Here we stand, p.19
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Here We Stand, page 19

 

Here We Stand
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  ‘I now find myself without a ship. The aliens captured it, presumably to stop me escaping. I have to assume they removed its confidential data as well. They have teeriks with them, so we must also assume they know our locations, strengths, and weaknesses by now. One of the teeriks relayed a warning telling me to surrender and make amends for the killing... This indicates the teerik rebellion was in contact with them before the object was stolen, and the incident may well have been instigated by the aliens themselves.’

  What incident? The teeriks’ rebellion had been their own idea and his agents had simply managed to exploit it. Now Gan-Pamas was suggesting these newcomers might have engineered the whole thing. Nir-Tenbiku read on, still skipping lines to pull out the most significant detail.

  ‘I would have preferred to have spoken to them and invited them to join us in ridding the sector of Kugin... their settlement seems recently built… I believe this is a military outpost of a much larger empire... They are bipedal, fast-moving, and as large as Kugin. They appear to coexist with a community of mechanicals, and another unknown intelligent species, aggressive tetrapods... These aliens are well-armed and I have to assume they have vessels in orbit or in bunkers that are equally well equipped.’

  The next part was very hard to read. Gan-Pamas — his friend, his loyal minister, a brave man if a frequently rash one — was waiting to be hunted down and probably killed, and yet he made a selfless plea to Nir-Tenbiku, knowing what his fate would be.

  ‘I can’t tell if they represent the greatest threat to us since the Kugin or a potential new ally, but we must try to make them the latter... I’m observing the aliens at close quarters, so I can’t remove my suit. It’s overheating as a result and I’ll be forced to discard it soon, and that will probably seal my fate... I’ll gather as much intelligence as I can... These new aliens are significant, and I urge you to overlook whatever happens to me and seek some kind of understanding with them. They represent a potential shift in the balance of power and that is an opportunity we can’t ignore. I knew the risks when I took this mission, and if the end result furthers our cause, I die content. I believe they are called Humans. Their arrival changes everything.’

  Nir-Tenbiku checked the message’s routing, indicated in the address panel. The date and location of origin were marked as “unknown” and “indecipherable.” Gan-Pamas had encrypted everything, not just the message within. He didn’t even want the clerical staff to know his position.

  “Bas, who else has seen this?”

  “Only me, Excellency. I was handed the intact unit. I decrypted it myself. The date and location were obscured when I received it and this is a once-only code. So the only people who have ever set eyes on this are Gan-Pamas, yourself, and me.”

  “Then it stays between us while I work out the implications. This is the first contact with a new intelligent species in millennia. And I hardly dare consult anyone’s government on the proper procedures now. We will use our intellect and our honour to reason our way through this, Bas.”

  Nir-Tenbiku tried to separate the fate of his friend from the shocking news. The stolen warship was there, wherever this place was, and a new empire was rubbing up against the borders of the Mastan. The last thing he needed was for the newcomers to align with the Kugin and the Protectorate, although he doubted that had happened yet, not if they had the ship. He’d have heard. If this outpost was that secret, and these humans had somehow infiltrated the teerik community, then they probably weren’t planning to be on friendly terms with either power.

  Where had they come from, though?

  It was hard to know whether he was looking at a disaster or a stroke of timely good fortune. And he didn’t know if his friend was still alive. He had to hang on to the hope that he was, although the insane teerik had probably ensured the worst by killing one of the humans. Yes, Gan-Pamas needed a competent engineer, but he’d taken a terrible risk with Lirrel and the worst had come to pass.

  “Come to the office,” Nir-Tenbiku said, striding back down the path. “Let’s see where this outpost is, and try to gather a few more facts before we involve the Halu-Masset.”

  Nir-Tenbiku was on his own now, dealing either with a new threat or a perfectly-timed blessing.

  05

  I know you can’t hear me, but I knew you so well that I can imagine what you’d say if I asked you for guidance. I suppose I’m talking to myself, and that worries me. But Marc admits he talks to the photo of his dead sons, and Captain Ingram and Chris talk to dead people as well. Please don’t think I’m feeling sorry for myself. But I would really like to talk to you again one day, Mr Bednarz. Sometimes I get scared, and I daren’t tell them that.

  Solomon, autonomous self-determining moral AI, constructing a conversation with his late creator, Tad Bednarz.

  Beer garden, Nomad Base: mid-afternoon, October 10, OC.

  Srale turned out to be a non-starter when the probe’s data was analysed, but Solomon wasn’t worried.

  Project Nomad didn’t need a new location because he had his own plan. But people needed to talk about it to feel they were doing something, and he understood why.

  He wandered around the lawn in the quadrubot, listening to the discussion as Ingram held court over sandwiches and soda in a quiet corner of the outdoor recreation area dubbed the beer garden. Dr Kim, Alex, and Dr Mangel were offering up ideas. Chris was leaning back in his seat, staring up at the sky, hands meshed on his stomach as if he wasn’t listening.

  “What’s wrong with it?” Alex shook the mustard dispenser, trying to coax some out onto his sandwich. “Idiot’s guide, please.”

  “It’s got a very short day, and there’s an equatorial region between huge ice caps, but it’s like the end of summer in the Arctic,” Ingram said. “So it’s survivable, but nothing like Opis. It’ll need sealed habitats and acres of greenhouses. Lower oxygen, too, so like climbing Everest without BA. But we’ll keep looking.”

  “How many star systems has Fred got on his list?” Kim asked. “Is there a Kugin or Jattan telescope mapping and analysing stars?”

  “I’ve not found one,” Solomon said.

  “And you’ve been rummaging.”

  “I can be of more use to Fred if I’m fully informed.”

  “Well, we’ve got a huge database of exoplanets, and we’re medieval peasants compared to aliens with interplanetary empires, but maybe the civilisations here just don’t look further afield for some reason. We could pick locations for the probe to check out. Come to that, Todd could manage the project. He’s the astrophysicist, after all.”

  “I did take a look at what we’ve got, actually,” Mangel said. “Nothing ideal so far, but it’s certainly worth a second pass with the probe.”

  “Well, if Kugin territory covers nine star systems like Fred said, and teeriks can survive on the Kugin homeworld as well as here, I’d take a guess that there are nine planets a lot like Opis, and that bodes well for others,” Kim said. “Even Fred says there are more out there. He just wasn’t very specific.”

  “He never is.”

  “Todd, if you want to work with Fred, I think he’d appreciate it,” Ingram said.

  Mangel shrugged as if he wasn’t fussed, but he was like a child with a perpetual birthday out here, surrounded by aliens, new worlds, and magical space stuff that he never thought he’d see. Given what Marc had said about the man’s tragic past, it was good to see there was still joy in his life.

  “I could look after the whole project for you if you like,” Mangel said. “I don’t really have a role at the moment, other than occasionally teaching fifth-graders about quantum hair.”

  Solomon was satisfied. “I’ll talk to Fred and set up a link for you to have control of the probe, then.”

  “Enclosed habitats aren’t the worst we could do, to be honest,” Kim said. “It beats starving. People thought Mars was okay.”

  “Are they okay now, though?” Ingram asked. “I still haven’t caught up with that. Nothing on the news.”

  “When I left Seoul, the only operational Mars bases were Chinese and they were self-sufficient. That was roughly eighteen months ago. The resupply missions were emergency-only because the APS space agency couldn’t resource them.”

  There was a brief silence. “Have they left them to starve?” Ingram asked.

  “No idea, but there’s not much anyone can do about it if they can’t maintain and launch rockets.”

  That was the real conversation going on here, a proxy debate for how they felt about Earth, that even the comparatively mighty APS was impotent and faced as many dilemmas as they did. Solomon could see it. They weren’t thinking of an alternative location for Nomad: they were imagining where to put refugee camps. They could only deal with it obliquely because the idea of having extraordinary FTL technology and not using it right away was almost unbearable. Solomon was happy to humour them with distractions if that was what it took to keep them from feeling they’d casually abandoned Earth to its fate.

  If the worst happened, Solomon had his own evacuation plan. He was still working out the least confrontational way to reproduce or commandeer the Caisin gate generator, but once he had one and could operate it, he could send ships and people anywhere to escape, either permanently or until the immediate crisis had passed. He had infinite locations to choose from. He might not have been able to insert people into precise locations without intelligence about layouts and a great deal more assistance from a navigation AI, but he could pinpoint coordinates well enough to move ships into orbit or open a gate on Earth. That would be enough.

  He could also calculate trajectories to send enemy warships straight into a convenient star. It was like being able to move the edge of a cliff in front of someone’s next step. Or he could just launch a missile through the gate and strike far away.

  There was no point in discussing that with Ingram or anyone else yet. They’d almost certainly worked out that he’d intervene and remove them from imminent danger, because he’d done it before with Chris and Marc, even though they’d been furious about it. But they needed this complex illusion of creating another haven to square their consciences with having an instant escape route that they wouldn’t or couldn’t share. Solomon had finally worked out the mental gymnastics required. As long as searching for alternative sites for Nomad could also be thought of as finding a home for Earth’s refugees — which it would — they felt they weren’t abandoning fellow humans.

  Recreating this base, complete with conditioned land and all the turnkey facilities they’d walked into was going to take decades, if only because of the bot replication cycle. Assuming a suitable planet was identified right away, they were looking at sixty or seventy years.

  They had an impossible choice. Whatever they could do would be too little or too late. Most people would shrug and say they’d tried, but Nomad military personnel had a reflex to step in and fix situations, and had to tell themselves a lie to live with their impotence. They knew they were lying, too. And it kept them sane.

  Chris was still gazing skyward as if he was checking for rainclouds, but he looked resigned. Solomon could tell he knew he was going to ruin everyone’s illusion and wished he didn’t have to.

  “It’s not just alien invasions we need to worry about,” he said. “It’s our own kind as well.”

  Alex looked at him sideways. “Our little ray of sunshine.”

  “Okay, if you seriously think we can do anything at all, then we don’t need to find one planet, we need a dozen,” Chris said. “Once we give away the FTL data, we’ll have no control over what they do with it. If Earth’s in that much trouble, they’re either going to be out of time already, or they’ll get as far as building FTL ships and say screw it, let’s head over to that nice Opis place. They’ll come here unless we give them a reason not to.”

  “You sound just like Marc,” Ingram said.

  “Did you disagree with him?”

  “No. That’s the hard part.”

  “I bet he said the first people to show up would be troops and a team of government busybodies,” Chris said. “And that’s where we lose control of everything, even if they’re Brits or Americans. Apart from a lot of room, Opis also has the raw materials that Earth’s short of. If we give incomers an incentive to go elsewhere and play with their own planet, the less chance there’ll be of them overrunning us. That’s not even a judgement on their potential asshole score. It’s just numbers.”

  “Unless it’s APS,” Kim said. “That won’t divert Pham from here. He doesn’t forgive and forget.”

  “Good,” Chris said. “Neither do I.”

  “Perhaps telling them about our alien warlord problem would encourage them to give Opis a miss as well,” Mangel said. “It would explain the house prices around here.”

  “Sol, can we replicate the Nomad automation process on another planet?” Ingram asked. “Bots building bots, mining, manufacturing, environmental adaptation?”

  “We could, Captain, if we can spare enough resources when the time comes,” Solomon said. “But I agree with Chris. If there’s nothing we can do immediately, seeding multiple planets is the next best thing. It’s the least dangerous option for us, and spreading the population between planets provides the best chance for human survival if the local civilisations turn out to be as aggressive as Fred says.”

  Mangel smiled. “And you get to keep your breeding colony of saints cloistered from the wicked, Solomon.”

  “So I do, Dr Mangel.”

  “I haven’t even identified the right people to send the data to yet,” Kim said.

  Chris stood up and collected the debris from his lunch. “If you’ll excuse me, ladies and gentlemen, I’ve got to prep for a course. Catch you later.”

  Alex called after him. “Embroidery?”

  “You guessed. I’ve booked you a place.”

  Alex watched him go for a few seconds, probably trying to work out if Chris had decided he’d had enough of the soul-searching. The conversation moved on to how many organisations might be able to supply their own habitat and infrastructure. It was getting very detailed, but Solomon didn’t think there was any harm in forming an actual plan. Eventually the discussion ran out of steam and Mangel, Kim, and Alex went back to work. Ingram finished her soda and looked at Solomon with a narrow-eyed, frozen wink, an expression that demanded an answer to a question she hadn’t asked.

  “I know what you’re thinking,” she said. “But all I’m trying to do is stop people beating themselves up because they think they’ve left people to die. You’re going along with this for the same reason. Yes?”

  “I’m glad we’ve reached the same conclusion, Captain.”

  “There was a time when I’d have told them to park it for later and deal with the threat in hand. I can’t do that so easily now because most of those looking back at Earth and worrying aren’t my crew. I’m not going to lie to anybody and say we can do more than we can, but if the busywork actually has a benefit in the long term, so much the better.”

  “You don’t have to explain yourself to me, Captain.”

  “Sol, you might be inside a bot, but somehow you have expressions,” Ingram said. “And I know when you’re looking at me with pursed lips.”

  “I’m happy we’re both being realists, actually.”

  “And before you say I’ve done a number of U-turns on not looking back at Earth, I know, but I’m not in my comfort zone. I’m learning how to handle people who don’t have to do a damn thing I tell them to. And the situation’s changing all the time now.”

  “If morale-boosting starts to compromise the immediate needs of the base, I’ll let you know.”

  “Thank you. Now, have I offended Chris again?”

  “No, he really does have a full timetable. By the time he and his colleagues have finished, we’ll have a population capable of defending themselves and able to survive if our facilities are damaged in an attack.”

  “Yes, I know they’re doing a good job. But is he standing for sheriff of Kill Line?”

  “He’s of the opinion that an experienced law enforcement officer should stand, and we have at least two. Does it worry you that he might want the job?”

  “Perhaps it should, but no. Never forget who’s the majority here, Sol. I signed up to hand over to a civilian administration, so I do as the electorate ask.”

  “You’ll never get anywhere in politics with an attitude like that, Captain.”

  Ingram laughed like she meant it. “A saucer of milk for our esteemed incorporeal colleague, please, waiter.” She reached out and slapped her hand on the quadrubot’s back. “I’m not gleaning much from the Jattan chatter. Are you doing any better?”

  “It’s a lot of listening to nothing. That’s why it’s best done by an AI.”

  “Because you don’t get bored. I know.”

  “I do, in a way. I certainly feel impatient when something isn’t productive. But I can relegate the task to another part of me and get on with something interesting.”

  “I’d pay good money to be able to do that.” Ingram stood up and stretched. “Ah well, better get back to the mill. Is Peter still digging trenches to keep himself busy? I think I’ll ask him if he’d like to work on the new settlements project.”

  “I’d be happy to ask him,” Solomon said.

  “Thank you, but I’d rather speak to him myself. We’re too old and we’ve got too much history to do this I’m-not-talking-to-you nonsense.” She took out her pocket screen and made a note. “Moving on, I’d like to visit Elcano and see how the drive installation’s getting on. I need to show my face up there. Can you arrange that for me, please? Last time I discussed it with Fred and Brad, the drives were on target for trials by April.”

  “That’s still the case,” Solomon said. “I’ll get on it.”

 
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