My karma must have been particularly bad that day, because I made the mistake of trudging past them with a beer.
Humansynths are tough things. No organs, no squishy bits, just a three-hundred-pound metal rack pretending to be human for sheer politeness. Still, when the fight began, it took them less than a minute to kick my head in and break my back. The last I saw of them was from where I’d been folded in under a table.
Coming home, the old soldier craves peace
But broken men around him stir.
Swords are drawn, battle-cries ring
Blood spills like tears in the rain.
PCS doesn’t like its people being fucked with. In ten minutes the response team was at the bar, and soon after we pulled over to the farm, guns out.
I was angry. And I’m not proud of what I did. But let’s just say there’s a reason the ex is an ex, and a reason I can never go home again, and a reason I don’t like Mercers. Nothing human should be able to crawl after that many shotgun blasts.
I’m not going to tell this to my crew. There’s things they need to know and things they don’t.
But wait. Ship has more: a fuzzy blob to the north, with massive electromagnetic activity. It’s huge, whatever it is. The composite image doesn’t make sense. Ovals. Interlocking hexagons. Squares neatly arranged within one another.
Quite frankly, it looks like a bunch of modern artists invaded this planet and left their unsold exhibits on display.
Except it didn’t exist on the scans last night.
This leaves us all nonplussed.
“So,” says Milo, pacing, “we know another crew made planetfall. We know there are weird statues just north of us. You think they got bored? Went native? You think it’s an ambush?”
“It doesn’t make sense,” says Simon, who’s fiddling nervously with the constructor kit. “They can’t be a huge crew, whoever they are. If you’re a small crew, and you want to lay an ambush, you don’t announce your presence. You hit hard when people are least expecting it.”
Simon has some experience in these issues. I value that.
FOR ALL WE KNOW, THEY COULD BE PRODUCTS OF THE COLONIST CREW, I point out. IT’S BEEN A HUNDRED YEARS.
Humans can do a lot of weird things in a hundred years.
“But you said they weren’t there yesterday?”
YES. I send them the scans. WE FOUND NOTHING THE LAST TIME WE CHECKED.
“Some kind of cloaking?”
MORE LIKE CLOUD COVER, I say. It’s a white lie. If MercerCorp is around, they may very well have access to cloaking tech. I just don’t want my people panicking.
“So what, do we look for them? Do we contact them?”
“I don’t like this,” says Anna. “This was supposed to be a simple job. We land; we scrounge around; we get paid. This wasn’t how it was supposed to go.”
“Okay. Can’t we just . . . do a speed run and get the hell out?”
“And what if we run into people? I mean, for a fucking empty planet, this place seems to be up the wazoo with people who really might have it out for us. You ever met MercerCorp scavs?”
“Er. No?”
“Take it from me. You don’t want to. They make us look civilized.”
I do agree, and this means I don’t have to explain myself about avoiding the Mercers. Social proof has been set out; humans value the wisdom of the crowds, even when it’s idiocy.
“So what do we do? Call it in? Can we even do that within the contract?”
“How much firepower do we have?”
Once again, I have to make a decision. Run in with a crew and resources that look increasingly inadequate, and risk everyone’s lives, in a world that’s thrown Megabeast-sized curveballs and potentially posthuman corporate competition.
BETTER SLOW AND ALIVE, I decide. PULL UP YOUR TRAINING. START PROTOCOL 8.
12
Fortress mode, aka Protocol 8, is the one order no Overseer wants to give. Protocol 8 is when you acknowledge that the mission is tougher than expected. Either you need more time, or you need more safety. So you start to put down roots. Build an actual base that’s fortified against outside threats. Think about weapons, kill zones, farms.
First step: contact Ship, which takes another day. Ship sends out a request to the closest PCS base, mostly for billing purposes—this is technically overtime.
I kept hoping for a response. That they’d tell us to pack up and leave. But no. The response comes in. Overtime pay confirmed. A warning that standard training doesn’t cover extended missions, so I’d have to watch my people carefully. And, the thing I dreaded: company insurance would cover our retrieval and medical costs only if we hit at least 70% of the target value. Basically, you either succeed or you die. Alone.
To whoever at PCS came up with that rule: fuck you. May your most precious assets spontaneously turn into goats. May those goats be reborn as lettuce.
They ignore this and send me, through Ship, a basic guide to running a colony, which is what we technically are now. Just to be on the safe side, I check into crew backups. Fortress mode comes with certain keys that let us requisition another Ship with more crew.
POSSIBLE, says Ship. PLEASE BE AWARE THAT BASIC TRAINING WILL TAKE A WHILE. PROFIT ALLOCATION WILL BE SPLIT AMONG ALL ACTIVE CREWS. REQUEST AID?
Ah, fuck. No, let’s not.
GOOD LUCK, says Ship, and scoots over the horizon.
Fuck you too, Ship.
Morale took a massive hit the moment I explained the new terms to Simon, Milo and Anna. I can’t really blame them. It’s a big hit to learn that what you thought was a peaceful op might actually be some kind of three-way high-stakes game with at least one opponent significantly nastier than you. It’s another to be told that you need to stick it out with a shitty hazard-pay contract. I pointed out that a handful of people on an alien planet would make a really good Star Trek episode. They didn’t find that funny.
Okay, they warned me this would happen. The initial do-everything-wide-eyed pioneer spirit doesn’t last. It never does. Pretty soon people start needing discipline and schedules. Humans think they crave the unknown and the freedom to do whatever they want to. In reality, they crave it for about ten minutes before they start yelping for order. That’s why armies and governments exist.
Order, Watson, is the order of the day, Mundanity. But then you can’t overdo this either, because too much schedule is problematic. I need to give them three hours of recreation a day, sandwiching four hours of work. That should do, for a start.
The woods are black and the river closed on itself,
Two banks per square foot of cloud—
And a flat rock faces the sun’s rays.
Monkeys and birds are still alert for my orders
And winds and clouds eager to shield my fortress.
. . . I am master of the brush, and a sagacious ruler
But I would ride the barge that comes from here,
I would dance on the bank of a river;
I would send my legions to raze this world
And I would dance alone forever.
As you can see, I’m totally not slacking off by writing poetry. There’s a lot I’m going to have to think of. Hygiene protocols. Entertainment. Colonist social structures. Power requirements. Farms. MREs can only get you so far. After a while things start to coalesce in my mind, meshing with the geography of the region.
Axiom 1: No operation of our size and scale is going to be able to resist a large force for too long. That’s the PCS UltraMilitary package that BLACK ORCHID operates on; I’m just running a low-rent civilian scrap operation. So anything we can build will have to be to buy us enough time to retreat. Any advancing enemies will have to be met with obstacles that funnel them slowly towards us, preferably one at a time.
Axiom 2: We need food, because the very act of building this stuff is going to exhaust most of our MREs.
Axiom 3: They need to be kept reasonably happy and under control. Lacking protocols, they will need t
o be micromanaged.
So Milo has been tasked with setting up perimeter walls. And Anna is now outside, doggedly setting up row upon row of little hydroponic trenches hooked up to a small motor I’ve fabricated. They’re really the first homegrown components we’ve built up here. We’re going to grow seaweed and potatoes—the Company versions, which will grow in damn near anything on damn near any surface.
In the evenings they both read their contract with PCS over and over again, looking for loopholes. Sorry, folks, they’re airtight. And—I hate to even think this—they’re airtight because of me.
That’s the other reason they send Overseers down here. If your crew looks like they’ll renege on the contract, there’s a kill switch hidden in each of them. Protocol 13, the one we don’t talk about.
Anyway. Back to lighter matters. We’ve scrapped the plans I had for a nice lightless enclosure, and we’re going with something wider. Because, apparently, crews stuck in fortress mode for too long go bad really fast if there isn’t a reasonable mix of natural light coming in. I suppose the guide has something for dealing with light-loving megafauna? Nope, nothing that useful.
Simon, hauling in rocks for Milo’s construction, volunteers to go to the site of the last kill and see if there’s any meat we can salvage. This sets off a rather touchy discussion.
“You WHAT?”
“What the fuck is wrong with you, Simon? Who eats alien meat?”
I ANALYZED IT BEFOREHAND, I assure them, trying to make it look like it was Simon’s idea but I, their faithful Overseer, approved of it. SIMON HAS BEEN PERFECTLY HEALTHY. THERE ARE NO ILL INTERACTIONS.
“We have a farm,” says Milo. “Look, let’s just get the food synthesizer up and running.”
THE FARM AND THE SYNTHESIZER WILL REQUIRE SIGNIFICANT ADDITIONAL POWER AND TIME TO MAINTAIN, I point out. IN LIGHT OF THE CURRENT SITUATION, IT WILL BE USEFUL TO HAVE SOME REDUNDANCY. LET HIM BRING THE CARCASSES. YOU CAN ANALYZE IT FURTHER IF YOU WISH.
“What about Protocol 8?”
Protocol 8 has one subclause I’m not too happy with. It goes like this: eat nothing local. Only trust PCS food synthesizers powered by PCS grain. It may be shitty, but it will take years for nutrient deficiency from this sort of diet to kick in, by which time you’re either successful or dead.
But in no situation is it wise to rely on just one workflow to get food in your mouth. There are plenty of horror stories floating around the corporate web—colonists whose synthesizers failed and had to eat seaweed raw, salvage crews who ate each other, and so on and so forth. That’s the problem with all these rules being written by some control-statist bureaucrat at the center of the operation. On the edge, your karma could be anything.
A single point
Failure, a collapsing sun
Pull all light into its grasp
Robbing the void of its purpose.
So, too, are group projects.
And one machine doing all the work.
No matter how efficient, it is ridiculous.
THERE IS A RISK OF LONG-TERM POISONING, YES, I agree. BUT IF WE ACT FAST ENOUGH, WE CAN BE ON THE SHIP AND REPAIRED BEFORE ANY ILL EFFECTS SET IN. THE IMMEDIATE GAIN IS TOO HIGH TO OFFSET LONG-TERM LOSS.
Anna passes by with some lumber. “What’s the argument?”
“Simon’s been eating those insects,” says Milo.
Simon looks uncomfortable.
ANALYSIS INDICATES THEY ARE SUITABLE FOR CONSUMPTION, I say.
“Well? Tasty? Good? Bad? Ugly?” says Anna with uncharacteristic chirpiness.
“Tastes like chicken.”
“What’s the problem, then?” says Anna, winking at Simon. “Boys, if it tastes okay, and OC thinks it’s okay, might as well eat it. The farm’s going to take a while to sort out, anyway. If we’re going to be stuck here, might as well have some decent food.”
Score one for common sense. Or the willingness to be human guinea pigs.
We agree, tentatively, to get a meat operation going. Maybe we can hunt some DogAnts—that’s the official name now, Doggus anticus simonus—of our own. Simon heads out into the wild with GUPPY and his rifle, and Milo and Anna go to work in relative silence: Milo on the power grid, and Anna on the wall.
“What do we call this place?” says Anna after a while, over the sound of power tools.
Milo looks around. “What, the planet?”
“No, I mean the Hab,” says Anna. “You know, we’re putting a lot of work into this. Feels like we should call it something.”
They decide to call it Just Missed the Landing.
Very funny, guys.
Very funny.
YOU KNOW IT ISN’T COMPLETE YET, I say, bringing up the schematics.
Anna scribbles the name on the outer wall. She looks like she’s trying really hard to be enthusiastic about it, but out of sight of the other two, she puts down our makeshift paint and wanders off to her hill, where she spends the evening looking up at the sky. Looking for Ship, I suppose.
13
Day eight of us landing here. Our camp is still a mess.
If I had a good crew—well, a crew of the kind BLACK ORCHID used to run—this place would be a minifortress by now, bristling with sharpened wood spikes, a tower and a crow’s nest for a lookout, possibly even a basic electrified fence.
Instead, we’re still the same old Hab and a whole lot of incomplete plans. We have lines marked out in the ground for water channels; we’ve got half a crude outer wall built with toppled trees; have work requirements stapled to the scaffolding on the quarry; and none of these things are getting done, because my crew is distracted today.
I’ve been pinging Ship for updates on the Mercer ship; whatever orbit it’s on keeps changing. Ship, of course, is on a Sun-synchronous orbit, passing above the poles of Urmagon at roughly the same time each day; this keeps the shadows constant and lets us image better. Not that you can do much imaging with Urmagon’s dense cloud layer, but it’s protocol. The Mercer ship, on the other hand, has started moving. It’s positioning and repositioning erratically, almost like it’s trying to carry out one of my hex-pattern searches by itself.
Why? What’s it looking for? Who or what has it sent down here? I’m keeping one drone permanently parked as high up as it can go, rapidly switching viewpoints so I can stitch together composite images every three seconds. It doesn’t make any kind of sense—for all we know, the Mercer crew made planetfall a hundred miles away—but see, now I’ve caught the jitterbug, too.
We’re in an extraordinarily bad spot for this. The entire camp is one big set of half-finished problems nested into other half-finished problems. Most of the power setup I wanted, for example, is incomplete: for all of Milo’s crunching, the power lines are still unprotected, unconnected, and basically useless.
I peek at the others. Anna is working on roofing for the base. She’s got a look of absolute concentration on her face, as if she can focus hard enough that everything else just goes away. She’s on the line with Simon.
Simon, to whom I’ve now assigned a drone, is taking a break from work. By which I mean he’s wandering around where the Megabeast was, finger on the trigger. So far he’s taken six breaks in five hours; the only thing that excuses him is that he makes up his quota in the remaining time. He’s chatting with Anna. The conversation’s mostly her telling him about this MercerCorp crew she met once, and him telling her about his childhood as a gamer.
Fascinating. But at another time, please. SIMON, I say, COME HERE WITH THE GUN.
I mark a high place, the closest we can get to a lookout that replicates my drone’s point of view.
STAY THERE AND REPORT ANYTHING THAT MOVES.
I move my drones back out and try to recover as much of the hex pattern as I can.
At least Milo is still running, if somewhat in his own direction. The darkness of the Hab has been cut in half by the torch mounted on his suit.
“So, I figured out where we went wrong,” he says, scribbling and measuring. “The
resistance in this new path we’re laying down is too high; your power output is too low to actually transfer enough current to stuff outside the lights. I’m going to use the BASE and some of the metal we recovered to add a couple of thermoelectric generators to the mix. Like, don’t expect a lot of efficiency—these things do 8–10% conversion rates, tops. But we used to build them out in, the, ah, well, last assignment. Nice for keeping warm; gets a little bit of power going on the side.”
IS THERE NOTHING BETTER WE CAN DO?
Milo smirks. “It’s a bootstrap problem. You need power to make power. Start small, work up. Later I can maybe do a small motor and a blade system and stick it in the stream. Add a few more amps to the system to iron out fluctuations. Right now my problem is where to install this. It’s basically a heater.”
ALRIGHT. SET IT UP NEAR THE FARM.
“Why, crops? This thing won’t be much use for that.”
NO, IT’LL GIVE YOU THREE SOMETHING TO COME SIT DOWN NEAR, I say. TRUST ME ON THIS.
Soon the generator is done. It isn’t particularly pretty, but Simon, passing by, does get excited about it. “Hey, can we fix a rack to that?”
“And do what?”
“Meat grill!”
“We shouldn’t be wasting our metal,” scoffs Milo.
But Simon persists, pointing out that a few sharp wooden prongs would do. Soon they have a makeshift grill design, and Milo’s grumblingly agreed to fix it, provided Simon does a bit more work extending the shelter we have. The wind cuts to the bone sometimes.
This Simon has no issues doing.
And Anna? Anna’s watching the two of them go at it. I tell her to take a break and she starts playing Go with me. I dial down my playing skill significantly but still end up crushing her in the first few games, which almost throws her off the game completely.
“You’re an asshole, OC.”
SORRY.
“Any news on the Mercers?”
NOTHING NEW YET.
“The boys aren’t taking it too well.”
The Salvage Crew Page 6