Branch ignored the second part of this argument, seizing on the first. “If they’re so much farther advanced than we are, then why did they come to Earth for our help in the first place?”
A good question, and one that had been asked often: by scientists, by politicians, by media, by an endless number of conspiracy theorists. Never with a satisfactory answer.
“All I’m saying,” Branch said, “is that I don’t trust them now. They never told us that humans were immune, after all.”
“If you haven’t trusted them all along, why did you apply to come on this mission?”
The young man looked away, then back at Salah. Honesty wrinkled his fresh skin, and all at once he looked even younger than he was. “I wanted to go into space. I mean, who wouldn’t? I jumped at the chance. But this is a dirty trick and I don’t trust them now. That’s all I’m saying.”
“And all I’m saying is that you’re a scientist. As a scientist, you owe it to objective truth to wait until you have all the facts before you make a judgment about the Kindred. When we get close enough for communication, we’ll have more answers. Does that seem fair?”
“Yes. But… if they’re so far ahead of us that they can build ships like this, why can’t they pick up our communications from space? We could do that decades ago.”
Another unanswerable question. Salah said, “I don’t know. But let’s gather all the facts before leaping to conclusions.”
“Yes. Okay. That makes sense.” Branch rose. He looked calmer now, the sleeping pill forgotten. “Thanks, Doctor.”
“Anytime.”
Salah made a note on Branch’s chart. Then he sat for a while, thinking. The lab tech’s underlying distrust of the Kindred should have been detected by the battery of psychological tests he took before being accepted for the Friendship. Not that Salah had ever really trusted psychological testing; except in extreme cases, it seldom revealed anything not obvious during an hour-long interview. Extroversion, novelty avoidance, reasoning ability, lying—a sensitive interviewer could ferret them all out with a few good questions and a lot of careful listening. People were just too complex for simple true-false tests.
Still, Branch’s visit raised a question about the supposedly exhaustive background checks: What else had they missed? And in whom?
When Leo got to the wardroom, five minutes late for his scheduled exercise session, Miguel Flores sat at the table, reading on his tablet. Flores looked up briefly and scowled; he’d been scowling since everybody got the news about the time dilation. Well, it wasn’t any worse for him than anybody else, and anyway there wasn’t anything anybody could do about it. It just was.
Zoe Berman was already on the AllEx machine, doing pull-ups. Her arms bulged with muscle. She was long, lean but with definite breasts, and she had a face that belonged on an angel. Leo tried not to look. He climbed onto the bike, set the resistance for maximum, and began pumping. In his view, none of this equipment was any substitute for running or climbing, but this was what they had.
Twenty minutes later, Miguel cursed softly, closed his tablet, and left. There was no place to go except here, your bunk, or the common room, which was off-limits to the enlisted men unless you were on watch. At least they each had personal quarters, however small and cramped, instead of a barracks.
Leo said to Zoe, “And so another one crawls into his cave. We’re all going to be hibernating bears before we reach the planet.”
Zoe said, “Switch.”
Leo climbed off the bike and onto the AllEx, and Zoe took the bike. She staggered a little getting on. Her eyes, huge and green, looked weird somehow. Cloudy. Leo said sympathetically, “Not sleeping well?”
“Shut up.”
O-kaaay. Not a candidate for leadership awards. Leo did the required pull-ups, enjoying the play of his own muscles, the beating of his own heart, even the sweat that filmed his forehead. The time dilation, which was covering the ship with its own stink, didn’t bother him all that much. His parents were dead; there was no love lost between him and the foster family that had raised him for the state money; he didn’t have a girl. Earth twenty-eight years from now was sort of intriguing, and the Army would still be there.
The whirring from Zoe’s bike slowed.
The Army was his real home, his bedrock, had been since he’d been eighteen. Basic, then sniper school, RASP (but don’t think about that), then the 101st Airborne. Action in Brazil and that pissant skirmish in Turkey. The Army gave his life order and meaning. He knew guys who couldn’t wait to get out, but not Leo. He was—
The bike stopped whirring.
Leo turned his head. Zoe slumped sideways, her eyes unfocused. Leo leaped up, just in time to catch her before she hit the deck. The bike seat and the back of her shorts were both covered with blood.
“Berman! Hey!” He eased her to the floor.
“Get away from me.” A second later she clutched him. “Don’t tell anybody!”
Tell anybody what? Leo didn’t understand what was happening. Zoe gave him the most forced, horrible smile he’d ever seen. She said, “You never seen blood from a girl’s period before? What are you, a virgin?”
“No.” But this wasn’t regular period blood like girls got, usually when you didn’t want them to. Leo was sure of it. Zoe closed her eyes and bit her lip hard, and Leo saw that she was stopping a scream.
“You need the doctor.”
“No! Just… just get me to my quarters…”
Leo eased her to her feet. More blood. Zoe staggered and he hoisted her into a fireman’s carry. This was a miscarriage. But that wasn’t possible, they’d all had a physical just two weeks before liftoff and the docs would have found a pregnancy. Appendix? Leo was hazy on where the appendix was—right side? left?—or whether it would produce blood.
“My quarters,” Zoe said, and although there was no panic in her voice—Rangers didn’t panic—and no audible fear, there was something scary.
Leo took her, dripping blood, straight to the infirmary.
The Muslim doctor—Leo wasn’t good with names—flung open the door as soon as Leo kicked it. The doc was there alone. As soon as he saw them, he flipped down a bed from the left bulkhead and said, “What happened?”
Leo said, “I don’t know. She was exercising on the bike and she slumped off. She said it’s just her period but—”
Zoe tried to say something, then passed out.
The doctor’s hands explored Zoe’s body. He pressed and she revived and screamed. He said, “Comm on, private channel, Dr. Patel. Claire, to sick bay STAT, emergency.”
The wall screen said, “On my way.”
The doctor was undressing Zoe. To Leo he said, “Go now.”
Leo was glad to go. In the passageway Dr. Patel pushed past him. In such a small ship, anybody could get anywhere really fast. Right now that was probably good.
He washed his hands; the washroom was empty. Christ—the passageway. Well, he could do that for Zoe, anyway. He got a towel, decided against it (Who did the laundry? He’d never thought to ask), and grabbed a lot of recyclable paper towels. Hoping no one saw him before he finished, he wiped the blood from the deck and bike.
Owen entered the wardroom just as he stuffed the towels into the recycle chute. “Brodie—aren’t you on exercise rotation?”
“Yes, sir. Bathroom break.”
Leo started doing pull-ups.
In his off-duty time, he knocked on the door of sick bay. The passageway lights had been dimmed to simulate night. The briefing in the common room, which even the Rangers had attended, had yielded a lot of math and astronomy that Leo didn’t follow and two useful pieces of information: still no response from Kindred to the Friendship’s radio messages, and the spore cloud would hit the planet ten weeks from now. Why an hour-and-a-half meeting to tell everybody that? And why did the hour-and-a-half briefing have to fall in Leo’s off-duty? But it was what it was.