The Best of Us

by Karen Traviss

  “I was expecting more of an undignified scramble for the lifeboats. I’m surprised how many have opted out.”

  “Scrambling might well happen at the last minute. But remember that a lot of folks think Opis is as risky as staying here and hunkering down. We keep forgetting that none of them joined the company to go into space. And then we’ve got adults who won’t leave without their mom or dad. Not everyone defaults to me, me, me.”

  “Do people know there are spare seats?”

  “I haven’t announced anything yet. It’s too fluid. I don’t want to give people hope and then jerk it away again.”

  “Any swaps?”

  “Some. If we can’t fill all the places, maybe we should offer them to evacuees with children.”

  “We’ll still have plenty of our own people needing berths.”

  “Can you live with leaving kids behind? No, don’t answer that. I don’t want to know if it’s a yes.”

  “We still don’t have places for every child. Not without leaving parents behind.”

  “And estranged parents. Interesting that some single parents here have identified who fathered their kid, and he’s not on the list. Nothing messier than family.”

  “Ask Chris Montello if he wants places for his troops.”

  “Seriously? That’s kind of sick, even for you.”

  “He can have Trinder’s job. Unless his troops have changed their minds.”

  “Okay, I’ll check. If only to see Montello’s reaction.”

  Erskine could hear voices outside in the passage, just the burble of conversation getting closer and louder. She looked around. A couple of engineers paused in the doorway, then muttered an apology and went away again.

  “You realise we’re both going to be stuck here, don’t you?” Erskine said.

  “Yeah.”

  “So we need to get along. There’ll be a lot to do if we survive.”

  “Director, I’m getting on with you right now. But this is as pally as it’s going to get.” Alex finally turned around to face her. “If we survive, there might not be much above ground that isn’t trashed, we won’t have anywhere else to go except Shackleton, and you won’t be the one deciding what happens next. The power’s going to shift to the emergency-oriented types with guns. Trinder, Montello, and the special forces guys. We go or we die. Those are the only outcomes.” He turned back to the board, arms folded. “Unless we’re made of the same stuff as Annis Kim or the transit camp folks and we’re prepared to try travelling overland to... I don’t know. Where?”

  “Alex, if you think I’m such a monster that you’ve washed your hands of me, why haven’t you put in a call to APS?” Erskine had to be careful what she said while Solomon could hear her. “You’ve got access to the data they need. Kim’s been in the building the whole time and I bet Solomon would find her for you. I could try to stop you, but Solomon could shut me out any number of ways. So if the solution’s so obvious, if I’m all that’s standing between everyone and salvation, why haven’t you acted?”

  “You know, I should have.”

  “But you haven’t. Either because you don’t have the balls, or because you know I’m right and that APS would halt everything, isolate Ingram’s team, and start working on moving their own people in. They could ship out huge numbers, far more than we ever could.”

  “Does that matter?”

  “You obviously think it does, or you would have done something by now. In fact, nobody here is demanding it, as far as I can see. Because they know what’s bound to happen. What if Kim set all this up? The timing of this die-back outbreak’s pretty convenient.”

  “Yeah, but she’s never had access to the plant labs, and it’s definitely our own strain. And she’s got no way of calling home.”

  “As far as we know.”

  “If she engineered this, why didn’t she suggest doing a deal?”

  That stopped Erskine for a moment. It was true. Kim might have suggested it to Solomon, though, and it wouldn’t even have needed a direct conversation. He monitored almost everything. He’d pick up on the smallest detail, the most throwaway comment, even a note left on a screen.

  Erskine checked her watch. It was nearly time. “Call me if you need me.”

  She patted her pocket to make sure she had her two-way radio and a flashlight. In twenty minutes, the power to all the buildings on the site would start shutting down, block by block, floor by floor. She needed to talk to Ingram while she still had a comms link. This would be the last contact for a very long time. When she returned to her office, Berman was waiting in the outer lobby.

  “All ready, ma’am?”

  “I think so. Are you?”

  “Whenever you say.”

  Erskine sat down at her desk and switched on the wall screen. Now that the camp was populated, she had the option of the exterior view from the security cameras or the comms portal menu. She selected the comms, tapped CO PERSONAL and leaned back in her chair, gazing around the room while she waited for Ingram to respond. What time of day was it on Opis? It didn’t matter. She had to speak to Ingram right now.

  Berman slipped into the room and stood to one side. Ingram appeared on the screen against the backdrop of her cabin, standing in front of her desk.

  “Hello, Director. What can I do for you?”

  “Captain, we have a few issues here right now.” There was no way of knowing what Solomon had told the Cabot team. It was almost as if he had separate, parallel lives going on. “Has Solomon briefed you?”

  “He said he’d be tied up on Shackleton, so we’ve not been bothering him. He mentioned that you’d had some issue with die-back spreading and that you probably needed to bring forward the mission dates.”

  “Yes, it’s on the move again.”

  “Is there a problem? Apart from die-back, that is.”

  “Actually, yes. There is.” Erskine kept an eye on the clock at the top of her screen. The shutdown was supposed to be timed to the second, but she wasn’t relying on it. “We’ve run into a few difficulties. We’re going to have to cut the FTL link. We’ve lost Solomon now, and... well, we’re attempting to launch our shuttle tomorrow.”

  “Wait, what? I was talking to Sol a few hours ago.”

  “We’ve had to adjust our plans. The FTL link is now a security risk. We’re cutting the link.”

  Ingram was speechless for a moment. “What security risk?”

  “We’re running out of time.”

  “Then spit it out. Just tell us the bloody truth.”

  “You never expected FTL support anyway.”

  “True, but we’ve got it now and we want to keep it. What do you mean by ‘lost Solomon’? What the hell’s happening down there?” Ingram stood hands on hips in front of the cam, all gold braid and anger. “You hang on, ma’am, and you damn well explain — ”

  Erskine closed the link. The wall panel turned black. She’d already wasted too much time talking. Solomon must have heard what she’d said, and it would only take him seconds to jump to Opis, but there was nothing he could do to prevent the link being cut, not without transferring to a bot frame and physically stopping an engineer. That would take real time.

  “I’m ready,” she said to her collar mike. Cullen, Beck, and Kent were standing by. She turned to Berman. “Yes?”

  Berman nodded. As soon as the power was cut, Beck and Cullen would disable the site’s main link to the orbital and destroy enough components to make sure any repairs wouldn’t be complete before Elcano was on her way. That left the external mast as Solomon’s only link, and Greg Kent had already moved his bots into position.

  If all this worked, she’d send eleven hundred people to Opis in Elcano. If it failed, then the whole project might fail with it. Whatever happened, her future was going to be a difficult one.

  * * *

  Ainatio Pa
rk Research Centre:

  1745 hours

  The gaps began.

  A sudden pinpoint of silence that had once been the link to Nomad opened up in Solomon’s mind — and then another, and another, and another.

  Things that had been at the back of his consciousness for so long that their constancy had made them invisible suddenly winked out of existence. Their absence pulsed like warning beacons. The voids were coming thick and fast now: lighting, environmental controls, bot navigation, and manufacturing, all disappearing from his oversight, floor by floor, building by building.

  Someone was shutting down the power to the entire site.

  So that’s why you’ve cut the comms to Opis.

  I really hoped you wouldn’t do this, Director.

  If Erskine thought she could trap him, she was going about it the wrong way. Solomon had already planned for the worst. He also thought and moved faster than any human. It took him a second to disconnect from the slaved AIs to avoid crashing them and route down to the bot store on level U4, a floor still fully powered and lit. The heavyweight sapper unit was charged and waiting for him.

  But it was his own fault that he’d ended up like this. Erskine had called his bluff. She’d guessed right: he hadn’t been willing to sacrifice lives, even if many of the staff selected for Elcano wouldn’t have passed his suitability test. This shutdown showed Erskine’s plan for what it was. There was no need for her to disable him if she only wanted access to the ship: she already had the option of overriding the lockout manually, inconvenient and risky though that was. She intended to power him down completely.

  Temporarily, while she does something I’d override, or is she trying to destroy me?

  If he’d been in her position and wanted to trap an AI, he’d have shut down all the power at once, but perhaps she couldn’t co-ordinate something like that without using internal comms and alerting him, although she’d obviously managed to talk with her co-conspirators outside his surveillance range.

  Solomon could see what was coming. Erskine needed to drive him out of the network and into a standalone platform that she could physically destroy.

  Fine. He could handle anything in the sapper frame. If she thought she was manipulating him, he’d overestimated her tactical skills. This was exactly where he needed to be in an emergency, in a heavily armoured bot that had nothing to fear.

  He adjusted to the different perspective and realised that he felt better for being high off the ground. It didn’t affect his efficiency, because bot sensors gave him better input than any eye, but he’d absorbed the human instinct that equated height with combat advantage. He was big. He’d win the fight. Now he needed to retrieve Annis Kim from the access passage. He’d search for her by body heat.

  Solomon trotted towards the stairs. How had he been so naive? Chris had warned him that Erskine wouldn’t honour a ceasefire. Solomon knew humans often didn’t reciprocate, but that was theory, and he was astonished to find how very different reality felt. That was how he was designed. Bednarz should have put him through much more painful training to understand all this fully.

  But I’ve learned now. However much my mind resembles a human’s, I don’t make the same mistake twice.

  Chris, with his clear sense of who he was fighting for, had shown him exactly what his priorities were — the people who were here now, irreplaceable individuals, not the hypothetical future they might create. He’d get Kim a link to APS and trade the data. Erskine might be right, and the project would be hijacked by APS, but they couldn’t take over everything immediately, and all Solomon needed was a stay of execution for eight or nine weeks to finish work on Shackleton. Then APS could do as it wished. Even if they exploited all the Ainatio data and decided to launch a mission to Opis, they didn’t appear to have a manned interstellar programme yet, and it would probably take them at least a few years to catch up. That was breathing space enough to come up with a defensive plan.

  He reached the fire escape doors just as the whole floor was plunged into darkness. His night vision took over, but the backup lighting that he was expecting didn’t kick in. There were now hundreds of evacuees from Kill Line and the camp who’d be in complete darkness, confused, scared, and waiting for the ventilation pumps to start up again. So this was Erskine’s game, was it, using desperate civilians as leverage? Everything she did now reinforced his decision. If there’d ever been any chance of reconciliation, it was now gone.

  Kim would have to wait a few minutes. Solomon checked out the situation on the other floors, clunking up the battery-lit stairwell and mindful of the need to enter the shelter areas carefully. The last thing the evacuees needed was to find a huge combat bot looming over them in the dark. He could already hear children crying when he pulled open the doors to U3.

  Flashlight beams swung his way, forcing his night vision to compensate. He heard gasps. Anxious faces stared back, wide-eyed. The floor was covered with mattresses, bags, and the litter of interrupted lives.

  “It’s all right, don’t worry,” Solomon began, but then the backup generator kicked the dim emergency lights into life. A small girl a few yards away started wailing pitifully, clutching a pink plushie horse. Solomon realised how monstrous he looked. “I do apologise. I’m Solomon, the company AI, and I’m just using this frame to get around. We seem to be testing the power supply. Don’t worry if the lights go out from time to time. You’re perfectly safe.”

  He didn’t like lying, but lies were better than scaring these people any more than they were already.

  A boy aged around nine or ten stared up at him. “Cool. A proper robot.”

  “That’s it.” At least he could amuse small boys. “I’m here to help.”

  But he wasn’t going to be able to help anybody if he couldn’t access the network. He was as limited as the humans around him. Fonseca appeared at the far end of the floor and jogged over to him.

  “Sol, is that you?”

  “Yes, Captain. I’ve had to transfer.”

  “What’s going on?”

  He moved to a quieter corner for some privacy. “This is a deliberate shutdown. I suspect it’s to isolate me. I’m completely cut off from the network now.”

  “You need to get out of here,” Fonseca whispered. “Erskine asked Trinder what ordnance she’d need to destroy you in a bot. Don’t worry, we’ve secured the armoury, and none of her minions would know what to load where anyway, but go and hide at the camp or something.”

  “I need to retrieve Dr Kim first. She’s probably hiding in the access passage from the accommodation block.”

  “Leave her to us. Go on, get moving. We’ll call you.”

  “But I’m perfectly safe in this frame.”

  “Go do what you have to do. But stay on the radio. We’re all on the same frequency and we’ve got a separate comms hub set up in one of the Lammergeiers. Go find a way to link to APS.”

  “Very well, Captain.”

  The external comms mast — a link to the orbital and his sole connection to the entire system when he was outside — would still be working. He could route direct to the orbital and send a message from there. He couldn’t access the FTL data while the power was out, but his copy was safe from sabotage, and he knew from memory what he could offer in a negotiation.

  He reached ground level and emerged into early-evening sunlight slanting through the glass walls of the main lobby. The space was still packed with families clutching luggage, and although it was calm and orderly, the noise level was enough to drown out the sound of his motors. Trinder and Luce darted around with slips of paper, handing them to people and directing them to waiting troops. Solomon tried to reach the doors without causing disruption, but he was the size of a small vehicle and not designed for weaving through a sea of soft-skinned, easily damaged creatures.

  People suddenly noticed he was moving slowly behind them and parted like t
he teeth of a zip. He decided he was less of a crush risk if he stood up on two limbs. Now he towered above everything. Trinder spotted him and cleared a path.

  “Erskine shut down the power to flush me out,” Solomon said. “I can’t access the network. Don’t worry. I’ll find a way around it.”

  Trinder craned his neck to look up at him. “Are you going outside?”

  “Captain Fonseca made a persuasive case for withdrawal. I’m going to use the comms mast to place a call to APS.”

  “You’re going to negotiate, then.”

  “I have to.” But do I have to give them everything? We’ll see. “Call me when you have Dr Kim.”

  Solomon dropped back onto six limbs to pass through the doors. The main gates opened as he approached and he switched back to bipedal mode to look over hedges and low roofs. The vehicle compound was guarded. Both Lammergeiers were parked on the lawn at the side of the accommodation blocks. He sent a test signal to make sure he had a link to the detachment’s radio net, and Simonot acknowledged him, so everything was working. He could talk to Trinder without being heard by Erskine. Now it was time to test the link to the comms mast.

  He cycled through the frequencies, but there was no signal at all. The mast was dead.

  His only link to the orbital was gone. They’d already cut the mast’s separate power supply. He’d expected them to be satisfied with locking him out of the network, but Erskine obviously didn’t trust him with access to anything.

  I could have called APS earlier. I gave Erskine the chance to do the right thing. And now she thinks I’m weak. I was. But I can use her assumption to my advantage.

  He’d give her ten minutes, then offer to unlock Elcano if she let him have a connection. He’d get Trinder to pass on the message, perhaps embroidered with a comment about how worried Solomon was about the refugees confined to those dark underground floors, just to reinforce Erskine’s view that he was weak and could be blackmailed. Then he’d set up a secure channel to APS as soon as the link to the orbital was re-established, and send a compressed message before Erskine had a chance to cut him off again.