Plague War by Jeff Carlson Page A

thought of cramming herself into a plane made Ruth claustrophobic again and she glanced uneasily at the walls of the room. Not all of the ISS crew had survived the crash of the space shuttle Endeavour. “All it takes is one missile to bring us down,” she said, “and Leadville will do anything to keep anybody else from getting the vaccine. They’ve already shown that.”
    “There are ways to defend against air-to-air missiles, especially if our escort doesn’t let anyone close,” Newcombe said. “And if we don’t do this, we’ll have to keep playing hide-andseek with the helicopters. We’ve been lucky so far.”
    “But we’re so close to the mountains here!” Ruth met his blue eyes, pleading with him. “The whole idea is to spread the vaccine to as many people as possible, so no one can ever control or keep it.” She worried that the Canadian government would prove just as sel‚sh. Overall, their losses had been even worse than those in the United States, and they might view the nanotech as the same opportunity for conquest and rebirth.
    “We’re not that close,” Newcombe said. “Look. Look where we are. It’s still a hundred miles to the Sierras and it’s going to keep getting more and more uphill. You have to realize we’re still weeks away from elevation. You don’t even know if anyone’s alive up there. We could wander around for another month just trying to ‚nd a mountain where someone’s survived this long.”
    And they might be dangerous if they did, Ruth thought, unable to stop herself from glancing at Cam. It was a real concern. Lord knew some of those survivors would be too desperate to care why or how they’d come, but she didn’t say it. She wasn’t going to give Newcombe anything else to use against her. Ruth genuinely believed that most people would help them, and once they’d reached four or ‚ve groups they would be unstoppable, dispersing in every direction, ‚lling the dead zones of the plague like a new human tide.
    “This is our best chance to get somewhere,” Newcombe said.
    I’m stronger than you are, Ruth realized, but she needed to be careful. She couldn’t afford to make an enemy of him. “I just don’t like it,” she said.
    Cam ‚nally interjected, and Ruth was grateful. “I know what I’d do,” he said. “This isn’t usable ground for them, not if we get away. If I was Leadville, if I thought the Canadians were going to take off with us, I’d just nuke the whole area. Here. Oregon. Wherever they could drop a bomb in front of us. There’s no way a plane can defend against that, right?”
    “That’s crazy,” Newcombe said. “This is their own ground— it’s American soil.”
    “No. Not anymore.”
    “They’ll stick to conventional weapons,” Newcombe insisted. “Look, it’s a gamble either way, so we take our best bet. We get the rebels and the Canadians behind us.”
    Ruth clenched her arm in its cast, wondering how deeply his training had affected his thinking. The need for structure. Newcombe was an incredible asset, a great soldier and obviously comfortable improvising in any situation, but he was still a soldier, with the expectation of ‚tting into a larger command.
    He was going to be a problem.
    “Do you want to get left down here?” he asked, gesturing at her broken arm. Had he seen the ‚st she’d made?
    The infections last night scared him, she thought. Me, too. But at least she knew how rare it should be to hit a concentration that bad, especially once they got out of the delta.
    “They’re willing to put a lot of lives on the line,” Newcombe said. “Fuel. Planes. Taking you north was always the plan, get you into a lab, make the vaccine better and then spread it everywhere.”
    “We can still do that,” Ruth said, slowly. “We can do that after we’ve given the vaccine to a few people out here.”
    Cam surprised her. “We could split up,” he said.
    She was right that he had been uncertain but wrong about the