Нэнси Кресс - If Tomorrow Comes

“Does it occur to you, Salah, that maybe I don’t need protecting? That I don’t want to be protected? I’m a mother .”

“You’re not a soldier.”

“Neither are you. But I know this world better than you do, and I know soldiers better than you do, too.”

“That’s all true. But—”

“But I’m a woman. And you’re a Terran male, who thinks women are to be shielded from danger even when they’re like Zoe Berman. Or me. At least Leo Brodie forbade me to go with him because a civilian might interfere with his mission, not because I need protecting from reality.”

Brodie had gone to the mountains, too? Salah hadn’t known that. He didn’t like it.

“Isabelle—”

She walked ahead of him, veering to the east. She said nothing more but Salah heard the loud sound anyway: another door closing between them.

After another mile of tense silence, during which the mountains seemed no closer and Salah felt himself flagging, Isabelle said, “Look. Straight ahead.”

Salah strained his gaze. The sun was low now, dusk gathering on the dark-purple landscape. A figure staggered toward them, fell, got up and went on. It carried something bulky and heavy. Salah couldn’t judge size from this perspective… Austin?

“Zoe,” Isabelle said and sprinted forward.

By the time he caught up, Isabelle crouched beside Zoe Berman, who lay on the ground, scowling up at both of them. Salah bent and said, “Where are you injured?”

Isabelle said, “Austin? Leo?”

“Both shot,” Zoe said. “Both alive when I left but bad off. Last night. Did what I could.”

“Shot? By Tony Schrupp?”

“No,” Zoe said, and passed out.

Salah examined her shoulder, gently palpated her belly. Spleen, bleeding into the abdominal cavity. It was amazing that she’d made it this far. These Rangers were almost another species.

Wryly, he realized what he’d just thought.

Beside Zoe stood a pyramidal object of gray, untarnished metal. The call-back device. This alien object might both aid Kindred in the spore plague and—which Salah suddenly hungered for as if he’d been starving—take Salah home.

Isabelle took Zoe’s goggles off her helmet, put them on, and fiddled with them, looking like some caricature of an alien insect. She stared into the distance. “Someone’s coming. A group of people.” And then, “Oh my God!”

She took off running.

They were carrying him carefully, on a simple litter made of cloth strung between two poles. Every time the litter jarred, it hurt. Leo bit down on his tongue and said nothing.

Lu^kaj^ho murmured something incomprehensible in Kindred. Isabelle’s language lessons had deserted Leo; he said back the only thing he could remember: “I greet you, Lu^kaj^ho.” Lu^kaj^ho smiled.

Once they reached the flatter meadow, it was better. Less jolting. The three Kindred cops—that was how Leo still thought of them—made their slow way south. The sun was lowering behind the mountains. A moon, almost but not quite full, shone above him. The procession passed something that smelled warm and spicy. Leo closed his eyes. If he lived, he would like some of that spicy smell around him. Hell, if he died he’d like it around him, too.

“Leo.”

His eyes flew open and she was there, bending over the litter. Leo scowled. “I told you not to come.”

Isabelle ignored this. “I greet you, Leo.” She touched his hand gently, as if the injury were there.

“Well, I goddamn greet you too, Isabelle, but I told you to stay put. Kandiss? Did you shoot him?”

“Of course I didn’t shoot him.” She gave a strangled little laugh, almost a sob. “I can come and go.”

But Bourgiba couldn’t, not without Kandiss’s permission, and now the litter was lowered to the ground and the doctor was removing the bandages Zoe had wound around Leo. Leo pressed his teeth together so hard they could have broken rocks. He wasn’t going to wince in front of Salah Bourgiba.

Bourgiba said, “The bullet’s still in there.”

News to Leo. He kept his eyes on Isabelle.

“I’m going to give you something for pain,” Bourgiba said. “At the clinic, I can operate. Can you swallow?”

“Yeah.” Of course he could swallow—Zoe hadn’t shot his throat. Was this doctor competent?

Of course he is, idiot. Keep your eyes on Isabelle.

She gave him the pill with water from her canteen, raising his head so he could drink. He groped for her hand and kept it. Take that, Doctor.

The pain pill must have been more than that. The only words he managed to say before he slid into blackness were, “Austin? Zoe?”

But nobody heard him. Isabelle jabbered in Kindred to Lu^kaj^ho and the other two cops. Then her hand slid out of his, or his from hers, and the world went away.

Marianne sat beside Branch and silently counted losses and gains. Branch, cross-legged on a pallet with her laptop and the call-back pyramid on the floor beside him, wouldn’t have heard if she’d spoken aloud. Probably he wouldn’t have heard Gabriel’s trumpet. His thin face scrunched with concentration.

Loss #1: Leo Brodie had been shot, his liver nicked by a bullet that had apparently done other damage as well, and Zoe Berman had a ruptured spleen. Salah, despite a single quiet comment that he was not a surgeon, had operated on both, with Isabelle and Marianne as untrained nurses. Both Rangers would recover but would need care. From whom?

Loss #2: Austin Rhinehart was luckier. Owen Lamont’s bullet—and what kind of fanatic would shoot a thirteen-year-old?—had only grazed his head, due to Leo. Isabelle had found Austin lurching toward home, crying, blood streaming into his eyes. Head wounds, Salah said, bled a lot even if superficial. Austin had a monster headache but would be all right. Except—what did it do to a child to be shot by an adult he had trusted?

Loss #3: Claire, Kayla, and, according to Austin, a bunch of Kindred girls and their mother, were still hostage in Tony Schrupp’s survivalist bunker.

Loss #4: Mason Kandiss no longer guarded the compound. He had gone to bring back, or to bury—Marianne wasn’t clear on this—his lieutenant’s body. “A Ranger never leaves a brother behind,” Isabelle had said. Marianne, who neither understood nor sympathized with a creed that placed unit loyalty over, say, intent to destroy an entire civilization, had bitten back her retort. Anyway, there wasn’t much to be guarded against; the camp was quiet.

Loss #5 was anticipated: In six days, the spore cloud would strike Kindred.

Well, then, gains. Gain #1—

She couldn’t think of anything gained in the last several days.

Isabelle entered the leelee lab with Salah, Ka^graa, and an old woman who had to be a mother. Who? From where? Everyone sat down, exchanging I-greet-you ’s in low voices, and Marianne suddenly flashed on faculty meetings at the college where she used to teach. A life ago. Several lives ago.

“Okay,” Branch said, finally aware that the room held other people and he was on stage. The tips of his ears grew red, but he had obviously thought through what he wanted to say. “We have the call-back device. Now we have to figure out how to use it, and we do that by thinking like an alien.”

All at once redness seeped from ear tips to his whole face. “I didn’t mean… not that Kindred are aliens, I mean the other ones, the aliens who designed this and… not ‘other aliens’ I didn’t mean to say that either—”

“Branch,” Marianne said firmly because there was no time for this polite fumbling, “we know what you meant. Get on with it.”

“Okay. Yes.” He drew a large breath, while Isabelle translated. “Worlders press a button, or something like that anyway, on their colony ship and it goes to… wherever it went. They press a button on their other ship and it goes to Earth. We press a button on the Friendship and it goes to Kindred. So there were preset variations in the original plans the master aliens left, or else the ships are programmable, which makes more sense. And since so far no humans know how to program them, they’re programming themselves on a simple return-to-where-you-started loop. Press the button and you reverse the flight plan.