“Affirmative.”
Three hours later, Koebsch dismissed Vonnie and Ash. He transferred their duties to Gravino, the other member of the crew who wasn’t a biologist or a gene smith. “Thank you for skipping lunch,” Koebsch said. “You must be exhausted. I’ll give you an hour off, but then I want you back again for another three. We need to keep the pressure on until we find Lam.”
“I’d like to stay, sir,” Vonnie said.
“Take a break,” Koebsch said. “Freshen up.”
“The FNEE need help interpreting our signals. They think everything is a target.”
“You did a great job defining our contacts,” Koebsch said. “They know where our mecha are situated and the boundaries of the sunfish colony.”
“But if they—”
“Go.” Koebsch had control of her station. He closed it. “Get out of here. I’ll ping you if something comes up, but this could take all day. Longer. Get some rest. I’ll need you to spell me soon.”
“Yes, sir,” Ash said, tugging at Vonnie’s arm.
The two of them left data/comm for the air lock, where they suited up and went outside.
Ash had a data pad in her leg pocket. She showed it to Vonnie, then cut her fingers at her neck to indicate radio silence.
After they climbed into the jeep, Vonnie tipped her helmet against Ash’s helmet. “What did you find?” she said.
“You were right about Dawson, and I also pilfered some of Koebsch’s orders about the Brazilians,” Ash said. “He doesn’t want to partner with them. He’s under duress.”
“I knew it.”
The jeep drove through camp. Ash craned her neck to gaze through her visor at Vonnie. “Our agreement here with Brazil allows for new talks between us on Earth,” she said. “You have to admit, if we could stop yelling at each other in the A.N., that would be good.”
“It would be good for Earth.”
“Good for everywhere. We don’t need another war. And if there is more fighting, we want Brazil on our side this time — or neutral. Anything to offset the Chinese.”
Vonnie stared at her, unable to hold back any longer. “You set this up from the start,” she said. “We’re going to let them kill Lam just so we can have a job to do together. So we can pretend to be friends.”
“I am your friend,” Ash said.
“Who are you working for? Really?”
“I’m one of the good guys, Von.”
“You used me and Lam. Now the FNEE mecha are getting close to the sunfish. You know the colony will attack. It’s like throwing them into the guns. Dawson will get what he wants.”
“That wasn’t the plan, I swear,” Ash said. “Think about it. If I wanted to capture sunfish, I wouldn’t need Ribeiro’s crew. We brought our own weaponry. There are eight torpedoes and a maser cannon on our ship, and hand weapons in the armory. We’re also packing a quarter ton of excavation charges. If my objective was to take the sunfish by force, I could have made it happen without the Brazilians.”
“Then why, Ash?”
The young woman was characteristically blunt. “We lived in London before the war,” she said. “My parents owned an apartment up the street from my uncle’s house. I had a sister. Three cousins. Only my mom is still alive, and I don’t ever want to see anything like that again.”
The contempt Vonnie felt began to wane. In a more roundabout way, Frerotte had used the same rationale for his support of the ESA/FNEE partnership. Horror, grief, and the desire to keep other people from suffering were noble motivations to serve.
“My job was to make the Chinese look responsible for Lam, then we’d help Brazil,” Ash said. “We thought we’d run a few joint patrols. The main thing is our governments would start talking again.”
“But you underestimated Lam, and you didn’t anticipate Dawson’s influence back home.”
“That’s right.” Ash’s gaze was haunted by the admission. “It’s not about Lam anymore. It’s about the sunfish. Brazil wants access to our site because we found a colony. We want them to do the dirty work so our hands are clean. A rogue AI is the perfect excuse. The point is to make any fighting with the sunfish look like an accident.”
“Collateral damage,” Vonnie said. “That’s what they called London and Paris.”
“I…”
“You screwed up. The sunfish are innocent exactly like those civilian populations.” She was being harder on Ash than she’d been with Frerotte, but she thought Ash would rise to the challenge.
She was mistaken.
“I fulfilled my orders,” Ash said. “It’s better this way. Brazil’s gene smithing programs are crap like their cybernetics. They need us. We need them. If we can establish a science program to develop the sunfish DNA together, we’ll have a long-term investment in each other. We can bring them to our side.”
“What about the families you’ll kill?”
“They’re aliens, Von. People come first. Why can’t you see that? I want to save people first. I’ll always save people first.”
Ash leaned back, pulling her helmet from Vonnie’s. It was an effective way to have the last word, but Vonnie rocked forward in her seat. Trying to catch Ash’s gaze, she realized that during their conversation, Ash had drawn her data pad from her leg pocket. Had she intended to share Dawson’s files? If so, she seemed to have changed her mind. Ash gripped the data pad in both hands, turning her body to protect it, and Vonnie worried that she’d lost Ash as a friend.
Everything’s coming to a head, she thought. Ribeiro. Dawson. Ash. Lam.
Is it still possible for me to protect the sunfish?
39.
The jeep slowed near Lander 04, and Vonnie looked at the sky. As an astronaut, she was accustomed to feeling satisfaction for the spacecraft overhead and grudging acceptance for the spy satellites. One came with the other. The need to guard against opposing nations was a fact of life.
Now we’re importing all of our problems to this world, she thought. And yet without those problems, humankind wouldn’t have traveled so far into the solar system.
They weren’t angels. They were apes. It was mutual suspicion and the hunger for power that drove their species to new technologies. Every advancement in spaceflight had been steeped in an arms race. Germany’s rockets in World War II begat the Soviet sputniks, which begat the American moon landings, which begat the ICBM standoff between NATO and the USSR, which led to a renaissance in global communications.
Briefly, there was peace. But the eyes in the sky continued to improve, aiding the technological nations in a hundred brush wars against men who used caves for fortresses and waged terror attacks on non-military targets to remain relevant.
The eyes combed the globe for patterns and clues. The ears listened. Smart bombs, drones, and robots entered the world’s battlefields as humankind’s first artificial intelligences.
The chess board of today’s political backdrop had started with another Cold War between East and West. Even before their third revolution, the People’s Republic of China had been on a path to usurp America as Earth’s foremost superpower.
In 2028, a military coup reversed China’s gains in freedom and democracy, channeling its economic might inward, then upward. In 2031, the People’s Supreme Society sent a mission to Mars as a stunt, beating Europe and America to the red planet. More significant, they’d constructed a permanent station in low Earth orbit as a launch facility for their Mars craft.
Within five years, there were two stations. Within ten, there were six. They also built a Lunar outpost.