Scales of Empire, Page 2

‘It leaves in two years –’ I began, and the puppy climbed back into my lap.

  I took a deep breath and eased my back. The new terrace was nearly finished, and water had already started to fill it. I fitted the rocks into the retaining wall until I ran out, then squelched back to the barrow to collect more.

  I stopped, gazing out over the mountains. The peaks surrounded the village, with glimpses of the flat ocean between them a great distance away. Another huge storm was brewing on the horizon, thick with black clouds and scattered lightning. The walking trail down from the village was a grey line through the vegetation, and one of the village children was guiding a flock of sheep along it, up to the safety of their pen.

  I pulled at my T-shirt; the heat and humidity had saturated me with sweat. I puffed out a quick breath and took more rocks from the barrow. If I didn’t finish the terrace before the storm hit, it could be washed away by the deluge. I carried the rocks back to the wall, pushed them firmly into it, checked they were stable, and stretched my back again.

  ‘Jian!’ a woman shouted, and I looked up towards the houses. It was Dianne.

  Cursing my mother’s big mouth, I slogged through the mud, scrambled up the wall onto the next terrace, then repeated the procedure twice more before I was at Dianne’s level.

  She was short and black, with a rounded body and a warm generous smile that always melted my heart. She spread her arms for an embrace and I wanted more than anything to lose myself in her soft breasts and unconditional love.

  I pulled at my T-shirt instead. ‘I’m soaked, love, and probably stink. Let me do you a favour and give you a hug after I’ve had a shower.’

  She took my face in her hands, pulled me down and kissed me soundly anyway, and I cringed at the contact between my soaked clothing and her silk shirt.

  ‘I don’t care,’ she said. ‘Now come up to your mum’s house and tell me what the big news is.’

  ‘She didn’t tell you all the details?’ I said as we walked along the narrow cobbled lane to my mother’s cottage.

  ‘Only that I needed to come see you right now.’

  ‘Interfering busybody,’ I said under my breath, then raised my voice so Dianne could hear. ‘I was coming to see you after I visited Mum anyway.’

  ‘Sure you were. Like the last three times you were “coming to see me”. Sure.’

  I winced. Dianne was right: I always put my career first …

  ‘… put your career first,’ she was saying, ‘and me and Victor second. I knew it would be that way right from the start, so don’t worry about it. But your mum says you have big news for me.’ She tapped me on the arm. ‘And I might have big news for you.’

  ‘Victor asked you to marry him?’

  ‘Nope,’ she said smugly as we reached Mum’s cottage. ‘Better than that.’

  I turned and studied her carefully, then my heart leaped with delight. ‘Holy shit, Dianne, you’re pregnant. Look at you – you’re fucking glowing.’ To hell with it. I ignored the sweat and hugged her anyway, then planted a huge kiss on her mouth for good measure. ‘Hot damn, girl, my mum’s going to be absolutely fucking thrilled to bits.’

  ‘What about you?’

  ‘Of course I am too!’ I said, opening the door. ‘But I have big news as well. Come on in and I’ll tell you all about it.’

  2

  I stepped off the ferry onto the island where the space elevator cable up to the Spirit of Britannia was located. It disappeared into the clouds above, and appeared to be tilting as if it might fall on me.

  The island was a treeless grassy knoll with rocky cliffs all around, except for where the ferries docked. The stinging ocean wind swept across its surface, making the elevator cable sing with a deep bass thrum. It was strange – and exhilarating – to be standing on such a flat clear area. I was accustomed to everywhere above water being covered in layers of terraces that were dense with crops and tiny dwellings. Perhaps my great-great-something-grandchildren would live on a new planet where the land was this open and free.

  ‘Proceed to the buildings over there,’ an officer shouted from further up the hill, and I and the other cadets who’d arrived on the ferry – forty women and two men – followed her directions to the plain concrete structures at the base of the elevator.

  After three hours of induction I was in a group of ten dazed recruits following an uninterested lieutenant through the corridors of the island facility. We were all too exhausted from the induction to say much. My arm still stung from the multiple vaccinations; and the burgundy-coloured coverall that had replaced my Euroterre uniform was stiff and scratchy.

  I checked the new secure tablet I’d been assigned. It was a heavy-duty model, water- and shockproof, and held more terabytes of information than I could read in a year, along with stern security warnings about sharing any of it, even with fellow recruits.

  We arrived at a corridor with five doors on either side, and a set of double doors at the end.

  ‘These are your quarters, with a shared bathroom at the end of the corridor,’ the lieutenant said. ‘Settle in, then Commander Alto will speak to you.’

  Each door had a name on it and a fingerprint lock. I thumbed my door and it opened to reveal standard single accommodation that could have been in any barracks, with a narrow bed and a small desk. My duffel bag was already on the floor next to the bed.

  I put my new clothes on the bed, the tablet on the desk, and peered out the window. The ferry terminal was at the bottom of the hill, and half-a-dozen young people were boarding, their body language projecting different levels of shame and defeat. I realised they were failures. Rejects.

  I straightened. Not me, I’m doing this.

  The tablet pinged: there was a briefing in the lecture theatre in five minutes.

  I quickly stowed the clothing in the small closet, and headed out the door to join the other cadets heading towards the theatre. We were all wearing different-coloured coveralls, probably identifying our skill sets. I noticed the same female-to-male ratio as on the ferry: there were twenty people living in this corridor, and only one man.

  We turned a corner and I nearly walked into an Asian man in a green coverall. He was as tall as me and slightly overweight, with scruffy hair and a square face.

  I stopped and said, ‘Sorry,’ then realised who he was. ‘Edwin?’

  ‘Corporal,’ Edwin Benton said, grinning. He flashed me a salute. ‘How’s the wife?’

  I saluted back. ‘Not wife. Partner, and expecting.’

  ‘Congratulations!’ His face fell. ‘And you’ll do this anyway?’

  ‘We talked about it and she understands. We have a common partner, so the kid will be very well taken care of. They both support me.’

  We turned together and followed the crowd towards the lecture theatre.

  ‘That’s good to hear. Your child will be very proud of you,’ he said. ‘What’s your role on the ship?’

  ‘Security. You’re med?’

  He nodded. ‘I received the offer shortly after I finished my residency at QE4 Hospital and graduated.’

  ‘Of course at the top of your class.’

  ‘No.’ His smile turned wry. ‘Too much partying away from the barracks. I came third.’

  ‘I need to take you through basic again.’

  ‘I’m sure the colonisation officers will do exactly that.’

  We picked our way along a row inside the lecture hall, and sat where we had a good view of the stage and the other recruits. The theatre held about two hundred and was filling quickly.

  ‘Your burgundy coverall is security,’ Edwin said. ‘My green is med. I can see blue, bright turquoise, fluoro yellow and a horrible mustard orange. Any ideas?’

  ‘The blues and turquoises are obviously civilians – long hair – and they’re grouping together and talking,’ I said. ‘They know each other already. Scientists?’

  ‘That’s what I think. Similar colours for similar fields?’

  ‘I recognise that blonde woman
in blue,’ I said. ‘Physicist.’

  ‘She’s next to a turquoise. Astrophysics?’

  ‘Probably. There aren’t many military here; it’s mostly civilians. I hope we won’t see any conflict between the military and civilian participants.’ I shook my head. ‘Look at me – career soldier wanting to avoid conflict.’

  ‘That’s the best sort of soldier, ma’am.’

  ‘Ma’am?’ I said, amused. ‘You’re a commissioned officer now, sir.’

  ‘And starting again from the bottom with this. The gender ratio makes me feel extremely privileged to be selected. But the ship will only take five thousand, and we won’t have the genetic diversity to be viable. We’ll have to take a hold full of frozen semen and fertilised embryos.’ He grunted with amusement. ‘Me and the other men are like emergency rations.’

  ‘Oh, don’t sell yourself short, Edwin. You’re one of the most intelligent recruits I had the privilege of throwing head first into a deep hole full of freezing mud.’

  ‘Surprisingly I never felt honoured by that.’ He straightened. ‘Here they are.’

  A group of men and women walked onto the stage, all of them much older than us. One of the men stepped up to the microphone and the room went quiet.

  ‘I am Commander Richard Alto, head of the project,’ he said.

  He was mid-forties, tall and slender, with the dark brown skin of South Asia above the collar of his naval uniform. His narrow face was full of intelligence and I immediately liked him – then recognised him. I searched my memory. Mid-forties, Alto … I remembered who he was at the same time Edwin obviously put it together and made a soft sound of astonishment. Richard Alto was the war hero who’d thrown himself onto a bomb twenty years ago to save the five-year-old King. I studied him carefully, looking for signs of the aftermath of the bomb, and couldn’t see anything, but I was too far from the stage to make out details.

  Commander Alto continued, and I was aware of a slight speech impediment now I knew what I was hearing. ‘Before we begin, it’s important that you know the current situation. The rest of the world hasn’t seen this yet.’

  He stepped back and the room lights dimmed. A screen descended from the ceiling and a projector flicked on.

  The captain of the Nippon Maru appeared: the now extremely famous Haruna Harashi. Her face was pale and drawn, and she was thin to the point of emaciation. The ship’s biomass had provided only just enough food for them to avoid starvation.

  She spoke in Japanese, and the translation scrolled across the bottom of the screen. ‘Dear citizens of our homeworld. My sincerest apologies for the delay on this transmission.’ She bowed, the top of her head fuzzy onscreen, then sat back again. ‘Here is the surface of Kapteyn-b. We will be landing in twenty-three Earth months.’

  The planet looked barren and lifeless; and the audience buzzed with quiet comments.

  ‘They made it,’ Edwin said softly. ‘Go, Haruna!’

  ‘There is no life on the planet,’ Harashi said. ‘We can terraform it. There is sufficient water and carbon dioxide to start a life cycle.’

  The buzz of conversation became more animated; this was extremely good news.

  ‘We have lost some crew. We have reported the degradation of the ship over time. When we reached Kapteyn’s gravity well, it broke up.’ She bowed again. ‘We lost four hundred crew before we could stabilise the ship. I will provide the list of fallen heroes at the end of the transmission.’

  A few people in the audience moaned in sympathy at the idea of making it all the way there only to die just before landing.

  ‘We hope that we have sufficient biomass in the remaining parts of the ship to begin terraforming when we land.’ Harashi took a deep breath and wiped her eyes. ‘Wish us luck, beloved homeland, because we aren’t sure that we have enough seeds and water to feed everybody. We will not give up. We will survive.’

  The translation said ‘survive’ but I definitely heard Captain Harashi say the word ‘seppuku’. She was talking about mass suicide, because they had a good chance of failure and a quick death was preferable to slow starvation. Charming.

  ‘Here are the details of the lost crewmen and women,’ Harashi said, glancing down at the tablet in front of her.

  The projection blinked out and the screen retracted.

  Commander Alto stepped back up to the microphone. ‘That’s the situation on Kapteyn-b as of five years ago. The ship was falling apart around them, and it’s possible that they didn’t land enough biomass to begin the ecosystem.’ He looked down at his tablet, then up at us. ‘We may encounter similar difficulties. However, we have their experience to work from. We know, for example, that a ninety-five per cent female crew with a cargo of frozen sex-selected semen and fertilised eggs is much more practical than fifty–fifty – hence your demographics. We can use the Nippon Maru’s scans to more accurately ascertain the nature of your destination planet. But …’ He raised one hand. ‘There is a good chance that the Nippon Maru failed, all the colonists died without establishing anything, and we will be accused of sending you and your children to their deaths. Cryogenics is still too unreliable; a third of the test rats don’t survive being frozen more than a year and we’re looking at a voyage of hundreds. If you don’t want to be associated with a project that may fail monumentally, you can leave now before we share any classified information with you.’

  The room was completely silent.

  ‘If you leave now, you will be escorted from the base with our thanks, and no negative implications for your career. You are all valued members of your professions and Earth needs your help to sort out the problems we have here. But if you stay, you are committed to seeing this project through to the end. Once you have been fully briefed, your knowledge will be classified. Even if you’re not evaluated as suitable to go on the ship itself, your role will be in support on the ground.’

  Two women stood up.

  ‘I thank you for your participation,’ Commander Alto said. He nodded, and one of the administrators rose to show the two women out.

  I snorted quietly to myself. ‘Failures.’

  ‘If they aren’t completely committed, we don’t want them along,’ Edwin said.

  ‘Last chance to decline,’ Alto said.

  A woman leaped up and nearly ran for the door; a last-minute attack of nerves.

  You’ll regret this later, I thought at her. She couldn’t have heard me – I hadn’t said it telepathically – but she turned and stared at us, then shook her head and sat again.

  I hunched down in my seat. Maybe some of my opinion had leaked out. I needed to sit quietly and shut it down.

  ‘That was strange,’ Edwin said. ‘It was almost –’

  He was silenced by Commander Alto talking again.

  ‘There is a contract on your tablet,’ he said. ‘Read it carefully and thoroughly. It is a contract with the nation, with Parliament, and with the King himself. You agree to tell us,’ he paused for emphasis, ‘anything at all that may relate to your ability to fulfil your role on the Spirit of Britannia that may not be on file. Previous attempts at pregnancy that ended in miscarriage. Reproductive issues. Psychological issues. Past history of trauma that may impinge on your handling of the stressful nature of the voyage. You’ve heard the problems experienced by the passengers on the Nippon Maru, including their extreme fear that they’d all be agoraphobic when they reached Kapteyn-b. If any of you suspect that you may have latent telepathic or empathic abilities …’ Commander Alto appeared to look straight at me, and I shrank lower in my seat, suddenly finding my tablet extremely interesting. ‘Let us know now so we can bring them on, because they will make you even more useful as crew.

  ‘In the meantime, like most first days on the job, your main task is to read the manuals while we perform a thorough physical and psychological evaluation on you all. Get to know each other, and identify now people that rub you up the wrong way, because you will be spending the rest of your life with them. Colour codings are in the ma
nuals; and I will be speaking to each of you individually to confirm your willingness to participate, and to accept your signed contracts after the evaluation. Return to your quarters, read the contracts, sign them, and I’ll speak to you on the other side.’

  It was two weeks before I saw Edwin again; we ran into each other in the cafeteria. He waved me over, and I joined him and his medical colleagues, all in green.

  ‘I’m interested to hear what they’re doing with you,’ he said after we’d made the introductions.

  ‘Whether it’s as intense as what we’re doing,’ one of the other meds, Lena, added.

  ‘It’s more than intense, it’s overwhelming,’ I said, waving my tablet. ‘I’m studying every First Contact situation in Earth’s history to see how they usually pan out, and to be prepared if it happens to us.’

  ‘Isn’t it true that most of the time it ends badly for the less developed civilisation?’

  ‘Always,’ I said. ‘At first I thought: how is this related to me defending us in space? And then I realised – I’ll be armed, and I’ll have the choice whether to respond with violence to any alien contact. It could end very badly if I make even the smallest mistake. Especially if we’re the weaker civilisation.’

  ‘Oh geez, yeah,’ Edwin said.

  ‘So it’s more than just defence. It’s diplomacy and history and socio-political relations. The main goal is for me to know when to shoot and when to ask questions.’ I looked around at them. They were all wan and exhausted, same as me. ‘You’ve already had your med training, you’re qualified doctors. What more can they teach you? Zero-g surgery?’

  ‘More basic than that,’ Lena said. ‘Today was surgery without scalpels, anaesthetic, antiseptic, sutures or bandages.’

  ‘Fun and games,’ Edwin said.

  ‘Is that even possible?’ I said.

  ‘It is if we improvise using a small tool kit that all of us carry,’ Edwin said. ‘But after we’re finished, we have to scrounge for replacements from general supplies aboard the ship. You really don’t want to hear the rest.’