If Tomorrow Comes

CHAPTER 20

In the two days since Marianne had called back the ship—if that was indeed what she had done—Salah had watched the refugee camp fill up again. People came by bicycle, by truck, by animal cart, on foot. They left their lahks just days before the spore cloud hit. Nearly all of them were furious.

“Why?” Branch had asked, puzzled. “If they think they’re going to die anyway from R. sporii, then why not stay at home and die there?”

Branch genuinely did not understand—from youth, from temperament, from the mostly sheltered life of well-off parents followed by academic research. Sometimes Salah felt very old.

“There are rumors on the radio that there is a second plague on the ship that’s coming here. A plague we Terrans are going to set loose on Kindred.”

“It’s a cure,” Branch said. “We hope. And if they know they’re going to die of the first plague anyway—”

“Branch,” Salah said, “which would you rather face: a bout of cholera alone or a bout of cholera followed by malaria when you’ve already been weakened by the cholera? They hope that some of them will survive R. sporii, and they’re probably right. They don’t want to then be hit with another unknown plague.”

An irreverent verse flashed into Salah’s head: When the wit began to wheeze / And wine had warmed the politician, / Cured yesterday of my disease / I died last night of my physician. Mathew Prior, in the irreverent eighteenth century.

No one on Kindred would appreciate it. No one.

“Then,” Branch said, “why doesn’t the Council of Mothers tell them different?”

“Tell them what? Nobody, including us, knows how the virophage will affect humans. The camp is full of scared and angry people both wanting to stop a second plague and looking for someone to blame. That happened on Earth, too, you know.”

“I know,” Branch said, so somberly that Salah wondered if he had overestimated the young man’s innocence, after all. “I wish we knew exactly when the ship will arrive. From the astronomical data I know the location of the colony planet, but distance doesn’t seem to correlate with how the drive works.”

“No,” Salah said.

Branch looked at the clinic ceiling, as if it were the sky. “I wish I knew when it will arrive.”

“When is this fucking ship getting here?” Zoe demanded.

“No idea,” Leo said.

They had met in the clinic kitchen, both hungry, though neither of them were supposed to move yet. Bourgiba had explained that he was not a surgeon, that the best he could do with what he had here was what he’d done: remove Zoe’s spleen and patch up Leo’s liver. Leo was grateful for the medical help but hated the inactivity. It gave him too much time to think. He was grateful when Kandiss or Lu^kaj^ho came in with reports, even though the reports were all the same: Nothing happening. People are angry. No ship yet.

It left Leo with too much time to think about Owen. He tried, instead, to think about OPORDS, about assessing defenses and effectively deploying personnel. Thinking like a leader, and wasn’t that a kick in the head? Him.

Which led his thoughts back to Owen.

So he was almost glad to meet up with Zoe in the kitchen. They eyed each other warily. He had injured her; she had shot him.

He waited to see what she would say.

“Just before I got deployed here,” she said, “my platoon did a night parachute drop. We dropped from eight hundred feet with zero illumination and seized a landing strip for follow-on forces. Three of us including me had injuries from a hard landing but we went on the assault anyway. Mission successful.”

“Where was this?” Leo said, because it was clear he had to say something.

“Not sure. Mideast someplace.” She reached for the soup ladle.

Evidently this story settled something in Zoe’s mind, although Leo had no idea what. He said, “Uh-huh.”

She said quietly, “You did right, Leo. I’ll say so at the court-martial.”

“Thanks.” Court-martial? For that, they had to first get back to Terra. Unless Kandiss decided to somehow arrest Leo and take control of the squad, which Leo doubted. It would require too many words.

Not that Leo himself was doing all that great at military protocol. Zoe didn’t treat him with much deference, and the whole idea of military chain of command was foreign to Lu^kaj^ho.

The Kindred, now an Army private second class, appeared in the doorway to the kitchen. His report was just more of the same: more people in the camp, no attacks, no visible weapons, a lot of refugees accompanied by children, and no ship.

“How many be children?” Leo asked.

“Now it is about half.”

“Half? Are kids?”

“Yes.”

After Lu^kaj^ho left, Zoe said, “You speak the lingo pretty good.”

“No. I don’t.”

“You think we got kid suicide bombers?”

“I don’t think so. They didn’t do that before, and Kindred aren’t really vicious or ruthless.” Not like in Brazil.

“Then why all the kids? In a strike zone?”

“I don’t think that they think it’s a strike zone, not this time.”

“Then what is it?”

“I don’t know,” Leo said. “Maybe a hospital zone, for vaccines? Hand me that ladle or are you going to eat all the soup yourself?”

She handed him the ladle. “Leo… I mean, sir…”

“Leo is fine.”

“What I said about a court-martial when we get home… It’s going to be twenty-eight years after we left.”

“Yes.”

“Twenty-eight fucking years. That’s too long. I won’t know anything, all the ordinances’ll be different.”

“They’ll send you back for more specialist training.”

“Maybe. But I don’t know if—”

“It’s here!” Austin screamed, bursting into the room. “The ship! It’s in the sky! It’s coming down!”

“Let’s go,” Leo said, and reached in his pocket for the dose of Owen’s popbite.

It was much larger than the Friendship. That was the first thing Marianne noticed: the ship’s size. Well, it was a colony ship, not a diplomatic flagship. The huge, bullet-shaped vessel of gray metal hovered over the compound, blocking the orange sun. She had been afraid it might return to the ruined city where it had been built, and then what would they have done? But the ship was here.

“Homed in on my transmitter,” Branch said with enormous satisfaction.

They stood in the cleared zone outside the compound, what the Rangers called the perimeter. Their necks bent far backward, along with nearly everyone else from the compound and the camp. Ranger Kandiss and some of Leo’s cops stood between the Terrans and the camp, weapons in their hands, but only Kandiss watched the Kindred instead of the ship.

“It’s beautiful,” Branch said. “I wonder who they were?”

He meant the ship’s designers, not the colonists. His remark jolted Marianne, who’d also been admiring the ship’s beauty, back to reality. This lovely vessel was full of dead human bodies, of chittering leelees, of a microorganism that had won its evolutionary battle against R. sporii. That, however, was no indication that the virophage could enable humans to do the same.

The ship stopped hovering and moved north, to the large empty grazing lands between the compound and the mountain.

What was Leo doing? Austin had watched him swallow a pill and give one to Ranger Berman. They’d both gone back to their rooms and come outside dressed in armor, carrying weapons, walking much steadier than before and without help. Leo gave the ship only a quick glance. He climbed a ladder to the compound roof. Why?

How come nobody told Austin anything?

Dr. Bourgiba said, “Brodie. Climbing to the roof could tear your stitches. I told you so. And you’ve taken popbite, haven’t you? It’s counterindicated if—”

Leo wasn’t even listening. Slowly he climbed the ladder. One of the new Kindred soldiers, Heemur^ka, climbed behind with Leo’s gear. Ranger Berman took her place beside Ranger Kandiss on the ground. Austin put one foot on the ladder.

“Are you crazy?” Isabelle hissed, grabbing him. “You are not going up there!”

Dr. Jenner said to Isabelle, “I don’t understand! What are they going to do?”

So nobody had told her, either, and Dr. Jenner was a mother. Well, no, she had refused to be a mother, but she was an old woman anyway and still she didn’t know what Leo was going to do. Austin felt a little better.

Five hundred yards away, the ship began to land.

It was big, and it settled down easy as a soap bubble. No noise, no fire, no nothing. Leo had been a teenager when the Kindred ship came to Terra and he’d had other things on his mind, like avoiding jail, but he remembered the TV broadcasts that showed the Embassy landing just like this in New York Harbor. No drama, just a perfect piece of machinery.

Leo, the popbite singing in his blood and brain, settled into position on the roof. Heemur^ka handed him his weapons.

“Shit,” Heemur^ka said; he was learning as much Terran as Leo was learning Kindred. But then Heemur^ka added, “I greet you, ship.”

Why didn’t they give their ships names? Weird.

The moment the ship touched ground, the Kindred in the camp ran toward it. Men, women, little kids. Okay, they had probably rehearsed mentally just as much as Leo’s squad had. They formed a line between the compound and the ship, several people deep, facing the compound. They were not going to let anyone, Terran or Kindred, near the ship. Dr. Jenner had already told Leo that the door could not be opened by signals from the outside, and she should know—a decade ago on Terra, she had been sealed inside the Friendship with an entire battalion of NASA technical experts outside. Leo didn’t know if these doors could be forced open manually from the outside, but it didn’t matter. The Kindred who massed in front of them in grim-faced protest weren’t taking any chances.

Leo knew what they were counting on: That neither his Kindred recruits nor Leo himself would shoot several hundred Kindred, half of them kids carefully placed in front. They were right. He wasn’t Owen. But that wasn’t the problem he faced now.

“Lu^kaj^ho,” he called down, “tell them to move away from the ship. Now.

“And tell them why.”

Salah grabbed Isabelle’s arm. “What’s going on? What’s Brodie going to do?”

“I don’t know but—” She started to climb the ladder.

Another of Leo’s pseudo-soldiers said, “No, Isabelle-mak.” There followed a furious exchange in Kindred that Salah could not follow. He glanced around for the Rangers; Kandiss was out of sight around the corner of the building. Zoe stood at the east door to the compound, her face disturbed about something.

Isabelle stopped yelling and again put her sandaled foot on the bottom rung of the ladder.

The Kindred soldier brushed her off and grabbed the ladder away from the roof.

“Give it to me!” Isabelle said.

The man didn’t even answer; he handed the ladder to another Kindred, who carried it quickly away.

Before Isabelle could even react, Zoe had put her rifle into its sling and made a cup of her hands. “I’ll lift you up,” she said urgently. “Talk Brodie out of it. The missile is experimental. One in two chances it explodes and kills him. And us.”

Missile? Brodie had a missile up there? Salah was no military expert but he hadn’t seen anything as big as a shoulder-mounted launcher.

Zoe’s eyes glowed with the feverish shine of popbite; probably she thought she could lift a mountain, but she wasn’t that long out of surgery. Salah said, “Isabelle,” and made a cup of his own hands. Isabelle stepped into it and Salah threw her as high as he could, wrenching his shoulder. Isabelle grabbed the edge of the roof and pulled herself up.

“You can’t, Leo,” Isabelle said.

“Get the hell off here, Isabelle!”

Heemur^ka moved between her and Leo, making sure she didn’t get close enough to interfere with the shot. The mount was affixed to his rifle, the canister loaded into it. Leo kept his gaze trained on the ship and the crowd gathering in front of it. More kids, and now a few old ladies, one carried on a litter. Mothers.

Isabelle said, “You’re going to blow a hole in the ship, aren’t you. To release the virophage. But it’s not a bullet because a bullet wouldn’t even dent that hull. It’s a powerful explosive from Terra and it’s not reliable. One in two odds of blowing us all up.”

“Zoe tell you that?” Damn her to hell, Leo had trusted her.

Isabelle didn’t answer his question. In the field, people crowded closer to the ship. In his scope, a tiny girl, pale blue dress on her little copper body, crooned to a doll in her arms.

Isabelle said, her voice steady but not completely hiding desperation, “Okay, assume you’re willing to risk killing yourself, me, your squad, and half the people in the compound if the explosive blows up in your face. Are you willing to risk killing all the people hit by the blast or flying debris near the ship? All those kids? That’s not you, Leo.”

Leo said, “Drop her off the roof, Heemur^ka.”

“No! Stop!” And then a blast of Kindese, which Leo ignored.

Four of the Kindred-Terran Peacekeeping Force approached the crowd surrounding the ship. The Kindred soldiers were armed but held their weapons loosely, unthreateningly, as they began to talk to people. Talk, persuade, cajole, threaten—Just get them away from there by telling them why.

Isabelle shouted at Leo, “You don’t even know that setting the virophage loose will work! It’s only a desperate gamble!”

Then Leo did answer her. Without turning, without taking his gaze from the scope, he said, “Isn’t a desperate gamble better than everybody dying for sure?”

He didn’t hear her answer; Heemur^ka dropped her over the edge of the roof. Presumably somebody caught her because a few moments later she was with the group that Zoe and Kandiss were herding away from both the compound and the camp, up the hill to the south. They would take everybody to Isabelle’s lahk house, to safety, with or without its lahk mother.

Heemur^ka said in Kindred, “I greet you, Leo-mak.”

What the hell? They hadn’t just met. They were here on the roof preparing to die or kill or both, preparing to set loose a plague on the planet—a second plague—and Heemur^ka was saying, “I greet you”? Some crazy fucking Kindred custom that Leo didn’t know about? A death ritual, like those songs that kamikaze pilots sang before they took off?

Leo said in Kindred, “I greet you, Private Heemur^ka,” and kept his finger on the trigger.

Halfway up the hill to the lahk, forced along by Kandiss and Zoe, Salah had had enough. Enough of being herded, enough of esoteric master-alien codes, enough of not being able to make his own decisions. Enough of death. Enough of this planet, just as he had once had enough of Terra. Nothing to choose between them for human idiocy.

He stopped walking and said to Zoe Berman, “I’m going back.”

“No,” she said. “You’re not.”

“I won’t go anywhere near the compound, anywhere near Brodie. I won’t interfere with whatever he’s going to do. But I can help move people away from the ship. They don’t trust Leo’s Kindred soldiers because they think they’re turncoats. They might trust me, a doctor. At any rate, I can speak the language. Let me try. Please.”

He tried to say more with his eyes: to remind Zoe that she had been forced to trust him once and he had not betrayed her. How much was he getting through to her? He couldn’t tell; she was half popbite now.

Finally she said, “Kandiss won’t let you go.”

“Then he’ll have to shoot me.”

Salah started back down the hill. Each step, he half expected a bullet in the back. But instead he heard Zoe’s voice, indistinct but passionate, presumably addressed through her wrister to Kandiss.

No bullet hit him.

And then Isabelle was walking beside him. “I speak Kindred, too, Salah.”

“Go back. It’s too dangerous,” he said, fear and determination removing from his mind that they’d already had this conversation once before. Too late, he remembered.

“Shut up,” Isabelle said, and said no more.

What the fuck? Bourgiba and Isabelle moved into Leo’s field of vision, crossing the open space between the compound and the protesters by the ship. That’s what they were—protesters, not enemies, just trying to protect their kids. Owen had never understood that. Owen had never understood a lot of things.

There was nothing Leo could do about Isabelle and Bourgiba.

“Heemur^ka,” Leo said in Kindese, “go now. I be okay. You go. Safety.”

Heemur^ka answered in a burst of Kindred that Leo couldn’t follow, and then stayed put. Nothing Leo could do about that, either. If Heemur^ka was willing to risk his life for his CO and their shared mission, that only meant Leo had done his job. “You’d have made a good Ranger,” Leo said in English.

Another burst of incomprehensible Kindred. But Heemur^ka grinned.

Things began to look better. The peacekeeping force was moving unchallenged through the crowd, talking and explaining, and now Isabelle and Bourgiba joined them. Much hand waving, mouth moving, pointing at the ship and then at Leo, clearly visible on the compound roof.

People began to move away from the ship. At first, just a few, then more. The persuaders were getting it done.

Heemur^ka jabbered something in Kindred and pointed.

Without moving, Leo shifted his gaze to the right. A group of Kindred—seven, eight—ran from the deserted camp toward the dispersing crowd. Two were women, one gray-haired but still fast.

Heemur^ka said in English, “Shoot. Now.”

Shoot? Why? The group wasn’t even armed; in their pale unisex dresses there was no room for weapons. All they were doing was joining the protest.

Heemur^ka said, “I shoot!” and raised his pipe gun.

What the fuck? “Hold your fire!” Leo said, but either Heemur^ka didn’t understand the English or pretended he didn’t. He fired his pipe gun.

The shot hit nothing—he hadn’t intended it to. It didn’t even make the advancing group slow down. And then they had reached the crowd and mingled with them, joined the talking and waving and pointing.

Heemur^ka said, “Bad people! Say not true! Make people to go to ship!”

Leo got it. These were the agitators, the haters, the “bad people.” They didn’t believe the Terrans could be trying to accomplish anything good. They weren’t just trying to protect their own; they were the type who wanted to eliminate anything not their own, and they would tell any lies they had to in order to accomplish that. To “make people go to ship,” even if it got those people killed. Leo had known them in the United States, in Brazil, in the Army itself.

Owen, it had turned out, had been one of them.

Five hundred yards away, people were hesitating, reversing direction to head back to the ship. Only a few, at first.

Then more.

Salah laid a hand on the arm of the first person he recognized, a gentle woman named Fallaabon. He had treated her rambunctious little son for a broken finger when the child had fallen from a tree near the refugee camp, one of the few occasions when the Kindred had not used their own doctors. Perhaps none had been handy. Salah spoke to Fallaabon as quickly and decisively as his Kindred would allow, explaining about the virophages, the leelees alive on the ship, the need to blast open the hull, the danger of taking her child too close to it. Others gathered to listen. Salah framed everything in terms of the children and of bu^ka^tel, at least to the extent he understood that enormously complicated concept. Obligation to her lahk, to the greater good, to the future, to the planet itself.

More people gathered to listen. Some nodded and began to move away from the ship.

Salah had lost track of Isabelle and of Leo’s cops; it was a big crowd. But less big than it had been. After half an hour, it seemed that they were making headway—people were leaving.

Then, somehow, the momentum reversed. Others were making speeches, too, Kindred with a different agenda. People still listened to Salah, but not as many, and some slid their eyes away from him and made a gesture that he had only seen associated with dung.

He saw Fallaabon lead her little boy back toward the ship.

The longer Leo hesitated, the more people had time to move themselves and their children close to the hull.

Leo had shot civilians before. Women, too, and even a kid. But they had all been credible threats to either his own platoon or to the Marines he’d been protecting. This was different. Nothing in his training or history or temperament prepared him for this.

If he fired the missile, it would—if it didn’t blow up—breach the side of the ship, letting loose Dr. Jenner’s virophage but also killing innocent men, women, kids.

If he didn’t shoot, the Kindred would take up their wrongheaded, determined position right up against the ship, convinced they were protecting themselves from plague, until four days passed, the spore cloud hit, and they all died of spore disease anyway. Or didn’t.

What if the virophage didn’t even work?

What if it did?

Kill maybe two dozen to save a planet?

He was not supposed to have to make this sort of decision. He was a sniper, and this sort of decision was supposed to be made farther up the chain of command so that Leo could obey orders. But there was no farther up this particular chain of command, and time was running out.

Leo sighted, adjusted for the freshening wind, squeezed the trigger, and fired.

The canister left the launcher without exploding. A moment later, the longest moment in history, it hit the hull of the ship broadside and tore a hole the size of a pickup. The blast shattered the air. Flying shrapnel, screaming, bodies falling to the ground.

Leo lowered his weapon and scanned the carnage, looking for Isabelle.

Salah felt it before it actually happened. How? No time to think, and the sensation was beyond thought, anyway. Brodie was going to fire. Salah knew it.

Fallaabon’s little boy turned and, still holding his mother’s hand, smiled and said something to Salah in Kindred. There was no time to answer. There was only time to act.

And to think, as he threw his body on the mother and child, This is my decision. Mine, by myself, for myself.

The ship exploded.