If Tomorrow Comes

CHAPTER 19

Austin lay on his pallet in the clinic and thought about the ways he’d fucked up.

He’d trusted Tony. He’d trusted Lieutenant Lamont. He’d taken his mother—his mother!—to a place where she was now a hostage. He’d taken Claire Patel there, too—another hostage. He’d let Lamont shoot him so that now he had a gash on his head and a shattered shoulder and might not be able to ever use his left arm again. He’d cried in front of Isabelle. He’d found and brought the call-back device, yes, but now there was another piece he hadn’t found or brought back: the instructions on how to use it. He was a total fuck-up and probably Leo hated him now. Along with everybody else.

Dr. Bourgiba came in to check his head, and Austin lay mute and stiff—he was stone! rock!—and didn’t answer any questions. He didn’t cry out when it hurt, either, which was something. But not much.

Then Isabelle came in and Austin turned his face to the wall. Why didn’t they just leave him alone? He made loud noises in his head so that he couldn’t understand what Isabelle was asking him, and when she laid a hand on his head he screamed, even though it didn’t hurt at all. “Go away! Go away!”

She did. Austin let the tears come. He wanted his mother, and that was the biggest fuck-up of all because he was too old to cry for his mother, he was thirteen.

The door opened again. Austin turned his head back toward the wall but jerked around again when he heard the next voice.

“Hey, buddy,” Leo said.

Leo leaned heavily on Isabelle’s arm. She lowered him to sit at the end of Austin’s pallet, back to the wall. Leo breathed heavily for a few minutes and then said, “Thanks, Isabelle. Leave us guys to talk now, okay?”

She did, closing the door behind her. Leo looked strange out of soldier clothes and without helmet or weapons. He wore a loose Kindred wrap and he was barefoot. A tube came from his side into a bowl he’d put on the floor. “Damn drainage pipe. I might as well be a sewer. Bourgiba says that on Terra this would be a sterile tube with a bag or some shit like that, but they don’t have one in the clinic. Listen, Austin, we need your help again. You did a great job, incidentally, getting that call-back device out of that survivalist shit hole. Nobody else could have done it, certainly not your buddy Graa^lok.”

Leo had pronounced it right, Austin thought dazedly, with the rising sound in the middle. Tony never did that. And Leo had said… that Austin did a good job?

“Here’s the thing,” Leo said, and his voice, too, dazed Austin—it sounded like an adult talking to another adult. “There have been developments while you were in sick bay, so I’m going to brief you. Dr. Jenner and Branch Carter are working on a way to call back the colony ship with that device you rescued. They haven’t figured it out yet but maybe they will, they’re smart people. They might call the ship back so they can let loose that germ on it that’s supposed to stop the spore germ.”

Austin already knew that much; he’d known it before his disastrous trip to Haven. He could tell that Leo was skeptical about some of it, or maybe all of it, but that he was waiting to see what happened.

“But now,” Leo said, “we have another problem. Most people left the refugee camp once it was clear to them there weren’t any more vaccines in there or any way to make more, thanks to that terrorist attack.”

The attack where Leo shot the attackers. How many? What did it feel like to kill somebody? Did Leo feel bad about shooting Lieutenant Lamont? He didn’t look like he felt bad.

But Austin was learning that people weren’t always what they looked like. Tony, for instance.

Leo continued, “But now people are coming back to the camp, because there are rumors out there that we Terrans are going to set off a second plague.” Leo considered. “Which, I guess, we are, if the scientists can figure out how. But nobody out there really understands about these virophages—hell, I don’t understand them either—and so everybody’s scared. For their kids, mostly. The vaccinated kids and their mothers have all been brought into the compound for their own safety. Probably you heard some of the babies crying?”

Austin nodded.

“Yeah, it’s a nuisance. But the crowd out there in the camp is getting bigger and more dangerous looking because they’re mad as hell at us. Even though we’re only trying to help. But that always happens when you go into a foreign country.”

“It does?” Leo blurted out.

“Yeah. It did in Brazil, in Iraq—hell, it happened on Earth when Kindred came to warn us about the spore cloud. That’s why the Russians got so pissed. Half the population just wants to blame somebody and there you are. Shoot-the-messenger stuff.”

Austin didn’t know what that meant, but he nodded anyway.

“So what I need to know is where these rumors are coming from. I got my squad out asking questions but—”

“What squad?” Wasn’t Lieutenant Lamont dead and Ranger Berman shot and… could just Ranger Kandiss be a squad all by himself?

“Oh, nobody told you? I swore in some of the Kindred cops, and six other recruits. Ten all together. They’re the Kindred-Terran Peacekeeping Force now.”

Austin felt his mouth fall open. The Kindred-Terran Peace Keeping Force! He said, “Do they have weapons?”

“Some, yeah. They need more, but we can’t deal with that now, we need to focus on intel. The people in the camp don’t trust my squad, they think they’re turncoats. It’s not a really rough crowd out there, Austin, not compared to… well, maybe they’re rough enough. We don’t want another assault on the compound. So I need to know just what the mob out there has been told about this ‘second plague’ and how they learned about it in the first place. Either we have a leak here or else they learned some other way. You have any ideas?”

All at once, Austin’s chest felt like one big bruise. This was horrible, this was the worst yet. Leo’s eyes gazed at him levelly, not trusting like his mother’s but something better than trusting, some bond of equals. Austin had to tell him the truth.

“It was me,” he managed to get out. “I told Graa^lok’s cousin why Dr. Jenner wanted the call-back device. We were just talking and she was curious and… I made her promise to not tell anybody. Tony has radio transmitters and now he has a lot of people that speak Kindred and maybe…”

“I see,” Leo said. “Pretty girl?”

“Yes.”

“Listen, Austin, don’t blame yourself. This is a good thing, in the long run.”

“It is?”

“Yeah. If the ship gets called back, and if it releases virophages, and if they cure people of spore plague, then the people will know it just didn’t happen by itself, we caused it. You see? Otherwise it might just look like the whole spore-cloud thing was wrong. It’s good that people have more information, even if it came from that asshole Tony Schrupp.”

There was something wrong with this reasoning, something more than just the long string of ifs, but Austin couldn’t quite see what it was. Relief overwhelmed everything else. Leo wasn’t blaming him. Another assault on the compound, if it came, would not be Austin’s fault. Still—

But—

Leo didn’t let him think. “Here’s the other thing,” he said. “This is a lot to ask of a wounded warrior, but I’m going to. There’s a lot of little kids in here now and mostly their mothers are looking after them, but there are some older ones who were vaccinated too. Nobody who speaks their language, which is only Isabelle and Jenner, has time to tell them what’s going on. So I’m going to send some of them in here and let you brief them, as my representative. Tell them whatever you think is appropriate for them to know. You’re on my staff now, okay?”

Austin nodded, torn between that wonderful sentence (You’re on my staff now) and a deep reluctance to lecture a bunch of kids. But Leo didn’t give him time to say no. He bellowed, “Isabelle!” and the door opened like she’d been waiting just outside all along.

Four kids came in with her: two boys about ten and a tiny girl of six, holding the hand of an older girl. Austin blinked. The older one was his age, the prettiest girl he’d ever seen, prettier even than Graa^lok’s cousin. She smiled shyly and said in Kindred, “I greet you, Austin-mak.”

Austin-mak. The title for an honored person of higher rank and not of one’s own lahk.

Isabelle said in Kindred, “This is Jen^la^hon and three children of her lahk.”

Austin said to the girl, “I greet you, Jen^la^hon.”

He didn’t even notice when Isabelle helped Leo out of the room.

“You were too easy on him,” Isabelle said to Leo.

He grunted, easing himself back onto his pallet, sticking the end of the tube into his pants instead of the bowl it was supposed to drip into. Let the damn thing drip blood and fluid down his belly, that was better than going around looking like unfinished plumbing. He said, “You’re too hard on him.”

“He kidnapped Claire!”

“We’ll get her back. We’ll get all of them back. Tony Schrupp is a dirtbag but not a killer, not really. He only tried to take out Lamont in some sort of self-defense.”

“Lamont—”

Leo held up a hand. “Don’t, Isabelle.” He wasn’t ready yet to talk with her about Owen. Maybe he never would be.

“All right. What do you need me to do now?”

Several answers rose to mind, but this wasn’t the time. Also, Leo doubted he’d be able to follow through, not for a while yet, although Bourgiba said his liver seemed to be healing well. Why was a liver so fucking important?

He said, “Check on the squad for me, ask if Lu^kaj^ho and his guys need anything, and what they’re hearing. Make sure Kandiss isn’t shooting anybody. Go up on the roof, I told him to let you, and eyeball the camp for me. Tell me everything you can, but do not go into the camp. I mean it, Isabelle. Don’t set foot out of the compound.”

“All right.”

She didn’t argue, and Isabelle not arguing was a welcome thing. Still, it was probably temporary.

“Leo,” she said, “what if Marianne and Branch can’t get the ship back here?”

“You know what. We go to the original plan, plan A.”

“Everybody either gets sick or dies.”

“And then we go on from there. Rebuilding with whoever gets well.”

She bent over and kissed him on the lips. Leo’s eyes flew open. The kiss was sweet, sudden, and brief. His chest swelled like he’d been shot all over again. She said quietly, “I love your optimism, even in the face of everything you must have seen and done.”

Then she was gone, opening his door to the sound of babies howling, then closing it again without looking back.

Marianne stirred a big pot of vegetable stew in the clinic kitchen. At least, she hoped it was going to turn out to be vegetable stew, given that she was unfamiliar with all the ingredients and had never been much of a cook anyway. She should have left this to someone else, but Isabelle was busy with Leo Brodie, Salah with doctoring, Noah with recovering and tending his wife and daughter, and the Kindred mothers with their kids—no, that wasn’t true. Marianne was making stew because she could no longer sit beside Branch, “helping” to search for a way to turn a series of random numbers into a meaningful sequence. Branch was tireless at what Marianne was coming to see as a hopeless task, but Branch was young. Marianne was not.

One tone, pause, six tones, pause, eleven tones, pause, sixteen tones, pause, nine tones, pause, fourteen tones, pause, three tones, pause, eight tones, very long pause, one tone. Silence.

The stew turned out edible, more or less. (How much longer would they have electricity for cooking veggies? How much longer would they have veggies?) She helped serve it to everyone jammed into the compound. Full of people, empty, full again—both compound and stew bowls. There was something profound in there, or at least notable, but Marianne was too tired to find it. Her back ached. Her head ached with thinking, except when it ached from trying not to think the same thoughts over and over.

One tone, pause, six tones, pause, eleven tones, pause…

“Mom,” Noah said, “go to bed. You look exhausted.”

“You do, too.”

“I’m recovering from a concussion. What’s your excuse?”

“I would laugh but I’m too tired,” Marianne said. “Did Isabelle take stew out to the soldiers?”

“I did. I need to do something.”

Marianne looked at her tall, alien son, with his artificially copper skin and surgically altered eyes and the same sweet smile he’d had as a little boy. There was nothing she could do to help him save the life he loved except what Branch was already doing, Claire had already done, and Leo Brodie was trying to do from his sickbed. The only thing Marianne could do for Noah was spare him more anxiety.

“I’m going,” she said. “Tell Lily good night for me.”

“I will,” Noah said, although they both knew that Lily had been asleep for hours. But when the world was ending, Marianne had discovered, tiny normal things mattered. A lot.

To her surprise, she fell asleep almost immediately. It was a deep, restful sleep, without dreams, until, abruptly, she woke.

Silence. Darkness. Both total and complete, as if she lay in a cave, or in the womb. But an image danced before her, clear as one of the countless drawings she’d made in college biology class, nearly fifty years ago.

Marianne pressed a button on her Terran watch, which was useless for telling the time here but good for illumination. In the tiny light of its dial, she made her way from her room to the leelee lab. Branch lay heavily asleep on a pallet beside the call-back device.

One tone, pause, six tones, pause, eleven tones, pause, sixteen tones, pause, nine tones, pause, fourteen tones, pause, three tones, pause, eight tones, very long pause, one tone. Silence.

Marianne switched on a light; Branch did not stir. Gingerly she lowered herself to the floor and pulled the call-back device to her.

A four-sided pyramid, with four bumps marching down each side. Did it matter which of the bumps near the apex she called “one”? Maybe not, for what she had in mind. The universe runs on mathematics, Branch had cried, with all the passion of the young scientist. He was right, of course. The physical universe ran on mathematics. But the human universe ran on something else, something that had to be known to any race who could follow master plans to build a starship.

One tone, pause, six tones, pause, eleven tones, pause, sixteen tones, pause, nine tones, pause, fourteen tones, pause, three tones, pause, eight tones, very long pause, one tone. Silence.

She pressed hard on one of the bumps near the apex. Her finger counted off the other three bumps on that face: two, three, four. Then the bump at the top of the adjoining face would be five and the one under it six. She pressed it hard.

Probably nothing would happen. Talk about your long shots….

The third button down on the next triangular face would be eleven, and the bottom button on the fourth face would be sixteen. She had spiraled down the pyramid, pressing. Her fingers returned to its pointed top, pressing the button on the face opposite where she had begun. That was bump nine. Then fourteen, three, eight, spiraling down the face of the pyramid, tracing a distinct pattern.

A double helix.

But what about that last single tone, following a much longer pause, that completed the code from the colony ship? What was that?

A ship’s number. It was the first one built, the first one launched, forty Kindred years ago. But where…

The whole thing was probably futile anyway, so did it really matter? Marianne returned her finger to the first bump she’d pressed and pressed it again, as hard as she could.

Blattt!

Marianne cried out, the noise was so loud. She slammed her hands over her ears. Branch woke and groped for a knife from under his pallet. The door flew open and Noah, in the room across the hall, rushed in.

Blattt!!!!

Then Leo Brodie stood in the doorway, leaning against the jamb but upright, a rifle in his hands. He yelled something but no one could hear him, or anything else, until the device stopped blatting and a silence, shocking after all that noise, fell. More people crowded into the corridor, kept back by Leo’s slumping body.

Branch said in an incongruous whisper, “What did you do?”

Marianne said, “I think I just called back the ship with the virophage.”