Here we stand, p.50
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Here We Stand, page 50

 

Here We Stand
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  “Oh wow.” Howie stopped digging holes and laughed. “I think this is a tomato. We didn’t plant any, though.”

  Ingram hauled herself off the lounger and went over to look. “Yes, that’s definitely a tomato seedling. It might have come from the compost bin.”

  “Do I have to pull it up?”

  “No, let’s leave it be. It’s a free vegetable and it can grow where it chooses.”

  “Fruit,” Howie said, grinning. “It’s a fruit, really.”

  And that was the point. Marc saw it now.

  They were relaxing in a make-believe English garden that wasn’t meant to be here, watching a small boy just being happy while he dug holes for plants without thinking about the horror of trying to bury his mum and sister. It was a win. Marc had done terrible things on behalf of his country so that people could live this ordinary life and never have to know how it felt to do otherwise. So had Ingram. Now it was their turn to try it.

  It wouldn’t make what was coming any easier, but it would see them through the darker days. Marc soaked up the unfamiliar sense of being at peace, looked at the back of his hand, and realised he wasn’t a ghost in the land of the living any more.

  10

  To: all former Ainatio personnel.

  From: Alex Gorko

  Subject: Elcano and the security situation

  Now that we don’t have to hide our access to advanced FTL and the presence of aliens, we’ve reconsidered the security situation and asked Britain to temporarily resettle Elcano’s personnel. The longer we wait, the higher the risk of an alien incursion, and rather than gamble with children’s lives we’re sending Elcano home to wait it out. When our colleagues are told about the aliens, they’ll be better placed to decide whether they want to come back. This wasn’t an easy decision, but now we can revive people somewhere safer, it’s the responsible one. I’ll be in the staff club on Monday from 1400 if you want to ask questions.

  * * *

  CO’s office: 0950, Monday, October 26, OC.

  The Ainatio staff wanted to talk about a few other issues apart from Elcano, Alex’s memo had said, so if Ingram was able to join them in the canteen at 1400, her input would be appreciated.

  His message imbued talk and appreciated with a sense of demanding to see the manager, which the staff didn’t seem to think was Alex. Other issues carried its own ominous weight, but it wasn’t hard to take a stab at guessing what the main item on the agenda would be.

  “Mutinous ingrates,” Ingram said. It required a firm explanation delivered with charm but minus apologies. “Can I keelhaul them, Sol?”

  “That might be comic exaggeration, Captain, but I suspect it’s one of those many true words spoken in jest,” Solomon said.

  Ingram looked up at the wall. “Is there something you know that I don’t?”

  “It’s what I don’t know that concerns me. People hang around in groups and talk, but when they do it in the middle of open ground, I can’t hear them.”

  “We could do something about that.”

  “Captain, you know very well I try to draw a line between monitoring and snooping.” It was always a touchy subject with Solomon. Ingram tried to stay off it, but sometimes she failed spectacularly. “It’s easy to classify missing personnel or the location of a fire as information I need to have without consent. But humans have a bad habit of expanding the definition of safety so they can impose control. To be frank, none of you would ever know if I was spying, but I respect human privacy because it matters to me to do so. And yes, I’m familiar with the argument about capability versus intent, but I am the capability, all of me, and I have little choice about that, so I put as many safeguards as I can into my intent, however imperfect it might be.”

  Ingram waited, expecting him to go on, but he’d had his say. She already knew that he thought she ignored the disapproval of the little people, so it was hard to decide if he’d treat her apology as sincere.

  “Sorry, Sol, I only asked,” she said. “You’re right. We don’t want a police state here.”

  “Anyway, I think it’s a good idea to go and speak to the staff this afternoon. Perhaps we should have done that as soon as we realised Tev was coming back.”

  He sounded embarrassed, as if he wished he hadn’t jumped on his soap box about privacy. Ingram did her best to imagine what it was like to be designed to be able to know everything, whether you wanted to or not, and why he set his own filters. It wasn’t just overload. Solomon had unique access to information about everything and everybody here if he chose to take notice of it, far more than any individual human would ever have, and if he acted on that — tip-offs, gossip, whatever — then he was in danger of replacing human communication, and that would make people more insular than they were already, as well as a little unhinged. Ingram had come to see him like the lone telepath in a normal society, burdened by knowledge and needing to find a way to shut it out so that he didn’t destroy the fabric of relationships.

  “You’re right, I could have handled it better,” she said. “In my defence, if I told people in advance, I’d have had an earful from the usual suspects. I told them afterwards, and I still got an earful, just from a different angle.”

  “I wasn’t criticising,” Solomon said. “Just exercising hindsight.”

  It was all about managing perception. On its own, each cock-up, misunderstanding, or knee-jerk had been innocent, but incidents eventually accumulated and took on a pattern for those watching, one that said the powers that be were carrying out a secret plan and it wasn’t benign. Perhaps today’s meeting would be a good opportunity to clear the air. Tensions were inevitable. Nomad’s isolation was almost like being cooped up in an orbital, because the vast space of an uninhabited planet didn’t change the limited human scenery. It was village life again.

  “We’re a couple of thousand independently-minded, intelligent people, so the chances of us agreeing on everything is zero,” Ingram said. “Am I going to have to justify not reviving the Elcano contingent again?”

  “Yes. You are.”

  “I accept that bringing her into Opis orbit for safekeeping wasn’t as good an idea as I thought, at least not from the general perception angle.”

  “But were you wrong?” Solomon asked. “Not now that Britain has the FTL data. The ship could still have ended up within Pham’s reach before she got here. Imagine Elcano was still on her way to Opis now at subluminal speed. If the FTL plans leaked to APS in the next few decades, which is a long time to rely on OPSEC, Pham would still be able to overtake a slow-route Elcano to pick her off or seize her when he felt like it. And then you’d have been criticised for failing to move her out of harm’s way.”

  Ingram had to think about that timeline, but it was a good defence, although not a reason she could have known about when she took the decision.

  “People who object to all the options in a situation often just need an excuse to have a go at someone,” she said. “Whether they realise it or not. Sometimes all they need is a lightning rod.”

  “They’re afraid,” Solomon said. “There really are things to be afraid of, but the unknown makes it worse.”

  “You’re going to remind me that nobody volunteered for this. Well, we did, but we’re actually talking about one specific group, aren’t we? Ainatio. I’d hoped the lines would have blurred by now.”

  “If Nomad had been completely isolated, they would have, I think.”

  “We’re still mentally shackled to Earth,” Ingram said. “But I think we always would have been, even without the option of contact and return.”

  Some people lashed out when they were afraid, and others wanted a reassuring boot placed on everyone’s neck, even if it was pointless. Ingram had only been prepared to maintain discipline within her crew. The rest of the civilians had never been part of that equation. She was supposed to hand over to them, not manage or command them.

  But it would all be talked out. People just wanted to vent and feel they’d been listened to.

  Ingram got on with the daily tasks that crossed her desk, which were still mostly about food production and surveillance of the Jattan navy. At least the food was interesting. Andy had been inspired to get on with the fish farm plans and wanted to co-opt Joni to help out. He was finding an absorbing role for another bunch of people who also hadn’t volunteered to be here. For a settlement where fewer than ten per cent of the citizens had actually signed up for Opis, it was a miracle that morale wasn’t a lot worse.

  Ingram paused to make a cup of coffee and took a breather with her screen propped on the desk, just watching the map to see who was where and what was happening. Her eye strayed automatically to the icons of the people she was most concerned about, but as she scanned the image, she gradually noticed a pattern she hadn’t seen before.

  An unusual number of Chris’s militia were clustered outside specific buildings, not mob-handed, just twos and threes, but they were suddenly at all the key positions. She still thought of them as Chris’s private army, even though they’d merged with Trinder’s detachment to become the Nomad defence force. But today they were noticeably not patrolling with Trinder’s guys. They were at the various power plants — the two reactors, the biogas units, the water splitter — and other critical sites, like the Caisin gate bunker and the main food warehouses. Those were the strategically sensitive sites Nomad would need to secure in an emergency. What were they up to?

  Perhaps she was being paranoid. Site security was as much Chris’s role as Trinder’s and he didn’t need her permission to do anything. It might just have been another exercise to test his team’s response to an alien incursion. Ingram checked her messages and diary again, but she couldn’t see any exercises scheduled for this week. That was when she started to wonder if Chris was reacting to a real situation.

  “Sol, have we got a problem?” Ingram asked. “Why are Chris’s people gathering at key sites?”

  “I don’t think it’s a coup, Captain. You can finish your coffee.”

  “It’s not like him to forget to list an exercise.”

  “I’m not aware of any unusual issues. I’ll ask him if you like.”

  Chris was a very able NCO but he had one particular talent that verged on a superpower. He could always spot trouble long before anyone else. Marc put it down to spending too much of his time “on orange,” hypervigilant and actively looking for threats. It wasn’t healthy, but it had its uses. He was a one-man early warning system.

  “No, I’ll talk to him,” Ingram said. “I’m probably imagining it.”

  She kept an eye on the map for the rest of the morning, noting the occasional change of personnel, although it was harder to spot some of Chris’s people because they weren’t chipped. Sometimes they didn’t carry chipped passes, either, and it was down to the bots around the base to recognise them and map their positions. But she’d already seen enough to wonder what was going on.

  She couldn’t find Marc or Tev, though, not that it surprised or troubled her. If two special forces guys couldn’t evade detection, they were slipping. They reappeared at lunchtime in the staff canteen, so she decided to drop in and see how Tev was doing. When she looked around the canteen, she found them eating with Chris. Well, that would kill several birds with one stone. She put her tray on their table and sat down.

  “Mind if I join you, gentlemen? How are things going, Tev?”

  “We’re just about settled into the house now, ma’am.”

  “And Sera?”

  “Confused about relative dates, just like me, but all we need to know is the baby’s due soon and it’ll arrive when it’s ready. Dr Mendoza says they’re both fine. She’s just a bit shocked about being here.”

  Ingram broke up her bread roll and dunked chunks in the soup. “Is there anything we can do to help ease that?”

  “I don’t think so, but thank you anyway. Mere’s not happy with me bringing all this trouble to her daughter, but at least Becky hasn’t ripped my head off.”

  Ingram had reached the stage where she couldn’t imagine much that wouldn’t upset people. It was a time of upheaval with a distinct shortage of better places to go. She’d bear that in mind when she spoke to the Ainatio malcontents.

  “Let me know if you think of anything,” she said. “I’m sorry about how this worked out. But if any of your family are really unhappy here, we can always find a way to get you back to Britain. Can’t we, Marc?”

  Marc nodded and stacked his dirty plates and cutlery. “Indeed we can.”

  Ingram could almost hear Chris’s thoughts. His expression never gave much away, but it didn’t have to. She’d said the unsayable. People — some of them, anyway, the special ones — could go back to Earth even if they knew about the Caisin gate. Resolve had crumbled in the face of human need. Ingram was sure he’d make that point to her sooner or later.

  “Did you have an exercise this morning, Chris?” she asked. “I saw you had teams out at key sites.”

  Chris still looked unmoved. “No, we were just showing a security presence in case anyone thought we’d gone soft.”

  “Scent of trouble, then?”

  “No intel, but if people want a meeting, and they’re muttering in small groups, and we know they’re pissed at us for various things, then there’s potential for escalation.”

  “Wait and see what they’ve got to say.”

  “Why?”

  “Being visible might make things worse.”

  For a moment, Chris looked like he was going to say something acid, but he moved on. “Well, if talking doesn’t solve the problem, we’re ready. You’re aware that my guys have pretty extensive experience of public order situations.”

  Marc let out a breath that could have been a sigh. “Sol’s capable of locking humans out of every essential service and running the show,” he said. “Been there, done that at Ainatio, right? Everyone’s fed and housed, so they won’t try to burn the place down. It’ll be all middle-class snotty complaints. In writing.”

  “We’ve armed them,” Chris said. It sounded like the two of them had already disagreed about this and were going over old ground. “And trained them to use lethal force.”

  “Yeah, but they know you’re a lot more lethal than they are.”

  “Let’s hope they do.”

  Ingram wondered if she’d missed something, but she trusted Marc’s personal radar. Chris was still operating in survival mode after living through the kind of upheaval even Britain hadn’t seen. Under the circumstances he wasn’t really overreacting, just aware of how badly the most reasonable of people could behave under stress.

  “Everyone here is an educated adult, Chris,” she said. “I don’t think we need to break out the water cannon.”

  Chris didn’t blink. “We don’t have one. I’ll put it on my list.”

  It was hard to tell if he was joking. He always had that blankly innocent expression that could have been deadpan humour or even mockery. She finished her soup and stood up to leave, clutching the tray.

  “I’d better get going. This meeting starts at fourteen hundred.”

  “I’ll see you there,” Chris said. “We all got an invite.”

  On the way back to the office, Ingram decided to pay a brief visit to her vantage point on the roof. When she’d been up there surveying the site over her morning cuppa a few hours ago, everything had looked and felt fine, and she liked to think she had her own sixth sense when it came to reading the mood on the base. The site was busier and more populated than it had been at 0630, but nothing struck her as out of the ordinary.

  Some of the Ainatio boffins were out on the green in small groups, eating their lunch. The weather was still mild and people enjoyed being outdoors in what would have been early winter back home. She didn’t see an insurgency in the making. She saw people who’d had to make a sudden transition from an isolated life in a lab on Earth, where they felt they had an urgent purpose, to being at a loose end on an alien world with an equally uncertain future. They’d had to find other ways to be productive. There was such a long waiting list to teach classes that Kill Line’s new school probably had the best science curriculum in the galaxy.

  Ingram reminded herself that Rome wasn’t built in a day, even if the Kill Line expansion literally had been, and she couldn’t expect an artificial, instant society to settle down in a few months. She climbed down from the roof and took a short cut through the office wing to the staff club, looking for signs of revolution brewing but finding none.

  Trinder was waiting for her like a sentry at the last set of doors before the staff club. It was hard to move around this place untracked even without a chip. He looked guilty. He usually did.

  “Trouble up at t’mill, Dan?”

  “Sorry?”

  “The workers are getting restless.”

  “Look, if they’re bitching about Elcano, Ainatio people are still my responsibility, even if the company’s dead and buried, and I’m the one who asked to send the ship home. So I want to lay it out for them first. If you take the lead on this, that’ll just fuel their conspiracy theories.”

  “Oh, so they do have some, then. Anyway, it’s Alex’s meeting, so if you beat me to it, fine, but I don’t want to look as if I’m shoving you in the line of fire. Or Chris.”

  “But Alex isn’t security, and Chris isn’t Ainatio. This is a company security issue. And I’ve never lied to them like Alex had to.”

 
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