Ten more minutes. Marianne, who’d dozed off while sitting in a chair and so nearly fallen off it, woke up. Spores, invisible and deadly, had permeated the recycling air of the cage for two hours.
The leelees scampered. Chittered. Sniffed the glass.
Breathed.
Eight minutes.
Kandiss said on the squad frequency, “Activity, east side of camp. Men, no women or kids, entering a single big tent. Not looking drunk.”
“Hold position and observe,” Owen said. “Do you have cover?”
“Affirmative. Large tree, but there are buildings behind me.”
“Brodie, do you have him?”
“No, sir.” The far eastern edge of camp was where somebody’s lahk started: gardens, orchards, outbuildings, and a big house. Christ, anybody could be in those houses, with any accumulation of weapons. Owen had wanted to clear out all the buildings, but what good would it have done? The squad didn’t have the troops to hold the objectives after clearance, and it just would have pissed everybody off.
Leo couldn’t see Kandiss; he must be somewhere in one of those groves of trees. Leo would know exactly where when Kandiss fired. Meanwhile, all the tents he could see, even though his scope, looked alike. Which one did Owen mean?
He knew a few moments later. A group of men emerged. Leo focused on them, following their progress through the camp. Everybody else was drinking or talking or… the couple having sex in the shadows didn’t realize Leo could see them. Get a tent, he thought, too tense/ready to be envious.
Leo said, “I got them, sir. Walking toward the compound, all carrying bags.”
Owen said, “Everybody’s carrying bags. They’re giving gifts to each other. It’s fucking Christmas.”
“Roger that, sir.”
“Kandiss, circle counterclockwise back to the compound and take the north doorway. Berman, keep the south. Brodie, anybody sets one step into the open zone and you fire. No more warnings.”
“Yes, sir.”
Below him, the north door opened. Leo called down in English, “Whoever opened that door, get the fuck back inside and lock the door!”
The door closed.
Two minutes past the time the leelees should have started writhing and gasping for breath. Instead, one of the animals tumbled another one to the ground and climbed on top of her.
“Yes!” Branch said.
“Give it more time,” Marianne said, but she felt hope blow through her like fresh salt air. Sex, not death—maybe they had the vaccine this time….
They were clear in his scope now, a dozen men, approaching the edge of the perimeter. They must be clear to everybody in the camp, too, because all the music and dancing and talking was stopping. Silence spread out in waves around the group of men, followed by frenzy. People pulled their children into tents. Some fled to the far edge of the camp and then out of it, prudently scattering. A few darted toward the group and jabbered, waving their arms. The advancing enemy unit—because that’s what they were now—ignored their fellows, moving purposefully toward the perimeter, facing the Big Lab door where Owen waited. Zoe, in response to Owen’s order, rounded the building to join him. Kandiss circled the camp toward the compound at a full run, but was still a quarter klick away.
In the enemy unit, hands reached into the bags they carried.
Leo tightened his grip on his rifle, sighted, and waited for the men to set foot onto the perimeter.
Below him, the east door opened behind Zoe and Kandiss, a faint click that registered on Leo’s above-average hearing only because he was hyperalert.
Ten more minutes passed. Claire, who’d come in with Salah from the illathil, said in her calm, pretty voice, “I think we did it,” and then let out an un-Claire-like whoop. Marianne felt her vision blur.
She had not teared up at any of the research advances on Terra that had led to this moment. So many steps to a vaccine, so much strife, so many deaths. But here, on a planet not her own, she was on the verge of crying: from release of tension, from relief, from momentary joy before she let herself remember that they still had to synthesize a planetful of vaccines, using outdated or jerry-rigged or completely missing machinery, on alien cultures in makeshift petri dishes, to protect immune systems that had evolved different defensive pathways.
Salah laughed, a deep masculine guffaw. He seized Claire and they danced a jogging step. Branch grinned like a Halloween jack-o’-lantern, wide enough to split his face. The leelees made high sexual squeaks as they mated.
Claire said, “I’m going to fetch Llaa^moh¡ and—”
The leelee lab door flung open and Austin Rhinehart stood there, his eyes almost as huge as a Kindred’s, vegetable dye crusting the teenage feet that had grown faster than his body.
“There’s an attack coming!” he cried. “And Isabelle went outside to try to stop it!”
Salah seized him by the shoulders. “Isabelle? What happened?”
“Lemme go!” Austin tore free and glared at Salah. “I opened the door to go outside because illathil is so boring! And Leo Brodie on the roof told me to go back inside so I did. But I told Isabelle because I thought somebody should know and she said to stay inside but she was going toward the door without telling anybody else so I came to tell you!” Austin looked triumphant, frightened, excited.
Thirteen, Marianne thought numbly. He was thirteen, so of course he looked excited. Was it really an attack? To get the vaccine they already had?
“Salah,” she said, turning toward him, but he was already gone.
Zoe slipped behind the barricade Owen had had built there, primarily from an old refrigerator. If the natives had had any military sense, they would have taken her out before she got that far. They didn’t have any military sense. Leo knelt, sighted, braced himself.
The men at the rear of the little group pulled from their bags pipe guns and—yes—an object the size of a cookie jar.
“Possible explosive device,” Leo said. “Composition and strength unknown. Enemy has halted just short of perimeter.”
Kandiss ran around the side of the building’s north door. Again, no Kindred fired. But all four soldiers’ attention was focused on the men with the weapons—were they a diversion for an attack from somewhere else?
When the east door again opened behind Zoe and Owen, Leo’s first thought was, We’re fucked. Someone inside could hurl an explosive and take out Zoe and Owen from behind, then let the enemy rush in without even having to breach… Then he heard the door click again, locking.
Owen yelled to whoever had come out, “Get the fuck back inside!”
Until the infiltrator moved away from the walls, Leo couldn’t see who it was. Then she moved, heading diagonally across the perimeter toward the enemy. Isabelle.
She carried nothing and wore only a short red dress, her light brown hair greenish in his night scope. So many complicated emotions tsunamied through Leo that for a moment he couldn’t breathe. Only a moment, though—he steadied himself.
Someone in the enemy group yelled something; a second later, Leo realized what the word was. “Vaccine!”
Owen said, “Brodie, warning shot.”
He fired high above the camp. Women screamed. The group huddled closer together—the reverse of what they should do. Owen shouted to Isabelle, “Go back inside! Now!”
She ignored him, turning instead to look up at the roof. “Leo, don’t shoot! All of you, don’t shoot! Let me talk to them—please!”
Owen had two choices, Leo realized: Let her join the enemy group or shoot her, because she wasn’t going back inside. Isabelle turned and ran toward the camp. Now if Owen, Zoe, or Leo fired, they risked hitting Isabelle. She could be taken hostage. She could be killed with a pipe gun or IED or even a fucking machete, right in front of Leo. If that happened…