Нэнси Кресс - If Tomorrow Comes

Austin nodded.

“Yeah, it’s a nuisance. But the crowd out there in the camp is getting bigger and more dangerous looking because they’re mad as hell at us. Even though we’re only trying to help. But that always happens when you go into a foreign country.”

“It does?” Leo blurted out.

“Yeah. It did in Brazil, in Iraq—hell, it happened on Earth when Kindred came to warn us about the spore cloud. That’s why the Russians got so pissed. Half the population just wants to blame somebody and there you are. Shoot-the-messenger stuff.”

Austin didn’t know what that meant, but he nodded anyway.

“So what I need to know is where these rumors are coming from. I got my squad out asking questions but—”

“What squad?” Wasn’t Lieutenant Lamont dead and Ranger Berman shot and… could just Ranger Kandiss be a squad all by himself?

“Oh, nobody told you? I swore in some of the Kindred cops, and six other recruits. Ten all together. They’re the Kindred-Terran Peacekeeping Force now.”

Austin felt his mouth fall open. The Kindred-Terran Peace Keeping Force! He said, “Do they have weapons?”

“Some, yeah. They need more, but we can’t deal with that now, we need to focus on intel. The people in the camp don’t trust my squad, they think they’re turncoats. It’s not a really rough crowd out there, Austin, not compared to… well, maybe they’re rough enough. We don’t want another assault on the compound. So I need to know just what the mob out there has been told about this ‘second plague’ and how they learned about it in the first place. Either we have a leak here or else they learned some other way. You have any ideas?”

All at once, Austin’s chest felt like one big bruise. This was horrible, this was the worst yet. Leo’s eyes gazed at him levelly, not trusting like his mother’s but something better than trusting, some bond of equals. Austin had to tell him the truth.

“It was me,” he managed to get out. “I told Graa^lok’s cousin why Dr. Jenner wanted the call-back device. We were just talking and she was curious and… I made her promise to not tell anybody. Tony has radio transmitters and now he has a lot of people that speak Kindred and maybe…”

“I see,” Leo said. “Pretty girl?”

“Yes.”

“Listen, Austin, don’t blame yourself. This is a good thing, in the long run.”

“It is?”

“Yeah. If the ship gets called back, and if it releases virophages, and if they cure people of spore plague, then the people will know it just didn’t happen by itself, we caused it. You see? Otherwise it might just look like the whole spore-cloud thing was wrong. It’s good that people have more information, even if it came from that asshole Tony Schrupp.”

There was something wrong with this reasoning, something more than just the long string of ifs, but Austin couldn’t quite see what it was. Relief overwhelmed everything else. Leo wasn’t blaming him. Another assault on the compound, if it came, would not be Austin’s fault. Still—

But—

Leo didn’t let him think. “Here’s the other thing,” he said. “This is a lot to ask of a wounded warrior, but I’m going to. There’s a lot of little kids in here now and mostly their mothers are looking after them, but there are some older ones who were vaccinated too. Nobody who speaks their language, which is only Isabelle and Jenner, has time to tell them what’s going on. So I’m going to send some of them in here and let you brief them, as my representative. Tell them whatever you think is appropriate for them to know. You’re on my staff now, okay?”

Austin nodded, torn between that wonderful sentence ( You’re on my staff now ) and a deep reluctance to lecture a bunch of kids. But Leo didn’t give him time to say no. He bellowed, “Isabelle!” and the door opened like she’d been waiting just outside all along.

Four kids came in with her: two boys about ten and a tiny girl of six, holding the hand of an older girl. Austin blinked. The older one was his age, the prettiest girl he’d ever seen, prettier even than Graa^lok’s cousin. She smiled shyly and said in Kindred, “I greet you, Austin-mak.”

Austin-mak. The title for an honored person of higher rank and not of one’s own lahk.

Isabelle said in Kindred, “This is Jen^la^hon and three children of her lahk.”

Austin said to the girl, “I greet you, Jen^la^hon.”

He didn’t even notice when Isabelle helped Leo out of the room.

“You were too easy on him,” Isabelle said to Leo.

He grunted, easing himself back onto his pallet, sticking the end of the tube into his pants instead of the bowl it was supposed to drip into. Let the damn thing drip blood and fluid down his belly, that was better than going around looking like unfinished plumbing. He said, “You’re too hard on him.”

“He kidnapped Claire!”

“We’ll get her back. We’ll get all of them back. Tony Schrupp is a dirtbag but not a killer, not really. He only tried to take out Lamont in some sort of self-defense.”

“Lamont—”

Leo held up a hand. “Don’t, Isabelle.” He wasn’t ready yet to talk with her about Owen. Maybe he never would be.

“All right. What do you need me to do now?”

Several answers rose to mind, but this wasn’t the time. Also, Leo doubted he’d be able to follow through, not for a while yet, although Bourgiba said his liver seemed to be healing well. Why was a liver so fucking important?

He said, “Check on the squad for me, ask if Lu^kaj^ho and his guys need anything, and what they’re hearing. Make sure Kandiss isn’t shooting anybody. Go up on the roof, I told him to let you, and eyeball the camp for me. Tell me everything you can, but do not go into the camp. I mean it, Isabelle. Don’t set foot out of the compound.”

“All right.”

She didn’t argue, and Isabelle not arguing was a welcome thing. Still, it was probably temporary.

“Leo,” she said, “what if Marianne and Branch can’t get the ship back here?”

“You know what. We go to the original plan, plan A.”

“Everybody either gets sick or dies.”

“And then we go on from there. Rebuilding with whoever gets well.”

She bent over and kissed him on the lips. Leo’s eyes flew open. The kiss was sweet, sudden, and brief. His chest swelled like he’d been shot all over again. She said quietly, “I love your optimism, even in the face of everything you must have seen and done.”

Then she was gone, opening his door to the sound of babies howling, then closing it again without looking back.

Marianne stirred a big pot of vegetable stew in the clinic kitchen. At least, she hoped it was going to turn out to be vegetable stew, given that she was unfamiliar with all the ingredients and had never been much of a cook anyway. She should have left this to someone else, but Isabelle was busy with Leo Brodie, Salah with doctoring, Noah with recovering and tending his wife and daughter, and the Kindred mothers with their kids—no, that wasn’t true. Marianne was making stew because she could no longer sit beside Branch, “helping” to search for a way to turn a series of random numbers into a meaningful sequence. Branch was tireless at what Marianne was coming to see as a hopeless task, but Branch was young. Marianne was not.

One tone, pause, six tones, pause, eleven tones, pause, sixteen tones, pause, nine tones, pause, fourteen tones, pause, three tones, pause, eight tones, very long pause, one tone. Silence.

The stew turned out edible, more or less. (How much longer would they have electricity for cooking veggies? How much longer would they have veggies?) She helped serve it to everyone jammed into the compound. Full of people, empty, full again—both compound and stew bowls. There was something profound in there, or at least notable, but Marianne was too tired to find it. Her back ached. Her head ached with thinking, except when it ached from trying not to think the same thoughts over and over.