Here We Stand, page 65




“I doubt it.” Chris felt better too. Sometimes it didn’t take much to make people happy. “I’m a good friend of the sheriff.”
Things looked quiet around the central buildings this morning, but a couple of Trinder’s people were still patrolling Levine Road between the security office and the food warehouses. Chris stopped at Warehouse 5 and saw Mrs Kessner into the building like a gentleman before returning the rover to the vehicle compound and walking across the green to the old accommodation building.
For once Solomon hadn’t sent the bots in to do the place up. He probably thought his humans would be happier doing something creative for themselves and would ask for bot assistance if they needed it. The room reserved for Marsha’s restaurant was only a big, dull space on the ground floor, but it could take ten tables, which made it the Ritz as far as Nomad was concerned. He found Jared hauling chairs through the doorway and gave him a hand. They placed the tables and chairs down one side of the room and then tried to rearrange them in a more welcoming layout.
“You need something on the walls.” Chris gestured at the industrial grey panels. “Big landscape pictures. A few mirrors. Mood lighting.”
Jared made a show of frowning and looking him up and down. “Damn, Chris, you getting all designer on me? See, this is what happens when you hook up with a woman. You’ll be holding opinions on cushions next.”
“I’ve already done cushions. Hey, we can get a construction bot to transfer pictures onto the walls? How about tropical sunsets?”
“It’ll only remind people of home.”
“Not if we pick images without trees and recognisable Earth features. Sol, are you listening? Can you get me a painter?”
“Of course, Chris.” Chris could have sworn Sol was laughing at him. “I’m glad to see you appreciating the arts.”
Marsha turned up with a trolley bot laden with prepared meals and Annis Kim in tow. “Annis is going to maître d’ for us,” Marsha said. “She’s done it before.”
“Actually, I worked in a kebab shop while I was at uni,” Kim said. “But I can do classy too.”
“You bored with bending space-time, then?” Chris asked.
Kim moved some of the tables as if the positions mattered. She seemed to know what she was doing. “I’m only here to get first crack at the leftovers. I’m a growing girl.”
This was what Nomad could always be like, Chris decided. They were having harmless fun, nobody cared who had a PhD or a criminal record, and the most pressing issue was keeping track of the meal inventory to make sure anything that wasn’t consumed was stored for later. Everything had to be accounted for. Chris checked the food containers to make sure they had token values marked on them and wondered whether he could ever have done this for a living. Yeah, maybe he could. All purposeful jobs came down to the same thing in the end.
A construction bot showed up, one of the cubes festooned with nozzles and sprays to apply coating. With a little remote help from Sol, it projected the required images of a sunset-tinted ocean and a gold sandy shoreline onto the walls before spraying the colours in place like it was painting by numbers. The room looked about right for a family diner now.
“So what’s the mood like behind closed doors in the boffin quarter today?” Chris asked.
Kim shrugged. “Don’t worry, I’ll dob them in the second I overhear anything bolshy going on.”
“They’ve calmed down, then.”
“I think the possibility of going in the chiller cabinet brought a few of them up short. Don’t let anyone tell you you’re not creative, Chris.”
“Where else were we going to put them? Keeping prisoners takes up manpower, and you still have to feed them. It solves our immediate problem and it’s kinder to them. The prison’s going to be tiny and it’s only for short sentences.”
“I always knew you were a wet liberal at heart.”
Chris finished putting chairs in place. It was one of those moments when he stood back, looked at the amount of new furniture and other stuff that had appeared, and realised how much the manufacturing operation was churning out every day.
Marsha studied the walls. “Thanks, Chris. It looks awesome. Your steaks will be waiting for you tonight.”
“Medium rare and medium.” Chris wished he still had his suit and tie, but the last time he’d worn that was when he was taken back to court for sentencing. Maybe he could get the bacteria farm to make him a smart shirt at short notice. “Any bookings from Ainatio?”
“Some. But we won’t be doing bar brawls here. Not with Dr Kim the Broken Bottle Queen and Jared in his tux on the door.”
Chris turned to Jared. “You never had a tux.”
“Have now,” Jared said. “I look scary in it. I might not let your type in. We’ve got standards to keep up.”
“Okay. I’ll sneak in the back entrance. See you at twenty-one hundred.”
It wasn’t even lunchtime yet. Chris ambled across the green, amused by the thought of Jared in a tuxedo, and said hi to one of the biomed team as he passed him heading the other way. The guy cut him dead and walked on. So that was the way they were going to play it, then. Maybe he was expecting too much from people who’d been cooped up for years in an institution where they thought they called the shots. They’d gradually realised they were now lower down the pecking order than a guy who spent his day ankle-deep in cow shit. It wasn’t their fault, either. But they’d have to deal with it.
Chris stopped to watch some of the Cabot guys setting up the barbecue and food stalls for the evening. At least they were getting into the spirit of things. Folks needed some fun after the last few months and an election was enough of an excuse, even if they weren’t voting in it. Hiyashi, Nami Sato, and Maggie Yeung were busy peering into a tyre-sized metal bowl that looked like a scavenged machine part. It was only when Hiyashi poured something into it, shoved in a thin stick, and started chuckling to himself that Chris realised what they were doing. After some stirring, Hiyashi pulled out a stick covered in thick white fluff. They’d made a cotton candy machine.
“Awesome,” Chris said to himself. It would have been even better if the scientists joined in, but nobody expected things to snap back to normal in a few days. What was normal anyway? The Ainatio HQ staff and the Kill Liners had never mixed back on Earth and Ingram’s attempts so far to break down the social barriers hadn’t had much effect.
Chris decided to see what Marc was up to now that he’d lost a couple of classes of firearms students to the weapons ban. The map showed him in one of the workshops with Tev. Chris called him on the secure network.
“Hey, am I missing something?”
“We’re testing Fred’s portable gate,” Marc said. “Just working out the best way to mount the controls.”
Chris thought of Solomon’s aborted confession. His first thought was that it concerned the teeriks, because even Chris had his action plan if they became dangerously inconvenient. “Is he okay today?” Chris asked.
“A bit distracted, but that’s boffins for you whatever the species. Is there a problem?”
“No, just asking after all the awkward arguments over leaking data.”
“We’ve moved on. We had to.”
“Well, don’t forget to vote before nineteen hundred. You and Ingram are both on the electoral register now.”
“Chris, we’re making technical magic here, you jobsworth. Anyway, my place hasn’t even got an address. I was thinking of declaring it a British territory and making myself governor.”
“You still get a vote. You’re between Convoy and Mill wards. Pick one and go to the school.”
“Bloody hell, what happened to you? Pipe hitter to pen-pusher in sixteen weeks. Have you been taking teerik pills?”
“I’m working on being a normal civilian.”
“There’s no normal for blokes like us, mate. Not for long, anyway.”
Chris was about to point out that Marc had rebuilt a different normality around himself since he’d been on Opis, but maybe the guy was just hoping that action became habit and then reality in the same way Chris had. He seemed more at peace with himself. That was enough encouragement for Chris to believe that he could overwrite his own baggage.
“Just vote, will you?”
“Okay. But I’ll expect a bribe.”
Chris still had most of the day to kill. He could do a little gardening, maybe, or go for a drive off-camp. Yeah, he’d take one of the Caracals out. He rarely went outside the wire unless he had a work-related reason, which seemed a terrible waste of a planet, and he still hadn’t done much by way of hands-on geology. He might not get any free time again for months. It was a shame Ash was working today, but he’d find some interesting rocks for her. She was endlessly patient with his hobby in a way he knew Fonseca would never have been.
He loaded a few survey maps onto his screen in case he lost the base network and went to sign out a Caracal. Rovers were more fun, but they weren’t armoured and they didn’t have any hatches to lock if he ran into aggressive wildlife.
“Sol, I’m going off-camp.” He’d head south in the direction of the mountains this time. The mines and quarries were on that track and the bots had spent years route-proving to map safe terrain for traffic, so he could stick to a tested path. “Call me back if you need me. I’m just exploring.”
“Don’t let the scientists know,” Solomon said. “They’ll want to go with you.”
“The ones I pushed around won’t. Look, I’m going about thirty miles south.”
“There are some granite formations out there you might enjoy.”
“Sol, you’re the only person on this base who can say that and not sound like you’re ragging on me.”
“I’ll get a drone to follow in case you run into problems.”
“Okay. Thanks.”
Chris drove out across the perimeter, slowing while the system overrode the minefield to let him pass. As he moved further out, he realised it wasn’t only the drone keeping him company. A flash of red to the left caught his eye. He lowered the window.
“You escorting me, Rik?”
Rikayl was keeping up with the Caracal, dead level with the side window. “Waaaankah! Where you go?”
“I’m looking for rocks. Stones.”
“Dumb.” Rikayl seemed to be developing his own voice, not just mimicking whoever first said the words he’d learned. “Food? Bouncy furballs!”
“How come you can eat all that shit and not get sick?”
“Eat shit!”
Damn, Chris hadn’t intended to teach him any more profanities than Jeff already had. He tried not to react. If he did, it just proved to Rikayl that it was worth saying again.
“So you don’t hate me any more,” Chris said.
“Marc say mate alright really.”
It was impressive. Rikayl might not have been a normal teerik genius, but he had a pretty good grasp of language. Chris could understand him with a bit of guesswork. So Marc had put in a good word for Chris, and Rikayl had decided on a ceasefire. He still called Chris wanker, though. And Chris still found it funny.
“Are you going to follow me all the way?”
“Yes.”
“It’s a long way, Rik.” Could a teerik cover thirty miles? Terrestrial birds crossed oceans, but that didn’t mean a juvenile teerik could. Chris wondered if he should stop to give the kid a chance to recover. “You sure? You could ride on the roof.”
“Fly.”
“Okay.”
Chris decided to stop every five miles to give the annoying little bastard some water and a breather. But he was only three miles down the track when his radio handset lit up on the dashboard.
“Chris, we have a problem,” Solomon said. “Can you return to base, please?”
Chris slowed to a halt. Rikayl landed on the Caracal’s hood and peered through the windshield at him.
“Sure, Sol. What’s happened?”
“We’ve detected two ships approaching, probably Jattan.”
“Ahhh shit.”
“We’re still trying to confirm their origin. Ingram’s put the base at action stations, so report to the command centre.”
“On my way.” It was the worst news, but Chris was actually relieved the waiting was over. This was what they’d prepared for. Everyone knew what to do, and even if they were short of a few dozen armed scientists, that wasn’t going to make much difference now. He hit the rear hatch control and dismounted to coax Rikayl inside. “Rik, get in, buddy. We’ve got to go back. You won’t be able to keep up with me at top speed.”
Rikayl cocked his head to one side. “No. Not. Won’t.”
“Get in.”
“No no no.”
“Get in now.”
Chris pointed to the rear of the Caracal but Rikayl wasn’t having any of it. He made an angry growling noise and planted himself on all fours on the hood.
“Okay, screw you,” Chris said. “I don’t have time to dick around. Make your own way back.”
He climbed into the Caracal and started the engine. Rikayl was still standing on the hood, defying him to do something about it. It was dumb to let a bird provoke him, but Rikayl had pressed his self-respect button and he still wasn’t in the mood to put up with anyone refusing to comply. He swung the APC around, put his foot down hard, and sent Rikayl skidding to one side of the hood. The teerik tried to grab the door frame but went spinning sideways, wings flailing, and vanished like a wrapper tossed out the window. Chris kept going.
The rear hatch was still open, though. A hundred yards and a few moments later, Rikayl crash-landed in the crew compartment in a flurry of feathers. He wasn’t happy.
“Waaaaanker. Bastard. Hate you wanker.”
Chris caught a glimpse of fluffed-up scarlet feathers in the rear-view mirror. He braced for an attack, but the driver’s seat was a good shield against claws and beaks. He still kept his hand on his sidearm, though.
“And don’t crap on the seats.”
“Hate wanker. Crap crap crap.”
“The Jattans are coming. Bad guys. Dangerous. Understand?”
Rikayl appeared to grasp the Jattan bit. He settled down like a broody hen, still making angry noises.
“Jattan wankers.”
“Yeah. Jattans. Wankers, all of ‘em.”
Chris’s brief taste of normality was over and he hated himself for feeling upbeat about it. This was what he excelled at, though, his calling, and everyone he cared about was woven into it as much as he was. It probably wasn’t healthy, but it was natural and comfortable. He pushed the Caracal to its top speed and almost hit the mined perimeter before it had a chance to deactivate.
The base had changed in the short time he’d been outside the wire. The only people walking around were on patrol — his guys, Trinder’s, and some of the Cabot crew — and there were now anti-aircraft missile launchers and gun trucks parked at key positions. Even the sound of the base had changed. It was almost silent.
He parked the Caracal behind the main building. “Go and hide, Rik,” he said. “The Jattans are coming.”
He didn’t expect the teerik to understand, but Rikayl hopped onto the rail of the hatch, looked around, and flew off. He’d be okay. It was time to worry about the civilians who would now be sheltering in place because most of the underground bunkers weren’t finished. It felt just like the bombing run that never happened back at Ainatio HQ. Life seemed to be playing out on a loop.
The grandly-named command centre was more like a store room lined with monitors and sensor plots, and until now it had seen less action than the admin office. Its output was fed through to security, but it hadn’t exactly been the throbbing hub of the base. It was alive now, though, and the crush of bodies made it feel more tense. A dozen of Ingram’s people were crammed in with Cosquimaden and Trinder. Ingram stood behind Hiyashi, watching one monitor in particular, the one with an aggregated feed from the ships in orbit and the northern hemisphere sat network. Thermal and EM signatures were overlaid on the images in real time.
“Are we sure that’s a ship?” Trinder asked. “It could be a missile.”
“There’s at least two.” Hiyashi pointed with his pen. “This small one’s about seven hundred klicks out, and the bigger one’s following it at about three thousand. I can’t detect any more yet.”
Ingram watched, arms folded. “Okay, commit the probes. Get a closer look. Whoever it is knows we’re here, so we don’t need to be coy about checking them out.”
“It’s got to be Nir-Tenbiku.”
“Agreed, but the question is whether he’s come for a chat or if he’s brought his fleet to sort us out.” She looked at Chris as if they’d never had any differences. “With any luck he’s just being pushy. If he’s hostile, we have options. Curtis still has her directed energy weapons, or we can just gate devices into their ships.”
Chris craned his neck to study the monitor. He’d never been good at interpreting imaging and it could have been a medical scan for all the sense it made. He could see the objects, but he couldn’t work out what they were doing or how fast they were doing it.
“How did we spot them?” he asked.
“The first ship is now within the orbit of your vessels,” Cosqui said. “It’s close to the trajectory the shuttle takes from Cabot, and both Elcano and Shackleton detected it. They have the upgraded sensors.”
“So whoever it is knows where to land. Yeah, it’s got to be the Jattan opposition using their probe as a homing signal.”
“It appears so.” The teerik cocked her head. The probes were now in position. The visual display switched from two vague blobs to a finely detailed image of the first ship with a lot more superimposed information from the sensors. Then the other ship appeared in close-up as the monitor split into two images. Being able to move assets instantly was a wonderful thing. “Ah, that’s a Kanur-class patrol ship. Larger than Gan-Pamas’s freighter, but still small, and no spacefold capability. The other is an old Type Four corvette built by Kugad, so I can give you deck plans and a list of likely armaments. That means it’s the opposition, because the Protectorate scrapped its Type Fours years ago. But the ship is still formidable. It has energy weapons and it could easily destroy the base.”