“I’ll give him a long list of experts I think he needs. It’ll take a week for him to get them together.”
“Excellent. Thank you.”
“That works for both of us.”
“I suspect there’s no real conflict here.”
“I hope not. Okay, Sol, which way now?”
“Left.”
Solomon trailed her from camera to camera, directing her through the corridors of the residential building. Chris had set up camp in one of the apartments that had been empty for years rather than one of the more comfortable recently-vacated ones, almost as if he didn’t want to venture into someone else’s territory. He was taking a shower. Solomon’s rule never to enter private areas still stood. He waited for Kim to ring the buzzer and for Chris to eventually open the door in a blue Ainatio-issue bathrobe.
“Sorry,” Kim said. “We’ve caught you at a bad time.”
“We?”
“Sol and me.”
“No problem.” Chris ushered her in. “I’d be standing there all day. It’s a novelty to have a shower with that much pressure.”
“I think I’ve got you a twelve-week reprieve.”
“That’s great.” He nodded a few times, looking a little awkward. “Thank you.”
“Actually, I’ve come to ask you for a favour. In case we get overtaken by events and I forget to ask.”
“Oh yeah. You said earlier. Well, if it’s humanly possible, I’ll do it.”
She handed Chris the urn she’d carried carefully from the infirmary. “Will you make sure these get to Opis?”
Chris handled the urn with reverent care. He seemed taken aback. “This can’t be your great-grandmother’s ashes. You didn’t have this when I found you.”
“No, they’re Mr Levine’s. Would you scatter them for me when you land? He deserves to get to Opis after what he went through all those years. I don’t know, maybe some on the planet, some into space... whatever seems right to you. Don’t laugh at me, but I want him to reach Pascoe’s Star.”
Chris looked at the urn for a long time, jaw muscles working silently. It was one of the few times Solomon had seen his emotions anywhere near the surface.
“You have my word,” Chris said. “That’s an honourable thing to do, Dr Kim.”
“I appreciate it. Thank you.”
“Alex says you did right by us.”
“I keep my word. I might need you to save my arse again one day.”
Chris smiled. He wasn’t quite the unredeemed, pitiless enforcer that he seemed to believe he was. “Any time.”
Kim left, but Solomon finally broke his cardinal rule and hung around for a few moments. Chris sat down on the sofa and put the urn on the coffee table, then sat staring at it for a while as if he was working something out.
“So you won’t be alone after all, Jamie,” he said to himself. “You’ll have company as soon as we get to Opis. That’s better.”
Solomon was both glad and ashamed that he’d heard it, and he would never intrude again. He withdrew instantly to wander around the site to think over the nature of grieving, and to watch humans doing what these humans did very well: organising themselves and making sure everyone was cared for.
He watched Annis Kim negotiating a passage to Fiji for Tev, courtesy of APS, to see the family he’d been separated from for so long. He watched Doug Brandt and the farmers working out what they could do for Marty Laurenson now that his sheep were gone. He watched Marc Gallagher cheering up little Jack Howard — Howie — with a story about his exploits with Tev in Washington, which was both thrilling and completely true. And he watched Zakko Chetcuti organising an APS medevac flight to Sydney for Dr Mendoza’s patients, five elderly, terminally ill scientists, the people the doctor had refused to abandon.
“If they don’t want to go to Sydney and they’d rather risk a space flight instead, I’ll sign off on that and prep them for it,” Mendoza was saying. “Their time matters a lot more than mine right now.”
Solomon was intensely proud of them all, and didn’t doubt his decisions for one moment. Trinder, Chris, and Marc had already formed a natural alliance built on the values Solomon found so appealing. These were the right kind of people. He’d had moments of doubt about his preference for the military because he’d read and been told so often that governance by it was dangerous and undesirable, but these men seemed not to want that kind of power. And that was exactly what qualified them for it. They were the heirs to Cabot.
Now it was down to Solomon to ensure that everyone reached Opis. He had twelve weeks to get this new community embarked in Shackleton and on its way to a new life.
After all the turmoil, death, and violence of the last few years, he wondered if the biggest risk was that the humans in his care might find Opis rather too tranquil by comparison.
* * *
Mess Hall, Nomad Base, Opis:
three Days After Final Contact with Earth
“I think I miss Solomon more than Earth, you know,” Haine said, stirring his coffee. “Very helpful with the morning crossword.”
The view from the printed plastic cube now claimed as the mess hall reinforced the illusion of Opis as an Earth decked out with a few more exotic plants. Ingram had seen more alien landscapes in the Middle East. And that was the problem: illusion. She was still trying to reset to the expectations she’d had when she left Earth. The loss of FTL didn’t matter a damn. What had they actually lost, other than Solomon? Nothing, just the fantasy that Earth was next door, which was dangerously seductive. They really were better off without it. Ingram had powdered scrambled eggs and drinkable coffee, and in a few months, when the agricultural projects ramped up, she’d have real eggs. When they took the hen embryos out of cryo, she was going to earmark one for herself and call it Mildred.
“You know what gets me?” she said. “The lies. They don’t even have to be really big ones. The small ones pile up. It’s a cumulative thing.”
Any one of the deceits and secrets would have created bad blood in a working relationship, but this was a whole collectors’ edition — telling everyone the crew was dead, turning foreign governments into potential enemies by stealing their technology, and then dangling the luxury of instant communications in front of an isolated crew before snatching it away. It wasn’t Erskine’s fault that the world had gone to rats in Cabot’s absence, but Ingram still felt that her crew had been abandoned. Being suddenly cut off without any explanation pissed her off. If Erskine had been that short of time, she could have sent a data burst instead of blathering on with stock excuses.
Based on Ainatio’s previous form, Erskine was lying about something. It could have been anything from someone spilling coffee in the power supply to full-tar Armageddon. Not knowing which just left mistrust to ferment.
“Look at it this way.” Haine seemed happier here already. He’d started sketching, and he hummed to himself a lot. “We can’t reach Ainatio, but that means Ainatio can’t reach us. We can live like pirate kings. Build our own empire. Have a bloody good laugh.”
“Put it in the suggestion box and I’ll take a look at it.”
“You know something else? I just realised my ex must have been paid death-in-service insurance money, and possibly even my pension, but now she’s ninety. Or dead. So there’s that.”
He laughed. Ingram, like everyone else, had put her financial affairs in order before she left, but after the welter of bad news from Earth, she hadn’t given any thought to being declared legally dead. Just finalising everything before the launch had seemed like organising her own funeral. Now she was doubly dead.
“Hang on, are Ainatio still paying us?” she asked, going along with the idea. “Because they’d need to have us declared dead to keep the cover story going, but we’re still working for them, so how did they hide the salaries? Or did they just stop paying us?”
“If we’re dead, it should be tax-free. Ah, if only we could ask Erskine.”
“See? What did I say? Everything they touch is a lie.”
Haine started laughing. “Maybe that’s why they cut the FTL link. For tax purposes.”
“Hah.”
“Piracy. It’s all we have left. Mark my words. Buckle up your swash and prepare to board, me hearties.”
Ingram cleared up her plates. “I think I’m going to take a rover out for a spin. See what’s happening around our lovely new country estate.”
“Look out for frisky wildlife.”
“I haven’t seen anything bigger than those rat-sized things,” Ingram said. “Apart from the crows. I wonder if we’ve landed on the galactic equivalent of New Zealand.”
“Well, there’s a whole planet out there. It might not be all wall-to-wall paradise.”
Ingram passed the bot hangar on the way to pick up a vehicle, but couldn’t stop herself doing a quick detour. She walked along the bays of assorted bots, from shoebox-sized things right up to big excavators, and stopped in front of the four near-identical industrial quadrubots in their charging docks. They must have been part of the original cargo launched more than a century ago. The one that Solomon preferred was distinguishable only by the red logo on one flank, now partially chipped off by constant use. Ingram squatted in front of it, almost expecting to hear Sol’s voice, but it was on standby like the others.
“I hope you’re coming back, Sol.” She wondered whether he ever amused himself by passing himself off as a regular bot to surprise the unwary. “And when you do, I want to hear everything that’s happened.”
The weather records that Solomon had provided showed rough weather in the cooler months of the year, but for the time being, Ingram could enjoy something that felt like a warm spring. The air was the freshest she’d ever smelled. She drove north towards the mountain range that hung tantalisingly in the distance like a permanent layer of purple cloud, flat-topped and constantly changing with the light.
The xenobiologists hadn’t seen her sneak a high-powered rifle into the vehicle, so they weren’t going to give her a hard time again about leaving the local wildlife alone. Ecological diversity was lovely, but she didn’t plan on ending her days in the slavering jaws of some fascinating new species that she wasn’t expecting to run into. If anything started on her, she’d shoot it and have it stuffed for display in the mess. There was probably a bot that could do that for her.
Half an hour out, she stopped the rover and got out to check whether the FTL signal had been restored. There was no reason to expect that it had, because Erskine had made the cut-off sound very final, but it didn’t hurt to keep trying. She held the receiver up in the air, hoping for a comms miracle, but she was out of luck again. She even clambered onto the rover’s flatbed to see if that helped. But nothing had changed. The display showed a flat line where the FTL signal had once been.
Standing on the rover’s flatbed, she could now see down a gentle slope into the shallow valley shown on her chart. On the south side, there were signs of mining, where bots had excavated raw materials to build and manufacture for their human masters. Track marks had formed faint dirt roads leading back towards Nomad. Mankind had already left its mark on this world before the first human even set foot on it.
If Ingram ignored the tracks, the rest of the scene was postcard-perfect. A river snaked through the valley and disappeared into a forest the colour of red cabbage. The ground around her was covered with short, moss-like turf in a tasteful shade of sage green, dotted with delicate cream flowers. It was such a pretty landscape, so tidy and orderly, that it looked cultivated. She mistrusted it completely. It was the sea on a calm day, something to be enjoyed carefully before it turned on her and started rolling the ship, smashing fifteen-meter waves onto the bows.
She was wondering where all the inevitably poisonous, annoying, and aggressive insects were when she caught a flash of blue-black iridescence in the corner of her eye. She could guess who was keeping her company today. She turned slowly, hoping that the creature wasn’t going to dive-bomb her again, and saw the big black bird, the one she thought of as the parent. She’d seen it a few times now and had spoken to it like a sparrow in the park back home begging for crumbs. Sometimes, when those piercing yellow, round-pupilled eyes met hers, she felt it actually understood every word. For all she knew, it was still sizing her up for lunch. But it did seem endlessly curious, and it always watched anyone it found walking around.
“Where are your babies, then, Mr Crow?” she asked. Maybe it was Mrs Crow. She had no way of knowing. “Have you grounded them?”
She hadn’t seen the two smaller versions of the creature since the day the big one had strafed her, so it had either eaten them or it really was a parent that had warned its roaming offspring that humans were off limits. The bird settled on the ground about five metres from her, wings folded, bolt upright.
Ingram was tempted to get a little closer, but it was bloody big. She decided to give it a wide berth, ready to shoot if it went for her. She had the flare pistol, too, so she’d try to humour the xenobiologists and just scare the shit out of it if it looked like it was getting ready to attack. That big, black, toucan beak wasn’t to be trifled with.
Don’t stare at it. That provokes a lot of animals. They might not be any different here.
It just stood there, watching, making no attempt to move, the height of an adult human. Now that Ingram wasn’t ducking to avoid it, she had a better chance to look at the detail, particularly the wings. That joint on the front edge reminded her of a bat’s. What was that part in a bat, then, the wrist or the knuckles? She remembered the anatomical diagrams from biology class. The wings were modified hands with webbing between elongated fingers, so the knuckle that the bird appeared to be putting its weight on was the equivalent of the base of her thumb.
Ouch.
She wondered how it would react if she tried to record it. Slowly, she took her screen out and framed up. It was a real shame that she couldn’t transmit any of this back to Ainatio.
The bird obliged and stood still while she filmed it. When she put the screen away, it seemed to relax, and draped its wings as if it knew its photo shoot was over and it could now bask in the warm sun. The biologists would have told her she was anthropomorphising, but this creature seemed as intelligent as any bird back home. For all she knew it was thinking the same about her.
“Damn smart plumage, Crow,” she said. “Classy.”
She was about to start backing away when she heard the rush of wings and caught a flash of shadow. She ducked just in time. It was one of the smaller birds. The big one made a long rattling sound rising to a crescendo and swiped at the small one, missing it by a good distance. Ingram couldn’t see that as anything but a parent scolding a kid who was messing around, threatening a good spanking for misbehaviour. Mr Crow suddenly brought its wings together with a loud snap, like a Mandarin emperor cracking a fan open.
“Bloody hell,” Ingram said. “You scared the life out of me.”
“Bloodyhellbloodyhellbloodyhellbloodyhell!” It came out in a rush, in a voice so like to her own that she was rooted to the spot. “Bloodyhellbloodyhell!”
“Oh, you’re a parrot. You’re a mimic.” She really wished there was someone else around to witness this. She hadn’t even recorded it. Were the biologists going to believe her? “This is going to be fun. No learning swear words, okay? If some sailor tells you sod off is a traditional Earth greeting, ignore them.”
“Bloodyhellignoresodoff.”
“That’s right.” Good grief, they learned fast. Or maybe it had heard the crew more often than Ingram had realised. “You’re very clever.”
“Bloody hell bot.” The bird’s speech slowed down to a normal human rate. “Bloody hell bot.”
Bot. Had she heard right? There was something else going on beyond simple mim
icry. If it knew the word, it might have heard it while hanging around the camp, and there were certainly plenty of bots at the site. Ingram tried hard not to imagine meaning that wasn’t there, but it seemed to understand that bloody hell was her reaction to being startled. Maybe it was telling her that the camp’s bots disturbed it or frightened its offspring. They’d been rolling around the area for years.
Damn, was it making a formal complaint?
“Bot,” she said. She made a walking motion with her fingers, then decided to show the bird an image. She had no idea what its visual spectrum was like, but if it could see in this light, it could probably see at least as well as she could. She took out her screen, found an image of a quadrubot, and turned it around so that the bird could see it.
“Solomon Solomon Sol Sol Sol,” said the bird, in Solomon’s voice. It rustled and flapped its wings. “Sol-o-mon.”
“You’re right. That’s Solomon.” The accuracy of the different voices was starting to disturb her. And how had the bird heard the name? Again, she’d had no idea that any conversations outside had been overheard, but she’d never looked up to check if there was anything sitting on the roof. “Sol’s gone away now.”
“Ma’am,” the bird said, in a voice she didn’t recognise. “Ma’am ma’am ma’am ma’am.”
“Yes... that’s what they call me.” She tapped her chest. “My name’s Bridget Ingram.”
“Briddd-jit.”
“Bridget. Ingram.”
“Bridget Ingram Bridget Ingram ma’am ma’am ma’am. Yes.”
This was getting bloody scary. She was obviously dealing with something a lot more intelligent than anyone had imagined, and that raised serious questions about colonising the planet. She had no choice, though. This was the real world, and she didn’t have the option of apologising for turning up uninvited and offering to move elsewhere. Humans and crows would have to learn to get on and give each other some space. But one thing was certain: nobody was going to be shooting or eating these birds.
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