Нэнси Кресс - Tomorrow's Kin

She cried, “We go back together now! Poshli obratno umeste!”

Another eternity, and then a heavily accented voice said, “You first.”

Judy didn’t know how to land the Venture . However, she didn’t need to. As soon as she opened the communications frequency, NASA ground control took over. People who had worked on the United States Deneb ship destroyed by the superstorm three years ago were hastily brought online. It seemed there were hundreds of people who understood how to control the Deneb crafts, if not the underlying forces that animated them.

Not, Marianne thought, unlike human minds.

Stubbins, lying on the cabin floor, worked steadily and ineffectively at Marianne’s duct tape and made noises around the sock in his mouth. Both women ignored him. Marianne sat in the captain’s chair, Colin on her lap. Judy, in what had been Wilshire’s chair, followed instructions from NASA— push that button, then these two simultaneously, then —and the ship took over. The Venture landed lightly as a butterfly in the no-man’s land between the inner and outer fences of its building site. Immediately the ship was surrounded and besieged.

Judy sagged in the chair, her broken arm dangling at her side. Once the ship was down, she allowed her face to contort in the full assault of pain.

“ Venture, ” said a man’s voice on the encrypted channel that served the building site, “this is the FBI.”

Stubbins groaned.

“Who am I talking to?” said the FBI—Marianne incongruously pictured the entire Hoover Building squatting on the Pennsylvania scrub—in a calm, subtly reassuring voice. “Jonah Stubbins?”

“No,” Judy said. “This is—” She moved in her chair and gasped with sudden pain.

“Let me,” Marianne said. She put Colin down as far away from Stubbins as possible in the cramped space and stood behind Judy. Public speaking was what she did. “This is Dr. Marianne Jenner. Dr. Judith Taunton and I are in control of the bridge, and Jonah Stubbins is in our custody for assault, attempted murder, and bioterrorism. Dr. Taunton is injured.”

“This is Special Agent in Charge Jack Warfield. Are you coming out of the Venture, Dr. Jenner?”

“Yes, of course we are. But first we need help. An engineer, Eric Wilshire, is somewhere else in the ship, I don’t know where. He may have found weapons. I have a child with me here. I can’t open the door from the bridge to the main cabin until I know we’ll be safe.”

A long pause. Then Agent Warfield said in that same hostage-negotiator voice, “I see. Why might Eric Wilshire be a threat to you?”

Because we’ve hog-tied his boss and killed two other men. Marianne didn’t say this. Whatever she did say now was going to be very important. There were going to be investigations, hearings, maybe even trials for murder. She needed to present everything in the best possible light.

She said, “Has the Russian spaceship returned to Earth? We made an agreement with them that both ships would land and avert any kind of international problems. That was our first concern.”

Another long pause. Warfield was conferring with someone, probably several someones. The wall screen showed the people and vehicles around the ship, and a larger mob, probably press, beyond the outer fence.

“Yes,” Warfield finally said. “The Stremlenie has returned to Vostochny, Dr. Jenner. We can send in people to protect you and to tend to Dr. Taunton’s injuries as soon as you release the door lock to the Venture . Can you do that from the bridge?”

“I don’t know how. Judy?”

Judy shook her head.

Colin said, “Some machines are coming.”

“I’m sorry,” Marianne said. “We don’t know how.”

“We have experts here who will explain it.”

Marianne followed NASA’s instructions. They didn’t work. She said, “The lock must be customized.”

“Is Mr. Stubbins conscious? Can he tell you how?”

“He has a sock in his mouth,” Marianne said, and all at once was conscious of her one bare foot. It felt cold. She had to get control of this situation.

“Agent Warfield, I’ll take the sock out of Jonah Stubbins’s mouth, but I don’t know if he will cooperate. But before we do that, I want to tell you for the record exactly what happened here. Step by step. Can I do that? Will you please record this?”

“Certainly,” Warfield said. “We very much appreciate your cooperation, Dr. Jenner. Go ahead.”

Marianne took a deep breath and began. Two sentences in, bullets exploded against the door of the bridge.

“Stop shooting!” Marianne screamed. “Stop!” She ran to Colin and stood between him and the door.

“We’re not shooting,” Warfield said. “It’s not us. Dr. Jenner, are you all right? Can you hear me?”

More bullets, a spray of missiles against the outer door. Wilshire. Could the bullets pierce the door? It was heavy metal, and the lock on this side, Marianne realized for the first time, was a manual bolt because Stubbins’s paranoia had wanted a shield against the digital dexterity of his own crew. A last-ditch fortress. Just in case.

She shouted over the din, “It’s the engineer! Wilshire! He’s firing at the door with some sort of heavy-duty gun, you need to come in and stop him!”

No answer. But then she heard the high-pitched whine of a laser cutter, and the bridge wall screen went dark and shattered. They’d been ready for something like this. They were cutting their way onto the bridge, careful to destroy not the consoles that controlled alien forces nobody understood, but only the human communications devices that everybody did.

Wilshire must have heard it, too. The hail of bullets stopped.

It took an astonishingly short time for the SWAT team, in full armor, to burst through the jagged metal hole onto the bridge. Marianne, with Colin in her arms, said, “I’m Dr. Jenner.” Judy gave the men surrounding her a weary, pain-filled grimace.

Marianne said, “There are mice loose in the ship, infected with a very contagious version of a deadly virus. Do not let any of them escape. I repeat— You cannot let any of those mice escape. Jonah Stubbins was stockpiling dangerous and illegal living weapons of bioterrorism.”

Stubbins, his mouth still stopped with Marianne’s sock, closed his eyes, and every muscle in his huge body sagged with epic, monumental defeat.

S plus 6.9 years

Ryan and Marianne sat in wing chairs in the day room of Oakwood Gardens. The day room looked, Marianne thought, more like a living room in Georgetown than a mental-health center. The distinguished, dark-toned portraits on the wall could have been nineteenth-century ancestors of some senator or congressman. A bouquet of June roses sat on the mantel. The Chippendale bookcases, worn oriental rug, and nautical pillows looked like they belonged to the sort of people who summered at Newport.

They were the only occupants of the room. This was a special visit and the other patients were at lunch. A nurse hovered in the doorway, but the room was so big that her presence didn’t feel obtrusive. Warm rain beat sideways against the tall windows. When Marianne had first arrived, Ryan had seemed troubled by the weather, but now his full attention was on his mother. Because he had seemed so distracted, she had begun to talk.

“The boys are with me, and Luke, too. You don’t know who Luke is, do you? He was living under some murky arrangement with Jonah Stubbins. When Stubbins was arrested for domestic terrorism, I took Luke with me. We’re all living near my old college. The boys are doing fine, you don’t have to worry about them.”