He tried to say more with his eyes: to remind Zoe that she had been forced to trust him once and he had not betrayed her. How much was he getting through to her? He couldn’t tell; she was half popbite now.
Finally she said, “Kandiss won’t let you go.”
“Then he’ll have to shoot me.”
Salah started back down the hill. Each step, he half expected a bullet in the back. But instead he heard Zoe’s voice, indistinct but passionate, presumably addressed through her wrister to Kandiss.
No bullet hit him.
And then Isabelle was walking beside him. “I speak Kindred, too, Salah.”
“Go back. It’s too dangerous,” he said, fear and determination removing from his mind that they’d already had this conversation once before. Too late, he remembered.
“Shut up,” Isabelle said, and said no more.
What the fuck? Bourgiba and Isabelle moved into Leo’s field of vision, crossing the open space between the compound and the protesters by the ship. That’s what they were—protesters, not enemies, just trying to protect their kids. Owen had never understood that. Owen had never understood a lot of things.
There was nothing Leo could do about Isabelle and Bourgiba.
“Heemur^ka,” Leo said in Kindese, “go now. I be okay. You go. Safety.”
Heemur^ka answered in a burst of Kindred that Leo couldn’t follow, and then stayed put. Nothing Leo could do about that, either. If Heemur^ka was willing to risk his life for his CO and their shared mission, that only meant Leo had done his job. “You’d have made a good Ranger,” Leo said in English.
Another burst of incomprehensible Kindred. But Heemur^ka grinned.
Things began to look better. The peacekeeping force was moving unchallenged through the crowd, talking and explaining, and now Isabelle and Bourgiba joined them. Much hand waving, mouth moving, pointing at the ship and then at Leo, clearly visible on the compound roof.
People began to move away from the ship. At first, just a few, then more. The persuaders were getting it done.
Heemur^ka jabbered something in Kindred and pointed.
Without moving, Leo shifted his gaze to the right. A group of Kindred—seven, eight—ran from the deserted camp toward the dispersing crowd. Two were women, one gray-haired but still fast.
Heemur^ka said in English, “Shoot. Now.”
Shoot? Why? The group wasn’t even armed; in their pale unisex dresses there was no room for weapons. All they were doing was joining the protest.
Heemur^ka said, “I shoot!” and raised his pipe gun.
What the fuck? “Hold your fire!” Leo said, but either Heemur^ka didn’t understand the English or pretended he didn’t. He fired his pipe gun.
The shot hit nothing—he hadn’t intended it to. It didn’t even make the advancing group slow down. And then they had reached the crowd and mingled with them, joined the talking and waving and pointing.
Heemur^ka said, “Bad people! Say not true! Make people to go to ship!”
Leo got it. These were the agitators, the haters, the “bad people.” They didn’t believe the Terrans could be trying to accomplish anything good. They weren’t just trying to protect their own; they were the type who wanted to eliminate anything not their own, and they would tell any lies they had to in order to accomplish that. To “make people go to ship,” even if it got those people killed. Leo had known them in the United States, in Brazil, in the Army itself.
Owen, it had turned out, had been one of them.
Five hundred yards away, people were hesitating, reversing direction to head back to the ship. Only a few, at first.
Then more.
Salah laid a hand on the arm of the first person he recognized, a gentle woman named Fallaabon. He had treated her rambunctious little son for a broken finger when the child had fallen from a tree near the refugee camp, one of the few occasions when the Kindred had not used their own doctors. Perhaps none had been handy. Salah spoke to Fallaabon as quickly and decisively as his Kindred would allow, explaining about the virophages, the leelees alive on the ship, the need to blast open the hull, the danger of taking her child too close to it. Others gathered to listen. Salah framed everything in terms of the children and of bu^ka^tel, at least to the extent he understood that enormously complicated concept. Obligation to her lahk, to the greater good, to the future, to the planet itself.
More people gathered to listen. Some nodded and began to move away from the ship.
Salah had lost track of Isabelle and of Leo’s cops; it was a big crowd. But less big than it had been. After half an hour, it seemed that they were making headway—people were leaving.
Then, somehow, the momentum reversed. Others were making speeches, too, Kindred with a different agenda. People still listened to Salah, but not as many, and some slid their eyes away from him and made a gesture that he had only seen associated with dung.
He saw Fallaabon lead her little boy back toward the ship.
The longer Leo hesitated, the more people had time to move themselves and their children close to the hull.
Leo had shot civilians before. Women, too, and even a kid. But they had all been credible threats to either his own platoon or to the Marines he’d been protecting. This was different. Nothing in his training or history or temperament prepared him for this.
If he fired the missile, it would—if it didn’t blow up—breach the side of the ship, letting loose Dr. Jenner’s virophage but also killing innocent men, women, kids.
If he didn’t shoot, the Kindred would take up their wrongheaded, determined position right up against the ship, convinced they were protecting themselves from plague, until four days passed, the spore cloud hit, and they all died of spore disease anyway. Or didn’t.
What if the virophage didn’t even work?
What if it did?
Kill maybe two dozen to save a planet?
He was not supposed to have to make this sort of decision. He was a sniper, and this sort of decision was supposed to be made farther up the chain of command so that Leo could obey orders. But there was no farther up this particular chain of command, and time was running out.
Leo sighted, adjusted for the freshening wind, squeezed the trigger, and fired.
The canister left the launcher without exploding. A moment later, the longest moment in history, it hit the hull of the ship broadside and tore a hole the size of a pickup. The blast shattered the air. Flying shrapnel, screaming, bodies falling to the ground.
Leo lowered his weapon and scanned the carnage, looking for Isabelle.
Salah felt it before it actually happened. How? No time to think, and the sensation was beyond thought, anyway. Brodie was going to fire. Salah knew it.
Fallaabon’s little boy turned and, still holding his mother’s hand, smiled and said something to Salah in Kindred. There was no time to answer. There was only time to act.
And to think, as he threw his body on the mother and child, This is my decision. Mine, by myself, for myself.
The ship exploded.
CHAPTER 21
Marianne woke to the sound of wind outside the compound. Not a religious person, nonetheless her first thought was a fervent Thank God! Which god? It didn’t matter. They needed wind.
There had been no wind the day the ship landed. No wind as they counted the dead and buried them. No wind as Isabelle, dry-eyed but clearly only by an effort of will, stumbled through a poem over Salah Bourgiba’s grave. Marianne didn’t know the poem and was surprised that Isabelle did, but Isabelle was endlessly surprising.