“You can stay here, if you need to,” Harold added, and if there’d been reluctance before, this invitation was practically pulling teeth. “We don’t exactly have a hotel in town anymore. Not much call for it.”
“We’ll stay on our ship,” Deke volunteered for us.
“And what do you want us to tell people about who you are and why you’re here?” Grace asked. “That ship being here is going to cause a stir, you know.”
“Tell them the truth,” I said, earning another dirty look from Deke. “Tell them we’re here from the Provisional Commonwealth Emergency Council to assess the situation out here and see what we can do to help.”
“Seriously?” Deke said, goggling at me.
“The best lies are closest to the truth.” I shrugged. “Besides, what else could we be? There’re people here who know Vicky and me, and they won’t buy that we’re the crew on a tramp freighter. This gives us an excuse to ask questions.”
“And what if these Confluence people decide they don’t like the new government nosing around?”
“Hey,” I told him, grinning, “we’re just three people in a little cutter. Totally harmless, right?”
Deke sighed.
“Yeah… and I guess if we’re going to keep looking harmless, we’d better go make a call and get our friends upstairs to find a good place to hide.”
I might have made a mistake.
I didn’t realize it until the next morning, when a loud banging on the compartment hatch brought me awake with my gun in my hand. It took me a full second before I realized where I was, that the tiny, uncomfortable bunk was on board Deke Conner’s ship. Though I didn’t realize I’d grabbed my pistol until Vicky’s hand closed around mine, pushing the weapon down.
“What is it?” I snapped, touching the control for the overhead lights. Our clothes hung from hooks set into the bulkhead, and I took a moment to shove my service pistol into its holster before I stood.
“We got a welcoming committee,” Deke’s voice came through the hatch, muted and distant. “And since I wasn’t the one who decided to tell everyone the truth, I won’t be the one who goes outside to talk to them. Capiche?”
I yawned, checked the time via my headcomp, and yawned wider. We’d managed about five hours of sleep, which would have been a lavish, nearly decadent amount back in the war, but I’d gotten spoiled with straight eights during our stint on the Orion.
“Yeah, give us a second,” I told him.
“Us?” Vicky repeated, eyeing me sleepily. “I wasn’t the one who decided to tell the truth either.”
I tossed her clothes at her, and she stuck out her tongue but started pulling them on anyway. Wishing I had time for a shower, I grabbed a fresher strip from the drawer beside the bed and let it melt in my mouth to kill the bacteria and clean my teeth while I dressed. Peaceful diplomatic mission or not, I buckled on my gun. The last time I’d been on this world, I’d wound up in a fight for my life, and those who didn’t learn from history were doomed to repeat it.
Deke waited in the utility bay, arms folded, glaring at us as if this was his mission and we’d intruded on it. I didn’t bother looking at the rear-facing camera feed before I imitated Deke’s earlier showing-off and had Jim open the belly ramp remotely. Watching the look of disbelief on his face was nearly worth the missed sleep.
“I’m not much of a talker before I’ve had my coffee,” Vicky mumbled beside me.
“Don’t I know it,” I agreed. She still glared at me as we stepped down and into the group of townsfolk gathered in the shadow of the Flying Dutchman II.
Most of them I couldn’t put a name to after all this time, but I recognized the faces, and if they wouldn’t have remembered Vicky and me on their own, the Kims would have made sure to tell them. Grace and Harold stood off to the side, inconspicuous, as if they too were merely concerned citizens who had only found out about all this at the same time as everyone else.
“Good morning,” I said, pitching my voice to carry across the gathering of over a hundred people.
It was a smallish crowd, probably because the farmers hadn’t gotten in from their homesteads and a lot of others would just be too busy running their businesses and trying to stay alive, but that wouldn’t last. If these people didn’t like what we had to say, the others would come and then we’d be forced to either take off and try again in Sophia or button up and hope no one broke out the heavy artillery.
“Vicky? Cam? Is that really you?”
The man who spoke was a fireplug, shorter than Vicky but broad across the chest in a way that had only been accentuated by two decades of farm work since the war. We hadn’t been close friends back when, but in a place this small, everyone knew everyone else, and my main problem was trying to remember his name.
“It’s really us, Bob,” Vicky told him, rescuing me when Jim couldn’t.
I only have access to what was in your official records, meatbag, Jim shot back.
If you’re going to get pissed off at my unspoken thoughts, I warned him, you should probably stop spying on them.
“Grace and Harold told us you represent some new government?” Bob said, apparently having appointed himself the spokesman for the community. I wasn’t sure if the position was official or if he’d just taken it on himself, but it made addressing the crowd easier, and I stepped down the ramp, face to face—well, honestly, more like nose to forehead—with the sawed-off Marine vet.
“We’ve been commissioned into the Marine Corps by the Commonwealth Provisional government,” I confirmed. “They sent us out to the colonies in Trans-Tahni space to assess your condition and see if you need help.” That caused a rumble of cross-chatter, and I raised a hand to settle it down. “Look,” I said, talking over Bob’s head at the audience, “things are just starting to get organized. The new capital is in Amity on the planet Demeter, and they’re still bringing in refugees who couldn’t survive on their own worlds, still trying to set up some kind of system of trade. But they want to find out who’s in desperate need of help, which is why we’re here.”
Well, it was why I wished we were here. I hated lying to them, but I would have hated getting into a fight with them more… or dragging them into our fight.
“Where were you six months ago?” someone yelled from the back. I couldn’t tell who, except that the voice was female. A chorus of grumbles joined her, and I put on my best quarterdeck bellow, as Top always put it, to drown them out.
“Six months ago, there was a concerted attack on Demeter by elements from the Pirate Worlds, and there were barely enough people left after the Psi War to beat it back.” Or so I’d been told by Munroe, since I’d been in stasis between star systems at the time. “I know things have been tight here, but they’ve been pretty bad everywhere, and the important thing is, the new government wants to help now that it can.”
“We’re here,” Vicky put in, her voice carrying even farther than mine, the pitch higher, “to find out what you need, what we can do. To find out if you’re interested in being part of the new government. So please, you can talk to us here or we can arrange something in town, maybe a meeting?”
“We appreciate you coming here,” Bob broke in, and his words, like ours, were intended for the audience at large, not simply the person he stood facing, “but we don’t need help from any half-assed new government. All it’ll mean is they’ll give us crumbs now and later on, once they get a real, organized military, they’ll come back here and collect taxes from us, recruit our kids for cannon fodder, and mine our resources without giving us a damn thing in return, just like the Corporate Council used to do.”
Ouch. Not bad points at all, and not ones I could easily refute, particularly since I’d had those same concerns myself.
“Do you think you guys on your own can maintain a technological society here for your kids?” Vicky asked him. “For your grandkids? You know what a razor-thin edge that kind of thing runs on out here. Look how fast the Commonwealth fell after the central government on Earth collapsed. What would you do if your fusion reactor went down and you couldn’t repair it?”
“The Confluence will take care of us!”