Private McNally, he of the spotty education and no specialist training, had invented two more improvements to ordnance. Another Awakened soldier, Specialist Kelly Swinford, had joined him. She was not, Dr. Holbrook told Jason, quite his intellectual equal—but then the old man had thrown both hands into the air in a completely unmilitary gesture and said, “I can’t really tell. They are different. No, not different, they all still have the same personalities but they are… different.” Jason had not pressed him. He understood.
Five people were still in v-coma, including Branch Carter and one child, Devon James.
The convoy from Fort Hood was a week out from Monterey Base.
Jason’s father and brother were planning a new Settlement, because We can’t live like this for much longer. Ryan, Jason suspected, would be glad to go on doing so, but Ryan would go where Colin led.
Major Sullivan and her team were closer to a vaccine against RSA, but not close enough. Nor had Major Vargas’s team made any progress on a way to tweak the human immune system to fight off RSA.
And Dr. Steffens…
Ah, not yet. Give him a few more minutes before he had to go to Toni Steffens.
Jason walked into the kitchen of Lab Dome mess. Big pots bubbled on a stove. Two Settlers, teenagers, rose hastily from the floor, straightening their clothes. The boy’s ears blushed bright red. Jason said, “As you were,” even though neither was a soldier, and withdrew. The little incident cheered him. Those kids, who had been small children at the time of the Collapse, had found pleasure, maybe even joy, in the midst of crisis. More power to them.
Hillson was increasingly wooden to Jason, and Jason knew he couldn’t hold off Hillson much longer. Hillson’s loyalty was beyond question, but the decision Jason had come to might shatter that loyalty beyond repair. Or not. Either way, Jason would talk to him next.
Right after Toni Steffens.
He made his way to the labs, only to be told that Dr. Steffens was in the underground annex. At the corridor leading to the stairwell, the guard saluted and opened the door. Jason put on an esuit and descended the staircase, his boots ringing on the alien metal. He entered the negative-pressure bird lab.
It was pandemonium down here. Cages and cages of noisy sparrows, none of them happy. Wings flapped, beaks opened, bird shit fell through bars, females squawked as he approached caged and artificial nests. Full-grown birds, fledglings, eggs. How had Dr. Steffens got them to breed so fully in captivity?
Not that Jason would understand it if he were told.
A harried lab tech nodded as he scattered seeds into cages. Jason called over the noise, “Where’s Dr. Steffens?” The man pointed.
Behind a stack of cages, she bent over a lab bench, a short dumpy woman with lethal bird shit on her pants, the brain of a genius in her head. Jason had a sudden incongruous picture of Toni Steffens accepting a Nobel Prize, standing in her bird-stained outfit at the Stockholm Concert Hall before the king, in a room full of chirping sparrows.
“Dr. Steffens.”
She looked up, startled. “Now?”
“Yes.” He hadn’t told anyone, not even her, when it would happen. Benjamin Franklin, again, with his wise counsel on secrets.
“I need a few minutes.”
“Yes.” Jason headed for decon, glad to escape the bird lab. He waited in the small space outside the airlock. To his left was the stockade, in which sat the deranged Corporal Porter, who had attacked Jason’s grandmother. Porter was another problem. Holbrook was trying different meds, although so far all they had done was reduce Porter to zombielike quiescence.
Eventually Toni emerged from the bird lab beside a lab assistant and a loaded carry-bot. The assistant wore a look that Jason recognized all too welclass="underline" terrified but determined. He’d seen that look on the faces of new recruits in Congo, some of whom had never made it home. Five trusted soldiers from J Squad, fully armed and armored, clattered down the steps.
The eight of them went through the airlock to the tunnel beyond. Parts of the tunnel walls and ceiling had shaken loose during Jason’s relentless bombing of Monterey Base, but the carry-bot was able to navigate three-quarters of the way to the hatch. When rubble blocked the bots’ progress, everyone carried the cages of birds over the debris. J Squad opened the hatch and took up defensive positions, with more soldiers covering them in the woods. However, as Jason had expected, the trees were empty of enemy. New America, reeling from the destruction of Sierra Depot, was most likely regrouping, or concentrating on attacking the undomed convoy.
The cages were lugged up the stairs, one by one. There should have been, Jason thought, some kind of ceremony. What Jason, Toni, and the lab assistant were doing would change the world just as fundamentally as anyone who had ever won a Nobeclass="underline" Alfred Nobel with his dynamite, Salk with his vaccine, Crick and Watson with their double helix. Just as much as anything since the spore cloud.
One by one, Toni and her assistant opened the cages.
Jason watched the last of the sparrows flap off into the trees. Probably some would die, eaten by predators. But in the spring, most would mate. The males, all sterile, would fail to impregnate their wild brides. The females would also mate, producing sterile male offspring and females who would carry the drive into the next generation. As the sterility spread, helped by Toni Steffens’s other, diabolically clever gene tweaks, there would be fewer and fewer sparrows. A “selective sweep,” Toni called it. Sterile males would have to go farther afield to find mates. They could—because they had, once before—cover two continents and, eventually perhaps reach Asia from Alaska. It had happened before.
Fewer and fewer sparrows. Eventually, there would be none. And RSA would die with them.
How long? Toni Steffens had not known for sure: too many variables. What she had known for sure was that Jason’s decision to release the birds would change Earth’s ecology even more profoundly than had the temporary elimination of eight species of mice by the original spore cloud. Sparrows filled more ecological functions than mice. Jason even knew what they were, but in case his knowledge was incomplete, there were going to be outraged scientists eager to shout it at him.
This evening. Time was running out.
For now, he stood quietly, watching a genetically altered sparrow, unwitting time bomb to its own species, perch on the branch of a blue oak. Finally he said to Toni Steffens, “All right. Let’s tell them.” And into his implant, “J Squad—all troops back to the dome. Perimeter patrol—all troops inside. Repeat, all troops inside.”
“Sir?” said a startled voice. Perimeter patrol was always maintained, in case of messages from the signal station.
“All troops inside.”
He tongued off the implant. To Toni he said, just as if she had been one of his soldiers, “Game on.”
Above the trees, a quadcopter hummed. Lieutenant Li, Specialist DeFord, and Corporal Michaelson, all undoubtedly mystified. The signal station had never been left empty before. But Jason wanted everyone here, no exceptions.
He opened the hatch to the tunnel. The sparrow on the blue oak spread its small wings and flew off.
The armory was the only space large enough to hold everyone, and then only when the FiVees and Bradley were jammed into one corner with the quadcopters on top of them. No room for many chairs; except for the old, people stood or sat on the floor. Jason and Toni climbed onto the hood of a FiVee, where everyone could see them. Half of J Squad stood in a solid line against the ordnance lockers; the other half made a cordon in front of Jason’s FiVee dais.
While people were being escorted from Enclave Dome to Lab Dome, while everyone was being brought through the open internal airlock to the armory, Jason had talked to Hillson. It had not gone well. Hillson stood now by the front left wheel of the FiVee, scowling. Whenever Jason glanced at his master sergeant, his stomach tightened.