Here We Stand, page 40




This Bridget Ingram had warned him and made a clear threat, but she’d also asked him a question. What did Jattans want from humans? He’d have to think about that. It wasn’t just a stolen ship. It was part of a wider ambition, more a longing than plan or policy.
Nir-Tenbiku wanted to restore the old ways, the traditional values of Jatt, when people kept their word and behaved with consideration and courtesy. He’d never lived in such a world, but he knew it had existed. A nation couldn’t endure if all it valued was its wealth. Full coffers weren’t an identity or a sense of community. Jatt had to believe in something, and he didn’t feel it was a backward step to try to restore that sense of shared purpose, because some things were meant to be eternal.
He hoped the humans agreed with him. He would certainly ask if they did.
* * *
Northern coast, 11 miles north of Nomad Base: 1220 hours, October 23, OC.
It was everywhere, as far as the eye could see, and for a guy who’d spent his life surrounded by tall buildings or trees, where his broadest panorama had been a silent interstate with the occasional abandoned vehicle, the ocean made Chris feel like he was falling off the edge of the world.
The wind only added to the feeling that he had nothing to grab hold of. “Wow. This is so different. It’s nothing like the Pacific. The smell, I mean. And it’s not turquoise.”
“You really have been cooped up, haven’t you?” Ash said. “But at least you’ve seen the South Pacific. That’s quite something.”
“I didn’t see enough of it, unfortunately.” Chris shook his head, unable to take his eyes off the water. “Damn, imagine being on a ship in the middle of that when you can’t see any land for weeks.”
“Wait until you’re in a storm at sea.”
“This is awesome. You get a proper sense of being on a sphere in empty space. You know, like those fixed camera vids with the night sky standing still and Earth moving. I don’t get that feeling with land.”
“Ah, the lure of the briny. We’ll make a sailor of you yet.”
Ash sat down on the grass and joined in the silent contemplation of an ocean that the Nomad project team hadn’t even bothered to name. Bednarz was dead by the time the first signals came back from Opis, but even when the FTL relay went live, they still didn’t start naming things.
It was down to Solomon in the end. He’d taken over the mission when Bednarz died, the only entity the guy trusted to get the job done, and whatever folks like Erskine’s dad thought they were doing, Sol controlled it. He decided what was named and what wasn’t. Did he argue with the new CEO, or did he just quietly erase whatever humans did without them realising? Chris would have to ask him. Solomon believed names had to mean something to people, so he left it to Nomad’s citizens. He didn’t need anything more than grid references and coordinates to do his job.
“I wonder what we’re going to call this,” Chris said.
Ash shielded her eyes against the sun. “Probably the North Sea. You can’t have too many of those.”
“Okay, do you want to try finding a way down to the shore that doesn’t end in a rock fall and massive embarrassment?”
“That’s what I’m here for.”
“If you see a path worn down to the beach, panic.”
Ash looked serious for a moment before she laughed. “I had to think about that one.”
“I found a safer route.” Chris opened the file on his screen and showed her the aerial image. “If we walk back to the Caracal and head down the cliff here, it almost levels out with the beach, so if it’s not as solid as it looks, you’re not going to fall far or get hit by rocks.”
“Good thinking.”
He felt dumb as soon as he said it. Ash was a trained sailor, a practical woman on every level, and she’d have taken all that into account for herself. But he just couldn’t risk another death. He’d brought helmets, protective clothing, extra emergency transmitters, and first aid kits. The survey bots had been sweeping the area for years, testing and sampling for everything from pathogens and venomous wildlife to unsafe geology and toxic plants, but small things that appeared intermittently could easily be missed. He wondered about a bot’s chances of finding a rattlesnake on Earth.
They collected their equipment from the Caracal and prepared for a fossil hunt, nothing too ambitious, just pottering around on the shore and checking out the limestone, and then they’d have a picnic. It was like a school field trip with adult promise. If Chris screwed up, he could accept failure and save face because the outing had an innocent purpose of its own. It wasn’t like a candlelit dinner. There were no excuses for those. Dinners were only about one thing, and failure was stark and brutal.
“We need to start sending bots underwater,” Ash said, striding towards the edge of the cliff with frightening confidence. “We must have some cross-medium ones somewhere. We need to know what the marine life’s like. Joni’s going to want to take his boat out sooner or later.”
“We might want ocean-going transport one day, too,” Chris said. “No point having sea if you don’t use it.”
“We’re doing this all wrong, you know. Any normal planetary mission would have sent scientists first.” Ash adjusted her daypack. “Oiks like us wouldn’t have been allowed anywhere near this.”
“Yeah, Jeff said the same about first contact. He got to make friends with Fred and teach him English, no PhD or research grant required, a regular blue-collar guy. Score one for the laymen.”
“One day they’ll say knowledge was lost because we didn’t know what we were doing.”
“If they ever know we existed.”
Ash gave him a mock-sad look. “That’s depressing. But I know what you mean. We all need to hold up our bit of treasure and say look what I found. It must be hard-wired from our hunter-gatherer past.”
There weren’t many people Chris could have this kind of rambling what-if conversation with. He’d hit the jackpot. She looked good, she was competent, and she was interesting. He couldn’t afford to fail with her. If he did, he’d spend the rest of his life kicking his own ass.
The yellow limestone cliff sloped downhill like a dry valley into a few feet of jagged rock that was almost a flight of steps. Chris went down first to test its stability, then beckoned to Ash to follow. The beach was mostly shingle and slabs of stone dotted with rock pools, with a fringe of sand nearer the waterline. When they peered into the pools, Chris was reminded that they really were on another planet. There was nothing familiar in the water.
He couldn’t decide if the organisms were plant or animal, or even if the distinction existed. A bright orange frilly seaweed turned out to be a creature that crawled out of the water as their shadows fell across it and buried itself in the shingle. At another pool, a tiny creature with a vague resemblance to a lizard picked its way around the edges, grazing on some kind of grey weed. Then something underwater shot out a tentacle or maybe a tongue and lassoed it, making Chris and Ash jump back. The lizard was dragged under and didn’t come up again.
“Bugger,” Ash said. “I won’t be putting my hand in there any time soon.”
“Nature’s a bitch.”
“And we’re the first to see that tentacle thing. Isn’t that cool?”
“Let me check with the lizard.”
“Everything’s got to eat, Chris. Especially me. What cake did you bring?”
“Marsha’s finest. Coffee pecan.”
“Yay. I do like a nutty cake.”
They walked along the shore taking pictures and pausing to look out to sea in search of larger creatures. Chris remembered planning to take the evacuee convoy south through Florida and maybe get folks to an island. The warning about not getting too close to water because gators were ambush predators and moved a lot faster than people expected had stuck with him. He wasn’t going all the way down to the waterline until he knew what was in there.
“No seabird-type things,” Ash said. “Environmental niches get filled, but apparently not here.”
“Maybe they’re migratory.”
“Good point. We’ve been here nearly six months, so who knows what we haven’t seen yet? I ought to check if the sats ever pick up anything.”
They carried on heading west until another headland stopped them going any further. It was time to start looking for fossils. Chris put on his gloves, more to prevent bites from some unseen but venomous creature than to protect his hands, and started tapping gently at the loose layers of stone with a hammer. Ash watched as he lifted a thin slice with a small chisel.
“Would we recognise a fossil here?” she asked.
“Probably,” Chris said. “There’s a lot of Opis species that resemble ones we know because the environment’s similar, so we should be able to see the difference between organic remains and random marks. If Opis has limestone, it’s had the conditions to form fossils of sea creatures.”
“Let’s take some samples back for the boffins to play with.”
“Don’t encourage them.” Chris stopped to examine another ragged slice of stone. There were some indentations on it, but they didn’t seem like parts of anything. Then he realised Ash was looking out to sea with her screen held up, recording. “Seen something?“
“Yes.”
“Birds?”
“Not sure. It was just a flash in my peripheral vision. It’s gone now.”
Chris bagged the piece of rock and put it in his rucksack before turning to watch the sea. Ash was still panning the screen slowly left to right and back again.
He couldn’t see anything, not even waves splashing on stone, but then he caught some movement as well, something so fast that he started doubting whether he’d seen anything at all. After a few minutes, Ash stopped recording.
“I don’t know if I got anything.”
“I saw it too,” Chris said.
Ash went through the recording, shaking her head every so often, then pulled a face, eyebrows raised. She tapped the screen before handing it to him.
“I’m really glad we didn’t walk along the shoreline.”
Chris hit play. Yes, the creature was fast. Even slowed down tenfold, it was there and gone in an instant. He froze the image and studied it. Whatever it was, its body never broke the surface, only a long whip-like structure maybe eight or nine feet long that arced onto the beach, hit the shingle, and pulled back again. It looked like a big version of whatever had dragged the lizard into the rock pool.
“I’m going to be unscientific and say it just caught dinner.” Chris now had his answer about spotting rattlesnakes. The chances of a drone or satellite being in the right place and detecting that creature were slim, even with movement sensors. “Okay, we’d better put this beach out of bounds until further notice. What a great start to our new-found freedom.”
“I’ll call it in. It must take small prey for its size, though. I didn’t see anything on the beach.”
“Doesn’t mean it won’t try something bigger.”
Chris hadn’t been properly scared for a long time. There was fear of something he knew and understood, which he could harness to his advantage, and there was fear of the completely unknown that suddenly revealed itself and made him realise he couldn’t even imagine the very worst. His gut told him to go straight down to the waterline and blow the shit out of whatever it was, but it was too stealthy, too fast, and for all he knew it was a harmless bag of jelly plucking seaweed off the beach.
But it looked too much like the thing that grabbed the lizard. He wouldn’t give it the benefit of the doubt.
Ash tapped out a message. “I’ve sent Sol the footage and I’ve told him I want it named after me. Bigbastardius briceae.” She looked up from the screen, frowning. “But you can have it if you like.”
“Nah, I’m good. I’m holding out for an alien dinosaur fossil. And you saw it first.”
“You can name the lizard.”
“Poor little guy. Infortunatus montellonis.”
“Whoa. I’m impressed. You made up a serious one.”
“I’m a serious guy.” Chris wanted to get Ash back to the relative safety of the clifftop. For all he knew, that thing could haul itself up the beach or extend its tentacle a lot further than they thought. “Let’s take a break. Picnic time.”
On the way back, Chris tossed a micro-drone into the air and set it to record the length of the beach, dragging his fingertip across the aerial view on his screen to define its route. By the time they’d climbed back up to the clifftop and reached the Caracal, the micro-drone had finished sending back images and returned to Chris. The thin strip of sand at the water’s edge showed marks at regular intervals that looked like a rope had been dragged through it.
“I think that’s the trail the tentacle leaves,” Chris said.
“Bloody hell. That’s either a gang of them or one animal’s really busy.”
“How do we know it’s not intelligent? Maybe it’s their planet and that’s why the survey decided Opis was unoccupied. The owners were in the sea.”
“You wait a million years for an alien species and then six come along at once.”
Ash unwrapped sandwiches and Chris countered with slabs of cake. A flask of hot tea rounded it off. They sat in the APC’s open rear hatch, sheltered from the stiff breeze, and savoured the afternoon.
“I’m glad sea monsters don’t put you off your food,” she said.
“Nothing ever does.”
“So I heard. The infested flour’s now a saga we recount to our tribe around the camp fire.”
“You know a lot more about me than I know about you.”
“Nomad’s a small village. Everyone’s got an opinion about the chiefs.”
“So you know how I ended up in jail.”
“Actually, I don’t.”
The longer Chris left it, the harder it would be to tell her, and the harder it would be to see her walk away. But maybe she was just checking if what she’d heard matched what he’d admit to, a kind of honesty test.
“Okay, I killed a guy when I was in high school,” he said. “But that’s not why I ended up in jail, because I was never caught. I can summarise it for you in thirty seconds.”
And he did. He felt like he’d told the story so many times that he could recite it like a poem, but he hadn’t. He’d just thought it. Ash didn’t even look surprised.
“Did you tell your parents?” she asked.
“Hell no.”
“Did anyone else find out? At the time, I mean. Not after you were conscripted.”
“If they did, they didn’t say.”
“How did you feel keeping that to yourself?”
“It was hard, but I didn’t feel guilty. Just worried about getting caught.”
Ash went on eating. “One thing, though. Did your boss know? He gave you a job when your college shut down. You don’t give someone a violent job if he’s a geology student. You do it because you’ve got reason to believe he can carry out the rough stuff.”
“I did wonder, but I can’t see how he could have known. I used to think it was written all over me. Do you understand why I had to tell you?”
“Because you’re honest?”
“Because I’d be upset if you found out later and dumped me.”
“It would have been the not being told rather than what you did,” Ash said. “But you’ve told me. Sorted.”
Chris wasn’t sure it was. He was nearly thirty-three and there was only so long a man could be the go-to guy for the dirty work before he saw his life as a void left by the problems he’d removed rather than landmarked by something he’d built. It wasn’t guilt or regret. What he did best had been needed in uncertain times, and still was. It had been needed again a few days ago on the smoke-filled deck of Joni’s boat. But knowing that only served to baffle him, because it was clear nobody cared what he’d done in the past and he was the only one who felt he had to explain it.
“I’m on duty at twenty-one hundred,” he said. There was always a member of Joint Command on call overnight, but Chris preferred to go into the office for some quiet catch-up time rather than be woken in the small hours. ”Do you want to go for a drink when we’ve got a little more time?”
Ash looked pleased with herself. “We can do better than that. Live football on the TV at my place, Sunday night, Brazil versus Chile. Hacking into terrestrial sats was the best thing Solomon ever did. Alcohol and snacks. You up for it?”
There was no form of football Chris cared much about or even understood, least of all soccer, but he seemed to have passed Ash’s test. He’d been offered admittance to the inner sanctum. He would have agreed to watch snail-racing with her.
“Yes,” he said. “I’d love to. Thanks.”
“One day,” Ash said, “I want someone to ask how we met, just so I can say I was working late and thought we had an alien intruder, so I went out ready to open fire but it was just you taking a leak, and our first date was discovering sea monsters on another planet.”
She seemed to find it incredibly funny and started laughing her ass off. Chris could only join in, although he’d have to learn to loosen up more to laugh as unselfconsciously as that with her.
“And I can say yeah, I’ll never forget the sewage plant where she tried to impress me with the flow rates on her macerator.”
He felt he’d turned the corner towards becoming Normal Chris, the self he’d never seen before. He drove back to the base, dropped Ash off at the treatment plant — all very proper, just in case Sol spotted them on the security cams, which he would anyway — and headed home to change into his uniform and teach a class. Success. He’d managed to get this far without screwing things up. Not every woman was out to betray him or use him for target practice.