“I can’t believe,” Kris said, “that anyone would be that blind to . . .” She ran out of words.
“The brainwashing on their ships must be pretty extensive,” Jacques said. “It must have started early and been all-inclusive.”
“But,” Kris started, then twisted her thought in midflight. “Even the Alwan elders with their egg check didn’t keep their people on that tight a leash.”
“Rebel Alwans could still run for the deep woods,” Penny said. “Where can you run to on a ship? It’s huge, but it’s just a ship. If you breathe their air, they own you, body and soul.”
“But for a hundred thousand years? For Christ’s sake,” Jack exploded.
But a moment later, he shrugged. “We don’t know their story. Has a ship gone rogue and been hunted down by the others. Has a crew mutinied and gone to planet? We just don’t know.”
“These people don’t even know how to live on a planet,” Jacques said. “Look at those below. Hell, you say those that destroyed the planet we found didn’t know to dig latrines. Neither did those fools. They’d piss in the water they were about to drink.” He shook his head.
“What are our choices?” Kris asked. “If we keep the woman, can we, what would you call it, deprogram her?”
“It would be a long process, and we might lose a few fingers,” Penny said.
“Or eyes,” Jack said.
“And if we send her back?” Kris asked.
“She will tell them the moment she sees her clan that she stinks of vermin, and they will kill her,” Jacques said. Then winced. “And if she tells them who I am, the men will likely kill all the women who slept with me.”
“But they’ve eaten the food you found for them,” Amanda said.
Again, the anthropologist could only shrug.
The room got very silent. Even Nelly seemed silent in Kris’s head.
Then Jack’s face got hard.
“Hon?” Kris said in question.
“I’m getting a report from the brig,” Jack said, his words distant and hard.
Kris gave her husband a puzzled look. “And.”
“The alien woman smothered her child with her own breasts as she lay in her bunk, then bit her own tongue clean off and bled out without our watch being any the wiser.”
“No!” Kris’s gut was plummeting even as she jumped to her feet, but Jack stepped between her and the door out of their quarters.
“You are not going down there, Kris. My Marines will take care of what has to be done.”
“But the baby!”
“Was killed by her mother.”
Kris’s gut had been in free fall before. Now her whole self was empty as space. And just as cold. Kris bent over, clutching for her belly. Clutching for herself. “Oh my God, I’ve killed them both.”
“You did not kill anyone,” Jack said, pulling her close, forcing her to stand, her cheek on his chest. “She killed her child. Then she killed herself.”
“But if I . . .”
“If you and our team hadn’t gotten involved,” Jacques cut her off, “they would have died soon enough. They were starving to death in a land full of food. But food they didn’t know how to reach out for. Food their training didn’t teach them could be there. They were stupid. Pissing in their own drinking water. Shitting there, too. Kris, most of them were already running a low-grade fever. One had already lost her baby, and the others would likely lose theirs to sickness or hunger before their first birthday. Kris, they didn’t know how to survive down there. I’ve helped them. Maybe those that are left will do better.”
Kris listened, but she didn’t believe a word of it.
“Kris. Look at me,” Jack said, pulling her face close to his. “Listen to what Jacques just said. Yes, these two died, but the others have a lot better chance of living because of what you did.”
“I should have seen this coming,” Kris said, tasting the cold darkness that was trying to engulf her.
“Yes,” Amanda said. “We all should have seen this coming. Jack, did your Marines have her on a suicide watch?”
Jack stared at the ceiling, thinking. “The guards were watching her. She was the best show in town. They didn’t see anything strange until the blood dripped out past her body and onto the floor.”
“That may not be a suicide watch, but it was just as good as one,” Penny said. “Kris, what were we supposed to do? She bit her own tongue out and just lay there as she bled to death.”
Now it was Kris’s turn to give herself up to a hopeless, helpless shrug. “I don’t know. I just don’t know.”
“Did any of us see this coming when we decided to haul her in?” Penny asked.
As one, they all shook their heads.
“Do any of us disagree that it is far better to try to talk out a conflict than just start killing everyone in sight and keep on doing it until there is only one left standing?” Penny went on doggedly.
“Is that a trick question?” Kris asked, trying to find some humor somewhere.
“Kris.” Penny, Kris’s best friend, came to stand beside her and Jack. She spoke her words slowly, as if she were hammering them into a stone wall. “You may not be as crazy as the Alwans are, demanding a ‘talk talk’ even as the aliens are shooting at us, but you’ve done everything you could to talk to them. This woman is not your first try. Knowing you, she won’t be your last. You’ll get better, and maybe, before too many more billion aliens get themselves killed, they’ll learn they need to talk to us because we are not vermin prey.”
“Dear God, I hope so,” Kris said, as all breath left her.
“Ladies and gentlemen,” Jack said, “if you will excuse me and my wife, I’d like some quiet time with her.”
Without a word said, the others left.
Kris found herself shaking. Shaking hard. “Jack, I need you to hold me.”
He folded his strong arms around her and settled onto the couch with her half in his lap. “That’s what I’m here for.”
23
Kris came awake slowly the next morning. For a moment, she couldn’t remember where she was. It was Jack’s rhythmic breathing beside her that restored her sense of time and place.
Instead of rolling out of bed, she rolled over and stared at the overhead. In her mind’s eye, she kept going back to the brig yesterday. Again, she saw a young woman nursing her baby so lovingly.
How could she have killed that child only a few minutes later?
Kris shivered.
Jack placed a loving arm over her.
“I thought you were asleep,” Kris said.
“I’ve been awake for a while.”
Kris rested a hand on Jack’s arm. “I didn’t see that coming. I should have, but I didn’t.”
“No, love, you couldn’t have seen it coming. Hell, woman, if someone marooned any man or woman in this fleet in that flea-bitten hellhole down there, they’d jump at a chance to get out.”
“It’s not a hellhole, it’s nature at its rawest,” Kris said.
“It looks pretty on a screen, but you spend a couple of hours down there, and it will lose that romantic sheen.”
“I’ll take your word for it. I have this chief of security who would never let me wander around such a hazardous place.”
“Damn straight he wouldn’t, love.”
Kris held on to that love for a long moment. When had his concern for her as the woman who was his primary morphed into concern for the woman he loved?
That mother had killed the child she loved. Could Jack kill her?
The thought alone brought another shiver.
He pulled her closer. “What’s wrong, hon?”
Kris considered answering with a dismissive “nothing,” but Jack deserved better than that. “She killed the child she loved because she loved her. Can you think of anything that would make you kill me out of love?”