Prinz gave her a non-committal, humourless smile with compressed lips and left. Now Erskine could get on with it. She turned her chair around, opened the link to Opis, and watched the base in the twilight for a few minutes. There were lights in the windows, and the flags had been lowered and taken down. She could see the halyards flapping against the poles in the breeze. Maybe all this would look different in the years to come, with enough distance between the glittering future and the dirty past that had been needed to guarantee it.
“Solomon,” she said. “I know you can hear me. Let’s talk. I find it hard to believe that you’d lock the ships at this stage of an emergency. But if you have, tell me why. We want the same outcome. We should be working together.”
There was no response. She knew this was about Kim. It wasn’t just a hissy fit, and she didn’t know if Bednarz had given him instructions to resort to force if he didn’t get what he wanted. With Solomon’s capabilities and his almost universal access, she couldn’t ignore the potential threat. She could only judge by what he hadn’t done so far while he still had access. He hadn’t destroyed anything or harmed anyone. But she didn’t dare rely on that.
Right, you little bastard. Showtime.
“Phil?” Erskine held her finger on the comms icon on the desk. “Phil, I’m going to take the list into the courtyard garden. Can you ask Will Cullen, Greg Kent, Jesse Beck, and Alex to join me, please? And your good self. With whatever decent alcohol we have to hand.”
“Certainly, Director.”
The big courtyard garden that separated the horticultural wing from the administration block was an easy way to avoid unwanted company, but it was also credibly private for an apparent discussion of human fates. Erskine took her papers, immune from prying eyes on the network, and walked out into a warm, sunny evening. She really regretted catching the scent of roses. Now they’d be linked inextricably in her memory to harrowing times.
The rose bushes shielded the long picnic table from the security camera’s direct line of sight. If everyone arranged themselves carefully with their backs to the camera, Solomon wouldn’t get a chance to monitor what was said. He’d realise that meant they were plotting against him, but concealing their plans would give a leak from the meeting more credence. And Erskine was sure that Alex would leak. He was already on Solomon’s side.
After a couple of minutes, Berman appeared with a tray, a bottle, and a selection of unmatched glasses.
“Your health, Phil,” Erskine said, pouring him a Madeira. It was an odd choice, but it looked like he’d raided the cellar for the oldest bottles. “It’s okay, you’re on the list.”
“I’d rather not be, thank you, Director. But I appreciate the kindness.”
“Oh. Oh.” She hadn’t seen that coming. It actually hurt. “I can’t force you, Phil, but this is awfully final.”
“I’m not being noble. I just don’t want to leave Earth, even at its worst. And then there’s Ruth.”
Erskine didn’t realise he was seeing anyone. She couldn’t even put a face to the name. Ruth? Ruth in Buildings Maintenance? Ruth in Records? Her own ignorance appalled her. But Berman had never been the kind to chat about life outside the office.
“If she’s not on the list, she can be.”
“Even if she is, she wants to stay as well.”
“Phil... “
“It’s okay. We can take a vehicle if there’s one available and drive south with any rejects who want to go.”
That stung. She wasn’t sure if it was intended to. But she knew that he’d do his job right up to the last minute, and that made it worse. The unspoken disappointment of a good man was painful.
She was relieved that Cullen and Kent showed up just then and cut the conversation short. Erskine arranged them as needed with their backs to the camera. Beck, the facilities manager, arrived a few moments later, looking exhausted. He’d already had the premature shutdown plans land in his lap when the die-back was confirmed, and now he had two days to make it happen. Erskine doubted anyone would be left to worry about what happened to the site, but Beck had his rules, and Erskine suspected he was also trying to plan for survivors.
“No Alex?” Cullen asked.
“He’s on his way.”
“And Solomon’s gone AWOL.”
“Worse,” Erskine said. “He’s locked us out of the ships and orbitals. It’s blackmail. He still wants Kim to negotiate a delay so he can finish prepping Shackleton. We can’t take that risk, so I said no. Again.”
“I wonder if it’s time to admit we’ve had a good run and find out if it’s as contentious for APS as we always thought.”
“And if we’re right, and they move in and take over?”
“We’ve still saved a lot of people.”
“On die-back-contaminated land, which APS may very well still regard as too much of a risk not to destroy.”
Cullen shrugged. “I never said it was an easy choice.”
“I don’t see how we can have a conversation with them without the risk of revealing Nomad in some way, and I don’t know how far Solomon will go to get what he wants. So we’re here to work out how we can bypass him.” There. She’d said it, if they hadn’t already reached the conclusion for themselves. She knew she had no control over the message that would trickle down to Solomon, but there was no easy way to lure an AI like him into a trap. “As soon as Alex shows up, we can get on with it, although I don’t really know how committed he is to all this.” She passed her paper to Cullen. “Anyway, here’s my passenger list. Whatever names we end up with, the responsibility is mine alone. And I’ve made sure that no department’s been left out. It’s as near a cross-section as we’re going to get.”
Erskine could tell they were all uncomfortable as they read down the columns. None of them wanted to be seen to look for their own name, but Greg Kent was both a father and an essential engineer, and Cullen was her best bet for keeping IT together after Solomon was contained. Beck had a key role as well, on any planet. She hoped they weren’t going to refuse places like Phil Berman had.
Alex finally appeared, looking breathless. Erskine poured him a drink and sat him down in the required position. She could only hope her mistrust was well placed.
“Solomon’s probably expecting an intervention from us, and I don’t want him to misunderstand anything we might say,” she said, settling next to him and taking care to keep her gaze straight ahead. “Face forward at all times. No profiles to lip-read, please.”
“There’s something I need to tell you first, Director,” Alex said. “Annis Kim’s now willing to talk to APS and appeal to some senior politician she knows.”
He was doing Solomon’s bidding. Erskine had called it. “I already said we wouldn’t do that. Can’t I even trust you now?”
“I think Solomon’s got a point, and now — well, there are other factors involved. And sixteen hundred lives have got to be worth pulling out all the stops.”
“Is this about Kim calling in some family favour? Because I don’t think that would cut it if APS is worried enough about die-back to bomb us.”
“No, Sol thinks Kim really is a spy after all.”
“Oh. Now he tells us. I wish he’d just talk to me.”
“I was present for the discussion.”
“I’m sure you were.”
“Yeah, well, thinking over what she said, I think Sol’s right. She said she’d ask for the APS sci-tech commissioner. Not the APS president’s office, or the Australian government, but the APS sci-tech guy. It’s very specific. All that fits her needing to report in on something. She’s been a royal pain in the ass about not getting the FTL data, and I think Sol tested her by suggesting we might do a deal on information in exchange for not bombing the shit out of us. Not for a few months, at least.”
“I can’t believe you did that. Either of you.”
“Needs must, Director.
”
“Don’t insult my intelligence.” It was impossible not to be genuinely angry with Alex even if he’d slipped conveniently into the role she wanted him to play. “You both constantly undermine me. What the hell do you think you’re doing?”
“This situation’s changing minute by minute. Like it or not, staff are seeing the shuttle activity and the die-back situation, and they know something brown and semi-solid’s hit the fan. It’s not a happy ship. We need to be out there talking to them.”
“Don’t try to divert me. You want to horse-trade with APS. The only things they’d want from us are Nomad and FTL.”
“Exactly that. You know it.”
“No.”
“Director — ”
“No. Absolutely not. We’ve done some appalling things to keep this under wraps because we had to, and we will not hand it over now.”
“Sol’s sure that a call from her will get their attention, and that they’ll want our tech badly enough to give us time to fix Shackleton.”
That confirmed her as an asset to be denied: no Kim, no discussion. “He needs to have Kim do this personally, then.”
“We’ve got to show we’re holding one of their people who’s got information. Otherwise it looks like stalling. Obviously.”
That settled it. Erskine checked her screen. Kim’s tracker showed she was still in her apartment, or at least her ID card was. Solomon would probably have hidden her by now. But she’d be confined to the building — nowhere to go, no other route to communicate with her handler — and that meant she could be found.
Especially when we shut down the power.
Cullen cut in. “Alex, we could easily end up giving everything away and saving nobody. They’re not going to let us consolidate a military base — because that’s what it is — on a habitable, resource-rich planet that we didn’t mention to them.”
Erskine couldn’t tell if Cullen had spotted what she was doing and was playing along, or if he was just returning to his original argument. “First things first,” she said. “I’m concerned that Solomon might do something irresponsible. I want to shut down all power in the facility until I’m sure this isn’t going to get out of control.”
Beck looked up. “When you say all...”
“I mean all.”
“It won’t reset the lockout on the ships, Director.”
“I know.”
“Emergency backup generators too?”
Erskine willed Alex to make a careful mental note of the details to report back to Solomon. “Not if they’re air-gapped and he can’t hide in their control system.”
“It’s okay, they’re completely separate,” Beck said. “Basic security design. But why would Sol do anything that would threaten lives? The last thing he wants is to kill people. That’s why we’re in this mess.”
“If he’s operating normally, I’d agree. But if we really think he’d never do it, why don’t we have the confidence to ignore the lockout on the ships and wait until he blinks at the last minute?”
Beck nodded reluctantly. So did Cullen.
“In case he doesn’t,” Cullen said. “In case we’re wrong.”
“Exactly. Now we’re all on the same page.”
“As soon as we start powering down, though, he’ll see it and retreat elsewhere. And he’s way, way faster than we are.”
Alex was getting agitated. Erskine could see his hands without turning her head. They were resting on the picnic table as he fiddled with his stylus, turning it end over end.
“Okay, Alex,” she said quietly. “Spit it out.”
“If you power down, it’ll cut off comms to Nomad as well. It might even collapse the wormhole. We’ve never shut it down before. How long are you planning?”
“That’s up to Solomon.” Erskine lobbed in a suggestion to test what Alex might know. “But I don’t want him transferring to Opis and locking us out from that end.”
“He wouldn’t do that.”
“Like he wouldn’t jeopardise a launch by locking down the ship? We’re relying heavily on his affection for humans, but that’s never been tested in a real crisis until now. He has to choose one group or another. He can’t save both.”
Stopping Solomon’s network-hopping excursions to Opis and Elcano was more than a way to force him into a bot. If he still had access to the ship in transit, and she was wrong about his lofty morals, she couldn’t rely on his goodwill while she was helpless in cryo. If he couldn’t jump to Opis, then he might insert himself in Elcano, and she might land and find a bitter, angry AI with a fully-fermented, forty-five-year grudge. Neither option was encouraging.
If I were him, I’d kill me in my sleep.
Cutting off his access to Elcano might mean severing his link with all the ships, though. Where did that leave the comforting lie she’d told herself about the possibility of survivors escaping in Shackleton?
Erskine moved on. The priority was making Solomon believe his own best chance of survival was transferring into a standalone bot.
“If we try to shut him down, he’ll retreat,” Beck said. “But we’ve got to power up again at some point, and we’re back to square one with an obstructive AI in a fraction of a second.”
“Then we might have to take more drastic measures.” Erskine prepared for the big reveal. “Perhaps we have to destroy the network. The shuttle can rely on its own dumb AI.”
Go on, Alex. Go back and tell your little friend I’m such a bitch that I’ll burn the place down to stop him.
But I don’t think I’ll need to. I just need enough time to distract him while I play my own card.
“So you’d rather throw the best part of two thousand innocent people under the bus and trash a big component of Nomad just because you won’t back down on doing a deal with APS.” Alex sat shaking his head and tapping the end of the stylus on the table, harder and harder. “Solomon honestly thought you were rational. Well, he’s a machine. What does he know? But he’s got more of a soul than you’ll ever have. You’re a piece of work, you know that?”
Erskine took that as Solomon’s parting shot relayed via Alex. The AI could have destroyed Elcano by now, and even the shuttle if it was connected to the network. But he’d held back. He needed to save everybody. That was his weakness. She’d use it.
She wanted to save everybody too, but the staff were hers, her people, and Kill Line were still strangers. See what a sensible idea it was to keep ourselves separate? The transit camp — well, she had nothing against them, and they sounded like decent people, but again, they were strangers. Solomon seemed to have decided that they were somehow a better choice. There was no point in debating with him. They just didn’t see the world the same way.
“If I can’t save everyone, Alex, I have to save some,” she said. “Not just now, but in the future, when APS might take an even less sunny view of all this.”
Alex swivelled around and faced her, finger stabbing the air in accusation. “How do you think we’re going to look when they write Nomad’s history? Mankind’s first manned extrasolar mission, the first extrasolar colony, and it cost the lives of farmers and veterans who just weren’t important enough to give a shit about. But never mind, it’s okay, we saved all the folks with PhDs. Just like QuiCo.”
“Don’t you try that class war garbage on me,” Erskine said. Everyone else at the table stared straight ahead, unable to escape the fight. “I was the one who wanted the farmers to be part of this. We needed them. But there’s no room and we’re out of time. We have one shot at this. It’s too late for Kim’s intervention anyway.”
“You haven’t even tried. And you never wanted the transit camp people.”
“It’s tragic after all they went through, I agree. But we already have a high ratio of men to women.”
“Oh, I forgot, men are expendable. Right. Thanks for reminding me.”
“I noticed.”
“If you had a choice between saving your family and saving someone else’s, even if they were deserving people, you’d save your own in a heartbeat. Don’t tell me you wouldn’t. And Ainatio is my family.”
“Director, I don’t even know what this is about any more. But there’s a chance we can take, and the situation’s desperate enough to try, but you won’t.”
“You know why. You know exactly why.”
“It’s okay, we’ll list the excuses in the official history.”
“Alex, history isn’t going to judge us, because it won’t be here. Perhaps mankind will be extinct in ten years, or a thousand, or when the sun engulfs Earth, but one day it all ends. And before everyone’s diaries turn to charcoal, someone will have written, ‘Why didn’t we take our best chance to get out? Why did we wait and sacrifice Western civilisation because we felt too guilty to save just part of it?’ That’s why I’m doing this. It’s what humans do. We keep moving on.”
Alex stood up to go. “You can move on without me, then. Congratulations. You’re now the captain of Elcano. My cryo pod can go to Jane Lurie in Engineering. She’ll be fine. Competent female of breeding age. Just what you need.”
Alex looked like he didn’t know what the hell he was going to do in the next breath, and for a second Erskine thought he’d really lose it and start breaking things. But he half-shrugged, half-threw his hands up, and stomped away.
She contemplated the bottom of her glass, examining her real reason for holding out, and hoped that she wasn’t doubling down on a big mistake just to feel that her life hadn’t been squandered on someone else’s dream. She couldn’t tell. But she knew that she had two days to get eleven hundred people into a ship and never look back at the ones who hadn’t made the cut.
“Wow,” Greg Kent said. “I suppose it’s getting to all of us.”
Erskine went on without missing a beat. “Okay, that’s Alex out of the loop. He might tell Solomon, so we’ve got to get moving. Here’s the plan. Keep Solomon out of the network, either temporarily or permanently, while we embark people and launch the shuttle. Stop him jumping to Nomad. And stop Kim talking to APS. Ever.”
The Best of Us Page 36
