Chapter 13: Roustabouts 2nd Voyage
The Roustabout entered the solar system where Zulu Foxtrot 89 was situated. As they broke the outer system the signal intelligence team aboard the Roustabout began a sweep of all communications frequencies and known communications channels. It was the first search that the crew had to make to see if the system was inhabited or not. While the ship was in bound the crew began mapping the system.
As they crept in system trying to use the Elint platform’s full stealth capability they found that there were three habitable planets in the system; all within two Astronomical Units of the primary. They mapped several smaller planets that were on the fringes of the system; but were so cold that the mapping crew felt that even light from the primary would freeze solid on their surface. There was a gas giant several AUs out from the primary.
“Skipper,” one of the mapping crew spoke up as Captain Vaughn walked into the mission coordination center of the ship, “Good news!”
“Oh,” Captain Vaughn replied.
“No asteroids! Or rogue planetoids,” The chief replied.
“That’ll make everyone’s day.” Vaughn commented.
“Skipper,” the mission coordinator spoke up, “I would like to launch the surveyor flights to foxtrot.”
“What about the other two planets,” the captain asked.
“We’ve identified foxtrot as this one here,” the mission coordinator responded pointing to a dot in the holographic image, “We feel that that these two worlds here are not in our contract.” He pointed to the other two worlds, “We are certain that they are uninhabited. What we want to do is to check these two worlds out after we check on Foxtrot. They are not listed in the records as being owned by Miss Jill. At least we can’t find the records on who owns these worlds.”
“Let’s assume for the moment that Wilson Enterprises owns the entire system. Let’s check out foxtrot first then we’ll worry about the other two.” Vaughn stated, “Launch your surveyors.”
“Attention,” the mission coordinator called pressing the all stations call on his work station, “All hands to flight ops stations! Launch the surveyors. Prep the landing craft for departure.”
The Surveyor craft left the Roustabout and headed towards Foxtrot. They kept their stealth systems on. They didn’t know if there were Ebio people in the system or not. If there were they didn’t want them to know that the Roustabout and her team were there. Just in case they had to pull out. They approached the planet in a wide formation separated by several thousand miles. Surveyor double oh eight took the north pole of the planet, and double ought ten took the South Pole. They would orange peel the planet; just as they had on Cherokee. This time they were hoping that they didn’t find anyone on the planet.
It took several hours to survey the planet. The planet had four continents. They appeared to be mostly empty of any sign of human habitation. The middle one was the biggest of the four and had evidence of past habitation scattered over it. There was a large town or small city in the center of the continent at the confluence of two rivers. The town looked more or less intact but there was no sign of any one living in it. Many of the buildings looked intact; but some looked ravaged by time and the elements. The river that the two smaller rivers formed in the middle of the town flowed north towards the north coast of the continent. Along it were several towns and villages. At the delta of the river along the north coast was a small village. It had several docks. The crew of surveyor double oh eight were shocked to see several boats had been beached while others had been put up on blocks. To the east of the outpost was a spectacular home looking out over the eastern ocean. There was an atrium that appeared to be made of stained class. It was U shaped and in a position to watch the sun come up out of the ocean in the morning.
“That’s the planetary mangers place,” one of the AI spoke up, “What little data we have on this world shows that this building belonged to the planetary manager. I think they called that village Out Post 1.”
“There’s no one down here,” The surveyor commander injected. “I think it’s time to land the survey parties.”
“Roustabout, Surveyor double oh eight,” the commander called, “If zero ten concurs I think we can land the survey parties while we continue mapping.”
“Zero ten concurs,” zero ten’s commander called over the com.
“Roustabout copies,” Captain Vaughn replied. On his bridge, Captain Vaughn turned to his first officer, “I thought Kellogg said something about an automated care taker down there. We’ve made enough noise and such to scare up a response from the caretaker.”
“It could be down,” the first officer suggested.
“Mr. Kellogg said that the computer system was in the main town. So the landing mission is to land in the town and make contact with the computer center.” Captain Vaughn ordered.
“Yes sir,” the officer answered and went to talk to flight operations.
The team landed at the main company complex at the confluence of two rivers. It was strange. They made a standard landing and off loaded a couple of hover jeeps and drove through the abandoned town.
“It looks like any abandoned town,” One of the Mounty’s commented. He was looking at the buildings. Some of them had broken windows, some had roof damage. The doors were wide open. They passed a parking lot with trucks and heavy equipment parked in neat orderly rows as if they were waiting for their drivers to come back. The town was not in bad shape over all. It looked without a doubt that the people who had lived there had just picked up and left. It appeared the last one who left the world turned the lights off and shut the door. At length they finally found the building they were hunting. Its door was unlocked. They entered the building. Here too the building was clean. There was no paper or debris in the building, just some animal droppings and a musty smell of a building being closed to long. Only the office furniture was left and it showed that small animals had been nesting in the chairs and desks. Some, who panicky fled to the shadows when the explorers entered? The team carefully swept through the building, praying that it was abandoned. They found the building deserted like the town.
They found the computer center and the computer that ran the planet’s infrastructure. It was off and the survey team leader decided to leave it off as they didn’t want to deal with the problems that turning it on might cause. As they left the building, the Mounty criminalist with them commented, “I’ll be happy when we can interrogate that computer. It might have information about what happened here and why the company abandoned it.”
“Well we aren’t turning it on until we have a new AI to run it,” The ground leader replied, “that computer could be a Pandora’s box!”
“Ground Leader, this is Surveyor 008 priority traffic,” The mission commander on the surveyor flight called interrupting them.
“Go with your priority,” The ground leader called back as he sat down in his jeep. He had escaped from a facility like this one, years ago. The memories were coming back. Not all of them good. He was a little uncomfortable being on this world and in this town.
“Ground Leader, radar mapping indicates that there may be a mass grave in a meadow 2 klicks north of town.” The surveyor’s mission commander called, “We would like you to dispatch a field team to check it out.”
“On it,” the ground leader replied nodding to his driver to take him to the site.
When they got there, they found a large meadow, maybe a quarter of a mile on a side. It looked anything but a mass grave. The meadow was covered with flowers from one end to another. The escaped bioman did not want to disturb the site at all.
“Alex,” he nudged the driver of the jeep, “Turn your sensor pod on. I want you to drive straight through the meadow.”
They drove through the meadow with the ground mapping sensors running. Not more than five feet into the meadow they found the first outline of a body. Then they began to find pieces of bodies. The sensor technology allowed them to determine th
at there were ten thousand bodies buried in the meadow. The bioman was heart sick. Here were ten thousand of his fellow biopeople who had been violently put down, and he couldn’t do anything about it. They couldn’t prove who did it, let alone if Ebio was responsible.
“Ground leader to all personnel,” The ground leader called over the all call channel, “From now on the meadow just outside of town is off limits. I want a guard on it.”
“Aye-aye skipper,” someone called.
Over the period of a few days, as they continued to explore using the town as a base a low brick wall began to be built at the meadow. It was spontaneous no one claimed to be the architect who designed it. The bricks came from a pile near a building that had been abandoned during its construction. People not on duty would wander over and spend several hours working on it. It wasn’t a very good wall nor very professional, but it would last almost forever. There were ten thousand bricks in the wall. The wall was five feet high and a thousand feet long. The low height allowed people to see the meadow but prevented them from entering the meadow itself. The bricks held the serial number, and where known, the name of all the persons who were believed to have been executed in the meadow. Unbelievable as it was, they had found a list of the people the company had put down in what appeared to be the planet’s security office. There were several hundred on it who were marked off with the notation missing. Everyone wondered where they were. Over the years it became a matter of honor for biopeople to make a pilgrimage to this wall when they were first on world to pay homage to the biopeople so honored by the new settlers on what would become known simply as Home.
The survey and pioneer parties found no other mass graves. The small towns abandoned by Ebio were in near perfect order. They found the barracks where the clones had been housed ready to be inhabited. The ground leader was tempted to destroy them; but he had to remember he was the agent of Jill Wilson and he couldn’t just order the destruction of her property.
A couple of days later Captain Vaughn came down to meet with the survey parties. They met at the small abandoned space port. It had five large landing craft pads, a small control tower and two hangars. They sat at a small table outside one of the hangers. Some stood around where the senior officers were meeting including a shy historian who was quietly observing everything and had, when she could, had interviewed many of the team members. She stood with her back against the hangar as the captain spoke with his officers.
“Well it is deserted,” the captain replied, “we’ve found nothing on the ground that indicates the planet has any population.”
“That is if you don’t count the large herds of cattle and sheep we’re finding,” someone said.
“But there is no sign of human life on the planet,” Vaughn asked.
“Yes sir,” The ground leader spoke up, “We have found no sign of recent human habitation of the planet.”
“So you all feel that there is no reason not to let our people occupy this world?” the captain asked.
“Captain,” the historian spoke up, “I think I can speak for all of us. But there is no reason for the people of Trena not to come and live on this world and to make our new homes upon it.”
There was a series of nods as a few people voiced their agreement with the historian’s statement.
“All of you are aware then that the other part of the contract I have with Miss Wilson is to make this planet ready for our people to occupy. I now activate that portion of our contract. Ladies and Gentlemen, please make our new home ready for our families to find refuge on.”
“So the Diaspora begins,” the historian commented as the meeting broke up.
“Diaspora,” one of the ground team members asked.
“This isn’t the first time in any of our peoples’ history that some of us left a bad situation to a better one.” Violet replied, “About the fourth century before Empire the people of an island nation known as Ireland, began leaving their small island during a famine to the old United States. They came to a small island known as Ellis, where they were processed and allowed entry into the country. But that is only one example. The thonians had their own diaspora as did we again once we discovered star travel.”
“So this is our Ellis,” the man asked.
“In a manner of speaking,” Violet replied.
As the pioneer parties began arriving from orbit a sign at the landing pad welcomed them to Home and Ellis as they stepped off the landing craft. Soon everyone was calling the Ebio planet Home.
As the pioneer parties spread out working to see what it was going to take to make the planet ready for the arrival of a thirty million people, one of the teams walked into a warehouse near the clone barracks. They found man sized rolls of fabric. They were made of gray canvas. The bioman with them shook his head. Before he had left the company he had worn a shapeless gray smock or jump suit made of this material. He shuddered.
His wife was standing with him. He had told her of the company and what he had suffered at their hands and that of his owners before he had escaped. She saw him shudder and wondered if this had been a good idea for the both of them to be on the exploration mission. She asked. “Are you okay?”
“Oh yeah,” the young bioman replied. He pointed to the rolls of fabric, “I was never so happy not to have to wear that shit again!”
“Why didn’t they take this stuff with them,” Another team member asked, “This is just wasteful!”
“Not to them,” an older bioman spoke up, “When they abandoned Home they thought they could take it to their new world. Or thought they could give it to another world. Obviously they couldn’t so they left it here thinking they would come back for it or just forgot about it.”
“But the expense of it!” the man said.
“Oh it didn’t cost them much,” The older bioman exclaimed, “Eats for thirty clones, that was all. The biopeople would sleep in the barracks we found. Hell the raw materials cost them more than we did! If we got sick and it was something serious they would just put us down! No fuss, no muss they just put us to sleep like any sick or injured animal. That is what they thought of us a beast of burden.”
She looked at both her husband and the bioman who had spoken. It was now her turn to shudder. She knew that her husband’s life before escaping had been bad but she hadn’t realized how brutal it had been.
“You know,” her husband commented pointing to the rolls of fabric, “what would be poetic justice if we could turn this into something we could use for our people it isn’t much but…”
“March,” one of the bioman asked, “didn’t they sometimes make tents and such for company functions out of these places?”
“Yes they did,” March said turning to his wife, “Madeline we need to find the control center. Let’s hope the computer is a stand alone!”
“Yes we don’t have a new AI for the planetary system yet,” Madeline replied.
They found the control center and soon found a way to turn the computer on and to begin to getting the plant up and running. Within a couple of days the plant was producing several different types of tents and awnings. By the end of the week there were nearly a thousand tents and dinning flys that could house a family of four quite easily.
As the Roustabout flew back to Trena the pioneer parties began to spread out and began to get the planet ready for occupation. With the exception of the small towns and villages scattered throughout the continent, (those were few and far between,) there was no place to put millions of people when they came to Home. No one wanted to see the planet’s natural resources plundered and raped to house over thirty million people. Everyone was concerned about the impact that tjhirty million people would have on Home.
Book 7: The Evacuation Begins
Every Last Mother's Child Page 79