“Yes. We’ll be back in business soon, Chris. Chin up.”
“Hey, we’re survivors. We’ll come out of this in one piece, no matter what.”
“Indeed. Keep the faith.”
It was almost funny to hear an AI say that.
Chris carried on downstairs, securing everything behind him again, and took the long route back to the control room to see Dr Mendoza. The makeshift infirmary still had patients. Chuck Emerson, the camp’s retired corpsman, had also found his way down there and seemed to be enjoying a long technical chat with the doctor. Mendoza waved at Chris and pointed to his knee.
“You missed your check-up,” he said from the far side of the room. “Get your ass in here tomorrow.”
“Will do, Doc.”
If they ended up stuck down here in a confined space for a few weeks, at least everyone could get on with each other. That was encouraging. Chris wandered back along the main passage, thinking of jobs he could do to pass the time until the next sat phone check. It was 0455, the sun was coming up, and Kill Line was still on the map.
Okay, I’m definitely going to hope.
It’s going to be okay.
His radio chirped. No bad news, please. “Six Zero receiving, over.”
“This is Echo Seven. Something unidentified on the long-range, approaching from south-west, out.”
It was Fonseca. For a moment Chris felt like he’d tempted fate once too often just by thinking the danger had passed. He jogged the rest of the way to the control room, trying not to break into a sprint in case any civilians spotted him and took it as a sign to panic.
The small control room was busy. Trinder sat at the desk, studying the sensor display and tapping his stylus on the table. Fonseca was watching, brows set in a frown, and Kim was craning her neck to try to see past both of them. Alex appeared to have given up and leaned against the wall, arms folded.
Howie seemed to have found a friend in Marc, though. He was curled up asleep on the bench with his head on the guy’s lap. Marc actually looked at peace for the first time since Chris had met him. He caught Chris’s eye and put his finger to lips.
“There.” Fonseca tapped the screen. Chris couldn’t see it from the doorway. “What is that, Sol?”
“I can tell you what it’s not,” Solomon said. “It’s not UCAVs. Too slow. I believe it’s three stealth aircraft that aren’t quite evading the sensor. Well, it’s nice to know we can still do something better than APS, isn’t it? They’ll be visible in fifteen minutes.”
“I’m going up there,” Chris said. He had the keycards and the sat phone, so nobody was going to stop him. Kim squeezed out of the room and hurried after him.
“You stay put,” he said. “If Sol’s wrong and you get blatted alongside me, that’s his trump card gone.”
She stayed close on his heels, even though he was taking the stairs two at a time. “He’s already played it.”
“Why didn’t they just insert you a few miles away, like spec ops?”
“You wouldn’t have believed I made my own way here if I wasn’t a tapeworm-infested wreck.”
“Yeah, the parasites were a nice touch.”
“Would you do me a favour?”
“Now?”
“There’s something I’d like you to do for me. Personal.”
Chris didn’t have time for this. “Sure. Remind me later.”
They walked down the approach road and stood on the open land outside the main gate, the spot with the clearest view to the south, and waited. Chris strained to hear engines or disturbed flocks of birds, anything that would give him warning, and tried to recall what kind of aircraft had carried out the bombing last time. Maybe they’d decided to drop the payload personally today as a courtesy, and this perfect dawn was going to be his last. Then he heard the engines.
“I’ll do the talking,” she said.
“In English, please.”
“We generally do in Melbourne.”
Chris tried his radio, but nobody was receiving. It was a long few minutes. Now he could definitely hear something that sounded rotary. Then three tilt rotors, two in Korean air force livery and one in plain dark blue, appeared above the trees.
“Well, that confirms they called off the UCAVs,” Kim said.
Chris watched the first tilt coming in to land and spotted APDU decals before he had to crouch to avoid the storm of debris. When the noise and downwash died away, he looked back and saw all three tilts had set down on the grass and their ramps were descending. Crewmen emerged and just stood there. They seemed to be waiting on whoever was in the plain blue aircraft.
“Is that an official APS ride?” Chris asked.
“Yep.” Kim tidied her hair. “Nice to see the boss fella show up in person.”
A dark-haired, dark-suited guy in his forties walked down the ramp and headed their way, flanked by half a dozen people in cheaper but equally dark suits who looked like serious close protection.
“Tim Pham?” Chris asked.
“Yeah, that’s him.”
“You must be high up the food chain.”
“I really sold the FTL hard.”
“Remind him to wash his hands before he goes home. Die-back zone, remember.”
“Hah.”
One of the CP detail peeled off and approached them ahead of Pham. “Dr Kim?” the guy asked, addressing Kim but keeping an eye on Chris and especially on his rifle. “Mr Pham would like to speak with you.”
He turned and gave Pham the nod that it was safe to approach. The guy looked at Kim as if he knew her. He shook her hand and held it way too long. Chris took a guess that they knew each other way better than they should have.
“We really thought you hadn’t made it, Annis. Good grief, this is a shock.”
“I nearly didn’t.” She nodded in Chris’s direction. “This is Sergeant Montello. I’d be dead from sepsis or something if he hadn’t found me, and the people here have been damn good to me, so let’s keep the promises we make to them, okay? They’re not the enemy.”
“Certainly. Now let’s talk.”
Chris and sixteen hundred scared people could breathe again, for a while at least. Now the real horse-trading was about to begin.
* * *
Ainatio Park Research Centre:
2 Hours Later
Solomon scoured the network, erasing all the downloaded feeds from Opis and putting expiry codes into the system to kill all Nomad documents that had been circulated.
Whenever staff logged in, anything sensitive on their personal screen would be wiped. It would be impossible to get this many people to agree on a cover story on Nomad, and even his own purge wasn’t perfect airbrushing, but he’d learned something from Erskine: a few speed bumps placed in someone’s path could work almost as well as complete destruction. He removed all the data on himself, too. Phil Berman, now a rather different man in the absence of his boss, helped him locate disconnected storage so that could be purged as well.
“I shredded a generation’s work a few days ago,” Berman said. “I actually had a nightmare about it afterwards. I was in Alexandria, burning the library, and people were trying to stop me, but I kept saying, ‘No, we can’t let it fall into the wrong hands.’ I do have a better class of nightmare, I think.”
“It had to be done, Phil. I’ve stored what I can to transfer to Shackleton.”
“Imagine if they’d had you in Alexandria.”
“Would it have added to the sum of human happiness if the library had survived?”
“Apparently most of it did, despite the myth.”
“Humans never use the information they’ve got. They seem to value it less the more they have.”
“But there’s a romance in what we don’t know or never can.”
He had a point. Solomon pondered it, then detected some
critical keywords in a conversation in Erskine’s old office that needed his full attention. “Oh, I need to eavesdrop on Tim Pham. Excuse me, Phil.”
Dr Kim was in the management suite with Pham, being debriefed. She was sticking to English. Solomon wondered if she was being considerate to him and hadn’t remembered that he could handle Korean, but she sounded particularly Australian this morning, almost as if she was so excited at the prospect of going home that she was slipping back into her real self. She obviously knew Tim Pham very well, far better than Solomon had realised. They chatted like old friends. There might even have been some romantic liaison in the past if their body language was anything to judge by.
“And Ainatio kept all this secret, even from their staff,” Pham said, swivelling slowly in Erskine’s big leather chair as if he was trying it for size. “Extraordinary.”
Kim nodded. She was reading the wormhole data for the first time on her screen. “Only a dozen or so senior managers knew. The rest thought they were working on die-back or keeping a little general research going in case the world ever got back on its feet. You should have seen them when she broke the news. Mad as cut snakes, Tim. None of them ever signed up for space. And then Erskine took her favourites and pulled the ladder up. So let’s be diplomatic with the people she’s abandoned. They’ve been screwed over.”
“So... the FTL research.” Pham rolled right over the human issues. He didn’t seem to need to pretend to care. “They never developed it any further.”
“They tried, but the most they got out of it was a comms-sized wormhole to run remote bots, and Erskine trashed all that when she left. But give that data to David Choi at the uni, and we could have a bigger wormhole or a drive on a useful scale in ten years. It’s not really my field, but I’m pretty confident.”
Pham gestured at the big executive office. “So what do we do with the rest of this? IP, personnel, plant?”
“Well, there’s a lot of data assessment and recovery to do, and I don’t know how much Erskine sabotaged, but I think the first thing is to let the personnel who still want to leave get off-site. And there are ex-Ainatio staff who want to move to Oz or Korea and carry on working there rather than ship out to some unknown planet.”
“You’ve assessed them, then.”
“No point letting brains go to waste, is there? We’ve got nearly five hundred staff here, with some really good agri researchers. Seb Meikle’s the die-back remediation man. His wife, Audrey — she definitely wants to stay because they’ve got a little girl. She’s a biomed researcher. Tissue regeneration, I think. Alex Gorko wants to stay put too. Plenty of useful expertise in everything from life sciences to manufacturing. You’d be knocking on an open door.”
“Have you gone native, Annis?”
“No, I just believe that you get more with honey than with vinegar.”
“What about the others?”
“They’re mostly the local farmers. They were the food providers, and now they’re screwed too. Then there’s the refugee camp people who evacuated down here, and a group of Ainatio security staff, but they’re just perimeter guards. Let them get their old ship together and leave. Then they won’t be in our way. The poor buggers probably won’t even get to Opis with a ship in that state, but I wouldn’t be here without them, and we wouldn’t have all that data.”
Kim had wrapped it all up as if it didn’t really matter, the path of least resistance so that APS could concentrate on scavenging data without being distracted by angry, scared, needy refugees. She’d considered the Ainatio staff who didn’t want to go to Opis, too. Solomon had to hand it to her. She was doing what she’d promised.
“Did any of their propulsion team stay behind?” Pham asked.
“No, Erskine made sure they left with her. But none of them were a patch on ours anyway.”
“And she’s shot through to Pascoe’s Star with her A team. Those ships must be fifty years old.”
“Tell me about it. I spent most of the last few months fixing them.”
“We still have one big problem, though. Die-back.”
“How long can you give them?”
“I’ll have to ask the plant pathogen people, but we’re not talking long, I’m afraid.”
“Months?”
“Hmmm.”
“Twelve weeks. Ah, go on, Tim. If it was that urgent, we’d be irradiated charcoal by now.”
“Okay, but I’ll have to confirm that. We might need to move in with some pretty heavy-duty defoliant as an interim measure.”
“Just give them a chance.”
Pham threw up his hands in amused capitulation. “Fine. We’ll overtake them en route if the FTL data is as good as it seems. Anyway, it’s not every day we get to deconstruct the archives of one of the most innovative research corporations in history. Who knows what else in is there?”
Kim looked pleased with herself. “Everybody gets more or less what they want. That’s my definition of a good deal.”
“And you?”
“My great-grandmother’s vindicated. I just want her honoured for the work that was stolen from her.”
“You’ve done a hell of a job yourself, Annis. Time to go home.”
“Once I’m done here, that’ll be terrific.”
“That could be three months.”
“I want to see this through. Besides, the computer network knows me. It won’t like strangers trying to access it.”
“Really?”
“Oh, it’s not sentient,” Kim said airily. “I’m just...”
“Territorial. You always were.”
“I don’t play well with others, Tim. Your wife knows that.”
Pham squirmed. “Okay, now let’s go through the Ainatio personnel list.”
Kim seemed to have things under control. Solomon put his awareness of the conversation in watching brief mode, ready to switch back instantly at the first hint of a problem, and sought out Alex. He was basking in the sun streaming through the lobby glass, looking wrung out as he awaited his audience with Tim Pham. From what Solomon could see, the farmers had returned to Kill Line to tend to their livestock, and the other townsfolk were discussing whether they should go home yet. That was the problem with good news: it never solved everything and it spawned uncertainties of its own. Chris’s people seemed the most relaxed about the state of limbo they now found themselves in, but then they were used to living from day to day. Some had started moving into the accommodation block, luxurious lodgings compared to their tidy but basic shacks at the camp. Judging by the power and water consumption, the most popular facility was hot showers.
Solomon interrupted Alex’s nap by making a gentle popping sound in his earpiece. Alex stirred.
“Alex...”
“Sol. Uhh. What’s up?”
“Dr Kim just negotiated a twelve-week period of grace for me to get Shackleton ready. It’ll be very tight.”
“Can you do it?”
“I have to. And she might well have booked your ticket to Seoul.”
“Damn.”
“I’m keeping an eye on her. She really is keeping her word.”
“Yeah, but will APS?”
“I think she’s angling to stay here to make sure she sees us out.”
Alex sat up and checked his screen. “Okay, I misjudged her.”
“Nobody trusts a spy. I think they allow for that.”
“Are you working on the comms mast now?”
“I decided to build a new one on the north side of the site. Less visible to our guests if they suddenly get nervous about what’s happening. They don’t know what I am, remember. This has to look robotic in every sense of the word.”
“Funny, Erskine never worried about you falling into enemy hands. Odd oversight. What’s the point in trashing all the records if you’re still around? You remember it.”
“She knew I’d evade capture.”
“Yeah. She definitely found that out, didn’t she?” Alex stood up. “Okay, I’m going to recruit some meat-bags and go help the bots fix those comms. It won’t be long before the APS guys are all over us. No trotting around in your quad, either, okay?”
“Don’t worry, I’m playing dumb until I’m out of APS’s reach.”
Solomon did another round of the underground floors to see how many people were still down there, then swept the rest of the facility. A group of engineers and mechanics had gone out to the shuttle pens with Trinder to check over their state of readiness, because they’d be needed too. Twelve weeks preparation was no time at all.
It was now three hours since the APS contingent had arrived. Were they planning to stay on, and would therefore need apartments, or were they were flying out again and planning to send personnel later? He hoped it was the latter. He could get a lot more done if he had some breathing space for a few days. Kim appeared to be doing an efficient job of steering the process, though, and three tilt rotor crews, a security detail, and a politician weren’t equipped to do a full inspection and audit. Perhaps he’d get Kim to suggest that they pull out by mid-afternoon and come back with a specialist team. With any luck, he could get the comms relay finished before they returned.
Solomon scanned the facility and found Kim in the deserted infirmary. He watched her go into the mortuary and come out a few moments later carrying something wrapped in paper towels. She looked uneasy. When she reached the doors, he activated the security intercom.
“Dr Kim, are you all right?”
“I will be, Sol.” She was holding the package like a newborn. “Could you open the doors for me? I don’t want to drop this.”
“Oh. Oh, yes.” He’d thought she was up to something dishonest, but now he could see the shape under the towels and guessed what it was. “Of course.”
“I need to see Chris. Where is he?”
“In the accommodation block. Would you like me to call a trolley bot for that?”
“No, I need to do this personally. But thanks.”
“Dr Kim, could you do something for me, please? Could you find out if Mr Pham plans to stay over, or if his mission’s flying back today? It would be helpful if they arranged to return later with a team of specialists for a full inspection. Quite a lot later, if possible.”
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