Here We Stand, page 61




At some point, though, Sol would probably intervene, and Chris had to put a stop to this before things reached that stage. He’d been ready for assholes sabotaging facilities, but not for them simply blocking choke points and defying Joint Command to use force on them. With the base map telling everyone everything, right down to the planned movements of raw materials, it was relatively easy for smart people to work out a minimum-effort plan for maximum impact.
“What are their demands?” he asked.
“Elcano stays here, everyone’s revived, and everybody gets to call home,” Ingram said.
“And everyone gets to use the gate, I suppose.”
“Mentioned, but not a condition.”
It didn’t matter if anyone in command agreed with that. It was how pressure was being applied that presented the problem. “And you told them to ram it, I hope.”
“Not yet. I might not need to. They’re not hardcore protesters. They’ll run out of steam by tea-time.”
Ingram was going to let this get out of hand because she wasn’t used to dealing with confrontational civilians, let alone groups of them. Chris was, though, and he wasn’t going to let anything slide. Civvies could be dangerous enough without firearms, but these were armed and trained for the defence of the base, and as far as Chris was concerned that made them part-time soldiers. It wasn’t just about holding up the food supply process. If these guys didn’t learn some discipline now, they’d never be an effective force against an alien attack.
“Ma’am, things can go south real fast in these situations,” Jared said. “Especially with weapons involved. Extra-especially if they’re not so used to using them. We don’t want anyone killed by accident.”
“I realise that, Jared, but it’s not a riot. It’s an argument.”
Solomon cut in on the security channel. “Captain, we now have Ainatio personnel moving to the entrances at all four warehouses.”
Everyone could see what was happening on their base map. Chris was now getting radio messages from Dieter, Alan Lombardo, and Bern Ford, confirming Sol’s assessment.
“We’re backed up to the doors and we’ll clear a path by force if we need to,” Dieter said.
Chris could hear voices in the background. They weren’t yelling, but he heard someone say, “You can’t stop us, this is lawful.” He trusted Dieter’s judgement.
“Do what you have to to maintain order and allow access to folks with a reason to be there,” Chris said. He looked at Ingram. “Yeah, they just want to bitch at you, right? Look, they’re organised and they’ve managed to do it so we didn’t see them planning it, not even via messages. If we don’t knock it on the head now, this base will be run by the loudest whiners.”
Ingram wasn’t giving ground. “And I say we don’t escalate this.”
Chris had done his best to be nice to Ingram for Marc’s sake, but now he had to treat her like any other officer who was fucking things up and who wasn’t his CO.
“With respect, I’m running security on the ground,” he said. “That was what we agreed. If you’re going to talk, you do it after they’ve stood down. They’re banking on you having rules about not being mean to civilians.”
“You’re not helping, Chris.”
“If you want to help, Captain, go find Marc and keep him away from here. Dan shouldn’t be involved either. We’re fine playing the bad guys, but you have to work with these people afterwards.”
Ingram looked disappointed in him. It was his mother’s look. He did his best to override what he knew damn well was just a reflex with no place in the here and now, but it was hard.
“You’re giving me orders on my own base,” Ingram said, like he should have known better.
“I’m telling you that I’ll act to secure the warehouses and stop anyone interfering with the normal delivery of produce.”
“Got to agree with Chris, ma’am,” Jared said. “You hand more control to them and they’ll do it again the next time they don’t like a decision. You wouldn’t accept this on a ship.”
“They’re civvies,” Ingram said. “Until they do something that threatens the well-being of everyone else. Then they’re civilian detainees.”
“They’re a volunteer militia,” Chris said. “Once they pick up a gun, they’ve got different responsibilities.”
“There’s a time for blowing the crap out of things, but this is the time to talk and lower the temperature.”
“We’re not going to argue in front of them,” Chris said. “If it looks like nobody’s in control, everything falls apart. But we’re going to have a bulk milk delivery in... let’s see... twenty minutes and someone has to make the call. I’m going to give the truck clear access.”
Chris had to hand it to Ingram. She didn’t bluster or try to pull rank. His opinion just didn’t matter to her.
“I’ll have to talk them down in nineteen minutes, then,” she said, and headed back to the picket line, which had increased by twenty or more Ainatio staff, four more of Chris’s guys, and Luce, Fonseca, and Alex. Jared gave Chris a knowing nod and followed Ingram. As she walked away, Trinder broke off from the group and approached Chris.
“I read body language fluently, but you’re a challenge,” he said. “I assume you said you’re dispersing them. I did too. Erin was going to sort it out right away, but Ingram got involved.”
“Dan, I asked you to steer clear.”
“Yeah, you did, but I wasn’t going to leave Erin to handle that lot.”
“Just because she’s a sniper doesn’t mean she can’t drop people at close range.”
“I know, but you try standing back in that situation.”
“Point taken.”
“Anyway, I’ve just deployed my guys to back up yours at the other sites in case this is a diversion for something else.”
“Thanks, but your life’s going to be shit when this is over.” Chris looked around to see who else was going to pitch in. He was noting the ringleaders, the catalysts who’d trigger the others, the ones he had to subdue first, and he slipped his rifle into patrol carry. “You don’t think I’m overreacting, then.”
“No, like I said, if we don’t deal with it now we’ll be dealing with worse next time.”
“I thought we’d left this shit behind. Sol, you’re very quiet. What are you up to?”
“I’m observing,” Solomon said. “Marc and Tev are inbound. As you would be were the situation reversed, of course. I’m also monitoring all the sites and I’ll warn you if I see movement. I’ll let you know when the milk tanker moves out, but you now have fifteen minutes.”
“I can track the tanker on the map. So can they. How did we miss them organising, Sol?”
“I know I’ve failed on that.”
“I’m not saying you failed. I just want to know.”
“I never saw tracking data that suggested meetings or large gatherings, or any messaging,” Solomon said. “I suspect they’ve used an in-person cascade system, one to one, like your own evacuation plan.”
Chris was still making an effort to see the best in people after a lifetime of mistrust, but events always reminded him that he was right first time. He’d taught the Ainatio guys how to shoot and how to communicate via low tech in an emergency. He’d trained and equipped his own enemy. They weren’t doing much more than shooting their mouths off at the moment, but they all appeared to have their weapons with them — another of his bright ideas — and when emotions were running high, firearms just made the mix more toxic.
Marc and Tev strode up with that controlled casualness that always looked menacing, like a couple of hitmen killing time with an ice-cream before they went up to the roof to do the job.
“Oh dear,” Marc said. He had his rifle slung but his sidearm was holstered on his chest for a change, and a pocket on his angler’s vest appeared to be full of zip-ties. He opened the tab and offered the ties around like a pack of cigarettes. “Do we have to restore some public order, gentlemen? I was going to slip into my smoking jacket and read some Dostoevsky this afternoon. How rude of them to disrupt my plans.”
“Ingram’s trying to talk them down,” Trinder said.
Marc’s gaze was fixed on her. “She may well succeed. But if she doesn’t, as soon as she steps out of that ruck, we go in.”
“And if she doesn’t step out?”
“I’ll pull her out so we’re clear to operate.”
“Good luck with that,” Trinder said.
“We’ve stood back out of courtesy rather than undermine her in front of the boffins,” Chris said carefully. No-fraternisation rules suddenly seemed like a really good idea. Relationships made these situations messy. “She’s got eleven minutes before Kill Line gets sucked into this.”
“Probably less,” Solomon said. “The tanker’s moving now.”
Raised voices cut the conversation short. Tempers were fraying. Chris turned and the four of them just moved forward without another word, ready to lay hands on collars. But the ruckus wasn’t the protesters arguing with Ingram. It was boffin on boffin violence.
Some of the other Ainatio staff had turned up, the ones with grievances about Erskine, and they were yelling at their colleagues, calling them ass-kissers and asking why they’d disrupt their buddies’ lives for the people who’d abandoned them to face a nuclear strike. The worrying thing was that most were carrying their rifles. Things were getting dangerously heated. Ingram tried to be the peacemaker, hands out to either side as she stepped between them like a referee making two boxers break.
“She’ll have my guts for garters if I intervene,” Marc said.
“Let me do it.” Chris was going to pre-empt the whole thing and dive in now, and grab Paul Cotton first and maybe smack the bastard around a bit, but Solomon whispered, “Tanker, with you in less than a minute.”
You could normally hear vehicles a long way off in Nomad, but there was too much noise from the protest. Chris looked down the road and waited for it to appear. Eventually someone heard it, heads went up, and people looked around. The uproar quietened down a little.
It wasn’t a big tanker, but it was hard to stand in the path of a vehicle moving fast enough to do serious damage, and when Chris saw who was driving it he expected to see casualties in the next thirty seconds. Liam Dale wasn’t the braking kind. Marty the sheep farmer was in the passenger seat, which told Chris there was going to be trouble from Kill Line as well. Nobody needed a co-driver for a half-mile journey.
The picket line stood its ground. For a few seconds, Chris thought Liam was going to run them down but the tanker stopped barely a yard from them and both men jumped down from the cab. They were armed as well.
Marc sighed. “He doesn’t piss about, does he?”
Ingram stepped into the one-yard DMZ, which Chris thought was pretty gutsy of her.
“Come on, chaps, let’s keep a sense of proportion,” she said. “We’re talking. We can sort this out.”
Liam wasn’t listening. “Get them out of my way or we’ll move them ourselves.”
Paul Cotton stepped forward. He had to have his say. It was another point at which a few calm words might have turned things around, but that wasn’t going to happen, not with the head of steam folks had built up since the day Erskine admitted she’d lied about every aspect of the Nomad mission.
“Mr Dale, do you think it’s fair that we’re controlled by a Brit clique who can pop back to Earth when they feel like it and hand over our technology to their government?” Paul asked. “Are you okay with our colleagues being kept in cryo because of some alleged supplies shortage, and then dumped back on Earth in the state it’s in now? You don’t find that odd or objectionable or an abuse of power?”
“It’s fine by me,” Liam said. “Your colleagues were okay with leaving us behind when they thought we’d be nuked by APS. They can ship you all back and dump you in the Sahara for all I care.”
No sugar-coating today, then. Marc wove his way through the crowd and Chris moved to the other side of him so they could do a pincer movement to pull Ingram out if it all blew up. It was too crowded and chaotic to get a clear shot if it all kicked off and weapons were discharged, but if a boffin shot anyone, it would be an accident born of panic, not intent. Someone might still end up dead, though. That was all Chris needed to consider.
“Well, Mr Dale, that’s very enlightened,” Paul said. “I’m glad we know where you stand.”
“Good. Get out of my way, then.”
“Come on, give it a rest,” Ingram said. She sounded genuinely pissed off now. She jerked her head in Chris’s direction like she was pointing him out. “If we don’t talk this through, Paul, someone’s going to get hurt, so I’m asking you again to put your weapons down and disperse, and then we can have a civilised discussion around a table when everyone’s cooled down.”
“We did that already, Captain. You didn’t listen.”
“Move,” Liam said.
“We’re not going anywhere.” Paul was pushing his luck with a guy who’d shot a Jattan. “If we don’t do the right thing now, and just cave in to all this, what kind of society are we handing to our children?”
“I’ve got kids,” Liam said. “You haven’t. And pretty soon you won’t have any food either, because we’ll stop supplying it. We’ve got plenty in Kill Line. Good luck living on tomatoes and coffee from your crop tunnels. We’ll feed Cabot people if they come to the bar in town — except you, Miss Park — but not you assholes.”
“Hey, we’re not part of this,” one of the anti-Erskine bunch said. “We’re as pissed at them as you are.”
Paul moved. Chris didn’t think he was making a lunge at anyone, but Marty — nice, kind, generous Marty who never made a fuss and put up with everything in silence — obviously did. He grabbed the scientist’s collar and rammed him up against the front of the tanker so hard that Chris heard the clang of metal as Paul’s rifle scraped the tanker’s grille and clattered to the ground. Marty had his arm across his throat. Paul’s eyes bugged. Everyone froze.
“We don’t need you frigging parasites here.” Marty yelled it in his face at point-blank range. “Nearly every damn calorie you’re eating now either came from our farms and went into your stores, or it’s the fresh produce we’re providing now. We fed you for decades. You never found a cure for die-back. You even let the damn virus out and finished us off. If we’d wanted to stay in Kill Line and take our chances, you took that choice away. And then your boss left us to die. I lost everything my family worked for over three generations. Well, fuck you, Dr Cotton, and fuck all your kind. We’ll be way better off if we freeze the lot of you and send you back with Erskine.”
It was a slow-motion moment when all the awful possibilities flashed up in Chris’s mind as he pushed people out of the way. If he broke up the fight, they’d probably both turn on him. The onlookers might go either way, maybe boiling over, maybe shocked into slinking off because they hadn’t intended things to go this far.
But the resentment had been festering and now it burst out on all sides. Chris pulled Marty away and slammed Paul to the ground, arm up his back, knee pinning him down, and zip-tied his wrists. When he looked up for a second, the scene of pandemonium was unreal. There was no sign of Ingram, but Marc had his pistol to Ziegler’s head as he took his Marquis off him, a couple of the Ainatio guys were trading blows, and Erin had her rifle aimed at one of the anti-protest guys who looked like he’d shat himself in terror. Erin could be very loud without shouting, like she had an extra volume control.
“Put your weapon on the ground,” she boomed. “Put it down now or I’ll fire.”
Chris expected to see scattered bodies, but it was more like opening a bar door when a brawl was in progress and not knowing where to look first. His guys and Trinder’s were forcing people to kneel with their hands behind their heads while they disarmed them. Then something struck him hard in the jaw from his right side. He spun around and landed a punch in return before he even realised who’d hit him. It was the nuclear engineer whose home he’d had to search. He’d laid him out. Chris had no idea the man felt any ill-will towards him, let alone that he was capable of punching him in the face out of the blue.
But Chris didn’t know these people at all. It wasn’t the first time he’d thought that, and not knowing what his neighbours were really capable of was more threatening than charging into a hail of bricks and gunfire from a mob of strangers. Then the yelling and general noise began tailing off, and he took in his wider surroundings. He was standing in the middle of thirty or forty people kneeling with their fingers meshed behind their heads, men and women alike, a scene from a foreign country he wouldn’t have wanted to live in. This was their fresh start.
Shit. Shouldn’t have happened. How do we come back from this?
The whole fracas couldn’t have taken more than a couple of minutes. It was going to take a damn sight longer than that to repair relations, though. Chris looked around for the others and saw Marc wipe the back of his hand across his mouth as if he was bleeding. Trinder, Tev, and Jared were busy hauling cuffed protesters to their feet and walking them away. Ingram reappeared and strode over to them. One of the detainees was Paul.
“This could have been talked out,” she said, almost kindly. “What did you expect them to do when you show up armed?”
Chris didn’t hear the answer. He was trying to work out what Paul had said to get that response. But he knew he was being held up as the nasty thing that would happen to Paul if he didn’t behave now.
“Can we get this milk pumped out, then?” Liam asked. He was flexing and rubbing the knuckles on his right hand as if he’d thrown a punch or two himself. His split lip confirmed he had. “But I mean it about not supplying those bastards. They can starve. I’m going back to organise the farms. Marty? Come on, buddy. Let’s do what we came for.”