by Nancy Kress
“—and they will start over—are starting over. This time, they will do better.”
“No. They will not. Do the math, Jeg^faan. If only four percent of each new generation survives, how long will it take for Terrans to become powerless? They have already lost their industries, their planet-wide communications, their technology. Probably all over Terra they are merely surviving. They were ahead of us, once, in science and technology, but they abused both. Terrans are finished. And yet they treat us with contempt!”
“They are not, and they do not.”
“Yes? I was attacked yesterday by two soldiers.” He pulled up his sleeve—Jane had wondered why he wore a Terran shirt over his wrap—and she saw ugly bruises and cuts on his arm. “They said that we are taking their food, bringing to them our diseases, polluting their bloodlines. They said we should go back where we came from. And they were right.”
Jane was shaken. “Did you … did you report this to Colonel Jenner?”
Glamet^vor¡ laughed. “Do you think he has control of his people? Like a lahk Mother would? There is no bu^ka^tel here, no respect, no solidarity. They are rotten animals.”
Claire emerged from Colin’s room. “He has remarkable recuperative powers, I’ll say that for him. You can go back in, Jane, if you like, but don’t stay too long. He needs to sleep.”
Jane turned her back on Glamet^vor¡ and squeezed herself into Colin’s room. She didn’t look back as she firmly closed the door behind her.
* * *
A half-moon shone as Jason climbed from a quadcopter in front of the signal station. Flying the copter at night was risky, but if Jason wanted to talk directly to HQ, it had to be from here. Specialist Kowalski was a good pilot even on visual only and by moonlight, and two heavily armed J Squad soldiers rode with them. Any snipers that New America had in the woods had either been asleep or inept. They’d flown under ground radar. Jason was here.
He glanced at the sky. Vega, Deneb, Altair: the Summer Triangle. He’d spent his thirteenth summer stargazing, making star charts, researching arcane celestial data on the Internet. He had hoped to be an astronomer, before he decided on West Point instead. Another, unlived life that probably would have ended abruptly at the Collapse.
The hillside tunnel opened and they entered the airlock. On the other side of decon, Jason shed his esuit. Neither Li nor DeFord saluted; things tended to be less formal at the station. Elizabeth Duncan would not have approved.
“Nothing to report, sir,” Li said. “No new intel to us, and New America’s comsat still offline.”
“Good. Get me HQ. And a cup of coffee, please.” The station had the last real coffee from base stores. They deserved it. “Do we have visual with HQ?” This report should already have been made, but before Jason had been able to get to the signal station, the visiting brass from HQ had shown up. Darnley and Mott had made the long, dangerous journey by quadcopter, and Jason still didn’t know why. That disturbed him. It didn’t seem like Colleen Hahn to not brief him that her representatives were in the Pacific Northwest.
Then something had gone wrong with the satellite software.
Li said, “No, sir, Fort Hood says that they’ve only been able to restore audio.”
“Good enough.”
IT Specialist DeFord said, “Sir, I tried to repair the visual component from this end, but there’s something wonky about the program … it’s like the code has been altered to block visual.”
Jason frowned and accepted a cup of coffee. “Altered? By the enemy?”
“No, sir, not hacked. Just rewritten at HQ, and in a way that won’t let me override it.”
That didn’t make sense, but Jason was no computer expert. “Audio will do.”
Li made the contact, requesting General Hahn. “One moment, Monterey Base,” said a disembodied voice. Jason had finished his coffee before another voice sounded. “Monterey Base, this is General William Strople, acting CO at Fort Hood and martial law commander in chief. Go ahead, Colonel Jenner.”
Startled, Jason said, “Sir? I was reporting to General Hahn.”
“General Hahn is gravely ill. Proceed, Colonel.”
Was this a New America hack of the satellite? Catastrophic, if so. Jason had never heard of a General Strople, although that proved nothing. He glanced at DeFord, who mouthed I don’t know. Jason said, “Request security protocol, sir.”
“Certainly. You are commended for your caution.”
They went through the classified oral exchanges until Jason was satisfied. He said, “Thank you, sir.”
“Begin your report.”
Colleen Hahn had had a definite format for briefings: one-sentence summaries followed by narration and Q&A. Jason stuck to it. “Three items to report. First, the Settlement of farmers on the Monterey coast was attacked by New America and survivors are now housed at Monterey Base. Second, one prisoner was captured and interrogated. Third, the spaceship Return remains safely in orbit.”
“What was learned from prisoner interrogation?”
“New America has captured Dr. Frank Philip Sugiyama and is holding him at Sierra Depot. They also have Sugiyama’s three children. One child has already been killed in an effort to force Sugiyama’s cooperation with retrieving the Q14 launch codes from the quantum computer. Unknown whether Sugiyama is now cooperating, or whether he is even able to retrieve the codes. Access protocol says no, and the computer will self-destruct if tampered with. But—well, this is a physicist with a mind equal to Albert Einstein’s.”
Silence. The dilemma was clear: Take out Sierra Depot with one of their three active Q14s, and you removed the possibility of New America’s gaining access to the codes for the other two. However, you also gave away the secret location of the Q14s, which would be clearly visible to New America’s ground radar. The nukes could be destroyed in their silos. If you did not take out Sierra Depot, and Sugiyama was able to get into the quantum computer and willing to cooperate with the enemy in order to save his children from torture, then New America had all three codes. It came down to trust in the quantum computer and lack of trust in Sugiyama. An impossible choice, given the lack of hard intel.
“Colonel Jenner, you are closer to the situation. What is your advice?”
Jason’s right hand, hidden on his lap, curled into a fist. Li shifted on his chair. Strople’s tone did not sound like a genuine request for additional information. Strople was covering his ass in case the situation went wrong. On the advice of Colonel Jenner, who had close knowledge of the factors involved … Generals Lassiter and Hahn would never have done this. Jason’s respect for Strople dropped a notch.
“Sir, it’s a difficult decision. But pre-Collapse classified materials are insistent on the integrity of the quantum computer’s protocols. The most likely scenario—not definite but most likely in my opinion—is that Sugiyama will be unable to crack the computer. He will try, from desperation, and it will self-destruct.”
And hopefully take out not only the physicist but also both his kids before they could be tortured. And destroy a bunch of New America fuckers as well.
Strople said, “So you suggest waiting to see how the situation develops.”
“Yes, sir. Maintaining both vigilance and readiness to shift strategy.”
“So ordered. What have you done with the prisoner?”
“Put him to hard labor.”
“At your discretion, Colonel.”
The disapproving tone meant Shoot the prisoner. Jason was not going to do that. He said only, “Yes, sir.”
The briefing continued. Jason explained that the Return was contaminated with RSA. He did his best to push from his mind the images of the two Sugiyama children still alive, a three-year-old boy and a four-year-old girl, Louis and Amanda. Frankie was all chopped up …
When Jason finished talking, Strople said, “Thank you, Colonel. Anything more?”
“No, sir. Sir, is General Hahn expected to recover? May I ask the nature of her illness?”
“T
he prognosis is uncertain. She contracted RSA.”
Stunned, Jason said, “How—”
“That is all, Colonel.”
“Yes, sir.”
RSA victims, as Jason well knew, died within a few days. Colleen Hahn’s infection must be recent, and inexplicable. In order to contract RSA, she would have had to leave the HQ dome without an esuit, or been in a firefight or accident that tore her suit, or come in contact with someone already infected inside the dome—but then all of HQ would be contaminated. Surely Strople would have briefed Jason on any of those events? And DeFord had said that visual communication with HQ had been deliberately blocked. Jason met Li’s eyes and saw his own doubts mirrored.
On his wrister, he called up the file on General William Strople. There wasn’t one, but ten years ago there had been a Major William Strople on active duty. No other Stroples among the officer corps.
No one in the United States Army had been promoted since the Collapse.
What had gone on at Fort Hood during the three days of the “software glitch”?
* * *
Two days later, Zack watched a hunting party leave through Lab Dome’s tunnel airlock. He only saw them go because he happened to be coming out of the bird lab, headed to Enclave Dome to see if Caitlin felt any better. The child was sleeping more and more. Claire Patel still could find nothing wrong. She told Zack and Susan that sleeping a lot was good for recovery from any illness, something that Zack already knew. “You might as well take the day off,” Toni said to Zack. “It’s not like we’re making any progress here, and didn’t you say Susan had to be somewhere for some meeting?”
“Yes,” Zack said, wound down his work, and took the rare chance for a whole day away from the bird lab, where sparrows cheeped and shat and bred and were sacrificed to, so far, no avail whatsoever.
The soldiers of the hunting party carried rifles with scopes, belts of ammunition, larger weapons intended not for game but for encounters with the enemy. That was also why there were so many hunters: once, a lone man had been picked off by a New America sniper and his body not discovered for days, by which time there had been little left of him. As the wilderness had returned to California, so had its big predators. On the other hand, it was no longer difficult to find deer, rabbits, even bear. Zack loved venison stew, and so wasn’t it hypocritical of him to shudder inwardly at the young men and women laughing and joking as they prepared for bloody killing? It was hypocritical, yes, as well as specieist, or whatever the word had been when Zack had been young. Let me eat meat and wear leather but don’t let me see how it’s procured. The eternal dilemma of the nonvegetarian liberal.
Leather—yesterday Zack had seen a civilian wearing a crude-but-new leather vest. Did the base now possess tanning facilities? Or did a tannery exist outside in the woods someplace, part of some Army-civilian black market? Zack worked so much that he didn’t keep up with what passed here for trendiness. He’d heard a rumor that two soldiers had shot a mountain lion and kept the head mounted on a wall somewhere, but this seemed doubtful to him. Surely taxidermy was now a dead art?
The chief importance of the rumor was its widespread belief. It showed that Jenner, who surely would have forbidden a mounted and decaying wildcat head, didn’t have complete control of the base he commanded, despite what Toni still called the “Praetorian Guard.” She had a name for Master Sergeant Hillson, too—“Varys,” who was apparently some sort of spymaster in an old epic.
The last of the hunting party entered the airlock. When it was empty again, Zack made his way through the tunnels to Enclave. Susan sat beside Caitlin, who clutched the tattered Bollers even while she slept.
“No change?”
“No. I think I’m worried.”
“Claire says it’s normal. So does Lindy.” Neither had been pleased to discover that Zack had used up their precious time by having both of them examine Caitlin at different times on the same day. Sometimes the lack of central scheduling was a good thing.
Zack put his arms around Susan and kissed her hair. “I miss you.”
“I’m right here.”
“You know what I mean.”
“I do. But I’m already late.” She gave his cock a friendly little squeeze, at once too much and far too little, smiled wickedly, and left.
Zack settled onto the bed beside Caitlin’s trundle, legs stretched out straight in front of him, and read an old scientific journal on his e-reader. There were no new scientific journals, and soon there might be no e-readers left. But while his existed, Zack tried to learn as much as he could of what had been cutting-edge science when the world Collapsed ten years ago.
The new normal, Marianne had said, with wonder and pain.
Hours later he was deep into an article on epistasis through epigenetic methylation, when someone pounded on the door. Zack leaped off the bed, tripped on Caity’s trailing blankets, and grabbed the doorknob to pull himself upright. It came off in his hand. He flung the door open by the hole and said in a fierce whisper, “Shhhh! My daughter’s sleeping!”
“Dr. McKay,” a soldier said, her eyes wide in a very young face, “Colonel Jenner says to report to Lab Dome. Right away, sir.”
“I can’t leave my daughter. She’s ill.”
“The colonel said immediately, sir.”
“Why? What’s happened?”
“Some people were killed.”
“An attack?” He hadn’t heard drones.
“No, sir. A bear.”
It didn’t make sense. If anyone outside—the hunting party or the Settlement garden diggers or the patrol—had been attacked by a bear, Zack wasn’t needed. He wasn’t a physician. And both perimeter patrol and the hunting party were heavily enough armed to take out a rhinoceros.
The soldier—and now Zack recognized her, a kid who’d grown up inside the base and now apparently joined the Army or been conscripted into it—said, “The colonel said Dr. Jenner wants you, ASAP. I don’t know why. I’m to escort you to Lab Dome.”
“But I … all right.”
He wrapped Caitlin in her blanket; she didn’t stir. He carried her into the corridor and to the “school,” a ramshackle area where two young women taught children of different ages whatever they could from tablets, a few handmade children’s books, and chalk on rock slates in lieu of paper. Before the Settlers arrived, the school had six pupils. Now there were an indeterminate and shifting number, depending on the day. Or sometimes the hour; Settler parents didn’t seem big on formal education. The cramped space looked like a mad version of America’s little red one-room schoolhouse.
“Karen, can I leave Caitlin with you? I’m sorry but there’s some sort of emergency at Lab Dome—no, not anything dangerous but Colonel Jenner has issued orders.”
“Well … I guess so. Is she contagious?”
“No, not at all,” Zack said, hoping this was true. But in such close quarters, whatever one child caught, they all got eventually, anyway. He laid Caitlin in a corner and arranged the blanket to partially hump up as a pillow for her head. “I’ll be back as soon as I can.”
“Okay. Devon, did you finish that math problem yet? No? Why not?”
Outside, escorted by the young soldier, Zack was startled to see an evening sky. He had been reading, and Caitlin sleeping, longer than he’d thought. Cool breezes ruffled dark trees beyond the perimeter, bringing the odors of mint and loam. One bright star shone directly overhead. He breathed deep, enjoying this too-brief taste of autumn twilight.
It was his last enjoyment for sixteen hours.
The corpses lay on open body bags on top of rough wooden tables. Zack recoiled; they were horribly maimed. His first thought was Torture.… sadistic fuckers! But then he saw that the young soldier had been correct. Even a layman could recognize the long claw marks of animal mauling. Kayla Rhinehart and Glamet^vor¡ had died horribly.
But why had they been outside? And why were the bodies here, in the virology lab?
Marianne Jenner, looking every year
of her age, was at the one electron microscope. Lab assistants seemed to be preparing slides. Toni spotted Zack and walked over, the usual sardonic lip curl gone from her face.
“Toni, what the hell happened?”
“Those two idiots went outside. Rhinehart left a note—they planned to steal the spaceship and go back to World. Apparently neither of them realized that of course Emperor Jason First of His Name had already moved the ship to safety in orbit. Anyway, they didn’t get very far. Wildlife got them first. Esuits might protect against microbes but not against a mother bear with cubs. A hunting party found them.”
“But—”
“They were both crazy, Zack, in different ways. And that’s not just a metaphor. Marianne suspected something about their brains. She says that everyone who came from World has been having headaches and, just lately, sleeping too much. She and Claire Patel convinced Lindy Ross that there was something weird going on. They did autopsies and prepared slides of brain tissue.”
Sleeping too much? It must be just a coincidence; Caitlin had not come from World.
Toni continued, “You’re going to ask how they got permission to autopsy. They didn’t. Lindy says she’ll take responsibility with His Majesty. Zack, you need to see these slides.”
She led him to the electron microscope. Marianne, so deep in her work that she didn’t hear them approach, jerked in surprise. Then she wordlessly rose and let Zack at the eyepiece.
Toni said, “Remember, everyone on that spaceship was infected with the virophage that destroyed the original R. sporii on World.”
Zack peered into the eyepiece, adjusted it for better focus, looked again.
“Oh my God!”
“And that’s not all,” Toni said. “There’s more.”
CHAPTER 11
Jason said, “How did this happen? How did those two get out of the dome?”
In the command post, the entire outside patrol stood at rigid attention, six soldiers whose blank faces didn’t quite hide their fear. Elizabeth Duncan stood beside Jason, hands clasped behind her back. Jason said, “Corporal Michaelson?”
