Here We Stand, page 35
Hredt spent an hour putting the probe back together. He needed Searle and Devlin to hold items in place for him, a duty they seemed delighted with, and it was hard not to feel affection for a species that was so curious and eager to learn. Devlin even helped make simple parts to mount the optics. The probe wasn’t fully restored, but there were now enough components in place to see if it would start. Hredt kept the propulsion unit and drive separate in case the probe managed to escape.
“Stand by,” he said. “I’ll plug it into Curtis’s power supply so I don’t burn it out. It can’t move, but it might try to transmit.”
“Better cover the thing before you switch it on, then,” Searle said. “The walls block signals, but in case that thing can bypass them, we don’t want to accidentally confirm that we’ve got the ship.”
It was excessive caution, but Hredt understood. He carried the probe into the hangar wrapped in a fire blanket and attached it to Curtis’s external power supply. The probe vibrated as it came to life.
“Well done, Fred, you raised it from the dead,” Trinder said. “Now what?”
“Is there a signal?” Chris asked.
Hredt poked his sensor under the blanket. “It’s attempting to connect.”
“Can you tell what it’s trying to connect to?”
Hredt tried to insert a screen cable into one of its ports. “No. It’s transmitting an obsolete ID code, and that doesn’t give me a location. But it does indicate it’s pre-set to connect to a relay.”
“Well, at least we know we can send a message if we have to,” Searle said. “Thanks, Fred. You can disconnect it now. Let’s lock it away and forget about it for the time being.”
Hredt was relieved they weren’t going to do anything rash. Ingram was another matter, but she listened to Searle the same way she listened to Bissey, so common sense would prevail. Hredt had bought some time to think of a better way to deal with the opposition’s incursions. He went back to the compound, planning to use the peace and quiet to formulate a better plan than just shooting everything that triggered the early warning systems.
Was there really a bargain to be struck with Nir-Tenbiku? Hredt didn’t want to give up Curtis, although Marc and Chris were right about the limited uses for the ship in their current situation. It actually had more value as a source of spares. But that would break Hredt’s heart after all the work they’d put in.
He still couldn’t see a group of Jattans with a grudge agreeing to take the prenu in exchange for staying away from Opis, though, even if Marc was right about their unusual patience.
Hredt opened one of the prepared meals that were delivered to the compound every day. The commune still didn’t know how to find or cook food, but he’d tackle that when the more urgent crises were over. For the time being, he’d enjoy the meat and pastry. He settled down to eat and studied the small container of medicated, chewy bars that now arrived with the meals.
At least the humans were completely honest about the drug and didn’t put it in the food like the Kugin must have done. He could read all the details on the label and see exactly how much he was being given, and he wasn’t being forced to take it. But a few days into the treatment, despite feeling better, he knew his brain wasn’t quite as active as it had been.
Now that he could feel a marked difference in a short time, he could compare the two states more easily. He realised that he’d actually thought more independently and creatively when the level of the drug in his body was declining and he no longer had access to treated Kugin food. The withdrawal must have been what made him do all those daring things: he’d started flying, he’d risked entering an alliance with the humans, and he’d taken over the leadership of the commune when Caisin died. It would be a shame to lose all that. He was still capable of doing his job to the highest level, but somehow that spark had gone, the surge of brilliant insights and bold decisions.
He read the label on the medication again. Without it, some members of the commune had become more aggressive. Some hadn’t, and had just been more anxious. He’d just become impatient. Did he really need this drug, then? If being deprived of it hadn’t killed him in the months since they’d escaped, then he could probably stop taking it while he needed his mind to be at its sharpest and most innovative.
He’d be fine.
Hredt put the medicated bar aside to dispose of it later and ate his meal. Now it was time to work out how his outnumbered human friends could hold their ground on Opis against three factions who would, sooner or later, be on a collision course with them.
* * *
North-east perimeter, Nomad Base: October 20, OC.
Ingram stopped the quad bike at the boundary of Liam Dale’s farm and watched his prize herd of Jerseys grazing on the reclaimed pasture as if they hadn’t noticed they’d left Earth.
For Kill Liners, life didn’t seem to have changed much. They were still isolated, still leading the same daily lives, still running their own show, and still partially dependent on their Ainatio neighbour for some commodities. But Ingram’s world had changed out of all recognition.
She was neither at sea nor in a spacecraft, and not fully in command or responsible for the entire base. She was anchored only by the illusion of still being in the navy. Nomad was orderly, but that didn’t mean it was a union of shared interests. But it did have a common enemy, and external enemies — real or manufactured —always made people willing to obey a dominant voice.
This was politics. She really didn’t like getting it on her hands.
While she debated whether to drop in for chat with Liam, who still seemed unaffected by killing an alien, a few cows wandered across to the wire fence to see what she was up to. Eventually the rest of the herd joined them, watching her with accusing stares that demanded answers to some unknown question. If they were asking whether she’d know when she was beaten and it was time to draw stumps on Nomad, the answer was no. She’d see this out.
Ingram started the bike and carried on around the base, noting two new fields in the process of being terraformed by bright green box-shaped bots that were inching across the freshly cleared soil, altering the microbiome to grow crops. One day, scientists would decry the destruction of an uncatalogued ecosystem, but Ingram had never lost sleep over that. People needed to live. There’d still be plenty of wild Opis to go around.
The next street on the left had no formal name yet, but it had become part of Wickens Road by default. It merged with the road further south and was gradually absorbing the name by the osmosis of use. She’d expected a clamour of suggestions for naming every available feature in the base, but so far only Kill Line had named its roads, and that was because Solomon had made the street plan fit the original one on Earth. The transit camp quarter had merged into Kill Line proper, but it still hadn’t named all its streets. They knew all their neighbours and where they lived. Postal addresses weren’t needed yet.
“Sol, what’s happening about Dr Kim’s names?” Ingram asked. “We agreed she could name things after her great-grandmother. She requested the school and a road.”
“I have it in hand, Captain.”
“And Marc’s place should have a proper address.”
“Technically, his house isn’t actually in any road,” Solomon said. “You’d call a traffic island. It’s just unit D Seven Four. I think he prefers it that way.”
“We’re really not very good at naming things, are we? Terribly un-colonial of us all.”
“Names evolve best through usage, Captain. Like desire lines in planning. See where people wear down a path before you lay paving.”
Ingram kept a chart in her mind that showed her what she thought constituted Nomad Base, but sometimes it included Kill Line and sometimes it didn’t, depending on whether she was talking about site security or day-to-day governance.
Whatever its status, Kill Line was made up of agreeably random houses that were starting to look like they’d been there for years, still arranged with the square and town hall at its heart. Ingram had grown up near a village and everything about this one comforted her, but she was under no illusion that village life was peaceful and uncomplicated. The full spectrum of human virtues and vices was simply compressed into a smaller space. Without the anonymity of a big city and places to hide, feelings could run very high.
On the board outside the town hall, election notices sat behind a weatherproof panel. Ingram stopped to study the list of candidates. Two things struck her, although they shouldn’t have come as a surprise. There were some transit camp names on the list, including Dieter Hill as the only candidate for the new post of sheriff, and it was the first election she’d seen without political parties.
Ingram hadn’t expected the transit camp to embrace local politics so quickly. They treated Chris as a tribal chieftain, but he was the one who kept insisting that Doug Brandt was included in command decisions because the mayor was the only man on Opis who’d actually been elected. Chris seemed keen to recreate an America that had vanished long before he was born. He had an oddly respectable, conformist streak for a man who openly admitted how often he’d broken the law.
Ingram went in search of Doug. The town hall was more minimalist than the original, but the townspeople had rescued the portraits of previous mayors and councillors and hung them on the walls of the main corridor. One hundred and thirty years seemed no history at all to Ingram, who thought in millennia as Englishmen and women did, but it was a long time to Kill Liners. And nobody understood the need for tradition and history better than she did. Opis might have been a blank sheet, but its new citizens weren’t. There were only so many roots you could trim from people before they had no connection to their neighbours at all and no will left to grow stronger.
Doug was hunched over his desk, checking a long list of figures with his forehead resting on one hand, fingers meshed in white hair that made him look older than his sixties. Ingram waited for him to finish and look up before interrupting.
“Oh, Captain, take a seat.” He jumped up to pour her a hot drink from an insulated jug. “Have some coffee. Milk and two sugars, isn’t it? Any more news on our aliens?”
“Thank you. Well, nothing concrete, but we’re reading the runes. Now we’ve had time to think about it, sending a probe instead of landing with all guns blazing suggests they’re not quite the trigger-happy hotheads we first heard about. And it makes them look a little scared of us.”
“And are they the rebels?”
“Yes, we’re fairly sure they are. The Protectorate variety would have shown up mob-handed with the Kugin. And we haven’t heard anything on their naval comms channels to indicate they’ve located us.”
“It’s a shame we couldn’t have met more peacefully. It’s hard to see how we’ll ever understand them.”
“At least we know they’re bipeds with some similar issues to ourselves,” Ingram said. “Which is just as well. I’m not sure we’d ever understand what sentient moss wanted from us.”
“Thirty per cent acetic acid or a dish soap solution would put it down, though.”
Ingram had to smile. “I’m a flamethrower girl myself.”
“Will we try to contact them?”
“I’m still working out what we’d say if we can get through.”
“Maybe ‘What do you want?’ would be enough.”
“The gamble is their current assessment of us,” Ingram said. “If they believe we’re an aggressive military power, and contacting them instead of blowing up their planet makes us look weak, we’ve made matters worse. Assuming we know which planet to blow up, of course.”
“Perhaps not contacting them might send the same message. What does Fred think?”
“He still says we shouldn’t respond. Is everyone here taking this as calmly as you?”
Doug shrugged. It was hard to faze a farmer. “We know you’ve thought out contingency plans. The best thing we can do is keep the lights on.”
Ingram was still in two minds about making contact. Her gut said do it, but it was hard to ignore Fred. The teeriks weren’t fools. On the other hand, if the only Jattans they spoke to were procurement officers or defence department staff, they’d have a narrow view of Jattan psychology. If Ingram judged all humans by some of the politicians or civil servants she’d known, she’d have decided nuking from orbit was long overdue. Doug might have been right about just asking.
What do you want?
She didn’t even have to get Fred to ask them. The linguistics AI now had most of the basics. There was always the risk of not understanding the etiquette, but after one dead crew member, two dead rebels, and a close call with Trinder, it might not make matters any worse.
“I’m going to think about that and our options for responses, then,” she said. “Anyway, you’ve got an election next month. None of my business, but what made you decide to have a sheriff? You never had one before.”
“We’re not our own little world now,” Doug said. “We share this patch of land in a way we didn’t share it with Ainatio on Earth. And there’s the future. When the population starts growing, we’ll be too big to settle things informally. Everyone’s going to need rules.”
“Are you going to draw up laws?”
“Ours have always served us well. They’re pretty simple. What about yours? What about the Ainatio folks? Are we all on the same page, and what happens if we’re not? I’m not criticising, because nobody knew Nomad was going to be cut loose like this. You left Earth thinking there’d be a civilian government coming in — independent, sure, but organised. But what are you going to do now if we’ve got a problem with one of the scientists, or they’ve got a problem with one of us? That applies whether Nomad’s independent or tied to Earth.”
Bednarz had assumed a military structure would operate while Cabot set up a turnkey colony for civilians to take over decades later. But everyone had arrived at once. That was the problem. Ingram could have stood down immediately and handed the keys to Doug, but everyone agreed you couldn’t dump Nomad’s pile of steaming security crises on inexperienced farmers.
“It’s a balancing act,” she said. “But if you’re asking my opinion, we need one set of laws for everyone, or we become different nations. Maybe that’s what people will want in due course, and that’s healthy. Laws don’t need to be any more complicated than saying treat others as you wish to be treated. But we’re humans, so we need definitions that we can exploit to get us out of trouble.”
Doug studied the surface of his coffee for a while. Ingram hoped he’d hand her a document that set out the Kill Line legal code, a single page of honest homespun clarity derived from a deep understanding of both nature and the Bible, but he didn’t.
“I’m a farmer,” he said. “I can run a small town with a bunch of sensible people I’ve known for years. But it’s not just us now, and we need to know which flag we’re under.”
“I’m preparing this settlement for a civilian administration,” Ingram said. “Joint Command is running security policy until civilians feel they can make those decisions themselves. When you’re no longer happy with us, you need to say so.”
“Can I make a suggestion?”
“Certainly.”
“After the elections, we hold a vote for everybody about how they want Nomad to be run, like we’re doing with the calendar. Everybody gets a say. Sure, Kill Line’s the majority, and maybe that’s something else we need to look at so we don’t have a substantial minority that feels it hasn’t got a voice.”
“If we’re not a pile of smoking charcoal by then, yes, we need to ask people what they want.”
“So it’s a yes.”
“If you want it, it’ll happen. We’re here to smooth the path.”
“But you’re arguably civilians too. You have a vote.”
“Then we’ll use it in due course. Don’t worry, I’ll get Solomon to scope something out.”
“Thank you.”
Ingram thought it over on the ride back to her office. Doug wasn’t interested in some kind of Kill Line empire. He was probably just worried what would happen if someone from one group wronged someone from another and the penalty didn’t satisfy the aggrieved.
What still worried Ingram, though, was that Nomad wasn’t cut loose from Earth. Its legal status was a mess — no America, no Ainatio, no formal link with a military chain of command on Earth — but a lot of people here did still have a country, and the majority of those were British members of her crew. Cabot also had crew from five East Asian nations, Australia, New Zealand, and Russia, and all those countries were still functioning as well.
“Sol, I know this is relative trivia at the moment, but why didn’t Bednarz draft the legal framework for the colony?” she asked. “He did everything else. I don’t buy the excuse that he thought we should be free to draft our own.”
“But that really was what he felt, Captain,” Solomon said. “You were all selected because you represented the values of what he regarded as civilisation. It’s exactly as it’s written in the mission document.”
“Well, if you have time, could you look at some all-purpose legal framework, one side of A-four only?”
“Of course. And I always have time. But what would you rather have, Captain? You have an opinion. We’ve discussed these matters before.”
“You want me to be completely honest? Gut level stuff?”
“Yes.”
“I’d rather have geography. A British sector under British law, an American sector with whatever pick-and-mix of state laws they want, and the rest of the residents can apply to join one or invent their own. I think it’s dangerous to take people’s identities away. Why can’t we have a federal set-up with different state jurisdictions? The US managed it back in the day, so we could too. How hard can it be to organise fewer than three thousand people? The only awkward part is the logistics of moving everyone around and having states with one resident.”
“Stand by,” he said. “I’ll plug it into Curtis’s power supply so I don’t burn it out. It can’t move, but it might try to transmit.”
“Better cover the thing before you switch it on, then,” Searle said. “The walls block signals, but in case that thing can bypass them, we don’t want to accidentally confirm that we’ve got the ship.”
It was excessive caution, but Hredt understood. He carried the probe into the hangar wrapped in a fire blanket and attached it to Curtis’s external power supply. The probe vibrated as it came to life.
“Well done, Fred, you raised it from the dead,” Trinder said. “Now what?”
“Is there a signal?” Chris asked.
Hredt poked his sensor under the blanket. “It’s attempting to connect.”
“Can you tell what it’s trying to connect to?”
Hredt tried to insert a screen cable into one of its ports. “No. It’s transmitting an obsolete ID code, and that doesn’t give me a location. But it does indicate it’s pre-set to connect to a relay.”
“Well, at least we know we can send a message if we have to,” Searle said. “Thanks, Fred. You can disconnect it now. Let’s lock it away and forget about it for the time being.”
Hredt was relieved they weren’t going to do anything rash. Ingram was another matter, but she listened to Searle the same way she listened to Bissey, so common sense would prevail. Hredt had bought some time to think of a better way to deal with the opposition’s incursions. He went back to the compound, planning to use the peace and quiet to formulate a better plan than just shooting everything that triggered the early warning systems.
Was there really a bargain to be struck with Nir-Tenbiku? Hredt didn’t want to give up Curtis, although Marc and Chris were right about the limited uses for the ship in their current situation. It actually had more value as a source of spares. But that would break Hredt’s heart after all the work they’d put in.
He still couldn’t see a group of Jattans with a grudge agreeing to take the prenu in exchange for staying away from Opis, though, even if Marc was right about their unusual patience.
Hredt opened one of the prepared meals that were delivered to the compound every day. The commune still didn’t know how to find or cook food, but he’d tackle that when the more urgent crises were over. For the time being, he’d enjoy the meat and pastry. He settled down to eat and studied the small container of medicated, chewy bars that now arrived with the meals.
At least the humans were completely honest about the drug and didn’t put it in the food like the Kugin must have done. He could read all the details on the label and see exactly how much he was being given, and he wasn’t being forced to take it. But a few days into the treatment, despite feeling better, he knew his brain wasn’t quite as active as it had been.
Now that he could feel a marked difference in a short time, he could compare the two states more easily. He realised that he’d actually thought more independently and creatively when the level of the drug in his body was declining and he no longer had access to treated Kugin food. The withdrawal must have been what made him do all those daring things: he’d started flying, he’d risked entering an alliance with the humans, and he’d taken over the leadership of the commune when Caisin died. It would be a shame to lose all that. He was still capable of doing his job to the highest level, but somehow that spark had gone, the surge of brilliant insights and bold decisions.
He read the label on the medication again. Without it, some members of the commune had become more aggressive. Some hadn’t, and had just been more anxious. He’d just become impatient. Did he really need this drug, then? If being deprived of it hadn’t killed him in the months since they’d escaped, then he could probably stop taking it while he needed his mind to be at its sharpest and most innovative.
He’d be fine.
Hredt put the medicated bar aside to dispose of it later and ate his meal. Now it was time to work out how his outnumbered human friends could hold their ground on Opis against three factions who would, sooner or later, be on a collision course with them.
* * *
North-east perimeter, Nomad Base: October 20, OC.
Ingram stopped the quad bike at the boundary of Liam Dale’s farm and watched his prize herd of Jerseys grazing on the reclaimed pasture as if they hadn’t noticed they’d left Earth.
For Kill Liners, life didn’t seem to have changed much. They were still isolated, still leading the same daily lives, still running their own show, and still partially dependent on their Ainatio neighbour for some commodities. But Ingram’s world had changed out of all recognition.
She was neither at sea nor in a spacecraft, and not fully in command or responsible for the entire base. She was anchored only by the illusion of still being in the navy. Nomad was orderly, but that didn’t mean it was a union of shared interests. But it did have a common enemy, and external enemies — real or manufactured —always made people willing to obey a dominant voice.
This was politics. She really didn’t like getting it on her hands.
While she debated whether to drop in for chat with Liam, who still seemed unaffected by killing an alien, a few cows wandered across to the wire fence to see what she was up to. Eventually the rest of the herd joined them, watching her with accusing stares that demanded answers to some unknown question. If they were asking whether she’d know when she was beaten and it was time to draw stumps on Nomad, the answer was no. She’d see this out.
Ingram started the bike and carried on around the base, noting two new fields in the process of being terraformed by bright green box-shaped bots that were inching across the freshly cleared soil, altering the microbiome to grow crops. One day, scientists would decry the destruction of an uncatalogued ecosystem, but Ingram had never lost sleep over that. People needed to live. There’d still be plenty of wild Opis to go around.
The next street on the left had no formal name yet, but it had become part of Wickens Road by default. It merged with the road further south and was gradually absorbing the name by the osmosis of use. She’d expected a clamour of suggestions for naming every available feature in the base, but so far only Kill Line had named its roads, and that was because Solomon had made the street plan fit the original one on Earth. The transit camp quarter had merged into Kill Line proper, but it still hadn’t named all its streets. They knew all their neighbours and where they lived. Postal addresses weren’t needed yet.
“Sol, what’s happening about Dr Kim’s names?” Ingram asked. “We agreed she could name things after her great-grandmother. She requested the school and a road.”
“I have it in hand, Captain.”
“And Marc’s place should have a proper address.”
“Technically, his house isn’t actually in any road,” Solomon said. “You’d call a traffic island. It’s just unit D Seven Four. I think he prefers it that way.”
“We’re really not very good at naming things, are we? Terribly un-colonial of us all.”
“Names evolve best through usage, Captain. Like desire lines in planning. See where people wear down a path before you lay paving.”
Ingram kept a chart in her mind that showed her what she thought constituted Nomad Base, but sometimes it included Kill Line and sometimes it didn’t, depending on whether she was talking about site security or day-to-day governance.
Whatever its status, Kill Line was made up of agreeably random houses that were starting to look like they’d been there for years, still arranged with the square and town hall at its heart. Ingram had grown up near a village and everything about this one comforted her, but she was under no illusion that village life was peaceful and uncomplicated. The full spectrum of human virtues and vices was simply compressed into a smaller space. Without the anonymity of a big city and places to hide, feelings could run very high.
On the board outside the town hall, election notices sat behind a weatherproof panel. Ingram stopped to study the list of candidates. Two things struck her, although they shouldn’t have come as a surprise. There were some transit camp names on the list, including Dieter Hill as the only candidate for the new post of sheriff, and it was the first election she’d seen without political parties.
Ingram hadn’t expected the transit camp to embrace local politics so quickly. They treated Chris as a tribal chieftain, but he was the one who kept insisting that Doug Brandt was included in command decisions because the mayor was the only man on Opis who’d actually been elected. Chris seemed keen to recreate an America that had vanished long before he was born. He had an oddly respectable, conformist streak for a man who openly admitted how often he’d broken the law.
Ingram went in search of Doug. The town hall was more minimalist than the original, but the townspeople had rescued the portraits of previous mayors and councillors and hung them on the walls of the main corridor. One hundred and thirty years seemed no history at all to Ingram, who thought in millennia as Englishmen and women did, but it was a long time to Kill Liners. And nobody understood the need for tradition and history better than she did. Opis might have been a blank sheet, but its new citizens weren’t. There were only so many roots you could trim from people before they had no connection to their neighbours at all and no will left to grow stronger.
Doug was hunched over his desk, checking a long list of figures with his forehead resting on one hand, fingers meshed in white hair that made him look older than his sixties. Ingram waited for him to finish and look up before interrupting.
“Oh, Captain, take a seat.” He jumped up to pour her a hot drink from an insulated jug. “Have some coffee. Milk and two sugars, isn’t it? Any more news on our aliens?”
“Thank you. Well, nothing concrete, but we’re reading the runes. Now we’ve had time to think about it, sending a probe instead of landing with all guns blazing suggests they’re not quite the trigger-happy hotheads we first heard about. And it makes them look a little scared of us.”
“And are they the rebels?”
“Yes, we’re fairly sure they are. The Protectorate variety would have shown up mob-handed with the Kugin. And we haven’t heard anything on their naval comms channels to indicate they’ve located us.”
“It’s a shame we couldn’t have met more peacefully. It’s hard to see how we’ll ever understand them.”
“At least we know they’re bipeds with some similar issues to ourselves,” Ingram said. “Which is just as well. I’m not sure we’d ever understand what sentient moss wanted from us.”
“Thirty per cent acetic acid or a dish soap solution would put it down, though.”
Ingram had to smile. “I’m a flamethrower girl myself.”
“Will we try to contact them?”
“I’m still working out what we’d say if we can get through.”
“Maybe ‘What do you want?’ would be enough.”
“The gamble is their current assessment of us,” Ingram said. “If they believe we’re an aggressive military power, and contacting them instead of blowing up their planet makes us look weak, we’ve made matters worse. Assuming we know which planet to blow up, of course.”
“Perhaps not contacting them might send the same message. What does Fred think?”
“He still says we shouldn’t respond. Is everyone here taking this as calmly as you?”
Doug shrugged. It was hard to faze a farmer. “We know you’ve thought out contingency plans. The best thing we can do is keep the lights on.”
Ingram was still in two minds about making contact. Her gut said do it, but it was hard to ignore Fred. The teeriks weren’t fools. On the other hand, if the only Jattans they spoke to were procurement officers or defence department staff, they’d have a narrow view of Jattan psychology. If Ingram judged all humans by some of the politicians or civil servants she’d known, she’d have decided nuking from orbit was long overdue. Doug might have been right about just asking.
What do you want?
She didn’t even have to get Fred to ask them. The linguistics AI now had most of the basics. There was always the risk of not understanding the etiquette, but after one dead crew member, two dead rebels, and a close call with Trinder, it might not make matters any worse.
“I’m going to think about that and our options for responses, then,” she said. “Anyway, you’ve got an election next month. None of my business, but what made you decide to have a sheriff? You never had one before.”
“We’re not our own little world now,” Doug said. “We share this patch of land in a way we didn’t share it with Ainatio on Earth. And there’s the future. When the population starts growing, we’ll be too big to settle things informally. Everyone’s going to need rules.”
“Are you going to draw up laws?”
“Ours have always served us well. They’re pretty simple. What about yours? What about the Ainatio folks? Are we all on the same page, and what happens if we’re not? I’m not criticising, because nobody knew Nomad was going to be cut loose like this. You left Earth thinking there’d be a civilian government coming in — independent, sure, but organised. But what are you going to do now if we’ve got a problem with one of the scientists, or they’ve got a problem with one of us? That applies whether Nomad’s independent or tied to Earth.”
Bednarz had assumed a military structure would operate while Cabot set up a turnkey colony for civilians to take over decades later. But everyone had arrived at once. That was the problem. Ingram could have stood down immediately and handed the keys to Doug, but everyone agreed you couldn’t dump Nomad’s pile of steaming security crises on inexperienced farmers.
“It’s a balancing act,” she said. “But if you’re asking my opinion, we need one set of laws for everyone, or we become different nations. Maybe that’s what people will want in due course, and that’s healthy. Laws don’t need to be any more complicated than saying treat others as you wish to be treated. But we’re humans, so we need definitions that we can exploit to get us out of trouble.”
Doug studied the surface of his coffee for a while. Ingram hoped he’d hand her a document that set out the Kill Line legal code, a single page of honest homespun clarity derived from a deep understanding of both nature and the Bible, but he didn’t.
“I’m a farmer,” he said. “I can run a small town with a bunch of sensible people I’ve known for years. But it’s not just us now, and we need to know which flag we’re under.”
“I’m preparing this settlement for a civilian administration,” Ingram said. “Joint Command is running security policy until civilians feel they can make those decisions themselves. When you’re no longer happy with us, you need to say so.”
“Can I make a suggestion?”
“Certainly.”
“After the elections, we hold a vote for everybody about how they want Nomad to be run, like we’re doing with the calendar. Everybody gets a say. Sure, Kill Line’s the majority, and maybe that’s something else we need to look at so we don’t have a substantial minority that feels it hasn’t got a voice.”
“If we’re not a pile of smoking charcoal by then, yes, we need to ask people what they want.”
“So it’s a yes.”
“If you want it, it’ll happen. We’re here to smooth the path.”
“But you’re arguably civilians too. You have a vote.”
“Then we’ll use it in due course. Don’t worry, I’ll get Solomon to scope something out.”
“Thank you.”
Ingram thought it over on the ride back to her office. Doug wasn’t interested in some kind of Kill Line empire. He was probably just worried what would happen if someone from one group wronged someone from another and the penalty didn’t satisfy the aggrieved.
What still worried Ingram, though, was that Nomad wasn’t cut loose from Earth. Its legal status was a mess — no America, no Ainatio, no formal link with a military chain of command on Earth — but a lot of people here did still have a country, and the majority of those were British members of her crew. Cabot also had crew from five East Asian nations, Australia, New Zealand, and Russia, and all those countries were still functioning as well.
“Sol, I know this is relative trivia at the moment, but why didn’t Bednarz draft the legal framework for the colony?” she asked. “He did everything else. I don’t buy the excuse that he thought we should be free to draft our own.”
“But that really was what he felt, Captain,” Solomon said. “You were all selected because you represented the values of what he regarded as civilisation. It’s exactly as it’s written in the mission document.”
“Well, if you have time, could you look at some all-purpose legal framework, one side of A-four only?”
“Of course. And I always have time. But what would you rather have, Captain? You have an opinion. We’ve discussed these matters before.”
“You want me to be completely honest? Gut level stuff?”
“Yes.”
“I’d rather have geography. A British sector under British law, an American sector with whatever pick-and-mix of state laws they want, and the rest of the residents can apply to join one or invent their own. I think it’s dangerous to take people’s identities away. Why can’t we have a federal set-up with different state jurisdictions? The US managed it back in the day, so we could too. How hard can it be to organise fewer than three thousand people? The only awkward part is the logistics of moving everyone around and having states with one resident.”
