Нэнси Кресс - If Tomorrow Comes

Leo was rolling to the ground the second his bullet left the barrel. He knew he was fast—in Brazil he’d changed weapons faster than the rest of his company could reload. But Zoe was close. Her bullet took him in the right side. He drew his sidearm and aimed, but there was no need. She stood completely still, her gun awkwardly in her cuffed right hand, the left dangling from her side, her mouth open.

“He… he killed that kid.”

Leo got to his feet, holding his left hand over his side, feeling the blood trickle between his fingers. “Drop the gun, Zoe.”

She did, unblinking, her face blank until it crumpled into pain that had nothing to do with a dislocated shoulder. “He killed that kid. You were right.”

Leo holstered his Beretta. The motion made him dizzy.

Zoe said, “Is Lamont dead?”

“Yes.” Leo didn’t have to look.

Then he slumped to the ground, and everything went black.

He didn’t think he was out that long, but when he came to, the sun beat down directly overhead and Zoe was gone. His armor had been removed and his shirt torn into bandages. Hers, too, he guessed—the pad of blood-soaked bandages on his wound was thick and the cloth tied around him to hold them so tight he almost couldn’t breathe.

He tried to raise himself on one elbow to see if Owen’s and Austin’s bodies were still there, but the movement caused something to rip, pain to shoot through him, and the conviction that he had better lie still until help came or he died.

One or the other.

But he would have liked to see Isabelle again. Just once more, with the orange sun shining on her pretty hair.

Salah stood before Noah Jenner and said, “Count backward from one hundred.”

“One hundred, ninety-nine, ninety-seven… uh…. no, wait…..”

“Can you name your siblings, Noah?”

A blank stare and a wince of pain, presumably from the headache that Noah had denied having.

Salah closed the door quietly. He found Claire’s useful medical suitcase and raided it. In the deserted kitchen he filled with water three of the sturdy, lightweight metal canteens the Kindred used. No plastic bottles here to clog land or oceans, both of which would soon be free of most, if not all, human life.

The early morning sun slanted long shadows across the refugee camp, now almost deserted. Abandoned tents sagged beside blackened cook fires and the rutted tracks of supply carts. It looked not like the well-run refugee camp it had resembled before, but more like a Terran homeless jungle. The Kindred remaining were mostly families with vaccinated children, those that had somehow alienated their lahks too much to return to them, and maybe a few who figured their survival chances were better near the Terrans, either for medical help or looting. Experiments, outcasts, opportunists.

Six steps away from the compound and Kandiss, on the roof, spotted him.

“Go back inside, Doctor.”

Kandiss was silhouetted against the lowering sun; Salah had to shade his eyes to see him clearly. Of all the Rangers, he had the least sense of Kandiss. The huge man had said nothing when Salah treated his injuries, mostly cuts from flying debris after the bomb attack. He’d refused any further questions about his concussion. Kandiss had never come to Salah with a minor illness caused by the alien environment. Even less than Lamont, Kandiss did not interact with the scientists. Although Salah had seen Kandiss’s entire medical history and psych profile back on Terra, both were so sparse and unremarkable as to define “normal.” He had a mother and two sisters in Florida. His service record was impeccable. Salah had never detected coming from him any whiff of Lamont’s racism, Berman’s fierce passions, Brodie’s unthinking optimism. He no idea who Kandiss really was, or what Kandiss felt about the four horsemen of the apocalypse set to come trampling over the gardens and lahks of Kindred.

“Private Kandiss, please listen to me. Lieutenant Lamont and Specialist Berman have been gone since yesterday, much longer than two ten-mile hikes and a negotiation with Schrupp should take them. That suggests there was some kind of incident. They both may be injured and need medical attention. I’m a doctor. We can’t”—he told the lie as convincingly as he could—“afford to lose any more Rangers. We need all of you. Let me go see if Lamont or Berman need medical help.”

Kandiss said nothing, which Salah interpreted as a good sign.

Salah hoisted his makeshift backpack. “I’m confident Lieutenant Lamont will bring back Dr. Patel,” he said, although he was confident of no such thing, “but if Lamont or Berman are injured, Dr. Patel might need these medicines and this equipment. She didn’t take anything with her when she was kidnapped. I’m going to bring the items that might mean the difference between life and death for your two Rangers.”

That sounded both simplistic and melodramatic, even though it was true. Salah didn’t know what tone might move this silent soldier with whom he had nothing in common. Not that he had anything in common with the other three Rangers, either. He waited.

Finally Kandiss said, “Can you track?”

“Yes,” Salah said—another lie.

Kandiss snorted. “Walk ten degrees east of north.”

Something landed at Salah’s feet. A compass. Yes, of course—Kindred had a magnetic field similar to Earth’s. He had never thought about it before. Kandiss’s directions—an order, actually—would include any necessary recalculation to make the compass useful.

He started walking. Ten miles would tax him, but he could do it. He hoped. He’d never been much of an athlete, and weeks of indoor activity at the compound hadn’t helped. He could have exercised like the Rangers did, but he hadn’t.

The backpack grew heavy. He felt exposed in these mostly treeless fields, empty except for grazing animals. One kind pulled carts, he knew that much. The other kind were splashed with blotches of different colored paint in different parts of their anatomy, maybe a more humane version of cattle branding. Their coarse hair was long and uneven—was this an animal that was sheared regularly for cloth but hadn’t been during this crisis? Salah had no idea. There was so much he didn’t know about this planet. And, he realized for the first time, so much he didn’t like. The light, the slow pace of lahk life, the deliberate and stubborn avoidance of tech… Kindred was admirable, far more admirable than Terra socially, environmentally, economically. The culture was everything that Salah had always said he believed in. But—

He wanted to go home, to Earth. He wanted it as much as Lamont did, although for completely different reasons. He did not belong here, and never would. From temperament or age or background, he did not have the adaptability of, say, Claire. Or of Brodie.

“You’re off course,” a voice said behind him, “and you’re a terrible traveler.”

Isabelle. Salah had not even heard her approach.

She said, “I could have been anyone sneaking up on you.”

“But you’re not,” he said, irritated because she was right. “Go back, Isabelle.”

“You’re going to Tony’s hideout and you’re off course.”

“I’m following the course Kandiss gave me.”

“Has Kandiss ever been there? Neither have I, but I’ve hiked in those mountains before. You need to go farther that way.” She pointed.

“Thank you. Now go back.”

“Why?”

“This could be really dangerous, Isabelle. Lamont is paranoid, impaired by too much popbite use, and too trigger-happy. Please go back.”

She said flatly, “You’re protecting me.”

“I’m trying to.”