The Best of Us

by Karen Traviss

  “Yeah, and we destroyed millions of acres for the same reason. They even gave us time for orderly evacuation. I’m not making excuses for them, just saying that they’re focused on Mars because that’s doable now. Maybe they won’t care if we send more ships after Cabot as long as we’re not on their turf. Like the lighthuggers. They didn’t see them as a threat either. Just lunatics they were happy to see the back of.”

  Erskine did that slow head shake. “And you think they’ll dismiss us as harmless nut-jobs as well? Superluminal propulsion’s going to get their attention pretty damn fast. It’s their technology.”

  “True. But we made it work.” Alex realised he was trying to reassure himself. He hadn’t succeeded. “So do we take a chance with Kim and accept she’s on the run?”

  “Whether we believe her or not, we haven’t been able to hire anyone new for ten years. It might be handy to have someone with more current knowledge.”

  “We don’t need more boffins, though. We need more families. Colonists.” The research centre wasn’t just a community. It had become its own education system as well. There were second-generation scientists who’d been born and educated here, and now their children were being trained. “Okay, she’s of childbearing age, but do you really want to consider her for Opis? And is it worth the hassle of integrating her professionally when we’ll be launching the follow-up mission pretty soon?”

  “We don’t know what she knows.”

  “We don’t know what she’ll be willing to share with us, either.”

  “Get Dr Prinz to check out her professional ability with Solomon. Set her some problems to solve. If she’s what she says she is, we can get her working on the existing drives. Keep the FTL research as her reward for doing the less glamorous work on the ships we already have.”

  “I suppose handing her back to her embassy is out of the question now.”

  “Yes. It is. If they don’t already know she’s here, then she’s the perfect excuse for them to stick their noses in.” Erskine looked weary and disappointed, as if Alex had failed her. “We’ve got thirty troops and a few nuclear missiles. We couldn’t repel their table tennis team.”

  “So we’re relying on staying hidden and hoping nobody notices us.” Alex felt that they’d talked out their panic and were back to the status quo, which had served them remarkably well so far. “And if they do notice us, it’ll be hard for them to walk in here and make things work without us.”

  Erskine looked at him for a moment as if a better idea had struck her. “We could revive the crew early and get them prepared. We need to brief them while we’re sure we still have control of the mission.”

  “Could do. There’s a good margin of error on supplies.”

  “It’s going to be a lot for them to take in.”

  Alex couldn’t see how the APS angle would make the news any more shocking for them than it already was. “They’ll cope. They’re ex-military. They’re not bed-wetting civilians. I include myself in the bed-wetting demographic, by the way.”

  “Let’s do the numbers on that and pencil in a date for revival, then.”

  For a moment, Alex felt as if he’d walked into the room for the first time and noticed a stranger. Erskine suddenly looked older than the everyday image in his mind, the one modified by familiarity and a side order of inexplicable fear. Maybe it was the lighting, but he hadn’t noticed the progress of age before, the veins in the backs of her hands, the faded limbal rings of her eyes, and more of a stoop these days. Seventy wasn’t ancient, but she was fond of wearing those tailored suits by some long-dead European designer, and that meant she kept herself thin. Alex could hear his mother telling him that a woman could either keep her figure or her face as she aged, but not both.

  And Mom’s gone. Never got to say goodbye. I had to be at work.

  “Well, at least we don’t have to turn down thousands of applicants for places on the mission,” Erskine said, closing her eyes as she ran her middle finger around the edges of the sockets. She blinked a few times. “Plenty of berths now.”

  “You’re counting on everyone in Kill Line wanting to go.”

  “Barring a late breakthrough, they’ll have to live with the risk of die-back getting here if they don’t. But there’ll be ample time for them to adjust while we ready the ships.”

  “Have you thought about the transit camp again? You know, ages, gene pool, frontier skills.”

  “I have. And they don’t fit the plan.”

  It was a weird way to put it. Alex chewed that over. The vets and refugees were just distant figures he’d sometimes see if he was monitoring the drones, which wasn’t often. Once in a blue moon he’d drive out to talk to the mayor of Kill Line and he’d see one of the armed vets out on an AT bike, but they never came close enough for him to even speak to them. They did, however, seem like the kind of guys the company would need on Opis. They were survivors.

  “I think that’s a missed opportunity, Director,” he said. “But it’s your call.”

  He left with the intention of going straight to Vicky Prinz’s office and discussing how they’d test Kim’s expertise, but he took the roundabout route to give himself some thinking time. With the exception of Cabot and Nomad Base itself, global circumstances had trashed the rest of the plan in the intervening years. Realists were concentrating on Mars, with maybe a few unmanned extrasolar missions to build expertise. But out-of-control geniuses skipped Mars, ignored red dwarves with less ideal planets a lot closer to home, mocked generation lighthuggers, and went all out for somewhere perfect but much further away for their first shot at colonising the galaxy.

  Because Opis is most like Earth. Not much remodelling required. But Bednarz wasn’t a hundred per cent sure of that, was he? It was likely, not guaranteed. We know now, but he couldn’t have known for sure then.

  Yeah, Bednarz, you were a frigging lunatic. Just like the lighthuggers. Yet here we are. We all bought into it.

  All that was left of Ainatio was this small core. The geneticists kept reassuring Alex that the gene pool was still varied enough to support a colony, but he would have felt a lot more confident right then if he could have guaranteed that the Kill Line townsfolk were added to the mix. Instead, he’d have to deal with two communities who still had no idea they were soon going to be offered a ticket to a very distant world, and none of them had signed up to be spacefarers.

  Well, shit...

  He went into the nearest bathroom and ran cold water into the basin to rinse his face. There were so few staff in a complex designed for thousands that he could almost guarantee he’d have a bathroom to himself, no matter which one he happened to walk into. As he wiped his hands and checked his beard in the mirror, he noticed grey hairs among the ginger. They were new.

  We’re all running out of time. Even me.

  Alex had moments when he realised he’d gone from apex predator to an endangered species in one generation, just like Rome but with nobody left to look back and admire those terrific roads and aqueducts. This was one such moment.

  “Hi guys,” he said to his reflection. This was how he usually rehearsed his opening conversation with Cabot. “You’re now approaching Opis. While you were sleeping, the epidemics got worse and killed hundreds of millions, a bioweapon wiped out most of our food crops, APS nuked us, and by the way, everyone thinks you died forty-five years ago. And we’re down to a skeleton staff, we rely on AIs to do all the heavy lifting, and we might have to bring a bunch of rubes with us to make up the numbers and stop us inbreeding ourselves into one-eyed droolers. So, how was your day?”

  Dragging out each painful revelation would only make it worse. He’d find a more diplomatic way of covering the talking points, though.

  “Solomon,” he said, “you really don’t listen in bathrooms, do you?”

  There was no response. Sol had set his own boundaries, despite his ability to take o
ver the entire operation if he felt like it. Alex thought again about what Trinder had said about foreign policy, that it wasn’t a nation’s intent that counted when assessing threats but its military capability. Intent changed. Allies could become enemies at the drop of a hat.

  No, Solomon was almost human, but he wasn’t subject to human whims. If he made a promise, Alex could take it to the bank. Whether the AI swore he’d stay away from the bathrooms, or get everyone safely to Opis, he’d keep his word.

  “Good man,” Alex said, and went on his way.

  04

  Land, water, fuel, ammo, transport, dogs. That’s all it takes to survive. But you need people and ideas worth defending if you want to rebuild a society.

  Corporal Jared Talbot, formerly Fourth Eastern Division State Defence

  FIBUA Facility, Ainatio Park Research Centre:

  First Week in March

  The round struck Trinder near the top of his spine, and it hurt like hell.

  It was his own fault. He’d paused too long at the corner of the passageway, giving Orange Force — Schwaiger, probably — time to sight up. If the round hadn’t been simunition, his armour probably wouldn’t have saved him.

  He shouldn’t even have been thinking that it wasn’t real. He should have been immersed, sufficiently convinced for a moment to treat it like a live round. But he couldn’t focus today. He could only dwell on his shortcomings, all the experience he lacked and that no amount of training could replace. Just thinking like that seemed to prove his point.

  We’ve got the SAS, and now we’ve got the guys who fought their way out of Baltimore. And then there’s me.

  Get a grip. The detachment needs you to be better than this.

  There were still three Orange targets left standing, maybe four. Trinder backed into a doorway and returned fire blindly. But whoever had caught him had moved on. He was left with a throbbing pain across his shoulders and a sense of failure.

  Shots were still echoing up the passage to his right. He edged to the corner again and poked a cam around, but the ceiling lights began flashing in a slow rhythm and the firing stopped. It was the signal to suspend the exercise while someone entered or left the area.

  “What is it, Sol?”

  “My apologies, Major, but Erskine wants to see you.”

  “Now?”

  “Right away.”

  Trinder could feel the sweat trickling down his spine. “Can I clean up first?”

  “She did say now.”

  “Okay.” He opened the squad link. “Commander exiting the area. Fonseca, you have command, out.”

  The safety bulkhead parted to let him pass. The walls had been moved to create a custom layout for the simulated clearing operation, and it took him a couple of seconds to orient himself. Damn, he really didn’t have his head in the game today. He removed his helmet and set off at a jog towards the management wing, irritable and sweaty, hoping that Erskine would keep things short.

  “Am I in the shit, Sol?” he asked.

  “I don’t think so.”

  “I can’t remember the last time she spoke to me.”

  “I can.”

  “Is it a delayed ass-kicking about Dr Kim?”

  “Not as far as I know.”

  The detachment was near the bottom of the food chain, and the highest level that Trinder scaled was departmental meetings with the facilities manager. A private meeting with the Director was unheard of.

  Berman, her bagman, looked him over. “It’s okay, you probably won’t need the armour,” he said.

  “We were training. I was told it was urgent.”

  “Do go in. She’s waiting.”

  Trinder rapped on the door and walked in to find Erskine at her desk. She gestured to one of the leather chairs.

  “Take a seat, Major. Thank you for coming so quickly.” She sounded as if she was trying to put him at ease before delivering bad news. “What I’m about to tell you is in the strictest confidence for the time being.”

  “I assumed it would be, ma’am.”

  Erskine was the empress of this closed world. Trinder had only seen in her full regal mode, sweeping into meetings or dining in the staff restaurant with an unmarked but very visible exclusion zone around her. Now she looked almost apologetic.

  “It’s about Cabot,” she said. “You remember the ship was lost.”

  Trinder couldn’t guess what this was about, but at least that hadn’t happened on his watch. He hadn’t even been born. “Before my time, ma’am. But I’ve heard of it.”

  “Well, that was just a cover story. Right now, Cabot is on course for a planet called Opis, and the crew are going to be revived shortly.”

  “Oh. Really?”

  This wasn’t what Trinder had expected at all. As news went, it was a shock to realise Ainatio still had live missions running, but it was also history. Perhaps it explained what Kim was doing here, though.

  Maybe she’s our spy, then. Not theirs.

  “You don’t seem shocked,” Erskine said.

  “I am, ma’am, but I don’t really understand the context.”

  “You will. The mission’s code-named Nomad, and it’s going to take over our lives here very soon.”

  Trinder wanted to tell her to spit it out, but after a slow start, his mind had started to pick up speed and now it was racing ahead. Shit, was this all going public? How?

  “Who else knows, ma’am?”

  “At the moment, just a dozen people.”

  “Is there a reason why you’re briefing me before the scientific staff?”

  “It’s going to be a big shock for them. I don’t know how people will react.”

  “Oh. Public order. Understood.” Trinder couldn’t imagine the folks here rioting over it. It might even boost morale. “What do I need to know?”

  “Cabot’s close to Pascoe’s Star, which is forty light years away, and we’ve been building a base on Opis.” Erskine frowned as if she couldn’t think how to explain it. “Perhaps I’ve gone about this the wrong way. See for yourself.”

  She picked up a handset and swivelled her chair around as the wall behind her peeled back into a screen. Trinder stared at the sunny landscape for a long time. He couldn’t tell where it was, only that the colour of the sky said it wasn’t Mars, despite the print-built domes and the construction bots moving around. It could have been one of the simulated Martian habitats built on Earth to train astronauts. But a moon gave the game away, low in the sky and streaked with bands like a gas planet.

  This wasn’t Earth, either.

  “Oh.” Now he couldn’t take his eyes off it. “Is that it?”

  “Nomad Base,” Erskine said. Her voice had dropped a pitch. She sounded like it was a relief to get it off her chest. “And that’s in real time. Only a handful of people here have ever seen this.”

  Trinder wondered if he’d misunderstood. He had a torrent of questions, but he couldn’t corral them into any kind of order.

  “How?” he asked. “The signal should take forty years. Or is that an old transmission that’s only just reached us?”

  Erskine pushed her chair further back and sat watching, arms folded, half-smiling, occasionally doing a little shake of her head as if she was still amazed by it all.

  “No, I said real time. Continuous live transmission. And we can do it because we developed a wormhole.”

  “That’s supposed to be impossible.”

  “No, just damned hard. We could only send very small payloads, but it meant we could put a comms relay in place to work with the conventional cargos we’d already launched. We landed self-replicating bots on Opis to build the base, and the wormhole relay lets us manage them in real time.” She looked at him and waited, as if she didn’t think it was sinking in. “Superluminal travel and instant transmission. That’s what turns us from
harmless eccentrics APS can ignore into something they’ll want to take over. Especially when they realise it’s probably based on research stolen from them.”

  The penny started to drop for Trinder. “Was Dr Kim our agent on the inside?”

  “No, but apparently the FTL was based on her great-grandmother’s research. She says we stole it, and I can’t prove we didn’t. If she’s worked it out, I’m now worried who else has.”

  Trinder struggled to find solid ground in an instantly changed world. What was it that he’d thought just a couple of weeks ago? Nobody could keep a big secret hidden for long in Ainatio. He’d really believed that. He’d believed a lot of things, including the impossibility of FTL travel, but now he was starting to wonder if anything he took for granted was true.

  He managed a nod. “Okay, yes, I’m shocked.”

  “I’m sorry you were never told the truth,” Erskine said. “Nobody was. My father broke the news to me when I took over the company, and I can assure you it was a shock for me too. The only other people who know are the heads of departments.”

  And they’d kept it quiet as well. Trinder felt oddly betrayed, knowing that he’d looked Alex Gorko in the eye many times and never seen the slightest hint of deception. He was starting to make sense of the revelations, but as the fog cleared, he realised how many questions Erskine hadn’t covered.

  “How did you plan to recruit for the follow-up missions if this was all secret?” he asked.

  “The first batch would have been by selection from key workers, probably with a high proportion of military.”

  “And still secret.”

  “Yes, but once Nomad Base and the comms and logistics links with Earth were secured, we were going to go public, say that we’d found the ship, and invite volunteers. There was a fleet planned. Fifty ships over a period of forty years.”

  “And now we’re down to four ships and zero volunteers.”

  “Yes.”

  “So what happens now?”

  “We adapt the original plan and carry on. It was never intended to be an evacuation. Bednarz did it because he felt it was mankind’s time to leave home. But events overtook us, of course.”