“Are you okay, Sol?”
“I am, thank you. Better than I’ve been for a long time. I was never comfortable concealing Nomad.”
“That’s not what I mean. I know you. Something’s happened.”
“Perhaps it’s death. When you have no prospect of it yourself, it’s quite sobering. The last few days have been a concentrated burst of it.”
“Oh, right. Yeah. What did happen out there with Fonseca, then?”
“I’ll tell you some other time. Go on, you’ve got hearts and minds to win.”
“Change of plan. I’d better sort out Kim first. Save all those happy physicists and engineers as a treat for later.”
“Be kind. I think she’s quite upset about Levine. It reminds her of her great-grandmother.”
“You’ve had a chat with her, then.”
“No, I heard her talking to him. They’re both propulsion people, remember. So was her great-grandmother, in a roundabout way. You knew that.”
“So I did,” Alex said. “I’ll be diplomatic.”
“Good practice for when you brief Cabot’s crew.”
“Yeah, that won’t be fun.”
“I could do it, Alex.”
“No. Absolutely not. My personal task. Promise me, Sol.”
“Very well, I assure you I won’t interfere.”
“Thanks.”
It was a long walk to the infirmary, and Alex felt he’d already run a marathon today. He took a buggy from the pool and drove down there instead, reminiscing about airports, baggage carts, and the last time he’d been on vacation. If he absolutely had to go to Opis, one last trip to Hawaii would have been nice. Life was probably still almost normal there.
Kim was still confined to the medical wing, but she didn’t seem too keen to leave. The duty nurse had to go get her from Levine’s room.
“I’ll stay with him until you come back,” the nurse said. “I promise.”
Kim wagged a warning forefinger at him. “You don’t leave that man for a minute, okay? And you hold his hand. He needs to know someone’s there, even if he nods off.”
Alex decided to deploy the kid gloves. He’d had his fill of aggravation today, and it was still only lunchtime. He ushered Kim out into the corridor and onto the buggy.
“I’m going to take you on a guided tour,” he said. “Because I don’t think we need to keep you locked up any longer.”
“Can’t it wait? Mr Levine’s time is pretty important.”
“It won’t take long. I’ve got a few things to tell you.” Alex drove off, trying to visualise a route that would give him enough time for a conversation with her. One thing that the research centre had was plenty of empty corridors. He pointed out landmarks as he went, then tried to ease into the story.
“You know that conversation we had, when you said what you thought we’d done with your great-grandmother’s research?”
“Yeah.”
“Well, you were pretty close.”
Kim blew out a long breath. “Bloody knew it. You thieving mongrels. Are you going to stop playing games now?”
“I did say close.”
“How close?”
“I’ll send you a copy of the report via your room terminal. Headlines — Cabot didn’t blow up or vanish. The ship’s about to reach Opis and we’ll be reviving the crew shortly. The habitats have been built. We launched unmanned missions at intervals starting more than a century ago, mainly self-replicating bots to mine materials and start manufacturing the base. About fifty years into the project, we developed FTL.”
“Oh, great. Grandma Park’s bloody drive.”
“Not quite. Apparently some of her work came in useful for setting up a teensy-weensy wormhole, though.”
“Teensy-weensy. Metric teensy-weensy, or imperial?”
Alex took one hand off the steering wheel and curled his fingers to indicate a baseball size. “We launched a micro-sat through the hole for an instant comms relay. So we’ve got a live feed from the planet. This is the big one. The first human extrasolar base. Have I left anything out? No, that’s pretty much it.”
“Bloody hell. You did it.”
“We did. Key in the door, ready to move in.”
“Yeah, I’m sure the base is lovely, but I meant FTL. The wormhole.”
“Well, we can’t throw ships around with it, but it was enough for comms, and that makes a big difference.”
“But you used some of Grandma Park’s research.”
“Looks like it. But it predates all of us.”
“I’ll bet.”
“Hey, if we did, then you had the same research. Why didn’t you make something of it like we did?” Alex glanced at Kim and noted the clamped lips and narrowed eyes. Bad idea. He tried to dig himself out of the hole. “Anyway, not only can you work on a project that’ll move a full-size vessel one day, you can watch Opis live on the TV as well.”
Kim said nothing. As bittersweet news went, it must have been a lot more bitter than sweet. She leaned back in her seat, occasionally making little uhhh noises that sounded as if she kept shaping up to ask a question and then deciding against it.
“I know this must be a pretty big campus, but where is everybody?” she asked at last. “The place is deserted.”
The sudden change of topic worried Alex. He’d expected a slow burn, then a broadside. Maybe she was saving her wrath for later. “Yeah, recruitment and retention isn’t too good these days,” he said. “It might be the dental plan. We’ll have to look at that.”
She gave him a dead-eyed look that said she wasn’t amused. “Am I allowed to know how many people you’ve got here?”
“Fifteen hundred, including families. But we have lots of bots. Bednarz believed you could never have too many bots. And AIs. I can’t remember, did we introduce you to Solomon? He’s the main man — well, main AI. He’s everywhere. Runs the whole shebang.”
“And that’s it?”
“That’s not just it, we’re all there is of Ainatio, too. No secret bases or anything. You said you travelled across the States. You’ve seen more of the devastation than we have.”
Kim’s brow puckered. Alex wondered if she was disappointed rather than just angry. She’d obviously thought Nomad was a much bigger project, and of course it had been.
“So what happened to the great and good?” she asked. “Where are your leaders and thinkers? And I hate to be crass, but where are your rich people?”
“We’ve got plenty of thinkers and we don’t need politicians.”
“You might have a point there. You’ve got an empress.”
“Hah. Yeah. We don’t need the wealthy, either. We’ve got trillions tied up in company assets that we can’t spend. Why would we want rich people anyway?”
“It just seems you’ve got a pretty narrow demographic here,” Kim said.
“What, you think it’ll be like those disaster movies where the powerful bribe their way out and leave the proles shaking their fists at an ominous sky? Look, unless someone can grow food, build stuff, run habitats, and generally do the frontiersman thing, they’ll just be dead weight on Opis.”
“So this is your gene pool. Just the people here.”
Alex felt a compulsion to defend his tribe. “Why not? They say a hundred is enough to avoid inbreeding. So two to three thousand is plenty. That’s counting the townsfolk as well.”
“You haven’t mixed with the outside world for years.”
“So? That’s not the same as being inbred. Our kids are only second and third generation.”
“Maybe not, but isolation makes you as mad as bloody hatters. Imagine what it’s like on those generation ships right now. They were all barking to start with. I wouldn’t breed from Quinn Worley and his researchers.”
“It’s a cult. They’ll be having a great time, a
ll agreeing with each other on everything, with nobody around to spoil their echo-chamber.”
“Cults devour themselves. Or turn on outsiders.”
“They’re zillions of miles from us. They can turn cannibal if they want.”
“You’re a little weird in here as well, you know. Face it. You’re an isolated colony. You should get out more.”
“Well, better to be stir-crazy than inundated with desperate refugees who find out we’ve got a lifeboat.”
“Remind me what you said about echo chambers.”
Alex couldn’t work out what bothered her, but then a thought struck him. “Did you come here to check us out for some oligarchs who want to bail? Because we’re only offering print-built domes and recycled urine for eight hours’ work a day.”
“Why the hell would you think that?”
“Because I still don’t understand why you’re here.”
“I’ve told you.”
“Yeah. So you have.”
“Okay, so why are you part of this team?”
“Sheer random accident,” Alex said. “When I joined, I didn’t know any of this would happen, and I didn’t expect to end up marooned here with one way out. It just looked better than what was happening outside.”
Do I want to go? No. I don’t. So what am I going to do if I stay behind?
Alex had known about Cabot for ten years, and had watched the world shrink around him, a fish trapped in a puddle in a drying riverbed. He was no pioneer. He was just a glorified progress chaser, excited by a cool mission and big challenges, but he’d never signed up to live out his days in a plastic dome on an alien planet. It depressed him to think that everyone he’d face the future with was already in this small, closed community. He’d exhausted its possibilities years ago.
But this is how people always lived until the industrial revolution. Born, lived, married, died in one village. Never left it.
“If you’d seen what it’s like in the rest of the country, you’d be happy to be shipwrecked,” Kim said.
“What’s life like in Korea, then?”
“Compared to this? Crowded, restricted, and nervous. And Oz is pretty much what normal life used to be like here, I expect.”
“Are they working on die-back research? I guess they are.”
“It’ll run out of insect carriers and crops eventually. All APS has to do is stop it getting in.”
Alex wasn’t sure if that was a no, but Kim was a propulsion expert. He couldn’t expect her to be up to speed on the details. But he needed to know. If he wanted to stay on Earth, Asia was his best bet, but getting in wasn’t going to be easy. Perhaps he could ask for asylum. What did he have to bargain with, though? No advanced technical or scientific skills that they didn’t have already, for a start. All he had was Ainatio’s industrial secrets, and he wasn’t ready to trade those.
“We’ll have an apartment sorted out for you,” he said, getting back to business. “Then you can start work. Dr Prinz wants you on Javinder Singh’s team. We’ve got ships to prepare.”
“What about my FTL?”
“Priorities. It’ll happen, don’t worry.”
“And what about giving me a connection to access my notes? My cloud’s blocked. I need Grandma Park’s research.”
“Sure, but what if your access is detected and your government realises you’re here?”
Kim nodded, more to herself than to him. “Okay. I’ll start as soon as Mr Levine’s ready to let me go.”
Alex wondered what Kim was getting out of Levine, seeing as the poor guy couldn’t even speak. But maybe she wasn’t the ice queen after all. Maybe it wasn’t even about engineers being comradely. Perhaps it was just simple human compassion.
There were many shortages in the world these days, and compassion had been one of the first commodities to run out.
“Understood,” he said.
* * *
Ainatio Infirmary:
Later That Day
“I don’t know, I really don’t.”
The voice drifted in, and Chris wasn’t sure if he was having another medication-fuelled dream or if someone was really talking to him. No, he was awake: he knew because he could see the clock on the wall and the seconds flicking by, turning 16:34 to 16:35. There were medics talking outside his room. The door was ajar and he couldn’t get out of bed to do anything about it. He just wanted to sleep.
Please, shut up.
Voices were insistent things, though, tempting him to listen whether he wanted to or not. The more he tried to shut them out, the more they grated on him. Whatever the staff were talking about, they were on edge. Chris could hear the rising pitch and the gabbling, one guy talking over the other. It didn’t sound like an argument. The tone was worried, maybe even scared.
When’s the funeral? I’ve got to be at the funeral. They can’t bury Jamie without me. Jared could at least call, even if they won’t let him in.
I fucked up. I should have taken a different road back. Retracing the route was asking for trouble.
Chris gave up on trying to get back to sleep. The meds didn’t let him surface all the way, but he knew where he was, he remembered why he was here, and he could feel his leg. He couldn’t move it because it was encased in something solid, but it was no more painful than a pulled muscle. He could see that his arm and chest were covered in patches, wireless monitors and slow-release drugs whose names he couldn’t quite read. At least one had to be a serious elephant-grade painkiller, because he knew the state his leg had been in when he was casevacked.
Nice sheets. Yeah, we could do with some of these in the camp.
He tried to work out if he could reach the sipper bottle on the nightstand without needing to call for a nurse and wondered if he was the only patient in here. There was no sense of bustle and activity outside. There were just the two guys talking.
“I don’t know how they did it either, but it’s true. You saw the live feed.”
“Well, if I get the chance, I’m going. It won’t get any better here.”
“I can’t even find it on the star map.”
“You’re looking at the wrong hemisphere.”
“It’s just a number.”
“That’s Pascoe. See?”
Pascoe. The name made Chris listen intently. He’d heard it from Nathan Marr when he was passing that code around the camp, asking what Kim’s sequence of numbers meant. Pascoe’s Star. It stuck in Chris’s mind because he didn’t know many stars named after people. The voices now dropped to a murmur as if the guys were trying to be discreet. Then someone spoke to him, right in the room, a male voice out of nowhere, but one that he knew.
“Can I get the nurse for you, Sergeant? Do you need anything?”
He jumped. “Shit — whoa. Where are you?”
“My apologies. I’m Solomon. We spoke at the casevac. I don’t usually operate in a quad unit inside this building. I’m part of the system in here.”
“Oh. Right. Hi, Solomon. Thanks. I think I owe you one.”
“You’re welcome. May I call you Chris?”
“Sure.” Chris’s heart was still pounding. He thought the monitor might bring one of the medics running but they seemed to be too busy talking. “I haven’t seen any of my squad. Are they okay? Some guy kept telling me not to worry, but I need to know.”
“They’re all well. Jackson and Lee have both been treated for wounds, but they chose to go back to the camp. I do hope you can persuade them to return for check-ups.”
“Did they get the bastards who ambushed us?”
“I can confirm that. I shot the last one myself.”
“No bullshit about robots being programmed not to harm humans, then.”
“I’m not a robot. Would you like some water?”
“No, I’m okay, thanks. How long am I going to be in here? I
’m not ungrateful, but I keep asking and I don’t think I’m getting answers. Unless I’m too stoned to understand.”
“It depends on how well you respond. Accelerated healing demands a lot from your body. This isn’t the usual enhanced treatment you’d get from a hospital.”
“Experimental, yeah?”
“Developed for extreme environments.”
“Ah, there’s always a catch. But thank you.”
“I wouldn’t doubt the doctors’ commitment. They don’t see many injuries like yours. They like to win.”
“As long as they don’t dissect me afterwards, we’re cool.”
“Major Trinder would like to visit, if you’re feeling up to it.”
“Sure. Are my guys allowed in here?”
“Of course. I’ve let Erin know that I’ll make the arrangements.” The door closed very quietly. Chris hadn’t noticed anyone walk past. So Solomon could control that as well, then. “We talked for a while. I realise she’s had more than her fair share of tragedy.”
There’d been AIs everywhere when Chris was a kid, and some of the customer service ones had been good enough to make him wonder if he really was dealing with a machine, but he’d never come across one quite like this. Erin. So they were chummy now, were they?
“Everyone’s going to be cut up about Jamie,” Chris said. “He was a good kid.” Then he realised he’d left Zakko out of his list of worries. “And I really need to see Zakko. You know — the curly-haired guy with a bit of weight on him? He put a tourniquet on me with rounds shaving past him. To think I was going to chop his finger off.”
“Why?”
“Stealing.”
“That seems harsh, but I’m sure you had your reasons.”
The Zakko who didn’t think twice about taking meds for Dr Kim was the same Zakko who raced to Chris’s aid without a thought for his own safety. It was the same impulse. Zakko just did things when he thought they needed doing. He didn’t always make the right call, but a man who was prepared to put his life on the line and didn’t panic was someone Chris would gladly fight alongside. Damn, Zakko could enlist if he wanted to. Chris would discuss it with the guys and they’d swear him in and train him properly. He’d earned it.
The Best of Us Page 18
