Plague Year by Jeff Carlson

relay.”
    “Hi, Gus.”
    Communications Officer Gustavo Proano, left aboard to appease the Europeans, was the only crew member who’d grown more free with his thoughts during their endless wait. Force of habit. Trilingual, with a smattering of Farsi and Portuguese and learning more, Gustavo had more friends than anyone else alive, friends all over the world.
    Ruth still hadn’t figured out his habit of blockading himself in. He was the most gregarious person aboard. Maybe subconsciously he was trying to protect his radios.
    He waved again, hurrying her, and jabbered into a microphone too fast for anyone to answer. His English had a pronounced New York accent, but the blabbermouth personality came through in any language, even those where hello and how are you were his entire repertoire. “Leadville, this is the ISS. Leadville, come back, I gotcha contact waiting.”
    Ruth clipped on the earpiece and realized her hair was growing long again, starting to curl. Good. An astronaut’s buzz cut made her look like a monkey.
    “Leadville,” Gus said. “Leadville, Leadville...”
    During the late 1800s, at the height of the Gold Rush, Leadville had been a boomtown of thirty thousand frontiersmen attracted to central Colorado’s rich silver mines. In the twenty-first century, shrunk to just 3,000 residents, the modern claim to fame had been that at 10,150 feet elevation it was the highest incorporated “city” in the United States.
    Now it was the U.S. capital, and a rough census put the area’s population at 650,000.
    NORAD command shelters under Cheyenne Mountain had originally housed the president, the surviving members of Congress, and the most prominent men and women in nanotech. The subterranean base sat far below the barrier but was equipped with a self-contained air system to protect against radiation or biowarfare, and most of Ruth’s communications had been with NORAD until the locust got loose from a laboratory inside the complex.
    “ISS, this is Leadville,” drawled an unfamiliar voice, calm in her ear. “Stand by.”
    Gustavo chattered, “Roger that. You wanna power down?”
    “Stand by.”
    The partial evacuation of the NORAD base had reduced their working capacity by a full order of magnitude, just as the original plague had done. Once there had been more than a thousand researchers nationwide, then hundreds, finally mere dozens—and aside from India and a displaced Japanese team on Mt. McKinley, Alaska, no one else was even trying. Across the Alps, the Germans, French, Italians, and Swiss were embroiled in war with starving refugee populations and each other, lost like the Russians, and the Brazilian scientists in the Andes had stopped broadcasting before the end of the first winter.
    Ruth reached for the lists of contacts plastered over the nearest wall but stopped short of disturbing them. So many names and places had been crossed out, she wondered how Gus could stand the constant reminder. Gruesome. Yet clearly something in him was satisfied by surrounding himself with data, and with physical barriers.
    “Hey, hello, am I on?” This new voice spoke almost as fast as Gustavo, trained by months of power shortages.
    “James,” Ruth said. “I hear you.”
    “I have—”
    The other voice on the ground intervened. “This is a secure call, ISS communications. Please clear the channel.”
    “Roger that.” Gustavo turned and winked at her before he swam toward the exit. So far, she’d chosen to share every piece of news with the rest of the crew, classified or not. She felt they deserved it. Why keep secrets anymore? The soldiers down there only bothered because it gave them something to do.
    Ruth opened her mouth to speak but there was a low, menacing click. Gus had identified the sound as recording equipment and it raised gooseflesh up the back of her neck.
    * * * *
    She yearned for clean air, a horizon, new faces, but felt it would be sinful to envy anyone on the ground. She was among the