“My friend. Do you remember the last time we were underground at Kartchner? I still have nightmares.”
“Yeah, you got stuck exploring the lower section. I had forgotten about that.”
He shook his head. “I’ll stay on the surface and you can bring the critters out for me.”
“Fine,” I answered. “Coward.” Jake just nodded and kept eating.
Wandering Star maneuvered into a polar orbit around Cleavus that night. By the time we met for breakfast she was already providing preliminary results for the areas that had passed under us as we slept. The main screen in the mess hall was showing real-time results as Star processed them.
“Here,” I said setting my roll down on the table and tapping the screen. “And here and here. Those are cave entrances. Really good reflections coming back. Do you see it?”
Angela’s voice answered directly behind me. “That’s good, Theodore. If they hadn’t been there I was going to deduct the cost of this survey from your pay.”
I smiled, thinking she was joking, but she didn’t smile back.
“What about these features?” Jenkins asked, tapping a grouping of bright rectangles far in the northern hemisphere. Two sides of each shape reflected brightly in the radar image. “It doesn’t look natural.”
“It’s not. Those are definitely buildings.” I turned back to Angela. “Do we have optical for this yet? I’d like to see a fused image to be sure.”
Angela was staring at the screen. “Cleavus was never colonized. Star has been scanning a full range of frequencies as we approached and there are no signals being broadcast from the surface. Whatever is there must have been abandoned long ago.”
“Star? Do you have optical imaging for this region?” I drew a circle around the structures with my finger and the image changed to a medium resolution picture of the area taken in late afternoon sunlight.
“This is the same resolution as the radar image. I have a better image at twenty centimeter resolution if you’d like to see it.”
“Show me, Star.”
The new image was also from late afternoon, shadows from the buildings stretching far to the northeast of each structure doing a good job of revealing relative sizes and rooftop details.
“Is this true color?” I asked.
“Yes,” Star replied, “I compensated for the angle of the sun and dust in the atmosphere.”
“Look here.” Sipa was now crowding the screen. “Green cultivated fields south of the buildings.”
“And here.” Charlotte tapped three long shadows. “Are those people?”
“We need to let the survey complete,” Angela said. “There are only a few structures there and some fields. If this planet was colonized and then forgotten, there could be more elsewhere.” She turned to Omar Gizbar. “Giz. Please load the first contact survey deck and let’s go through the tasking again. Star, how long till you have imagery for the entire surface?”
“I will be finished in under two hours. Would you like me to reprocess the data to identify other potential structures on the surface at the same time?”
“Yes.” Angela looked at the rest of us. “We’ll meet in the main lab in two hours. This is a rare opportunity. I want to hear innovative ideas in addition to what’s in the first contact deck.”
Giz was standing next to me still studying the image of a couple of dozen low buildings in the afternoon sun.
“Giz,” I asked, “how many first contacts have you been on?”
“Just one.”
“How did it turn out?”
He smiled at me, deep wrinkles around his eyes. “I’ll let you know.”
I looked at the long shadows of people walking around the buildings, a few others by the green fields.
“They have no idea how their world is about to change.”
“Are you speaking of the people on Cleavus, or to those of us in this room? This is what everyone that joins RuComm dreams of.”
“I was just looking forward to spending my time exploring some caves, maybe find some weird little creatures living in the subterranean waters there.”
He slapped me on the back. “You’re having quite the first hop, Mr. Holloman. I hope you don’t expect all of your missions to be this exciting.”
I found it hard to smile back at him.
“Don’t despair, Ted,” he said, lowering his voice, “who knows what the future holds, other than surprises?”
Our meeting opened with a review of the two other groups of structures Star had identified south and west of the colony we had already seem. Both were larger but obviously long abandoned, streets full of drifted sand or dirt and many walls showing signs of collapse. We would explore them, time permitting, but the surviving colony would be our first priority. Members of the team without anything planned for Cleavus had already started to prepare for our planet fall on Malapert, three months out. Now they were scrambling to complete their plans for first contact. My tasking remained unchanged. There was a complex of cave openings ten kilometers north of the colony and I was expected to explore that area and the associated karst features surrounding them.
Hannah was struggling. Whatever else the meds were doing to her, they were also preventing her from being able to change her focus rapidly and come up with meaningful answers. She looked flustered and frustrated as her mind was unable to solve what she knew should be simple problems. In the end, Angela sat with her and did most of her work.
I was not surprised when Jake told me over a late lunch that he had overheard Angela ordering Star to stop the meds other than something to help her sleep.
“Good,” I replied.
“Ted?” Jake whispered back to me. “Stay away from her while she’s coming out of this. She’s going to be emotionally… volatile. Go explore your caves. Maybe camp there for a week or two, OK?”
All I could think about was Sipa telling me that morning how Hannah would have wrapped herself around me if it weren’t for the meds. I looked at her sitting with her back to me, wanting to wrap myself around her.
“She’s hurting, Jake, and I’m forbidden from doing anything to help her.”
“Stay away for now. That will help her.”
I sighed. “I know. I will, but it’s hard.”
Angela entered the mess hall along with Captain von Muller and his XO, Velena Copeland.
“We’re going down initially with a small party. Hannah, for helping us understand their language, Charlotte for anthropology, Ted, myself and our XO for security,” she told us.
“Why geology?” Alice asked.
Angela gestured to Charlotte.
“There have been a couple of first contacts where the colony had devolved into a patriarchy. Having four women show up without any men might be taken poorly.”
I smiled slightly. “So I’m a figurehead.”
Charlotte looked at me fondly. “Exactly. I’m also hoping you can supplement Velena for security if needed.”
I looked at our XO. I think she spent all of her off duty time exercising or practicing combatives. I had no doubt she could take me in under five seconds. She smiled at me as though she found the idea of me being of any use amusing.
“Don’t worry,” Angela continued, “the rest of you will have your turn down there. For the initial team, please be in the port shuttle bay by 1530. The colony site is about four hours out of sync so it will be about noon there when we arrive. Star will be correcting our time over the next couple of days. It’s about twenty degrees C on the surface now, but that will be dropping quickly by late afternoon. We’ll only be staying for four hours max so you don’t need to pack for a long exploration. Above all else, follow my lead. Any questions?”
There were none. Velena approached me as the meeting was breaking up.
“So, Ted, you ever done security?”
“No,
but I imagine that’s obvious.”
“I read the reports on your Margo Islands adventure. It sounded like you took care of yourself OK there.”
“That had more to do with luck than anything else.”
“Well, I don’t believe in luck.” She handed me a shoulder holster and a mean looking side-arm. “You ever use one of these before?”
“I’ve used a pistol, various rifles and shotguns.” I turned the weapon over in my hand. It was heavy. “Never anything quite like this.”
“What’s the biggest thing you ever killed?”
“A coyote. I was out for a run in the desert and he was following me, keeping thirty to fifty meters back. I didn’t think anything of it at first; coyotes do that some times. Then he was joined by three or four friends and they started closing the distance. I stopped and fired a round over their heads and they all scattered except for one. He kept coming so I had to shoot him.”
Velena nodded. “If you have to use this,” she caressed the barrel, “don’t waste ammo on a warning shot. Understood?”
“Yes, ma’am.”
She took the gun back and released the magazine. “First three rounds are regular slugs, the next fifteen are plasma rounds. You ever use those?”
“No, but I’ve seen them. They explode on impact and do a lot of damage to soft tissue.”
“That’s right.” She inserted the magazine and handed the gun back to me. “Use the holster and wear a loose fitting coat. Don’t pull it out unless I do.”
I went back to my quarters and changed. I reached for my pack, thought better of it and walked to the shuttle bay. Angela was standing on the boarding ramp.
“About time.”
I glanced at my watch. “I’m early.”
“Not as early as the rest of us. Strap in.”
Hannah looked up as I got on board, made eye contact and smiled very slightly before looking away. I sat next to Charlotte at the back of the shuttle.
“Scared?” I asked.
“Terrified. All I can think is, please God, don’t let me screw this up.”
I felt the shuttle detach and pass through the gravitational flux outside the hull as we started our fall toward Cleavus.
“We should have brought Alice along to pray over us.”
Charlotte nodded. “I thought about having her along to help smooth the way with the colonists, but I’d rather look around first before she starts evangelizing everyone.”
“Yeah, she would do it too.”
Charlotte continued talking, trying to distract herself and calm down. “You and Hannah, you came back on board burning hot enough to cut through deck plates and then there’s Alice with an obvious interest, but just watching, making a comment here, a nudge there, assessing the situation and biding her time. She’s an interesting one. I’ve talked to her quite a bit over the past week and I trust and admire her as our chaplain. As a woman… watch out, Ted. She’s patient and her mind is always tipped about ten degrees from where you think it is.”
Star interrupted her to let us know that the shuttle had just released twenty-five freshly printed autonomous sensors that would provide real-time situational awareness for us, and that we were ten minutes out. Angela came around handing each of us a small pin to clip to our ears that would provide an audio link back to Star and with each other. Then we were on the ground, the only sound the engines spooling down and the hiss of compressors equalizing internal pressure.
Velena and I were the first ones down the ramp. There was no one there so we walked all the way around the shuttle in opposite directions looking for anything odd.
“What did you see?” Velena asked me when we were back at the ramp.
“The landing pad is in great condition considering they’ve had no use for it for two or three hundred years. And there’s an elderly woman approaching us from town moving very slowly.”
“Why send her?”
“Maybe no one told her to run and hide from the scary spaceship.”
“Huh. More likely they see her as the least valuable member of their society. If the scary spaceship kills her it’s no big loss.”
We stood together on the edge of the pad watching her.
“Should we go down and meet her? This is going to take forever.”
Velena paused, listening to Star’s voice whispering in her ear. “Go get the others. Tell Angela it looks safe for now.”
The five of us walked down from the landing pad, Velena leading, me trailing and looking over my shoulder from time to time. The old woman stopped and waited for us. She looked at us without any great curiosity.
“What have you brought us?” She asked. I could see Hannah’s head tip to the side as she listened to the accent, trying to match it to something known. Watching her made my chest hurt.
I noticed that Velena was no longer paying any attention to the old woman and was keeping her eyes moving from building to building looking for threats. I did the same.
“We bring you news from the Union,” Angela answered. “Where can we meet with your leaders?”
The woman was disappointed. “News? Not worth my time.” She turned and started walking slowly away.
“Velena,” I called. “This side.” A group of seven men and two women had emerged from a structure behind us. The man leading the procession walked with an arrogant stride, not looking at the others, assuming that they were keeping pace. He looked to be in his early forties, strongly built and muscular but coasting on past physical glory. Four of the men with him were younger with a hard, mean look about them. I’m sure he thought of them as bodyguards but I felt sure he should be watching his own back. The two older men looked like they had gained weight and prestige by telling their leader whatever he wanted to hear. The women stayed back, glancing at us occasionally but mostly looking at the ground or at the leader. They looked kind of twitchy, as if they were used to being yelled at or hit.
“This looks more promising,” Angela muttered as she turned to face the new group.
“And who might you lot be?” he asked. He looked sharply at each of us in turn for a couple of seconds, his eyes assessing who we might be.
“Angela Dawkins.” Angela held out her hand. “Reunification Commission. We are here to help your colony reintegrate into the Union.”
“Hetman Christof Skorzeny,” he replied taking her hand. He looked around at his companions, smiling. “We are right pleased to be meeting you.”
“Mr. Skorzeny—“
“Hetman. It is my title. It means I am in charge here.”
“Hetman Skorzeny,” Angela continued, Skorzeny nodding, “is there someplace we can go to talk? There is much we need to discuss.”
“My courthouse chambers. I will keep my advisers with me.” He gestured toward one of the larger structures down the street fronting a square that may have once had a small park at its center. The building looked like it was made of adobe and, like all of the others, was the same color as the surrounding hills and in a poor state of repair.
Angela walked along with him, followed by the two older men and the women. The rest of our party followed a few meters back. The four body guards had stayed behind talking together in the street but were now following us fifty meters back.
“What are you hearing, Hannah?” I asked, keeping my voice as natural as possible.
She answered without looking at me. “Can’t tell yet. It’s not like any example of old English that I’ve ever heard. The vowel shifts are unusual.” She shrugged.
“Charlotte?”
“I’m glad you and Velena are with us. He acts more like a gang leader than a politician. You can tell a lot about a society by how they treat their women. I’m not liking this so far.”
I looked at Velena. “Technology looks primitive enough for a lost colony other than being able to still manufacture clothing. I
would have expected homespun. At least we’re not seeing any weapons.” She nodded to where Angela was walking with the Hetman. “Dawkins is all in on this ‘lost colony’ theory. What about you, Ted?”
“Me? I’m just here to shoot the coyotes following us if they get too close.”
That earned me a smile.
We reached the courthouse and I hesitated at the entrance. “Should one of us wait out here?”
“No.” She watched the guards finding spots of shade around the square, getting comfortable. “The sensors Star deployed will warn us if anything happens out here.”
The Hetman’s chambers were primitive. An old wood desk, a dozen chairs. The lighting panels glowed a dull yellow from low current coming from the rooftop solar system that we had seen in the on orbit survey images, their light supplemented by lanterns hanging from the open trusses in the ceiling.
“Sit,” Hetman Skorzeny indicated the mismatched chairs. “Angela Dawkins, you sit here.” He patted the chair in front of his desk.
Angela introduced her team and then Skorzeny introduced his two advisers, Symon Hevsky and Byron Namenko. Angela waited for a moment and then turned with a questioning look toward the two women who were seated together on a bench along the side of the room.
“Of course,” Skorzeny continued, “my wife Lana,” pointing at the woman who was about his own age, “and my wife Buna,” indicating a woman about thirty years old wearing a dirty yellow dress and a defeated expression.
“You have two wives?” Angela asked.
“Three, actually. I am also newlywed of just one month. Tirana could not join us, being too pregnant.” I noticed Buna turn her head at this, looking toward the back of the room away from her husband.
“It is the duty of Hetman,” one of his advisers explained. “He has demonstrated superior qualities of strength, intelligence and wisdom in order to become leader. These attributes must be passed on to future generations.”
Skorzeny nodded. “Just so, well said Symon.”
Angela took a deep breath and I realized how hard she was trying to make this go well. First contact, something so rare that even Giz had not been on one, was going to succeed or fail based on what she did. I knew I should have felt sympathy for her, but I was still hating her for what she had done to Hannah.
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