The Best of Us

by Karen Traviss

  Nothing.

  Her father had always told her to stick with a decision. But even if she changed her mind in the hours to come and Solomon got what he wanted, the animosity and mistrust had already done their damage. It would be a bad start for a new society.

  She tapped out the message on her screen, selected ALL USERS, and hit SEND.

  “Done,” she said. A nightmarish forty-eight hours had begun.

  Berman dropped her off at her quarters to shower and change. It helped to have no time to think. She had fifteen minutes to get ready and compose herself before he collected her in the buggy again.

  “Ready?” he asked.

  “Ready.”

  There were only three or four hundred people in the room. Maybe some staff hadn’t checked their messages, although Erskine’s would have arrived with an alert tone. Perhaps they hadn’t even picked up on the rumours and activity over the last few hours, and were blissfully unaware of what was heading their way. But she had to start. She stepped up to the podium and played it by ear.

  “Thank you for coming at such short notice,” she said. “I’m sure you’ve already realised that something serious happened earlier today, and I’m sorry that I didn’t level with you all a few hours ago. But I didn’t want to give you information that I’d have to retract minutes later.” The obvious worry on their faces was almost enough to stop her dead, but she had to press on. “The Alliance of Asian and Pacific States has given us forty-eight hours from midnight tonight to prepare for a salted radiation weapon strike on this area to stop the spread of die-back. Evacuating so many to a safe distance in that time is beyond us, as I’m sure you can work out for yourselves.” Erskine could now only blurt out the worst part. “We plan to evacuate as many people as we can by bringing forward the launch of Elcano, and Major Trinder is setting up shelters in the underground levels for everyone else. There are... ah... obviously not enough places for everyone in Elcano, and Shackleton won’t be ready in time, despite our efforts.”

  Erskine waited a few beats to make sure that had sunk in rather than try to make herself heard over a crescendo of questions and objections. There was grim silence, though, and it didn’t surprise her. People had had too many shocks these past few months. It had drained them.

  She carried on. The pause had only made this harder. “I’ve had to make some hard decisions in a very short time, and please don’t think that I took them lightly or that they won’t haunt me to my grave. We only have berths for eleven hundred people. That leaves us with a shortfall of four hundred and thirteen places, but a number of people currently involved with the preparations, like Major Trinder and the detachment, have already decided to remain. I’ll be sending every one of you a notification immediately after this meeting about whether you’ve been designated for evacuation or shelter. My priority has to be our children and their parents. I can do no more than say I’m truly sorry.”

  Erskine stood waiting. This wasn’t a raging mob. These were people she had known and worked with for years, but it would have been a lot easier to stand in front of strangers throwing bottles and screaming for revenge. Now she at least had a partial answer to Berman’s question about whether she wanted to be punished. The expressions on the faces in front of her reflected shock, blank disbelief, fear, and anger. Then the silence gave way to a murmur that grew louder, and in seconds she was facing shouted questions.

  “Isn’t there anything we can say to APS to delay this until we can all leave?”

  “You could have given us time to get out of the area.”

  “There’s nowhere else to go now.”

  “Why are you penalising people who don’t have children?”

  “What happens to the people in the town?”

  “Are you saying people might survive this?”

  “Is that why the security detachment’s staying?”

  People deserved time to talk this out and vent their anger and fear, but time was the one thing Erskine couldn’t give them. And no amount of time would have been enough to come to terms with losing friends and possibly their own lives. Erskine decided she was now doing more harm than good by standing here.

  She held up both hands. “I deserve your anger. I really do. I have no excuses, and I know sorry isn’t even close to being enough. There’s nothing helpful that I can add now, but if anyone on the list decides they want to stay, they can name their replacement from those who didn’t get a place, or delegate that to me. I’ll let you know what’s happening as soon as we get more information. In the meantime, please keep an eye on your messages and start packing essential items, because you’ll need them wherever you’re heading. Once again — I’m sorry.”

  Erskine tried to walk off to the side door with some dignity, but she ended up almost rushing. Berman was waiting for her in the passage at the back of the hall. It was mercifully dark, lit only by safety lighting.

  “I’ll send the notifications,” he said. “I think you should get some sleep.”

  “I’m going to see if Solomon’s ready to talk to me first. But thank you.” She leaned against the wall, suddenly ready to sit. Whatever reserves of energy she’d been running on had finally been depleted. “When you start getting calls, put them through to me.”

  “No, I’d rather you were functioning tomorrow, Director. Besides, Alex didn’t attend tonight, so I’ll go see him and bring him up to speed. As far as is prudent, anyway.”

  Erskine nodded and waved him away. “Very well. You go on ahead. I’ll be fine.”

  There was an old air-conditioning unit near the door, just under the fire exit sign, and Erskine made her way towards it, putting her hand on the wall for support. The unit was just about low and wide enough for her to rest on it for a few minutes. All she could hear now was the hum of air con and her own breathing.

  “Solomon, we need to stop this pissing contest right now,” she said. “I’m not going to blink. I’ve got no choices left.” She waited. “Come on. We’re going to launch the shuttle anyway. You can see it. Why the charade?”

  You could have destroyed this whole building. You could have marshalled all the bots as your private army. You could have paralysed this facility. You could have shut me down any number of ways.

  But you didn’t.

  Erskine had cornered him, but she wasn’t going to kid herself that she’d out-thought him. It was accidental, the inevitable result of being ready to sacrifice people when your opponent wasn’t.

  Solomon broke his silence at last. “It’s not too late for you to avert this, Director.”

  “Oh, it is. I’m afraid it is.”

  “You’ll always lose to people with someone to fight for.”

  “Sorry?”

  “Just something Chris Montello said to me.”

  “Solomon, you can’t stop the shuttle launching. And we can dock and transfer to Elcano manually. There’s nothing to be gained.”

  “I have control of Elcano’s armaments as well. Think that through.”

  “But you won’t risk lives or jeopardise the Nomad project, will you? So carry on doing this if it makes you feel better, but it won’t change the outcome.”

  “I’ve given you every chance, Director.”

  “What the hell have you been doing, anyway? We needed you.”

  “Did any system actually fail? No. I did my job. I’ve simply been silent for a few hours, because I had no need or desire for a conversation, and I’ve been focused on exactly what I told you I’d be doing — making Shackleton flightworthy. But it’s still going to take weeks. We’ll probably lose the uplink to the ship in the blast, and possibly the shuttles, and then if anyone survives they’ll eventually starve. I hope you understand that, and that I won’t forgive you.”

  “But you’ll be stuck here too. Your forgiveness will be somewhat academic.”

  “Ironic that you’ve spent most
of your adult life feeling that you were left marooned on this project by your father, and now you’re the one leaving people stranded.”

  It was as near as Solomon could get to throwing a punch. He knew her father was a topic never to be discussed. He fully intended to draw blood. Erskine willed herself not to show him that he had.

  “I thought you could do better than that,” she said.

  “You are going to leave, I assume.”

  Erskine had held that thought at arm’s length for as long as she could. She’d assumed she’d go because it was her duty to see the mission through to the end. But would she survive cryo? Would she take up a berth that a younger, fitter person could have had, and be found dead in it when Elcano reached Opis?

  No, it wasn’t even a matter of whether she’d waste a precious cryo berth on her corpse. It was whether she deserved to escape. She’d made a decision that no amount of self-delusion about survivors could rinse clean. People would die. That was even harder to face now that Trinder and his team seemed to have given up their places as well. She didn’t feel she’d lived long enough yet to accept death, but she wasn’t sure that living with what she was about to do would be any better.

  It would be good for morale if she stayed, not because she’d be a source of comfort, but because wronged people needed to see her get what was coming to her. It might help the Elcano contingent cope with it as well.

  “Actually, I think I’m staying,” she said. “This is where I’m going to see this through. And don’t think for one minute that you’ve shamed me into it.”

  “But it changes nothing, Director,” Solomon said. “And I will get those you’ve abandoned to Opis. With you or without you.”

  They’d both drawn their battle lines. Erskine tried to put Solomon’s barb about her father out of her mind and focus on this feeling of finality, which felt better than she’d imagined.

  Her father had been right about that, at least. Good or bad, a decision was better than nothing.

  * * *

  Transit Camp, Kill Line:

  6 Hours, 20 Minutes After the APS Warning

  They’d closed the bar early tonight to get ready for Zakko’s passing-out ceremony in the morning, which left Chris at a loose end. Jared was helping Marsha with the catering, and there’d been no joint patrols since the die-back outbreak, which left Chris’s evening suddenly empty. It began filling itself with thoughts and doubts about Opis.

  He’d had a few solitary beers while he sat outside the bar watching fireflies in the bushes. Now he debated whether to go back to his cabin and finish off the rest in the plastic container. But he couldn’t be bothered, and he wanted to carry on watching the fireflies. They reminded him of tracer rounds in slow motion until one backtracked or wobbled, and then he suddenly saw them as insects and wondered if they were enjoying their lives. There wouldn’t be fireflies on Opis, but maybe there was something just as fascinating.

  It wasn’t that he liked Earth enough to want to stay, but he wasn’t sure he had sufficient purpose ahead of him to leave, either.

  He climbed up to the flat roof of the wood store with his old, precious, and irreplaceable woobie, rolled it into a pillow, and lay back with his fingers meshed behind his head to stare up into the night sky. Did it look the same from Opis? He’d have to ask Nathan how far from Earth you had to be before the constellations looked different. It was probably a lot further than forty light years if most of the stars were further away than that.

  That made him think of Gina when he really didn’t want to. Did I ever believe the crap she spouted about us both looking at the same star? She sure forgot that fast.

  He tried to raise Trinder on the radio again to invite the detachment over for Zakko’s parade, but a woman he didn’t know responded and said Trinder was already on his way over to see him. That was weird. Maybe Trinder had heard about the party from someone else and was sneaking out some of Ainatio’s stash of liquor that might not be drinkable in forty-five years’ time. There was a sad sense of a last hurrah about the whole thing.

  Am I really going to go? Yeah. I can’t leave these folks now.

  And what about Dieter?

  Solomon had said the dogs could be transported. Chris couldn’t see how they were going to put them in cryo, but they must have tested it on animals at some stage, so maybe it wasn’t just well-meaning bullshit to get Dieter to leave. What would Dieter do if the dogs didn’t survive the process, though? Chris realised he was thinking unhealthy thoughts about someone secretly putting the dogs down, loading the bodies, and then telling Dieter that they found them like that when they tried to revive them. Yes, Chris knew he had serious trust issues, but people were assholes, so that wasn’t unreasonable. When you let someone put you out cold for forty-five years and depended on some external process to wake you, you surrendered all power over your own life in the worst possible way.

  Is that what’s worrying me?

  Solomon would still be awake. He never slept. He’d be conscious and in control for the whole voyage, and Chris trusted him as much as he could trust anyone he couldn’t look in the eye.

  He sat up, arms folded on his knees. Ainatio was a couple of miles away, and he could normally see the glow of lights from up here. With a pair of field glasses in the winter, he could even pick out some detail through bare branches. But the light haze seemed much brighter tonight. He was certain it wasn’t the beer playing tricks on him. He got to his feet and tried to work out what he was looking at.

  No, there was definitely a lot of light that hadn’t been there before, not the usual yellowish glow but blue-white like a floodlit football stadium. Did they have one? It was such a damn big campus that anything could have gone on in there and he wouldn’t have seen it even when he was exploring. But the combo of unusual lights, Dan Trinder doing weird shit, and everything that was going on made him think he ought to sober up and take a look.

  He rolled up the woobie and hung it around his neck to climb down, but he jolted his injured knee as he missed the last rung of the ladder. It didn’t hurt. It just felt different, like his body hadn’t been fooled by the high-speed healing and didn’t want him to forget how he’d been wounded and what he’d got so very wrong that day. He thought about Jamie, like he thought about him most nights when there was nothing else going on to distract him. He wasn’t going to leave his remains here when they shipped out. Exhuming someone was freaky and he knew some people would be upset even by the idea of it, but he couldn’t leave him behind.

  Especially with nobody to tend the grave.

  You deserve better than that, buddy.

  Chris was contemplating why he wasn’t troubled by killing some people yet was gutted by the deaths of others when the bar doors creaked open behind him. Jared came out with Marsha.

  “Hey Chris,” Marsha said. “You okay?”

  “I’m good. Dan’s on his way over.”

  “You got hold of him, then.”

  “No. Some woman. Hey, something weird’s going on over there. Look at the lights.”

  Marsha locked the bar doors. Old urban habits didn’t change, not even out here with a camp full of friends who were closer than kin and God-fearing neighbours in the town. “I’m beat,” she said. “You two look at the pretty lights and make sure you’re up early for Zakko’s big day, okay?”

  “Sure, honey.” Jared started climbing the ladder to the roof. “I’ll just humour Chris. Wow, look at the fireflies. Are they usually active this late at night?”

  He went quiet for a while. Chris did a few stretches, wondering where Trinder had gotten to.

  “Damn, looks like they’ve got a game going,” Jared said.

  “Huh?”

  “One last ball game before they go.”

  “No. It’s arc lights.” Yeah. That made sense to Chris. “Why are they working this late at night, though? And bots don’t ne
ed lights. It’s almost all bots doing the work in there.”

  “Who knows? Imagine trying to mothball a site like that.”

  “Maybe they’ve gone on lockdown again.”

  “You expecting to see a pall of smoke or something?”

  “Maybe.”

  Where had Trinder gotten to? Chris sat down to wait. His head was a little clearer now. Jared settled down next to him.

  “Okay, I was wrong,” Jared said. “You turned Zakko around after all.”

  “Nah, I think he turned me around.”

  “Hadn’t noticed.”

  “Okay, Maybe we pushed each other closer to the middle ground. On trust and shit. Giving strangers a chance.”

  “Really.”

  “Well, I decided to trust Dan Trinder’s guys.”

  “They came through when we needed them.”

  “And Zakko.” Chris tapped his knee. “He came through as well.”

  “Amazing what a difference it makes to a guy to give him a uniform and make him feel part of something bigger than himself.”

  “Uniform. Hah. A camo jacket. But he likes it.”

  The man Chris had almost taken a meat cleaver to in February had turned into a competent, hard-working soldier by June. He’d also lost the extra weight. Zakko was never going to be a stone-cold killer type, but he wasn’t afraid to get stuck in, and he had everyone’s back. He’d earned his rifle.

  “I was trying to invite Dan and his guys to the pass-out,” Chris said.

  “I thought you said he was on his way over.”

  “He was. I’m going to head down the track and see if he’s coming.”

  “It must be like the fall of Rome over there.”

  “It’s the lights,” Chris said, shaking his head. “Something’s up. I’ll be back.”

  “Take a flashlight.”

  “Got one...”

  “You’re still not walking right.”

  “It’s fine.”

  Chris made his way through the centre of the camp and towards the road. The arc lights were really troubling him now, and every time a detail nagged at him like that, he knew his subconscious had noticed something and was trying to get his attention. That was how he’d fallen into all this: an uneasy feeling about some woman showing up on the boundary, another uneasy feeling about the way Ainatio had reacted to her and her string of numbers, and so on. His mistrust had led him here. He knew it wasn’t his best feature, but at least it was reliable.