Here we stand, p.11
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Here We Stand, page 11

 

Here We Stand
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  “We have to test that food, Rikayl,” Solomon said. He sent a message to Commander Haine to stand by for collection. “Don’t drop it.”

  “Good boy!” Rikayl said. “Good good good boy!”

  For a moment Solomon thought he was saying he’d been a good boy and done as he was told, as a child might, but he was mimicking the voice of Dieter Hill, the dog handler. Rikayl thought Solomon was some kind of dog. Perhaps he was even mocking him. It was undignified to get into arguments about terminology with a child, though, and Solomon bit back his urge to say he wasn’t a dog. He preferred to see his bot persona as a cheetah because that was how it moved. But it was a pointless thing to concern himself with.

  He maintained his speed. “I’m an emanation,” he said, using Fred’s term for an AI. “Solomon. Emanation. In a quadrubot mechanical. Understand?”

  “Alright really,” Rikayl said, keeping station effortlessly. This time he sounded like Marc. “Alright fun.”

  Whatever Solomon had done, he’d placated Rikayl and intrigued him enough to lure him back to the base. Rikayl sailed straight through the insect barrier field and didn’t even flinch. It was probably time to have a word with Chris and add more physical measures like dedicated drones in case something larger than Rikayl and equally barrier-proof showed up unexpectedly.

  Commander Haine was waiting by the hangar with Nina’s former deputy, Helen McArthur. She was holding a large bowl. Rikayl’s senses must have been better than the quadrubot’s, because he diverted at top speed towards Helen immediately, leaving Solomon wrong-footed. It looked like the teerik was going to crash into her, but he dropped to the ground at the last moment and walked a few steps with his head down before stopping at her feet like a supplicant. Whatever was in that bowl had his attention. Haine searched in the grass, holding a lab container in one hand, and picked up the discarded chunk of egg-creature.

  “What was this poor soul before it was so cruelly taken from us?” He held the transparent box up to the light, inspecting the contents. “This could be a luxury export one day if it’s not poisonous.”

  “It’s little four-legged creature that rolls itself into an ovoid,” Solomon said. “About twice the size of a hen’s egg. I assume the shape dictates its defensive strategy of bouncing randomly like an asymmetric ball when attacked.”

  “Not much of a defensive strategy for this chap, then, was it? Still, that’s four to a supermarket pack. We’ll make our fortune in exotic gourmet meat.”

  Rikayl was polishing off half a roast chicken — the alluring contents of the bowl — while Helen watched him with a rather sad expression. She seemed to have taken on her late boss’s mantle when it came to Rikayl. When she reached out and stroked the teerik’s head, Solomon fully expected her to lose a few fingers, but Rikayl tolerated her interruption and said, “Alright, really!” in Marc’s voice.

  “Good boy,” she said.

  Rikayl shook his head emphatically. “No no no, Sol good boy.”

  “Bless. That’s quite an impression of Dieter.” Haine smiled. “You’ve clearly established a rapport, Sol.”

  Solomon tried not to bristle, then was surprised that such an impossible physical reflex had even occurred to him.

  “No, he’s saying that he’s not a dog, but I am.”

  Haine just laughed and walked off with Helen. Rikayl took to the air and headed in the direction of the teerik compound, leaving no trace of any chicken carcass, so he must have eaten the bones as well. If the bouncy egg creature didn’t make him ill, it proved teeriks had robust biochemistry.

  “I’m sorry, Solomon.” Fred had come out of the hangar with both hands full of probes and cables. He was wearing a short white lab coat, human-style. “I know Rikayl went roaming again. But we had a drone tracking him this time. What did he do?”

  Solomon was fascinated by the lab coat. Someone must have spent considerable time altering it to fit Fred, because it hung on him like the brown jinbei-style jacket he wore when he was working. The overall effect softened him into a child’s storybook character. His resemblance to a familiar bird and his incongruously human clothing and equipment made it far too easy to see him as a harmless pet, like a dog wearing a little sweater. That wasn’t a trap Solomon would fall into, but he could see the humans here succumbing to it. The only people who didn’t get that oh-how-cute look when they were with Fred were Jeff Aiken, who treated him like a shipmate, Marc, who seemed to see him as a stubborn subordinate he needed to whip into shape, and Chris, who didn’t trust anything or anybody.

  “He killed a small animal and ate some of it, I’m afraid,” Solomon said. “They’re running tests to see if the flesh is toxic.”

  “He’s too big and energetic to lock up now.” Fred had a habit of drooping his wings in a way that made him look like an exhausted human. No, it wasn’t cute. Solomon wasn’t influenced. “Perhaps we should trust him to come home, but if he’s found a new game and something to eat, he might not.”

  “Let’s see what happens,” Solomon said. “Anyway, I see you have a lab coat now.”

  Fred adjusted the front with his beak. “Lieutenant Commander Hiyashi said I ought to have one because I was a boffin. I thought that was very kind. I take it boffin is positive.”

  “It is. You’re one of the gang now. They must like you.”

  “I’ve almost finished adapting the freighter’s autopilot. You can connect to it remotely now. Would you care to look?”

  “Of course. Thank you.”

  Gan-Pamas’s ship was cramped even by Jattan standards, but Solomon could move around relatively easily on all fours because there were no ladders. The interior was a single continuous deck broken only by a couple of hatches leading down to the cargo space, and he didn’t need to access that. The freighter was, as Marc described it, the Jattan equivalent of a delivery van, except for its impressive military-grade defence and intelligence-gathering refinements, almost none of which were apparent from the outside except the stealth cloaking system, and even Fred had to examine the hull closely to see that.

  Solomon studied the display on the console. He could see the difference in the symbols from the last time he’d been in here trying to decrypt logs with Fred, but he still didn’t have enough data on the Jattan language to tie symbols to sounds.

  “Can I test this?” Solomon asked.

  Fred attached an adapter to the console, the same type that enabled Solomon to link to Curtis’s systems. “This should provide an approximation of the data you’ll see when it’s operating remotely. You can input courses with a numerical pad if you want your human colleagues to be able to use it.”

  “Ah.” Solomon rotated a leg to place the connection into the quadrubot’s panel at the base of its neck. He could now see a three-dimensional chart of Dal Mantir space. “This is an archived chart, I take it. You’re not actually connected to a satellite.”

  “No, this is a standard chart, the kind that all off-world traffic uses. The ship’s still not linked to anything externally.”

  “Just checking.”

  “I haven’t re-enabled the communications system yet.”

  “Very wise.”

  “So we can now insert the ship using a Caisin gate closer to Dal Mantir and pull out the same way,” Fred said. “Nobody can track it unless they actually pass through the gate with it. If they happen to intercept the ship in Mantiri orbit and manage to board it, they’re likely to assume that it’s the exiled opposition spying on them and deal with it on their own.”

  “All we’ll be looking for is an early warning that they’ve located us,” Solomon said.

  “I’ve given that some thought and the best route is via the Jattan intelligence services. They commissioned Curtis and they’ve lost her. They’ll almost certainly have tried to keep that quiet because of the humiliation and the risk of rival departments capitalising on it. So I think they’ll be discreet and send out an inconspicuous task force, possibly assembled some distance from Velet or Dal Mantir, but whatever they do, there’ll be a lot of discussion and planning, and therefore noticeable comms and ship movements.”

  Solomon was reminded again that Fred wasn’t a simple engineer. He understood his clients’ office politics. “You’re suggesting we spy on spies. That does make sense.”

  “The division that commissioned the ship is more akin to what you might call the secret police than to espionage agents. They’re responsible for dealing with external threats from other nations, countering internal threats from within in the Protectorate itself, and keeping its off-world colonial interests under control — putting down independence movements, for example. We can take an educated guess about the departments which will be talking to each other about this.”

  “And you can intercept that?”

  “I think the easiest way is to establish a link with naval headquarters and then watch their fleet reporting centre, which tracks all Jattan vessels, and transmit the data back via their link to one of the weather satellites. If we can pin down the personal communications within the complex, then we would have even earlier warning of any movement.”

  “And how do you establish that initial link?”

  “We have most of their access codes in order to work on the ship,” Fred said.

  “But don’t they realise teeriks also designed the algorithm to change the keys?”

  “I meant the Kugin codes.”

  “I’m lost, Fred.”

  “The Kugin spy on all their allies as well as their enemies, and we have the knowledge to use that to infiltrate.”

  That was new. Solomon understood Marc’s frustration with how little information Fred volunteered. “Presumably the Kugin wouldn’t warn the Protectorate someone might use it to spy on them. But when you took the ship, they’d have changed all the keys you had access to.”

  “It’s an open secret,” Fred said. “The Jattans would be fools to think it didn’t happen, but doing something about it is hard. It’s not just the technical challenge of blocking Kugin infiltration. It’s the risk of being caught trying to look for it, because they wouldn’t want to upset them. As for changing keys, we look after that as well, so we can probably predict what the new ones will be.”

  Alien politics seemed as convoluted and as messy as Earth’s. “Wouldn’t the Kugin expect you to do this, though? If they haven’t changed the codes, it might be a trap to detect you.”

  “No, they would expect us to avoid all contact, which is what we were doing before you arrived here,” Fred said. “They’d have no reason to think we would return to Dal Mantir or even Velet space and put ourselves in danger, nor would they know we’d have use of another ship to do so, or that we wanted to spy on the Protectorate in the first place. They won’t expect any of this.”

  “They thought you were obedient,” Solomon said. “Now they know you’re not. Are they too stupid to allow for that?”

  “I’m sure they didn’t think we’d find people willing to help us. Or that those people would have a motive to track their search for the ship.”

  Solomon couldn’t fault his argument, but they had to take the risk anyway. He tested the chart by inputting coordinates directly from his core. It worked as far as he could see.

  “When can we test this in flight?”

  “Allow me two more days.”

  “It’s excellent work, Fred.”

  “Starting the monitoring may be easier than maintaining it. We’ll be waiting for something that might take years to happen.”

  “They’ll still keep searching for the ship.”

  “Yes, but they might not find a reason to look on Opis.”

  “I think that’s optimistic,” Solomon said. “You found the planet, and then Gan-Pamas did as well. Why wouldn’t the Protectorate and the Kugin end up here too? There seems to be some kind of common thread that brings others to our front door.”

  “It was the Jattan opposition that found Opis, or at least someone who procures arms for them.”

  “I don’t see why that makes a difference. But in that case, perhaps we should try locating them first.”

  “That’s a much more difficult task,” Fred said. “And it won’t tell us when the Protectorate makes a move.”

  “The opposition would be spying on them. We would pick up something in their chatter if that were the case, surely.”

  “There’s no guarantee of that.”

  This was a convenient moment to steer the conversation back to Gan-Pamas and what he’d actually said in his final moments. Chris was uneasy about it. Even if his talent for knowing when something was wrong was pure folklore of the kind humans found reassuring, Solomon at least owed him an answer. It was potentially a sensitive topic. Fred might think he wasn’t trusted, and also feel threatened if he saw Solomon taking his role as an interpreter.

  Solomon was relying on the skills of one of the dumb AI systems that he managed. He was making a big assumption that all Jattans spoke a form of the same language, and that it might have a number of variations depending on region, the age and gender of the speaker, and the social situation it was used in, like many human languages. If he was wrong, then any translation would be unreliable.

  So far, the linguistics AI had used the Jattan call to surrender that Fred had drafted to identify enough fragments of the language to build the structure and outline a grammar. It had then used that to analyse the conversation between Fred and Gan-Pamas. But vocabulary was patchy, and that was where subtle details mattered.

  “I’d like to learn Jattan properly,” Solomon said, unplugging the connector and passing it back to Fred. “And Kugin, so I can automate the surveillance. A language course. The kind of information that Jeff Aiken gave you to help you learn English. But I imagine you never needed to keep that kind of module.”

  Solomon hoped that would either show Fred how harmless and necessary it was to learn a language, or shame him for being unwilling to extend the same courtesy to Solomon that Jeff had extended to him.

  “I’m afraid not,” Fred said. “As you said, we don’t need to.”

  “Could you go over a few details for me, then? Would you mind? I have the message you recorded for Gan-Pamas, telling him to surrender, and the exchange between you when he was captured.”

  “Of course.”

  “Can you remember what Gan-Pamas was shouting?”

  Fred paused for a moment. “Yes, all of it. I did as Chris requested and asked Gan-Pamas why Lirrel had killed Nina. He said he was sorry that it happened and that he couldn’t trust Lirrel. He kept saying that to Chris, too — ‘I couldn’t trust that teerik’ — but he didn’t realise I was one until I told him. He could only hear me, after all. I asked him if he’d told anyone else that we were here and what he’d found, and he called me a traitor and a few other insults. I kept asking him why Lirrel had to kill Nina and he kept saying he didn’t realise how much Lirrel had changed. I didn’t understand what that meant, but presumably he’d trusted Lirrel in the past but his behaviour had altered over time.”

  “Insults. Such as?”

  “Mekika. It’s not a word we hear often in our work — monster, abomination, hateful thing, animal. In a negative sense.” Fred cocked his head, staring at the bulkhead as if he was recalling a sequence of events the same way a human would. “He said... ‘I know what you are, and they’ll find you no matter where you run, I’m sorry about the killing, I shouldn’t have brought him.’ That didn’t mean much to me, I’m afraid. Then he started saying, “You have no idea what this is and what’s actually happening, so let me tell you.’ But that seemed to be addressed to Chris. Then something panicked him — Major Trinder, I think — and he opened fire.”

  “Those exact words.”

  “Yes. I’ll write them down for you.”

  “Thank you.” Solomon now had a few more words to work with, but he also had a more confused picture of the argument. It almost sounded as if Fred hadn’t fully understood the Jattan.

  “Was he speaking a dialect?”

  “Well, it wasn’t the form of Jattan we’d usually hear. It was more like the difference between Chief Jeff and Commander Searle. They both speak English, but they speak it differently — different terms for things, different grammar, even different meanings for the same word. It’s not all the time, but sometimes enough to confuse me.”

  “I know what you mean,” Solomon said. It didn’t look as if Fred was being evasive or unhelpful, nor had he forgotten anything. He simply wasn’t sure what Gan-Pamas meant. “Language is full of pitfalls and misunderstandings, even if we believe we’re speaking the same one.”

  Solomon would relay all that to Chris, and maybe it would settle things for him. The part about Gan-Pamas telling him he didn’t understand what was going on would probably provide more questions than answers, though.

  “When do you think more humans will come?” Fred asked. “The sooner you increase your numbers, the better. You need to consolidate your position here before the Kugin find you.”

  Ingram hadn’t told Fred the technology transfer was on hold for the foreseeable future. Solomon did his best to be non-committal and not dash Fred’s hopes before work was complete on the base defences.

  “We have to find the right people to give it to first,” Solomon said. “They have to be able to build ships, and they have to be willing to bring the right people out here — not a few pampered elites, but hard-working people who can build cities and defend them.” That was true, but Solomon knew it would strike a chord with Fred. “And we should identify another planet for them, because there might be contamination from die-back if they’re not careful enough with biosecurity. Not every human is going to be good for the sector, Fred. We have to be careful.”

  And there was the lie.

 
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