Here we stand, p.41
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Here We Stand, page 41

 

Here We Stand
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  And Ash had asked a good question, one that he’d stopped asking himself years ago: why did his dad’s client offer him that particular job? How did he know he’d be good at beating the crap out of people?

  There was no point in wondering now. That was why he’d stopped thinking about it back then. Forgetting was a talent that had kept him sane as a soldier.

  Jon Simonot was in the security office when Chris arrived for his night duty. He’d been a permanent fixture in Ainatio’s security office back on Earth and if it hadn’t been for the different decor in Nomad’s equivalent, it would have looked like he hadn’t moved an inch. He was a good comms guy and he never missed a thing on the net. He could listen to multiple channels, keep an eye on a wall of monitors, and follow conversations going on around him simultaneously. It was almost unnatural. He looked up when Chris walked in.

  “I see you’ve been battling giant squid, Sergeant.”

  “Visit the beach, they said. It’ll be all volleyball and ice cream, they said.”

  “First time?”

  “No, I saw the sea for the first time when we extracted Tev. Or did you mean my first encounter with giant mono-tentacled alien life forms?”

  “Both, really.”

  “It’s been an educational day.”

  Simonot smiled to himself and went back to whatever he was doing. Chris found a couple of messages Ingram hadn’t cleared before she left, and he had his contact report to write about the potential hazards on the coast, so he could keep himself busy tonight. Now this was a classic example of why they needed to start naming geographical features sooner rather than later. If he could have written Sandy Beach or Nag’s Head Bluff, or whatever folks wanted to call things, it would have been a lot easier to write a report. He ended up using grid references instead. Still, if the worst thing that happened to him today was bureaucratic inconvenience, he’d be happy. It wasn’t so long ago that his reports would have been about engaging looters, firefights with insurgents, and lacking resources to bury the dead properly.

  It was around 0100 hours when Chris heard Simonot pick up a transmission that got his attention. He didn’t hear the incoming channel, but Simonot’s reaction was enough to alert him. Simonot leaned closer to the console, as if he was trying hard to listen.

  “Sorry, sir, say again?” Simonot frowned at whatever the caller had said. “Where are you calling from?”

  Chris was now watching him. He pressed the mute icon, scribbled something on his desk pad, and turned to Chris.

  “Sergeant,” he said, “I’ve got a guy on the base net asking for Marc Gallagher, but I don’t think he’s calling from here. He’s come through on Marc’s connection to the Earth probe. I don’t know why it hasn’t gone through to Marc’s screen, either.”

  “Has he given a name?”

  “The guy says he’s Sir Guy Lawson and he’s the Permanent Secretary at the Foreign Office. The British Foreign Office. It’s the British government on the line.”

  * * *

  UNIT D74, NOMAD BASE: 0115 HOURS, OCTOBER 24, OC.

  “Stall him for half an hour.” Marc struggled into his pants one-handed in the dark, trying to hold his screen with the other. Sir Guy Lawson, eh? Marc had only ever known him as Lawson, and he’d had no idea the man was the fucking Permanent Secretary, the head of the whole bloody department. Why didn’t he know that? He was slipping. He should have asked who he was talking to from the start. “Tell him I’m on my way in.”

  “Already done,” Chris said. “I told him I had to go look for you. He’s like God in your civil service, yeah?”

  “He literally runs the Foreign Office. But he must be a recent appointment or I’d have known that.”

  “So are you coming here, then?”

  “Yeah, because we might need to make a joint decision about what to say, depending on the questions he asks.” Lawson probably thought Marc was still in the US, and the less information he had, the less he could work out from apparently harmless detail like day or night zones. “Does he know it’s the middle of the night here?”

  Marc tried to keep track of the mismatch in the respective lengths of day, and he was sure the time was almost in sync with Earth again. If Lawson thought he was still in the US, he’d assume it was five hours earlier.

  “No, Simonot didn’t say anything and neither did I,” Chris said. “I couldn’t work out what time he’d expect it to be anyway.”

  “Good man.”

  “You want me to call Ingram?”

  “Leave her to me.”

  Marc put his screen in his back pocket and pulled on a sweatshirt. Maybe it was some issue with the Earth probe because he hadn’t closed the channel properly or something last time he put in a call to Tev, but he wasn’t expecting Lawson to be able to reach him. All Lawson had to do, though, was to use the number Marc had given him when he was trying to negotiate the mass airlift to the UK, and he’d get through just like he was making a sat phone call. But he wouldn’t know where he was calling. He might have been checking in because Marc had made a vague comment about possibly being in range when he’d asked if they’d speak again. It was hard to tell.

  He shook Ingram’s shoulder. “Wakey wakey, Boadicea. The Foreign Office just called.” He was surprised the conversation hadn’t woken her already. “I’m going in. We need to get our stories straight before I speak to Lawson.”

  “Oh... bugger.” Ingram rubbed her eyes. “That doesn’t bode well.”

  “He’s the bloody Permanent Secretary. I never knew.”

  “You sound surprised.”

  “He’s so far above my pay grade I’d need binoculars to see him.”

  “No, he’s not. You’re the joint commander of an independent extrasolar base. And special forces. Stop being deferential.”

  “I’m not tugging my forelock,” Marc said indignantly. He wasn’t awed or intimidated by civilian staff, no matter how senior they were. He knew his own worth. “I just assumed he was a grade three or something. But I didn’t ask. I should know better.”

  “It doesn’t actually matter,” Ingram said. “He trusts you enough to talk to you directly. And he’s forty light years away.”

  “I didn’t think he could link to me here, though. He’s spoken to Simonot and Chris, so he probably thinks I’m still in America.”

  There was nothing Chris or anyone else could have done to head this off. If Chris had said he’d never heard of Marc or that he wasn’t here any more, wherever Lawson thought here was, it would only have begged more questions. Marc couldn’t even cut Lawson loose. Ingram was right that Lawson had no way of sending anyone to follow up, but if Tev ever decided Opis wasn’t the right place for his family and had to go back to Britain, Marc would need Lawson’s help. He had to tread carefully.

  Marc checked Howie’s bedroom door to see if the activity had woken him, but it was still closed. He left a note for Howie on the door in case he woke, and walked down to the main building with Ingram, trying not to look in a hurry. He found Chris sitting at Trinder’s desk, staring at the rosters on the wall. Simonot was busy at the console. He looked like he was trying hard not to notice what was happening.

  “Okay, before I call Lawson, let’s agree a few things,” Marc said. “No mentioning the Caisin gate, obviously, but how much are we going to admit to if he asks? He doesn’t know we’re on Opis. It looks like he doesn’t think we’re even on our way yet.”

  Chris shrugged. “Maybe it’s an update on Barry Cho’s family. But he could have done that by text.”

  “Or he might have intel from our agents that Tim Pham’s saying we escaped through a portal,” Ingram said. “Spooks know Pham’s not a nutter, so Lawson will have questions.”

  “Or maybe someone clocked me on Fiji somehow and called it in. If Pham had people watching Tev, we probably had people watching them.”

  Marc had to cover all the angles before he risked talking to a man who’d spot every nanosecond of hesitation. The verbal sparring with Lawson got harder every time he had to do it, and not just because it was more difficult to keep tabs on what he’d said. He’d grown to quite like the bloke, and there was no professional satisfaction in trying to con your own side, least of all when you were in a position to help them and had decided not to. Torn loyalties always hurt.

  “Sol, are you getting this?” Chris asked, looking up towards the ceiling. “You’re unusually quiet.”

  “I’m staying out of this unless you want me to intervene,” Solomon said. “But I’m also trying to pin down how this happened. There was a comms link kept open to enable Tev to make contact, but I thought we closed it.”

  Marc turned to Ingram and Chris. “Can we do this the old-fashioned way, please? You two stay in my line of sight and give me the appropriate signals if the conversation gets awkward. Just in case I start saying something you don’t want me to.”

  “I could just cut you off,” Solomon said.

  “It might come to that, mate. Put the call on the speakers, please.”

  Simonot pointed to a terminal on another desk. “Ready?”

  Marc settled into the chair and took a breath. He recognised Lawson’s direct line on the display as the call connected.

  “Ah, Sergeant Gallagher. Thank you for getting back to me.”

  Marc paused. “Look, before we continue, do you prefer to be called Sir Guy? I didn’t know your name before. I didn’t even know your grade.”

  “Oh, just Guy will do fine,” Lawson said. “I think we have enough of a relationship to speak man to pen-pusher. May I call you Marc?”

  “Go ahead. I’m not Sergeant Gallagher these days.”

  “Well, I’m glad you’re still in one piece, Marc. I was following up on the data.”

  It had been three months since Marc had sent him Ainatio’s FTL research. It was complicated stuff, though, and maybe it took longer than he realised to analyse it.

  “Any problems with it?”

  “People with far better physics grades than me are working through it as we speak, but I have a few general questions.”

  “My physics grades are probably worse than yours, but I’ll do my best.”

  “We’re still evaluating the data, but I was calling to verify that it’s genuine. Your friend said I should ask you after we had a chance to look through it.”

  And there it was, the unmistakeable slap of shit hitting fan blades from forty light years away. Friend. Marc looked at Chris and Ingram, and even Chris the Unshockable looked slightly dismayed.

  “Friend,” Marc said. “Can you narrow that down?”

  “He wouldn’t give a name. Male, English accent, although I couldn’t place it.”

  Marc knew what was coming next and his heart sank. He had to be sure, though. “What data has he actually sent you?”

  “Ah, yes, he did say it would put you in a difficult position if he’d told you in advance,” Lawson said. “I assumed he’d tell you later. He said it was the full production plan and technical data for a ship with a superluminal drive, and that the British government was the sole recipient. I just need to know if this is genuine or not.”

  “I didn’t realise he was sending anything,” Marc said, watching the stunned expressions gradually forming around him. “Wait one while I check.”

  Marc muted the call. This had to be the data that they’d decided to hold back until they had a plan that didn’t involve Nomad Base being swamped, but some irresponsible bastard was obviously fed up with waiting. This hadn’t just trashed their plans. It had put Earth in the driving seat, and there was nothing they could do to stop it now.

  “He’s got the latest FTL blueprints,” Marc said.

  Ingram looked homicidal. “Sol, I want all comms links to Earth and access to the Caisin gate locked down now. Any channel that can be opened, any signal that can be piggybacked, you lock it until we work out who and how. Nobody has access now except Joint Command, and I mean nobody. Not even the teeriks. I want to know who did it P-D-bloody-Q. Let’s work out how far we can go with Lawson. We can’t deny it now. When the DRA’s finished pulling it apart, they’ll know it’s real.”

  “If I thought lying would make him pull it before they complete the evaluation, I’d give it a shot,” Marc said. “But there’ll always be a couple of boffins who’ll keep a copy and work on it in their own time out of sheer curiosity.”

  “This is some asshole who thinks we ought to be rescuing people,” Chris said. “How do we know they didn’t tell Lawson about the Caisin gate as well? I don’t think he’d tell you that yet.”

  Marc reminded himself that he and Lawson were still playing the guessing game. “We’ll find out soon enough.”

  “Okay.” Ingram made an irritable pfft sound. “We assume the intelligence services eavesdropped on Kim’s call to Pham when you were trying to negotiate a delay to evacuate the research centre. So they know about Opis, and they must know Cabot wasn’t lost. We don’t have to volunteer that, but it won’t make matters any worse if we have to mention it.”

  Chris kept shaking his head. “It’s too late to keep anything from Lawson except the Caisin gate. He’s going to unpick this like a cheap sweater.”

  “What about aliens?” Marc asked. “My gut says don’t tell him until they adjust to the idea of FTL first. Because he can’t sit on this forever. He’s now got scientists who know about it, so he’s had to talk to his opposite number in the MoD because the Foreign Office doesn’t have rocket scientists, and with the cost of this thing, he’ll have to show it to ministers. And then you might as well broadcast it live to the bloody world.”

  “I thought you guys had a massive purge of the deep state in your last civil war,” Chris said. “Kind of awesome, to be honest.”

  “Yeah, we did, but even when you remove the ideologues, you still have to keep cleaning the fish tank, and it’s the politicians as well. There’s no filter for idiots, gobshites, or wrong ‘uns taking gifts from APS to enhance their lifestyles.”

  “So we’re screwed, basically.”

  “Only if they come here and we get swamped before we’re ready to deal with it,” Ingram said. “This is still our government, not APS. They’re not going to attack us. They’ll have a vested interest in keeping Nomad going.”

  “Is that any better?” Chris asked. “They’ll want to take over. Governments always do. Everybody’s.”

  “Told you so,” Marc said, nodding at Ingram.

  “I know,” Ingram said. “I’m adjusting my expectations to reality.”

  “I don’t want to keep Lawson on hold too long, but we’ve got three questions to think about as soon as we’re done with this call. Who decides if they want any official British involvement here, what do we do if the answer’s no, and what do we do if HM Gov doesn’t take no for an answer?”

  “It’s still years away,” Ingram said.

  “But what we do right now determines what happens in ten years’ time,” Marc said. “Okay, immediate issues first. Plan A — I’ll keep my answers to a minimum, no mention of Caisin at all, delay the big reveal about aliens, but if pressed, I admit we’re on Opis, and suggest it’s a bad idea to count on heading here for reasons that’ll be revealed later. Yes?”

  Chris and Ingram both nodded. Marc unmuted the link. “Yes, Guy,” he said. “I can confirm the data is genuine.”

  “Thank you.” It came out as a sigh. Lawson paused for so long that Marc thought they’d lost the link. “We’re on the same side, aren’t we?”

  “We are,” Marc said. “I have a moral duty to the civilians we’ve evacuated, but I’m still an Englishman.”

  The last time Marc had spoken to Lawson, Solomon had just trashed Asia’s infrastructure and caused the biggest power outage for a century. Marc and Lawson had played the game, fully aware they both knew what had happened — Lawson might or might not have known about Sol and exactly what he was — but they feigned ignorance, because that was what you did when you weren’t sure the other guy was telling you everything, or if you were telling him things he didn’t know. By the time it got as far as Lawson offering a transatlantic airlift to evacuate the civvies before Asian planes could get airborne again, he must have had a good idea of what Marc had been up to.

  “Your friend said he’d be able to talk our engineers through the project,” Lawson said.

  Oh shit. “Yes, I’m sure he can.”

  “Forgive me for asking, but where are you right now?”

  Marc looked at Ingram and Chris. They nodded.

  “Opis,” Marc said.

  “Oh.”

  “Oh indeed.”

  “Would you mind running that by me again, please? Just so I’m sure I’ve understood. Not some town called Opis in Nebraska or wherever. Opis Opis. Orbiting Pascoe’s Star.”

  “Yes, I’m on Opis the planet,” Marc said. “And you need to factor in our twenty-six-hour day, so times and dates won’t sync up with yours. I’m forty light years away and talking to you in real time because the FTL technology works. But you know about FTL comms, because I sent you the Ainatio research, and that’s what they eventually used to manage the remote construction of this base.”

  “And that’s how you know this new FTL drive works, because you’re there now.”

  “Exactly. Instead of transit times taking decades, it’s weeks or months.” Marc hoped that was enough misdirection to explain why they’d reached Opis already. “It’s a game-changer.”

  Lawson didn’t sound as stunned as he had when they’d first spoken about Marc opting to leave with the Nomad mission. He seemed to be getting used to the idea of space and big surprises.

  “I don’t want to sound as if I’m carping,” he said, “but I do have a question about the sequence of events. If you’re there now, that means Ainatio had this advanced FTL before you left, in order to make that transit time possible. When did you know they had it?”

 
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