Free Plague War by Jeff Carlson Page B

rock darkened by lichen. A lot of rock. Rock and snow. In many places, in fact, the snow never melted completely.
    Up here, the air was frigid and thin. Every survivor had acclimated to elevation or they hadn’t survived, but headaches and nausea were very common among the population in Leadville, and that was down near ten thousand feet. More than half a mile higher, any physical effort made it necessary to gasp to get enough oxygen, breathing too fast to let the air absorb any warmth in the sinuses. It didn’t take much to scar your lungs or even freeze from the inside out, dropping your body core temperature almost before you knew it. Anxiety was also a common side effect of hypoxia. Not getting enough oxygen, the brain naturally created a sense of panic, which did nothing to help people who were already under a lot of strain. In fourteen months, Hernandez had seen a lot of soldiers ruined as outposts and patrols sent their casualties back to Leadville.
    These mountaintops were dead and ancient places, never meant for human beings. The orange-gray rock had been worn smooth and broken and worn smooth again. The elements could do the same to them in far less time. Hernandez had issued orders to dig and build only in the few hours of midday, and only on staggered shifts. No one worked every day, no matter how urgent their situation. His command had reached this slope just forty-eight hours ago. Already he had three troops on sick call, plus Kotowych, and there was little sense in having superior ‚ghting holes with no one capable of ‚ghting from them.
    That goes for you, too, he thought. His back hurt, as did his hands and shins. Frank Hernandez was barely on the wrong side of forty, but the cold made everyone arthritic.
    He was committed to doing more than his share of the grunt work, rather than sitting back and passing out bad jobs. He was too worried about morale and too many of his Marines were strangers to each other, thrown together from the remnants of ‚ve platoons. There were too many rumors and fears.
    “We’re almost there,” he told Kotowych.
    Their bootsteps faded into the clear, brittle sky. Hernandez kept his eyes on his footing, but the mountainside fell away so dramatically that it was impossible not to see the immense up-anddown horizon, a collision of dark peaks and snow and far open spaces. It was a distraction. Panting, Hernandez glanced west. There was nothing to see except more mountains, of course, but he imagined reaching across the basins of Utah and Nevada to the heavily urbanized coast, where everything had gone wrong for him in one minute.
    By necessity, the American civil war was mostly an air war. The urgent struggle to claim and scavenge from the old cities below the barrier was dependent on the ability to maintain their helicopters and planes. Infantry and armor could only cross the plague zones if they were †own over, and yet this patch of ground he’d been ordered to hold was still a frontline assignment, when just a week ago he’d been the security chief for Leadville’s nanotech labs and a liaison between the scientists and the highest circles of the U.S. government. Hernandez had been tapped to lead the expedition into Sacramento because they relied on him, because that con‚dence was more valuable than food or ammunition. Now he was on the outside. The hell of it was that he understood.
    Their mission hadn’t been a total loss. They’d returned to Leadville with a stack of computers, paper ‚les, and a good deal of machining hardware. The hidden cost was the conspiracy itself. All except ‚ve of the ‚fteen traitors had been accounted for—six dead, four captured—but their betrayal screamed of larger problems.
    Who could be trusted? The rebellion had ‚nally reached the innermost circles of Leadville itself, although no one had said anything so blunt to Hernandez. He’d seen the doubt in their eyes. The fact that he hadn’t been called in to meet with General