Dr. Bourgiba said, “Brodie. Climbing to the roof could tear your stitches. I told you so. And you’ve taken popbite, haven’t you? It’s counterindicated if—”
Leo wasn’t even listening. Slowly he climbed the ladder. One of the new Kindred soldiers, Heemur^ka, climbed behind with Leo’s gear. Ranger Berman took her place beside Ranger Kandiss on the ground. Austin put one foot on the ladder.
“Are you crazy?” Isabelle hissed, grabbing him. “You are not going up there!”
Dr. Jenner said to Isabelle, “I don’t understand! What are they going to do?”
So nobody had told her, either, and Dr. Jenner was a mother. Well, no, she had refused to be a mother, but she was an old woman anyway and still she didn’t know what Leo was going to do. Austin felt a little better.
Five hundred yards away, the ship began to land.
It was big, and it settled down easy as a soap bubble. No noise, no fire, no nothing. Leo had been a teenager when the Kindred ship came to Terra and he’d had other things on his mind, like avoiding jail, but he remembered the TV broadcasts that showed the Embassy landing just like this in New York Harbor. No drama, just a perfect piece of machinery.
Leo, the popbite singing in his blood and brain, settled into position on the roof. Heemur^ka handed him his weapons.
“Shit,” Heemur^ka said; he was learning as much Terran as Leo was learning Kindred. But then Heemur^ka added, “I greet you, ship.”
Why didn’t they give their ships names? Weird.
The moment the ship touched ground, the Kindred in the camp ran toward it. Men, women, little kids. Okay, they had probably rehearsed mentally just as much as Leo’s squad had. They formed a line between the compound and the ship, several people deep, facing the compound. They were not going to let anyone, Terran or Kindred, near the ship. Dr. Jenner had already told Leo that the door could not be opened by signals from the outside, and she should know—a decade ago on Terra, she had been sealed inside the Friendship with an entire battalion of NASA technical experts outside. Leo didn’t know if these doors could be forced open manually from the outside, but it didn’t matter. The Kindred who massed in front of them in grim-faced protest weren’t taking any chances.
Leo knew what they were counting on: That neither his Kindred recruits nor Leo himself would shoot several hundred Kindred, half of them kids carefully placed in front. They were right. He wasn’t Owen. But that wasn’t the problem he faced now.
“Lu^kaj^ho,” he called down, “tell them to move away from the ship. Now.
“And tell them why.”
Salah grabbed Isabelle’s arm. “What’s going on? What’s Brodie going to do?”
“I don’t know but—” She started to climb the ladder.
Another of Leo’s pseudo-soldiers said, “No, Isabelle-mak.” There followed a furious exchange in Kindred that Salah could not follow. He glanced around for the Rangers; Kandiss was out of sight around the corner of the building. Zoe stood at the east door to the compound, her face disturbed about something.
Isabelle stopped yelling and again put her sandaled foot on the bottom rung of the ladder.
The Kindred soldier brushed her off and grabbed the ladder away from the roof.
“Give it to me!” Isabelle said.
The man didn’t even answer; he handed the ladder to another Kindred, who carried it quickly away.
Before Isabelle could even react, Zoe had put her rifle into its sling and made a cup of her hands. “I’ll lift you up,” she said urgently. “Talk Brodie out of it. The missile is experimental. One in two chances it explodes and kills him. And us.”
Missile? Brodie had a missile up there? Salah was no military expert but he hadn’t seen anything as big as a shoulder-mounted launcher.
Zoe’s eyes glowed with the feverish shine of popbite; probably she thought she could lift a mountain, but she wasn’t that long out of surgery. Salah said, “Isabelle,” and made a cup of his own hands. Isabelle stepped into it and Salah threw her as high as he could, wrenching his shoulder. Isabelle grabbed the edge of the roof and pulled herself up.
“You can’t, Leo,” Isabelle said.
“Get the hell off here, Isabelle!”
Heemur^ka moved between her and Leo, making sure she didn’t get close enough to interfere with the shot. The mount was affixed to his rifle, the canister loaded into it. Leo kept his gaze trained on the ship and the crowd gathering in front of it. More kids, and now a few old ladies, one carried on a litter. Mothers.
Isabelle said, “You’re going to blow a hole in the ship, aren’t you. To release the virophage. But it’s not a bullet because a bullet wouldn’t even dent that hull. It’s a powerful explosive from Terra and it’s not reliable. One in two odds of blowing us all up.”
“Zoe tell you that?” Damn her to hell, Leo had trusted her.
Isabelle didn’t answer his question. In the field, people crowded closer to the ship. In his scope, a tiny girl, pale blue dress on her little copper body, crooned to a doll in her arms.
Isabelle said, her voice steady but not completely hiding desperation, “Okay, assume you’re willing to risk killing yourself, me, your squad, and half the people in the compound if the explosive blows up in your face. Are you willing to risk killing all the people hit by the blast or flying debris near the ship? All those kids? That’s not you, Leo.”
Leo said, “Drop her off the roof, Heemur^ka.”
“No! Stop!” And then a blast of Kindese, which Leo ignored.
Four of the Kindred-Terran Peacekeeping Force approached the crowd surrounding the ship. The Kindred soldiers were armed but held their weapons loosely, unthreateningly, as they began to talk to people. Talk, persuade, cajole, threaten—Just get them away from there by telling them why.
Isabelle shouted at Leo, “You don’t even know that setting the virophage loose will work! It’s only a desperate gamble!”
Then Leo did answer her. Without turning, without taking his gaze from the scope, he said, “Isn’t a desperate gamble better than everybody dying for sure?”
He didn’t hear her answer; Heemur^ka dropped her over the edge of the roof. Presumably somebody caught her because a few moments later she was with the group that Zoe and Kandiss were herding away from both the compound and the camp, up the hill to the south. They would take everybody to Isabelle’s lahk house, to safety, with or without its lahk mother.
Heemur^ka said in Kindred, “I greet you, Leo-mak.”
What the hell? They hadn’t just met. They were here on the roof preparing to die or kill or both, preparing to set loose a plague on the planet—a second plague—and Heemur^ka was saying, “I greet you”? Some crazy fucking Kindred custom that Leo didn’t know about? A death ritual, like those songs that kamikaze pilots sang before they took off?
Leo said in Kindred, “I greet you, Private Heemur^ka,” and kept his finger on the trigger.
Halfway up the hill to the lahk, forced along by Kandiss and Zoe, Salah had had enough. Enough of being herded, enough of esoteric master-alien codes, enough of not being able to make his own decisions. Enough of death. Enough of this planet, just as he had once had enough of Terra. Nothing to choose between them for human idiocy.
He stopped walking and said to Zoe Berman, “I’m going back.”
“No,” she said. “You’re not.”
“I won’t go anywhere near the compound, anywhere near Brodie. I won’t interfere with whatever he’s going to do. But I can help move people away from the ship. They don’t trust Leo’s Kindred soldiers because they think they’re turncoats. They might trust me, a doctor. At any rate, I can speak the language. Let me try. Please.”