Here We Stand, page 1
Contents
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
PREFACE
PROLOGUE
01
02
03
04
05
06
07
08
09
10
11
12
13
EPILOGUE
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
ALSO BY KAREN TRAVISS
Copyright © 2023
Karen Traviss
All rights reserved.
This is a work of fiction. Any similarity to real persons, living or dead, is coincidental and not intended by the author.
No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise without the prior written permission of the publisher and copyright owner.
All rights reserved. Version 1.0
First Edition
Hardcover ISBN: 978-1-912247-06-6
Paperback ISBN: 978-1-912247-07-3
eBook ISBN: 978-1-912247-08-0
Published by Karen Traviss
Editing: Angela Roemelt
Design: Kevin G. Summers
Jacket art: Thomas Wievegg
karentraviss.com
For Tony Serena, much missed.
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
Special thanks to Angela Roemelt, who can spot a plot hole or a formatting glitch from the orbit of Pluto, for merciless scrutiny and generous moral support.
PREFACE
A NOTE FROM THE AUTHOR
For those of you who’ve been used to reading my books from American publishers, you’ll find my current novels are now written in UK English, except for proper nouns and those American terms that just don’t anglicise. If you’re new to my work, you’ll notice that I write both dialogue and narrative in the style and grammar of the character, and occasionally their own spelling, so that varies from scene to scene. Those discrepancies are an integral part of the characterisation.
There’s also a prologue and an epilogue in all my books. They’re part of the story and also a quick recap of the events so far and a taste of what’s coming in the sequels.
The reference I use is the Shorter Oxford English Dictionary. Where there are differences between the SOED and the Oxford English Dictionary, I let Oxford Dictionaries Online have the final word. Very rarely, none of these sources gives me a solution that I feel makes something clearer for the reader, so I’ll opt for clarity even if it means breaking a formal rule.
Now the science. I do a lot of research for my books and much of this novel is real science, but other parts aren’t intended to be, notably FTL travel, although there are some fringe theories out there that make it seem less of a stretch. I do try to respect Kepler, though. This is just a personal quirk — some tropes don’t bother me but others set my teeth on edge.
In the end, my books are about people: human people, non-human people, and people we build as code. And they’re not about heroes or villains, just individuals on different sides who find themselves in tough situations. So I’ve taken real science and bent it enough to pose the ultimate questions we can ask ourselves. In Here We Stand, how do you hold a divided community together in the face of an existential threat? And when does the end no longer justify the means?
Karen Traviss
January 2023
PROLOGUE
Security office, Nomad Base, Opis: 1920 hours, September 20 by the Opis Calendar — eight hours after Mother Death claimed responsibility for the bioterrorism attack on Korea.
The enemy within is the one you need to deal with first.
They’re the ones who’ll open the gates for the barbarians. They look like us, they sound like us, and I might be looking at one of them right now. I just don’t know. After all, I never spotted Abbie Vincent.
For the last thirty minutes, I’ve been sitting across the table from Dr Lianne Maybury, head of Die-back Remediation when Ainatio was still a thing. You want a measure of how crazy this shit’s become? We’ve had to put a possible alien attack on the back-burner while we find out if another one of our own is going to sabotage the mission before they do. We’re a long way from home without backup. We need to clean house fast.
I didn’t come to Opis to fight my own people. I didn’t come to fight at all, to be honest, but we escaped trouble on Earth, and then we walked into trouble here, forty light years away. The alien trouble I can handle. What I can’t take is our own people betraying us.
Lianne and I are having more of a sporadic conversation than an interview under caution. She used to be Abbie Vincent’s boss, working on a cure for die-back, and then Abbie decided to smuggle the virus out of the lab and infect one of the few regions on Earth still free of it. It was on the news today. Die-back’s hit Korean rice crops and the Mother Death movement’s claimed responsibility. They’re the people who think the universe would be better off without humans, and I say the universe because they don’t want us infesting other worlds either, which is why I’m sitting here trying to work out if we have any other genocidal maniacs on the staff.
I never signed up to be the thought police. I don’t want to live in a community that spies on neighbours and marks their card for having an opinion. But if someone’s released a plague once, another someone can release it again here.
Those of us who lived through die-back in America and Europe know what Asia’s facing now. Rice, maize, soy, and wheat, the big four staples, will start dying and there’ll be famine because there’s still no way to prevent die-back or cure it. All you can do is burn off contaminated vegetation when you find it. Starving people — some carrying contamination — will try to move into Russia, India, Australia, or the Pacific islands, places that are still mostly okay. And it’ll snowball from there.
Even before we found out what Abbie had done, we evacuated an entire town to Opis instead of taking resettlement in Britain. Britain’s held out for a long time, but how much longer can they last? We have Brits here. They look at us Americans and see how we lost our nation, and I don’t envy them the decisions they need to make now.
But I feel sorry for Asia too, no matter how hostile we’ve become. They kept die-back at bay by cutting themselves off from the rest of the world, and even when the Alliance of Asian and Pacific States was trying to sabotage our mission, the fact they could carry on at all still gave us an odd kind of hope that the rest of the world could survive too and eventually recover. Yeah, I know that’s pretty rich after what we did to APS to make sure we got to Opis, but seeing the other guy’s point of view doesn’t exempt you from picking a side. I chose saving the people I’d sworn to protect over the well-being of strangers on the other side of the world.
It was ugly. But I’m not ashamed.
Does that mean sabotaging APS infrastructure is more ethical than using a bioweapon to starve Asia to death, then? We had to buy time to evacuate Kill Line. Abbie thought she had to wipe out humanity to save Earth and all the other worlds humans might colonise one day. Maybe, in the global scheme of things where other life forms have a say, her point is as valid as ours. But I don’t care. We want to live, she wants us to die. There’s no point in even discussing it.
“Major Trinder?” Solomon’s been quiet for a long time, but now he’s in my earpiece, talking in a whisper. “The crop tunnels are clear. The bots have collected all the pollinators and they’re clear too. But I did say that would be the case, didn’t I? I think it makes more sense to focus on the possible malcontents.”
Solomon has a list of those, you see.
He was an integral part of the security system at Ainatio Park Research Centre. Some folks would see the company’s chipped staff and total surveillance as spying on the workforce, but the system’s main job was to watch over a vast complex that housed dangerous materials and was a target for industrial espionage. Either way, Solomon has extensive archives. The system’s data can now be repurposed for good old-fashioned snooping. He knows who didn’t want to go to Opis when Georgina Erskine revealed the big lie and told the staff about Nomad. He’s now combing through all that data in the light of today’s news. But the security system we’re sifting through didn’t even catch Abbie smuggling the virus out of our lab, so it probably hasn’t spotted any of her fellow Mother Death sympathisers.
The tricky thing is we don’t even need someone to smuggle in a virus. We have scientists here who could create a new pathogen from scratch if they were sufficiently pissed off. We’ve got nineteen people from Die-back Remediation and a few other virologists who — hypothetically speaking — could knock out a new bioweapon in their lunch break. There’s my problem. I don’t like the profiling thing, but it’s the most logical and efficient way of looking in the right place first.
This is the problem with a fifth column. If you find one traitor, you wonder how many more there are. They don’t even have to be real to do lasting damage. We’ll search the base and cross-examine everyone, and we won’t find anything, but we probably won’t believe some people one hundred per cent either, so we’ll keep an eye on them, because not keeping an eye on them is too much of a risk. Solomon will monitor them because he’s everywhere in the Nomad system and AIs never sleep — well, not completely anyway — and folks will guess that they’re being watched for
So they’ll feel persecuted and resentful. Everyone else will look at them sideways. The farmers in Kill Line, the Cabot crew, my guys, and Chris Montello’s people will be wary of them even if they don’t mean to be. The small distance between groups from different backgrounds — townsfolk, scientists, military — will turn into unbridgeable divides, and that’s a recipe for disaster in an isolated outpost.
I don’t have a better idea, though.
Dieter Hill, one of the ex-cops here, nailed it pretty well: traitors poison the land and leave it toxic even longer than radiation. If you stick them in front of a firing squad, it won’t clear the air one bit. It’s hard to trust again when you know you’ve already been fooled, and it’s equally hard to forgive when you’ve been wrongly suspected and you realise what your supposed buddies really think of you.
But if guilty bastards exist, I need to find them fast. If they’re innocent, I have to live here afterwards and so does everyone I care about. So I’m treading carefully, just discussing things with Lianne in a civilised way and looking for clues I might have missed.
“Okay, Sol says they’ve now checked everything in the crop tunnels, including the pollinators,” I tell her. “We’ll get this over with as fast as we can.”
Nomad Base covers around three hundred acres, with nearly a thousand homes and dozens of workshops, labs, and offices, so it’s going to take a few days to search for biohaz materials manually even with dogs and bot assistance. The longer the disruption goes on, the more disgruntled folks are going to get. Lianne’s been sitting back in the chair with her arms folded, staring past me as if she’s trying to remember something, but now she leans forward and rests them on the table.
“Dan, don’t take this the wrong way, but cutting our comms, confining us to quarters, and searching our offices makes us look like suspects,” she says. We’re kind of friendly, or at least she talks to me like an old buddy, something few of the scientists did back on Earth. “Presumption of innocence still applies out here. Morale’s going to be rock-bottom.”
In a way, I wish she’d be more combative. I’m sure some of her team will be.
“We’re just showing that we’re doing it by the book, and that you’re cooperating because you want to reassure everyone,” I say. “If you can’t talk to each other, it’ll head off any accusations that you got your stories synced up to cover your asses.”
“Are you searching and interrogating everyone else this thoroughly?”
“Of course we are. Look.” Her screen’s blocked from the network for the time being, so I take out my own screen to show her the real-time map that displays and records everything happening on the base. You can see the search teams as clusters of icons. Everyone with a comms device or an Ainatio security chip is tracked and shows up as an icon, primarily for safety reasons, because a lone base on an unexplored planet is a lot of accidents waiting to happen. Even the bots and vehicles are trackable so that everyone can see if there’s transport or labour available to use. “See? Everywhere’s being searched. Kill Line, the warehouses, even my quarters. We can’t afford to get this wrong.”
Lianne studies the screen and nods. “Okay.”
“Look, I didn’t spot Abbie, and I can’t fail again,” I say. Yeah, I really mean that. I was Ainatio’s head of security. Chris and Alex both think they dropped the ball, but it was my job. “Even if we’ve got more Mother Death psychos here, most folks want to live. I realise it’s a tough thing to ask, but if you’ve got any doubts about your colleagues, I need to know.”
I’ve just asked her to rat out her buddies. The look on her face shows that, just for a moment. She wrinkles her nose as she shakes her head.
“If anyone was going to sabotage the mission, they’d have released the virus by now, not wait while we build up food stocks.”
“Sorry to put it bluntly, but would any of your team be capable of creating a new pathogen?”
Lianne always looks like she’s got the world’s problems on her shoulders when she’s actually fine. It’s just the way her skin’s draped into a frown over the years. It’s when she raises her eyebrows and the frown vanishes that she’s reacting, and that’s what she’s doing now. It looks genuine.
“I’d have to assume all of them could,” she says. “But it never even crossed my mind.” She leans on her elbows and presses her fingers against her brows as she looks down at nothing in particular on the table. “I really wish I hadn’t even thought that.”
“Suspicion isn’t a natural part of your job.”
“But it’s part of yours. I’m sorry. It can’t be much fun to see everyone through that filter.”
“I’m finding out. It’s new for me.”
“Is this interfering with your defence duties?”
“We’ll catch up,” I say, but of course it’s stopping us from doing other work. We should be reinforcing perimeters and extending monitoring. “Rule out the closest threat first. Look, once we’ve confirmed the base is all clear, remind your people that this really is routine. They don’t rely on guesswork or emotions in the course of their work, and neither do we.”
And even as I’m saying that, being all objective and sensible, I’m thinking maybe it is Lianne after all and her guilt-trippery about failing to spot Abbie is a smokescreen. If I’m that paranoid, others will be too. She’s right. When you wonder if the people you’re cooped up with in mankind’s most remote outpost want to kill you, it robs you of something. External enemies unite the tribe, but internal ones destroy even the reality you took for granted.
I frigging hate Mother Death. You have to wonder what their parents were like to spawn psychopathic bastards like that. You’d think they wouldn’t breed if they hate their own kind so much.
Lianne sits up straight again. “If there really is a saboteur, though, what will you do with them?”
We’ve only been here for a few months. We don’t have any courts, we don’t have a jail, and my troops and Chris Montello’s militia are the nearest thing we have to a police force. Apart from the rules of common decency, I’m not even sure we’re following a single legal or regulatory code. I’ve only got one law right now, though: survival. I think it’s going to show me another side of myself that I won’t like.
“It’ll be kind of awkward,” I say. As a species, we have that monkey thing about fairness, and part of fairness is a punishment fitting the crime. “I don’t see rehabilitation being an option.”
Lianne looks crushed. “If the worst happens, at least we’ve still got a chance to go back to Earth.”
“You know it’s not going to be that easy,” I tell her. “It’s worse than when we left. And now we’ll have more awkward things to explain.”
“But Britain was going to take us in.”
“That was before Abbie. We can’t count on that now.” Maybe that door’s still open, though. We have some value, and Marc Gallagher seems to know how to play the barter game with his government. But the main problem hasn’t gone away. Earth’s in trouble. “We’ve got to make Nomad work.”
“Yes. Yes, I know you’re right.”
I don’t think I’m getting anywhere with this. Lianne’s harmless. But I had to make sure.
“Okay, thanks for your time, Dr Maybury. We’ll notify you when we’re done with the residence searches and you can go home. Your place should be cleared in an hour or two.”
When she leaves, I have a few minutes to myself before I start on the next interviewee. The list says it’s Gavin Huber. The thing they don’t tell you about interviewing — okay, interrogation — is that the suspect isn’t the only one whose resolve gets ground down as it drags on. I’m worn out too. But the sooner I get it done, the sooner we get back to dealing with external threats, of which we have a shitload. One murdered scientist, two dead aliens in the morgue, two alien navies looking for the ship that our new alien buddies stole, and half of our people are still stuck in cryo because we can’t risk reviving them before we can feed and house them without endangering everyone else. Terrific. And Ingram’s second-in-command just walked out because he thinks she’s a war criminal.
