Here we stand, p.71
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Here We Stand, page 71

 

Here We Stand
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  Ingram liked the way Searle thought and almost wished she didn’t. “That’s an idea.”

  “What about the teeriks?” Trinder asked.

  “Good point. The Protectorate will tell Kugad where Nir-Tenbiku got Curtis and they’ll come looking for them. So we’re screwed on that front too.”

  “No, I meant what Nir-Tenbiku said about them. That they’re basically Dieter’s dogs.”

  “That was freaky,” Alex said. “Do we care?”

  “The point is do we tell them.”

  “You think they don’t know?”

  “I don’t think Dieter’s dogs see themselves as owned,” Trinder said. “They treat him as their pack leader.”

  “Yeah, but teeriks understand concepts the way we do. Calling them animals might just be an interspecies insult. We should tell them what was said, but it doesn’t change how we see them, does it? Tell me it doesn’t.”

  “I’m more interested in how you domesticate an animal into a rocket scientist,” Chris said. “It took nature four million years to turn a hominid into Todd Mangel. How did someone do it with teeriks?”

  Ingram could imagine Chris as the kid who kept asking awkward questions at the back of the class to piss off an ill-prepared teacher. “Perhaps they started with better raw material,” she said.

  “Maybe.” Chris didn’t sound convinced. “But that’s still way more than domestication as far as I’m concerned.”

  “Have we ruled out semantics?” Alex asked. “Swap the word domestication with civilisation and it might make more sense. Maybe Jattans are snobs. Fred said they think they know it all.”

  Chris shook his head. “No, Nir-Tenbiku referred to Kugin as people and barbarians. So he’s not saying animals in the sense of savages. It doesn’t look like a translation issue.”

  “He did confirm Fred’s Gan-Pamas translation, though,” Alex said. “Abomination. So at least we know Fred was levelling with us, if we’re still worried about that.”

  Ingram was replaying the conversation from her own memory, but she’d go through the recording later.

  “Nir-Tenbiku said something like there had to be limits on interfering with the order of the natural world,” she said. “If he thinks teeriks are just working animals, he might mean we shouldn’t treat them like humans. A warning about anthropomorphism.”

  “Look, it’s not going to change how we treat them, so can we save this for a pub quiz and worry about security?” Marc asked. “Evacuating Elcano just became a bit more urgent. We need to discuss dates with Lawson.”

  “Nothing’s changed,” Ingram said. “We delay it so that it takes a plausible transit time that fits the FTL drive Lawson thinks we’ve got. When he tells us he’s fixed accommodation for them, he gives us the time and location, and we back-time from there. What’s a regular FTL trip to Earth, then, four weeks? Five?”

  “Twenty-five days,” Searle said. “According to Cosqui.”

  Marc moved out of shot. He must have stood his screen on the dash and leaned back in his seat. “Okay, I’ll press him. Anyone disagree with me telling him what was discussed with Nir-Tenbiku?”

  Chris shrugged. “No point in hiding it now. He might even have some foreign policy tips.”

  “The first rule of which is what’s in it for us,” Ingram said. “If Nir-Tenbiku can provide intel on the Kugin, that might make it worth having an arrangement with them.”

  “Enough to risk letting them have a base here?” Trinder was always the sceptic, not as contrary as Chris but likely to want to wait and see. “They could be here for decades. This revolution hasn’t moved fast so far. They might bring all their relatives and buddies too. But how do we know they’re not just three guys and a dog? The Protectorate doesn’t seem to have shut them down yet, so they’re either amazing ninjas evading Jatt’s finest or they’re hobby guerrillas the Protectorate can safely ignore.”

  “Yeah, that question needed asking,” Marc said. “How many times have we seen that on Earth? Just because Nir-Tenbiku’s an alien, it doesn’t mean he’s not a conman looking for someone to bleed dry. Fund us or the bad guys will attack you next. You know the scam.”

  Ingram knew Nir-Tenbiku would contact her again at some point. She’d pin down a few more things then. “Let’s see how long he takes to come back to me and ask if I’ve made a decision about Curtis,” she said. “If I contact him first, he’ll think he’s hooked us and he’ll get what he asked for. We do need to know what the Kugin are doing, though.”

  “So we do what we’ve done at Dal Mantir,” Chris said. “Sol hacks into their system and we listen.”

  “Or my spyware manages to overhear what the opposition hears,” Sol said.

  “But we’ve had surveillance in place for weeks now and we haven’t learned anything about what the Protectorate’s doing to find Curtis,” Trinder said. “It’s not a perfect solution.”

  “No espionage is.”

  “I don’t think we’ve missed anything, Major,” Solomon said. He sounded defensive. “Perhaps we’re not intercepting the right channel. But I’m making further inroads into everyone’s comms now.”

  “And I suspect what we’re picking up from the Protectorate might be more useful to Nir-Tenbiku than it is to us,” Marc said.

  Ingram was sure the Protectorate wouldn’t have given up looking for the ship and the Kugin hadn’t lost interest in recovering their renegade teeriks. She knew she was attributing human reactions to aliens, but even if Fred’s assessment was wrong, she’d now gained some insight into Jattan psychology, and she could see they were persistent if nothing else. The opposition had been planning to retake Jatt for years, and Nir-Tenbiku didn’t take no for an answer either. That didn’t necessarily mean that they succeeded, though. Maybe Jattans were all talk, which was a lot closer to Fred’s assessment of them.

  “Could we stop them if they showed up with a bunch of Jattan hard hats and started breaking ground?” Chris asked. “We’ve got complete satellite coverage of Opis, but we had all that on Earth once, and we still didn’t see every square foot of the surface. We kept finding new species, too. If Nir-Tenbiku showed up on the opposite side of the planet, we might not even know.”

  “The question is whether Kugad or the Protectorate would know,” Ingram said.

  Searle rustled and scraped as he tried to find a more comfortable position in the heads. “We could stop Nir-Tenbiku. Remember that Cosqui says the Protectorate thinks he’s only got ten ships, which is serious opposition for us, but nothing to the Kugin or the Protectorate. It would mean a shooting war here, though, and we don’t know who else is backing him and might come after us.”

  “If they’ve got backers, they’ve done sod all for them so far,” Marc said. “But they’re not going to fight the war with ships. They’ll need to create an insurgency, if only because they can’t go in and flatten Jatt without a lot of collateral damage to people they’re relying on for support. ‘There, we’ve freed you, sorry about your gran.’ Hard to sell that.”

  “But it isn’t our problem until they make it our problem,” Chris said. “Wait and see. In the meantime, we go ahead with what we’ve already planned and scope out the alternatives for getting intel on Kugad’s intentions.”

  “Yeah, I hate to sound unadventurous, but unless there’s some advantage for us, there’s no point in discussing concessions with them,” Trinder said. “Which is pretty much what you told him, Captain. But he did say that if there’s anything we need, you should call him. I’m going to give that some thought.”

  Ingram rubbed her eyes. It was nearly 1500 hours but it felt like the middle of the night. “Okay, let’s wrap this up and carry on as we were.”

  “We’re going to hang around out here after Steadfast’s clear,” Searle said. “Just to test Curtis and see what we might be letting go. We’ll bring her back in time for the election results.”

  “Twenty hundred,” Chris said. “Doesn’t take long to count in a small town. Apparently we’ve got some fireworks, courtesy of Ainatio’s chemists.”

  “Those fireworks better not be a bloody bomb,” Marc said. “We’re still on Boffinworld’s bugger-about list.”

  The inset images on Ingram’s screen switched off one by one as the team logged off and left her nursing half a cup of lukewarm tea. Life went on now, no matter how many history-changing events happened. The extraordinary was so commonplace here that she’d finally become immune to it. She looked for Marc’s radio signal, which already showed him in the vehicle compound, so he was probably dropping off the rover. Then the tracker moved towards the main building and she could see he was heading her way. It took him longer than she expected to reach the office, but when he walked in he was carrying a couple of mugs of tea.

  “I’m so hen-pecked,” he said, putting one on her desk and pulling up a chair. “Are we going to send Lawson the recording, then?”

  “My gut says no, but my brain says there’s no reason not to, because we might be charcoal this time next week and someone’s got to arm Earth with the intel. It’s at the stage now where he’s the one who has to make the decision about who else he involves.”

  “Yeah. Okay. I was daft to think we could decide what’s best for Earth. It’s one thing trying to hide Nomad, but the whole alien thing is too big, like Chris kept saying. Any dream people had of starting from scratch without any interference from Earth is probably over.”

  Ingram sipped her tea. Marc never put enough milk in it but she wasn’t going to tell him. “Just remember it’s Fred’s doing.”

  “Look on the bright side. It saved us from agonising over making the decision.”

  “I’m glad you’re back in one piece, by the way. Awkward boarding.”

  “That obvious, eh?”

  “Only to me.”

  “It’s not that I’m afraid of dying. It’s how I die that I worry about.” Marc looked at his watch, then took out his screen. “But I did it and I can do it again. Look, Lawson’s going to be calling me back in a few minutes. We’d better have that file ready to send. Sol, can you sort that, please?”

  “Certainly, Marc.”

  “Are you coming with me to the Kill Line event tonight?” Ingram asked. “Congratulate the new mayor and all that.”

  “There’s beer and a barbecue on the green, and Doug’s going to be re-elected. Of course I’m coming. And I don’t think Howie’s ever seen fireworks before.”

  “We’re going to enforce normal Western life here if it’s the last thing we do, aren’t we?”

  “That’s the whole point of coming here. A little bit of England.”

  “And a lot of America.”

  “When we finally decide to go our separate cultural ways, which I think we will, I’m going to found a new town called —” Lawson’s call came in and cut Marc off in mid-declaration. “Before I answer, are you in or not?”

  “I’m in. Can’t avoid him, really.”

  Marc put the call on speaker and sat back. They still hadn’t progressed to video calls, but Ingram understood Marc’s need to play as many of his cards as close to his chest as he could without any visible tells when he was bluffing.

  “Guy, how are you?” he said. “Thanks for getting back to me. First things first — we’d like to firm up a date for Elcano. It’s going to take us twenty-five days to get her there. One reason we want to press on with it is related to this recording I’m going to send you now. We had an unexpected visit from some of the aliens earlier today. All very polite, a nice diplomatic chat, but we’re becoming less of a secret out here.”

  “Good grief,” Lawson said. “Corvid aliens?”

  “No, the eel-headed ones.”

  “Oh, of course.” At least Lawson had a sense of humour. “Eels.”

  “With legs. Sending now.”

  There was a long silence, at least a couple of minutes. Marc just stared up at the ceiling. Then Ingram heard a quiet “Oh...”

  “Guy, are you watching the recording?” Marc asked.

  “Dear God, they really do have faces like eels.”

  “Okay. I’ll let you finish digesting the content.”

  Ingram could hear the audio of the meeting with Nir-Tenbiku in the background. Listening to herself, she thought she hadn’t done too bad a job under the circumstances. The Foreign Office certainly couldn’t have done any better. Eventually, Lawson spoke.

  “Quite extraordinary,” he said. “Putting monumental culture shock to one side, I think the experts are going to be shocked that you can hold complex conversations with these people. Not the language — I mean the shared concepts. There seems to be a lot of common ground. Of course, that might mean there’s a lot of ground to fight about as well, but I suspect this is a situation where common sense beats academic overthinking when it comes to first contact.”

  “Well, not exactly our first contact with Jattans,” Marc said. “Just our first non-violent one.”

  “Ah, yes. Gan-Pamas. One of their ministers.”

  “Could have been a war. Wasn’t.”

  “Are the teeriks really animals?”

  “I don’t think so. And even if they are, technically speaking, they can still do sums that baffle our PhDs and speak English fluently, so we treat them as equals.”

  “And the opposition, if we call them that for now, have offered mining concessions and other benefits for your support.”

  “If they win. We don’t need it, but you never know how handy that might be in the future.”

  “I’m glad we’re on the same page.”

  Ingram never underestimated Marc, but sometimes she was surprised to see just how politically astute he could be. She’d definitely found the right man. He knew the score.

  “We just had a wash-up and we’re not ready to let Nir-Tenbiku put a base here,” Marc said. “If we let him have the stolen ship, which isn’t much use for defending Nomad, it’s more likely the Protectorate are going to spot it and use the intel to locate us. But it’d also help him hit them hard so they’re too busy with him to look for us. We need to find out whether he’s got the resources to take back Jatt or if the opposition’s just a bunch of washed-up ex-pats holding court in a bar.”

  “You’re doing everything I’d do, Marc.”

  “Anyway, our priorities are to defend this settlement and make sure Earth’s location remains secret.”

  “Any other data you can give me?”

  Marc glanced at Ingram. She mouthed not yet at him.

  “It’s piecemeal stuff, but we’ll collate what we’ve acquired from a little basic espionage,” Marc said.

  “I wish I could offer professional support, Marc, but I don’t think anyone here could do a better job than you are right now. But I suspect we’re at the stage where I need to brief a minister about the existence of aliens. I’m not looking forward to that.”

  “Yeah. Had to happen.”

  “Are aliens all as reasonable and cultured as the teeriks and the Jattans?”

  “Apparently some are and some aren’t, but we’re ready for that.”

  “I’ll firm up the plans for your evacuees. I’ll take a guess that it’s going to be at least another month before we can receive them.”

  Marc looked like he was calculating. “Remember that we switch to a new calendar at the New Year, which will be later than your New Year, so factor that in when we talk specific dates. You’re already running days ahead of us.”

  “Will do. My, this is quite the time to be alive. Do you still require information relating to Corporal Cho?”

  “I certainly do.”

  “We’ve acquired building plans that might be a little out of date by now. We’re trying to find current ones, but I think you’ll still find it useful.”

  “Appreciate it,” Marc said. “Thank you.”

  “I still hope I’ll have the chance to visit Nomad.”

  “Let’s hope Nomad is still here to visit. But we’re not doing too badly. The town’s holding its first elections today, so things are taking shape. American barbecue and everything.”

  “I’ll come back to you with arrangements for Elcano. Enjoy your barbecue.”

  Marc looked pleased with himself as he ended the call. Ingram leaned back in her chair.

  “Don’t let me get in the way of your bromance,” she said.

  “He’s okay. Unflappable. I can do business with a bloke who doesn’t piss his pants when he sees a two-legged talking eel in a Swiss admiral’s uniform having a chat with the Butcher of Calais.”

  “He’ll be interested in the mining concessions.”

  “He’ll be interested in mining here, too. I think we’re just going to have to find a balance along the way. We can’t stop anyone building a ship and coming here now, not without a small war, so we might as well roll with it. Don’t try to make sense of it. Just live it.”

  “I should stop him encouraging you to rescue Cho.”

  “I’m the one who needs to do it. Humour me.”

  “Is this our natural pause to get our breath back before the next embuggerance?”

  “Whatever it is, we grab it.” Marc stood up and stretched. “You know what, I’ve got nothing more important to do for the rest of the day, so I’m going to collect Howie from the mad scientist, make him a snack, pour myself a beer, and have a nice old man’s nap. Come and get us when you’re ready to see Doug proclaimed emperor. That’s what we crave, really. A wise old emperor.”

  “Leave at nineteen-thirty?”

  “Yeah. Catch you later.”

  The remains of the afternoon looked painfully dull after the adrenaline rush. None of Ingram’s problems had been solved, but she felt like they’d shrunk a little by being discussed with Earth. She’d always assumed she was happier when she was answerable to nobody, but her reality was far less autocratic. Making decisions in tough situations with no time to debate was easy. Having some latitude and a range of options created complications, and the awareness of what she didn’t excel at and who would be affected by her actions. She’d been a little hurt when Solomon had effectively told her her ego was too big and bullet-proof for her to feel demeaned when she needed to admit she’d made a mistake, but he was right.

 
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