Here We Stand, page 20




He trotted off, checking the base map to see where Bissey was. The man had been helping out in the crop tunnels, but his icon now showed up in the new wheat field on Doug Brandt’s farm. It was hard to tell if he was on his own because Kill Liners often didn’t switch on their radios for tracking, but Solomon was adept at reading the movements and decided Bissey was talking with someone. After a few moments, Bissey turned around and walked in a straight line to the edge of the field, then headed towards the Brandts’ farmhouse.
Solomon had been worried that Bissey might become an irritant now he had no military role, but he seemed to have thrown himself into agricultural life with some enthusiasm. Solomon wondered if he regretted his decision but didn’t feel there was a way back, so he was making the best of it. But it just reminded Solomon how awkward the whole business was: everyone was technically a civilian, except perhaps Chris and Jared, but some people were civilian civilians. Once someone challenged Ingram’s authority to make decisions, or Trinder’s, or Chris’s, the situation would get messy.
Ingram was right. Nomad needed to formalise the issue of a standing defence force. But that meant having a set of laws, and to have laws, a society needed to be a nation of some kind.
Bednarz hadn’t foreseen die-back or how it would accelerate the Decline, or that Project Nomad’s waves of carefully-selected settlers and civic administrators would be replaced by the only people left to take their places, Ainatio’s last remaining staff and the population of the small town that serviced the research centre. Now Kill Line was holding its own elections, carrying on the cycle of a tiny city-state because it always had and still needed to. The whole of Nomad Base could do the same. It made sense that the best examples of humanity would evolve the right kind of society, so perhaps it was best to leave things to sort themselves out in time.
He’d sound out Chris and see what he thought. Of the Gang of Three — Bissey’s rather acid nickname for Chris, Marc, and Trinder — Chris seemed to be most likely to take an interest in governance and kept reminding meetings that Mayor Brandt needed to be kept in the loop and have a say.
Chris was in one of the workshops across the road from the beer garden, collecting plumbing tools. Solomon trotted up to him and waited for an appropriate moment to interrupt.
“Hey Sol.” Chris looked over his shoulder. “You signing up for lessons?”
“I think the python bots have more aptitude for plumbing tasks. Your people built your transit camp from scratch, didn’t they?”
“We did.” Chris examined a crescent wrench. “We’ve got all the skills. Time to pass them on.”
“I don’t think you need worry about Nomad being overrun, by the way.”
“I didn’t think you wanted an open door here either.”
“Of course I don’t. But the multi-planet approach was a good compromise, and you were right to raise it. It’s the best we can do in the long run.”
“Sure, as long as it doesn’t take our eye off the ball. And as long as people don’t see things on Earth getting worse every time they switch on the news and start thinking that maybe we should take the risk and open a Caisin gate. Which, of course, is exactly why most of us are here now. So I’m fully aware of the irony as well as my hypocrisy.”
“Chris, the difference was that we calculated the base could absorb the evacuees,” Solomon said. “Everyone knows that.”
“I should feel bad about pulling the ladder aboard, because guilt’s a normal human response, but I don’t. There’s a reason CBRN instructors tell you to put your own mask on first.”
“You don’t have to convince me. You understand why I don’t want this colony to become like the Earth we left.”
Chris looked down at him as if he was working out the best way to express something awkward. “Yeah, but we might not meet your expectations, Sol. We’re not saints. Most folks here aren’t assholes, either. They’re just normal. I worry about Opis being a magnet for scumbags and chancers, so yeah, I agree with Bednarz about not exporting our failings. But you’re all about the best and I’m more about us not being the worst. I’ll be happy if we end up with a society that has some basic values like helping your neighbour when they need it and minding your own business when they don’t. Nothing high-minded or perfectionist. Just better than the cesspit we left.”
Georgina Erskine used to talk about a higher ideal than that, a fresh start that would create its own human civilisation instead of reproducing a theme-park version of Earth, as she put it. Awareness of history was essential to a healthy society, but excessive reverence for the achievements of the past only made people believe humanity’s peak was over and that it could never be greater, so Project Nomad didn’t need a grand vault housing a collection of priceless art for posterity. It would produce its own artists. But the Director had had the project thrust upon her by her dying father, and she’d spent her life making the very best of a bad job.
It was going to be a difficult moment for Solomon when she was eventually revived and he had to explain everything that had happened while she’d been in cryo.
“Can I change the subject and beg a favour?” Chris asked.
“Certainly.”
“Would you make something for me? Well, hypothetically, because I haven’t asked the recipient yet.”
“Ah, Captain Fonseca.”
“No, not Fonseca. Marc. If I wanted a memorial, would you need me to give you a design, or do you think it up yourself? I know you programme bots to do the stonework, but I never asked where the designs came from.”
“I can do either,” Solomon said. “We have plenty of image sources now.”
Chris blinked a few times. “Marc’s never had anywhere to grieve for his sons. He’s thinking about it. Would you make something?”
“Of course. Was there no grave on Earth, then?”
“His boys loved white-water canoeing. He scattered their ashes in their favourite river.”
For all Solomon’s ability to monitor everything, there were still things he didn’t know about his humans, and they were often the most important ones. He imagined the tumbling river and the moment Marc let go of the last physical trace of his sons. It must have been very hard. Solomon didn’t like the idea of cremation. Perhaps his own uncertain relationship with an absence of a physical form made it seem more like erasure than eternal rest.
“I’ll do it happily, Chris,” he said. “Let me know.”
“Thanks, Sol.” Chris zipped up the holdall full of tools and headed for the door, then paused to look back for a moment. “I like it here. We should take our time working out what we want this place to be, not get bounced into decisions we can’t change later.”
At least they still agreed, even if it was for slightly different reasons. The dread Solomon had felt when Ingram and Marc had seemed willing to jeopardise his mission out of a misplaced sense of responsibility had finally passed. They’d thought it through, seen sense, and gone for a compromise, giving Solomon breathing room.
It wasn’t about stopping more humans from colonising deep space but about making sure they didn’t do it here. Earth would eventually recover a few generations from now. Many humans would never want to leave anyway, and even without FTL, others would still find a way to reach new planets. The fate of Earth and the future of mankind as a spacefaring species wasn’t the sole responsibility of anyone here. Project Nomad was just a small part of of an inevitable future.
There, Mr Bednarz. I think that actually squares the circle. I’m sticking to my task. I’m protecting them, but without coercion. They’ve worked it out for themselves.
It’s hard, isn’t it, Solomon? But you got there in the end. It’s no small feat.
Solomon wondered if he was talking to his imaginary Bednarz a little too much now. But as long as his humans talked to the dead, he didn’t feel he was defective.
He returned to the main building, parked the quadrubot in its charging bay, and slipped back into the network. The continuous feed from the Jattan navy was now making more sense with some helpful input from Fred, so he listened to it consciously while he got on with the rest of his work rather than leaving the linguistics AI to flag issues below the level of his attention. This was probably how humans felt when they played music or an audio show while they worked.
A quick check showed Nomad Base was running smoothly. The assorted bots moving around the site were doing their additional duties of sampling for die-back and reporting anything that had changed position — objects and people — to keep the interactive base map updated. Utilities and the security network — perimeter, hazardous processes, general safety monitoring — were a bank of virtual green lights. From the network of sensors, Solomon could see personnel going about their business. He didn’t need to be consciously aware of any of this unblemished normality as long as the dumb AIs around the base were running, but it was a strange view to have of his community if all he actively saw were the problems.
It was a little harder to keep an eye on Kill Line, because both the town proper and what had been the transit camp had few security cameras. They just preferred not to be continuously monitored. Public areas like the school and the town hall had security cameras, and Solomon could still detect emergencies like fires via the fleet of aerial micro-drones that could map a dozen indicators from spot temperatures to air quality. He erred on the side of respecting the Kill Liners’ wish to not only have privacy in their homes but also on their streets.
See, Mr Bednarz? It’s not ideal for me, but it’s what they want. They’re adults. They can choose. We’ve reached a compromise. Now I’ll check the vessels.
Solomon transferred himself to Elcano, moving through the ship via the sensors to see how work was progressing on the new drive. He only glanced at the status indicators for the cryo berths. He really didn’t want to see the chilled, unconscious faces of the people he’d known for so many years, least of all Georgina Erskine’s.
Had she really wanted to shut him down permanently, to kill him? Yes, and he needed to remember that, and why it had happened.
He completed his sweep of Elcano and moved across to Cabot, deserted except for bots now that a duty maintenance team was no longer required to live on board. Shackleton’s new drive was partially complete, although not as advanced as Elcano’s, and Eriksson was showing some progress after being cannibalised for parts. Completion was still months away, but Solomon had his backup plan for the Caisin gate if an evacuation became necessary. He wasn’t going to panic.
He finished looking over the ships and returned to the base to transfer into the quadrubot again. It was already getting dark, and the night was much more interesting when he could walk around. Outside the wire, the grassland was always full of interesting little nocturnal creatures moving about and preying on each other.
Solomon could see the path of the barrier field around the base even without switching to a different EM spectrum. If he looked on the ground, there was always a scattering of dead insect-like creatures that hadn’t survived contact with the disruptive field. This part of Opis seemed to have few animals that filled the insect niche compared to Earth, but the situation might have been different elsewhere on the planet. One day, he’d see for himself instead of relying on the satellite net to watch it for him.
Inside the perimeter, Nomad was a round-the-clock operation, but the night belonged to the bots. This was when the housekeeping fleet moved out to clean offices and labs, cut grass, check pipes and cables, and generally maintain the site. But there were still plenty of humans up and about; the perimeter security patrol, engineers servicing vehicles, the duty medic, or just people working late. Up the road in Kill Line, the newly-completed tavern was still open and the lights were on in Mike Hodge’s barn. Solomon wandered around, watching the entire settlement via feeds from drones and security cameras transmitted to his quadrubot, forming a patchwork of shadows and pools of light.
He could have viewed everything in daylight colour through the night vision settings if he’d wanted to, but he preferred to see the base as humans saw it and leave everything beyond that spectrum to the security system. Nomad looked settled and welcoming, a landscape dotted with lights from windows and the faint green glow of safety strips along the roads. It looked like home. Whatever was happening on Dal Mantir — and there was still no mention of the missing ship — the settlement was getting on with the simple business of living.
Half an hour later, though, the sensors alerted Solomon to unusual sounds and movements inside the walled teerik compound. It was one of the most monitored parts of the base, ensuring no intruder could reach the teeriks, and there were regular foot patrols, so Solomon’s first thought was that Rikayl had grown bored and was causing havoc in the grounds. He switched back to the quadrubot’s full array of sensors and picked up the feeds from the monitors spaced at intervals around the walls, just to make sure.
But it wasn’t Rikayl.
The security lighting had been triggered and the grounds were lit up like a sports arena. Two of the adult teeriks were outside the house, shrieking and rasping at each other. One of them sprang into the air and slashed at the other with a clawed hind foot. Then the fight broke out in earnest.
Solomon turned and raced towards the compound. He knew Fred’s two young grandsons had scrapped over food when the commune was running low on supplies, but he’d never seen the adults fight. Vehicle headlights snapped on behind him as a security patrol followed him in.
The first sight that met him when he passed through the gates was the two teeriks locked in battle, clawing at each other like fighting cocks and stabbing with their beaks. Blood and feathers flew. It looked like Pannit and Epliko, and Epliko was getting the worst of it. Pannit ripped into his neck and Epliko went down, wings spread, struggling to get up again. Pannit leaped on top of him, hacking out chunks with that fearsome beak.
Solomon knew the security teams were right behind him but a human wouldn’t have much chance of separating them without shooting Pannit. This was a task for something built to withstand industrial levels of damage — a quadrubot. Solomon reared up on his hind legs and grabbed Pannit from behind, yanking him backwards and putting a crushing grip around his chest to subdue him. Pannit fought and screeched and threw Solomon backwards, but the quadrubot righted itself and Solomon lunged in to grab the teerik again.
Two of Trinder’s troops, Gemmel and Schwaiger, jumped out of the Caracal. Gemmel had a cattle prod and he moved in to give Pannit a shock. It took three zaps to stop Pannit fighting back long enough for Schwaiger to put cargo straps around the teerik’s legs, wings, and beak. They could worry about how they would release him later.
“What the hell happened?” Schwaiger was panting with the effort. “Jesus, he’s killed the other one. Is that Epliko?”
“He’s still alive,” Solomon said. He activated the medical alert and went to inspect Epliko’s injuries. “Commander Haine? We have a seriously injured teerik. It’s Epliko. I realise this is unknown territory for you, but he has multiple lacerations from a fight.”
“Bloody hell,” Haine muttered. “Okay, bring him in. We’ll be waiting at the rear doors.”
“You said you’d identified an anaesthetic suitable for teeriks.”
“Yes. But we haven’t tested it.”
“I fear we might not be able to afford that luxury. We’re going to need to sedate Pannit, too. He’s still fighting mad.”
“We might end up killing both of them. Do we have a choice?”
“I don’t think so.”
Kilbride and Finch turned up in a rover and manhandled the trussed Pannit onto the flatbed. He couldn’t open his beak to shriek but he was making ominous angry noises in his throat. As Gemmel and Schwaiger lifted Epliko into the back of the Caracal, Fred came out of the house, turned around, and slammed the door behind him. It opened again as Turisu tried to follow him but he drove her back with angry rasping noises and beating wings. Solomon could now translate enough Kugin to hear him telling her to stay inside and leave it to him. Fred dropped into that all-fours posture that Solomon had seen the youngsters use and ran towards the chaos like a pterosaur. Solomon tried to intercept him.
“Fred, they’ve had a fight,” Solomon said, blocking his path. “Don’t worry, Commander Haine’s going to treat him. Leave it to us.”
Fred’s crest was raised and his neck feathers were fluffed up. It was hard to tell if he was shocked or angry. As the Caracal and the rover pulled away, he ducked down as if he was going to take off and flapped his wings a couple of times. While there was very little expression in a teerik’s face that Solomon could read, he looked distraught.
“We never fight,” Fred said. “We never even really argued until recently. Now we’re harming each other. What’s happening to us?”
He took off, following the Caracal up the path towards the green. Solomon kept up with him. It was a good question. Why would two of the quieter, more easy-going teeriks suddenly try to kill each other?
* * *
Medical centre, Nomad Base: 2115 hours.
The world was falling apart.
Everything that Hredt thought he knew about his own commune had been swept away. They weren’t all blood relatives, but they’d worked together, lived together, and even rebelled together. They knew each other as well as anybody could. They quarrelled from time to time, and the difficulties of the last few months had made them increasingly irritable and argumentative, but apart from the odd warning peck and the tussles between his young grandsons, they’d never had physical fights. Teeriks didn’t do that.
Now Epliko was lying in his own blood on a table while doctors tried to work out how to safely sedate him. Hredt stood to one side of the room, feeling helpless and desperate because he could do nothing and — even worse — he understood nothing. He’d never watched doctors working on a patient before, let alone seen serious injuries. Every treatment he’d had, and there hadn’t been many, had been conducted under anaesthesia or in such a way that he couldn’t watch what was going on.