Here we stand, p.45
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Here We Stand, page 45

 

Here We Stand
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  Coming from Sol, that sounded ominous. Ingram decided not to ask him to expand on it and focused on what she needed to do this morning. She’d spend more time walking the course today to see how her message had been received. Yet again she was in that no man’s land between responsibility for the base and reliance on goodwill for her share of the authority to carry it out.

  “What time is it in London, Sol?”

  “It’s nine fifty-seven.”

  “Better talk to Lawson, I suppose. Could you call the number for me, please?”

  “Right away, Captain.”

  Ingram hadn’t had a conversation with anyone from the government for a long time, and as far as she could recall, never at this level. But all she had to do was touch base with Lawson, explain how awkward things had been and how far from Bednarz’s plan the mission had strayed by the time the crew was revived, and ask him to await further updates. The trick was to do it with the right language and avoid the kind of detail that he seemed very adept at analysing for gaps. She waited, rehearsing key lines, but Lawson responded right away just as he had with Marc. Given his seniority, she was surprised, but it seemed to be a private number, and he probably gave it to so few people that any call would be the kind he’d interrupt meetings to take.

  “Captain Ingram,” Lawson said. “It was a very pleasant surprise to find you were still alive.”

  “Not half as pleasant as it was for me, Sir Guy. Have I interrupted anything?”

  “Nothing that can’t wait.”

  “I’m sorry I didn’t make contact before,” Ingram said. “When we were revived from cryo, we didn’t find the world quite the same as we left it. And Ainatio had blocked our comms to Earth because they needed us to stay dead.”

  “Were you aware Ainatio was going to use that as a cover story?”

  “No, and we weren’t best pleased. Friends and family went to their graves thinking we were dead, so some of my crew want to talk to old friends while they still can, but you can imagine the security problems.” Ingram was thinking of the Caisin gate, but she hoped Lawson would take it as a general point about Pham’s determination to scuttle Nomad any way he could. “I have fifteen APS nationals in the ship’s company. Even the most loyal personnel can let information slip accidentally.”

  “And are they really all loyal?” Lawson asked. “I can’t avoid asking about the Ainatio scientist who spread die-back in Korea. I assume you know about her.”

  “We have access to news satellites, so we do.” There was no harm in telling Lawson. If Nomad had FTL, it wouldn’t be credible to claim it didn’t have comms to match. “When we heard about it, we locked down the base, ran a biohaz search, and interrogated all Ainatio staff in case Abbie Vincent wasn’t an isolated malcontent. We’re still monitoring them.”

  “That must put quite a strain on morale.”

  “Time will tell.”

  “I hope the settlement’s in good shape.”

  “Overall, yes, it’s going well.” Ingram knew exactly what Marc meant when he said that talking with Lawson was a tightrope act, never knowing if he knew more than he let on. “But Bednarz’s mission plan didn’t survive contact with events. The base is a miracle of automated construction, but we weren’t set up for an immediate influx of colonists from Earth — which you know about — so we have food security concerns. And we’re still coming to terms with local conditions, which also aren’t what we expected.”

  “And they are?”

  “Sir Guy, if I sound evasive or all over the charts, it’s because we really weren’t prepared for what we found here. In time, you’ll understand why my first act when Ainatio ceased to exist wasn’t to call and hand you the keys. There’s a lot to resolve.”

  “May I just check I’ve got the facts straight?” Lawson asked. Ingram had already learned it was his terribly polite way of easing into a cross-examination. “Cabot didn’t have instant comms when she launched because the development of the technology happened while you were in transit, yes?”

  “Correct.”

  “But she didn’t have FTL propulsion, either, hence waking up to find you were officially dead.”

  “Also correct.” Ingram could now guess where this was heading. “It took us forty-five years to reach Opis.”

  “You know what I’m trying to make sense of, don’t you?”

  “I think so.”

  “The FTL technology — the one that drives ships, not the instant comms — became available after you reached Opis but before you evacuated the Americans. If it’s not Ainatio’s technology, then, whose is it and how did you acquire it?”

  “All I can tell you at the moment is that it’s not ours, but we have use of it.”

  “Perhaps you could give me some idea of your difficulties in more neutral terms, then.”

  “The base is complete and we’ve got adequate supplies, which was a massive operation in itself,” Ingram said carefully. “But we haven’t been able to bring some Ainatio scientists and their families out of cryo yet. That’s just over a thousand people still in their ship and orbiting Opis, including children. We had to evacuate a complete town in under twenty-four hours, and we don’t yet have the two-year food stockpile to buffer us against failed harvests. Life’s relatively comfortable for the time being, but it’s completely unpredictable.”

  “And this is because Elcano — I have the name right, don’t I? — was the ship that Georgina Erskine took when APS was about to purge the die-back-infected area with nuclear weapons. And that predates your acquisition of FTL by a couple of weeks, by my calculation. And now the ship’s orbiting Opis?”

  Of course Lawson knew. From the moment Marc had to use his contacts to get Annis Kim’s call through to Pham, Ainatio’s comms were being monitored by the UK.

  “Correct,” Ingram said, ignoring the tail of that question. “I’m reassured to see Kingdom is still giving the British taxpayer good value for money on the intel front.”

  “Are you fully in control of the base?”

  Ingram had to interpret that. Who did he think the adversary was? Americans? If he mentioned aliens, she’d have to tell him now, but until then, she’d hold back.

  “I want to bring you up to speed,” she said. “But I can’t do it yet because some work’s required to brief you properly. There’s also concern here about APS agents getting hold of information. Let’s be realistic. They have spies in London just as you have spies over there. We have a very unfortunate history with APS, as you’ve noticed, and they have scores to settle.”

  “At the moment,” Lawson said, “the only people who know about these FTL plans are a very small team in defence research and the Permanent Secretary at the MoD. The Foreign Office is considerably smaller and less influential than it was in your day, Captain, because there’s far less foreign left for us to deal with at this stage of the Decline. But the advantage is that I don’t have quite so many politicians breathing down my neck. It’s purely luck that put me in this seat because Marc’s point of contact to reach APS was here rather than the MoD. I just need to work out the importance of deep space to Britain. Is it a viable alternative to preserve this nation, Captain, or is it a threat?”

  “It could be either. We’re assessing other planets too.”

  “Yes, Marc implied we’d want to steer clear of Opis. Are you able to explain that? I have a ludicrous idea in my head, but I’m a grown man, so I can’t bring myself to say it.”

  Ingram’s first reaction was that he realised this was about intelligent aliens, but he might just have meant some horror movie scenario of plagues from outer space. She had to play it safe for the time being.

  “All I can say at this stage is that if you do manage to complete the ship and you plan to send a mission, you might be better off on another terrestrial-type planet,” she said. “And there are some close matches, I’m told. I’m sorry to be so oblique, but the engineer who contacted you wasn’t supposed to release this yet. He’s put us all in a difficult position.”

  Lawson was silent for a while. “The yet reassures me.” He paused. “Are you able to return to Earth at all?”

  “In theory, yes.” Ingram thought it was a non-sequitur, but Lawson might have been wondering if they still needed a safe haven. Maybe they would. “But we’re fine here for the time being.”

  “And you or Marc will brief me at some point and make sense of all this. Because some aspects baffle me. Not that we’re ungrateful for this extraordinary asset, but when I have to tell my political masters, I’ll be asked questions. A lot of questions.”

  “We will when we can, Sir Guy.”

  Ingram thought she’d already given Lawson too much to speculate about, but she couldn’t tell him everything was going fine and have him make plans based on that. Once she told him about the assorted aliens and the risk of being attacked or sucked into their conflicts, he might well think it was too high-risk, and the problem of holding Earth at arm’s length would solve itself. But she knew that was wishful thinking. There were too many good reasons to look for habitable worlds and now Britain seemed to have a foothold on one of them, informally at least.

  “I’ll wait, then,” Lawson said. “Thank you. I realise this situation is unprecedented in human history. Forgive my scattergun curiosity.”

  “And again, my apologies for the delay in making contact.”

  “Is there anything at all that I can do to help you?”

  “It’s an awfully long way to send tea.”

  “I realise you’re in a tight spot. I’ve seen your service record and you’re hardly the type to make a fuss about minor inconveniences.”

  This was ridiculous. All Ingram’s instincts were telling her that it was far too late to keep secrets.

  “I’m going to take time out to consult my colleagues,” she said. “As we weren’t expecting the technology to be shared with you so soon, we’ve got issues to iron out. I want to tell you more, but I’m also aware that what we tell you will also become a liability for you.”

  Lawson did his usual few seconds of silence before responding. “If it affects the security of Britain, then I’ll have to live with that, Captain.”

  “Thank you,” Ingram said. “I’ll get back to you as soon as I have something concrete to add.”

  The icon on Ingram’s monitor went red and the call ended. She bent over and rested her forehead on the desk, resisting the urge to bang it a few times.

  Caisin gate. Caisin gate. Caisin gate.

  The idea should never have crossed her mind, but now that it had, it kept circling back to make sure she knew it was still waiting for her to do something with it. The gate could be deployed on Earth for Britain to put an end to the threat of invasion once and for all. She wasn’t sure how yet, but she knew its potential, and then she could finish the task she’d cut short all those years ago. Nobody would have to abandon Earth. Die-back hadn’t attacked every edible crop, just the four major ones, and overdependence and political insanity had done the rest. If only the surviving nations could catch their breath and stop brawling in the lifeboat, Earth could recover faster. Staying home had to be safer than venturing out among hostile aliens.

  No, that was daft. If governments had the sense to do that, they’d have done it a long time ago and the situation would never have imploded. The technology was luring her into bad decisions, exactly as Chris and Marc had warned. And there was one factor she kept overlooking in all this — Solomon. He had a mission and he showed no signs of deviating from it. It was such a clear, uncomplicated task that it left no room for mission creep.

  “Sol,” she said. “If — and I do mean if — refugees from Earth had to come to Opis, would you have conditions?”

  “You know I would, Captain.” Solomon sounded relaxed rather than irritated, but it was probably because he was never going to concede. “They’d have to pass vetting, because Nomad has no purpose if we import the old problems again. Unless those refugees were a good fit for the existing population, and that population approved of them, then I wouldn’t accept them.”

  It was said politely and logically, a reasonable reply to a hypothetical question. Selecting people with the right stuff and protecting them was the reason for Solomon’s existence. There was no way he would change his mind and no way to force him, so he was the one who’d decide how this played out.

  Ingram stopped short of asking what not accepting migrants would actually translate to in the physical world. She knew how he’d dealt with APS. He also seemed to have marked Fred’s card.

  “You’re going to have to tell Lawson about the aliens soon, Captain,” he said. “It might even have a salutary effect.”

  Sol was right — again. But then there’d just be the Caisin gate left to surrender, and Opis would become an extension of Earth rather than a new world in its own right. Was that what people here wanted? Handing control to a civilian government when the settlement was ready, the original plan, was tempting but for all the wrong reasons. Ingram had no guarantee the government that eventually arrived would be British and not APS. She’d seen how fast nations could simply cease to exist.

  But Opis was home now. There were people who’d probably opt to go back to Earth if they could, but if she’d read the Kill Liners right, they’d come to see the settlement as a small country worth fighting for, a chance to make a life free of the destructive regimes that had caused misery for billions. Ingram was as caught up in it now as they were. She didn’t want to surrender Nomad to anyone, not even her own tribe, but she didn’t want to see Britain fall like America had either, and there had to be a way of reconciling those two positions.

  “I agree, Lawson needs to know who else is out here,” she said. “I’ll talk it through with the others. What a load to dump on the poor man. He gets to hear the biggest news in human history whether he’s ready for it or not.”

  “But we took it rather well.”

  “That we did, Sol.” Ingram tried to focus on the promise of pizza and an instant family. All the technology in the universe wouldn’t preserve humanity if it forgot the basics of being human. “That we did.”

  * * *

  CO’s office, main building: 1520 hours, later that day.

  Trinder zoned out of Ingram’s meeting for a moment and couldn’t quite recall why it had been so important until now to avoid telling Earth about the aliens.

  Shutting APS out of Nomad and anything associated with it was a given. Whatever Ingram told Lawson and Lawson had to tell someone else might eventually end up in Pham’s in-tray, and what Lawson didn’t know couldn’t be extracted from a bugged communications channel. But it didn’t seem like a line worth holding now. Lawson had to know there was the biggest problem in history before his political masters started making plans to explore deep space.

  And Pham was sure he already knew the truth. He’d think that intercepted talk of aliens was there to throw him off the scent.

  Ingram had called the broader Joint Command group together this time, including Doug Brandt, who was equally powerless to do anything about the situation. Maybe she just wanted to reassure him she hadn’t imposed a military dictatorship. She looked around the room, working left to right, and settled her gaze on Trinder.

  “Well, gentlemen?”

  Trinder’s tactic when admitted to Erskine’s meetings at Ainatio had been to say nothing until he was forced to, and then to say as little as he could as blandly as possible. But the inner Trinder had finally broken loose, the one who had plenty of opinions and enjoyed the novelty of saying “No” more than any toddler.

  “Just tell Lawson everything,” he said. “Brits aren’t the enemy, but even if they were, we can’t stop them building a ship, and we can’t stop them landing, either. We can’t blockade the entire planet. But even if we could, are we seriously going to shoot them down or something? Warning them what’s really out here is the right thing to do. It also stops them blundering in here and putting us at risk.”

  “That’s if they listen,” Chris said. “But does anyone here remember what all of us said a month ago? It was pretty much the opposite of what we’re saying now.”

  “Circumstances change,” Ingram said. “Fred changed them.”

  “Dan, does your everything include the Caisin gate?” Alex asked. “I’m a civilian moron, but even I know we need to hold our ace. And not look so ripe for pillage.”

  “I don’t know.” Trinder shook his head. “It’s what Chris said, I suppose. A month ago, yes, we were all saying the complete opposite. I still think we should keep the gate quiet, though, because it’s such a magnet for any wrong ‘uns.”

  Marc was staring out of the window, but he nodded. “Yeah, hold that in reserve. We’re the only wrong ‘uns who get to play with it until further notice.”

  “Besides, we’re not the galactic peace police.” Alex fidgeted with his glasses, cleaning the lenses with a scrap of cloth that looked like it had been cut out of a pair of boxers. “The only reason we should worry about who gets hold of it is how it impacts our own safety.”

  Trinder kept trying to imagine what making full use of the gate meant in real terms. Most folks in Nomad, whether they admitted it or not, had considered all the things they could do with an instant walk-in portal to anywhere, ranging from the entertaining and humanitarian to the downright criminal. Gallagher’s Rules applied. As Marc kept reminding them, anything new would eventually be used for the worst possible purpose, one it was never intended for. And there was some very bad stuff to be done with a Caisin gate. They were counting on that if they got into difficulties with Kugad.

  “But we’ve made the gate hard to seize, haven’t we, Sol?” Trinder asked. “So even if people find out, they can’t necessarily access it. There’s knowing about it and then there’s doing something about it.”

 
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