She did. Austin let the tears come. He wanted his mother, and that was the biggest fuck-up of all because he was too old to cry for his mother, he was thirteen.
The door opened again. Austin turned his head back toward the wall but jerked around again when he heard the next voice.
“Hey, buddy,” Leo said.
Leo leaned heavily on Isabelle’s arm. She lowered him to sit at the end of Austin’s pallet, back to the wall. Leo breathed heavily for a few minutes and then said, “Thanks, Isabelle. Leave us guys to talk now, okay?”
She did, closing the door behind her. Leo looked strange out of soldier clothes and without helmet or weapons. He wore a loose Kindred wrap and he was barefoot. A tube came from his side into a bowl he’d put on the floor. “Damn drainage pipe. I might as well be a sewer. Bourgiba says that on Terra this would be a sterile tube with a bag or some shit like that, but they don’t have one in the clinic. Listen, Austin, we need your help again. You did a great job, incidentally, getting that call-back device out of that survivalist shit hole. Nobody else could have done it, certainly not your buddy Graa^lok.”
Leo had pronounced it right, Austin thought dazedly, with the rising sound in the middle. Tony never did that. And Leo had said… that Austin did a good job?
“Here’s the thing,” Leo said, and his voice, too, dazed Austin—it sounded like an adult talking to another adult. “There have been developments while you were in sick bay, so I’m going to brief you. Dr. Jenner and Branch Carter are working on a way to call back the colony ship with that device you rescued. They haven’t figured it out yet but maybe they will, they’re smart people. They might call the ship back so they can let loose that germ on it that’s supposed to stop the spore germ.”
Austin already knew that much; he’d known it before his disastrous trip to Haven. He could tell that Leo was skeptical about some of it, or maybe all of it, but that he was waiting to see what happened.
“But now,” Leo said, “we have another problem. Most people left the refugee camp once it was clear to them there weren’t any more vaccines in there or any way to make more, thanks to that terrorist attack.”
The attack where Leo shot the attackers. How many? What did it feel like to kill somebody? Did Leo feel bad about shooting Lieutenant Lamont? He didn’t look like he felt bad.
But Austin was learning that people weren’t always what they looked like. Tony, for instance.
Leo continued, “But now people are coming back to the camp, because there are rumors out there that we Terrans are going to set off a second plague.” Leo considered. “Which, I guess, we are, if the scientists can figure out how. But nobody out there really understands about these virophages—hell, I don’t understand them either—and so everybody’s scared. For their kids, mostly. The vaccinated kids and their mothers have all been brought into the compound for their own safety. Probably you heard some of the babies crying?”
Austin nodded.
“Yeah, it’s a nuisance. But the crowd out there in the camp is getting bigger and more dangerous looking because they’re mad as hell at us. Even though we’re only trying to help. But that always happens when you go into a foreign country.”
“It does?” Leo blurted out.
“Yeah. It did in Brazil, in Iraq—hell, it happened on Earth when Kindred came to warn us about the spore cloud. That’s why the Russians got so pissed. Half the population just wants to blame somebody and there you are. Shoot-the-messenger stuff.”
Austin didn’t know what that meant, but he nodded anyway.
“So what I need to know is where these rumors are coming from. I got my squad out asking questions but—”
“What squad?” Wasn’t Lieutenant Lamont dead and Ranger Berman shot and… could just Ranger Kandiss be a squad all by himself?
“Oh, nobody told you? I swore in some of the Kindred cops, and six other recruits. Ten all together. They’re the Kindred-Terran Peacekeeping Force now.”
Austin felt his mouth fall open. The Kindred-Terran Peace Keeping Force! He said, “Do they have weapons?”
“Some, yeah. They need more, but we can’t deal with that now, we need to focus on intel. The people in the camp don’t trust my squad, they think they’re turncoats. It’s not a really rough crowd out there, Austin, not compared to… well, maybe they’re rough enough. We don’t want another assault on the compound. So I need to know just what the mob out there has been told about this ‘second plague’ and how they learned about it in the first place. Either we have a leak here or else they learned some other way. You have any ideas?”
All at once, Austin’s chest felt like one big bruise. This was horrible, this was the worst yet. Leo’s eyes gazed at him levelly, not trusting like his mother’s but something better than trusting, some bond of equals. Austin had to tell him the truth.
“It was me,” he managed to get out. “I told Graa^lok’s cousin why Dr. Jenner wanted the call-back device. We were just talking and she was curious and… I made her promise to not tell anybody. Tony has radio transmitters and now he has a lot of people that speak Kindred and maybe…”
“I see,” Leo said. “Pretty girl?”
“Yes.”
“Listen, Austin, don’t blame yourself. This is a good thing, in the long run.”
“It is?”
“Yeah. If the ship gets called back, and if it releases virophages, and if they cure people of spore plague, then the people will know it just didn’t happen by itself, we caused it. You see? Otherwise it might just look like the whole spore-cloud thing was wrong. It’s good that people have more information, even if it came from that asshole Tony Schrupp.”
There was something wrong with this reasoning, something more than just the long string of ifs, but Austin couldn’t quite see what it was. Relief overwhelmed everything else. Leo wasn’t blaming him. Another assault on the compound, if it came, would not be Austin’s fault. Still—
But—
Leo didn’t let him think. “Here’s the other thing,” he said. “This is a lot to ask of a wounded warrior, but I’m going to. There’s a lot of little kids in here now and mostly their mothers are looking after them, but there are some older ones who were vaccinated too. Nobody who speaks their language, which is only Isabelle and Jenner, has time to tell them what’s going on. So I’m going to send some of them in here and let you brief them, as my representative. Tell them whatever you think is appropriate for them to know. You’re on my staff now, okay?”
Austin nodded, torn between that wonderful sentence (You’re on my staff now) and a deep reluctance to lecture a bunch of kids. But Leo didn’t give him time to say no. He bellowed, “Isabelle!” and the door opened like she’d been waiting just outside all along.
Four kids came in with her: two boys about ten and a tiny girl of six, holding the hand of an older girl. Austin blinked. The older one was his age, the prettiest girl he’d ever seen, prettier even than Graa^lok’s cousin. She smiled shyly and said in Kindred, “I greet you, Austin-mak.”
Austin-mak. The title for an honored person of higher rank and not of one’s own lahk.
Isabelle said in Kindred, “This is Jen^la^hon and three children of her lahk.”
Austin said to the girl, “I greet you, Jen^la^hon.”
He didn’t even notice when Isabelle helped Leo out of the room.
“You were too easy on him,” Isabelle said to Leo.
He grunted, easing himself back onto his pallet, sticking the end of the tube into his pants instead of the bowl it was supposed to drip into. Let the damn thing drip blood and fluid down his belly, that was better than going around looking like unfinished plumbing. He said, “You’re too hard on him.”