The duty guard knocked on the door. “Sir, a message from Lab Dome. Dr. Farouk has woken up. You said you wanted to know when it happened.”
Jason glanced at Duncan. She said, “Better late than never.”
“Like so much else,” he said.
Days later, Jason arrived at the command post early in the morning, after a night with Lindy. The night had not gone well.
It had been his fault. They hadn’t been together since the day before Jason had executed Dolin. She was kept so busy with the awakenings—eleven of them now—and he with running a base short of supplies, routine, and answers. But last night’s tension had not come from those inescapable cares. “You’re avoiding me,” she’d said to him yesterday. “Why?”
Sometimes he wished she were less direct. “I’m not.”
“Yes, you are. I waited for you to… never mind that. You’ve got something on your mind, Jason, something you’re not telling me. What is it?”
And less perceptive.
She repeated, “What is it?” but now her tone was softer, more concerned, Lindy at her most gentle. Damn her! Accusative Lindy he could have resisted; merely sexy Lindy he could have enjoyed. But this was Lindy evoking the kind of bond they had once had, in which they told each other their deepest desires and fears, as Jason had never told anyone else. This was the Lindy of long sweet conversations in bed after orgasm, wrapped in each other’s arms or propped up on pillows with glasses of wine or making the kind of silly jokes that grew from a long marriage. But he could not tell her that in the eyes of the United States Army, he was no longer in command of Monterey Base, was under arrest, was facing court-martial. That deception was known only to six other people, all bound to silence, and he could not be the one to break the secrecy that was eventually going to endanger so many. He had, after all, been its architect.
So he said, “It’s nothing,” and watched disappointment and then hurt darken Lindy’s eyes. And still she didn’t give up.
“All right. I don’t believe you, but I’m not going to press it.”
Lindy! When hadn’t she pressed, pried, burned through his reticence with a laser cutter? That was why he’d been able to be himself with her in the first place, why he had fallen in love with her. She had pushed him into love, and he had landed into more happiness than he’d thought possible. Until the war began.
He still loved her. He knew that now. Jane had been a momentary attraction; it was Lindy he wanted, needed. But it wasn’t fair to her to reconnect, not when chances were that Strople’s troops would execute him for treason. It would be too much like soldiers who quickly married before deployment, only to create widows and widowers. Jason had always considered that selfish behavior. Better to wait until you could offer, if not security, at least a living body. Until you were a little more in control of events.
Lindy said, “Spend tonight with me anyway, Jason. I just want to feel you next to me, inside me.” And she’d touched him, quickly and furtively, in that special caress only she knew that he responded to, and then tossed him a mischievous smile over her shoulder as she walked away.
Maybe his reasoning was wrong.
So he’d gone to her, and they’d tried to make love, and it had been a failure.
“It doesn’t matter,” she’d said, “it happens to all men occasionally. Look at the strain you’ve been under… it’s all right.”
“No.”
“Jason, love, you can’t control everything.”
The old accusation, and even though this time it hadn’t been an accusation, just a sweet reassurance, Jason had shut down. It was not all right with him. He’d said, “I think you should go now, Lindy.” His tone had been wrong and, stony-faced, he hadn’t corrected it. Lindy had left his quarters hurt and angry. He hadn’t gone after her.
Not fair to her, none of it. The rest of the night had been sleepless.
Dawn broke, pink and gold and angelic, over the burned forest. Then a knock on the door—Christ, this early? Hillson must never sleep. But it wasn’t Hillson.
“Sir,” said the guard, “Major Sullivan to see you.”
The scientists almost never requested to see Jason, especially at the command post. The daily reports to Jason from Lab Dome all said the same thing: no more information about brain changes. More v-comas were awakening, and all showed the same increased intelligence as the first ones. Dr. Steffens was working day and night on the gene drive for birds, with no results. No vaccine, no boosted human immunity. Nothing changed. And yet, here was the head of the vaccine team. Hope surged in Jason.
“Show her up.”
Major Denise Sullivan appeared at the command post with a sheaf of printouts and a puzzled face. “Sir? Something major to report on the virophage.”
“Proceed, Major. Do you have—”
“The vaccine? No. I’m sorry, I shouldn’t have started like that, it’s not the vaccine, it just has to do with virophage transmission, but I thought you should know…”
It wasn’t like her to be this flustered. Jason waited.
“We’ve been looking at how the virus affects those who don’t fall into comas. The controls, you know. The epidemiological graphs, which I’ve printed out for you in incremental time units, plotting blood samples versus—”
“Major,” Jason said, summoning patience, “cut to the chase. I don’t need the graphs. Just tell me what the graphs say about transmission.”
“Yes, sir.” She tilted her head slightly, obviously thinking how to phrase this simply enough for Jason, and he thought that she looked in that moment like a large bird.
She said, “Everybody is infected with virophage. Everyone here. But if you don’t have the allele, the virophage seems to leave your body after a period of time ranging from two days to seven. Your immune system fights it off. Like a rhinovirus.”
“A…”
“A cold. But if you are, or were, a v-coma, the virophage stays in you. And then you can go on infecting other people.”
“For how long?”
“Unknown. But from the contact diagrams we constructed, the transmission goes on after you come out of the coma. That seems to be how subjects twenty-nine and thirty-one contracted it. If you look at graph sixteen-A—”
“I will. But let me see if I understand this. I had the virophage, but it’s gone from my body now, and I can’t infect anyone else. Dr. Steffens, who was in a coma and is now out of it, can go on infecting people and if they have the right genes, they go into a v-coma and come out smarter.”
“Well, there are nuances that you haven’t… but yes, sir. Basically, yes. Metabolic cascades…”
“Major, I don’t want this discussed with anyone who doesn’t already know about it.”
“But, sir—”
“That’s an order, Major.”
Jason was thinking about Dolin, Winfield, Kandiss. If this intel entered the base’s rumor factory in some twisted form, it wouldn’t change who could or could not fall into v-coma, but it might fuel the anti-star-farer sentiment out there. Without the Return, after all, there would not be any virophage on Earth, nor any division among those who could spread it further and those who could not.
Jason said, “Leave those graphs with me. I want to study them. Anything else?”
“No, sir.” She left. But before Jason had time to study the virus-transmission graphs, Hillson appeared. The master sergeant’s entire body was so rigid it looked as if he were encased in invisible cement. This was Hillson in his most extreme rage.
“Sir,” Hillson said.
Jason said, “The second convoy has started from Fort Hood. Finally.”
“Yes, sir. I just received the encrypted call from Lieutenant Li.”
So whatever turmoil had been going on at Fort Hood, delaying a second convoy, had been solved, or subdued, or killed, and Strople was still in command. Or again in command. Either way, he was confident enough of his troops to now send a detachment rumbling north to claim the Return.