The penalty for treason in wartime was death.
But maybe there wouldn’t be any court-martial. Maybe the order would come later today to summarily execute Jason and DeFord. If so, nobody but the seven of them would hear it.
“Jim,” Jason said to Goldman, “we’re returning now to base.”
Belok^ sat up on a pallet, in a row of pallets divided by inadequate curtains. La^vor crouched beside him, holding his huge hand. The boy blinked his large dark eyes, looking dazed. Zack hung back as Claire knelt on the floor beside the rumpled blankets.
“Belok^? Kar^ judil¡?”
La^vor spoke rapidly in World; Zack couldn’t tell if Claire understood her. Claire listened to Belok^’s chest, shone a small light into his eyes, tested his reflexes. Belok^ said nothing, but the skin between his eyes wrinkled slightly.
La^vor stroked her brother’s hand. It seemed to Zack that Belok^ was gathering himself, trying to pit his challenged, mostly wordless mind against circumstances. He looked slowly around the cubicle, then directly at Claire, at La^vor, at Zack. Some emotion moved in the depths of his eyes.
Zack felt the hairs on his arms prickle.
La^vor went on murmuring to her brother.
Belok^ stood up. He staggered, stiff with not moving for so long, and Zack saw how thin his arms had become in his coma. La^vor jumped up and let him lean on her. From his great height he looked down at her upturned face. “La^vor,” he said slowly.
She answered in World, something reassuring. Zack braced himself. Now Belok^ would say the name of his dead brother, Glamet^vor¡, and she would have to tell him that the only other pillar holding up Belok^’s universe was dead.
Belok^ looked all around once again. Then, haltingly, he said something in World: something of several words, something that might have been an entire sentence, something he had never been able to say before. Then a second entire sentence.
And none of the other three, frozen by surprise, managed to say anything at all, until Zack said in a voice that didn’t even sound like his own: “Caitlin.”
Caitlin had not woken, nor Susan, nor any of the other v-comas. When Zack had finished checking, he returned to Belok^’s cubicle. The boy was sitting up, broad back against the wall, while a clutch of medical personnel peered at him from the corridor. Claire said, “La^vor, kar^… I mean, hee^kan… no… we need Jane for this!”
Zack said, “I’ll go get Ka^graa. He can’t translate like Jane, but he’s the best we’ve got. Besides, he’s the head of the World expedition.”
“No, he’s not,” Claire said crossly. “But go get him anyway.”
Zack didn’t want to leave. In the corridor, a young Army nurse, Josie Somebody, hovered at the edge of the silent crowd. He said, “Please go find Dr. Ka^graa and bring him here. Right away.”
An expression of distaste flitted across the girl’s face. But she said, “Okay,” and walked off. A soldier rounded a corner of the corridor and said something to her, but she shook her head and moved on. Zack returned to Belok^.
He was still speaking, fluently and without hesitation.
Claire, who’d rocked back on her heels, looked as if she’d been hit with a two-by-four. La^vor was weeping. Zack got out, “What is he saying?”
Claire said, “He’s hungry.”
“Is that all?”
“I can only get a few words, but mostly, yes, it seems to be that he’s hungry. Also that he wants to see Glamet^vor¡. She hasn’t told him yet. But, Zack, it’s not what he’s saying… it’s that he’s talking so much and so easily.”
“I know.” And then, “Colin Jenner and the others…”
Claire nodded, understanding without Zack’s finishing his sentence. Colin Jenner and the other superhearers had had their auditory centers rewired in utero by the original R. sporii. The infants, hypersensitive to sound, had cried nonstop until drugs were developed to tamp down their ability. Some had stayed on the drugs for life. Some, like Jenner, had been bright enough to learn to compensate, as bright children learned to compensate for dyslexia. They had learned selective attention, still hearing the incessant background noise but paying attention only to those they chose at a given moment.
Microbes in the fetal brain had done that. Microbes, that for two billion years had been the dominant form of life on Earth. That had evolved complex and sophisticated signaling techniques, gene-swapping techniques, interdependencies, antibiotics to kill each other. Microbes that, through the union of two prokaryotes, had begun the long evolutionary march toward the multicelled organisms that eventually became humans. Microbes, that still made up one-third of the cells in the human body, outnumbered humans on Earth by a factor of 1022, and could produce a new generation every twenty minutes and so had adapted to—and modified—every available ecological niche on Earth, clear through the stratosphere, solely to aid their own survival.
What had microbes created for themselves in Belok^’s brain?
“Zebras,” he said aloud, and Claire looked at him as if he were crazy.
CHAPTER 18
By the time Jason reached base, Elizabeth Duncan had her orders from Strople, brought in from the perimeter by Private Laura DeSoto and delivered as if both of them didn’t already know the orders would not be obeyed.
Jason jumped out of the FiVee in the armory airlock, went through decon, and left Lab Dome for Enclave. Between the domes, soldiers grunted and swore as they cleared away wreckage from New America’s attack. Jason didn’t ask what they did with the enemy bodies; he could see the mass grave at an edge of the charred forest. Carry-bots trundled body bags and sacks of lime. Amid the devastation, the twin energy domes shone almost obscenely bright in the afternoon sun.
At the command post, Elizabeth Duncan said, “You look like shit, sir.”
Jason blinked; she had never spoken to him with anything approaching such informality. He said, “You don’t look great yourself, Major.”
“Do you think Strople will promote me, now that you’re in stockade?”
“Probably.”
But neither of them could sustain the banter. He had been up for thirty-six hours and sagged with fatigue, and banter was foreign to Elizabeth Duncan’s nature—had she rehearsed it to try to reassure him of her loyalty without any embarrassing sentiment? Unwritten rules forbid them to name what they had actually done: falsified information and retained control of a United States Army base after being relieved of command. To name things was to give them greater power—although it was difficult to see how this situation could have more power over either of them than they had already committed to. But they had made their decision, they’d made it together, and for good and sufficient reasons.
Still, Jason had been unwilling for as good a soldier as Duncan to go down with him. If it came to that, he and Specialist DeFord would go alone to court-martial, and Strople would never know that Major Duncan plus four others had collaborated with Jason. But it was not going to come to that.
She said, “Sir, General Strople has ordered me to bring him the Return. I told him the ship is too damaged to fly that far.”
Which might, for all they knew, be true. “Did he believe you?”
“I don’t know. But he pretended to. He’s sending a unit here for the court-martial and to take control of the base.”
“Sending? How?” If they had somehow acquired more planes or functional choppers and the fuel to fly either…
“FiVees. A convoy of eleven vehicles.”
Jason blinked. “You’re kidding.”
“No. I calculate about ten days.”