“Yes.” She taped his hands together. As she started on his ankles, Stubbins twitched. Before she’d finished, his eyes opened.
They stared at each other.
Stubbins tried to buck his huge body toward her, but it was a feeble motion. Some ketamine still remained in his system. Then he started to curse, language so foul that Colin’s eyes opened wide. Marianne ripped off her shoe and then a sock and stuffed the sock into his mouth.
Judy laughed, the sound shaky but shocking. She did something else to the controls in front of her and all at once the cabin was filled with Russian voices.
“I have a channel open to the Russian ship,” Judy said unnecessarily. “Can you speak Russian?”
Marianne had only the phrases she’d learned to address a cleaning lady she and Kyle had once had: Please to clean stove today and Need more soap? She understood nothing of the sentences swirling around her. “No!” she said to Judy.
“Well, one of us better try. Look.”
Marianne glanced for the first time at the blue and green dots on the wall screen. They had moved much closer to each other.
Judy said, “I don’t think they can see us. Go.”
“Can they fire on us?”
“How the fuck should I know? Go!”
Marianne sat down in the seat Judy vacated, the drop into the chair a harder jar to her aching body than she expected. She said loudly, “Mest’! This is Dr. Marianne Jenner.”
Sudden silence. “I am on the Venture.” Maybe if she used simple words, someone aboard the Mest’ would know enough English to understand. Although the Mest’ had taken off as suddenly as the Venture and so was probably without a linguist. “We will not fire. This is a mistake!”
A torrent of Russian answered her.
“I don’t know what they’re saying!”
“They’re moving closer,” Judy said. She had taken Wilshire’s chair. And then, very softly, “I can fire first.”
“What? No!”
“Marianne, I’m not getting blown up when there’s a way I can defend myself.”
“You have no reason to think they’ll—”
“Why else are they moving closer?”
Marianne’s guts churned. She hadn’t known, hadn’t suspected this side of Judy. The Russian torrent became more insistent. Marianne said, “Nyet! Nyet! We will not fire! We will land our ship!”
More Russian.
Then Colin said at her elbow, “Say this, Grandma: ‘Sdayus.’ It means ‘I surrender.’”
“What… how do you know that, Colin?”
He hung his head. “Ataka! The game you wouldn’t let me and Jason play.”
A tremor shook her whole body. “Can you say, ‘I will not fire’?”
“You said that was a bad game.”
“Tell me.”
“It might not be right.”
“Tell me anyway! ‘I will not fire.’”
He screwed up his little face. “I think… maybe… it’s sort of like ‘Strelyat’ ne budu.’ That’s what Ivan says in level two when he puts down his gun.”
Marianne repeated the strange sounds, twice.
No response.
She turned back to Colin. Can you say, ‘We both should land now’?”
He shook his head.
“Try, Colin! Maybe ‘We go back now’?”
“What if I get it wrong?”
Then we all die. Her six-year-old grandchild looked at her from clear gray eyes. Colin’s little body stood stiffly beside her elbow. His lip trembled. She had no idea how much of this he understood.
She said gently, “Do the best you can, Col. ‘We go back now together.’”
“Maybe… ‘Poshli obratno umeste’?”
She said to the unseen Russians, “Poshli obratno umeste,” and held her breath.
A long silence. At the other console, Judy did something. Arming warheads?
She cried, “We go back together now! Poshli obratno umeste!”
Another eternity, and then a heavily accented voice said, “You first.”
Judy didn’t know how to land the Venture. However, she didn’t need to. As soon as she opened the communications frequency, NASA ground control took over. People who had worked on the United States Deneb ship destroyed by the superstorm three years ago were hastily brought online. It seemed there were hundreds of people who understood how to control the Deneb crafts, if not the underlying forces that animated them.
Not, Marianne thought, unlike human minds.
Stubbins, lying on the cabin floor, worked steadily and ineffectively at Marianne’s duct tape and made noises around the sock in his mouth. Both women ignored him. Marianne sat in the captain’s chair, Colin on her lap. Judy, in what had been Wilshire’s chair, followed instructions from NASA—push that button, then these two simultaneously, then—and the ship took over. The Venture landed lightly as a butterfly in the no-man’s land between the inner and outer fences of its building site. Immediately the ship was surrounded and besieged.
Judy sagged in the chair, her broken arm dangling at her side. Once the ship was down, she allowed her face to contort in the full assault of pain.
“Venture,” said a man’s voice on the encrypted channel that served the building site, “this is the FBI.”
Stubbins groaned.
“Who am I talking to?” said the FBI—Marianne incongruously pictured the entire Hoover Building squatting on the Pennsylvania scrub—in a calm, subtly reassuring voice. “Jonah Stubbins?”
“No,” Judy said. “This is—” She moved in her chair and gasped with sudden pain.
“Let me,” Marianne said. She put Colin down as far away from Stubbins as possible in the cramped space and stood behind Judy. Public speaking was what she did. “This is Dr. Marianne Jenner. Dr. Judith Taunton and I are in control of the bridge, and Jonah Stubbins is in our custody for assault, attempted murder, and bioterrorism. Dr. Taunton is injured.”
“This is Special Agent in Charge Jack Warfield. Are you coming out of the Venture, Dr. Jenner?”
“Yes, of course we are. But first we need help. An engineer, Eric Wilshire, is somewhere else in the ship, I don’t know where. He may have found weapons. I have a child with me here. I can’t open the door from the bridge to the main cabin until I know we’ll be safe.”
A long pause. Then Agent Warfield said in that same hostage-negotiator voice, “I see. Why might Eric Wilshire be a threat to you?”
Because we’ve hog-tied his boss and killed two other men. Marianne didn’t say this. Whatever she did say now was going to be very important. There were going to be investigations, hearings, maybe even trials for murder. She needed to present everything in the best possible light.
She said, “Has the Russian spaceship returned to Earth? We made an agreement with them that both ships would land and avert any kind of international problems. That was our first concern.”
Another long pause. Warfield was conferring with someone, probably several someones. The wall screen showed the people and vehicles around the ship, and a larger mob, probably press, beyond the outer fence.
“Yes,” Warfield finally said. “The Stremlenie has returned to Vostochny, Dr. Jenner. We can send in people to protect you and to tend to Dr. Taunton’s injuries as soon as you release the door lock to the Venture. Can you do that from the bridge?”
“I don’t know how. Judy?”