Here We Stand, page 73




“You can fuck right off.” Duncan looked shocked and in pain. “The dog’s got to go. Look what it’s done to me. And that kid’s crazy. If you don’t sort him out, he’ll turn into a thug. And we don’t need any more of those.”
“I said this wasn’t a debate, didn’t I? Nobody touches the dog. And you won’t ever — ever — come within ten yards of Howie again. Do you understand?”
“Or what?”
“Or you deal with me. Same goes for everyone.”
“You can’t keep doing this shit and getting away with it,” Duncan said. “Rules are only for the rest of us, yeah? But you go where you like, do what you like, with no consequences.”
“Yeah, makes a fucking change, doesn’t it? If you want to settle your list of grievances, we can do it privately.”
It was Marc who wanted to settle it, though. Ingram knew him well enough to spot when he wanted to let rip and needed an excuse. There was an awful ten seconds of silence, but Mendoza appeared and that seemed to completely defuse things. Marc just walked away, put his arm around Ingram’s shoulders, took Howie’s hand, and steered them back towards the centre of the green. Tev and Chris looked expectantly at him, but he shook his head and carried on. He didn’t need backup.
“I hope no bugger’s nicked our cups,” he said. “Come on, Betsy. Let’s get you some hotdogs as a reward. Who’s a good brave girl? Did that tosser hurt you? We’ll get you checked out.”
“I take it neither of you want to talk about this now,” Ingram said.
“No, I want to eat, drink, and party.”
“I’m sorry,” Howie said. He sounded tearful now. “But he said something awful about you and I told him to take it back, but then he said worse.”
“He was drunk, Howie. But his opinion doesn’t count for anything anyway. I’ll teach you how to avoid wasting your energy on nobodies. I wish it hadn’t happened, mate, but you’re not a bad person, and you were only doing what men do, defending your family.”
Now the adrenaline was draining away, Ingram felt embarrassed, awkward, and also rather proud of Marc. He was very good at controlling a situation. Even if she felt she should have taken the lead, it would have made matters worse and turned it into a battle over her authority again instead of a personal spat. But it was clear that the grievances were going to continue and Marc had become their demonic icon of Britain taking over the mission for its own ends while they had to do as they were told.
The two cups were exactly where Marc had left them on the trestle table next to the candy floss machine, a measure of how much people didn’t want to incur his displeasure. But Ingram didn’t feel like drinking now. She sat cross-legged on the grass to watch the moon and realised she paid almost no attention to it at all these days because her brain had labelled it as interchangeable with Earth’s, and therefore not much use to her, a rock with some interesting coloured streaks like a displaced chunk of Alum Bay. If Nir-Tenbiku had the technology and the budget to make it suitable for a base, he could have moved in and never troubled Nomad.
Yes, her problem list was quite spectacular now.
Dieter showed up. “What did they do to my girl?” He’d obviously just heard what had happened with Betsy. Marc was still feeding her hot dogs. “I swear I’ll have that asshole if he’s hurt her.”
Marc gave Betsy a cuddle with both arms and blew a raspberry on the top of her head. There was something touching about a tough man making a fuss of an equally tough dog like she was a tiny Yorkie.
“She’s okay,” Marc said. “What a clever girl. She did it by the book. Did you train her to bite and hold? I never did ask you when you mentioned it.”
“No, she already knew.” Dieter looked her over and she basked in the attention. “I’m guessing, but I think that was her speciality in her narcotics career. She was there to intimidate wayward dealers without permanent damage. Because you can’t pay up with your throat ripped out.”
Of course Dieter would worry about her. He’d hadn’t got over Girlie’s death. Duncan was lucky that Marc was the one who intervened and not Dieter. And Dieter was now the official sheriff of Kill Line. That was going to make things interesting.
“Is that your official badge?” Ingram asked, getting to her feet.
It was a child’s button badge with I AM FIVE in cheery orange letters. Dieter tucked his chin in to look down at it.
“It was all they could find. Who needs a gold star anyway? I’m good with this.”
“Where does your jurisdiction end?”
“Is Kill Line separate? This is where it’s going to get interesting.”
“We need to cover the whole base. It’s a good place to start the discussion on a common set of laws here.”
Marc grumbled in the back of this throat. “Seeing as you’ve sobered up, Boadicea, it’s time to go home. Howie needs his beauty sleep. So do I. I’ve had a pig of a day.”
“Yeah, better let the dust settle before I expand my police state into the Ainatio section,” Dieter said. “Goodnight, you troublemakers.”
They walked back home with Betsy on point, talking about anything but the scrap with Duncan. That would come later. Howie got ready for bed and Marc sat talking to him for a while in his room. Ingram could hear snippets of the conversation, which wasn’t a kindly dressing down but advice on dealing with difficult adults.
“Your heart’s in the right place,” Marc was saying. It verged on approval for slugging Duncan. “You’re not a brat and you’re not out of control. You’re just a lad. You’ve got to learn a few different ways to handle morons, and that’s what growing up is about.”
“Please don’t let them put Betsy down. It was my fault.”
“Nobody’s laying a hand on Betsy. Or you. They’ll have to go through me to do that. Now get some sleep. Betsy’s guarding your door.”
Ingram went outside and sat on the doorstep to wait for Marc to join her and pick over the debris of the day out of Howie’s earshot. He emerged with two mugs of tea, wearing his sheepskin jacket as if he was going to head out somewhere.
“You’re not cold, are you?” Ingram asked.
Marc turned up his collar. It was a lovely jacket, dark brown leather sheepskin, not the usual suede finish. “No. Marty made these coats for me, Chris, and Dan as a thank you for staying with the civvies. I ought to wear it more.”
“You three are going to look like Bomber Command when you’re all out together.”
“Yeah. We can gaze nobly at the horizon, waiting for the last Lancaster to come home.” He let out a long sigh. “Well, tonight was a total shambles. I don’t think we’ll get many Ainatio Christmas cards now.”
“I’m worried about Howie.”
“He’s fine.”
“He’s not fine. He got in a physical fight with an adult.”
“Did you grow up with brothers?”
“No. You know I didn’t.”
“Exactly. He’s a ten-year-old boy and boys get in fights. It’s not a failing, it’s how we’re made. All male mammals do it. We’re hardwired to fight and risk our lives for women and children, and you can’t educate us out of it, whatever some high-minded peacenik thinks.”
Ingram got the feeling she’d been filed under high-minded. “Does he realise it’s wrong?”
“But it’s not wrong. It was a bad idea in this particular case, and he was lucky it was only Duncan McWeakling and that Betsy had his back, but in principle he was standing up for others.”
“So we let him get on with it.”
“Yes, we do. Or I do. He’s my responsibility and I owe it to him to raise a man.”
Ouch. “Howie’s been orphaned in the worst possible way and he’s been uprooted and terrified God knows how many times. This is his trauma coming out.”
“I don’t think so. His clinginess and obsession with being helpful is, though.”
Marc had brought up two sons, and she hadn’t. He also had a point about her disdain for physical violence that somehow didn’t extend to her own service. It didn’t make her feel any less worried about Howie, though.
“Anyway,” Marc said, “what did Bissey want?”
“He wants to be the liaison if we get pally with Nir-Tenbiku. An ambassador. He’s volunteered to go to Esmos. You floated that idea at a meeting, I think. Have you spoken to him about it?”
“Not a bloody a word. I’d have told you.” Marc sounded offended. He examined his jacket’s leather buttons with the critical eye of a watchmaker. “And how long do you think it’ll be before someone gets Earth’s location out of him?”
“We did touch on that.”
“And?”
“I didn’t have to make a decision, and it might never happen, so I left it at that.”
“Maybe it is his calling. So where are we on all our other woes and clusterfucks?”
Ingram struggled to put them in order, but it felt like at least part of the alien problem had dropped down the list. “We’ve got a lot of work to do regaining the trust of the Ainatio staff,” she said. “I should have been the one to sort Duncan out, but on balance, it would have been worse and made it an official war with them. Is that why you stepped in?”
“Did you stand back because it was less contentious to let me have a go at him?”
Ingram had to think about that. “Sorry, I realise I do that. But you did gesture at me to keep out of it. I suppose I ought to check how Duncan is.”
“Jake Mendoza already messaged me. It’s a single bite, no tearing or complicated damage. It’s not like Betsy was savaging him. She just held on to his arm the only way she could.”
“Oh, that’s all right, then.”
“Yes. It is. She’s a dog. Which, incidentally, is what Duncan called you. Do you want to send him flowers to speed his recovery?”
Howie had only mentioned Duncan bad-mouthing Marc. Perhaps he didn’t understand the insult about her. “Ah, the sparkling repartee of Nomad’s cafe society.”
“He’d have got a lot worse than a bite and a punch in the shoulder if I’d heard him. Would you have been worried about my mental state?”
Ingram tried to stop herself imagining what had offended Howie that much. “You’re an adult. But you don’t have to labour the point.”
“Good. Leave me to deal with it. Now, change the subject. We’ve got bigger problems to keep us busy.”
“Okay, at least Kill Line’s sorted,” Ingram said. She felt she’d been rebuked, but Marc was bound to be protective about Howie. It was all too tangled up with his own loss. “No drama with the election. Perhaps Doug really should take over the base right away. And the sooner we send Elcano home, the better. I’m all for cheerfulness in adversity, but life’s been a bit trying lately and this place seems to be more divided every day.”
“Yeah, but it’s inevitable. Kill Line’s happy because it still does the job it always did. The neighbours are still next door, the council’s still running things, and everyone knows where they fit in.” Marc frowned as if he was trying to find one word for it all. “I think it’s a status and purpose thing. The Kill Liners have the same social structure. We do, too. Your crew, Dan’s detachment, Chris’s troops, even his civvies — the people used to a uniform have a familiar structure to slot into and the civvies have already been through the losing everything phase. They’ve all got a purpose. But the boffins are having a harder time.”
“Yes, I know that,” Ingram said. “I haven’t worked out how we make it any easier, though.”
“You can’t. They were top of the food chain at Ainatio. It was all about them and their work, even if that was a smokescreen. The food just showed up and bots did most of the crap jobs. Okay, the food and the bots bit is the same here, but overnight, they stopped being gods. The teeriks beat them at physics and engineering and you’d brought your own boffins. A lot of them don’t even have a relevant specialisation. Nomad needs builders, farmers, troops, and pregnant women now more than it needs them. It’s hard to find out you’re ballast after years of thinking you were special. Especially when you didn’t have many choices about coming.”
“But not everyone we evacuated from Ainatio is a pain in the arse,” Ingram said. “It’s not even confined to those with less useful skills. I doubt we need Todd Mangel’s astrophysics expertise to survive, but he teaches, he helps out around town, he’s scouting for new planets, and he’s studying other STEM fields. He’s fully involved. But Paul Cotton isn’t and his plant disease expertise is crucial here. He’s still a science god, to use your analogy.”
“Actually, I was trying to be open-minded and see the whiners’ point of view,” Marc said. “Todd’s a nice bloke and he doesn’t think he’s God’s gift to science. Lots of the redundant boffins are like that. Some of the essential ones aren’t nice and neighbourly. It comes down to personalities.”
“They were never meant to come here,” Ingram said.
“Neither was I. Or Dan. Or Chris.”
“I meant that we rescued them out of common decency, but we didn’t need them all.”
“Now you sound like Sol.”
“But it’s true. Project Nomad was supposed to be about generalists and community builders. Now we have an abnormally high percentage of boffins.”
“And that’s probably why they want their friends in Elcano thawed out,” Marc said. “They feel outnumbered and threatened.”
“We can’t keep changing our minds over that, Marc. Like you always say, it looks weak and weakness breeds disorder.”
Marc smiled. “It sounds a lot more sinister and jackbooted when you say it.”
“And I’m not sure adding more scientists to a divided population is the answer,” Ingram said. “Not until those here integrate more, or just stop stirring it up. But we’re only talking about a vocal minority.”
“Doesn’t take many to sow discontent.”
“The medics managed just fine.” Ingram drew up her knees and rested her folded arms on them. “They formed their little clique on the first day and revelled in it. They really like it here.”
“Ah, but they kept their identity,” Marc said. “Doctors and nurses are always useful and it’s still a respected job, even for the ones who are shit at it. The rank earns the salute. But there isn’t a medic here who only does brain surgery and doesn’t know how to use a bandage, and that’s what some of the boffins are like. Alex says a lot of them are really specialised and they have to start over in another field. You’re not going to do that in a few months.”
“That’s why Erskine picked the ones she did,” Ingram said. “She saved the essential personnel with a job to do here, plus kids.”
“Yeah. She might have been unlikeable, but she wasn’t stupid. Or wrong.”
“Oh God, don’t make me see her as a martyr, Marc. It’ll cloud my decision-making.”
Marc stood up slowly as if his back was stiff. “You need to work that out with Sol, love. This is his job. I’m just saying what I think because I trained insurgents and it feels a lot like this. But you already know how to do it. It’s like absorbing a lot of new crew members. You’re just tolerating too much crap because you’re dealing with civvies and you’re worried about looking like a military dictatorship.”
Ingram’s acceptance that she didn’t have the moral authority or numbers to dictate to civilians seemed reasonable to her. She’d only impose control if the base was in immediate danger.
“I’ll get my jackboots polished and give stirring speeches from the roof of the main building, then,” she said. “I want banners and a well-disciplined crowd, too.”
Marc held his hand out to help her up. “Come on, you old tyrant. Beddie-byes. It’s late and we’ll have a whole day of brand new bullshit tomorrow.”
Ingram had almost sobered up, but she’d reached the regretful did-I-really-do-that aftermath of a run ashore. The awful whirling sensation kept her awake and gave her subconscious a chance to spew all its buried issues into her conscious mind. What was Sol up to? He’d been completely silent tonight, but perhaps that was a courtesy to allow her to let her hair down. Had Alex already floated the idea of an election for everyone outside the Kill Line boundary? If he had, then any brakes she’d need to put on that to take the Kill Line jurisdiction issue into account would just be seen by the usual suspects as suppressing democracy. And Fred — she had to spend more time with him and rebuild the relationship, especially as Cosqui had stepped into his role with enthusiasm because she liked Brad Searle.
And why hadn’t Nir-Tenbiku asked to repatriate Lirrel’s body?
The teerik was still in the morgue. Ingram hadn’t raised the matter either. In fact, she’d forgotten all about him, which she could almost excuse because the Jattan visit had caught her out and put the base at defence stations just hours ago.
But she hadn’t mentioned his remains when she spoke to Nir-Tenbiku the last time. Nobody had referred to him in discussions, not even Chris, who could usually be guaranteed to ask awkward questions, or Marc, whose idea it had been to preserve the remains in case disrespectful handling sparked an incident at some point down the line.
Lirrel had hacked Nina to death, so there was probably zero concern around the base for what happened to his body as long as he wasn’t laid to rest in the churchyard. He didn’t even have a country Ingram could return him to. It was technically Kugad, but she wasn’t planning to drop them a line any time soon. The Jattan opposition didn’t seem interested in what happened to him either. He was like a dead goldfish dumped in the kitchen waste, not even a pet that you’d miss and get a little headstone made for and bury in the garden. He’d just been machinery.
For some reason, it saddened her. Whatever failings the humans of Nomad had, they had at least lacked concern for Lirrel because he was a murderer, judged by the same standards they held themselves to, not excused from guilt because he was just an animal who didn’t know any better.