Here we stand, p.7
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Here We Stand, page 7

 

Here We Stand
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  Marc got the feeling that Chris had been building up to that for a few days, but he’d told Chris not to tiptoe around him about bereavement. He was relieved that Chris talked frankly about it now. Knowing that your grief made people afraid to say anything somehow made it worse, like they were staring at a bloody stump where your leg used to be and wondering why you weren’t in more pain.

  “Yeah, sometimes I wish I had graves to visit, but they both wanted their ashes scattered,” Marc said. “We all fill in the form to say how we want to go, but I always wondered if they opted for cremation because they didn’t want me obligated to care for graves.”

  “Or maybe they really did love that river and thought it would be a nicer place for you to visit.”

  “Possibly.” It was easier to have this conversation with Chris than with Sandra. Chris wasn’t in permanent pain the way she was. “Okay, it’s a good idea. Thank you. I’ll give it some thought.”

  Marc went on his way to the warehouse he’d commandeered for weapons training, wondering where he’d even start with a memorial. It couldn’t be a headstone. It’d be a fake grave. It had to tell the truth, not just today but long after he was gone. What, then, a statue? He had no idea. He’d think about it later when he could concentrate on it. He tapped out a message to Ingram.

  I NEED A FEW TINY BITS OF JATTAN FOR COMPUTER MODELLING. NO MAJOR DAMAGE TO THE DECEASED. PLS TELL HAINE HE CAN DO IT.

  Liam Dale had managed to kill the Jattan with a shotgun, so maybe they already had their answers, but it wouldn’t hurt to find out if there was a better way of doing it. Marc carried on across the open green in the centre of the base, wondering if he could have detained the rogue teerik and got some answers out of him, then slowed to look over his shoulder as he heard the whop-whop-whop of wings.

  Rikayl, the weird chick from Caisin’s last egg, swooped down on him and crash-landed on his shoulder in a flurry of feathers. Marc braced to keep his balance. The kid was the size of an eagle now with claws to match, and according to Fred, he should have been talking fluently and able to use tools at this age, but he wasn’t developing normally. He didn’t even look like the other teeriks. They were all iridescent blue-black, and he was bright red. The medics and vets agreed with Fred that he hadn’t turned out right because of Caisin’s age and health, but Marc was coming around to Chris’s view that Rikayl was actually a throwback — a very smart bird, not a handicapped teerik. The boffins disagreed and pointed out in their let-me-make-it-simple-for-you way that no human reverted to an ape no matter how serious a genetic abnormality was. But they still couldn’t explain Rikayl.

  “I hope you’re not going to make a habit of that, Rik,” Marc said. “What do you want?”

  Rikayl’s bright yellow eye peered into his face at point-blank range. “No waaankah.”

  Wanker appeared to be his name for Chris, thanks to Jeff Aiken teaching him the word. Rikayl didn’t like Chris. He might not have been a genius like the other teeriks, but he knew the man with the gun kept an eye on him and didn’t trust him not to attack kids. Marc seemed to be tolerated, though. He’d work with that.

  “What do you mean, Rik?” Marc carried on walking, head tilted to one side to counterbalance the weight on his shoulder. “I’m not a wanker? I’m not Chris? Or are you asking where Chris is?”

  “Not waaankaah. Neee-nah. Maaaarc kill.”

  Marc took a few seconds to work that out. The penny finally dropped. Rikayl had seen him shoot the teerik who killed Nina. He’d decided Marc wasn’t a wanker because he’d avenged his beloved human mum.

  “Yeah, mate,” Marc said. “Sorry I didn’t shoot the bastard before he got her. I’m your friend, then, am I?”

  Rikayl made a hissing noise that sounded like a yesss of approval. He was smart, alright. Jeff — Chief Jeff to the teeriks, Chief Petty Officer Aiken — had taught him to play card games like Patience. So Rikayl grasped numbers, and he definitely used language. He wasn’t just mimicking. Chris was on to something.

  “Okay, Rik, be nice to Chris, will you?” Marc said. “He’s my mate. He’s okay really.”

  “Wankaaaaah,” Rikayl said. “Okay really.”

  Then he laughed, real human laughter in a woman’s voice that sounded just like Nina Curtis. It was too real. It made Marc’s stomach knot. But teeriks were great mimics, and Rikayl had obviously picked up laughter by listening to Nina. Maybe he wasn’t laughing about calling Chris a wanker at all, just recalling something that Nina had done that made him happy. But it sounded to Marc like he found it funny.

  Marc wondered how he’d get Rikayl off his shoulder when he reached the hangar. He didn’t want him in there during weapons training because he could be stubborn when he didn’t get his own way. But he needn’t have worried. Twenty yards from the doors, Rikayl spread his wings and started flapping.

  “Kill,” he said, and took off, smacking Marc in the ear. “Kill, kill, kill.”

  He soared at a steep angle and disappeared in the direction of the church. Marc watched him go and decided the little bugger knew exactly what he was saying.

  Rikayl had also seemed to know where the Jattan freighter had landed and had zeroed in on it, even with its stealth shield that made it invisible until you were only a few yards away. But that was a question for another day.

  He’d keep wondering about it, though.

  02

  I’m pleased to announce that Commander Bradley Searle has been appointed First Officer of CSV Cabot, effective immediately. He’ll continue to lead the team adapting SDV Curtis, formerly designated Nar P12, for human crewing and the defence of Nomad Base. Lieutenant Commander Jacqueline Devlin is promoted to the rank of Commander and will carry out the duties of Chief Engineering Officer.

  Captain Bridget Ingram, announcing new appointments in the wake of Peter Bissey’s resignation.

  Teerik compound, Nomad Base: September 23, OC.

  “Why Curtis?” Pannit asked. “Why not Caisin? Why a human’s name?”

  “Because it’s a good name for the ship,” Hredt said, not looking up from the Earth broadcast on his screen. It was fascinating but confusing information and he needed to concentrate. “All the other human ships are named after explorers as well. It fits.”

  “But Nina wasn’t an explorer.”

  “Of course she was. She risked danger to travel to an unknown world. And she died because she thought all teeriks were as friendly as us, so we have a duty to commemorate her.”

  “But how will we honour Caisin?” Pannit asked. “Her gate’s one of the greatest achievements in engineering.”

  Hredt looked up slowly, copying the movement that Chief Jeff used to indicate impatience when he was about to restate a point that someone had failed to grasp. “Caisin already has her memorial, and the gate’s named after her. There’ll be many more inventions and places to name. I guarantee nobody will be unaware of Learned Mother’s genius when it’s safe for others to know about it.”

  Pannit generally kept his thoughts to himself, although he was always a little more talkative when Turisu wasn’t around. But he was almost aggressive today. It was starting to wear on Hredt’s nerves. The communal room at the centre of the complex the humans had built for them should have been a quiet sanctuary for a few hours while Turisu was on board Shackleton with Demli and Runal, teaching them while she worked on the vessel’s upgrades. Pannit was ruining Hredt’s brief respite from his daughter’s constant disapproval.

  “So are you always going to call yourself Fred now?” Pannit asked.

  “I’m Fred to my human friends, and Hredt to all of you.” Fred was still the best humans could do to pronounce Hredt’s name properly, but he wasn’t offended by that. It was close enough. Human soldiers gave each other nicknames and he was happy to be included in that camaraderie. “I’m content with that.”

  “So what are you watching?”

  “Have you no work to do?”

  “I’m taking a break. Just like you.”

  “Well, I’m trying to concentrate on this broadcast.” Hredt knew he was being unreasonably irritable, but he couldn’t help himself. Perhaps old age was shortening his temper. “We’re supposed to be upgrading the Ainatio fleet, Pannit. All four ships need spacefold drives as a matter of urgency. It’s not just for the humans’ survival. It’s for ours as well.”

  Pannit carried on, undeterred. “Are you going to tell me what you’re watching, then?”

  “Events on Earth. News.” Hredt felt his neck feathers start to rise. “I want to find out what’s happening. They transmit information to everybody, all the time.”

  “Even if they don’t have a permit to know it?”

  “Apparently.”

  “Did you ask Ingram if you could watch?”

  “Solomon said it was permitted. He wouldn’t do that if Ingram didn’t approve.”

  Pannit wasn’t giving up. “Is the news full of state secrets, then?”

  “I can’t tell,” Hredt said. “I’ve watched news from three different nations. They talk about the same topics but say entirely different things, even about this crop plague. Chief Jeff says people don’t believe all the information anyway.”

  “Sounds stupid to me. Why do they bother, then? How do they make anything work?”

  “Perhaps news isn’t meant to inform and the real exchange of information happens elsewhere.”

  “I saw soldiers searching the base,” Pannit said. “They had mechanicals with sensors testing the buildings. But they checked everything when they arrived, so why are they worried about contamination now?”

  “If you can’t think of anything useful to occupy your time, I’ll find something for you to do.”

  “I want to know. Nobody’s transited between here and Earth since the great arrival. Doesn’t their sensor equipment work? Can’t you find out?”

  “Pannit, I have very little time left in my break period. And very little patience as well. I’ll find out what I can. Now please leave me in peace.”

  Pannit stiffened his back as if he was about to lunge. “Don’t take it out on me because your daughter’s nagging you.”

  “If she’s nagging me,” Hredt said carefully, “then you should show me more consideration. Shouldn’t you?”

  “You never used to be this grumpy,” Pannit said, and stalked out.

  Hredt now felt guilty for snapping. He’d apologise later and make more allowance for the stress everyone was under. The whole commune seemed to be more argumentative, even his grandsons, and the events of the last few days hadn’t helped. Their comfortable existence in a secure city like Deku, all their needs met, was over. The reality of freedom had turned out to be fear, then hunger, and now close proximity to violence. It was ironic for professional creators of armaments and warships. Even though the humans fed and protected them, the reality of being a target in a lawless world was a sobering experience.

  It was Lirrel who worried Hredt most, though. A solitary teerik was unheard of, but this one had apparently managed to escape and join a Jattan arms dealer. He’d even become aggressive enough to use a makeshift weapon. None of it made sense. The entire population of teeriks belonged to the Kugin, and they were so valuable that they were always closely guarded on the rare occasions they left Deku. There were no unknown teeriks, and there’d never been a case of a teerik trying to escape until Caisin had urged them to rise up and build a new world for themselves.

  In the end, the commune was left waiting at the rendezvous point for comrades who never came. They were now exiled with the prototype warship they’d hijacked and presumably a price on their heads. How had Gan-Pamas acquired Lirrel, then? Where had he come from? How had the pair found Opis?

  The planet didn’t seem to be uncharted any longer. But no teerik in Kugad could have revealed its location, because Opis had never been part of the plan. It was a last-minute, panicked decision when the commune realised it was on its own and had to hide. Hredt put his screen down, still unable to work out how this had happened. The logs of Gan-Pamas’s freighter provided no answers. But if there was another teerik civilisation somewhere, and somehow the exiled Jattan opposition had found its homeland, it might have explained Lirrel.

  Hredt had no idea where teeriks had come from. No teerik knew their distant past. Their species was ablun, but everyone called them teeriks, the Kugal word for creator, inventor, designer, engineer. They were repositories of knowledge and skills, and — to the humans at least — the ultimate engineers and physicists. But their genetic memories didn’t seem to contain any traces of a culture before they came to Kugad.

  What are we? What were we in the past? Yes, we look like raptors, but what were we when we evolved?

  Hredt had read enough human history now to understand one thing about independence movements. They were all anchored to a time when a group of people believed they were a separate population with distinctive customs, however embellished or invented that belief might be. Teeriks knew they weren’t native to Kugad, but they had no past to resurrect and no ancestral language to embrace. There was only the existence that Hredt and his commune had rejected.

  Now they were free, but as dependent on the humans here in Nomad Base as they’d been on the Kugin. There was a difference, though, even if Turisu refused to see it. The humans treated them as equals and seemed to want them to be independent. Humans were fundamentally just. There was nobody here to force them to behave in a certain way, and the commune couldn’t defeat them, so their actions had to be what they truly believed was right. When more of them arrived and their civilisation spread, they would eventually rival the Kugin and their client states, and erode their power, and that was good news for every nation that didn’t want to be a Kugin vassal.

  Hredt still had no doubts about what had to be done. Humans had to be supported and encouraged to spread by all means necessary. This was his purpose, discovered late in life but all the more powerful for it.

  A burst of music from the screen jerked him out of his thoughts. The news bulletin had ended. He watched for a few seconds, expecting something new, but the broadcast just started repeating something he’d seen earlier, word for word and image for image.

  It was time to resume work. He was due for another session of what Marc Gallagher called debriefing on Kugin and Jattan operations, but first he had something important to hand to Ingram. He’d spent the last couple of days collating information on the class of FTL drives being fitted to the Ainatio vessels parked in orbit, and he’d written it in English.

  This was his gift to his human friends. It described everything Earth needed to build its own FTL ships that were equal to Kugad’s fleet and become a truly spacefaring species, written in a format that human engineers could understand, a complete set of instructions they could simply follow like a manual. Hredt never imagined he would be willing to commit his knowledge to a permanent record. Teerik trade secrets, mostly kept in their heads, had always been their insurance against ill-treatment, and as far as the Kugin military industry was concerned, their skills were irreplaceable. Hredt had finally learned to see it not as a defence but as a source of power.

  If only we’d tried to use it for ourselves.

  He switched off the screen and gazed at the device for a few moments, suddenly afraid that he’d done something reckless. It wasn’t too late to delete the documents. He fought down the panic and reminded himself that the world had changed forever when the humans arrived, and now teeriks had to change with it. He slipped his screen in the pocket of his jacket and left the compound.

  The base seemed to be getting back to normal today, but there were still more bots around than usual. As Hredt crossed the grassed area at the heart of the base, referred to as “the green” by the humans, he could see the mechanicals moving around, slowing at intervals to eject sampling probes. The bots that monitored the base were a third of his height, small enough to be unobtrusive but large enough to be seen and avoided as they skimmed around buildings. It was the larger ones that he still gave a wide berth, from the giant construction machines and autonomous mining units to the four-legged animal-like models. They were harmless, but old habits died hard. Even Solomon, an emanation unlike any artificial mind the Kugin could build, was somehow intimidating in the quadrubot frame he liked to move around in.

  Hredt dodged a monitor bot before it had the chance to avoid him. Any mechanical was a good deterrent, even if the humans didn’t realise it. A Jattan or Kugin pilot, used to avoiding areas populated by mechanicals, would have taken one look at them and assumed the worst, just as the commune had when they first detected the activity on Opis. Here was an unpopulated world with mechanicals busy excavating and constructing. There were buildings, but they’d seemed to be factories or storage facilities. It looked like any automated mining or manufacturing operation, except it was on a world with a rich ecology, and planets like that generally presented more practical problems than conveniently barren, ready-to-mine worlds of rock and ore.

  But the machines here weren’t sentient. They were just an advance party of robotic equipment preparing Opis for human settlers, nothing like the mechanicals left on unpopulated worlds to carry out commercial operations as they saw fit. To those miner robots, any outsider who landed, organic or mechanical, was a legitimate target for attack. No unauthorised pilot who valued his ship — or his life — would attempt to land.

  But we did, though, didn’t we? We did exactly that, even before we knew the ones here were harmless.

  It was a logical decision. It had been worth the risk to land here. The ship had the ability to bury itself in the ground thanks to the Jattan client’s specific needs, and, to borrow Chief Jeff’s phrase, nobody would bugger around with an army of mechanicals. This was a good place to hide.

  Then the humans arrived.

 
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