by Nancy Kress
“Branch, no.” Her voice held compassion under its firmness. “This time dilation is as much a surprise to me as to the rest of you.”
Silence. Salah waited. Whatever Branch said next would be critical.
“I’m … I’m sorry, Dr. Jenner. It’s just…”
“I know,” she said. “Don’t worry about it.” Then she did the best thing she could have done: her footsteps receded quickly along the passageway, allowing Branch to enter the infirmary unseen.
The small room had all the personality of a meat locker: two walls of bulkhead storage cabinets plus a blank wall screen, two walls of stacked metal bunks that could fold down if needed. If more than four beds were required, the ship was in trouble. In the middle sat two chairs and a collapsible table, now holding a box of tissues and the pot of coffee without which nobody on the ship seemed able to function. Salah, who drank tea, was prepared.
“Come in, Branch. Sit down. What can I do for you?”
Unlike Ritter, also twenty-eight, Branch Carter was direct. “I need a sleeping pill. I can’t sleep since I heard what those bastards did to us.”
Salah kept his tone neutral; the young man bristled with anger looking for a reason to explode. Branch’s personnel file said he was extremely competent at his job, affable and tireless, and “of a disposition to work well with the scientists aboard.” It did not say he was prepared to have his temporal place in the universe fucked with. Salah said, “You’re assuming that the Kindred knew about the time dilation.”
“Why wouldn’t they? They brought their ship to Earth, and they sent a ship to a colony world, too—the ship that got infected with the spore cloud in the first place.”
“Yes, that’s true. But consider this—they may not have known they jumped fourteen years when they came to Earth, where they’d never before been. And if the colony planet is fairly close to Kindred—say, even in the same star system—their other ship might not have needed to jump, or the time dilation might have been so small they didn’t notice it.”
“Or they might have lied to lure us to Kindred, thinking that we wouldn’t come any other way.”
Was that the idea circulating among the younger people aboard? Maybe. Branch, the three youngest soldiers under Colonel Matthews, and two of the Navy crew were under thirty. Naturally they would talk away from their superiors. Salah leaned forward in his chair.
“If the Kindred lied, why do you think that might be? What would they gain from ‘luring’ us to Kindred?”
“A blood supply immune to the spore cloud. When they left Earth, remember, we didn’t have the vaccine yet. Maybe they never developed it.”
“Possibly. But of course, they are more advanced than we are, so they probably did develop the vaccine. After all, when the spore cloud hits Kindred a few months from now, the Kindred will have had years to prepare. In addition, they already have ten Terrans, the ones who went with them, to donate blood.”
Branch ignored the second part of this argument, seizing on the first. “If they’re so much farther advanced than we are, then why did they come to Earth for our help in the first place?”
A good question, and one that had been asked often: by scientists, by politicians, by media, by an endless number of conspiracy theorists. Never with a satisfactory answer.
“All I’m saying,” Branch said, “is that I don’t trust them now. They never told us that humans were immune, after all.”
“If you haven’t trusted them all along, why did you apply to come on this mission?”
The young man looked away, then back at Salah. Honesty wrinkled his fresh skin, and all at once he looked even younger than he was. “I wanted to go into space. I mean, who wouldn’t? I jumped at the chance. But this is a dirty trick and I don’t trust them now. That’s all I’m saying.”
“And all I’m saying is that you’re a scientist. As a scientist, you owe it to objective truth to wait until you have all the facts before you make a judgment about the Kindred. When we get close enough for communication, we’ll have more answers. Does that seem fair?”
“Yes. But … if they’re so far ahead of us that they can build ships like this, why can’t they pick up our communications from space? We could do that decades ago.”
Another unanswerable question. Salah said, “I don’t know. But let’s gather all the facts before leaping to conclusions.”
“Yes. Okay. That makes sense.” Branch rose. He looked calmer now, the sleeping pill forgotten. “Thanks, Doctor.”
“Anytime.”
Salah made a note on Branch’s chart. Then he sat for a while, thinking. The lab tech’s underlying distrust of the Kindred should have been detected by the battery of psychological tests he took before being accepted for the Friendship. Not that Salah had ever really trusted psychological testing; except in extreme cases, it seldom revealed anything not obvious during an hour-long interview. Extroversion, novelty avoidance, reasoning ability, lying—a sensitive interviewer could ferret them all out with a few good questions and a lot of careful listening. People were just too complex for simple true-false tests.
Still, Branch’s visit raised a question about the supposedly exhaustive background checks: What else had they missed? And in whom?
* * *
When Leo got to the wardroom, five minutes late for his scheduled exercise session, Miguel Flores sat at the table, reading on his tablet. Flores looked up briefly and scowled; he’d been scowling since everybody got the news about the time dilation. Well, it wasn’t any worse for him than anybody else, and anyway there wasn’t anything anybody could do about it. It just was.
Zoe Berman was already on the AllEx machine, doing pull-ups. Her arms bulged with muscle. She was long, lean but with definite breasts, and she had a face that belonged on an angel. Leo tried not to look. He climbed onto the bike, set the resistance for maximum, and began pumping. In his view, none of this equipment was any substitute for running or climbing, but this was what they had.
Twenty minutes later, Miguel cursed softly, closed his tablet, and left. There was no place to go except here, your bunk, or the common room, which was off-limits to the enlisted men unless you were on watch. At least they each had personal quarters, however small and cramped, instead of a barracks.
Leo said to Zoe, “And so another one crawls into his cave. We’re all going to be hibernating bears before we reach the planet.”
Zoe said, “Switch.”
Leo climbed off the bike and onto the AllEx, and Zoe took the bike. She staggered a little getting on. Her eyes, huge and green, looked weird somehow. Cloudy. Leo said sympathetically, “Not sleeping well?”
“Shut up.”
O-kaaay. Not a candidate for leadership awards. Leo did the required pull-ups, enjoying the play of his own muscles, the beating of his own heart, even the sweat that filmed his forehead. The time dilation, which was covering the ship with its own stink, didn’t bother him all that much. His parents were dead; there was no love lost between him and the foster family that had raised him for the state money; he didn’t have a girl. Earth twenty-eight years from now was sort of intriguing, and the Army would still be there.
The whirring from Zoe’s bike slowed.
The Army was his real home, his bedrock, had been since he’d been eighteen. Basic, then sniper school, RASP (but don’t think about that), then the 101st Airborne. Action in Brazil and that pissant skirmish in Turkey. The Army gave his life order and meaning. He knew guys who couldn’t wait to get out, but not Leo. He was—
The bike stopped whirring.
Leo turned his head. Zoe slumped sideways, her eyes unfocused. Leo leaped up, just in time to catch her before she hit the deck. The bike seat and the back of her shorts were both covered with blood.
“Berman! Hey!” He eased her to the floor.
“Get away from me.” A second later she clutched him. “Don’t tell anybody!”
Tell anybody what? Leo didn’t understand what was happening. Zoe gave him the most
forced, horrible smile he’d ever seen. She said, “You never seen blood from a girl’s period before? What are you, a virgin?”
“No.” But this wasn’t regular period blood like girls got, usually when you didn’t want them to. Leo was sure of it. Zoe closed her eyes and bit her lip hard, and Leo saw that she was stopping a scream.
“You need the doctor.”
“No! Just … just get me to my quarters…”
Leo eased her to her feet. More blood. Zoe staggered and he hoisted her into a fireman’s carry. This was a miscarriage. But that wasn’t possible, they’d all had a physical just two weeks before liftoff and the docs would have found a pregnancy. Appendix? Leo was hazy on where the appendix was—right side? left?—or whether it would produce blood.
“My quarters,” Zoe said, and although there was no panic in her voice—Rangers didn’t panic—and no audible fear, there was something scary.
Leo took her, dripping blood, straight to the infirmary.
The Muslim doctor—Leo wasn’t good with names—flung open the door as soon as Leo kicked it. The doc was there alone. As soon as he saw them, he flipped down a bed from the left bulkhead and said, “What happened?”
Leo said, “I don’t know. She was exercising on the bike and she slumped off. She said it’s just her period but—”
Zoe tried to say something, then passed out.
The doctor’s hands explored Zoe’s body. He pressed and she revived and screamed. He said, “Comm on, private channel, Dr. Patel. Claire, to sick bay STAT, emergency.”
The wall screen said, “On my way.”
The doctor was undressing Zoe. To Leo he said, “Go now.”
Leo was glad to go. In the passageway Dr. Patel pushed past him. In such a small ship, anybody could get anywhere really fast. Right now that was probably good.
He washed his hands; the washroom was empty. Christ—the passageway. Well, he could do that for Zoe, anyway. He got a towel, decided against it (Who did the laundry? He’d never thought to ask), and grabbed a lot of recyclable paper towels. Hoping no one saw him before he finished, he wiped the blood from the deck and bike.
Owen entered the wardroom just as he stuffed the towels into the recycle chute. “Brodie—aren’t you on exercise rotation?”
“Yes, sir. Bathroom break.”
Leo started doing pull-ups.
* * *
In his off-duty time, he knocked on the door of sick bay. The passageway lights had been dimmed to simulate night. The briefing in the common room, which even the Rangers had attended, had yielded a lot of math and astronomy that Leo didn’t follow and two useful pieces of information: still no response from Kindred to the Friendship’s radio messages, and the spore cloud would hit the planet ten weeks from now. Why an hour-and-a-half meeting to tell everybody that? And why did the hour-and-a-half briefing have to fall in Leo’s off-duty? But it was what it was.
“Come in.”
Dr. Bourgiba switched off the wall screen, which showed the common room; he must have been watching the briefing. In the low light, Zoe lay asleep or knocked out on the bunk. Leo smelled disinfectant, a smell he’d never liked.
“I came to see how Berman is, sir.”
“She’ll be fine. Sit down, son.”
Leo disliked being called “son,” but he sat. The doctor said, “Did you know about Ranger Berman?”
“Know what?”
Bourgiba met his gaze squarely. The doctor’s eyes were very dark, almost black. He looked in pretty good shape for a civilian in his forties, but he was no Colonel Matthews. Bourgiba said, “Ranger Berman was pregnant. Were you the father?”
“No!” Despite himself, Leo was shocked, which was ridiculous. “How could she be pregnant? They had physicals just two weeks ago! Anyway, she’s a Ranger—too smart for that.”
“Nonetheless, she was. An ectopic pregnancy—do you know what that is?”
Leo shook his head.
“The fetus implanted in a fallopian tube, not in the uterus. Tubes don’t stretch. So when the pregnancy grows too big, the tube bursts and the patient bleeds internally. When Dr. Patel and I opened Berman, she had a liter of blood in her belly. But she’ll recover fine.”
Leo leaned forward in his chair. “Does anybody else have to know about this? I don’t know how Berman got pregnant”—stupid statement, there was only one way—“but it would get her tossed out of the Rangers. Especially since she’s the only female Ranger with combat experience and that’s why she’s on this mission. It’d be a huge stink and the Army would discharge her.”
“Leo—discharge her to where? We’re in an alien star system and in temporal dislocation.”
Well, shit. All true. Still … “But they might discharge her when we go home. In twenty-eight years, I mean. And even now, aboard ship … she’ll want to resume her duties, it’s why she came. Why we all came. Can’t you just say her appendix burst or something?”
Bourgiba didn’t smile. Leo gave him credit for that. He said, “Any physician could tell the difference instantly. But I see what you mean—her unit and commanding officer might view her differently, as a female liability, and you don’t think she deserves that, right?”
“Right.”
“I won’t falsify her records, but I will tell Colonel Matthews that her surgery was to address an abdominal problem that has been fully repaired. If he doesn’t actually read her chart, that may be enough, and he probably won’t read her chart because everyone has so much else to deal with. Ranger Berman should be able to return to duty in a few weeks. Will that do?”
“Yes. Thank you, sir.” Leo stood. No way a Ranger was going to stay in bed for two weeks; by that time they’d have made planetfall. Zoe would be on her feet by the day after tomorrow.
Bourgiba said, “And you were not the father.”
“No. I never met her till I came aboard.”
“Are you two friends?”
“Not really. She keeps pretty much to herself.”
Bourgiba looked at him more closely. “Then your concern for her is admirable.”
“She’s in my unit.” Didn’t civilians understand anything?
“I see,” Bourgiba said, although Leo doubted that he did. “Get some sleep, Ranger Brodie.”
“I’m not a Ranger. I’m just on temporary duty with—”
“Get some sleep anyway. You can visit Ranger Berman tomorrow.”
* * *
When Leo returned to sick bay the next afternoon, Dr. Patel was there. She nodded at Leo and said in her pretty accent, “Ah, Ranger Brodie. Perhaps you would like to visit with Ranger Berman alone. If you need assistance, just activate the comm and call for me.”
She smiled at him. Dr. Patel, who only came to Leo’s shoulder, was as old as Dr. Bourgiba, but her smooth brown skin and dark curls looked good to Leo. All women were looking good to him lately—it had been too long—except for, now, Zoe Berman, which was weird because she was the most beautiful woman aboard. Something to do with her leaking blood all over him yesterday. Or maybe with her hard scowl.
The first thing she said was, “I suppose you ratted me out to Matthews.”
“No. I didn’t tell anybody.”
Surprise, followed by suspicion. “Yeah? Why not? Against regs.”
“Didn’t think you’d want me to.”
She looked at him a long time, until the expression in her cat-green eyes changed and she turned her head on the pillow so that her gaze rested on the ceiling. “I didn’t know I was pregnant.”
“Pretty stupid.”
“Yeah.” She wasn’t offended, and Leo saw all at once that she wanted to talk. He pulled up a chair.
Zoe said, “It was a sort of farewell fuck. I got so little body fat that I was supposed to be immune. I always was before.”
Leo nodded. His foster family, the one he’d stayed in longest, had had four older girls. Nasty, manipulative bitches that had bullied and hurt him, but Leo had learned to listen.
Zoe said, “I
didn’t even like him that much. But we were drinking and he was cute and he was there and … you know.”
Leo knew. He’d had a lot of sex just because the girl was there. He could tell, too, from the way Zoe turned her head to look at him that she was done talking and that now he was supposed to say something personal. Girls did that. It was how they made friends. Figuring out this weird bit of girl-lore had helped Leo get a lot of them into bed, although that wasn’t what was going on here. This might be better; he could use a friend aboard the Friendship. He was mulling over which piece of his personal life to offer when Zoe took that decision out of his hands.
“Why’d you wash out of Ranger School?”
“How do you know that?”
She rolled her eyes. “You think there wasn’t a lot of talk about bringing you into the unit? A lot of poking around online?”
“Didn’t think about it. But your poking didn’t turn up the story?”
“It wasn’t my poking. And Lieutenant Lamont didn’t say anything, neither. Flores is pretty good on the computer.”
Flores, scowling at his tablet, leaving the wardroom when Leo came in to exercise. “He didn’t want me here.”
“Nope. But he’ll do what Lamont wants. Worships the guy. You still didn’t say why you washed out.”
“I didn’t, exactly.” Leo took a deep breath. Did he want to tell her this? Well, why the hell not. It was what it was. “I was there with Owen. Lieutenant Lamont, but he wasn’t a looie then. We went together through RASP and then Fort Bening, then we were in mountain phase and I got into some poison ivy.”
“So? I did, too. Common.”
“Yeah, but I’m allergic and didn’t know it. I got blisters all over my body. That wouldn’t have been too bad except that the blisters got infected. Sepsis, with a fever so high I hallucinated. Owen carried me back down the mountain. Saved my life.”
“A natlee,” Zoe said. “That’s what my class called the natural leaders. But there’s medical recycle. You could have gone through school again after you got well.”
“Yeah.” This was the hard part to tell somebody, especially a Ranger. “I decided I didn’t want to.”