Нэнси Кресс - If Tomorrow Comes

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.