The Long Mars

43

Twenty-four hours after the Armstrong and Cernan took up station over Happy Landings, Captain Maggie Kauffman summoned Ed Cutler, Captain of the Cernan, over to her sea cabin aboard the Armstrong. “We need to discuss your note,” had been her only order.

Then, on second thoughts, she asked Joe Mackenzie to join them.

Before the officers arrived, Shi-mi rubbed up against her leg. “Why Mac?”

“Because I feel I need a voice of sanity.”

“I’m a voice of sanity.”

“Yeah, right. Just keep out of the way.”

“Oh, I always keep out of Mac’s way…”

Mac arrived first, in his green medical scrubs, straight from work, crumpled, informal. “What a circus this all is,” he said as he threw himself into a seat. “That idiot Cutler.”

“I agree, a circus. But it’s what we have to deal with. Want a drink?”

Before he could reply, in walked Captain Edward Cutler, carrying a small briefcase. He was in full uniform, and insisted on standing to attention and saluting.

Mac grinned sourly. “About that drink, Captain. You got any grain alcohol and rainwater? That’s your poison, isn’t it, Ed? Got to think about the purity of your bodily fluids.”

Cutler frowned. “I have literally no idea what you’re talking about, Doctor.”

Maggie glared at Mac. “I do. Not the time for old movie jokes, Mac. At ease, for Christ’s sake, Ed. Sit down. Just tell me again what you put in your note.” A handwritten memo delivered to Maggie personally by Cutler’s XO, Adkins, evidently a trusted officer.

“Well, you read it, Captain—”

“You really have a tactical nuke aboard the Cernan?”

Mac gaped. “What the hell are we talking about here?”

“We’re talking about a nuclear weapon, Doctor. Which I didn’t even know we carried until we got here. Which, it seems, we also carried all the way to Douglas Black’s new Shangri-La and back again, entirely without my knowledge. Which Ed Cutler knew we had all along…”

“It has about the firepower of a Hiroshima.” Cutler pushed the briefcase across the desk to her; she didn’t open it. “The enabling mechanism is in the case, along with a copy of my orders. It’s self-explanatory. You’ll need one other officer to authorize its use, but that’s your choice, doesn’t have to be me.”

“Oh, it’s nice to know I have some leeway.”

“I’m just the delivery system, if you will.” He was clearly glowing with self-righteousness, and the sheer pleasure of fulfilling his covert orders.

Mac said, “Let me make sure I got this clear. We carried this damn bomb—”

“And a maintenance facility for it.”

“It gets better. All the way to Earth Quarter Billion and back?”

“Yes. It wasn’t specifically loaded for this mission, to be brought to this place. To Happy Landings.” He said the silly name as if it were heretical. “It was meant to provide you with an option, Captain. In case of a certain kind of threat.”

“What the hell kind of threat demands a nuke?” Mac growled.

“An existential threat. A threat to the whole human species. The mission planners had no clear idea what that might prove to be, Captain. They had no idea what was out there in the Long Earth in the first place—what threats we might encounter, what trouble we might stir up.”

Maggie said, “I can imagine a lot of threats against which a nuke would be no use at all.”

“True. As I said, Captain, the intention of the orders was only to give you an option, and my task was to ensure that option was in place when you needed it.”

“In your judgement.”

“In my judgement, yes. The choice was always yours, however. To use it or not. Admiral Davidson was always clear that a twain Captain has a great deal of autonomy, being so far out of contact with the chain of command, was he not? So it is with this.”

He was right about that, of course. Before Step Day the armed forces, like everybody else, had got used to a wired-up world where you could speak to anybody, anywhere, with a delay of only fractions of a second. But when the great dispersal across the Long Earth had come, all that had broken down. Maggie in the remote High Meggers had been as out of touch with USLONGCOM as Captain Cook had been with the Admiralty in London, when he stopped at Hawaii. And old models of distributed command dating from the eighteenth or nineteenth centuries had had to be dusted off. Yes, Maggie had a vast amount of autonomy out in the field; she’d been trained to face decisions like these.

She said, “But I never anticipated facing this situation, Ed, you and your damn nuke.”

Mac growled, “And what’s the overwhelming threat that requires us to consider this option? A bunch of smart-ass kids?”

“Who broke out of the high-grade military facility they were confined in, Doctor.” Cutler shook his head. “Who took down a USN ship. Who are a new kind of being walking among us, of unknown capability. They are clearly a ‘potentially existential threat’ within the meaning of my orders. And this place, Happy Landings, is some kind of locus, a source. A nest, if you like. We were sent here—”

Mac snapped, “To study the place! To speak to the people! We’ve gondolas stuffed with ethnologists, anthropologists, geneticists, linguists, to achieve this. Those were our orders.”

“All that was just cover,” Cutler said dismissively.

“Hmm,” Maggie replied. “And in your note you say that you’ve already implanted the nuke. Even before telling me about its existence.”

“Again, orders, Captain Kauffman.” He tapped the briefcase. “Now all you have to do is make your decision. From this unit you can disable the weapon, we can retrieve it, take it away. Or—”

“OK, Ed, you’ve said your piece. Get out of here.”

He stood up, smug, smooth, neatly groomed. “I’ve fulfilled my own orders. But if you need any more input from me—”

“I won’t.”

When he’d gone at last, she reached under the desk. “Now I need that drink. Fetch the glasses, Mac. Christ. As if I didn’t have enough to deal with concerning the fall-out from the mission.”

Mac just nodded sympathetically. Their long journey had left a loose end. On the way back they’d been able to retrieve the party Maggie had left to study the crab civilization of Earth West 17,297,031. But earlier, at the moon-Earth, West 247,830,855, there’d been no trace of the equivalent science party. Given the state of the ships’ supplies it hadn’t been possible to stay long to investigate, and Maggie was reluctant to strand anybody else, any search party, given the uncertainty about when if ever a new mission might be sent out here. So they’d come home, leaving behind supplies, beacons, messages—Stepper boxes—in case the missing crew found their way back to the rendezvous point. Maggie hated to lose people. On her return she’d thrown herself into the work of contacting the families, before Davidson had called her in for a fresh assignment, and sent her out once more—to this.

And now, here she was sitting on a nuclear weapon like an unhappy hen.

“That guy Cutler,” she grumbled as she poured Mac his whisky. “Never known a guy who fit his role in life so well.”

Mac grunted. “And wouldn’t fit anywhere else. Whereas you are a bit more amorphous. Which is why he reports to you, Maggie, and not the other way around. Our senior commanders aren’t entirely idiots, not all of them.”

“A ringing endorsement. But, you know, there was scuttlebutt about Cutler and his role in the mission even before we left the Datum in the first place. I remember Nathan Boss coming to me with below-decks rumours about Cutler having some kind of special assignment from Davidson.”

But Mac was dismissive. “So what? Look, Ed Cutler doesn’t matter any more. He’s done his job. All that matters is how you use that switch on the desk before you.”

“I feel like smashing the thing, Mac. That’s the truth. I’m being asked to consider, not just the fate of these few ‘Next’, whatever the hell they are, but everybody else in this community too. This is a nuclear weapon we’re talking about. There’ll be collateral damage—”

“But you can’t just push this choice away.”

“No, I can’t. I need to take this seriously.”

“A career-defining moment?”

“More than that, Mac. Life-defining. Whatever I decide I’m going to have to live with it for the rest of my days.” She massaged her temples. “One thing’s for sure. Sitting in here staring into my own conscience won’t be enough. I need to open this out. Take some advice.”

“Hold a hearing,” Mac said.

“Hmm?”

“Get a couple of advocates. One to argue each position, to nuke or not to nuke. They don’t have to be proponents of the position they defend. Just logical about it.”

“That’s not a bad idea.” She looked him in the eye. “Guess what? You just volunteered.”

He sipped the single malt. “I thought that might happen. It’ll be a pleasure.”

“I’m afraid it won’t be.”

“Come again?”

“I can’t call on some swivel-eyed bigot to argue the case for a nuke. Ed Cutler, for instance? I need somebody sane. You, Mac.”

“Hold on a minute. You need me to argue for the nuking?”

“You just said the advocates don’t have to be proponents of their cases, personally—”

“I’m a doctor, for Christ’s sake. How can I possibly argue for mass slaughter?”

“By setting your conscience aside, and appealing to logic. Just as you said. You’re a doctor but you’re also a military man. Look at it this way, Mac. If the logic you come up with is compelling, then the argument will have been won.”

“You spoke about needing to live with this action for the rest of your life, one way or another. If I was to win the argument—I couldn’t forgive myself. Not even a priest could pardon that.”

“I appreciate what this will cost you, Mac. Will you help me?”

“Is it an order?”

“Of course not.”

“The hell with it. The hell with you.” He drained his glass, and stood up. “When?”

She considered. “The nuke is concealed, but it won’t stay that way. Twenty-four hours, Mac. Back here.”

“Christ, Christ.” He made for the door. “Who will you get to argue the case against?”

“I don’t know. I need to think about it.”

“Christ.” He slammed the door on the way out.

Maggie sat back, sighed, considered another whisky, decided against it.

Shi-mi slid out of wherever she’d been hiding and leapt on to the desk. She sniffed the briefcase, electronic eyes gleaming with suspicion. “I did tell you that Cutler was aboard as a weapon, Captain,” she said.

“Yes, yes.”

“My intuition was good. But even I didn’t imagine it would be quite so literally true as this.”

“OK, smartass. The question is, how we go forward from here.”

“You have a choice to make,” Shi-mi said. “This idea of a hearing is a good one. But as Mac asked, who should argue to save the Next?”

“One of them, I guess.”

“No. It can’t be one of the Next.”

“Why not?”

“Consider the logic,” Shi-mi said. “The whole point of the case against them is that these Next are not human. They’re a new species. That’s precisely why they’re a threat to humanity. As a consequence this is a human decision to make. It can’t be made, even in part, by the Next themselves. You need a human to argue their case for survival, a case based on the interests of mankind, not the interests of the Next. Of course that advocate can gather evidence from whoever he wants.”

“Why do you say ‘he’? Who are you thinking of?”

“Joshua Valienté.”

“The super-stepper guy? You know him?”

“He’s an old friend.”

“Why aren’t I surprised? And he’s here? How would you know that?… Ah, the hell with it. Of course you’d know. Can you find him, ask him to come in?”

“Leave it to me.” The cat jumped down from the desk.