The Sins of Our Fathers Read online

  Filip strolled toward the workers, his hands in his pockets. They were all maintenance and construction. Jandro’s crews. One woman saw him and nodded sharply, as much a challenge as a greeting. Filip smiled and nodded back.

  “Nagata.”

  Jandro, lumbering up beside him, was a mess. Mud caked his legs to the middle of his thighs and smeared his arms and chest. When he grinned, Filip noticed that one of his eyeteeth was chipped. He hadn’t seen that before. He found himself very aware of the physical size of the man. The strength, the sense of ease, and a deep maleness that wasn’t a threat unless it was.

  “Jandro,” Filip said. And when Jandro only grunted in reply, “Lot of work.”

  “Yeah. Figure about four passes. So about twice this wide and twice this deep. Build up the hill on the side. I figure we use the mud and some of that shit that looks like grass. Make bricks. Lace plating doesn’t stop these fuckers, but make a hill steep enough, they’ll get tired and go around, same as anyone.”

  Jandro shrugged like he was commenting on all he’d just said and leaned a little forward, waiting. Filip wasn’t sure that he wanted to be the one who said the next thing, but he was the one who was there. “The plan was that we move the town, though, yeah?”

  “That’s a bad plan. Better that we do this.”

  They were quiet for a moment, looking out over the growing ditch. The maintenance crew working and shouting. Filip wondered what would happen if he made it into a confrontation. He thought of Mose saying We’re subcontractors. That wasn’t exactly right, but he wasn’t the one who’d called the town meeting or held the vote. Nobody had elected him to be in charge of anything.

  Jandro shifted his weight again, stretched his shoulders. His smile was friendly enough, but it was friendly with an edge. Like milk that was just starting to go bad.

  “Well,” Filip said with a nod, then turned to amble back into town. A few others passed him, heading the other way. The news, getting out. He kept his eyes down as he walked. His jaw ached.

  Mose and Kofi were at the medical bay, sitting on ceramic crates with their backs against one of the walls that hadn’t been taken down. As Filip came close, Mose lifted his hands, asking a question without saying what it was.

  “Mining, though,” Kofi said, continuing the conversation they were already having. “There’s a lot we can do as long as we’ve got power. The fuel pellets run out, and then what? No hydroponics. The yeast vats stop working.”

  “Kofi’s decided we’re all gonna die because he’s out of cigarettes.”

  “It’s not just that, it’s everything. The guns are out of cartridges. Med center’s out of bone density drugs. Security’s down to half a dozen tasers. You think those big fuckers are going to give a shit about tasers? And the fabrication lab can’t just print new parts out of nothing. The printers aren’t magic. They need metal and industrial clay. Carbon. And even if we get everything where we don’t starve to death… Shit, we’re gonna need to make babies.”

  “Oh, for fuck’s sake.”

  “No, serious! We don’t have any kids here. Youngest person in Beta’s probably twenty-something. We’re all going to be dead of old age and no one to keep things going if we don’t.”

  “Good thing there’s no kids. You’d be scaring the shit out of them,” Mose said, and spat like it was punctuation. “How about we don’t start freaking out about our legacy until Alpha gets their radio working and we hear from that survey mission? Anyway, what we need now is some fucking carts. I’m not strapping this shit to my back and walking it halfway up a mountain. I don’t care if we are under four tenths.”

  “Don’t wait underwater,” Filip said.

  Mose scowled. “What’s that mean?”

  Filip shook his head and left it at that.

  Over the next few hours, the town slowed to a halt. The teams that had been focused on taking the structures apart paused. The piles of supplies stopped getting bigger. Conversations were quiet and tense, people stood with their heads close together. The expectation of action, of business, of having the hours filled to the top with things that needed to be done and done fast gave way to a half-nauseating torpor. Outside the town, the maintenance crew shouted a little too much and laughed a little too loud.

  The afternoon was slipping into early evening when Leward and the others came back. Filip watched from a distance, the same as everybody else, as Evelyn Albert and Nami Veh headed north past the wall. The tightness in Filip’s chest made him feel like he was a child again, waiting for something bad to happen. He checked the power feed to the magnetic bolt thrower on top of the fabrication lab. It gave him something to do, and he couldn’t bring himself to stay still.

  He wasn’t there when Leward and Jandro faced off, but he heard about it. Leward had shouted himself red in the face about how Jandro was defying the will of the town and breaking the plan. They’d lost a day because of him, and the carts had better be cleaned and ready to start the evacuation in the morning. According to Kofi, Jandro had listened and been calm while Leward poked him in the chest and yelled in his face. Then he’d said that Leward’s plan was a bad plan, and that Jandro wasn’t going to let the town do something that could get them all killed just to save Leward’s feelings. Then he’d tousled the science lead’s hair and walked away. Just like that. Like a big brother messing with his little sibling.

  “You should have seen it,” Kofi said, awe in his voice. “You should have been there.”

  “No,” Filip said. His stomach felt like someone had punched it. “I’m fine here.”

  They were sitting on a bench with legs made from spools of optical wire and a seat of a local tree analog with veins of green and blue lacing through pale woodlike flesh. Filip, Kofi, and Mose. With their backs against the medical center wall, they could see the plaza. The dark stain had almost vanished, and Filip wondered idly what had happened to the blood. Around the town, other little groups were huddled together like they were. The uneasy sense of conflict was like smoke in the wind, an invisible maybe-threat that everyone felt and no one could see.

  “Leward’s an asshole,” Mose said.

  “Is,” Kofi agreed. “But he’s the boss asshole. Or used to be, I guess. Now, I don’t know.”

  Filip knew how this would have gone before. There would have been a message sent out at the speed of light, tightbeam lasers hitting relays one after another out to the ring gate and back to an administrator at Emerling-Voss, then a conversation with the union rep, then authorization for the company to sanction Jandro and his team. Loss of pay. Loss of union benefits. A berth back out, maybe. Maybe on the Rhymer. Maybe on one like her. Part of Filip was still expecting it to play out that way. It wouldn’t, though. Leward had made a plan, had gotten people to agree, and he’d failed. There was no corporation or union behind him. There was no process now. Just power.

  “You’re not eating,” Mose said, and Filip realized the man had still been talking to him.

  “Not that hungry.”

  “This is crap,” Mose said, lifting his bowl. “Did we run out of sauce?”

  “Yeah,” Kofi said. “Plain is what we get from now on. Barrett over in the chemistry group is looking at what we can harvest from the local organisms that won’t taste like shit or kill us. We’ll have something in a few weeks, probably.”

  “I’m not eating alien shit,” Mose said. “Are you crazy? None of this stuff’s made with the same chemistry we are.”

  “There’s some overlap. And salt’s salt, no matter where you go. I’m just hoping we can find something that tastes like pepper. Or cumin.”

  “We’ll get resupplied from Alpha when the radio comes back up,” Mose said. “I can eat shit until then.”

  “If there’s still an Alpha,” Kofi said. “They’ve been down for a long time. And if they didn’t eat all their stuff while we were eating ours. Not like they’re getting resupplied.” He lifted his bowl like he was displaying an exhibit. “This shit is all the shit there is.”

  Mose’s cheeks darkened and his lips went thin. “You know what? Fuck you.”

  He stood up, shoulders high around his neck, and stalked off muttering. Kofi watched him leave with surprise in his eyes. “What’s with him?”

  “All of it, I guess,” Filip said. “Our ship. Our team in Alpha. The gate. It’s a lot, you know.”

  Kofi nodded. “I forget how new you two are around here. Beta was just supposed to be a stop for you.”

  “It was.”

  Kofi took another scoop of the yeast protein in his bowl and nodded toward Filip. “You should eat. It’s not good, but none of this gets better by starving.”

  Filip made a scoop of his first and middle fingers. The mush was bland and viscous. His gut was too tight, but he swallowed it anyway, pleased not to gag. “What do you remember?”

  “Que?”

  “About the thing before the gate went away.”

  Kofi nodded. There was only one thing before the gate went away. “I don’t know. It’s hard to bring it back now. I was here working on… I think the water feed. And then, I was other people. Or no one. And I was huge. What about you?”

  “It’s like a dream, you know? How when it’s over, you don’t remember? Like whatever it was doesn’t fit in your head. I was in this dream…”

  “And you woke up in a fucking nightmare.”

  Filip laughed, and Kofi laughed with him. “Fuck, you know? It’s just… Mose is weird. I get that. But I keep thinking the Rhymer’s coming. Or that Diecisiete’s finishing up in Alpha and coming here. Or I’ll go there. Or… Our next contract was in Tridevi system. Five-workgroup contract putting a power grid up for a city of half a million people. We were going to be hauling teams in and out for four years, and we were just doing the back
bone. I keep thinking about how that’ll be, like it was still going to happen. Half a million people. And now, there’s four hundred.”

  “All those others are still out there.”

  “Are they? I don’t know that. Maybe everyone else everywhere else got snuffed out like candles, and we’re the only ones left. How would we know?”

  “There’s Alpha.”

  “Maybe.”

  “There’s the survey team.”

  “You know what I mean.”

  “Yeah,” Kofi said.

  Across the plaza, Eric Tannhauser, a short blond man with skin so pale you could see the veins in his forehead, was talking to Mina Njoku. He was shaking his head and pointing an angry finger up in the tall woman’s face. Nami Veh appeared at his side, and Tannhauser turned his wrath, whatever it was, on her. Filip tried to take another bite of his food but couldn’t bring himself to do it.

  “You think they’ll call another vote?” he asked.

  Kofi shrugged. “If they do, I’ll bet you half a week’s wages that Jandro wins it. You should have seen him. Leward spitting like a wet cat, and Jandro letting it all wash past him like it was nothing. Anyway, doesn’t matter what the vote was. We’re staying here. Holding our ground.”

  “Maybe we won’t have to. Maybe those things already moved past us. Moved on.”

  “Or maybe they’re growing wings and getting ready to breathe fire. Who knows on this planet?” Kofi took a last scoop of his meal, then held the empty bowl up like an exhibit. “I am going to get mighty fucking tired of this.”

  Mose didn’t come back to the cots after dinner. Filip lay on his back, one arm behind his head like a pillow, and waited for sleep that wouldn’t come. Every time he started to drift, some tiny noise would pour adrenaline into his bloodstream and snap him awake again. He wasn’t even certain what he was anxious about. There were so many options.

  When he didn’t sleep, he thought about Jandro. He imagined the confrontation with Leward, building versions of it from Kofi’s description. Putting himself into it. The knot in his stomach kept getting tighter. Jandro smiling his wide, sharp threat of a smile. The man was a hero. He’d ridden one of those monsters. He’d saved the town, maybe, when he’d steered it into the plaza and within range of the slug thrower. He didn’t remember who’d said it, but when he’d been much younger, someone had told him that saving money for an economic collapse was a bad plan. Who knew what scrip would matter and what would just be a number in an account no one cared about? The things that would last were bullets and liquor, not cash. When the apocalypse came, bullets and liquor would be the only currency that mattered. They weren’t wrong. Beta could have used a lot more of both.

  But that half-remembered giver of wisdom wasn’t talking about Beta. They’d been talking about the bombardment of Earth. They’d been talking about the billions of people Filip had killed. Filip and his father. He wondered if Mose was out somewhere in the town right now, finding whoever had been smart enough to set up a distilling pot. They’d be the richest person in Beta soon, whoever did that. Until someone else made some bullets and took it from them.

  “Fuck,” he said to the darkness, and hauled himself up. His jumpsuit was filthy. He’d take it to the river tomorrow and let some of the dirt wash out of it, but tonight it was slick and sticky, and he felt dirty putting it on. Outside, the night sky was a riot of stars, and the astringent stink of the broken ground north of town was thicker. He didn’t know why that was, and probably no one else did either. He stuck his hands in his pockets, put his head down, and walked.

  If the monsters were coming tonight, they’d have started singing earlier. He’d be out north of the town with a torch in his hand. With Jandro and Leward and all the others. It was a fucked-up thing to feel nostalgic about. But at least they’d all still be on the same side.

  Maybe, they would be. Maybe now it was different. He wondered, if Jandro went to risk his life for the town again, whether Leward would try to stop him the way he had last time. It was harder to picture.

  The breeze was cool against his cheeks, and the light gravity wasn’t enough to make his joints ache. Here and there in the town, lights glowed, and the local insects drawn by them made little humming clouds. He heard a few voices, but they weren’t raised in anger. They were just people talking. Some of them laughing. A couple having some kind of sex, he was pretty sure. Human sounds. It was bigger than a ship, but not so much that he couldn’t get back some of the feeling of walking decks. He could almost imagine that Beta was an old colony ship, burning through the long darkness. He could make sense of it that way. The planet was just a weirdly designed ship, spinning through the same vacuum he’d grown up in. The people of the town were crew and passengers, their fates locked together by the ship’s recyclers and the thrust of the drive. The problems and dangers they faced might express differently. There weren’t great, strange, smiling monsters lumbering through space. But there were micro-meteors and the unforgiving vacuum always trying to get in.

  The mission was the same: Keep the food supply going. Keep the water drinkable. Don’t boil in your own waste heat. Survive. That was always the job. Survive.

  By the time he’d made it all the way back around, the knot in his stomach was looser. The fatigue of the day had come out from under the tension and fear. He could imagine sleep.

  Mose was on his cot, snoring gently. Filip stripped down to his undershirt in the darkness and crawled into his own. Mose muttered something once but settled back down to sleep without making sense. Filip’s body felt like it was growing heavier, the cot rising up from below like the ground had started a faster burn. Leward and Jandro, Nami Veh and smiling monsters were all still there, floating through his thoughts like echoes from another deck. He could ignore them. Let them go. When he closed his eyes, it felt comfortable to let them stay that way. Even the little pang of hunger wasn’t enough to keep him awake.

  Filip slept, and for the first time in more than a decade, he dreamed about his father.

  “We found them.”

  “Who?” Jackson said.

  “The big fuckers. The monsters,” Cameron said. He was practically hopping up and down with excitement.

  Jackson made eye contact with Filip in a way that meant Can you keep the work going while I deal with this? Filip wiped the sweat off his forehead and nodded in a way that meant he could.

  Jackson stood with a grunt. The food production unit they’d started taking apart yesterday, they were putting back together today. The racks that had been emptied of cylinders were almost half full now, and half of the remounts had power. It was slower putting together than it had been taking apart. Filip felt like that was true for a lot of things.

  “So what are you talking about?” Jackson asked.

  “Muhammed Klein? Fat Muhammed, not the one with the bent nose? He put chemical sensors on the survey drones. The reason we couldn’t track them before is that there’s another species that follows them. Little bird-things that eat the grubs and stuff that the big fuckers churn up. It’s like they’re sweeping away the tracks. Only the tracks are outgassing trace ammonia where they dig down to hibernate or whatever. So we found them.”

  Filip took one of the capacitors, a flat red box a little larger than his hand, and triple-checked the charge status before he fit it into the base of a cylinder. His attention was on Cameron. The big bastards’ tracks were giving off trace ammonia. Like a freshly scrubbed toilet. Filip realized they’d had an early-warning system all along.

  Jackson spat on the ground. “Where are they?”

  “Everywhere. North of here. South of here. All over the valley.”

  Filip and Jackson shared a look. “I can’t finish it all, but I can get it to a good stopping place,” Filip said. “I mean if you want to go see about working on the defenses.”

  “Better should,” Jackson said.

  “Yeah.”

  Jackson smoothed their hands on the fronts of their thighs like they were wiping the palms clean, then walked off with Cameron toward the science labs. Filip hoisted the next cylinder into place, steadying it with one hand while he fixed the bolts to hold it. It was a little unwieldy without another pair of hands to help, but it wasn’t bad. At a full g, it would have been impossible.