Stolen Earth, page 13
Federov grunted. “They would need more than numbers to stop us.” But he sat down as he said it and Gray threw Bishop a grateful look. Morales settled back into her chair as well, though she continued to stare daggers at the kid with her sidearm. Station security types were always high strung about other people getting a hold of their gun, so Gray didn’t worry about it too much. She’d get over it and if the kid ended up keeping the gun, well, they’d figure something out that didn’t involve bloodshed.
“Thank you.” The woman picked out a chair of her own and sat down. Her voice was deep for woman and had a certain timbre to it that Gray found familiar. It had… gravitas. An air of authority. It was the voice of one accustomed to being in charge. No. It was the voice of one accustomed to being followed. The voice of a leader. “Oliver, Tomas, please sit down. And take your hand off the gun, young man.”
Gray kept a careful eye on Tomas as he removed his hand from the butt of the pistol. Only then did the other man—Oliver—release his grip on the boy’s wrist. Gray didn’t have a lot of confidence that Tomas would play nice, and apparently Oliver didn’t either. He stayed close to the kid’s side, ready to intervene again should it prove necessary.
The whole situation was tense enough that a single wrong word could lead to bloodshed. Morales and Federov were both perched on the edges of their seats and, if it came to it, Gray had little doubt that the crew could take out the three people across from them. Maybe they could even do it without getting shot up. But that did leave all the other people Bishop had mentioned. Better to play nice and see where things went.
“Now that it appears we won’t be killing each other,” the stately woman said, “perhaps we can introduce ourselves?” She offered a broad, warm smile. “I’m Margaret. You’ve each already met Oliver.” She nodded at the doctor. “And, of course, we have Tomas, whose manners might leave a little bit to be desired, but who takes very seriously the safety of our people here.” The young man continued to glower at Gray’s side of the table.
Gray nodded at each in turn, then said, “I’m Lynch. And my companions are Bishop, Federov, Hayer, and Morales” He indicated each member of the Arcus’s crew as he named them.
“Last names?” Margaret noted, a hint of chiding in her voice. “So formal. Or, perhaps, so militaristic?” She phrased it as a question and arched one eyebrow at Gray as she did so.
He snorted. “No ma’am. Oh, don’t get me wrong. There’re more than a few years of ‘service’ floating around the table. But none of us have any association with SolComm. Not anymore.”
“SolComm?” she asked.
Gray felt a brief surge of confusion before remembering that these people’s ancestors had been cut off from the Commonwealth before it was a Commonwealth. Back when the proto-Commonwealth had tried to evacuate as many people from Old Earth as possible, it had been a ragtag collection of colonies, space stations, corporations, and shipping concerns.
“The Sol Commonwealth,” he clarified. “The polity that arose after the End.”
“The End,” Oliver said with exaggerated sobriety. The capitalization was much clearer in his tone than in Gray’s. Then he snorted and laughed. “It wasn’t the end, son. For some of our grandparents, it was just more of the same. For others, a new beginning.” He smiled. “And hard as you may find it to believe, that ain’t always a bad thing.”
Hayer spoke up at that. “But, how could that be? I mean no offense, and I admire the fact that you’ve managed to survive down here. But…” She waved a hand at the room around them, at the obvious signs of wear and tear.
Tomas bristled. “What do you mean? Just because we don’t have spaceships and whatever doesn’t mean that we live poorly.”
“Easy, Tomas, easy,” Margaret said. “They do not mean anything by it. And when their ancestors left this place it was a world torn by a war such as I hope none of us ever knows.”
“It seems like you still have problems with the remains of that war,” Gray said. “Assuming, of course, that’s what those things are that attacked us?”
“They are,” Oliver said. “Though those types of attacks have been much less frequent. And we have our share of problems outside of old weapons.” He sighed. “We live a hard life, Mr. Lynch. That much is true. But at some point in the history of our species, people forgot that a hard life could also be a good life. They forgot that the struggle of existence wasn’t something to be smoothed out and glossed over; it was something to be embraced, relished even. Your associate,” he inclined his head toward Hayer, “sees wear and tear and, I imagine, a building that could fall apart at any moment. And I’m sure she sees a life lacking in many of the comforts to which you and yours in this Sol Commonwealth are accustomed.” Hayer looked more than a little embarrassed, but she nodded, nonetheless. Their computer specialist had her quirks, but she was honest.
“Do you know what I see, Mr. Lynch? Ms. Hayer?” Oliver asked.
“What?” Gray inquired.
“I see good people working together to enrich and better each other’s lives. I look at the peeling paint and our cobbled-together power grid and I see the kind of ingenuity and perseverance that engenders all the good in humanity. We hunt and toil for our food; we bleed and sweat for every erg of power; and yes, sometimes we die in ways and from causes that I’m sure are all but abolished among your Commonwealth. But we live pure. And we live free. I’d bet there aren’t many out there in the great beyond—“ he pointed one upthrust finger toward the vastness of space “—that can say the same.”
The sentiment spoke to Gray. It wasn’t the lure of the pastoral life that called to him. He enjoyed space. Loved the vastness of it. And piloting was in his blood. It wasn’t just what he did; it was who he was. But freedom? SolComm was a lot of things, and Gray knew that not all of them, maybe not even most of them, were bad. If he’d thought that, he never would have volunteered in the first place. But they weren’t a free society. The long arm of government reached into every aspect of the lives of its citizens and wherever its shadow fell, regulation followed. It was, to quote ancient history books, an alles verboten society, where any change from the already approved behaviors required government permission. In triplicate.
The idea that a small group of people could be both self-reliant and self-governing spoke to Gray at the most basic level of his being. Something about it seemed… right. A nod to simpler times, yes, but also a manifestation of the way things should be.
You know, if you could forget about all the desolation and killer robots.
That thought broke Gray from his reverie. All was not sunshine and roses here on the surface of Old Earth. “Maybe not,” he agreed with Oliver. “Maybe there are a bunch of different kinds of freedoms. But somehow, I think that’s not the issue here. You saved us, and for that you have our thanks, but I’m guessing that’s not why you gathered us together.”
“No,” Margaret replied. “It is not.” She paused and Gray felt the weighing nature of the look she leveled at him. “The timing of your arrival is… fortuitous. To be blunt, we need your help. And your ship.”
It was Gray’s turn to level his own weighing look. Margaret and Oliver seemed relaxed, but both had the experience of long years to help mask their emotions. The kid, Tomas, on the other hand, was a wreck. Angry, jumpy, and ready to shoot someone. At first, Gray had taken it for the kid’s natural state, but if they needed the Arcus…
“I don’t think we can take you off-world,” Gray said. “You need to understand the level of paranoia about anything coming from Old Earth out there among the stars. The politicians have everyone convinced that if a single mote of dust were to leave the atmosphere, it would mean the death of everyone.” He really didn’t want to bring up the next point, in case the crew hadn’t through it through already, but he couldn’t leave them in the dark either. “And we might not have much of a chance making it back to SolComm, either.”
“What?” Federov asked. “Why would we not make it back? These people will not stop us.”
It wasn’t a question, but Oliver raised his broad hands in a placating gesture. “We’re not here to stop you. We need your help. And while we might be able to take your ship by force, we have no idea at all how to fly it, so it wouldn’t do us one bit of good. If you hear us out and don’t want to help, then as far as we’re concerned, you’re free to go.” Tomas flushed an angry red at that and his hand dropped once more to the pistol at his side, but he didn’t say anything.
“And I believe you,” Gray told him. “But you have to understand that our presence here is strictly illegal—we probably brought lot of attention on ourselves by the way we came in to land. And even if we make it back out to space, undetected, there’s something else that’ll give us away to every vessel and station with a scanner.”
“The nanites,” Hayer gasped, looking at Gray in horror. He just nodded.
“What do you mean, ‘the nanites’?” Federov demanded. “We all have nanites.”
“Yeah,” Bishop said, “but the ones normally running around inside us or on our suits aren’t of Old Earth manufacture. Standard decontamination procedures could have taken care of anything clinging to our suits, but once those were breached…” Bishop shrugged. “I’ve been scanned most times I’ve entered a station or colony outside of the Fringe. Some ships, too. What do you think is going to happen when those scanners pick up strange nanites never seen before? At the minimum, we’re going to be held in some sort of quarantine.”
Gray nodded. “Most of you know that I’ve been here before, albeit briefly. Bishop’s right. We had extensive decontamination protocols to remove any Old Earth nanites as part of our extraction. But we never lost suit integrity. The SolComm brass might have something to deal with the atmospheric invader bugs—they never told us if they did.” He smiled at Margaret and Oliver. “But we certainly didn’t receive medical care from the locals.” He glanced over at Oliver. “I assume whatever meds you injected us with are self-propagating?”
Oliver snorted. “You assume correctly. Necessary, I’m afraid, our situation being what it is. I suppose it’s possible that your SolComm will have a way to remove them, but I know of no such path. They were designed to be both tenacious and aggressive; in point of fact, and please understand that my knowledge in these matters is somewhat limited, it’s my understanding that they are quite intentionally difficult to eliminate. That’s a design feature. Anything that would give us a chance to survive here had to itself be able to survive all manner of attack. I don’t believe the nanites would know the difference between a removal method with the goal of helping you reacclimate to SolComm and one that was trying to kill you.” He offered an apologetic shrug. “I’m sorry, Captain, but so far as I know, the treatment we gave you is permanent. We certainly didn’t intend for it to cause you more trouble.”
Gray sighed. “You don’t have to apologize, doctor. Funny thing about trouble—you have to be alive to be affected by it. But that does mean that we’re in a tight spot. As is, SolComm scanners are bound to flag us. And there will be questions.”
Morales laughed, a sharp, bitter laugh. “Questions? Come on, Lynch. SolComm isn’t going to ask us any questions. They’re going to take a blood sample, run it through a thousand different tests, and when they realize what they’ve got, they’re going to launch us from an airlock. No matter who we are.” Gray thought he heard a pang of emotion in her voice.
“You mean we’re stuck here?” Hayer asked, a note of panic in her voice.
Federov snorted. “Never stuck. Plenty of places where they don’t bother with scans. It’s not like we’re regulars in main SolComm space anyway.”
Gray glanced at the crew. Bishop was nodding his agreement. Morales and Hayer, however, both looked a little green around the gills. Living a life on the Fringe was different from knowing that you could never, ever go back. He was aware of Margaret and Oliver watching them. And of the sullen Tomas, glaring at the table and anything else that crossed his field of view.
“There’s not a lot we can do about it at the moment,” Gray acknowledged. “But we are going to have to deal with it, at some point. We’ll need to decide, as a crew, how we’re going to handle our return to SolComm. I wanted to make sure you were all aware of the difficulties we’re already facing before deciding if we’re going to help these folks. Because there is a chance that doing so will make our exfiltration more difficult.” He arched one eyebrow at Margaret. “As I understand it, whether or not we give aid is a decision we get to make, right?”
“Of course,” Margaret replied.
“Well—” Gray leaned back in his chair once more “—why don’t you tell us what’s going on?”
LAUREL
Laurel was pissed.
There was no other word for it. Sure, she was glad to be alive. Grateful, even, especially to Oliver Stephens. But that punk kid strutting around with her gun. Her gun. Like he had some kind of right to it. She had to remind herself that he didn’t know who she was, that no one here could know. But it still rankled to have her weapon riding someone else’s hip.
And if that wasn’t enough, Lynch’s statement about never going back to SolComm proper hit her like a bucket of space-cold water. She knew this assignment would have risks. Hell, getting on planet in the first place had nearly killed them all. But the risk of death was part of the job. Exile wasn’t.
Her life—her old life—had just ended as surely as if she’d died in the drone attack. As she realized that little gem, the anger passed and, in its wake, she was left feeling… nothing. Numb. It took a focused effort of will to even pay attention to the conversation around her.
“We’ve had people go missing,” Margaret was saying. She paused and glanced at Tomas, sorrow and regret in her eyes. “Four, from here. At first, we thought it was just a run of bad luck. Oh, sure, life has its dangers. But we can all recognize the signs and find cover when the drones come around, avoid the nanite swarms—”
“They’re being taken,” Tomas grated. It was the first time he’d spoken in front of Laurel, and his pain cut through her own numbness like a plasma torch. She’d heard that tone before. It had been in the voice of every loved one of every victim she’d ever spoken to.
“What do you mean, taken?” Lynch asked.
“Just that.” Margaret sighed. “This isn’t the easiest of subjects, you understand, but normally, when we lose people to the machines… well, we find remains. In our living memory, the Six have had no real interest in our… biological waste. But these last four? Nothing. No remains to be found.”
“Who are these Six?” Federov asked.
Hayer jumped in before any of the Old Earthers could answer. “You’ve got to be kidding me, right? The Six? The Six artificial intelligences that were developed by the nations of Old Earth before the End. How can you not know this?”
“I grew up on Protsvetaniye station, Dr. Hayer. We were lucky to have air and food. Children spent their time processing ore, not sitting in class,” Federov growled.
Laurel winced. Protsvetaniye station had a reputation in the security community. It was nominally a mining station among the Trojan asteroids that owed its existence to the need to process raw materials and the Commonwealth’s insatiable hunger for rare metals. In practice it held to traditions traceable back to the Solntsevskaya Bratva, a pre-End organized crime group. It was often held up as an example of the necessary evils of Fringe and near-Fringe elements, allowed to operate with some measure of autonomy so long as the vital resources flowed.
She could appreciate the irony; in many ways, Protsvetaniye station was a mirror held up to SolComm, showing some of the ugliness that propped up the system as a whole. She shook her head. Where had that thought come from?
“Besides, all that stuff was decades ago,” Federov finished.
“The End was a century ago, idiot,” Hayer said with a mocking shove that was more successful in moving the computer specialist than it was the mercenary. Laurel felt a smile twitching her lips. “And the Six could operate far longer than that. The only thing that surprises me is that there’s anything left of this world that they haven’t destroyed.”
Oliver cleared his throat. “As to that, things were definitely more dangerous when Margaret and I were young. Forty years ago, we couldn’t even go out into the streets. But in the course of my lifetime, things have gotten better: there haven’t been anything resembling targeted strikes on human settlements in decades.”
“Until now,” Margaret added.
“But different, you said.” Lynch leaned forward, propping his elbows on the table and peering over his steepled fingers at Tomas. “A friend of yours was taken?”
“Not just a friend,” Tomas snarled. “My fiancée, Elaine. She was out scavenging. I was supposed to be with her but I was running late. When I got out there, I saw it flying away.”
“Saw what?”
The kid—maybe not as much of a kid as Laurel had initially thought if he was engaged—shrugged. “I don’t know. Some sort of ship. Bigger than any of the drones or droids I’ve seen. It was flying away from where Elaine had been.”
The investigator in Laurel kicked in automatically. “Did you actually see her abducted?”
“No,” Tomas replied. “But it’s not like she’d just run off.”
“Can you describe the ship?”
“I only saw it for a moment. It was sort of triangular. No rotors like some of the drones have. It was burning something to fly. There was fire and heat as it hovered. It was climbing, gaining altitude when I caught sight of it and then… it just sped away.” He wiped one hand across his face and for a moment, Laurel forgot her anger. The kid was scared and hurting.
“Are there others like you—other groups?” Laurel asked. She glanced at Lynch, to make sure the captain didn’t resent her jumping in and taking over the interrogation—which was, she realized, how she suddenly viewed it. But he had just leaned back in his chair again and had a small smile on his face, content to let the professional do her work. Good. “Anyone who may be abducting people?”
