Ruins (35 page)
“These people are already dead,” said Armin. “Leaving them alive is no mercy, for they’ll only be killed by someone else, and yet I can’t abandon them. I’ve played my part in their destruction, don’t think I’ve forgotten that. Don’t think I’ve forgiven myself. But Jerry has set the stage for a new beginning. And when the snows melt and the sun returns and the world erupts in young green leaves, I will make sure that someone’s there to see it. I will make sure there are eyes to behold it, and minds to understand it, and voices to carry on our story. You are breaking yourself in pieces to give a dying man a few more seconds of life. I’m going to take that man’s blood and build a child and a future and a legacy that will last for another five billion years. To cover the Earth and reach out into the stars and fill the universe with poetry and laughter and art. To write new books and sing new songs.”
Kira felt unable to look away from the Ivie’s body and everything it represented. Too much blood. Too much loss. “You’re going to build a new species.”
“Human and Partial will be no more,” said Armin. “There will only be one species, one perfect species. I’ve done it before. I’ve unlocked the human genome and arranged it in perfect order, like notes in a symphony. I’ve honed the genetic template for the human form through dozens of generations of Partial technology, and you know that better than anyone. Because you’re the final result.”
Kira looked up, meeting his eyes, and he smiled.
“You,” he said, “my daughter, built on the model of my own DNA, polished and refined through countless drafts until I had eliminated all trace of flaw or imperfection. I had hoped some of the late-model Partials had survived, for they would be the ideal starting point for this new world, the first brushstroke on our new, blank canvas.”
“Okay,” said Marcus, stepping forward to place himself between Armin and Kira. “This whole conversation has been freaking me out, but that last sentence took it down a whole other path.”
“You want my DNA too,” said Kira. “My blood in a jar to take back to your lab.”
“I want you,” said Armin. “Your body and your mind.”
“I won’t go with you.”
“You don’t have a choice.”
“There’s always a choice,” said Kira. “I learned that from someone who was more of a parent to me than you could ever be.” She drew herself up as tall as she could. “If you want my blood, you’re going to have to take it.”
Armin sighed, and the energy in his face fell away like dead skin, leaving nothing behind but a dull, emotionless stare. “You’ve heard what I’m planning,” he said softly. “You understand that there is no other way.”
He pulled a small metal tube from a sheath on his belt, like a rounded trowel, sharpened on one end. The precise size and shape to puncture a human body and sluice out all the blood and tissue within. “None of us is more important than this. Not even my own daughter.”
D
r. Cronus Vale used the link to clear a path through the crowded White Plains street, ignoring the stunned glances of the Partials he passed. His age alone marked him as an anomaly, for there were no Partials left who looked older than eighteen. The doctor and officer models were all part of early batches, long since expired, and his link data marked him as a god, a powerful being their biology had no choice but to obey. There were no guards at the door of his hotel, just as there were no housekeepers inside. The soldiers took turns cleaning it, infantrymen alternating with the women of the piloting corps, giving the building an austere, military feel. Everything in White Plains felt that way. Vale missed the country paradise of the Preserve, but there was no way to get back there now. He could commandeer a rotor, he supposed, but what then? Fly there in the deepening cold and worsening storm? Bring another group of Partials along and hope they would understand what he was trying to do? Rely on Morgan to not come out looking for him again? Vale wanted to see the Preserve once more, the friends that he’d made there, but more than that he wanted to keep the Preserve safe. If the only way to do that was to stay away, he’d stay away.
Especially now that there was a nuke on the loose. The stakes had been raised, and the few Partials who knew about it were clamoring to take the fight to the humans. They were already terrified by the thought of the bioweapon—Vale had left Dr. Morgan’s lab partly just to keep the army under control, halting every new plan for retaliation. If he told them the humans were on the way with a nuclear device in tow, he didn’t know if he’d be able to hold them back.
A Partial soldier named Vinci was waiting in the lobby; he was the one who’d warned Vale about the nuke. He’d been chasing Delarosa all the way from Long Island, but when he’d lost the canny human terrorist in Manhattan, he’d come straight to White Plains to recruit more people to the search. He watched Vale with somber eyes. “Any news?”
Vale shook his head. “Not here. We’ll talk in my room.” He led him up the elevator to a suite on the top floor, which Vale had converted to a command post. When the door was closed and locked, he turned to Vinci with a solemn look. “We’ve canvassed the Bronx with regular patrols, and put as many spotters as we can on the coast in case she tries to cross by water, but they haven’t turned up anything yet. It was smart of you to come straight to us, but we have to consider the possibility that Delarosa already crossed to the mainland before we established our patrols.”
“I put the men you gave me on regular routes in and around the city,” said Vinci, acknowledging the possibility that Delarosa was already on their doorstep. “I just don’t know if it will be enough.”
“What else can we do?” asked Vale. “Everyone left in White Plains is assigned to energy, maintenance, or food production; we can spare them, but do we really want word of this to spread? It’s a nuclear attack, for crying out loud—the last time someone tried to nuke the Partial army, they struck back with the biggest display of overkill in the entire Partial War. I don’t want to cause a panic or a pogrom.”
“All they need to know is that they’re looking for a human matching her description,” said Vinci. “We don’t have to tell them what she’s doing.”
“They’ll figure it out soon enough,” said Vale. “They’re not idiots.”
“Their first assumption will be the East Meadow bioweapon,” said Vinci. “The patrols I organized this morning already think that’s what they’re looking for, though obviously I didn’t confirm or deny it.”
“Congratulations,” said Vale, “your cunning ruse has struck me speechless. Did you also tell them not to share their suspicions with anybody else? Do you have any faith that they’ll actually follow that order? All it takes is one drunk soldier in a bar tonight, telling his mates about the paranoid snipe hunt he’s been assigned to by the former AWOL traitor now serving under a member of the Trust, and the suspicions will fly and the rumors will grow and who knows what we’ll have in the morning? Not three months ago this city tore itself apart in an involuntary change of leadership, because Trimble was too paralyzed by indecision to confront any of the problems her people were facing. Now Morgan’s doing the same thing, too obsessed with expiration to bother with anything else, and the city’s getting restless. A panic like this—nuke or bioweapon or anything similar—and we’ll have a riot on our hands.”
“A few Partials dead in a riot is still better than an entire city disintegrated in a mushroom cloud,” said Vinci. “If it takes a public announcement and a citywide search, then that’s what we do.”
“Another batch dies in two weeks, give or take,” said Vale. “Another fifty thousand people gone, not in the blink of an eye but in a debilitating, agonizing process. Fifty thousand death signatures saturating the air in this city until you can barely breathe without losing your mind to depression or madness. Do you know what that’s going to do to the army here? Do you know who they’re going to blame?”
“You?” asked Vinci.
Vale frowned. “They should, but they won’t—even if the Trust’s role in their expiration was common knowledge, killing me wouldn’t be enough. Their problems have always had their root in humanity: the war, the poverty, the oppression, the Last Fleet. Even expiration—Morgan and I pushed the buttons, but it was the human species as a whole who asked for it, who planned it, who paid for it. Now the humans have a bioweapon? They have a nuke? Tell me you believe for one minute that the Partials won’t retaliate with lethal force, falling on that island with everything they have and more. Even with two-thirds of your species dead, you outnumber them ten to one. You have rotors, you have ATVs, you even have a few tanks left—enough for an armored brigade, at least. The humans have survived this long only at your mercy, and that mercy will be gone if word of the nuke gets out. I want to find that nuke as much as you do, but we need to keep it secret.”
Vale closed his eyes, exhausted and frustrated. There was a squawk from the radio.
“Arrow Team to General Vale,” said the voice. “Code White, repeat, Code White.”
“Code White,” said Vale, his eyes snapping open. “They’ve found her.”
“And Arrow’s one of mine,” said Vinci, a slow wave of fear spreading out across the link. “That means she’s in the city.”
“Damn.” Vale climbed to his feet and crossed to the radio. “This is General Vale. This line is not secure, repeat, this line is not secure. We will come to you. State your location. Over.”
“Unsecure line acknowledged,” said Arrow Team. “Checkpoint Seven. Over.”
Vinci spread a map across the table and scanned it quickly. “Here,” he said, pointing to the western edge of the city. “It’s an old college.”
“Barely a mile from downtown,” said Vale. “If she sets it off there, it’ll kill every Partial in White Plains.”
“Then we’d better make sure she doesn’t.”
Vinci frowned, then pressed the radio button to speak. “Checkpoint Seven: We’ll see you in a few minutes. Over and out.”
Vale had a small Jeep, fully electrical. The Partials maintained a nuclear power plant that supplied more than enough power—enough that Morgan had siphoned it for years while in exile, powering her secret laboratory. The drive to the old college was short, and when they arrived they found the place swarming with soldiers, far more than a single recon team could account for. Vale swore and climbed out of the Jeep.
“Report,” he said firmly, and the link carried the full weight of his authority. The sergeant in charge was talking almost before she turned to face him.
“Sergeant Audra, sir.” She saluted. “We found the human insurgent approximately twenty minutes ago. She attempted to activate her cargo when she saw us, and we were forced to incapacitate her.”
“You shot her?” asked Vinci.
“She’s wounded but alive,” said Audra. “Our medic expired last year, but we’ve done our best to stabilize her.”
Vale nodded; the medics had been among the first to be produced, due to their more advanced training requirements, and thus had been some of the first to die. He looked pointedly at the swarm of soldiers, feeling their nervous energy crackle across the link; they were scared. “Why the crowd?”
“Don’t worry, sir, they all have clearance. We’re all teams Commander Vinci organized.” She hesitated, and Vale felt another burst of nervous fear. “When we realized what her cargo was, sir, we thought it was wise to bring in extra security.”
Vale ground his teeth in frustration; the other recon teams did, technically, have clearance, but he’d have preferred if the team that found her were the only team to know what she’d been carrying. “Take me to see it.”
The sergeant led Vale and Vinci into the main college building, where several soldiers in tech uniforms were milling around just as nervously as the scouts outside. “We’ve been using this facility for weeks,” said Audra, “trying to get the satellite feeds up and working again. That’s how we found her—she was farther north, trying to sneak in through a residential neighborhood, but her movement showed up on a scan from the satellites, and we brought her here, like I said, for security. We think she probably came up the river and managed to bypass our patrols.”
“I used to lead a security checkpoint in Tarrytown,” said Vinci. “Was nobody there?”
“I understand that checkpoint’s been vacant since you abandoned it and joined the humans,” said the sergeant, adding a strictly formal “Sir.”
Vinci’s irritation steamed across the link, but Vale steered the conversation in another direction before it could escalate. “What do you mean that you found her by satellite?” he asked. “We haven’t had satellite uplinks working since the Break.”
“Not until a few weeks ago,” said the sergeant, and Vale could sense her pride. “General Trimble had several feeds she used to monitor the faction wars, but her control room was . . . irreversibly damaged in the civil war. This college had a new computer science department, upgraded right before the Break. Our techs have been working on it for a while, and last week we were finally able to tap into Trimble’s old feeds.”
“You didn’t think that was something you ought to report?” asked Vinci.
“We’ve reported it to Morgan three times,” said the sergeant. “She never got back to us. We’re lucky we had the satellites, though, since Delarosa was easy to spot against the snow. Here they are.”
She led them into a heavily guarded room. Marisol Delarosa, whom Vale recognized from the files he had found on her, lay on one side of it, bleeding heavily from her shoulder, with two soldiers leaning over her trying to clean and bandage the wound. In the center of the room sat a small nylon bike trailer, the kind people would use to pull their children behind their bicycles before the Break. Barely two feet across, painted a dull white, it carried a fat metal canister that had gotten an identical paint job. From some scratches on the side Vale could tell it had once been painted green, to better hide it in the forest, and he imagined she must have hurriedly repainted it when Ryssdal’s insane winter storms started up. It was smaller than he’d expected, and while he marveled that she’d gotten so far, he couldn’t deny that such a disguise would have made them phenomenally hard to spot. With as much trouble as the human resistance was making right now, a lone woman with a small package like this could hide in the wilderness almost indefinitely.