Bigger! That meant that all Austin’s dismantling of supplies, crawling with them through the tunnel, getting scraped and bruised—all had been unnecessary. There was another, bigger entrance that Tony never showed him.
“But Graa^lok contaminated Haven with—”
“There’s an airlock. A real one. Beyon is a good physicist, I’ll give him that, and Graa^lok a good engineer.”
“But Tony will kill Graa^lok for letting you go!”
“Austin,” Claire said, “I’m not going to stand here arguing what Graa^lok did or what Tony will do or anything else. Now carry that thing, and start to make up for all the trouble you caused.”
She walked forward and Austin had to follow. She didn’t seem to understand that he was really a hero.
More deaths from the spore cloud were being reported on the radio. Isabelle and Noah plotted them on a map that Noah drew of the continent. Marianne and Claire studied the map. The pattern was clear.
No one else had died in the camp. The farther east you went, the more deaths. Most clustered on the east coast, beyond a mountain range that blocked wind, and to the far north, where the land was rockier and less fertile. Mostly herders lived there, with some fishermen and scientific outposts. Those fared the worst. The map was almost a perfect epidemiologic match to the wind direction and strength.
The virophage had saved millions of lives, without causing sickness in humans. It was a miracle. It was scientific triumph. It was evolution in practice, and sometimes, Marianne thought, evolution was on your side. Sometimes.
“About one-twenty-fifth of the population is gone,” Isabelle said, “four out of every hundred. That’s still enough, along with the Russian attacks, to cause major disruption in how everything functions.”
“But maybe not enough to cause collapse,” Noah said. He held Lily in his arms, and Marianne saw all over again how much her son loved this planet and his life here. He added, more somberly, “Apparently there are groups that still blame Terrans for everything, including the spore cloud.”
As there were on Earth. Marianne didn’t want to think too much about the past. She turned away from the discussion and to her work.
Claire Patel had brought a gene-sequencer from Haven. Zoe Berman and Mason Kandiss had taken some convincing that the sequencer wasn’t a bomb in disguise, but Leo Brodie was in charge and he explained to the unit what it was. Marianne would like to have heard that explanation; what Leo knew about science would fit on a thumbnail, in a large font. But he wasn’t stupid, Marianne had to give him that.
The gene sequencer was Terran, brought to Kindred ten years ago. Old, cranky, outdated, but running. Marianne and Branch obtained a virophage sample from dead spores—not an easy task, in itself—and sequenced its genome.
The genome was tiny, only twelve-thousand base pairs making up eighteen genes. Eight of them were completely unknown to the database on Marianne’s laptop. Five of them corresponded to known genes for RNA viruses. The other five were also known: they were exact duplicates of genes in R. sporii.
So this was not the first time the two viruses had encountered each other. Somewhere in the unimaginably distant past, spore cloud and virophage had met. The virophage had raided its host’s genome, as microbes did all the time. The virophage could even be a genetic “mule,” carrying genes between many viruses on planets, on asteroids and comets, in the drifting cold of space. Virophages stole from viruses, modified viruses, destroyed viruses, and viruses did the same to each other. Marianne realized yet again she was looking at the very oldest form of evolution—a jump through time that made the time dilation between Terra and Kindred completely irrelevant. This was the real, fundamental battle, and it would outlast every other form of life.
As well as affecting every other life-form. On the colony ship, the virophage had changed parts of the leelees’ brains. It wasn’t obvious what effect this had on the animals, if any. But it had happened.
Marianne touched her forehead, wondering.
Leo had recovered from his gunshot wound, and Zoe from her surgery. “I feel fine,” he said irritably to Dr. Patel, who had insisted on a thorough exam. “You don’t need to do that.”
“Yes, I do,” she said. “You’re a very bad patient, Lieutenant Brodie. And Ranger Berman is worse.”
Leo had given up on trying to get anybody to address his unit by their right ranks, including the unit. He said, “I have better things to do than to lie here and—”
“Lieutenant,” Lu^kaj^ho said over his wrist radio, in Kindred, “two groups come at the compound, one by north and one by south.”
“I will come now,” Leo said in Kindred.
Dr. Patel said in English, “You’re picking up the language really fast.”
“Have to. Thanks, Doc.” He was already scrambling into his armor.
By the time he’d climbed up to the roof, it was obvious who the group from the north was. Young women, led by Graa^lok. Austin raced out of the compound, past the now deserted refugee camp, to meet them.
Leo said to Lu^kaj^ho, “The prodigal son comes home.”
“What is this?”
No way Leo could explain. Actually, Leo wasn’t sure, either, what the story was about—it was a phrase people used. From the Bible, maybe? Or Shakespeare? Most everything seemed to come from Shakespeare.
Salah Bourgiba would have known. Hell, he would have recited the whole damn poem. If it was a poem.
Leo said to Lu^kaj^ho, “It is not a thing,” and turned his scope south.
A group of men on bicycles, heavily laden with gear. This was more serious. Leo snapped out orders. Before the bicycles got into firing or bomb-throwing range—assuming they had no weapons more advanced than Leo had seen here before—Zoe had the peacekeepers in defensive position. Kandiss had hustled the group on the plain into the compound, along with Dr. Jenner, who’d been picking vegetables in the kitchen garden. Leo had his full kit brought up to the roof. Then they all waited.
The group on bicycles got closer. They were all old men.
Leo set his lips together. One thing that had made defense easier on Kindred than in Brazil, in Afghanistan, in so many other military missions, was that the Kindred did not use suicide bombers. Owen had never believed that, and Kandiss still didn’t, but it had proved true. The Kindred weren’t fanatical enough, or cruel enough, or maybe just plain insane enough to throw away their lives. But things change, and there was nothing like a major plague to change them. These old men could have decided to take out the Terrans who, they might believe, had taken out so many of their own, and to do so by ending lives near their end anyway.
Except that for old men, these looked like a pretty healthy group. Only one rode in a sort of cart behind a bicycle. The rest pedaled away. One reached under a tarp over his gear and Leo trained his rifle on him.
“Hold your fire,” he said to his wrist radio.
The group drew closer.
Then Isabelle, who must have just heard that her sister had returned from Haven, was running down the hill from her lahk to the compound—no, to the men. Damn the woman! She was always where she shouldn’t be… Leo would kill every last one of those geezers if they so much as touched her.
She threw her arms around one and hugged him hard.
Christ on a cracker—Who was that? Who were any of them?
Lu^kaj^ho said over Owen’s radio, now his, “Lieutenant, these be no danger. They be jukno^hal.”