Because somebody had to do something, and Zack had not trusted that Jenner and his military were capable of that. Well, Zack had been wrong. The attacking forces had apparently been pulverized. The base was safe, and Zack was lucky he wasn’t in prison for violating a military area or something. If they had a prison. If he wasn’t so desperately needed in the “research effort.” Which, like Lindy’s plan, was going nowhere.
In the last twelve hours, another soldier, a civilian, and a Settler had fallen into v-comas.
He was, paradoxically, too tired to sleep. But eventually the sound of Caitlin’s and Susan’s breathing calmed him, the only things that could.
The only things that mattered.
Colin said to his brother, “You need to take me with you to Sierra Depot. It will be today, won’t it? You need me with you.”
It took all of Jason’s self-control to not betray surprise. “Sierra Depot?”
“Come on, Jason—the attack you’re planning.”
“Why do you think there will be an attack on Sierra Depot?”
“I made it my business to know. I’m not stupid, even though you think my ideas about the Settlement are stupid. And unlike you, I’m not isolated by military protocol from talking to anybody at all. Nurses, cooks—do you know how much information cooks and kitchen help overhear in the mess? Your off-duty soldiers talk to the Settler women, who report to me. Soldiers speculate about what you’re going to do with them. Some might even know.”
Christ—Colin’s intel network was as good as Hillson’s. Maybe better. “I don’t discuss strategy with civilians. Especially not civilians that engage in violations as stupid as the one you just did.”
“It was stupid,” Colin said, with his disarming candor, “but that was Lindy’s plan. This will be yours and so I’m sure it will be well thought out and effective. The reason you need me with you is my hearing. I can hear things way before any of your officers can.”
“We have technology to ‘hear things.’”
“Not on the Return, you don’t. Or if it’s there, you don’t know how to use it. Because you’re going to go on the Return, aren’t you? To bomb the jets at the depot the same way you bombed New America here?”
“Again, as I said—”
“I know, I know, you don’t discuss strategy with civilians. But I can be an added resource, Jason. You need all the resources you can get.”
Jason studied his brother’s face, that face he had known as toddler, child, awkward teen, grown man. And yet how much did he know Colin at all? It was possible to become so familiar with someone that you ceased to see him at all. And since Jason had chosen West Point, their lives had diverged so much.
“Colin, why would you even want to go on any kind of military operation at all? You disapprove of the Army, of our tech, of everything this base is trying to do. Why go on an attack, if there were to be one?”
Colin said simply, “The kids.”
“What kids?”
For the first time, Colin showed a flash of anger. “Don’t play dumb with me. Jason. The two kids of Sugiyama’s that New America captured and are still alive. If they are alive still.”
“How did you—”
“Tommy Mills. That boy is confused as hell. But he’s been in Sierra Depot, he came from there, and he’s another resource you’re neglecting. Seeing what happened to the one Sugiyama child really shook him. He wants to help get the kids out of there. Lindy told me—”
“Lindy? Lindy talked to you about all this?”
“We got a little drunk one night. This is all a huge strain on her, too.”
Lindy and Colin ‘got a little drunk one night’? A flash of jealousy seared through Jason like a first-degree burn. Jane, and now Lindy?
Colin, for once oblivious to Jason’s state of mind, rushed on. “Lindy’s having nightmares about the kids. About Sugiyama, too. I know you’re not planning an extraction raid, but you’ve got Mason Kandiss, who’s done them before. And Tommy says the Sugiyamas are housed separately and a little away from the main barracks. Even some of the New America soldiers are appalled at what happened to Frankie, and so General Blackwood moved them out of sight. And—why, Jason? What do they want from Sugiyama?”
So Colin didn’t know everything. Not about the quantum computer, not about the launch codes for the Q14s. Colin’s ignorance steadied Jason. He said, “What could you hear if you were on the Return? Nothing.”
“Not until you open the airlock. I don’t suppose that a Worlder ship comes with bomb-dropping equipment. You’ll have to do it manually, won’t you? From fairly low?”
Jason said nothing.
“I can hear a lot,” Colin said, almost humbly.
Jason knew, had known all his life, how much Colin could hear. Plants making more noises than anyone had suspected. Imminent earthquakes, thunderstorms, air attacks. Mice underground, buried machinery, humans. The entire environment, which was why he was so sensitive to its fate.
“Please,” Colin said. “Let me do something useful, Jason.”
Jason tongued on his mic. “Hillson, escort Private Mason Kandiss and the prisoner-at-large to Lab Dome conference room immediately.”
Marianne dreamed. Deep in v-coma, images formed in her brain, shadows born of new connections and new proteins, both built with old cerebral materials. But in that building, that unconscious construction, lay everything.
Gaze at the shadow of a building at midday and it looks sharp, well defined. Look at the building again at midafternoon and the shadows have gone soft and long, melting at the edges into other structures, connecting them in new ways. At night the shadows disappear, along with the building itself if the night is dark enough. But look by moonlight, by starlight. Look through night-vision glasses at the green images both familiar and infinitely strange.
It all depends on the light. On how much you can see, on how much appears connected to everything else.
Marianne rose almost to consciousness, stirred on her pillow, sank back into the shadowy depths.
The FiVee rumbled from Lab Dome an hour before dawn. The low cloud cover continued, although the rain had stopped and on the western horizon lay a thin strip of clear pearl gray.
Jason sat in the back of the FiVee with Mason Kandiss, two other soldiers with airborne experience, half of J Squad, Colin Jenner, the prisoner-at-large, and an exhausted Major Holbrook, who was too old to operate at midnight and do battle at dawn but who was the only Army physician they had. Only Kandiss and Jason wore esuits; the rest had already survived RSA, the invisible killer all around them. But Jason was more concerned with visible enemies.
The FiVee rolled over the charred and body-strewn perimeter of the base, then reached the rain-sodden forest. Smashing through and over saplings, bushes, hidden rocks, the vehicle was both noisy and easily spotted, but that no longer mattered, not until New America sent reinforcements. Jason watched Kandiss’s lips move—a silent prayer? The big Ranger, 240 pounds and all of it muscle, sat on the parachute packs, with Colin’s powerchair wedged between Kandiss and the truck wall. Tommy Mills crouched at Kandiss’s feet.
The Return floated down to a new location, fairly close to the base. The troops jumped from the back of the FiVee almost before it had come to a complete stop. In five minutes everyone and the new equipment was on the ship and it was lifting. The most important resources were already aboard.
As always, Jason was struck by the amount of wide, empty space on the Return. This was a spaceship designed to carry people, their possessions, their animals, and their crops to colonize a new planet. Once, the United States had planned on doing that, too. Those plans had disappeared in the destruction of the Collapse and then the war, but maybe his country could have another chance. After all, it was to the United States that the Worlder ship had come. To Jason’s base. It was his job to use and preserve it.