by Nancy Kress
They climbed to dome level and dispersed to stations per the OPORD. Jason, ignoring the frightened civilians—J Squad would explain and reassure—climbed to the command post and looked out through night-vision goggles.
The Return, its mission finished, had already lifted back to orbit. The bombs it had dropped, the most powerful nonnuclear weapons ever developed, had incinerated everything around both domes in a quarter-mile radius. In the eerie night-vision green, the scene was something from a nightmare. Forest burned, although the thickening rain would take care of that. It was already bringing down the dust and smoke of the carnage. The twisted metal of Strykers gleamed wetly. Debris lay everywhere, along with what was left of bodies. It would take days to clean up everything and refortify the tunnels.
Jason had gambled that the domes themselves could withstand the ordnance. The bombs had been experimental ten years ago; no one knew how powerful they still were. Now Jason knew. The Return would be back at first light. This job was only half finished.
He wasn’t going to report to HQ until it was. Strople wasn’t going to stop him.
* * *
Colin said shakily, “Can you get Lindy up the stairs? You can leave me here and put her in the chair!”
“No,” Zack said. “I don’t dare move her any more without a doctor—I have no idea where she’s hurt. I’m going for help.”
Lindy quavered, “I’m a doctor, I—” but Zack was already sprinting up the stairs. At the top, he found himself unable to unlock the door at the top. Christ!
Colin called, “What is it?”
“The door isn’t recognizing me—I don’t know why not!” It must have something to do with the earthquake, or bombs, or whatever the fuck had happened. He pounded on the door with his fist; nothing happened.
Colin called, “Come back down. She has an implanted mic and earplant.”
Of course she did. Cursing himself for an idiot—Colin, who eschewed technology, had remembered the mic and implant and Zack had not—he sprinted back down the stairwell. He bent over Lindy. She was speaking in short gasps, her voice full of pain. “Jason … help me … Lab tunnel … please…”
“Lindy, no—Jenner will be over in Enclave Dome, he can’t hear you! Call someone else…”
But someone heard. Maybe the mic, or the frequency, was tuned to more than just Jenner. A few long minutes later multiple footsteps pounded down the stairwell. Claire Patel said, “What happened?” at the same moment that an Army sergeant thundered, “What the fuck are you people doing down here?”
Zack wished he had a good answer. He no longer knew.
Anything.
CHAPTER 16
When Dr. Holbrook came out of the operating room, Jason was there. Three o’clock in the morning, and Dr. Holbrook’s eyes drooped with exhaustion; he was not a young man. He pulled down his mask and said, “Sir, she’ll be fine. A broken rib punctured a lung, but she’ll be fine.”
“Will there be any permanent damage?”
“No.”
“Can I see her?”
“She’s sedated. They’ll take her to … wherever they can find an empty bed, I guess.”
A nurse found, or made, an empty bed in a tiny room whose empty shelves on three sides said that until recently it had been a storeroom. Lying on a gurney, Lindy looked small and vulnerable. Jason smoothed her hair, matted with dirt, away from her forehead. She didn’t stir. Her left hand lay on top of the blanket. Bare—what had she done with her wedding rings? Probably put them in a drawer somewhere, as he had with his.
She breathed regularly, her small breasts rising and falling under the hospital gown. Was the 3-D printer still making gowns? He thought he remembered hearing that the raw material had all been used up, but maybe not. There was so much going on in these two domes that he did not, could not, keep track of it all.
When had he and Lindy lost track of each other? At the Collapse? No, they had still been working together then, overwrought and terrified and furious in those first few days when Jason had been snatching scientists and equipment, trying to outrun the spread of RSA in order to create an outpost of military research. He and Lindy had worked together at the start of the war, too. He had held her as she cried when they’d gotten the news of the nuclear strikes that had wrecked what was left of civilization.
So when? He had done only what was necessary to defend the base. To defend her. And, somehow, that had made him lose her.
Just as he had lost Jane to Colin. Although Jane, unlike Lindy, had never been his to begin with.
“Lindy,” he said softly, “what the fuck were you trying to do in that tunnel?”
Actually, he already knew. The patrol, outside in the nightmare wreckage, had received the message from Captain Cooper, acting CO at Lab Dome. Jason had gone over there, picking his way through twisted wreckage and body parts in the streaming rain, and had learned the whole stupid story from Zack McKay.
Lindy had been trying to save the base. Jason had actually done so, by taking a terrible risk, and armed with bombs and military knowledge and a fucking spaceship. She had had nothing but courage and heart and a willingness to die if necessary.
He took her limp hand. So much emotion shook him that the floor seemed to waver. Lindy.
A noise behind him, and Jason turned. Colin, in his powerchair, sat in the doorway.
“Jason—Colonel Jenner—I need to talk to you. Alone.”
* * *
Zack crept onto the bed beside Susan, who didn’t stir. Sometimes v-coma patients twitched when touched, but not now. The curtained cubicle held two beds; Caity lay on the other. Zack put his arms around his comatose wife. Susan had lost weight. Always slim, now her bones felt as fragile as a sparrow’s, as fragile as Zack’s heart.
Everything in him ached: muscle, bone, brain. Colonel Jenner himself had questioned Zack about Lindy’s plan, about the tunnel, about the entire disastrous enterprise, and the more Jenner questioned, the stupider Zack felt. Why had he ever agreed to help Lindy?
Because somebody had to do something, and Zack had not trusted that Jenner and his military were capable of that. Well, Zack had been wrong. The attacking forces had apparently been pulverized. The base was safe, and Zack was lucky he wasn’t in prison for violating a military area or something. If they had a prison. If he wasn’t so desperately needed in the “research effort.” Which, like Lindy’s plan, was going nowhere.
In the last twelve hours, another soldier, a civilian, and a Settler had fallen into v-comas.
He was, paradoxically, too tired to sleep. But eventually the sound of Caitlin’s and Susan’s breathing calmed him, the only things that could.
The only things that mattered.
* * *
Colin said to his brother, “You need to take me with you to Sierra Depot. It will be today, won’t it? You need me with you.”
It took all of Jason’s self-control to not betray surprise. “Sierra Depot?”
“Come on, Jason—the attack you’re planning.”
“Why do you think there will be an attack on Sierra Depot?”
“I made it my business to know. I’m not stupid, even though you think my ideas about the Settlement are stupid. And unlike you, I’m not isolated by military protocol from talking to anybody at all. Nurses, cooks—do you know how much information cooks and kitchen help overhear in the mess? Your off-duty soldiers talk to the Settler women, who report to me. Soldiers speculate about what you’re going to do with them. Some might even know.”
Christ—Colin’s intel network was as good as Hillson’s. Maybe better. “I don’t discuss strategy with civilians. Especially not civilians that engage in violations as stupid as the one you just did.”
“It was stupid,” Colin said, with his disarming candor, “but that was Lindy’s plan. This will be yours and so I’m sure it will be well thought out and effective. The reason you need me with you is my hearing. I can hear things way before any of your officers can.”
“We hav
e technology to ‘hear things.’”
“Not on the Return, you don’t. Or if it’s there, you don’t know how to use it. Because you’re going to go on the Return, aren’t you? To bomb the jets at the depot the same way you bombed New America here?”
“Again, as I said—”
“I know, I know, you don’t discuss strategy with civilians. But I can be an added resource, Jason. You need all the resources you can get.”
Jason studied his brother’s face, that face he had known as toddler, child, awkward teen, grown man. And yet how much did he know Colin at all? It was possible to become so familiar with someone that you ceased to see him at all. And since Jason had chosen West Point, their lives had diverged so much.
“Colin, why would you even want to go on any kind of military operation at all? You disapprove of the Army, of our tech, of everything this base is trying to do. Why go on an attack, if there were to be one?”
Colin said simply, “The kids.”
“What kids?”
For the first time, Colin showed a flash of anger. “Don’t play dumb with me. Jason. The two kids of Sugiyama’s that New America captured and are still alive. If they are alive still.”
“How did you—”
“Tommy Mills. That boy is confused as hell. But he’s been in Sierra Depot, he came from there, and he’s another resource you’re neglecting. Seeing what happened to the one Sugiyama child really shook him. He wants to help get the kids out of there. Lindy told me—”
“Lindy? Lindy talked to you about all this?”
“We got a little drunk one night. This is all a huge strain on her, too.”
Lindy and Colin ‘got a little drunk one night’? A flash of jealousy seared through Jason like a first-degree burn. Jane, and now Lindy?
Colin, for once oblivious to Jason’s state of mind, rushed on. “Lindy’s having nightmares about the kids. About Sugiyama, too. I know you’re not planning an extraction raid, but you’ve got Mason Kandiss, who’s done them before. And Tommy says the Sugiyamas are housed separately and a little away from the main barracks. Even some of the New America soldiers are appalled at what happened to Frankie, and so General Blackwood moved them out of sight. And—why, Jason? What do they want from Sugiyama?”
So Colin didn’t know everything. Not about the quantum computer, not about the launch codes for the Q14s. Colin’s ignorance steadied Jason. He said, “What could you hear if you were on the Return? Nothing.”
“Not until you open the airlock. I don’t suppose that a Worlder ship comes with bomb-dropping equipment. You’ll have to do it manually, won’t you? From fairly low?”
Jason said nothing.
“I can hear a lot,” Colin said, almost humbly.
Jason knew, had known all his life, how much Colin could hear. Plants making more noises than anyone had suspected. Imminent earthquakes, thunderstorms, air attacks. Mice underground, buried machinery, humans. The entire environment, which was why he was so sensitive to its fate.
“Please,” Colin said. “Let me do something useful, Jason.”
Jason tongued on his mic. “Hillson, escort Private Mason Kandiss and the prisoner-at-large to Lab Dome conference room immediately.”
* * *
Marianne dreamed. Deep in v-coma, images formed in her brain, shadows born of new connections and new proteins, both built with old cerebral materials. But in that building, that unconscious construction, lay everything.
Gaze at the shadow of a building at midday and it looks sharp, well defined. Look at the building again at midafternoon and the shadows have gone soft and long, melting at the edges into other structures, connecting them in new ways. At night the shadows disappear, along with the building itself if the night is dark enough. But look by moonlight, by starlight. Look through night-vision glasses at the green images both familiar and infinitely strange.
It all depends on the light. On how much you can see, on how much appears connected to everything else.
Marianne rose almost to consciousness, stirred on her pillow, sank back into the shadowy depths.
* * *
The FiVee rumbled from Lab Dome an hour before dawn. The low cloud cover continued, although the rain had stopped and on the western horizon lay a thin strip of clear pearl gray.
Jason sat in the back of the FiVee with Mason Kandiss, two other soldiers with airborne experience, half of J Squad, Colin Jenner, the prisoner-at-large, and an exhausted Major Holbrook, who was too old to operate at midnight and do battle at dawn but who was the only Army physician they had. Only Kandiss and Jason wore esuits; the rest had already survived RSA, the invisible killer all around them. But Jason was more concerned with visible enemies.
The FiVee rolled over the charred and body-strewn perimeter of the base, then reached the rain-sodden forest. Smashing through and over saplings, bushes, hidden rocks, the vehicle was both noisy and easily spotted, but that no longer mattered, not until New America sent reinforcements. Jason watched Kandiss’s lips move—a silent prayer? The big Ranger, 240 pounds and all of it muscle, sat on the parachute packs, with Colin’s powerchair wedged between Kandiss and the truck wall. Tommy Mills crouched at Kandiss’s feet.
The Return floated down to a new location, fairly close to the base. The troops jumped from the back of the FiVee almost before it had come to a complete stop. In five minutes everyone and the new equipment was on the ship and it was lifting. The most important resources were already aboard.
As always, Jason was struck by the amount of wide, empty space on the Return. This was a spaceship designed to carry people, their possessions, their animals, and their crops to colonize a new planet. Once, the United States had planned on doing that, too. Those plans had disappeared in the destruction of the Collapse and then the war, but maybe his country could have another chance. After all, it was to the United States that the Worlder ship had come. To Jason’s base. It was his job to use and preserve it.
If Sierra Depot had acquired F-35s and Strykers, they might have acquired ground-to-air missiles that could take out anything below seventy-five thousand feet. And way below that was where Jason intended to go.
Corporal Michaelson escorted him to the bridge. Lieutenant Allen turned from the control console. “Welcome aboard, sir.”
“Thank you.”
“Awaiting orders.”
He gave them. Allen’s eyes widened. “Yes, sir.”
“And maintain constant communications with the airlock, Lieutenant.”
“Yes, sir.”
“Do you know any more about the fuel situation than you did before?”
“No, sir. Unknown fuel source, presumably sealed inside somewhere.”
“Then we’ll just have to hope the ship doesn’t suddenly run out of fuel and fall out of the sky.”
“If so, I’ll try to have it fall on Sierra Depot, sir.”
Despite himself, Jason almost smiled. “Are you still navigating solely on visual?”
“Yes, sir. We’ll have to drop out of the clouds at some point.”
“I’ll tell you when.” Jason had maps and Allen had a compass; given a constant and known speed, he’d figured the time to Sierra Depot. Maps, compass, basic geometry—it was as if navigation had returned to the nineteenth century.
Jason returned to the large area near the wide airlock. Why so wide? Had the Worlders, whose “technology” Jane had described to him, brought beast-drawn carts through here, along with the sophisticated telescopes and other tech that their bizarre society permitted or the super-alien tech bequeathed to them?
Everyone was in position. The inner door of the airlock was already open. Colin and Tommy were both harnessed to the wall, close to the outer door; neither would fall out if the ship abruptly tilted with the outer door open. Everyone wore oxygen masks except Kandiss and the two airmen, who wore parachute harnesses. Just beyond, the designated bombardiers stood with the same lethal explosives that Jason had just dropped on his own base.
Tension
prickled through the area like heat.
“Allen, now,” Jason said.
There was no sensation of motion. But on the wall screen, the gray mass of clouds below them became a gray wall filling the screen, and then they were below the clouds, dropping low. The airlock door opened. Tommy and Colin leaned forward, into the cold air.
Below them, Sierra Depot lay in dawn light. Mostly a support facility, it had no dome. Once the depot had been a 34,000-acre, high-desert supply, maintenance, and repair facility, ideal for outdoor storage of rows and rows of vehicles along with its many buildings. Even before the Collapse, changes in weather patterns combined with budget cuts had greatly reduced the depot’s stocks of everything. RSA had left so few survivors that much of the rest had been closed. When the war started, the remaining troops had defended the depot bravely until reinforcements arrived. Before that happened, however, the commander had destroyed everything he could not defend, so that it wouldn’t fall into New America’s bloody hands.
The depot had been chosen to house the top secret quantum-computer project precisely because a supply depot was not a place an enemy would look for it—but that was before the enemy included renegade pieces of the Army itself. Sierra’s CO had been prepared to blow up the buried quantum project, too, but that hadn’t been necessary. The depot had held until New America had captured it a few weeks ago.
Jason asked Tommy Mills, “Where are they being held?” The Return hovered over the remains of so many battles: rows of blasted vehicles, charred barracks, twisted metal storage units. An area to one side, circled by an electric fence, held lighted buildings. Tiny, antlike figures patrolled, undoubtedly raising alarms.
Tommy shook his head, his young face squinched into fantastic anxiety. Then he pointed. “That building there … by them trees … I think that’s it.…”
“Allen, sixteen degrees north from current position … Colin?”
Colin, eyes closed, bit his lip. “I can’t … no, wait … yes. That building there, the one off by itself.” As the ship dipped low to fly over the building, Colin sagged in his chair with efforts Jason could only imagine: straining his hearing to take in everything below, filtering out what he didn’t need, searching mind-deafening noise for one muddied signal. No time to ask if he was sure. F-35s could scramble in three minutes. Missiles could launch even faster.