Here We Stand, page 23




The giggle finally escaped and Chris started laughing so hard that he thought he’d cough up a lung. Jared laughed his ass off too. Marsha stepped in from the kitchen with her whisk held like a hatchet. Chris always found her mock-angry act hilarious.
“This,” she said, “is why we never get invited to any movie premieres. Are you two drunk already?”
“No ma’am.” Chris put his hand over his glass and hit pause on the TV. “Just happy to be viewing quality entertainment.”
It was good to be full of beer and laugh with friends about bad movies. The great thing about losing daily contact with the world outside the die-back cordon for so many years was that there was plenty of dumb stuff to catch up with, and catching up meant drinking and eating and trashing the plot. There were completely new movies to tear apart too. This was what he needed, a few hours away from teeriks trying to kill each other and waiting for invading aliens and getting more worried about what had happened to Tev. Jared and Marsha were family. He could let his guard down.
“Maybe we need some of whatever they’re giving the teeriks,” he said.
“Yeah, what’s all that about? Jeff says they’re all sweetness and light with each other now.”
“Ingram says the biomed guy thinks it might be a Kugin tranquilliser, not a food supplement.”
“I’m not trying to be funny,” Marsha said, “but if they’ve been on happy pills all the time, withdrawal’s going to be rough. Maybe the bad tempers were down to going cold turkey.”
Jared exploded with laughter again. “I can’t believe you said that.”
Marsha didn’t look amused. “I said I wasn’t trying to be funny.”
“That’s birdist,” Chris said. “For shame, ma’am.” Then he thought about Nina Curtis and Lirrel, and whether it was withdrawal or something that had made the teerik hack Nina to pieces, and he didn’t feel like drinking any more. “So, are you really going ahead with this restaurant idea, then?”
Marsha took Jared’s beer off the table and drank half. “Yeah, I’m opening it in time for election day if I can.”
“In the DMZ?”
“In the old housing block next to the landing pad on the green.”
“Yeah, the DMZ.”
“I prefer to call it equidistant from Kill Line and the Ainatio housing tract.”
“Folks still aren’t mixing, whatever you call it.”
“They need more places to hang out. It’s not a luxury. People who shut themselves away do not make a healthy society.”
“Amen.”
“I meant you, Chris.”
“I’m still enjoying my bathroom.” Chris raised his glass to her. “But we do mix. We get original Kill Liners in our bar, we drink in theirs, and Dan’s guys and a lot of the Cabot crew use both plus the staff club. But except for Annis Kim, Todd Mangel, and Alex, the Ainatio civvies don’t come up here, and Kill Liners don’t go down there.”
“It’s our mediocre wine list,” Jared said, and started laughing again. “And lack of nachos.”
“I think it’s us searching them for bioweapons.”
“They’re over that.”
“Not all of them.”
Jared topped up his drink. Grain was rationed, so beer had become gold in Nomad’s barter economy. Chris was always impressed by how efficiently folks worked out exchange rates, whether it was in lawless ruins of cities or an isolated deep space outpost. Everybody knew what a chicken, decent boots, or a smoke was worth, and that alcohol was the gold standard. It was the same in prison, except without the chickens.
He took another pull of beer and tried to concentrate on the movie. For a few hours, there were no aliens to scan the skies for, and no scientists to teach survival skills to, and no news programmes. He’d been a lot happier when he hadn’t been able to see any at all.
Marsha went back to the kitchen and came out with a finished cake. She put it on the coffee table in front of them with a knife and some plates.
“Help yourselves,” she said. “Coffee and pecan with maple frosting. That’s the star of the menu when the coffee shop gets going.”
“So you can buy this with dessert tokens?” Chris asked.
“Dessert or beer. Andy’s orders.”
“Harsh on folks who want dessert and beer and cake.”
“It makes sure you eat your greens,” Marsha said.
“You’re fuelling a token-swapping black economy, you know that?”
“It’s a free market.”
Whatever Ainatio’s corporate sins had been, they’d put every effort into feeding Nomad Base well, from the variety of plants they’d shipped out with the unmanned missions to the preserved supplies that had arrived with the evacuation. There wasn’t much they didn’t have or wouldn’t be growing soon. The combination of decent food, a proper bed, and plenty of hot water was the difference between living and surviving, and also quelled rebellions pretty efficiently. Chris was feeling chipper about the settlement’s prospects, alien warlords or no alien warlords. His life wasn’t perfect and he didn’t deserve it to be, but this was a home worth defending to the death. He’d lived through the alternatives.
“Are you guys cool about the alien threat?” he asked.
“Uh-uh.” Jared munched on a wedge of cake, nodding. “We can deal with anything, and anything we can’t deal with isn’t going to make Earth better either.”
“Like I said from the start, we’re meant to be here,” Marsha said. “Too many impossible things all lined up for us to get this far.”
Chris settled back to carry on watching the movie. “That’s all I needed to know.”
“Anyone mind if we watch the news first?” Marsha asked. “I know I should pretend it isn’t there, but sometimes it feels like we’re alone in the universe.”
“Honey, we’ve got two military empires’ worth of aliens way too close for comfort,” Jared said. “Loneliness is underrated.”
“I just have to remind myself we’re not the last humans.”
Usually they’d drink and talk and dissect movies until midnight or later, but it was nearly 2200 and for once Chris didn’t want to watch harsh reality. He was happily buzzed, a little tired, and Jared and Marsha had their own home and a life to get on with for the first time in years. Sometimes he felt he was in the way. This displaced small town wasn’t like the convoy, when they lived in each other’s pockets as much out of necessity as friendship. Life here was suddenly normal, far more normal than the one they’d left behind and maybe as normal as Earth had ever been before the Decline. There was some kind of future ahead for the making. Normal meant that folks built homes and families, and Chris had a long way to go to reach that stage.
“Okay, I’ve got some admin to catch up on,” he said. “I’m going to go walk the perimeter and sober up first. Thanks for dinner, Marsha. And the cake. You’re on to a winner there.”
“You throwing the towel in this early?” Jared asked. “We’re still way behind on telling the movie industry where it’s gone wrong.”
“Sorry, I can’t handle drink like I used to. Goodnight, guys. Behave yourselves when I’m gone.”
Jared got up and gave him a bear hug. “You poor old geezer. Have some hot milk before you go to bed and tell the kids to get off your lawn.”
Chris still walked the perimeter every night, even though there was a regular patrol. It was a good cure for general uneasiness, the accretion of unexplained and inconvenient things that stopped him having a reasonable answer for everything. It wasn’t as dark around the base as it had been when they’d first arrived, when he’d needed a flashlight and a night vision visor, but there were more buildings now and more light spilling out of them. How long would it be before Nomad was big and bright enough to be visible from space? There’d be no hiding it then.
As he walked up the road to cut through the fields, he tried to imagine Opis seen from its moon. Despite covering at least a quadrillion miles in Caisin gate transits — he still wasn’t sure he’d got the right number of zeros in that — he’d never flown in a spaceship. He’d never looked back at Earth or Opis with his own eyes, or even experienced take-off. He wanted a sense of how far he’d come, that he’d actually left everything behind.
He’d lived his life in three US states, one that he’d grown up in and two that he’d had to cross. Earth had never been a wide world for him or millions like him. It had just been images on a screen or a poster, because there was always some travel ban or restriction locally or internationally, but it had always been that way since he was a kid. He hadn’t even been in an aircraft before he enlisted.
The limitations hadn’t bothered him until now. It was only seeing the endless wilderness of Opis that showed him how much he’d never had on Earth, and coming to a halt at the edge of this bean field, knowing he could explore the whole planet if he wanted to.
Maybe Hiyashi or Devlin would let him tag along on their next trip to the orbiting vessels. He could view most of the surface of Opis from the network of satellites feeding the monitors in the survey section, but it wasn’t the same as looking back at an isolated rock in an endless void.
And how long would Nomad be small enough for him to cycle through the frequencies on his radio and listen to almost everything that was happening around the base? At least that day was some way off. People would have to start having families first. He kind of liked the scale of society at the moment. Everyone knew pretty well everyone else. He adjusted his earpiece and called Solomon.
“Sol, can you give me the Jattan feed, please?”
“Certainly, Chris,” Solomon said. “You haven’t monitored it before, have you?”
“Nope. I just want to get a feel for what they’re like. How much is in English now?”
“The AI’s managed about seventy per cent so far. It takes time for Fred to go through the unidentified words and correct the inaccurate guesses, and he doesn’t know every word. But the AI’s getting better all the time.”
“It’s still weird that he’s not fluent in Jattan.”
“Not really. As we’ve said before, if he talks directly to Jattans at all, he uses a specialised vocabulary.”
“His conversation with Gan-Pamas, then. Does it make any more sense now?”
“It hasn’t made me think he’s concealed something, if that’s what you mean.”
“But he’s the one who’s translating the stuff the AI doesn’t understand, so how would you know?”
“I’m aware of the limitations. The only consistent ambiguity is the words that appear to be insults, like mekika. Monster. Abomination. It’s not a word an engineer would often encounter, and apart from being abusive, which is understandable if Gan-Pamas thought teeriks were traitors, it’s hard to tell if it’s significant. It may be that Jattans just despise other intelligent species.”
Chris wasn’t convinced, but he didn’t have grounds for doubting it. “Okay, patch me in.”
“I warn you, it’s tedious after a while. I disabled the inflection so the voice doesn’t attempt to add meaning to anything. It’s much easier to listen for detail that way.”
Chris heard the first burst of a flat, unemotional voice speaking an oddly disjointed kind of English. “Is it being literal?”
“In the simultaneous translation, yes.”
“I suppose all we need to listen out for is launch fleet now and some reference to our location.”
“That’s one way of putting it.”
“Thanks, Sol. That’ll keep me amused for a while.”
“Before you go, did you have any further thoughts about that memorial for Marc’s sons?”
“I’m not very creative. I’m still thinking.”
“Would you like me to provide a few concepts?”
“Okay. Yeah, sure. Thank you.”
“If there are words you’d like, let me know in due course. Or I could suggest something. I’ll make sure the stone in question can be ground flat and re-carved in case Marc feels it’s not appropriate.”
It was one of those moments when Chris had to remind himself he was dealing with an AI. Sol was the only ASD type to escape being shut down. But he was actually in a class of his own, Bednarz’s unique creation. That made him the only one of his kind, which was somehow sad, and worse than being the last.
“You’ll make a better job of it than me, Sol.”
“I doubt it. You gave a fine eulogy for Jamie.”
Yeah, for all his annoying habits — or because of them — Sol was mostly what humans should have been.
“Maybe. But that was my gut talking. I don’t know how to speak for Marc.”
Chris carried on, sobering fast and getting into the rhythm of the Jattan transmissions. They weren’t continuous and a lot of the words were unintelligible, presumably Jattan that the AI couldn’t translate and just skipped, but overall, they were just what Ingram kept saying they were, the same pattern of messages that human armies and navies had sent for millennia — position and intended movement, supply requests, reports of observations, and asking for clearance to do this or that.
It was too easy to think of Jattans in human terms and get things badly wrong, but they had enough similarities to want some of the same things Chris did, and get into a fight over them. Jattans weren’t sentient blobs from hot gas planets who probably didn’t have enough in common with humans to come into conflict with them, and whose wars would be with other alien blobs who wanted to fight over whatever blobs cared about. Despite their aquatic ancestors, Jattans breathed a similar atmosphere, walked around, talked, and seemed to have bureaucracies and territories and ambitions, all the stuff that humans could recognise and squabble over. It was too much to assume they’d get on because they had a lot in common.
Chris stopped every hundred yards or so to put on his visor to look out past the strip of cleared land beyond the perimeter and into the darkness of wild Opis. The floral scent that had grabbed his attention a few weeks ago had disappeared, possibly because whatever was emitting it had finished flowering. Something squealed in the distance, but the cry was cut off and it didn’t squeal again. The wildlife here was savage but small, a lot of tiny, deceptively appealing things that preyed on each other, and there was nothing bigger than those cat-sized guinea pig creatures with giraffe legs. If there’d ever been larger predators or herd animals around here, nobody had detected any. No wonder Rikayl fancied his chances as a hunter. He was automatically the apex predator.
It wasn’t so easy to hear the wild noises tonight because of the machinery chugging and grinding in the factory units. If the influx of settlers had happened by stages as planned, and not in a frantic one-day surge, the automated industrial side of Nomad Base would have been separated gradually from the housing, but it was still right on the doorstep to the south-east.
The perimeter had grown to enclose more fields and industrial units and it was now longer than the three or four miles it had been when the housing tracts were first completed. Chris wasn’t sure how much longer he’d have the time or the energy to walk the course like this if it kept expanding. He’d have to take a quad bike, but it wouldn’t be as therapeutic as walking.
If he turned around and headed south down the perimeter now, he’d pass between the eastern edge of Kill Line and its farmland, cross the road down to the church, skirt around the back of the teerik compound, and find himself in what a town would call its industrial estate, a sprawl of buildings that included the hangars and workshops for the shuttles and the Lammergeiers. There was the bacteria farm that made yarns, plastics, and chemicals, and a dozen other factories churning out whatever small objects were needed. A little further out, a foundry stood next to the road carved out by thousands of passes by wheels and tracks as the bots moved back and forth, creating quarries and mines, and hauling the raw materials to the extraction plants.
None of these buildings were designed for human workers, though. Chris wondered how Nomad would cope if the automation failed. Had Bednarz thought of that? Chris had read the mission brief, more of a library than a single document, but he hadn’t seen much about it. Maybe it was up to him and the Kill Line tradesmen to work out contingency plans. Bednarz was too smart to have overlooked the risk, but automation and AI had made his fortune and ultimately became his life. Chris still wasn’t sure why a guy like that cared about improving humanity when he seemed more fond of robots.
It would have been cool to talk to him, though. Project Nomad was a stupendous level of obsession for a man to sustain for a lifetime.
Chris carried on walking north. Common sense said to call it a night and just cut back down the road past the crop tunnels, because he wasn’t doing anything useful that the duty perimeter patrol and a network of boundary sensors weren’t doing already. But he couldn’t break the habit. At the north-east edge of Kill Line’s fields, a cluster of lights picked out an isolated group of buildings that he’d never seen fully lit at night. It was the water treatment plant. He hadn’t really checked it out before.
Well, now was as good a time as any. He picked his way between rows of soybeans with the aid of his NV visor in case he trod down any plants, and emerged on a paved path where he could hear the faint sound of water. Bots could work in complete darkness, but if the lights were on it meant there was someone around. He couldn’t see anyone, though. He walked around looking for a door, then followed the burble of water into a low-roofed building.