Erskine’s stomach started falling down a lift shaft. “Spit it out, Solomon.”
“They’ve noticed, I’m afraid. The new spread of die-back.”
This was the last thing she needed. APS had ignored Ainatio for years. They certainly picked their moments.
“But do they know we’ve got operational vessels almost ready to leave Earth orbit?”
“There’s been no mention of that. They’re just asking to speak to the person in charge.”
“Keep an eye on this and be ready to change plans fast.” Erskine pushed her chair closer and adjusted her collar mike. She couldn’t remember ever having contact with APS at an official level. “Who is it, their agrisat control room? Space station?”
“A general at APDU. Colonel Su-Jin Yoon.”
This was getting worse by the second. The Asia-Pacific Defence Union was probably as high as a problem could get shunted, a level above national governments. Erskine guessed where this might be heading. When the call came through, she was ready to play the pitiful old woman.
“This is Georgina Erskine,” she said. “How can I help, Colonel?”
“Madam, I regret to tell you that our satellite imaging has detected diseased vegetation near your position.” The colonel was a woman. She spoke good English. “Are you aware of this?”
APS knew Ainatio was probably still functioning in some limited way because they must have detected shuttle launches occasionally, but they’d ignored the facility so far. It was irrelevant to them. Erskine kept up the harmless act.
“We test the surrounding area every week,” she said. “What kind of pattern are you seeing?”
“It is progressing from within the cordon sanitaire to the north-west. It is fast-moving, a matter of only days, which is more rapid than the spread has been in the past. You are a science and technology company. Do you have countermeasures?”
“Colonel, we were a major research company. Not any more. You must be able to see how cut off we are. This is a remote rural area. There are a few small farms and a displaced persons’ camp close to the facility, but that’s all. We can certainly burn off the contaminated areas, though.”
“Burning does not seem to have stopped it before. It appears to have crossed your cordon.”
The last thing Erskine needed was for APDU to work out that the contamination had come from inside the labs. They’d have only one response to that: they’d destroy the site. She prayed that it looked as if animals had wandered in and out of the area.
“We can eradicate carrier animals too.”
“You have a space station, at least one disused ship, and several operational shuttles.”
Now it starts. “None of which changes our situation on the ground.”
“Very well, then we are obliged to act. Despite our quarantine measures, we have still had isolated outbreaks of die-back that we destroyed. Bird and animal migration is a concern.”
“Sorry, I don’t understand what action you plan to take.” Erskine couldn’t have APS clean-up teams landing here now. “What can you do?”
“At the request of your government, we used salted nuclear devices to clear contaminated land when this virus emerged,” Su-Jin said. “We will do that again.”
“Hang on, what do you mean, ‘At the request of your government’?”
“The United States government did not have the appropriate ordnance, and asked us for assistance. You should be aware of that.”
Erskine struggled to compose herself for a moment. “We were under the impression that the assistance got a little out of hand and exceeded the help you were asked to give.”
“That is unfortunate. We were asked to sterilise affected areas, and we did.”
“Well, there’s no government left now. No state structure at all. We’re just refugees in our own country.”
“This is why I have contacted you directly. It was not easy to route this call.”
“I’m grateful for the information, Colonel. I assure you that we’ll identify the affected areas and carry out a burn-off.”
“I apologise. I have not been clear. We have to destroy the vegetation across the entire area because of the rapid rate of spread, and your previous measures have obviously been inadequate. We ask you to evacuate your people to a safe distance within two days, starting from midnight, your local time.”
“You mean two weeks.”
“I do mean two days. Forty-eight hours.”
She can’t mean that. “I have nearly three thousand civilians here, including children, invalids, and elderly. I can’t move them in two days. We have nowhere to go.”
“You have the orbital dock.”
“We can’t cram that many people into it, let alone keep them there for an indefinite period.”
“Nevertheless, I must ask you to do it. The nature of the ordnance means the fallout will be short-lived and you will be able to return in weeks. All vegetation and animal life over a considerable area will be dead, and there will be blast damage, but you can return.”
Erskine was stranded in the middle of an argument. Everyone was shipping out anyway, but two weeks wasn’t enough to move that many, let alone two days. She did a few rapid calculations. It would take four shuttles, or four round trips. Elcano could only hold eleven hundred people. Even if Shackleton was ready to be used as a holding area, people would have to go into cryo. The ship was effectively an armed freighter with no space for a couple of thousand conscious passengers to move around. The orbitals weren’t an answer either. They couldn’t cram in more than a couple of hundred.
Erskine cleared her throat and tried to stall. “I’ll have to talk to my people to see what can be done. I’m asking you to keep a channel open to me so I can update you. This is no small task, and I’ll need information from you about the exact area you plan to destroy. Will you promise me that? Will you keep a line open to me? Innocent people who’ve already suffered a great deal are going to die if we can’t reach some agreement.”
“Very well, madam,” Su-Jin said. “I do this with a heavy heart, but it must be done, or millions more will die in the future. We will talk again very soon. Please make your preparations.”
For a few moments after the call ended, Erskine sat at her desk in a daze. Solutions had started to occur to her but she didn’t like them at all.
And there was nowhere to run except up.
“Solomon, I have to assume APS is serious.”
“They are, Director.”
“Can we have Shackleton ready in two days just as somewhere to park people?”
“No. Elcano can take eleven hundred. We have sixteen hundred and four left, and Shackleton’s nowhere near ready to start accepting people. Not in two days.”
“Dear God.” Erskine almost put her head in her hands. There was only Solomon to see her moment of weakness, but the gesture alone would have diminished her in her own eyes. “So we talk them out of it, play for time, or make some hard choices.”
Solomon didn’t respond, but she knew he’d have an opinion. It troubled Erskine that he’d suddenly decided to keep his own counsel after becoming increasingly vociferous.
“Get everyone together, please,” she said. “Alex, department heads, Phil, and Trinder.”
“At some point very soon we should tell Mayor Brandt and Sergeant Montello, too. They may well have their own intentions.”
“Not until we come up with a credible response here. And I mean it.”
A few hours ago, Erskine had told worried families that APS was more scared of contamination than they realised, and that staying put wasn’t an option. It wasn’t just the truth. It had now become prophecy.
12
You want a fight? You pick on one of us, you’d better be ready to fight all of us.
Marc Gallagher, explaining the hazards of starting a pub brawl with sol
diers
Director’s Office, Ainatio Park Research Centre:
2 Hours After the Warning from the Alliance of Asian and Pacific States
As soon as Erskine told Greg Kent to get the shuttles launch-ready, Solomon knew how long it would take the bush telegraph to transmit some kind of gossip around the building.
It would be a couple of hours at most. This was still a village, and after realising they’d been lied to so thoroughly for so long, the staff now seemed to be extra-vigilant, watching every unexplained activity.
Solomon wandered around the security cams, watching them speculate without any idea that APS had called to give Erskine an ultimatum. He paid special attention to the people who’d now become part of his circle of interest. Marc and Tev were taking their run around the perimeter earlier than usual, probably to talk privately, Lennie Fonseca was issuing extra weapons and ammunition to the detachment. Annis Kim was in her quarters.
Solomon only knew that because she still had her security pass on her: she hadn’t been chipped. He didn’t — wouldn’t — break his own rule on privacy by observing, but the security tracking had to show current locations, or else it was useless in an emergency. Kim had gone back to her small apartment in the accommodation block and was now pacing around the living room in what resembled a parallel search pattern, back and forth across the width of the room while progressing gradually towards one wall. It was possible that she’d dropped something and was searching for it on the carpet, but she’d now covered the room several times. She had plenty of places to walk for exercise unobserved in a huge, mostly deserted site. Solomon came down on the side of anxious pacing.
He tried to work out why she was agitated. Nobody knew about the approaching deadline yet, and Kim had shown no sign of being anything other than tough and single-minded to the point of obsession. Solomon couldn’t imagine her being afraid to leave Earth. Although she was unhappy that she couldn’t publicly vindicate Grandma Park’s research, Solomon doubted that was bothering her. Something else was wrong.
He’d keep an eye on it, but his primary focus was the emergency meeting in Erskine’s office. Alex looked wrung out and impatient. Trinder, always harder to read, seemed to be biding his time, speaking only when spoken to but looking more brooding than quiet. The department heads seemed to have been invited mainly to stop them wondering why they hadn’t been included and becoming an irritant. The only one contributing something right now was Prinz, busy explaining the lack of evacuation options.
“We can get everyone clear of the area fast — and I mean everyone, including Kill Line and the camp — if we just put them on the shuttles and fly as far south as we can to a landing site near the coast,” she said. “But that’s as far as we’ll get. We won’t be able to sustain an evacuee population of nearly three thousand in the middle of nowhere for a few weeks, and if we abandon this facility, we leave behind the technical infrastructure to reach the orbitals, let alone continue repairs to the three remaining vessels.”
“If we can prep all the shuttles in time,” Kent said. “I think we’ll only manage one.”
“So we’re still looking at the same three options.” Erskine held up a finger to count off each point. “Delay the APS drop, find a way to tackle the contamination ourselves that’ll persuade them they don’t need to, or accept that we can only rescue eleven hundred, which is going to take two shuttle trips to Elcano.”
Alex cut in. “We can’t abandon Kill Line and the camp. We just can’t. They won’t stand a chance. Just because this salted ordnance is lower yield, it doesn’t mean it won’t cause massive explosive destruction on top of wiping out crops and livestock. Sixteen hundred is a lot of people to move overland, even if there was somewhere to go, and there isn’t. We don’t have enough vehicle capacity without repeated round trips. We’ll also be hostage to wind direction with fallout. And on foot — forget it.”
“Okay, so we tell APS we just happen to have our own nukes, and that we’ll blitz the place ourselves,” Mangel said.
“And APS says, ‘Gee, thanks, we never knew you still had WMDs, so you’re obviously a threat,’ and obliterates us in an unfriendly way instead of with our blessing.”
“Okay, how do we stall them, then?” Erskine asked.
“We can’t, Director,” Solomon said. “Not without introducing new facts into the equation.”
“Let’s go back to the numbers. We need to face this. We can’t even evacuate all our own people. We have to talk about who doesn’t get to go. My first duty is to our staff, so we’re looking at reducing fifteen hundred names to eleven hundred.”
“Fifteen hundred and thirteen,” Solomon added quietly. “Including Dr Kim.”
The silence, the held breaths, and the lowered eyes told Solomon that this was what Fonseca called a cold shower moment. Even Mangel blinked. He usually liked to play devil’s advocate, with the emphasis on play. Solomon always felt these occasional crises were a game for him because his key work had finished long ago, and this was the time of logisticians and engineers. But he’d always say what others would only think.
“Women and children first isn’t going to work,” he said. “And I’m not saying that as a man with an ass to save.”
“Go on.”
“How many kids do we have?”
“Two hundred and forty-nine,” Solomon said.
“And you can’t separate kids from parents, not only because it’ll warp them for life, but because someone has to look after them on Opis. Kids eat up human resources. There’s no childcare in the neighbouring town because there is no neighbouring town. So how many two-parent families? Unless you’re prepared to tell them one parent can’t go and unleash weeping, more trauma, and rebellion, of course. How many single parents?”
Solomon could at least provide accurate numbers even if he couldn’t see a solution yet. But I will. I have to. “One hundred and seventy-one with two parents, and seventy-eight with one, which is six hundred and sixty-nine people. That leaves four hundred and thirty-one cryo pods for the eight hundred and forty-four remaining. Roughly half.”
“I’m glad to see you anticipated my direction. And roughly is still bad, even if it was one man left behind. Then there are the adults who have parents here. Three generations. We can’t talk about acceptable losses. There’s no humane cut-off line.”
“Or you could decide not to take every child,” Solomon said. “You could rank adults in terms of their utility to the mission, and then prioritise those who have children. The hard choices still remain further down the league table, but you’ve addressed practical need first. You’re sacrificing our non-essential people along with the residents of Kill Line and the transit camp.”
“And I thought I was Ainatio’s resident bastard. But yes, Sol, every way we slice this cake is bad.”
But I didn’t mean for you to do it. I’m just showing you why you shouldn’t. You have to find another way. I have to make you.
Alex looked agitated, as if he knew this would land in his lap. “Assuming we do this, we’re going to be exporting some truly screwed-up survivors. We’ll kick off with a guilt-ridden, bereaved, angry, accusing mob. How’s that going to work when they collide with the Nomad folks? And what effect is that going to have on... I don’t know, the Nomad national psyche, for want of a better term. Wars change societies. This is no different.”
“Here and now, people.” Erskine rapped the table. “We can’t think more than two days ahead. But that’s a good point. We’re looking at what’s going to feel like a postwar recovery.”
“And we all know how quickly everyone forgives and forgets in those.”
“So the alternative is that we all die nobly together?”
“People do. Some of ours might prefer to.”
“Pick those best able to survive, and with the most practical skills,” Mangel said. “And try to get a gender and age balan
ce for breeding purposes. So no seniors, which removes a lot of our best minds. None of Mendoza’s long-term patients, so we abandon sick and dying people, which kind of rips away our moral validity. I’m betting Major Trinder’s people will volunteer to stay, because military folks have a different philosophy, but we’ll need their pioneer skills and crisis handling on Opis.”
Trinder still hadn’t said anything. Solomon had started to see the man in a very different light these past few months. He’d had too little to do for years, but now he had plenty and he was hungry to do it. He also seemed clear about what he had to do in a way that probably wouldn’t please Erskine. His silence seemed to be about not revealing his position, like the way he’d deployed the Lammergeiers to Kingston without asking her. He wasn’t refusing an order. He’d just never allowed himself to hear one.
He spoke up at last. “I haven’t asked them. They’re still working out what forty-eight hours looks like in evacuation terms. We already know it’s not enough time.”
It was actually a neutral response carefully devoid of facts, but Mangel’s brief nod suggested that he thought it was a decision. Solomon hoped he’d be proven right about Trinder. He’d been wrong about some people, but humans did seem to divide broadly into two types, those who would risk their lives and run towards trouble, and those who would run away.
“Remind me where we are on the logistics, Alex,” Erskine said. Solomon noticed she hadn’t said yes or no to this triage by reproductive status and utility. “How many people would be ready to leave at short notice? I don’t mean running in the clothes they’re wearing. I mean properly prepared.”
Alex shrugged. “I’ve tried to encourage staff to keep a grab bag for emergencies, but I know most haven’t bothered. Once we press the button on this, though, we just tell them that they’ve got this much luggage space, any excess will be dumped, and they have to be at the hangar at H-hour, no delays.”
“How long to board?”
“Two shuttles, forty-five minutes each, tops.”
“Eleven hundred people? No.”
The Best of Us Page 33
