by Nancy Kress
“Dr. Ross—”
“Be quiet, I’m not done. I’m taking a quick blood sample.”
Could she see how much her nearness disturbed him? She moved close to lift one of his eyelids and he could smell her, that spicy female odor … How long had it been for him? Masturbation was not the same.… He felt his cock rise and how could that be when everything else on him was barely functional? Christ, let her not notice.…
“Jason,” she said quietly, “you have to sleep. Your reflexes are off, your skin is sallow and your eyes puffy. You have way too much cortisol in your blood. Soon you’re going to have tremors, impaired concentration, and forgetfulness, if you haven’t already. I’m going to give you something that won’t put you out so completely that you can’t be roused in case of emergency, but will nonetheless let you sleep. And Major Duncan is perfectly capable of taking over for a few hours.”
“Okay,” he said, and watched her eyes widen with surprise.
“Okay? Well, good. You should take two of these at—”
“Sir!”
Hillson, flinging open the door with no announcement, no ceremony. The master sergeant’s face wore the wooden expression that meant extreme rage. His shoulders looked carved from granite. Jason said, “What is it?”
“A homicide, sir. Corporal Winfield is dead. Private Dolin is under arrest.”
Winfield? A member of J Squad, he’d been on the raid at Sierra Depot, he’d parachuted down to extract the Sugiyama kids.… Jason’s mind fumbled at trying to place Private Dolin, and failed. He said, “What happened?”
“Corporal Kandiss—”
“Kandiss was involved? Did he kill Winfield?” A sour stickiness formed in Jason’s throat.
Lindy said, “Is a doctor needed?”
Hillson ignored her; perhaps he didn’t even hear her. “Sir, what happened was that Dolin drew his sidearm on Kandiss, who wasn’t armed, but Dolin didn’t know that Winfield was there, too. Winfield tried to disarm Dolin and Dolin shot him. Then Kandiss disarmed Dolin.”
“Where did all this happen?”
“At the brothel, sir.”
The brothel, where Settler women tried to spread indoctrination of Colin’s nature philosophy. A weird arrangement, but you couldn’t lock soldiers, most of them male, into two domes without a brothel developing, however informally. Colin had found out about it within days of arriving at the base. Jason hadn’t asked its location.
“Where’s Dolin?”
“In the stockade.”
Where Strople thought Jason was. Or maybe not. Did Strople have suspicions that more was going on at Monterey Base than he’d been told? Of course, Jason thought, more was also going on at Fort Hood than Jason had been told. Unless … Christ, he was so tired.
“Sir…” Hillson said, looking suddenly uncertain.
“I’m fine, Sergeant. Begin a formal investigation immediately. Report to me no later than this evening. Dismissed.”
“Yes, sir.” Hillson left.
Lindy said, “An investigation? Are you going to … will there be a court-martial?”
She didn’t understand. Jason passed his hand over his eyes, even as a detached part of his mind thought: That, that thing I’ll have to do—I have never done that before in my life.
“Jason? Will there be a court-martial?”
“No. We are at war. Dolin shot a fellow soldier. The investigation will find out why, but it doesn’t really matter why. He did it.”
“And you…”
Jason opened his lips to order her out, to stop her questions, to remove the scent of her that brought back so many memories, but no words came out. He felt his knees give way. He staggered, caught himself, sagged against the desk.
“Jason—”
“Go … away.”
She didn’t. She took another step forward. He stumbled again—how could he stumble when the floor was supporting him?—and she caught him.
Her touch undid him. All of it undid him: the long months, years, of trying to hold together a base of military and scientists who were needed—both groups—to save the world but did not trust each other. The murder of Winfield, which Jason should have somehow prevented. The murder by torture of Sugiyama’s little son and Jason’s failure to rescue Sugiyama in time. His looming court-martial, into which he had dragged six good soldiers. The fruitless work of the scientists in stopping RSA, the mission to which Jason had sacrificed his military honor by defying orders. The wreck of the Return, the wreck of the United States he’d sworn to serve, what he was going to have to do to Dolin, all of it all of it all of it …
Then he was in Lindy’s arms, the sobs shaking his whole body but nonetheless silent because a colonel in the United States Army did not cry.
“Shhh,” Lindy said, “shhhh, it’s all right.…”
The stupid statement sobered him. It was not all right. He pushed her away, but she caught at him, her small hands surprisingly strong. He remembered that.
“Listen to me, Jason,” she said, but without a trace of either command or plea. Maybe she still remembered that the best way to deal with him had always been with calm facts. “You are under enormous, even superhuman strain. You’ve done an incredible job, but no one can control everything, especially not in such an insane situation as this. If you keep blaming yourself for every single thing that does not go perfectly, you will drive yourself mad. And you can’t do that, because the base needs you. And I need you.”
That last was said in the same steady, reasonable voice as the rest, without emphasis. For a moment Jason wasn’t even sure he’d heard it. But he had; Lindy was letting the need show in her eyes.
So she was braver than he was, after all.
“Right now, you must sleep. I’m going to give you something for that. Hillson can conduct his investigation and then you can … do what is necessary. You have to have Dolin executed, don’t you? Yes. I’m sorry. But I’ll tell you this—he didn’t kill Winfield over any fight in a brothel over a girl or money or drink or whatever else anybody claims. Dolin was after Kandiss because some of your soldiers blame the star-farers for bringing the virophage to the base and causing the v-comas. They can’t reach Marianne or Jane or the other comatose because you have guards on the infirmary, but they could reach Kandiss. And Dolin wouldn’t have even tried it if he didn’t have more soldiers ready to lie for him about it.”
“I know.”
She smiled, a complex smile he couldn’t read. “Of course you do. Jason, you’re doing the best possible job under the worst possible circumstances. Now, take these.”
She handed him two pills. He took them without water, a pointless piece of macho toughness, and sagged into a chair. Lindy stood over him. He closed his eyes, but she was still there.
“Lindy,” he managed to choke out, “Lindy…”
She went still beside him.
He reached out, groped for her, and pulled her down on top of him, even as he rolled both of them off the chair and onto the floor.
“Lindy…”
“Shhh,” she said.
“I can’t … I want … You’ve always been…”
“Shhhhh.” She reached for his belt, tugging with her small, strong hands at the buckle.
It took a while for the sleeping pills to work.
CHAPTER 19
Zack watched Toni. It was unsettling to not know what he was seeing. He was unwilling to admit that he had become a little afraid of her.
He saw his old friend and colleague, looking physically unchanged. Toni wore the same tee and many-pocketed pants she had always favored, although now they hung on her; during the v-coma she had lost weight. Her gray-streaked brown hair was pinned back in its usual careless bun. She bent over the lab bench with the same round-shouldered stoop.
He saw her unchanged concern and love for Nicole, whom Toni visited three or four times a day, each time striding from the lab to the v-coma ward to stand wordlessly at the end of Nicole’s pallet. Toni never stayed more than
a few minutes. Once, she whispered something in Nicole’s ear. The comatose body on the bed didn’t stir.
He saw Toni’s intense concentration as she worked, as she had always worked. The researchers in the next lab, Drs. Sullivan and Vargas, worked on the samples taken from Toni’s and Belok^’s bodies. Toni worked on the avian gene drive. To carry out her experiments, she’d commandeered as many lab techs as she could. The problem was that she couldn’t work with them. Zack saw her frustration that not even he could follow what she was doing.
Toni would bark out a sentence—sometimes just the fragment of a sentence—about her work. The problem, Zack eventually figured out, was that she was giving a report that left out several things: the intermediate steps to get to her process, the results of those steps, the scientific hypotheses that had led her to those processes in the first place. It was as if she expected Zack and the assistants to grasp those from what she’d said. And none of them could.
“Go back, Toni,” he said, so often that he grew even more impatient than he was afraid. “Start at the beginning of what you did, and why.” And she would look at him as if he were a not-very-bright fifth-grader instead of her department head. Explain? her look said. Why would I need to explain to you how to add sixteen and seventeen: add the six and seven to get thirteen, put down the three and carry the one …
Then she would try to explain, and that was even worse. She was apparently holding several different strands of thought at once—that’s what she called them, “strands”—as graphics in her mind, enormously complicated and detailed graphics. That let her see connections among them that she was pursuing both mathematically and experimentally, each step of which changed a graphic in ways that in turn changed all the others. She couldn’t, or wouldn’t, draw it for him: “Too complicated.” And he could follow only a small part of it.
It made him humble.
It made him resentful.
Humbly and resentfully, he worked the intricate process of modifying DNA. The genes they modified would be injected into sparrows in the subterranean bird lab; the gene drive would incorporate itself into the sparrows’ reproductive machinery. The birds, artificially brought into mating readiness, would copulate and lay eggs. If Toni succeeded, embryos inside the eggs would carry a gene drive that would render all male offspring sterile.
If.
“Denatured random coil one sixty-four, with molecule fifteen,” Toni said, and Zack was supposed to know what she wanted him to do about the engineered folding of a protein he had never known existed.
Then all of it—proteins, genes, eggs—fled from his mind. An Army nurse entered the lab, protected by his scrubs from Toni’s scowl. “Dr. McKay,” he said, “your daughter is waking up.”
* * *
Caity had climbed off her bed and onto Susan’s, trailing her IV. When Zack dashed into the cubicle, she looked up at him fearfully. “Daddy! Mommy won’t wake up!”
He lifted Caity in his arms. “Yes, she will, honey. She needs to sleep now. Come on, let Mommy get her rest. Nurse, can this line come out of her arm? Can she … oh, Caity!”
The nurse detached Caity. Zack carried his daughter—where? There was no place to take her in this crowded makeshift coma ward, where now even the corridor held sleeping figures on gurneys. Zack clutched Caitlin as if she, not he, were a life raft. Her little body felt hot in his arms; she smelled of soap and a wet diaper, although she was far too old for diapers. He ducked with her into a supply closet, its shelves ominously bare.
The nurse followed, alarmed. “Dr. McKay, we need to … she must be examined! I’ve sent for Dr. Patel!”
“A minute … just give me a minute!”
“Daddy, I feel funny.”
Alarm shot through him. “Funny how? Nurse! Come back!”
Caitlin vomited all over him.
Toni and Belok^ hadn’t done that when they woke—had they? “Nurse!”
Then Claire was there, taking Caitlin from him, laying her on a clean bed somewhere—how had they gotten to this cubicle? Zack, paralyzed with fear, didn’t remember. But Claire was saying, “It’s all right, Caitlin, your tummy just hurt for a minute.… Zack, there was almost nothing in her anyway, I’m not finding anything abnormal…”
Caitlin lay quiet on the bed, gazing solemnly at the three adults clustered around her, at the small crowd visible in the corridor beyond. This was an event: a third v-coma victim had revived, the first child to do so.
Claire said gently, “How do you feel now, Caitlin?”
“Good.”
That same unblinking gaze, Caity’s eyes traveling from Claire to Zack to the nurse, from the nurse to Zack to Claire. The stillness of her small body, as if everything in her was concentrated in her eyes, or what was going on behind her eyes. The adults all holding their breaths, waiting … for what?
The suspended moment spun itself out longer than Zack could stand. “Caity, sweetheart…”
“I’m good, Daddy,” she said in her high child’s voice. “I’m not sick.
“I’m just thinking.”
* * *
Jason had never had to do this before. Had never expected to do it. There was no protocol. There were only eight soldiers and a doctor on a charred stretch of land beside an alien dome, in a gray dawn.
The day before, after sex with Lindy, whatever drug she’d given him had let him sleep nine hours straight. He’d woken to a message from the signal station, addressed to, and delivered to him by, Major Duncan. The convoy, five days from Monterey Base, had been attacked by New America. There had been a firefight, and New America had won.
Duncan, her lips drawn in such a tight line that words barely fit through them, said, “General Strople says he will send another convoy, more heavily fortified, but he can’t do so until next month. He says to keep you and DeFord in stockade and to turn all available resources to the repair of the Return. He wants that ship, sir, and he wants it bad.”
“Yes.” Bad enough to cause the deaths of a convoy of his troops. New America did not take prisoners, not unless the prisoner was someone who, like Sugiyama, they thought could be of use to them. Had the convoy been underfortified? Or did New America have more scavenged weapons, more powerful weapons, that Jason didn’t know about? He knew for sure only one thing: the annihilation of the convoy had bought Jason more time. Time paid for by the deaths of yet more men and women, because of him.
And now he was going to cause another death.
They stood on the east side of Lab Dome, just beyond the armory airlock. Gray clouds seemed to hang directly overhead and a light drizzle fell on the burned-out woods. Jason was the only one in an esuit. If he had permitted himself, he would have felt at a disadvantage, a commander more vulnerable than his troops. He did not permit himself to feel that, or anything.
“Lieutenant, conduct the prisoner to the … the pole.”
Dolin staggered a little as he was walked to the shoulder-high stake driven firmly into the ground twenty feet away. The pole was the trunk of a dead sapling, dragged from beyond the woods and stripped of its branches and leaves. The exposed wood where branches had been torn away looked pale against the remaining bark.
Dolin lurched again, and his escort clasped him more firmly. Jason had instructed Holbrook to give Dolin some sort of drug to dull anxiety and pain. Maybe it was keeping Dolin quiet as well, although Jason had not asked for that.
He had the results of Hillson’s investigation. He had conducted a hearing as well—not a formal court-martial but more than Dolin was entitled to under the rules of war. He had Dolin’s confession, offered not only freely but sneeringly, with all the vitriol of a man who knew he had nothing more to lose: “I shot the fucker defending Kandiss, and I tried to shoot Kandiss too. Them cunts brought the sickness to the base and if you wasn’t an alien-loving traitor who don’t deserve to command a latrine, you’d of shot them all out of the sky before they even landed on Earth. Fucking lily-livered coward!”
The lieutenant tied
a blindfold around Dolin’s eyes, then walked away.
Jason said, “Raise weapons.”
He didn’t know any other way to do this. The United States Army was at war, by a valid vote of Congress even if Congress no longer existed. He was commander. He would not order a backroom lethal injection, or anything else that could give rise to rumors of torture. The five men with raised rifles were all volunteers, but all carefully vetted. None, as far as Hillson could tell, were likely to lie about what they were doing, or to turn and shoot the base commander. None of the five was Kandiss.
Dolin sagged slightly forward in his bonds, straightened, sagged again. Maybe he was drifting in and out of consciousness. Jason had not specified how high a dosage Holbrook should administer.
This man had willfully murdered a fellow soldier, while trying to murder another.
The United States was at war.
“Fire,” Jason said.
Five weapons laid down fire. If any of the guns were aimed to miss, Jason didn’t need to know about it. Dolin’s body jerked, jerked again, blossomed into red. The guns fell silent.
“Lower weapons,” Jason said.
Holbrook declared Dolin dead. The body was cut down. The burial detail moved into action, covered by the others.
Jason and Holbrook returned to the airlock. Just before he went inside, he heard a flock of sparrows somewhere begin their morning song.
* * *
Zack sat in the conference room of Lab Dome, beside Colonel Jenner—an unwelcome juxtaposition he had not planned. The room, as always, held more people than it should. Someone had moved out the table (putting it where?) and brought in more chairs. These were packed in so close that Zack could smell the mustiness in Jenner’s uniform. He tried to edge away, but it was impossible.