Нэнси Кресс - Terran Tomorrow

“Sir!”

Hillson, flinging open the door with no announcement, no ceremony. The master sergeant’s face wore the wooden expression that meant extreme rage. His shoulders looked carved from granite. Jason said, “What is it?”

“A homicide, sir. Corporal Winfield is dead. Private Dolin is under arrest.”

Winfield? A member of J Squad, he’d been on the raid at Sierra Depot, he’d parachuted down to extract the Sugiyama kids…. Jason’s mind fumbled at trying to place Private Dolin, and failed. He said, “What happened?”

“Corporal Kandiss—”

“Kandiss was involved? Did he kill Winfield?” A sour stickiness formed in Jason’s throat.

Lindy said, “Is a doctor needed?”

Hillson ignored her; perhaps he didn’t even hear her. “Sir, what happened was that Dolin drew his sidearm on Kandiss, who wasn’t armed, but Dolin didn’t know that Winfield was there, too. Winfield tried to disarm Dolin and Dolin shot him. Then Kandiss disarmed Dolin.”

“Where did all this happen?”

“At the brothel, sir.”

The brothel, where Settler women tried to spread indoctrination of Colin’s nature philosophy. A weird arrangement, but you couldn’t lock soldiers, most of them male, into two domes without a brothel developing, however informally. Colin had found out about it within days of arriving at the base. Jason hadn’t asked its location.

“Where’s Dolin?”

“In the stockade.”

Where Strople thought Jason was. Or maybe not. Did Strople have suspicions that more was going on at Monterey Base than he’d been told? Of course, Jason thought, more was also going on at Fort Hood than Jason had been told. Unless… Christ, he was so tired.

“Sir…” Hillson said, looking suddenly uncertain.

“I’m fine, Sergeant. Begin a formal investigation immediately. Report to me no later than this evening. Dismissed.”

“Yes, sir.” Hillson left.

Lindy said, “An investigation? Are you going to… will there be a court-martial?”

She didn’t understand. Jason passed his hand over his eyes, even as a detached part of his mind thought: That, that thing I’ll have to do—I have never done that before in my life .

“Jason? Will there be a court-martial?”

“No. We are at war . Dolin shot a fellow soldier. The investigation will find out why, but it doesn’t really matter why. He did it.”

“And you…”

Jason opened his lips to order her out, to stop her questions, to remove the scent of her that brought back so many memories, but no words came out. He felt his knees give way. He staggered, caught himself, sagged against the desk.

“Jason—”

“Go… away.”

She didn’t. She took another step forward. He stumbled again—how could he stumble when the floor was supporting him?—and she caught him.

Her touch undid him. All of it undid him: the long months, years, of trying to hold together a base of military and scientists who were needed—both groups—to save the world but did not trust each other. The murder of Winfield, which Jason should have somehow prevented. The murder by torture of Sugiyama’s little son and Jason’s failure to rescue Sugiyama in time. His looming court-martial, into which he had dragged six good soldiers. The fruitless work of the scientists in stopping RSA, the mission to which Jason had sacrificed his military honor by defying orders. The wreck of the Return , the wreck of the United States he’d sworn to serve, what he was going to have to do to Dolin, all of it all of it all of it…

Then he was in Lindy’s arms, the sobs shaking his whole body but nonetheless silent because a colonel in the United States Army did not cry.

“Shhh,” Lindy said, “shhhh, it’s all right….”

The stupid statement sobered him. It was not all right. He pushed her away, but she caught at him, her small hands surprisingly strong. He remembered that.

“Listen to me, Jason,” she said, but without a trace of either command or plea. Maybe she still remembered that the best way to deal with him had always been with calm facts. “You are under enormous, even superhuman strain. You’ve done an incredible job, but no one can control everything, especially not in such an insane situation as this. If you keep blaming yourself for every single thing that does not go perfectly, you will drive yourself mad. And you can’t do that, because the base needs you. And I need you.”

That last was said in the same steady, reasonable voice as the rest, without emphasis. For a moment Jason wasn’t even sure he’d heard it. But he had; Lindy was letting the need show in her eyes.

So she was braver than he was, after all.

“Right now, you must sleep. I’m going to give you something for that. Hillson can conduct his investigation and then you can… do what is necessary. You have to have Dolin executed, don’t you? Yes. I’m sorry. But I’ll tell you this—he didn’t kill Winfield over any fight in a brothel over a girl or money or drink or whatever else anybody claims. Dolin was after Kandiss because some of your soldiers blame the star-farers for bringing the virophage to the base and causing the v-comas. They can’t reach Marianne or Jane or the other comatose because you have guards on the infirmary, but they could reach Kandiss. And Dolin wouldn’t have even tried it if he didn’t have more soldiers ready to lie for him about it.”

“I know.”

She smiled, a complex smile he couldn’t read. “Of course you do. Jason, you’re doing the best possible job under the worst possible circumstances. Now, take these.”

She handed him two pills. He took them without water, a pointless piece of macho toughness, and sagged into a chair. Lindy stood over him. He closed his eyes, but she was still there.

“Lindy,” he managed to choke out, “Lindy…”

She went still beside him.

He reached out, groped for her, and pulled her down on top of him, even as he rolled both of them off the chair and onto the floor.

“Lindy…”

“Shhh,” she said.

“I can’t… I want… You’ve always been…”

“Shhhhh.” She reached for his belt, tugging with her small, strong hands at the buckle.

It took a while for the sleeping pills to work.

Zack watched Toni. It was unsettling to not know what he was seeing. He was unwilling to admit that he had become a little afraid of her.

He saw his old friend and colleague, looking physically unchanged. Toni wore the same tee and many-pocketed pants she had always favored, although now they hung on her; during the v-coma she had lost weight. Her gray-streaked brown hair was pinned back in its usual careless bun. She bent over the lab bench with the same round-shouldered stoop.

He saw her unchanged concern and love for Nicole, whom Toni visited three or four times a day, each time striding from the lab to the v-coma ward to stand wordlessly at the end of Nicole’s pallet. Toni never stayed more than a few minutes. Once, she whispered something in Nicole’s ear. The comatose body on the bed didn’t stir.

He saw Toni’s intense concentration as she worked, as she had always worked. The researchers in the next lab, Drs. Sullivan and Vargas, worked on the samples taken from Toni’s and Belok^’s bodies. Toni worked on the avian gene drive. To carry out her experiments, she’d commandeered as many lab techs as she could. The problem was that she couldn’t work with them. Zack saw her frustration that not even he could follow what she was doing.

Toni would bark out a sentence—sometimes just the fragment of a sentence—about her work. The problem, Zack eventually figured out, was that she was giving a report that left out several things: the intermediate steps to get to her process, the results of those steps, the scientific hypotheses that had led her to those processes in the first place. It was as if she expected Zack and the assistants to grasp those from what she’d said. And none of them could.