The Best of Us

by Karen Traviss

  “I do hope this won’t become an excuse to shun our neighbours.”

  “Stable doors and all that. So how’s Shack coming along?”

  “The welding schedule might slip another five days.”

  “Don’t worry. It’s not Doomsday.”

  Sometimes it did feel like it, though. That was probably why the brightly lit Asian Pacific night seemed so reassuring. Earth endured, albeit incomplete. “We’ll be ready,” Solomon said. “But it’ll be a close-run thing.”

  Along with Eriksson and Da Gama, Shackleton was in a higher orbit than Elcano, on the edge of the graveyard zone where junk was nudged further out to die far from the working satellites it might blunder into. Solomon debated whether it would be faster to cannibalise Eriksson’s welding bots to build extra mini-bots to speed up the repairs to Shackleton’s hull, or to simply raid Da Gama and remove whole sections of her hull. He settled on sacrificing a welding bot or two to save two days.

  In the bigger scheme of things, Alex was right. It wasn’t going to make a lot of difference. Solomon was just uncomfortable with slippage. Like viruses, slippages had a tendency to spread.

  He left the bots to their work. If he kept his focus here any longer, he’d be doing the equivalent of human daydreaming. He shifted back to Elcano, now ready to launch, and looked over the compartments that were devoted to cargo in her sister ship Cabot. Elcano’s were full of cryo chambers, eleven hundred sarcophagi that reminded him a little too much of kitchen appliances, and a communal deck that only needed to accommodate two hundred people at a time for a few days while they adjusted to consciousness again. Like Cabot’s crew, Elcano’s passengers would be revived and transferred to Nomad Base in separate batches.

  It was going to be a lonely forty-five years with all of his friends in cryo. He consoled himself with the thought that he’d be in constant contact with Opis instead, so he wouldn’t lack human company. He just hoped that the Nomad community wouldn’t gradually become more important to him. He was designed to think almost like a human — a man, minus the kind of self-interest that came from a physical body — and he knew affection was a strangely malleable thing. It would be a betrayal to transfer it and neglect his old friends.

  Nomad Base seemed to be settling into the happy and efficient ship that he’d teased Ingram about. Now he could keep a watching brief on it while he prepared two ships and 2,704 people to join it. How much time did they have? If the worst happened and no crops in Kill Line made it to the harvest, there was enough food stored to fill the shortfall for another seven months.

  Solomon checked Orbital 1’s latest images of the area around Kill Line, captured in the last two weeks. The resolution was one pixel to fifteen square yards, and the images were taken three days apart, but it was enough to show what was happening. He could see the areas of burn-off, but there was also a distinct chain of patches leading away from the town and out across the cleared boundary. The vegetation had definitely changed colour in the last few days. To the north-west, a similar pattern had emerged. Solomon interpreted the plumes as the path taken by animals that had carried contaminated insects with them. Ainatio had put its faith in the cordon, but it finally seemed to have failed, albeit in the opposite direction. They’d probably never know which particular insects were the carriers, or why the animals had decided to move out of Hart County, but they had, and the mutated version of the virus was on the move.

  But that vegetation can’t all be cereals. Would abandoned crops re-seed that much? Has die-back jumped the species barrier again?

  Whatever the reason, it wasn’t his priority. He had to keep Shackleton on schedule. If things slipped much more, it might become a race to move people into cryo early to avoid food shortages. In the worst scenario, an unforeseen problem could be a setback they’d never recover from in time.

  And then who would decide who was saved?

  I would. This is what I was meant for.

  Every day, Solomon realised a little more about Bednarz’s intentions. If he hadn’t known that the cumulative disasters were real and beyond even his creator’s technical ability, he might have thought this was all a test of character, to see how far Solomon would go to ensure that mankind’s best survived.

  I know you’d do anything to save people. That was what Alex had said. Anything was a very big word.

  Solomon sent Trinder a request for a surveillance drone to take a closer look at the vegetation, then transferred back to Ainatio to update Erskine and Alex. He couldn’t pin down the exact point when Alex had become Erskine’s de facto deputy, but the role seemed to have latched onto him more firmly in the last few months whether he wanted it or not.

  Erskine was giving a staff talk to a packed hall on the subject of living and working on Opis, describing the kind of housing that would be waiting for them forty-five years from now. Solomon decided not to interrupt. Alex was in his office, watching the monitor.

  “Do you have five minutes, Alex?”

  Alex leaned back in his chair and put his feet up on the desk. “Yeah, sure. Just watching Erskine selling time-share. You realise we haven’t named anywhere yet? You can’t have a town called Nomad.”

  “A little premature. Names should evolve from usage. Otherwise they sound like tract housing.”

  “It is tract housing.”

  “Names have significance.”

  “Okay, you’re in charge of naming now.”

  “Very well. But I came to show you these pictures.”

  Alex sat forward again with his elbows on the desk and watched Erskine replaced by Orbital 1’s images. He sighed.

  “Well, no real surprise there. At least it’s heading away from us. So that’s actually quite good news, relatively speaking.”

  “Do we continue with testing and destruction?”

  “If I thought a few more months’ effort on top of all the years we’ve spent would work, I’d put on a hazmat suit and do it myself. But time’s tight.”

  “You don’t like giving up.”

  “There’s a fine line between tenacity and denial. I keep an eye open for it.”

  “Very wise.”

  “You want me to brief Erskine?”

  “Yes. Thank you.”

  “Will we make it, Sol?”

  “You’ve seen the calculations.”

  “I meant... your gut feel. Belief. That vague stuff.”

  “I wouldn’t be doing all this if I didn’t believe we could.” It was very much about numbers now, calculating calories and the nutritional requirements of everyone in the three locations — Ainatio, transit camp, and Kill Line — and how many days the food stores would last. “We have seven months’ food in storage for the entire population, not counting the emergency supplies already in Elcano, which I’d prefer not to touch. I’m working on the assumption that neither Kill Line nor the transit camp have substantial food reserves. But we do have the option of reducing rations in an emergency, or putting some people into cryo early in Elcano.”

  “In an emergency.” Alex started laughing. “Hell’s bells, Sol, let’s hope we never have one of those. Everything’s been peachy so far.”

  “I’m ready,” Solomon said. “I’ll make this work. You just have to trust me.”

  Alex made an uncertain gesture. He was trying to reach out and touch something, but was frustrated by finding nothing there. He ended up patting the desk. It was almost as if he’d wanted to pat Solomon on a non-existent back.

  “I do, actually,” he said. “I really do.”

  Solomon was reassured. One day, he might have to test that trust to the limit.

  * * *

  Ainatio Park Research Centre:

  Late June

  The roses in the grounds were at their best this summer, heavy with perfect blooms as if they knew it was their final performance.

  Even the hedge of ru
gosas had put on a show. The scent was pure rosewater in the hot sun, and when Erskine inhaled it she couldn’t recall why it meant something to her. It was a childhood memory that had escaped her, leaving only the most basic sensations.

  Had the botany team remembered to save decorative plants? She’d have to check again. Radical new beginnings needed radical surroundings, not a theme park replica of a world they’d abandoned, but some things would be missed too badly to leave behind. It seemed like a good topic to start the next informal staff session she’d scheduled.

  The seminar-style talks in the main lecture theatre were easy. She’d reluctantly learned to play the CEO at twenty-seven, the art of stepping onto a stage and projecting confidence and authority despite being press-ganged into the position and hating it. She was never expected to get into complex conversations with her audience. But these smaller staff groups, no more than ten people at a time, left her nowhere to run. She had to deal with their fears and questions. And more of them were afraid than she’d expected.

  With any luck, Nomad would be doing something interesting that they could watch on the live feed. Showing nervous staff what was happening right now and giving them a chance to talk to others on the ground soothed many of the doubters, but not all.

  Erskine consulted her screen. Department heads were keeping a tally of which staff were still unwilling to leave.

  “Where do they think they’re going to go, Solomon?” she said.

  “Sorry, Director?”

  “My apologies. I was checking how many holdouts we have.”

  “Considering almost nobody knew they were signing up to move to another planet, the take-up rate is impressive.”

  “Glass half full, then.”

  “Ah, this is when I know I’m giving balanced advice.”

  “Pardon?”

  “Nothing, Director.”

  Erskine’s staff session today was with a group of nine drawn from the shuttle maintenance and reactor teams. The link between the two was more social than an overlap of responsibilities. There were several marriages within those groups and a father-son connection as well, so talking to them as families rather than professional categories made more sense. They were going to Opis to live: their anxieties weren’t about their jobs, but survival.

  “Here’s what I don’t get, Director.” Liz Kent worked on the reactor, and her husband, Greg, ran shuttle maintenance. They had a teenage son. “Is this really our only option? Why can’t we contact APS and ask for asylum? I bet they’d open their borders for scientists and engineers with a lot of commercial data and expertise to trade.”

  Erskine had to word her response carefully without lying. This group was one she’d definitely need on Opis and she didn’t want to make opting out sound easy.

  “I stand by my promise that nobody will be made to go,” she said. “Even if we could force people on board at gunpoint, I wouldn’t want anyone that unwilling on a mission this important. At the very least, they’d become disruptive. But staying put isn’t an option, and APS is much more afraid of disease — all of them, plant, animal, human — than you realise.”

  Greg reached slowly for his wife’s hand. “I realise we’ve had a lot of privileges here, but we’ve all lost family and friends in the rest of the country. We’re probably all there is left of mine. It just feels like an even bigger risk.”

  “Only you can decide,” Erskine said. “But imagine what this site will become in your children’s and grandchildren’s lifetimes. Maybe die-back will run out of host species, and maybe it won’t. If it does, or a countermeasure’s found, people will eventually start reclaiming the land, at least where it isn’t too heavily contaminated. But Opis is clean, safe, and waiting for us right now. Have a think about that. In the meantime, would you like to talk to some of the Cabot crew about what it’s like?”

  Solomon always took his cues. The monitor in the meeting room came to life, revealing a couple of crew members waiting at a table in a sunny lounge, chatting to pass the time. Opis looked remarkably like home. The image was more persuasive than anything Erskine could say.

  “Audio’s ready, Director,” Solomon said over the speakers. “Shall I connect them?”

  “Thank you, Solomon.” Erskine stood up and smiled at the engineers as convincingly as she could. “I’ll leave you to it. If I hang around, it might inhibit your questions. Feel free to ask the crew whatever you want.”

  Erskine walked back to her office. Another one down, another dozen, two dozen, maybe three dozen to go. Pep talks were now occupying more than half her day. That was leadership, but she knew it would have been better for her to swap roles with Alex and take on his organisational duties. He was much better at persuasion.

  “Everything okay, Alex?” His office was a short detour on her route. “How are we doing?”

  He’d arranged a wall of screens, each showing the status of one area of preparation. There was a lot of red and amber among the green bars on all of them. He looked as if he hadn’t slept much in weeks.

  “People,” he said wearily. “I hate them. If you can’t give a population of STEM folks the deck plan of a ship and get them to understand how much garbage they can’t take with them, what hope is there for the world?”

  “Medical status?”

  “Everybody’s cleared for cryo except the transit camp. We haven’t started on them yet. The town’s doc is going to help out when she’s finished with the residents.”

  Erskine walked across to the screen wall and studied the detail. “Just as well we have more bots than humans. Sad to see the bio labs go, though.”

  “One left to zap. Want to go down there and see it burn?”

  It didn’t appeal to her. It would be like watching a cremation through the furnace inspection window. “One for the nihilists and bridge-burners to savour, I think. What’s happening about the camp?”

  Alex shrugged. “It’s not like they’ve got much gear. And Jared said they’re used to packing and moving at a moment’s notice anyway.”

  “Dogs? Dairy herds?”

  “Best you don’t know, Director. Everything will be resolved.”

  Erskine took the advice. She carried on reading the screens, finding comfort in certainty. Everything was scheduled: shuttle transfers, cryo processing, mothballing the buildings, and eventually shutting down and entombing the reactor.

  “Have you ever been in cryo?” she asked. “I ought to remember, but I don’t.”

  “I did a week. A test. Years ago.”

  “And?”

  “I didn’t dream and I didn’t puke when I woke up. Like a general anaesthetic. Better than real life.”

  “You’re busy. I’ll get out of your hair.”

  “No Phil? Where’s he gone?”

  “He’s condensing the company records. Including the pre-Bednarz era. That’s nearly one hundred and seventy years.”

  Alex made a cranking motion with his hand. “Shredding. Uh-huh.”

  “Condensing. Never keep archives you don’t need.”

  “Sol’s probably kept copies anyway. Look, if you need distraction, you can always check the passenger lists. We’ve allocated pods now.”

  “But you’ve not notified anyone.”

  “No, because some of them are officially don’t-knows.”

  Erskine continued to her office. She wasn’t watching the Opis feed as much as she used to, perhaps because she felt it was a beachhead that had finally been secured. The alien landscape had somehow become Earth: people she felt she knew were walking around the camp, flying Earth’s flags and veneering the planet with human normality. She hadn’t seen the avian creatures for days, either. The illusion was complete.

  Imagine how scientists would react if we shared this with the rest of the world now. Not the FTL. Not the colony. Just show them a planet that isn’t gas or ice or airless desert, or
hot enough to melt metal. A world with complex animals and plants, not just bacteria and algae.

  Ainatio had to keep its discoveries to itself. It wasn’t the secrecy that occasionally made Erskine pause. It was that this little collection of miracles hadn’t been as important to Ainatio as the fact that it was habitable.

  She swung her chair around and returned to her monitor, checking the cryo pod allocations. Nearly 250 were children. Nearly half of Ainatio’s personnel were families. It was a solid foundation. With the Kill Line community, there’d be a wide gene pool and a more equal ratio of male to female.

  She still had misgivings about the transit camp, though. They were a mix of the unknown and the intimidating, as alien as anything on Opis. While a PhD wasn’t necessary to build a new world, Erskine felt more comfortable among her own kind, like anyone else. There were also practical considerations. The camp’s militia was a separate armed force, larger than the detachment, and it didn’t do things the Ainatio way. She was prudent to be cautious about them.

  I’m not a snob.

  Am I?

  No. We all worry about who might move into the house next door.

  By the time Elcano and Shackleton reached Opis, the community would be effectively civilianised anyway. Nomad was a military outpost with only a few civilians now, but in forty-five years, at least one generation, and probably two, would have grown up without that culture and experience, and then they’d be joined by twenty-seven hundred new arrivals, of which fewer than a hundred would be soldiers. There was no need for a military force in the new world. The veterans would gradually learn to think like civilians again. Erskine was sure of it.

  She opened the day’s reports from the department heads, keeping an eye on the clock for her next staff session. While she was reading, Solomon interrupted.

  “Director, I think you need to speak to Major Trinder as a matter of urgency.”

  “What’s happened?”

  “I’ll put him through when he’s ready. He’s talking to APS at the moment.”