Here we stand, p.52
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Here We Stand, page 52

 

Here We Stand
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  “I didn’t hear any threats,” Alex said.

  “I did,” Chris said.

  Ingram left with Chris, followed by Trinder and Alex. They stopped up in the courtyard between the clinic and the comms tower and had an impromptu wash-up.

  “They can’t interfere with Elcano,” Ingram said. “She’s up there and they’re down here, and nobody’s going to fly them there. And anyway, there’s Sol.” She tapped her earpiece. “Right, Sol?”

  She looked up out of habit, but it was just the sky, not a networked office. It did remind her that Solomon had godlike powers, though.

  “Correct, Captain,” he said.

  “You heard all that.”

  “Indeed. I can lock personnel out of every control system on the base. I don’t want to sound rude, but Nomad can function without humans, as it has for decades. So nothing will be sabotaged. But I agree with Alex. I don’t think I heard any hint of escalation. Paul Cotton doesn’t seem to know what to do, only that he objects to what you’re doing.”

  “We’re just prepared,” Chris said. “Even civilised people can do crazy shit if they’ve got a crowd egging them on and they’re agitated enough.”

  Alex shook his head. “We haven’t even got any bricks they can lob at us. I don’t think any of the boffins can throw anyway.”

  “It’s not the physical consequences I’m worried about,” Ingram said. “It’s the psychology. It’s not even about Ainatio versus everyone else. It’s nationality. Suddenly Brits are the villains.”

  “Well, there’s only two nations capable of getting out here, and that’s you and APS, and I’m fine with it being you guys.” Chris didn’t seem worried. “Anyway, Dieter’s got the dogs out. We just don’t want to be caught with our pants around our ankles.”

  Ingram was still making an effort to like Chris. Even if she failed, though, she knew she could count on him and it made her feel strangely guilty. “If we get heavy-handed, it’ll never be forgotten or forgiven,” she said. “The rift between Ainatio and everyone else is just going to get bigger.”

  “But this isn’t just about sending a ship home or Brits taking over,” Chris said. “It’s about maintaining functional discipline, and yes, that covers civvies too. If anyone disruptive sees weakness, things fall apart fast. We’re on our own and we’ve got plenty of external threats to worry about. People need to see that someone’s in charge. It makes them feel safer.”

  “Yeah, if we give in, we open the door to all kinds of demands when the going gets tougher,” Trinder said. “If we come under attack, getting people to do as they’re told is going to be the difference between Nomad surviving and being the most remote war grave in Earth history.”

  “Well, we’ve certainly bigged this up in our imaginations,” Alex said. “Indignant boffins one minute, armed insurgents storming the presidential palace the next.”

  “Let’s not get too paranoid,” Chris said. “And I know that’s rich coming from me. I don’t like some of the boffins, but they’re not the enemy until they start using force or jeopardise the safety and security of the base.”

  “I’m worried that I’m back to thinking Paul’s got a point about the Caisin gate,” Ingram said. “I admit I blow hot and cold on it. As Marc never forgets to point out.”

  “Push comes to shove, would we sacrifice anybody to keep it under wraps?” Trinder asked.

  “No, I wouldn’t,” Ingram said. “In the very worst scenario, we should be prepared to use the gate to evacuate the base and live with the consequences of its wider discovery.”

  “Sounds like we’ve got a policy, then.”

  “We’re here to protect the residents of Nomad, not to police the galaxy’s arms race.”

  “I hate being a grown-up,” Alex said. “But at least if someone else gets hold of the gate tech, we’re relieved of our superhero duty to ensure it’s only used for good.”

  “We still have some bad things we might need to do with it ourselves yet,” Ingram said. “I’d like to hang on to our advantage until we don’t need it any longer.”

  “See? We’ll be doing this for the rest of our lives.” Chris glanced at his watch as if he needed to be somewhere else. It was one of the twenty-six-hour straps that one of the engineers had been printing as a sideline but they still reminded Ingram too much of hospital tags. “It’ll always be a burden. Even if we cut ourselves off from the rest of humanity.”

  “Anything else we need to do for the time being?” Ingram asked. “I was going to look in on the firearms training today, but now I’m wondering if we’ve armed the revolution instead.”

  “We passed the thousand mark this week,” Chris said. “Counting two-hundred and twenty-one trained military personnel, we have one thousand and two adults and teens capable of defending Nomad with firearms.”

  “That’s brigade strength. Well done.”

  “On paper. In reality, that’s about forty per cent expert to pretty good, and sixty per cent between useful and basic competence.”

  “It’s good enough, Chris.”

  “Thank you, Captain. Marc’s the one to pin a medal on, though. He’s been driving this from the start.”

  Ingram wondered if Chris was trying hard to like her in return. They both might fail, but it was one of those situations where it really was the thought that counted. She’d settle for civilised discourse.

  The huddle broke up and they dispersed. Nomad looked comfortingly busy doing small-town things, if small towns had large bot populations and gun trucks passing up and down the main road. The noise of farm vehicles, quad bikes, and the occasional cow mooing in the distance told Ingram all was well for the time being. This was normal Opis. Her brain had filed it as background noise to be filtered out.

  But there were no birds, and she still noticed that gap in the natural soundtrack. Nothing except teeriks breached the barrier field around the perimeter. Eventually, when Earth’s transplanted ecosystem had spread far enough and displaced enough native habitats, the base probably wouldn’t need a barrier, but by then Nomad would be a small backwater in the spread of human settlement.

  Ingram had to make that expansion happen. Standing her ground now was the key to it. She knew they wouldn’t be the first settlers to pack their bags if things got too hard, and Lawson had said he wouldn’t blame them if they did, but she couldn’t live with the shame of failure. There was no going back. They wouldn’t be able to forget humans had once built a colony on an alien world and say it was too bad that space didn’t work out. Ingram could move civvies around to safer places like chess pieces, but it was her duty to hold the line here until the day someone removed her by force.

  She checked her map as she walked across the green to call up the latest resources figures for the training section. The base map had now grown even more layers and could answer almost every how, what, where, and when about Nomad and the space around it. Ingram tapped on the warehouse icon and called up the data.

  There it was. Training sessions ran twelve hours a day, fifty-eight per cent of the military personnel spent between four and twenty hours a week as instructors, and fifteen per cent of the base’s clean-up bots active during the training day were tasked with collecting the spent cases and other debris to recycle the polymer into fresh ammunition. With the chemical production resources for making primer and powder — simulation wasn’t a complete substitute for firing live rounds — it was more resource-hungry than she’d thought, but they had plenty of raw materials and the priority now was to be ready for an alien attack.

  One thousand and two. Bravo Zulu, Marc. And Chris.

  Now that was a proper militia. There were now very few adults and teenagers here who weren’t armed and able to fight, a fact Ingram had to take into account when she worked out how far she could push people. It was the old dilemma of training allies and hoping they didn’t turn those skills on you one day.

  She slipped into the warehouse via the side door and took a pair of ear defenders to stand behind the safety cordon and watch the class for a while. Some of them were pensioners from Kill Line, well into their seventies.

  The number of elderly and infirm willing to have a go at the enemy was sobering. Luce was teaching them handgun skills today, shooting on the move. But instead of being distressed to see elderly men and women tooled up and pumping rounds into disturbingly realistic alien figures instead of pottering around the garden, Ingram found it was a reason for optimism.

  Old people had become an increasingly rare species in the Western world as the Decline progressed. Life expectancy had dropped by fifteen years even before die-back. Children might have been a nation’s hope for the future, but elderly guerrilla fighters were a sign of something equally uplifting as far as Ingram was concerned. They weren’t going to fade into quiet helplessness, and they had no plans to die anytime soon. They summed up Nomad. Mankind wasn’t beaten yet. It could regroup and rebuild from decline.

  Luce paused and looked over the heads of his class. “Are you joining us, ma’am?” he asked, with a look that suggested he thought it was high time she did.

  “I’ll be in later this week, Sergeant,” Ingram said. “I just came to see how everyone was getting on.“

  “We’re ready.”

  Luce didn’t need to say what they were ready for. Ingram still wondered how effective the weapons would be against Kugin even with improved ammunition, but at least she knew a farmer’s everyday shotgun could kill a Jattan. She watched a couple of the old ladies from Kill Line drilling holes in the child-sized Jattan dummies at very close quarters, aiming down at the head as the most vulnerable point, and hoped it would never come to this. Perhaps the old girls felt they had nothing to lose. They looked wonderfully harmless in their knitted cardigans and gardening pants, but the unblinking determination on their faces said otherwise.

  Is this what I brought them here for? Really?

  And then there was Reverend Berry. It troubled Ingram to see a vicar in his dog collar doing fast reloads.

  For a moment, she thought he’d joined the pensioners to show willing or boost morale, but she realised he was now one of the instructors, another detail she wouldn’t have missed if this had been her ship. Perhaps he’d done national service before he was ordained, but whatever the explanation, he handled a weapon confidently, and she couldn’t really object to a man of God being ready to defend his congregation with lethal force. There was room for interpretation in the fifth commandment.

  Ingram was polishing her softer skills though, which she’d assumed she’d always had. She could charm and persuade. She could be such a nice, down-to-earth woman despite her rank and connections, people said, and she knew when to switch it on, but there was more to it than being formally gracious and informally friendly. It meant not steamrollering men like Paul Cotton into compliance, even if letting him have his way wasn’t possible.

  There’d been a time when she’d have been able to manoeuvre him into thinking the Elcano evacuation was his idea, but she seemed to have lost her touch in the last few weeks and painted herself into a corner. Now she couldn’t climb down without looking like she’d give in on other issues if sufficient pressure was applied.

  “So you’re sending Elcano home,” one of the old dears said while she reloaded. “It’s for the best. They can always come back later.”

  “I hope you don’t feel pressured to stay,” Ingram said. “Nobody ever intended you to have to fight here.”

  “If we left, we’d still end up back here sooner or later,” the woman said. “You know what? For the first time in years, I feel like I’ve got a real purpose beyond deciding which grandchild gets my antique clock when I’m gone. We’re making a new future for mankind. Ordinary folks — especially us old ones — don’t usually get a chance to do that, let alone have a say in it. So I’m not budging an inch.”

  That was what Ingram had set out to do when she’d signed up for the mission. She’d just forgotten about it. She wanted to be like this old girl when she finally grew up.

  “Thank you for reminding me of the bigger picture,” Ingram said. “It’s too easy to lose sight of what we’re doing.”

  “Just remember we’re a long time dead. Seize what you can while you can.”

  It wasn’t new advice, but that didn’t make it any less valid. Ingram had seized one half of her life but kept the other at arm’s length because it was too difficult and now she regretted it. It wasn’t enough to be a dead heroine in a history book, and that Bridget Ingram had never really existed. She went back to the main building, wondering what it was going to take to unite everyone and whether she was capable of doing it.

  “I hope you heed that advice, Captain,” Solomon said in her earpiece.

  Sol’s little asides and interruptions felt like having a conscience that really did talk to her. “What should I seize, then, Sol?”

  “I think you’ve forgotten that you were supposed to move out of your cabin today.”

  “I’m not avoiding it.”

  “Good, because I had your belongings moved to Marc’s house.”

  “You pulled that stunt on Dan.”

  “And now I’ve pulled it on you.”

  “A bot’s been rummaging through my underwear drawer, you mean.”

  “I’ve left your more sensitive belongings for you to handle,” Solomon said. “But I’ve already scheduled the refurbishment. Your cabin will be an office by this time tomorrow.”

  “What if I’ve changed my mind about Marc?” Ingram asked.

  “You haven’t, but if you did, you’d have to sleep in one of the store rooms until a house was ready for you. I know you’re preoccupied with Paul Cotton’s band of ingrates, but you’re all here to lead normal human lives, not to import crises and burn yourselves out on them. Go and be a normal woman for a few hours.”

  “Bloody hell, that’s a tall order.” Ingram marvelled at Solomon’s ability to bollock her and get away with it. “I’ll sort it out now.”

  Once she’d cleared the last of her personal effects, it would be a done deal: she’d have moved in with Marc, with no moving back. She packed the last remaining bits and pieces from her cabin — pictures of shipmates long gone, a collapsible stool, Ainatio’s bogus commemorative plaque marking the loss of Cabot — and found she suddenly felt happy for the wrong reasons. At last she could go home and there would be someone there to unload her day upon. It was an unimaginable luxury. It wasn’t a positive approach to domestic bliss, but she couldn’t help it.

  Marc was already home when she arrived. She put her holdall in the bedroom and realised she no longer had any private space outside duty hours. She checked where Howie was and found him in the back garden, working out how to tie plant supports.

  “I see you’ve pissed off the workers’ revolutionary committee,” Marc called from the kitchen. “Good work, Boadicea.”

  “It wasn’t me. It was Chris. Well, I started it, I suppose, but Chris was keen to finish it.”

  “A cattle prod up the arse works wonders.” Marc walked into the living room, wiping his hands. He had a split lip that hadn’t been there this morning. “It’s too late to undraw red lines.”

  Ingram forgot Elcano for a second. “Good God, what happened to you? Have you been in a fight?”

  Marc started laughing. “I’ve been training some of the technicians. Unarmed combat. I know it won’t be much use against the Kugin, but it builds confidence. The last fight most of them had was at kindergarten.”

  “And they beat you?”

  “No, but a couple of them are showing promise. And Mangel too. Us old buggers against the kids.”

  He looked pleased with himself. On one level, Ingram understood his need to blow off testosterone-laden steam and pass on his skills like some paramilitary village elder. But she was horrified that he’d been hurt enough to bleed. She tried to act as if it was all in a day’s work. For him, it was.

  Howie walked in clutching a couple of lettuces. “Are we going to make the salad now?”

  “Give me five minutes to clean up,” Ingram said. “Is that another chicken I can smell cooking?”

  “We’ve got lots of wings and legs,” Howie said proudly. “Mrs Brandt killed some chickens today. They don’t live long, do they?”

  He didn’t sound upset by it. Ingram wasn’t sure if that was a good sign. She’d certainly never imagined kindly Mrs Brandt as a chicken slayer.

  “That’s what tortoises say about us,” she said. “And mussels. And sharks.”

  Ingram was just starting to learn to deal with children and the task suddenly seemed so vast that it put her worries about rebellious boffins on the backburner for a while. This was her new reality, wrapped up in a matter of days. This was now her home, Howie was her shared responsibility, and she’d find out whether Marc’s charmingly eccentric habits would eventually get on her nerves. Landing on Opis had been easy. This was the real alien landscape — an instant surrogate family. She’d have to get used to where the plates and cups belonged and catch up on Howie’s day, memorising the names of teachers and fellow pupils who populated his own daily dramas.

  None of this had been part of her plans. She’d always thought all those things didn’t apply to her, and that she was somehow excused from a role in normal society because she was a destroyer, not a creator. Her family had prepared her to be that way. But here she was, just a primate like everyone else, needing the basic animal things — food, a mate, a shelter — that underpinned everything humans did and made.

  She hoped Solomon was satisfied with her normality score. She didn’t think she was doing too badly for a beginner. The more she focused on unremarkable domesticity, the less likely she was to seek out battles to fight because she knew no other life.

  “Fred’s ignoring me.” Ingram washed the dishes while Marc dried. Howie was getting ready for bed. “I suppose I ought to go and see him. Mend a few fences.”

 
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