Here We Stand, page 49




“Selling that to politicians could be a challenge,” Lawson said.
“Okay, you can put it this way, if and when you have to. I killed a teerik, one of the farmers killed a Jattan, and we’ve commandeered and cannibalised a stolen warship, so it’s probably best not to be associated with us. And Fred jumped the gun and gave you the data prematurely because he wants billions of humans here to give the Kugin a good kicking. Don’t get sucked into an alien grudge match.”
“That’s useful,” Lawson said. “Thank you.”
Marc was looking at his notes and working out what Lawson hadn’t asked him yet. He hadn’t asked about Solomon, although Marc had mentioned the AI without naming him, and he hadn’t asked for details about the contact with the Jattan rebels.
Marc decided to give him an opportunity to fill in the gaps. “I’m sure things will occur to you later when all this sinks in, but is there anything else you want to ask at the moment?”
“Yes. How will you transfer the Elcano passengers if you ship them back here? Will they arrive in cryo? We might not have the expertise to revive them safely because it’s not a technology we use.”
“If we do, it’ll be handled by our AI,” Marc said. “There are medics in cryo as well and the system’s set up to revive them first. The whole process is automated because they could never guarantee anyone from the Cabot mission surviving to revive them manually.”
“That’s most impressive. Thank you.”
Marc waited. The next question would be about Elcano, about what happened to her once her passengers were disembarked, and whether Britain could keep her for the time being. He had his line ready: they’d have to bring the ship back on autopilot because they’d need her missile capability to defend Nomad. Lawson would then start discussing nukes, but he probably wouldn’t ask about acquiring raw materials for shipbuilding because they were still assessing the plans, and it would emerge naturally when they got down to detail.
But he didn’t ask any of those questions. “And I really was talking to an alien, was I?” he asked.
“You were.” Marc regrouped mentally, waiting for the catch. “I want you to understand that this is as much to protect Britain as Nomad Base. If we didn’t give a toss about you, there’d have been no call from Fred because we wouldn’t have asked him to prep plans for human use. We’d have cut all contact.”
“Are you getting grief from the other national interests on the base?”
“Who cares?” Marc asked. “America’s gone, APS wants to shut us down with extreme prejudice, and we considered giving the tech to public-spirited scientists and leaders around the world, but we were still struggling to think of any when Fred made the decision for us. I’m not joking about that, by the way.”
“Well, I’ve got a considerable amount of quiet contemplation ahead of me.” Lawson made a sound that was almost like the start of a suppressed laugh, the kind you made when you couldn’t believe the depth of the shit you were in and had to find the funny side to stay sane. “And to think I once said to you, ’Space is always interesting, Mr Gallagher,’ as a lofty response to your question about Kingdom.”
“Oh. Yeah.”
“Did you know any of this then?” It sounded very much as if he thought Marc did.
“Actually, I didn’t.” Marc almost told him he’d run into Fred for the first time an hour or two after they’d spoken, but the bloke probably didn’t need to add aliens landing briefly on Earth to his list of awkward things to explain to ministers, not yet at least. “But I’d already burned out my shock chip. You’ll be totally blasé about all this in a couple of months. Maybe even a couple of days.”
“I await that day with interest,” Lawson said.
“Let me know when you’ve got a location for us to disembark the Elcano personnel,” Marc said. “And any information about them that you need.”
“About your AI,” Lawson said.
A...ha. Here it comes. “What about him?”
“We do hear some odd things coming out of APS.”
Marc had a split second to decide how far to cooperate with a fishing expedition. Lawson was a skilled angler, and if he didn’t have a bit of spook in his past somewhere, then he almost certainly helped them out when they were busy. The speed or otherwise of Marc’s response would shape how this went. He pulled a feint.
“Oh, so you are spying on Pham,” he said.
“Messy business, but it’s sort of mandatory.”
“Yeah, Pham went mental about Solomon. That’s the AI’s name. Pham thought he was Earthmother. If Solomon was an Earthmother type, Pham wouldn’t be alive now, and neither would any of his troops.”
“So what is Solomon? In type terms.”
“Bednarz’s own design.” Marc was so far out on a limb now that he could see squirrels below. He caught Ingram’s eye and she looked grim. “He’s built to make moral choices and his sole purpose is protecting human life. Well, ours, to be specific — we’d all be dead now without him, and Cabot’s crew wouldn’t be looking too clever either. And Erskine tried to shut him down when he wanted to stop her abandoning the civvies to a bloody nuclear air raid, so we made sure she couldn’t. He’s acquired some enemies for all the right reasons.”
“But you don’t regard him as a potential threat.”
“No. I don’t.”
“The cyberattack on APS?”
“We tasked him to do that. The responsibility’s mine and we only pulled the trigger when APS destroyed Da Gama. If Solomon had been an Earthmother type, you’d be looking at a big scorch mark where APS used to be. We went for the least lethal temporary option because Solomon would have had issues about killing people.”
The fuck he would. But whatever Sol did had to be provoked, and there were too many grey areas in that discussion when Marc was trying to shut it down and move Lawson on.
“Your AI sounds very impressive,” Lawson said.
“He is. He’s our mate. We’ve got his back.”
“They can be terribly human, can’t they?”
Marc went for it. It helped that he wasn’t acting now. “He helped me grieve properly for my sons for the first time. Yeah, he’s human, alright.”
Lawson did his usual pause. “Is Erskine going to be a problem?”
“Yeah, sorry that she’s part of the return package, but if you end up shooting the old bag, we won’t file a complaint,” Marc said. “Not so much a problem as a lot of folks here want an unfriendly word with her. Tell her if she still wants a piece of Sol, she’ll have to come through me. That applies to Pham, too. Anyone, in fact.”
“I’ll pass it on, Marc.”
“Anything else?”
“I’ll have more information on Corporal Cho’s location in a few days, although I shouldn’t encourage you.”
“Thank you.”
“May I ask what Opis actually looks like?”
“I’ll send you some images. We even have sea monsters.”
“Wouldn’t be an alien world without them.”
“It’s probably time for you to have a stiff drink and digest all this news.”
“I do believe I will. We’ll talk later. Thank you for an extraordinary conversation.”
“All part of the service. Mind how you go.”
Marc ended the call and sat staring at his unused notes. He could feel the sweat running down his back. Ingram walked over and ruffled his hair.
“Well handled. I love it when you’re all alpha and bolshy.”
“I give him three days before he’s back on to me asking if I know anything about a helicopter being shot down near Fiji,” Marc said. “He’ll know. And Pham will know about a missile appearing out of thin air and Joni’s boat vanishing, which he’ll discuss and somehow Lawson will get to hear. Some of the ex-pats we saw around the islands might have been our spooks, not just Pham’s.”
“There’s nothing we can do about that. We’re responsible for our own actions, not the reactions of others.”
“But apart from that, you think I said what he needed to hear.”
“Yes. You would have fooled me if I didn’t know you better.”
“What, claiming Sol’s not an ASD AI? Like Doug said, show me the serial numbers.”
“I meant the fake innocence, that you really were telling him more than you intended because he was coaxing it out of you. Plus an oblique threat that could equally be a simple, honest soul expressing strong manly feelings about Sol. Which I suspect were genuine.”
“That’s me. Rough diamond. Good at killing and dumb enough not to know when the toffs are manipulating me.”
“You’re rather scary, you know that?”
“That’s what they paid me for.” Marc knew that Lawson knew that they both knew what the game was, but there was enough genuine emotion in the warning to back off Sol to make the point. “I suppose I’d better pick up the chicken and stuff. A dead one this time. Don’t get your hopes up, Boadicea.”
“No chicken can ever replace Mildred.”
“I had your groceries delivered,” Solomon said. “Howie’s unpacking the trolley bot now. It was the least I could do for your gallant intervention. You didn’t need to take the blame for my actions, but thank you.”
“Purely selfish, mate.” Marc squirmed. “If you go, we’re all stuffed.”
“Of course. I knew that.”
“Yeah.”
“Bullshit,” Ingram said, and laughed. “You’re one of us, Sol, and that means he’d take a bullet for you.”
“Speak for yourself,” Marc said, and ushered her out. He paused outside the building to send an audio file of the call to Chris, Alex, Searle, and Trinder with a message attached that Lawson now knew that mankind was not alone, in fact so un-alone that there was a good chance of an armed misunderstanding with a mixed bag of aliens. At least it was easier to grasp the threat potential of Jattans and Kugin than six-dimensional plasma beings who didn’t deal in linear time.
As they strolled back to the house, Marc was in a more positive frame of mind than he’d started with. He felt that same relief he’d had when he’d first told Lawson that he was calling him from a distant planet. The problems he still had to fix were of the conventional variety he was used to. There was Barry Cho to take care of, and making sure Tev and his family were settled in, and of course Kugad and its Jattan sidekicks hadn’t gone away either. But the list of shit to shovel was being whittled down. It could all be tackled in stages.
“Lawson wasn’t too shocked to see the advantages and ask awkward questions,” Marc said.
Ingram nodded. “You were right to do the talking. I think he’s a bit scared of you.”
“There’s a certain advantage in being a professional psychopath.”
“And you didn’t mention Annis,” Ingram said. “Neither did he.”
“Oh, he hasn’t forgotten her. It’s on his list along with all the other stuff he didn’t ask.”
Marc felt drained. Breaking the news of aliens had been more emotional than he’d expected, and that wasn’t like him at all. What would John and Greg have made of their dad being central to the biggest discovery in human history? He imagined their reactions and how they’d have ended up talking all night about it. It was one of those moments that really hurt, a memory that never had the chance to happen.
“Alex will have to break the Elcano news to the rest of the staff,” Ingram said. “There’ll be objections.”
“Take the moral high ground,” Marc said. “Women, children, and harpy CEOs first.”
“And a few chaps in lab coats that some will feel should be kept here.”
“We’ve got a few weeks’ grace now.” Marc stopped from time to time to take pictures of the base and the wild landscape beyond. He passed his screen to Ingram. “Anything in the shots that we should redact?”
“Can’t see anything top secret that they’ll be interested in.” Ingram zoomed into the images until they were unrecognisable. “They’ll be analysing light and shadows and all that, but that’s just astrophysics, and if they spoke nicely to some university they could get all the data they wanted on Pascoe’s Star and its planets. I’m sure they already have.”
“The distant purple foliage looks nice. Shall I include Ash’s shot of the sea beast?”
“It’s just a one-legged octopus. Go ahead.”
“And Fred?”
“Is that wise?”
“What can they do with a picture of a big crow-raven-microraptor thing? Other than get an anatomist to speculate on the best way to kill it, and we’ve already done that.”
Ingram gave him a sadly amused look as he opened the front door. “You’ve ruled out their boffins oohing and aahing, lost in wonder, I see.”
“They’ll think it’s AI-faked.”
Marc thought about the appropriate teerik image to send Lawson as he considered the chicken carcass, holding it upright by its wings like a doll. At least he didn’t have to remove any giblets. He’d make himself do it if he had to, but he couldn’t face telling Ingram that it made him queasy. He’d seen too much of the stuff that spilled out of human beings and switched off his revulsion a long time ago. If he’d been living off the land in an escape situation, he’d have been skinning rabbits and gutting fish, and it wouldn’t have affected him because he’d be in his work mindset, but offal got past his defences when it came into his nice tidy urban kitchen. He sliced one of the much sought-after lemons that Lianne had donated and tried to work out how to keep the slices sitting on the chicken’s skin.
In the end he gave up and stuffed them into the cavity. He’d grate some of the peel from the other lemon and rub it into the skin with a knob of Liam Dale’s Jersey butter.
No, this wasn’t a bad life at all, was it? All they had to do was iron out the external problems and then they could get on with living it.
He could hear Ingram talking to Howie as he washed his hands and retrieved the drinks from the fridge. The two of them were in the living room, having a heart to heart, and it sounded like he’d just asked her when she was coming to stay.
“You can always say no,” Ingram was telling him. “You seem really happy now and I don’t want to spoil that. I can’t replace your real mum and I wouldn’t try to.”
“We’re pretending we’re a family,” Howie said, like he was explaining family psychology to her. “But it’s to make ourselves happier, not telling fibs to other people because we want them to believe we really are. So if we want to pretend it’s real and we don’t care what they think, that’s as good as being real, isn’t it?”
Howie understood the power of a shared illusion. Marc preferred the role of grandad, because his sense of being a father began and ended with John and Greg, but he’d go along with whatever made Howie happy. It wasn’t a kid’s job to accommodate an adult’s traumas. Ingram looked up at Marc as he put her drink on the table and he thought she was going to cry.
“Humans want to be part of a group,” Marc said. “It’s normal. It’s what keeps us alive. I’ve missed it. That’s why we’re happier like this. Remember how you used to do your rounds at the transit camp, Howie, making sure the old people had someone to talk to? It’s the same thing. It’s what humans are meant to do.”
Marc had sworn he’d never try to fill a parental role again. He’d thought he was too damaged to plug the hole in Howie’s life, but he couldn’t walk away from it because of the hole in his own. Ingram was another matter. It was easy to think that she accepted Howie as part of the Marc Gallagher package, but maybe he didn’t fully understand the size and composition of the holes in her own life. She had to have some. She’d been the only child of an old moneyed family, he knew that much, and she’d left the family estate to her cousin when she signed up for the Nomad mission because there was nobody else.
The history book at school had told Marc what Ingram did in the Channel War. It had told him nothing about a naval family that had served for generations and how it had come down to one woman with no immediate family, just some cousin she left the country estate to. For some reason he thought about her encounter with a dead man and how she’d kept that to herself as well, and wondered if she’d lost someone she didn’t want to talk about.
She’d tell him when she was ready.
“Did you remember to turn the oven on?” Howie asked.
“Yep.” Marc checked his watch. “Ninety minutes. Spuds at thirty minutes before zero, beans at ten. Let’s take our drinks into the garden.”
If Marc hadn’t known exactly where he was and why, he could have been on Earth and the last ten years hadn’t happened. The world had shrunk to a couple of makeshift loungers partly shaded by an awning made from an old tarp, a jug of fruit juice suitably fortified by the time it reached the adults’ glasses, and Howie happily digging more rows to plant winter lettuces. Unexpected normality overwhelmed Marc. He looked at Ingram and she stopped reading her screen.
“From healthy professional distance to playing house in five days,” Marc said. “Who’d have thought it?”
“Several months elapsed in our minds, though.”
“True. Are you sending memos?”
“Just a quick note to the crew.” Ingram brandished her screen. “Alex just sent out an all-staff message, and my people ought to hear it from me. He’s going to talk to them in the canteen tomorrow, so I’d better be there. Brace for incoming.”
“It’s Sunday,” Marc said. “We can brace tomorrow.”
The temporary peace was like realising he couldn’t hear anything and thinking he’d gone deaf. For a few hours, the three of them could almost relive a way of life that had been taken from them, not restored without visible cracks but repaired enough to remind them what ordinary contentment looked like. They could pretend for a while that it had always been this way. But it hadn’t, and it wouldn’t be like it tomorrow, either. All they’d done was swap die-back, feral Europe, and APS for alien threats. Why did either of them bother? What was the point?