Нэнси Кресс - If Tomorrow Comes

“A natlee,” Zoe said. “That’s what my class called the natural leaders. But there’s medical recycle. You could have gone through school again after you got well.”

“Yeah.” This was the hard part to tell somebody, especially a Ranger. “I decided I didn’t want to.”

“Yeah? And why is that?” Her tone was a challenge. Leo picked his words carefully.

“Nothing against Rangers. Christ, you guys are the best of the best. But lying there in the hospital, I just realized it wasn’t for me. Not the service—hell, I’m a lifer. But what you just said—the emphasis on leadership. I’m just… not.”

Long silence. Leo was thinking how to make his escape from sick bay when Zoe said, “Okay, I can see that. You’re all right, Leo.”

“Thanks.”

“You, too. For not blabbing. Now get the fuck out of here so I can sleep.”

“Yes, ma’am.”

They grinned at each other, and Leo left whistling.

In the passageway the PA boomed. “This is Captain Lewis. Ambassador Gonzalez and Colonel Matthews to the bridge, please. Repeat, Ambassador Gonzalez and Colonel Matthews to the bridge. Ladies and gentlemen, we have contact with Kindred.”

Two weeks aboard ship. Marianne stood on the bridge; once again she was there only because Ambassador Gonzalez had requested her. She, in turn, had suggested that Dr. Patel be present. If Kindred was going to communicate information about the vaccines developed against the spore cloud, Marianne wanted the virologist to hear it immediately. Nobody had expected the Friendship to arrive so soon. This temporal glitch would add tension to the humans’ expedition.

Not that there wasn’t already tension. As the Friendship , now under the in-system drive, had flown toward Kindred, the ship had repeatedly hailed the planet. Kindred had never replied.

“We greet you from World,” a voice said in Kindese. Marianne had learned a few useful phrases. Tourist phrases, her mind mocked.

Gonzalez said, “We greet you from Terra.” Whatever the ambassador said next, Marianne couldn’t translate, but she assumed it was more ritual greetings.

Captain Lewis said to his engineer, Joseph Volker, “Why isn’t the wall screen showing images?”

“They’re not sending any. The broadcast is on the same frequency as ours—I think it’s coming from their ship on the ground, right… there.” One of the bridge screens sprang to life with a stylized globe decorated with an asterisk, a dotted line running from that to a tiny icon of the Friendship in space.

The Kindred said something, and Gonzalez replied sharply. Marianne recognized the word “why,” or at least one of the words for “why.” Kindred, a complex language, employed different inflections for different states of being: absolute, tentative, in flux, and rotational.

The Kindred answered for a few seconds, and then silence.

Captain Lewis said, “Mr. Volker?”

“It isn’t us. The channel went dead. I think… it might be because the Kindred ship just passed over the horizon as the planet rotated. Captain, they don’t have any comm satellites in orbit that I can detect. None. And no space stations, either.”

Marianne blinked. Terra had hundreds of communications satellites, most using laser-based communication systems in contact with Earth, with deep-space and Martian probes, with each other. Why wouldn’t the Kindred, so much more advanced that they could build starships, also have them? It made no sense.

Gonzalez said, “The Kindred I was talking to—I didn’t understand her title—said that the government would communicate again in an hour or so.”

Volker said, “Then it can’t be just that their ship is over the horizon. The rotation period is twenty-five hours three minutes.”

Captain Lewis said, “Ambassador?”

Maria Gonzalez said, “We wait.”

An hour later, communication resumed. Nearly everyone aboard had spent the time sitting in the wardroom with steaming cups of coffee. Ship’s time was after midnight, but as far as Marianne knew, no one was asleep. One of Colonel Matthews’s Rangers “stood watch” beside the open door to the bridge. (Why? What did the Army expect—a hijacking?)

Marianne eyed James Ramstetter, one of the ambassador’s entourage. His official title was “Security” and ostensibly he was her personal bodyguard, but Marianne suspected he also worked for the CIA or NSA or FBI or maybe some Washington agency so secret she’d never heard of it. Maybe Gonzalez’s chief of staff, sociologist Wayne Henry, and her economics adviser, Will Bentley, did, too. Or maybe these were merely the people needed to set up a United States embassy on an alien planet. Don’t be paranoid, Marianne.

David Sherman said, apropos of nothing, “The spore cloud intersects Kindred in seventy-one days, Terran.”

No one answered him; they all had this information already.

The wall screen brightened. The ambassador had made the decision to communicate openly, throughout the entire ship, whatever was said from Kindred. Even the infirmary, where Salah Bourgiba had one of the Rangers recuperating from some sort of minor intestinal operation, would hear and see the first transactions with Kindred.

The wall screen showed the planet, much larger now as the Friendship traveled toward it. No image had been transmitted from the planet. And the audio—

“That’s radio ,” David Sherman, the geologist, said. “Listen to the static!”

There was so much of it that only a few words of Kindred were clear. Then, all at once, a female voice speaking unaccented English. “Terran ship? I greet you. This… garble garble… today… garble garble… land…”

“Who is this, please?” Ambassador Gonzalez said.

“Garble garble… more…. can’t…. more tomorrow—”

David said, “Maybe they mean that when the planet brings the grounded Kindred ship in direct line on communication again—but why wait? And why radio? Their previous message was laser-based, like ours.”

The staticky, unintelligible speech had continued to broadcast. Then, shockingly, a whole sentence came through static-free: “Do not attempt to land on World.

“Please.”

“They don’t want us,” Mason Kandiss said to Leo and Zoe. For Kandiss, this was a long speech. The three of them crowded sick bay, Leo and Mason sitting on the two chairs and Zoe up in bed. Miguel Flores was on watch in the common area.

Kandiss was one of the biggest men that Leo had ever seen. His magnificent body bulged with the kind of muscle that came from daily climbing ropes, lifting weights, scaling walls, running for miles. He was spit-and-polish—you could be blinded by the shine on his boots. Zoe had told Leo that Kandiss was “the real shit.” From her, this was high praise. “Plus,” she’d said, “he wasn’t one of the pricks who hassled me about women in combat, you know? He don’t talk much, but he’s okay.”

Leo said, “If they don’t want us—but wait, who doesn’t want us? That was an American voice. Not an alien. So what’s up with that?”

Zoe said, “Ten Americans went to Kindred with Noah Jenner. Well, nine and him. Maybe they run the place now? Naw, that’s dumb. How could it even happen? They’re supposed to be peaceful, this great culture with no war and shit like that.”

Leo had heard that, too. He wasn’t sure he believed it. Everybody had wars. “I’ll tell you who will want us, any minute—Colonel Matthews. We’re going to be—”

All three wristers vibrated. Kandiss said, “On. Kandiss here. Sir?”

“Battle stations immediately.”