The Best of Us

by Karen Traviss

  “How will you man the missions? We’re all there is. Us and Kill Line. And the transit camp.”

  As soon as Trinder said it, he felt his scalp tighten. He already knew the answer. He hadn’t signed up for this. Neither had any of his detachment. He didn’t even know how he felt about it.

  “In a way, the decisions have been made for us,” Erskine said. “We have all the right skills around us. Now that we’ve reached Opis, we can’t abandon the project.”

  No, the decisions hadn’t damn well been made as far as Trinder was concerned. He hadn’t been consulted. Was she telling him that she expected his troops to just ship out to another planet? They weren’t an expeditionary force. When there’d still been a national defence structure, overseas operations had been carried out almost entirely by private military contractors, and the last people to wear a national uniform had been border forces like the Homeland Navy and local State Defence units. Few of his own troops had served on any kind of frontline, either at home or abroad. They were corporate forces with very specific tasking, defenders of economic and strategic targets.

  We’re not even real infantry. And we’re sure as shit not space marines. The nearest we’ve got to that is two Brits pushing fifty who aren’t even under my command. Well, that’s terrific. And I can’t even guess what the risks are.

  “Does that include us?” he asked.

  “Nothing’s compulsory, but I was rather counting on the detachment.”

  Trinder knew that he should press her, but he said nothing and hated himself for his silence. He’d assume the worst until the details started to emerge. It was the wrong attitude, and he knew it, but at some point soon, he was going to have to look his people in the eye and tell them they were being deployed to another planet, and that the timescales involved made it a one-way trip.

  The world isn’t ending. Asia’s fine, more or less. What makes it worth abandoning even this?

  He realised that he’d been distracted from the screen. That told him all he needed to know about his personal priorities. The biggest event in human history, the impossible made possible, was unfolding in front of him, and it had taken a back seat to his growing panic about being drafted into a deep-space mission. He stared at the feed from Opis for a moment, trying to recapture the unthinking amazement of a few minutes ago, the wonder of an unspoiled planet beyond his imagination, but now all he could see was a wilderness so far from home that he couldn’t even work out how many zeroes there were in the distances involved.

  Erskine swivelled around again to face her desk and tapped at the terminal. “I’ve just sent you the original Nomad operational plan. It’s a lot to digest, so take your time, and as I said, don’t mention this to anyone yet, not even to your officers.”

  “Yes, ma’am.” Trinder pushed himself out of the deep chair and picked up his helmet from the coffee table. He was on autopilot now. “Thank you.”

  He left Erskine’s office in a haze. He imagined this was how people felt when they’d just been given a terminal diagnosis, reeling from the realisation that the universe didn’t know or care about their plans. Shit, was this the best he could do? He’d always worried that he wouldn’t be up to the task in a real emergency, and now he knew he wasn’t. His first reaction should have been to face the challenge and make it work.

  Desk jockey. REMF. Plastic private. Yeah, that’s me.

  It was too soon to go back to the office. They’d all smell the secrecy on him. Lennie knew him too well, and even if their relationship had been over for a long time, she wouldn’t let up until she got it out of him.

  The john was the only sanctuary he had left. Everyone could track where he was, but at least he’d have some peace and quiet to unscramble his brain. He retreated to the nearest bathroom, locked the toilet cubicle, and sat down on the seat lid to take a look at his screen.

  There it was, sitting in his mail folder: Project Nomad.

  And now Solomon would see he’d retrieved the document. Trinder didn’t even feel that his thoughts were private today.

  Hang on... Solomon must know all about Nomad.

  He knows what Erskine told me. He’s part of the building. He’s in all the ships. He’s in the weapons systems.

  Things were dawning on Trinder too slowly today.

  He stared at the back of the door and let his focus slip until it was just a pale yellow blur with an unreadable notice on it. Solomon must have been a key element of Nomad from the start. The AI was woven into Ainatio, distributed across the network. There was no core machine to fail or for an enemy to target and destroy. Solomon could regroup in an intact part of the system or download to a mobile unit like a quadrubot, beyond the reach of attack, safe from sabotage, and keep things running. He and the subsidiary AIs that he managed were the failsafe. They probably didn’t need the meat-bags at all.

  But why do I feel bad about this? At the end of the day, Sol’s just a computer programme.

  Solomon wasn’t a human slyly keeping something from his buddies, and he wasn’t an unseen comrade on the radio net, or state surveillance, or an all-seeing, judgmental god, even if his invisibility sometimes made his interventions feel like all three. It was easy to start thinking crazy things when you were cooped up like this. Trinder knew he had to get a grip. He wasn’t the only one kept out of the loop, because most of the scientists didn’t know about Cabot either. He took some comfort from that and tried to concentrate on his screen again, working out how he’d explain all this to the detachment.

  The outside door clicked open. It was probably one of the cleaning bots on its rounds. Well, he couldn’t hide in here all day. He put the screen in his pants pocket and stood up. But when he opened the cubicle door, there was no sign of a bot, just Alex Gorko leaning against the row of washbasins with his arms folded.

  “You too, huh?” Alex said. “Hiding in the john, I mean.”

  “Doesn’t everybody?”

  “I’m not stalking you, by the way.”

  “Sure, everyone ends up in this bathroom by accident sooner or later.”

  “So are you okay?”

  There was no point in playing the game. “You’re asking because...”

  “I know that you now know what I know. So to speak.”

  “Yeah. I have questions.” Trinder made an effort to look cynical or resigned, anything but scared. “How do you feel about it?”

  Alex shrugged. “It’s an amazing achievement.”

  “Spare me. I’m asking how you feel about a one-way trip to Opis. Or did I get the wrong idea about that?”

  “Well, I admit they didn’t mention it at my interview.”

  “Just tell me how you kept it quiet. Who’s been working on this?”

  “Mainly the AIs.”

  “I’m going to find out a lot of things I won’t like, aren’t I?”

  “You’ve got the report.”

  “So the intention was always to keep the staff in the dark until the last minute.”

  “No, but when a project’s been running across four generations, things change and priorities drift. Look, nobody’s going to be bundled aboard a ship against their will. It’s not going to be the wagon train exodus that Bednarz fantasised about, either, but if we decide to ship everybody out, we can.”

  “Who decides?”

  “We’ve still got some details to work out.”

  Trinder could translate that. “You haven’t got a clue, have you?”

  “Dan, all I’m saying is come and see me when you want to talk this through. I’m always available.”

  “And Dr Kim?”

  “We’re still evaluating whether it’s safe to let her work on the project.”

  Trinder bristled. “Erskine never mentioned that. Are you people crazy, letting a spy loose? I thought Erskine said we had to keep APS out of this.”

  “Maybe we be
tter have that beer and chat later.” Alex pushed himself away from the basins and half-opened the door. “By the way, your new buddy Chris Montello just notified your guys that the vets are going off-camp tomorrow. He thought you’d want to know in case you spotted activity and got worried. They’re going to Kingston to look for ammunition.”

  “He’s taking a hell of a risk.” There was no telling what state the town was in or who might still be around. “We could save them the trouble and give them some.”

  “They’ve never asked for any.”

  “So? They patrol the boundary. We benefit from that.”

  “Yeah.”

  “Where’s the harm in it? It’s like giving them stuff from a dumpster. Come on.”

  Alex looked uncomfortable for a moment, lips compressed as if he was debating whether to say anything. “Well, now you know what I know, you understand why it’s not a good idea to arm our neighbours.”

  “Why? We haven’t had any trouble from them. In fact, they’re the ones who’ve headed it off.”

  “Erskine hasn’t factored them into her plan.”

  “That’s pretty callous.” The camp folk might not want to leave Earth any more than Trinder did, but they deserved the chance. “So decisions have been made, then.”

  “It’s early days. Besides, this isn’t some last-chance evacuation.”

  Trinder knew when Alex was making excuses for Erskine. “They’re armed already. You’ve never been worried about that before.”

  “Because sleeping dogs are best left lying. Disarming them would just set hares running, to overdo my animal metaphors.”

  “And who do you think would disarm them anyway? My guys. And vets who’ve been through Baltimore wouldn’t just touch their caps and say yessir, we understand, and hand over their weapons to us, would they?”

  “A good reason for not giving them a stockpile of ammo.”

  Sometimes, just sometimes, Trinder’s gut overruled his faith in the rule book. Right now it told him to shut up and walk away. But it wasn’t telling him to accept Alex’s veto. It was just telling him to keep his powder dry.

  “Okay,” he said. “I’d better talk to Montello. You and me, we’ll have that chat when I’ve read the Nomad report.”

  He left the bathroom ahead of Alex and didn’t look back. Now that he was coming to terms with how much he didn’t know, and how long he hadn’t known it, uncomfortable thoughts were fermenting. Was that why the detachment was really here? Had he and his troops just been marking time, bored out of their minds and filling their days with training until the follow-up missions needed to deploy them? Erskine should have realised that they weren’t trained for Nomad. She might as well have armed the medics and shipped them out instead.

  Get a grip.

  Would he have signed on if he’d known? Probably not. He’d just needed a job, any job, but astronaut hadn’t been on the list, not even when he was a boy.

  As soon as he walked into the control room, Simonot shoved a screen under his nose. Lennie Fonseca should have been off duty, but she was hanging around, probably waiting to cross-examine him about his meeting with Erskine.

  “The transit camp notified us they’re going outside, sir,” Simonot said. “They’ve never done that before.”

  Trinder glanced at the message and handed the screen back to Simonot. “I know. Alex caught me on my way here.”

  “They’re going to check out Kingston. Latest radhaz data we have says it’s not contaminated.”

  It was a what-would-Marc-and-Tev-do moment. Trinder suddenly knew what he needed to do. Alex had only told him not to give them ammo. He hadn’t mentioned anything else.

  “Okay, then let’s give them some backup,” Trinder said. “We need some overwatch experience. They might need some cover out there. Perfect.”

  Fonseca edged into the conversation. “So we’re operating jointly now?”

  “Just taking an opportunity to exercise some skills.” There were some rusty tilt rotor pilots who needed to know what being on alert-five really felt like. “Corporal, have air support stand by. And maybe give Montello a couple of quadrubots to search buildings. See if he wants anything else.”

  Simonot didn’t even blink. “Okay, I’ll call him back, sir.”

  Trinder wondered whether to drive over and see Chris personally, but it might come across as suspiciously pushy after having had no contact. He’d take it a step at a time so they got the measure of each other, a little cooperation from a distance to see how it worked out, and if it did, he would have a case to put to Erskine about joint working.

  But why am I doing this? Because I feel guilty about dumb rules that say they’ve got to scavenge while we’re rolling in ammo we’ll never use? That Erskine’s leaving them behind? Respect for what those guys can do? Or just sticking it to the management for lying to us?

  Whatever was driving him, Chris’s people deserved some help. Trinder shuffled a few things on the desk, found absolutely nothing else had happened in his absence, and wandered out into the corridor, unable to bear Fonseca’s scrutiny. She followed him out anyway.

  “So what went on with Erskine?”

  “I don’t even know where to start.”

  “You’re mad. I know that look.”

  “Okay, I’m mad.” He decided he could bend the truth a little without looking like a liar later. “Anyway, I suggested that we manufacture some ammo for the transit camp, and I was told no. Despite the fact that we’ve only been stockpiling just about everything for, oh, I don’t know, twenty years. So there you go.”

  “Dan, if the world was down to its last dozen humans, six of them would still be petty bureaucrats.”

  “Ain’t that the truth.”

  “You sure you’re all right?”

  “I’m sure. Look, I’m going back to my quarters. I need to shower and catch up on some reading. I’ll see you later.”

  He got about ten yards down the corridor before she called out after him. “Yeah, okay,” she said, and he knew that whichever way he played this, she’d round on him and ask why he hadn’t told her about Cabot and the implications for everyone.

  Orders. You don’t get to pick the ones you like. Although I think I’m going to learn to bend them.

  Trinder re-ran the conversations with Erskine and Alex in his head while he showered and thought of all the smart things he should have said, none of which would have changed the situation one damn bit. When he finally sat down on the bed to read the Nomad document, it felt like staring at an unopened bill that he’d been dreading. He steeled himself to open it and skipped to the executive summary.

  Tad Bednarz was clever, he had to give the guy that. Ainatio had played an incredibly long game. The most interesting part was how payloads had been sent fifty years before the FTL mission was launched. The tiny bots that arrived on Opis started by building bigger ones from local materials, and those in turn built the specialised construction plant that built the entire base. It looked like they’d done a lot of it before there was any FTL relay in place to keep an eye on them. Trinder thought that level of automation was more impressive than actually getting there.

  But did Bednarz live to see any of this? Trinder checked the dates. The old guy had died a few years before the wormhole was established. But with or without FTL, he must have died believing his life’s work had paid off. It was the most any man could hope for.

  Now Trinder understood why Bednarz was so big on AIs. Without them, building anything complex on Opis would have been almost impossible. The company’s multi-billion dollar AI business now looked more like a by-product of Bednarz’s fixation with colonising deep space than his main ambition. There was a fine line between crazy and visionary.

  A message icon blinked on the screen. Trinder flicked it automatically with his finger, not checking who was calling, and went on reading the report.
>
  “Am I interrupting, Major?” Solomon asked.

  It was the AI’s way of holding his finger on a doorbell until someone answered the door. “No, go ahead, Sol.”

  “Mr Montello said thank you for the offer of assistance, and he appreciates it, but he doesn’t want to put any more people at risk than he needs to.”

  Trinder wasn’t sure what to make of that. He hadn’t been able to judge Chris from a single meeting, other than to note that he took his task seriously, but the polite rebuff could have been literal, or a way of telling Trinder that he thought the team wasn’t up to it, or just an indication that the transit camp still preferred to keep its distance.

  “Did you speak to him personally?” Trinder asked.

  “No, I’m relaying what he said to Corporal Simonot.”

  “Okay.”

  “If you’re concerned, we could deploy drones to keep an eye on things. I’m sure Mr Montello wouldn’t object to being warned if he was heading into difficulties.”

  “Sure. Let’s do that.”

  “I understand why you’re concerned.”

  “I’m not sure why I am, but what the hell.” Trinder decided that he might as well ask. “You know about my briefing, then.”

  “Of course.”

  “And you’ve always known about Cabot.”

  “Yes. I’m sorry. I realise that must seem somewhat dishonest on my part.”

  “Orders are orders.”

  “We’ll all be able to make better decisions when everything’s out in the open.”

  Trinder looked up at the wall to his left. He’d taken a long time to put any family photographs on it. He still couldn’t bear to have them on the wall facing the bed, because they would have seemed more accusing than watching over him, but he could cope with a sideways glance now and again. There was Mom and Dad, Grandad, and his sister, plus a few neighbours at Thanksgiving, a little the worse for drink around a table piled with half-finished dinners. Maybe the last of them were dead now, and maybe they were still surviving somewhere in a pocket of civilisation out of comms range, but either way he’d never see them again.