Here We Stand, page 26




Marc went back into the house and sorted through his stuff again. He searched every line in his notebook, every scrap of paper in his wallet, every single file on his pocket screen, and every page of the bible that Tev had left with him and which he’d never even opened.
“Sol, I have absolutely no idea what the fishing reference is about.”
“I’ve checked for places with fish-related names,” Solomon said. “There’s a tourist bar on one of the smaller islands called The Last Marlin. But that’s a stretch.”
It didn’t ring any bells with Marc. “What’s the current state of security around Fiji, then?”
“Mainly focused on stopping landings by vessels from mainland Asia, which is quite time-consuming given the number of islands. But the outage cut them off from APS for a month, and since then they’ve dusted off their older communications technology. Which has made my eavesdropping tasks a little harder.”
Marc thought he knew Tev and the way his mind worked, and also that Tev knew him. The man would have picked a clue that Marc would understand. If Marc didn’t get it, then the problem was his. But Tev wouldn’t leave a message without a way of getting back to him if he wanted Marc to find him, so either the answer was obvious but Marc had lost his touch, or Tev had managed to get back to Britain from APS territory, possibly by putting in a call to the government. He could still have done that, just as Marc could. He also knew there was Marc’s connection to use as leverage.
Marc could call Lawson at the Foreign Office and ask him outright. He’d probably know, and he was also open to doing deals for the kind of treasure and intel Marc had to trade. But that was the problem. Teerik technology was a seductive and dangerous thing. He’d gone as far as getting everyone’s agreement to use it to extract Tev, but it had to stop there. If he weakened, they’d end up handing over the full FTL kit, the wisdom of which he was fed up arguing about, and then it’d be the Caisin gate. He had to draw the line and remember that anyone who got hold of gate technology on Earth would probably do something fucking insane with it, and yes, he knew he was treating himself as the exception who wouldn’t.
Sod it, if push came to shove, he’d find Tev without the FCO’s help, even if it meant searching in person.
“I’ll continue looking,” Solomon said. “I’ve left your connection to the probe in place, so if he tries to contact you he’ll get straight through without knowing where you are. And I’m still looking for Barry Cho. I’ve not given up.”
“Thanks mate.” Marc hadn’t given up either. But he wasn’t doing anything useful and he needed some distraction. “I’d better get to work.”
Apart from training, he didn’t have many tasks that were exclusively his. Instructor duties came to most older NCOs winding down their careers, but all of Chris and Trinder’s troops and Cabot’s military personnel did their share of firearms and self-defence instruction as well, and even with nearly eight hundred civilians eligible for training, that didn’t fill everyone’s working day.
So Marc went running, organised the rugby teams and gym sessions, played dad — or grandad — to Howie, walked around making sure he knew who was where and what they were up to, and helped out with any job that needed a fit man. It still left him too much time to think, but he was doing okay. Today, Trinder needed concentric trenches dug around the perimeter so he could lay anti-personnel devices that would be activated for an imminent ground assault, so Marc lent a hand.
No human needed to lift a finger when there was a bot for every task, but it seemed Marc wasn’t alone. Lots of people, women as well as men, had turned up to operate machinery and dig by hand. Either everyone was getting restless or they’d taken Chris’s survival philosophy to heart. Bots might not always be available, and humans couldn’t afford to forget how to do the basics.
People were also socialising while they worked, though. It felt like Nomad was recreating the stages of human civilisation on fast-forward. Marc watched some of the Ainatio scientists realising there were singles on the wrong side of the track in Kill Line and Cabot, and striking up more meaningful friendships, which would probably to do more to blur sectarian lines in Nomad than Ingram’s supermarket diplomacy. For some reason, the grocery shop suddenly struck him as hilarious today. The idea of Ingram trying to unite the plebs by setting up a village store was both imperious and endearing at the same time. It was typically her.
He stabbed the shovel into the ground and smiled to himself. It was his turn to cook a dinner again. He hoped she liked pizza and chips. Howie would eat it if she didn’t, though.
“Hey Marc.” Chris had shown up, minus a shovel, so he wasn’t planning to stay and dig. “Nothing like the dignity of labour, huh?”
“Nostalgia, mate. I haven’t laid mines in ages. I just hope the Kugin don’t launch an airborne assault.”
”I don’t think they’re the paratrooper type.” Chris took him to one side, suddenly grim. “I asked Sol to come up with a design for the memorial. You don’t have to go with it, but it might help you work out what you’d rather have instead.”
Marc had only himself to blame for this. If he’d told Chris to forget it, he would have done. “Nice idea. He’s good at that.”
“I’m sorry I’ve jumped the gun. I know it isn’t easy.”
Marc hadn’t come up with any ideas of his own but now he wasn’t sure he wanted to see anyone else’s either. An amateur psychologist could have come up with a list of reasons why he was avoiding it, from denial that John and Greg were gone to guilt about everything from letting them enlist to leaving Sandra without somewhere to grieve. But it needed doing, because he wouldn’t be around forever. He didn’t want his sons forgotten and erased because nobody else knew they’d ever existed. This was the first place he’d lived since their deaths that felt permanent enough for him to commit to something public.
“You okay, Marc?”
Marc put his hand on Chris’s shoulder. It felt like he’d braced for a punch. “Sorry, mate. I’m bloody useless at these things.”
“You want to see the pictures now?”
It still felt impossible. Marc couldn’t face it. There were so many peaks of grief along the way — the first notification, seeing the repatriation flight coming in to land, trying to work out the funeral service, every stage and detail as fresh and painful as the first — that he didn’t know why this one had defeated him. Perhaps it really was the final straw. It was grief made solid.
“What do you think of it?” he asked.
“Honest opinion? It’s beautiful. It hit me kind of hard.”
Marc never expected to hear Chris say anything like that. “Oh. It’s that good, is it?”
“Yeah, the inscription’s really something. But you can change it if you don’t like it.”
The memorial was a statement for the future that Marc wouldn’t be around to make, and almost didn’t belong to him at all. War memorials had that effect on him too. The names carved on them were transformed from the intimacy of friends and relatives into historical figures who belonged to everyone. Maybe that was the distance required to learn to move on with life.
“You know what?” Marc said. “I think I want to see it the way a stranger would in a hundred years’ time. Could you have it installed so it’s the first time I see it?”
Chris looked baffled for a moment. “Sure. Where do you want it?”
“Next to Jamie, if that’s okay. My boys would probably have got on well with him in life.”
“Absolutely.”
“Do you think I’m being weird?”
“No, I’ve been pushing you on it from the start. I didn’t give you any room to say mind your own business.”
“I think I’d have dithered forever and failed, to be honest.”
“We’ll keep at it until it’s exactly what you want. No problem.”
“I really appreciate this, Chris. Thank you, mate.”
Chris was an undemonstrative bloke but he did that awkward half-smile that sometimes escaped from him, lips compressed, and nodded. “Least I can do,” he said.
Marc decided not to analyse Chris’s reasons for trying to look after him. Whatever drove the bloke was genuine, and that was enough.
Next day, after the morning briefing, Marc went in search of proper potatoes to make chips, which meant sweet-talking Lianne Maybury. He planned to keep a couple of spuds to chit for planting out in the patch of garden he had big plans for, but the rest were going to be fried in beef dripping, courtesy of Mike Hodge’s herd, and if that didn’t impress Ingram then nothing would.
He walked into the decontamination airlock at the entrance to the crop tunnels and hoped he’d get a warmer welcome than usual from the boffins. Lianne was okay with him, but some of the others were still pissed off about being searched and questioned over die-back. They let him know in their frosty middle-class way that he’d overstepped the mark, either walking away when he approached or just blanking him. Well, that was fine by him. There were one thousand, seven hundred and forty-four people in Nomad Base, not counting Elcano’s human payload. Marc worked on the basis that ten per cent of any population would always be arseholes he wouldn’t get on with, so there were at least another hundred and sixty people here whose opinion he wouldn’t give a toss about either. He was well within the safety margins.
“I’ve got some russets,” Lianne said. “They’ll make decent steak fries.”
“I’ll take them. Have you got ten big ones?”
“Sure.”
Marc took a metal container out of his vest and rattled it. “Sealed tin of humbugs? You know, mint-flavour hard candy.”
“It’s a deal. Give me five minutes.”
Lianne returned with a box of lovely big spuds. Marc admired his haul as he put them in the pannier on the quad bike. They were probably enough to make at least six portions with a few left over for chitting, and it made his day. It was the little things that made life satisfying here. He was sitting on the bike and examining the potatoes for eyes — yeah, he could cut up two of these and get at least eight pieces to plant — when his screen chirped.
It was a call from Tev, an actual voice call. Marc forgot all about the potatoes.
“Tev?”
“Hi Marc. The dairy said you’d called. Is anything wrong? Why aren’t you in cryo now?”
Marc could breathe again. “Bloody hell, Tev, I didn’t understand your clue so I didn’t know where to get hold of you. Are you okay?”
“I didn’t leave a clue. I just check in every week to see if I’ve had any calls.”
Solomon was going to be pissed off that Marc had wasted his time. “I was worried you were banged up in some APS jail. We saw the news about Abbie. Did you leave because of APS?”
“As soon as they mentioned the Vincent woman on the news last month, I thought we’d get a visit from Pham’s heavies, so we moved. But I thought you’d be a long way from here by now.”
“Yeah. About that.” Marc really couldn’t say it over the link, secure or not. He had to look Tev in the eye when he told him. “I need to see you, mate. I’ve got something important to tell you and I need to do it face to face.”
“You haven’t gone far, then.”
“In some ways, no. Is there somewhere we can meet up?”
“Sure, but aren’t you taking a big risk?”
“Not really. I’m serious, Tev. And if you’re worried about APS, I can help.”
Tev paused for a moment. “Okay, I don’t need to know where you are. I’ll send you the grid ref and I’ll be there. When are you coming?”
“When can you make it?”
“How about tomorrow? Late morning my time? It’s just that Joni needs a hand with the boat.”
“Okay. No problem. I’ll message you when I’m on my way.”
“I’m sending the grid ref now. Look for the jetty when you get there.”
“Is there any cover I can use? A few trees or a boatyard?”
“There’s a golf course with a lot of palms about ten minutes’ walk along the coast from that grid ref. It doesn’t get much use now. Folks have reclaimed a lot of it for crops.”
“Perfect. Don’t worry. Keep your head down and I’ll see you then.”
“There’s no airstrip here, Marc.”
Tev obviously thought he was somewhere in APS territory. “I don’t need one, mate,” Marc said. “See you soon.”
Marc looked up the grid reference and found it was one of the old resort islands. There were bound to be Aussies around, then, because loads of them had moved out to the islands in recent years, so he wouldn’t be too conspicuous. It was summer, coming up to the rainy season. It’d be humid but he could get away with wearing his angler’s waistcoat as well and have plenty of pockets to conceal weapons. He had no intention of going into APS territory unarmed.
He started the bike and went to find Ingram. The base map said she was in the new bunker under construction beneath the main building. If Tev wanted to bring his family to Opis, he’d become Ingram’s problem, because there’d be Cabot crew and other personnel who’d resent Marc for being allowed to travel back and forth to rescue his mate when they weren’t even allowed to call anybody. He’d need Ingram’s blessing for this just to keep the peace.
He parked the bike and picked his way through the bots milling around the entrance to the construction site. The fastest way down to the bunker was via the goods platform carrying materials down to the excavation, so he ignored the site safety warnings and jumped onto it. As it descended, he had time to take a look at the bunker, which was still just a rectangular room with unidentifiable cables and conduits sprouting from every surface. Jac Devlin and Ingram both looked up from the screen they’d been studying.
“Workplace safety,” Devlin said pointedly.
“Yeah, I’ve heard of it.” Marc jumped off before the platform reached the bottom. “It’s on, Captain.”
Ingram looked blank for a moment, then nodded. “Walk with me, Sergeant.”
She beckoned him to follow and went into a side chamber at the other end of the bunker. It didn’t look like she’d told Devlin what he was doing.
“Okay, what do you need?” she asked.
“A gate tomorrow. Before that, I’d better take a look at the exit point and make sure I don’t step into a great white’s open mouth or something.”
“You’ve found Tev.”
“He found me.”
“Did you tell him anything?”
“No, it’s got to be done in person. Could you do me a favour? Could you keep an eye on Howie while I’m gone? I don’t like leaving him alone.”
“Certainly. How long?”
“Might be overnight, might be fifteen minutes. It all depends what happens when I tell Tev the truth. He thinks APS is already after him.”
“God, if only someone had throttled Abbie Vincent before she left.”
“If I’d known, I would have. And don’t start Chris off again. He already thinks he should have had X-ray vision and spotted what she had in her flight case.”
“Don’t worry, I’ll be tactful.”
Marc looked past her for a moment and saw Fred and Cosquimaden in the main chamber, doing something with a tangle of pipework and cables. “And the teeriks are okay about moving the gate generator here, are they?”
“Yes. It’s going to mean Eriksson doesn’t get a drive for another six months, but it’s a price worth paying.” Ingram showed him the plans on her screen. “We’re planning a connecting tunnel to the teerik compound, too. If the Kugin show up, the commune can take refuge in here without having to cross open ground. It’s another drain on resources we could do without, but we’ve got to protect them.”
“And that’s the line you spun them, is it?”
“Yes, because it’s true.”
“But it’s not the reason.”
“It achieves the outcome both sides want.”
Fred and Cosqui looked pretty relaxed. There was a subtle but definite change in their postures. “So they’re happily baked now.”
“Whatever that compound is, it’s what they’re used to and Fred says he feels like his old self. Even Turisu’s quite tolerable now, apparently.”
“Are the medics giving them the right dose? It’s great they’re not trying to kill each other, but I like my teeriks with their mathematical judgement unimpaired. It’s a bit dangerous if they’re doped up to the eyeballs.”
“I did ask that,” Ingram said. “I was assured the dose was increased gradually until they felt better.”
“Oh good. If they botch the coordinates and I end up crashing into the sun, it’ll all have been worth it.”
“If you’ve got the grid reference, give it to Sol so he can programme it in. He’ll do a recce with the probe, too. We’ll open the gate in Curtis’s hangar. There’s no work scheduled in there this week.”
“Will it work in an EMP-hardened structure?”
“Apparently yes.”
“So Sol’s got some control of the gate now.”
“We’re getting there,” Ingram said.
Sol cut in on the radio. “Marc, I’m glad Tev made contact,” he said. “So he left no clues after all, then.”
“Yeah, sorry, Sol. Look for the golf course and the jetty, will you? Thanks.”
“Certainly.”
Marc felt bad about the teeriks. Still, if they were happy, that was fine. And they weren’t naive. They knew they were handing over the technology to Ingram’s control, whether it was providing a hardened citadel for their own safety or not.
“Okay, I’m going to kit up and then explain to Howie and persuade him not to worry,” Marc said. “I’ll see you later. And don’t tell Chris. He’ll insist on riding shotgun, and two blokes like us showing up will attract attention.”