Here we stand, p.46
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Here We Stand, page 46

 

Here We Stand
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  “It’s still an asshole magnet,” Chris said. “If not now, then later.”

  Solomon ignored Chris’s aside. “As long as Fred doesn’t find a way to share the details with anyone else and enable them to build their own, it’s easy for me to put it out of action if I have to.”

  Sol always had a plan. He’d obviously thought through how to destroy the gate as well as how to operate it without teerik assistance, and he’d certainly have a contingency for saving humans from themselves if they made dangerously bad decisions. For some reason, Trinder was fine with Sol doing that, but not Fred.

  “What if we need to destroy it permanently?” he asked. “Just hypothetical. You know, if we decide it’s so dangerous that the universe needs to forget it ever happened. And the teeriks know how it works.“

  “We’ve discussed that before,” Solomon said. “We either keep them absolutely secure in perpetuity or we terminate them.”

  Trinder wondered when that was going to sound routine. He knew he could measure his humanity by how long it continued to make him squirm. “You know how it works as well, Sol. More or less.”

  “If your survival depended on erasing all records and knowledge of the gate, then I would erase it from my memory as well, or even terminate myself.” Solomon sounded like he meant it. “But what can be invented once will probably be invented again. So it’s best to regard any asset denial as temporary, even if that means centuries.”

  “Then why are we bothering to conceal it at all? It’s why we can’t let anybody call Earth. Except us, of course, and that’s causing another morale problem.”

  “It’s to save our own asses in the present,” Chris said. “We can’t manage the future beyond the next couple of years, and maybe not even that. Right now, we don’t need to attract scavengers.”

  Ingram folded her arms and looked like she was getting impatient. “Okay, let me play devil’s advocate,” she said. “We thought we’d be overwhelmed by numbers if we offered to resettle people and just opened the gate. But now we’re going down the FTL ship path, which requires investment and resources at the other end, we’ll get an official advance party. Troops. Scientists. Government officials. Geologists who won’t be coming to admire the fossils and cave formations. This is a virgin planet loaded with unmined treasure. They’ll assess Opis for its commercial and strategic value to Earth — well, to Britain, unless something goes horribly wrong and we get a visit from APS. In anticipation of that, then, I’d like to address the redcoatophobia that might be forming. We’re not seeking to rebuild the British empire or slipping valuable tech to our mates. If you have even the slightest twinge when I say that, spit it out now.”

  “No, it’s our fault for carelessly losing our country,” Alex said. “You go, girl, as long as you don’t make us eat Brussels sprouts. That’d mean war.”

  Doug looked concerned. “Captain, nobody’s going to blame you for continuing to protect your national interests,” he said. “If Bednarz wanted us to preserve Western civilisation, that’s part of it. But we want clear demarcation lines because Kill Liners aren’t British and we want our American way of life again. That’s assuming the most extreme situation, of course, where your people turn up and try to run Nomad. But there’s nothing to suggest they will. And they were ready to rescue us when we were just a bunch of farmers and out-of-date scientists who weren’t worth much to them. I think that indicates the kind of people we’re dealing with.”

  Marc, still staring out of the window, chuckled to himself but said nothing. Ingram ignored him and carried on.

  “I signed up to prepare an independent settlement here for a civilian government to take over,” she said. “We never set out expecting to have real-time contact with Earth. It’s easier to build a new society if you don’t have the old country at the end of a comms link for instant reference, but there’s bound to be nationalism here and that’s a good thing. It’s when we try to enforce conformity where none naturally exists that we run into trouble.”

  “We could have a British sector and an American sector so far apart that we never see each other,” Alex said. “But that’s assuming they want to come here.”

  “Yeah, and we might have identified another planet for them by then,” Trinder said. “But they might just say thanks for the technology and the intel and head for some other planet they earmarked years ago.”

  “Or they might not be able to source the raw materials for the FTL drive and they never leave Earth,” Searle said.

  Chris shrugged. “Pretty sure we’ve got everything they need here, actually.”

  “Meaning?”

  “How long before we need something they’ve got?”

  “We’re trying to keep our distance from Earth, not foster interstellar trade,” Searle said.

  “But they’ll ask. I sure would. We’ll need an answer ready.”

  Ingram interrupted silently with a glance. It was amazing how she could do that. “One problem at a time, gents. Okay, to speed things up, does anyone think we shouldn’t tell Lawson everything, Caisin gate excepted?”

  Chris raised a forefinger. “Yes. Don’t mention the teerik probes in Earth orbit, either, or at least how capable they are.”

  “He knows we have relays in place, or we wouldn’t be talking. I don’t think he cares if we’re stealing sat TV.”

  “No, but he’ll be very interested if we tell him we can place mobile surveillance almost anywhere without much risk of being spotted.”

  “Good point.” Ingram nodded. “We haven’t gone into detail about it. He’s got all the Ainatio instant comms data, so he probably thinks we’re using that.”

  “I’m not worried about him wanting to acquire it,” Chris said. “I just want the means to check things out for ourselves without being obstructed. It’s like the gate. Once you know someone’s got that technology, even if you haven’t, you can plan around it and reduce its effectiveness in some ways.”

  “Indeed.”

  “And another thing.”

  “Okay.”

  “Don’t let Fred do the technical liaison. The more he talks to Lawson’s boffins, the more dangerous it gets. If they have technical issues, get Cosqui. She’s as competent as Fred, she likes Brad, which is a point we can lever, and she thinks Fred’s a loose cannon.”

  “Yes, I’ve noticed,” Ingram said. “Brad, is she up to it?”

  “Sure.” Searle nodded. “And she likes to be told she’s doing a good job. Because nobody ever told her before. So yeah, if we need to, I’ll get her to do it and sit in on the sessions.”

  “I’m reassured.”

  Marc wasn’t saying much. Perhaps he didn’t like home following him across the galaxy for the same reason he hadn’t gone back to Britain. But he’d been the one who’d first said Nomad might have some responsibility to help Earth simply because it could. That summed up the problem, though. Everyone here wanted to do the decent thing but there was a downside to every act of generosity, and at the heart of it was a bunch of people who’d gotten used to life without government, a life on a tribal scale where they made their own rules. They liked it that way. Trinder certainly did. He’d reinvented himself and he didn’t want to go back to the way things had been.

  “Well, we’ve still got a few years to iron things out,” Doug said. “Nobody knows what’s going to happen here, let alone on Earth. But as you said, now they can build an FTL vessel, it’s only fair to warn them what they’ll find out here. That applies whether they venture into space or not, because the Kugin could head for Earth.”

  “People assess risk differently when there’s profit and military advantage involved,” Chris said. “And some diplomat or scientist is bound to want to try to make contact with Kugad or the Jattans without us playing gatekeeper. We need to dissuade them.”

  “I think Lawson’s aware of that,” Marc said. “He’d have passed the ball to the politicians by now if he hadn’t. Let’s see what he says to the basic shock news package before we give him any add-ons.”

  “Okay, but how do we explain why we’re not inviting them over right away to see what we’ve done with the place?” Trinder asked. “They think we used FTL drives to get here and they now know that’s only a few weeks’ flight time, so the round trip could be made immediately. If I were them, I’d ask you to come and pick up a recon party to pay a visit. I can’t imagine any government not wanting to do that. This is the biggest event in human history. Proof of aliens. New worlds for humanity in the nick of time. You know how it goes.”

  “Yeah, we’re already out of excuses,” Chris said. “Lawson knows we can’t revive everyone in Elcano because of the food situation, but if he just wants to send a small party with their own supplies, how do we justify refusing? And what if he says no problem, we’ll help out with pallets of extra supplies when you send a ship?”

  “We simply tell him the truth about why we don’t want them here for the foreseeable future,” Ingram said. “Not just food, but the awkward stuff about aliens, tensions within Nomad, getting the governance right, and the whole point of the mission, however unpalatable Bednarz’s philosophy might sound to outsiders.”

  “I’ll talk to him,” Marc said. “But that’s mission creep right there. Tensions and governance issues. Are those now part of our official reason for keeping Elcano on ice?”

  “No. It’s just that we don’t have to face those issues on top of everything else.” Ingram cocked her head slightly as if she thought that was out of order. “Anyway, I told Lawson I’d call back after we’d had a chance to talk.”

  “Fine, but I’ll do it. If only to keep my story straight.”

  Trinder read that as a low-key wrangle over who managed the liaison. Marc didn’t seem to treat Ingram any more deferentially now they were an item. She blinked for a moment, looking more amused than offended, then smiled.

  “Oh, he’s got a man-crush on you because you’re special forces,” she said. “You can get away with more than I can.”

  Chris ploughed on, typically undistracted. “I’m going to be a whiny little bitch and raise another problem.”

  “Oh, that’s not like you, Chris,” Ingram said sweetly.

  “I know. I like to surprise you. Dan mentioned the radio blackout. We all know we didn’t want Fred to take a dump on our careful plans, but it’s not going to look that way to all the folks who still can’t call home and who are building up a righteous head of steam about us going back for Tev. It’s not even about failing to go back for the Ainatio contingent who opted to stay. It’s perception. It looks like a Brit stitch-up to take over the project. How long can we keep up the embargo? Not forever, that’s for sure. And do we keep it in place for everyone until then just so APS folk don’t feel hard done by?”

  Trinder almost wished the gate had never happened. Although they owed their lives to it, he’d always realised it would be a liability, like wearing a big gold designer watch in the rough end of town. They had full-on regular FTL now, journeys slashed from decades to weeks, so if they suddenly lost the gate it wouldn’t make much difference to Nomad’s day-to-day activity. But that ability to join two points in space, seamlessly and silently, could do so much more of the things necessary in emergencies they couldn’t yet imagine. Now they’d experienced just a fraction of what it could do, it’d be very hard to go back to relying on ships.

  Would we have the backbone to trash it on moral grounds? Really?

  Trinder didn’t need a test of character when they still had real-world problems like Kugad and the Protectorate. He knew he wouldn’t destroy the gate if the choice was his. It gave him a glimmer of awareness of how it felt to be the research scientist who thought he’d done the world a good turn by developing a heritable weed-killing gene for grain crops, and thought nothing could possibly go wrong.

  Or maybe it had been designed as a bioweapon all along. The truth was dead and buried and in the end there wasn’t a whole lot of difference between planning genocide and just thinking you were too clever to cause it by making a dumb, obvious mistake.

  “We keep an eye on it and see how it goes,” Marc said.

  Trinder had forgotten what they’d been talking about. Ah, the calls ban. “It won’t necessarily be the APS nationals who slip up,” he said. “It could easily be us talking to someone whose pattern of association we just don’t know about.”

  “Blimey, Dan, you’ve gone all policey,” Marc said.

  “Can’t work with Luce for years without learning something.”

  “Anyway, what Lawson intends now might be very different from what happens a few years down the road when the politicians have drawn all over it with crayons, but how he reacts to the general news is going to give us a clue about the direction policy’s going in.”

  “Do you trust him, Marc?” Searle asked.

  “As much as I trust any arm of the government. But they’ve got more skin in the game than you think. Who’s APS going to target first if they find out about all this? Not us — Britain. Lawson’s got a lot to lose as well.”

  “Okay, it sounds like we’re done,” Ingram said. “We tell Lawson about everything except the gate and exactly what the probes can do. We’ll worry about those when the time comes. The calls ban remains for everyone until we know more.”

  But Trinder wasn’t done. The whole discussion had been like pulling a loose thread. Yes, the gate was a problem, but not having to hide the existence of aliens and advanced FTL made other things possible.

  “Captain, before we go, I want to talk about Elcano,” he said. “There’s no reason now why we can’t send her back to Earth, is there? Lawson’s going to know about the Kugin threat and he already knows about the FTL.”

  “For safety reasons, you mean?” Ingram asked. “Put her back in Earth orbit?”

  “Yes, it’s safer, but no, not back in Earth orbit. Revive everybody when they get there.”

  Ingram frowned. “Including Erskine? Including everyone who knows that Sol’s an ASD AI, a major threat to humanity like Earthmother, a pitiless slaughter machine and all that? Seriously?”

  “I doubt Erskine’s going to tell them when she’s the one responsible for continuing the deception about him,” Trinder said. “Anyway, Lawson knows what she did, but what can he do about Sol? Nothing.”

  Ingram raised an eyebrow. “Lawson’s sharp enough to point out Sol’s the same AI who fried Asia. But yes, he can’t shut him down.”

  “Stick with the story,” Marc said. “We told him to do it.”

  “You all agreed to it,” Solomon said.

  “And if we’d said no?” Ingram asked.

  “Would you try to stop a comrade killing himself?”

  Trinder was getting fed up. There was no easy answer to anything connected to Ainatio, Opis, or APS. It was about weighing risks at a particular moment. He’d taken that advice to heart.

  “Look, they can’t touch Sol, but a couple of hundred kids could end up vaporised,” he said. “Sending Elcano home is the easiest option, but neither choice is perfect. The problem is that they’re in cryo. That’s what makes them vulnerable, not being in orbit. They’d be vulnerable even if we kept everyone in cryo down here. You can move a single ship fast, but if we came under attack, evacuating a thousand or so unconscious people from a facility is going to be slower even with a gate. We keep them in Elcano for a fast getaway.”

  “We couldn’t build a cryo facility on the base at the moment anyway, not without stopping other essential construction,” Ingram said. “Bots and materials are fully committed. It’d also compromise evacuating Kill Line if we needed to.”

  “So you agree, Captain.”

  “On that point alone, yes.”

  Chris was nodding to himself. “If the Kugin decide to zap us from orbit, and take out the base, everyone’s dead. If we leave Elcano in orbit, and we’re charcoal, what happens to the folks in cryo? Elcano’s marooned. They’re better off a few trillion miles away instead of being abandoned in the freezer when nobody knows they’re here.”

  “But Lawson will know,” Solomon said. “And if I survived such an attack, I would send the ship home anyway.”

  Just occasionally, Trinder was reminded who was really running the mission, and it wasn’t Joint Command. He turned to Alex. Technically, Alex was the last CEO of Ainatio. Alex began polishing his glasses again.

  “They’re your people, Alex,” Trinder said. “And I know we’re all dreading Erskine being revived and the arguments starting, but I’m genuinely not suggesting this just as a way to avoid that.”

  “Wow, lots to unpick there,” Alex said, not looking up. “Okay, they’ll be out of harm’s way, or at least less likely to be fried unless APS declares war on Britain. Wherever they’re kept, they can’t self-evacuate, so that makes our job harder. We can’t build a cryo facility here without compromising something else. But if we decided to do that, it’d just make my people pile on more pressure to revive them early. It’d be the ‘They’re here now so why not’ argument. And Lawson’s going to know pretty well everything, so what’s the point in not involving him?” Alex held his glasses up to the light to inspect them for smears and frowned. “We’re still tied to Earth. Face it. As long as we can see and hear the motherworld, or even visit it, we’re part of it and we have to factor it into decisions. There’s no point in trying to avoid contact altogether. If we ship out our people still in cryo, they don’t know about the Caisin gate, so that’s one problem avoided for the time being.”

  “What if APS spots the activity?” Chris asked.

  “You said Pham already thinks we’ve got a portal,” Searle said. “He won’t be convinced there isn’t one either way. Everyone else will think Elcano’s journey was aborted to return home, if they detect her at all.”

  Ingram tapped her desk. “I don’t want to get sucked into doing something purely because we’d feel irresponsible doing nothing.”

 
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