Here we stand, p.10
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Here We Stand, page 10

 

Here We Stand
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  “We’ll never know,” Trinder said. “And I’d bet alien gunrunners lie just like their human counterparts.”

  “I won’t be satisfied until Sol can translate for himself.”

  “Do you ever wonder if you’re up to this?” Trinder asked. “I do.”

  “All the time.”

  “I always think you’ve got all the answers.”

  “As if.” Chris slid a monocular out of his pocket and focused on the workshops, then put it away again. “I know what my job is. So I’d hate to be in Marc’s position or Ingram’s, because they’ve got a functioning country that might make good use of the information and technology we could give them. And maybe we should. I don’t really buy into Sol’s thing about the best of us and keeping us in some kind of sacred quarantine, but I don’t want trash arriving here and fucking up a decent little town either. I’ve seen enough of it. But in the end, it’ll be the Kugin or the Jattans who set the agenda. I just hope they let us know in advance if they’re not the assholes the teeriks say they are. I’d hate to attack guys bringing us a welcome wagon pack.”

  “You don’t trust Fred, do you?”

  “I don’t rely on a one-sided story. No matter how sincere it is.” Chris turned and looked Trinder in the eye. “Are you beating yourself up about your family? I hate to be blunt, but cut yourself some slack.”

  “It’s complicated.”

  “Yeah, I don’t know what happened to my folks and I think I don’t care after they washed their hands of me, but it’s still on my mind. You want to tell me what happened?”

  “I just moved a long way away to work for Ainatio, we weren’t the kind of family that lived in each other’s pockets, and then I didn’t visit for a while. Then there were the epidemics, and the cities going bust and no cops or State Guard any more, and the calls stopped.”

  Chris nodded a few times like he was working something out. Trinder had never really discussed family with him and it was a minefield for most people anyway. He didn’t know what else to say.

  “Remember, I was the other side of the wire,” Chris said at last. “Some people formed up into heavily-fortified communities and started their own militias, and some just tried to get by in what ended up as civil war zones. You saw some of the news at Ainatio for a while, didn’t you? It wasn’t pretty. So if you couldn’t contact your folks on the network, buddy, there was no point in going out looking for them. You wouldn’t have made it. That’s what you’re worrying about, isn’t it? You feel you could have tried harder.”

  He was telling Trinder exactly what Trinder had told himself and it still sounded like an excuse.

  “But Annis Kim made it to Ainatio from Korea and crossed the country from Alaska,” Trinder said.

  “Yeah, but she did it in the last couple of years,” Chris said. “A lot more people were dead by then. Fewer assholes around to stop her.”

  It was brutal, but it was still what Trinder wanted to hear, even if it didn’t feel like forgiveness. “Maybe.”

  “Dan, you did what you could, when you could. And if we end up rescuing anyone from Earth, we’ll try to contact your family. Okay? I’ll go with you.”

  Trinder knew the chances of finding his parents or his sister alive were slim, but the idea of them thinking he’d forgotten them had only grown worse since he’d come to Opis. It was seeing the Cabot crew dealing with the fact that surviving friends and relatives still thought they’d died forty-five years ago, and had never been told that the loss of the ship was another elaborate Ainatio lie to keep Project Nomad free of political interference.

  “Thanks, buddy,” Trinder said. “Damn, we’re all broken people, just like Erin says. What kind of society are we going to create here?”

  “One that knows the value of sticking together,” Chris said. “And we’re not going anywhere.”

  03

  I went into astrophysics because I didn’t want to believe Earth was all I’d ever understand, and I realised there was much more to be discovered than I’d ever see in my lifetime. There was a kind of hope in that, a future that would carry on when I was dust. And now I’m on another planet, digging its soil and watching its moon rise, and I don’t have access to space telescopes or any of the sophisticated tools of my trade. I make do with a teenage boy’s amateur telescope. And the cosmos has lost none of its wonder.

  Dr Todd Mangel, former head of Astrophysics,

  the Ainatio Corporation.

  Supply Warehouse 5, Nomad Base: September 25, OC.

  “How the hell could you not know? What’s going to happen to Audrey and Seb now?”

  “Hey, it’s no safer here. She made her choice.”

  The fight hadn’t reached the stage of trading blows, but Solomon still found human arguments unpleasant to watch. Stephanie Bachelin, one of Ainatio’s biomed researchers, was berating Gavin Huber from Die-Back Remediation about the Meikles, who’d decided to stay on Earth. Gavin was correct in every fact. Audrey Meikle had decided to ask APS for refuge in Sydney rather than take her young daughter to an unexplored planet, and her husband Seb had gone along with it. It was unfortunate that die-back was now spreading within APS and the decision now looked like a mistake.

  The row was being conducted in whispers that sounded like animals hissing at each other before striking. The safety system had flagged an unusual sound profile for the warehouse and alerted Solomon to check it out, but it wasn’t intruders or a coolant failure. He monitored it anyway.

  Stephanie was furious. “You just don’t care, do you?”

  “What did you expect me to do about it?” Gavin whispered. “We didn’t know what Abbie was up to, okay? And why was the crazy bitch my responsibility? What about her mom, your co-worker? And Seb worked in the same damn lab with Abbie. If you want to blame anyone for letting Audrey haul the family off to APS, try him.”

  “Aude thought they’d be safe. It was for their little girl.”

  “It’s no safer here. It’s a choice of die-back or homicidal aliens. But Abbie’s not my fault or anyone else’s.”

  “Fine, but now everyone thinks we’re all genocidal maniacs too. And that’s down to your sloppy lab procedure, because you should have spotted her taking samples. It’s all on you. Screw it, we should open that gate and bring them here.”

  “Yes, brilliant plan. Pull the family out of Australia, which hasn’t been infected yet and might never get it, and let them get fried by an alien navy instead.”

  They both stopped abruptly as if they’d realised they probably had an audience somewhere. The new grocery section within the warehouse normally had a supervisor on duty during the day and a few people wandering around picking supplies. It was Ingram’s idea for getting the different groups to mix. If bots stopped delivering rations and everyone collected their food allocation from a central point that functioned like a grocery store, she said, the different social and professional groups on the base would run into each other like normal people did on Earth, which would help break down the barriers that had already formed.

  Solomon remained unconvinced. Meeting neighbours didn’t always mean a friendly chat.

  The section was a canyon of tall shelves, but Solomon’s access to the security cameras showed him who the audience was. Damian Shure, one of Trinder’s troops, had paused while picking groceries for Mrs Toft, an elderly lady from Kill Line who he’d given a ride to. Near the front exit, Dave Flores, acting as stores supervisor for the morning, looked up slowly, craned his neck, and began walking towards the scene of the fracas as if he was going to make sure things didn’t get out of hand. By the time he reached the shelves, Stephanie and Gavin had parted and were leaving in different directions. Dave ambled up to Damian.

  “Are they all at each other’s throats now?” Dave asked.

  Damian shrugged and went back to consulting his shopping list. “I think the die-back guys are getting it in the neck from everyone.”

  “Weird.” Dave scanned the trolley’s contents and studied the stock control figures on the display. “We never busted their asses when they lost the virus and infected Kill Line. Maybe we should have.”

  “Hey, you brewing any more of that porter ale yet?”

  “Maybe. Had enough of Andy’s gin, huh? Help me out building the bar extension and I’ll start a batch for you.”

  “It’s a deal.”

  They laughed. Solomon was glad to see his detachment getting on well with the Kill Liners. But then some of them had ended up moving into the transit camp zone, where the boundaries with Kill Line had mostly vanished. It was also encouraging to see them looking for opportunities to be sociable. Bots could have print-built the bar extension in a day, but Kill Line wanted to do it the old-fashioned way. Humans enjoyed bonding while doing constructive things. Solomon had never had the opportunity to study the behaviour of regular people before, and after a century surrounded by scientists and technicians, and lately military personnel, the lives of ordinary civilians seemed quite exotic.

  Solomon would let Alex know about the spat in case it escalated. Marc had predicted months ago that the ease of using the gate would make people see it as a way to fix problems on Earth, and if anybody had a case for covertly returning to rescue friends, it was him. For others, though, the Caisin gate would always offer an easy way out, and that would make it harder for them to see Opis as the centre of their existence rather than an outpost looking over its shoulder at Earth.

  It was a lot to ask. Solomon knew that. He suspected Opis had to be lived in, built upon, and become the birthplace of generations before the settlers would begin to feel this was where they were meant to be. But this wasn’t about opening up new territory, at least not for him. It was about preserving special humans, and anywhere safe and habitable would serve the purpose. Opis was just the best place to do that for the foreseeable future.

  Solomon moved his focus back to the quadrubot, still idling at the perimeter to the south of the base. He was going to go for a run. He hadn’t done that for a long time, and he’d missed it. In the years after the FTL relay was established, long before Cabot arrived, he’d upload himself to a quadrubot on the surface a little more often than was necessary just for the joy of racing across the open plain.

  He surveyed the landscape before moving off. This was where he’d first seen the teeriks and not realised they were intelligent; this was where he’d start his run and race flat out for a while, keeping an eye on the quadrubot’s backup charge if he went out at night, thrilled by the impact of his feet on the ground and the way it shook the bot’s frame. Disabling the sensors and stabilisers that gave him steady three-sixty-degree vision made running even more visceral. He could only see what was ahead of him, like a real terrestrial predator. After so long as a disembodied mind, the cruder experience of having a body and compensating for its shortcomings made him feel real, more in touch with the humans he cared for. This was their chaotic existence, constantly being shaken by movement and brushed by objects around them.

  It was also reassuring. Solomon still recalled his early development when he thought he was a being like Bednarz and the lab assistants, and didn’t understand why he had no physical connection to the world he could see. A hundred years later, he still felt better for touching solid reality and knowing that it wasn’t a simulation.

  He started to trot, then picked up speed. In daylight the undulating plain looked much busier than at night, even without the nocturnal creatures. It was packed with bushes, small animals, and divots in the grass. Splashes of dark red, green, and blue-grey vegetation jerked around in his field of vision. By the time he reached the bot’s top speed, thirty-two miles an hour, he felt like he was being shaken around in a bottle. He wasn’t even sure where his feet were hitting the ground. It was exhilarating. Eventually he reactivated the orientation system to make his vision compensate for movement and slipped back into a sensation that felt more like gliding a few feet above the ground.

  The view of the mountains in the distance was intriguing. Like so much of the world, they had no names yet because the decision was to be left to those who’d settled here. Solomon was happy to deal in precise coordinates until that happened. But nobody had ventured more than a few miles beyond the wire when Ingram had lifted the lockdown, and it wasn’t a lack of curiosity. They still needed an armed escort to go off-camp, and there were too many other tasks that took priority after Nomad’s overnight explosion in population. If they were honest, even the most adventurous here would admit they were wary of straying too far when hostile aliens might show up at any time.

  Soon, though, they’d need to explore properly. The satellite network could show them detailed aerial views of the whole planet, but that wasn’t as thorough as exploration and it wasn’t the same as setting foot on undiscovered land.

  How about the Caisin gate?

  It could set down anywhere. If Marc was considering it for sabotage missions, then its ability to pluck people to safety would work equally well for survey teams. There — Solomon had fallen into the trap. He was as seduced by the technology’s potential as anyone else. And he wanted to explore for himself instead of seeing Opis as a stream of meteorological and seismic data, and imagine what it would look like in two hundred years when the human population had grown and perhaps founded other cities around the globe.

  His friends would be long dead by then. He’d outlived many people in his existence and mourned them, but he knew he’d take the passing of the men and women here far harder. His life before had been Bednarz, but now he had a circle of friends, humans he’d shared real hardships and possible death with, a family. For a moment the sadness of it overwhelmed him, but he shook it off and headed out towards the river that ran past Nomad to the northern coast. He hadn’t reached his turnaround point before the site safety alarm paged him again. Something had passed through the perimeter without authorisation.

  It had travelled out of the camp rather than crashing into it, so it wasn’t a crisis. A quick check with the sentry drones that had been flying continuously since the Gan-Pamas incident showed that it was Rikayl. The minor shock from the barrier field didn’t seem to dampen his enthusiasm for exploring.

  Solomon stopped and turned around. Rikayl was heading in his direction, so Solomon calculated a return track to intercept him. As he loped back, he looked up at the sky and wondered if the small flying creatures circling high above him ever landed. He’d never seen any on the ground or in trees. For the time being, he’d call them birds, but they looked nothing like teeriks. They might even have been large insects. But that was another huge field to explore; the various invisible barriers around the base, the bare earth cordon zones, and seventy years of eradication by bots had made Nomad a desert for native creatures. There were no brightly-winged insects or other wonders to marvel at inside the wire.

  Eventually a drone image showed Rikayl swooping down to a clump of bushes two hundred yards ahead. A storm of small animals erupted, scattering across the grass and fleeing in all directions — speckled rodent-like creatures with kangaroo tails, egg-shaped things springing randomly into the air in all directions, and the small long-legged animals that Erin had nicknamed guinea pigs. Thrashing red wings shook the foliage. Everything was suddenly still.

  Solomon slowed to a walk and went to look. Rikayl had caught something. When Solomon got close enough to see what it was, the teerik already had it gripped in both hands, tearing chunks out of it like a slice of melon.

  His meal was one of the bouncing eggs. It turned out to be a creature with grey feathery scales and sturdy little legs that Solomon had seen scuttling around when the drones surveyed the area. But he’d never seen its escape strategy of rolling into a defensive ball as it sprang into the air so that it bounced unpredictably when it landed. Rikayl paused to look up at Solomon with a scrap of the egg creature hanging out of his beak, swallowed the chunk, and fluffed up his neck feathers as if he was indignant at the interruption.

  “That might not be safe for you to eat,” Solomon said. He’d had little contact with the youngster but it was worth talking to him as if he understood English, because he was picking it up fast. “Have you eaten these before? You know we have to check to see if food’s safe for you.”

  Rikayl held out what was left of his meal. “Fun!” he said, in Jeff’s voice. “Fun fun fun!”

  Solomon debated whether to try to stop him eating, but he’d already swallowed most of it, and he’d put up a savage fight if any of the veterinarians tried to examine him. A teerik couldn’t do much damage to an industrial quadrubot frame, though. Perhaps it was worth trying to separate him from his snack.

  “You’re learning more words, Rikayl,” Solomon said, edging towards him. He reached forward very slowly with his left front leg, gripper attachment open. “Shall we go back to Nomad, then?”

  Rikayl tilted his head on one side and rasped, then took a warning peck at Solomon’s leg. “Mine. Shoo!”

  It was a different voice again. He was mimicking everyone he’d heard now, and the shoo sounded like Chris.

  “Okay, Rikayl,” Solomon said. “You can keep it. Now will you come back with me?”

  Solomon knew that if he ran off, Rikayl would want to chase a fast-moving object for the thrill of it, but it had to be done carefully. If Solomon spooked him, the teerik might fly further out and this time Solomon could lose him. Solomon turned away and started trotting towards Nomad, keeping his speed down to give Rikayl a chance to catch up, then picked up his pace. It was only when he broke into a run that he detected Rikayl coming up from behind. Then he was flying at head height alongside, level with Solomon’s head. He still had a chunk of meat clutched tightly in his hind claws.

 
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