If Tomorrow Comes

CHAPTER 15

The sun stained a faint strip of sky near the horizon, the rest obscured by thick clouds. A stiff breeze bent the trees in the distance, and occasionally a puff of spicy scent rode the air through the open east door of the compound. Salah could have done without the wind, but at least it wasn’t raining. Yet. Dawns were cool on Kindred and he shivered, but not from cold. He wore his Terran clothes, shoes and pants and jacket, and he needed to be quick out the door.

It was vaccine day. Lamont did not want Salah to be among those leaving the compound.

Steve and Josh McGuire had arrived during the night. The first-expedition brothers looked so much alike they could have been twins. Large, silent, shaggy, they looked exactly like what they had been on Terra and were now on Kindred: miners. Dirt seemed permanently embedded under their nails, in the seams of their faces. Isabelle had told Salah that they had always kept to themselves. The copper mine they had gone to work in fifteen years ago, they now owned due to a combination of superior expertise, insanely hard work, and isolation. They participated in no social activities near the mine. They had learned only as much of the language as necessary. Nominally they belonged to Isabelle’s lahk, but they rarely visited, not even for illathil. They took no lovers; in the rich interconnecting gossip of the lahks, everyone would have known. They had come to the compound now, at the twelfth hour, only because of the spore cloud.

“I greet you,” Salah had said, first in Kindred and then in English. They stared at him. Steve finally nodded; Josh turned away with a look Salah recognized. On Earth, he’d encountered it whenever he was the sole Arab-American in a conservative backwater town.

These were the Terrans that would accompany him into the camp.

“They’re there only for protection,” Noah said, “or at least the illusion of protection. Just to deal with any pushing and shoving. They look threatening, is all.”

“They are threatening,” Salah said. “They’re armed.”

“No, Doctor, that’s not possible. We don’t—”

“They’re armed,” Salah said flatly. “Ask them.”

Noah, looking impatient, had asked. He’d returned slightly shaken. “They have guns. Kindred-made guns. I didn’t know how the… they can’t go into the camp like that.”

“Isn’t that Isabelle’s decision?” Salah said, knowing it was. Isabelle was mother to the Terran lahk since Marianne, the oldest woman, had refused the position. Salah wanted as much protection as possible for Isabelle. If Steve and Josh had possessed guns for a while without killing anyone, they were probably not wild-eyed and trigger-happy.

Noah, defeated, held a long colloquy with the McGuires. The brothers kept their guns.

The vaccine team would go into the camp in three groups of three. Each group held someone who could speak Kindred to explain and soothe, a scientist to administer vaccine, and a Terran to handle any mild rebellion. For major rebellion, they had the Rangers.

But not accompanying them. Both Noah and Isabelle had argued with Lieutenant Lamont, who remained firm. More than firm; his air of sly triumph had driven Salah from antipathy to rage. He disliked the Rangers on principle, but for Lamont he felt contempt. Racists always deserved contempt.

“It isn’t my mission to vaccinate Kinnies,” he’d told Isabelle. “My mission is to protect members of the Second Terran Expedition and get them home safely, which is why none of them are going with you. Your so-called lahk can do what it likes, but my squad will provide you only with cover if you choose to retreat. That’s all. I’m not risking good troops on a medical mission to insurgents, that has no chance of succeeding anyway.”

Isabelle had asked mildly, “Do your soldiers agree with you, Lieutenant?”

“Irrelevant, Ms. Rhinehart. Subject closed.”

Provide you only with cover. Which meant a chance to shoot Kindred if necessary, but not to make possible saving more lives.

That had been last night. Now nine people assembled in Big Lab: Isabelle, Noah, Ka^graa, the McGuires, three more Kindred, Salah. They walked through the east door toward the refugee camp, Salah in the center of them. It would take the entire US Marine Corps to stop him. He was a doctor; Isabelle was going; no punk lieutenant two-thirds his age was going to push him around. And what could Lamont, stationed by the east door with Zoe Berman, both in full kit, actually do to stop him? Shoot?

“Stop, Doctor!” Lamont said.

Salah kept walking, waiting for Lamont to seize him, or to order Berman to do so. Would she? Of course. Would the McGuires try to stop that? Probably not; their investment in this was minimal. They weren’t the kind of men who avoided danger, but neither did they look possessed of humanitarian impulses. If Berman or Lamont fought with Salah, there was no doubt whatsoever that Salah would lose.

The order didn’t come. It took a moment before Salah realized why. Lamont was protecting the second-expedition members, but only those he considered fully human. Despite his posturing, he really didn’t care what happened to Salah as long as they had Claire as doctor.

Towel-head. Dune coon. Camel fucker. Salah had heard them all.

Just as they reached the edge of the camp, Salah looked back at Lamont. He couldn’t see the lieutenant’s face under his helmet and behind his goggles. But his stance was completely different from the man who’d bristled with irritable exhaustion last night. Lamont stood with alert confidence, every line of him controlled and full of power.

Why?

The camp had not been told that the vaccine was coming today, to avoid any organized rush. Nor did the refugees know that only children would be receiving the limited supplies of vaccine. But as the nine people approached from the compound, tents opened and men rushed out, stared, ducked back in. Women starting their morning cook fires stopped, eyes even wider than evolution had provided. Noah began in loud Kindred, “I greet you! We bring a gift for your children, who carry the hopes of all our futures—”

It had begun.

The sun disappeared behind the looming clouds, and the wind smelled of rain.

Owen was different this morning.

Leo knew it as soon as he saw the lieutenant, and immediately he knew why. Shit. Well, not Leo’s call, and it wasn’t like he hadn’t done it himself. Only once, though. Once was enough.

His eyes met Zoe’s as they went through weapons check, and then cut sideways to Owen. Leo raised his eyebrows. Zoe, grim, gave a small nod and put on her helmet.

They crouched on top of the roof, Zoe with her SCAR and Leo with the long-range sniper rifle. The nine people in the vaccinating groups crossed the perimeter. Salah Bourgiba was among them, which surprised Leo, but Owen hadn’t stopped the doctor and that, too, was Owen’s call. A sudden fragment from last night’s conversation with Isabelle invaded his mind: Damn, Leo, you’re almost Kindred yourself in the way you accept authority! She’d been teasing, but somehow the remark stung a little anyway.

She was there, too, walking beside Bourgiba. Now Isabelle, Josh McGuire, and a Kindred scientist split off from the rest and headed slightly north, toward a group of tents where three women stood outside, little kids in their arms or clinging to their legs. Leo moved his scope slightly in that direction.

The camp started to boil. That’s how Leo pictured it—a big pot of water that usually simmered but now started to bubble faster, throwing off heat and steam. Some men and women went into tents; some came out of them. Groups formed, dissolved, reformed. Steve McGuire, bulky next to the slim Kindred, stood between Llaa^moh¡ and a woman who was screaming at her. Noah Jenner gestured as he talked with a group of men. Isabelle put her hand on a woman’s arm, probably trying to persuade her to let them vaccinate her child. The woman first waggled her chin, which meant no, and then moved her head side to side, which—it had taken Leo a while to adjust to this—meant yes. She held out the kid, who immediately opened its mouth to scream.

“Christ,” Zoe muttered, too low for the radio to pick up. “Chaos.”

Owen said, “Brodie, report.”

“No weapons visible, not yet. A group of men forming at eleven o’clock, they look angry. People rushing from tent to tent, probably spreading the news about vaccinating just kids.”

“Copy. Berman, see anything different?”

“Seems there are more people total than yesterday. Maybe snuck in at night.”

“Brodie?”

“Could be. Hard to be sure.”

“Anything else?”

“No, sir.”

But there was. Leo saw the Kindred cops he’d sort of recruited, Lu^kaj^ho and three others, moving through the crowd. They had on the cloaklike things they wore for rain, although it wasn’t raining. Did that mean they had weapons underneath? That wasn’t part of what Leo had, laboriously, instructed them to do, and not part of Kindred life as Isabelle described it. Although Kindred life was obviously changing as it—maybe—came to an end.

“Something going on now at ten o’clock, four hundred yards,” Leo said. “A group of men wearing cloaks, possible weapons underneath, moving toward Noah Jenner’s group—no, they went into a tent.”

Tension prickled Leo’s skin like lice. For ten minutes, nothing happened. The three groups from the compound explained, argued, stuck syringes into kids. Women without kids in tow moved from tent to tent. Were they just spreading news, or were carrying messages about an attack? If Lu^kaj^ho detected the latter, he would signal Leo.

Jenner’s and Bourgiba’s groups moved farther into the camp; Isabelle’s still worked the tents closer to the perimeter. The air filled with the cries of children, mingling with those of birds wheeling overhead.

No, not birds—these were closer to reptiles, Isabelle had told him, and were called… something that began with B or maybe P…

Then it all happened at once.

Lu^kaj^ho raised his arm in signal to Leo. Three different groups of men, boys, and a few women, all cloaked, emerged from three scattered tents and walked purposefully toward the perimeter. Two of them took a circuitous route, keeping groups of people or tents or vaccinators between themselves and the compound. The third, moving faster, came directly on.

“Here they come!” Zoe said.

Owen said, “The first motherfucker that sets one toe onto the perimeter, open fire.”

Get down, Isabelle! But she didn’t. She saw the men and began running toward them, leaving the Kindred scientist holding a child with Steve McGuire standing beside him. Did Isabelle think she could talk down this group? No chance…. Leo knew a full-out-fucking-serious attack when he saw it.

A man rushed into the open zone and Leo dropped him.

He hoped that would stop it. It didn’t. The others hit the dirt but they didn’t open fire. One of the men not in the group ran into the perimeter, pulled something from his cloak, and hurled it at the compound. Steve McGuire, closest, pulled a gun and fired, but someone else shot him in the back.

A bomb—the fucker had hurled a bomb. He would find out soon enough that a Molotov wasn’t going to stop anything. These people had no idea what ordnance was, they couldn’t make anything that could—

It wasn’t a Molotov. A huge explosion at the east door blew out the wall of the compound, knocking Leo off the roof. He fell eight feet and landed hard, but a second later was on his feet, still clutching his rifle. Smoke thick as cotton filled the air. Leo coughed and stumbled, unable to see anything. Gunfire from above—Zoe was still firing. Kandiss and Owen, they’d been right in front of the east door….

Figures rushed past him in the smoke and flying debris. The compound was breached and enemy flowed inside in search of more vaccine… was there any more? Incongruously, Leo realized he didn’t know.

All this took only a nanosecond. Then some of the smoke cleared and Leo was firing at the enemy still running toward the compound. When they either were dead or had turned tail, he turned toward the east door. Kandiss lay there, his huge body still, and an insurgent was raising a pipe gun to fire. Leo swung his weapon around. But before he could shoot, a crack! came from his right and the enemy fell. Leo spun around. Isabelle stood there, blackened from smoke and dirt, holding Steve McGuire’s gun.

“Get down!” Leo yelled, at the same moment that Zoe’s voice crackled over the radio, “No more enemy approaching!”

“Fire if they do,” Owen said. “Brodie, Kandiss, room clearing!”

“Kandiss is hit,” Leo said. “I’m coming in.”

Half the east wall was gone off the compound. Injured or dead lay on the floor of the Big Lab. Screams came from the clinic. Leo and Owen ran down the walkway.

In the first room, three Kindred scientists stood backed against the far wall. Two men stood in front of them, spinning around as Leo and Owen entered. The men both fired, but Leo and Owen were faster. The pipe guns sprayed the ceiling as the men fell.

Other rooms held more Kindred, one actually on his knees peering under a pallet for vaccine. All of them dropped their pathetic weapons and raised their hands. Leo kicked away the guns and Kindred scientists rushed in to tie them up.

In the last room, at the far end of the clinic, a Kindred held Noah Jenner’s little girl, a knife at her throat. Marianne Jenner lay on the floor where he had flung her.

Leo didn’t even hesitate. He had a clear shot, he had surprise on his side, he had the man’s stupidity—the fucker didn’t even hold the kid to cover his own face. Leo fired and the man’s brains splattered on the wall behind him. He dropped Lily, who screamed and screamed.

Marianne Jenner moved, moaned, raised her head, and crawled toward her granddaughter.

Owen said, “Brodie, bring in Kandiss, then take the roof with Berman. I’ll take the east door.”

There was no east door anymore, but Leo got the point. He sprinted back down the covered walkway. The vaccinators rushed into Big Lab, including Isabelle and Bourgiba. But not enough vaccinators—who had been killed? Leo heard Salah say, “Isabelle, triage… where is Claire? Somebody find her—”

Kandiss was moving feebly on the ground. Alive, then. Leo dragged him through the nonexistent wall and over to Bourgiba. “Doctor!”

Bourgiba looked up from a Kindred that even Leo could see was too far gone to survive and ran to Kandiss. “Ranger, can you hear me?”

Kandiss moaned.

“Open your eyes and look at me.”

Kandiss’s eyelids twitched, then slowly opened.

“How many fingers am I holding up?”

“T-two.”

“Excellent.” Bourgiba asked a few more questions, peered into Kandiss’s eyes with a tiny flashlight, removed his helmet and ran his hands over Kandiss’s head. “You’ve probably got a concussion—there’s a nasty bump on your head—but I think you’ll be fine. Any other injuries?”

“No,” Kandiss said, although Leo suspected there were. But he had seen Special Forces compensate for all kinds of serious wounds, just putting the pain and damage on hold until the mission was over. Airborne troops with injuries from a hard landing went on the assault anyway; soldiers bleeding enough to turn pant legs dripping red nonetheless took the objective.

Kandiss staggered to his feet. Leo said, “Join Lamont outside.”

Bourgiba had moved on to the next body. People moaned and tried to move. Glassware, belatedly, fell along with its shattered shelf and smashed on the floor. Bourgiba yelled, “Somebody find Claire!”

Isabelle said, “I’ll look.”

Leo climbed back onto what was left of the roof beside Zoe. Nothing to the west or north. To the east and south, the camp was emptying as people ran, carrying kids and who-the-fuck-knew what else. It was chaos.

Thunder rumbled, and it started to rain.

Rain was good. Rain was wonderful. This planet wanted Austin to succeed. Proof: When the bomb exploded, Dr. Patel was standing in the Big Lab, and a piece of flying something hit her and knocked her down but didn’t really hurt her! It couldn’t have been better if Austin had planned it himself.

He had planned everything else. You had to be ready, be alert, so that when your chance came, you could grab it. Leo had told him that. Austin wore his Terran clothes, the jacket pocket bulging. In the smoke and confusion and gunfire, he’d grabbed Dr. Patel—Claire—under the armpits and dragged her away from the east wall, just like he was keeping her safe from any more explosions. Well, he was.

He dragged her into the kitchen of the clinic, tied her hands behind her back, and gagged her. Quick, quick, not much time, someone might come…. But everyone out there was shooting and screaming and nobody watched the kitchen. The door, which led to the vegetable garden, had finally been boarded up and locked because Lieutenant Lamont had insisted. Just before dawn, Austin had loosened the boards, leaving just enough nails to hold the karthwood in place, and stolen one of the multiple keys—easy job! Now he pried off the boards, unlocked the door, and peered out. Refugees might have circled around the building….

But there was no one here. They were assaulting the east side, or maybe that and the south door, and the Rangers were busy stopping them. Everybody else was either hurt or tending to hurt people. Austin couldn’t relock the doors or replace the karthwood, but he didn’t have to. Noah would know where he was going, so no use trying to cover up his tracks. He just needed to get there with Claire before anybody came after them.

Her eyes opened. She looked around, tried to scream and couldn’t, and began to kick him.

But he was prepared for that, too. He fished the bioplast box from his pocket, drew in a huge breath, and held the fluid-soaked cloth to her face. She struggled for a minute and then she was out again.

He dragged her away and gasped for breath.

This was the hardest part. He could be seen from the roof of the compound until he reached the karthwood grove fifty meters away. Ranger Berman was on the roof, firing—Austin could just see the top of her head from this angle—and might turn around. Austin dragged Claire as fast as he could across the stony field. Two grazing pel^aks, impervious to rain, raised their heads and stared, chewing. He was astonished that Claire was so light. Tiny, light, so pretty…. And it was a good thing he was so big and strong, not like that wimp Graa^lok. There were things Austin could do that Graa^lok, for all his brains, could not!

The clouds roared and a hard rain began.

Harder to drag her through the mud. One sandal came off and he put it in his pocket. Thirty meters to the trees… ten meters…. they were under the trees.

Austin put her down and bent over, gasping for breath. Only for a minute, though. He had to get her as far away as he could. Maybe they would think she disintegrated in the explosion and that’s why they couldn’t find her body. He didn’t know much about explosions.

It would be easier when she came to. Then he could make her walk, even run. But what if she didn’t come to? The knockout stuff was from school, they’d used it to knock out leelees to study. What if Austin had given her too much? What if she died?

Panicky, he stopped to put his ear to her mouth. She breathed.

She smelled of soap and flowers.

The rain tore through the leaves above them, pelting down.

“I shoulda known,” Joshua McGuire said. “We use that explosive in the mines. Some of my miners went missing last week. I shoulda guessed, I shoulda checked the supply….”

Salah moved his hand toward McGuire, stopped it, withdrew. McGuire was not the sort to welcome such a gesture. He sat next to his brother’s body on the floor of the tiny room, formerly Marianne’s bedroom and before that the Kindred equivalent of a clinic exam room, where the three dead had been taken. Two Kindred scientists had been standing close to the east wall of Big Lab when it exploded. Steve McGuire had been shot in the field with a pipe gun.

Another seven from the compound had been injured, two severely but not critically. Llaa^moh¡, Noah’s wife, had a belly wound. A Kindred lab tech had his arm nearly torn off. They lay in what was now the ICU, after Salah’s makeshift surgery. He longed for the sick bay equipment on the Friendship, or even the unknown hospitals destroyed in the Stremlenie attack, even though they had probably been decades behind Terran facilities. Llaa^moh¡ would be lucky to escape peritonitis.

Noah had a concussion from having been hit in the head with a rock in the refugee camp. (A rock! In the age of star-faring!) Noah was dazed, with blurred vision and sensitivity to light. It was impossible to tell how badly off Kandiss was because the Ranger refused to leave his post long enough to be examined any further: “I’m fine, Doc.” The best Salah could do was watch him. Symptoms of concussion could worsen over as much as three days as the brain swelled.

Three more Kindred inside the compound had been injured, none seriously; they’d been standing farther back from the east wall.

There were also dead and injured among the Kindred in the camp, shot by the Rangers. Salah didn’t know how many. He would have treated them, but Lamont allowed no one to leave the compound.

And Claire Patel and Austin Rhinehart were missing.

“They’re hostages?” Isabelle said, fear creasing her face into a caricature. Salah had left McGuire to his mourning and gone back to Big Lab. Shattered glass and broken equipment littered the floor. Beyond the huge hole in the wall, the camp looked quiet; a lot of people had fled. The rain had stopped. Salah bent over his last patient, a young lab tech, and began picking glass from his arm. The young man gazed at him from wide, dark eyes, refusing to cry.

“Hostages?” Isabelle repeated. “In the camp?”

“No,” Lamont said. “Go back into the clinic with the others, ma’am. We can’t protect you as well here. Doctor, can you move that man yet?”

“No,” Salah said. He was finished with the young Kindred and the lab tech could easily walk, but he wanted to hear Isabelle, who was not leaving.

She said, “I don’t want you to protect me, Lieutenant. I want my nephew back! And we need Dr. Patel. What are you doing about retrieving them?”

“We can attempt extraction once we know where they’re being held. But my first priority is to secure this building. Now go back to the clinic.”

Isabelle still didn’t move. “I can go into the camp, talk to people, find out where they were taken.”

“You’re not among my protectees. If you want to go out there, I won’t stop you. But I won’t risk my soldiers guarding you, either.”

“I’m going.”

Salah stood. “Isabelle, no. It’s too dangerous.”

She rounded on him, and he understood that her fury wasn’t really directed at him; it just had to go somewhere. “Don’t try to stop me, Salah. You do your job here and I’ll do mine.”

“Isabelle…”

“You aren’t going,” another voice said, and Isabelle whirled around.

Leo Brodie stood on duty, his back to them, eyes and weapon on the camp. But his voice carried clearly over his shoulder.

“Brodie,” Lamont said sharply, “this isn’t your concern!”

“No, sir. Sorry, sir. But I have relevant information. Permission to speak?”

Lamont said nothing. Something in the quality of his silence, in his stance as he rolled forward on the balls of his feet, caught Salah’s attention. Lamont wore his helmet but not his goggles, and Salah could see his eyes.

Oh.

Where had he gotten the popbite? He must have brought it with him; even if it was manufactured on Kindred, Salah couldn’t see Lamont scoring a drug deal with a native. Popbite was a serious stimulant. It kept you awake and alert for days, but the price was steep: first, jitteriness. Then hallucinations. Then psychotic episodes.

Finally Lamont said to Brodie, “Permission to speak.”

Brodie said, “There are tracks in the mud on the north side of the compound, leading toward the open fields and the mountains. The kitchen door is unlocked and the boards removed.”

“Are you saying, Brodie, that Dr. Patel escaped? With that kid’s help?”

“No,” Isabelle said. Fury had replaced fear. “Claire wouldn’t do that. Austin took her!”

Salah stood, nodding at the lab tech to go to the clinic. The lab tech stood but didn’t go. How much English did he understand?

Lamont scowled. “You’re saying a teenage boy kidnapped a grown woman?” But Salah could see Lamont’s mind churning over this information, weighing the factors. Claire was tiny even for an Asian woman; Austin was strong for his age; the commotion and distraction of the assault on the compound and the aftermath of assessing the dead and injured…

Finally the lieutenant said, “Why would he do that? Sex?”

“No,” Isabelle said. “I don’t know why!”

“And where would he take her?” Lamont now looked disbelieving; he had decided to blame the Kindred rather than Austin.

Brodie said over his shoulder, “He has a secret fort somewhere.”

Isabelle said, “A what?”

“He told me once. He said he has a secret place—a cave, he said a cave, yeah—and that Noah Jenner knows about it. Also that he was going to take care of his mother there.”

Isabelle stared at Brodie’s back for a full twenty seconds. Then she tore off down the walkway, pushing past the exhausted people sitting on the floor along its walls, and slammed the door into the clinic. Lamont was grilling Brodie about the location of this cave, which Brodie said he didn’t know, when Isabelle rushed back. “Josh says Kayla was never with the McGuires! Her note said she went on a supply dirigible but Josh said the dirigible arrived and Kayla wasn’t on it. Austin—”

“Has both women trapped in a cave somewhere?” Lamont sneered. “A thirteen-year-old punk? I don’t believe it.”

“Leo, what else did Austin tell you?”

Brodie, without asking permission, said, “That’s all, Isabelle. He was filthy and sandy, said he’d been digging around for old stuff in the cave and—”

“You’re on report, Brodie,” Lamont snapped. “Pay attention to duty before it becomes a court-martial.”

“Yes, sir. Sorry, sir.”

Isabelle ran back to the clinic, Salah right behind her. “Isabelle, wait. Noah is confused and dazed right now—”

“Not as confused as I am! Salah, Austin stole the vaccine, nobody else could have taken it, he stole Claire—is he psychotic? Is he like one of those mass murderers back on Terra? Those kids who shoot up their own schools?”

Ten years on Kindred and whatever she’d seen on Terra still lingered. Salah didn’t know her past, didn’t know Austin, thought lately that he didn’t know much of anything. But he gave her his best opinion.

“I don’t think he’s a sociopath, no. I think he’s a confused adolescent, and I also think he has help. He didn’t take Claire and Kayla—if he did take them—to some kid-built secret fort in a shallow cave. Isabelle, where did those other two first-expedition members, Tony Schrupp and Dr. Beyon, go?”

“They have a company that manufactures transistors, way over in the coastal mountains. I told you, all manufacturing is confined to—”

“Are they there now? Are you sure?”

Isabelle was silent. “No.” And then, “The Council of Mothers. They would know. I’m only a junior member but there’s a senior group, Ree^ka was the lead, of course, but—I can radio.”

“Are Schrupp and Beyon the kind to make survivalist plans for themselves somewhere? To believe that civilization is going to end and they better create a bunker?”

After a silence, Isabelle said, “Yes. They could be. I never liked either of them, but that doesn’t… it could be. But why would they take in Kayla and Austin? Claire I can see, she’s a doctor… I’m going to talk to Noah.”

“I’ll go with you.”

The clinic was jammed with people in what was now post-op. Noah sat beside his wife’s pallet, Lily on his lap and Marianne next to him, watching carefully for signs of nausea or confusion. Llaa^moh¡ slept. Noah looked a little more alert. Salah said, “How are you feeling?”

“Headache to shake mountains.”

“To be expected. Still dizzy?”

“If I stand up.”

“Any nausea, blurred vision, confusion?”

“I don’t know.”

“Count backwards from one hundred.”

“One hundred, ninety-nine, ninety-six, no wait….”

Isabelle burst out with, “Noah—what do you know about a secret cave that Austin goes to?”

“How do you know about that?” Noah said at the same moment that Marianne said “Cave?”

“It doesn’t matter how I know!” Isabelle flared. “What matters is that you didn’t tell me! I’m the mother of this lahk and—”

“Not so loud! Please!” Noah put his hand on his forehead.

“Sorry. But why didn’t you tell me? Where is this cave? Are Tony and Nathan there? Is Kayla?”

“Kayla? No—isn’t she? You told me… it’s a little confused…”

“Isabelle,” Marianne said in a tone that could have controlled an earthquake, “go easy.”

Gradually the story emerged. Tony Schrupp and Nathan Beyon were constructing or had constructed a survivalist bunker in a mountain cave. Austin had been helping them with, Noah guessed, translation of radio broadcasts; neither man knew more than a few phrases of Kindred. (Why? Salah wondered. If you emigrated, wouldn’t you learn the language?) Noah had followed Austin to the cave and then promised him that he would not tell the lahk if Austin agreed to not go there again and Austin had promised, an agreement he evidently broke. Yes, the Council of Mothers knew about the bunker; supplies and equipment had been going in for months. Noah knew nothing about Kayla’s whereabouts, and this was the first time he’d heard that Claire was missing.

“That stupid kid! What does he think—”

“Easy,” Salah said. “Don’t get too agitated, Noah. We’ll get them back.”

“How? You don’t understand, the entrance is small and probably impregnable, Beyon is an electronics expert and—”

“Easy, please.”

“Noah,” Marianne said, and Noah subsided. The power of mothers, even if the son was nearly forty.

Isabelle stood. “Okay, I got it. You rest and don’t worry, Noah. You either, Marianne. Leo will know how to get them out.”

Leo. Salah surprised himself with a flash of jealousy so strong that his stomach jumped in his belly. She didn’t trust Lamont, but Brodie….

Salah thought he’d left this kind of sickening jealousy behind, long ago, with Aisha.

Lily whimpered and stirred. Salah laid a hand on her forehead. Still afebrile.

Marianne said, “Go now. Let them sleep. If the—”

The door flung open. Branch stood there. Like everyone else in the clinic half of the compound, he’d sustained no injury from the bomb, but now he looked so wild that he might be hallucinating. “Dr. Jenner!” he shouted.

“Branch! For God’s sake—you woke Lily!”

The little girl started to cry. Llaa^moh¡ woke despite the sedative—the power of mothers!—and said, “Lily?” Noah put his hand to his forehead. Marianne grabbed Branch and dragged him into the corridor, Isabelle and Salah following. Against the corridor wall, two Kindred lay asleep, their usual sleeping areas destroyed in Big Lab.

“Marianne!” Branch said. “I did it! I got it!”

Marianne said, “Good. Great. But Branch, right now astronomical data—”

“It’s not that! Come!”

They all followed him to the leelee room, which smelled worse than ever. Branch pointed dramatically to a complicated pile of equipment and said, “There! The code was convertible to sound and I did it!”

“Sound?” Isabelle said. “From the ship? Recordings?”

“No! Live! Real-time transmission!”

“Of what?” Marianne said.

“Listen! I’m going to turn it up—listen!”

Branch dropped to the floor and fiddled with analog dials. A light flashed briefly. Then Salah heard it. At first he thought it was coming from the cages behind him: chittering, very fast. But it wasn’t.

Isabelle said, “Leelees? There are leelees alive aboard the ship? How?”

Branch said, so fast that he was almost chittering himself, “It was a colony ship, wasn’t it? To a planet close enough for radio transmissions. Preset so that was the only place the ship could go. Big enough to hold animals and plants for a colony. When the people died, the animals didn’t! The leelees didn’t!”

Isabelle said, “Well, okay. They’re up there, but the ship is still contaminated with spores because the colonists went outside and brought them in. Everyone’s dead.”

She didn’t see it. Salah did, and Marianne had known the second the chittering began. She said now, sounding unlike herself, “The leelees aren’t dead. There are spores there, but the leelees survived. Mutated immunity, or maybe a virophage since at least two survived to breed… let it be a virophage. Oh, God!”

Isabelle said, “What’s a virophage?”

Salah said, “A satellite virus that infects larger viruses and can’t reproduce any other way.”

Marianne babbled at Salah, “R. Sporii is large enough to be a host, it could have coevolved with the spore cloud even though… but no paramyxovirus before now has hosted… no, that’s not right, it’s a new mutation… Isabelle! You said that Ree^ka told you there was a device to call the ship back to Kindred!”

There was? Salah looked at Branch; he hadn’t known it, either.

“Yes,” Isabelle said. She didn’t look excited; maybe she didn’t realize the implications. Salah did. If they could get their hands on a virophage that naturally killed R. sporii and it was airborne—insha’Allah, let it be a virophage and let it airborne!—they could release it on Kindred and it would fight the coming spores. Thousands of people might be saved. Maybe more.

Marianne seized Isabelle’s arm. “Where is it? The device to call back the ship—does it still work? Where is it?”

“Nobody knows,” Isabelle said. “It’s gone. Buried somewhere in the mountains. Mining out the original tablets with starship plans…. they’d been there for 140,000 years! Getting them free took explosives. Caves collapsed, tunnels closed up, the ground shifted. Nothing but the coming spore cloud crisis could have led the Mothers to cause that much environmental disturbance. But Ree^ka told me that the call-back device is described in the tablets but wasn’t with the drive or the plans.

“It’s lost, and nobody knows where.”