Plague Year (10 page)

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 right. “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.”

“I guess.”

She wanted to add that it was unlikely that more than a handful of soldiers would precheck the Denver runways. Leadville just didn’t have the suits or the canned air for a larger effort, but she wasn’t going to be the first to say
Denver
. She didn’t dare distract him.

“I guess if we force their hand,” Mills said, “they’ll use all the resources they have anyway.”

“Yes.”

“I could use a fucking beer.”

The unsteady laugh escaped this time, but she knew it was okay. Mills would think she liked his joke. He flashed a grin and Ruth realized what she had to say next,
I’m buying
. Could she build him up enough that Ulinov and Wallace wouldn’t sway him back to their side?

Ulinov scuffed through the interdeck hatch directly behind them and banged one hand against the ceiling to catch himself as Ruth turned, blinking, confused to find her fears manifested.

How long had he been listening?

“You,” Ulinov said. His broad face was a deep bloody brick color, so much uglier than his frown that at first she didn’t even see his expression. Then she noticed his stance. He had not secured himself with one easy grip. He’d wedged himself to the floor by pushing back from his handhold, ready to launch himself with both feet.

It was a combat pose.

Ruth managed to force a sound past the earthquake of her heart. “Look—”

Ulinov dismissed her with one shrug of those beautiful shoulders. He addressed Mills, his English as bad as she’d ever heard. “You, I think better. Professional knows better.”

There was a noise beside her as Mills shifted in his seat and Ruth wanted to look, maybe encourage him with a gesture. But there was no way to pull her gaze from Ulinov.

“Your photographs,” Ulinov said. “Now. Pushing them over.”

She said, “It was me—”

“No.” His shoulders twitched again. He didn’t even want to hear a confession.

How long had he been listening?
Fuck. The only way to salvage anything would be to take the offensive, act like a nano. Fuck fuck fuck. She had to be relentless. “Commander—”

“Enough. Do your orders.” Ulinov sounded more tired than angry now, and might have relaxed a fraction.

“The war you’re trying to fight. Ushba. Shkhata.” She named the peaks where the Russians had failed to hold a line against their Muslim enemies. “You can help them more by putting me on the ground before we lose our best chance to beat the plague. Otherwise they’ll fight forever.”

“What is it wrong with you? Do your orders.”

“They’ll fight until they’re all gone, Uli.”

“No. There is no mutiny.”

Strange that the word hadn’t even occurred to her. But it was accurate.
Mutiny.
“That’s not, I was just . . .”

Ulinov watched her wind down before he turned to Mills. “Push me the photographs,” he said. Then he looked at Ruth again and said, “You do not come back to the shuttle.”

* * * *

Her pulse refused to calm and chased so rapidly through her thoughts that she felt disassociated from herself. She’d retreated to her lab after Ulinov escorted her from the
Endeavour
, both to placate him and because she didn’t want to show herself to the others. Because she hoped to find some safety and comfort.

It might have been better to face them. Here there was only the rattle of her own fear.

Ruth knew how she could force an evacuation of the ISS.

There wasn’t any other way. The Russian Soyuz docked to the station as an emergency lifeboat wasn’t something she could pilot herself. The whole crew had to leave together or not at all.

She intended to dig under the insulation somewhere away from her lab, create a pinprick pressure bleed. The damage would be attributed to a micrometeorite strike. Wallace had already gone on EVA twice to repair their solar panels. The concept of total vacuum was an illusion. There were constant hazards, dust and debris, human garbage left in orbit.

All the more reason to get out of here, before a random strike killed them all.

Ruth had decided the curse of guilt was an acceptable price—and it would not be a small burden. No matter what the crew thought, she respected the knowledge and effort that had gone into establishing a permanent human presence in space more than most of her own work. Partly that was a casual respect for any challenge successfully met. Mostly it was in recognition of the Cold War notion that Earth was much too fragile a basket in which to place all of humankind’s eggs.

The locust was more proof than anyone needed that they’d better spread throughout the solar system and farther if possible as soon as they got the chance, before a disaster even worse than the plague left humankind extinct.

But first they needed that chance.

Ruth tore through her personal effects in search of a tool and laughed at a box of tampons. Four pencils. Nothing. She tried to jaunt across the lab without clearing her foot from the open locker door, and momentum flung her down against a bank of computers. She whacked her thigh, then her forearm, and hurt her neck straining to keep her face from the console.

Somehow she bounced in the direction she’d intended to go, toward the hatch. She caught herself there. She didn’t think she’d suffered worse than bruises, but the shock of it had cleared her head. She rubbed her leg.

She had to wait, of course. The timing would be suspicious if it happened right away—

The thump of hands and feet ignited her heart again. Someone was coming. Ulinov? He’d already shown an uncanny ability to predict her actions.

Ruth backed away. Her eyes went briefly to the viewport. But it was Gustavo who filled her tiny space. “The radio, your friend James,” he yammered. “They said yes!”

“Yes...”

“It worked! Everything you’ve been telling them, the ANN, getting you on the ground, they said yes!”

He stuck out one hand in congratulations and Ruth grabbed him instead, shouting right in his face. “Aaaaaaaah!” There were no words to express the depth and complexity of her triumph.

She was going back to Earth.

8

Chair 12 had an alien look against the broken mountainside. All of the lifts at Bear Summit were painted dark green, to blend with the environment, but nothing could soften the giant straight lines of these structures. Cam always felt an ambiguous thrill when he emerged from the gorge between the base of their peak and the highest point of the ski area. In another life this had been among his favorite places. Now it was strange and deadly.

The big metal box that housed the gears perched fifteen feet in the air, looming over a glass-faced attendant’s booth. Two hundred identical, evenly spaced chairs dangled from a cable that ran along both sides of a series of massive poles, plunging out of view beyond a ridge and the first pine trees of any height.

The chairs rocked against the gray sky, heralding the storm, creaking, weeping. Sometimes when the wind was right this sound had carried over their peak for hours.

Cam looked away and turned to Erin, close beside him. She was also staring. “Watch your feet,” he said. Nosing up from the hardpack were low veins of granite, mostly smooth but peppered with toe-catching nubs and hollows.

He tried not to think about the nanos that must be puffing upward with every step, unseen dust. Grasshoppers sprang out of their path constantly, the same tans and grays as the dirt and rock. There were more of them now than ever and their irregular bursts of motion made the ground seem unstable— constant flickers at the corner of the eye.

Sixty yards ahead, almost racing each other, Sawyer, Manny, and Hollywood marched three abreast. Erin had protested when Sawyer pulled away from her, but Cam was glad. They needed pacesetters. The bulk of the group seemed to be hanging back, and this ridge they were traversing was the easy part. They’d come just three-quarters of a mile, heading west into the damp wind.

Cam glanced over his shoulder. Bacchetti wasn’t far behind but everyone else actually seemed to be moving slower, faces tipped up, all eyes on the chairlift.

Lorraine caught her foot and flailed into the ground. Cam lost sight of her as most of them bunched around, yet he could see that she didn’t get up again. He started back to help and Erin said, “Cam, no.”

The storm clouds had muted both the sudden dawn and the few colors of this world. His polarized goggles, designed to highlight white-on-white features in the snow, made the forest below seem almost black. Then he pushed into the blues and reds of everyone’s jackets and saw that Price had pulled Lorraine’s ski mask down from her cheeks.

“Christ, what are you doing!”

“She has to breathe,” Price said, and Cam dropped to one knee and grabbed at her, tugging the mask up again.

Her eyes were wide behind her goggles and he thought she was hyperventilating. She knew how serious her mistake had been. A flap of jacket sleeve hung from her left elbow and on the rock between them was one thin looping spatter of blood like a signature, dark as oil.

“We’re still safe here!” Price said, and McCraney added, “There’s no way we’ve hit the barrier yet.”

“How do you feel?” Cam asked. “You think it’s broken?”

“Let her breathe!”

Lorraine shook her head and Cam took her wrist, feeling for any deformity beneath her sleeve, working all the way up to her shoulder. Then he shook his head too. “Do you hurt anywhere else? No? Good. Somebody bring us a hunk of ice.”

Price didn’t move but Doug Silverstein turned away.

“Hold on,” Cam said. “I need a few pieces of that rope.”

Silverstein handed him the entire bundle, then hustled uphill toward a field of snow.