More words Grandma wouldn’t like, but Colin let it go. “No. It’s the truth. I can hear the ground. So can Luke. And plants, too,” he added, in case the ground wasn’t enough to get him into the club. As soon as he was in, he’d figure out how to get Jason in, too.
Ava swung her head to look at Luke, then back at Colin. And then she burst into sobs. She covered her face with her hands and sunk to the floor, sitting on the remote. She sobbed and sobbed, and after a moment of fright, Luke reached out with his big pale hand and patted her skinny hunched back, over and over.
CHAPTER 21
S plus 6.5 years
Two months later, the ship was nearly complete. Workmen riveted and shouted in the main compartments, engineers tested displays on the pristine bridge, everyone viewed the containers being loaded into the hold. There were a lot of these, including food, mostly freeze-dried, for twenty-one people for three months.
Marianne said to Judy, “How do you know you need three months? Or twenty-one people?”
“We don’t.” Judy’s fingers flew over a keyboard, crunching some data incomprehensible to Marianne. They had stopped by Judy’s “office,” a cubicle in the raw-wood building closest to the ship. Everyone called the building “the command center,” although the commander, Jonah Stubbins, and his second, David Chin, actually worked elsewhere. This cavernous, ugly building was filled with scientists and engineers, working furiously on computers or arguing tensely across cheap conference tables. There were a lot of arguments. Marianne, who had never been around so much as a garden shed being built, let alone a starship from plans nobody fully understood, had begun to think the Venture would never get off the ground. Not unless it could be fueled by sheer hot air.
She said, “You don’t know how long it will take to get to World?”
“Wait just a moment… I just have to… there.” Judy turned her attention to Marianne. Judy looked tired, the broad planes of her face drawn down in sags. She wore overalls and another of her exquisitely embroidered silk shirts; the effect was of the world’s richest handyman. “We’re pretty sure the star drive distorts the fabric of space-time and that it won’t take much time at all to arrive at World. Of course, ‘not much time at all’ is a matter of debate, like everything else around here. But we don’t know how long we need to be there, or who will stay on the ship, or what. There are sleeping cubicles in the design for twenty-one people, so twenty-one people go.”
“From everything I’ve read, Terran space travel was planned with ships that were self-sufficient biosystems, at least as much as possible. Hydroponic tanks for growing food, algae-based air scrubbing, waste recycling. The Venture doesn’t have that.”
“There will be plants aboard,” Judy said.
“But it won’t be a sustainable closed biosystem.”
“We never got that to work even on Earth. You know that, Marianne.”
“So that means that nobody stayed aboard the mother ship when the Denebs came to New York seven years ago. It was empty.”
“That seems to be what it means, yes.” Judy grinned, a weary grin. “I know what you want to ask. So ask it.”
“Okay. Who are the twenty-one?”
“Nobody knows. Stubbins isn’t saying. Except, of course, for David Chin.”
“Do you want to go?”
Judy gave her a duh look. “Of course I want to go. Everybody here—well, most everybody—wants to go. But I don’t think my chances are good, not for the first trip. We’re all hoping for subsequent trips. What we want is a bus route to the stars, with regularly scheduled commuter routes. Don’t you want to go?”
Marianne said slowly, “I don’t know. Noah is there, but Ryan and Elizabeth and the boys are here, and—”
“I forgot—you’re a breeder. Well, that does tie you to terra firma, doesn’t it?”
“Judy, why am I really here? What does Stubbins want with Luke and Ava and Colin?”
Judy grasped Marianne’s shoulder. “Put on your coat and let’s go on over to the mess. I’m starving.”
Outside, Judy spoke in a low voice as rapid as her stride. For a short woman, she could move amazingly fast. “Nobody knows what Stubbins wants with those kids. Believe me, there’s a lot of speculation. Luke’s been here since site selection. So you tell me: What’s special about these three kids? Is it true that they can hear in infrasonic and ultrasonic ranges?”
“It’s true of Colin and Luke. I don’t know about Ava. She doesn’t talk to me.”
“She doesn’t talk to anyone but the other kids. A prickly pear, that one. But Stubbins wanted her badly enough to pretend he’s going to marry her mother. He never will, of course. Why don’t you ask him why he wants these kids? You’re the one with a right to know.”
“God, I’ve tried!” Marianne said. “I can’t get to him. When he’s on site, and I actually succeed in finding him, he’s rushing off to somewhere else, hollering folksy crap at me over his shoulder. ‘Catch you soon, lil’ lady!’ And Belinda—she’s not here, either. She’s off getting reconstructive surgery for her face, which was apparently her price for coming here. Ava’s next.”
“Well, that’s good. That poor kid needs—What the fuck?”
Sirens sounded all over camp: three short blasts and one long, over and over. Security had conducted extensive drills; this pattern meant “not a drill”! Marianne, with Judy panting behind her, took off at a dead run for the underground bunker where Allison Blake would take the children. The bunkers were small and crude, except for communications, but they could protect everybody from anything less than ballistic missiles.
The attackers had ballistic missiles.
Packed into the rocky caverns, shivering without their coats, the four children pressed close to her and Allison. Marianne put her coat around Colin and Ava, the smallest two, without taking her eyes off the bunker’s LAN-fed TV. The ground underneath her was hard and damp; moisture dripped along the walls; Ava clutched Marianne’s arm hard enough that the girl’s untrimmed nails drew pinpoints of blood. Marianne felt none of it. Her gaze never left CNN.
Minutes ago a short-range tactical missile—“possibly a Scud” said the visibly shaken newscaster—had hit the California site of SpaceX. Images of twisted wreckage, burning buildings. On the Internet, credit was being claimed by ACWAK, No Contact with Alien Killers.
Judy said raggedly, “A Scud! Those things can carry nuclear warheads. This one must’ve carried only conventional explosives… ‘only,’ Christ, listen to me… fuck them to hell!”
Marianne said, “How could an American hate group get a Scud?”
“Oh, fuck, Marianne, the Russians sold them to everybody. Congo had Scuds. They’ve been drifting around ever since, sold and resold on the black market. They can be launched from mobile launchers and their accuracy within, say, fifty miles isn’t too bad. Although these fuckers got really lucky, the—”
Colin said in a small voice, “You’re saying bad words.”
“Sorry, kid.”
Jason said, “Is that spaceship all the way wrecked?”
“Yes,” Marianne said. She pried Ava’s nails off her hand. But we’re completely safe, she wanted to say—but was it true? She turned her full attention to the children.
“Listen, all of you. Mr. Stubbins has really, really good security here. You know that. I don’t think any missiles will ever get to his ship. We’re—”
“But you ain’t all the way sure,” Ava said, with a mixture of defiance and fear that tore at Marianne’s heart.