Нэнси Кресс - Terran Tomorrow

“I’ll walk you to the mess,” Toni said. “Just keep talking on the way.”

Late in the evening, Jason received a panicky, private-frequency call from the stockade. He jammed on an esuit, crossed to Lab Dome, and ran down the long flight of metal steps. In the fetid prisoner cell, Corporal Yunez bent over Dr. James Anderson. The prisoner’s naked form lay distorted in a position Jason wouldn’t have thought even possible for a human body. Somehow Anderson had looped the chain of his wrist manacles behind his neck and then hooked each knee beyond the opposite wrist, straining the tether that held one ankle to the wall, turning himself into a pretzel whose slightest movement to free himself would result in strangulation. And then he had wriggled.

“Sir,” Yunez said, shaken, “I was watching, sir, I only went to use the head, not gone more than three minutes…”

Jason knelt and entered the code to release the manacles. They fell away and the prisoner unfolded limply. Under the grime, his face was deep purple, even the swollen tongue that protruded through parted lips the color of blueberries. Jason groped for a pulse and didn’t find it. But Anderson gave a long, shuddering breath and so maybe… Jason started CPR.

He tongued his mic. Dr. Holbrook would already be asleep in Enclave Dome and would need an esuit and escort to come through the tunnels… no time. But Jason had passed Lindy on her way to the infirmary. “Dr. Ross, to the bird lab immediately, code one!” To Yunez he said, “Bring her into the stockade the second she comes down the steps. Go!”

Yunez sprinted from the cell. Jason kept on with CPR.

This was his own fault. He had waited too long to extract information. If he hadn’t wanted to give the prisoner every chance to cooperate…

Breathe, damn you!

If he hadn’t tried hunger first but had gone right to torture…

Breathe, you fucker!

If he hadn’t tried so hard to play by rules of engagement set by a world that didn’t even exist anymore…

Lindy burst into the room. “Jason! What the fuck is this undergroun—oh my God.”

She dropped to her knees. “Stop CPR for a minute.” Pulling a stethoscope from her pocket, she listened to his heart and lungs and pushed a knuckle hard onto Anderson’s sternum. “I’m not getting anything. Jason, try again!”

He resumed CPR while he pried up Anderson’s eyelids. The pupils were fixed. Jason said, “A defibrillator?”

“No time. Let me check him again.” She did, while Jason waited.

Lindy said, “It’s too late. He’s gone.”

“No, I heard him give a breath just before I started CPR!”

“Agonal respiration—the lungs trying one last desperate thing. But he’s gone.” She sat back on her heels and wrinkled her nose. “What is this—a dungeon? What have you done? Who is he? Jason!”

“Anderson. Of the Gaiists.”

“ James Colson Anderson? Of the original eight?”

“Yes.”

“And you captured him and were torturing him for information about New America? Their movements? He was with them now?”

“I’m not discussing this with you.” He stood. His legs felt wobbly; he clenched his ass cheeks to steady them.

She leaped to her feet. “You sure the fuck are discussing it! Torture? You were torturing—”

“No. I wasn’t.” But he would have, tomorrow morning. “Anderson did that to himself.”

“And I suppose he starved himself, too, and was willing to piss and shit himself and—What the fuck did you think you were doing down here?”

Something rose up in Jason, knotted and complicated as gnarled tree roots, sharp as thorns. He said with deadly quiet, “What do you know about it, Lindy? It’s my job to defeat New America so you and people like you can stay all holy and above the dirty work necessary to accomplish that. Who the hell do you think you are? You want the war to end but condemn the tactics necessary to get there. You—”

“This isn’t a ‘tactic,’ it’s a war crime! Couldn’t you have just used truth drugs?”

“Do you think we didn’t try? God, this is you jumping to condemnation and conclusions before you even—”

“No, this is you , Jason, trying to prove to himself once again how he can handle anything thrown at him!”

“I couldn’t handle you, could I? Couldn’t handle your smug self-righteousness, your holier-than-thou—”

“No,” she said, her voice dropping into glacial cold, “you couldn’t handle me. Or anyone else who has the guts to speak truth to you. You want a doctor to certify that the prisoner is dead so you can stay within all your stupid rules? Okay, I so certify. He’s dead. Congratulations.”

She turned and stalked up. Her shoes rang on the metal stairs, leaving behind an embarrassed Yunez, who tried to look as if he had not heard all that. Jason knelt beside the dead man, this Gaiist scientist, one of the eight who had helped create the most horrendous weapon of mass destruction ever let loose on the world.

Carefully, Jason closed Dr. Anderson’s eyes.

Jane stood in the… courtyard? lobby?—no English word she had learned for the Terran structures on World fit this cluttered area of Enclave Dome—and let six children look at her. She knew that she was like nothing they had ever seen before.

Earth was like nothing she had seen before, or had imagined. Lindy Ross said there was hardly anyone left after the plague, but then she said there were perhaps two hundred million people still alive on the planet. Two hundred million! All of World contained, on its one small continent, only fifteen million people. Lindy said that many might be left in the “United States,” a subdivision of this continent that Jane had trouble grasping. It didn’t seem to be based on lahks or families. And the head of government, who had not been a Mother but a man, was dead without anybody else taking that role except the Army.

These children had lahks, of course. Four little boys and two girls. The smaller girl came shyly forward, held out two chubby fingers, and touched Jane’s hand below the “sleeve” of the “shirt” that had been given to Jane to wear over her wrap. “Are you real?”

Jane laughed. “Yes. What is your name?”

“Caitlin.”

“I greet you, Caitlin. I am Jane.”

Emboldened, two of the boys inched forward. One said, “Do you come from a star?”

“Yes.”

Murmurs, wide eyes, wiggling. The boy said, “Does it have a really big dome?”

“No dome.”

“You went outside with no dome? You’ll die!”

“Here, yes. But not on my planet.”

They digested this. Jane had no idea how much they understood. Two adults, a barefoot man and a woman with startlingly red hair, stood nearby, talking to each other and ignoring everything else. Jane said, “Do you children go now to the school?”

“Yes.” Caitlin, her brown hair in two bunches on either side of her head. “Where are you going?”

“I come now from Lab Dome. I wait for someone to take me to see Colonel Jenner.”

The boy said importantly, “You need soldiers to go to Lab Dome. And an esuit.”

“I know.”

Caitlin said, “Can you hear the ground?”

It must be an idiom. “Hear what?”

“The ground,” Caitlin said. “The air. The machines. The sky.”

“I hear it, too,” one of the older boys said.

“You’re a liar!” another said.

The first boy punched him. Jane, shocked, waited for the adults to rush over and be severe with the child. No adult did, so she said, “Stop! You cannot hit people!”

“You’re not the boss of me!” The boy ran off.