Here We Stand, page 25




“Hear me out, then. Because this is going to sound unhinged.”
“Now that worries me. Never heard you say that before.”
Pham realised his fingers were getting numb from clutching the icy can of cola. He put it down on the deck beside his seat. “Here’s why I know there’s something really big and worth having, and those cowboys who locked me down and trapped us in Redneckville have still got it. If FTL comms were all Ainatio had, they wouldn’t have surrendered it so easily. They’d have wiped all the records before I showed up. And you know as well as I do that what’s missing is far more telling than what’s recorded and filed. They knew they had something better, so they fobbed us off with two baked bean cans and a piece of quantum string. That’s why they had next to nothing on Opis itself. But tell me about Tev Josepha first.”
Stu settled down in the lounger, making the springs creak. “Well, when he left Viti Levu, he had to take his family with him, and it’s hard to be a ninja with a load of civvies in tow. His son’s fairly well known among the fishermen, too, so it was a matter of finding the boat. They’re all on one of the old resort islands that used to belong to Sapphire Seas before they went bust. Y’know, I should have bought one those islands myself when I had the money.”
“What constitutes a load of civvies?” Pham asked.
“Wife, son, pregnant daughter-in-law, daughter, daughter-in-law’s mother.”
That would definitely slow a man down. “He’s left to protect them, then, not to save his own arse.”
“If you’ve read him right, I assume so.”
Pham always looked for the weakness in strong men. It was usually other people, either the bad choices they made, like liability wives, or loved ones and friends they’d make noble sacrifices to save. It didn’t matter which. They could all be useful levers.
“You’ve still got someone keeping an eye on him now,” Pham said.
“Of course. An ex-pat who needs my goodwill. I’ve just asked him to tell me when the man comes and goes. He can’t even guess why. He thinks people owe me money.”
“Well, Tev Josepha’s my bait,” Pham said. “Someone’s going to try to extract him, I just know it. Wherever Gallagher is, he’ll probably know we’ve now got a die-back problem and I guarantee he’ll want Tev out of here. But now Tev’s decided to go into hiding, I think he’ll bring that forward as a matter of urgency.”
“He’s left it a long time, then,” Stu said. “We’d have pulled our guys out as soon as we could, especially if they had special intel. Maybe this Tev doesn’t know whatever you’re so excited about. If you’d thought he did, you’d have flown him straight to a cell instead of giving him a ride.”
“I didn’t know I needed to until he was loose in Fiji,” Pham said. “But by then, we could watch and wait.”
“So what’s the real prize here?”
“You know I said Ainatio had a surprising lack of documentation on this planet they were heading for?”
“Yeah. Opis, you said.”
“I think they’d already been there and had a lot more interesting stuff they didn’t want us to see.”
Stu just fiddled with his beer can, nodding slowly, then looked away for a moment.
“Okay, I can do the sums,” he said. “Forty-five year journey, there and back, equals ninety years, so multiple trips — if they wait for one ship to come back before launching the next — means they were ready to roll nearly two hundred years ago. It predates Bednarz. Unless you mean remote exploration, like you mentioned, using the FTL comms that Terrence wet his boxers over. That was what Ainatio used it for, wasn’t it?”
“Yes. But now they’ve got something else. Portals.”
“What?”
“Instant wormholes. Gateways from one point in space to another. I suspect they’ve got one.”
Stu laughed awkwardly. “Christ, Tim, I didn’t think you were a problem drinker. Get help.”
“I saw it.”
“Actually saw it? Saw what?”
“One of Ainatio’s tilt-rotors just disappeared through it in mid-air. I saw the video. We had python survey bots out recording what they were really up to.”
“Tim, I meant with your own eyes, mate.”
“You want to hear something I saw myself?” Pham asked. “Okay, just before they escaped, I’ve got this thug Chris Montello, and he’s mouthing off at me, and to my right, slightly behind me, there’s three men — a major from Ainatio’s private army who’s giving first aid to a guy called Dieter Hill, who’s bleeding out because I stabbed him to lure Montello and the others, and one of my guys, Davis, who’s guarding them. There’s nowhere to run. It’s a clearing in the woods, but it’s too far from immediate cover for anyone to hide in a few seconds. The stabbed guy isn’t going anywhere under his own steam anyway. Then I see something move and hear a big grunt, and they’re all gone. I mean gone. Instantly gone. I searched the clearing. Not a trace.”
Stu said nothing for a few moments, then rubbed his forehead slowly. “Tim, the least likely explanation for that is a wormhole.” His tone had changed completely. It was embarrassed and kindly, the way someone would talk to their dotty grandad about dementia-induced behaviour. “You know what happens under stress. We don’t take in everything that happens. The old tunnel effect kicks in and we can only see what matters.”
“Whoa, the story’s not over yet,” Pham said. “When I can’t find any of these men, I turn back to Montello to ask him what the hell’s happened, he takes the piss and says it’s aliens, and I’m about to kneecap him. Then Davis’s body just drops out of nowhere a few feet away from me. And before you suggest it, no, not from an aircraft, because he’d have been splattered, and how the hell could he transfer to an aircraft in the first place anyway. He dropped a couple of feet at most. He’d been beaten and shot through the head.”
Stu looked like he was desperate for a logical explanation because he thought his old protégé had gone mad. “You sure you’ve remembered this right?”
“Yes, because a few seconds after Davis dropped back from wherever, Montello literally disappeared right in front of me like he’d been physically pulled out. I swear I saw some kind of mechanical grab reach out of thin air. But then he was gone as well. I saw him vanish. So then I recovered Davis’s body and got some evidence.”
“Oh.” Stu had started to look worried, but a different kind of worried from thinking Pham was crazy. “I was going to say they probably have some incredible stealth technology, but that wouldn’t explain Davis.”
“Exactly. When we were finally picked up from the Ainatio campus by APDU, I got the lab to take a look at Davis, and the the woman said he’d been shot. I’ve still got the round. I couldn’t get definitive ballistics done because his handgun was missing, but it was the right calibre.” Pham felt a lot better for finally telling someone the story in one fell swoop. There was a sequence to it, a logical progression, and it fitted neatly into the wormhole theory. “And he’d obviously had a scuffle on open ground, because he had dirt and plant debris on his clothes. I got a reliable lab that owed me one to run some tests.”
“Oh God. Don’t say it.”
“I didn’t tell the guy how I got hold of it or why. I just asked where he thought it had come from. He took a bloody long time to get back to me, and not before he’d called a couple of times to ask for some context because it was baffling him. I told him he didn’t need to know, and his conclusion was that not only did the soil contain traces that he wouldn’t expect to see on Earth, but there were unusual bacteria he couldn’t classify either. I had to tell him not to worry about the bacteria because it was a contaminated sample and the soil had come from some meteor site here. Actually, I’m not sure that helped. He probably thought I was running some bioweapons programme in the outback.”
“Jesus Christ, Tim.”
“I’m serious.”
“Tell me we haven’t got an alien epidemic.”
“No, we zapped the sample back at Ainatio and the bacteria were dead anyway. I’m not stupid. And I’m not thinking about aliens.” Pham picked up his cola and drained the can. The confession had left his mouth uncomfortably dry. “So Davis looked like he’d been on another planet for a few minutes and been dumped straight back. Is it all falling into place now?”
Stu wasn’t one for theatrics but he did put his hand to his forehead for a moment. “Who else knows?”
“The other operator, but he didn’t see anything because he was off searching for Gallagher to stop him ambushing us. I’m not going to tell Terrence, am I? I’m still trying to work out what this can do for Australia. It isn’t for APS. But you know that.”
“I’ve always been with you on that point, mate. But this is more of a global issue than a regional one.”
“Half the world isn’t in any condition be consulted even if I gave a shit what it wanted,” Pham said.
“In a sane world we’d ally with the Brits.”
“They’ve got their own problems and we won’t be helping them by finding reasons not to accept mainland refugees. Anyway, now you see why I want Gallagher or Montello or the other guy to come back and try to extract Tev Josepha. Because that’s how they’ll do it, using a portal, and we’ll get a shot at grabbing that technology somehow. They never leave a man behind. If we have hostages here, we can make something happen.”
“Yeah? They’ll send a fucking nuke through the wormhole. That’s what’ll happen.” Stu shook his head. “I’ve remembered that right, haven’t I? They’ve got at least two armed operational ships and we haven’t found them yet.”
“And their AI in the quadrubot is actually an ADS type. They never shut him down.”
“You never told me that bit.”
“I’m telling you now.”
“Oh, this just gets better. That’s what carried out the cyberattack on us, isn’t it?”
“I can’t think of anyone or anything else with the ability or the motive.”
“And you’ve sat on all this for months.”
“Who would you trust enough to tell?” Pham asked. “I had to cover my tracks. I’m not sharing this with countries that stab us in the back and rob us blind. I can’t even trust our own pollies not to sell us out.”
Stu opened another beer and the two of them sat in absolute silence for twenty minutes, just drinking and watching shearwaters diving into the sea. Pham had learned his craft from Stu and they both knew where their true duty and loyalty lay. It wasn’t with a supranational bloc that saw Australia as a mineral resource or somewhere to offload their excess population. APS had been founded for a reason, but the alliance had become too much like the China it had been created to break up.
“Tim, I need to ask you a question, and please don’t punch me,” Stu said at last. “The die-back woman. You don’t make mistakes. You’re the four-dimensional chess champion. I’m not proud of this, but my first thought was that you deliberately helped her get to Seoul as a human WMD. Did you do it, mate? Because if one thing’s going to weaken APS and help get us out, it’s that. It’s given us an excuse to close our borders and sit tight, too. We’re not the only ones.”
Pham wasn’t even offended. It was a reasonable suspicion. “No, but maybe if I’d known what Abbie Vincent really was, I’d have thought it was a bloody good idea.”
Stu had always shared Pham’s view on independence from APS. Maybe he didn’t realise how far Pham was prepared to go, though. “I believe you.”
“Would you be ashamed of me if I had?” Pham asked. “We’re still talking, so I’ll take a guess at not.”
Stu shrugged. “It’s going to take something pretty big to lever us out of APS. But this Ainatio thing is damn big. And what if this Montello guy wasn’t joking? What if there really are aliens building that system?”
“Focus on the portal. Think of the size of the problem.” Pham expected Stu to ask more questions, but then he’d only just learned what Pham knew months ago, and some things took a few minutes to sink in. “Whatever that portal is, it can move people without the need for a ship. It’s not like the hyperspace gates you see in science fiction movies, big structures orbiting a planet with ships flying into them. Think about what could be done with that.”
“I’m thinking about what could be done to us with that, to be honest.”
“And what if the Brits have access to it?”
“I’ve heard nothing out of our guys there to suggest they do. And I know you haven’t either, or we wouldn’t be having this conversation.”
“I’ll be honest, Stu, the ramifications are so wide-ranging that I’m not completely sure what to make of it yet,” Pham said. “I just know that some people can’t be trusted not to do the worst or most careless thing with technology, human or alien.”
“Yeah, but aliens. Just when we thought we might come out the other side of all this one day.”
“What are the chances of the Ainatio mob being in league with intelligent aliens?” Pham knew what he’d seen and what he hadn’t. Extrapolation was one thing, but a really big game-changing device had been used right in front of him, and whatever it was, he knew it was real. “That’s an order of magnitude less likely than an extreme development of an existing technology. If Ainatio could send an orange-sized relay forty light years in a fraction of the time an ion drive would take, but still years, then moving big objects like ships, and eventually moving big objects almost instantly with a portal is doable by humans.”
They fell into another silence. The whole scenario was too big for a couple of blokes, but Pham had no choice.
“Remember that the President doesn’t know about anything except the FTL,” Pham said. “Mun, the other operator, knows about the psycho AI, obviously, because he was tasked to find it along with Davis, and he saw the video record of the aircraft disappearing, but that’s about it.”
“He might be a loose end,” Stu said.
“He’s a pro. He won’t talk. In fact, until now, neither of us knew enough to say anything about it at all.”
“Shame you couldn’t ask Annis. She’s the physicist.”
“I have no idea where she is now.”
“You’ll never find her in America.”
“She’s a survivor. A traitor, but a survivor. She might have gone with the Ainatio mob. That little bastard Cho isn’t talking, but I know he had something to do with it.”
“He did turn himself in for surrendering to the local militia,” Stu said. “Fair’s fair. It takes a man to do that.”
“I know. But he might well be another useful lure. His family shot through, so someone cared enough to do him a big favour by getting them away from here. Anyway, he’s only detained pending further investigation. They can’t court-martial him because I slapped an order on it on national security grounds.”
“So where does this leave us, Tim?”
Pham kept his focus on the near-future. The temptation was to extrapolate to the worst scenarios and there were so many of them that it wouldn’t get him anywhere at the moment or do him any good. But one thing was certain: that portal or whatever it was needed to be in the hands of Australian patriots, not APS, and definitely not anyone else, not even the Brits.
“Just keep watching Tev Josepha and let me know the moment there’s any activity,” he said. “And I mean that literally. Any time, day or night, call me, or we might lose him. And if anything happens to me, you know enough to take over. Get the technology and shut down that damn AI for good.”
“No pressure then. Piece of cake.”
“Do you believe a word I’ve said?”
“Yes. I believe you saw something inexplicable that our current technology isn’t capable of and that we need answers at the very least. And the only unfortunate fate that’s likely to befall you is your missus finally asking for a divorce and taking you for every dollar you’ve got.”
Pham smiled. “She too fond of the perks of being an APS politician’s wife without the necessity of having me around to crimp her lifestyle. But I wouldn’t stand in her way.”
He had his plan. He had a fast boat hanging around the islands and it’d be there for as long as necessary, ready to respond. He also had helicopters and a boarding team standing by. It wasn’t cheap to keep private contractors on a retainer indefinitely, but he suspected he’d be pushing his luck if he used APDU assets so close to home. Nobody was watching him in the wastelands of America. But they’d certainly be watching him here.
APDU assets, my arse. He wanted his country’s armed forces back under sole Australian control. Well, first things first. And the first thing was a technological advantage.
If he played this right and was granted just a little luck, it would all come together. But he accepted the real risk: if and when he found whatever it was he was hunting for, he might not know what to do with it.
But he’d face that when he came to it.
* * *
Unit D74, Kill Line: October 14, OC.
“Nothing?” Marc asked. Whenever he thought about Earth, he found he automatically looked up at the sky. He didn’t know where Earth was in relation to the base at the moment and it wouldn’t have helped if he did, but it was hard to stop himself doing it. “Nothing at all?”
“I’m afraid not,” Solomon said. “I’ve checked shipping registration, fishing licences, fish markets, and harbourmasters’ frequencies, and I’ve done a visual search with the probe. I’ve also checked police communications in case they’ve been issued with a BOLO by APS. There’s no sign of Tev yet.”
When Solomon said checked, Marc heard hacked. “Tev never told me the name of the bloody boat.”
“If the family’s using the vessel to evade detection, his son might have changed the name anyway.”
“I bet APS doesn’t know,” Marc said. “But Pham does. And your chances of hacking his comms are slim. But thanks, mate. We’ll have to do this the hard way.”