“How long?”
“I estimate ten to fourteen days, sir, but of course it depends on weather, on if New America attacks them, on the state of coastal highways.”
Those had not been maintained for ten years. Rock slides, forest encroachments, bridge collapses. The Strykers could pretty much go through or over anything, but not fast. And thanks to the climate shifts of global warming, which had been halted but not reversed, parts of the terrain between here and Texas were rainier and muddier this time of year than they had been in centuries.
“Did Li say anything else?”
“No, sir. The signal station will monitor the convoy’s progress via the Return. But there is something else.”
Of course there was. Hillson was not in this stiff, contained fury because the convoy had left Fort Hood. Jason waited.
“Six soldiers have deserted. Gone.” Hillson listed them, spitting out the names as if they were rotten fruit pits. “They took weapons, supplies, bivouac tents, and gear. Sometime in the night.”
Jason said nothing, a little surprised to learn that he was not surprised.
“Sir, I can organize a search party in half an hour. With quadcopters, or you can bring the spaceship down to—”
“No.”
Hillson blinked. “No?”
“No. Let them go. They can either be picked off by the enemy or found a settlement that—I assume all six are RSA survivors? They didn’t take any esuits?”
“All survivors. But, sir—they are deserters. In time of war.”
Jason understood what Hillson was not saying: Jason had executed Dolin but was taking no action against these six. Inconsistent, bad for discipline, bad for morale, Army regs…
“Hillson, let them go. In ten days I won’t want them here anyway.”
Hillson’s face crinkled into a fantastic terrain of bewilderment. Was there contempt there, as well? No, not yet. But Jason couldn’t tell, didn’t know, what Hillson would think about the much larger decision that Jason had to make soon. Hillson, loyal and tireless and meticulous, nonetheless lacked imagination.
In less than ten days.
But not yet.
“Yes, sir,” Hillson said unhappily.
The duty guard opened the door. “Sir? Dr. Patel is here.”
Christ, it was practically Grand Central Station in here. “Send her in. That’s all, Sergeant Hillson.”
“Yes, sir.”
Claire Patel walked in, her small upright figure stiff with determination. “Colonel Jenner, a word, please.”
“Certainly.”
“I’m concerned that the Awakened in the lab are working too hard. Doctors Steffens and Farouk, and the two lab techs who were in a coma before. Their bodies now require more energy and maybe more sleep—we don’t know why—but they’re hardly sleeping and they’re eating only when forced. All four of them are losing weight and starting to show signs of sleep-deprivation psychosis. The medical staff has tried reason, argument, and orders, and none of them will listen. As commander here, you could order them to preserve their own health.”
“How would I do that, Doctor? Except for Dr. Farouk, aren’t they all civilians?”
“We’re under martial law, aren’t we? Lock them in their rooms, or somewhere else, for six or seven hours and they’ll sleep. Put food in there. You could order that.”
“I could. I will not.” Didn’t she see the kind of resistance that imprisoning civilians—civilians!—“for their own good” would cause on a base already fragmented into military and scientists, those who welcomed the star-farers and those who resented them, those emerging as superintelligent and the rest of us poor slobs? She did not. All of them, Patel and Hillson and even Lindy, saw the situation here through their own lenses, and no other way.
“You won’t intervene to save their lives?”
“Are they in danger of imminent death?”
She hesitated. “No.”
Claire Patel was always honest; that was why he’d asked her that question. Jason said, “Is their work yielding any useful results?”
“Not yet.”
“Will it?”
“I don’t know.”
More honesty. Jason almost said, “Dismissed,” but not only should he not do that, it wasn’t necessary. Dr. Patel turned to go. But she had one more parting shot.
“Colonel Jenner, your grandmother has woken up. She’s not young. I hope she doesn’t overwork herself in the lab, as well.”
Marianne was not in the lab. She sat with Colin in the conference room. A group of Settlers had been in there with him, discussing plantings for the garden that had to be created all over again outside the dome since, while Marianne had been comatose, there had apparently been a terrible battle. Colin asked the Settlers to leave the room and they had, trailing children and bits of environmental conversation. Colin sat in a powerchair, his injured leg in some sort of cast, regarding his grandmother with intense curiosity.
“No,” she said, “you first. Tell me everything that happened while I was comatose. How were you hurt?”
He did. Part of her mind listened intently, although it was an effort to slow comprehension to the speed of his words. The rest of her mind kept evolving the thoughts that had seized her since she’d woken up four hours ago.
Night in the dome—dim lights, soft breathing beyond closed curtains, solitary footfalls in the corridor. She lay in the v-coma ward, yes. A narrow bed, a green Army blanket that was too warm. She didn’t move it yet. She lay absolutely still, mental fingers that were still Marianne tentatively touching her new mind, as if it were a lab specimen.
It was not. It was her. She was not fragmented, not fundamentally different. But her thoughts ran on parallel lines simultaneously, and the tracks crossed and recrossed, making connections she could not have made before. The image came to her of a yarn sculpture she had seen once, long ago, so intricately and fantastically knotted that each strand seemed to connect to every other in ways that her linear mind could not conceptualize.
Linear no longer.
She lay there for three hours, making neither movement nor sound, knotting strands. Her old watch, still on her wrist after journeying to the stars and back again, glowed with the time. Eventually, a nurse moved silently through the curtains.
“I’m awake,” Marianne said.
The nurse brought Lindy Ross. Marianne submitted to Lindy’s examination but said little. Lindy finished by saying, with unnecessary force, “Marianne, you must eat. Your brain is now using more glucose, and you are already in ketosis. I’m going to send food in here now.”
“All right,” Marianne said, and for the first time, Lindy smiled.
She ate. She walked up and down with an orderly, until he was satisfied that she would not fall. She dressed in her own clothes, which she found in a plastic bag under the bed. She wanted to talk to someone, but not Lindy, who had seemed agitated and distracted. Someone who might understand the thoughts in her head. Zack McKay was, Lindy said, asleep—“Finally!”—and shouldn’t be disturbed. Jane was still comatose, Ka^graa too hard to talk to without Jane’s translations. Claire, the nurse said, had gone to Enclave Dome. Dr. Steffens was here, but apparently she would not leave her lab work to talk to anyone, even Jason. Jason himself was out of the question. He would listen, but he would not care about the topics knotting themselves fantastically through her brain.
Ryan? No. Marianne loved her son, but he was now more frail than she had ever been.