by Nancy Kress
“Who’s Judy?”
She’d forgotten his methodical, careful way of assessing a situation: dig out all the facts, arrange them in rows, study them. It steadied her. You didn’t win a Nobel Prize with wild assumptions, nor with excesses of either trust or paranoia. She had always admired Harrison’s mind, and now she needed it.
“Judy is a friend, a physicist at the site. I need to tell you all of this, but first let me show you some data points. Dead mice and a picture.”
He looked at both. He said, “That’s Apodemus agrarius, the striped field mouse. It’s not found in the United States.”
“It is now,” she said grimly. Another invasive species. “And it carries Korean hemorrhagic fever with renal syndrome. You remember that German scientist did the initial work on HFRS infecting Mus musculus, probably from Apodemus, and then the American team led by Samuel Wolski extended it.” From her bag she drew the six dead, plastic-wrapped pups.
Harrison studied them. “I’d need to do lab work on these, of course. Do you have live specimens?”
“Not anymore. Harrison, there’s a woman at the Venture site ill from what I think may be HFRS. The rest of us have been vaccinated, but we were told it’s for Lyme disease.”
“Why do you think it wasn’t? And that whatever killed these mice is in any way related to your sick woman?”
“I can’t know for sure. But I brought you a vaccine sample—I stole it, actually.” She’d pretended she couldn’t breathe, sending the nurse out the room to summon a doctor, and had pocketed a vial of vaccine.
He frowned and ran a hand through his thinning hair in a gesture she remembered well. “I can do tests, of course, Marianne, but the vaccine for Korean hemorrhagic fever isn’t even available in the United States. They use it extensively in China and Korea, but it isn’t FDA approved.”
“That wouldn’t even slow down Jonah Stubbins.”
“Stubbins?” Harrison grimaced. “No, probably not. But still … the disease is transmitted through inhalation of aerosolized rodent urine or feces. Transmission rates aren’t high with proper pest control.”
“That’s another thing I want you to investigate,” Marianne said. “To find out if the virus has been genetically altered to go airborne.”
“Marianne—why on Earth would anyone—”
“Not on Earth,” she said. “On World. As a weapon, or a threat of weapon. Find out. Please.”
CHAPTER 23
S plus 6.5 years
Everything was bad.
The mice all got dead. Everybody had to get a shot in the arm, which hurt, and Colin felt sick for a whole day after his. Grandma said they had to leave the spaceship camp, her and Colin and Jason, and Colin didn’t want to go. Luke wasn’t going and Ava wasn’t going—they got to live here. But Ava wasn’t here now because she had to fly with Mr. Stubbins someplace for some more of those stupid tests. Two weeks had gone by since Grandma told them about leaving, and Ava had been gone that whole time.
“Everything’s shit,” Colin said, trying out the forbidden word. He only did that because Grandma had left her laptop to go to the bathroom, while Jason and Colin did math on their tablets and Luke struggled to read something to himself in the corner. His lips moved. They were the only ones in the mess hall because it wasn’t time to eat and anyway why weren’t they in their own room where they usually did lessons? Maybe because Grandma looked a lot at her laptop.
“Not everything’s shit,” said Jason, who liked math better than Colin did. Colin liked drawing and reading but not math. “Grandma said Daddy was getting better and pretty soon he can come live with us again.”
Colin said nothing. He liked living here better than he’d liked living with Daddy.
“And Ms. Blake is getting better, too.”
“She isn’t better enough to teach us,” Colin pointed out. “And when she is all better, we’ll be gone and we’ll have a new school and new kids to get used to and that’ll be shit, too.” He thought of Paul Tyson.
“Maybe it will be good,” Jason said, entering an answer on his tablet. “There might be enough kids for a soccer team.”
“I hate soccer,” Colin said, although he’d never played soccer. Right now he hated everything. Everything was shit. And he couldn’t figure out how many apples were left over if you divided seven of them up evenly for Pat and Pam and Cam. Who cared if those stupid girls got any apples anyway?
Jason said, “Why are you so grumpy?”
“I don’t want to move away.”
Jason sighed. “Col—”
“I’m going now.” The idea burst in on him like a firecracker. He could walk out of this room! Grandma could make him leave the camp for good and miss the spaceship launch and everything, but she couldn’t make him sit here and do this math. She had really disappointed him! That’s what she said when he or Jason did something bad, they’d disappointed her, but this time he was the one who was disappointed. No camp, no mice, no Luke or Ava forever and ever. He had a right to be disappointed!
He got up and walked to the door.
“Hey!” Jason said. Luke stared with big eyes.
Colin opened the door and darted through it, real fast, before Grandma could come out of the bathroom. He knew where he was going and he ran as fast as he could. Behind him he heard Jason, still going “Hey! Hey!” and then Luke. Jason was taller and Luke was bigger and all three boys reached the spaceship at the same time.
Jason panted, “What … do you … think you’re doing?”
Colin didn’t answer him. The spaceship door was open, but two workmen inside were doing something to a door and they would just tell him to go away. So he walked—he was too tired now to run—around to the other side of the Venture, where there was no door. There was a guard but he was used to the boys and just went on reading his comic book. Colin slumped to the ground, his back against the side of the ship, which was called the “hull.” It felt warm from sunshine. Then Colin heard it.
Luke did, too. Luke said, “There’s mice in there!”
Colin pressed his ear to the hull. The sounds were clear and high. He rearranged the rows of noises in his head to hear the mouse sounds more clearly. “A lot of mice.”
“They’re mad,” Luke said.
Jason said, “Let’s go in and see them!”
The boys crept back around the ship. The door was still open but the workmen weren’t there. Colin led the way through the airlock, into the big room where some seats were ready and some still in big boxes. To Colin’s surprise, he heard Mr. Stubbins on the bridge. Did that mean Ava was back? Then why wasn’t she at Grandma’s school? Mr. Stubbins said to somebody, “Damn it, there has to be a door on that toilet! Make it fit!”
A workman—Colin could see part of him now, on the bridge—answered. “It won’t fit, sir. It just won’t.”
Luke said, “We shouldn’t be here.”
Jason said, “Luke’s right. Let’s go.”
But Colin didn’t want to go back to math and to Grandma—who was going to be even madder than the mice—and to leaving camp forever. Another firecracker idea burst into his head. “I can’t go! I have to rescue the mice!”
“Rescue?” Jason said.
It was like Brandon and the elephant in the basement! Colin was the hero who would rescue the mice, who were probably mad because they were trapped in their cages. But Colin didn’t have time to explain that because the two workmen, frowning, came back from the bridge. Jason and Luke ran through the airlock and outside. Colin yanked open a door and ducked behind it.
The mice weren’t here. It was a big empty space except for a smaller ship: the shuttle. The walls of the room had cupboards, mostly open and mostly empty. Colin climbed into one and closed the door. He just fit. Perfect—he could stay here until night when everybody left, and then he could go out and rescue the mice.
After a while it got cramped in the cupboard, but Colin stayed in there because that’s what rescuers did. He could hear everything: th
e mice and the workmen and Mr. Stubbins rumbling to somebody else on the bridge and the ship making its metal-ship sounds and the underground machines and the real ground under that. All of it.
But it was cramped and he wished everyone would go home.
* * *
The e-mail arrived while Marianne was in the bathroom. She heard the laptop ping with the specific sound she and Harrison had set up as a signal, and she finished hastily and rushed out to the mess. The boys were gone.
“Jason? Colin? Luke?”
No answer. They’d run off. She was surprised because all three were usually obedient, but Colin and Jason had both been angry with her ever since the announcement that they were leaving the Venture site. She’d deal with them later. This e-mail was the reason she’d been teaching the boys here instead of in the classroom.
Her heart began a slow, arrhythmic bumping in her chest.
Harrison had written using the code they’d worked out, he skeptical that such “cloak-and-dagger histrionics” were necessary, she increasingly sure that they were. Each sentence meant something entirely different than its ostensible content:
My dear Marianne—
Not “dear Marianne” or just “Marianne.” The dead Mus had tested positive for hemorrhagic fever with renal syndrome.
I find myself thinking about the time we spent together in the harbor, at Columbia, that day in Central Park …
Harrison’s hybridization analyses of the postmortem material had found either antigens or the viral RNA itself in the mice’s brain, liver and spleen.
… and, especially, that memorable boat ride on the Hudson.
A small groan escaped her. That was the worst. The virus’s genes had altered so that it could infect via a respiratory route. Either that evolution had occurred naturally, or there had been a long, intensive effort to change the genome.
I guess what I’m saying is that I would like to see you again …
Colin’s identification of the striped field mouse had been accurate. Apodemus had been imported to carry the virus here. Or rather, not here—to World.
She had no doubt now that Stubbins had imported and altered the virus, or that World was his target. Apodemus was an incredibly adaptive rodent, and Terrans already knew it was not killed by the spore cloud. Stubbins had stockpiled vaccine in case it was needed for just such an emergency as Colin’s escaped mouse. World would have no vaccines, no natural immunity. Judy’s speculations did not look quite so paranoid now. If Judy was right and World did not know as much genetics as Stubbins’s scientists did, Worlders would be vulnerable to even the threat of the disease. This version of HFRS was the most deadly, with a kill rate of 15 percent—and that was not counting what other microbes the mice might carry as they slipped, silently and pervasively, into whatever World cities looked like. And even if alien microbes killed the mice, the rodents would leave behind droppings, urine, carcasses, all infected with airborne viruses.
Smallpox to the Indians.
But why? What could Stubbins gain? Not revenge. Whatever the Russians might want, Marianne didn’t think that Jonah Stubbins was after vengeance. For that, you had to care about what you’d lost, and Stubbins cared for no one and nothing except profit. So—these mice were bargaining chips, threats, to obtain something from World. Trade, or tribute, or power, or maybe just survival.
There was one more piece to Harrison’s message: Eagerly awaiting your reply, Harrison.
He was notifying the CDC.
* * *
Folded up in the cupboard, Colin suddenly had to go to the bathroom. Was there a bathroom on the spaceship? There must be because every place had a bathroom, even parks, although Grandma wouldn’t let Colin use park bathrooms by himself. Colin wished he were in a park now. He crossed his legs.
There were less people in the ship now. Colin could hear every one of them, if he looked at the right rows of sounds. Closest was Mr. Stubbins, still on the bridge, rumbling at two men and Grandma’s friend Dr. Taunton. Colin was supposed to call her Aunt Judy, she said so, but he never did because she wasn’t his aunt. Aunt Elizabeth was his only aunt, and he hardly ever saw her because she lived far away in Texas, where she played with guns. She didn’t like children anyway.
What if Grandma took Colin and Jason to live with Aunt Elizabeth? Well, he wouldn’t go, he just wouldn’t! So there!
Crossing his legs wasn’t helping.
* * *
Marianne was still staring at Harrison’s message when Jason and Luke burst into the mess hall, panting, their faces gleaming with sweat. “We lost Colin!”
Marianne grabbed Jason’s arm. “What do you mean, you lost him? Is he hurt? What happened?”
“He ain’t hurt, ma’am,” Luke said, and belatedly Marianne saw that Jason was more excited than alarmed. Some sort of boyish adventure, then. But Colin was barely six.
She forced herself to calm. “Tell me what happened.”
“We went to see the spaceship,” Jason said. He propped himself with one arm against a table and pretended to pick a speck of dirt off his sleeve. Marianne recognized the attempt at casualness to cover transgression; she’d seen it in Ryan, just this same pose, all his life.
Jason continued. “There were people coming out of the bridge so we ran but Colin didn’t come. Maybe he wanted to find the mice.”
“Mice? What mice?”
Luke said in his slow, labored speech, “Mice on the ship. Lots.”
Stubbins was stocking his weapons. Oh dear God. How close was liftoff? Who knew? “Where did Colin go?”
“We don’t know,” Jason said. “Maybe he’s still on the ship? Or he ran away to hide? He’s mad at you, Grandma, ’cause he doesn’t want to leave camp.” After a moment he added bravely, looking directly at her, “I don’t want to, either.”
“I know. We’ll talk about it more. But right now I have to go find Colin. You two stay right here, do you hear me? I mean it. If I find out that you left the mess hall again…”
“Yes’m,” Luke said. He hung his head. Jason did not, but he sat on a bench and halfheartedly picked up his tablet, still displaying math problems.
Marianne moved at a fast walk to the Venture. She was not seriously worried about Colin, who was only acting out his displeasure at leaving. But what Stubbins planned was bioterrorism. Harrison would, of course, think first of the CDC; he focused on pathogens. But if Marianne was right and Stubbins actually intended to menace World, if he was bringing infected mice to threaten or retaliate—
She didn’t know how men like Stubbins thought. She never had. But others did know, the military and the FBI, and that’s where the CDC would report. The president. The UN. What was left of NASA. Something would be done. It was out of Marianne’s hands, and she knew that what she felt was, in part, a cowardly relief.
The door of the Venture stood open. Inside, two workmen were installing a door on a bathroom. Marianne was surprised at how complete the interior now looked. Seats bolted to the deck, tables, a wall screen that said “Sony,” a giant coffeemaker on one wall. The interior was being customized for Terrans. Doors led to the bridge, the shuttle bay, the aft storage area. Were the mice back there?
“Well, hold the fucking door steady!” one of the workmen said to the other.
“I told you, it won’t fit! No matter what the old man says!”
“Well, we need another one, then. We’re done here for today.”
Marianne went through to the bridge. Stubbins was there, along with Judy and the chief engineer, Eric Wilshire. Behind Stubbins stood his bodyguard, whom Marianne had never heard called anything but “Stone.” He was huge, muscular, and blank-faced. Not usually around when Stubbins was at the ship, Stone’s presence suggested that Stubbins had just returned from another of his off-site trips.
Judy carried an unlit cigarette and looked annoyed. “Eric, I’ve explained and explained. The plans are mostly pictorial and mathematical, so we’re guessing at all the effects, and even though the shield
ing seems minimal there’s evidence that the repulsion factor doesn’t exceed the—Hey, Marianne.”
“Hi. Jonah, is Colin here?”
“Colin? ’Course not. Why would he be here?”
Stubbins gazed at her, and Marianne felt a shiver in her brain, as if he could see directly into it. See her thoughts, know what she now knew. He was preternaturally insightful, as aggressors often were. Was her body language giving away her revulsion, her fear, her fury at what he planned to do? Or was she responding to one of his infernal pheromonal scents? No, that was fanciful; she was under too much stress; her suppositions were ridiculous.
No, they weren’t. Stubbins knew she’d discovered something. He knew.
She said, “Colin ran away. I know he’s fascinated with the ship so I thought maybe—”
Judy, oblivious but helpful, said, “He isn’t here, Marianne. We’re just winding down for the day.”
“Okay, I’ll just—”
Then everything began at once.
* * *
Aaarrrrr! Aaarrrr! Aaarrrr! Blat blat blat!
Sirens sounded, just like a fire engine but a lot louder. Colin had heard those sirens once before, when the bad guys fired missiles at the other spaceship and wrecked it. The Venture was getting attacked!
He burst out of the storage cupboard and fell, his legs wouldn’t work right, they were all cramped up. A moment later he was up. He ran through the door from the shuttle bay just before it swung shut and made a locking sound.
The big door to the airlock swung shut and locked, too, but not the bathroom door because there still wasn’t one. Colin bolted for the toilet and made it just before it would have been too late. Only the toilet didn’t have any water in it or pipes; it wasn’t hooked up yet. He didn’t care.
Grandma’s voice behind him—what was Grandma doing here? Nothing made sense! “Colin, what are you … oh my God!”
Colin finished peeing and turned around. The wall screen in the big room was filled with a man’s face. He looked familiar, like somebody Colin had seen around camp. He also looked scared.
“Incoming, incoming,” the man said. “Impact in ninety seconds.… Jonah, the Venture is the target! Eighty-five seconds…”