Terran Tomorrow

CHAPTER 14

Over the next four days, five more people fell into comas, all soldiers. Jason visited McKay’s lab, a scene of purposeful and focused activity, to see if isolating Mason Kandiss would help. “Probably not,” Toni Steffens told him; McKay was “unavailable.” “Preliminary transmission diagrams indicate that there are secondary and even tertiary carriers.”

“Have you found anything? Anything at all?”

Dr. Steffens stared at him. “We’ve found a lot of things, Colonel, but so far none of them are going to pull your soldiers out of their comas or keep more from falling into it, if that’s what you mean.”

“It isn’t.” Jason held on to his temper; the scientists were all overworked, overstressed, and absolutely necessary. “I’m going to ask some basic questions. Are you any closer to understanding what happened here?”

“No. Not yet.”

“Are you closer to predicting how widespread the problem might be?”

“No.”

“Can you predict anything about who might or might not be susceptible to the condition—any shared physical qualities, for instance, in the victims?”

“Not yet.”

“Look, Doctor, I’m going to be frank here. You don’t like me, and I’m not crazy about you, either. But I need to be kept up to date about anything you find. You’re a civilian, but this base is under martial law. Now is there anything else I should know?”

“Only that ‘what happened here,’ ‘the problem,’ and ‘the condition’ are no ways to refer to human beings who may die if we can’t help them.”

“Don’t talk to me in—”

McKay appeared at Jason’s elbow. “Toni, please get back to work. Please.” And when Steffens had stalked off, “Colonel, I apologize for my colleague. We’re all unraveling a bit.”

“That is no excuse for disrespect.” He’d almost said insubordination.

“Her wife, Nicole, collapsed into a coma a few hours ago.”

“I hadn’t yet been told that.” Jason felt his adrenaline ebb. “How is your little girl doing?”

McKay looked surprised. Why? Did everyone on the science side think that Jason knew of the coma victims as only nameless statistics? Jason added pointedly, “Caitlin.”

McKay said, “She’s the same.”

“I’m sorry. Please let me know if you make any advances at all.”

“I will.”

Jason left, glad to escape the lab. Although his next visit proved worse.

He pulled aside the curtain in front of Jane’s cubicle. A second v-coma ward, as close as possible to the first, had been carved out of a hallway plus a few storerooms. The ward held, ominously, room for more patients.

Like the others, Jane looked deeply asleep. An IV with nutrients ran into her arm. Her dark curls spread across the pillow, and occasionally the lids over her big eyes fluttered. Dreaming? Of what?

This was Jason’s second visit. He didn’t even know why he came; he could have just requested reports on her condition, on all their conditions. On his previous visit, Ka^graa had been sitting by his daughter’s bed. Today Colin, with a bandaged side and a large cast on his leg, sat in a powerchair that badly crowded the cubicle. He looked up.

“Colin. How are you feeling?”

“Better. Does anybody know anything about how to cure this thing?”

“You mean, with the technological advances you despise?”

Colin said, “Cheap shot, big brother.”

“Accurate shot.” They were bristling at each other like cats… no, not cats. Colin was holding Jane’s hand. So—like horned elk in springtime.

I didn’t know, Jason thought. He didn’t know that Colin and Jane… but was it mutual? And what was Jason doing even thinking about her when he had so much else to think about?

Colin must have seen something on Jason’s face. His own expression softened. He said gently, “No, Jace. She and I belong together. And she wouldn’t have been good for you anyway, or you for her. You need someone who will push back, like Lindy.”

Rivalry vanished from Jason’s mind, replaced by rage—the pure product, directed against one of the two people who would push back at him. The rage came out cold, because that was how he had been trained and how he had trained himself.

“You aren’t exactly the correct person to dictate my life, Colin, when yours wouldn’t even exist if it weren’t for my intervention. I thought you might have learned something from the violence that lost you a third of your precious Settlement.”

Colin’s gentle expression vanished. He had always been equal to Jason’s attacks. “I didn’t need to learn it, because I already knew. Violence is never the answer, not yours and not New America’s.”

“How can you—”

Colin rolled on, raising his voice, holding his brother’s gaze with one just as fierce. “You think violence is an instrument you can control, like your tech, using it only for ‘good and sufficient’ reasons. But violence is not an instrument; it’s a cancer. You can’t turn people into killing machines with the power to end life, and then expect them to behave humanely in the rest of their lives. Humane empathy is always the first victim of war, or soldiers couldn’t kill at all. Once violence gets started, it always escalates. It can’t be controlled.”

“We didn’t start it. New America did. And Congress declared war on them.” Just before Congress itself became a victim.

Colin said hotly, “Your Army equipped New America with all their stolen weapons and their stolen destructive imperialism. Fighting over territory that doesn’t belong to either of you, only to the Earth! Did you know that a hundred years ago in World War II, sixty-five percent of the casualties were civilians? And in Iraq and Brazil, it was ninety percent?”

“Of course I knew that. Don’t patronize me—I know more military history than you ever dreamed of. But I’m defending people here, and I have no choice.”

“There’s always a choice, Jason.”

“Only for those as smugly self-righteous as you are. You get to have a choice because people like me make that possible. Without my Army, your entire precious Settlement would no longer exist, and you wouldn’t, either.”

“I know,” Colin said, with one of the truthful and humble swerves to facts that made him so endearing, and so exasperating. “But, Jace—you don’t have to actively go after New America. You can just wait them out. They’ll destroy themselves eventually, because violent societies always do.”

Jason said carefully, “Why do you think I’m planning to ‘actively go after New America’?”

“Aren’t you? Before you lose so many soldiers to v-coma that it’s too late?”

“I—”

“Annhhh,” Jane said, and opened her eyes.

Instantly Colin bent toward her. “Jane?”

But her eyelids fluttered closed again, and Colin’s gentle shaking didn’t make her stir.

Jason slipped through the curtain. He didn’t want to watch Colin gazing like that at Jane. And if she opened her eyes again, he didn’t want to see how she gazed back.

Before going to the beds of his soldiers in v-coma, Jason went to find a nurse or doctor and report Jane’s brief, futile, apparently painful awakening.

Analyses of Caitlin’s cerebral-spinal fluid revealed several proteins nobody had seen before. The other v-comas’ samples confirmed that. The proteins contained expected amino acids, but they were folded in unique ways. “What the fuck do you suppose they’re doing in there?” Toni said. Since Nicole had become comatose, Toni’s language had deteriorated below even its usual obscene level. She barely slept, and definitely didn’t bathe. Zack breathed through his mouth around her, hoping that she didn’t notice.

At 2:00 a.m., bleary with lack of sleep, Zack said, “I think the proteins are rewiring their brains. Along with all those glials and the chemicals that we know either create or prune synapses.” There were many more synapse-forming chemicals than synapse-pruning ones, the direct opposite of the autopsy tissue from Kayla and Glamet^vor¡.

“But rewiring to what end, fuck it all? To what?”

“Toni, get some sleep. Please.”

“No. Not till the genome matching is done.”

With the available computing power, it seemed to take forever to run the matching program. The base’s main system sat dark and unrepairable. The most powerful consoles that were still running had been commandeered for this, over the completely unreasonable protests of the immune-boosting team, who claimed they needed it more. There was no “more” than researching the v-comas, and Zack had told Major Vargas so, forcefully. Jessica Yu had backed Zack.

Tissue samples had been sequenced to provide full genomes for Belok^, Jane, Caitlin, Devon, Marianne, Branch, Farouk, and the soldiers in v-comas. The matching program was comparing their genomes with control samples, cycling through all fifteen million possible genetic variations in each genome, looking for sequences that they all shared.

Zack said, “We’ll find the allele that triggers the comas.”

“You don’t even know for motherfucking sure that it is an allele!”

Zack didn’t answer. He turned away before he said something too sharp.

Toni put a hand on his arm. “Look, I’m sorry. I’m just—”

“I know. We all are. But go sleep, Toni. And shower.”

A tech rushed into the room. “Zack! The matching program finished!”

The matching program was printing its results—damn the shortage of paper and ink. Zack seized the densely covered sheets as they came from the printer. Toni studied the display screen with three lab techs crowded behind her.

The six v-coma genomes shared thirty-two alleles not found in the control samples, most in junk DNA. Six of those were insertions, genes incorporated into the genomes somewhere in, probably, the distant past. One of the six might have been activated by the virophage to set in motion the cascade of proteins and chemicals now rewiring brains. Or might not have been. Only 4 percent of polymorphism affected gene expression. That was the figure decided on just before the Collapse, when most basic science pretty much stopped.

Toni said, “The v-comas might be multifactorial inheritance disorders, rather than monogenic.” She said it reluctantly; she wanted there to be a single-gene explanation as much as Zack did. The chances were better for coming up with some sort of gene therapy.

Although in no case were the chances high.

The lab tech said, “If it’s a single variant, we can at least predict who else might fall into a coma. If you don’t have any of those six alleles…”

If I don’t have them, was what the tech really meant. This research was intensely personal. Zack said, “I have a sample to sequence next.”

“Yours?”

“No.” It was Susan’s. If he lost her as well as Caitlin, he lost everything.

Toni said, “We have a lot of samples to sequence and match. Let’s get started. Zack, the new v-comas from today have to be first, as confirmation—you know that. Anyway, it might help further narrow down the allele. If there is an allele.”

Her skepticism was the correct attitude. Zack knew that. He went to find the tissue samples from the v-coma soldiers. Before he had even prepared the samples for the sequencer, someone came into the lab. Zack didn’t turn; Toni talked to whoever it was. After the visitor left, Toni touched Zack’s shoulder. Her eyes looked almost as big as a Worlder’s, and compassion moved in their depths.

“Zack—there’s one more. Susan.”

Bright morning light assaulted the top of Enclave Dome, throwing everything in the command post into harsh relief. Jason could have closed the tentlike curtains installed on rods overhead, but he didn’t. He needed the glare, he needed coffee, he needed everything he could get to combat the sleeplessness of a bad night. A nightmare reliving the Collapse, another filled with sweating anxiety, a wet dream about Jane.

He cradled the coffee mug in cold hands. After ten years, the base was officially out of coffee, but a small amount had been hoarded for both the signal station and the CO. Jason refused to feel guilty about this. Hillson, his pipeline to the barracks through careful cultivation of selected recruits, had told him that the troops drank some sort of tea steeped from a plant gathered by hunting parties. The United States Army was reverting to Paleolithic hunter-gatherers.

Well, no, it wasn’t quite that bad. But the hunting parties were more frequent now, and vegetables and dried seaweed concoctions from Colin’s settlement would have to be stretched farther than before, to feed more people than before. The base cooks were endlessly inventive, but it was still going to be a problem. One of so many.

The first thing for today was to issue an OPORD to—

“Sir,” Hillson said in his earplant, “coming up.”

It was the first time that the master sergeant had announced entry instead of asking permission. Jason braced himself.

Hillson’s face had the rigid, impassive expression that meant he was furious. “Sir, we’ve had an incident. A hunting unit left at dawn, ten troops led by Lieutenant Sullivan. They just returned. Two of them are dead.”

“New America?”

“No. They were shot by Private Kandiss.”

Jason blinked. Mason Kandiss, the soldier off the Return that Jason had assigned to J Squad, had performed so well that Jason had had the luxury of forgetting about him. “Tell me as much as you know, and how you know it.”

“Kandiss told me himself. I have him in custody in the stockade. I also talked to the seven other members of the hunting unit and to the prisoner-at-large.”

Tommy Mills, of New America? What the fuck did he have to do with this? Jason waited. Hillson would produce the story in his own way, each word weighed and measured before being released.

“The hunting unit divided into two squads. They preserved, as far as I can tell, proper communication and support distance. Kandiss was assigned to lead one squad; Sullivan had the other. When the two had reached maximum permitted distance apart and were out of line of sight, the four other members of Kandiss’s squad turned their weapons on him. They told him he was a traitor, bringing the virophage to the base, part of a conspiracy to kill everyone. They—”

“Was this ‘conspiracy’ supposed to be created by World or by New America?”

“They didn’t say. Sir—you knew that in some quarters there’s a lot of anger and fear about the aliens, and about the v-comas, and about bringing the Settlers here, and about… everything.”

Of course Jason knew. Anger and fear were to be expected after ten years of claustrophobia, of boredom broken by rare bouts of combat, of crowding now made worse by the Settlers, of a war that seemed to go nowhere. There had been incidents before, but no one had died. He said, “Go on.”

“Kandiss told me that the four others said he deserved to die, along with all traitors, and they were going to take him out. They didn’t. He killed two of them. A third is in the OR now with a knife wound in the belly. The fourth threw down his weapon and raised his hands. The other squad heard the commotion and came running. Kandiss surrendered.”

“He took down three of his attackers? Who were the four?” Not J Squad, surely.

“Privates Landry, Guerra, and Madden. Landry and Madden are dead. Madden was a new recruit who grew up on base. Landry was always a troublemaker and Guerra a broke dick, always whining. Private Drucker surrendered. Lieutenant Sullivan shouldn’t have put them together in a squad.”

“But they were all armed and in full gear—how did Kandiss take them down?”

“Sir, you may have forgotten—Corporal Kandiss was an Army Ranger. The only one we have.”

Jason heard the respect in Hillson’s voice. He said, “Is Kandiss injured?”

“Minor bruises.”

“How extensive are these sort of conspiracy theories?”

“As far as I can tell, not very. But there is resentment about the aliens and the v-comas. Some about the Settlers, too, although as long as we have enough food, that seems pretty low level. Especially since some of the Settler women don’t believe in monogamy and they’ve made it their business to try to convert soldiers to their Mother Nature ideas, which they’re doing in a sort of free cathouse combined with ideological lectures.”

Jason tried to picture this enterprise, and failed. “Why did you talk to the prisoner-at-large, Tommy Mills?”

“He’s been assaulted a couple of times—war enemy and all that. Mills says that Kandiss started to protect him. Which made Kandiss even more suspect to a lot of our people with bad attitudes about the aliens.”

It was the third time he’d used the word. Jason said, “Hillson, they aren’t ‘alien.’ The aliens are the ones who took them from Earth a hundred and forty thousand years ago, the same ones who left them the spaceships and domes. Worlders are as human as you and me.”

“If you say so, sir. I’m just saying that a lot of soldiers don’t see it that way. We could have more assaults.”

Jason tried to think. He needed more sleep. Hadn’t he learned once that Rangers were trained to function on a few hours of sleep for a week or more? Probably Jason, who had been competent but not outstanding at physical training during basic, could not have qualified for Ranger School.

“Kandiss is housed with J Squad? Any trouble there?”

“No, sir, never in J Squad.”

Good—Jason needed to trust his elite unit. “Quarter the prisoner-at-large with J Squad. Put Drucker—and Guerra, too, as soon as Major Holbrook gives permission—in the stockade to await court-martial. Keep me informed of any further conspiracy theories or other problems you hear of.” Hillson must have a hell of an informant system, and Jason was grateful for it.

“I may not hear of anything in time to stop it.”

“I know. Pick men you trust for twenty-four-hour guards on Dr. Ka^graa and the other three Worlders, including the two in v-comas. Don’t use anyone from J Squad—I’m going to need them.”

“Yes, sir.” Hillson didn’t ask what Jason planned for J Squad.

“And send Kandiss to me.”

“Yes, sir.”

Colin’s words ran through his mind: You think violence is an instrument you can control. You can’t.

Colin had no idea how much more violent things were going to get. But then, before Jason could put his plans in motion, New America attacked.