“Okay. Go back to base.”
Colin said, “Open the airlock and let me listen. I can hear any machinery on the ground.”
Jason did. It seemed to him only a slim safety, but if there were missile stations along the way and if Colin couldn’t detect them, the Return would be shot out of the sky. And this was the only way home.
At a thousand feet up, the Return glided over desert and forest and hills, rising and falling with the terrain, just as if the ship did not have an open airlock and a huge hole in her side. Air whooshed through as in a hurricane.
“Allen, slow down before we’re all sucked out!”
“Sorry, sir.” The ship slowed and the wind became less than a gale. Jason watched Holbrook bend over the prone figures on the deck.
Corporal Wharton was dead, shot as the three airmen breached the building. Kandiss had carried Wharton’s body; Rangers never left a comrade behind. Dr. Sugiyama, also carried out, was unconscious, and when Jason saw what had been done to the physicist’s face, he felt sick. One of the children, the girl, lay gasping and batting everyone away. The little boy clung to the airman who had carried him out, even as the soldier tried to pass him to someone else. The child started to scream, which set the girl screaming too.
Holbrook, opening Sugiyama’s shirt, said tightly, “Take them away. They shouldn’t see this.”
Christ alone knew what they’d already seen. But Jason said to Kubetschek, “Take them to another room,” even as the girl started to shriek, “Daddy! Daddy!” and the boy screamed even louder.
When the children had been forcibly removed, Jason knelt by Sugiyama. “Doctor…”
“He isn’t going to make it,” Holbrook said. “What they did… he will die soon.”
“Can you revive him enough for questioning?”
Holbrook grimaced. “No. And it will be a mercy if he stays oblivious to the pain.”
Jason stood. Kandiss sat beside the dead airman, the Ranger’s lips moving in prayer. Wharton would be buried with military honors in the base’s expanding graveyard beside Private Sendis, the soldier who had died defending Colin’s Settlement.
Flying low and slow, it was noon before the crippled Return reached Monterey Base. There had been no further attacks. The dead and wounded were carried inside through the carnage and debris around both domes, and Jason and a guard took the FiVee to the signal station. Before it left, Colin grabbed Jason’s sleeve.
“What happens now?”
“I report to HQ.” He yanked free of his brother.
“And then…”
“We clean up the base. Patrols check out the woods. We hunt and forage. Maybe you get to be the founding father of another quixotic settlement. Jesus, Colin!”
“I meant what happens to you.”
“Court-martial,” Jason said briefly, and climbed into the truck.
CHAPTER 17
Jane dreamed.
A voice came to her speaking her own language, sounding as if from a great distance and yet filling the inside of her head, a voice calm and measured as oceans: “You do not choose your enemies; they choose you.”
I want no enemies! Jane tried to cry out, but her own voice was muffled, wrapped in thick folds of flesh that clogged her throat.
A closer voice, startled, said, “She tried to say something!”
“No, she…”
She what? Was Jane “she”? Who was she?
Then voices and identity both disappeared, sinking into velvet blackness, into even deeper sleep.
Zack, bleary, looked up from his lab bench, where it seemed to him he’d spent days, weeks, possibly years. Claire Patel stood in the doorway. From her face, whatever news she was bringing him wasn’t good.
“Zack, three more v-comas. Do you want to test them for the allele?”
“No. They’ll have it.” But three more comatose people affected the allele frequency rate. “How many does that make, total?”
“Thirty. Plus Kayla Rhinehart and Glamet^vor¡.”
Thirty-two out of about seven hundred people: roughly 4.5 percent. “Who are the new v-comas?”
“A kitchen worker, a soldier, and a lab tech from Dr. Sullivan’s team.”
The lab tech was faintly surprising: Lab personnel had been exposed earlier to the star-farers than had the Settlers, yet this tech was just now lapsing into v-comas. But, then, there were always variations in innate resistance.
He focused more sharply on Claire. He didn’t know her well; his insane hours working meant he’d barely interacted with anyone from World except Marianne. Claire was small, pretty, drooping with fatigue even though it was only around noon—wasn’t it? He’d lost track of time. He said, “Aren’t you supposed to have an Army bodyguard with you? Where is he?”
“He’s the soldier who just went comatose.” She took a step forward, hesitated, raised a hand and let it drop, and then it all burst out of her. “I can’t do anything for them. Nothing. The nurses keep them clean and turned and hydrated. But we’re running out of nutrient solution, and then what? And there is nothing I can do for the v-comas. I can’t do anything for anybody else, either. The soldier brought in from the raid was dead, Sugiyama died twenty minutes ago, and the children won’t let anyone near them.”
“A raid? What children? Wait… Frank Sugiyama the physicist?”
“You didn’t know that Colonel Jenner attacked Sierra Depot this morning?”
“No! I’ve been—”
“The Army destroyed those fighter jets that New America’s been strafing us with, plus everything else at the depot, or at least that’s what Colin Jenner said. He was there. They brought back Sugiyama and his children, but Sugiyama had been tortured and his kids are traumatized beyond belief.”
Colin Jenner? A raid? Why didn’t Zack ever know what was going on?
Tears, silent and the more terrible for being silent, slid down Claire’s cheeks. She swiped them away. “Sorry. I just feel so… helpless.”
“We all do.”
Except, apparently, Jenner. Zack tried to catch up to events. “Then New America won’t be attacking the base anymore?”
“Well, not from Sierra Depot, anyway. Zack—are you any closer to finding out anything useful about these comas?”
“No. We—”
A newly recruited nurse, very young, dashed into the lab. “Doctor! They need you now! The alien—the boy—”
“Belok^?” Claire said sharply.
“Yes! A few minutes ago, nobody was there except his sister, but then I—”
“What is it, Josie? Is Belok^ dead?”
“No. He woke up.”
A flock of birds nested on bushes just outside the new signal station. The station had been hastily dug by a bore-bot into the side of a sloping ravine. Jason, accompanied by Captain Goldman, tried not to slip on the muddy hillside on the way to the camouflaged entrance. Rain sparkled on tall weeds; at the bottom of the ravine a brook murmured. He paused briefly to scowl at the birds.
They were sparrows. Until RSA, Jason could not have told a sparrow from a goldfinch, but everyone had learned about sparrows. Native to Eurasia, the small, plump, gray-brown house sparrows were now found on every continent except Antarctica. Some idiot had introduced them into the United States in 1852. They weighed about an ounce, liked to bathe in dust, hopped rather than walked on the ground, ate seeds and insects. House sparrows were mostly monogamous, although adultery occurred often. They laid two to seven clutches of eggs every year. They would build their domed nests almost anywhere—in bushes, under eaves, in cacti, on top of streetlights for the warmth. They liked to be near groups of humans.
This group was settling down to roost. They chirruped to each other: orphilip orphilip orphilip. A few tucked their heads under their wings, preparing to sleep. An adorable illustration from a children’s book, deadly with unseen plague. Jason restrained himself from pulling out his sidearm and shooting them.