Нэнси Кресс - Terran Tomorrow

“What is it?”

“I need to talk to you!”

Sarah, startled, faded tactfully away. Jane didn’t talk. She seized his chair and tried to push it. Colin made it roll by itself, following her along the narrow, clogged corridors as swiftly as possible. Jane kept her head down so no one could see her face. She ignoring Colin’s repeated, “Jane? What is it? Jane?” At his room, she closed the door, climbed onto the bed, and lay down. She pulled up her wrap.

His face changed; his pattern shifted. He whispered, “Are you sure?”

“Yes!”

“I haven’t said anything, Jane, because I didn’t want you to feel that in a place strange to you, you were in any way pressured to… I wanted to give you…”

“I know. Don’t talk now. Later, but not now.”

Colin ducked his head, and she couldn’t see his face. Then, carefully, he heaved himself from chair to bed. Jane, in an agony of desire that was sweet as Terran honey, sweet as World mef fruit, sweet as home, reached for him.

For a while, then, the patterns were all shining, and she didn’t have to picture what must inevitably come.

Two more v-comas, one a soldier and one a civilian, had awakened. Jason had reports brought to him hourly, from many people. He walked the corridors. He visited the infirmary wards, the labs, the armory, the mess. He put on an esuit and talked directly to the outside patrol. Elizabeth Duncan took over the command post. Jason talked, but mostly he listened. Command had always involved invisible tentacles resting lightly all over the base, sensing every movement in every corner, trying to anticipate the next shift. Too often he had failed. But now the tentacles vibrated constantly, hot with detail, so that sometimes it seemed to Jason that he stood in every bit of Monterey Base at once. That he could see the freckles on the Settler children kicking a ball in the Commons, smell the deer roasting in the kitchen, hear the squawk of sparrows in the bird lab underground.

The one thing he could not do was sleep. He wouldn’t take any more of Lindy’s sleep-inducing drug; he needed to be sharp. Night after night he lay awake, alone in the dark, going over the plan again and again, trying to find an alternative. Failing.

Failing, too, to still the ache for Lindy. But it wouldn’t be fair to her, wouldn’t be fair, wouldn’t be fair…

Nothing was fair.

Then back to walking both domes of the base, tentacles vibrating, people watching him from eyes that were fearful or hostile or speculative or sympathetic. Listening. Learning.

His grandmother had been shut up for days with Dr. Farouk. They were “working out equations” that they would not, or could not, explain in terms that Jason could understand.

Private McNally, he of the spotty education and no specialist training, had invented two more improvements to ordnance. Another Awakened soldier, Specialist Kelly Swinford, had joined him. She was not, Dr. Holbrook told Jason, quite his intellectual equal—but then the old man had thrown both hands into the air in a completely unmilitary gesture and said, “I can’t really tell. They are different . No, not different, they all still have the same personalities but they are… different.” Jason had not pressed him. He understood.

Five people were still in v-coma, including Branch Carter and one child, Devon James.

The convoy from Fort Hood was a week out from Monterey Base.

Jason’s father and brother were planning a new Settlement, because We can’t live like this for much longer . Ryan, Jason suspected, would be glad to go on doing so, but Ryan would go where Colin led.

Major Sullivan and her team were closer to a vaccine against RSA, but not close enough. Nor had Major Vargas’s team made any progress on a way to tweak the human immune system to fight off RSA.

And Dr. Steffens…

Ah, not yet. Give him a few more minutes before he had to go to Toni Steffens.

Jason walked into the kitchen of Lab Dome mess. Big pots bubbled on a stove. Two Settlers, teenagers, rose hastily from the floor, straightening their clothes. The boy’s ears blushed bright red. Jason said, “As you were,” even though neither was a soldier, and withdrew. The little incident cheered him. Those kids, who had been small children at the time of the Collapse, had found pleasure, maybe even joy, in the midst of crisis. More power to them.

Hillson was increasingly wooden to Jason, and Jason knew he couldn’t hold off Hillson much longer. Hillson’s loyalty was beyond question, but the decision Jason had come to might shatter that loyalty beyond repair. Or not. Either way, Jason would talk to him next.

Right after Toni Steffens.

He made his way to the labs, only to be told that Dr. Steffens was in the underground annex. At the corridor leading to the stairwell, the guard saluted and opened the door. Jason put on an esuit and descended the staircase, his boots ringing on the alien metal. He entered the negative-pressure bird lab.

It was pandemonium down here. Cages and cages of noisy sparrows, none of them happy. Wings flapped, beaks opened, bird shit fell through bars, females squawked as he approached caged and artificial nests. Full-grown birds, fledglings, eggs. How had Dr. Steffens got them to breed so fully in captivity?

Not that Jason would understand it if he were told.

A harried lab tech nodded as he scattered seeds into cages. Jason called over the noise, “Where’s Dr. Steffens?” The man pointed.

Behind a stack of cages, she bent over a lab bench, a short dumpy woman with lethal bird shit on her pants, the brain of a genius in her head. Jason had a sudden incongruous picture of Toni Steffens accepting a Nobel Prize, standing in her bird-stained outfit at the Stockholm Concert Hall before the king, in a room full of chirping sparrows.

“Dr. Steffens.”

She looked up, startled. “Now?”

“Yes.” He hadn’t told anyone, not even her, when it would happen. Benjamin Franklin, again, with his wise counsel on secrets.

“I need a few minutes.”

“Yes.” Jason headed for decon, glad to escape the bird lab. He waited in the small space outside the airlock. To his left was the stockade, in which sat the deranged Corporal Porter, who had attacked Jason’s grandmother. Porter was another problem. Holbrook was trying different meds, although so far all they had done was reduce Porter to zombielike quiescence.

Eventually Toni emerged from the bird lab beside a lab assistant and a loaded carry-bot. The assistant wore a look that Jason recognized all too well: terrified but determined. He’d seen that look on the faces of new recruits in Congo, some of whom had never made it home. Five trusted soldiers from J Squad, fully armed and armored, clattered down the steps.

The eight of them went through the airlock to the tunnel beyond. Parts of the tunnel walls and ceiling had shaken loose during Jason’s relentless bombing of Monterey Base, but the carry-bot was able to navigate three-quarters of the way to the hatch. When rubble blocked the bots’ progress, everyone carried the cages of birds over the debris. J Squad opened the hatch and took up defensive positions, with more soldiers covering them in the woods. However, as Jason had expected, the trees were empty of enemy. New America, reeling from the destruction of Sierra Depot, was most likely regrouping, or concentrating on attacking the undomed convoy.

The cages were lugged up the stairs, one by one. There should have been, Jason thought, some kind of ceremony. What Jason, Toni, and the lab assistant were doing would change the world just as fundamentally as anyone who had ever won a Nobel: Alfred Nobel with his dynamite, Salk with his vaccine, Crick and Watson with their double helix. Just as much as anything since the spore cloud.