Нэнси Кресс - Terran Tomorrow

“It will self-destruct,” Jason said. His lips felt numb. On the floor, Tommy snored. “It will self-destruct if anyone but Army command accesses it. Sugiyama doesn’t know the password.”

“So they’ll torture his family in front of him and kill him for nothing?”

“Yes.”

“Tommy said ‘back door’—is there a back door into the computer code?”

“No.”

Unless Jason had not been told everything he needed to know by a US Army command that barely existed anymore. Or unless Sugiyama, under terror about his family, used the fine mind that made him the twenty-first century’s equivalent of Albert Einstein to find a way around the self-destruct feature.

“Jason,” Lindy said, “what information is in that computer? Why do you look like that? What can New America do if they get into the quantum computer?”

Jason didn’t, couldn’t, tell her. Classified. He looked at Tommy, snoring on the alien material of the floor. When he woke, he wouldn’t remember what he’d said. That was how truth drugs worked. For a brief moment, Jason envied him.

Lindy said, more insistently, “What’s in that computer?”

“Classified.”

The launch codes for the only three viable nuclear missiles that the United States had left.

Zack sat with Caitlin in the Enclave dining room, called a “mess hall” even though the Army had its own mess in Lab Dome, as the little girl fished the last of her vegetables out of the broth in her bowl. A bit of broccoli dropped onto her pants. She picked it up and ate it.

“Good girl. Now drink the broth.”

“I don’t like it.”

“Drink it, pumpkin. You know we don’t waste food.” There was not as much of it to waste now.

Caitlin made a face and drank her broth. A pair of children from the Settlement entered the mess, surprising Zack; he thought that all the Settlers had been crammed into Lab Dome. Maybe Susan, as quartermaster, had moved some of them over here. Well, that would make sense—the school, such as it was, occupied a single room in Enclave Dome.

Caitlin’s eyes went wide. “Daddy, who’s that !”

The six children of Enclave Dome—that was all Caity had ever seen. Maybe that was all she thought existed in the world. He said, “The new people who came to live at the base. Do you want to say hello?”

She turned shy, pressing herself against his knee. “No. Where’s Mommy?”

“She’s at work. You know that.”

“Okay. Can I eat my peach now?”

“Go ahead.” A woman in a homespun tunic rounded up the two kids and led them away. Compared to the few people in the mess in midafternoon—two uniformed soldiers on duty in Enclave and four pale civilian staffers in old, 3-D–printed jeans—the three sandaled and suntanned Settlers looked as exotic as Fiji Islanders.

Caitlin put down her half-eaten peach. “I don’t feel good.”

“Is it the headache again?”

“No. My tummy.” She turned and vomited onto the wooden bench, then started to cry.

“Oh, sweetie. It’s all right. Here, let’s get that icky shirt off you.”

Zack took off the child’s shirt and wrapped her in his own. Her head lolled against his bare chest. A janitor, sister to one of the lab techs, rushed over. “I’ll take care of that, Dr. McKay. Do you need a doctor?”

“No, she saw Dr. Patel yesterday. It’s just a stomach bug, but I thought she was over it.”

“I’m over it,” Caitlin mumbled against his chest.

“You take her home. I’ll get this.”

“Thank you so much.”

He carried his daughter “home,” which meant an eight-by-ten cubicle that Zack had been moved to after the influx of Settlers. Susan had been careful to not show any favoritism to her own family. Her and Zack’s bed occupied four-by-six of the space; when Caitlin’s trundle was pulled from underneath, there was barely room to stand beside it. He extricated the trundle and laid her on it, gazing down worriedly. “Does anything hurt now? Tummy? Head?”

“Nothing hurts. I’m sleepy.”

“I see that.” She was, it seemed to him, sleeping too much lately. But in the last few days, both Claire Patel and Lindy Ross had examined her. Neither had found anything unusual. Zack was supposed to turn Caity over to the two teachers who babysat children as well as taught them, but he wasn’t going to leave his daughter until he was sure she was all right. Anyway, neither Karen nor Marissa would appreciate being saddled with a vomiting child. He intercommed Susan.

Caitlin yawned and said, “Tell me a story.”

He began The Three Bears , a Caitlin favorite, but it was clear she wasn’t listening. In the middle of Goldilocks’s discontent with porridge, she said, “Daddy, who made the domes?”

“The Army made the domes. You know that.”

“No, who made them. Devon says the Army doesn’t know how the domes work.”

True enough. How to explain to a four-year-old what physicists didn’t understand? “The Army built the domes. But they didn’t invent them. Somebody else told them how to make domes. Like when your teacher tells you how to add up numbers.”

“Who told the Army how to make domes?”

“People from another planet. People like Jane—you met Jane.”

“She’s pretty.”

Was she? Zack realized that he hadn’t ever noticed. Susan was the only woman he’d noticed that way in years. Talk about your long-married clichés.

Caitlin said, “Jane must be really smart if she showed Colonel Jenner how to make domes.”

“Well, it wasn’t exactly like… you see, sweetie, some other people showed Jane’s people how to make domes.”

“Who?”

“Nobody knows. Nobody has ever seen them. They’re… they’re like super-aliens. Like in your book about Jerry and the Space Puppy.”

That woke her a little. Caitlin sat up. “There are super-aliens? Where?”

“Nobody knows. They left a long time ago.”

“Where did they go?”

“Nobody knows.”

“What did they look like?”

“Nobody knows.”

“Why did they go away?”

“Nobody knows that, either.”

She stared at him doubtfully, this father who didn’t seem able to provide answers to anything, and then lay back down on her trundle bed. “ I know.”

“You know what the super-aliens look like?”

“Yes.”

“Then tell me! I really want to know!”

Caitlin frowned, and her eyes roamed the room, jammed with her family’s few possessions, most heaped on shelves hastily affixed to the wooden walls. Her gaze fell on her own drawings. Triumphantly she said, “The aliens look like zebras, ’cause they are zebras!”

When you hear hoofbeats, think of horses not zebras.

“Maybe,” he said, but Caitlin was already asleep.

Zack hurried through the tunnel connecting the domes. This was just as complicated as going through two ground-level airlocks, but right now Zack didn’t want to deal with delay of the required military escort. It had taken too long to find someone to stay with Caity, and he was already late.

He ran down the long flight of stairs leading from the kitchens. The large, alien-metal room at the bottom was Enclave Dome’s storeroom, jammed with produce, eggs, and grain from the Settlement and forest game shot by the Army. Semi-successful cheeses ripened on a shelf, the result of a semi-successful experiment with capturing and milking wild sheep. Two men were filling tote bags with apples from a crate; the smell made Zack’s mouth water.

In the corner stood the door to decon and the airlock. “Retinal scan and digital chip match: Dr. Zachary McKay.” The kitchen workers watched him with an expression Zack couldn’t read: envy or pity or maybe just puzzlement that anyone would risk exposure to RSA. I already had it, boys, he thought, and pushed the memory away.