Here we stand, p.13
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Here We Stand, page 13

 

Here We Stand
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  “I’ll sleep with it under my pillow,” Alex said. “I don’t want Mr Hippo to get me.”

  Matt sidled up to Chris as everyone filed out looking shell-shocked, some clutching their rifle like it was a live snake.

  “You sure about that, Chris?” he asked. “What if we get some NDs?”

  “What are we going to do, wait a couple of months until they’re competent? We might not have that time.”

  “They won’t even remember how to load the mags if we get a Kugin visit now.”

  “Maybe. But the alternative is getting invaded tonight and their weapons are all locked away. Besides, they’re all sensible enough and old enough to know this is serious. We’ve all seen guys rise to the occasion with almost zero training.”

  Matt nodded. “Okay.”

  “If I’m wrong, I’ll bust myself down to private and Jared can take over.”

  Martin Berry had hung back. He was still sitting on one of the benches with a coffee when the rest of them left. Chris got the idea that he wanted a private chat. He’d looked the most competent guy there, good enough to persuade Chris that he had some experience. He knew how to strip down the carbine right away and he showed good form and muzzle control. He wasn’t a bad shot, either. Chris examined the targets again.

  “Good grouping, Reverend,” Chris said, poking the holes.

  “Thank you.”

  “Where did you serve?”

  “I didn’t. And I never thought I’d want to pick up a weapon again.”

  It sounded like the opening of a reminiscence. Chris waited for him to go on and explain, but he didn’t.

  “I suppose I should ask why,” Chris said.

  “It didn’t work out so well last time.” Berry drained his cup. “I gave it up, but I don’t think I can sit this out if the worst happens. I have the skills so I should use them.”

  “You don’t have to tell me,” Chris said. “It’s none of my business.”

  “From what I hear, we have a lot in common.”

  “Unless you wanted to be a geologist but you ended up as a major disappointment to your parents, I doubt it,” Chris said.

  The guy sat there in his zip-up blue jersey and dog collar, looking like a favourite uncle who always showed up on the holidays and gave you the feeling that he’d never tell you off no matter what you said or did. Chris knew nothing about him. Even Doug didn’t know his background and hadn’t asked, just as they hadn’t asked about Chris and his militia. Berry had drifted into Kill Line thirty years ago from New England, Doug said, and as they hadn’t had a minister for some time, he was checked for infections and welcomed. If Chris had been around then, he’d have wanted to know how Berry found the place and why he was displaced, but it was common for folks to go on the road to get away from cities in the process of collapsing. Chris’s convoy had ended up at Kill Line without intending to as well. It was plausible luck.

  “Will you be offended if I speak frankly?” Berry asked.

  “I’m very hard to offend, Reverend.”

  “You were a hitman, yes?”

  “No, I never actually killed anyone for money. And State Defence duty doesn’t count. I killed for revenge when I was a kid, though.”

  Berry didn’t look fazed at all. “I see.”

  “Okay, maybe not wholly revenge. I was sick of being scared all the time so I decided to become the threat.” Chris had made a point of having no secrets. If anyone asked, he’d tell them. It was surprising how many people didn’t, but word finally seemed to be getting around and it was almost a relief. “I used to work for a guy who funded shady businesses. If they were late on their repayments, he’d send me around to discuss rescheduling their loan. I never killed any of them, but I did cause them pain. And then I got busted. Ten years for felony assault, cut short by the State Defence Force needing cannon fodder.”

  “Did you have a hard childhood?”

  “Not at all. White-collar. Gated community, a good education, a respectable family. No excuses. I stabbed a guy from a local gang who beat my buddy and left him brain-damaged, and maybe I didn’t plan to kill him, but I didn’t care if I did. And I didn’t get caught. I was nearly fifteen, and yes, I knew what I was doing.”

  Chris didn’t expect Berry to recoil in horror because ministers were supposed to listen compassionately to all kinds of shit and still feel a man could be redeemed. But he didn’t expect him to have that look of sympathetic regret, either.

  “I shot my buddy,” Berry said quietly. “He was banging my wife.”

  Chris was shockproof these days but that came as close as anything could to making him blink. And he could relate. “How long did you serve?”

  “Five years, out in three. Involuntary manslaughter.”

  “Okay.”

  “No, it wasn’t. I meant to do it. We were out hunting and I confronted him. To the cops, it just looked like I was careless about checking my line of fire. I stuck with that story. Obviously, things were such that I didn’t have a marriage to go back to anyway, so when I got out, I thought I’d better address the state of my soul.”

  That was some confession. “If you could go back, would you do it again?”

  “No, if I could undo it, I would. You?”

  “I’d still do it.” Chris nodded at Berry’s dog collar and indicated an imaginary line around his own neck with his forefinger. “You weren’t clergy at the time, then.”

  “No, that would have been pretty awkward with the Boss. But I did a lot of thinking, and that’s where I ended up.”

  “Okay.”

  “I kept meaning to tell the Kill Liners.”

  “If they’d wanted to know, they’d have asked,” Chris said. “But they never do because they can guess you’ve got a past, and they’d rather believe in the person they know now than the one they didn’t know then. Which counts as forgiveness, I suppose.”

  Berry looked Chris over as if he was trying to read him. “So what changed you?”

  “I haven’t changed. I just found the right place. It was the military. It was the first time I belonged. I had purpose, I could trust the guy next to me to have my back, and I could trust myself to have his.”

  Chris felt he’d talked himself out for the day. Berry spent a while staring into his cup.

  “You can call me Martin, you know.”

  “Can I ask you a general question?”

  “Sure.”

  “How come Kill Line doesn’t have any crime? Statistically speaking, a thousand people are bound to have a few bad apples. But they’re electing a sheriff for the first time.”

  “Peer pressure and very active councilmen,” Berry said.

  “Citizen justice, then.”

  “The occasional punch in the mouth between neighbours. They’re not saints, Chris. They’re just dependent on each other and there’s no anonymity in a town that size. It’s the way small communities have always been.”

  “I kind of like small,” Chris said. “Maybe it’s worth the price of everyone knowing your business.”

  Chris was being literal, but it occurred to him that Berry might have taken it as a sly rebuke. He didn’t react.

  “Have you spoken to Marc about that memorial yet?” he asked.

  “Yeah, I have,” Chris said. “He’s thinking about it.”

  “That’s good.” Berry patted his shoulder. “Thanks for listening. I’ve wanted to tell someone for a long time but I felt it was like kicking my neighbours when they were down. Y’know, that they had a seriously flawed minister when they needed some absolutes in their lives. I feel better now someone knows what I really am.”

  “You’re a guy who changed,” Chris said. “That’s what you really are.”

  “It’s time I told the rest of Kill Line, I think.”

  “They’ll understand. But don’t do it until you’re ready for their reactions.”

  Maybe Berry really did think it was only fair to tell them about his past, but Chris suspected some of them might not appreciate knowing. Like the guy had said, everybody needed their untarnished icons.

  “I hope I haven’t burdened you with unwelcome knowledge, Chris.”

  “Not at all. But I kind of expected to be the one doing the confession. Sorry, that’s Catholics, isn’t it?”

  “I try to cater for all denominations in such a small community.”

  “We should have a beer some time,” Chris said. “Just remember not to beat yourself up. A good man is someone who saves more lives than he takes.”

  Chris had never imagined he’d be giving half-assed life lessons to an ordained felon. In a way it was weirder than working with aliens. He collected the quad bike and set off for the dog pound to find Dieter and give him the news about the sheriff’s post, if he hadn’t seen it already.

  Chris was halfway up the road before he realised that the one word neither he nor Reverend Berry had used in that conversation was murderer. That was what they had in common. Chris wondered if his parents had realised what he’d done and decided the topic was closed, but now he’d never know.

  * * *

  Nomad Base, northern boundary: 1450 hours, October 5, OC.

  “Call me ungrateful, but I think that old banger’s going to be more use than Curtis.” Ingram shielded her eyes against the sun and watched the small Jattan freighter circle over the grassland north of the base, completely unmanned. It was remarkably quiet and easily overlooked even without its stealth cloaking. “We could probably do with a few more of those.”

  Searle, Devlin, and Hiyashi watched with her. If everything went wrong and the Jattans spotted the surveillance, the most they could do was board a Jattan vessel with no point of origin. They already knew they had a disgruntled rebel faction to worry about. Nomad would lose a surveillance asset, but there would be other options.

  The real issue was that Nomad was now attempting to engage in espionage with a species they hadn’t begun to understand, and what was routine between nations on Earth could have completely unpredictable consequences out here. But Ingram had to know. Nomad needed an early warning system.

  “Are we all set up for monitoring Opis space now?” she asked.

  “It’s not perfect,” Solomon said, “but Fred’s identified the likely course and where ships would need to exit spacefold to deploy landing craft. I’ve programmed the relevant satellites to cover that corridor. Plus the sensors on all orbiting ships.”

  “But they could still land elsewhere on Opis and we’d miss them,” Searle said.

  “And they’d miss us. If they’re coming, they’re coming here on the basis of specific intelligence that would include our location.”

  Nobody spoke for a while. Everyone’s eyes were fixed on the ship. Ingram asked herself if she was making a terrible mistake that would backfire, because this was her last chance to abort the operation. But if she did, it wouldn’t be any easier when they decided to do it in the future. They hadn’t started this mission equipped to fight a war, despite their nuclear missiles, and they had zero expertise in first contact, although they’d managed to establish good relations with the teeriks by muddling through. On the other hand, nobody on Earth was an expert on extraterrestrials or could deal with a threat of this nature either. There would have been little point in seeking advice or calling for backup even if the issue of contact wasn’t fraught with other problems.

  It was a joint decision with Trinder, Marc, and Chris. She still felt solely responsible.

  “Solomon, are we ready?”

  “We are, Captain. Fred will open a gateway and place the freighter seven hundred and fifty thousand miles from Dal Mantir, deploy an instant comms relay for my link, and the ship will then proceed to planetary orbit under its own power.”

  Here we go. “Very well. Chocks away, Solomon. Or whatever the launching in mid-air command should be.”

  The freighter slowed to hover above the landscape for a few moments, then edged forward again and disappeared as if it was flying slowly into fog. There was nothing to see of the gate itself against the sky, not even the faint blurred patch that was visible at closer quarters. There was something almost disappointing about how simple and low-key such a prodigious feat of engineering appeared.

  “The freighter’s now at the exit point in Dal Mantir space,” Solomon said. “Launching the comms relay now.”

  It took seconds. For all the astonishing physics, moving the freighter a few light years towards the centre of the galaxy was the easy part. Solomon now had to wait for the ship to reach Dal Mantir’s holding orbit for commercial transport, a kind of parking zone kept clear of manoeuvring vessels, before he attempted to infiltrate the Jattan navy’s network. It would be some time before he knew if he’d succeeded.

  “That’s the drone deployed, so I’m now moving the freighter to its final orbit,” Solomon said. “Fred, you can close the gate.”

  The small comms relay was now transmitting Solomon’s remote link to the ship. It was too small and too far from the planet to be spotted, but if anything went wrong, Solomon could kill the signal and there’d be no way of tracing its origin, other than a Kugin manufacturer.

  “Let’s get back to work, then,” Ingram said. “Good luck, Solomon.”

  “I’ll only speak to you if I have a problem, Captain. I’ll maintain radio silence until I penetrate their network in case the system can detect me and track back to here.”

  “Look on the bright side.” Ingram climbed into the rover’s passenger seat. “If that happens, at least we’ll know they’re coming.”

  Searle drove back to the main building, frowning as if he was working something out. Devlin sat in the rover’s rear seat with Hiyashi.

  “I know the Caisin gate is our star technology,” Devlin said, “but imagine what it took to create an AI — an autonomous, emotionally functional AI at that — who can learn an entirely different code for an alien computer system and operate in it. I know how Solomon does it, in principle, but that still doesn’t stop me marvelling at Bednarz’s skill.”

  “I’m still stunned by the automation,” Ingram said. “We’re just the wildlife here.”

  “Mechanicals rule.”

  “Perhaps we should plan how to deploy them all and hide ourselves if Fred’s right about pilots being too scared to land on bot planets,” Hiyashi said. “Break out the sapper bot for Sol, too. We’ve got it, haven’t we? Don’t tell me they left it at Ainatio HQ.”

  “Yeah, it’s here,” Searle said. “But maybe we need bots that behave like theirs.”

  “We’ve got autonomous CAVs and point defence on the ground.”

  “They don’t look intimidating enough. I’ll ask Fred to show me some of the alien ones.”

  “You’re serious, aren’t you?” Ingram said.

  “I’m willing to try whatever it takes, ma’am.”

  “I’ll design one with you, Brad,” Devlin said. “I’ve always wanted to build a killer robot.”

  Illusion had always played a part in warfare, so Ingram wasn’t about to dismiss the idea. She imagined a tidal wave of enraged bots advancing on the first wave of Kugin ground troops. They’d certainly slow the advance if nothing else.

  “I never saw my naval career ending up here,” she said. “Robot wars and talking crows.”

  “Fighting crows,” Searle said. “Cosqui really tore into Turisu yesterday. I thought they were going to peck each other’s eyes out. I think she’s run out of patience with her.”

  “Every ship’s got a misery-guts,” Ingram said. “Turi’s theirs.”

  “Sure, but this looked serious. Cosqui’s pretty easy-going. I’ve never seen her mad. She did the whole red crest display like a cockatoo.”

  Everyone was bound to be anxious now, even the teeriks. Ingram would have a word with Jeff Aiken and see what he could do about reassuring them. When she got back to her office, the first thing she did was check the news channels for a sitrep on the die-back situation on Earth to see how guilty it made her feel today. It wasn’t about Korea or anywhere else in APS. It wasn’t her problem, and there was nothing she could do about it even if it was.

  She concentrated on the UK news and tried to read between the lines to assess the situation, allowing for what the media wouldn’t have been told and what they’d get wrong. So far, the government had stepped up coastal patrols and was monitoring changes in vegetation via satellite. It was business as usual for an island that hadn’t succumbed to die-back or invasion yet.

  Ingram sat scrolling through the menu on her screen without really seeing it. Unless she did something positive, she’d be better off not knowing at all, although she needed to keep an eye on the global situation because of the ship’s company who’d come from APS states. They’d be upset. Perhaps discipline would finally collapse and they’d demand to contact someone back home — distant relatives or much older friends, people who still thought everyone in Cabot was dead.

  No matter how thoroughly they’d prepared for what was effectively a one-way mission, and the fact they’d been selected because they had no immediate family ties, events on Earth during forty-five years of cryo had changed everything. Ingram not only understood the need to touch base with home but felt an urge to do it herself, to find someone who’d known her all those years ago and say: I am not dead. It was all a lie, a cover story, and right then she hated Ainatio and Georgina Erskine for maintaining that deception. It would have been so much easier if she’d been allowed to call Earth and say they’d made it.

  It wouldn’t have solved the problem of what else she’d have to tell Earth now, and how much that would complicate the situation. But she could at least prepare for that day. She tapped out a message to Fred.

  You mentioned that we could identify other habitable planets for settlement. I’d like to select one now and start sending out bots to evaluate them for modification the same way they’ve done here. Is that feasible?

 
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