Нэнси Кресс - Tomorrow's Kin

Dear God, the Venture was taking off .

Marianne grabbed Colin, who stood with his jeans around his ankles, pissing into a pipeless toilet. Stubbins cursed from the bridge, loud raspy noises as if the very words choked his throat. Judy yelled something—

Judy. What had Judy said, months ago? “A very real fact—no one knows what will happen the day we finish the ship and press the button to start her.”

But nothing seemed to be happening, not even motion. No press of gees on Marianne’s body, no tilt to the floor, nothing to say the ship was lifting except the clanging shut of the airlock and shuttle bay doors and the two images on the wall screen, now split between the twisted face of the ground officer and the land falling rapidly, silently away beneath them.

“My pants!” Colin cried. “Let me go!”

“Twenty, nineteen, eighteen—” said the ground officer.

An aerial view of the building site, then the no-man’s land around it, then the perimeter fence and guard towers.

“Grandma, my pants !”

“Thirteen, twelve, eleven—”

Hills and farmlands coming into view. Frightened cows raced away from the thing in the sky.

Marianne released Colin, who yanked up his jeans. On the bridge Stubbins still shrieked and Judy matched him in volume. The door to the storage bay flung open and a man stumbled out, his face ashen. “ Jonah— ”

“Seven, six, five—”

Marianne threw Colin into one of the seats—as if that would help anything! The ashen-faced man, she knew him, from somewhere…. “No one knows what will happen…” Incoming incoming….

“Three, two—”

Far below them, something streaked white across the landscape, and then the place where the Venture had been exploded into light and flame, almost immediately obscured by thick smoke. Marianne forced her eyes to stay open, to watch… no mushroom cloud. The weapon had not been nuclear. But how much of the site had been taken out? Jason and Luke—

She dashed to the bridge. The ship rose steadily, light as a soap bubble. Stubbins stood in the middle of the bridge, meaty hands gripping the back of the captain’s chair, with Judy and Eric Wilshire in the two side chairs facing consoles, studying data displays just as if they knew what they were doing. Stubbins said, “How bad?”

The ground officer’s face, pupils dilated as if on drugs, said, “A direct hit, probably from a high-explosive Scud. Hard to see through the smoke but it seems… two buildings severely damaged. Casualties unknown. Havers, come in, Havers… Johnson… Olvera…”

But Wilshire, even paler than the man in the main cabin, said desperately, “Mr. Stubbins! What—”

“Stop the ship!” Stubbins roared. And then: “Do you know how to stop the ship?”

“No one knows what will happen—”

The ship stopped.

Marianne clutched at something, anything, to keep herself upright. Her hand found the back of Judy’s chair. There was no lurch beneath her feet, no sound of grinding engines. The ship simply stopped; again her dazed mind thought of a soap bubble, gently hovering. A soap bubble with perfect Terran gravity inside it…. My God, what forces must be contained here! How had human engineers built this?

Below, in panoramic sweep and brilliant Technicolor, lay Pennsylvania as it might be seen from a jet liner thirty thousand feet up. Life-support machinery must have switched on somewhere; there was warmth and oxygen and light.

Stubbins began to laugh.

The sound was shocking, unreal—more unreal even than the alien ship around them. “We did it!” he cried. “We fucking did it!”

Marianne felt something clutch her legs. Colin. She found her voice, although it didn’t sound like hers. “Jonah—the children ? On the ground?”

Stubbins didn’t hear her. She had seen faces like that in medieval paintings, on stained-glass windows. His broad features and small eyes shone, transfigured with unholy joy.

“Jonah! The children!”

She might as well have spoken to the bulkhead. But Judy, who’d been talking in low, rapid tones to unseen people on the ground, said, “The kids were nowhere near the impact, Marianne. Jonah, NASA codes coming in.”

Stubbins took her seat. Judy grabbed Marianne and dragged her off the bridge, Colin still clinging to her. “You don’t belong here. Classified. They don’t need me in there. Kid, you all right?”

Colin nodded. The man who’d burst out of the storage bay stood uncertainly beside a crate. Judy said, “Who the fuck are you?”

“I know who he is,” Marianne said because, all at once, she did. “Wolski. Samuel Wolski, the geneticist. You did that work on HFRS infecting Mus !”

Judy started back toward the bridge but stopped as if shot when Marianne said, “The infected mice. They’re aboard, aren’t they? To release on World.”

Wolski, cowering, moved behind the crate, as if Marianne might attack him. Every organ in her body turned to mush. She’d been right, then—Stubbins had weaponized mice and was prepared to deliberately cause a plague on World if he thought it might help him get what he wanted. And now the Venture had lifted and was on its way to… oh, God, was the ship steerable? Or was its alien technology preset on one route, a sort of interstellar trolley on fixed and unalterable tracks?

Judy exploded, “Infected mice ? Here?”

“Judy,” Marianne managed to get out, “is the Venture —”

But Judy had turned away. She had heard, as Marianne had not, the shouting on the bridge, even through the thick metal door. Judy flung it open and bolted back to the bridge.

Marianne hesitated, then grabbed Colin and dragged him with her. She wouldn’t leave him with Wolski. And if the Venture was about to self-destruct, or vanish into some other dimension, or plummet to Earth, she wanted to be holding Colin when it happened.

The Venture did none of these things. The bridge had the focused air of a high-stakes poker game, the shouting suddenly over. Stubbins sat in the captain’s chair, facing a screen showing a room full of people in uniform. Wilshire occupied the second chair, Judy the third.

“No,” Stubbins said, quietly. Yet the word had the force of an avalanche. He touched something and the room full of uniformed men and women, suddenly moving very fast and with faces rigid with anger, all disappeared. Stubbins’s ground officer reappeared.

“Confirmed, Jonah. I’ll put it on tracking.”

The central screen in front of the captain’s chair split into two, with the officer on one side and a graphic on the other. An arc of the Earth, looking like a blue marble—had the Venture resumed flight? Marianne had felt nothing. Beside the arc were two dots, one blue and one green, moving toward each other.

Judy made a low sound that Marianne had never heard anyone make.

Marianne’s mind raced. Human communications systems on the Venture —and what else? As long as the drive machinery and life support and other technical aspects of the Deneb plans weren’t altered, anything could be added to the ship. Military tracking systems? Military weapons? Yes, of course. If homegrown terrorist groups could obtain Russian Scuds, what couldn’t Jonah Stubbins obtain on the international black market?

Or was it the black market? Had the US Army… No. That room full of angry soldiers had not approved of whatever Stubbins was up to now.

“Judy,” Marianne said, because it was clear that no one else would answer her, “what are those blue and green dots?”

Judy didn’t reply. She was rapidly typing on a keyboard and examining data brought up on her screen. But Stubbins heard Marianne and he said, still in that deadly voice, “Get off the bridge. Now.”