Chris Moriarty - Spin Control

“If it’s a terraforming tool,” By-the-Book Ahmed inquired icily, “then who put it here?”

“The original colonists. The UN. Little green men. I don’t care. All I know is it works. It works so well that there’s a real chance that other ship you’re so worried about wasn’t Peacekeepers but colonists.”

“Colonists with cutting-edge UN military technology?” Ahmed asked. Obviously the question was rhetorical.

“Maybe we need to go back to Aurelia’s first point,” Arkasha said. To Arkady’s surprise he was holding his temper in the face of Ahmed’s attacks. Perhaps it was a sign of the importance he placed on the outcome of this consult. “The immunological splices have always been the weak link in Syndicate physiology. It was the right trade-off to make, but we knew it might come back to haunt us someday. This thing hit us so hard because our immune systems happen to be an ideal vector for it, not necessarily because it was intentionally targeted at us.”

“If you step on one of Arkady’s ants,” By-the-Book Ahmed asked trenchantly, “does it matter to the ant whether you killed it on purpose or by accident?”

“Still,” Arkasha insisted, “we don’t know it’s the Peacekeepers. That’s a big jump.”

“Then explain why we didn’t see them come in-system?” By-the-Book Ahmed asked. “They have to have kept the planet between us and them for every kilometer of their in-system flight or our navcomp would have picked them up. Do I need to draw you a map? Do you have any idea how minute an area of space the solutions for that trajectory occupy? Talk about putting a camel through the eye of a needle!”

“I still don’t see why we can’t get more information before we—”

“What do you want us to do, fly around to the other hemisphere and politely ask them if they’re here to kill us? If they are, then I guarantee you the only reason we’re still alive is that they haven’t figured out where we are yet. We’re running on UN commercial technology that was already obsolete when we left Gilead three years ago. Fact of life. If we go out looking for them, they’ll find us a hell of a long time before we find them!”

They argued the question back and forth for a while, getting nowhere. Arkady had seen this dynamic in other consults: people talking around a problem not because they were still making up their minds, but because they needed to put mileage between themselves and their doubts. And in this consult Arkady sensed an emotional undertow that he suspected would be ominously familiar to anyone who’d lived through the bloody and bewildering weeks that followed the UN invasion.

His crewmates were frightened. They were terrified. And in their terror they turned to the tacticals.

The only real and effective support for Arkasha’s position came from a quarter that was as unexpected as it was welcome: Laid-back Ahmed.

“I think we’re losing sight of the real priorities here,” he said finally with the calm confidence that had made him the more or less undisputed mission leader ever since they woke up. Arkady could see team members glancing covertly at each other, taking stock, reexamining their previous assumptions in light of Ahmed’s calm rationality. “It’s not our personal safety that matters, it’s our long-term ability to settle this planet. Thawing out the tacticals and retreating into orbit may make us feel safer, but it won’t do a thing to solve the real problems facing us. The only way to do that is to stick to our guns and let the scientists keep working.”

“But what does that matter if their work is lost because we get—”

“It doesn’t need to be lost,” Arkasha jumped in. “We can just start shooting message drogues to the out-system relay daily instead of weekly. That way nothing’s being lost. Our data and questions and theories will all get to Gilead.”

“But not soon enough to save us if—”

“Since when did this become about saving us ? If we go home without having gotten our job done, then we might as well have let whoever’s out there kill us.” Arkasha looked around the table incredulously. “What’s happening to you people? Where’s your altruism? You’re acting like humans, for God’s sake!”

And then Bella said the awful words that changed everything:

“You weren’t so worried about acting human when you got my crèchemate pregnant.”

A chill settled over the room. Arkasha froze. The others shrank away from him, looking in every other possible direction.

In retrospect it seemed incomprehensible, but until Bella made her accusation everyone had been so overwhelmed by the fact of Bella’s being pregnant that it had never occurred to them to wonder who’d helped her get that way. And of course they would all suspect Arkasha long before their thoughts turned to Ahmed. Arkasha the contrarian. Arkasha the intellectual. It was only a short step from there to Arkasha the deviant.

Arkady sought Laid-back Ahmed’s eyes across the table, but the big Aziz A was looking at Arkasha. The two of them stared at each other for what would have been a breath’s length if anyone in the room had been breathing. Ahmed looked stunned. Arkasha looked as if he were wavering on the brink of a choice he didn’t want to have to make.

Laid-back Ahmed cleared his throat and began to speak.

“Don’t bother,” Arkasha said, cutting him off brutally. “They don’t care about the truth. They only want to find a scapegoat. They’ll turn on you too if you try to stick up for me. I’ve seen it before.”

Arkasha stood up and began collecting his papers. No one spoke to him. No one met his eyes or even looked in his direction. As he left the room Arkady saw Bossy Bella and By-the-Book Ahmed exchange a glance of quiet satisfaction.

In the end Arkasha’s sacrifice didn’t make much difference. Laid-back Ahmed did his best to hold the line, but the final consensus was still for waking up the tacticals and sending the civilians back into orbit. The tacticals made contact just after local dawn the next day and hit their LZ by midafternoon. The first lander brought down only a single squad, running point for their fellows, but from the moment they arrived the base camp stopped being a research station and took on the unmistakable atmosphere of a military outpost.

To Arkady’s trembling relief, the tacticals paid no real attention to the survey team. They took it for granted that the Rostov A’s, no matter how adamantly they’d opposed the decision to wake them up, would now fall into line and do as they were told. And they were right, Arkady thought bitterly…though not bitterly enough to do anything about it.

He wasn’t sure when he began to realize that Arkasha was going to do something.

There was no sudden, blinding revelation. Just a gradual surfacing of the idea that Arkasha was acting oddly…and that when you put all the little oddities together they made a disturbing pattern. By the afternoon of the tacticals’ second day on-planet, suspicion had given way to certainty and Arkady was secretly convinced that Arkasha had no intention whatsoever of leaving Novalis.

He went looking for him. He checked the orbsilk garden, thinking Arkasha might have gone there to check on poor Bella, but it was empty. He went to the bridge and found only By-the-Book Ahmed, busy and excited now that he had a war to run.

“Have you seen Arkasha?” he asked.

“Why? Is he off sulking somewhere? He’d better get over it in time to finish packing. We don’t have time for tantrums.”

“Do you know where your sib is?”

“No.”

“What about Be—”

“What?”

“Uh…nothing. Never mind. I’ll, uh, tell Arkasha to hurry up with the packing when I see him.”