Ruins

“What else can we do?” asked Vale. “Everyone left in White Plains is assigned to energy, maintenance, or food production; we can spare them, but do we really want word of this to spread? It’s a nuclear attack, for crying out loud—the last time someone tried to nuke the Partial army, they struck back with the biggest display of overkill in the entire Partial War. I don’t want to cause a panic or a pogrom.”

“All they need to know is that they’re looking for a human matching her description,” said Vinci. “We don’t have to tell them what she’s doing.”

“They’ll figure it out soon enough,” said Vale. “They’re not idiots.”

“Their first assumption will be the East Meadow bioweapon,” said Vinci. “The patrols I organized this morning already think that’s what they’re looking for, though obviously I didn’t confirm or deny it.”

“Congratulations,” said Vale, “your cunning ruse has struck me speechless. Did you also tell them not to share their suspicions with anybody else? Do you have any faith that they’ll actually follow that order? All it takes is one drunk soldier in a bar tonight, telling his mates about the paranoid snipe hunt he’s been assigned to by the former AWOL traitor now serving under a member of the Trust, and the suspicions will fly and the rumors will grow and who knows what we’ll have in the morning? Not three months ago this city tore itself apart in an involuntary change of leadership, because Trimble was too paralyzed by indecision to confront any of the problems her people were facing. Now Morgan’s doing the same thing, too obsessed with expiration to bother with anything else, and the city’s getting restless. A panic like this—nuke or bioweapon or anything similar—and we’ll have a riot on our hands.”

“A few Partials dead in a riot is still better than an entire city disintegrated in a mushroom cloud,” said Vinci. “If it takes a public announcement and a citywide search, then that’s what we do.”

“Another batch dies in two weeks, give or take,” said Vale. “Another fifty thousand people gone, not in the blink of an eye but in a debilitating, agonizing process. Fifty thousand death signatures saturating the air in this city until you can barely breathe without losing your mind to depression or madness. Do you know what that’s going to do to the army here? Do you know who they’re going to blame?”

“You?” asked Vinci.

Vale frowned. “They should, but they won’t—even if the Trust’s role in their expiration was common knowledge, killing me wouldn’t be enough. Their problems have always had their root in humanity: the war, the poverty, the oppression, the Last Fleet. Even expiration—Morgan and I pushed the buttons, but it was the human species as a whole who asked for it, who planned it, who paid for it. Now the humans have a bioweapon? They have a nuke? Tell me you believe for one minute that the Partials won’t retaliate with lethal force, falling on that island with everything they have and more. Even with two-thirds of your species dead, you outnumber them ten to one. You have rotors, you have ATVs, you even have a few tanks left—enough for an armored brigade, at least. The humans have survived this long only at your mercy, and that mercy will be gone if word of the nuke gets out. I want to find that nuke as much as you do, but we need to keep it secret.”

Vale closed his eyes, exhausted and frustrated. There was a squawk from the radio.

“Arrow Team to General Vale,” said the voice. “Code White, repeat, Code White.”

“Code White,” said Vale, his eyes snapping open. “They’ve found her.”

“And Arrow’s one of mine,” said Vinci, a slow wave of fear spreading out across the link. “That means she’s in the city.”

“Damn.” Vale climbed to his feet and crossed to the radio. “This is General Vale. This line is not secure, repeat, this line is not secure. We will come to you. State your location. Over.”

“Unsecure line acknowledged,” said Arrow Team. “Checkpoint Seven. Over.”

Vinci spread a map across the table and scanned it quickly. “Here,” he said, pointing to the western edge of the city. “It’s an old college.”

“Barely a mile from downtown,” said Vale. “If she sets it off there, it’ll kill every Partial in White Plains.”

“Then we’d better make sure she doesn’t.”

Vinci frowned, then pressed the radio button to speak. “Checkpoint Seven: We’ll see you in a few minutes. Over and out.”

Vale had a small Jeep, fully electrical. The Partials maintained a nuclear power plant that supplied more than enough power—enough that Morgan had siphoned it for years while in exile, powering her secret laboratory. The drive to the old college was short, and when they arrived they found the place swarming with soldiers, far more than a single recon team could account for. Vale swore and climbed out of the Jeep.

“Report,” he said firmly, and the link carried the full weight of his authority. The sergeant in charge was talking almost before she turned to face him.