Нэнси Кресс - If Tomorrow Comes

He waited to see what she would say.

“Just before I got deployed here,” she said, “my platoon did a night parachute drop. We dropped from eight hundred feet with zero illumination and seized a landing strip for follow-on forces. Three of us including me had injuries from a hard landing but we went on the assault anyway. Mission successful.”

“Where was this?” Leo said, because it was clear he had to say something.

“Not sure. Mideast someplace.” She reached for the soup ladle.

Evidently this story settled something in Zoe’s mind, although Leo had no idea what. He said, “Uh-huh.”

She said quietly, “You did right, Leo. I’ll say so at the court-martial.”

“Thanks.” Court-martial? For that, they had to first get back to Terra. Unless Kandiss decided to somehow arrest Leo and take control of the squad, which Leo doubted. It would require too many words.

Not that Leo himself was doing all that great at military protocol. Zoe didn’t treat him with much deference, and the whole idea of military chain of command was foreign to Lu^kaj^ho.

The Kindred, now an Army private second class, appeared in the doorway to the kitchen. His report was just more of the same: more people in the camp, no attacks, no visible weapons, a lot of refugees accompanied by children, and no ship.

“How many be children?” Leo asked.

“Now it is about half.”

“ Half? Are kids?”

“Yes.”

After Lu^kaj^ho left, Zoe said, “You speak the lingo pretty good.”

“No. I don’t.”

“You think we got kid suicide bombers?”

“I don’t think so. They didn’t do that before, and Kindred aren’t really vicious or ruthless.” Not like in Brazil.

“Then why all the kids? In a strike zone?”

“I don’t think that they think it’s a strike zone, not this time.”

“Then what is it?”

“I don’t know,” Leo said. “Maybe a hospital zone, for vaccines? Hand me that ladle or are you going to eat all the soup yourself?”

She handed him the ladle. “Leo… I mean, sir…”

“Leo is fine.”

“What I said about a court-martial when we get home… It’s going to be twenty-eight years after we left.”

“Yes.”

“Twenty-eight fucking years. That’s too long. I won’t know anything, all the ordinances’ll be different.”

“They’ll send you back for more specialist training.”

“Maybe. But I don’t know if—”

“It’s here!” Austin screamed, bursting into the room. “The ship! It’s in the sky! It’s coming down!”

“Let’s go,” Leo said, and reached in his pocket for the dose of Owen’s popbite.

It was much larger than the Friendship . That was the first thing Marianne noticed: the ship’s size. Well, it was a colony ship, not a diplomatic flagship. The huge, bullet-shaped vessel of gray metal hovered over the compound, blocking the orange sun. She had been afraid it might return to the ruined city where it had been built, and then what would they have done? But the ship was here.

“Homed in on my transmitter,” Branch said with enormous satisfaction.

They stood in the cleared zone outside the compound, what the Rangers called the perimeter. Their necks bent far backward, along with nearly everyone else from the compound and the camp. Ranger Kandiss and some of Leo’s cops stood between the Terrans and the camp, weapons in their hands, but only Kandiss watched the Kindred instead of the ship.

“It’s beautiful,” Branch said. “I wonder who they were?”

He meant the ship’s designers, not the colonists. His remark jolted Marianne, who’d also been admiring the ship’s beauty, back to reality. This lovely vessel was full of dead human bodies, of chittering leelees, of a microorganism that had won its evolutionary battle against R. sporii . That, however, was no indication that the virophage could enable humans to do the same.

The ship stopped hovering and moved north, to the large empty grazing lands between the compound and the mountain.

What was Leo doing? Austin had watched him swallow a pill and give one to Ranger Berman. They’d both gone back to their rooms and come outside dressed in armor, carrying weapons, walking much steadier than before and without help. Leo gave the ship only a quick glance. He climbed a ladder to the compound roof. Why?

How come nobody told Austin anything?

Dr. Bourgiba said, “Brodie. Climbing to the roof could tear your stitches. I told you so. And you’ve taken popbite, haven’t you? It’s counterindicated if—”

Leo wasn’t even listening. Slowly he climbed the ladder. One of the new Kindred soldiers, Heemur^ka, climbed behind with Leo’s gear. Ranger Berman took her place beside Ranger Kandiss on the ground. Austin put one foot on the ladder.

“Are you crazy?” Isabelle hissed, grabbing him. “You are not going up there!”

Dr. Jenner said to Isabelle, “I don’t understand! What are they going to do?”

So nobody had told her, either, and Dr. Jenner was a mother . Well, no, she had refused to be a mother, but she was an old woman anyway and still she didn’t know what Leo was going to do. Austin felt a little better.

Five hundred yards away, the ship began to land.

It was big, and it settled down easy as a soap bubble. No noise, no fire, no nothing. Leo had been a teenager when the Kindred ship came to Terra and he’d had other things on his mind, like avoiding jail, but he remembered the TV broadcasts that showed the Embassy landing just like this in New York Harbor. No drama, just a perfect piece of machinery.

Leo, the popbite singing in his blood and brain, settled into position on the roof. Heemur^ka handed him his weapons.

“Shit,” Heemur^ka said; he was learning as much Terran as Leo was learning Kindred. But then Heemur^ka added, “I greet you, ship.”

Why didn’t they give their ships names? Weird.

The moment the ship touched ground, the Kindred in the camp ran toward it. Men, women, little kids. Okay, they had probably rehearsed mentally just as much as Leo’s squad had. They formed a line between the compound and the ship, several people deep, facing the compound. They were not going to let anyone, Terran or Kindred, near the ship. Dr. Jenner had already told Leo that the door could not be opened by signals from the outside, and she should know—a decade ago on Terra, she had been sealed inside the Friendship with an entire battalion of NASA technical experts outside. Leo didn’t know if these doors could be forced open manually from the outside, but it didn’t matter. The Kindred who massed in front of them in grim-faced protest weren’t taking any chances.

Leo knew what they were counting on: That neither his Kindred recruits nor Leo himself would shoot several hundred Kindred, half of them kids carefully placed in front. They were right. He wasn’t Owen. But that wasn’t the problem he faced now.

“Lu^kaj^ho,” he called down, “tell them to move away from the ship. Now.

“And tell them why.”

Salah grabbed Isabelle’s arm. “What’s going on? What’s Brodie going to do?”

“I don’t know but—” She started to climb the ladder.

Another of Leo’s pseudo-soldiers said, “No, Isabelle-mak.” There followed a furious exchange in Kindred that Salah could not follow. He glanced around for the Rangers; Kandiss was out of sight around the corner of the building. Zoe stood at the east door to the compound, her face disturbed about something.

Isabelle stopped yelling and again put her sandaled foot on the bottom rung of the ladder.