Isabelle ran forward and helped the ancient woman to her feet.
Leo said quickly, “Don’t shoot, Zoe.”
“Jesus, Leo!”
“On my responsibility.”
She held her fire. Kandiss came toward them at a dead run, sidearm drawn.
Isabelle and the Mother of Mothers tottered across the perimeter. And Leo let them because Isabelle was right: He couldn’t shoot her and a hundred-and-two tottering old bird, even if he was court-martialed for disobeying orders. If he shot, Terrans would never again be trusted on Kindred. Also, there were hundreds of people in that camp; even unarmed, their sheer numbers could overwhelm the squad and then what would they do to the other Terrans inside, to the whole vaccine program? The Ranger creed said I will complete this mission, though I be the lone survivor. Well, this was the way to complete it: by disobeying Owen’s order.
And Leo wasn’t a Ranger, anyway.
It took a long time for Isabelle to get the old lady across the hundred yards of cleared perimeter and into the lab door. By that time, people from inside the compound crowded the doorway, but nobody challenged Leo’s order to stay inside. The door closed. Kandiss said, “Returning to outer perimeter, unless…”
“Stay here for now,” Leo said. “I’ll wake Lamont.” What was he doing deciding this? Kandiss outranked him! One lousy alien planet and the command structure fell apart? Not if Owen had anything to say about it.
Kandiss said only, “Camp is quiet.”
“Great,” Leo said. He could feel the adrenaline still coursing. It had nowhere to go. The feeling was sour, like too much bad beer you couldn’t vomit up. He knew that Zoe and Kandiss felt it, too. Rangers were trained for action. Inaction was hard.
He called Lieutenant Lamont.
Salah didn’t know that anything was going on outside until it was all over.
He’d been reading on his bunk, one of three stacked in the ex–storage room he shared with biologist Ha^jak¡ and Branch Carter, although Branch now slept in the leelee lab. Salah had about fifty books on his tablet, which was good because he wasn’t ever going to get any more. Marianne might have some on her laptop, but file transfer was beyond Kindred. Still, as long as the tablet held out, Salah could reread War and Peace or medical journals now decades out of date, or the poetry of al-Mutanabbi.
Austin Rhinehart flung open the door without knocking. “Doctor! Isabelle wants you! Ranger Brodie almost shot the Mother of Mothers!”
Salah stared at Austin, flushed with excitement. What the boy said made no sense. When he didn’t answer right away, Austin turned sulky, deflated at the lack of response.
“It’s true. And Isabelle wants you.” He vanished.
Salah caught up with him in the middle of the milling, gesturing crowd filling the central area of Big Lab. He caught phrases in Kindred:
“… did not know the…”
“… should not be permitted…”
“Mother of Mothers…”
“… attack…”
“Austin,” he said, grabbing him by the shoulder, “What happened? And where is Isabelle?”
“The Rangers almost shot the Mother of Mothers because she crossed the perimeter and Isabelle stopped them and she’s with Dr. Jenner. Hey, Graa^lok!” He plunged across the room toward his friend.
Salah pushed his way through the crowd to the clinic and Marianne’s room. The tiny space was jammed with people: Marianne, Claire, Isabelle, Ha^jak¡, Ka^graa, Llaa^moh¡. At least there were no Rangers present. Propped up on pillows on Marianne’s bed, puffing with exertion, sat a wizened woman with fantastically lined copper skin. There were cloudy white circles at the edge of her filmy dark irises. Her bare feet extended straight in front of her, the toes dusky blue and the legs swollen.
Cyanosis, edema, arcus senilis, cataracts. Probable congestive heart failure. This lady was very sick.
Isabelle made a curious gesture that Salah hadn’t seen before: a small circle with two fingers in front of her forehead. Some sort of salute, maybe. She said in English, “This is the Mother of Mothers. You address her as Ree^ka-mak. She wants to speak to you in World.”
Salah said, “I greet you, Ree^ka-mak.”
“I greet you, Salah-mak.” Her voice was low but clear, without the quaver of her dying body. The filmy eyes had followed the sound of his voice. How much could she see through the cataracts?
She said, “You come from Terra, the long-ago place.”
“Yes.” Beside him, Isabelle translated in a low murmur for Marianne and Claire. Salah hoped his Kindese was up to this. Tenses in this difficult language were very complicated. In addition to past, present, and future, different inflections indicated different states of being for each: absolute, tentative, in flux, rotational. There were also degrees of rank carried by different wording. He could not afford miscommunication here.
Ree^ka said, “You bring vaccines to prevent deaths from the spore cloud.” Tentative state of being. He matched it.
“We bring some vaccines and we try to make more.”
“So Marianne-mak says. She says you have enough already for fifty of my people.”
“Yes.”
“How will you decide who will receive these fifty gifts of life?” Future tense, in flux.
There had been conferences about vaccine allotment among himself, Marianne, and Claire. There actually remained fifty-two vaccine syringes; two had been reserved for Noah’s wife and child. Salah knew that in giving way to Marianne on this he had subverted what he was going to say next before he’d even said it, but it had not been possible to deny Marianne. Or Noah. Salah said, “That is for the people of World to decide.”
Ree^ka-mak said, “You are not saying everything.”
How did she know? For a nanosecond, bizarre thoughts swept through Salah’s mind: telepathy, primitive magic. But of course it was not that. Either the Mother of Mothers had a highly developed ability to hear the nuances in voices, which sometimes happened with the blind, or else she was on a fishing expedition. Salah repeated, “That will be for the people of World to decide.”
“There are many people outside this lahk who wish that vaccine.”
“Yes.”
“You have brought soldiers with weapons to keep them out.”
How to explain the Ranger unit that had somehow morphed from an honor guard into a self-appointed and dangerous entity with its own ideas of what should happen here? Salah knew a refugee camp could be dangerous; he’d spent two years in the Mideast with Doctors Without Borders. The Rangers protected the compound, for which Salah was grateful, but he didn’t trust Lamont and his three war machines. “The soldiers keep them out, yes.”
“Until they do not.”
“I cannot say what will happen, Ree^ka-mak. Perhaps it helps if the Mother of Mothers speaks to the camp.”
“I have spoken.”
When? Then Isabelle murmured to him in English, “Through the radio and through the lahk mothers.”
He said to her, “There was a radio broadcast? Were we told about this?”
“I only learned it myself ten minutes ago. We’ve been busy in the lab, Salah. But maybe one of us should monitor the radio.”
“Yes.” As he and Isabelle spoke, the Mother of Mothers watched—no, listened—sharply. Salah said to her, “I ask what Ree^ka-mak said to the camp.”
“I told them they must be patient,” she said, and the tense was one Salah had not heard before.
“What… may I ask what the camp replied?”
“It is not a single thing, this camp.”