Нэнси Кресс - Terran Tomorrow

“Go back, Toni,” he said, so often that he grew even more impatient than he was afraid. “Start at the beginning of what you did, and why.” And she would look at him as if he were a not-very-bright fifth-grader instead of her department head. Explain? her look said. Why would I need to explain to you how to add sixteen and seventeen: add the six and seven to get thirteen, put down the three and carry the one…

Then she would try to explain, and that was even worse. She was apparently holding several different strands of thought at once—that’s what she called them, “strands”—as graphics in her mind, enormously complicated and detailed graphics. That let her see connections among them that she was pursuing both mathematically and experimentally, each step of which changed a graphic in ways that in turn changed all the others. She couldn’t, or wouldn’t, draw it for him: “Too complicated.” And he could follow only a small part of it.

It made him humble.

It made him resentful.

Humbly and resentfully, he worked the intricate process of modifying DNA. The genes they modified would be injected into sparrows in the subterranean bird lab; the gene drive would incorporate itself into the sparrows’ reproductive machinery. The birds, artificially brought into mating readiness, would copulate and lay eggs. If Toni succeeded, embryos inside the eggs would carry a gene drive that would render all male offspring sterile.

If.

“Denatured random coil one sixty-four, with molecule fifteen,” Toni said, and Zack was supposed to know what she wanted him to do about the engineered folding of a protein he had never known existed.

Then all of it—proteins, genes, eggs—fled from his mind. An Army nurse entered the lab, protected by his scrubs from Toni’s scowl. “Dr. McKay,” he said, “your daughter is waking up.”

Caity had climbed off her bed and onto Susan’s, trailing her IV. When Zack dashed into the cubicle, she looked up at him fearfully. “Daddy! Mommy won’t wake up!”

He lifted Caity in his arms. “Yes, she will, honey. She needs to sleep now. Come on, let Mommy get her rest. Nurse, can this line come out of her arm? Can she… oh, Caity!”

The nurse detached Caity. Zack carried his daughter—where? There was no place to take her in this crowded makeshift coma ward, where now even the corridor held sleeping figures on gurneys. Zack clutched Caitlin as if she, not he, were a life raft. Her little body felt hot in his arms; she smelled of soap and a wet diaper, although she was far too old for diapers. He ducked with her into a supply closet, its shelves ominously bare.

The nurse followed, alarmed. “Dr. McKay, we need to… she must be examined! I’ve sent for Dr. Patel!”

“A minute… just give me a minute!”

“Daddy, I feel funny.”

Alarm shot through him. “Funny how? Nurse! Come back!”

Caitlin vomited all over him.

Toni and Belok^ hadn’t done that when they woke—had they? “Nurse!”

Then Claire was there, taking Caitlin from him, laying her on a clean bed somewhere—how had they gotten to this cubicle? Zack, paralyzed with fear, didn’t remember. But Claire was saying, “It’s all right, Caitlin, your tummy just hurt for a minute…. Zack, there was almost nothing in her anyway, I’m not finding anything abnormal…”

Caitlin lay quiet on the bed, gazing solemnly at the three adults clustered around her, at the small crowd visible in the corridor beyond. This was an event: a third v-coma victim had revived, the first child to do so.

Claire said gently, “How do you feel now, Caitlin?”

“Good.”

That same unblinking gaze, Caity’s eyes traveling from Claire to Zack to the nurse, from the nurse to Zack to Claire. The stillness of her small body, as if everything in her was concentrated in her eyes, or what was going on behind her eyes. The adults all holding their breaths, waiting… for what?

The suspended moment spun itself out longer than Zack could stand. “Caity, sweetheart…”

“I’m good, Daddy,” she said in her high child’s voice. “I’m not sick.

“I’m just thinking.”

Jason had never had to do this before. Had never expected to do it. There was no protocol. There were only eight soldiers and a doctor on a charred stretch of land beside an alien dome, in a gray dawn.

The day before, after sex with Lindy, whatever drug she’d given him had let him sleep nine hours straight. He’d woken to a message from the signal station, addressed to, and delivered to him by, Major Duncan. The convoy, five days from Monterey Base, had been attacked by New America. There had been a firefight, and New America had won.

Duncan, her lips drawn in such a tight line that words barely fit through them, said, “General Strople says he will send another convoy, more heavily fortified, but he can’t do so until next month. He says to keep you and DeFord in stockade and to turn all available resources to the repair of the Return . He wants that ship, sir, and he wants it bad.”

“Yes.” Bad enough to cause the deaths of a convoy of his troops. New America did not take prisoners, not unless the prisoner was someone who, like Sugiyama, they thought could be of use to them. Had the convoy been underfortified? Or did New America have more scavenged weapons, more powerful weapons, that Jason didn’t know about? He knew for sure only one thing: the annihilation of the convoy had bought Jason more time. Time paid for by the deaths of yet more men and women, because of him.

And now he was going to cause another death.

They stood on the east side of Lab Dome, just beyond the armory airlock. Gray clouds seemed to hang directly overhead and a light drizzle fell on the burned-out woods. Jason was the only one in an esuit. If he had permitted himself, he would have felt at a disadvantage, a commander more vulnerable than his troops. He did not permit himself to feel that, or anything.

“Lieutenant, conduct the prisoner to the… the pole.”

Dolin staggered a little as he was walked to the shoulder-high stake driven firmly into the ground twenty feet away. The pole was the trunk of a dead sapling, dragged from beyond the woods and stripped of its branches and leaves. The exposed wood where branches had been torn away looked pale against the remaining bark.

Dolin lurched again, and his escort clasped him more firmly. Jason had instructed Holbrook to give Dolin some sort of drug to dull anxiety and pain. Maybe it was keeping Dolin quiet as well, although Jason had not asked for that.

He had the results of Hillson’s investigation. He had conducted a hearing as well—not a formal court-martial but more than Dolin was entitled to under the rules of war. He had Dolin’s confession, offered not only freely but sneeringly, with all the vitriol of a man who knew he had nothing more to lose: “I shot the fucker defending Kandiss, and I tried to shoot Kandiss too. Them cunts brought the sickness to the base and if you wasn’t an alien-loving traitor who don’t deserve to command a latrine , you’d of shot them all out of the sky before they even landed on Earth. Fucking lily-livered coward!”

The lieutenant tied a blindfold around Dolin’s eyes, then walked away.

Jason said, “Raise weapons.”

He didn’t know any other way to do this. The United States Army was at war, by a valid vote of Congress even if Congress no longer existed. He was commander. He would not order a backroom lethal injection, or anything else that could give rise to rumors of torture. The five men with raised rifles were all volunteers, but all carefully vetted. None, as far as Hillson could tell, were likely to lie about what they were doing, or to turn and shoot the base commander. None of the five was Kandiss.