The Mosdva had slowed to observe the progress of the humans, allowing them to catch up.
“You do not fly as fast as your ship, Captain Joshua Calvert,” Quantook-LOU said.
“Our species lives on planets. We’re accustomed to high-gravity environments.”
“We know of planets. The Mosdva have many stories of Mastrit-PJ’s worlds before the expansion devoured them all. But there are no pictures on file in Tojolt-HI, not after such a time. They are as legend, now.”
“I have many pictures of planets in my ship. I would welcome exchanging them for any pictures you do have of Mastrit-PJ’s history.”
“A good first exchange. We are fortunate to have made contact with you, Captain Joshua Calvert.”
Joshua had been hanging on to a frond tip as he waited for the serjeant to catch up; now he realized the plant was wriggling slightly. There certainly wasn’t enough of a breeze to do that.
“The fronds stir the air for us,” Quantook-LOU explained when he mentioned it. All plants on Tojolt-HI flexed gently; that was why they’d originally been selected, and careful breeding had enhanced the trait. Air had to be moved in freefall, or stagnant pockets of gas would build up, unpleasant and potentially lethal for animals and plants alike. The Mosdva still had mechanical fans and ducts, but they were very much secondary systems.
“Not quite up to Edenist levels,” Sarha said.
“They’re edging towards biological solutions,” Ruben replied. “Leaving the mechanical behind.”
“You can’t use wholly biological systems here, not in this environment, it’s too hostile.”
“And there is precious little sign of genetic engineering techniques being employed,” Samuel said. “Quantook-LOU told us the plants were bred. Cross-pollination is almost a lost art in human society, Adamist and Edenist alike. We shall have to be more careful here than we originally expected, both in what we say and what we exchange with them. This society is static, and it survives perfectly by being so. To introduce change, even in the form of concepts, could be disastrous to it.”
“Or save it,” Sarha said.
“From what? We are the only conceivable threat it faces.”
They progressed further along the tube, gradually encountering more Mosdva as they went. All of the xenocs stopped to watch as the humans went past, slow and clumsy in comparison to their entourage. Mosdva children flashed about through the fronds, incredibly agile. They burrowed deep below the tips in smooth dives and popped out everywhere, making sure they got a look at the humans from all angles. Like the adults, they wore torso harnesses that contained a multitude of electronic modules—but none of them had cybernetic implants.
Looking down past his gauntlets, Joshua could see straight through the corkscrew fronds. They weren’t as dense as he’d first thought—a plantation rather than a jungle—which allowed him to piece together how the tube was constructed. There was an outer casing, the ribbed section with glass on the sunside, and an opaque composite or metal on the darkside. Lining that on the inside was a tightly packed spiral of transparent piping, studded with small copper-coloured annular apertures from which the plants grew. Their roots were visible inside the pipe, just. The spiral was filled with an opaque and somewhat glutinous fluid which cut down the sun’s intense red glare. It was also flecked with dark granules and a swirl of tiny bubbles, which showed him how fast it was being pumped along.
The spirals contained either water or hydrocarbon compounds, Quantook-LOU said when Joshua asked what it was; its circulation formed the basis for their whole recycling philosophy. Heat from the red giant was swiftly carried round to the darkside, where it was disposed of via the thermal exchange mechanisms, generating electricity in the process. A range of algal species flourished inside the various fluid types, absorbing Mosdva faecal waste and transforming it into nutrients for the plants, which in turn maintained the atmosphere. The thickness of the spiral pipe (none under two and a half metres in diameter) meant the fluid bulk also acted as an excellent protection from stellar radiation.
They were shown web tubes which specialised in high-yield arable plants. Living tubes, which were sectioned off by thin sheets of silvery-white fabric. Industrial tubes, whose manufacturing machinery was strung out along the axis, just above the plant tips. (“Condensation must be hell for them,” Oski said at that.) Huge public tubes thronging with Mosdva.
After two hours, they were in a section dedicated to what the translator program termed the Anthi-CL dominion’s administrative class . Joshua began to suspect a society structured along strictly aristocratic hierarchy lines. The vegetation was lusher here, the technology less obtrusive. Personal tubes radiated away from the main branches, far more substantial than the living sections they’d seen earlier and with a lower population density. Two thirds of their entourage dropped away once they entered. Those that were left were heavily augmented with cybernetic prosthetics. No overt weapons, but the humans agreed they were police/military.
Quantook-LOU stopped in a large bubble of transparent material, the junction for three small tubes. The surface was still a spiral of pipe dotted with chunks of hardware, but there were no plants; and apart from the bubbles, the fluid was almost clear. It gave a peerless view out over both darkside and sunside.
“My personal space,” Quantook-LOU said.
Joshua could just make out the misty smears of the nebula through the curving walls. Sharp-edged dissipater cones formed a strange, close horizon. Sunside was a simple uniform mantle of red light. “It is matched with everything else we have seen here,” he said.
“What of your world, Captain Joshua Calvert? Does it have sights to match this?”
The exchange of history began. Under the Mosdva’s urging, Joshua, Samuel, and Oski started off describing continents and oceans (concepts which had to be clearly defined for the Mosdva—they’d even lost the words for them in their language), and moved on to explain how humans had emerged from Africa to spread across Earth after the Ice Age glaciers retreated. How a technoindustrial society had developed. The rampant pollution which had altered the planetary ecology for the worse, creating an era where ships flew between the stars to found new colonies. How the Confederation now embraced hundreds of star systems, and traders prospered among them. A colourful generalised summary, devoid of any real detail and timescale.
In return, the Mosdva told them of Mastrit-PJ’s long story; how neither they nor the Tyrathca were the original sentient species on the one planet which supported biological life. The Ridbat were the first, with a society that had flourished over a million years ago. Little was known of them now, Quantook-LOU said, other than whispers that trickled from generation to generation becoming wilder with each telling. They were Mastrit-PJ’s true monsters, ravenous beasts with evil minds. Wars had been constant while they were alive, two of which escalated into the exchange of nuclear weapons on the planetary surface. Their civilization was knocked back from an advanced technological culture to primitive barbarian on at least three separate occasions. It wasn’t known if they ever had spaceflight; there was no evidence of off-planet activity. The fourth and last Ridbat industrial era was brought to an end by thermonuclear conflict, concurrent with the release of biological weapons which wiped them out along with seventy per cent of the planet’s animal life.
The Mosdva had risen to a rudimentary state of intelligence while the Ridbat ruled the planet. That made them useful slave creatures, who were bred for dexterity and strength and passivity while any traits such as curiosity or stubbornness were ruthlessly culled. By the time the Ridbat exterminated themselves, the Mosdva had become fully sentient. Although their population was severely reduced by the diseases raging across the land, they did at least survive as a species.
With the Ridbat gone, Mosdva evolution reverted to more traditional lines—as normal as life could become on such a ruined planet. Their own civilization was extremely slow to emerge as a coherent whole. Mastrit-PJ, with its exhausted mineral r
esources, devastated biosphere, and extensive radioactive deadlands, was not an environment conducive to sophisticated or high-technology-based cultures, and the cautious Mosdva psychology fitted this well. They became nomadic during the period of nuclear winter which followed the demise of the Ridbat, roaming between habitable areas. It was only after the glaciers withdrew, half a million years later, that the Mosdva began to advance again.
They achieved a modest level of industrialisation. Because there were no underground petrochemical deposits left, nor coal or natural gas, their technology was based around the concept of sustainability, benign and in harmony with the ecosystem. Although not opposed to change, change generated from within was extremely slow to manifest itself. Steady advances in the theoretical fields of science such as physics, astronomy and mathematics were not grasped upon for technological extrapolation. They already lived in what they considered to be a golden age. After their terrible heritage, stability was the one icon they craved above all else. Such a desire could have led to a society whose timescale rivalled geological epochs.
Fate dealt that prospect two bitter blows. Once the glaciers were gone, the Tyrathca, until then simple bovine herd animals, began to share in Mastrit-PJ’s evolutionary renaissance. Their sentience was a long time emerging, but their progress towards it reflected their physical stamina, plodding forwards imperturbably. On any other world, their total lack of imagination would have been a serious flaw, but not here. Sharing the planet with a species as benevolent and (by now) advanced as the Mosdva meant that they had access to machinery and concepts they themselves could never originate.
Unfortunately for the Mosdva, the Tyrathca were more aggressive, a trait which came from their herd ancestry and its consequent territorial disputes, which in turn led to the breeding of the vassal castes, especially the soldiers. With their copied technology, greater size and larger numbers, they swiftly became the dominant of the two species.
This situation could well have spelt extinction for the Mosdva. Their settlements were being put under considerable pressure by the Tyrathca expansion. Then Mosdva astronomers discovered their star was about to expand into a red giant.
For a race whose thoughts operated on an abstract level, the knowledge of certain extinction in 1,300 years’ time would be devastating enough; for the Tyrathca, to whom a fact was immediate, it was intolerable. Racial survival provided a unifying motivator which enabled them to swiftly consolidate their domination of the planet. For the second time in their existence, the Mosdva were effectively enslaved. First they were used to devise a scheme whereby some if not all the Tyrathca could survive the star’s expansion. They came up with the arkship concept which would guarantee ultimate racial survival, with habitable asteroids sheltering the remainder of the population which couldn’t be evacuated. Secondly, they were made to implement it.
With their smaller bodies, greater dexterity, and higher intelligence, they made excellent astronauts—unlike the Tyrathca themselves. Mosdva technical expertise was adapted and utilized to capture asteroids and shunt them into orbit around Mastrit-PJ, where they were hollowed out and converted into arkships. The arkship building phase lasted for seven centuries, in which time 1,037 were built and launched.
After this, with the star’s growing instability wrecking the planet’s fragile ecology, Mastrit-PJ’s massive space manufacturing capability was switched to adapting asteroids into habitats. The asteroids chosen were orbiting more than a quarter of a billion kilometres from the star, putting them outside the predicted expansion photosphere. As this operation was far simpler than changing asteroids into giant starships, over seven thousand were created in just two centuries. Unlike the arkships which were immediately lost to the Tyrathca upon completion, building the asteroid habitats was a near exponential growth process, as new habitats used their industrial capacity to prepare further asteroids.
A thousand years after the project began, the planet had become uninhabitable, and was completely abandoned.
No Mosdva were ever carried on an arkship, the vessels were used exclusively by the Tyrathca. As soon as they had finished building one, the Mosdva were moved on to the next.
However, they couldn’t be excluded from the asteroid habitats without a policy of complete genocide. The Tyrathca tolerated them, knowing that their own numbers were constantly rising, necessitating an ongoing construction programme. And with the exact conditions of the star’s expansion unknowable, they would need Mosdva technical ability to adapt the asteroid habitats to the environment of the swollen photosphere.
When Mastrit-PJ’s star expanded, its diameter was larger than predicted, as was its radiant heat output. New, larger thermal dissipation systems had to be constructed for the asteroid habitats, and quickly. As a consequence, the habitats became even more engineering-dependent, which began the gradual shift of political power. Only Tyrathca breeders were capable of any meaningful technological activity, making all but the builder, housekeeper, and farmer vassal castes redundant. Their soldier caste was now bred purely to keep the Mosdva in line.
The revolution didn’t happen all at once, but rather over a thousand year period, starting ten thousand years earlier. The asteroid habitats initially formed a cohesive one-nation grouping after the expansion. But the scarcity of mass in the form of unused asteroids to mine forced the Tyrathca to revert to their original clannish state of competition. As the number of unused asteroids declined, wars were fought over the remainder. Each asteroid habitat reverted to complete autonomy.
After that, the rise of the Mosdva to supremacy was inevitable. They controlled the habitat machinery, and industrial facilities, a power they discovered which enabled them to dictate their terms to the Tyrathca.
Under this new order, the asteroid habitats gradually banded together politically and physically. As they did, new design concepts were enacted, bringing the old Mosdva dictum of sustainability to the fore, enabling them to maximise their use of dwindling mass resources. Life support sections outside the spun-gravity biospheres were constructed. First they were little more than adjuncts to the gridwork which held the clustered asteroid habitats together; transport and transfer tubes, eliminating the wasteful need for airlocks and vessels. But the Mosdva, with their climbing-adept limb arrangement and natural agility, found they adapted well to the freefall environment inside them. Only the Tyrathca needed gravity and the associated complex engineering to maintain the rotating biospheres. More freefall segments were constructed and added to the clusters, hydroponics and industrial sections first; which led to their technicians spending more and more time in freefall. Living sections followed quickly. The era of the diskcities began.
“And the Tyrathca?” Joshua asked. “Are they still here?”
“We do not keep them any more,” Quantook-LOU said. “They are no longer our masters.”
“I congratulate you on ridding yourselves of them. The Confederation has always found them difficult to deal with.”
“But we are not difficult, I hope. And the dominion of Anthi-CL is on the edge of Tojolt-HI. That makes us rich in mass, more than any other. We are good trading partners for you, Captain Joshua Calvert.”
“How does being on the edge of Tojolt-HI make you richer than other dominions?”
“Is that not obvious? All ships have to dock at the edge. All mass flows through us.”
“Oh, classic,” Ruben said. “The rim dominions are the diskcity harbourmasters, they can charge what they like to allow cargo through. They’ve probably got some kind of political alliance between themselves to put the squeeze on the central dominions.”
“A minimum fee?” Joshua asked.
“Most likely. It puts us in a good position. Everything travels through them; QED, they must have good communications with all the other dominions. They should be able to find us a copy of the almanac file if it still exists.”
“Okay.” Joshua checked his neural nanonics time function. They’d been in the diskcity for nine hours. �
�I thank you for your hospitality, Quantook-LOU. My crew and I would like to return to our ship now. We have gathered enough information to see where our respective interests lie, so we’ll start reviewing what items and information we’ve brought with us which will bring about the most beneficial exchange for both of us.”
“As you wish. How long will this review process take?”
“Only a few hours. I look forward to returning, and the start of true negotiations between us.”
“As do I. Our resources will be marshalled to cope with your demands. Perhaps then I could visit your ship?”
“You would be an honoured guest, Quantook-LOU.”
Ten Mosdva formed the entourage to see them back to the MSV. It had been left untouched, though Ashly and Sarha who’d been monitoring its status, reported it had been bombarded by every conceivable active sensor sweep.
As soon as they were back through Lady Mac ’s decontam procedure, Joshua ordered the SII suit to withdraw, giving a huge sigh as his skin was exposed to air again. “Jesus, I thought that Quantook character would go on forever about how wonderful his people are. Don’t they ever sleep?”
“Probably not,” Parker said. “As a general rule, sleep evolves from a planetary day-night cycle; they don’t have that here any more. I suspect they have slow periods, but no actual sleep.”
“Ah well, that’s one weakness we’ll have to concede to them. I need a meal, a gel wipe, and some time in the cocoon. It’s been a long day.”
“I concur,” Syrinx said. “The ELINT satellites are approaching operational range, which may or may not give us useful information on the dominions. We also need to evaluate what we’ve heard today, and I’d like us all fresh for that. We’ll reconvene in six hours to see what the satellites have found and discuss the next stage.”
Joshua managed three hours in the cocoon before he woke. He stared at the cabin wall for fifteen minutes before acknowledging he’d need to put a somnolence program into primary if he wanted to sleep again. He hated doing that.
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