“Why?” Branch had asked, puzzled. “If they think they’re going to die anyway from R. sporii, then why not stay at home and die there?”
Branch genuinely did not understand—from youth, from temperament, from the mostly sheltered life of well-off parents followed by academic research. Sometimes Salah felt very old.
“There are rumors on the radio that there is a second plague on the ship that’s coming here. A plague we Terrans are going to set loose on Kindred.”
“It’s a cure,” Branch said. “We hope. And if they know they’re going to die of the first plague anyway—”
“Branch,” Salah said, “which would you rather face: a bout of cholera alone or a bout of cholera followed by malaria when you’ve already been weakened by the cholera? They hope that some of them will survive R. sporii, and they’re probably right. They don’t want to then be hit with another unknown plague.”
An irreverent verse flashed into Salah’s head: When the wit began to wheeze / And wine had warmed the politician, / Cured yesterday of my disease / I died last night of my physician. Mathew Prior, in the irreverent eighteenth century.
No one on Kindred would appreciate it. No one.
“Then,” Branch said, “why doesn’t the Council of Mothers tell them different?”
“Tell them what? Nobody, including us, knows how the virophage will affect humans. The camp is full of scared and angry people both wanting to stop a second plague and looking for someone to blame. That happened on Earth, too, you know.”
“I know,” Branch said, so somberly that Salah wondered if he had overestimated the young man’s innocence, after all. “I wish we knew exactly when the ship will arrive. From the astronomical data I know the location of the colony planet, but distance doesn’t seem to correlate with how the drive works.”
“No,” Salah said.
Branch looked at the clinic ceiling, as if it were the sky. “I wish I knew when it will arrive.”
“When is this fucking ship getting here?” Zoe demanded.
“No idea,” Leo said.
They had met in the clinic kitchen, both hungry, though neither of them were supposed to move yet. Bourgiba had explained that he was not a surgeon, that the best he could do with what he had here was what he’d done: remove Zoe’s spleen and patch up Leo’s liver. Leo was grateful for the medical help but hated the inactivity. It gave him too much time to think. He was grateful when Kandiss or Lu^kaj^ho came in with reports, even though the reports were all the same: Nothing happening. People are angry. No ship yet.
It left Leo with too much time to think about Owen. He tried, instead, to think about OPORDS, about assessing defenses and effectively deploying personnel. Thinking like a leader, and wasn’t that a kick in the head? Him.
Which led his thoughts back to Owen.
So he was almost glad to meet up with Zoe in the kitchen. They eyed each other warily. He had injured her; she had shot him.
He waited to see what she would say.
“Just before I got deployed here,” she said, “my platoon did a night parachute drop. We dropped from eight hundred feet with zero illumination and seized a landing strip for follow-on forces. Three of us including me had injuries from a hard landing but we went on the assault anyway. Mission successful.”
“Where was this?” Leo said, because it was clear he had to say something.
“Not sure. Mideast someplace.” She reached for the soup ladle.
Evidently this story settled something in Zoe’s mind, although Leo had no idea what. He said, “Uh-huh.”
She said quietly, “You did right, Leo. I’ll say so at the court-martial.”
“Thanks.” Court-martial? For that, they had to first get back to Terra. Unless Kandiss decided to somehow arrest Leo and take control of the squad, which Leo doubted. It would require too many words.
Not that Leo himself was doing all that great at military protocol. Zoe didn’t treat him with much deference, and the whole idea of military chain of command was foreign to Lu^kaj^ho.
The Kindred, now an Army private second class, appeared in the doorway to the kitchen. His report was just more of the same: more people in the camp, no attacks, no visible weapons, a lot of refugees accompanied by children, and no ship.
“How many be children?” Leo asked.
“Now it is about half.”
“Half? Are kids?”
“Yes.”
After Lu^kaj^ho left, Zoe said, “You speak the lingo pretty good.”
“No. I don’t.”
“You think we got kid suicide bombers?”
“I don’t think so. They didn’t do that before, and Kindred aren’t really vicious or ruthless.” Not like in Brazil.
“Then why all the kids? In a strike zone?”
“I don’t think that they think it’s a strike zone, not this time.”
“Then what is it?”
“I don’t know,” Leo said. “Maybe a hospital zone, for vaccines? Hand me that ladle or are you going to eat all the soup yourself?”
She handed him the ladle. “Leo… I mean, sir…”
“Leo is fine.”
“What I said about a court-martial when we get home… It’s going to be twenty-eight years after we left.”
“Yes.”
“Twenty-eight fucking years. That’s too long. I won’t know anything, all the ordinances’ll be different.”
“They’ll send you back for more specialist training.”
“Maybe. But I don’t know if—”
“It’s here!” Austin screamed, bursting into the room. “The ship! It’s in the sky! It’s coming down!”
“Let’s go,” Leo said, and reached in his pocket for the dose of Owen’s popbite.
It was much larger than the Friendship. That was the first thing Marianne noticed: the ship’s size. Well, it was a colony ship, not a diplomatic flagship. The huge, bullet-shaped vessel of gray metal hovered over the compound, blocking the orange sun. She had been afraid it might return to the ruined city where it had been built, and then what would they have done? But the ship was here.
“Homed in on my transmitter,” Branch said with enormous satisfaction.
They stood in the cleared zone outside the compound, what the Rangers called the perimeter. Their necks bent far backward, along with nearly everyone else from the compound and the camp. Ranger Kandiss and some of Leo’s cops stood between the Terrans and the camp, weapons in their hands, but only Kandiss watched the Kindred instead of the ship.
“It’s beautiful,” Branch said. “I wonder who they were?”
He meant the ship’s designers, not the colonists. His remark jolted Marianne, who’d also been admiring the ship’s beauty, back to reality. This lovely vessel was full of dead human bodies, of chittering leelees, of a microorganism that had won its evolutionary battle against R. sporii. That, however, was no indication that the virophage could enable humans to do the same.
The ship stopped hovering and moved north, to the large empty grazing lands between the compound and the mountain.
What was Leo doing? Austin had watched him swallow a pill and give one to Ranger Berman. They’d both gone back to their rooms and come outside dressed in armor, carrying weapons, walking much steadier than before and without help. Leo gave the ship only a quick glance. He climbed a ladder to the compound roof. Why?
How come nobody told Austin anything?