“I will,” she said. “Thank you. And thank you for the advice about the plaque. I’ll be diplomatic and put it in storage until we have a different perspective on events. So you’re definitely going to try to return to the UK, then?”
Mark shrugged. “I’ll go where I can be some use.”
“I’m going to try to get to Fiji,” Tev said. “I’ve never even seen the place. Dad never took me and Mum back. But I know my wife and kids are safe there, and if I just show up, maybe we can try being a family again. As long as the authorities don’t shoot me when I crawl up the beach, of course.”
“We might find a way to get you back to the UK, but Fiji’s going to be a difficult journey.”
“Ah, we’re used to getting in and out of places that don’t have a bus route.” Mark smiled, but as always his apparent good humour ended short of his eyes. He was a deeply unhappy man who seemed to carry on because he couldn’t think of anything else to do with himself. “We’ll work it out.”
They went on their way, picking up speed until they disappeared behind one of the outbuildings. It was rather sad. If Ainatio had had an understanding with APS and the right long-range transport, Erskine would have handed Tev the access codes and wished him a safe journey. Perhaps Solomon might have some ideas on that. But now she certainly had an idea about Solomon.
If Marc or Tev interpreted her questions as planning to shut down Solomon the hard way, it might not be a bad thing if they happened to mention it to him.
Under threat, Solomon would relocate to another part of the system, and everyone knew he could transfer to a bot frame. She couldn’t help thinking that it would be much easier to destroy a bot than pursue a near-omnipotent AI around his own site-sized network. She couldn’t guarantee that he would head for one of the bots when threatened. She couldn’t even guarantee that he wouldn’t exact revenge on her if he got wind of her half-formed plan. But it wasn’t even a plan, really: it was more like an awareness that action might be needed.
We’ll see. Maybe I’ve already made a big mistake.
Erskine took one last look at the bronze plaque in the faint glow of the security lights, stood up, and held it to her chest as she walked back to her office.
There was coffee waiting for her when she got in. Berman rarely seemed to go off duty now. “I wasn’t sure where you were, Director,” he said. “You left your comms on the desk.”
“Just tidying up a few loose ends,” she said, and held up the plaque without comment for him to read it.
He just raised his eyebrows. “Solomon’s got some maintenance updates. I’ll leave you to it then. See you in the morning.”
Solomon would know where she was, and he’d have heard Berman’s comment, but he didn’t appear. Perhaps he was too engrossed with the Opis end of the operation. Erskine logged into the network and checked her mail while she sipped the coffee.
He’d left a report. He was very good about opening with two or three lines of summary to save her the trouble of reading the entire document if she was pushed for time. It wasn’t particularly good news: Shackleton had developed problems with her coolant system and a hull leak had been discovered. Solomon estimated that it would delay the launch by a month or two. Elcano was almost ready to launch, though, so the maintenance bots could focus on Shackleton full-time.
Erskine wasn’t unduly worried. They were still well within the launch window. She downed her coffee and looked up towards the speakers mounted on the wall.
“It’s okay, Solomon. I’ve read the report and I’m not worried about the delay. If you want to talk it through with me, I’ll be here for the next couple of hours. Thank you for giving me the heads-up.”
Solomon responded a good thirty seconds later. That was an eternity for an AI. “Hello, Director. Yes, it’s aggravating at this stage of the project, but it’s nothing we can’t handle.”
“Are you with Captain Ingram at the moment?”
“No, I’m with Sergeant Montello at the camp. I’m trying to flesh out the security reports you asked for. There wasn’t much available on any of the servers that I can access.”
Erskine had forgotten that she’d asked him. “Don’t worry about that now. I think we’ve made up our minds, haven’t we? We need people like that in a frontier situation. If you feel they’re reliable, I trust your judgement.”
“Thank you, Director.”
It did no harm to butter him up. But it was interesting that he’d left the site in the quadrubot again. For a few rash seconds, Erskine wondered if this was her chance to stage a coup while he was physically separated from the slave systems. But it was just a random impulse. Solomon was still connected wirelessly to the Ainatio network, and if she took action now, even if she knew what action was possible and whether a well-placed explosive would solve any problems, he would react instantly and probably lock her out of everything.
“Solomon, do we have any way of helping Marc and Tev get home?” she asked. It would have been useful to have both men on Opis, but even if anyone was physically capable of forcing them to go, they would make very dangerous unwilling guests. “UK and Fiji, but you know that. I recall we looked at requesting a shuttle transfer via the Chinese space station, but APS hasn’t budged on quarantine, and the UK doesn’t have an orbital presence now.”
“I might be able to arrange something irregular, Director. Both men are adept at infiltration. Let me work on that.”
“Thanks, Solomon. Are we friends again now?”
“Of course we are, Director.”
For the time being, that was good enough for Erskine. But she wouldn’t drop her guard, or see him quite the same way ever again.
* * *
Hart County Boundary:
2030 Hours, April 2
Trinder parked the Caracal just off the narrow track through the woods, watching the patrol’s progress on the drone’s night-vision display on the dashboard. It was definitely Chris. A dog trotted from side to side a few yards ahead of him.
Startling him was never a good idea. Trinder flashed the Caracal’s lights and saw him break his stride for a moment.
“Echo Five Actual to Six Zero, over.”
“Six Zero here, I see your vehicle, on my way.”
The dog reached the Caracal first. It was the husky with odd-coloured eyes, and it stood at the driver’s door, staring up at Trinder as if it was trying to recall his face. Chris caught up with it a few moments later.
“You’re overdoing it on that damn leg,” Trinder said. “Want a ride back? I’ll finish the patrol with you.”
“I suppose this counts as a joint operation.” Chris walked around the back of the vehicle to open the rear hatch for the dog, then got in on the passenger side. “What are you doing out here?”
“What you said. We keep talking about joint patrols so I thought tonight was as good a time as any to discuss — oww.”
The husky had stuck its head over the seats and was slobbering in Trinder’s ear. Chris did an ah-wooo howl and the dog joined in, a weirdly wild voice. Trinder winced at the volume.
“Yeah, she does that.” Chris smiled to himself, something he didn’t seem to do much. “I keep telling her that’s why she’s still single.”
“I’ll send you the audiologist’s invoice.” Trinder wiped his ear with one hand. “How’s the leg doing?”
“Still feels strange, but I’m functioning. Had any more drama at your end?”
“Just all the damn questions nobody thought to ask earlier.”
“Yeah, I know what you mean. Did your guy with the beard ever find out if we can take animals? Because Dieter says he isn’t leaving the dogs behind and he won’t shoot them. He’ll stay. And I’m not leaving anybody.”
“I’ll chase it up. If the biologists are worrying about wrecking the Opis ecology with alien species, it’s a little late for that. Besides, we
need working dogs in an isolated settlement. We don’t have any.”
“You’ve got Solomon the dogbot. Shit, we’re moving forty light years away and I’m worrying about dogs.”
“It’s the small detail that bites you in the ass,” Trinder said. “Plenty of that to talk about.”
“Yeah, I’ve got questions too. You want to stop by for a beer when we get back?”
“Good idea.”
The Caracal wound its way along the track, snapping branches and bouncing over roots, and eventually emerged to the north of the camp. Trinder could see the lights through the trees. Chris directed him through an orderly grid of dirt roads flanked by solidly-made little cabins to a central area with equally orderly single-storey timber buildings around it. The place looked like an army camp, but then it pretty much was.
One of the buildings turned out to be a bar. A blast of warm air and a comfortingly malty smell of home-brewed beer greeted Trinder as he followed Chris through the door. It was busy but low volume, with just the murmur of conversation and occasional laughter. Behind the bar, a small picture of Jamie Wickens stood on one of the shelves in front of battered regimental colours that Trinder couldn’t identify because they’d been folded to fit in the space.
While Chris poured the beers, Trinder sat down at one of the tables. Folks acknowledged him, probably because they recognised him from the funeral. He spotted Erin sitting at a table in the corner, talking to a woman with a baby asleep in her arms, and she gave him an uncertain little wave. He returned it, equally uncertain. She got up and came over to him.
“It’s nice to see you in here, Major.” She managed a lovely sad smile. “I just wanted to thank you again for the flag. That was a really kind gesture.”
It was hard to know what to say to her. He knew she wasn’t exactly Jamie’s widow, just a woman who wished she’d treated him a little better when he was alive, but that must have been hard to live with in itself.
“You’re very welcome,” he said. “I’m probably wording this all wrong, but how are you coping?”
“Ups and downs. There’s no need to tread on eggs with me, Major. We’ve all lost him, not just me.”
“It’s Dan,” Trinder said. “If there’s anything else I can do, let me know. I’m not sure how much use I’ll be, because I’ve never lost anyone in combat, but I’ll do my best.”
“Thank you, Dan. That means a lot.”
She went back to her table. Chris brought a couple of mugs over and put one in front of Trinder. He’d obviously seen Erin talking to him and worked out why. There weren’t that many shared topics between them.
“Yeah, everybody’s still trying to take it in,” Chris said. “I suppose we thought that because we managed to get here without losing anyone, we were bulletproof.”
“So...”
“Are you going first with the admin stuff, or shall I?”
Chris didn’t want to talk about Jamie, then. Trinder respected that and moved on. “Okay, we’ve been two separate units in two separate towns. How do you see this working when we land at the other end? Are we going to stay separate? Because the bots there can build anything.”
“I’ll have to ask everybody. But that’s not the whole question, is it?”
“No. It’s also about a combined defence force and who does what. Or if we’re even needed.”
“How about the Cabot crew? They’ll be pretty old in forty-five years. Are they going to train their kids in security roles?”
“The original plan was to set up all the structures a colony would need to run a town, which means internal and external security. Police and soldiers. So they’ll have to.”
Chris stared into his beer for a while as if he was working it out. “Okay, so let’s assume we arrive to find some kind of security force in place. How do we fit in, who’s in charge, and who do they answer to? There’ll be about two thousand seven hundred of us and at best three or four hundred of them.”
“A civilian committee. That was the plan. But that’ll now be the follow-up mission — us.”
“We should be discussing this now with the captain, so she knows who’s coming, and agree where we fit in. But it’s all going to be guesswork anyway.”
“Yeah, I’m going to have to ask Erskine to let me talk to her. Ingram can do the math, though. She knew from the start that the next mission would be a couple of thousand civilians.”
“Your two Brits,” Chris said. “You think they’d like to join us for a beer? Different perspectives help.”
There was an easy way to find out at the tap of an earpiece. “Sol, Trinder here. Are Marc and Tev still up and about?”
“Playing pool, Major.”
“Can you ask them if they’d like to come over to the transit camp for a drink with Chris and the guys?”
“Certainly. I knew roughly where you were from the Caracal’s signal, but I lost your personal tracker.” Trinder’s chip was out of range. Solomon would be curious at the very least. “If this is going to be a rowdy night out, I’ll just be available.”
“Thanks, Sol.” Trinder pocketed his earpiece. “He’s going to ask them. He’s said he won’t monitor us, though. Plausible deniability.”
“He thinks we’re planning a coup, does he? Or does he want one?”
“Who knows? Hey, here’s Jared.”
Jared collected a beer and sat down with them. “Wondered when you’d show up, Dan.”
“We’re waiting for the Brits to join us,” Chris said. “We’re having a heavy discussion about coups.”
“Can’t we just have a movie night?”
“Later. We’re working out where we all fit into Nomad and who gives the orders when we get there.”
They had another round of beers, speculated about whether the Cabot crew’s kids would be any good at soldiering, and debated what kind of threats they’d have to deal with. The more Trinder discussed it with Chris and Jared, the more he realised the only kind of security the colony would need for a very long time would be policing itself and maybe fending off the occasional animal. Most of the population would be people he already knew, so maybe nothing would change at all. But when any group of human beings grew large enough, there’d be problems, and the detachment was meant to deal with external threats, not internal ones.
Jared looked past Trinder towards the doors. “Heads up, your Brits are here. I’ll get the beers.”
Nobody in the transit camp had seen Marc or Tev before. Some folks in the bar watched them walk in as if they were mythical beasts, and in a way, they were. Tev was a really big guy, and Marc always looked like he still had ten assassinations to fit into his busy schedule before dinner. Trinder beckoned them over, made room at the table, and did the introductions.
“Gentlemen, do a bit of drinking, and then we’ll get to the point,” he said. “We’d like to pick your brains as security advisers. It’s about what happens when we finally land on Opis.”
“We’re not going, mate,” Tev said. “I’m going to try to get to Fiji. Marc’s heading home somehow.”
“Might not,” Marc said.
“Okay, he might not.”
“Well, damn,” Trinder said. “I understand, but I can’t say you won’t be missed.”
“We’ll be here for a while yet, so there’s plenty of time to make the most of us,” Marc said. “What’s your question?”
Chris folded his arms. “What’s the worst that could happen? Apart from ending up dead before we land.”
“Depends on your definition of worst. But assuming you don’t find Nomad empty with just a pile of gnawed skulls, and the Cabot crew have actually bred, life might have been tougher than expected. They might have gone a bit feral. Or built a very different society. But you’ll still outnumber them by ten to one. There’s your real problem, I think.”
Tev seemed to be enjoying the
beer. He held it up to the light for inspection. “I think it’s what you might call Rear Party Syndrome.”
“Yeah, put yourself in the colony’s position,” Marc said. “They’ll have been working their arses off for forty-five years, there’s a second generation of adults, and then a big crowd of strangers shows up on their doorstep and expects to run the place. Because you will, and however nice you try to be, it’ll still feel like an invasion to them.”
Trinder suspected Erskine had a plan that wasn’t in the original document. “So this rear party thing.”
“Yeah, take it from anyone who’s done a long overseas deployment. You leave the missus to hold the fort at home, which can be bloody tough, and you come back expecting her to drop everything to welcome the conquering hero so you can be head of the household again. Except she’s managed without you, she’s got her own routine, and she doesn’t need you crashing in and trying to take over. You end up sleeping on the sofa for a while until you’ve learned your lesson.”
Chris nodded slowly and almost smiled. “Good point.”
“They must have thought of this back in the day. But planning for it doesn’t change people’s basic tribal instinct.”
“If I had the balls, I’d ask Erskine whether she was willing to take a back seat to a forty-year-old stranger who’d been elected mayor,” Trinder said. “Because she’s put her whole life into this. She was the one who kept the pessimists on track when things got worse. It’s going to be painful to step off that ship and be patted on the head like some senile granny.”
“And there’s another flashpoint.” Marc tapped the table. “Even if she takes over, there’ll be a power vacuum when she dies, because there’s nobody stepping up to take her place.”
“There’s Alex.”
“Nah. He’s not a leader. He’s a fixer and manipulator, but you’d never follow him with bayonets fixed.”
Tev still had the smile of a man whose mind kept drifting back to something else, probably Fiji. “You need to think what you’ll do if it’s a total shit show when you get there, or who you’ll take orders from when one group wants to change things. Because someone will.”
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