano to recolonize the planet as they saw fit.
“That’s genocide the easy way,” she said. “Leave everyone else to die off and they’ll rule forever.”
Cam had pledged his loyalty again — too late. It was a waste of manpower, but Young put Iantuano in the crowded chamber to stand guard, to make sure Cam didn’t reconnect his headset and shout a warning to Leadville, or maybe wrestle down one of the scientists and cause a disturbance that couldn’t be explained.
Red red. At a third signal from Young, the pilots across town reestablished the audio relay to Colorado. There had been only four minutes of silence from the expedition group, and during that time the pilots continued to provide secondhand updates while “working around a bad wire in the relay.” No cause for alarm. The mission was on target, on time, and prepared to stay put for a while.
They had maintained that fiction. Most of Leadville’s attention was on the science team now, prompting or questioning them. D.J., Ruth, and Todd were supposed to describe their every action, yet often became distracted by each other’s commentary or fell quiet as they obsessed with their thoughts. Ruth especially was untalkative, using gestures whenever possible.
The plan was to keep the lie going until early afternoon if possible, until they abruptly pointed their C-130 north from its path back toward Leadville.
On the half hour, every half hour, Major Hernandez spoke to his superiors while Captain Young aimed an assault rifle not at Hernandez but at the rest of the Marines. Young was visibly reluctant, shamed by this role, but he had sworn that Hernandez would watch the rest of his squad die before getting it himself if he said anything wrong.
It was also necessary to make a show for the satellites, despite a forty-minute gap in coverage. The takeover had occurred safely under a roof, hidden from orbit, but once there were eyes overhead again, Leadville would have questioned why they weren’t seeing an effort that matched what they’d been told — so the Special Forces exhausted themselves loading the trailer and bustling in and out of the lab simply to look like a group of twelve men instead of seven.
There hadn’t been time yet for Cam to settle things in his mind. Too much was happening too fast, although they spoke with him less than he’d hoped, questioning Sawyer rarely now.
His disappointment verged on panic. He needed them to need him, but most of the work had already been done, apparently — in Colorado before they’d flown out, late last night on Ruth’s laptop, and more this morning.
Their efforts were going well. That much he knew. That was good. Still, it frustrated him to be pushed aside. He had never been their equal but now he wasn’t even a useful tool. His big contribution had been to confirm Sawyer’s identification of each vacuum wafer. He’d also made certain that they understood two passwords for the computers, powerpuff and Mar12, the birth date of Kendra Freedman’s favorite niece.
Sawyer also seemed afraid of becoming irrelevant, yet devalued himself by burying each bit of worthwhile information in meaningless personal background. The niece’s name. Her visits. He squawked and rambled, rubbing and rubbing at his armrest with his good hand, trying to be a nuisance.
Twice the science team exchanged a round of high fives and several times Ruth laughed, a satisfied, barking ha that carried through her helmet.
Cam watched them and he waited, his torn gum aching, aware of the bruises along his back, arms, chest, chin. Aware of the numb scars covering his face and his body. In many ways the growling in his belly was also a memory, ugly and alive.
The fabrication laser didn’t look like much, three fat blocks like refrigerators that would be a motherfucker to get through the air lock, never mind the wires and pipes joining them together. The third one was missing a shallow inset from its middle, where the gray paneling gave way to a white console that held a display grid, a keypad, and two joysticks.
Nothing the scientists did looked like much, either. They typed. They patiently monitored their equipment. They consulted with Leadville.
Almost two hours ago D.J. had fitted a pair of vacuum wafers into a thin tongue that eased out of the console, exactly like the tray of a DVD player. Retracted into the body of the laser, automatically sealed within an atmosphere hood, the wafers were opened by delicate waldos after a decontamination procedure swept dust and debris from the working space. The laser was also equipped with atomic point manipulators and a scanning probe, and D.J. activated autoretrieval programs that found and then arranged a single proto-archos from the first wafer alongside a heat engine component from the second.
It was a painstaking process. Each wafer held a dozen samples of a common type but with minor variances, since they had been individually machined rather than produced by self-replication. D.J. rejected the first three engine fragments.
Meanwhile, Ruth and Todd solved a protocol issue between her laptop software and that of the lab computers, then began uploading their files. They had also popped in several of Freedman’s discs, ordinary CD-RWs.
The actual beam of the extreme ultraviolet laser, despite its giant name, would have been imperceptible even if it wasn’t hidden inside the machinery. On the video monitor it appeared only as a symbol, a computer-generated slash, even tinier than the lattice shapes representing the nano-structures.
Unable to use a touch pad well with his gloves, D.J. sketched the parameters he wanted with a joystick and then sat there, hands off, as the laser cut unnecessary materials from the engine component, paring it down. Then he gave instructions to graft this nub into the heart of the proto-archos.
He ran adjustments on the same program six times before he had it right. This took eighty minutes.
“Great, looks great,” Ruth said.
Still cutting, the laser began to alter the molecular composition of the nano’s core. By eradicating select atomic particles, they could create a semi-solid state microprocessor encoded with the replication algorithm and their hunter-killer discrimination key, as well as coding for the thermal sensor.