Here We Stand, page 4




And she kept forgetting that what had become normal for Nomad — the existence of aliens — would be a massive culture shock for humanity.
Juggling the right to know against the consequences of that discovery was a dilemma far above even a captain’s pay grade. Ingram’s focus needed to be closer to home, and home was now Nomad. Her duty was to the people here.
It was hard to accept, but she wasn’t responsible for Earth. She’d have to keep reminding herself of that.
* * *
Kill Line housing zone, Nomad Base: later that day, 1940 hours.
“You can come in, you know.” Chris stepped over the bot that was testing the floor of the living room for contamination and assessed the personal effects he’d have to move to search the place properly. “I’d prefer that, so you can see I’m not tampering with your stuff.”
Frank Lundahl hovered nervously in the doorway, watching Chris rummage through his home. “I didn’t think you would.”
“Humour me anyway.”
The guy was a nuclear engineer, not high on Chris’s list of likely Mother Death sleepers, but everyone had to go through the same procedure: contact test by bot to check for traces of die-back on surfaces and on the person, plus a manual search for objects that might contain virus specimens. It was time-consuming and it wasn’t foolproof, but sitting back and assuming nobody here could possibly be a psycho like Abbie wasn’t an option.
“Wouldn’t the pathogen system detect anything smuggled in?” Lundahl asked. “We ran it for years back home. We know it works.”
“Yeah, that’s what Korea thought when they let Abbie in.”
Chris checked the kitchen cupboards. It brought back memories of clearing houses with his platoon, always hoping to find something edible in abandoned properties. It was nice not to have to live on garbage these days. He hadn’t had food poisoning in three years.
He examined the coffee machine. “You know something? Going round houses, I’ve found almost half the folks evacuated from Ainatio rescued their personal coffee makers.”
“There’s a thesis in that,” Lundahl said. “What did you save?”
Chris held the analyser like a wand and swept it around the room. “My woobie. My army poncho liner. They stopped making them a long time ago.”
Sensors could only detect what was airborne, stuck on a surface, or suspended in fluid. An ordinary airtight, watertight seal would defeat them. Chris planned to remove every container he couldn’t identify, but viruses like die-back didn’t need refrigeration and could even be stored on filter paper. So what was he looking for now, sealed envelopes? Book marks? Nobody had been able to bring a lot of stuff when they’d been evacuated, and folks hadn’t amassed much clutter yet, so at least that made things simpler.
The lockable, shockproof, Ainatio-issue metal flight cases turned his stomach, though. He was looking at one right now, standing in the corner of the living room next to a chair.
Most of the scientists had those cases. When they were told to pack up and report to the buses, they salvaged favourite equipment and other lab stuff. But now all Chris could see was Abbie Vincent carrying a case just like this one, refusing to let him put it in the back of the Caracal for her. She clung to the damn thing. She was a miserable, snappy bitch and he just thought she wanted to prove she didn’t need a man to help her.
But he should have realised he needed to see what was so important in that case. He should have listened to the nagging voice in his head that said she was weird and way too anxious to hang onto it. But at the time, she and her folks were a disruptive problem he was happy to palm off on APS, and he still had a small town to evacuate via an interstellar alien portal that hadn’t been tested on that scale before. He was rushing to draw a line under Earth’s problems because he couldn’t fix them.
My fault. I was the last person who could have stopped her. So what do I owe Earth? And when did I start getting bent out of shape about stuff I can’t go back and change?
Chris stared at the case, then picked it up to lay it flat on the table, feeling like he was defusing a bomb. Lundahl moved in to watch. Chris felt his scalp tighten.
“Okay for me to open this?”
“Sure. It’s not locked.”
Chris flicked the catch and slowly lifted the lid. It was empty and he could breathe again, but he pulled out the instrument-shaped retaining inserts and poked around under linings until he touched bare metal. Dieter Hill, who’d been a narcotics cop, had given him a ten-minute crash course in searching for small items, but he still wasn’t sure if he’d recognise every permutation of die-back virus in storage.
If that case was contaminated, Chris would be too.
He put it flat on the floor, fully open, so the bot could do some sampling. The bot reminded him of a bright orange horseshoe crab, but what looked like lots of legs were mostly a selection of sensors. The bot poked them into the case and felt around, patting and stroking the surfaces like it was trying to find its keys in the dark. Eventually it withdrew the probes and rolled back to its start position. Chris carried on checking the room, moving free-standing objects like chairs.
“Is someone searching your place as well?” Lundahl asked.
“Yes. If it’s on the base, it could be anywhere.”
“What will you do if you find something?”
“Take it for analysis.”
“I meant what you’ll do with the suspect.”
“Not sure yet. But I don’t think they’ll get a medal.” Chris waited for the next question, but it didn’t happen. “Okay, all clear. Thanks for your cooperation.”
Lundahl still seemed jumpy. That was the other point of the search, to take a close personal look at anyone who might be sweating a bit too much and let them know it had been noticed. Chris was on the verge of changing tack and shaking Lundahl down when the guy blurted out a question.
“Can I ask you something?”
“Go ahead.”
“Why did you shoot the alien? Someone said you’d tried to talk to him.”
Chris often forgot that even in this tiny village of a place, people didn’t see everything that went on, and they heard scraps of news from the bush telegraph before they were given any solid information. He wasn’t sure if Lundahl meant the generic you, meaning Nomad Base Joint Command, or that he thought Chris had personally fired the shot. Chris opted for the literal interpretation.
“I didn’t shoot either of them,” he said. “If I’d shot the teerik on sight, and hindsight says I should have done, Nina Curtis would be alive. I was ready to shoot the Jattan, too, but someone beat me to it.”
That wasn’t really an answer, but Chris wasn’t trying to be evasive. He was still working out exactly what had happened and why. Shooting an armed attacker was automatic, and Marc had done exactly that without a moment’s hesitation. But Chris hadn’t shot the Jattan and he wasn’t sure why. He was the one who’d argued with Bissey and said there was no way they could risk Gan-Pamas surviving to tell anyone they were here or that they had the stolen prototype warship. He was ready to drop the Jattan the second he saw him. But he didn’t, and when Gan-Pamas shot Trinder, it was Liam Dale — just a farmer with a shotgun — who returned fire.
What the fuck was I thinking?
“I meant the Jattan,” Lundahl said. “I know we had to assume he was hostile because of Nina, but — okay, I know we need to keep our heads down. Last thing we need is them knowing where Earth is.”
That was the explanation Lundahl seemed to want to hear Chris confirm. It was Chris’s argument with Bissey, that if the Jattans turned out to be fans of scorched earth diplomacy instead of friendly discussion, nobody could roll that back. Humans were the underdogs in the new order of things. Lundahl sounded like he didn’t want to believe the good guys would kill anyone who wasn’t a threat.
“Remember the Jattan did shoot Dan Trinder, though,” Chris said, wondering if he was trying to justify his death sentence on Gan-Pamas to himself. “He’s lucky to be alive.”
That was one of the loose ends that still bothered Chris. He didn’t know why the Jattan’s energy weapon hadn’t killed Trinder. It had just put him down him like a cop’s shock prod. He’d have to go lean on the engineering lab and get them to do a proper analysis with Fred and work out whether the Jattan weapon really was non-lethal or just underpowered.
“If the Jattan was a gun runner, perhaps the leaders will be guys we can reach an understanding with,” Lundahl said. “I live in hope.”
Gunrunner. That was only one interpretation of Gan-Pamas’s mission. This was where myths and parallel histories began. Chris wondered if Lundahl realised that having any kind of conversation with the Jattans was going to be a problem for Fred and his commune if Jattans really did regard teeriks as the legal property of their Kugin owners.
Perhaps they didn’t, though. Chris didn’t have an explanation for the lone rogue teerik with Gan-Pamas.
“Maybe we’ll be pleasantly surprised,” he said. “Anyway, I’d better get going. Sorry for the disruption.”
Chris walked down the street towards the junction with the main road. He wasn’t up for an existential debate about first contact. He’d had enough of that with Bissey, and he wasn’t sorry to see him resign. The guy was probably great in a naval battle, but that was because he had the measure of his enemy on Earth. Nobody had any real idea yet what the various alien species out here were capable of. If Project Nomad had been done by the book, the way government agencies would have run it, there wouldn’t have been a settlement here for another century or two. More unmanned missions would have been sent, more surrounding space explored, and more experts would have weighed in before any contact was made, from biologists and anthropologists to defence specialists.
But Tad Bednarz was a man in a hurry because conditions on Earth convinced him that time wasn’t on anyone’s side, and he was used to getting things done the way he wanted. There was nobody to stop him charging ahead once he’d identified a planet that fitted the bill. The guy seemed almost clairvoyant, because he’d planned for every major crisis on Earth and most had eventually happened, and to give him his due, it wasn’t even his fault that he didn’t foresee intelligent aliens on Opis. There weren’t any here until the teeriks arrived less than a year ago. Humans — bots, anyway — had been here for seventy years.
Chris still couldn’t decide whether Bednarz was a visionary destined to save human civilisation or an irresponsible asshole who should have stuck to perfecting robotics and spending his billions on gold-plated yachts.
But the answer to his question actually depended on what everyone here did next. “Well, shit,” Chris said. “Thanks, Tad. No pressure.”
Aaron Luce, Lee Ramsay, and Darryl Finch were standing on the corner with their quad bikes parked in a triangle, lights full-on in the darkness, consulting their screens like they were having a meeting. Lee waved Chris over.
“All done, boss?” he called.
“Yeah. No contamination, no obvious suspects. I’d like to say panic over, but I’m not standing down completely.”
“They’re pissed at us for even asking questions, but none of them pinged my radar either.”
“How are we doing on interviews?”
“It’s still going to take forever,” Luce said. “But between me and Dieter, we’ve almost finished the most likely ones. We’re down to the last five life sciences people. He’s loving it. Good to see him in action again.”
“Yeah, he’s missed handcuffing perps to tables. You too, huh?”
“You bet. I almost forgot myself and planted some evidence on them.”
They laughed. Seeing the funny side was the only way to stay sane at the moment. It was good to see Dieter had decided to throw himself back into the fray, but he was probably still a long way from his old self, and it wasn’t complications from the stab wound that were slowing his recovery. It was losing Girlie.
Despite Marc’s efforts to stop Chris finding out how the dog died, because he knew Chris all too well, Chris had found out, and yes, he certainly was planning to return to Earth when the time was right. He’d find Tim Pham and make him pay for what he’d done to Dieter and the dog. Thanks to the Caisin gate, he could step right into Pham’s path, face to face in a second if he had the coordinates. It would be worth the wait.
“That’s my watch over, then.” Lee stretched his arms like an athlete, pulling the right one across his body, then the left. Everyone had worked through without a break and the adrenaline had ebbed. “I’m going to apply a pizza to the pie-hole, grab a few beers, and crash. See you later.”
Chris was still training his system to accept a twenty-six hour day. If he didn’t stay up until he fell over, he’d start drifting back to his old body clock. It was time to catch up on the jobs he’d had to shelve when the news broke about Abbie. He’d swing by the engineering workshop later to take a look at that Jattan stuff they’d salvaged.
There was still plenty to examine — the stealth suit, the stealth-camouflaged freighter, and the weapons. But it wasn’t idle curiosity. There were things Chris had to know for his own peace of mind. Somehow his subconscious always spotted when something didn’t fit, and it’d prod him until he worked out what it was, a warning bell he’d learned not to ignore. It had been ringing quietly for a couple of days and it was about the Jattan and his weapon.
Chris thought it through as he walked back home to shower and grab a meal. According to Fred, Gan-Pamas was a marbidar, a species from a planet called Dal Mantir, and he was a Jatt citizen. To make it easier for humans to understand, Fred had come up with a quick list of key points: marbidars evolved from aquatic ancestors, and they were egocentric, stupidly daring, and therefore not very effective soldiers, which made Jattans a pain in the ass if you had to make warships for them. The prototype ship the teeriks designed for them had to have an override on the targeting system to stop them getting into friendly-fire situations. The Kugin, who sounded like a much more disciplined and ruthless outfit, tolerated them as sidekicks on the battlefield because they controlled mineral exports on Dal Mantir. Well, that was Fred’s analysis and the only intel Nomad had.
Chris had expected aliens to be completely unfathomable, but whatever these guys looked like, their personal and political dynamics sounded pretty familiar. He just wanted to know if Gan-Pamas had intended to kill Trinder. The guy hadn’t managed to, but that wasn’t academic any longer. Chris needed to work out his intent, and that meant taking a closer look at the Jattan hardware.
And they still didn’t know how he’d acquired a lone teerik as crew. Teeriks, Fred said, rarely left the Kugin state, always worked in groups called communes, and were closely supervised if they took part in ship trials or travelled anywhere off-site. They were just too valuable to lose. Generations of technical knowledge was stored in their brains and their genetic memories.
Chris had been over the events so many times that he wasn’t sure what he recalled and what he’d imagined in the meantime. He’d been trying to replay events to work out the sequence of the various shots that had been fired, but every time he thought about it he found he had to spool back to the moment he first saw the lone teerik emerge out of thin air, and the next awful minute with Nina. He couldn’t break the connection. He shut his eyes and tried concentrating on how the slurry pit had looked while Liam Dale was pumping it out to see if Gan-Pamas was hiding under the surface.
Maybe it was time to talk to the engineers.
He made a sandwich, flopped on the sofa, and checked the time. The engineering section was probably working around the clock at the moment, but he couldn’t leave it too late. He called up the real-time base map on his screen to see who was still in the workshops, wolfed down the sandwich, and set off on foot.
The engineering section was a complex of hangars with walls and partitions that could be rearranged as needed. Chris opened the side door to the main hangar and wandered inside, looking for Gan-Pamas’s weapon. The Jattan’s heavily customised freighter was standing in a separate bay flanked by blast walls, hatch open and a ramp leading inside, while blue-overalled technicians were squeezing in and out of it with some difficulty like it was a kid’s play house. Jattans were small.
Brad Searle stood watching, arms folded. As Chris walked up to the ship, it turned into a heat haze in the vague shape of a vessel. Someone had activated its stealth cloaking.
“You going to pilot that thing, Commander?” Chris asked. “You’ll have your knees jammed in your ears in that cockpit.”
Searle smiled. He was a very tall guy. “I might have to saw my legs off, but yeah, I’ll give it a shot.”
“Are you overseeing this as the chief engineer or as the XO in waiting?”
Searle looked embarrassed. “She told you, then.”
“No, Ingram hasn’t said a word to me.”
“Well, I’m thinking it over. I’m not sure if I’m up to replacing Commander Bissey. And I might be more useful as a pilot again.”
“Sure.”
“I understand that we’re both of the same mind about how we conduct ourselves out here.”
Word had gotten around. It saved time. “Yeah, a strong deterrent and zero tolerance,” Chris said. “Scare them off until we can defend ourselves properly.”
“Amen.”
Chris nodded at the Jattan freighter. “Handy for covert ops. Found anything informative yet?”
“Intel? Maybe.” Searle shrugged. “Fred took some of the navigation components to see if there was more information to be extracted about the point of origin.”