The Best of Us

by Karen Traviss

  The automated systems would monitor him in his infirmary room, but Solomon felt a need to watch over him personally. For someone who’d just had surgery, Chris was unusually restless. He dozed sporadically, sometimes waking and just lying there with one arm across his eyes, his other at his side, fist clenched and hitting the blanket in a steady rhythm. He looked like a man who wanted to rewind the day and do things differently. Solomon knew that he wasn’t thinking about his own injury.

  In another part of the infirmary, Derek Levine was dying. He was eighty-three. His records said he’d had another stroke, and that he was deteriorating rapidly and not expected to survive the next few days. Notes for the nursing staff specified hourly checks as well as routine monitoring.

  Over the course of a century, Solomon had seen many staff grow old and die, but today his filter had shifted forever. He’d killed a human, and he’d seen grief and indelible regret at close quarters. He also remembered that Bednarz hadn’t lived to see the completion of the mission that had consumed his life.

  Don’t leave it too late.

  Solomon knew what he had to do. It might be days or even weeks before Erskine revealed Cabot’s situation to the staff, and by then Levine could be dead. He and his engineering team believed a drive failure had destroyed Cabot — their work, their responsibility, their fault — and it had haunted them. Levine was still alive to believe it.

  Why didn’t I see it was wrong to let them go to their graves blaming themselves? Why did I comply? Should the mission ever take precedence over individuals?

  At least he could try to put things right with Levine. Erskine’s need for secrecy wasn’t reason enough to deny the man the truth. Erin Piller had shown Solomon what he ought to do. He slipped into his regular quadrubot frame and went to find the medical staff.

  “May I see Mr Levine?”

  Dr Mendoza was on duty, wandering around the reception area. He looked up from the screen he was reading. “He’s not very communicative. He hasn’t been able to talk since the last CVA.”

  “That’s okay,” Solomon said. “Can he still understand speech?”

  “There’s no major cognitive impairment. He nods and gestures.”

  “I just want to talk to him about the old days. I was there. You’re too young to remember.”

  Mendoza smiled. “You know you’re getting old when even the AIs look young.”

  Solomon tapped on the door and went in. Levine was watching some TV rerun, propped up on pillows, but his eyes were glazed and Solomon wasn’t sure that he could even see the screen. The old engineer turned his head with difficulty to squint at Solomon, frowning with bewilderment.

  “It’s Solomon, Mr Levine. Remember me? I was Tad Bednarz’s AI project. I just borrow the quad frame when I need to interact. There’s something I have to tell you.”

  Levine nodded and beckoned him closer. His lips formed a circle, but no coherent sound emerged, just a groan as he tried to speak.

  “May I share some news with you? It’s important.” It was also a gamble. There was every chance that the man’s last conscious moments would be spent regretting that he’d blamed himself for Cabot’s apparent fate. But Solomon had to seize the chance. Erin had told him so. “Sir, this was kept top secret for security reasons. Cabot wasn’t lost. The ship and the crew are safe. In a couple of months, they’ll land on Opis.”

  Levine didn’t react for a few moments. Solomon thought he’d understood, but it would have been a lot for even a healthy man to take in, let alone one who was dying. Levine shook his head.

  “No, you didn’t fail, Mr Levine,” Solomon said. “The mission was a success. It was just top secret. I’m truly sorry that you and your colleagues thought you’d lost the ship and all those lives. You didn’t. You made history. Do you understand?”

  Levine looked blank.

  “Do you believe me, sir?”

  Levine shook his head emphatically.

  “Okay, I’ll show you. I swear that this is the truth.” Solomon activated the live feed from Opis and diverted it to the old man’s TV screen. “This is live from Nomad Base, right now. We’ve got an FTL relay. We established a tiny wormhole for comms. And this is where the crew are going to live and work.”

  They sat and watched the feed together. Nothing much was moving, except the bots trundling about their duties, but the dark blue birds that had trailed Solomon on the surface passed through the shot a couple of times.

  Levine’s eyes filled with tears, not the rheumy eyes of a dying man, but a man weeping. Solomon had seen two people cry today, and it was hard to tell if Levine’s tears were for happier reasons.

  “You did that, Mr Levine,” Solomon whispered. “This is your achievement. Humanity’s future. Be proud. Am I forgiven for not telling you sooner? I’m so very sorry.”

  Levine stretched out an unsteady arm and put his hand on Solomon’s back. His fingers felt cold, at least colder than Erin’s had been. He kept nodding for a long time, but he was still struggling to say something. Eventually, sounds formed.

  “All... okay?”

  Solomon realised he wanted reassurance about the crew. It seemed to be what really mattered to him. Solomon couldn’t imagine the undeserved guilt he’d had to live with all those years.

  “Yes, the crew’s alive and well,” Solomon said. “You did a good job, sir. A brilliant job.”

  Levine broke into a lopsided, peaceful smile. He seemed to understand just fine. It was a testament to his character that he appeared to have no anger.

  “Wormhole,” he mumbled, still smiling. “Hah.”

  I want you to define the best, identify it, and protect it against all its enemies.

  Solomon was now clear what the very best of humanity was, and exactly what he had to protect, with or without Erskine’s approval.

  * * *

  Director’s Office, Ainatio Park Research Centre:

  Next Morning

  Now was as good a time as any to tell the staff.

  Erskine had inherited a project plan from her father that laid out milestone dates almost to the day because so many elements of the mission could be calculated exactly. It had taken prodigious mathematics to get Cabot where she was today. But the untidy world that the ship had left behind was an unfeeling saboteur, lobbing clogs into the machinery on a daily basis. Erskine had started to feel a change in the atmosphere here, a kind of impatience bordering on irritation, and that hadn’t been helped by yesterday’s rescue flooding the place with testosterone and outsiders. If she let the restlessness fester, it would be hard to ask extraordinary things of people in the years to come.

  And those demands would be extraordinary.

  You didn’t think I could do it, did you, Dad? Neither did I.

  It had to be today, then. She’d call the meeting and make the announcement in the conference hall. It would be brief, and she could follow it up with a Q-and-A session over the network later when the reality had sunk in and everyone had considered their questions. But the trump card she’d play today would be the live feed from Nomad. People might be angry and upset that they’d been fed so much disinformation for so long, but they were also scientists, and the breathtaking novelty of a new planet and a base all fully fitted and fresh out of the box — and the revelation of FTL comms — would stun them. The lies would be forgotten as soon as they realised they could watch Opis in real time, and that in a matter of weeks they’d have real human beings on the ground to talk to, not just bots.

  There’d be some awkward questions about priorities and how this would now fit in with the die-back remediation research, but she’d handle that.

  She called Berman. “Phil, I’m going to do the announcement today. Let’s make it sixteen hundred. Can you set up the conference hall with a Nomad link?”

  “Going for drama, then, Director?”

  “Picture, thousa
nd words, equivalent values.”

  “Do you want me to contact department heads?”

  “No, I’ll send them a message myself. They know it’s due.”

  “It’s going to be an interesting adjustment period.”

  Erskine could translate Bermanese like a native. “There’s always a trade-off between briefing in advance of a critical event and losing your grip on need-to-know.”

  “And have we decided how we’re going to tell Doug Brandt?” Berman asked. “Because this will now leak. Guaranteed.”

  “We’ve put a lot of effort into keeping the local population at arm’s length. Very few staff have any contact with them.”

  “Well, Colin Croad does, for one.”

  “We’ve got time to work this out.”

  “News travelled fast about the transit camp patient. Main topic of gossip in the staff restaurant this morning.”

  Erskine reached for her screen and checked for medical updates. “That’s inside the wire. Let’s see how long he’s going to be in here... Montello, Christopher Anthony. Maybe a week. So they’re seizing the chance to test tissue regeneration.”

  “Yes, not an injury they’ve seen before. They were surprised how long it took to remove bone fragments before they could start.”

  Erskine wondered who’d visited the man and might have been the source of the gossip. She switched to the security log. Two Lammergeiers scrambling was an event that was impossible to hide, though. There was bound to be talk.

  Something else caught her eye. Solomon had visited the medical wing in his quadrubot frame on returning from Kingston, and he didn’t appear to have gone into Montello’s room. Why not? Ah, he’d visited Levine. That explained it. But monitoring had been suspended from the time he entered the room to when he left an hour later. He must have done that himself. He could override every system, but the question was why he’d bothered. In a human, it would have been secretive behaviour, but what secrets would Solomon need to keep from her?

  The thought suddenly struck her as naive. Of course he had secrets. Even with his rather quaint privacy rules, there was probably a lot he saw people doing in unguarded moments but never mentioned to anyone. He’d also kept the biggest secret of all: Nomad.

  She’d grown up with his ubiquitous presence, and she hadn’t had to worry about the implications until now. He’d know right away that she’d accessed the logs, but perhaps he wouldn’t consider how the data might look to her.

  “I’ll talk to you later, Phil,” Erskine said. “I need to give Trinder time to brief his people, too. Never a good thing to let your security team find out the hard way, is it?”

  “On that topic, you didn’t seem troubled by his decision yesterday.”

  “I’d rather see him deal with an emergency than ask my permission first. I’m reassured to see that his people are competent to do more than play war games.”

  “It’s not like him.”

  “I’d say that he’s reconsidered what the detachment needs to be able to do since I told him about Nomad, and he’s being pragmatic about it.”

  “I appreciate that he’s never been... ”

  “Dissenting? Abrasive? Assertive? I did worry that he might not have the backbone for a follow-up mission, but perhaps I’ve underestimated him.”

  Erskine sat thinking about what Berman had said. She realised she knew too little about the military mind. It had never been an issue: the detachment was there to provide site security, and although a few of them had come from military and law enforcement backgrounds, she’d never been conscious of a barracks atmosphere, or even knew if she’d recognise one. They’d been among the most recent hires and tended to keep to themselves even in this closed community. Then there was Montello’s ragtag band of vets and refugees. They’d never been her concern: a small, badly-equipped group kept at bay by a damn big fence was unlikely to be a threat to Nomad. But she knew there was some common philosophy between people in uniform, and perhaps it was more a sense of shared identity than simple duty — or boredom — that had driven Trinder’s rescue mission.

  Now she had nearly two hundred military personnel about to be revived in Cabot. The mission depended entirely on their cooperation. She couldn’t coerce them. She couldn’t even send anyone to enforce her orders.

  Yes, it’s high time I learned how the military thinks.

  “Solomon,” she said. “Are you free?”

  “Yes, Director.” The AI’s voice emerged from the speaker on her desk. “What can I do for you?”

  “Ah, my troubled thoughts are still closed to you, then.”

  “I’ll work on telepathy if you wish, but AIs were banned from unsolicited sensory stimulus reconstruction a long time ago.”

  Solomon’s tone was always measured. It was hard to tell if he was joking or being sarcastic. “Any thoughts on Major Trinder and his team?”

  “In what way, Director?”

  “Should I worry about him launching a mission without clearing it with me?”

  “Not if you want him to do his job properly. The detachment was very effective. Lives saved, threats neutralised. We’re all the safer for it.”

  “Good.”

  “May I ask you a question in return?”

  “Go ahead.”

  “If Major Trinder had asked you for permission to go to Sergeant Montello’s aid, would you have agreed?”

  “There’s no point having a defence force if it isn’t tested.”

  “I meant would you have felt Montello’s patrol was worth saving.”

  Erskine was used to Solomon’s excursions into ethical debate, but it was the first time a conversation had felt like it was acquiring an edge. She really should have given him the expected answer right away, but if the dumbest of dumb software could detect stress changes in the human voice, then Solomon would definitely know if she was lying.

  “It would be the right thing to do.” Seeing as he was playing dare, truth, or promise, she’d counter-attack. “My turn. Can I ask you why you visited Mr Levine last night?”

  “The man’s dying. I decided to tell him the truth about Cabot and that he wasn’t responsible for any deaths or the failure of the mission. I showed him the live feed. I wanted him to know what he’d achieved instead of going to his grave believing he’d made some terrible mistake that got people killed.”

  Erskine couldn’t believe he’d done it. “Solomon, this is still a top secret project. We managed to keep this under wraps for years because we had to. Nobody was to be told. Nobody.”

  “I know. I decided otherwise.” He actually sounded defiant. “Levine’s hardly in a position to tell anyone else about it. Not that I would have withheld the information even if he was.”

  “Good grief.” Erskine was shocked. “At least you’re honest about it.”

  “We only lie to wound or protect others, or to protect ourselves. I have no need to wound, and no fear of punishment, so there’s no point in deceiving you.”

  “Oh.” No fear of punishment. He’s designed to be invulnerable. Am I imagining things, or is he getting rebellious? “Really.”

  “Anyway, if you’re addressing the staff this afternoon, I’d better make sure that the Nomad feed’s set up for the most informative view. It’ll be dark, so I’ll adjust the floodlighting.”

  He’d hit a raw nerve and provoked her into needing to win. This is insane. I’m arguing with software. But Erskine couldn’t stop herself rising to the bait and trying to outflank him. “So do you think Montello’s people are worth risking lives for?”

  “Yes, of course I do. They’re loyal, courageous, and actually rather inspiring. I like them. I’ve learned a great deal.”

  No, she definitely wasn’t imagining it. Solomon was putting her in her place and telling her that he knew best. She’d never known him to be anything other than reassuring or analytical
before. But it was too easy to see him as wholly human, complete with all seven sins, and forget the very non-human and complex intellect beneath the interface. Without him and his slaved AIs, most of this facility and the entire Nomad project would probably be beyond this small workforce’s ability to manage. Perhaps he just saw her concerns as trivial at such a critical time for the mission. If it was anything other than that, it didn’t bear thinking about.

  “I’d better get ready for my presentation, then,” she said.

  She rehearsed in her office, or at least she started to. What was there to tell? No matter how much she revealed, only four points would register on her audience today: the Cabot disaster was a lie, the ship was about to reach Pascoe’s Star, Nomad Base was complete, and — perhaps the real shock that would kick in a little later — Ainatio had developed FTL propulsion. Every other detail would be lost in a sea of slack jaws, gasps, and disbelief. Erskine decided to dispense with notes and wing it.

  Jeans. Yes, she’d wear jeans today. The designer suits were the old era. Now Ainatio was entering a new age and she had to signal that she was one of the team, ready to roll up her sleeves and face necessary hardships to create humanity’s future, because they were the lucky few in an unlucky world.

  She reached across her desk to put in a call to Trinder to tell him he could brief his people confidentially in advance of the main announcement, but paused. No matter how the troops heard, they’d want to know why he hadn’t told them earlier, and they were smart enough to work out that the job they’d signed up for wasn’t the one they’d be asked to do now. A few extra hours to worry wouldn’t make them any happier. It was better for all the staff to hear the same message at the same time.

  Erskine had just over five hours to wait. It felt like killing time in eternity. She spent it reading reports more carefully than she would normally have done and watching the feed from Opis, remembering Trinder’s reaction and trying to see it for the first time as the staff would. She even lingered over a late lunch in the staff restaurant. If the world hadn’t gone to hell in a handbasket, she would have been preparing for an international news conference now, ready to make world headlines. But there was only half the world left to watch, and it was the half that she couldn’t tell. There would be no papers presented or glittering scientific prizes awarded, both of which mattered very much to some of the researchers, but not to all. She decided to major on the gratitude and immortality of history.