Ruins (36 page)
Until she came here
, thought Vale,
and tried to kill eighty percent of the people on the planet.
He felt himself sweating.
She’d been trying to activate it when they found her. Another minute and we’d have all been dead.
“Is it really what we think it is?” asked Audra. “A nuclear warhead?”
Vale could hide his feelings from the link and lie if he wanted, but Vinci’s data would give it away.
And they already know anyway. They’ve examined it, identified it, and neutralized the threat. They’ve done their jobs, and I can’t lie to them now.
“It is.”
“Damn bloody humans,” said the sergeant. “Nothing’s ever enough for them, is it? First the bioweapon, and now this.” She gestured violently at Delarosa. “If this witch got this far without us seeing her, how do we know there’s not more of them out there? What are we supposed to do?”
One of the newly appointed medics piped up from the side of the room; his name tag said Ether, and Vale couldn’t help but be amused by the juxtaposition. “I’ll tell you what we do,” said Ether. “We take that nuke straight back and turn East Meadow into a parking lot.”
Vale’s amusement vanished.
Delarosa, bound and bandaged and muzzled by an oxygen tube, made a move to attack Ether, but the other medic held her down.
“No one’s going to blow up anything,” said Vinci, and Audra’s fury burned across the link.
“We don’t need a human-lover in here telling us what to do,” she snapped. “After everything they’ve done to us, you’re taking
their
side in this?”
“I’m taking any side that’s not genocidal,” said Vinci. “Everything that has gone wrong since the moment we came back from China has been because of one species trying to get the upper hand on the other. We’re not going down that road again.”
“It’s going to give us some breathing room,” said Audra. “It’s going to give Dr. Morgan time to finish her work, maybe save some of us from expiration.”
“And what if the cure was coexistence?” asked Vale. He looked around the room, holding each Partial’s gaze before moving to the next one—the sergeant, the medics, the guards. “What if I told you that we could cure expiration right now, just by breathing the same air as that human in the corner.” Delarosa looked at him in disbelief, and the link told him that the Partials were just as incredulous.
“That’s impossible,” said Vinci.
“Humor me,” said Vale, but there was no humor in his voice. He looked at Vinci intently, pleading with him, and his sincerity was palpable on the link. “Pretend, for a moment, that she, and every human carrying the RM virus, is the cure for expiration. That they produce a chemical agent in their breath, the same as you do for them.”
Ether answered first, hesitantly. “We’d . . . have to find a way to synthesize it and . . . make a pill or something.”
Just like the humans tried to do,
thought Vale.
Just what I did
. He shook his head. “You can’t synthesize it. It’s a two-part biological reaction: You breathe out a particle that renders RM inert in the humans, and then their body alters it and breathes it back out, curing you of expiration. You have to have both species in close proximity, and you have to have living bodies in which the reactions can take place.”
“They’d kill us first,” said Audra.
“Not all of them,” said Vinci.
“It only takes one,” said Audra. “This one smuggled a nuclear bomb right under our noses—one lone woman—and we stopped her with seconds to spare. How is the existence of one or two or even a thousand friendly humans supposed balance that out?”
“We might be able to harvest it,” said Ether. “We could keep them in a controlled environment—a prison camp, or a smaller island where we can watch them more closely—and then send a few people in every morning to collect the healing particles. Then we could distribute it through the army like an inoculation.”
Delarosa’s face was livid.
Now they’re re-creating my own failed plans,
thought Vale. “Suppose that doesn’t work,” he said. “Suppose it takes”—he reversed the numbers from the Preserve—“ten humans for every two thousand Partials. One human for two hundred. If we implement this now, today, before losing any more soldiers to expiration, we’d need what, one thousand of them? Fifteen hundred? How do you support that many humans?”
“They could support themselves,” said Audra. “We’d make it a . . . like a labor camp.”
“And the Partials that live with them?” asked Vale. “As I said, they need to be in close proximity to Partials in order to produce the particle. Would those Partials live in the labor camp too?”
“They’d need guards anyway,” said Audra. “We could take shifts.”
“And what about the other thirty thousand humans?” asked Vale, feeling increasingly repelled by the entire conversation. “What do we do with the ones we don’t need? Do we put them in labor camps as well, or just kill them outright?”
“Fifteen hundred is already large for a sustainable prison population,” said Ether. “If we want to keep them from attacking us, or escaping and making the whole thing moot, we have to limit the population as much as we—”
“Listen to yourselves!” shouted Vale. His felt his heart pounding, his blood pressure rising even with a host of gene mods to keep it in check. “They’re not animals! They created you!”
“And they tried to destroy us,” said Audra. “This prison camp idea isn’t all that different from what we’ve done all along, keeping them isolated to Long Island. But keeping them alive was a mistake. Do you know what else we’ve seen on the satellite? They’re massing in the south—a giant human army, armed to the teeth, gathering for a final push.”
“Gathering in the south?” asked Vale. “As far away from us as possible?”
“They’re getting out of the blast radius,” said Audra. “What else could it be? They retreat to the South Shore, send her to trigger the bomb, and then come around Manhattan and up the river to clean up any survivors.”
“That’s a military plan,” said Vale. “They’re not an army! That’s what you’d do, but not—” But even as he said it, he realized he was caught in a loop of flawed logic generated by racist suspicion, one he could never hope to talk his way out of. “Just . . . get out, all of you.”
“But—” Vinci protested, but Vale sent a surge of linked authority, and the Partials started filing obediently through the door.
“I’m going to talk to the prisoner,” said Vale. “Keep the door closed and locked, and resume your patrols, all of you. You are not to mention any of this to anyone.”
The door closed, and Vale locked it, then wearily walked to the corner where Delarosa lay red-faced and helpless. He pulled an office chair toward her and flopped down in it heavily, making no attempt at ceremony or formality.
I’m too tired,
he thought, then he said it out loud. “I’m too tired.”
The woman remained still, watching him with dark, serious eyes.
“You must just be burning up right now,” he said. “Aren’t you? Caught in a trap by the very people you were looking to kill. And I suppose that includes me. I’m not a Partial, but I’m just as guilty as any of them for what has happened to this godforsaken planet. No, guiltier.” She saw the surprise in her eyes, and nodded. “I’m a member of the Trust, though I don’t suppose you know what that is?”
She paused a moment, then shook her head. Vale let out a long breath.
“Not many humans do.” He looked at the nuke, mud-spattered and scratched by a hundred thousand rocks and roots and whatever else it had passed through to get there. It was a simple metal cylinder, battered and dingy and absolutely terrifying. “The finger of God,” he said softly. He leaned over to grab the wheeled cart and pulled it closer. The end screwed off, and he found the inner electronics jury-rigged with a series of yellowed plastic light switches, probably scavenged from an old abandoned home. “You’re old,” he said idly, then shot her a quick glance. “Not old, of course, I’d never be so rude to a lady like yourself. But you’re old enough to remember the old world. The things we left behind. You remember how in all the movies and the holovids, everyone always had big red timers on their nuclear bombs? It looked like someone had stuck a digital alarm clock on there, though I suppose that’s still more high-tech than these things.” He gestured to the switches, their wires exposed, but he didn’t dare touch them. “The bad guy sets the bomb, or the good guy sets it accidentally, and then everybody watches as it counts down: fifty-nine, fifty-eight, fifty-seven. Tick, tick, tick. None of that for you, though.” He looked at her again. “No timer, no ‘run like hell’ period where you try to get to safety. You were just going to flip these switches and blow up right along with us.” He screwed the lid back on, then looked at Delarosa, lying bleeding on the floor. He leaned forward and pulled off her oxygen mask. “I figure it’s not much of an interrogation if you can’t even talk.”
Delarosa watched him, saying nothing. Vale said nothing back. After a moment she spoke, and Vale heard the pain in her voice.
“This is still not much of an interrogation.”
“The things I want to know you don’t have any answers for.”
She adjusted her shoulder slightly, wincing. “Such as?”
“Such as why everybody in this entire world hates everybody else. Why I can’t get four people to agree to a peaceful resolution even when I lead them by the hand ninety-five percent of the way.”
“I don’t hate you,” said Delarosa. “You or them. Not personally.”
“But you still want to blow us all to hell.”
“This is going to end in war,” said Delarosa. “Everyone in the world is dying, and there’s no hope left, and the nerves are too raw. Look back at what’s happened and tell me which part we could have avoided.”
“You could have not brought a nuke into the middle of an army,” said Vale. “You think your island got invaded? Just wait until word of this gets out.”
“You heard them talking just now,” said Delarosa. “This warhead is an excuse. You said it yourself—they’re an army, bred for battle; the humans are just as desperate. War is inevitable.”
“So you wanted to end it before it could start.”
“It seems like the only moral option.”
“‘Moral,’” said Vale. “That’s an interesting adjective to apply to ‘genocide.’”
“Destroy White Plains and the Partial population drops to whatever’s on Long Island,” said Delarosa. “We’ll be back on even footing again, give or take. The Partial leadership will be dead, and the ones left will stop waiting for orders that are never going to come. Maybe they’ll make a treaty with the humans, I don’t know, but even if they attack, the humans will be able to fight back. They’ll have the courage to fight back. They’ll have a chance.”
Vale nodded, thinking, staring at the bomb. “The situation I spoke of earlier wasn’t just smoke,” he said softly. “It’s real. Kira Walker discovered the biological mechanisms, and since then I’ve had the chance to study it out, to dig down into the science of it, and it’s real. It could save everyone.”
“Do you think anyone will go along with it?”
“I thought so,” Vale said, closing his eyes. “A long time ago. But then the Break happened and . . . No, I don’t. I told Kira that if Dr. Morgan found out about the cure for expiration, she’d enslave the entire human population. It took four soldiers less than three minutes to propose two different versions of that worst-case scenario.” He tapped the bomb, listening to the metallic clang. “I had to choose once before, you know. Humans or Partials. I chose to save a group of humans, and enslaved ten Partials to do it. It was the only way.” He sighed. “What else can I do?”
Delarosa furrowed her brow. “What are you saying?”
Vale took the cap off the warhead and looked at the jury-rigged switches. “I’m saying that I still think the end of all this is a choice between the species.”
“Are you serious?”
Vale flipped a switch. “There’s a combination, I assume?”
Delarosa took a deep breath, her voice almost reverent. “Yes.” She hesitated. “Okay. On, off, on, off. Right to left.”
Vale raised his eyebrow. “That’s the secret password?”
“It kept it from going off accidentally,” said Delarosa. “Beyond that, the simpler the better. I figured if I made it easy enough, even if you caught me someone might trigger it accidentally.”
Vale looked at the switches, flipping the first three in turn. “On, off, on.” He looked up. “Any last words?”
“My shoulder hurts,” said Delarosa. There was steel in her voice. “Get it over with.”
Vale closed his eyes, speaking not to her but to the entire world. “I’m sorry.”
Off.
T
he hospital shook, and Kira stumbled. “What was that?”
The noise continued, a distant rumble, deep in the bones of the earth.
Green raised his rifle at Armin, and one of the Ivies saw the move, perhaps even anticipated it, raising his own rifle at Green. Armin leapt through a side door and out of sight. The entire exchange was so fast Kira barely even registered it.
“Holy—” Marcus spluttered, but that was all Kira heard before Green fired a long, loud burst into the hallway, scattering the Ivies, and pulled him and Kira back into the stairwell. The Ivies took cover and returned fire, but the three companions were already diving down the first flight of stairs, throwing themselves to the floor. Bullets riddled the door above them, tearing through the wood in a furious hail of splinters and shredding the drywall on either side, only to ping and ricochet off the thick concrete steps. At the first break in the shooting Green fired back, and urged the other two farther down the stairs. The rumble they had felt hadn’t gone away; instead it was gathering in intensity.
“We can’t leave,” Kira shouted. “That’s my father!”
“Your father wants to kill you,” said Green.
“I have to talk to him,” Kira insisted, trying to get back up. “I have to stop him.”
Green threw her back down, shouting to get through to her. “We’ve lost the advantage up there—they have the numbers, they have the high ground, and they have cover. Put your head above those stairs and they will shoot it off.”