Нэнси Кресс - If Tomorrow Comes

His thoughts were almost simultaneous. Adrenaline coursed through him. The Kindred was still shouting. Now Leo caught the one Terran word, hard to decipher in that accent: vaccine . The fucker wanted some of the precious vaccine. What did he think, that he could just waltz in here, be given a syringe, and stroll out?

Leo heard his own voice saying calmly, “Give him something he can think is vaccine.”

No one moved. No one understood his English. Then Dr. Patel stepped forward, something in her hand. Behind him he heard another voice, speaking Kindred loudly: Isabelle.

Claire Patel walked up to the Kindred and held out her hand. A syringe lay on her palm. The intruder, holding the gun and Carter, had no hands left to take it. Dr. Patel smiled; only the throbbing of her temples gave away her fear—and approached the intruder. No one else, maybe, could have done it; Dr. Patel, weighing maybe ninety pounds, looked as threatening as a child. She put the syringe into a pocket of the intruder’s wrap.

Isabelle continued to talk in Kindred. Leo would have given anything to know what she was saying. Leo would have to make a decision soon; the fucker was backing away, toward the door, his arm tightening around Carter’s neck. No way Leo could let them get out of here.

The man shouted something back at Isabelle and kept moving.

Leo said, “Isabelle, tell everyone to get behind doors. Now. ”

She did. A small part of Leo’s mind was astonished at how quickly and completely lab personnel followed directions. He’d seen platoons less disciplined.

Then— yes . Leo caught the movement before anyone else did. Carter—because he was choking or because he was being taken away, flailed in the intruder’s grasp. For a fraction of a second, the intruder’s body was exposed. Leo fired.

His bullet hit exactly where he intended: the left knee. The intruder screamed, let go of Carter, and fell to the floor. The gun did not explode; it skittered across the floor and came to rest against a closed door. Leo was on the intruder, and it was all over.

“How the fuck did this happen?” Owen demanded.

The unit stood at attention in front of him. The homemade pipe gun, disassembled, lay on a piece of cloth at his feet. He glanced at it in disgust, although it was clear the thing didn’t merit disgust. Made from two pieces of steel pipe, with a wooden dowel and nail making up the firing pin, the gun resembled the Philippine guerilla gun, utilizing blow forward action. Leo had seen such guns in Brazil. But this was a much sleeker version; the pipes had been sanded so that the barrel slid perfectly inside the receiver. The stock had a wooden block in front of the end cap so that if the receiver end threads failed, the end cap would not be blown into the user’s face. The stock was smooth, with some sort of material acting as grip.

The problem with all these pipe guns was that you got only one shot—after firing, the barrel had to be removed and the spent shell pulled out by hand. That hadn’t seemed to deter the attacker, who was now being treated by Dr. Bourgiba and questioned by Noah Jenner.

“Brodie,” Owen said, “where were you?”

“On interior patrol, sir. In the walkway between buildings.” Owen already knew this. “Permission to speak, sir.”

“Go ahead.”

“There aren’t enough of us, sir. We can’t cover everything. And if one Kindred could make this weapon, then a lot of them can.”

“Do you think I don’t know that, Brodie? Is that what you think?”

“No, sir.”

“I’m glad you don’t think that. Because I know this will happen again. I know there aren’t enough of us to secure this facility adequately. I also know this should not have been allowed to happen. Berman, why didn’t you observe the Kinnie from the roof?”

Kinnie. Leo hadn’t heard the word before. They way Owen said it, it sounded ugly. Brassie. Towelhead. Gook. Jap. Chink.

Zoe said, “No answer, sir, except that he might coulda crossed the perimeter to the south, while I was watching what looked like suspicious movement in the east outer edge of the camp, sir. Kandiss went to check it out.”

“What kind of suspicious movement?”

“Males of fighting age moving in, like… coulda been drills.”

“Armed?”

“Not that I could see.”

A diversion? If some group in the camp was that organized, the squad was in trouble. Three soldiers awake at one time… not enough.

“Kandiss, where were you? Did you see this ‘drilling’?”

“No, sir.”

Zoe said, “Sir, they’d stopped by the time Kandiss reached that section of the perimeter.”

“And you—any of you—have never seen any more of these weapons, or anything resembling them? Or anything else that can be construed as a weapon? Molotovs, IEDs, anything?”

Three no-sirs.

Brodie said, “Permission to speak, sir.”

“Go ahead.”

“We need more eyes, sir, as you said. We should start training Kindred to supplement patrols.”

Something moved behind Owen’s eyes. “Because that worked out so well in Brazil, right, Corporal Brodie? At, for instance, Brasília?”

Leo was silent. He hadn’t been at Brasilia, but he knew all about it, as did everyone in the entire world. Fourteen US-trained and armed insurgents had—all fourteen of them—been infiltrators. They had slaughtered fifteen Marines who had trained and trusted them, and then an entire village of women and children.

Owen said, “We aren’t arming Kinnies any more than they’re doing themselves. Christ, all that propaganda about how these are genetically and socially peaceful people…”

Leo blinked. “Genetically and socially peaceful”? Not the sort of language that found its way into any debriefing he’d ever been in. Well, Owen was smart and college-educated.

And the Kindred, whatever they were genetically and socially, were human. Humans got desperate.

Owen said, “From now on, standing orders are twenty-hour duty shifts. Roof watcher reports anything suspicious directly and immediately to me. No more fuck-ups. Another Kinnie gets inside, and the fuck-up is facing court-martial when we get back home. Got it?”

“Yes, sir!”

Back home? Did Owen still think that was happening? How?

“Dismissed,” Owen said.

Leo bent to once again examine the parts of the pipe gun. There could be a whole factory making these somewhere—except, wouldn’t the Mothers object? And what had the Kinnie been shouting before Leo dropped him? Maybe Leo better start learning the language.

He’d picked up a fair amount of Portuguese on duty in Brazil. He didn’t have the kind of language ability that Dr. Bourgiba did, and opportunity to study was limited because they were going to stand twenty-hour duty shifts, but you could learn a lot just keeping your eyes and ears open. And—wait!

Maybe he could ask Isabelle to teach him. Half an hour, fifteen minutes carved from his sleep time… yes.

Two hours later, a dirigible floated toward the camp. Kandiss, on roof watch, used the squad frequency to detail its landing a mile away from the lab. Then he said, “Okay, a… a procession coming toward us.”

Owen’s voice, sharp on the radio frequency: “What kind of procession?”

“It looks like… four men carrying a platform on poles. Canopy, open sides… woman lying inside.”

“A body? Dead?”

“No, sir. Really old. Not headed here, swerved toward Noah Jenner’s house on the hill.”

Where the Terran lahk lives, Leo thought, and then corrected himself: lived . Nobody was left in the beautiful karthwood house except Isabelle’s sister and her kid, Austin. Jenner and Isabelle had moved into the compound; the McGuire brothers had returned to their “manufacturies” in the central mountains; nobody seemed to know where the other two males, Schrupp and Beyon, lived now. Or, if they did know, they hadn’t told Leo. Well, that had been typical of most of the foster families Leo had grown up in: people moved away, leaving no forwarding address. No biggie.