Нэнси Кресс - If Tomorrow Comes

“Yes. Well, as official as possible.” He raised one hand, put it on his cheek, and pulled downward on the skin on his face—some sort of tension tic. Leo had seen his mother do the same thing.

Owen said, “If your delegation carries any weapons, place them on the ground now.”

“We have no weapons,” Jenner said. “Lieutenant, we want to talk to you. Did your… your military destroy our cities this morning?”

Pretty direct. Leo heard the strain and grief in Jenner’s voice. Those were dangerous emotions. He kept his rifle trained on Jenner.

“No,” Owen said. “A Russian ship fired on the planet, destroyed our ship, and then fired on our landing shuttle.”

Jenner turned and spoke to the other four people, presumably translating. Their faces crumpled, looking suddenly much more human. Jenner turned back to Owen. “Why would a Russian ship do that?”

Jenner knew nothing—how could he? The Kindred ship, with him on it, had left Earth ten years ago. Before the spore plague hit, before whole economies collapsed across the globe, before Russians died in greater number than anybody else, before the vaccine was found.

Owen said, “Revenge.”

“For what ? All we did—”

We. Jenner considered himself Kindred, not Terran. Leo filed away this piece of intel.

“—was ask your help with finding a vaccine!”

“Some people didn’t see it that way,” Owen said. “Look, Mr. Jenner, I can fill you in on Terran history later. Right now, we have a problem, and so do you. Your planet is under attack, and our transport has been destroyed, both by the Stremlenie . We have the same enemy.”

Jenner gazed at Owen, and Leo couldn’t read the expression in those Terran-gray, alien-large eyes. Finally Jenner said, “Put away your weapons, Lieutenant. We won’t harm you. But I don’t think you realize that—”

“Noah!”

Leo turned his head the slightest fraction. Dr. Jenner was slipping and sliding over rubble on the rough terrain, Berman behind her. Ordinarily Zoe could have restrained Marianne Jenner with one hand, but Zoe had had surgery only two days ago. Behind both of them came Dr. Bourgiba, calling, “Ranger Berman! Don’t—” Kandiss, behind his boulder, looked like he didn’t know what the hell he was supposed to do. It was a zoo.

Owen said tightly, “Squad, stand down. Mr. Jenner, let’s talk.”

Salah sat quietly, listening as Noah Jenner deconstructed the universe.

Jenner sat cross-legged on the ground beneath the overhang. A short distance away, Zoe Berman “guarded” the other four Kindred, who sat in a huddle, not understanding the English being spoken but looking, Salah thought, more saddened than alarmed. One, an old woman, seemed to be the leader, but she hadn’t asked Noah or Salah to translate for her. She merely waited, the coppery skin of her face set in the deep crevasses of age and grief. Her waiting, however, had not an air of resignation as much as of patience, with the trust that in good time she would be informed of everything she needed to make whatever decisions were necessary. Meanwhile, she grieved silently.

Mason Kandiss and Leo Brodie were “securing the area,” whatever that meant under these circumstances. The rest of the Terrans listened to Lamont question Jenner.

“It wasn’t just the city you saw destroyed,” he said, and the grief of his expression echoed the old woman’s. “It was three of our four cities.” He named them, a litany of trills and clicks among syllables heavy with pain. “But we think the Russian ship has gone back to Terra.”

“How do you know?” Lamont demanded. He, alone, remained standing, looming over the others, his weapons glaring to Salah even in the dim and orangey light. The day was heating up, even in the shade of the overhang.

“We don’t, for sure. It could be on the other side of the planet. But—”

“Why can’t you detect it with satellites or probes or your own ships? We could, with the Friendship .” Lamont’s voice was controlled but relentless, each word coming out like a small bullet.

“Ship. Singular. It was also destroyed in the attack. It sat in Kam^tel^ha.”

This time Salah caught the name of the city: Beautiful-by-the-Sea.

“Your fleet consisted of only one ship?”

“There were two. The other, as at least some of you know”—he nodded at his mother, who sat beside him with her hand on his arm—“is contaminated with spores at the colony it was supplying.”

“And you only built two?” Lamont was not even trying to hide his skepticism.

“Yes. Two. We had no need of more than two.”

“A navy of—”

“It was not a navy,” Lamont said. “Or an air force. Or space satellites. We have no military, Lieutenant.”

“Uh-huh. So you’re saying you have no starships left to get us home.”

“That is what I’m saying.”

Branch Carter suddenly shifted his weight on the ground, and Jenner gazed at him briefly before turning to his mother. Jenner’s voice went reedy with strain. “I know you all thought that World must have an advanced technology. I thought so too, once. But I’m here to tell you that we do not. Our two star drives, plus plans to build the ships, were left for us, presumably by whatever race took humans from Earth to World 140,000 years ago. The plans were partly pictorial, partly mathematics, partly in symbols with a pictorial key or something like that—I don’t pretend to understand it. But there were texts, all engraved on some metal that did not decay—the same plans that Mee^hao¡ and his expedition left you on Terra ten years ago. And World understood them even less than you did. But we’d been left parts, too, in sealed containers that required a civilization far enough advanced to open. Including two star drives. It was sort of like…. like fitting together Legos. Or so I’ve been told. I wasn’t here then.”

Lamont said, “So you can’t build another ship.”

“We wouldn’t even if we could,” Jenner said. “We only assembled the last one because the spore cloud was—”

Claire Patel blurted out, “Why wouldn’t you build another one? If you could?”

“Building one was a tremendous drain on our resources, and a tremendous violation to Mother World.”

Claire looked confused, but Salah understood. They were now on religious grounds, or something close to religion.

“Violation?” Branch said.

“Mining substances, dangerous processing of them, radioactive waste—I’m not sure of the details. I’m not a scientist. But I know that the two ships were built only because of the spore cloud.”

“And when you left us on Earth information about the ships, you just left out that tiny little piece about jumping ahead fourteen years during the trip here.”

“We didn’t know,” Jenner said. “It was a shock to us to arrive here twenty-eight years after the Embassy left World. We thought we had twenty-four years before the spore cloud hit. We didn’t.”

Salah was doing rapid math in his head. But then, if the Embassy jumped fourteen years before it reached Earth and another fourteen returning here, and the cloud had been due in twenty-five years—

Jenner said, “Our calculations were wrong. We don’t have your accuracy with astronomical measurements. But we know now that the cloud will come soon.”

Salah said, “Our astrophysicist says— said —seventy-one days from now.”

Jenner bowed his head.

Marianne Jenner spoke for the first time. “You couldn’t accurately calculate the cloud’s arrival. You don’t have the physics to understand the ships you built. And you didn’t have the biology, the genetics, to research and combat R. sporii yourself. So you came to Earth with hopes that we knew more.”