The Best of Us

by Karen Traviss

  “Yes. We queue them in the right order and just march them in. There’s no dicking around with cabin luggage and lockers and ooh-that’s-my-seat and can-we-swap-with-you and fussing with coats. Get in, sit down, and shut up. Pee in your seat if you didn’t remember to visit the bathroom first, because this is a one-way trip and the shuttle won’t be used again. Just frigging do it.”

  “Alex, we won’t have two shuttles ready in time,” Kent said. “I’m cannibalising them as it is. You’ll have to do it in one.”

  “Okay, then it’s ninety minutes to board, and very crowded. Because if we take one and try to land again to pick up the rest of the list, we’ll meet a crowd begging to be rescued, or a riot. Scientists are human. Survival kicks in. If you’re really, absolutely going to leave people to die, then you go and you don’t look back.”

  This was part of the Alex that Solomon liked. There was a time for sweet-talking people, and a time to bark orders and bang tables. But the part he’d hoped for, the Alex who refused to let good people die, was absent. Solomon wasn’t sure if it had ever been there at all.

  So this is my task. Nomad’s my responsibility. I’m going to have to take control. But I’d rather they decided to do the right thing themselves, because forcing them could become very unpleasant.

  Solomon noted how fast they’d gone into a detached, almost ruthless state. At least they weren’t paralysed by panic. “Can we hear from others around the table?” he asked.

  Prinz, Cullen, Mendoza, and Venner hadn’t said anything on the topic of who should be saved. It was probably easier than having to put a case that favoured their areas of expertise, although Prinz, with her young son and necessary skills, would be guaranteed a place by the current reckoning. The plan that seemed to have formed in a mist above the table in the last half hour wasn’t being challenged. And nobody had asked the obvious question: who in this meeting was going to demand that they went?

  “I don’t know which is worse,” Venner said. “To die here myself, or to let others die and try to live with that for the rest of my life. So you do the decision-making, Director. But you’re going to have to tell Mayor Brandt and the people at the camp, because it’s just wrong not to at least give them time to try to get clear.”

  “When we actually reach a decision, I’ll call them personally,” Erskine said.

  “That might not leave them enough time to act.”

  Mendoza stood up and slowly pushed back his chair. Solomon thought he was simply going to refill his coffee from the jug on the sideboard, but then he took his lab coat off the back of the chair and put it on.

  “I’m going to stay with my patients,” he said. “Whether that’s in the infirmary or in Elcano. I’m not a saint, and I’ve done things I’m not proud of, but I don’t have an excuse for abandoning them. Call me if any of you need medical assistance.”

  And he walked out.

  Erskine didn’t say a word, call him back, or even blink. She stared at the door, then turned back to the meeting. Solomon was never sure if it was more effective to stay in the fight or wash your hands of it in these situations, but he had no choice. The meeting went on.

  “I’m a coward,” Cullen said. “And I don’t have an answer. Although knowing a bit more about the other guy’s real position instead of where he’s negotiating from would make a difference.”

  “She,” Erskine said.

  “It’s not that colonel’s decision. She’s just the messenger.” Cullen polished smudges off his screen with his cuff. “Imagine this a couple of hundred years ago. Some foreign government phones us and says they’re really sorry, but they have to nuke us. A few minutes later, it would have been three thousand degrees and cloudy in Beijing or Tehran or wherever. Today, they can do what they like to us.”

  It was probably the most useful comment Solomon had heard so far. North America was less than the Third World to APS: so a colonel could make that decision, and the politicians would agree because of the potential risk. But Solomon didn’t understand APS on a practical level any more than Cullen did. There’d been no contact for too long.

  Annis Kim was an APS citizen, though. She spoke three Asian languages, and if the media reports hadn’t exaggerated her importance, she was a respected academic and engineer. Perhaps she could give him an insight, just enough to change the parameters of the discussion. Perhaps she was even a bargaining chip. How important was she to her government? Solomon wouldn’t know unless he asked them and watched her reaction — and theirs.

  There was always something to trade.

  “Are you going to give us your take on it, Solomon?” Erskine asked, sounding as if she already knew but needed to go through the motions. “Because we don’t seem to have a practical way out of this.”

  One last try. “We’ll lose too many essential people the Nomad project needs, Director, and while I appreciate we’re driven by a deadline, this is the very last chance we’ll have to strengthen the colony with the right mix of people. If we get it wrong, Nomad might die out, and a century of work will be wasted. And, put simply, it’s immoral to abandon people here.”

  “It might be possible for them to survive, though.”

  “It might, but the chances are the damage to the facility will be so bad that any survivors will be marooned here. They won’t be able to reach Shackleton, let alone finish prepping her. And you don’t believe it’s survivable, otherwise why would we be talking about shuttles instead of preparing shelters?”

  Erskine didn’t blink. “What else are we supposed to do? We plan for the worst. We can’t trust to luck.”

  “Negotiate with APS. There may well be something we’ve missed. Dr Kim would be ideally placed to act as a go-between.”

  “No.” Erskine shook her head. “That’s out of the question.”

  “I don’t think you’re exploring all the possibilities. It would take no more than an hour to try using Dr Kim. We’d at least know if there was any latitude.”

  “What if they want her back? What if they want to extract her, and naturally we don’t want to hand over someone who’s now got an intimate knowledge of Nomad? She’s not an asset. She’s a liability.”

  “I believe her presence could buy us time.”

  “Nomad’s confidentiality is paramount. It always has been.”

  “It’s not more important than saving lives. It’s not more important than making sure we have the right people for the colony, either.”

  “We have no choice.”

  “There’s always a choice.”

  “We’ve discussed this enough. No.”

  “Very well, you’ll have to excuse me. Unless there are any urgent issues that only I can deal with, I’m going to divert everything to seeing how much progress I can make with Shackleton.”

  It was as near to storming out as Solomon was ever likely to get, but all he wanted was a little time to do two things: to talk to Dr Kim, and to make sure that nobody was tempted to do anything premature with the ships.

  Locking Ainatio out of the orbitals and all four vessels would probably focus Erskine’s mind.

  In fact, he’d do that before he spoke to Kim, and make sure that he generated a fake status to buy a little more time before anyone realised what he’d done. The engineering team were busy with the shuttles, and Prinz probably wouldn’t brief anyone on the need for urgent evacuation for another hour or so.

  Nomad was Solomon’s reason for existence. He would do whatever was necessary to save the best of humanity, and not all of it was working for Ainatio.

  We leave nobody behind.

  If Chris Montello’s people and the residents of Kill Line were left here, then Nomad had failed anyway.

  * * *

  Engineering Section, Ainatio Park Research Centre:

  20 Minutes Later

  “What’s happening?” Jane Lurie stepped out of a door
way as Alex strode at a race-walking pace down the passage. “Vicky’s not answering her comms, I can’t get data from any of the ships, and Sol’s not responding. Is this something to do with the shuttles?”

  Alex bowed to the inevitable. There was no way of keeping this quiet, no good time to tell people, and no sensible information to give them.

  Would I want to be told? Damn straight. Will they panic anyway if I don’t tell them? Of course they will.

  “Vicky’s still in with Erskine,” he said. “Sol was in the same meeting.” But he’s not in there now... I think. What’s he doing? It’s not like he can’t hear this. “Tell me about the data problem first.”

  “I wanted to check where Da Gama’s welding bot was. Sol moved it to Shackleton to try to claw back some slippage.”

  Uh-oh. “You don’t need to do anything with the ship maintenance bots, though, do you? Sol manages all that.”

  “That wasn’t my question. I’m supposed to have an overview of what’s happening, in case we need to manufacture parts down here. Now stop stalling, because I can tell this is serious.”

  “So you’re locked out of the ships?”

  “Ships and orbitals. I can see them on the system, but I can’t access them.”

  “What else is down?” Alex added a disgruntled Sol to a rare system problem and concluded the worst. “Look, just show me.”

  He followed her down the passage into the control room, a title which always made it sound like a vaulted, darkened chamber where uniformed officers watched hologram schematics of vessels from a high gantry. But it was just a windowless office packed with unfathomable metal boxes. There were eight monitors, one for each of the original orbitals and ships, with menus for selecting sections, maintenance actions, and operations, including the endpoint of the FTL link in Orbital 1 that relayed the signal to Ainatio.

  Alex studied the screens. “So we haven’t lost the link.”

  “It’s still live. I asked the network guys to check.”

  Great. Another department knew things weren’t going to plan. “So you can’t call up any information, take control of bots, or move the ships.”

  “Or the orbitals.”

  “Have you tried? Moving the ships, I mean.”

  “We really shouldn’t touch that.”

  This was part of the problem with being reliant on so much automation, and on Solomon in particular. There were proper engineers like Annis Kim who could design parts and tell technicians which numbers to feed in, but AIs instructed bots how to do the hands-on work. “Humour me and see if you have control of anything. Vent some coolant or something.”

  “Let’s just switch on a docking light.”

  “Whatever.”

  Lurie tapped the screen. “Definitely locked out.”

  “I’ll find Solomon. He’s probably gone walkabout in the quad.”

  “But he always responds.”

  “He’s having a sulk.” Sol would hear that. “Don’t worry, he’ll respond right away if there’s a real problem. He wouldn’t sit back and let anything crash just to get his own back. He’s too responsible for that.”

  I hope.

  “But he’s never done that before.”

  “Well, today’s been something of a hundred-year storm. Look, if this is a real fault, and we can’t fix it, we can still get into Elcano the old-fashioned way, can’t we?”

  “Sure. We dock the shuttle and open the hatches manually from outside. It’s not without risks, but it can be done.”

  “Then don’t worry.”

  “You still haven’t answered my question. You just stoked my anxiety.”

  “Okay, we do have an ongoing situation, and we may have to transfer to the ships sooner rather than later.”

  “Elcano’s ready, but Shack isn’t.”

  “Yeah, I know. There’ll be an announcement when we’ve got something definite to tell everyone. Please — I know this isn’t easy, but the last thing we need right now is the rumour mill going into overdrive.”

  “It’s the die-back. I knew it.” Lurie shook her head. “Had to happen.”

  “Just make sure your bag’s packed, regulation size. I hate to run, but I’ve got to find Sol.”

  “Alex, everyone here has a technical or scientific background. We know what happens with die-back. We also know we won’t be the only ones to notice, because we remember how the news used to show agrisats tracking its spread before. You lied for years and you’re lying again now. You just don’t know how to stop lying.”

  Alex was at that rock-bottom point when everyone had worked out what was happening but he was still kidding himself that he had nothing concrete to say yet. This was where trust was irrevocably lost and everything spun out of control.

  “Like I said, be ready to ship out at short notice. And for what it’s worth, we’re waiting for information.”

  That would be all around the company in about twenty minutes. Alex jogged back to his office the long way around via a service corridor to avoid running into anyone else. Damn, was Lurie even going to make the sort? If hundreds of people were going to be stranded here, then even being twenty-something, female, and an engineer didn’t necessarily guarantee a seat. It wasn’t as if a few extra passengers could stow away, either. If there wasn’t a cryo pod waiting for you, you weren’t going to make it even if you reached the ship.

  “Sol, where the hell are you?”

  The AI could definitely hear him. Any system could fail, but the chances of Solomon developing some disabling but highly specific fault that caused a system lockout and his own disappearance when he’d had a disagreement with Erskine were probably infinity to one. Alex lifted his shirt collar to whisper into the mike as he jogged down the passage.

  “Come on, buddy, this isn’t going to help. I’m going to have to tell Erskine you’ve locked her out, but let’s talk before I do that.”

  There was no response. Alex took out his screen and checked everyone’s trackers. Cullen and Prinz were still in Erskine’s meeting. That meant Solomon was already out of the loop somehow or Erskine was talking about something else, because she wasn’t going to discuss anything contentious if he could still hear.

  Alex hoped she wasn’t going to go full Boudicca and try to shut the AI down. Nobody could be sure of the full extent of Solomon’s capabilities, or even his mission now, but Alex was prepared to bet that he was ready to defend himself.

  Maybe we should spend the next two days loading supplies and bots onto all the shuttles, embark everyone, and head for that Air Force base. Maybe we could get enough systems working to wait it out and launch from there.

  No, I’m wishing now. Impossible. Isn’t going to happen.

  He got back to his office, ignored the flashing messages on his monitor, and locked the door before anyone could notice that he was back.

  “Sol, there’s nobody around to hear us now. Talk to me. I can’t stop you, so just explain where all this is heading.”

  “My apologies, Alex. Bednarz made me precisely for situations like this. I stick to the plan when humans don’t.”

  “Hey, I don’t want anyone else dying while we swan off to Shangri-La either. But we don’t have a plan that evacuates everybody and also gets us to the ships. If we did, I’d have those shuttles out of here tomorrow morning.”

  “I won’t release any of the vessels.”

  “Then what? Come on, what’s your plan? Why did you go silent?”

  “Blackmail. Hostage-taking, to be more accurate, except ships are inanimate objects. Either way, nobody leaves until we’ve tried every possibility. I’m letting Erskine stew for a while. And working on Shackleton.”

  “You’re taking a terrible risk.”

  “You should have stood up to her, Alex.”

  “Yeah. Don’t I know it. But I don’t have a better idea. With one ship
, what would you do?”

  “Try harder. Try every option. I want to save people willing to sacrifice themselves for others, not those deciding who to sacrifice to save themselves.”

  Solomon really knew how to stick the knife in. But he was also being literal, and it had taken the first real moral crisis for Alex to see that. Solomon had started his moral training with Bednarz’s ethics, which seemed classically altruistic. The guy had clearly thought that would be beyond most flesh and blood when the going got tough. Perhaps Bednarz didn’t even trust himself to do the decent thing, because he certainly didn’t trust his own corporation to stick to a hundred-year, multi-trillion-dollar project to give humans a second chance. He’d built his own enforcer, an AI who’d developed his own moral code.

  “Sure.” Alex threw up his hands. “I’ll defy Erskine and get involved in some crazy shit with you. What else do I have to do at the moment? I’m only co-ordinating an evacuation.”

  “Come and talk to Annis Kim with me.”

  “What do you think she’s got that we haven’t?”

  “An APS passport, for a start. And maybe some leverage. Erskine’s still in her meeting, by the way.”

  “Anything I should know?”

  “They’re discussing how much latitude there is with cryo pods. Whether one can be modified to accommodate two small children.”

  “Well, she wouldn’t be openly discussing how to shut you down, would she?”

  “She hasn’t found out she’ll want to yet.”

  “I suspect she has. Okay, let’s see Kim. Make it snappy.”

  Annis Kim was still in her quarters. She seemed surprised to see Alex when she opened the door.

  “This is urgent and highly irregular,” Alex said. He pointed up at the grille of the ubiquitous public address system, even though Sol was connecting via his collar comms. “Sol’s with me. We need some help with diplomacy.”

  “You’ve come to the wrong place, but I’ll do my best.”

  That was the trouble with always using jokes as a disarming device. When things were deadly serious, people expected a punchline from him.

  “I’m not Funny Alex today,” he said. “We’ve got a disaster on our hands. Your government — well, the Asia Pacific Defence Union — spotted the new die-back spreading on their agrisat feed. They’ve given us two days to evacuate before they drop nukes again.”