Terran Tomorrow

CHAPTER 3

“Sir,” Lieutenant Seth Allen said in Jason’s earplant, “we picked up the starship captain, Branch Carter. He’d left the ship in an esuit and was following the FiVee’s tracks here. He says he thinks he can move the ship. It hasn’t been hit yet, although one missile came close. But sir, it’s a whole lot bigger than we expected. Maybe twenty times the size of the one that launched twenty-eight years ago.”

Jason said, “Okay, stand by.” He tongue-flicked off his mic and turned to Mason Kandiss, the soldier from the Return. Jason wanted a debrief about the whole situation, but there was no time for that now. Zack McKay and Lindy had the other nine refugees in a far corner of the signaling station, checking them out and answering questions. Outside the signaling station, the drones still attacked—how many more missiles were the fuckers prepared to expend? Jason would have to have the signaling station moved again, assuming the external equipment survived. If it didn’t, they’d lose contact with the comsat as well as the ship, and communication with Headquarters would be reduced to the uncertainties of long-distance radio.

Private Kandiss stood at attention, a faded Ranger tab on his shoulder. Jason said, “At ease, Private. I need information. Does that ship have its own e-shield?”

“No, sir.”

“What can destroy it?”

“On World, a shoulder-launched missile blew a big hole in it. It was repaired.”

World had shoulder-launched missiles? Jason thought it was supposed to be peaceful, without war. But no time to go into that now.

“To the best of your knowledge, can Captain Carter lift the ship again?”

“He says so, sir.”

“Can he park it in a stable orbit high enough to preclude a drone attack? Earth no longer has space-missile capacity.” Long gone. But at least Earth no longer had fighter jets, or they would have hit the spaceship already. The world’s remaining jets sat rusting on cracked tarmacs, all fuel long since expended and no people to make more.

“I don’t know, sir. Carter isn’t really a pilot. He’s a lab assistant with a knack for hardware.”

Christ. The only starship on Earth and it depended on a lab assistant with a knack for hardware. But it wasn’t like Jason had much choice; they had no additional dome to put the ship under, even if it would’ve fit, and a direct missile hit could take out the signaling shield at any moment. Jason flicked on his mic.

“Lieutenant Allen, take Carter back to the ship and stay in it while he takes it up to low orbit. Take IT Specialist Martin with you. Up there, both of you learn everything he knows about the ship—maneuverability, communication capacity, fuel stores, weapons—particularly weapons. Await contact with us—we might wait to contact you, to avoid giving away the position of the next station. If you hear nothing in a week, it means the contact equipment has been destroyed. Land somewhere and hope. Go now.”

“Yes, sir. Out.”

Jason scanned the station. Sergeant Hillson stood with more of J Squad, awaiting orders. The star-farers huddled with Zack McKay and Lindy in a corner. As soon as he deemed it safe, Jason would send them all to the base.

“Sir,” Kandiss said, “permission to speak.”

“Go ahead.”

“What happened to the Seventy-Fifth?”

The Ranger Regiment of the United States Army. Of course Kandiss would want to know; he must have assumed he would return to it, albeit twenty-eight years later than he’d expected.

“I don’t know. They were headquartered at Fort Benning, weren’t they?”

If Kandiss felt surprise that Jason didn’t know this, it didn’t show. “Yes. And the Second Battalion at Joint Base Lewis–McChord.”

“Benning is gone. Pretty much the entire East Coast was heavily nuked during the war. It’s not livable. Seattle and Portland were taken out, too, as was Creech Air Force Base. There are a few other Army bases left and staffed, or at least the parts of them that were under domes, notably Fort Hood and Fort Campbell. We are in communication with them. Headquarters is Fort Hood, ranking officer is General Ethan Lassiter, who is the military head of the United States under martial law.” Jason didn’t add that Lassiter was eighty-three and sickly. Let that information wait.

Kandiss said, “Commander in chief?”

“There is no president anymore. Chain of command starts with Lassiter.” Whom Jason would have to apprise about the Return as soon as possible.

“Yes, sir,” Kandiss said. His face was stone.

“You are hereby officially attached to J Squad of this company,” Jason said, knowing that what men like Kandiss needed was structure. “When we return to base, see Sergeant Tasselman about billeting. After that, report to me for full debriefing.”

“Yes, sir.”

“Dismissed.”

Kandiss joined the other refugees. A Ranger in such superb physical condition would be an asset to the elite J Squad. And Kandiss was probably the most reliable source for learning in military terms what had happened on World, including to the rest of Kandiss’s unit. And hadn’t there been an ambassador along?

His grandmother would know.

Jason turned his back to the group of refugees. He had never before considered himself a coward. He had seen military service in Congo, he had come through the horror of the Collapse, he had fought New America. He had taken control of Monterey Base when there was nobody else left to do so. He was a colonel in the United States Army. He could steel himself to do what was necessary to the man in the underground prison in order to further protect the safety of those in his charge.

But faced with his grandmother, the woman from the stars whom he had long thought dead, a thousand memories flooded his already stressed brain: Grandma making him and Colin peanut butter and jelly sandwiches. Grandma teaching him to read. Grandma believing Colin could superhear what Colin said he could, when no one else believed. Grandma was the same as Marianne Jenner, world-famous geneticist—Jason’s childish pride when he had first realized that! Grandma—

But he had lacked the courage to tell her outright that her daughter, his aunt Liz, had vanished during the Collapse. R. sporii, the scourge that his grandmother had once successfully defeated, had been weaponized by madmen to roar back and defeat the victors.

Only—Jason did not feel defeated, and that was going to be the hardest thing of all to explain to her. Ninety-six percent of humanity had perished, but humanity was recovering. The remaining three large Army bases were winning the war against New America, even though the enemy had guerilla mobility on their side and a continent-wide returning wilderness to hide in. The scientists in Lab Dome, which Jason would do anything at all to protect, were going to figure out a way to neutralize RSA. He believed that. Villages and farms, at least those he’d had contact with on the West Coast, had not descended into preindustrial barbarism. The United States had working technology, and enough brilliant minds to restart heavy industry as soon as the war was over and factories could be restarted or built. Children were being born. The oceans and atmosphere were recovering.

Would his grandmother see all that? Could he make her see it?

He knew what she would see at the base, what it would look like to her eyes. Two domes packed with too many people, divided into mazelike warrens by walls of wood harvested from the burgeoning forest or metal from before the Collapse. The result was a functional, unlovely, ramshackle hodgepodge surrounded by blue shimmering walls.

Once Lindy had said, “It’s a mess. But what can you expect in a postapocalyptic world?”

“This is not a postapocalyptic world!” Jason had flared, before he even knew he was going to say anything.

She’d stared at him in astonishment. “Of course it is. The Collapse was an apocalypse, Jason. The Four Horsemen, every last rider.”

“No. We are not scavenging for canned goods. We are not eating dogs. This is an Army base, orderly and growing. We are not some cheap horror film cliché. This is a thriving base of the United States Army.”

“You always have to think you’re in control, don’t you? Have to prove to yourself again and again that you can handle anything because nothing is stronger than you are, not even reality.”

“That is not true.”

“It is, and don’t take that measured and superior tone with me. I’m sick of it.”

The fight had escalated from there. One of their many, many fights. Until the last one.

He could not expect Lindy to tell Grandma about Aunt Liz. Jason would have to do that himself. And this old woman who had come home from so far, who had endured so much over the years, who looked so worn—was she strong enough to bear this double blow?

“Sir,” Li said, “the shelling has stopped and the outside equipment wasn’t hit.”

“Good. We’ll wait for confirmation of liftoff from the Return, then convey the refugees to base. I’ll leave three of the squad here to help you move the station tonight.” Li would already have the next location picked out, and it would be the best fit possible, the borer bot already on site.

Jason needed to call General Lassiter at HQ and brief him, now, before the station’s equipment was either hit or moved. Radio contact among the domes that did not go through the one remaining comsat, and so did not call further attention to the signaling equipment, was fitful. It depended on the use of codes and coding machines, and no one knew when or if New America had broken the latest code. It had all been so much easier when the Internet had existed, along with quantum encryption, cell towers, and eyes-in-the-sky. But if they existed, then New America would have access to them, too. Maybe this way was actually better.

You always have to think you’re in control, don’t you?

And she had always said that he wasn’t. Jason was better off without her.

He straightened his back to go talk to his grandmother.

In the outer cave, Jane climbed into the back of the big self-moving cart—a “fighting vehicle.” Huge guns, much bigger than anything Lieutenant Lamont had had on World, were mounted on the front. The FiVee had no windows along the sides but there was a big window along the front. The shield between front and back was now gone. Five soldiers, one of them driving, and nine people from the Return crowded the space. Kayla still sobbed. Zack McKay perched at the edge of a bench that ran along the inside, talking intently with Claire. Marianne had jammed herself into a corner, her face turned away from the rest of them.

Jane maneuvered to squeeze in beside Lindy Ross, who seemed the most willing to answer questions. “Lindy, are you of Army, too?”

“No, I’m a civilian. That means ‘not in the Army.’”

Jane noted the word. “The soldiers here don’t wear esuits, but Lieutenant Jenner does wear one. Why—”

“Colonel Jenner,” Lindy corrected. Her face took on a fleeting expression that Jane could not interpret.

“Yes, I am sorry. Colonel Jenner.” She had not heard that title from the Terran soldiers on World; the soldier leader there was “lieutenant.” It was confusing.

“Oh, I don’t mind, but he will.” Again that face. “About the esuits—some people at the base are survivors of RSA and so are immune. Like me, and all of the soldiers here although not all of those at the base. Some never had the disease and aren’t immune, and since the virus is airborne, those can’t go outside without the esuits. Is your English good enough for scientific translation?”

“I hope so. My father and Glamet^vor¡ are biologists.”

“I see how eagerly they’re listening. Any English?”

“Not many words.”

“They’ll want to talk with Zack, not me. He’s the virologist. I’m a physician.”

Abruptly the FiVee roared to life, startling Jane. Belok^ clutched his sister.

Jane said, “Will you tell me about the place we go? Are many of people there?”

“About seven hundred, which is more than the domes should hold. They were erected and equipped as an Army base before RSA, a sort of West Coast Fort Detrick—never mind, you can’t know what that was—doing biological research along with basic military functions. Inland, because coastal flooding and superstorms were ravaging the coast. When RSA hit, families and some other scientists not yet infected were flown here on an emergency basis—that was the colonel’s foresight, I have to admit that much—and quarantined until… I’m going too fast, aren’t I? You’re not getting all this.”

“No,” Jane said. “I am sorry.”

“My fault, not yours. Let me drop back several notches. Monterey Base, where we’re going, has two domes, one of living quarters called Enclave Dome and one for scientific research, called Lab Dome, although some scientists live there, too, and the Army has a whole quadrant for the armory. We’re all pretty jammed in, but we manage.”

The FiVee rumbled but did not move out of the cave. Colonel Jenner seemed to be talking to the driver, or maybe to the air, since he wasn’t looking at the other soldier. Jane said, “If the domes are… are closed up against air like esuits are…”

“Sealed,” Lindy said. “And like the esuits, they’re equipped with some mechanism that purifies the air of everything, even nanoparticles, instead of keeping air out completely. Nobody understands exactly how they work, even though we can—could—make them. From the plans that we thought were your people’s. Jane, I have a lot of questions, too. Can I ask some?”

“Of course. I did not intention to be rude.”

Lindy smiled. “I don’t think it’s in you to be rude. Is it true that World has no war, no violence?”

“No wars, no, although there were some small ones back in history. Violence, yes, sometimes. Quarrels, personal fights. We are human, you know.”

“Of course. But… no, that’s too complicated to ask in a moving FiVee. If we ever actually move, of course.” She made a funny face.

“Where do—Oh, we move now!”

The back of the FiVee slammed closed, the hillside opened, and the truck tore out at tremendous speed. Jane rose to her knees to look through the forward window, which seemed to be made of something thicker and cloudier than glass.

“Lindy, what is the window stuff?”

“Plastic. Bulletproof. This whole vehicle is heavily armored.”

Through the plastic, Jane watched trees slide past as the FiVee lurched and rolled. She grabbed a metal protrusion and hung on. So many trees! The road wasn’t really a road at all, just a rough track through the trees, mostly hidden by leaves overhead and plant life underneath. There was no place on World, not even in the central mountains kept for hiking, this wild.

“It looks like… like Ranger Kandiss’s weapons.”

Lindy smiled. “Dangerous?”

“Yes.” Another new word.

“It is dangerous. The wilderness has rushed back. So has its wildlife, bears and cougars and all kinds of rodents that—”

Something hard smashed into the FiVee’s front plastic window. Belok^ cried out. Jane clutched her bench and said, “Was that a weapon?”

“No. A bird.”

A long dark smear ran diagonally down the window. The FiVee did not slow. Jane translated for the others. To Lindy she said, “Belok^ thought it is something dangerous.”

“It is,” Lindy said. “That sparrow is the most dangerous thing on Earth.”

Zack said quietly to Claire over the roar of the FiVee’s engine, “Will Marianne be all right?” He remembered, all too painfully, losing his wife and two sons to RSA. Marianne’s daughter was only presumed dead, but still… if he ever lost Caitlin…

Claire said, “Marianne is the toughest person I’ve ever known. You wouldn’t believe what she’s survived. The best thing is to get her back to work.” She grimaced. Small and delicately made, with skin the color of wet sand, she looked spun of silk, but Zack suspected that Claire Patel had survived just as many horrors as Marianne. Spider silk, strand for strand, was stronger than steel.

She said, “The virophage destroys R. sporii, and it does it fast. The two seemed to have coevolved. All of us from World are carrying it, asymptomatically. It’s unusually easy to culture from blood samples. On the ship, we used a culture of leelee tissue—”

“Of what?”

“A native mammal. But, Dr. McKay—”

“Zack, please.”

“Zack, I doubt the phage will be effective against this weaponized version of R. sporii, not with all the genemods you told me about.”

“No, probably not. But there might be something in the virophage genome we can use.”

“Use to do what? What are you trying to do?”

“Later. It’s complicated, and we’re here.” Zack wasn’t sure how much he was supposed to reveal. This was classified work, after all. Toni wouldn’t have hesitated, but Zack had more respect for Jenner’s orders. Slightly more, anyway.

The FiVee drove into Lab Dome’s vehicle airlock, a tight fit, and everybody climbed out to go through decon. Zack had only been here a few times before; this quadrant was Army, tightly restricted. Soldiers called it the armory. It held FiVees, three low-flying quadcopters, tanklike things that Zack didn’t know the name of, and huge, e-locked, reinforced metal containers. Some probably held ammunition. Zack didn’t know what was in the rest and wasn’t sure he wanted to know. The Army drones were elsewhere, off base, although they were launched and controlled from Enclave Dome’s command post. Everything stood around the walls, leaving an open space for drills or calisthenics or whatever else the soldiers did here.

One of the things that made life so difficult at Monterey Base was the prefab, unchangeable design of the domes, inherited from—whom? Apparently not, as everyone had believed until today, from technologically advanced humans on World. If Claire and Marianne could be believed (and Zack did), World had received these plans from some other, long-gone “super race”—even thinking the words made Zack feel unreal. But the domes were real enough, with their prefab forms that Jenner, and everyone else, had to work around.

Each dome was divided by internal, unchangeable, alien-energy walls into three sections, one taking up half of the dome and the other two one-quarter each. Internal airlocks connected them. This was undoubtedly a safety measure. On the Embassy, for instance, thirty-eight years ago, Worlders had lived in their own section, with their own air, emerging only in esuits. Now, however, the internal airlocks were a nuisance, standing open most of the time except to the restricted-area armory that Zack walked through, escorted by armed soldiers as if they were royalty, or prisoners. The five star-farers still wore their esuits, shimmering faintly and looking exhausted except for Jane, who looked around so eagerly that her head might have been mounted on a swivel gun.

The other smaller quadrant—the name had stuck even though there were three sections, not four, go figure—housed living quarters, the Army mess, and a kitchen. Some scientists were quartered here and some soldiers; Jenner wanted a military presence in both domes. The large quadrant held the labs that were Monterey Base’s initial reason for existence.

Enclave Dome was similarly divided into more living quarters, the main kitchen and mess, communal showers, and nonmilitary storerooms. The large “quadrant” included a common area that was supposed to be an open, airy relief from the crowding everywhere else, a sort of park with no plants. But partitions were always being put up for one reason or another. Big pieces of equipment that there was no room for anyplace else littered the area; some of the equipment no longer even worked but was kept for the scrap metal.

To complicate matters even more, Jenner’s command post was located at the top of Enclave Dome, not Lab Dome, although the armory was in Lab Dome. This arrangement was the result of pre-Collapse plans, presumably to allow two effective areas of command in case of attack. Or something; military matters didn’t interest Zack much. He had his own worries. He could, however, imagine the difficulties that Jenner encountered in getting orders from the command post to Lab Dome when no electromagnetic radiation could penetrate either, although sound could. There was an underground tunnel running from one subterranean cave to another, but it was not part of the dome design. Dug by an Army borer, it wouldn’t be usable by anyone who hadn’t either survived RSA or donned an esuit. RSA spores were everywhere, long lived, and deadly, except where kept out by alien energy shields.

As Zack emerged from the armory airlock, Toni pounced on him. “Well? What are our star-farers like?”

“Christ, Toni, you’re a vulture.”

“Are they… okay, here they come. Exotic. What advanced tech are they bringing us?”

“None.”

For once, he had surprised her. It was a mean-spirited surprise, but Zack was already tired. He didn’t feel up to explaining that the Worlders were behind Terrans in science, not ahead, and that they didn’t know who had given their planet the ships and e-shields that Earth had inherited from them secondhand. Third hand. Whatever. Let someone else give the details to Toni.

He said, “We need blood samples from each of them before they’re given any treatments. Lindy will do that. She’s going to take all nine to quarantine and give them the pills to adjust their microbial signatures to ours. She says they can sleep through it. Apparently when their microbiomes were adjusted on World, it was a horrendous process.”

“Because they’re so far behind us scientifically. You want to explain that to me?”

No escape. “Can I go home and see Susan and Caitlin first?”

“No. They’re fine; I saw them in the mess at lunch. We didn’t lose anybody in the drone attack. Come on, Zack, spill. I can’t wait for the all-hands-on-deck meeting. Are any of these aliens scientifically literate?”

“Two geneticists. There’s also a young translator who seems very bright, and one of the scientist’s younger sister and brother. The brother seems to have some variation of Down’s syndrome.”

“And they brought him here why?”

“Not sure. Jane—that’s the translator—says that the Mother of Mothers decreed that the lahk should stay together.”

“Oh, well, that makes everything crystal clear.”

“Toni,” Zack said, “if I have to satisfy your unprofessional impatience, can I at least have a cup of coffee first? And something to eat? I haven’t had anything since breakfast and, as you just pointed out, you got to eat lunch.”

“I’ll walk you to the mess,” Toni said. “Just keep talking on the way.”

Late in the evening, Jason received a panicky, private-frequency call from the stockade. He jammed on an esuit, crossed to Lab Dome, and ran down the long flight of metal steps. In the fetid prisoner cell, Corporal Yunez bent over Dr. James Anderson. The prisoner’s naked form lay distorted in a position Jason wouldn’t have thought even possible for a human body. Somehow Anderson had looped the chain of his wrist manacles behind his neck and then hooked each knee beyond the opposite wrist, straining the tether that held one ankle to the wall, turning himself into a pretzel whose slightest movement to free himself would result in strangulation. And then he had wriggled.

“Sir,” Yunez said, shaken, “I was watching, sir, I only went to use the head, not gone more than three minutes…”

Jason knelt and entered the code to release the manacles. They fell away and the prisoner unfolded limply. Under the grime, his face was deep purple, even the swollen tongue that protruded through parted lips the color of blueberries. Jason groped for a pulse and didn’t find it. But Anderson gave a long, shuddering breath and so maybe… Jason started CPR.

He tongued his mic. Dr. Holbrook would already be asleep in Enclave Dome and would need an esuit and escort to come through the tunnels… no time. But Jason had passed Lindy on her way to the infirmary. “Dr. Ross, to the bird lab immediately, code one!” To Yunez he said, “Bring her into the stockade the second she comes down the steps. Go!”

Yunez sprinted from the cell. Jason kept on with CPR.

This was his own fault. He had waited too long to extract information. If he hadn’t wanted to give the prisoner every chance to cooperate…

Breathe, damn you!

If he hadn’t tried hunger first but had gone right to torture…

Breathe, you fucker!

If he hadn’t tried so hard to play by rules of engagement set by a world that didn’t even exist anymore…

Lindy burst into the room. “Jason! What the fuck is this undergroun—oh my God.”

She dropped to her knees. “Stop CPR for a minute.” Pulling a stethoscope from her pocket, she listened to his heart and lungs and pushed a knuckle hard onto Anderson’s sternum. “I’m not getting anything. Jason, try again!”

He resumed CPR while he pried up Anderson’s eyelids. The pupils were fixed. Jason said, “A defibrillator?”

“No time. Let me check him again.” She did, while Jason waited.

Lindy said, “It’s too late. He’s gone.”

“No, I heard him give a breath just before I started CPR!”

“Agonal respiration—the lungs trying one last desperate thing. But he’s gone.” She sat back on her heels and wrinkled her nose. “What is this—a dungeon? What have you done? Who is he? Jason!”

“Anderson. Of the Gaiists.”

“James Colson Anderson? Of the original eight?”

“Yes.”

“And you captured him and were torturing him for information about New America? Their movements? He was with them now?”

“I’m not discussing this with you.” He stood. His legs felt wobbly; he clenched his ass cheeks to steady them.

She leaped to her feet. “You sure the fuck are discussing it! Torture? You were torturing—”

“No. I wasn’t.” But he would have, tomorrow morning. “Anderson did that to himself.”

“And I suppose he starved himself, too, and was willing to piss and shit himself and—What the fuck did you think you were doing down here?”

Something rose up in Jason, knotted and complicated as gnarled tree roots, sharp as thorns. He said with deadly quiet, “What do you know about it, Lindy? It’s my job to defeat New America so you and people like you can stay all holy and above the dirty work necessary to accomplish that. Who the hell do you think you are? You want the war to end but condemn the tactics necessary to get there. You—”

“This isn’t a ‘tactic,’ it’s a war crime! Couldn’t you have just used truth drugs?”

“Do you think we didn’t try? God, this is you jumping to condemnation and conclusions before you even—”

“No, this is you, Jason, trying to prove to himself once again how he can handle anything thrown at him!”

“I couldn’t handle you, could I? Couldn’t handle your smug self-righteousness, your holier-than-thou—”

“No,” she said, her voice dropping into glacial cold, “you couldn’t handle me. Or anyone else who has the guts to speak truth to you. You want a doctor to certify that the prisoner is dead so you can stay within all your stupid rules? Okay, I so certify. He’s dead. Congratulations.”

She turned and stalked up. Her shoes rang on the metal stairs, leaving behind an embarrassed Yunez, who tried to look as if he had not heard all that. Jason knelt beside the dead man, this Gaiist scientist, one of the eight who had helped create the most horrendous weapon of mass destruction ever let loose on the world.

Carefully, Jason closed Dr. Anderson’s eyes.