by Nancy Kress
Brodie had gone to the mountains, too? Salah hadn’t known that. He didn’t like it.
“Isabelle—”
She walked ahead of him, veering to the east. She said nothing more but Salah heard the loud sound anyway: another door closing between them.
After another mile of tense silence, during which the mountains seemed no closer and Salah felt himself flagging, Isabelle said, “Look. Straight ahead.”
Salah strained his gaze. The sun was low now, dusk gathering on the dark-purple landscape. A figure staggered toward them, fell, got up and went on. It carried something bulky and heavy. Salah couldn’t judge size from this perspective … Austin?
“Zoe,” Isabelle said and sprinted forward.
By the time he caught up, Isabelle crouched beside Zoe Berman, who lay on the ground, scowling up at both of them. Salah bent and said, “Where are you injured?”
Isabelle said, “Austin? Leo?”
“Both shot,” Zoe said. “Both alive when I left but bad off. Last night. Did what I could.”
“Shot? By Tony Schrupp?”
“No,” Zoe said, and passed out.
Salah examined her shoulder, gently palpated her belly. Spleen, bleeding into the abdominal cavity. It was amazing that she’d made it this far. These Rangers were almost another species.
Wryly, he realized what he’d just thought.
Beside Zoe stood a pyramidal object of gray, untarnished metal. The call-back device. This alien object might both aid Kindred in the spore plague and—which Salah suddenly hungered for as if he’d been starving—take Salah home.
Isabelle took Zoe’s goggles off her helmet, put them on, and fiddled with them, looking like some caricature of an alien insect. She stared into the distance. “Someone’s coming. A group of people.” And then, “Oh my God!”
She took off running.
* * *
They were carrying him carefully, on a simple litter made of cloth strung between two poles. Every time the litter jarred, it hurt. Leo bit down on his tongue and said nothing.
Lu^kaj^ho murmured something incomprehensible in Kindred. Isabelle’s language lessons had deserted Leo; he said back the only thing he could remember: “I greet you, Lu^kaj^ho.” Lu^kaj^ho smiled.
Once they reached the flatter meadow, it was better. Less jolting. The three Kindred cops—that was how Leo still thought of them—made their slow way south. The sun was lowering behind the mountains. A moon, almost but not quite full, shone above him. The procession passed something that smelled warm and spicy. Leo closed his eyes. If he lived, he would like some of that spicy smell around him. Hell, if he died he’d like it around him, too.
“Leo.”
His eyes flew open and she was there, bending over the litter. Leo scowled. “I told you not to come.”
Isabelle ignored this. “I greet you, Leo.” She touched his hand gently, as if the injury were there.
“Well, I goddamn greet you too, Isabelle, but I told you to stay put. Kandiss? Did you shoot him?”
“Of course I didn’t shoot him.” She gave a strangled little laugh, almost a sob. “I can come and go.”
But Bourgiba couldn’t, not without Kandiss’s permission, and now the litter was lowered to the ground and the doctor was removing the bandages Zoe had wound around Leo. Leo pressed his teeth together so hard they could have broken rocks. He wasn’t going to wince in front of Salah Bourgiba.
Bourgiba said, “The bullet’s still in there.”
News to Leo. He kept his eyes on Isabelle.
“I’m going to give you something for pain,” Bourgiba said. “At the clinic, I can operate. Can you swallow?”
“Yeah.” Of course he could swallow—Zoe hadn’t shot his throat. Was this doctor competent?
Of course he is, idiot. Keep your eyes on Isabelle.
She gave him the pill with water from her canteen, raising his head so he could drink. He groped for her hand and kept it. Take that, Doctor.
The pain pill must have been more than that. The only words he managed to say before he slid into blackness were, “Austin? Zoe?”
But nobody heard him. Isabelle jabbered in Kindred to Lu^kaj^ho and the other two cops. Then her hand slid out of his, or his from hers, and the world went away.
* * *
Marianne sat beside Branch and silently counted losses and gains. Branch, cross-legged on a pallet with her laptop and the call-back pyramid on the floor beside him, wouldn’t have heard if she’d spoken aloud. Probably he wouldn’t have heard Gabriel’s trumpet. His thin face scrunched with concentration.
Loss #1: Leo Brodie had been shot, his liver nicked by a bullet that had apparently done other damage as well, and Zoe Berman had a ruptured spleen. Salah, despite a single quiet comment that he was not a surgeon, had operated on both, with Isabelle and Marianne as untrained nurses. Both Rangers would recover but would need care. From whom?
Loss #2: Austin Rhinehart was luckier. Owen Lamont’s bullet—and what kind of fanatic would shoot a thirteen-year-old?—had only grazed his head, due to Leo. Isabelle had found Austin lurching toward home, crying, blood streaming into his eyes. Head wounds, Salah said, bled a lot even if superficial. Austin had a monster headache but would be all right. Except—what did it do to a child to be shot by an adult he had trusted?
Loss #3: Claire, Kayla, and, according to Austin, a bunch of Kindred girls and their mother, were still hostage in Tony Schrupp’s survivalist bunker.
Loss #4: Mason Kandiss no longer guarded the compound. He had gone to bring back, or to bury—Marianne wasn’t clear on this—his lieutenant’s body. “A Ranger never leaves a brother behind,” Isabelle had said. Marianne, who neither understood nor sympathized with a creed that placed unit loyalty over, say, intent to destroy an entire civilization, had bitten back her retort. Anyway, there wasn’t much to be guarded against; the camp was quiet.
Loss #5 was anticipated: In six days, the spore cloud would strike Kindred.
Well, then, gains. Gain #1—
She couldn’t think of anything gained in the last several days.
Isabelle entered the leelee lab with Salah, Ka^graa, and an old woman who had to be a mother. Who? From where? Everyone sat down, exchanging I-greet-you’s in low voices, and Marianne suddenly flashed on faculty meetings at the college where she used to teach. A life ago. Several lives ago.
“Okay,” Branch said, finally aware that the room held other people and he was on stage. The tips of his ears grew red, but he had obviously thought through what he wanted to say. “We have the call-back device. Now we have to figure out how to use it, and we do that by thinking like an alien.”
All at once redness seeped from ear tips to his whole face. “I didn’t mean … not that Kindred are aliens, I mean the other ones, the aliens who designed this and … not ‘other aliens’ I didn’t mean to say that either—”
“Branch,” Marianne said firmly because there was no time for this polite fumbling, “we know what you meant. Get on with it.”
“Okay. Yes.” He drew a large breath, while Isabelle translated. “Worlders press a button, or something like that anyway, on their colony ship and it goes to … wherever it went. They press a button on their other ship and it goes to Earth. We press a button on the Friendship and it goes to Kindred. So there were preset variations in the original plans the master aliens left, or else the ships are programmable, which makes more sense. And since so far no humans know how to program them, they’re programming themselves on a simple return-to-where-you-started loop. Press the button and you reverse the flight plan.
“But what if no people are left to press that button, which is the situation on the colony ship now? You don’t just want to abandon an expensive thing like a starship. So you build and leave behind an unbreakable call-back device. This.”
He put his hand on it, and Marianne suppressed her impatience. Everyone here already knew this. Branch had a careful, linear mind, touching all bases, a good thing in a researcher, but
—
“With your call-back device,” Branch finally continued, “you build in a code to use it, because even if the device can’t be damaged by anything short of a nuclear bomb, it can be stolen. Remember, you don’t know how the stone-age people you’re leaving all this with—you don’t know how they’re going to develop, what kind of society they’ll create. The device could be stolen, misused by terrorists, lost for millennia—which it was. Applying the code has to be intuitively obvious—just press the right bumps in the right sequence. The code itself can’t be too simple or it might accidentally be set off by, say, rocks falling on it. But the code might be lost or misremembered. So although complex, it has to be something that could be figured out by a society advanced enough to build the ships in the first place. A sequence of numbers that is basic to the universe.
“So what do you use?
“Not every single possible combination of pressing all sixteen bumps. That would be 20,922,789,888,000 possible sequences, and then only if the device is activated by a sequence using all sixteen bumps. At two seconds per trial, running them all would take over five million years. And the correct sequence might not even require all sixteen bumps. Is everybody with me so far?”
Marianne nodded. Branch waited until the low murmur of translation caught up.
“You can’t use constants from physics, either, like the speed of light or Hudspeth’s constant because they depend on units—meters, kilograms, joules, seconds—and there is no telling what units your stone-age society will develop if it ever builds starships.
“So you make sure that any ship still capable of being recalled sends its own code. That’s what I think is coming from the ship … listen.”
They had all heard this, but Branch played it again anyway from his receiver: one tone, pause, six tones, pause, eleven tones, pause, sixteen tones, pause, nine tones, pause, fourteen tones, pause, three tones, pause, eight tones, very long pause, one tone. Long silence before repeating.
“So the problem is to translate that bunch of numbers into some sequence of pressing bumps on the call-back device. You can’t just press the numbers from the ship onto the pyramid because how do you know where to start? And there are still millions of possible combinations. No good. I think the transmitted numbers are supposed to be the key to the actual code to press. But the sequence doesn’t match any mathematical sequence—not primes or Fibonacci or anything else I can come up with. It might be based on some common, indisputable number like the days in a Kindred year, but I can’t make anything like that work, either. Yet the sequence has to be something known to the Kindred who will build these ships. I just don’t know what!”
Salah said, “Branch, it seems to me you’ve made a lot of assumptions here. Three of those tones are in two digits—eleven, fourteen, sixteen—and you don’t know that the numbers are even in base ten. The ‘master aliens’ might count in base six or base twelve—why assume they use base ten?”
“Because humans do,” Branch said, wiggling his fingers, “and they gave the code to humans.”
“Why assume the tones implies another number to press?”
“I told you. There has to be a way to narrow the possibilities and this is the most logical.”
“Why assume the transmission from the ship is a call-back code at all? It could be a Mayday call for help or—”
“Because I fucking have to assume something!” Branch flared.
They were all so tired, Marianne thought: tired of tension, tired of violence, tired of not succeeding at anything. Tired of this planet.
Branch got himself under control. “Look, the universe runs on mathematics. It’s the only shared language across all advanced cultures, all sciences. The transmitted numbers have to mean something.”
“You did a good job,” Isabelle said. “Look, let’s sleep on it. Maybe someone will come up with something.”
Branch looked at her, his eyes pleading. He was so young. Approval still mattered to him as much, or more, than survival.
Isabelle repeated, “You did a good job.”
* * *
Leo woke and, without thinking, groped for the sidearm he had insisted on keeping on his pallet. It wasn’t there. He bellowed, “Hey! Somebody!” and Kandiss came into the room. The big Ranger, in full kit, loomed over the pallet, his face blank.
The two men stared at each other. If Kandiss was going to kill him, there was nothing Leo could do about it. He said, “Give me back my weapons.”
Kandiss ignored that. “I buried him.”
Owen. Of course Kandiss had retrieved and buried the body. Leo said, “Zoe told you what happened.”
“I want to hear it from you.”
Leo told him. He couldn’t tell if Kandiss believed him, or even heard him. Kandiss never blinked; his face never twitched. When Leo finished, he repeated, “Give me my weapons.”
Then Kandiss did react. “I don’t have them.”
It took Leo a moment to absorb this. He let out a string of curses worthy of Zoe. “Find my weapons and bring them here.”
“Yes, sir,” Kandiss said.
Sir. Leo was now the ranking soldier on Kindred, the CO. Christ on a cracker. Leadership was exactly what he didn’t want, what he’d dropped out of Ranger School to avoid. Although somehow he seemed to have been exercising more of it despite himself: making decisions, recruiting locals, shooting his CO.
A sharp pain in his heart, which Leo ignored because he had no choice.
Before Kandiss could return, Salah Bourgiba came in. “How are you feeling, Brodie?”
“Just dandy. Never better. Austin and Zoe?”
“Both will recover.”
“Did Isabelle take my weapons?”
Bourgiba’s brows rose; evidently this was news to him, too. “Isabelle?”
“Send her in here. Jenner, too!” Then, remembering who he was talking to, he added a grudging, “Please.”
Bourgiba left without a word, but Leo didn’t need words. Looks were enough. Bourgiba disliked him as much as he disliked Bourgiba.
Leo tried to stand up, couldn’t, and sank back onto his pallet. He was as useless as a toddler. Kandiss returned and said, “Your weapons aren’t in the compound.”
“Where are Lamont’s?”
“I have them.”
“Bring them here, Kandiss. And—What is it? Why do you look like that?”
Kandiss looked away, looked back, bit his tongue. For Kandiss, this amounted to major drama. He said, “Sir, Lieutenant Lamont had a nonregulation weapon on his person.”
“He did? What?”
“I’ll bring it.”
He returned with Lamont’s rifle, sidearm, helmet, all of it. And something else. Leo picked it up: a metal canister about six inches long and three in diameter, marked only with the code A45D6. Plus a device about a foot long. Leo said, “What is it?”
“Don’t know.”
“Is it … this looks like a mounter that might fit onto a rifle. Is this canister some sort of explosive? Can Zoe come in here?”
“Doc says no.”
“Then I’ll go to her. Help me up.”
Torture getting to his feet, torture walking even with Kandiss’s support. Leo ignored the pain and hoped that motion wasn’t tearing apart anything important inside him. Zoe lay on a platform bed in the next room. She stared at him stonily.
He thrust the canister at her, along with the mounter. “What’s this?”
Zoe’s stoniness vanished, either in relief that Leo wasn’t going to rehash what happened on the mountain or in simple astonishment. She said, “Where’d that come from?”
“What is it, Zo?”
“Experimental. Not approved yet, nobody has them, too dangerous. I’m not even supposed to know about them, but there was this looie on Terra who—”
“I don’t care how you know. Lamont has this. Had this. What is it? An explosive?”
“Yeah. Has almost the impact of a shoulder-launched missile but is fired right from sta
ndard rifle. Only thing is, nearly half of the field trials blew up the rifle, the tripod, and a crater big as a refrigerator.”
“Huh,” Leo said. “My weapons are missing. You know who took them?”
“You lost your weapons? Again?”
“I was being operated on!”
“So was I, but I have mine.”
Leo didn’t ask how she’d done that. Maybe Kandiss had held them for her, maybe somebody else. “Take me back to my room,” he said to Kandiss. “Bring me Noah Jenner.”
Jenner looked better than when Leo had seen him last—sharper, more focused—although he still had a lump on his forehead the size of a walnut. Noah glared. Another one that doesn’t like me. Well, tough shit.
“I have your weapons,” Jenner said, “and you’re not getting them back. We do things differently here, Brodie. We’re grateful for your help in getting the call-back device, but there will be no more killing. I’ll take these things, too.”
“Try,” Leo said.
Kandiss took a step forward.
Jenner looked at the huge Ranger, pressed his lips together, and left without another word. Leo said to Kandiss, “Did Jenner leave the compound with any duffel or box that could have held my kit?”
“Supply carts have been coming and going all day, sir. They’re moving the vaccinated kids and their mothers into the compound before the cloud comes. I’m frisking everybody.”
Leo considered. His side hurt but his head felt clear. “Okay. Let them come in but check any supplies for contraband. You guard the door and periodically scan from the roof. Also, tell Isabelle Rhinehart I want her to bring me Lu^kaj^ho and his cop squad.”
Kandiss stiffened. Leo didn’t have to be told that Kandiss didn’t want armed Kindred males inside the compound. Leo said, “They’re on our side, Kandiss.”
“Yes, sir.”
“Really.” Immediately he knew he shouldn’t have said that; in Kandiss’s world, a superior officer might give information, but he never justified his orders. In some ways, the Kindred cops were actually easier to deal with than Kandiss.
What the fuck? What did he just think? How could he relate more to these alien cops than to Army?