Ruth estimated the Russians’ short-term losses at 5 percent. Over a period of years, if the technology didn’t improve, there was no question that the internal war between the vaccine and the plague would lead to signi‚cant traumas and deaths, but in the meantime the invaders would merely be uncomfortable. Except for anyone who stayed in a hot spot, mostly they’d suffer only minor hemorrhaging and blister rash. Sometimes an unlucky individual might experience a bleeding eye or a stroke, perhaps a cardiac arrest, which could be costly if it was a pilot or a driver who was suddenly incapacitated.
The Russians were willing to pay that price. Their advance was staggered at times, but they’d claimed hundreds of miles, absorbing dead cities and airports, quickly motorizing their troops with abandoned vehicles and American armor — and they must have used the promise of the nanotech to win reinforcements.
The U.S.-Canadian net had detected huge †ights of Chinese aircraft rushing across the Paci‚c to strengthen the Russian foothold. Large naval †eets came behind. The enemy already held Hawaii. They’d attacked the tiny American outpost on Mt. Mauna Loa during the blackout after the electromagnetic pulse, risking an alert to the mainland. The islands were an ideal stepping-stone. The Chinese probably hadn’t thought twice about it. With the vaccine, they could win their ‚ght in the Himalayas even as they helped the Russians take control of industry-rich North America, its superior croplands, its military bases. The new allies could divide everything however they liked, unless Ruth stopped them. The snow†ake might be the only way for the U.S.-Canadian forces to regain the West, short of poisoning it with their own nuclear strikes.
She’d done it. She knew exactly how the snow†ake killed, but she’d rebuilt it with the same blind will of the rat in the snare. It hadn’t even felt like her decision. Millions of people needed the weapon’s power to survive. Millions more would die. The holocaust would always be her responsibility, but so were the lives she’d save. Her guilt colored everything she did. It affected her sleep. It kept her from approaching Cam even when she needed him more than ever.
The snow†ake was more of a chemical reaction than a true machine. It was originally one of several ANN developed by the scientists in Leadville, an anti-nano nano meant to destroy the plague. Composed of oxygen-heavy carbon molecules, the snow†ake was intended to disable its rival nanotech by drawing the plague into nonfunctional clusters. Each bunch would recombine around the original seed and shed more arti‚cially weighted grains, which would attract more plague, and so on. The process was termed “snow†aking” by its creator, LaSalle, but he had never been able to limit or regulate the effect.
The snow†ake tore apart all organic structures. A single wisp of it would liquefy all living things within hundreds of yards, people, insects, plants, even microbes and bacteria. Fortunately the chain reaction broke down in an instant. The snow†akes tended to glom onto each other as well as foreign mass and became encased in free carbon of their own making.
Cultivating it was extremely delicate work, for which Ruth donned one of Grand Lake’s few containment suits. One mistake could kill her. But the snow†ake did not attack rubber or glass.
She was forced to start from scratch. The data index included notes and information stolen from Leadville, but LaSalle’s ‚les had been unavailable. It didn’t matter. Her memory was nearly photographic and she’d helped LaSalle with early models of his baby. In fact, after the president’s council realized the true might of the snow†ake, Senator Kendricks had tried to recruit Ruth into LaSalle’s weapons group with the threat of losing a new arms race to the Chinese. At the same time, James Hollister had insisted that the Asians were years behind U.S. research.
Ruth didn’t know who to believe anymore. By itself, the new technology she’d called the ghost was proof enough that other scientists were still at work. The nanotech war had begun, almost unnoticed within the larger con†ict. She was afraid they’d already lost. The hundreds of sick people in the medical tents. The thousands of others who’d died undiagnosed in the long winter…How many of those casualties could be attributed to some as-yet-unknown effects of the ghost?
In three days she’d spent less than three hours trying to improve the vaccine. The rest had gone into preparing a genocide. It was a real chore to assemble the snow†ake by hand with inadequate gear and her ‚rst four efforts failed, too imbalanced to retain their purpose. Finally she had a single working snow†ake and locked it in a glass cap, carefully exposing it to a handful of weeds inside a larger glass. Breeding more was that easy. The weeds disintegrated and suddenly Ruth had trillions of the killing machines, although many of these new snow†akes were dead or half-strength. Ruth had to discard two hundred before she quit trying to sort through the mess, but during that time she found seven more snow†akes that were whole. Each of them went into a cap. Then she exposed those seven, too, after which she divided each of her eight teeming glasses into hundreds of smaller vials. Cluster bombs. Fifty vials to a case.
The snow†ake would also be effective in stopping the massive ‚res across the West, she’d realized. If they dispersed the nanotech along the front lines of a blaze, it would smother the inferno by reducing its fuel to dust. Maybe there were other peaceful uses.
If nothing else, she needed the snow†ake for testing. Eventually she hoped to design some way to protect people against it, like a weapon-speci‚c ANN, but the damned thing was just too basic. There was no proof that Ruth could imagine. Not yet. In time she might design a supernano that was capable of holding a person together against anything, even a bullet. It would be a form of immortality, an augmented immune system capable of sustaining good health.
Most important to Ruth, it would be the incredible technology to save Cam, using the blueprint of his DNA to restore his body and completely heal his wounds.
* * * *
She found him where the soldier had said, hiking up from the broad valley where the town once stood. Footpaths and crude jeep trails lined the slopes by the hundreds. Mud slides slumped across the barren earth. Here and there, stripped vehicles marred the land, cars and trucks that had bogged down or run out of gas during the ‚rst sprint for elevation. They were empty shells. Everything had been ripped away from them, seats, tires, hoods, doors, bumpers. The need for building material had been that severe. Far away, all that remained of the town were the right corners and straight lines of its foundations and streets, a small maze of squares set against the uneven shore of the lake. Several concrete structures remained, as did the fenced-off tarmacs of its three gas stations, but anything that was wood or brick or metal was gone.
Ruth felt nearly as forlorn. She worried at the choices she’d made. She could have had Cam, even for a moment, but she’d run to her work instead. It was the same choice she’d always made, even when one sweet hour together would have left her rested and better focused.
She didn’t want to die alone.
The sun had fallen away from noon in a hazy sky laced with contrails. Helicopters chattered somewhere in the north and Ruth wondered what they would do if the war suddenly fell on top of them. Run down, she thought. Run to him and keep running.
There were more than a dozen people with Cam, but Ruth recognized the way he carried himself even though his body was top-heavy with equipment. He’d slung a rack of wire cages over his shoulder. He wore a pack, too, and there were thick leather gloves tucked into his belt. Her chest lightened at the sight of him so clearly in his element…
Cam was laughing with a young woman. Ruth frowned. She had waited nearly an hour, holding her stone in her left hand, pressing its gritty surface into the soft, tender skin of her palm. She could have trudged down after him instead of staying with her thoughts, but she was sure he would have made the same decision. Be patient. Don’t risk infection.