Authors: Nancy Kress
Kaufman rose from his bunk. He had an appointment with Capelo at 0900 to discuss Capelo’s non-progress on the physics of the artifact. The meeting promised to be caustic and short. But Kaufman might be able to see Grafton before that.
The middle ground. When hadn’t he taken the middle ground? Risk, but not too much. Adverse consequences for failure, but mild adverse consequences (a letter of reprimand in his promotion jacket). An unpleasant encounter, but not really brutal (the one with Capelo would be nastier). Colonel Lyle Daniel Kaufman, master of the middle ground.
He started to dress.
* * *
Capelo woke to screaming. Instantly he was out of his bunk, scooping up Sudie.
She thrashed in his arms, still screaming. He pinned her against his chest with one arm, patting her back with the other and crooning. “It’s okay, Sudie, it’s all right sweetheart, it was just a dream. Just a nightmare, baby, it’s all right now, Daddy’s got you…”
She clung to him, screams changing to sobs, and he went on holding her and murmuring reassuring nonsense. It wasn’t all right, it was getting worse. Three, four, even five nightmares a night. Capelo had moved her from the room she’d shared with Amanda and Jane Shaw into his own quarters, jamming a cot into the crowded space. He wanted Amanda to be able to sleep through the night, and he wanted Sudie with him.
“It’s all right, sweetheart, it was just a dream. Just a nightmare, baby, just a bad dream…”
Her sobs didn’t stop. Capelo kicked a chair from under its table/shelf and sat on it. He cradled Sudie’s small body, feeling the sparrow-like bones in her back, smelling the sweet childish scent of her dirty hair.
“Maybe if you tell me about the dream, baby, then Daddy can make it go away.”
She had always refused to do this, but now she gasped against his neck, her arms almost strangling him. “Mama.”
Capelo forced himself to go on. “What about Mama, baby?”
“She’s killed dead.”
“Yes, sweetheart. Mama’s dead.” For the last eighteen months, after her first grief had passed, Sudie hadn’t talked about Karen’s death. Even Sudie’s first, violent grief had been mostly wordless; she’d been only three. She had cried and sobbed, but it had been the older Amanda who had needed to talk it out, over and over, until it had taken every muscle in Capelo’s soul to go on listening, to hold himself steady to Amanda’s need in the gale of his own bereavement. Sudie still refused to be separated from either her favorite blanket or Capelo, she sometimes drew black angry scribbles on her e-tablet, and she developed exaggerated attachments to women of her mother’s age, such as Marbet Grant. But nothing like these nightmares, this screaming.
Sudie sobbed, “They killed her. They killed Mama dead.”
“Yes, sweetheart.” His own throat closed up. Somehow it never got easier. Those who’d said time would heal him were fools, or charlatans, or brutes.
“I don’t want them to kill you dead, too, Daddy! Or Mandy or Jane or Marbet! I don’t!” The words rose to a wail.
“Nobody’s going to kill me dead, sweetheart. Or Amanda or Ja—”
“Yes! Yes, they will! ’Cause the aliens are here on our ship!”
Capelo shifted her in his arms. “There
were
aliens on the ship, baby. Nice aliens. You saw them come up on the shuttle with us, remember, and you played with the alien little girl in the ship garden…” He tried to remember the details of what Amanda had told him about the natives in the garden. Marbet had taken the girls there and Ann Sikorski had stupidly let her tame natives wander loose on the ship. Sudie had played hide-and-seek with an alien child … nothing that should produce this maelstrom of fear in Sudie.
Sudie was shaking her head against his chest, still nearly cutting off his air with her grip around his neck. “No, no. Not Essa. Essa was nice. The other aliens, the bad ones that killed Mama dead!”
“Sweetheart, there are no bad aliens here. There never are bad aliens near you. Daddy wouldn’t let any bad aliens on the ship, and neither would Commander Grafton and all his soldiers.”
“No, no, a bad alien is here!”
“Sudie, baby—”
“Marbet said so! She said!”
Capelo stopped patting Sudie’s back and went very still. “What did Marbet say to you?”
“Not to me. To Dr. Ann…”
“What did Marbet say to Dr. Ann?”
“She said the bad alien was here and Marbet talked to it.”
“When did she say this, Sudie? And how did you hear?”
“She said it in the garden. I was behind a bush. Me and Essa were playing hide-and-seek.”
Capelo thought very fast. Marbet missing for long periods from team meetings. “In quarantine,” Kaufman had said, but there she’d been in the garden with Ann Sikorski. Marbet showing up planetside just once, for a short but intense look at the excavated artifact. Ann, with her exaggerated love for aliens, talking intimately with Marbet, who was a Sensitive, supposedly brought along to bridge communications gaps with the World natives. Whom Marbet had never once gone near until she’d accidentally run across them in ship’s garden. A Sensitive, the logical choice to attempt communication with aliens. Any aliens. A scientific mission to the ass end of the galaxy. A distant, secret place, uncolonized by humans. A place unlikely to be surprised by a sudden intrusion of the war.
“Daddy, I don’t want to be killed dead by the Faller on the ship! Like Mama was killed dead by bad Fallers!”
“Nobody on this ship going to hurt you, Sudie. Or me or Mandy or Jane.”
“Yes! A bad Faller is here!”
Capelo hated to lie to his children. He never did to Amanda, and only to Sudie about things for which she was too young to grasp truth. He lied now.
“Listen to me, Sudie. Listen very hard with your best-hearing ears on. Are they on?”
Unhappily she pantomimed putting on the ears. Capelo said, “Sudie, there are no bad Fallers on this ship. There are no Fallers at all on this ship. Marbet was talking about a holomovie she saw. I saw it, too. It was scary.”
“A holomovie?”
“Yes. A holomovie.”
The child considered. Finally she said, “Can I see it, too?”
“No. It’s too scary for you.”
“Did Mandy see it?”
“No. It’s too scary for Mandy. Only grown-ups got to see it.”
“Oh.”
He could feel her body relax a little. Her small tear-stained face floated uncertainly on the tide of his barely-checked rage. But check it he did, for her sake. For now.
“Do you want me to sing the rabbit song? Since you’ve got your best-listening ears on?”
“Yes. Sing the rabbit song, Daddy.”
He sang her back to sleep, carried her next door to the cabin containing Jane and Amanda, kicked softly at the door until Jane opened it. Jane was already dressed. It was eight-thirty ship time; the night had been so disrupted by Sudie’s nightmares that Capelo had slept far past his usual hour. Wordlessly he handed Sudie, now a limp bundle heavy with the deep sleep of childhood, to Jane.
“Tom—”
“Later.” He closed the door, walked back to his own cabin, and dressed. All his movements were controlled and deliberate. Fury gathered in him like a tsunami still far at sea.
* * *
“No,” Grafton said. “I’m astonished, Colonel, that you would even ask.”
“I wouldn’t ask if I didn’t think the results will justify the action.”
“A dangerous tenet.”
Kaufman made himself smile. “Usually, yes. But these are unusual circumstances, as I’m sure you’d be the first to understand.”
Grafton had not asked Kaufman to sit down. The two men stood beside the polished table of the small conference room adjoining Grafton’s quarters. Empty chairs yawned at Kaufman. He could see Grafton reflected in the highly polished metal surface of the table; Grafton looked equally polished and hard.
“Colonel Kaufman, I’m well aware of the circumstances here. More than you are. Those circumstances include information I received only a few hours ago, from a flyer arrived at the tunnel.”
Kaufman felt his chest tighten. The mission to World was supposed to be kept as quiet as possible, which meant no unusual traffic through Space Tunnel #438, which effectively meant no traffic at all. Intelligence officer McChesney’s warship, the
Murasaki
, kept guard this side of the tunnel but never went through. This meant that for weeks everyone aboard both the
Murasaki
and the
Alan B. Shepard
had effectively been cut off from the rest of the galaxy. If a flyer, the military’s fastest small ship, had come through Tunnel #438 and sent lightspeed news to Grafton, the news had to be major. Judging by Grafton’s face, it was not good.
Grafton said, “The message comes directly from General Stefanak, inquiring about our progress with the artifact. The inquiry is prompted by a serious war development.” Grafton stopped, and Kaufman saw the flesh above his uniform collar work up and down.
Grafton continued, “An entire star system, the Viridian system, has been destroyed by radiation. All five planets, one of them plus its moon colonized by humans, were rendered highly radioactive by destabilizing all elements with an atomic number higher than fifty.”
Fifty, not seventy-five. Tin, iodine … there would be no life left in the star system. There would never be life there again.
Grafton seemed to be calmed by the recitation of numbers. “Viridian system was ninety-eight percent civilian, with only a small military contingent. No one expected enemy activity so far into our tunnel space. A single Faller skeeter equipped with a beam-disrupter shield evaded all attempts to stop it from going through three separate tunnels, the last of them leading to Viridian. It went through the tunnel and reappeared only a few moments later. By that time, a lightspeed wave had already started to spread outward from the tunnel.”
Kaufman said nothing. His mind raced.
“What the report described is consistent with what happened in this system, as I’m sure you realize. The Fallers must have had a large artifact like the one Dr. Johnson tried to take through this tunnel. But why did it destabilize so much more than Dr. Johnson’s artifact, and how did the enemy get it through the tunnel to the Viridian system?”
“Commander,” Kaufman said, the words rushing out too fast, “we’ve kept you apprised of all Dr. Capelo’s tests and their results. But we have not passed on pure conjecture until we had some experimental basis. Last night at the party, Tom Capelo said…”
“What we have now fir the artifact is: setting prime one: a local weapon. Prime two: a local shield. Prime three: a wider-scale local weapon. Prime five: a planetary shield. Do you think prime seven will be a weapon, following the pattern?”
“Yes. I think setting prime seven will fry an entire planet through destabilizing the strong force.”
“And settings prime eleven and prime thirteen?”
“If the pattern holds, prime eleven might protect an entire star system. Prime thirteen will fry an entire star system, like Syree Johnson’s artifact fried this one. Except for World.”
“What did Dr. Capelo say?” Grafton demanded.
Kaufman pulled himself together. “Untested speculation, Commander: Please remember that.” He told Grafton of Capelo’s hypothesis.
Grafton said evenly, “Do you mean to tell me that you knew of these speculations by our ranking scientist—a scientist who, you’ve assured me, is brilliant at this sort of thing—and you still asked for Marbet Grant to see the prisoner again? To give away more knowledge of what advantage this artifact may give humans in the war?”
“I made a mistake,” Kaufman said bluntly. “I should never have had Ms. Grant arrested. It’s precisely
because
of what you just told me about Viridian that Marbet must resume her work with the Faller. We need to know exactly what weapons they have.”
“Not by telling them what we have!”
“The Faller is a prisoner, for God’s sake! Who’s he going to tell?” Kaufman said, and a second afterward knew that he’d lost.
“Colonel,” Grafton said, “let me remind you that I am well aware of the military circumstances of the prisoner of war. It is my job to be aware of them. I am also aware that this is no ordinary interrogation situation. There is no way to monitor what Ms. Grant says to the prisoner or he to her because nobody else can interpret his so-called ‘nonverbal communication.’ Truth drugs, I’m told, are incompatible with the prisoner’s biology and may even kill him. Finally, I’m aware—as you seem to not be—that it is precisely for unusual and ambiguous situations that Navy regulations are designed. They—”
The door flew open and Tom Capelo burst into the room.
Kaufman moved swiftly between him and Grafton. Capelo looked demented: wild-eyed, unshaven, his long unknotted hair snaking around his gaunt face. Spittle flew from the corners of his mouth. Kaufman realized he was looking at a man who had lost all control, gone beyond reason.
“Both here. Good. Now you bastards tell me what the fuck a Faller is doing aboard ship with my kids.”
Grafton barked, “You’re out of line, mister!” at the same moment that Kaufman began, “Tom—”
“Don’t ‘Tom’ me! Do you motherfuckers have any idea what the enemy did to me? To my kids? And you have one here without even telling me! Sudie … nightmares … nowhere safe…” He swung on Kaufman, who stood closer than Grafton.
Kaufman had seen it coming. He blocked the blow and wondered what the hell to do next. He outweighed Capelo, a small man, and Kaufman was trained to fight, as Capelo was not. Kaufman could easily deck the physicist. But that wasn’t what needed to be done.
“Tom, listen—”
Capelo swung again. Kaufman countered easily. Grafton had of course summoned security; before Capelo could try for a third blow, two MPs ran through the open door and grabbed him. He fought them with no finesse but surprising persistence, kicking and gouging, screaming incoherently, until an exasperated MP used his tanglefoam and Capelo fell to the deck, encased from shoulders down in sticky strands that could only be broken by dissolving them. His head was still free, and he continued to shout every filthy word that Kaufman, a soldier, had ever heard from experienced combat troops.