Here We Stand, page 9




“We could have done that months ago,” Searle said. “Hand everything to the Brits and sit tight.”
“But everything leaks in the end.”
“If our priority’s saving our civilians, we have to accept what happens if we go back and other countries find out what’s been happening,” Trinder said. “And conditions on Earth won’t improve in our lifetime, so we’d still be looking to come back here eventually. Even if we find other suitable planets, look how much time and effort it took to prepare a few hundred habitable acres here.”
“Seventy-plus years, God knows how much money, and all we got out of that was a base to accommodate a couple of thousand people,” Marc said. “Sol alone cost a trillion or something. Even with a century of hyperinflation, that’s a huge budget. Now Earth can’t even maintain old technology. If there’s still enough raw materials in the failed states that used to mine them, nobody can get at them. But if we open a gate to Opis, we’ve also opened the gates to a shitload of metals and minerals here and everyone’s going to want a slice. My gut says it won’t be any better than dealing with hostile aliens.”
“I thought we’d knocked that idea on the head,” Trinder said. “Opening the gate to escape is one thing, but opening it to let people in is a non-starter. We agreed that, didn’t we?”
“You abstained,” Chris said. “But yeah. You know where I stand on it.”
“If I might interrupt,” Solomon said, “an influx of unsuitable people is precisely what Bednarz tasked me to avoid. Harvesting resources isn’t inherently wrong, but we’ll almost certainly have APS muscling in sooner or later, because they’re the only bloc that still has enough resources left to come to Opis and exploit the opportunity. Britain has the technology, but its resources are limited by its size. Adding to the guest list only puts you all in greater danger. Anything that threatens the well-being and continued existence and growth of this colony is counter to my instructions and personal objectives.”
That sounded pretty final. Trinder was glad he agreed with Sol. This was the AI’s warning to them not to throw Nomad away. Trinder hoped nobody decided to get into a spat with an AI who’d fought a one-man war against Asia.
“I think we’ll have given up on Nomad before anything like that happens, Sol,” Ingram said.
“But I won’t give up. And I expect to exist indefinitely.”
Trinder wasn’t sure what to make of that. But if he’d spent a century working to deliver Bednarz’s vision and someone was about to take a giant dump on it, he’d react like Sol, he was sure of that. Sol was immortal by human standards as long as he could find a platform to house his core. He wasn’t a short-term thinker.
“Sol, mate, we don’t want the riff-raff here either,” Marc said kindly. “I’m just war-gaming. That’s my job. Everything up for discussion.”
“So where does this take us?” Ingram asked. She put the stylus down and parked her ass on the windowsill. “Do a little espionage, work out how long we’ve got, and in the meantime make sure we can fight on the ground? The best we can do if a Kugin-Jattan fleet arrives is fire up the nukes on board Shackleton or Cabot and try to take out a few. It’s a slow job and they’ll probably be able to deploy more ships than we have missiles. Our advantage is that we have their teeriks and their ship, which they’ll want to recover, and Fred says Kugin usually land troops because they’d rather make a few bob from their conquests than turn them into molten slag. So perhaps no indiscriminate bombardment from orbit. Can we win on the ground?”
“For a while,” Chris said. “Then it’s a case of who can pour in more troops, and it’s not us. But we should be ready for it anyway.”
“They do accept surrenders, though.”
“Maybe not from us,” Marc said. “We’ll be the new kids on the block swaggering in and stealing teeriks and ships, so they’ll need to make an example of us. Fred said they were big on examples. They’ll take what they want and erase us.”
“Then we’d better be ready to ship civilians out of the combat area before that happens,” Ingram said.
“That won’t be many if we’re training all those physically able to fight.” Chris shook his head. “Are they drafted or not? I remember sending vehicles through the gateway and telling Kill Liners they weren’t expendable and we didn’t expect them to storm beaches or build empires.”
“Have we actually forced anybody to take up arms?” Searle asked.
“Not yet.”
“Then they’re just being Americans. They’re defending their home.”
“I promised the folks my guys evacuated that we’d take them somewhere safe,” Chris said. “I’m not going to let them down now.”
Trinder couldn’t tell if Chris was restating his reason to keep going or saying that was his red line. His voice never gave much away. There was almost no difference between him sounding completely calm and warning folks to back off. But he did get that grim look when he was really mad, like when he was itching to beat the crap out of Tim Pham, and he didn’t have that now.
“If the worst happens, we can evacuate them,” Marc said. “I think we’re on the same page.”
“Yeah.”
“Look, before you go full Alamo on this, let’s take another lesson from dealing with APS. Asymmetric warfare works. We shut them down. A poxy little village against a superpower. Okay, it was temporary, but the point was that we crippled them because Sol had one big card to play and he didn’t hold back. We’ve got another big card now — the Caisin gate. I bet we’ve all thought what we’d do if we could go anywhere in a second and get out again. There’s a lot more we can do with the gate if we get creative. It’s not just transport.”
“Yeah, we’d need to do something so big and so shocking that they piss their pants and decide to leave us alone,” Chris said. “Which is what we said when Fred suggested it and Bissey got all pious with me.”
“Exactly. But I don’t think we’ve really joined up the two before — specific use of the gate for insertion and extraction. As long we’ve got the coordinates, we can breach any defences, assassinate any target, and sabotage any asset. Jump straight in and bang out again.”
“Could Fred identify targets accurately enough?” Chris asked.
“I’m still debriefing him. But he’s got maps of Deku. If it comes to it, we can hit them where it hurts. Yes, there’s an element of bluff. They’d have no idea how it happened, they know nothing about us, and they won’t know whether we’ve got a massive fleet on standby waiting to do a lot worse if they don’t back off. They just need to know we did it so they get the message to avoid us.”
Trinder noted how effortlessly the discussion had jumped from self-defence straight to pre-emptive strikes, and he’d escalated with it. He’d thought it was a sound idea at the time Fred suggested it and he still felt that way. If Bissey had been sitting where Searle was, he’d probably have said it was terrorism, and maybe it was, but Marc knew more about that than anybody here and he had plenty of experience in using unorthodox tactics in an existential war.
Maybe if Marc had been a complete stranger giving a talk at some staff college, Trinder would have thought it was a step too far. Civilised people had to have rules of engagement that stopped humans sliding back into savagery. But this was coming from Marc, one of the most decent and likeable guys Trinder knew, a man who knew exactly what loss felt like and who routinely put himself on the line. He was endlessly patient with a grieving kid, and had time for Dieter and Dr Mangel when they most needed basic human compassion. He was a good man. If he was willing to go that far against Kugin or Jattans, it couldn’t be so wrong.
Your ethical standards mean nothing here. The Kugin will laugh at you before they kill you.
Fred kept telling them that. If the Caisin gate had sent them to medieval Europe instead of forty light years away, they’d have had to adopt the brutal standards of the day to stay alive. Back on Earth, Trinder had realised the only moral certainty he had left was the need to defend the people he cared about. Everything else was muddied and contradictory. All he could do was pick a side. He’d already done that when he agreed Solomon should sabotage APS’s network infrastructure, knowing that it might well cost civilian lives.
“Dan, are you still with us?” Ingram asked.
“Sorry, yeah. Just thinking. I agree, we need to be creative. It’ll take generations before we’ve got the numbers to defend ourselves by conventional means.”
“Then we use what we’ve got,” Searle said. “Much as I want to fly Curtis, we need to divert resources to building our own Caisin gate generator. Right now, we’re entirely dependent on the teeriks and the ship. If anything happens to them or they change their minds about us, we’re screwed.”
“I was banking on having a second system in the base itself,” Ingram said. “But I don’t want to spook Fred and make him think we don’t trust him, or that we’ve got what we want so they’re all redundant. I’ll have to explain it in terms of an emergency backup.”
“But that’s exactly what it is,” Searle said. “And it’s safer if it’s not on Curtis. If the ship gets hit in a Kugin attack, we’ve lost everything. If the Jattans manage to seize her complete with the Caisin generator, then there’s no limit to what they or the Kugin can do. We need the equipment in a bunker they can’t get at, if only to evacuate the teeriks so they don’t fall into enemy hands.”
“That’s for our benefit,” Trinder said.
“Sure, but they don’t want to be captured either. It’s a persuasive argument.”
Ingram nodded. “If any Kugin do manage to land, do we know how to kill them on the ground? Do they land vehicles?”
“Short of some crazy quirk we don’t know about like them being terminally allergic to dairy, we’ve only got a few ways of killing anything,” Chris said. “Nukes, personal weapons, artillery, and sharp objects.”
“Fred reckons that if we can take out a tank, we can stop Kugin ground transport,” Marc said. “If we’re in a position to shoot them, then it’s like the Jattans. They’re physically tough and we’ll need stopping power. Shotgun slugs. Tank rounds. Fifty cal.”
“Jeff said Fred asked him if we could create bioweapons, because our life sciences are more advanced than anyone else’s,” Ingram said. “Jeff explained why we wouldn’t be too keen on that. How do we feel, though?”
That stopped the discussion in its tracks. Even without the history of die-back, there were some things that seemed too dangerous even in an war for survival. Marc looked like he was considering it, though.
“We’d need to get Kugin tissue samples,” he said. “I’d give that a go. But it wouldn’t be a five-minute job to develop the stuff, and I’d prefer us not to go down in history as the tossers who exported biological warfare across the galaxy. Let’s try to stick to introducing the natives to cricket, cucumber sandwiches, and blowing shit up.”
“We need real-time Kugin and Jattan translation systems too,” Ingram said.
“And when do we warn Earth about them?” Chris kept asking that. He wouldn’t drop anything until he had an answer. “We’ve gotten so used to aliens that we’re forgetting how big a deal this is. Earth doesn’t even know there are any. At some point they have to know what’s out here in case things go wrong and it ends up on their doorstep.”
“Are you saying we should contact Earth but not give them FTL?” Marc asked.
“All I’m saying is we should warn them. The FTL issue’s separate.”
“I don’t think it is. You can’t tell people they need to look out for alien warlords on the rampage and then not hand over technology that might save them. For example, what if there’s a way of using FTL to deploy really long-range missiles?”
“It goes back to what I said when you first suggested it,” Chris said. “We’re amateurs making decisions about things we barely understand and that affect billions of people.”
“You’ve just described the average government.” Marc sounded matter-of-fact rather than argumentative. “Look, we’re the only grown-ups around now whether we like it or not. We made ourselves responsible for policy the minute we decided not to tell anyone about Sol, the Caisin gate, and where we are at the moment. We’re now the politicians as well as the grunts who carry out their orders. And yes, I accept I’m more to blame for not telling Earth than anybody. I talked Captain Ingram out of passing this to the MoD at least twice.”
“Actually, I’ve changed my mind again,” Ingram said. “If we’d told your chum at the Foreign Office or I’d called the MoD, they’d have wanted to come here and we’d have had to tell them about the Caisin gate because it’s the only fast way to get to Opis at the moment. What happens then? Pour troops and assets into Opis and leave Britain undefended? And what would we do about the millions they’d ask to evacuate? We’re back to our first argument. If we have a massive influx of people, even spread over the course of a couple of years, this settlement can’t feed them. So we sort out this problem on our own and keep Earth in blissful ignorance unless we find we can’t, because I doubt there’ll be a unified international response to this.”
“Better that we find out what we can and then decide who’ll be helped by knowing it, ma’am,” Searle said. “I think this sounds like a workable plan.”
Marc grunted. “Yeah.”
“The devil’s in the detail,” Ingram said. “But I don’t see a better way to do this yet.”
“Sol, you got any thoughts on this?” Trinder asked.
Solomon would have a plan for when it went wrong, even if he didn’t share it with them. He took a couple of seconds to answer. Trinder knew what that pause meant. Sol had made his position clear: he didn’t want random humans turning up here. His job was to look after his chosen ones, and everyone else was at best a distraction and at worst a threat to the whole project.
“Protecting the population here is paramount,” he said. “Ideally, not at the expense of Earth, as you say.”
Ideally was doing a lot of work there. “So Elcano, then.” Ingram took a few steps back and studied the board. “We leave them in cryo so we can at least evacuate them fast. Marc, how long is this debrief with Fred going to take? Because I’d like to have him working on the freighter with Sol as soon as possible.”
“Give me a couple more hours,” Marc said. “Shorter sessions seem to work better than one long interrogation.”
“Very well. Anything else, gents?”
“Yes,” Chris said. “We should have Doug Brandt and Alex along to these meetings now. Otherwise Kill Line and the scientists don’t have a voice in security decisions. If we’re asking them to stand and fight, they should be in the loop.”
Trinder admired Chris’s honest insistence on some kind of accountability. Ingram gave him that long, careful look disguised with a half-smile, the one that said he was a pain in the ass but she’d have to concede.
She had no real command authority any more, only the power of persuasion. Nomad’s defence forces were more like a miniature international organisation, a bunch of commanders who’d agreed to work together for the common good but couldn’t give each other orders. The majority of civilians on the base were American and they had no obligation to take orders from a defunct corporation or a foreign government. Ingram didn’t represent either of those anyway. She seemed very aware of that.
“You’re right, but let’s avoid creating expectations that they’ll have a veto on this.” She still had that careful smile. “Anyone else?”
“No, ma’am, we’re in full swashbuckling mode now.” Searle said. “I’d like to be on friendly terms with the local aliens, but if that’s not possible, we’ll play to win.”
“Good. I need a coffee. Have you got five minutes, Number One?”
Searle went off with Ingram and Marc disappeared, presumably to find Fred. Trinder wandered outside with Chris and leaned on the railing at the front of the building, watching the ebb and flow of activity across the green. He felt strangely deflated. The session must have hiked his adrenaline more than he’d realised.
Chris checked out a Caracal driving past and nodded at the driver. It looked like Lewis Conway. “We haven’t really talked about what happened with Gan-Pamas yet, have we?” Chris said. “You and me, I mean. I didn’t take the shot. We could have been burying you as well as Nina.”
“You said the weapon wasn’t on full power,” Trinder said. “But that doesn’t prove lack of intent, like Marc said. Anyway, I sighted up on him. He saw me aim. I was going to shoot him so it’s my own damn fault for being slow.”
“I’m sorry, that’s all.”
Chris was probably blaming himself like he did when Jamie Wickens was killed. It was too easy to think he was completely unemotional. Trinder knew he visited Jamie’s grave every few days. He’d see Chris’s icon moving on the map, usually first thing in the morning unless he was on duty overnight, and he’d spend a few minutes there and walk back. Trinder knew enough about the militia from what Erin told him to realise Jamie hadn’t been Chris’s closest buddy, just a young guy Chris liked a lot and felt responsible for. It wasn’t hard to work out what was happening.
“Chris, we all had a chance to open fire right away,” he said. “It was a weird situation. If we’d taken Gan-Pamas alive, we might have more answers now, but we’d also have a liability on our hands and we’d still be arguing about if, how, and when to kill him. It wouldn’t have been a better outcome. Just different.”
“Maybe.”
“So why didn’t you shoot? I’m not criticising, just asking.”
Chris looked out across the green and shook his head. “I think I was caught out by how small he was, but it was when he started talking.” He shrugged. “I wanted to know what he was really saying. Maybe I misread him completely and he really was doing what Fred said Jattans did, going out in a blaze of glory when he knew he was surrounded. But he said sorry. Fred said he kept saying sorry about Lirrel.”