Judy shook her head.
Colin said, “Some machines are coming.”
“I’m sorry,” Marianne said. “We don’t know how.”
“We have experts here who will explain it.”
Marianne followed NASA’s instructions. They didn’t work. She said, “The lock must be customized.”
“Is Mr. Stubbins conscious? Can he tell you how?”
“He has a sock in his mouth,” Marianne said, and all at once was conscious of her one bare foot. It felt cold. She had to get control of this situation.
“Agent Warfield, I’ll take the sock out of Jonah Stubbins’s mouth, but I don’t know if he will cooperate. But before we do that, I want to tell you for the record exactly what happened here. Step by step. Can I do that? Will you please record this?”
“Certainly,” Warfield said. “We very much appreciate your cooperation, Dr. Jenner. Go ahead.”
Marianne took a deep breath and began. Two sentences in, bullets exploded against the door of the bridge.
“Stop shooting!” Marianne screamed. “Stop!” She ran to Colin and stood between him and the door.
“We’re not shooting,” Warfield said. “It’s not us. Dr. Jenner, are you all right? Can you hear me?”
More bullets, a spray of missiles against the outer door. Wilshire. Could the bullets pierce the door? It was heavy metal, and the lock on this side, Marianne realized for the first time, was a manual bolt because Stubbins’s paranoia had wanted a shield against the digital dexterity of his own crew. A last-ditch fortress. Just in case.
She shouted over the din, “It’s the engineer! Wilshire! He’s firing at the door with some sort of heavy-duty gun, you need to come in and stop him!”
No answer. But then she heard the high-pitched whine of a laser cutter, and the bridge wall screen went dark and shattered. They’d been ready for something like this. They were cutting their way onto the bridge, careful to destroy not the consoles that controlled alien forces nobody understood, but only the human communications devices that everybody did.
Wilshire must have heard it, too. The hail of bullets stopped.
It took an astonishingly short time for the SWAT team, in full armor, to burst through the jagged metal hole onto the bridge. Marianne, with Colin in her arms, said, “I’m Dr. Jenner.” Judy gave the men surrounding her a weary, pain-filled grimace.
Marianne said, “There are mice loose in the ship, infected with a very contagious version of a deadly virus. Do not let any of them escape. I repeat—You cannot let any of those mice escape. Jonah Stubbins was stockpiling dangerous and illegal living weapons of bioterrorism.”
Stubbins, his mouth still stopped with Marianne’s sock, closed his eyes, and every muscle in his huge body sagged with epic, monumental defeat.
CHAPTER 24
S plus 6.9 years
Ryan and Marianne sat in wing chairs in the day room of Oakwood Gardens. The day room looked, Marianne thought, more like a living room in Georgetown than a mental-health center. The distinguished, dark-toned portraits on the wall could have been nineteenth-century ancestors of some senator or congressman. A bouquet of June roses sat on the mantel. The Chippendale bookcases, worn oriental rug, and nautical pillows looked like they belonged to the sort of people who summered at Newport.
They were the only occupants of the room. This was a special visit and the other patients were at lunch. A nurse hovered in the doorway, but the room was so big that her presence didn’t feel obtrusive. Warm rain beat sideways against the tall windows. When Marianne had first arrived, Ryan had seemed troubled by the weather, but now his full attention was on his mother. Because he had seemed so distracted, she had begun to talk.
“The boys are with me, and Luke, too. You don’t know who Luke is, do you? He was living under some murky arrangement with Jonah Stubbins. When Stubbins was arrested for domestic terrorism, I took Luke with me. We’re all living near my old college. The boys are doing fine, you don’t have to worry about them.”
Ryan said nothing. But he looked, for the first time since he’d come to Oakwood, as if what she was saying genuinely mattered to him. She didn’t dare stop talking.
“Judy Taunton will stand trial, too, for killing a man named Andrew Stone. You don’t know about that and I won’t explain it now, but Judy’s attorney is positive that she’ll get off. Actually, a whole bunch of Stubbins’s people are being detained until the FBI sorts out who knew what about the mice.”
Ryan didn’t ask about the mice, and Marianne didn’t explain. Nor did she tell him that no charges had been filed against her for Wolski’s murder; the district attorney had decided it was self-defense. Marianne had no idea how much Ryan understood, or had been told, of what had happened aboard the spaceship. Maybe nothing. She was now talking as much to herself as to him, saying aloud all the things that had kept her awake nights during these last painful months. Once she’d started, she couldn’t stop.
“The Venture has been taken over by the government. Some law about seizing property involved in terrorism. I doubt Stubbins will ever get it back.”
“But you know the strange thing, Ryan? The thing that doesn’t fit? Stubbins’s pharmaceutical company just released the drug he developed for children born after the spore cloud. It fast-tracked through the FDA trials without a single hitch. It blocks ultrasonic and infrasonic hearing, so that those who can’t do what Colin and Luke and Ava can, won’t need Calminex. Won’t be little zombies. Stubbins did that. The same Stubbins that could commit an atrocity like weaponizing HFRS.”
Ryan didn’t even blink. His steady, sharp gaze was a beacon, or her need for a beacon.
“I was wrong,” she said. “Completely wrong, a hundred eighty degrees wrong. But I thought that by urging the spaceship to be built no matter what, I was helping promote human cooperation and brotherhood. That’s how I felt when I was researching aboard the Embassy. When Harrison and I were running the Star Foundation. When I was helping Stubbins get to World. I thought that because Worlders and Terrans are both human and not separated by much evolutionary time, we should just establish open communication.”
She let her hands rise, then fall back to her lap. Ryan’s gaze stayed on her face.
“But I was wrong. It can’t be that simple. We can’t have an open highway between Earth and World. It has to be… oh, I don’t know, a toll road. With checkpoints so that not everyone with the money and expertise can just drive past. Because you were right, Ryan. You were right all along.”
His eyes, so completely without Noah’s and Elizabeth’s beauty, sharpened.
“No,” Marianne corrected herself, “you weren’t completely right. You were right to say that on World, we would be an invasive species. An organism not in its native ecological niche, infecting the Worlders with pathogens like Jonah Stubbins. He was a pathogen, yes. But the answer isn’t to never go to World, or anywhere else. The answer is to do what Noah did, to slowly infect each other. In a controlled way. With restrictions on who can go to World, and why. And on who can come here. A slow journey toward brotherhood. Like any two clans would have done when our species was still whole, on the savannah, before Worlders left us in the first place.”
Ryan said something, very low.
“I’m sorry,” Marianne said, “I didn’t hear you? Ryan?”
He said, “I did it.”
She didn’t ask what he meant. She knew. Knew, too, that this secret was what had been destroying him ever since the Embassy bombing. Marianne’s heart shattered and rose into her throat; she couldn’t breathe. Her son had arranged for Evan’s death, for the deaths of the other scientists—