The Sins of Our Fathers Read online

  When they’d all come back to themselves, the gate was dead. The Rhymer was still weeks from its scheduled passage back, and both the ring and the ship were now gone forever. Someone on the astronomy team had spotted the ring falling sunward into a new long elliptical orbit, shoved out of its former place at the edge of the solar system by some unknown, godlike hand. No one on Jannah knew why. They never would. All the problems they had now, all the ones they ever would have, they’d have to work through here.

  Alone.

  The sky darkened fast. A scattering of high, thin clouds clustered in the north took the red of the sunset and turned it into gold leaf. The monster’s corpse had been dragged off the plaza, but the place it had lain was black with blood. A cloud of local insects buzzed around the stain and ignored the people.

  The damage to the town was real, but the salvage and repair effort had left it less wounded. What had been the machine shop had become piles of salvage, squared away and ready for reuse. The new breach in the wall was shored up enough to keep the wildlife out. Just because the monsters could walk through it didn’t mean that the other animals were welcome. The town kitchen had given out bowls of riced tofu and black sauce, some of the last of their supply, and Filip was finishing his now. The bowl was made of hardened and vacuum-formed vat-grown kelp. He’d eat that too, when the tofu was gone. Every calorie and vitamin was so precious now, that someone on the science team had suggested using calories as the basis of a new currency.

  At the edge of the plaza, Jandro and his crew were sitting together, laughing and talking louder than anyone else. They had what looked like beer. Since Jandro had ridden the monster down, he’d been treated like a hero and a badass. Which, Filip figured, was fair enough. If the price of beer was hauling himself up on a monster’s back while the bolt thrower on the fabrication lab shot holes in it, water was fine for him.

  Mose wasn’t there. Probably he was back at the room, making his point about union rules to himself. Kofi was, along with a handful of other Belters, sitting not far from Jandro and his crew. The scientists and administrators were sitting in clumps of their own, except for Nami Veh, who circulated from group to group to group, talking to everyone, touching shoulders and arms, smiling like she was running for office.

  As the early-evening sun continued to drop, the golden clouds flared and faded to gray. Filip took a bite of the bowl. It was crisp and layered and salty, like baklava without the sweetness. He chewed and watched Nami Veh approach.

  “Filip,” she said. “Long day. Thank you for coming. I really appreciate everyone showing up.”

  “Mose won’t be here. But he doesn’t mean anything by it. He’s just working some things through, you know?”

  Her smile dimmed a little. “I think we all are.”

  “Yeah,” Filip said.

  She looked for some way to touch him without it seeming awkward, didn’t find one, and moved on. The relief he felt as she walked away surprised him. He didn’t dislike her. Her kindness seemed a little too consistent to be real, sure, but it wasn’t her that bothered him. It was talking. That bothered him because he was trying to listen. And he was listening for the monsters, singing.

  So far, they were silent.

  At the front of the plaza, Leward hauled out a little metal bench and a holographic projector. From where Filip sat, he could see the science lead’s lips moving. Practicing. There were probably four hundred people in the plaza. Almost everyone. Filip shifted. His leg was falling asleep.

  Leward stepped up awkwardly, holding his palms out to ask for quiet. Or to demand it.

  “Everybody?” he said, and while it was inflected like a question, it wasn’t one. “Everybody? Thank you all for coming here tonight. I know we’ve all been through a lot, and I wanted to start by saying how much I appreciate everything all of you have done.”

  The sunset was dimming fast. It was hard to make out the expressions of people across the plaza, but Filip thought he saw Nami Veh shake her head just a little.

  “We’ve learned a lot. We know a lot more than we did before, and it’s really going to help.” He nodded as he spoke. Someone to Filip’s right muttered something. Someone else laughed. Leward’s smile widened. “Beta’s site was selected based on a slate of criteria. Water availability. Shelter from major weather patterns. So on.”

  He took out his hand terminal, tapped it, and the projector came to life. A topographical map of the valley sprang into slightly fuzzy existence, with a red ball the size of a fist where the town was. Filip leaned forward, considering the shape of the hills.

  “All the reasons this is an attractive site for us?” Leward said. He was getting his rhythm. He sounded like a university lecturer. “They also make it attractive for the locals. We knew that. Biosample diversity was a plus for us. But we didn’t know about the size of some of the local fauna, or that we were setting down roots pretty much exactly in its migratory path.”

  One of the communications team stood up, raising her hand. “So the monsters aren’t attacking us? We’re just… in their way?”

  “Turns out we built our houses in their hallway. But that makes a solution pretty straightforward.” Leward flexed his wide hands and tapped his hand terminal again. The red ball that was Beta was joined by a green one halfway up a nearby slope. “One of the tertiary sites that we didn’t pick is close enough that we can relocate even without the shuttle.”

  Filip felt himself sink. He glanced around at the town. The structures for more than four hundred people to work and live. The recyclers, the reactor, the power grid. It was all designed to travel in the hold of a colony ship: easy to take apart, easy to put together. Easy meaning maybe not impossible. He thought of the conduit that he and Mose had put in place, the wire and vacuum channeling they’d laid down. Relocation would go faster if the whole town was focused on the task, but the prospect left him weary all the same.

  It wasn’t until someone else interrupted that he noticed that Leward had kept talking. Jandro was standing in the middle of the holographic display, gesturing between the two versions of Beta. The real and the imagined. Filip had missed whatever the start of his comment had been.

  “I mean that’s got to be half a klick up, yeah?”

  “That’s true,” Leward said, “but the carts were all built with a full g in mind. They’re pretty robust for this kind of short-distance travel, and there are game trails that the local animals have made that we can appropriate.”

  Jandro looked around at the crowd. The stars had come out above them to compete with the worklights and the backscatter of the display. Jandro shook his head slowly, crossed his arms. “This is a bad plan, boss.”

  “We’ve run the numbers,” Leward said. “The whole move won’t take more than five days, start to finish.” That sounded optimistic to Filip, and probably to many of the others sitting under the stars. He’d probably picked a low number to make the whole thing sound feasible. But it was so overly optimistic that it made everything else Leward had said seem a little more suspect.

  Nami Veh stepped up to the bench, smiling and holding out her hand to Leward like she was doing him a favor by helping him down. He hesitated for a moment, then let her take his place.

  “Can you share more of what you’re thinking, Alejandro?” Nami Veh said. “This is a big decision, and we don’t have a lot of time to make it. Anyone who has thoughts about this, it’s important that we hear from you. That’s what this meeting is for.”

  When Jandro spoke, his voice had less of a buzz in it. “Here’s the thing. We’re talking about taking down everything. All of it. And then putting it back up. Every time we do that, we risk breaking something. It’s just wear and tear, yeah? And that’s if these big fuckers don’t come while we’re in the middle of the shift. Look at how much it would take to move, and instead we put that work into making what we already have a harder target. Dig some trenches. Put some spikes in ’em. Get that slug thrower tested out better. Get the chem lab to cook us up
some gunpowder. Some bombs, maybe. These big fuckers bleed. They die. We can teach them not to fuck with us.”

  “Fortification is less effort at first, but it’s also a commitment to permanent upkeep,” Leward said. “Relocation, we do once and then we can get back to our routine.”

  “Unless there’s something at the new site we don’t know about like we didn’t here.”

  “These are interesting questions,” Nami Veh said.

  Jon Lee, one of the recycler techs, stood up, and Nami pointed to him. “What about water availability? We chose this spot for reasons. What would we be giving up if we went?”

  “I can speak to that,” a younger woman in a research team jacket said. “The tertiary site is on a creek that feeds down into the valley. We’d be seeing a reduction in overall flow compared to the river, but it’s still more than we need in the near term.”

  “Even with the recyclers?”

  “Recyclers, hydroponics, cooling. Even some secondary energy production for when the reactor runs out of fuel pellets. The new site’s enough for all of it.”

  Filip listened and watched but didn’t take a turn standing up. He’d spent a lot of his life trying not to get noticed, and there were more than enough opinions to go around.

  About half of it, it seemed to him, was really about the monsters and their migration paths. The rest was about fear. Fear of the monsters. Fear of what had happened with the gate and what it meant for them. Fear of losing what little they still had left. Filip understood, because he felt it too.

  It was close to midnight when Nami Veh called a halt to the proceedings, told everyone to go get some sleep and think about what they’d heard. They’d take a vote in the morning. Filip joined the line at the latrine, then went back to his cot without changing clothes. Mose was watching something on his hand terminal that had a man in a bright red suit getting into a floridly choreographed gun battle in what was supposed to be Ceres Station but looked more like a cave network on Callisto. It occurred to Filip that the entertainment feeds saved on the local system were the only ones they’d ever have. Unless the data went corrupt. Then they wouldn’t have the man in the red suit either.

  “You went to the meeting,” Mose said coolly as Filip curled under his blanket.

  “I did.”

  “I told you not to.”

  “I know you did.”

  “You went anyway.”

  “Yeah.”

  Filip waited to see where Mose took it from here. He didn’t think he’d push the issue, but times were odd. Things came out sideways sometimes. He almost thought the other man had gone back to his feed or turned over to try to sleep when he spoke. “I’m not going to bullshit you, Nagata. I’m going to have to report that. If I don’t and the union finds out, that’s my balls in a sling.”

  “Okay.”

  “Okay,” Mose echoed. And then, “I can maybe make it better if you report in, though. Like you were there to keep an eye on these assholes. What happened?”

  “Everyone debated about whether to move the town out of the way or dig in and try fighting the monsters off. The science teams like moving. The technical staff lean toward punching it out. There’s going to be a vote at breakfast.”

  “Shit,” Mose said. “Well, I guess we’ll see what the plan is tomorrow.”

  Filip rolled onto his back, looking up at the featureless gray of the ceiling. He thought of Leward’s map, and the crowd sitting close to Jandro. The black mark where the monster’s blood stained the earth. He remembered his mother saying The only right you have with anyone in this life is the right to walk away. He thought about his father’s need to frame everything as an epic struggle between himself and the universe. He pictured Nami Veh’s calm, sweet voice, and Jandro’s angry growl, and knew which way the vote would go.

  “Stay and fight has some good points, but it doesn’t have the votes. We’re going to move the town.”

  “You sure about that?”

  “I am,” Filip said.

  When morning came, he was right. And he wasn’t.

  After the vote, Leward and six of the civil engineering and administrative workgroups, Nami Veh among them, headed out to review the new site and the paths they could use to reach it. The rest of the town got to work. Filip and Mose, Beta’s only local experts on the power grid, took two hours isolating lines and preparing the pocket reactor for shutdown. When they’d gone as far as they could, Mose went to help with the medical bay equipment and Filip headed over to where half a dozen of the long-timers were breaking down the food production units.

  It was a simple enough setup. In the depth of space, a ship’s galley could use water and energy to cultivate textured fungus that, with the right compounds and spices, the system could use to mimic a wide range of foods, some with better fidelity than others. In Beta, they had fifty separate meter-long cylinder units mounted in steel racks. The power regulation on them could be tricky. The capacitor design was kind of shitty, and more than one untrained person had died from misunderstanding the caution warnings on the little red box, so Filip took that part of the job himself.

  If half of the cylinders went down, the town would still have enough to eat. The fabrication lab could probably keep these in replacement spare parts for six years. It sounded like a long time, until Filip started thinking about what they’d need in year seven. Then it seemed very soon.

  The person overseeing the breakdown was named Jackson. Thin as a Belter, but with a Laconian accent. They were a contractor just like him and Mose, but with a different company. Jackson’s plan was to break down half the units, install them at the new site, and then come back for the rest.

  “If we can get a pinche cart to carry them on,” they said with a scowl. “Can someone go find a cart?”

  One of the others, a younger man named Cameron, jogged off looking for Jandro and his maintenance crew. Filip shifted the power couples off the unit he’d been working on, but before he could start on the next, Jackson put a hand on his shoulder and shook their head. They had wide lips and a narrow nose that Filip might have found attractive in other circumstances. The barely restrained annoyance Jackson gave off any time they looked at him reassured him his interest was irrelevant anyway.

  “No point if we can’t get them on carts,” Jackson said. “You can strap one of these fuckers on your back okay, but you better really fucking want it.”

  Filip chuckled and went to clean his hands. All around the settlement, people were at work breaking down what they had. He’d only been there a couple months. There had been people living in Beta for much longer than him. Still, it felt a little like seeing an old ship getting scrapped. There was a loss to it.

  He found Mose sitting outside the medical bay. One of the walls had been unhitched and the guts of the bay left open to the breeze. Filip shrugged his question.

  “Need some tie-downs,” Mose said. “I get the feeling people weren’t expecting to take the place down and haul it halfway up a mountain.”

  “We’ll figure it out,” Filip said.

  “Diecisiete’s going to laugh about this when she gets here,” Mose said. “Those fuckers at Alpha better get their radio back up, or when the shuttle comes, they’re going to piss themselves. Whole place just…” Mose whistled between his teeth and swept one flat hand like he was erasing the town.

  Filip sat. The ground was a little damp. It smelled like potting soil and citrus and the ever-present note of toilet cleanser.

  Mose chuckled to himself. “Yeah, Diecisiete’s gonna laugh.” And then, softly, “When we’re done here, I’m taking us back to Alpha. Whole team. That’s an established colony. This penny-ante bullshit? It’s no way to live. Alpha’s better.”

  Filip nodded. There was a pleading tone in Mose’s voice. He recognized it. It was the same sound people had when a ship went unexpectedly dark. The universe wasn’t kind. There were millions of things that could go wrong. Every now and then, a ship hit a micro-meteor or had some cascade failure t
hey couldn’t catch in time. Every now and then, a colony or station got surprised by an accident. Sometimes, apparently, ring gates went dead. Whole civilizations, billions of people wide, pared down to a few hundred between one day and the next. Look at it that way, and Mose wasn’t having a psychological breakdown. He was just thinking things through out loud. Catching up to a universe that had changed faster than he could and didn’t give a fuck if anyone kept up or not.

  “She’ll laugh,” Filip agreed. Down near the food pods, Cameron was back and talking animatedly to Jackson. Filip couldn’t tell what he was saying, but he kept pointing north and shaking his head. Filip scratched his neck even though it didn’t itch.

  “Hey,” he said. “I’ll be right back.”

  “Whatever,” Mose replied. “Where the fuck am I going to go?”

  Filip went toward the north end of the settlement. Three other teams were busy breaking down structures and piling up supplies. Beta was packing to move, but no one was moving yet. Even where crates and spools were ready to load, they weren’t loaded. The protective wall was broken in two places now where the monsters had lumbered through it. Filip walked slowly, looking for whatever Jackson and Cameron had been talking about. He heard it before he saw it: voices raised outside the wall. It wasn’t anger or laughter, but loud all the same. The shouts of people coordinating with each other. Work voices. Filip lifted himself over a low spot in the broken wall.

  The carts were there. Past the wall, he could hear their motors whirring and straining, and the whine made him wonder what they’d do when the bearings wore out. For now, they all seemed fine, lumbering along or parked. Great loads of dark soil were heaped up in two of them. The yellow metal was streaked with mud. The workers that crewed them were streaked with mud too. They carried shovels. And from one end of the town almost halfway to the other, a deep gouge ran through the earth, three meters wide and a meter deep, the displaced earth piled in a berm between the hole and the town wall. The smell of fresh-turned soil was thick and weirdly astringent.