Here We Stand, page 8




Hredt didn’t know why the commune had picked Opis. Planets much like this one were scattered everywhere. Opis hadn’t even had a name until the humans revealed it to Hredt, and while it wasn’t strictly in the Kugin sector, it was certainly within striking distance of the navies the commune was trying to evade. The Mastan — the Kugin sphere of influence — spanned nine star systems.
Hredt could think of only two reasons for the teeriks and a Jattan to come here beyond random coincidence. One was that Opis was somehow already on someone’s charts and the commune had some ancient genetic memory of it. The second possibility was that he’d made a terrible miscalculation and the Caisin gate was actually producing a detectable signature after all, announcing their presence like a homing beacon to Gan-Pamas.
No, he was sure Caisin had never made mistakes like that. They’d activated the gate for a power test while they were still relatively close to the Mastan borders and nobody had come after them. Sheer coincidence was still possible, and Lirrel might have gone through exactly the same subconscious thought process as any other teerik and ended up in the same place.
Humans made decisions that way as well. Hredt had seen a movie, a type of invented history that humans enjoyed, where the enforcers of the law learned to think the same way as a criminal and predict where he’d go and what he’d do. Yes, it was possible. Lirrel might have simply followed the most likely route in the same way the commune had.
“Fred?” Chief Jeff was calling him. Hredt turned around to see him striding towards him. “Hang on.”
“Have you found any contamination yet?” Hredt asked. “I’m going to see Captain Ingram. Is it safe for me to enter the building?”
“Yes, no problem, mate. How’s everyone doing?”
“We’re all well, thank you. On edge, as you would say, but healthy.”
Jeff caught up and walked with him. “It’s been a rough few days. It can’t have been easy for you.”
“Naming the prenu after Nina will help everyone come to terms with her death.”
“That’s a really decent thing to do, Fred. People here appreciate it.”
“Anyway, I’ve watched the news from Earth,” Hredt said. “I don’t understand most of it, but the die-back incident is worrying. Could it really have reached us?”
“Sadly, yeah.” Jeff shrugged. “You remember the Ainatio scientist who grassed us up to APS? The traitor who told them about Solomon and the other things we wanted to keep quiet? Well, that was Abbie Vincent, the same woman who smuggled die-back into Korea. We wanted to make sure we didn’t have another one like her here. It’s all clear of pathogens, though.”
“I see. Would they tell you if they felt the way she did, though?”
“No. So we ask questions and keep an eye on them.”
“I shall do likewise.”
“Thanks.”
Hredt was always impressed by the humans’ skill in life sciences, even in misuse. Nobody out here could match that. “Could one of your scientists create a new pathogen?”
“Yes, they can. We wondered about that too. But don’t worry, we’re very vigilant.”
“I meant could you make a biological weapon for use against our enemies.”
Jeff hesitated for a moment. Hredt had learned to spot when humans were having second thoughts because what they wanted to say might meet with disapproval. It was always that breath held for a fraction too long.
“After what die-back’s done to Earth, I don’t think it’d be our first choice,” Jeff said. “You can’t control these things. They come back to bite you, believe me.”
Hredt thought about that for a moment. It was a shame. Humans had the advantage there, and they really should have thought about using it. Perhaps they’d reconsider if it became necessary in the future. He changed the subject.
“I’ve completed all the documentation for the FTL drive, by the way,” he said. “I’m delivering it to Captain Ingram now. I’ve never formally recorded anything like this before.”
“Do you mean for our refits?”
“No, the drive documentation to send to Earth so they can build their own spacefolding ships.”
“Ah,” Jeff said. “Too complicated for me. Anyway, want me to drop in after work and keep Rikayl amused for a while?”
“That would be welcome. He likes the card game. We’ll have fun.”
They parted in the parking area at the front of the main building and Hredt made his way inside to Ingram’s upstairs office. He knew she was there on her own because he could locate anyone with a radio on the Nomad interactive map. Allowing people to be tracked like that seemed excessively trusting, and before Gan-Pamas had shown up, Hredt would have taken it as another sign that that humans were too innocent and easy-going to survive out here. But then they’d revealed the violent side he’d learned about in the children’s encyclopaedia at the very beginning, and it reassured him they could rise to the task in an instant.
Ingram’s door was already open. She stood at her desk, arms folded, frowning as she read something on the desk-mounted screen.
“Ah, Fred, come in,” she said, suddenly all smiles. “What can I do for you?”
Hredt indicated his screen. “I have some files for you, Captain.” She’d told him to call her Bridget, but as nobody else seemed to, he still felt too awkward to use her personal name. “It’s the FTL information for Earth. I think Annis Kim should check it and note anything that won’t be clear to human engineers.”
“Fred, thank you so much. That’s wonderful. Is it on the network?”
“I’m sending it now. I know you think you might have traitors here, so please secure it. You don’t want APS to acquire this.”
Ingram checked her pocket screen. “Got it. I’m fairly sure we’re okay, to be honest, but better safe than sorry. I’ll limit access.”
“I’ll be available to offer remote assistance to Earth when needed.”
Ingram raised her eyebrows while she poked at her screen. “I’m not sure they’re ready to find out about intelligent extraterrestrials yet.”
“They don’t need to see me or know what I am. I sound passably human on an audio channel. When do you plan to contact them?”
Hredt accepted that humans would be shocked to see proof they weren’t alone in the galaxy. But Chris had said most people had grown up with movies about alien civilisations and expected there’d be life on other worlds, even if the news might surprise them at first. He didn’t think it would be a big deal. Some of the Nomad scientists seemed to take a different view. They thought it would panic the public and cause political chaos. Hredt found it hard to imagine being so isolated that the mere existence of aliens alarmed anyone. The time to run and hide was when they encountered a hostile culture.
“First we have to work out who we can safely share the FTL with,” Ingram said.
“Your government, surely,” Hredt said. “They’ll know.”
“Lawson? We have to give that some thought.”
“You don’t trust this Lawson.”
“Oh, it’s not him,” she said. Hredt suspected she was going to repeat the concerns he’d already heard from Chris. “But not everyone’s going to handle the knowledge sensibly or reasonably. Some are going to see it as a commercial opportunity or find a way to use it to attack their neighbours. We need to make sure we’re handing it to someone who’ll use it to save the maximum number of people, not the highest bidder. Then we have to work out when we offer it, because we could cause chaos by creating unrealistic expectations. People want help right now and can’t wait years for it, but we can’t absorb millions of people overnight. We’ll have to identify other planets for them and it’ll probably take years to build ships anyway. So it’s much more complicated and untidy than just sending everyone a copy of your work and telling them to get on with it.”
“I understand why you think using the Caisin gate to evacuate more people is unworkable,” Hredt said.
Ingram spread her hands. “The only ready-made refuge is here, and we can’t even accommodate the people in Elcano yet.”
She was only repeating what he knew she’d said several times before in the last few days. He wasn’t sure if she was polishing her argument like a Jattan legislator or trying to convince herself that not throwing the doors open immediately was the right decision. Hredt happened to agree with her. He wanted as many humans as possible to flood into the sector and beyond, but not at the cost of overwhelming Nomad Base, and certainly not so that it attracted attention before the forces here were strong enough to defend it against seizure by Kugin or Jattans.
“Very wise,” Hredt said, estimating that the process might begin in a few months. “I’ll help you identify other worlds that might be suitable for settlement as well.”
“May I take advantage of your generosity again, Fred? I have a favour to ask.”
“Of course. We’re allies. What’s good for you is good for us.”
“Is it feasible to monitor Velet and Dal Mantir in the same way we’re monitoring Earth?” Ingram sat on the edge of her desk. “You know, a probe in their region of space that could eavesdrop on communications. Knowing what they’re planning would give us an advantage, obviously. Specifically, we still need to know how they found us and if they intend to come back.”
Hredt thought about it. “They’ll detect any probes eventually,” he said. “We monitored Earth because we didn’t think you had the means to do that, but the Kugin and Jattans can detect objects entering their planetary defence net, and while a probe is minute, it’s always possible that they’ll be lucky and spot it. It’s a matter for you if you want to risk it.”
Ingram looked a little sad. “Never mind. It was just a thought.”
“If we managed to evade the net, we could probably intercept signals from one of their military relays,” Hredt said. “Would you like me to investigate that?”
“I’d be very grateful, Fred. Thank you. If the Kugin found a probe, though, would they be able to trace us from it?”
“Possibly. The only signal worth worrying about would be the transmission of data back to Opis, so making that intermittent would reduce their chances of detection. But the best way to disguise the point of origin would be relays that eventually enter a Caisin gate. If they caught the downlink, they’d know a probe was accessing information, but it would be a Kugin-made one — ours — so it could have come from anywhere.”
“We’d like Solomon to be able to hack into their comms. He’s very good at it.”
“I’m sure we can learn from each other.”
Ingram gathered items from her desk and gestured towards the door. “I’ve got a meeting now, but we’ll talk again later. Time to plan for the worst. I always enjoy that. Just like old times.”
She said it with a smile and laughed to herself. Humans were eccentric, finding humour in dark places, taking risks they were hopelessly underequipped for, and confident they’d succeed if they persisted. But they also tried to help their own kind back on Earth, even when it made sense to forget them and leave them to their fate.
They were civilised. Hredt trusted them.
* * *
Security meeting, CO’s office, Nomad Base: same day.
“How are you feeling today, Dan?” Ingram walked up behind Trinder as he sat staring at the blank wall display. She patted his shoulder and manoeuvred around the seats to reach her desk. “Has it all cleared up now? Getting zapped, I mean.”
It had been six days since they’d found Gan-Pamas’s freighter laid up north of the base, but to Trinder it felt like it had taken a couple of weeks to live through them. The funeral had slammed on the brakes at a cliff edge. Maybe the upheaval was why he kept thinking about his family again, years after he’d lost contact and thought he had plenty of reasons for not trying to find them. If and when Nomad made contact with Earth again, he’d have no excuses left for doing nothing.
“Just lost my sense of elapsed time, Captain,” he said. “Give me a few more weeks of boring paperwork and I’ll be fine.”
“Can’t promise that.” Ingram moved to the wall display. “Okay, chaps. I had a word with Fred about intelligence gathering. He says it’s doable, but both Jattans and Kugin have a planetary defence net that could detect probes sooner or later. So let’s look at our options and the risks involved. At least we’re starting with a lot of knowledge about the enemy’s capability — assuming they are an enemy — because we have the engineers who made it, as well as some of the hardware. But the enemy might not know we exist, or even plan to attack us if they do. Sol, you’re quiet. Are you with us?”
“I am, Captain.” Solomon’s voice emerged from the speaker on the wall. “I just don’t want to interfere with decisions.”
“Do what you always do and tell us where we’re lacking,” Ingram said.
“Then I’m sure I won’t have much to add.”
“You’re such a diplomat.” Ingram held her stylus to the display and looked at them all expectantly. “So on the technical side, we’re ahead. But we know nothing about enemy intent, except that if it’s what Fred tells us, we don’t have the numbers to hold off a sustained attack. The act of finding out if they’re aware of us could expose us. Is it worth the risk? What happens if we just wait and see?”
Trinder held back out of habit just the way he’d always done at Ainatio. Marc, Chris, and Searle, lined up on a bench against the wall, looked like they had a shopping list of questions.
Chris opened the batting. “Whatever we do next, can we agree that our civilians come first?” he asked. “No sacrifices. None of them dies just to stop aliens finding Earth or hiding the technology. We evacuate them somehow, even if that means giving Earth a big surprise by sending them back.”
“Well, we trashed Asia to save them last time, so twice makes it a policy,” Marc said. “And this is a rerun of the APS situation. All the options cause collateral damage, but there’s probably one where Nomad survives.”
Ingram drew the start of a tree map and wrote HIDE, GO HOME, RUN, and FIGHT in a line across the top. “If I recall, running and hiding from APS weren’t options because there was nowhere safe to hide and you had vulnerable civilians who wouldn’t survive the running bit. You had the go-home option with the British airlift, but you thought APS would then target Britain because Tim Pham would still pursue Solomon. So the Kugin, Jattans, and possibly the Jattan opposition are the new APS, except going home will probably be more feasible because we could get away before they can track us by using the gate.”
“Even if we could evade them here on Opis, it’s taken the bots seventy years to make this location crop-friendly and safe for humans,” Chris said. “It’s probably impossible to relocate on virgin ground here at short notice. But you said it — intel’s the difference between having ten years to fortify the base and Caisin-gating everyone back to Earth right now because there’s a Kugin fleet inbound.”
“Do we need a probe or something actually in their space to eavesdrop?” Marc asked.
“Apparently yes. Fred suggested using relays to bounce the return signal and eventually pass it through a Caisin gate so they can’t track it back.”
“And presumably they have probes too, which they can use against us.”
“If and when they find us.”
“Are we set up for detecting those?”
Ingram looked at Searle. “What have we got, Brad?”
Searle balled his hand to indicate a small sphere. “If it’s a baseball-sized object in orbit like the teerik ones we’ve used, it’s nearly impossible to sweep for them. But if it wants to come down and take a look around the base the way Fred’s probe did with Kill Line — say to locate Curtis — then we could set up sensors to cover the footprint of the base up to a few hundred feet. Dome coverage.”
“And they’ll still know we’re here,” Ingram said. “But at least we get some warning. Do it, Brad.”
“There’s always Gan-Pamas’s freighter for covert ops,” Trinder said. “If you can’t hide a probe, brazen it out and send something that’s meant to be detectable and looks completely ordinary. The beat-up freighter act obviously worked for him, and he was trying to avoid the Jattan government as much as we are.”
“You mean focus on the Jattans,” Ingram said.
“Their navy’s probably going be talking about recovering Curtis even more than the Kugin are. And Fred said the Jattan navy wouldn’t make a move on us without Kugin support. We’ll hear something. Two birds with one stone.”
“Sol, can we operate the ship on autopilot without any leads back here?” Ingram asked.
“I’ll check with Fred,” Solomon said. “The real question is how I intercept their comms once we have a target. But I suspect Fred will solve that.”
Ingram started writing again. “How long do you think this will take?”
“I can start today, but it could be weeks. The remote operation would have to be flight-tested, obviously.”
Trinder was trying to work out if they could even resource all this at short notice. They had the entire natural wealth of a virgin planet, and the bot technology to manufacture almost anything, but not the bot or human numbers to complete everything at once. And each task had its own case for urgency — FTL drives for the Ainatio fleet in orbit, adapting Curtis for human crewing, hardening the base with bunkers and shelters, and manufacturing probes, weapons, and ordnance.
“We can’t do it all simultaneously,” Trinder said. “Better intel means we can prioritise. If we complete the FTL drive programme, then we can ship people out temporarily or permanently, but we can do that much more easily with the Caisin gate.”
“But if the destination’s Earth, we have to explain how we got back without mentioning the gate,” Chris said. “If we’re so out of options that the only choice is to go home, maybe it doesn’t matter if Earth knows about it. We arrange to open the gate somewhere in Britain and rely on the discretion of the MoD.”