Нэнси Кресс - Tomorrow's Kin

Marianne stayed where she was. But she said to Colin, “Go back to your seat and stay there. Do you hear me?”

At her tone, he stuck out his lip, but he went. No time now to worry about Wolski.

“You, too,” Stubbins said, without turning around. Marianne didn’t move. Judy suddenly sank into her chair and her head snapped back as if she’d taken a blow, but a moment later she was back keying in commands.

“Stone!” Stubbins bellowed.

The bodyguard moved toward Marianne. Effortlessly, as if she were Colin, he picked her up and carried her, flailing pointlessly, to the door. He shoved her through and slammed the door to the bridge. A second later she heard the lock click.

Colin cringed in his seat, looking very small. Marianne, scarcely knowing what she was doing, went to him and he crawled onto her lap. Wolski had disappeared. Colin began to talk, but she didn’t hear him.

She had caught a snatch of Wilshire’s conversation with the tracking station on the ground. She knew what the two moving dots on the screen, so small beside Earth, were. One was the Venture . The other was the Russian ship Mest’ .

The Revenge .

Colin was scared. Nobody was acting right. It should have been thrilling to be up on the ship out in space—especially since Jason and Luke and Ava didn’t get to go, only him—but it wasn’t. Grandma was holding him too tight and that big man who was always with Mr. Stubbins had locked them out of the bridge and Colin had peed in a toilet with no pipes so that he couldn’t even flush his pee away. It was just sitting in there for anybody to see because there was no door on the bathroom.

And the big wall screen had nothing on it to look at.

But at least that changed. Somebody on the bridge must have done something because all at once a picture of Earth—Colin was proud that he knew what it was—came onto the screen, with two dots moving near it.

“Grandma, is that a video game? Can I play? Where’s the controller?”

Grandma didn’t answer. A second later sound got added to the picture, but it was just Aunt Judy and Mr. Stubbins and that other guy on the bridge. Aunt Judy whispered, “Marianne, one-way comm,” and then there was only the other two grown-ups, saying things Colin didn’t understand.

But maybe Grandma did, because she got even weirder. She went all stiff, like the mice that had died, and for a horrible minute Colin was afraid that Grandma was dying, too. But she wasn’t, so he said again, “Where’s the controller? Can I—”

“ Be quiet, ” she said, so mean that Colin was shocked. Grandma was never mean to him! Nothing was right!

He jumped off her lap. She said to him, “Sit down and don’t say anything.” It was her obey-me-or-else voice, so he did. But he picked a seat behind her so that when she wasn’t looking he could leave the room and go hide again. That would show her!

Tears prickled his eyes. He hated everything.

After a moment he got up and moved—carefully, soundlessly—toward the storage bay. He could hear the mice someplace in there. Right now, mice were nicer than Grandma. Quietly, Colin opened the door, slipped through, and closed it behind him.

Judy had routed audio-visuals to the screen in the main cabin. Marianne listened, and looked, and found she could barely breathe.

The Mest’ had lifted because the Venture did. To the Russians, it must look as if the Venture was going to beat them to World. Or were they afraid of some other kind of attack that these ships were capable of but ordinary weapons were not?

She knew nothing about weapons, ordinary or alien. But Noah and Ambassador Smith had both told her that the Denebs were peaceful, did not engage in warfare. Had Noah been deceived and Smith lying? Or had Stubbins’s engineers, as well as those on the Mest’ , discovered ways to use the drive machinery as a weapon? Dark energy, Judy had told her. Quantum entanglement.

No. There was no reason for this much paranoia. The Venture had lifted because of the Scud, and the Mest’ lifted because the Venture had. In a moment the Venture would set back down in Pennsylvania, and the Mest’ would set back down at Vostochny because even if vengeance was the Russians’ motive for building their ship, they weren’t any more ready for an interstellar voyage than Stubbins was. The UN would be working on this mess right now. Vihaan Desai was no longer Secretary-General, but the newly chosen Lucas Rasmussen of Denmark was a man of peace. In just a moment the Venture would return to Earth… dear Lord please let Wilshire know how to actually control this thing….

Stubbins’s voice said over the open channel, “Eric, get close enough to fire.”

“Yes, sir,” Eric said.

Marianne’s throat closed so suddenly she couldn’t breathe. Fire? Fire what? Why?

“How long?” Stubbins said.

“Assuming they don’t return to Vostochny—”

“They won’t,” Stubbins said grimly. “Not until we do. They don’t want us warning the Denebs what’s coming. Those Russky sons of bitches aren’t going to destroy my trade partners, much less my ship. We’ll get them first. Maneuver into firing range.”

“We don’t know the range of anything they might—”

“Do it!”

“Yes, sir.”

Breath whooshed back into Marianne’s lungs. Why didn’t Judy object?

Then she knew. Judy had opened the channel so Marianne could hear all this. She had not objected because she did not want to be thrown off the bridge and have it locked behind her. Judy’s paranoia had paid off—she suspected this might be Stubbins’s course of action. And now she and Marianne would have to stop it.

Three men on the bridge, two of them big, Stone a trained fighter. Wolski somewhere aft. The chances of she and Judy—middle-aged, unathletic, female—overpowering the men was nil. What did Judy expect her to do? Judy was the one on the bridge! But over and over Judy had told her “I’m a physicist, not an engineer.” Marianne had no idea of how well Judy understood the human equipment Stubbins had installed on the ship, or what Judy could or could not do with the Venture . And Marianne had far less understanding of the ship than Judy did. So what the fuck could Marianne do ?

She could use her brains. It was all she’d ever had.

And… Where was Colin?

Marianne pressed her hands hard against the sides of her face. Then she tried the door to the storage bay. Inside the vast space were pallets of boxes and crates; the liftoff had been so smooth that they had not shifted a centimeter. Marianne said softly, “Colin?”

No answer.

Neatly stowed against the wall on hooks and in straps were tools for opening wooden crates. Marianne freed a crowbar, then tried the door at the far end of the area. It opened.

Exactly what she had expected: a small genetics lab. The familiar equipment—autoclave, sequencer, thermal cycler—looked jolting in this unfamiliar setting. But it was she who was the jolt, who was unfamiliar even to herself. The thudding of her heart melded with squeaks and rustles from the mouse cages lining one wall.

Wolski, bent over a bench, turned. “You! What are you doing—”

“Lie down on the floor,” Marianne said. “Right there. Or I’ll hit you with this.”

Wolski didn’t move. His eyes slid sideways, looking for a weapon of his own. He stood maybe five foot eight, not muscular—could she overpower him if she had to? A close call.

“I said lie down!”

Her tone, so effective with undergraduates and grandchildren, made no impression on Wolski. He started toward her. At the look in his eyes, she struck him on the shoulder with the crowbar.