The Best of Us

by Karen Traviss

  02

  There’s no one disaster that ends the world. Not even a massive asteroid managed that. Whatever the movies say, there’s no single event that’s screwed us, just a hundred-odd years of smaller crises that have fed others. One local war displaces millions and starts a famine elsewhere, and another war. One sick guy steps off a plane and starts a killer epidemic that scared, dumb people spread from one country to another. One bomb wipes out a city. And we run out of people to protect us and clean up the country, people we need to maintain factories and power stations, so things leak and then we’ve got contaminated land and water. And then we got die-back. It was only the final straw in a whole bale of woes.

  Chuck Emerson, retired USN corpsman, teaching the transit camp history class

  Director’s Office, Ainatio Park Research Centre:

  Friday, February 20, 1745 Hours

  “I want that woman scanned, Phil.” Georgina Erskine stabbed the air in front of her aide with an angry finger. “Foreign physicists don’t just drop in at a secure facility that’s not on the map for a chat about Pascoe’s Star. Especially not now.”

  Erskine didn’t believe in coincidences with precise strings of numbers. The equatorial and galactic co-ordinates of the star weren’t a secret, but the chances of a random stranger travelling seven thousand miles to repeat them now, here, and at a critical point in a forty-five-year mission were too remote to be anything but significant.

  Annis Kim knew. It was hard to guess what she’d come to ask of Ainatio, but Erskine expected it to involve the word unless.

  “She’s actually an Australian citizen, Director,” Phil Berman said. “Solomon’s confirmed the Korean media reported her as missing eight months ago. It’s easy to fake a cover story like that, but it’s all we’ve got right now.”

  “I didn’t authorise any checks. Whatever happened to comms silence?”

  “Solomon’s always discreet.”

  “I see.”

  “And this is routine public information. It’s not like he had to hack into secure networks.”

  “I still want Kim scanned. I don’t just mean searched, I mean scanned. Every organ, bone, and body cavity that can possibly house a transmitter. Saw her skull open if you have to. But she gets to see nothing and hear nothing until I’m satisfied that she’s not a spy.”

  “She’s confined to a shielded room. No signals in or out.”

  “What else do we know?”

  “She didn’t have much with her. Nothing loaded on her card except her university authorisation and Korean, Australian, and Chinese bank accounts, but they’re no use to her outside the APS zone. Which explains the small pieces of jewellery sewn into her rucksack.”

  That proved nothing. Equipping a spy with convincing props and pocket litter was standard procedure. “They still use cards?”

  “If you’re travelling alone in bandit country, would you rather hand your card to a robber, or have him extract your chip the hard way?”

  Erskine had never been chipped, but that had nothing to do with robbery and everything to do with resenting the intrusion. “So what did she tell Montello?”

  “Only what Trinder passed on. Name, rank, and co-ordinates. Don’t worry, neither of them understood what the numbers were. They thought it was an ID code.”

  “Has Mangel spoken with her?”

  “She wasn’t in a fit state to chat. And I changed his access to block him from the medical wing.”

  “Does he know that?”

  “He does now.”

  “Very well, I’ll see her in fifteen minutes.”

  “She hasn’t brought in any die-back, by the way. Montello had the sense to bag her boots for testing.”

  “Very efficient. Trinder can thank him for me.”

  Erskine needed time to frame her questions. It was only when Berman had left that she wished she’d said well done for battening down the hatches right away. Berman was a safe pair of hands, privy to almost all her information. She’d need his support even more in the coming months.

  Because I’m going to have to tell the staff the truth.

  She missed having an office with a view that let her stare at a neutral landscape to think. This wing of the building was a citadel, partly below ground. But she did have another kind of view, a unique one that nobody else except an AI network and a small team of scientists and engineers had ever seen. It was a landscape nearly forty light years away, a plain on a planet called Opis.

  How do I even begin to explain this? I’ve rewritten that speech twenty times. No, thirty.

  The deception was so thorough and so essential that few personnel had ever been told the whole truth. No, Cabot hadn’t been lost, the wormhole project hadn’t been an expensive failure, and Ainatio hadn’t abandoned its exploration programmes to focus on resistant crops and eradicating die-back. Erskine remembered the briefing from her father — a secure room, swept for bugs, no others present — when he told her he was terminally ill, handed her control of the company, and dropped another, very different kind of bombshell.

  It was too much to take in the pain of knowing he was dying and the magnitude of the Cabot cover story in one conversation. She’d sat stunned by the scale of the secrecy. She understood right away why Nomad needed to be covert, and why the treaties broken by its technology might start a shooting war, but forty years later that necessity still hadn’t erased her sense of betrayal, or her guilt at being angry with a dying man. She’d never suspected that everything he’d told her before that moment had been a fantastically calculated lie. She’d swallowed the whole story, from the disaster itself to the decision to mothball the company’s orbital docks because it was easier than decommissioning and disposing of the reserve spacecraft that had already been built alongside them.

  Erskine believed nothing else her father said after that until the day he died. Sometimes, when she switched on the feed from Opis, she half-expected to see him emerge from the accommodation dome and apologise for faking his own death.

  I know it’s a shock, Georgie, but it’s been a necessary lie. You do understand, don’t you?

  “No, I don’t, you bastard,” she said aloud, snapping back at the imaginary voice in her head. “I nearly had you exhumed. I really thought you’d even lie about being dead.”

  She felt like she’d had a miserable childhood, but she knew she hadn’t. Happy memories had been distorted and discoloured through the lens of her father’s lie. She missed the years in Hong Kong, the street markets and the busy harbour and the brilliant bustle of people, now exchanged for this dull, lonely prison. She could either see the research centre as a shark cage that had kept the collapsing outside world at bay, as most people in here seemed to, or as a cell that kept her locked up with a duty imposed on her.

  I could have called in a few family favours and bought my way into Hong Kong. I wish I had.

  But this is my punishment for being angry with him when he most needed my love and support.

  There was one benefit in being a small community holed up here in an inhospitable land. It was already an isolated colony, the third generation for some. It would just be a change of scenery when they reached Opis.

  Hong Kong was probably beyond her now, but she could watch the wider horizons of humanity’s new home taking shape. The opaque panel faded into transparency as she pressed the blue lacquered handset. A vista like nothing on Earth appeared, a live and almost instantaneous transmission from another system, received by Orbital 1 from the quantum array near Pascoe’s Star.

  In the late afternoon light, the print-constructed domes of Nomad Base looked like an architect’s impression set against a distant backdrop of sage green hills. Pascoe’s Star, low in a clear sky, threw long shadows from the buildings. If Erskine hadn’t seen the structures formed from the planet’s raw materials by bots that had been built by bots themselves, she’d
have thought it was a hoax instead of the fruition of a century of planning and execution. Everyone had said it was too ambitious and doomed to failure, the journey too far, the long-term cryo too risky, a gamble taken far too soon when colonising Mars was still full of challenges and failures. They weren’t surprised when the ship was lost. Damn it, there were some who even seemed to relish saying so. So cover stories that fitted expectations were the best kind, even if this one still hit a raw nerve in her.

  But I’d have loved the satisfaction of telling them we pulled it off. And that we’ve got superluminal technology. Up yours, doubters. Eat our dust.

  Erskine wasn’t sure if the wormhole would be a bigger shock for the staff than Cabot’s existence. The wormhole was limited to tiny payloads like micro-sats, but that enabled an instant communications route to manage bot operations remotely in real time rather than relying on the programming they’d been launched with so many years ago. That programming could now be changed whenever necessary. It was the edge Ainatio needed in an unforgiving environment where humans couldn’t go home and try again later if things went wrong. Cabot’s crew would emerge from cryo to find a ready-made base awaiting them.

  If they wake up.

  Erskine had inherited a contingency plan drawn up before epidemics and die-back. It had been adjusted over the years, but nothing changed the basic dilemma: four ageing ships and the population here were all she had left for the follow-up missions. They had one shot at this.

  We’ll make it.

  Cabot still stood a better chance of success than the corporate generation ships. Erskine’s father had always said the crews would eat each other before they made planetfall, wherever that happened to be. They weren’t heading for Opis, though, and that was all that mattered to Erskine now.

  You can’t breed from crazies, Georgie. And even if you start with the brightest and best — and the most stable — there’s no telling what’ll happen three or four generations down the line, inbred, cooped up in a tin can. They’re not even sure where they’re going. We are.

  Tad Bednarz was crazy too, but it was a very specific gamble: the right people in the right place, provided they could reach it. The team he’d selected for the hardest part of the mission would be the ones to carry it out, not their children, not people he’d never live to know, and he was certain of how his team would perform, just as he was certain that it was worth the extra mileage and all its risks to put them on the best possible planet for humans. For a man whose life was entirely wrapped up in bots and AIs, he seemed to place an almost religious amount of faith in flesh and blood. Erskine could hear her father repeating the man’s mantra even now: the best investment I ever make is the right people.

  Yes, she understood why Ainatio wanted to keep Cabot quiet. It was right in front of her.

  A small bot on tracked wheels trundled across the screen on its way to one of the linked domes that formed Nomad’s living quarters. A robotic quadruped loped across the foreground, then paused and turned its snakehead camera arm as if it had picked up her scent over trillions of miles. She knew who was controlling the bot, but that slow, deliberate turn always made it look predatory, a headless Doberman poised to attack.

  It wasn’t entirely irrational. The AI within was another piece of banned technology, fully autonomous and capable of using weapons. He was also the backbone of the Nomad project.

  “Having fun, Solomon?” she said. “Don’t make the meat-bags jealous.”

  Solomon could have transferred his consciousness to any bot frame he pleased, but he liked quadrubots. AIs had their whims. His voice popped in her earpiece.

  “It’s been a perfect day, Director. There’s a very pleasant breeze here at the moment. How’s Dr Kim?”

  “I’m about to find out,” Erskine said. Solomon was just making conversation. He was aware of what was happening in the building as well as on Opis. “Thank you for checking her story.”

  “It’s incomplete data. Be cautious.”

  “I will.”

  The quadrubot headed for one of the domes, stood upright on its hind legs at the airlock, and extended an articulated grab to open the doors manually. The crew of Cabot would be on the ground and working on that very spot in a few months, preparing for the follow-up missions. It would be another forty-five years before the next wave landed. They were meant to be the explorers rather than the settlers, but some would inevitably want to start families rather than go back into cryo to wait for the next phase. They knew they were unlikely to come home.

  Especially now we’ve got to tell them that Earth’s changed for the worse since they went into cryo.

  They were prepared, though. They were trained to treat Earth as a world out of time and out of place, a ninety-year round trip. They were too far away for Ainatio to force them to do anything, but they were almost all former military personnel, disciplined and focused. Erskine trusted them to do their duty.

  “Okay, Dr Kim, let’s see what you really want,” Erskine said to herself, pulling on her jacket. “Because we didn’t slog our guts out for a century to see Nomad compromised now.”

  She’d shoot the woman herself if she turned out to be a spy. Her conscience wasn’t going to be any the worse if she did. The Nomad project had done terrible things out of necessity, far worse than lies, and while the most extreme excesses had been on her father’s watch, Erskine accepted that she’d kept those sins fresh and polished every day since then.

  She wasn’t sure that Hell existed, but if it did and she was going there, it was a fair exchange. Mankind — the best of it, the most civilised of it — had reached the stars.

  * * *

  Conference Hall 12A,

  Ainatio Park Research Centre:

  Monthly Departmental Party

  “You all got a drink? Have you? No empty glasses. Them’s the rules.”

  Alex Gorko looked around a packed room of technicians, researchers, and specialists in twenty different fields. Glasses and bottles were raised in his direction, accompanied by whoops and cheers. He held up both hands.

  “Boffins and assorted eggheads, attention please! What have we got to celebrate this month? Well, Kyle and Lucy decided to get engaged...” More whooping interrupted him. “...and Sarah’s learned enough long words to be appointed Deputy Head of Aeroponics... and the maintenance on Elcano’s navigation system is complete!”

  A voice piped up through the cheers and applause. “Waste of resources. It’s never going anywhere.”

  Alex had learned to gloss over questions about ships and orbitals with the convincing air of a manager who pursued pointless things. “Got to maintain expertise, in case we need it one day,” he said. “Moving swiftly on — we also have a record crop of hydroponic coffee.”

  “Yeah, how about serving some, Al?”

  Alex pointed an accusing finger into the crowd. “Hand that beer back and rack off, you filthy teetotaller.” Everybody laughed raucously. “Come on, people, party. Life’s too short to spend it sober.”

  They had reason to celebrate, but Alex couldn’t tell them why yet. Nomad would make history — on his watch as mission manager, his real role — even if nobody heard about it for a very long time. He just hoped all the cheerful people here were still smiling when Erskine broke the news and they realised that they’d been working on a lie for generations.

  To be fair, it wasn’t actually a lie. No, it was just a really, really big omission and a lot of misdirection.

  And I’ve got to break it to Cabot about how things have panned out since they left. That’s not going to be a bundle of laughs.

  Alex shook off the moment of doubt and carried on serving drinks, chivvying everyone into having a good time. He roamed the conference room with one of the catering bots trundling behind, laden with party foods and bottles. A chat here, a gossip and a joke there, and Alex could eyeball everybody to make sure they were
n’t starting to crumble. Those who’d been here for the longest, even born here, were less troubled by events outside, but the most recent recruits, the ones like him who’d joined ten years ago, felt the isolation most. They’d lost contact with extended family and friends, and didn’t know if they’d survived, but accepted they would probably never see them again either way. They were still working on forgetfulness.

  “Al, can I ask you a question?” Eduardo, one of the plant geneticists, steered him off to one side. “It’s personal.”

  Alex ducked his head to listen. “Sure.”

  “Any chance of transferring to the die-back team?”

  “Aren’t you happy?”

  “Well, sure, it’s a great department, but I don’t feel fully utilised.”

  Alex knew what was coming next. He’d heard it before. His answer was ready and waiting, polished by frequent use and requiring only small changes of detail to make it sound fresh and carefully considered each time.

  “Ed, you’re the prince of plant tweaking,” he said. “You could engineer trees to grow by candlelight. That sounds utilised to me.”

  “But we really need all hands to the pumps on die-back. I think that’s a lot more urgent.”

  “I understand, but you’re our insurance for the future.”

  “Really.”

  “We wouldn’t have sunk this much time and effort into plant adaptation just to give you a hobby. Keep building that freaky seed bank, Ed, in case we end up having to launch one day.”

  Everybody knew what that meant, or at least they thought they did.

  Eduardo let out a long, quiet breath. “Face it, we’re never leaving Earth. It’s fifty years too late to resurrect the Mars programme.”

  “Sure, but if that’s our last resort, we’ll still have options. We’re not going to sit back and wait to die, are we? If nothing else, we can keep the orbitals going for a long time.”

  “Yeah.” Eduardo looked down at his boots, nodding. “Yeah, you’re right.”

  “If it makes you happier, see Lianne and ask if she needs a hand. If you haven’t already.”