CROSSFIRE

by Nancy Kress

  "Not satellites," Beta said. "Us."

  Which cleared up nothing. Jake looked carefully at the picture, memorizing it. He now noticed that the second smaller circle had a single fine filament extending into space, not unlike a tail. "Beta, is that second planet from the sun your home world?"

  "Yes."

  "What is that ... string? Tail going into space?"

  "Not the tail," Beta said. "The ramp."

  "Oh," Jake said, clueless.

  Shouting sounded from the east. Jake sprang up, straining to hear. Nan?

  Beta said, "Jake Holman."

  "Yes?"

  "Can William Shipley sit with us?"

  "I'll get him," Jake said, surprised. But before he could ask any more about this, Nan burst from the woods and ran toward him at top speed. Jake walked to meet her.

  "Jake! They're on their way back, Gail and the rest. The wall stopped just east of them, within feet. So since the Furs knew just where they were, Gail decided they may as well be here."

  "Thanks, Nan," Jake said. The girl's face and arms were covered with scratches and bruises, none of which she seemed to notice. There were leaves caught in her chopped hair.

  Coming up to Nan, Karim said, "Is George coming? I have something to describe to him."

  "Of course George is coming, did you think they cooked him and ate him? Stick to physics, Karim."

  Jake went over to where Shipley still lay asleep. Kneeling, he shook Shipley gently until he woke. "Doctor, are you all right? There's a request for you."

  Shipley heaved himself up, looking toward the woods. "Someone's hurt?"

  "No. It's Beta. The remaining Vine. It asked me if you would come sit with it. I think it's grieving." Or something.

  Shipley looked toward the encased alien. Something moved behind his eyes. "Are your people Jewish, Jake?"

  "No. Why?"

  "Did you ever hear of sitting kaddish?"

  "No," Jake admitted.

  Shipley was silent a moment before saying quietly, "It never ceases to amaze me how human the Vines seem."

  It had never ceased to amaze Jake how unhuman they seemed.

  Shipley walked off toward the Vine. Watching him, Jake thought about Beta's asking specifically for Shipley. Shipley had been the one to first suggest the humans just sit quietly beside the Vines' shuttle, back at the beacon tower. He had been the one to teach the Vines a sentence like "It brings light to my soul." Quakers, like Vines, sat silent together, thinking or dreaming or whatever went on in their minds.

  And he, Jake, thought the Furs were closer to humans. The Hundred Years' War. Might makes right. Tech means physics, and physics means weapons.

  Disquieted, he walked toward the woods to meet Gail, Lucy, George, and Ingrid.

  George said, "Not satellites. Spores."

  He studied a replica of the drawing Beta had made on the bioarm. Everyone but Shipley sat around the fire Gail had made. She'd grabbed a portable heater from the skimmer, but she was probably saving it in case ... in case what? In case they were caged here a long time, or had to make their way to Mira City. Jake didn't believe that would be possible, but it was like Gail to plan for it anyway.

  The abrupt Greentrees night had fallen. All afternoon had been spent putting together a camp from what they had. It was a pretty primitive camp because they didn't have much. Gail had taken from the skimmer only what could be carried, and she had concentrated on food. There was a one-person inflatable brought to protect the food from weather and predators. They had five blankets woven with thermal fibers. They had dried food and a communal pot to cook it in and some spoons, plus the water-clean machine and a large inflatable tank to keep the sanitized water in. The cage didn't encompass a river, but Nan had found a muddy pond and all of them except Shipley had taken turns with the numbing work of filling the cooking pot, carrying it the mile to the clearing, and dumping it through the cleaner until the tank was full.

  Jake hadn't been able to eat much. He half listened to George, half scanned the darkness for Shipley where he still sat with the Vine. Jake had never seen such darkness; the sky had clouded and the only light came from the fire. Gail was also saving the flashlights. The air was turning chill and damp, and if Shipley sat there much longer he would be stiff as glass. Jake hoped like hell it didn't rain.

  George said, "Sure, it could be, Karim. Their tech is bio, not physics. They can create molecules we never dreamed of, with near-perfect control. So they create some sort of bacteria-analogue that eats at whatever metal the Fur hulls are made of. Or some other vulnerable external part of their ships. Make them self-replicating at a very fast rate. They—"

  "Where are they going to get the energy for that fast replication?" Ingrid said.

  "From the sun, where the Vines get it."

  "They'd need water."

  "Ingrid," George said, not patiently, "how do we know they need water? We don't know what they need. They're not DNA-based."

  "Even so," Ingrid argued, "they have to get building-block chemicals from somewhere to live and to replicate. And how did they get up there in the first place?"

  George pointed to the drawing. "See this thin filament coming up from the planet? It could be a space elevator."

  "Could be," Karim conceded. He took the drawing and squinted at it as if the crude representation could actually tell him something.

  Lucy said, "A kind of panspermia. Only not creating life—puncturing ship hulls. Until the Vines can get up there and appropriate the craft."

  Ingrid said, "I see more holes in this theory than I can count."

  Karim said, "I know. But don't forget, Ingrid, there's not only alien biotech behind this ... this star-system shield, there's some alien physics as well. We can't get energy out of the vacuum to power our ships."

  "If that's what they really do," Ingrid said.

  Jake got up and stretched. Lucy looked up at him inquiringly, but he smiled down and gestured for her to remain. He wanted to bring Shipley into the makeshift camp. The old man had been sitting there, without even dinner, for hours.

  Shipley was just getting to his feet when Jake stumbled toward him through the darkness. He could barely make out the bulky lines of Shipley's body.

  "Doctor? Gail says to come and eat." Gail, not Nan. Nan hadn't once asked after or moved toward her father.

  "Yes. Beta is asleep, or whatever they do."

  Jake wondered how you'd tell. He groped for Shipley's arm. "Let me guide you, Doctor."

  "Just a minute, Jake. I want you to know something. Beta gave me its death flower."

  "Its what?"

  Shipley guided Jake's hand to a small packet wrapped in what felt like layers of tightly wound groundcover. "This. It's a death flower. A small piece of Beta that the bioarm pushed through the slot. If any opportunity arises, I'm to give it to any other Vines we encounter. If anything happens to me, will you do it?"

  A complex emotion seized Jake, one he didn't dare analyze. He said instead, "You swore a deathbed oath to an alien?"

  "New Quakers don't swear oaths," Shipley said. "Our word should always be good, making any additional requirement unnecessary. But yes, I said I would do this. Beta expects to die when the Furs return. If I can't, will you—"

  "No!"

  Shipley tried to peer at him in the darkness. Jake heard himself breathing harder, felt it slipping back over him. Donnie. Mrs. Dalton. Dying requests. No.

  "Jake—"

  "Ask Gail. Or George. And come back to the camp before you get hypothermia. You're shivering already."

  "Jake—"

  "I said to come!"

  Silently, Shipley stumbled after him to where the humans huddled, like a primitive tribe without even cave or teepee, around the precious fire.

  Soon after sunset the rain began, cold and relentless. Shelter was primitive. Gail had assigned the tiny storage inflatable to Shipley and insisted he take it. "Don't argue with me, Doctor, I've got too much to do to indulge you." Shipley had submitted.
Jake figured he was the only one actually dry, if not warm. As compensation, the physician had refused to take one of the five thermal blankets.

  Jake and Lucy shared one, Gail and Nan another. Mueller had also refused a blanket from, Jake suspected, a tough-soldier stance. Or maybe Mueller had unknown augments and genuinely didn't need it. Ingrid, George, and Karim each lay wrapped in the other three. All of them shared a crude lean-to Nan had directed them to make, with large forked branches driven into the ground as supports and layers of branches slanting to the ground as roof and windbreak. It was mildly effective except when the wind changed direction suddenly and cold rain blew in slantwise. Everyone slept fitfully.

  A pressure built in Jake's head. He recognized it, and its intensity, and its end. Fear drenched him, colder than the rain.

  "Lucy," Jake whispered in her ear, inches from his mouth. He breathed in the sweet, fecund smell of her dirty hair.

  "I'm awake."

  "Come outside with me."

  "Now? Outside?"

  "It's stopped raining." It hadn't, really, but it had slowed to a pervasive, miserable drizzle, and it was no more wet out there than in the shelter. Or so Jake told himself. This sudden need to talk to Lucy scared him with its strength. It was Shipley, Shipley and his deathbed oath to the damned alien, Shipley and the memories he'd released ... Jake couldn't wait anymore. If he waited, he would explode.

  Lucy rose, stepping over Ingrid and Karim in the dark. Jake groped for her hand and hung on blindly.

  He led her through the drizzle to nowhere in particular, and ended up beside the invisible wall behind the spot where the skimmer had once landed. Twelve hours ago, fourteen? It seemed days. Somewhere in the wet blackness Beta sat under his dome, its sides streaming with a water he could never touch. Jake pulled Lucy to a sitting position with their backs against the wall, the thermal blanket a hood over both their heads.

  "Jake, what is it?"

  "I have to tell you something."

  He could feel her waiting.

  "I have to tell you something, but it isn't easy to say. I just need someone—you—to know the truth before I die."

  She said gently, "We won't die."

  God, she was brave. He tried to match her courage. "Maybe not. Maybe I want you to know anyway. To know what kind of a person I am." And then you won't love me anymore. But that was a risk he felt impelled to take.

  "I had a brother. Twelve years younger than I. He was ... wild. Our parents died when I was nineteen and Donnie was seven. We were poor, and there wasn't anybody else, so I raised Donnie. No, that's not true ... Donnie raised himself. I was too busy with college and then law school to do more than buy groceries and give him lunch money. By the time he was ten Donnie was spending most of his time on the streets, with predictable results."

  "Jake, that wasn't your—"

  "Just listen, please. Donnie had a police record by fourteen. I had just passed the bar and I tried to be home more but it was impossible. Atlanta, where we lived, got worse and worse and Donnie would disappear for days. So I forcibly put him in a pseudo-military school in Virginia, one of those places where they supposedly outfit troubled kids for careers in space. Motivation, discipline. Goals, all the crap I still believed in then.

  "And it seemed to be working. He made new friends, not street thugs but kids from respectable families. He started spending his time with Hobart Sullivan Dalton III."

  Jake waited, but there was no reaction from Lucy. The rain picked up again.

  "You didn't ever hear about the Dalton murder? Twenty-five years ago?"

  "Jake, I was five years old."

  She still might have heard of it, but he let it go. "The Daltons were a wealthy family. Beyond wealthy. They were what people meant when they said that the rich had taken so much they'd drained both poor and the Earth itself. Anna Standish Dalton was a widow and Hobart was her youngest son. The two older kids were good little vampires but Hobart had decided it was more fun to kick his relatives than to enjoy his advantages."

  Lucy said, "Like Nan Frayne."

  "It isn't the ... never mind. Maybe. Hobart and Donnie teamed up and stole inside the school, outside the school, anywhere they could. The school expelled them. Donnie came home and I gave him hell so he disappeared into the high-tech slums of northern Virginia with Hobart. He emailed every once in a while, and eventually I had a jumper follow the electronic trail and track him down. It took me a couple years to get to it because I was having my own troubles. My wife and I were in the middle of a nasty divorce."

  "Your ... wife?"

  "Rania." Strange to think that Rania had been dead and buried for decades now, back on that shadowy Earth lost in time dilation. "We didn't have much money, but she wanted it all. I didn't want to give it to her. We spent enormous amounts of time fighting each other, and Donnie got lost in the smoke of battle. But when I found him in Virginia, I took an aircab up there and checked into a hotel and started the utterly futile process of arguing him back to a straight life. It was like arguing with the wind. I could see that Donnie, and Hobart, too, were both using neptune and it was already destroying them. They were gaunt and crazy-eyed and filthy. I wouldn't give Donnie any money for the drug, and I gathered that Mrs. Dalton wouldn't give Hobart any, either. He didn't come into any money of his own till he turned twenty-one."

  This time when he paused, Lucy stayed quiet.

  "I decided to go see Mrs. Dalton to discuss the boys, and I told Donnie I was going that same night. I took a robocab to the estate. I was just approaching the front door of the suburban, still out of sight of the surveillance vids, when the gate burst open and Donnie ran out. He was hysterical. I made him tell me what had happened. When he had, I thought quicker than I ever had in my life. I was a state's attorney, Lucy. I knew how these things worked."

  Jake's mouth felt dry, despite the rain. He licked his lips. Lucy was very still.

  "I made Donnie change clothes with me. Boots, coverall, face mask, gloves. I told him to walk back to the city, get as far as he could before the police caught him, and not to resist arrest when they did. Hobart had taken the surveillance system down, and it was still out. He knew, or had gotten, the codes. I walked right in. I thought I might see servants, but I didn't.

  "Mrs. Dalton and Hobart lay in her study, where Donnie said they were. Probably he'd fired first, and his gun was still in his hand. She'd been quick, though, maybe even simultaneous, and her gun was right beside her. Maybe Hobart hadn't expected her to use it. It's one thing to shoot your mother. It's another to have a mother kill a child, even a child that's just forced her to open her e-account and transfer a million dollars to you.

  "When I went in, I planned on simply taking something, anything, that might help in Donnie's defense. I knew he'd be caught. Forensics is too damn sophisticated; he'd have left fibers and God-knows-what all over the place. I did, too, but it was all from Donnie's clothing. They'd know someone else had come in, but they wouldn't know who. Not an inch of me was exposed. I picked up an e-tablet, thinking I'd check out later whose it was, what if anything it said. Then I noticed that Mrs. Dalton was still alive. And I saw something else."

  Lucy made a movement and Jake put a restraining hand on her arm. If she interrupted now, he didn't think he could finish this.

  "She'd been shot maybe ten minutes ago. I was pretty sure she was dying, but her heart was still pumping. That meant her blood was still flowing. As long as the blood flows anywhere, it flows everywhere, including through the capillaries in the eye. And Hobart had already forced her to open her e-account for a transfer. I—"

  "No..."

  "Yes. I dragged her by her hair to the terminal and shoved her retina against the scanner. It authorized a money transfer. I dropped her and transferred ten billion dollars to the Bolivian secret account I'd set up to keep assets away from Rania, and I left the house. It was a major conjunction of circumstances that had come together, like a major conjunction of planets, and just as rare. To me it me
ant that I was intended to defend Donnie. I took the money, which was still only a fraction of the Dalton estate, to hire the best lawyers I could to defend him. The cops would suspect where the money came from, of course, but they wouldn't be able to prove anything. They wouldn't be able to put me on the scene. My practice and my life would be ruined but it seemed to me, in the fever of that moment, that my ruin was right, too, because I owed it to Donnie. I'd failed him and it was my job to make it up to him. Lucy, I left that house in a glow of unholy virtue, illuminated by my own inner light."

  "Jake?" Gail called from the direction of the shelter. "Lucy?"

  Jake said, "Only it didn't work out that way. There was no defense. Conjunctions of circumstances last only an instant, you know, and then the planets move on. Donnie went straight to a neptune den in the city, took an overdose, and died the next day."

  Gail, more insistent: "Jake! Are you out there? Are you all right?"

  "I was never even a suspect. The cops assumed either Hobart or Donnie had transferred the money before the shooting. Bolivian accounts were absolutely secret and absolutely secure. If they hadn't been, half the transnationals might have collapsed. That ten billion dollars had just disappeared off the face of the Earth, for all anyone could prove."

  "Jake—"

  "Just a little bit more. I waited five full years. Then I spent one billion of the ten to have the best criminal jumper in the world create a rich uncle to leave me the other nine in his will. By the time he finished, my Swiss uncle Johan had a lifelong e-trail, friends, old retainers, everything. Then I started Mira Corp and looked for investors as eager to get off the stinking corrupt planet as I was. My first investor was William Shipley, upright leader of a New Quakers sect that wanted to live a purer and more idealistic life somewhere else."

  "Jake!" Gail called, and now there was real fear in her voice.

  "We're all right, Gail. Leave us alone!" Jake yelled, but instead of calling back an embarrassed apology, Gail must have started toward them. Jake saw a flashlight bobbing toward them in the dark.