After the bombing, Deborah’s unit had surrendered to the large contingent of rebels aligned under Grand Lake, the nearest surviving American stronghold. Loveland Pass had burned, too close to ground zero, and White River might as well have been on the moon because of the huge plague zones in between — but Deborah said there had been similar movements up and down the Continental Divide as the American forces rejoined. Grand Lake’s ‚ghting strength was actually larger than it had been before the bombing, although most of the new troops were infantry or light armored units. The surprise attack had done that much good, at least, pushing most of the shattered United States back together once more.
Now the vaccine would turn everything upside down again, as would the data index. Ruth believed that researchers everywhere must be on the verge of weaponized nanotech like the snow†ake. Could her presence here become the boost that Grand Lake’s small lab needed?
When she kissed him, Cam had seen the haunted, rising dread in her eyes. He ‚nally recognized the distance he’d heard in her voice outside the medical tent. It was the fear of so much responsibility. Given a moment to reassess, given a full lab and equipment, he wondered how Ruth would change the war.
20
There was a second nano in Cam’s blood sample, a new machine shaped like a twisted X. Ruth had never seen it before, although she immediately thought of the dead mountaintop etched with thousands of crosses. The emotions in her now were the same — lonely confusion and despair. She leaned back from her tunneling scope and clenched her left ‚st in her brace, unable to get past the truth. It should be impossible, and yet the strange nanotech existed in his blood alongside the vaccine. His, but not hers. The nanotech was benign for the moment. Ruth expected it was waiting for some trigger.
Where had it come from?
“Let me out,” she said suddenly, turning to the microphone on her left. The clean booth was equipped with two open mikes, one to record her observations, the other to keep in contact with the outside because this booth was too small to enter or exit without help. For a laboratory, Grand Lake had built a reinforced steel box too small to hold all the equipment they’d gathered. A rack of electronics partially blocked the door and the bulk of an electron microscope crowded Ruth on her right, but the lab was sterile and well-lit and could draw more power than she needed, even to purge the box.
They knew the danger in some of what she was doing. The workbench was rigged with X-ray and ultraviolet projectors, which should at least slow an uncontrolled nanobot if not destroy it outright, and the air-conditioning could brie†y jump to eighty-mile-per-hour winds if necessary, vacuuming up any stray particles. It didn’t bear thinking about. The radiation would be bad enough for anyone inside the lab. Ruth expected the vacuum would also lift the scopes and machining tools in an upside down rain of metal, hard plastic, and lashing power cords — and of course if that didn’t eradicate any threat, they could just weld the box shut forever. It was like working inside a cof‚n.
“Let me out,” she said.
“What’s up?” McCown asked.
Ruth touched her white gloves to her mask. “I forgot my notes, I’m an idiot,” she said, ‚ghting to hold down the cold, bright edge of her claustrophobia.
Most days, that particular fear was only a scratching at the back of her mind. She had been enthralled to return to her work. It was unspeakably good to be in control again and Ruth had always excelled at ignoring everything beyond her microscopes, at least while she was making progress. Sometimes she lacked momentum. More than once her nerves leapt with a memory of planes or gun‚re. Another time, she saw ants that didn’t exist from the corner of her eye.
Ruth thought she had been very brave to step into this cramped box day after day, but now it was all that she could do to keep her heartbeat from affecting her voice.
“Please,” she said. “I know it’s a hassle.”
“Why don’t we have somebody get your notes for you,” McCown said. “We can read anything you want.”
“No.” The word came out too fast. “No,” she said carefully. “I should have worked through a couple ideas before I even bothered today. I was too tired after dinner.”
“Um. All right.” McCown sounded like he was frowning. “Give us a second.”
Ruth sagged against the workbench but caught an atmosphere hood with her elbow, a small glass sheath meant to snap onto the tunneling scope. The hood clanged and Ruth jerked and hit her head on a shelf. “Oh!”
McCown came back on the intercom. “Ruth?”
“Oh, shit,” she said, with just the right tone of casual disgust. “This place is like a shoebox.” Get me out, she thought. Get me out. Get me out.
“Five minutes, okay?” McCown said.
“Yes.” Ruth looked up at the harsh lights in the ceiling and then back and forth at the cluttered walls. Trapped. Then she leaned over the slim, elegant shape of the microscope again. It was her only escape.
McCown would probably be ten minutes, in fact. First he had to call for power to ramp up the air ‚lters in the prep room outside the lab. Then he’d run his clothes and especially his hair and hands against a vacuum hose before he stepped inside, locked the door, and repeated the process with another vacuum. Next he’d take his clothes bag down from the hooks on the wall and don his hairnet, mask, gloves, and baggy clean suit. It was only after this meticulous checklist that he would unlock Ruth’s door and help her stow her own suit.
She didn’t want him to see her panic. She needed to bury the feeling deep, but her best-learned coping mechanism left her in direct confrontation with the source of her fear.
Who made you? Ruth wondered, peering into the scope. The new nanotech was a ghost. It shouldn’t exist at all. Who could have made you, and where was Cam exposed? His blood sample contained only two of the new machines that Ruth had isolated so far, among thousands of the vaccine nano, but the ghost was very distinct. The ghost resembled a bent snippet of a helix, whereas the vaccine was a roughly stem-shaped lattice.
The ghost was beautiful in its way and Ruth brie†y forgot herself, caught in the mystery. She couldn’t help but admire the work it represented. Her quick estimate was that the ghost was built of less than one billion atomic mass units, which was damned small. The vaccine was barely under one billion AMU itself and as uncomplicated as they’d been able to make it. Could the ghost be a failed effort? Maybe the pair she’d found were only fragments of something larger. No. The two samples were identical. Even more interesting, the ghost had the same heat engine as the vaccine and the plague, which meant it had been built after the plague year by someone who was both capable of identifying the design work and reproducing it. The heat engine was a top-notch piece of engineering. Like Ruth and her colleagues, the ghost’s creator had seen no reason to reinvent the wheel. He’d put his energy elsewhere. This was obviously a functioning nano and it was biotech just like the vaccine, designed to operate inside warm-blooded creatures.
But what does it do? Ruth worried. The fear in her head felt like clots and lumps now, straining her ability to think.
What if the individual ghosts were meant to combine into a larger construct? Its helix shape could lend itself to a process like that. The trigger might be nothing more complicated than a heavy dose. Saturation. Cam appeared to have a low and ineffectual amount in his blood, but what if he absorbed more? Would it activate?