Caitlin yawned and said, “Tell me a story.”
He began The Three Bears, a Caitlin favorite, but it was clear she wasn’t listening. In the middle of Goldilocks’s discontent with porridge, she said, “Daddy, who made the domes?”
“The Army made the domes. You know that.”
“No, who made them. Devon says the Army doesn’t know how the domes work.”
True enough. How to explain to a four-year-old what physicists didn’t understand? “The Army built the domes. But they didn’t invent them. Somebody else told them how to make domes. Like when your teacher tells you how to add up numbers.”
“Who told the Army how to make domes?”
“People from another planet. People like Jane—you met Jane.”
“She’s pretty.”
Was she? Zack realized that he hadn’t ever noticed. Susan was the only woman he’d noticed that way in years. Talk about your long-married clichés.
Caitlin said, “Jane must be really smart if she showed Colonel Jenner how to make domes.”
“Well, it wasn’t exactly like… you see, sweetie, some other people showed Jane’s people how to make domes.”
“Who?”
“Nobody knows. Nobody has ever seen them. They’re… they’re like super-aliens. Like in your book about Jerry and the Space Puppy.”
That woke her a little. Caitlin sat up. “There are super-aliens? Where?”
“Nobody knows. They left a long time ago.”
“Where did they go?”
“Nobody knows.”
“What did they look like?”
“Nobody knows.”
“Why did they go away?”
“Nobody knows that, either.”
She stared at him doubtfully, this father who didn’t seem able to provide answers to anything, and then lay back down on her trundle bed. “I know.”
“You know what the super-aliens look like?”
“Yes.”
“Then tell me! I really want to know!”
Caitlin frowned, and her eyes roamed the room, jammed with her family’s few possessions, most heaped on shelves hastily affixed to the wooden walls. Her gaze fell on her own drawings. Triumphantly she said, “The aliens look like zebras, ’cause they are zebras!”
When you hear hoofbeats, think of horses not zebras.
“Maybe,” he said, but Caitlin was already asleep.
Zack hurried through the tunnel connecting the domes. This was just as complicated as going through two ground-level airlocks, but right now Zack didn’t want to deal with delay of the required military escort. It had taken too long to find someone to stay with Caity, and he was already late.
He ran down the long flight of stairs leading from the kitchens. The large, alien-metal room at the bottom was Enclave Dome’s storeroom, jammed with produce, eggs, and grain from the Settlement and forest game shot by the Army. Semi-successful cheeses ripened on a shelf, the result of a semi-successful experiment with capturing and milking wild sheep. Two men were filling tote bags with apples from a crate; the smell made Zack’s mouth water.
In the corner stood the door to decon and the airlock. “Retinal scan and digital chip match: Dr. Zachary McKay.” The kitchen workers watched him with an expression Zack couldn’t read: envy or pity or maybe just puzzlement that anyone would risk exposure to RSA. I already had it, boys, he thought, and pushed the memory away.
The airlock gave onto a tunnel with two branches. One, sealed a short distance along, was an escape hatch that Zack hoped fervently would never have to be used. He hurried, holding his flashlight, along the much shorter tunnel. It connected to a similar branching outside Lab Dome. Airlock, decon, and he stood in the small space outside the bird lab and the mysterious, heavy third door. Up the stairwell to the young soldier on guard (didn’t they ever get bored, doing essentially nothing?), who unlocked the door to Lab Dome.
Zack raced into the conference room jammed with chairs, people, and the odors of too many bodies. Colonel Jenner sat at the head of the table. Was Jenner’s command post at the top of Enclave Dome more spacious than this? Zack had never seen it. Almost no civilian had, and only the most trusted soldiers.
“Sorry I’m late,” Zack said, squeezing into the only empty chair, beside Toni. Jenner frowned at him. Present were the heads of each research team, with some of their colleagues both military and civilian, plus some of the lab assistants. Four newcomers: two Army captains, Marianne Jenner, and Claire Patel. Neither of the Worlder scientists, which surprised Zack. Either Jane would not be able to keep up with the translation for this more technical meeting, or Jenner had decided on security grounds to exclude Ka^graa and Glamet^vor¡ from what was essentially a military briefing. Theoretically, these monthly briefings were classified, although in such close and crowded quarters almost nothing stayed secret very long. Major Duncan, whom Toni referred to as “Stonejaw,” wasn’t here; presumably Jenner had left her in temporary command at the top of Enclave Dome.
Surrounded by all those uniforms, Jenner looked tired but even more powerful than usual. “The emperor in state,” Toni said to Jason under her breath. She had the disconcerting ability to speak sotto voce without moving her lips at all.
Jenner said, “This briefing is in session. I’d like to introduce captains Mott and Darnley from Headquarters. Their mission is to update General Hahn.”
Zack blinked. Sending brass from Headquarters was a big deal, complicated and dangerous, unless these captains were already in the area. Why would that be? Something in Jenner’s posture suggested that this visit had been a surprise to him as well.
Jenner said only, “Captains Mott and Darnley will need to be brought up to speed on progress to date, so please start with the basics of your work. Dr. Yu?”
Dr. Jessica Yu, chief scientist for the base, also headed the vaccine unit. It seemed to Zack that she had always headed the vaccine unit, since the beginning of time. She’d been with the original Embassy team with Marianne. They had succeeded in creating a vaccine against R. sporii, and now Dr. Yu was trying to do the same for its weaponized cousin. At eighty-two, however, she turned more and more of the work over to others. She said, “Dr. Sullivan will present for the team.”
Major Denise Sullivan, once of the United States Army Medical Research Institute for Infectious Diseases, stood diamond-fiber straight, facing her listeners as diagrams from her tablet appeared on the wall screen behind her. Despite the lack of advance warning, her presentation was meticulous and detailed. Zack couldn’t tell how much of it the visiting captains understood, but by the end, one thing was clear: there was still no vaccine against RSA.
“Thank you, Major,” Jenner said. “Major Vargas?”
Juan Vargas, a brilliant but disorganized researcher perpetually in trouble for disregarding military protocol, headed the human immunity unit. His uniform, which he hardly ever wore, was missing a button. Toni, who respected both Vargas’s ability and his laissez-faire attitude toward spit-and-polish, changed her expression from fake to genuine interest, even though both she and Zack knew that Vargas’s unit had nothing real to report. They had made no progress toward tweaking the human immune system to cope with RSA. The variant of the protein that conferred natural immunity on a very few people was their hope; they had not been able to mimic it.
Marianne and Claire both asked a lot of questions. Zack watched Mott and Darnley. He became certain that they understood little of what they were hearing; Vargas was being too technical for laymen. Well, Zack could remedy that, maybe earning some brownie points for his team.