The Best of Us

by Karen Traviss

  “Baked potato.”

  “Great. Thanks.”

  “You want it hot? I can put it back on the stove.” Jared opened the squeaky metal door and shoved a couple of logs into the flames. He chuckled to himself. “Tell me about the singularity thing again. Weren’t we supposed to be so technically advanced by now that we’d uploaded ourselves and didn’t need potatoes?”

  “We must have been out when it happened. Cold spuds will do fine.”

  They ate the last of the potatoes and drank the beer. It was always a case of finish it or waste it, and nobody wasted anything, not after the famines. Food had never gone back to being routine. Chris dunked his potato in hot sauce and thought about the time they’d gone scavenging in an abandoned suburb and had been ecstatic to find a pantry with bags of flour. It had been swarming with insects, and they’d spent hours sieving them out with a plastic strainer, but everyone had bread to eat for a while. Yeah, constant hunger — real hunger, starvation hunger — made a different man of you.

  Jared got up and refilled the jug from the battered plastic container, then held out his hand for Chris’s bottle. “So this code number.”

  “I ran it past the guys and not even Chuck could get it.”

  “It still looks like map co-ordinates to me.”

  “Yeah, we got that far.”

  “Except there’s four sets of numbers. So that’s latitude, longitude, depth or elevation, and... time?”

  “You’ve got to stop watching time-travel stuff.”

  Jared chuckled. “Doesn’t have to be time as a dimension. Could be an RV.”

  “Whatever. Hey, this is a good brew.” Chris held up his bottle in respect. “I could smell the malt from the Kill Line brewery this morning.”

  “We should organise a joint beer festival. Try to get some social interaction going. We’ve got too many single guys here.”

  “You running a lonely hearts’ club now?”

  “Single guys are potential trouble when they outnumber women. Rivalry, fighting, tension. You know it’s true.”

  “We haven’t had any trouble so far,” Chris said. “We don’t mix, they don’t mix, Ainatio doesn’t mix. We’re the wrong kind of people for each other. We don’t even see them for days or weeks on end.”

  Jared raised an eyebrow. “But they treat the townsfolk in their hospital.”

  “A colonoscopy isn’t the same as inviting the guys around for a few tins.”

  “Did you ask Trinder if they had any spare ammo? Seeing as you’re best buds now.”

  “I’m saving that for the next date.”

  “We need to go procuring again.”

  It was always a toss-up between relying on the ammunition they’d stockpiled and conserving it, or going out to find more and risking expending a lot of it if they ran into trouble. Chris decided to err on the side of risk this time.

  “What’s left around here that we haven’t searched?” he asked.

  “Nothing in a twenty-mile radius. Time to spread the net.”

  “Okay, we’ll look west. Kingston, maybe.” Chris mopped up the last of the sauce with the final chunk of potato. Judging the bite sizes to achieve perfect and total use of both always made him feel better. “Y’know, if I was Trinder, I’d make damn sure I knew who everybody was and where they were. And I wouldn’t have let us in.”

  Jared started laughing again. “Yeah, you’re drunk. You always get hyper-responsible when you’re wasted. You know how many times we’ve had this conversation?”

  “It bothers me.”

  “It shouldn’t. It’s not like they’ve been through what we have. Why are you suddenly worried? Nothing’s changed since the day we got here.”

  “I never got this close to getting in there before.”

  Chris had filed Ainatio under situational awareness. Even if he didn’t know what Ainatio got up to or who was in there, it was a significant target that had to figure in his threat assessment. If it had some strategic value, someone might try to destroy it. If it was storing food and supplies, survivors might storm it. Maybe that was all he needed to know, but he still had too many questions.

  “Chris, if we were getting paid, this would be above our pay grade,” Jared said. “Watch the movie and relax. It’s an alien invasion. You like those.”

  Chris enjoyed doomsday movies as long as they were so dumb that they were funny. If they were too accurate, he might as well have been back in Baltimore, fighting for real. This one looked like it was going to pass the stupidity test and take his mind off Dr Kim’s code for a while, but his nagging curiosity drifted back during a boring scene.

  Maybe...

  Maybe the code really was just a set of numbers that only Kim would know, and Ainatio had been waiting for her to show up and identify herself. Doug had said that new personnel had sometimes been shuttled in. That would mean Kim was a defector, though, and that opened a whole new can of worms. Chris made an effort to stop thinking about it.

  “Are you watching this or not?” Jared asked.

  “Kind of.”

  “I’ll be testing you on it later.”

  “Okay, why do the aliens always travel halfway across the galaxy to fight us for our water? They’re advanced enough to travel faster than light, but they can’t find a source closer to home? A frozen, empty planet? Asteroids?”

  “You’re not getting into the spirit of this, Chris. I can see that.”

  Jared could always say it with the straight face and sombre tone of a preacher. The act lasted about ten seconds. Then he burst out laughing again and Chris couldn’t avoid joining in.

  It was a very dumb movie doing what movies were meant to do, erasing the real world for a while. Even guessing how it would end wasn’t important. It was sitting there and laughing at it with a buddy that mattered.

  Chris stood up as the credits rolled and stretched his arms. “I better walk the course.” He picked up his rifle. “Beer’s no excuse.”

  “Yeah, Marsha’s going to wonder where I am. See you in the morning.”

  They left the lights dimmed and the stove stoked for the duty guard. Chris needed to walk around the camp once every night before he could sleep, even when he wasn’t on duty. He was the one who’d brought them all here: he was responsible for their safety. And it reassured him to see the lights in the windows and hear the sounds of people getting on with their lives — water running down a drainpipe, the faint sound of music, the distant thud of a door being shut. It told him that he’d done the right thing in the end, and that if the situation ever improved, this community could grow, not die off quietly in some desperate, shattered city like so many others had.

  And what happens if and when the die-back reaches us?

  He had a plan. He always did. They’d have to go back to the original objective and head for the coast.

  And what then? Can’t run forever.

  Chris ambled around the boundary, shining his flashlight into the undergrowth. It lit up the eyes of a fox that looked right at him before trotting away, completely unconcerned.

  Outside the Marrs’ place, their teenage son was sitting on the front step with his telescope aimed at the sky again. Nathan loved astronomy. Chris wasn’t sure how much use a small handheld telescope was for stargazing, but it seemed to keep the kid happy, and that was something. There wasn’t much to do around here for a fifteen-year-old boy who didn’t like the outdoors.

  “Hey Nathan.” Chris stopped to chat. “Good clear sky tonight, huh?”

  Nathan was at that awkward, uncommunicative stage. “Yeah. Really good visibility.”

  “Anything interesting?”

  “Jupiter’s clear.” Nathan handed the telescope to Chris and pointed up. “Uh... you know that list of numbers that you’ve been showing people?”

  “Yeah?”

  “It’s galacti
c and equatorial co-ordinates. The position of a star.”

  “Oh.” Well, that explained the request for an astrophysicist. I should have guessed. “Thanks.”

  “You never seen that?”

  “No. I never think about space.” Chris put the telescope to his eye to find Jupiter again. Constellations were for last-resort navigation when he didn’t have a compass, or just for admiring on a balmy night, which this definitely wasn’t. He couldn’t remember how old he’d been when he’d stopped seeing space as an exciting place to go in a future that every kid assumed would happen. “Which star is it?”

  “Not a major one. Pascoe’s Star.” Nathan managed to sound casual, but Chris guessed that he was trying not to overreact to unexpected attention about his hobby. “I don’t think it’s above the horizon yet.”

  “Makes a good password.”

  “Yeah. Nearly impossible to guess. Even if you know that someone uses positions as passwords, you’d still have to work through thousands of stars to find the right one. Well, millions, actually. And somebody would catch you long before then.”

  Chris handed back the telescope. The kid showed Chris a chart full of numbers on his screen, probably the first time he’d had the opportunity to tell an adult something important. Chris had to run his fingertip along the lines of text to follow it and it still meant nothing. But all he needed to know was that it was a map reference.

  “Well done,” Chris said. “If I’m ever stuck on another question, I’ll ask you first. Don’t freeze out here, okay?”

  Nathan gave him an awkward grin. “Sure.”

  Chris carried on walking. The co-ordinates made sense. As Nathan had pointed out, it was a great password generator, but while it answered one question, it just made another one more puzzling. If Kim was a defector, what did she have that was so important to Ainatio that they’d let her in?

  He paused by the garbage pit to have a smoke and look back at the neat lines of camp lights strung between the cabins, his daily reassurance that they were still a civilisation.

  Maybe Kim knew how to reverse the die-back, and for whatever political reason, APS hadn’t wanted to share it with the West.

  No, that didn’t make sense. She was a physicist, and if APS wanted to destroy what was left of America, they wouldn’t have given advance warning and time to evacuate. Chris knew that they had. He’d been there on the ground, listening to the voice traffic and watching the clock, trying to hurry straggling civilians onto buses and telling them to forget about packing stuff they’d never need. Actually, it was always stuff they needed. Everyone knew what mattered to them, however dumb and useless it looked to others. It was about what those objects represented, not their usefulness.

  He dismissed the saviour theory. Kim hadn’t struggled all this way with some miracle cure against the wishes of any government. He placed his bet back on spying. And there was always the possibility that she wasn’t spying for APS, but for Ainatio, and had finally escaped from behind enemy lines.

  Actually, that wasn’t a bad idea. What were they doing behind those walls that needed so much secrecy when the world around them was dead or dying? Chris let the thought rattle around his head as he continued walking the border of his small, accidental kingdom.

  * * *

  Ainatio Park Research Centre,

  Staff Restaurant B:

  0900, Saturday, February 21

  Erskine knew this was the wrong time of day to resume the conversation with Annis Kim. On a weekday it would have been routine, but on a Saturday it would look like she was panicking. If Kim knew less than she appeared to, it’d confirm that her fishing expedition had gotten a bite.

  Kim would have to wait, then. Besides, Erskine had someone else to see first. She killed time buttering her toast with slow deliberation and looked at Berman pointedly.

  “You told me Marc Gallagher always comes in here after his squash game,” she said.

  Berman just stared back at her, expressionless. “I’ve collated his tracker data. You could set your watch by him. And if he doesn’t show, it’s not as if he can disappear.”

  “Phil, I don’t enjoy these theatrics any more than you do, but I can’t be seen to deliberately bypass Trinder.”

  Marc wasn’t chipped like Ainatio staff. Erskine wondered if he’d just slipped his long-standing temporary card into someone else’s pocket to cover his tracks, then remembered the security cameras in the recreation wing. Her default was suspicion. She wanted to blame her father, but her common sense said those tendencies were born, not created in adult life.

  “I have to talk to him before I go back to Kim.”

  “I realise that.” Berman cleared his plate and went to put it on the trolley, but a bot rolled up to take it from his hand. It was one of the earliest models, a box on wheels. Berman addressed it like a disapproving parent. “One day I’m not going to let go, just to see what you do.”

  “Don’t be surprised if one of them slugs you,” Erskine said.

  “I’d better be off, then, Director. Good luck.”

  Berman left her to it. She carried on toying with the toast, reading the overnight messages on her screen. Solomon had filed a contact report about the nocturnal wildlife that he’d encountered on Opis, using an odd mix of scientific detachment and the slightly excited wish-you-were-here tone of a tourist messaging home. Sometimes she tried to imagine how his consciousness handled being aware of everything that was happening without being mired in trivial detail, but he latched onto priorities like someone hearing their name in the murmur of a conversation that they weren’t consciously listening to. The more she learned about AI theory, the less she understood Solomon.

  Sometimes the AI seemed like a paralysed man trapped in his interface rather than an entity with extraordinary freedom of access and control of every system. In that light, his enthusiasm for the more limited powers of the quadrubot made more sense. He was willing to forgo omnipotence and omnipresence to be able to touch the world.

  And I can’t keep many secrets from him, if any. Does he judge me? He certainly judges others.

  A movement caught her eye. Her subconscious was scanning for targets without thinking. Marc Gallagher was now standing at the counter, studying the hot dishes, one of those men she would always treat with caution: late forties, lean, hair razored just long enough to reveal that it was mid-brown, with an air of physical certainty that always made him look like he was ready to tackle a threat she couldn’t see.

  Okay, give him a moment, then take my plate back for a refill.

  Erskine stood up. The serving bot rumbled back to assist her but she waved it away. Sometimes she regretted the decision not to employ Kill Line people in here. It was good security to have as few outsiders in contact with the staff as possible, but that policy hadn’t been designed for a world that was running out of people. Opis would need more colonists. There was only one source left now.

  “Morning, Director.” Marc studied the scrambled eggs. “Any more incidents?”

  He was unfailingly courteous, but he always gave the impression that he couldn’t see why she was relevant to his existence. Perhaps she wasn’t. But he was relevant to hers.

  “What do you make of it, then?” she asked.

  “Dr Kim, you mean?”

  “Yes. Until I get some sense out of her, I have to assume she’s an APS spy.”

  “Well, spies aren’t supposed to tell you where they come from, but it’s always possible that’s exactly why she did.”

  “No disrespect to Trinder and his troops, but they’ve never gone up against state actors. You used to protect critical infrastructure, I believe. I’m trying to assess the threat.”

  “Yeah, our job was stopping bad guys attacking strategic targets. Power stations, oil rigs, nukes, that kind of thing. Which, to be fair, is the same as your lads are trained for, except we tend to have
a higher body count at the end of the day.” Marc seemed to have made his choice. He picked out the most overcooked bacon to top his eggs. “But my first question would be what you’ve got — or what you’ve done — that APS want to know about. If someone’s spying, they either want to take something or stop something.”

  It was inevitable that he’d ask her the very question she didn’t dare answer, but if he hadn’t been smart then she wouldn’t have asked for his advice. Now the lying started in earnest.

  “I’m trying to find out what they think we’ve got,” Erskine said. “Or done.”

  “It’s perception that matters. No joy from Kim, then.”

  “I’m taking another crack at her later.”

  “Well, your biggest threat is the one they’ve already demonstrated. If they think that die-back’s still a risk to them, they’ll nuke you again. But they could suspect you of anything if they’re worried enough.” He followed her back to the table. “Okay, look at it from the other end of the telescope. What could they take out that would shut you down? What’s critical for you? We did the assessment with your guys when we came here. Apart from this facility, if you lose the town and farmland, you might just about survive for a while on your own hydroponics, if you step it up. And that yeast stuff as long as you’ve got sugar to feed it. So what about the orbitals?”

  Lie. “If APS targets those, we lose the labs.”

  “I don’t think you’ve got labs up there. Not these days, anyway.”

  And I thought I was such a good poker player. Or maybe it’s just logical and he’s shaking me down because he’s exactly like me.

  “Do we need to go into that?”

  Marc carried on eating. “Just nod and I’ll work it out for myself. Whatever you’re doing, I hope you’ve got some defensive capability. I know weapons are banned, but we’re not stupid, are we? Close-quarters battle isn’t much fun on a space station. Shooting holes in bulkheads is a bit more serious in a vacuum. Then there’s the low-gravity areas.”

  “I think APS would have made a move by now.”

  “So how about the ships you’ve got alongside?”