Her face had gone bone white. Was she going to faint? Leo reached out to grab her, but Isabelle was made of tougher stuff than that. She held onto a kitchen shelf and breathed deep. Then she said, “Go get Lieutenant Lamont.”
“Whoa, you don’t want to—”
“Do it. I’ll get Marianne and the others. Tell Lamont it’s urgent. Life-or-death urgent. No, tell him something else, something he’ll want to hear.
“Tell him there might be a way to call a ship to take him home.”
Salah Bourgiba wasn’t convinced. Leo could see that. He thought the unrusty object that Austin had mentioned might be anything at all, a view that Leo shared, even though he didn’t like sharing anything with Bourgiba. Dr. Jenner and Isabelle believed it was the call-back device but that, Leo thought, was because they wanted to believe it. Branch wanted mostly to get his hands on the hardware.
It was Owen who disturbed Leo.
He’d gone outside to look for Owen but found him instead in the ready room. Owen must have taken more popbite because he was hyperawake, counting his clips of ammo. They lay on the floor in lines straight as a parade drill, but Owen nudged one of them a fraction of an inch to the right. What was the point of that? Better not to ask.
“Sir, sorry to distur—”
“What?” Owen’s calm, following so much irritability in the past week, was more unsettling than a shout or howl. The whites of his eyes looked yellowish, and the pupils were enormous. Not yet in armor, his weight loss was obvious. How much popbite was he doing? Every soldier knew the limits, as well as what could happen if you exceeded them.
Leo said, “Dr. Jenner and the others think they might have a way to call the colony ship back from wherever it is and use it to go back to Terra.”
Owen went completely still. Seconds passed, during which Owen stared hard at something in the corner of the room. Leo turned his head, but the corner was empty.
Finally Owen said, “How?”
“Some device that Austin Rhinehart found in the mountains. He said to… they would like to discuss this with you, sir. In the clinic.”
Owen put his ammo into his lockbox, locked it, and strode out. Since he had no orders to the contrary, Leo followed.
The Terrans had moved into the leelee lab, leaving the door open to let out some of the stink. Noah wasn’t there. The leelees chittered—didn’t the dumb things ever sleep? Well, if not, they looked better not sleeping than Owen, who reminded Leo of a twitchy jaguar he’d seen in Brazil.
“Lieutenant Lamont,” Isabelle said. “We have two pieces of information for you. First, a few days ago Austin told Leo that he’d found an ‘unrusty alien piece of machinery’ in Tony Schrupp’s cave, where Austin took Dr. Patel. Before she died, the Mother of Mothers told me there had originally been a device to call back the colony ship, World’s other spaceship. It’s been sending signals, as you know. Branch decoded them with that”—Isabelle pointed at a pile of machinery taking up a good chunk of floor space next to a rumpled pallet—“and there is a good chance that if we can get the device from the cave and use it through Branch’s transmitter, we can call the colony ship back here.”
Owen said nothing. His yellowish, huge-pupiled eyes did not blink.
Marianne said, “If we can get the ship here, there might be a chance that Branch could change its destination settings to Terra. After all, other settings aboard the Friendship were reprogrammable. Within limits, yes, but—”
“Why should I believe you?” Owen said in a calm, reasonable voice that nonetheless made Leo’s skin prickle. “You want the hostages back. I said no. All of a sudden you come up with another reason for an extraction.”
Bourgiba’s eyes narrowed and he started to speak, but Isabelle put a hand on his arm. Smart Isabelle—she could do this better than anyone else.
Isabelle said, “I understand what you’re saying, Lieutenant. But Austin spoke originally to Corporal Brodie, and I’m sure you trust your own unit’s intel.”
“Brodie?” Owen said, without turning.
“It’s true, sir.” Leo strained to remember Austin’s exact words. “I caught him coming back to camp and he told me that Noah Jenner already knows where he goes, but that Jenner didn’t know everything, that Austin was the only one who knew everything. The kid said that Jenner didn’t know that Austin found ‘a rusty old alien machine buried in sand.’ He told me it’s shaped like a pyramid. He didn’t know what it was for.”
Isabelle said, “Ree^ka told me the call-back device was pyramidal. Also, it’s the only piece of alien machinery pictured in the tablets but never found. Geological activity over eons—”
Fuck geological activity. Leo saw that Owen had stopped listening. Owen stared at the floor, head down, an un-Owen-like pose. When he raised his head, his face looked somehow both twitchy and impassive.
“All right. We go after the call-back device.”
Don’t say thank you, Isabelle. This was a mission decision, not a favor or capitulation, don’t let him think it is…
Dr. Jenner said, “Thank—”
“What do you want us to do?” Isabelle said, quick and loud. “Do you need a translator?”
Of course he didn’t; the survivalists spoke English. But it was probably the first thing Isabelle had thought of.
“Wake Jenner,” Owen said. “He can guide us to the cave. If he’s too injured, then I need everything he knows about direction, distance, terrain, and the enemy forces inside the objective, including what weapons they might have. What is your second piece of information?”
This time, Isabelle let Dr. Jenner speak. “It’s what’s aboard the colony ship. Every time we’ve exposed leelees to spores here in the lab—”
“You have spores here? From Terra?”
Dr. Jenner looked surprised. “A limited number. What did you think we used to manufacture vaccines?”
Leo thought: Did I know they had live spores? No, he did not. The scientists had assumed everyone knew the science, and Owen had assumed their business was separate from his mission. Just as he’d tried to keep the squad separate and self-contained, using everything short of a nonfraternization order.
“Anyway,” Dr. Jenner continued, “all the lab leelees that we exposed to spores died. But Branch has auditory evidence that on the colony ship, there are live leelees. That argues that they’re somehow immune to the spores that killed the Kindred crew. It might be that just a few with natural genetic immunity survived and bred. But here on Kindred we haven’t found any leelees with natural immunity. The other possibility is a virophage, a virus that destroys the spores, and if we can get the ship here and let the virophages loose before the spore cloud hits, and if the virophage proves to be airborne, it might save any of the population that can breathe it in. It’s a long shot, but even so we—Lieutenant?”
Owen had turned away. No one saw his face except Leo, and he felt his own eyes widen. Owen’s face jerked into a rage that Leo had seen only once before: in Brazil, on a suicide bomber rushing toward a group of Marines.
The rage vanished. Owen turned back to the others. “Bring me Noah Jenner. We start at first light. I’ll take Specialist Berman with me. Private Kandiss and Corporal Brodie will remain here to secure the building.”
Bourgiba said angrily, “We no longer need ‘securing’ because there’s no more vaccine to—”
But Owen had already left the room.