Deborah Reece looked up from her atomic force microscope when the room trembled with a sharp, hammerlike boom. “What—” she said, studying the concrete ceiling. Then her chair rattled as the sound was repeated again and again. Boom boom boom. Boom. The desk shivered, too, and the faceplate of her containment suit vibrated from the same onslaught of explosions.
“Air strikes,” Bornmann said nearby, muffled in his suit. “Son of a bitch.”
Boom.
“Where the fuck are our planes!?” someone yelled as another man said, “Rezac, what’ve you got?”
In her fear, Deborah thought Dirk Walls had called for her. He was a two-star Marine general and as out of his element in this tiny squad as Deborah herself. She leaned away from her equipment, turning her entire torso inside her suit, but Walls was talking to the communications specialist attached to their unit, NSA Special Agent Michelle Rezac, a dark-haired woman with a soft voice and hard gray eyes.
Suddenly the floor went sideways. It shoved Deborah’s feet out from under her. The mountain groaned. Bornmann fell against her and she screamed — but even in the confusion, it was the sideways jolt of this quake that caught her attention. The other explosions were clearly downwards. The larger quake felt as if it had come from another direction entirely and it was followed by aftershocks, none of which matched the detonations overhead.
“What was that!?” a man yelled.
Boom boom.
Dust sifted down from a corner of the room where the concrete was under strain. Deborah clambered back to her feet. Somehow her microscope was still on the desk and she grabbed it in case there was another quake.
She wouldn’t have believed the pressure on her could increase. Now there were Chinese aircraft in the sky, plastering the surface of Grand Lake with fire. Why? Would they land?
Boom.
She wondered how many people General Caruso could send against enemy soldiers, and if that number included herself. Of course it did. There couldn’t be more than a few dozen effective troops outside the command center and she bunched her hand inside her glove, remembering the jolt of her pistol all the way up her arm.
Deborah and four others had left the command center an hour ago, hurrying to a makeshift lab in the upper levels of Complex 1, where they found the hardware retrieved from 3 by a squad of USAF commandos. Those men stayed with her as bodyguards. The other members of the group, like Walls and Rezac, were only here because Caruso had four more suits he hadn’t committed elsewhere. Caruso wanted to safeguard Deborah, but he also must have felt like there was no longer any point in holding onto his reserves. They were living on borrowed time.
They were late, so late. Deborah never would have imagined the U.S. arsenal would still be in the ground, and yet she’d been thrilled by Caruso’s decision to keep their missiles in check. She had been wrong about him.
Boom boom. Boom.
Across the room, desks and gear clattered against the floor. Deborah looked at the ceiling again. The fluorescent lights gleamed in every scratch in her faceplate. This suit had seen plenty of action and it smelled of other people despite the nauseating rubber stink. Pulling on the heavy pantlegs, sleeves, and chest piece had been like wrapping herself in a men’s locker room.
Boom.
“Rezac!” Walls shouted, but Agent Rezac ignored him. She stood at the intercom with her hand collapsing her bright yellow rubberized helmet against her ear to secure her headset. At her waist, like all of them, she wore a control box, but she’d disconnected the short wire that connected her to their radios and jacked herself into the intercom instead.
The nine of them were a hodgepodge of colors. One man wore a yellow civilian suit like Rezac, one was Army green, and the remainder were black as night. Deborah wore black, too, and she was glad. If they needed to ambush Chinese storm troopers, she didn’t want to do it in an emergency yellow hazmat suit.
Rezac’s voice was an unintelligible mumble. Deborah stared at the other woman, needing information. In fact, everyone was watching Rezac except Emma.
“I think I have a picture,” Emma said.
“Really? Good work.” Deborah shuffled to a neighboring desk, where she’d paired Emma with a magnetic resonance force microscope and a small plastic tray littered with thin, square, colorless tabs called substrates. The MRFM was bigger than Deborah’s AFM. It had a larger base and internal arrays. Otherwise it looked much the same — a stout, glossy white tower with digital controls and a black eyepiece on top.
“This is what we’re supposed to be looking at, right?” Emma said without using the radio, raising her voice to be heard outside her helmet.
Deborah bent beneath the weight of her air tanks, taking care not to bang her faceplate against the eyepiece. She saw a black-and-white topography like the bottom of an egg carton, a symmetrical row of bumps joined by perfectly identical ribs and struts — but was she looking at the nano or just the material of the substrate itself?
A speck of dust wouldn’t be so uniformly structured. She was sure of that. But the only way she’d known how to capture samples of the mind plague was to wave the substrates in the air, then insert the slides one by one into their microscopes and look for proof of the invisible machines. Unfortunately, holding the tiny squares in her gloves was an exercise in frustration. The substrates were made of sapphire, she remembered, but were just one centimeter across and only one millimeter thick, which made them as substantial as cellophane.
If Emma had zeroed in on a nano at last, this would be only part of it. Was the magnification set too high? They were actually making some progress. It wasn’t enough, but at least they’d taken a few steps forward.
Deborah was the most proud of saving Emma. I need her, she’d told Caruso. She worked with me with Goldman, she said, urging him to bring Emma through their decon tents into the command center, and Caruso agreed. It was the first time she’d deceived a superior in her life. Placing her friend above everyone else was selfish. Something in her had broken, but for Caruso to drop the entire nanotech program on her shoulders was beyond unfair. He expected too much.
Deborah was finally questioning herself and what was most important to her — her country or her life. It was only an incredible bonus that Emma was so smart. Emma had clever hands and a good memory, and Deborah allowed herself to feel a bit of rivalry. There’s no way I’m going to let her show me up, she thought. “Okay, I see it,” she said.
“Now what?”
I don’t know, Deborah thought, but Bornmann was watching and she couldn’t bring herself to admit her ignorance.
Captain Bornmann was a lion of a man, not because he was especially large but because he had a slow, lazy way of moving that radiated danger and stamina. Bornmann had led the commando team into Complex 3, risking the lives of his men to secure this equipment. Deborah understood why he was hovering. He wanted miracles, but she couldn’t give him any.
“Listen up!” Rezac said on the intersuit radio. “They’re reporting nuclear strikes across Wyoming and Montana.”
“Christ,” someone said.
“The Chinese just hit most of our silos. Now they’re decapitating our command centers. It sounds like most of our gear topside is gone.”
Deborah nearly had to sit down, swooning, as her blood leapt in her veins like a drum. The wildness she felt was unlike her. She wanted to run, but where?
“We just had a coded message out of Salt Lake,” Rezac said. “They’re getting it, too — fighters, followed by troop carriers.”
The attacks were insanely bold and well choreographed. The Chinese had sent their planes toward their own missile strikes, and yet the invasion worked because so many of the U.S.-Canadian radar stations were out of commission. There had also been jamming. During the past two hours, Grand Lake’s satellite links had filled with interference or failed completely. The survivors at Peterson AFB and in Missoula reported the same complications. The Chinese had total air superiority. They’d probably set a dozen AWACS planes above the Rockies, creating an electronic umbrella. That was why the missile launches from China went undetected — and now those aircraft must have been sacrificed by their own generals, either burned outright or short-circuited by the electromagnetic pulse.
As for the fighters and troop carriers, no doubt those planes had come in extremely low to the ground, using the Continental Divide as a shield against the nuclear blasts. They must have timed their arrival at their targets just minutes after the ICBMs hit.
This isn’t over yet, Deborah thought. It didn’t matter that the war was lost. The enemy had beaten them at every turn, but she knew the men and women around her would never give up. Neither would Deborah, not with the guilt she felt for lying to Caruso. That deception had been a small thing, saving Emma, but Deborah had always placed her integrity above her personal feelings.
Now the two of them would pay the price. They were on the front line. If the Chinese wanted this base and high-level prisoners, they would probably succeed, but first a lot of people would die. Room by room, Deborah thought like a mantra. We’ll fight them for every goddamn room.
“General Caruso has ordered us out,” Rezac said.
“Out?” Bornmann asked.
Deborah felt the same uncertainty, even dismay. She had made her decision to fight.
“Pack it up,” Rezac said. “We can’t hold this base against ground troops. That’s impossible. All they need to do is bring the roof down on top of us. We’re getting out.”
“Out where?” another man asked.
“You heard the lady,” Walls said. “We’ll go for the north tunnel.”
“Jesus Christ,” the same man said, but the group was already in motion.
This is crazy, Deborah thought, even as she whirled to reevaluate the nanotech gear. The AFM was more versatile, but Emma seemed to have adhered a sample of the mind plague to the test surface of the MRFM.
“We need both of these,” Deborah said to Bornmann.
“You got it.” He gestured for his men and said, “Sweeney, Pritchard, load ‘em up. I’m on point with Lang. General Walls, I need you and everyone else to carry more air tanks, sir.”
“Right.” Walls accepted the order without protest.
The tanks on their suits were only good for another forty minutes. Deborah didn’t want to be a problem, but she wondered how they could have any chance at all if the mountain was covered in enemy troops and nanotech. What if this was another mistake?
Then the power failed and left them in blackness.
Deborah was competitive. She had a hard time understanding anyone’s failure, especially her own — and she’d changed her mind about General Caruso. The truth was that he’d misjudged the situation in delaying his launch against the Chinese. He was reluctant to hit U.S. soil. That much was forgivable. They all hoped California would become American territory again someday, and San Diego and Los Angeles were vital cities on the coast.
Before her small group left the command center, Caruso had reversed his diplomatic efforts. He tried to negotiate their surrender. He was willing to lose if he could extract a few conditions from the Chinese before standing down, and it took an awful kind of bravery to broker a cease-fire. It was the same sort of courage Ruth must have summoned to end the previous war. Caruso would always be remembered as the man who capitulated. He’d even fought to take that role, wresting power away from the secretary of defense because he thought he could better manage the job.
He should have known better.
The problem was that every word needed to pass through his translators to the Chinese and back again, sometimes twice or even three times to be certain. Their failing communication links only intensified these delays as Caruso switched from satellite phones to radio bands and the very few hard lines between the Rockies and southern California.
The enemy had strung him along expertly. The Chinese were masters at stonewalling. They kept promising top-level contacts even as they claimed that each of these officials were already engaged with other members of the U.S. military. Each time, Caruso’s teams scrambled to reach those Americans themselves. Too often, they verified that these people were cut off or infected or dead. Confronting the Chinese with this information only led to more contradictions and excuses, all of which needed to be translated as well.
The Chinese had only meant to slow him until their missiles fell from the sky. Caruso would have been better off with a limited strike on his own ground, much like India had done in the Himalayas. If he’d destroyed southern California, mainland China might have backed off, either suspending their operations in North America or shutting off the mind plague altogether — but the enemy must have seen his hesitation as cowardice.
Deborah had been doubly wrong about him, which made her feel like her loyalty was misplaced.
“Hold it!” Bornmann yelled on the radio.
Pritchard stopped the group. His black suit was the first Deborah could see in the gloom. They had only two flashlights and a battery-powered lamp. Most of them were only shadows, except for Rezac and Medrano, whose yellow bodies were brighter in the dark.
Thirty yards in front of Pritchard, a single beam rocked in another room. Bornmann and Lang had run ahead of them, leaving Pritchard to pace the group. He brought up his M4 as Deborah heard a short, furious scuffle ahead of them. Then it was done.
“Clear,” Bornmann said.
“Okay, move,” Pritchard said. He carried the AFM in a sling on his side — his air tanks prevented him from carrying the microscope on his back — keeping his M4 and flashlight at the ready. Did he think Bornmann and Lang would miss an infected person in the dark?
Deborah glanced through the doors and offices on either side. Far away, the complex crackled with gunfire. More than once, they’d heard another small boom, and there was a dim, irritating whine that rose and fell at the edges of Deborah’s hearing depending on the walls and open spaces around her. The Chinese were drilling through blast doors or straight down from the surface. Even a slight hole into the command center would infect it with the plague.
From the fighting, they were sure the main entrance and the south gate had been overrun. If the north tunnel was blocked, too, this would be the shortest escape attempt of all time. Deborah tried not to think about it. She had enough problems jogging in her suit with her arms wrapped around an extra air tank. It weighed twenty pounds. She was embarrassed she couldn’t carry more, but the suit alone was like swimming in glue with forty pounds on her back. She just didn’t have the upper body strength.
They entered the next room, which had been personnel quarters. It was neat and square with tall bunk beds, low foot-lockers, and two bodies in a heap. They had been bludgeoned by Bornmann and Lang. Both men carried rifles, but gunshots would be another kind of risk.
“Oh, God,” Emma mumbled. She looked away. Deborah did not. She thought the two soldiers — their own soldiers — were deserving of her horror. She stopped without intending to. Walls bumped against her and she fell onto one knee, grasping at the aluminum cylinder in her arms. They’ll hear you! she thought. The tank would hit the concrete like a gong, increasing the likelihood of drawing every infected person in this wing.
Walls caught Deborah’s sleeve clumsily. He wore a backpack sideways over his air tanks, humping two laptops and a sat phone in addition to two spare tanks in another sling.
“I’m okay,” she said.
“We’re almost there.”
He said it like they were going to stop and rest, and Deborah nodded at the lie. “Yes, sir.”
Behind him came Rezac. All of them rustled and clanked.
Rezac carried their Harris radio, one spare tank, and an M16. Medrano held two more tanks and their lamp, a white star near his hip, where the light puddled on the floor among the fat, sagging tubes of their legs. Sweeney brought up the rear with an M4, bent nearly in half beneath the MRFM.
As they trotted through the empty rows of beds, Deborah thought again how lucky she was just to be alive. It also occurred to her that General Caruso must have known the risk he’d taken in holding onto his missiles. Maybe he’d been right after all? The composition of this small unit was proof of his intent to fight in any way possible without resorting to a planetwide nuclear holocaust. Caruso hadn’t only put them in suits to access the nanotech gear. With the few people he’d chosen, Caruso had created a backup command group. That was the only explanation for assigning General Walls to a squad of eight people.
Walls was meant to assume Caruso’s role as the supreme U.S. commander if Complex 1 was breached. Rezac was his signals intelligence specialist. Medrano, an engineer, served as the team’s mechanic, and Bornmann and the other commandos were their might. Staff Sergeant Lang doubled as their linguist. Like the other translators she’d seen, Lang was Chinese American and all the more valuable for his heritage and verbal skills. Deborah wouldn’t be surprised if others in the group knew some Mandarin, Cantonese, or Russian themselves. This was a top-level unit, which left only Deborah and Emma as their pathetic science assets… And yet what could Caruso honestly hope for them to accomplish? If they escaped and regrouped with other survivors, what use were a few hit-and-run attacks against the Chinese? Even that seemed unlikely. Their air wouldn’t last two hours.
“We’re there! We’re there!” Pritchard shouted, grabbing Emma’s shoulder to help her. They’d reached a blast door. Beyond it was a narrow vertical shaft with a spiral metal staircase. Their boot steps thrummed on the steel.
Stupidly, Deborah looked up. There was no end in sight. The height of it nearly defeated her. She lowered her head, but the climb was endless. Her muscles ached. Then her thighs turned rubbery. Then there was a heavy clung above her and suddenly the shaft was in twilight.
Deborah looked up again. Bornmann had thrown open a hatch at the top. Deborah saw a square of light, but it looked like it was another full story above her.
Keep going, she thought. Keep going.
Finally, she threw herself through the hatch into the unexpected silence of an Airstream camper. All of their doors to the underground were covered by RVs, huts, and trailers. Other top priority areas were strung with camouflage netting to prevent surveillance by spy planes and satellites. This shaft was no exception. The gutted shell of the Airstream sat above the stairwell. The netting outside was ripped and burned, hanging in brown mats across the shattered windows on one side. The sky was black. It reverberated with the long lines of sound from two jets and somewhere Deborah heard other, deeper engines, but she was shocked by the quiet that otherwise surrounded her.
Bornmann and Lang stood against the wall with their M4s. Bornmann gestured for everyone to get down as they emerged from the stairwell, but Walls joined the two commandos and Deborah continued to peek outside.
She saw fires and dust and the eerie shapes, everywhere, of people staggering through the haze. No one ran for cover. They walked upright. There should have been screaming. One man limped badly. Another’s face was blackened by fire and blood except for the jutting white gleam of his cheekbone. He didn’t seemed to notice, casting about in the smoke with his only remaining eye.
They were infected. These men and women would never grasp the danger of the Chinese assault — and they provided her group with some cover as Bornmann led them out of the calm space of the Airstream. The mob enveloped them. Lang brought up his M4 when several people turned, but didn’t shoot. There was no telling how close Chinese soldiers might be.
Bornmann and Lang clubbed five Americans to the ground as they ran into a maze of destruction. Some of the buildings and trucks that coated these mountains hid the antennae and dishes sprouting above the command complex. Their eyes and ears had been distributed as widely as possible to mask their signals, but the enemy must have strived to triangulate each source of electronic noise ever since the war. It was these points that had been targeted by the Chinese fighters, not the people themselves or even the gun emplacements.
Bornmann led their squad past burning campers and an overturned jeep. Debris lay everywhere, a mix of dark earth exploded from the hillside and lighter material blasted out of walls and furniture and people. Camouflage netting sagged from the structures or twisted on the ground in curls and lumps. Deborah saw a dismembered arm and a shoe and a field of broken glass.
She realized her uncertainty was pointless. She was one of the lucky ones. She reminded herself of it with every step. Even if she and Emma ran away, where would they go? Agonizing over it was a waste of energy.
Just do your part, she thought.
Deborah resolved her self-doubt as easily as that, and she was grateful. She felt like the eye of a hurricane, composed and intact despite the carnage all around her, even because of it. The chaos was exactly why she needed to remain pure. That was how she wanted to be remembered — competent and reliable — and no one would ever know otherwise if she kept her secret and followed orders to the end.
Suddenly they could see past the sprawl. The mountainside fell away to the northeast, where a familiar trio of peaks were lost in the filthy sky. Dark clouds crashed against the land in a billowing conflict of wind and heat.
The fallout will reach us, she thought.
“You’re going for Complex 2,” Walls said on the suit radio, breathing hard, and Bornmann answered, “Sir, we have to get out of the open. Then we’ll run for Complex 3 and resupply.”
“Rezac,” Walls said. “Any contact with 1?”
Rezac had been chanting to herself as they worked through the ruins, calling for Complex 1 or any allied assets. “No, sir,” she said. “Even if there are hardened units who survived the blasts, the sky is for shit. I’m getting nothing but static.”
“Your call sign is Viper Six,” Walls said, undeterred. “Authentication Hotel Golf India Sierra India X-ray. I want—”
“Missiles,” Pritchard said.
“Get down!” Bornmann shouted. “Where?”
“They’re at two o‘clock. Outgoing. I see three. Four. I think they’re ours.”
Within the turmoil to the northeast, yellow-white sparks raced into the sky. Deborah saw three flecks streaking intermittently through the haze. The rocket trails hurt her eyes, rising, rising… “Yeeaaah!” Pritchard cheered. His voice was savage and Deborah felt herself respond the same way, meeting his pride with a keen new predatory feeling of her own.
Smash ‘em, she thought.
The blinding white sparks were U.S. missiles intended for enemy targets.