MOTHER DEATH (Nomad Book 2), page 1
Table of Contents
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
PREFACE
PART ONE
PROLOGUE
01
02
03
04
05
06
07
08
09
10
PART TWO
11
12
13
14
EPILOGUE
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
ALSO BY KAREN TRAVISS
Contents
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
PREFACE
PART ONE
PROLOGUE
01
02
03
04
05
06
07
08
09
10
PART TWO
11
12
13
14
EPILOGUE
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
ALSO BY KAREN TRAVISS
Copyright © 2021
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
ISBN: 978-1-912247-05-9
Edited by David Gatewood
Published by Karen Traviss
Jacket art: Thomas Wievegg
Design: Kevin G. Summers
karentraviss.com
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
My grateful thanks go to my editor, David Gatewood, always ready to dissect my very lengthy train of logic or scrutinise a timeline; Thomas Wievegg, for fabulous cover art; and Kevin Summers, who went above and beyond to answer my obscure question about the flavour of cattle feed… by tasting it. Now that’s dedication to the craft. Thank you, gentlemen!
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 latest novels are now written in UK English, both spelling and grammar, 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.
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.
But in the end, my books are about people: human people, non-human people, and people we build in labs. 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. Who would we fight and die for? And when we’re a long way from home, in a world where our laws and customs mean nothing, what must we hold onto to remain human?
Karen Traviss
July 2021
PART ONE
PROLOGUE
Ainatio Park Research Centre, Kill Line, Hart County,
former USA: first week of July, 0345 hours.
This place is a ghost town. Which, to be fair, is probably where I belong.
I talk to ghosts a lot these days. I’m a ghost myself: eight years, seven months, twelve days, and counting. I talk to them while I’m out running. Some blokes drink to escape whatever’s haunting them, but I run.
I’ll cover three or four miles of mothballed corridors tonight and I won’t see another living soul. I run every day. I run when I can’t stand being trapped in my own head, and I run when I can’t get away from the voice that keeps telling me I could have stopped John and Greg deploying. I run when I can’t get back to sleep in the middle of the night and the old worries bubble up in the dark. I run to stop myself tearing the guts out of things I can’t change and that won’t bring my boys back.
If I can talk it over with the ghosts, though, maybe I can work out why I’m still going through the motions of being alive.
So you’re in luck, princess. You’re the stiff who’s going to be a good listener today. I don’t know who you used to be, only that you forgot you’d be skylined when you stepped out of cover on that roof to squeeze off a burst at me. I squeezed first. But you won’tremember that. So be grateful I saved you the trouble of living through the last fifteen years of this shit show.
You want to know what you’ve missed? The world was already circling the drain the last time you were busy murdering and mutilating, but die-back pretty much wiped out the major food crops on this side of the world, and now it’s on the move again. It’s not your buddies who let it loose, though. Not this time.
Okay, listen in. Sitrep: we’ve done a deal with the Alliance of Asian and Pacific States, which basically consists of us handing over Ainatio’s FTL wormhole research and saying please don’t nuke us. So they’ve held off sterilising the area with sodium bombs to give us time to prep Shackleton for launch and get out of here, but they’re a bit pissed off that Erskine stripped out the FTL comms kit before she abandoned everyone. Not half as pissed off as we are, though. In real terms it means we won’t be able to talk to Nomad Base until we’re almost on their doorstep. Forty-five bloody years. Still, we’ll be asleep in the freezer. It’s not like we’ll notice.
Next task: eleven weeks to launch Shackleton. Risks: APS might find out the latest die-back is the strain Ainatio’s boffins were working on to find a treatment, and Asia blames the West for the whole die-back thing anyway, so things might get ugly. We haven’t told them Shackleton and Elcano are armed with nukes, or that we’ve also got a banned autonomous AI running the mission, either. I know APS is a pretty threadbare superpower these days, but in a world running on empty, the man with a charged battery and a spare mag is king. They can still fry us.
So now you know as much as I do.
Can I ask you a personal question, princess? Do you remember who you were when you were alive, and what you did? Does it all finally make sense now that you’re wherever you are? Or did your god wipe your slate clean and you’ve forgotten all those mass graves you filled with corpses? Okay. Never mind. Forget it.
This isn’t really my fight. I don’t work for Ainatio, the refugee camp’s got its own militia — who are hardcore, believe me — and the corporate security troops are competent enough. So I could have gone home by now. Me and Tev got stranded after we evacuated the embassy in DC, but we could have made our way back to England if we’d put our minds to it. We’re both former special forces, and if anyone can find their way home from the arse-end of the world when the buses aren’t running, it’s us. But I wouldn’t go and Tev wouldn’t leave me, because that’s what mates do. Home is family. Mine’s gone. There’s nothing left for me in England except the bits that hurt.
So I’m a ghost. Not completely dead like you, princess, but not really alive either, still drifting around looking for some peace. I can see the real world but I can’t touch it. The living can walk straight through me. But as I’m here, and blokes like me are made for situations like this, I have to do something. I just need to understand why.
Hold up, can you hear that? Listen... that grinding, clunking noise? It’s a quadrubot coming up behind us. Sorry, hun, got to go. That’s our AI, Solomon. He’s come to nag me.
Solomon catches up and matches my pace. “Are you all right, Marc? I assume you and Tev carried on drinking last night when you went back to your quarters.”
“We did, Sol. We got totally rat-arsed.”
“But why are you out for a run now? Tev’s flight leaves soon. If you miss him — “
“I know. I just needed to ask a dead woman some questions.”
“Yes. Of course.”
“Ghosts, Sol. You, me, the people in our heads. We’re all ghosts.”
Sol pauses for a beat. “Do you mean disconnected from the world, or unable to let go of the living?”
“I’m too hung over to do philosophy, mate. Ask me one on sport.”
Most AIs sound human in conversations, even the cheap customer service ones that are really sorry your parcel didn’t arrive, but Sol’s something else. Look at him. He’s transferred into that scruffy red industrial quadrubot again. It’s a museum piece. I know he needs to be able to exit the network, but out of all the bots in storage, everything from drones to
Yeah, I can relate to a runner. You can argue the toss over whether AIs should be classed as people, but Sol is definitely a human minus a body, and if that’s not a ghost, I don’t know what is. I think he just wants to touch the real world to check if it’s still there. The quad’s the best way he knows.
“We should start heading back,” he says. “The flight won’t wait.”
He’s right. I can’t miss it. This is the last time I’ll ever see my mate Tev. Tev’s Fijian but he’s never been to Fiji, and that’s where he’s heading for a second chance with his ex and his kids. It’s decent of APS to fly him out, but I wouldn’t trust them as far as I could spit. Even if Fiji’s their side of the quarantine line, they’re bound to see him as a source of answers about what Ainatio’s been up to. They won’t see the pick of our scientist litter as undesirables, either. They’ve got a shopping list.
“I’m glad you decided to come with us,” Sol says suddenly. “I know it wasn’t an easy decision. But a fresh start — “
“I don’t want a fresh start, Sol.”
I don’t know what I want.
I did twenty-four years in the army, eighteen in special forces. Part of me knows I should go home and defend my country again — and slip the MoD a copy of Ainatio’s research — because even an island can’t hold out against disease and invasion forever. But I feel the same need to get away from wherever I am as I did when I left the regiment, and I can’t tell if I’m running away from something or chasing it.
I remember the day I became a ghost. A woman from the MoD visited in person to tell me and Sandra that both our sons had been killed in action. And my life ended there and then. I felt like I’d fallen off a roof, flailing for the last few seconds before I hit concrete oblivion. But I never reached the ground. I’m still in free fall today, life receding behind me, death and a bit of peace always a few yards ahead. I could do something about that and I don’t know why I haven’t — not fear, not optimism, not atonement — so I’ve decided to go out doing what special forces do best and recover some self-respect, and be the man my boys thought I was. Or maybe I’m just too far gone, so badly burned by it all that the nerves have been destroyed and I can’t feel the pain that should make me stop moving.
I’ve shut Sol up. I didn’t mean to.
All I can hear is his legs going chonk, chonk, chonk, my heart pounding all the way up my throat, and that weird muffled quietness that sound-reducing floors create. We loop back down the passage, scattering a group of housekeeping bots cleaning the floor from side to side like they’re doing a creeping line search. Eventually we end up back in the undercroft below the management building. It’s nearly zero-four-fifty.
Plenty of time. We can slow the pace. We’re a few yards from the external doors, and then it’s just a stroll to the landing area outside the main gates. I don’t want to drag this out. Extra time won’t make it any easier.
“I’ll have to dumb down in a moment,” Sol says. He’s linked into the security cameras, which give him his all-seeing view of the site when he’s in the network, and the imaging sat in Orbital 1, so he can keep an eye on APS’s aircraft carrier as well. “APDU personnel outside, on our route.”
Sol is an AMAI, an Autonomous Moral Artificial Intelligence, but the M won’t cut any ice with APS. Nobody wants another rogue AI like Earthmother. As the exterior doors open, scented humid air rushes in like someone’s just taken a shower. I can hear helicopters — not ours — and that means the APS technicians have arrived from the aircraft carrier Temujin to start their shift, and one of those helicopters will be Tev’s ride. When I round the corner of the next building, I’ve got line of sight with the landing area, and it’s light enough now for me to see two tilt rotors in APDU livery.
This is it, then.
Solomon trots beside me, looking as unremarkable as he can while we pass a group of very young, very new Asia-Pacific Defence Union troops. They’re wearing a mix of Korean and Australian uniforms, some of the white lads in Korean rig and the Asian guys in Aussie greens, all with the extra APDU badges. They’re well turned out, all pressed and polished, but they’ve got a mix of firearms that’s revealing. The Korean lads have fairly modern but basic Plat rifles, but the Aussies are carrying ASP 65s. Those things were overdue for replacement when I was in basic training. They’ll still make a nasty hole in you, but they’re antiques. This is what I mean when I say APS is threadbare.
The APDU troops really are kids, though.
They can’t be more than eighteen or nineteen, conscripts engrossed in their pocket screens like any youngster. They’re probably talking to their families and reassuring them that we haven’t descended into cannibalism yet. This is our occupying army. It doesn’t look like they’ve noticed me or heard Sol grinding along. That could get them killed one day.
I’m a couple of yards away. “Gentlemen,” I bark. “Screens off.”
And they obey before they’ve even turned to look at me. They shove their screens in their pockets and stand there looking startled and sheepish. I’ve got the voice, you see, the sergeant’s authority that makes dogs sit and young Toms snap to attention. These kids are the same age as Greg. That wouldn’t stop me dropping them if anything kicked off, but I don’t want their mums to get the call every parent dreads.
While I’m keeping an eye out for Tev, I see Dr Annis Kim hanging around the gates. She’s an APS spy. She’s not even hiding it now. The more I think about the last couple of weeks — and I’ve thought about it a lot — the more I suspect she set us up and the die-back breach wasn’t an accident, no matter how chummy she is with us.
But I’ve also spotted a stocky Asian guy in his forties having a smoke on the far side of one of the tilts, watching the technicians dispersing, and he’s a lot more interesting.
We recognise our own, you see. The dark blue zipper jacket and plain tan pants might as well be a full dress uniform. He’s like me. He’s an operator. He watches me back, probably thinking the same thing, sending me the silent message that he’s got my number, but it’s discreet enough not to look like he wants to slug it out just yet.
Noted. I’ve got your number as well, mate. Any time.
Now Kim’s seen me coming. She intercepts me at the security gates. “Tev should be in Suva by tomorrow evening,” she says, with that cocky smile that’s starting to piss me off. “I’ve got a line set up if you want to talk to him when he lands.”
“Thank you.” I always try to be polite. When I work out what she’s done and how she did it, I might not be. “But if your lot don’t treat him well, remember I’m still here, you’re still here, and I do a textbook double tap.”
That was polite enough. She gets the point. I keep walking and stand at a safe distance from the rotor blades. Sol doesn’t ask why I’m being a bit off with Kim. A couple of minutes later, Tev appears with his rucksack, and dumps it on the ground to straighten his collar as if he’s just put his shirt on, which he probably has — he’ll have been through decontamination before they’ll let him board the tilt. Sol walks away to give us a moment.
“There’s always Fiji,” Tev says. “It’s not too late to change your mind.”
“They’ve already got enough rugby players.” The tilt pilot ambles across to the ramp, folding and unfolding his arms. “Look, I know I pushed you to do this, but are you sure? They won’t be able to resist shaking you down for intel.”
Tev does his big unworried grin. “We’ve been through all that. They think I’m just the big dumb security guard from the embassy and you got me out of DC because I was ex-Army too. You were right. I’ve got to see my kids. Whatever happens after that doesn’t matter.”
Tev’s unbreakable, but I don’t want some APS tosser to test that. The pilot’s looking more fidgety. “You better get going, mate. Your chauffeur’s restless.”
