The Best of Us

by Karen Traviss

  Solomon walked down the road, intending to carry on to the camp, but he stopped to watch the facility for a while, cycling through all the comms frequencies just in case he’d missed something that was still powered up. The comms mast was thirty yards from the perimeter fence, an ugly mesh pylon crowned with a cluster of anonymous rectangular boxes and thick black cables. But as he watched and waited, movement made the bot’s lens zoom in automatically.

  There were two objects edging their way up to the top of the pylon. They were pythons, flexible tube-like bots that could worm their way into tight spaces or climb a vertical object by coiling around uprights and hauling themselves up exactly as a snake would. What were they doing, dismantling it before the bombs got a chance to collapse it? No, they weren’t trying to save the mast at all.

  They seemed to be operating as a team. They reached the top cluster of antennas, perfectly synchronised, and started slicing them into pieces, not dismantling them carefully for reinstallation. It was already too late to stop them. Solomon watched helplessly as the bots lasered through the covers, slicing up the components as well. There was no way the mast could be reassembled now. From this distance, the only thing Solomon could do to stop them was to fire his missiles, but that would only finish the job for them.

  Erskine hadn’t powered down the whole facility just to flush him out. She was also making sure that he couldn’t resume operations when the power was restored. The mast needed a whole new array, and there wasn’t enough time left before the deadline to build one. She’d silenced the whole complex. Solomon had no link to the orbital, to Elcano, to Opis, or to APS now. And neither did she. She’d decided there was no more discussion to be had.

  The gloves were off. Solomon headed back to the facility, fully ready for war.

  15

  The courageous and altruistic give their lives to save those who have neither of those qualities. It’s hard to inculcate those attitudes — they’re either in you or they’re not. I thought that was a downward evolutionary spiral towards the most selfish and unworthy mankind could be, so I introduced Solomon into the Nomad equation. I won’t tell him what’s admirable in humans. I’ll let him work it out for himself. I suspect a lot of people won’t like his conclusions.

  Tad Bednarz, explaining AMAI in a top secret briefing to the Nomad project development team, 108 years ago

  Temporary Shelter, Level U3,

  Ainatio Park Research Centre:

  1820 Hours, 10 Minutes into the Blackout

  There was something of the grave about those few moments of absolute blackness when the power was cut. Trinder wheeled four portable lighting units out of the elevator, determined not to be caught off guard again. He found Alex waiting for him, leaning against the wall.

  “It’s okay, it’s not an electrical fault,” Alex said.

  “I know. And it’s not okay. It scared the shit out of the kids.”

  Alex followed Trinder down the passage. “Hey, I was trying to assign cryo pods when my screen crashed. She didn’t warn me.”

  “You know something? If I had access, I’d call APS right now and hand them the schematics for the wormhole or whatever it is we’ve got. Fuck the project.” Trinder wasn’t sure where his balky side had come from. Recent events had unleashed someone he hadn’t known was in there. “So what did want you want?”

  “Just checking to see if you needed any help. Where’s Dr Kim? Is she sitting this out with you, or does she want a cryo pod? We’ve got spare berths.”

  Despite Alex’s falling-out with Erskine, Trinder wasn’t sure how much to trust him. He had to stand with Sol. They had the same duty: to save as many people here as they could. He decided not to mention Solomon if Alex didn’t ask and to develop a sudden memory problem if he did.

  “No idea.” Trinder stopped the trolley at the doors. He hadn’t heard back from Luce’s team yet, but they must have found Kim by now. “So some folks don’t want to go, then.”

  “Yeah, around seventy. I’m trying to work out who the hell I can offer the places to. I know you guys said you were staying, but if any of you have changed your minds... ” Alex looked down at his boots. “Seeing as we’re shipping out women, children, and nerds for the most part, and we don’t know what Opis is going to be like when they finally get there, maybe some armed support would be handy.”

  “Purely on utility grounds, yeah?”

  “That, and feeling bad about how all of you volunteered to stay.”

  “But you’re staying too.”

  “That’s because I’m more afraid of going.”

  “When’s the launch?”

  “Just before noon tomorrow.”

  “Sixteen hours.” Get a grip. There’s a lot you can do in that time. “Okay, I’ll ask them again.”

  Trinder couldn’t face himself if he didn’t give the detachment every chance to leave, yet he knew he’d be disappointed if any of them took it. Surviving the initial blast would only be the beginning. The real challenge would be the weeks that followed, keeping people safe and fed while they waited for Shackleton.

  But I’d cope if they decided to go. Plenty of capable men here who can fill the gaps. I just need to believe my people are heroes.

  Trinder stepped away from the doors to the main floor and got on the radio. He didn’t want this overheard by any evacuees.

  “Echo Five to all callsigns. Anyone wanting to leave in Elcano tomorrow, notify me by twenty hundred. Final call. Not to be discussed within hearing of evacuees for obvious reasons. Out.” He turned to Alex. “I’m going to have to repeat this on the other floors. The signal’s patchy. Look, if you really want to help, we could do with extra hands down here. We’re starting to backlog because we can’t move people out of the ground floor. See Fonseca. She’s through there.”

  “On it,” Alex said. He seemed to have picked a side.

  Trinder ran down the fire exit stairs to U3 and repeated the message, then went up to the lobby to transmit again to anyone on the ground floor or outside. He stood back in an office doorway, keeping an eye on guys he could see in the press of bodies, and watched their reactions. They paused, looked at one another, and shrugged. Then they carried on processing evacuees.

  “Lammergeier One to Echo Five, over,” said a voice in his earpiece.

  “Echo Five, go ahead, over.”

  “I have bot Charlie Echo Six here wanting to speak to you in person, over.”

  “Echo Five, on my way, out.”

  Trinder slipped out of a side door into the gardens and walked around to the lawn where the Lammergeiers were standing. He’d have to get them moved into the underground hangars tomorrow after the shuttle launched. They’d be needed in the weeks to come, as long as he still had two pilots.

  Simonot was waiting at the foot of the tilt’s tail ramp. “Look, sir,” he said, pointing. “Comms mast.”

  Trinder followed Simonot’s finger. He could see the top of the mast above the low-rise admin block, but it took him a few moments to work out what was missing.

  “All the antennas are trashed.” Simonot handed him a visor to get a better look. “I didn’t notice at the time.”

  Trinder studied the magnified image. There was no twisted, jagged metal of the kind he’d have expected from explosives. All the antennas were gone except for the stumps of mountings. The cables had been cut. Their ends drooped like wilted stalks.

  “How the hell did they get up there unnoticed?”

  “Sol said they used python bots. I’m sorry, sir. But I don’t know how we’d have stopped them once they were up there.”

  “Not your fault. Where did they get pythons? I thought we’d secured everything down below.”

  “Sol said the engineering departments still have some. They’re not networked any more.”

  “So where’s Sol now?”

  Simonot jerked his thumb
over his shoulder. “Inside. He needs someone to help him get a signal out.”

  There was a sound from the cargo bay like an ammo crate being dragged across the deck. Trinder looked up the ramp into the dimly-lit space and saw the sapper bot emerging.

  “I need to route a call to APS,” Solomon said. “I thought I might be able to use this ground station, but I can’t connect to any of the sats. I assumed that Erskine would keep some means of contacting APS, but she’s destroyed all the links.”

  “We’re not beaten yet,” Trinder said. “Let me think.”

  The Lammergeier hadn’t used its satcom link for years. The satellites it could access had either reached the end of their lives or the comms companies that leased them were long gone. There were still people on site who did have a functioning government to talk to, though, and who would also have the right authentication provided they had the means to place a call: Marc and Tev.

  “Corporal, do we still have any sat phones?”

  “We recycled some, but I’m sure there are others.”

  “Good. Find one and then get me Marc Gallagher. Tell him I need a really big favour.”

  Simonot shot off. Trinder sat on the end of the ramp, trying to work out if they had enough credibility to get APS to take their call seriously.

  “So what are you going to say to them if we manage to patch you through, Sol?” Trinder asked.

  “I’m going to tell them that I have one of their field agents and name Dr Kim. But I need to be able to produce her at some point in the next few hours. I haven’t heard from Sergeant Luce.”

  That didn’t bode well. Trinder would need to follow that up. “Are you serious about giving APS the Nomad file?”

  “Yes.”

  “Couldn’t you give them incomplete data or something?”

  “They’d work that out before we were ready to leave. I still need a couple of months to work on Shackleton, and now we’ve got to rebuild the comms mast just to access the ship.”

  “How long will that take?”

  “I don’t know until we assess the damage. Don’t worry, we’ll get the uplink to the orbital working, if nothing else.”

  Trinder had always felt that Solomon could do anything with his army of dumb AIs and bots. It was sobering to hear his uncertainty. “Well, if Erskine’s right, and APS muscles in and takes over the project, we won’t have to worry about it, will we? But we’ll be out of here either way.”

  “I’m gambling, Major. I think Erskine could be right. But once we’ve saved people, I’ll have the luxury of time to work out what we can salvage from the project.”

  “If they let us leave in Shackleton, then we’ll still have a few months or even years on them. It’s not like they’ll get the FTL stuff and magically be able to build a full-size superluminal drive overnight.”

  “That’s exactly what I’m hoping for,” Solomon said. “Which is why I say that I’m gambling.”

  “Humans can be deceitful bastards, Sol. They might agree to it and then welsh on the deal.”

  “This is why I need Dr Kim. I also need to get back into the network to extract the data. I have a backup hidden.”

  “Wait one.” Trinder tapped his radio. “Echo Five to Echo Nine. Luce, have you located our asset yet, over?”

  “Echo Nine to Echo Five, negative, we haven’t found her. Extending search, over.”

  “Echo Five, keep me posted, out.”

  “That’s worrying,” Solomon said.

  “She can’t have gone far.” Trinder was worried too, but if Erskine had found Kim, that wasn’t necessarily the end of the road. Solomon had his own copy of the data. All he needed was to restore power to retrieve and transmit it. “How are you going to introduce yourself to APS?”

  “What do you think they would take more seriously, a human or an AI like me?”

  “Don’t tell them you’re an AI. They’ll be more interested in getting hold of you than the damn ship. Pass yourself off as flesh and blood.”

  “It’s not as if they can check my identity.”

  “Tell them you’re Alex. He’s not going to argue.”

  “Very creative thinking, Major. An excellent idea.”

  Simonot came jogging back towards them, clutching a black ripstop bag and looking pleased with himself. A few yards behind him, Marc Gallagher walked at a brisk pace before breaking into a run. It looked like they were in business.

  “Never ditch any old gear, right, sir?” Simonot opened the bag under Trinder’s nose. “This one’s charged. I found a couple more if we need them.”

  Marc fished a small screen out of his pocket and checked something on it. “I’m going to work through my old contacts book,” he said. “Bear with me. It all depends on whether they’ve changed my ID. But there’ll be someone, somewhere who’ll vouch for me. So do you want a message relayed to APS, asking them to call you? That means I’ve got to tell my people the kind of information that might make them a bit too interested in you. Or do you want to be connected so you can talk to APS direct?”

  “I think I should speak to APS direct,” Solomon said. “I can give them more detailed information. Tell them I’m Alex.”

  “Let’s give it a go, then. So this phone was registered to some telco that’s defunct now, yeah?”

  “I think so. Sorry.”

  “Not to worry.” Marc stepped out of the shadow of the Lammergeier and stood in the middle of the lawn, sat phone in one hand and his screen in the other. “I’ve got a special big boys’ prefix code. You tend to need that when you don’t know whose phone you’re going to have to steal to call for extraction. Bloody hell, is this thing steam-powered?”

  Like a lot of equipment here, the sat phone was obsolete to the point of antiquity, but the habit of not throwing things away had paid off. Trinder found himself doing crazy superstitious things and keeping his fingers crossed while he willed Marc to make the connection. Solomon said nothing. Simonot went back into the cockpit.

  It seemed a painfully slow process. Marc kept keying in numbers and frowning at the display, then walking to the other side of the lawn and back again. Eventually, he stopped dead as if someone had answered. He put his hand over his opposite ear. Trinder couldn’t hear everything he was saying, but he caught bursts.

  “Yes, that’s my code... correct... no, it’s Gallagher, I’m still in the States, or what’s left of it, and this is an urgent message for the consulate in Seoul.” The conversation faded out for a while, then Trinder heard Marc’s voice rise a little and take on an edge. “Look, APS is going to nuke this frigging site tomorrow. I’ve got nearly two thousand civvies here who we can’t move, including hundreds of children. If you can’t be arsed to do it for me, then do it for the kids, okay? I’ve got an urgent call that I need routed to APS. Tell them there’s a guy called Alex Gorko who needs to speak to Colonel Su-Jin Yoon right away about Dr Annis Kim, one of their field agents. So do me a favour and pull your bloody finger out. Now let me spell those names for you...”

  Trinder could only watch. The helplessness knotted his guts. He wanted to think that Marc was exaggerating to panic someone into action, but he knew the guy was simply stating the reality of their situation.

  “You didn’t think the phone was going to work,” Solomon said quietly. “But it did. And so will this.”

  Marc seemed to be waiting now, passing the time by squinting up at the comms mast. It was a long wait, at least ten minutes. But then he snapped back to the conversation and exchanged a few mumbled words, beckoning to Solomon.

  “Okay, cheers for that. Really, I appreciate it. Because I don’t want to be vaporised either. Wait one while I get Mr Gorko.”

  If the situation hadn’t been so desperate, Trinder would have laughed his ass off. There was Solomon, a big, ugly battlefield bot, towering over Marc while the Brit held the phone against his audio grille.
Trinder hoped he’d live long enough to look back on this and find it funny.

  “Yes, this is Alex Gorko from Ainatio,” Solomon said, completely convincing as a human. He even sounded like Alex. “We have one of your field agents here at our facility — Dr Annis Kim. She wants to speak to Commissioner Tim Pham. We know she was sent to acquire propulsion technology, but industrial espionage isn’t our biggest problem right now. We’re willing to give you the data if you postpone the bombing of this area long enough for us to get one more of our ships operational. If you don’t postpone it, then obviously all the data will be destroyed, along with a lot of innocent people. Let’s do one another a favour.”

  Solomon really was quite a diplomat. Trinder was impressed by how many threats he’d managed to wrap up in that appeal for mercy. In the next few seconds, it might prove to be a waste of time, but while Trinder waited, he still had hope. Whoever Solomon was talking to then appeared to give him an answer.

  “Very well,” Solomon said. “If you make Mr Pham available, I’ll get Dr Kim to speak to you... no, Miss Erskine no longer runs this facility. That’s why I’m calling you via the British Consulate. She disabled our communications. She’s been under a great deal of stress in recent weeks, so I hope you’ll excuse her behaviour and deal with me instead... yes, yes, that’s right. Gorko. Alex Gorko.”

  The situation hovered between tragedy and comedy yet again. Trinder put his hand slowly over his mouth in case his nerves got to him and he started laughing.

  Solomon ended the call. Marc patted his casing. “That was bloody brilliant,” he said. “Liar of the Year, Sol. We’ll make you a medal. So what happens now? We just go and get Kim, she talks to her boss, and we can forget Erskine?”

  “Luce and his guys haven’t found her yet.”

  “Shit.” Marc shut his eyes for a moment, then took out his sidearm. “If Erskine’s got her, I’ll extract her. Just don’t get squeamish on me, okay?”

  Anyone Marc shot in the course of getting hold of Kim would be someone Trinder knew. It wasn’t going to be pretty if they tried to put up a fight.