Here We Stand, page 32
Not enough work, that was their problem. The sooner they started going outside the wire and studying stuff, the happier they’d be. Some specialisations still had plenty of work to do in their own professional area — medics, botanists, engineers, geologists — but the rest had to find a role that Nomad needed, and learning manual skills was the best option as far as Trinder was concerned. Chris was dead right on that. All it would take to screw this settlement would be for some catastrophe to take out power or automation and they’d be left with a bunch of people who could rearrange molecules in ten dimensions but didn’t know how to repair a water leak, make a chair, or grow tomatoes.
That included him. He had to face it. He could grow stuff, and he’d built a makeshift barbecue, but he’d be guessing his way through the leak and stumped by the chair. He’d have to up his game if he wanted to be solid husband material.
He could prep a fish, though. That was something.
He took his own advice and spent the rest of his watch digging a trench to lay networked mines for the perimeter defences, driving the mini-excavator around the path laid out with pegs and trying not to rely on its mapping system to do all the work for him. Two of Chris’s guys, Zakko and Rich, were laying the mines in his wake and testing the links to the monitoring system. Once all this was complete, the base would be surrounded by a ring of devices that would recognise intruders or unauthorised vehicles and detonate in overlapping arcs. In theory, nothing approaching on the ground could avoid it and the enemy didn’t even have to tread on it or drive over it. Proximity was enough. It was a straightforward system and Trinder chose not to think how long it would hold off sustained waves of attacks. He finished digging his section of trench and walked back up the line to see how the mine-laying was going.
“What if Kugin use paratroopers?” Zakko asked. “They’ll skip all these defences.”
“We just pick ‘em off on the way down,” Rich said.
“They’re supposed to be big and heavy.”
“You ever seen a Fennec ATV parachuted from a plane? They’re heavy too. They still take enough time to reach the ground.”
Zakko chuckled to himself. “I bet we never see a Kugin here. Everybody ready for a quick signal test?”
It was always a nervous moment. The explosives were isolated from the control system while they tested the connections, but Trinder always half-expected something to go wrong and leave a smoking crater with him in it.
“Ready,” he said.
Rich tapped in the code. Trinder consulted his screen to see what had linked up. The map overlaid a mesh on an aerial image of the entire base, and when Trinder dragged the viewpoint around, Nomad looked like it was under a chicken wire dome. All the security systems — sensors, drones, fixed cameras, satellite monitoring, and now the mine network — were successfully linked to the control room. The mesh showed almost complete sensor coverage of the whole base from ground level to fifteen thousand feet. As Nomad reclaimed and conditioned more land for farming and extended the perimeter sensors, the dome would expand.
“Lasers,” Zakko said. “That’s what we need. Curtis has energy weapons. Everybody had them before the Decline. If we added laser defences, it’d really cut down on the maintenance.”
“Maybe we can,” Trinder said. “Can I fill this trench now?”
“Yeah, we’re good.”
Trinder dug and filled another fifty yards before Ray Marriott turned up to relieve him. On the way back to his office, basking in the contentment of doing what he considered real work, he checked on Sautu to see what was happening. Rikayl was sitting on the wheelhouse roof with his back to the base, watching something. It was only when Trinder walked around the boat that he saw Chris cleaning the deck. He could put the pieces together. Chris was removing bloodstains.
Rikayl poked his head over the edge of the roof. “Wanker kill!” It sounded like approval. “Kill kill kill!”
Chris looked over the side. “Oh, hi, Dan.”
“I’m not going to pry.” Trinder pulled himself up the ladder and leaned on the boat’s rail. “I saw the state you came back in.”
“Opposed boarding. We did the opposing. Kind of a clusterfuck, really.”
“I heard. Couldn’t be helped.”
“You’ve been there.”
Trinder remembered cleaning blood off his uniform and being appalled that it was someone else’s. “Yeah.”
“Anyway, I owe Joni a clean deck. It’s the fiddly bits around the hatches. Muck gets in the grooves.” Chris shrugged. “Maybe some of it is fish blood.”
“We’ll have some peace and quiet now. Everyone’s safely gathered in.”
Chris rinsed his brush in a bucket and knelt to scrub at a recessed pull handle on one of the hatches. “But they’re not, are they? It’s only a matter of time before someone wants us to extract the Ainatio folks who opted to go with APS.”
Trinder knew it too. Perhaps a simple no was the way to deal with it.
“Pham knows we’ve got a gate,” he said. “Why are we still pretending it’s a secret?”
“Yeah, I can’t see how someone wouldn’t have noticed us vanishing off visual and radar. I don’t know why I was worried about that. He still can’t do anything about it, and even if we didn’t have it, he’d still want Sol shut down and he’d still want to end Nomad.”
“So you’re going to chill, yeah?”
“I’m going to get a life.” Chris shook his head. “The gate’s awesome. But it’s a massive burden and I think we’ll regret having it one day.”
Trinder wasn’t going to argue with him. He wasn’t even sure why he wanted to, but when he climbed down the ladder and went on his way, he looked at the locator on his belt and tried not to think how easy it would be to get Sol and Fred to gate him straight him into Dubuque. Solomon was getting adept at using the gate under Fred’s supervision, and it wouldn’t be long before Fred wasn’t needed at all.
I could just step in there. Right now.
But even if Trinder didn’t get shot as soon as he arrived, he’d probably face months, maybe years of searching for family he hadn’t seen for sixteen years and hadn’t heard from in nine or ten. The exact date should have been etched in his memory, but it wasn’t. When Tev’s rescue had first been discussed, Trinder felt it prick his conscience, but here he was, still doing nothing about his family.
They were probably already dead. He was back in that loop again, damned if he found out and damned if he didn’t. But he couldn’t let the past blight the present. Erin was his family now. They’d get married and have kids, and nothing was more important or deserving of his ambition than that. All the clever science that had driven Ainatio for a century, built careers and professional reputations, and brought them to Opis had just one purpose: to enable humans to carry on having families. Everything else was a substitute, a distraction from the main business of existence. He’d made that mistake and thought family — being part of one, having one of his own — was a poor second to something else that he couldn’t even name now. But he had a second chance and he wasn’t going to waste it.
That afternoon, he signed out an hour early and got home to find Erin had made burgers and sweet potato fries. It was simple bliss to lounge in the garden with a plate on his lap and a beer in his hand and watch the sun dissolving into a pink sunset. Trinder counted himself lucky.
“I keep meaning to ask what happened to Fred’s wife,” Erin said. “He must have had one.”
“If their kids were usually sent away to other communes, maybe they did the same to spouses.”
“Dan, that’s horrible.”
Trinder thought about it. “I don’t know. Birds on Earth kick out their kids when they’re old enough and most of them don’t mate for life. So maybe it’s the same with teeriks.” Anyone who’d lived through the last years of the Decline in America knew not to ask about absent relatives anyway. “It’s kind of hard to raise the subject. I didn’t even know Mangel was widowed until the guy told Marc and Chris.”
“We don’t ask, do we? Not usually.”
“I never asked you.”
Erin seemed to take that as a question. “Okay, you know about Jamie and how I said it wasn’t the first time I regretted leaving stuff unsaid?”
“Yeah.”
“Well, I was engaged to a guy in my platoon. Ross. I survived a firefight and he didn’t.”
“Sorry. I didn’t mean to open wounds.”
“No, I need to say this. I’d just told Ross that maybe we should put it off and think about it, and he was upset, and the next day he was dead before I got the chance to say I was wrong and I wanted to get married right away. That’s about it, really. I couldn’t bear thinking I hurt him so much that his mind wasn’t on the fight, like knowing all I had to say to Jamie was yeah, sure, I’d date him, and then he’d at least have been happy when he died.”
Trinder had suspected it’d be something like that, but it was still hard to hear. “I’m really sorry, honey.”
“Everyone’s lost people they’ve loved,” Erin said. “It was routine, even for you guys holed up in Ainatio. We’ve all been through it, except the Kill Liners.”
“Do you want me to shut up?”
Erin swirled her beer around the glass. “No, you can say anything you want, any time. But I’m not going to dwell on it. If you want to talk about your family, I’ll listen. You do, don’t you? I knew from the way you looked at Tev’s people when they came through the gate.”
Yeah, Erin knew him better than he knew himself sometimes. “I feel like a total shit because I always found an excuse for not going back to find them.”
“It’s real hard to find people out there, Dan. Ask anyone who arrived with the convoy.”
“I know. But I see Marc and Chris pulling out the stops for Tev and I wonder why I didn’t try.”
“Honey, we ended up where we are because we’re mostly people who didn’t have tight-knit families to start with,” Erin said. “You can love family because humans are hardwired for it, but sometimes you just don’t feel the need to be with them. So you don’t visit so often, and the gulf starts to widen, and then you haven’t spoken to each other for so long that you don’t even know how to break the silence. But we spent generations encouraging people to move away from their hometowns and do their thing or find a better job and giving them reasons not to have kids, and now we’re damn miserable and wondering how we forgot to be normal.”
Trinder felt a twinge that could have been some of what she’d said resonating with what he’d buried. He didn’t have a clear-cut painful past like Chris and his folks, with a solid reason to blame. It was harder to pin down his motives, but the accidental rootlessness struck a chord. He’d just thought there was something better out there for him, and there wasn’t.
“You’re right, no point in trying to fix something until I know what’s broken,” he said. “Want another beer?”
“Where do you get all this extra stuff?”
“Jared’s experimental batches.”
“So we’re guinea pigs. Awesome.”
Trinder tried to avoid thinking about his family for the rest of the evening, but the silt of the past had been stirred up and it muddied his sleep that night. It was like trying to recall a name on the tip of his tongue. He kept waking up and trying not disturb Erin, and when he fell asleep again he had more dreams.
One was about koi carp the size of dolphins pouring out of the Caisin portal in a never-ending river of vermilion and white. He tried to stop them like wayward cattle, holding his arms wide, and somehow he wasn’t getting wet. “Now look what you’ve done,” he said to Marc, who was inexplicably there but not doing anything to help him. “We’ll never be able to stop them now.”
The dream lingered for a while when he woke again. He’d long since given up worrying what dreams told him about his mental state, but he picked this one apart anyway. The fish were all his fears, maybe, or simply the product of too much talk about invasions, and Marc was the guy he thought had all the answers.
Damn fish.
Too many fish.
Trinder woke again with them on his mind, not the koi this time but the wahoo sitting in the freezer. He was feeling guilty for not holding a fish barbecue for the detachment. Even a giant mutant mackerel wouldn’t go far between thirty people, though.
He decided to put a few fillets aside for Aaron Luce, then tried to calculate if he had enough for everybody to at least have a wahoo canapé each. He was cutting the tiny portions when Erin came into the kitchen to start breakfast.
“I knew you’d do this,” Erin said. “You’re so transparent.”
“I’m sorry. I brought it back for you.”
“No, share it with your guys,” she said. “You wouldn’t be Dan Trinder otherwise. That’s the guy I fell in love with. Do it.”
“I’ve got a tuna put aside too.”
“See? We won’t go without.”
Trinder fried twenty-nine very small portions in the admin office kitchen for his troops that morning. Everyone seemed pleased. Only Rory Farrar had tasted wahoo before, so it had enough novelty value to offset how little there was, but it left Trinder feeling terrible that he’d even considered not sharing it. He felt even worse when they told him what a great commanding officer he was.
He didn’t like himself very much at the moment. He needed to be the man Erin thought he was.
At least he felt confident enough to go for a beer in the staff club before he went home that evening, something he hadn’t done for a while. Erin wouldn’t be home for a couple of hours so he had time to kill. The bar was pretty full even at six in the evening, and he got a few odd looks, but they were more of the what’s-going-on variety, as if people were surprised to see him and expected him to have a work-related reason for being there. It wasn’t the accusing stare of the fishless that he’d imagined.
Marc, another rare visitor here, was sitting at a table near the bar, and he had a noticeable exclusion zone around him. Betsy was stretched out under the table. Whether the space around them was down to Marc’s intimidating presence or the dog’s was hard to tell. But Trinder had a feeling that Marc was defying someone to start it with him over the trip to Earth. The smarter Ainatio people would have realised that and left well alone. Trinder helped himself to a beer behind the bar, logged it in the ration book, and sat down at Marc’s table.
“It’s Howie’s astronomy night with Nathan and Todd,” Marc said, like he had to explain being there. “I was taking Betsy for a walk and the urge for liquid refreshment came upon me.”
Trinder peered under the table. “Have you worn her out?”
“I cooked some fish for her,” Marc said. “She’s full.”
“I shared mine with my guys.”
“See? I knew you would.”
“Has Tev given Lianne her bribe?”
“He has.”
“And?”
“She’s growing kava for him. She’s a transactional woman. I like pragmatists.”
Trinder had to laugh. “A recreational beverage war’s coming, buddy. Lianne controls coffee and now kava. Andy’s still the hard liquor baron because he’s got distillery access, but Jared and Dave have taken over the beer market. There’s still wine and tea to fight over. My money’s on Lianne.”
“That’s when shit gets real. You lot can’t be trusted with tea. I’m muscling in on that.”
Marc seemed to be a little happier now. It made a nice change to sit down and socialise with him instead of just talking when things went wrong. Trinder was also enjoying the relief of a secret he didn’t have to keep. He was so relaxed that he wasn’t reading the room, and didn’t realise there was an awkward moment approaching until he saw Marc’s gaze shift away from him to something over his shoulder. The guy didn’t move his head at all, just his eyes. Betsy scrambled to her feet. Trinder turned his head as casually as he could.
Jenny Park had appeared at the bar. She didn’t seem to have come looking for Marc, because when she glanced around and spotted him, her expression changed. She left her drink on the bar and walked straight up to him, ignoring Trinder and looking murderous.
“So it’s okay for you to visit Earth anytime,” she said, “but I can’t even check on my relatives and tell them not to hold memorials for me. Or find out if they had to burn the family farm to the ground. I’m from Honam. The first area contaminated with die-back. So thank you, Sergeant. Now we know who matters on this base and who doesn’t.”
Marc looked up at Jenny, expressionless. The entire bar was now listening, not that it was possible to ignore the spat in a room this size. Betsy moved forward through the chair legs and planted herself between Marc and Jenny. It was so quiet that Trinder heard her claws scrape on the floor. Marc hooked his fingers under the dog’s collar, slow and casual. Few men would risk having a go at Marc, but if Jenny thought her gender made her immune, she was pushing her luck. The guy didn’t give women any quarter if they got in his way.
“So?” Marc said.
“We accepted the ban because Ingram said it would cause chaos if people back home realised we were here and how most of us got here.”
“At the risk of repeating myself, so?”
Jenny bristled visibly. Marc wasn’t doing tact today.
“It was all for nothing, wasn’t it?” she said. “You blew our cover, whatever that was worth. Is it true you and Chris had a shoot-out with APS?”
“No, we had a shoot-out with Tim Pham’s private army.”
“So he knows you’re commuting back and forth to Opis. Oh, that’s terrific. Does he know about the Caisin gate as well?”
“He knew about that back at Kill Line,” Marc said. “You do remember the great escape, yeah? He saw people and objects go through the gate. He probably watched us disappear off Fiji and realised that was the gate too. I’m sorry about your family. But nothing’s changed. Pham wants to keep APS in the dark about all this. If you contact your relatives and he finds out — and he probably will — then he’ll permanently silence them in case you’ve told them too much that might get back to APS.”
