Here we stand, p.64
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Here We Stand, page 64

 

Here We Stand
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  He fastened his safety harness. “I’m ready. I’ll signal when I make contact. And I realise this is an impossible request, Cudik, but I forbid you to worry about me.”

  “Understood, Primary.”

  “And stay off the comms. I need silence to speak to Ingram.”

  “How long will you wait before you decide she isn’t going to respond?” Nesh asked.

  “The probe’s still active. She’ll hear me. Please do not attempt to recover the ship unless I explicitly say so.”

  “Yes, Excellency.”

  As the launch rails moved the small ship to the bay doors, Nir-Tenbiku rehearsed his lines again. He’d keep it simple. He’d throw himself on Ingram’s mercy, not in surrender but with a plea to be allowed to put his case, and if she declined further contact after that, he’d have to respect her wishes. He’d have another opportunity to ask when she returned Gan-Pamas’s body, though. He was sure she’d keep her word on that.

  The scout ship was now under way and he realised how tiny it was when it emerged from the shadow of Steadfast. He was in a small metal tube in a black void that he didn’t venture into very often and rarely saw this starkly, and he wasn’t used to microgravity. It unsettled him. The comms silence he’d insisted upon made him feel more alone than he’d ever been in his life, and the unfamiliar humming and clanking of the ship’s systems sounded louder and more alarming.

  Perhaps the humans couldn’t detect anything this far out, but it was hard to tell. He wasn’t going to take a chance of his intentions being misunderstood. He’d thought they’d overlooked the probe, but they’d only let it descend to get a better look and capture it. Whatever happened in the next few hours was going to teach him a great deal about humans.

  Cudik’s right. I’m insane to do this.

  I really am.

  He kept his eyes on the display to check that the probe on Opis was still receiving. At the bottom left margin of the image hovering in front of him, a blue icon appeared at his back and moved slowly closer. It was Steadfast. He let it continue, confirming the ship hadn’t strayed unintentionally. Someone had ignored his order. The corvette was following him.

  The last thing he needed was for Ingram to spot an uninvited and unannounced warship. If humans had missile capability, he wouldn’t know he’d been targeted until it was too late to change course, and if they had long-range energy weapons, he’d be dead even before that.

  He opened the comms link to Steadfast, determined not to get angry because that anger would stay in his voice when he spoke to Ingram.

  “Steadfast, this is Primary Nir-Tenbiku.” There was nobody else who’d be calling them, but he wanted to remain formally polite. “You’re following me. You’re far too close. Stop now and withdraw to your original position before the humans detect you. You’ll get me killed.”

  “My apologies, Primary.” It was Cudik. “We’d lost visual contact and you insisted on radio silence.”

  Nir-Tenbiku didn’t believe him. They were expecting to see the scout ship burning briefly as a missile hit it and trying to position themselves close enough to attempt a rescue.

  And maybe that was how his life would end after all. If it was, he’d face it like a Jattan, as Tenbiku men had always done. He’d do his duty. He hung on to hope and imagined a day in the future when he’d look back on this moment and see it as a turning point in Jattan history, the day they made new allies.

  * * *

  Dr Park Ha-Neul School, Kill Line: election day, November 10, OC.

  It was the ninth sunny day in a row, a glorious morning scented with freshly cut grass and the waft of malt from Dave’s brewery. Chris opened the gymnasium doors to let in the breeze and wished life could always be like this.

  He’d volunteered to help out with the election. It was the most normal, average, small-town thing he’d ever done and it felt totally alien. It was also the most important. The debacle at Warehouse 4 had shown him that laws — rules, regulations, social contracts, whatever you wanted to call them — were critical to survival out here, not because they told folks how to behave but because they laid out what would happen to them if they screwed with their neighbours. This election was the first step towards a society that would create its own laws and where the Paul Cottons of this world would understand what the stakes were before they decided to be fantasy revolutionaries again.

  Chris was still frustrated that the protesters had mostly gotten away with it. He didn’t disagree with the decision. He’d voted for it, in fact. It just seemed insane that there was no way of punishing the bastards at the moment because nobody could work out what constituted a reasonable sentence, thanks to the fact there were no damn rules written down about civilians. Punishment mattered. It didn’t just make a point to the perpetrator, it also signalled the system’s fairness to everybody else. When there didn’t seem to be any consequences for bad behaviour, it became an unspoken message that everyone else could act like assholes too.

  The alternative system was the basic animal one that still underpinned everything humans did. The most powerful and aggressive individuals decided what was allowed on any given day and set the level of punishment. He’d seen and done too much of that on Earth, and in a survival situation he’d probably be the one doing it here, along with Marc, but that didn’t mean it was a good idea to rely on it as a form of government.

  Well, at least he got the cryo sentence idea passed. Liam would be pleased that his rant about freezing down all the boffins and sending them back had borne fruit. Bots were breaking ground for a small detention block, and by tonight there’d literally be a new sheriff in town, Kill Line’s first. Chris checked his watch and prepared for a day of making democracy mean something that it had never meant to him before.

  Dr Park Ha-Neul School, named after Annis Kim’s great-grandmother as Ingram had promised, was closed for the day to double as a polling station, and Mrs Alvarez was overseeing the voting with a couple of the other teachers. She settled down at the table to arrange her checklists and the piles of ballot papers for what was now five wards following the addition of the transit camp. Nearly eight hundred voters were expected to pass through the polling station set up in the school gym before 1900 hours. Chris found village-scale efficiency reassuring.

  “What’s the turnout likely to be?” he asked, keeping an eye on the doors.

  Mrs Alvarez lined up her pens and pencils. “Oh, close to a hundred per cent. This isn’t the city. It’s hard to sit it out.” She placed a very old folding alarm clock on the table in front of her with a precision that confirmed this was a long-practised ritual. “Anyway, it’s time. Let democracy take its course, Sergeant Montello. Open the doors.”

  Chris removed the barrier blocking the entrance, an A-board announcing the opening of Marsha’s restaurant and the movie theatre in the old accommodation building, and the early birds filed in, led by the old ladies of the cookbook committee, fearsome women Chris would never dare cross.

  “You should have stood, Chris.” Mrs Kley picked up a pencil from the table at the entrance and collected her ballot paper from Mrs Alvarez. “We could do with a sensible young man like you on the council.”

  “Thank you, ma’am, but I don’t know enough to be useful.” Chris wanted to say that he thought local politics would bring out the worst in him, but he let her take it as a display of modesty. “I’m real good at sharpening pencils, though.”

  He’d spent the early hours assembling six screened booths and making sure the ballot papers were stacked correctly in wards. Back home, he couldn’t even remember bothering to vote in the few years between turning eighteen and going to jail because he knew it wouldn’t make any difference to how his life would turn out. But this time he caught himself believing that putting a cross next to names on a piece of paper would shape his future.

  Permanence and respectability had overtaken them all. The transit camp neighbourhood now had a proper designation for administrative purposes. Nobody wanted to be referred to as the transit camp any more because they were here to stay no matter what, not just passing through, so they’d settled on the name Convoy Ward. Their identity had been forged on the road, and that name said they’d arrived at their destination with a gruelling journey behind them. The accretion of all these small changes had now become roots.

  At first, Chris had thought he was going through the motions of dull citizenship to reinvent himself as a regular guy in the same way that some folks believed a man could train himself to be happy by nailing on a smile when he didn’t feel like it. But Ash had made a difference. Now that he had a woman to focus him, one who wasn’t a predator, he found his primal need for continuity was starting to emerge.

  He was still in the first heady flush of romance, but he’d started to look further ahead than the end of the day for the first time since prison. He wanted Kill Line to be the kind of place where his hypothetical kids could grow up safely, and where he could come home after a proper day’s work to have dinner with his family, knowing there’d be no bigger crises than a roof that needed fixing or a disappointing school report to address.

  It was a lot to ask for a man with so much baggage. Maybe he didn’t deserve it. Maybe it didn’t exist for anyone in the real world, either, and he’d just been idealising other families that were actually no happier than his own. But he’d met a lot of worse guys than himself who did have happy home lives, so he was at least entitled to try.

  Now the voters had started arriving, his election duties were finished and he had the day off. He’d help Jared and Marsha with the final preparations for the restaurant, and then he’d catch up with Ash when she finished her watch. Dinner and a movie was now a feasible date night for the first time in forever. Ash would probably have preferred sandwiches and a day out looking for monsters again, but a guy had to demonstrate at least once that he could do the formal stuff like a gentleman, even if it was a table at a pizza and burger kind of place.

  But that was the great thing about Opis. It didn’t have any real luxuries. Nomad Base had absolutely nothing to give a woman an ulterior motive for dating him — no designer clothes, no jewellery, no nice cars, none of the trappings of a fat pay packet and useful connections that Gina liked and only guys like Chris on the criminal fringe could provide for her. If Ash was with him, it was because she wanted his company. There were a couple of steaks reserved with his name on them for tonight, a bottle of fruit wine courtesy of Dave Flores, and two seats to watch a movie they’d probably both seen a dozen times before. That didn’t matter. It was the ritual that counted. Chris was determined to perform it with the diligence of a high priest.

  He collected his ballot paper, cast his votes — Doug for mayor, Dieter for sheriff, Jeanie Cleaver and Jared as ward councillors — and headed for the restaurant to see what still needed doing. When he stopped the rover at the end of the road to check to his right for traffic, he spotted a bunch of boys hanging around the Kill Line sign. They were looking up at the sky and pointing, probably waiting to see Curtis on a rare training flight as Searle rehearsed his flypast. He was determined to mark the election results with a display, and it was a good excuse for him to put in some flying hours before Ingram traded the ship for beads or whatever else she had in mind. The atmosphere on the base was still so hostile that the Cabot crew were doing their damnedest to make the day a fun event for themselves and the Kill Liners. Chris doubted any of the Ainatio dissenters would show up at the barbecue tonight.

  He decided to join the kids. He still didn’t know every Kill Liner by name, but he recognised Patrick, Armand Hillier’s son.

  “Hey Pat, anything interesting?” he asked, looking up.

  The boys were still glued to the sky. “Not yet,” Patrick said. “But we heard the engines start up.”

  “That was the Lammergeier,” said a kid Chris didn’t know. “Not the spaceship.”

  “Is it true we’re giving the ship back, Mr Montello?”

  Chris shrugged. “Maybe. Maybe not. Depends if they want to swap it for something worthwhile.”

  “We should keep it. It’s amazing. A real alien spaceship.”

  “We’ve got spaceships,” Chris said. “Four of them.”

  “But we’re not aliens. It’s cooler if it’s alien.”

  Chris couldn’t argue with that logic, and it was good to see kids refusing to feel jaded by their extraordinary new world. He leaned against the sign and watched with them. Trinder drove past in a Caracal, stopped to look, then got out to join them.

  “Any moment now,” he said, looking up. “I just hope Brad doesn’t try to do a barrel roll in that thing.”

  Chris could hear engines, but it was the other Lammergeier starting up, not Curtis. The Jattan frigate sounded a lot lower down the scale and he could usually feel the vibration if he was close enough. He was wondering whether she might have been useful for Earth missions one day when one of the boys pointed and he followed the kid’s outstretched arm to a cluster of farm buildings in the distance. A Lammergeier, Ainatio scarlet and almost luminous in the bright sun, had lifted above the roofline and was holding position. The second Lamm popped up some distance away and hovered as well. Then the distinctive low throb of Curtis’s engine confirmed she was taking off. The frigate rose into view between the two tilt rotors and all three craft hung motionless for a moment against a pure cornflower-blue sky.

  The kids oohed and ahhed. “That’s amazing! Will you look at that!”

  Curtis moved forward with the Lammergeiers flanking her like escorts. It certainly looked pretty cool even if they weren’t doing any fancy aerobatics.

  “Y’know, I never found out why Brad gave up flying for the engineering branch.” Trinder stood with his hands on his hips, smiling to himself as he watched Curtis pass overhead. “Damn, we’ve got to stop taking this stuff for granted. We’re the luckiest guys in human history. I just wish we had someone to tell.”

  Chris hadn’t noticed the rows of small blue lights on Curtis’s nose before. Whatever her drive was doing made him feel like his chest was vibrating, even though the engine noise wasn’t particularly loud. “It’s a shame she’s not what we need,” he said.

  Trinder opened the Caracal’s door. “I’m going up to visit the farmers again and make sure there’s no lingering resentment. Or at least not enough to make them cut off supplies. Any grievance that can make Marty lose his temper must have some pretty deep roots.”

  “Makes you realise where the real power lies, huh?”

  Trinder went on his way. Chris saw Curtis and the Lammergeiers out of sight and then mounted the bike. One of the seniors from Kill Line, Dorothy Kessner, had appeared at the end of the road and was heading slowly towards the centre of the base. She preferred to pick up her own food supplies, no matter how long it took her. As long as she kept moving, she said, she wasn’t finished, but Chris stopped to offer her a ride. She probably didn’t want one but he’d feel bad driving past her while she tottered along with her bag. He helped her into the passenger seat.

  “You’re such a kind boy, Chris.” He was conscious of her staring at him while he looked straight ahead at the road. She was probably checking the progress of his bruises from the warehouse brawl. “They should have locked up those scientists. At least we’ll have a sheriff by tonight, though.”

  Chris didn’t know if Kill Line’s law and order would creep outside its boundaries. Dieter policing the Ainatio district would be a sight to behold — and he’d get the job, of course. Nobody else had stood for election, although there was a “none of the above” option on the ballot.

  But Chris had to fend off the “nice boy” comments first. It was dishonest to say nothing and let people go on thinking he was an upstanding citizen. He’d always suspected that Kill Liners didn’t want to know about the past when it came to transit camp people, but he just needed to go on the record for his own peace of mind.

  “I wasn’t a nice boy until I joined the army, Mrs Kessner,” Chris said. “I did some terrible things. I ended up in jail.” He thought of Martin Berry and decided to do a little ground prep for the day when the minister came clean. “Okay, some folks are just bad and there’s no redeeming them, but others genuinely change. I don’t think I’ve managed it.”

  “But you’ve got humility,” she said. “That’s how folks change for the better. Not sure those professors have found that yet.”

  “I understood why they were upset.”

  “So is it that easy to go back to Earth?”

  Chris thought she meant the gate. “You’ve used the gate, ma’am.”

  “I meant the Captain’s ban on contact. Because I wish I’d stayed.”

  That wasn’t a good sign. “Don’t you like it here?”

  “Oh, I like it well enough, but I won’t be buried with my husband. It’s bothering me lately.”

  Chris understood the sentiment all too well. He wouldn’t have exhumed Jamie if he’d thought last resting places didn’t matter. “You want to be buried in Kill Line. The old Kill Line.”

  “Too late now.”

  Chris didn’t think twice. “If that’s what you want, I’ll take you back myself when the time comes. Which is years away, of course. But I won’t forget.”

  Mrs Kessner was quiet for a few moments. “That’s put my mind at rest. Thank you, Chris. I know you always keep your word. Won’t you get into trouble, though?”

 
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