Нэнси Кресс - If Tomorrow Comes

Tony raced from a side tunnel to the door, unlocked it, and disappeared into the tunnel.

Austin said, “That’s Graa^lok’s signal. He’s back.”

Tony led seven women from the tunnel, followed by Graa^lok. Austin recognized Graa^lok’s mother and two sisters; he’d known them since he was three. The other girls, all young, were strangers. All wore cloaks and carried large packs.

“Oh my God,” Claire said. “You really think you can form a polygamous commune.”

Austin didn’t know what a “polygamous commune” was, but it didn’t sound good. Or maybe it did. Graa^lok’s mother smiled uncertainly and said in World, “I greet you, Tony-mak.”

“Tony-kal,” Graa^lok corrected. “We’re a new kind of lahk now.”

Another of the girls, the youngest, peered shyly at Austin. He stood up taller. She was even prettier than Claire.

Saving civilization might be great, after all.

Leo stood on the roof, watching Owen and Zoe, both green in his night-vision goggles, as they set off north toward the mountains. The camp, its population a quarter of its former size, wasn’t yet stirring. Were the Kindred left here the ones with no lahk to go back to? But everyone had a lahk. Maybe the vaccinated children and their parents were the hangers-on, the parents hoping to hand their kids over to the Terrans as the spore cloud hit and they themselves died.

But that horror would have to wait. Leo had another one to deal with.

Kandiss was on perimeter patrol. He would be back soon. Leo dropped from the roof and went inside the compound, where seven people slept. Plenty of room for them now.

In the ready room, he tried to smash the lock on Owen’s lockbox with the butt of his rifle. It didn’t give, and neither did the metal of the box itself. Okay, then—he’d have to blast it open, despite who might hear. Zoe was the explosives specialist, not him, but Zoe wasn’t here. Leo fitted the silencer, even though silencers never really were, onto his rifle and blew the lock.

Congrats, Leo—you just qualified yourself for court-martial.

Owen had taken all the weapons, the full monte. His lockbox held only a photograph of a beautiful girl—who? Leo had no idea—a plastic bottle, and a Kindred box made of the stuff that Isabelle called “bioplast.” Leo had almost forgotten what plastic felt like in his hand: smoother than bioplast, slipperier, somehow more slimy. The bottle held tabs of popbite. Leo knew what was in the bioplast before he opened it. But he’d had to look, had to be sure, had to prove himself wrong if he could.

God, he wished he’d been wrong.

He heard a sound behind him and turned. Isabelle stood there, dressed in some sort of flimsy nightie thing. She said, “I heard a noise and—Leo, what are you doing ?”

“Nothing. Get out.”

She stepped into the room. Leo snapped shut the box, but she’d already seen. “Those are… oh my God, the vaccines. Did you… no. Lamont. ”

He stood. “I said get out, Isabelle. Go back to bed.”

She ignored him. “He was the one who stole them. Lamont. When everything was so confused during that first assault—he was checking the compound before we all went back in even though it hadn’t been breached… but why? Why?”

“I don’t know,” Leo said, but he did.

Owen, disliking Kindred since the moment they’d landed, more and more lumping all natives together as “the enemy,” calling them “Kinnies” in that tone of utter contempt. Owen refusing to even consider training Kindred cops as force multiplication. Owen’s paranoia about the camp made a hundred times worse by popbite. Owen clinging to the mission, which was to protect the Terrans and get them home no matter what, not letting anything or anyone deter him from that. Even if, in dawning psychosis, it meant making sure that as few Kindred as possible survived to interfere. The Ranger’s creed said I will complete the mission, though I be the lone survivor .

It wasn’t like he hadn’t seen this before. In Brazil, a guy in his unit had gone crackers, started shooting up their camp one night, raving about voodoo and demons and Armageddon. He’d been doing popbite, too, but it hadn’t needed that. Sullivan had been a little nuts even before he snapped. When he did, he’d managed to murder three Marines right in their own camp. There were always guys like that, couldn’t take the strain, but…

Not Rangers.

Not Owen. Owen might strain but he didn’t snap.

It still didn’t make sense. There had to be more. Owen hadn’t decided to go after Claire Patel until Dr. Jenner talked about that thing on the ship, the virophage thingy, that might save Kindred who breathed it in. Okay, so Owen was going for the call-back device so he could bring back the Kindred ship and help save the natives, long odds or no. But if that was true, then why steal the vaccines that had been the scientists’ best shot at saving Kindred lives until Dr. Jenner came up with this new science? Why?

Unless Owen wanted not to recover the call-back device, but to destroy it. Unless he really wanted all the Kindred dead. Unless that had been his reason for coming on this mission in the first place.

No. Stupid idea, ridiculous, disloyal .

Why had Owen stolen the vaccines?

Leo scoured his brain for anything else he knew about Owen, any scrap of information. There wasn’t much. Parents dead, raised by his grandmother Judith, liked the Pittsburgh Steelers, declined once to go to a bar with Leo and some guys because Owen had some sort of meeting to go to, a meeting he’d been secretive about…

The government would have vetted Owen for this mission. Looked into every nook and cranny of Owen’s past. Only… look how many nooks and crannies they had missed about Leo’s past. And Zoe’s, too, from stuff she’d told him.

Not Owen. Leo wouldn’t believe it. Couldn’t believe it.

But if he were right…

The box of stolen vaccines was still in his hand.

Leo put it down, opened his own lockbox, and began adding everything in it to the gear he already wore. Isabelle was still talking to him, but he wasn’t listening until she stood in the doorway, trying to bar him from leaving. “Are you going after them? Lamont and Berman? What is he going to do? It’s the call-back device, isn’t it? He wasn’t interested in going after Claire and Austin until we told him Austin had that in the mountains and… No. He still wasn’t interested, not until Marianne told him about the virophage. Leo—what is going on?”

“Get out of my way.”

“Wait till I get dressed—I’m coming with you!”

Leo said, “You’re not. You’d slow me down, give away my position, and distract me with keeping you safe. Isabelle, if you follow me, I’ll disable you with a shot to the foot. Do you understand?”

Her eyes widened. She saw that he meant it. Leo lifted her by the waist and set her aside so he could pass through the doorway. Over his shoulder he said, “Don’t tell Kandiss that I’ve gone, if he asks you. Go back to bed and pretend you never saw me.”

She didn’t answer. Leo let himself out the kitchen door, scaled the garden wall, and followed Zoe and Owen’s tracks toward the mountains.

The sky turned orange and red.

Leo lay flat behind a slight rise. The Rangers weren’t in any hurry, and catching up to them had been easy. Periodically Zoe scanned behind them but she wasn’t expecting to be followed—certainly not by Leo—and keeping out of sight wasn’t difficult even in this relatively open country.

How far was Owen willing to go? Leo had a pretty good idea of how Owen would breach the supposedly impregnable mountain fortress, but depending on the setup inside, it might kill the Terrans as well, including Dr. Patel, who was one of Owen’s protectees. And if Zoe objected—?