Нэнси Кресс - If Tomorrow Comes

“Thank you,” Gonzalez said. “Captain, can we speak to the planet now?”

“I’ll try.”

Owen must have been equipped with some way to hear Colonel Matthews, or something, because he broke off in the middle of a sentence and said, “As of now, this unit is on red alert. Battle stations, now .”

Four soldiers sprang up faster. Faster than Leo, standing bewildered and alone by the table, imagined possible, Owen had opened a bulkhead locker and he, Kandiss, Flores, and Berman were grabbing arms and donning armor. Owen felt like a fool. He didn’t have a battle station, had no idea what he was supposed to be doing. A sniper was useless on a tiny ship. Owen said calmly, “Brodie, come with me. Cover me if necessary.” He handed Leo his gear.

Cover him? Against what? Were they going to be boarded, or land, or… Leo did as he was ordered, automatically checking his weapon, copying Owen’s movements, hoping for the best.

Marianne stood inconspicuously in a corner of the bridge while Ambassador Gonzalez addressed the tiny blue marble on the wall screen. “Kindred, this is the Terran ship Friendship , from the United States, built with the plans you left us when you came to Earth. We come now in peace and friendship.” She then repeated the message in English.

No answer.

Gonzalez tried again, and again. Nothing. She turned to the engineer and the physicist, both of whom had been involved in building the ship. “Are we too far out?”

Volker said, “It seems so, ma’am.”

“I want the recorded version of the message played every hour, and I want to be summoned immediately, awake or asleep, when there is a response. We don’t know where their receiving equipment is, in orbit or on the ground, or in how many places.”

No, they didn’t know that. Although, Marianne thought, it was reasonable to suppose that a civilization so much further advanced than Earth had ultra-sophisticated detection equipment for anything out of the ordinary in their star system. Still—

Judy Taunton, physicist on Earth and Marianne’s friend, had made some very disturbing speculations about Kindred.

Gonzalez said, “Open the all-ship frequency, please. I would like to tell everyone what the—”

“Oh my God!” McKenzie blurted.

Colonel Matthews said sharply, “What is it? Incoming?”

“No, no, I… my God, no, but I checked… let me run the program again!”

Gonzalez said, “What program? Inform us, Dr. McKenzie!”

The astrophysicist turned away from the computer and toward the ambassador. Marianne was shocked at how pale he looked, how shaky. If he fainted… But he didn’t. McKenzie got hold of himself, although his voice quavered.

“The astronomical program checks the stars’ locations against charts. We know what positions every celestial body should hold relative to each other, given observers’ positions. None of them right now are as projected, they—”

Gonzalez said sharply, “You mean we aren’t at Kindred?”

“Oh, we’re there,” McKenzie said. “But the aliens didn’t tell us there would be a temporal dislocation. But… but from star positions, there is . Time dilation has carried us forward fourteen years from when we left Earth. And I’m assuming that returning will add another fourteen years. And they didn’t tell us.”

It began almost immediately.

Salah Bourgiba had anticipated it, from the moment that the ambassador made her announcement. The other doctor aboard, Claire Patel, was a virologist, more of a researcher than a physician, although she was licensed to practice medicine. It was Salah who had extensive clinical experience, who did so well with medical patients needing psychological support. The background checkers knew that, of course, along with everything about everybody.

So they came to him, these young men and women who had just learned that when they returned home, everybody else would be twenty-eight years older, and they would not be. Who were expected to remain adaptable and tight-lipped and professional everywhere else on the ship. Crewman Robert Ritter, who had a wife and a three-year-old child. A month from now, little Susan would be older than her father. Dr. David Sherman, who was embarrassed to be asking help at age forty-one but who had parents who would be dead when he returned. Ambassador Gonzalez did not come to see Salah, although he knew that she was uneasy about establishing diplomatic relations now, when the spore cloud was imminent. She’d expected to arrive on Kindred fifteen years before that happened.

Branch Carter, the brilliant young lab tech and personal-hardware whiz, did come to see Salah. And, unlike many others, Branch was willing to express openly his rage.

Salah heard that rage even before Branch entered, in the passageway outside sick bay. Branch’s voice rippled with anger. “Did you know?”

“What? No!” Marianne Jenner, who must have been passing by. “I didn’t know any more than the rest of you.”

“Uh-huh. You sure your son didn’t tell you before he left with the aliens and you just didn’t bother to tell the rest of us because you were so hell-bent on getting Terrans to World?”

“Branch, no.” Her voice held compassion under its firmness. “This time dilation is as much a surprise to me as to the rest of you.”

Silence. Salah waited. Whatever Branch said next would be critical.

“I’m… I’m sorry, Dr. Jenner. It’s just…”

“I know,” she said. “Don’t worry about it.” Then she did the best thing she could have done: her footsteps receded quickly along the passageway, allowing Branch to enter the infirmary unseen.

The small room had all the personality of a meat locker: two walls of bulkhead storage cabinets plus a blank wall screen, two walls of stacked metal bunks that could fold down if needed. If more than four beds were required, the ship was in trouble. In the middle sat two chairs and a collapsible table, now holding a box of tissues and the pot of coffee without which nobody on the ship seemed able to function. Salah, who drank tea, was prepared.

“Come in, Branch. Sit down. What can I do for you?”

Unlike Ritter, also twenty-eight, Branch Carter was direct. “I need a sleeping pill. I can’t sleep since I heard what those bastards did to us.”

Salah kept his tone neutral; the young man bristled with anger looking for a reason to explode. Branch’s personnel file said he was extremely competent at his job, affable and tireless, and “of a disposition to work well with the scientists aboard.” It did not say he was prepared to have his temporal place in the universe fucked with. Salah said, “You’re assuming that the Kindred knew about the time dilation.”

“Why wouldn’t they? They brought their ship to Earth, and they sent a ship to a colony world, too—the ship that got infected with the spore cloud in the first place.”

“Yes, that’s true. But consider this—they may not have known they jumped fourteen years when they came to Earth, where they’d never before been. And if the colony planet is fairly close to Kindred—say, even in the same star system—their other ship might not have needed to jump, or the time dilation might have been so small they didn’t notice it.”

“Or they might have lied to lure us to Kindred, thinking that we wouldn’t come any other way.”

Was that the idea circulating among the younger people aboard? Maybe. Branch, the three youngest soldiers under Colonel Matthews, and two of the Navy crew were under thirty. Naturally they would talk away from their superiors. Salah leaned forward in his chair.

“If the Kindred lied, why do you think that might be? What would they gain from ‘luring’ us to Kindred?”