Over the broken roads, through the desert and up the shattered coast… no way to refuel except with what they carried with them, the possibility—no, the certainty—of attack by New America….
“They want the Return that bad,” he said, and it wasn’t a question.
“Yes. Or they don’t believe that I wasn’t complicit in your decision.”
“Fuck,” he said, knowing that she had never before seen him lose control, “fuck, fuck, fuck.”
“Yes, sir.”
“We can’t catch a break.”
“You took out Sierra Depot.”
Her voice held uncharacteristic admiration, in which there was nothing personal. In another world, Jason thought, she could have commanded the entire US Army; she had the necessary toughness, control, and intelligence. If the Collapse hadn’t happened when it did, she’d have risen through the ranks faster than he did. Instead she stood a chance of going down with him.
He said, “Elizabeth, when the convoy arrives, I’ll be in the stockade along with DeFord and you will disavow any knowledge of—”
A scuffle outside the closed door. “No!” said the soldier on duty, and Duncan’s hand moved to her sidearm. But when the door was flung open, Claire Patel stood there.
“Sorry, sir… she insisted and I didn’t want to…”
“It’s all right, Private. Dismissed.”
“Colonel Jenner—I’m sorry to burst in like this but you have to be told now… Belok^ is awake.”
For a disoriented second, Jason couldn’t remember who Belok^ was. Then he got it. “Out of his coma?”
“Yes!”
“The others?”
“No, but they’re all being closely watched. There’s more. I examined him, and he’s changed. He can talk now.”
“The coma made him able to talk?”
“It did something inside his brain. No, don’t ask for details because we don’t know. But he’s different now.”
The other v-coma victims had already been able to talk. Jason’s exhausted mind fumbled at Claire’s unspoken ideas. She moved forward a step. “We don’t know what it means, no. But Zack McKay’s spinal-fluid analyses seem to indicate massive alteration of brain chemistry. The kind of chemicals that usually indicate more formation of synapses, more pruning of synapses, the sort of profound changes that are usually seen only in small children and adolescents.”
“Doctor,” Duncan said, “do you mean that the v-coma victims will wake up with increased verbal fluency?”
“We don’t know, Major. That’s the whole point.”
Jason said, “Monitor the situation and keep me informed. Dismissed.”
Claire grimaced; too late, he recalled how much the civilian doctors and scientists disliked it when he addressed them as if they were soldiers. Well, tough. He had more important things on his mind than civilian touchiness.
But then Claire’s face softened. “Colonel,” she said, gently and yet with the note of defiance that said she knew she was overstepping boundaries, “I’m sorry to say this, but you should get some sleep. You look like shit.”
Zack thought that the next v-coma to wake up would be Caitlin, since she had gone comatose at the same time as Belok^. But it wasn’t Caitlin. At evening, the little girl still lay comatose in the same cubicle as her mother, and the nurse said there had been no change in either of them. Zack gazed down at his wife and daughter, reached out, touched Susan’s hand. It felt so warm, so alive…
“Dr. McKay,” said the same nurse he’d sent to find Ka^graa. Only now she looked oddly defiant. “There’s another v-coma awake.”
“Where?”
“Bed on the end.” The nurse turned away… sneering? Why?
The bed on the end held Toni Steffens.
Head Nurse Amy Parker bent over Toni, who batted her away. “I’m fine. Nicole?”
“Still comatose,” Amy said. “Dr. McKay, Major Holbrook will be here in a minute.”
“Zack,” Toni said, wonderingly. And then, “I have the motherfucker of all headaches.”
Well, whatever had been going on in Toni’s brain had not changed her personality. But her broad, intelligent face looked puzzled. Holbrook strode in.
“Dr. Steffens? How do you feel?”
“Headache.”
“I’m going to examine you. Everybody out, please.”
Zack waited, fidgeting from one foot to the other, just outside the curtain, until Holbrook emerged. “Vitals are all fine,” he said. “I don’t think it’s wise to give her anything for the headache until we—”
“I can hear you, you know,” Toni said. “No, I don’t want anything for the headache. And no, I’m not a superhearer now, you’re just loud. Be quiet and let me think.”
Think? Zack pushed his way into the cubicle. Toni struggled to sit up, her nutrient IV bobbing, her puzzled expression replaced by such intense concentration that she seemed frozen all over again. Holbrook said, “It would be good for you to walk now, Dr. Steffens.”
Toni didn’t answer. Eventually she said to Zack, “Tell me what’s happened while I was comatose.”
Where to begin? “New America attacked the base with fighter jets and—”
“Not that.” Toni raised her newly thin arm and waved it, brushing aside New America, the base, and the fighter jets. “What happened in the lab. Not with the v-coma analysis—with the avian gene drive.”
“Nothing. Toni, you know that.” Had her memory been affected? “All work on the gene drive was dropped to investigate the v-coma and try to—”
“Shut up now.”
Zack held on to his temper. He and Holbrook glanced at each other, neither knowing just what they were dealing with, uncertain how to proceed. A minute passed, two. Then five very long minutes.
Toni pushed back her blankets and tugged at her IV. “Get me out of this thing. Out of here.”
“Be careful,” Holbrook said, “your muscles will have partially atrophied and—”
“Get me out and to the lab. Zack, I need your help.”
“With what?”
Toni looked at him. Her puzzlement was gone. She gazed at him with what looked like… was it pity?
Toni said, “I’ll try to explain in terms you can understand. Stop me if I go too fast.”
Jane stirred on her pallet, caught in the twilight between sleep and wakefulness, where the real and the imagined cannot be told apart because all things have become possible. She was with her lahk sisters in their house of curving karthwood; she was on Terra under a dome; she floated free in a dark space of cold, glowing stars. Creatures scampered through the walls, through her blankets, through her brain. Voices rose and fell, or were they waves on the beach at Kle^chov^ol¡? No, they were the stars themselves, rumbling before they exploded in novae of gas and speeding particles and the end of everything….
“They’re killing us,” a star said.
“And he’s letting them.”
“Nah, Josie, the old man’s all right. He stopped the attack by the Newsies and pulled off that raid on Sierra that—”
“And he let in them fucking aliens that’re killing us!”
“Nobody dead yet—”
“Might as well be—”
“For two cents, I’d—”
“Watch your mouth, Carl.”
“Quiet, you guys, my head nurse is coming…”
But no one was coming, Jane was alone except for the things scudding through her brain: leelees… no, Terran “mice”… no, something else…
Then nothing, and again she slept.
Another morning, after another long and mostly sleepless night. It might, Jason thought blearily, be an interesting experiment to see how long he could go sleepless without losing the rest of his mind. Parts of it seemed gone already. His thoughts moved slowly, through tarry mud, and in circles.