The Expendable Few: A Spinward Fringe Novel (11 page)

“Start with Pandem,” Doctor Anderson says. “That’s where the Order of Eden started their first gathering colony, committed the worst crimes, and where the most relevant former First Light crew members reunited. The logs get interesting once they’re all back on board the Triton.”

“Tell me we can watch this holographically,” Remmy says.

“Any way you like, just begin with the major events,” Doctor Anderson replies as he makes to leave. His stride leaves no time for another question, and I have more than I can count.

It’s as if we were all eager for another assignment. Within minutes we’re all neck deep in study material. I start with the journey of Ayan Rice the second and Minh-Chu Buu to Pandem right away. Isabel is right beside me, watching my half metre tall holographic projection as the pair have their first conversation at the outset of their journey on Minh-Chu’s old ship. “I can’t believe they both just left Freeground,” she says. “I mean, Minh hadn’t finished his stress therapy, Ayan could have been a star as the first perfectly fabricated human being, and they just decided to chase Valent. They couldn’t even be sure what he’d be like when they got there.”

“Jonas Valent saved their lives, and Minh was his best friend,” I tell her. “It makes sense to me.”

“I’m sorry, it sounds selfish to me,” Isabel says. “Minh-Chu has a big family on Freeground, and he could have gotten back into Freeground Fleet as a decorated pilot. I’d kill for that kind of career bump.”

“If there’s one thing the First Light crew had in common, it was loyalty,” I retort.

“To a fault,” she replies. “I mean, they threw away everything and ended up on Pandem? Everyone who was able to get even a glance at the open Stellarnet from a nearby system knows that the place was a world wide slaughter.”

“May as well go where the action is,” Remmy chuckled. “Turned out okay though.”

“Idiot,” Isabel sighs. “Skip to the end, bonehead. They’re stranded on Tamber, a moon without any police, where you have to scrounge for food, clean water - it’s a disaster.”

“But they saved hundreds, maybe thousands of people along the way,” Remmy replies. I know he’s arguing with information that he gleaned at a glance, neither of them have all the facts yet. “That’s what these people do, I think. On their first mission they saved an entire colony, Concordia, wasn’t it Clark?”

“That’s right,” I say. “They stepped right in front of Vindyne and saved as many as they could. I met a few. Some of them are pretty happy to be Freegrounders now.”

“What did that get them?” Isabel asks. “Vindyne didn’t exactly forget and forgive. Within weeks they had Valent in custody, and where is he now?”

I look it up idly and find the logs detailing Jonas Valent’s death. My heart sinks. Before I didn’t know for sure, but seeing the footage of him dragging the original Lucius Wheeler out of an airlock before a chemical reaction could detonate him like a bomb makes it real. “He’s dead,” I say quietly.

“See? They just stumbled in, not taking measure of the situation.”

“No one knew much of anything current about humans outside of Freeground space back then,” Remmy argues. “Most crews would have done the same thing or worse, we were so closed off. We just didn’t realize it until they brought back stories of the outside. Their experiences out there were so exciting, so incredible to us that they couldn’t be contained. Censoring was pointless, it only encouraged Freegrounders to seek out the truth, and they found it more often than not.”

Isabel sits back, red faced, turning her attention to her comm unit. Something in what Remmy said got through to her.

Remmy presses on anyway. “If they didn’t stumble around out there, some other corp would have taken us over because we wouldn’t have worthwhile shield technology, or know who the players were, or have anyone out there who owed Freeground any favours. The Concordians had friends, and when Jonas’ crew saved them, they became Freeground’s friends.”

“Fine, I get it,” Isabel says quietly.

“Better to stumble around in the dark, looking for the door than to suffocate in a sealed room.”

“I get it, okay?” she shouts.

“They did the best with the knowledge they had,” Remmy won’t give up, even though he’s won.

“She gets it, Remmy,” I say. “We have a lot of catching up to do.”

We read summaries and watch logs well into the night, until we can barely keep our eyes open. Remmy tires out first, followed shortly by Mary.

When it’s just Isabel and me, and we’re starting to fade she looks at me. “Can I ask you something?”

“I’ve seen some pretty bad arguments start with those exact words,” I say with a reassuring smile. “But sure.”

“Why do you idolize the First Light crew? Mary told me you’ve been digging up info on them for years.”

I’m starting to realize that Isabel, the woman I fancy over every one that’s come before, might not be a big fan of the First Light crew. My answer doesn’t come without a measure of consideration. “They took a challenge and made a difference for us, even though they didn’t have much of a chance.”

“That’s just it,” Isabel says. “I don’t know that they did much of anything.”

“Without them we would probably only have a bare understanding of shield technology, our vacsuits would still just be basic environment suits, and there’s a whole catalog of tech they brought back and improved.”

“It’s just technology though. What good is it if they opened us up to Vindyne? The Order of Eden?”

“Without them the Order of Eden or something like it would have swept in and taken us over, no problem.” This is starting to look like it might get heated, and I decide it’s time to change tact. “But, in a way you’re right. The technology can’t be the only benefit. I think they also opened Freeground up to other cultures. We even had pretty free access to the Stellarnet for a while. The feeds were a couple months old, but we could see the galaxy for what it was.”

Isabel’s gaze takes a down turn, she’s looking into her lap. “That was them, wasn’t it?” she admits.

“I don’t think we would have had that short alliance with Lorander either. They taught us a lot during those three years, and we only caught their notice because they saw what Vindyne was doing to people through our distress messages. If the First Light never rescued those refugees from the Overlord, we’d never have sent those. If we were still closed in like we were, we wouldn’t have had an advanced warning about the Holocaust Virus either, and it would have hit Freeground before we hand a chance to wipe out all our artificial intelligences.”

“Didn’t Valent cause that? In the beginning, I mean, by releasing his AI?” she asks.

I remember seeing something about that during the day and call it up after a moment. “Here’s evidence that was just sent from Tamber that shows that the Order of Eden included code from Alice to make people think it was Valent’s fault, or Valance’s doing,” I show it to her and, while it doesn’t provoke an argumentative reaction, it does nothing to raise her spirits.

“Well, that’s good,” she offers sullenly.

I shut down the display on my comm and take her hands in mine. “What’s wrong?”

A tear rolls down her cheek and she hesitates before answering. “I’m starting to understand.” She takes a deep, unsteady breath. “To understand what it’s going to be like on our own out there. If we get through the missions Anderson sends us on, we’ll get turned out on our own. Then what?” Her teary eyes look into mine, and I see she’s terrified. “All I see about these people from the First Light is how they’ve had to fight, and adapt just to stay alive.”

I pull her into my arms and brush her cheek. Isabel lays her face into my palm and cries. “I’m not like them, or as strong as you and Mary.”

I don’t know what to say, so I just try to keep her talking. “What about Remmy?”

That inspires a wet chuckle. “Remmy’s too daft to realize what’s about to happen.”

I laugh and nod. “When he goes off duty, he really goes off duty.”

“Like his brain has a switch,” she elaborates. “Wish I had one.”

The hard won levity starts to drain, and a realization strikes. I voice it before she slips back down into tears and worry. “You won’t be alone,” I whisper against her temple, punctuating it with a kiss.

She looks up at me with what almost looks like surprise.

“I’m pretty sure Mary has a crush on you,” I inform her.

Isabel laughs and punches me in the chest. “Be serious!”

I look her in the eyes and let it all out. “You brought me back, Izzy. My first big feelings were for you, and now you’ve got me. You’ve got me from here to the furthest star, luv.”

The kiss that follows my dedication is soft, warm, and slow. “Thank you,” she says against my lips when we part. “I think I want to stay just like this,” Isabel says, getting comfortable in my arms. “For as long as we can.”

I hold her closer until she starts to doze off some time later. I carry her to bed. I didn’t think about our impending future enough to be frightened of our freedom. After seeing her fall apart at not knowing what that future would be like, after our missions were complete, I’m forced to stare it in the face.

As I lay her down she half-wakes. Her gentle grip on my arm stops me from standing up. I quietly join her. As she drifts off again I lay wide awake wondering; where is my fear?

I learn more in a few days about the First Light crew, what became of them, and how different they were in the time leading up to our mission than I ever thought possible. Through their logs and summaries of events I experience how dangerous the galaxy really was. I follow one of the Samson crew for a while, his name was Ramirez, only to find that he dies needlessly in a battle for the Triton. Within hours of his death a political solution is found. Ramirez and the men he killed all sacrificed themselves for nothing.

Never is it more clear in my mind that you can’t always know how much a sacrifice means until it’s made. For the first time in my life I question how valiant Freeground’s heroes really are. I begin to think many of them are misguided, blinded by fervent patriotism at first. They discover that’s not enough, but not without paying the price.

They fight for each other. The bonds that tie those people together are personal. At one time they decided they were as good as family so they sought to renew friendships some time after Jonas surrendered himself. Jacob and Ayan the second seemed to find a new love for each other after they meet up even though, by all accounts, they felt like very different people. To someone from Fleet Command their abandonment of Freeground might seem treasonous. The way I see it, they are going towards each other while seeking a life in the greater universe.

It was their timing that made things difficult. The Holocaust Virus and the Order of Eden were making a mess of humanity. The First Light crew, the Samson crew, and finally the Triton crew’s experiences while the virus was spreading is terrifying. Anything with an artificial intelligence can be infected. It would then check the identities of people around it against a copy of the Order of Eden database and attempt to murder anyone who wasn’t on it. In most cases, that’s just about everyone.

Some families on Pandem did get the chance to pay. While Jacob and his people were there they kept their forensic software running, collecting data. I know I should have felt something as I looked through the re-enactments. When I reviewed the death of a nafalli family who were sheltering humans who couldn’t afford to pay the Order of Eden membership fee, Mary had to leave. She couldn’t watch as three maintenance bots tore them to shreds. When it was over a very young nafalli crept out from a small cupboard. She cried for hours when her parents wouldn’t move, eventually falling asleep. When she woke she tried to get a response from her father by patting his cheek and plucking at his eyelids. In the end, she curled up against his corpse and quivered in the cold of night. I should have felt something. My critical thinking should have collapsed and I should have been in tears like Mary, but there was nothing.

I found out what happened to that little girl. She was picked up by survivors and eventually transported to the Triton, where someone named her Zoe. The most recent holographic recording of her placed her with an adoptive mother, and she was visited daily by Ashley Lamport from the Samson, and Panloo Ieem, a refugee. I stared at a hologram of the toddler hanging between their hands for the better part of ten minutes. I didn’t feel relief, but some kind of satisfaction at seeing the child happy. If they never sheltered humans, the whole family would have survived. Most non-humans were left alone unless they got involved with unregistered humans.

I’m thinking about Zoe’s relatively happy end when we break through the atmosphere and pass over the yellow and green surface of Uumen. Thick forest encroaches on issyrian habitats. Their great clutches, where nutrient rich lakes are contained by domes built from yellow-orange resin are slowly being violated by giant brambles. The brief told me that those habitats were where most issyrians preferred to live. The waters of the clutch extended their lives, facilitated easy chemical communication and was the birth place for their young.

The brief didn’t prepare me for the grand reality of it. The clutch isn’t just one large dome encompassing the lake, it is several. Some are artfully stacked atop each other, and at the end of the habitat furthest from the encroaching forest you can still see water flowing between the resin bubbles.

Most of the habitats are abandoned. The encroaching forest, designed to convert habitable worlds to a human friendly environment, is taking one side of the lake. Its persistent growth is visible through the domes, creeping along the shore and inward along the murky bottom.

“I can see why there’s an issyrian resistance here,” Remmy says as he monitors communications for any mention of our little transport.

“I’d get closer, but I don’t want to draw attention,” Isabel says. “I’d be pissed if someone came along and messed with my habitat too.”

“It limits their breeding,” Mary says. “By corrupting their waters, the Order is making it a lot harder for the issyrians here to find mates and have children.”