Here We Stand, page 17




“I knew you wanted that, Captain, but timing is everything. There’s a danger of overloading Fred, as well.”
“Workload or goodwill?”
“Workload. He trusts you implicitly.”
Ingram wouldn’t have trusted herself if she were Fred. On the other hand, he knew that she wouldn’t hand over any of the teeriks, not even his awful daughter. Ingram liked to think it was because she’d earned his trust, but he was no fool, and he knew the commune now had knowledge of Earth and its defences that needed protecting at all costs.
“Let’s get some preparation done, then, and talk to Brad and Jac about designing a bunker, please,” Ingram said. “Make it accessible from the bomb shelters. Do you know the dimensions of this generator? We could at least build a space ready to accept it. I assume you rummaged through their schematics the moment you got access to their system.”
“I did, Captain. And I’ll work out which bots we can withdraw from projects to start reproducing.”
“Thanks Sol. I know I ought to leave it all to you, but if we stop doing jobs ourselves and solving our own problems, what are we going to become?”
“A good point,” Solomon said. “Which is probably why Chris is teaching some of our Ainatio neighbours some basic carpentry this morning.”
“Good grief, another course? Not quite the image I had of him.”
“It’s post-apocalypse bootcamp, Captain. Preparing them for frontier life if the lights go out. At least it’s keeping the scientific staff busy and stopping them feeling like pariahs. Some of them don’t have much to do these days and there’s a waiting list for jobs on the agricultural side. Are you going to visit the medical centre now?”
Ingram checked the time and started the bike. “When I finish my rounds. Better write me off until lunchtime.”
Solomon knew what was going on before she did. He couldn’t help it. If Haine was involved in some dissection, he’d probably have activated biohazard precautions that blipped Solomon’s system. But Solomon didn’t say anything to her unless there was a problem that required advance warning, and she was gradually accepting that it was for the best. It would be like having an ever-present gossip pre-digesting every scrap of information and foisting it on you at inconvenient times. People had to find out things for themselves in the normal course of events by talking to each other, or else they’d cease to interact like adult humans.
What did it do to Solomon, though? Did Bednarz design it into him, or did Sol work it out for himself? Ingram hoped he’d speak up if he was being put under too much pressure.
Her first port of call was the crop tunnels. Rounds here were the equivalent of her daily walk through her ship to check that all was well and give people a chance to raise things with her personally. Being seen out and about and keeping an eye on things was important for trust and morale, even if she wasn’t the sole authority here. This morning she took a route out past the Kill Line farms, stopped to chat to Mike Hodge about his beef herd — still surviving, doing as well as could be expected in their unplanned expatriation, two cows in calf already — and made a fuss of Marty Laurenson’s collies. Then she looped around the perimeter, pausing occasionally to check out the wild landscape through binoculars before visiting Lianne Maybury and the team in the crop tunnels.
Team was possibly an optimistic word to use. Most of the agriculturalists here were Cabot civilians, but there were some plant geneticists from Ainatio as well, some of them from the die-back lab. Ingram trod carefully. In the last couple of weeks, none of the Ainatio personnel had mentioned the embarrassing business of being Mother Death suspects at all. She couldn’t work out if they were making an effort to move on or just keeping their resentment on a steady simmer.
Lianne showed her a handful of rice. The cut-and-come-again perennial strain was doing well and ready to be transplanted.
“Short grain?” Ingram asked. “Risotto?”
“Near enough, as long as you don’t rinse it first.”
“Oh good. I’ll be your first customer. It’s all I can cook.” It was probably time for an olive branch. “Is there anything you need at the moment? We’re trying to get more bots built, so if there’s any specific model you want, let Solomon know.”
“Actually, there is something,” Lianne said. “We’d really like to send some survey teams off-camp. We’ve been here a couple of months, and there’s a whole unexplored world of plants out there.”
Nobody was allowed outside the wire without clearance and an armed escort, but enforcement hadn’t been necessary because Nina’s death had been a wake-up call about just how dangerous the world beyond the perimeter might be. But now the same lull that had made Ingram restless seemed to have reminded the scientists what they were as well, and what was waiting to be discovered.
“You understand why we’d be nervous about unarmed civilians entering unexplored areas,” Ingram said.
“Yes, but technically we’re all civilians, and quite a few us are taking firearms courses.”
Ingram knew the untidy status of everyone here who regarded themselves as still serving would bite her in the arse one day. It had been a matter of shared belief, that everyone agreed who was in uniform and who wasn’t, and divided roles and responsibility accordingly. If the agreement broke down, it became a matter of who could enforce it. At the moment, that was still Nomad’s defence forces. In the near future, with everyone armed, it might not be that easy.
“You’re going to need an armed escort, then,” Ingram said. “The threat hasn’t gone away.”
Paul Cotton, Lianne’s husband, muttered loudly enough to be heard. “An armed escort didn’t do much for Nina.”
Lianne shot him a look. “Paul, please.”
Ingram ignored insults aimed at her. Solomon had been right about that: she didn’t care because her self-esteem was forged from the reinforced titanium of generations of social certainty. But criticism of her comrades or her crew when they weren’t there to defend themselves demanded rebuttal.
“I’m trying to be reasonable, Paul,” she said, deploying the tone of patient disappointment that worked with young ratings who’d had a few beers too many ashore. “But armchair-generalling about the people who risked their lives to get you here and who’ll risk them again to keep you safe is below the belt. You’ll find things are very different when you’re in that situation. By all means, arm yourself properly and explore wherever you wish. I won’t stop you. But we don’t have troops free to escort you or rescue you if things go wrong. Our priority at the moment is being ready to defend the population against more alien incursions. We’re not a scientific mission, and we won’t prioritise research for its own sake until we’re sufficiently established here to investigate new resources.”
She’d made a pig’s ear of that and she knew it. But she also knew she’d regret saying nothing at all. The silence that followed — just a couple of seconds, but somehow an eternity — was painful.
Lianne changed the subject with commendable speed. “I’ll talk to Sol about bots, Captain. A few more acres of paddy would be useful.”
“Good idea,” Ingram said. “Otherwise I’ll have to learn to cook something else. Thank you for showing me around. I’m always impressed to see the progress here.”
“Tell Logan I might have some lemons for him soon.”
“All he’s missing is the tonic, then.”
They laughed politely. Ingram decided to move on before she dug a deeper hole. She rode off, angry with herself but unable to see how ignoring Paul’s barb would have helped.
Maybe she was just wrong, though.
“I suppose you heard all that, Sol,” she said.
“I did, Captain. Don’t worry about Paul Cotton. He’s always been one to snipe and gripe. I don’t think his opinion carries weight.”
“And Lianne’s so nice. I never understand what people see in each other.”
“Who knows the mysteries of the human heart?”
“You’re just taking the piss now.”
“I am.”
“But it means it’s time for us to formalise things here. A constitution. Proper armed forces. All that stuff that we thought we were too swashbuckling to need right away.”
“Bednarz did plan for this, of course,” Solomon said. “But it was on the assumption that the follow-up wave of settlers would include administrators who’d already have their plan for a constitution. We’re never going to have that. It’s up to all of you now.”
Ingram didn’t feel she was cut out for nation-building. “I’m sure you can contribute too, Sol.”
“The entire issue rests on whether you regard Nomad Base as a colony of Earth or not, and if you do, which elements of Earth you’re going to treat as the source of law and authority when the day comes.”
“I’m more concerned with internal legitimacy,” Ingram said. “If we’ve got unhappy Ainatio people reminding me that they’re armed and we’re all actually civilians, even harmless ones like Lianne Maybury, we have a potential problem. We can’t disarm them, and we shouldn’t if we expect them to help defend the base, but it does complicate matters.”
“I don’t think any of the civilians are going to be a serious threat to the professional forces here,” Solomon said. “We have two hundred and twenty-one individuals we’ve chosen to class as military personnel because of prior service, most of them your ship’s company. But Chris and Dan’s troops could put down any violent protest on their own, and Kill Line’s competent gun users would back them.”
Ingram hadn’t read the mission brief for a while, but the key part for her was the point at which she handed control to the settlers. “It’s not even about whether there’s military governance or civilian, Sol. It’s the need for a set of rules we all agree on and abide by. It’s working informally now, but that won’t last forever.”
Command responsibility was blurred but things worked because Nomad was still small enough for informal decision-making on every level. Ingram shared command with the Gang of Three and the mayor of Kill Line, and people bartered for items outside their allocation of food and other supplies and settled disagreements by talking things out or occasionally throwing a punch. But when the community grew, it would have to think about currency and laws and enforcement, and all the other complications of civilisation. By then it wouldn’t be a village-sized base but a looser community of small towns. And something special would be lost in the process.
Ingram knew this was the best time to be a citizen here, the peak of pioneering. The issues were as uncomplicated as they were ever going to get and everybody knew their neighbour. Even with the prospect of hostile aliens, life for her was purposeful and satisfying, but it was also temporary. Succeeding on Opis meant these days wouldn’t come again. It was rather sad.
“I understand,” Solomon said. “But I still say this isn’t about whatever constitution you all agree on, but whether you’re a small nation willing to defend its independence.”
Ingram knew what Solomon’s anxieties were. She shared a lot of them. “Let’s discuss it later when I find out what Haine’s itching to show me.”
Haine could have sent her a memo about whatever he’d found, but perhaps she hadn’t visited the medical staff often enough and they just wanted to be acknowledged. She certainly hadn’t given Haine enough time lately. She still owed him a drinking session, too. If he and his fellow scab-lifters wanted her to come to their kingdom instead of seeking an audience in hers, that was fine.
The medical labs were now housed in a cluster of the original print-built dome buildings opposite the clinic. Jeff Aiken was waiting for Ingram at the entrance.
“I hope you didn’t mind me inserting myself into this, ma’am.” Jeff led her down the connecting corridor. “But someone has to tell Fred about this and I decided it’d be easier coming from me.”
“That sounds ominous, Chief.”
“Not really, but the teeriks ought to be involved in this.”
The lab was crowded. For some reason Ingram had expected to see Lirrel on a metal table and she’d braced herself for weird smells and unpleasant anatomical detail, but all she could see was a huddle of men and women in lab coats and blue scrubs looking down at something on a desk. They were a mix of medics, exobiologists, and a couple of people from the vet’s surgery.
“There you are, Bridgers.” Haine appeared beside her. “You look disappointed.”
“I was expecting to see a tableau of Rembrandt’s anatomy lesson, to be honest,” she said. “No body?”
“Oh, we did all that in the biohaz lab just in case. You never know, especially when you start cutting.”
“Bit late for that, isn’t it? Lirrel leaked a lot when Marc shot him and my chaps moved the body. And the Jattan. He ended up leaking too.”
“Well, we’ve got the AI working on a full analysis, so if it detects anything we can get the appropriate drug formulated. We’re trying to sequence the teerik genome at the moment — which is DNA-based, by the way — and we’ve created a full three-dimensional anatomical scan, which’ll come in handy if and when our teerik friends need treatment. Did you want to see the cadaver?”
“Not really. I want to see what they’re doing.” She walked over to the crowd around the desk to take a look. They were watching a screen. The image looked like a molecular structure that was changing every few seconds. “Is this the genome?”
Jake Mendoza turned around. “No, we’re trying to identify a substance we found in the blood and some of the organs. Do you want the quick summary?”
“I’m a simple sailor. Yes please.”
“Well, there’s a chance our teeriks might have a nutritional problem.”
“Draw me a picture.”
“We have some pieces of the puzzle already. We know what kind of food they can digest, thanks to Nina’s team, so we’ve reverse-engineered that to establish some things about their biochemistry. We also have tissue samples from more than one teerik, and those show significant differences. We’ve examined specimens from Rikayl, a feather from one of the other teeriks, and a wider range of samples from Lirrel, and there’s a substance we can’t identify at all. The level in the feather Solomon found lodged in one of the bots before Cabot arrived is much higher than in Lirrel, but Rikayl shows none of it. In other words, the teeriks who started life elsewhere have traces of it, but not the one who was born here. It could be environmental, or it might be related to age. One possibility is that it’s a nutrient of some kind that teeriks can’t obtain from a diet outside the Kugin homeworld.”
Ingram hated herself for thinking it, but combined with the problem of the commune dying out from isolation, the longer-term nutritional issue looked like a double blow. If Nomad was going to place more reliance on teerik technology, it needed a guaranteed supply of teeriks. She also hated herself for wondering if she’d been too hasty in banning a dissection of Caisin’s body.
“Worrying,” she said.
“Yes, but I stress that it might be age-related instead. A biomarker.”
“Whose feather did you test?”
“We don’t know who it came from, so we’ll need to get on with sequencing and then ask the commune for specimens to work it out.”
“We could also try levelling with them and asking them what they know,” Jeff said.
Mendoza gave him a look. “Jeff, they didn’t even know what happened to their dead or their newly-hatched chicks.”
“Nevertheless, we ask them, out of courtesy if nothing else,” Ingram said. “If it turns out to be a nutrient they’re missing, can we synthesise it?”
“Probably.”
“Okay, I’d like the Chief to discuss this with Fred now and see what he says,” Ingram said. “There might be a simple answer, but at very least the commune should be kept informed.”
Jeff was already heading for the door. “Will do, ma’am.”
“Dr Mendoza, do you need me to do anything right now?” she asked.
“Not really. I just thought you needed to know there might be some issues with the long-term welfare of our teerik neighbours. I’d rather panic first and scale back later than assume everything’s going to be fine.”
“My thoughts entirely,” Ingram said. “Thank you.”
Ingram hung around for a while talking to the other medics to try to understand what else they’d worked out so far, and it wasn’t all bad news. The lab AI had already come up with formulations for two anaesthetics that might be safe for teeriks, as well as modifications to some of the Opis-specific vaccines and antibiotics that had been developed for the Nomad mission. Again, this was the clever stuff, and mostly achieved without humans. It reminded Ingram how dependent the mission was on bots, AIs, and now aliens.
Before Cabot launched, she’d been on an orientation course that explained how bots had mined, refined, and manufactured everything she could see today, reconditioned the local environment, then found the toxins and pathogens that might harm human settlers and formulated the drugs that would protect them. But it had never seemed so stark before that humans were guests and the bots could carry on functioning without them.
Now she was also reliant on aliens who might be gone in a few decades, taking their knowledge and skills to the grave. No wonder Chris and some of the others were teaching people to be self-sufficient.
Ingram went back to her office, wondering about developing a teerik-equivalent AI or even a teerik breeding programme. It all depended on what that mystery substance was and if it had any bearing on teerik health. They seemed to be able to eat a wide range of food with relatively little modification, though, and Rikayl had eaten Mildred the chicken as well as the local wildlife without any apparent ill effects. Ingram remained hopeful.
There was an opaque white storage bag about eight inches high sitting on her desk when she opened her office door. She bent over to read the attached label before picking it up. It was from Lianne.