Plague Year by Jeff Carlson Page A

Colorado. At worst there was an entire planet between them. And the men and women down there had no reason to engage in a conversation they didn’t want to have if they could win simply by not talking to her.
    Yesterday her fears and frustration had reached a new pitch.
    Yesterday, Gus had intercepted a series of transmissions between Leadville and a C-130 cargo transport on its return flight from California. They’d done it. They’d sent a team of Army Rangers west in search of the lab where the locust had been created—and the soldiers had remained in Stockton for more than five hours after their air tanks ran out, refusing to accept failure. One young man had been partially blinded. All for nothing. They hadn’t found a single clue and Ruth could still hear the last words of the recording Gus had played for her, the terse exhaustion of the soldier’s voice: “No go, it’s no go.”
    What if Leadville chose not to risk more men, more equipment, more jet fuel? What if they stuck to the conservative path that had trapped her up here for so long and let their greatest opportunity slip away?
    Ruth decided she’d been working on the wrong people. It was too easy for everyone on the ground to ignore her—but if she could convince the astronauts, everything changed.
    There wasn’t anything Leadville could do to stop them from abandoning the ISS.
    * * * *
    Derek Mills had fled to the Endeavour , and Ruth cornered him there. He sat in the low, cramped flight deck, strapped to his chair, the rattle of his laptop’s keyboard masking her approach through the interdeck hatch behind him.
    She froze halfway out of the floor. He’d dimmed the up-lights but didn’t seem to notice her shadow laid over the console before him, until she knocked and quickly moved closer.
    Mills tilted one glance up at her, his jaw set. Ruth didn’t bother with words. She passed him the bound sheaf of photographs she’d wanted to share back in the hab module. The station’s cameras were incredible stuff, worthy of James Bond, able to count the legs on a bug.
    She’d clipped the picture of the Leadville county airport to the top of the stack because she wanted to stir his interest. She needed to engage him with the challenge of it.
    Two bulldozers and several hundred people both in and out of uniform were expanding the lone runway, fighting into the hill on the south side because a big DC-10 had sunk into the mud fifty yards beyond the north end. They were also bringing in a crane to deal with the wreck, but it was having trouble maneuvering through the jam of other aircraft.
    Mills barely looked at the picture and he did not look at her. He held the stack out for Ruth to take back.
    “I know it’s not enough room,” she said.
    A ten-minute drive from town, the county airport offered less than 5,000 feet of runway. It was never intended for large commercial flights, much less space shuttles careening down at 220 miles per hour. If they’d begun construction the previous spring, Ruth supposed there might have been something usable by now—but she didn’t have the right to blame them for being too busy.
    “It’s never going to be enough room,” she told him. “Not before we’re out of air.”
    Mills jiggled the stack with an irritated grunt, about to drop it. Ruth reached in quickly but was careful to touch only the top picture, peeling it back.
    “Here,” she said. “We land here.”
    From above, the terrain around Leadville resembled a giant bathtub that had been filled with clay and left under the shower for eons. The Continental Divide ran nine miles east of the city and curled around to wall it in on the north as well. Just six miles west of downtown stood another immense range, and most of the area within this vast, bent tub was a jumble of hills and lumps and gullies, scoured by the unimaginable amounts of rain and snowmelt that formed the headwaters of the Arkansas River.
    A railroad track and two-lane highway ran north