The suspended moment spun itself out longer than Zack could stand. “Caity, sweetheart…”
“I’m good, Daddy,” she said in her high child’s voice. “I’m not sick.
“I’m just thinking.”
Jason had never had to do this before. Had never expected to do it. There was no protocol. There were only eight soldiers and a doctor on a charred stretch of land beside an alien dome, in a gray dawn.
The day before, after sex with Lindy, whatever drug she’d given him had let him sleep nine hours straight. He’d woken to a message from the signal station, addressed to, and delivered to him by, Major Duncan. The convoy, five days from Monterey Base, had been attacked by New America. There had been a firefight, and New America had won.
Duncan, her lips drawn in such a tight line that words barely fit through them, said, “General Strople says he will send another convoy, more heavily fortified, but he can’t do so until next month. He says to keep you and DeFord in stockade and to turn all available resources to the repair of the Return. He wants that ship, sir, and he wants it bad.”
“Yes.” Bad enough to cause the deaths of a convoy of his troops. New America did not take prisoners, not unless the prisoner was someone who, like Sugiyama, they thought could be of use to them. Had the convoy been underfortified? Or did New America have more scavenged weapons, more powerful weapons, that Jason didn’t know about? He knew for sure only one thing: the annihilation of the convoy had bought Jason more time. Time paid for by the deaths of yet more men and women, because of him.
And now he was going to cause another death.
They stood on the east side of Lab Dome, just beyond the armory airlock. Gray clouds seemed to hang directly overhead and a light drizzle fell on the burned-out woods. Jason was the only one in an esuit. If he had permitted himself, he would have felt at a disadvantage, a commander more vulnerable than his troops. He did not permit himself to feel that, or anything.
“Lieutenant, conduct the prisoner to the… the pole.”
Dolin staggered a little as he was walked to the shoulder-high stake driven firmly into the ground twenty feet away. The pole was the trunk of a dead sapling, dragged from beyond the woods and stripped of its branches and leaves. The exposed wood where branches had been torn away looked pale against the remaining bark.
Dolin lurched again, and his escort clasped him more firmly. Jason had instructed Holbrook to give Dolin some sort of drug to dull anxiety and pain. Maybe it was keeping Dolin quiet as well, although Jason had not asked for that.
He had the results of Hillson’s investigation. He had conducted a hearing as well—not a formal court-martial but more than Dolin was entitled to under the rules of war. He had Dolin’s confession, offered not only freely but sneeringly, with all the vitriol of a man who knew he had nothing more to lose: “I shot the fucker defending Kandiss, and I tried to shoot Kandiss too. Them cunts brought the sickness to the base and if you wasn’t an alien-loving traitor who don’t deserve to command a latrine, you’d of shot them all out of the sky before they even landed on Earth. Fucking lily-livered coward!”
The lieutenant tied a blindfold around Dolin’s eyes, then walked away.
Jason said, “Raise weapons.”
He didn’t know any other way to do this. The United States Army was at war, by a valid vote of Congress even if Congress no longer existed. He was commander. He would not order a backroom lethal injection, or anything else that could give rise to rumors of torture. The five men with raised rifles were all volunteers, but all carefully vetted. None, as far as Hillson could tell, were likely to lie about what they were doing, or to turn and shoot the base commander. None of the five was Kandiss.
Dolin sagged slightly forward in his bonds, straightened, sagged again. Maybe he was drifting in and out of consciousness. Jason had not specified how high a dosage Holbrook should administer.
This man had willfully murdered a fellow soldier, while trying to murder another.
The United States was at war.
“Fire,” Jason said.
Five weapons laid down fire. If any of the guns were aimed to miss, Jason didn’t need to know about it. Dolin’s body jerked, jerked again, blossomed into red. The guns fell silent.
“Lower weapons,” Jason said.
Holbrook declared Dolin dead. The body was cut down. The burial detail moved into action, covered by the others.
Jason and Holbrook returned to the airlock. Just before he went inside, he heard a flock of sparrows somewhere begin their morning song.
Zack sat in the conference room of Lab Dome, beside Colonel Jenner—an unwelcome juxtaposition he had not planned. The room, as always, held more people than it should. Someone had moved out the table (putting it where?) and brought in more chairs. These were packed in so close that Zack could smell the mustiness in Jenner’s uniform. He tried to edge away, but it was impossible.
Did all these people really need to be here? Maybe not, but everyone wanted to hear the first results of the team analyzing the awakened v-comas, and apparently Jenner had okayed this as an open meeting instead of a military briefing. So in addition to every scientist on the base and some of the techs, the room contained all three physicians, as much of the nursing staff as could be spared, Ka^graa—although no one to translate for him—more officers and, standing against a side wall, two privates who had recently awakened from comas. Zack, like everyone else, took furtive little peeks at the man and woman, whose faces showed no hint of whatever they were thinking.
The only significant people missing were the other three who’d awakened from comas. Caitlin was a child; Belok^ was a functional child; Toni had refused to leave her work on the gene drive. “His Highness can do without me.”
Major Denise Sullivan made the presentation. Her broad, kind face looked pinched with exhaustion, but she stood straight and spoke without either notes or polite preliminaries. Everyone here was well beyond preliminaries.
“Analysis of cerebral-spinal tissue from those who awakened from v-comas”—she nodded at the two privates—“hasn’t, so far, turned up much more than we knew from samples taken when they were asleep. There are proteins we haven’t seen before, as well as different and new folds in proteins commonly found in the brain. Proportions of various proteins are different. Specifically—”
She went into details. The presentation was pitched badly: too simple for Zack and the other scientists, who already knew all of this, too technical for the military. Without turning his head—he didn’t want to be rude—Zack watched the two soldiers standing against the side wall. They were the most interesting people in the room. What was going on in those altered brains? Their faces gave nothing away.
“So in summary,” Denise finished, “at the cellular level, we cannot yet explain much. What we do know is that only people with what we’re calling ‘the coma allele’ go comatose. In the coma, profound changes occur in the brain that may indicate both increased neural connections and altered neural connections, and that the result, according to IQ tests administered to all awakened subjects, seem to show a leap forward in intelligence.
“If the increased brain activity resulted only from increased density, length, or thickness of neurons, there would probably be a problem with overheating of brain tissue, since the brain would then use more energy and so generate more heat. Human cortical gray-matter neurons already had axons that were pretty close to the physical limits. Therefore, the most likely situation is that the greater proportion of the changes in brain functioning are due to revised connections and functioning among the neurons that were already there.”