“We’ll be doing a policing job,” Chris said.
Marc nodded. “Well, you’ve had some hands-on keeping order when society collapses.” He tapped his collar to indicate Trinder’s comms. “Is your radio off?”
“Oh. Yeah. Don’t worry, Sol’s not monitoring. But I switched it off anyway.”
“Okay, if he was flesh and blood, would you rely on him to keep things on track single-handed?”
“Yes.”
“Are you two chummy enough to have a quiet word?”
Trinder nodded. “Sure.”
“Then tell him I wasn’t joking when I said Erskine might want to pull his plug. We ran into her the other night and she was talking about destroying the sensitive parts of the facility when Ainatio pulls out. I prodded her about Solomon to see her reaction, and she was all, ‘Oh no, I don’t mean him.’ But if I was in her position, that’s exactly who I’d mean.” Marc held up his forefinger in a listen-carefully gesture. “Chris, did Dan tell you about the row they had in a meeting we were in? Sol said that he’d told you about Nomad. She went bloody spare.”
“It was me,” Trinder said. “But that’s another issue.”
“Well, either way, she was fuming. Even though Sol’s right, leaking top secret info doesn’t win friends. If she doesn’t trust his judgement, she’ll do what anyone with her responsibility should do. She’ll shut him out. Or down.”
“Except she can’t.”
Chris stared at the table again, chin down a little, as if he was trying to remember something. “I knew she didn’t want us on board but that he was trying to soften her up.”
“He defied her to get you on the list,” Tev said. “Did he tell you what his exact mission brief was? It’s interesting.” He looked up at some point on the wall as if he was reading a screen. “It was something like... define the best of humanity, find it, protect it. And he was given complete freedom to decide what that was.”
“Ah.”
“Oh, yeah — and he thinks the best of humanity is always people who don’t realise that they are.”
“Tev never forgets anything.” Marc nodded approval at his buddy. “So my leap of intuition is that Sol’s selectively breeding humans for altruism and a stiff upper lip. He wants loyal, resilient, team-minded, resourceful people willing to make sacrifices. Remember some of that from any recruiting posters?”
“Ah,” Chris said. “Our robodog pal loves a uniform.”
“He’s packing Nomad with as many military personnel as he can. And farmers, obviously. A lot of overlaps there.”
Trinder wouldn’t argue with Marc’s analysis. Solomon couldn’t die, at least not in any timeframe that most people could imagine, and knowing that some humans would voluntarily shorten their already brief lives for the benefit of others seemed to have struck a chord with him. There were some Ainatio staff who were survival-trained and had the mental resilience and guts to be a soldier, but Solomon seemed to want the tried and tested.
Which should rule me out. Shouldn’t it?
Chris reached for his mug. “Let’s drink to all the people we knew or liked or loved who didn’t make it. Best way to honour them is to do better with the fresh start we’ve got.”
That was a long speech by Chris’s standards. Everybody had lost someone. Did Chris know Marc’s history? Trinder couldn’t remember if he’d mentioned the man’s sons or not, but Marc never showed that things stung him any more than Chris did. They all raised a glass and drank.
“Keep the faith,” Trinder said.
“I like that.” Jared nodded to himself as if he was testing the words. “Yeah. Keep the faith. Once you’ve worn a uniform, you’ve got more in common than you’ve got differences.”
Trinder wasn’t sure that they’d reached any decisions, but something had crystallised tonight. They’d started to see themselves as one group with a common cause, even if they didn’t know exactly what they were going to do about it yet.
They were a team. And it felt right.
10
We’re in a strange limbo between knowing that nobody’s going to hear us and that everything we say and do is observed and recorded by a sentient AI. What will he do with the archive? Will he redact it, broadcast it sometime in the future, or just file it? We always think technology moves us forward, but events are just as likely to be lost to time now as they were when we scratched pictures on cave walls. Something of the reality might remain, but mostly it’ll be replaced by myth.
Captain Bridget Ingram’s log, written by hand off-site and on non-networked paper
Level U4 Storage, Ainatio Park Research Centre:
Mid-May, 20 Hours Before the First Landing on Opis
I might try a combat engineer unit today.
Who knows when I might need it?
Solomon knew exactly where every piece of experimental equipment was mothballed, its service status, and all its movements and activities during its operational life. Today he decided to get more experience of moving in a much larger bot than the battered red utility quad that he’d come to regard as his alter ego.
Level U4, deep in the underground storage area, was almost a museum of mobile autonomous robotics. Solomon wandered up and down the rows, admiring the collection of industrial and military prototypes that Ainatio had developed over the last one hundred and fifty years. From intelligent mobile artillery units to survey snakes to restraint bots that could scoop up an injured human or immobilise a suspect, they stood in ranks like a metallic version of Qin Shi Huang’s terracotta army.
One of the combat units caught his eye. It wasn’t the most elegant machine, more of a roadblock on legs, but it was definitely a useful one to have in a hostile environment. He looked up at it as it towered more than a metre over his quadrubot. It was a combat engineer that could excavate, build, demolish, smash openings, and defend itself under fire with its own armaments. The only aspect that didn’t fit its rugged image was its extra pair of limbs — delicate precision manipulators for EOD and other fiddly jobs.
Solomon settled into it, flexing and turning the manipulators, and learned what it felt like to have six limbs instead of four.
No, he probably didn’t need this battlefield frame, but it made him feel... safer. Trinder had told him to watch his back with Erskine, because she’d had an odd conversation with Marc and Tev. But the chat was equally plausible as the housekeeping concerns of a CEO faced with shutting down a site full of secrets, chemicals, and pathogens.
Nothing to worry about at all.
Really. Nothing.
So this was what paranoia felt like. It wasn’t pleasant. Doubts piled up and forked off of each other, threatening to trap his thoughts in a loop. He considered where the line lay between readiness for any danger in a world full of risks and letting himself be warped by imagining that Erskine was out to get him.
Are we friends again? Of course we are, Director.
But Erskine was too sensible and knew too much about his design to try disabling him. If she botched it, it could take out the lower-level automated functions, and that would include the comms between Ainatio and Nomad Base. Separating Solomon from his staff of AIs was now something only he could do safely. Erskine knew better. But he’d do his best to avoid confronting her again.
He’d still test the sapper bot, though. It fascinated him. He reared up into bipedal mode and extended an arm to almost touch the ceiling.
Marvellous. And it can climb.
He clunked around the warehouse floor on four legs for a few minutes to get the feel of it, and realised what he could have done with this shell when he’d had to breach the house in Kingston. He could have demolished the building on his own. The sapper could smash through reinforced doors and dig through concrete, a formidable weapon even without its Boll missiles and grenade rounds. This was a frame he needed to take to Opis. There might come a t
ime when he’d need it.
He almost walked it back to the offices to see how people reacted to him in a less appealing body, but tomorrow’s landing at Nomad Base was a red letter day for Erskine. He didn’t want her distracted by trying to divine meaning from his sudden change of habit.
“Sol, we’ve got a problem.” Alex’s voice sounded tinny in the sapper’s audio system. “I know we’ve only had forty-five years to think about it, but folks are arguing about what the first words spoken on Opis should be. I suggested, ‘We bankrolled this gig, so rack off and find your own planet.’ But I was outvoted.”
“I think Captain Ingram will improvise very well. I assume the plan is still for her to be the first down the ramp.”
“Aren’t you monitoring them?”
“The captain asked me to put the wardroom off-limits. The officers like their privacy when they’re passing the port, or whatever it is they get up to at the end of their watch.”
“You’ve been hanging with too many army guys,” Alex said. “I sense some inter-service rivalry creeping into your conversation.”
“I enjoy their humour.”
“Whatever. But you know how petty everyone gets over this kind of thing, so some ideas would be appreciated.”
Solomon left the sapper bot at its docking station and slipped back into the network. “Nobody’s going to be watching this live, Alex.”
“Well, we will be.”
“I meant a world audience.” It was a pity that this would be another remarkable thing done unnoticed and mostly unknown, like so many pivotal events in history. “But the first words have already been spoken. By me. On the other hand, I do appreciate that I’m being flexible about the definition of first human landing.”
“Humour the meat-bags, Sol.” Alex was making his way along the corridor between the cryo unit and the propulsion lab. “We care about trivia.”
“I’m not best placed to advise on this. Have you thought of asking Chris? He has a minimalist eloquence.”
“You’d think that with all the naval wit and intellectual firepower on that ship that at least one of them could manage to write their own lines. Didn’t Bednarz leave you with instructions?”
“Not about that. How about, ‘Let us put our mistakes behind us and be what we know we can be’? But Ingram will do as she sees fit.”
“See, I knew you’d chill when the mission was home and dry.”
“It isn’t.”
“They’ve only got to start landing people.”
“And then we have to transport two thousand seven hundred and four, most of them unprepared for this, make provision somehow for those who don’t want to go, mothball this facility, and dispose safely of two ships and some unmanned orbitals.”
“Glass still half-empty, then, huh?” Alex walked into the propulsion laboratory. “It breaks my heart to see all that hardware being junked. Still, we’re out of time. Look, I’ve got to give Annis Kim another pep talk. She’s still banging on about her promised FTL research. Wish me luck.”
Alex stopped at the main lab door and bowed his head for a moment as if he was summoning courage. Kim was certainly restless. She’d been promised that she could work on a superluminal drive, but then she’d found that it wasn’t Ainatio’s top priority, or even in the top five. Dr Singh kept trying to explain to her that he needed everyone working on the follow-up ships, more than half a century old and a constant source of maintenance challenges.
“I bloody well got stitched up, didn’t I?” Kim said as Alex walked in. She had three screens and a pile of paper spread out across a table littered with coffee cups. Solomon had watched her apparently trying to reconstruct equations from memory for weeks. “I just need to see everything you’ve got. And I know you’re worried about being detected, but I really need access to my cloud. I’ve got important notes there.”
“Annis, we’re only going to be here for a few more months, and nobody’s going to crack scaling up the wormhole to move ships in that time,” Alex said. “We need to put everything we’ve got into Elcano and Shackleton. Once we get to Opis, you can have access to everything and we’ll start the programme all over again.”
“In a plastic hut.”
“In a rapidly expanding industrial environment.”
“Sure.”
Alex sounded perfectly reasonable. Kim was unusually agitated today, though. At first, Solomon thought she’d just had enough of being idle after throwing away a comfortable existence in Korea and risking her life to get here, but there was something else going on. Sooner or later, people had switched their focus to Opis, whether they were looking forward to the adventure or so scared that they were ready to tunnel out and live rough, yet Kim was still fixated on the FTL project. Solomon accepted people reacted very differently. But he expected the reality of leaving Earth forever, a massive emotional step for any human, to have eclipsed other obsessions by now.
“You don’t trust me, do you?” Kim said. “What do you think I’m going to do with your bloody pipsqueak wormhole when I’m stuck here? I never leave the building. Even if I did, you’d be hard-pressed to find anyone within a hundred miles of here who’d give a toss about the thing.”
Alex was really very good with angry women. Solomon had watched him manoeuvre and placate them quite often, and it was a skill to be admired.
“I know, Annis, and I realise that you’re frustrated after going through hell to get here, but we’re going to be leaving Earth for good before you know it. And those shitty old drives that Javinder wants to focus on are all we’ve got to save us from being marooned in interstellar space until we end up mummified. This isn’t to keep you busy. We need you to do it.”
“You’ve got Solomon.”
“Solomon’s a manager. Not an engineer.”
Kim shrugged. “When we leave, I lose the means to publicly acknowledge Grandma Park’s achievements.”
“Don’t worry, the world will know one day,” Alex said.
“It certainly will.”
Solomon decided Alex had suffered enough and needed extraction. “Alex, if I might interrupt...”
“Excuse me, Solomon wants to talk. Be right back.”
“No, it’s okay,” Kim said, with that slight huffiness that said it definitely wasn’t. “I understand. I’ll get on with Elcano and Shackleton.”
Alex seemed relieved to escape. He stepped out into the corridor and let out a long breath, eyes shut. “Thanks for that, Sol. For a smart woman, she’s not good at grasping priorities. But family stuff can warp anyone.”
“Would you like me to ask her if she wants some help?”
“Sure. You go in there and tell her she’s not smart enough to fix a fifty-year-old junker. I’ll hold your coat.”
“She needs a distraction.”
“You mean like a colouring book, only with really difficult sums?”
“You put it so well, Alex. It’s entirely possible that I could access her cloud documents.”
“But then she’d spend all her time on FTL and Javinder would be pissed at me.”
“I could offer. It might make her feel honour-bound to put the time in on the priority work.”
“True. She does have a sense of fair play. Like staying with Levine.”
It was a test of conscience. Solomon needed to be sure that Kim was the right kind of person for Nomad. She was clever, courageous, and resourceful, but he’d now decided what represented the best aspects of humanity, and so far she’d shown little sign of a vital quality: being a team player.
“I’ll offer,” he said.
“Make sure you copy everything, just in case there’s stuff we haven’t seen.”
Solomon accepted that Alex was an opportunist. He wondered how far he might go. “Alex, nothing that I do is forgotten or erased. You know that.”
“Okay, give it a try.
”
Kim was sorting out the paper on the table, touching the sheets to her screen one at a time to store the scribbled notes. Solomon watched for a moment, then pounced.
“Dr Kim, would you like me to try to download your material?” he asked. “You understand why we’re nervous about the access being noticed. But I also need to know you won’t be distracted from your main task by the temptation to work on FTL.”
He didn’t get the answer he expected. Kim looked up at a point in mid-air rather than the speakers. Perhaps she hadn’t noticed where they were.
“I could just log in myself.”
“But as you’re officially missing, a diligent police officer might possibly notice. Whereas I could gain access to your account and a number of others, posing as a hacker from a location far from here.”
Kim looked like she was thinking about it, but only for a couple of seconds. “It’s very kind of you, but I think you’re right. I’d better keep my head down.”
For someone apparently willing to risk death to vindicate her ancestor, Kim suddenly didn’t seem quite so obsessed. Solomon suspected she had material in her cloud that she didn’t want him to see. Whatever it was, she’d backed down.
“It’s for the best,” Solomon said.
There was nothing stopping him from attempting the hack without her assistance, though, except the possibility of losing her trust one day, if she trusted him at all. She barely knew him. She had no reason to.
But he also had no reason to trust her. He’d leave it for a while and see if it still seemed like a sensible idea to investigate what she was hiding.
* * *
nomad site, Opis:
5 Minutes After Landing
It wasn’t finding the right momentous words that worried Ingram, or the knowledge that support was a generation away. It was taking off her helmet.
She stood at the top of the ramp, looking across a sunny, almost Mediterranean landscape towards the B-movie architecture of the Nomad camp. A light breeze was ruffling leaves on the trees at the boundary. But her subconscious, the one shaped by the long training in Cabot and several lunar trips, kept whispering check your seals check your seals check your seals like a weirdo she hoped wouldn’t sit next to her on the train. Constant safety drills had done their job and embedded the habit of checking helmet, cuff, and boot seals before exiting a compartment.
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