Нэнси Кресс - Terran Tomorrow

Jason and Kandiss, the only members of J Squad who were not RSA survivors, activated esuits.

“Okay,” Jason said, “listen up.”

Zack dozed on a pallet in a corner of his lab. He was dreaming something formless but menacing when someone shook his shoulder, hard. Instantly he bolted upright and lashed out.

“Jesus, Zack, don’t assault me!”

Lindy Ross, crouching over him. Zack looked wildly around. No one else was in the lab, and only a dim night light burned.

“What the hell are you doing, Lindy? What time is it? What’s happened?” Fear spitted his guts.

“It’s not Caitlin or Susan,” she said quickly. “It’s midnight. I need your help.”

“My help?”

“Yes. I have to move Colin Jenner and I can’t do it alone.”

That made no sense. “What? Move him where? You want an orderly.” And then, “Is he dead?”

“No, he’s not dead. I can’t move him alone with his injuries and tubes unless I use a carry-bot, which can’t go down stairs.”

“Down stairs? Why would Colin go down any stairs?” Was Lindy delusional?

“I’ll explain later but I need help now , while I can do this in secret, and you’re the only one I trust. Come on!”

She tugged on his arm, and Zack rose, befuddled by sleep or its lack but responding to the authority and urgency in her tone. They moved swiftly through the artificially night-dimmed corridors to the infirmary. When Zack tried to whisper a question, Lindy put her finger to her lips.

Colin Jenner waited in a powerchair. Lindy whispered to Zack, “If we run into anybody, say that you need tissue samples from Colin for your research. Come on.”

They moved, a silent ghostly group, past the cubicles with v-comas, who were beyond hearing anything. God, so many of them! From a side room came night nurses’ voices, weary and yet strident, arguing about something. Beyond the infirmary, the corridors were empty. They went through the first door to the tiny enclosure at the top of the staircase, Lindy squeezing in Colin’s bulky chair. She closed the door behind them.

Zack said, “Are we going down to the bird lab? Why? And where’s the guard?”

“Went comatose a few hours ago. Zack, you can get down there. Give the security system your scans.”

“Not until you tell me what’s going on!”

Colin said, “I’ll tell you. The underground annex will have a small airlock and then a long tunnel to the outside, as an emergency escape hatch and—”

“I know that, Jenner!”

“What you don’t realize is that there’s a whole New America army camped all around us, with tanks or something like tanks, and—”

“How do you know?”

“I looked ,” Lindy said. “Observation deck is off-limits now, but I’m a doctor . With a good enough story, soldiers let me go places they won’t let other people go.”

“And anyway, I hear them,” Colin said.

Of course. Zack hadn’t put it together. If Ben Corrigan could hear “something different out there,” so could Colin Jenner.

Lindy said, “We’re going to take Colin through the tunnel to its exit somewhere in the woods. We need you because you have security clearances for the airlock scanner—you’ve gone outside to obtain sparrows. Colin’s going to listen to find out whether there are New America troops right above, waiting for us to come out like rats from a burning sewer. If not, I’m going outside and try to call the signal station. I have an earplant and mic, you know—doctor’s privilege. Mine aren’t military but maybe the signal station will hear us. Otherwise, there’s no way to tell them what’s going on.”

Zack was appalled. “New America will hear your message, too. They’ll pick up your location instantly.”

“I’ll walk a long way from the tunnel exit before I signal.”

“Lindy, they’ll mow you down!”

Lindy said, “Help me with Colin’s chair. We can’t jiggle him too much.” She took off her long white coat. Under it she wore a jacket, military pants, and boots. An assault rifle was strapped across her chest.

Zack said “And even if you reached the signal station, what good could they do?”

“Send missiles. Jason can’t fire outside, and we’re just sitting here like caged sparrows in the bird lab. And if the signal station can’t fire missiles, they can at least send the Return to rescue us.”

“No,” Zack said. “It’s an insane plan.”

Lindy moved so close to him that their feet almost touched. Her eyes, inches away, bored into his. He smelled her musky female odor, overlaid with smells from the old jacket. “Let me tell you what’s insane, Dr. McKay. It’s insane that my ex-husband didn’t foresee this. I would verbally flay him up one side and down the other except that I know beyond a grain of doubt that he’s already doing that to himself. It’s insane that New America found antique weapons that what is left of the entire United States Army didn’t find, or at least didn’t find here. It’s insane that we live in structures we didn’t build, don’t understand, and can’t alter by so much as a molecule. It’s insane that the only way the formerly greatest military machine on Earth can only communicate with itself is through one lousy comsat or else with human signalers through one relay station, like a nineteenth-century telegraph office. It’s insane that New America can hold us in a state of siege until we either starve, or all fall into v-comas, or start eating our comatose patients, whichever comes first. All those things are insane. Getting a signal to the Return so they can rescue us is the only thing not insane.”

Rescue—how? All at once Zack realized that Lindy had lied. She was keeping secrets. Colin Jenner probably believed the Return , which had conveyed him unconscious from the Settlement to the base, was going to swoop down and carry everyone off to safety. Lindy knew that the order would be to bomb the hell out of New America and everything else in a mile’s radius.

Or did Colin know that, too, and was still willing to help Lindy even to the point of her own death?

And how long could the overcrowded, underprovisioned domes hold out without food coming in from the forest or Colin’s Settlement?

Zack closed his eyes, opened them, and began easing Colin’s chair down the steep, narrow stairwell.

Kubetschek took point. J Squad moved through the airlock that the “super-aliens,” whoever the hell they’d been, had designed, and into the bot-bored tunnel beyond. A generation ago, on the Embassy , the analog of this airlock had served as a submarine bay under New York Harbor. In Colin’s Settlement, it had led to a wide tunnel that slanted sharply upward to bring in stored crops. In domes used as Army bases, the tunnels went downward first so they could be more deeply buried, and were fortified with steel and concrete.

Jason walked directly behind Mason Kandiss. The only light came from their helmets, and the Ranger was a huge dark silhouette. They all moved quietly, but if New America was above them, and if they had among them a superhearer, then the enemy knew what Jason was doing. No way to calculate the odds.

At the end of the tunnel, Kubetschek and Goldman mounted the stairs. The others covered them from shallow alcoves built into the tunnel walls. However, that wouldn’t help much if strong enough explosives came down from above.

Goldman tapped in the code to open the hatch. The old, familiar tension tautened the base of Jason’s skull.

The two men touched the mechanism that raised the heavy, camouflaged hatch at the top of the stairwell.

It made a shocking amount of noise as soil, bushes, small rocks slid off the rising hatch. Dirt and pebbles clattered down the stairs, mixed with fat droplets of rain. But no larger noise of enemy fire. Kubetschek sprang through the hatch, followed by the other three members of J Squad. They took up defensive positions while Jason, at the top of the stairs, spoke urgently into his mic to the comsat somewhere above.