If Tomorrow Comes

by Nancy Kress

  “To make what?”

  Austin, lips pressed together, looked down at his muddy shoes.

  “It’s a survivalist refuge,” Noah said. “And Beyon is too smart not to know that spores can get in, so he’s got some sort of air filter mechanism, doesn’t he.”

  This wasn’t a question, so Austin didn’t try to answer it.

  Noah sighed. “Maybe he can do it. Although how he thinks they can stay in there forever … Austin, you’re forbidden to go here again.”

  “You can’t—”

  “Your mom says so, Isabelle as lahk mother says so, and as lahk-male-head-adviser”—there was no word in English for this—“I say so.”

  Austin almost said Then forbid Graa^lok too because he’s in there right now! But that would be childish, and Austin was no longer a child, so he didn’t say it. He was quite proud of this maturity.

  Anyway, Graa^lok was not in their lahk.

  Noah said, “Promise me.”

  “I promise,” Austin said.

  “Good. Now let’s go home.”

  Austin hiked faster than Noah, just to show him he was not a follower. Because Austin was going back to Tony’s. It was terrible to break a promise, but this was a situation outside normal ethics. There was too much at stake. Survival was at stake. All the Worlders would die except for those with natural immunity, whoever they were. In the last two weeks, Austin had learned a lot about spore disease. After the cloud came, everybody still alive from natural immunity would loot and fight for the food that was left—Tony had said so. He’d said it had happened over and over again, on Terra, whenever there was a plague. All the places Tony had told Austin about—the collapse of a huge city called Rome, and food riots in another place called Brazil, and also a mountain named Donner where people got so desperate they ate each other. Worlders were no different; they were human, too. Austin had an obligation—an ethical obligation!—to help preserve civilization in Haven. Also his own life. He didn’t think he’d do well with fighting and looting and eating other people.

  Someday Noah-kal would thank him. If Noah wasn’t dead first.

  Austin plodded on through the mud and rain.

  CHAPTER 8

  Leo, in full kit and with his rifle in hand, walked compound patrol. That’s what they were calling it, the two buildings now connected by a covered walkway: “the compound.” One building, the “Big Lab,” had been a school and the “Little Lab” had been the clinic, but now they were collectively the compound and the squad was securing it. Owen had the whole thing built in less than a week. Kindred workmen from the little town did anything he said, they were that eager to have the scientists find a vaccine against spore disease. They’d then cleared a hundred-foot bare perimeter around the east, west, and south sides of the compound.

  There were three doors, to the south, east, and north. The north door, which faced away from the town and toward open fields backed by distant mountains, had sparked intense arguments between Owen and Isabelle. That side of the clinic held a big vegetable and herb garden circled by a shoulder-high wall to keep animals from eating the vegetables. Owen had wanted the wall torn down. Isabelle had fought for wall and vegetables, and had won: “How do you suppose we’ll feed you, Lieutenant? You’re posting a soldier on the roof during each watch anyway—surely they can manage to see anything that approached over all that open grazing land to the north?”

  Owen also had built a ready room on one side of the compound, made of triple-reinforced karthwood and stone, with doors opening both into Big Lab and out to the perimeter. The four of them slept there, one six-hour off-duty each day. Actually, it was six hours and eighteen minutes, since the day here was longer than on Terra. Leo would take any extra eighteen minutes of sleep that he could get. The ready room held four metal cabinets brought from the clinic, each with a lock. Owen, Kandiss, Zoe, and Leo kept their weapons there, separately—“The better to foil thieves,” Owen said. “Four locks are harder to crack than one.” Since the only people with any way of getting into the ready room were the scientists inside the compound, the lockers struck Leo as one more example of Owen’s military caution. Or his general suspiciousness of Kindred. Depending on how you looked at it.

  Owen had put together an OPORD with all the mission-essential elements: assessment, capabilities, civilian considerations, possible courses of action. Leo didn’t know everything in Owen’s mind, but at least he understood patrol. Like today, his often took place during the daily afternoon rain, which was also the daily siesta time, although not for the Rangers. Leo didn’t mind rain; he’d been deployed to Brazil during the food riots.

  Beyond the perimeter lay the refugee camp, which Leo also circled in his patrol. It wasn’t properly a refugee camp; these people all had homes somewhere else. They were camped here to wait for vaccines. They had no guns, no IEDs, no grenades, no weapons of any kind. And in the past two weeks, the only Kindred who had ventured onto the bare perimeter was a child, whose mother pulled her back with smiles and what sounded like babbled apologies.

  Leo didn’t understand the camp. In Brazil, the refugee camps had been violent places, with fights over food, over places to put tents, over soccer balls, over name-calling. None of that here. Food and water came in on carts every day. Privies were cleaned. Sections of the river were set aside for bathing and washing clothes, apparently on some sort of schedule that everyone respected. Everybody was polite all the time, sharing and helping and keeping their kids in line. Not that many kids, either—apparently every person only got one “tallied” to him or her, and then the mother’s brother was responsible for raising the kids, who lived in their mothers’ lahks. Crazy. Even crazier was that people didn’t seem to mind that much government control over their personal affairs. Nobody in Tennessee would have stood for it, not for a minute.

  “They’re polite now,” Owen had said. “There’s no vaccine to fight over yet.”

  Well, that made sense, sort of. Maybe when the spore cloud got closer and if there wasn’t enough vaccine to go around—

  “There won’t be enough,” Owen had said. “It’s six weeks off. When this place pops, we take out anybody rushing the compound. They will. There are males of fighting age there, plenty of them, and they’ll get desperate.”

  The unit had all nodded, but something about the way Owen had said it bothered Leo. Under that Ranger calm was a kind of what—eagerness to start shooting? Well, nothing wrong with that—Rangers always found battle more exciting than waiting, they were trained for active missions. Still—

  The rain started—you could set your watch by it—and the old people covered their cook fires and went into their tents. Leo spoke to Zoe, on watch duty on the compound roof, over the private radio frequency they had set up. “Zo—what are the refugee tents made of?”

  “How the fuck should I know?”

  “Well, they don’t make plastics. Not good for the environment. So it must be something else, maybe cloth treated with some pine resin or something. See anything from up there?”

  “If I did, don’t you think I’d of already told you?”

  This was inarguable. Leo said, “I’m going in now.”

  “Roger that.”

  His breath quickened; this was the only part of patrol that wasn’t exquisitely boring. He nodded to Kandiss, on duty at the compound entrance. At any given time, three of the four of them were on duty and one was asleep. Owen always took night duty. Leo walked inside to begin his check on the interior rooms.

  Rough walls had been erected in the Big Lab, which before must have been just one open room—how the hell did any kids learn anything? Well, they must have. The place swarmed with Kindred scientists. Branch Carter was explaining something to a bunch of them, but the translator was Noah Jenner, not Isabelle. There were machines and objects Leo didn’t understand, but everything looked okay. Mostly he was ignored, but Dr. Patel gave him a quick smile. Dr. Bourgiba did not.

  He took the covered walkway from the Big Lab to
the clinic. No sick people in it now, unless you counted Marianne Jenner, who wasn’t exactly sick but wasn’t well, either. She spent a lot of time sitting up in bed, helping other scientists understand stuff on her computer. The rest of the time she was doing experiments with leelees.

  As soon as Leo opened the door that connected the clinic part of the compound to the covered walkway, the leelee smell made his nose wrinkle. Inside the leelee lab, it was far worse. The small space was crowded with stacked cages, benches with equipment, and a big locked metal cabinet like the weapons lockers in the squad’s ready room. The vaccines, Leo knew, were kept in there.

  Two Kindred kids were supposed to keep the cages clean, Isabelle’s nephew Austin and a fat kid called Graylock who spoke pretty good English, but either they weren’t doing their jobs well or else leelees smelled like that even in clean cages. Not putrid or anything—nothing near as bad as the camps in Brazil—but sort of sour, like milk going bad. And the weird little animals chittered all the time, like insects. Dr. Jenner had told Leo that the leelees were a lot like mice, but Leo couldn’t see it. Smaller than mice, the creatures were furless, short-tailed, with round purplish bodies. Part of their energy came from photosynthesis, part from eating.

  “They look like skittery plums,” Leo had said.

  Dr. Jenner had smiled. “I meant their genomes. They’re the closest mammals here to human genomic structure.”

  That was beyond Leo’s pay grade, so he’d just nodded and filed the information away. Maybe it would give him something to talk to Isabelle about.

  She stood on what was left of the floor space between Dr. Jenner and two Kindred scientists. Automatically Leo scanned the men for weapons (where? They just wore those brief pale-colored dresses) and the room for dangers, but everything looked clean. Dr. Jenner was showing the men how to do something to a leelee, and Isabelle was translating. Leo’s heart skipped a beat.

  She wasn’t beautiful, exactly, not like Zoe and little Dr. Patel were beautiful, but everything about her appealed to him. Leo knew he was good-looking—enough girls had told him so—and usually he was good with women, talking easily to them and flirting and, if he wanted to, getting them into bed. Isabelle was different. He felt tongue-tied around her, maybe because she was older than he was, and she treated him like … what? A friend. Not a friend like Zoe, who understood Leo’s world because it was her world as well, but like the friend-of-a-friend whom you might respect but thought you had zero in common with. Like that.

  Dr. Jenner said to Leo, “Everything’s good here, Ranger.”

  He didn’t correct her. Her attention had moved back to the leelee, and anyway nobody on Kindred cared about the distinction between the Seventy-Fifth and the US Army. To the Kindred, the squad were all Rangers.

  Leo checked the rest of the clinic, the locks on the two outer doors, one in the kitchen and one in what had been the lobby and was now filled with lab benches. He was halfway along the walkway to the Big Lab when a woman screamed.

  Three seconds to reach the Big Lab. A Kindred stood there with his arm around the neck of Branch Carter. In the Kindred’s hand was what Leo recognized instantly as a homemade pipe gun, pointed at Branch. The Kindred was shouting something in his own language, and people poured from the surrounding makeshift labs and sleeping cubicles to stand, hands pressed to their mouths and wide eyes wider, at the edges of the room.

  All at once they looked alien to Leo: long spindly insect arms and legs, big dark reptilian eyes. All of them, not just the intruder holding the skinny human a foot shorter than he was.

  The intruder could fire the weapon. The gun could—probably would—blow up, wounding or killing both him and Carter. Leo could drop him—his sidearm was already in his hand—but the impact might set off the homemade gun.… homemade? The thing looked pretty finished.

  His thoughts were almost simultaneous. Adrenaline coursed through him. The Kindred was still shouting. Now Leo caught the one Terran word, hard to decipher in that accent: vaccine. The fucker wanted some of the precious vaccine. What did he think, that he could just waltz in here, be given a syringe, and stroll out?

  Leo heard his own voice saying calmly, “Give him something he can think is vaccine.”

  No one moved. No one understood his English. Then Dr. Patel stepped forward, something in her hand. Behind him he heard another voice, speaking Kindred loudly: Isabelle.

  Claire Patel walked up to the Kindred and held out her hand. A syringe lay on her palm. The intruder, holding the gun and Carter, had no hands left to take it. Dr. Patel smiled; only the throbbing of her temples gave away her fear—and approached the intruder. No one else, maybe, could have done it; Dr. Patel, weighing maybe ninety pounds, looked as threatening as a child. She put the syringe into a pocket of the intruder’s wrap.

  Isabelle continued to talk in Kindred. Leo would have given anything to know what she was saying. Leo would have to make a decision soon; the fucker was backing away, toward the door, his arm tightening around Carter’s neck. No way Leo could let them get out of here.

  The man shouted something back at Isabelle and kept moving.

  Leo said, “Isabelle, tell everyone to get behind doors. Now.”

  She did. A small part of Leo’s mind was astonished at how quickly and completely lab personnel followed directions. He’d seen platoons less disciplined.

  Then—yes. Leo caught the movement before anyone else did. Carter—because he was choking or because he was being taken away, flailed in the intruder’s grasp. For a fraction of a second, the intruder’s body was exposed. Leo fired.

  His bullet hit exactly where he intended: the left knee. The intruder screamed, let go of Carter, and fell to the floor. The gun did not explode; it skittered across the floor and came to rest against a closed door. Leo was on the intruder, and it was all over.

  * * *

  “How the fuck did this happen?” Owen demanded.

  The unit stood at attention in front of him. The homemade pipe gun, disassembled, lay on a piece of cloth at his feet. He glanced at it in disgust, although it was clear the thing didn’t merit disgust. Made from two pieces of steel pipe, with a wooden dowel and nail making up the firing pin, the gun resembled the Philippine guerilla gun, utilizing blow forward action. Leo had seen such guns in Brazil. But this was a much sleeker version; the pipes had been sanded so that the barrel slid perfectly inside the receiver. The stock had a wooden block in front of the end cap so that if the receiver end threads failed, the end cap would not be blown into the user’s face. The stock was smooth, with some sort of material acting as grip.

  The problem with all these pipe guns was that you got only one shot—after firing, the barrel had to be removed and the spent shell pulled out by hand. That hadn’t seemed to deter the attacker, who was now being treated by Dr. Bourgiba and questioned by Noah Jenner.

  “Brodie,” Owen said, “where were you?”

  “On interior patrol, sir. In the walkway between buildings.” Owen already knew this. “Permission to speak, sir.”

  “Go ahead.”

  “There aren’t enough of us, sir. We can’t cover everything. And if one Kindred could make this weapon, then a lot of them can.”

  “Do you think I don’t know that, Brodie? Is that what you think?”

  “No, sir.”

  “I’m glad you don’t think that. Because I know this will happen again. I know there aren’t enough of us to secure this facility adequately. I also know this should not have been allowed to happen. Berman, why didn’t you observe the Kinnie from the roof?”

  Kinnie. Leo hadn’t heard the word before. They way Owen said it, it sounded ugly. Brassie. Towelhead. Gook. Jap. Chink.

  Zoe said, “No answer, sir, except that he might coulda crossed the perimeter to the south, while I was watching what looked like suspicious movement in the east outer edge of the camp, sir. Kandiss went to check it out.”

  “What kind of suspicious movement?”

  “Males of fightin
g age moving in, like … coulda been drills.”

  “Armed?”

  “Not that I could see.”

  A diversion? If some group in the camp was that organized, the squad was in trouble. Three soldiers awake at one time … not enough.

  “Kandiss, where were you? Did you see this ‘drilling’?”

  “No, sir.”

  Zoe said, “Sir, they’d stopped by the time Kandiss reached that section of the perimeter.”

  “And you—any of you—have never seen any more of these weapons, or anything resembling them? Or anything else that can be construed as a weapon? Molotovs, IEDs, anything?”

  Three no-sirs.

  Brodie said, “Permission to speak, sir.”

  “Go ahead.”

  “We need more eyes, sir, as you said. We should start training Kindred to supplement patrols.”

  Something moved behind Owen’s eyes. “Because that worked out so well in Brazil, right, Corporal Brodie? At, for instance, Brasília?”

  Leo was silent. He hadn’t been at Brasilia, but he knew all about it, as did everyone in the entire world. Fourteen US-trained and armed insurgents had—all fourteen of them—been infiltrators. They had slaughtered fifteen Marines who had trained and trusted them, and then an entire village of women and children.

  Owen said, “We aren’t arming Kinnies any more than they’re doing themselves. Christ, all that propaganda about how these are genetically and socially peaceful people…”

  Leo blinked. “Genetically and socially peaceful”? Not the sort of language that found its way into any debriefing he’d ever been in. Well, Owen was smart and college-educated.

  And the Kindred, whatever they were genetically and socially, were human. Humans got desperate.

  Owen said, “From now on, standing orders are twenty-hour duty shifts. Roof watcher reports anything suspicious directly and immediately to me. No more fuck-ups. Another Kinnie gets inside, and the fuck-up is facing court-martial when we get back home. Got it?”