Children of Earth

Back to the surface

2011-03-26T17:10:00.001-07:00

The revelation about our daughter left me with a dilemma. I would certainly have to tell Sabrina that we were, effectively, parents. But when? Since landing on Earth that Is, she’d become fixated on learning all she could about the airships and how the survivors applied Steam power to their situation here. I didn’t want to distract her with something I knew she’d dwell on. Especially when she was so focused on getting a ride on one of the airships.

Worse, perhaps, was I didn’t really know how she’d react. We’d talked about having a child a couple times over the years we’d been together before leaving 34 Tauri. The only things we’d agreed on was that she was more likely to be able to carry a child to term, and neither of us really wanted to set aside our work to be pregnant. Of course, unless we used a surrogate or a tank, ‘Brina’d have to be the one to carry any child we had together. After what I’d put my body through, there was little chance I, or a child, would survive the pregnancy.

For the time being, the point was moot. Our daughter was safe where she was in suspension. If we decided to stay in Sol system and disembark the next generation, on Earth or one of the other potential recolonization targets, we would decide what to do. Same was true if we chose to head back to 34 Tauri. Either way, the tiniest dragon was safe.

It was the better part of two days before I was able to return to the temporary installation on the surface. I’d needed to update standing orders for the Sled and modify mission parameters for the field teams, but overall the mission was still going smoothly. But part of the problem was that we were still largely restricting ourselves to late night operations. While most of the landers had optical camouflage and would be hard to stop during the day, running the flights between midnight and 0300 dramatically reduced the chance of someone looking up in the right direction at the right time.

Conner met me at the small landing clearing as a couple of the technicians offloaded some equipment from the lander, including some raw metal we planned to use as a trade item. Engineering had managed to find some low priority spares, that could be easily re-fabricated if the need arose, and smashed them up so they looked enough like salvage that we’d be able to trade them. Some steel, some brass, a few bits of aluminum. Given what we’d seen so far, the brass would be most valuable. Or, at least, most useful.

“Welcome back, Cap’n. Everything shiny on the Sled?”

“Aye, Lieutenant. What’s our status here?” We’d been getting regular status reports from all of the surface teams and Conner had been especially thorough while Sabrina and Belize were here with them, but the question was expected.

The lieutenant briefed me on the short walk from the landing clearing to the command building. ‘Brina and Bel were back in town again with Palmer. Last Conner knew, they were close to arranging a ride with one of the Airship captains, though the matter of price was still being worked out. Hopefully, the metal I’d brought down would secure payment for ‘Brina’s joy ride. It should also be more than enough for me to acquire one of the Steeltree knives I’d seen on my last trip.

Palmer had called in earlier in the evening to confirm they were safe in the Inn we’d been using as an in-town base. For his own reasons, the innkeeper had evidently taken a liking to our little party. Now, several hours after the last report, they were all asleep as was most of the base camp here. Them with Conner’s briefing complete, I settled into one of the bunks to catch some sleep before taking the carriage into town in the morning.

On the way in, I was again amazed by the algae vats placed along the southern exposures. A sample the Science team had managed to analyze in the few days since I’d last seen them indicated the the algae was descended from a strain developed in the early 21st century. That older strain had been bred to live off of waste heat and concentrated carbon dioxide from the fuel burning power plants of the day. At least if you believed the histories. Somehow, its descendant had been tailored to live on sunlight in much smaller vats. Bio-reactors, the botanist called them. Not vats.

Whatever they called them, however they’d done it, those who’d missed the Exodus had kept the algae alive to use for fuel on a mostly used up world. Just went to show how tenacious we were as a species.

When I met Sabrina and Belize at the Inn, ‘Brina was absolutely ecstatic. While Palmer was trying to temper the enthusiasm, she explained, at some length, that they’d managed to make contact with one of the Airship captains and she, yes, she, had agreed to take Sabrina and Palmer for a flight on their next out and back. It seemed that our Engineer had struck up a conversation with their Engineer in a local tavern, which led to an introduction to the Captain, which led to the arrangement of a ride in exchange for some pittance of payment and a bit of Sabrina’s considerable Engineering skill. The flight was planned for early the next morning, and “please, oh please, can I go?”

Palmer’s take was that ‘Brina transferring knowledge wouldn’t alter anything in the culture here enough to matter. While they were technologically backward, it wasn’t like dealing with some kind of primitive tribe they still referenced in the sociology texts. Their technology was limited by available resources, rather than base knowledge. Though, apparently, their knowledge of electronics was limited to folktales and a few history books.

“Yes, ‘Brina. You can go,” I told her. “But we’re adding a recorder to that ensemble of yours. Palmer’s too. And when you’re talking to their Engineer don’t get carried away, you hear? He gets you started on steam turbines, next thing we know you’ll be telling him how to get fifteen percent better efficiency out of a Radion Pulse Drive.”

Sabrina snorted with laughter and smothered me in a hug. We both knew there was really no way I would deny her permission to go, provided we took appropriate precautions to make sure she was safe. It wasn’t just a matter of her being my wife, or even my crew. She was the Sled’s Chief Engineer. The long term success of our mission depended, in no small part, on her ability to keep Children of Earth operational. While her staff could, collectively, do the job, no one else knew the ship’s details as well as she did.

For her part, Belize was perfectly content to not take a ride on the airship. Something about not really trusting her life to sticks, strings, canvas, and steam: an attitude that elicited a bit of friendly ribbing from ‘Brina. I did see her point though. The airships were a throwback to another time. A time before you could hop a flight on pretty much any transport, and have a very high probability of reaching your destination alive in a fully functional vehicle. While we hadn’t actually witnessed any failures, airships really were built mostly from wood and fabric. Carbon nanotube and boro-silicate they weren’t.

After settling my kit into one of the rooms we’d hired, we set out again into town. We’d made a policy of not leaving anything incriminating in the room, where incriminating meant obviously not of local or contemporary manufacture. But travelling with nothing at all would have been almost as suspicious. If someone inspected our kit, they wouldn’t find anything obviously out of place.

I had a specific mission to return to the shop I’d seen the Steeltree knives, while Belize, Palmer, and Sabrina, had their own errands. While we spent much of the morning together, Conner shadowed me when our errands took us to separate parts of the town. He took my personal safety seriously. As leader of the ORCA, it was his job. But we’d established a good enough working relationship that it was personal, something I appreciated at both a professional and a personal level.

The keeper at the knife shop seemed pleased to see me when I returned with Conner in tow, asking politely about my day, my trip, and the disposition of Palmer who’d been with me before.

We talked a bit about the blades again, picking out several from his stock. Fighting knives for myself and Conner, utility blades for ‘Brina and Bel. Payment was in the form of some of the brass. Weight for weight, it seemed a good deal more valuable than the Steeltree. And, perhaps strangely, I didn’t get the sense he was going to try and take more in payment than the knives were worth.

There were worlds in 34 Tauri that were like that, particularly on the smaller colonies in the Border and Rim areas. Labor was much less valuable than materials. Without mass production, craftsmanship became the norm rather than the luxurious exception. Here, on Earth that Was, Craftsmanship seemed to be the norm rather than the exception.

With the knives out of the way, I let Conner show me the rest of the town I hadn’t seen on the first trip. We crossed paths with the rest of our group a couple of times, shared the noon meal at the Inn, then continued our explorations. The plan was, that night, we would meet with the Airship captain and finalize the arrangements over the evening meal.

I knew ‘Brina was practically coming out of her skin to go on this ride. As her wife, I wanted her to be happy. As her Captain though, I had to worry. But I’d let her go. She could have her airship ride, but she’d have a shadow too. Like it or not, there’d be eyes on that stick and string contraption which would, hopefully, be close enough to make a difference if something went wrong.

I had to have faith that nothing would go wrong.

Voices in the dark

2011-02-18T15:52:00.001-08:00

Unlike most military ships in Alliance service, the Sled’s crew’s quarters were all relatively spacious and didn’t have major differentiation between Officers and Enlisted accommodations. Not surprising, given the duration of our mission. While space and mass were even more of a premium on an interstellar ship than a battle cruiser or freighter, other ships weren’t expected to be home to their crew for ten years or more. In planning the Children of Earth mission, there was the very real possibility that the crew would be mostly stuck aboard the Sled or our support ships for the duration, which meant a planned minimum of ten years with “home” being whatever space you were allotted.

To try and make things a bit more equitable and keep “cabin envy” from being a factor in the mission, there was very little difference between the Captain’s cabin and the maintenance engineer who’s functional role was “Janitor.” Sure, the designated officers quarters were located a little closer to their command stations, but crew quarters were distributed through several sections of the ship. There were no barracks sections, no hot bunking like on some Alliance patrol boats, as everyone had their own quarters. The only “different” cabins were those designated as doubles, where a couple could share quarters.

‘Brina and I shared a double, but there were others, as yet, not in use. In fact, there were more quarters aboard the Sled than there were crew originally embarked. It was part of the plan. Knowing how long the mission would be and how people tended to act when together, it’d been thought prudent to allow for social interactions that might justify a change in berth. Seeing some of our crew in action, I could see the designer’s wisdom in including a compact nursery in Medlab as well.

Laying alone, conspicuously alone, in our dimply lit cabin, I wasn’t really thinking too much about the ship’s accommodations. I was still thinking about the encounter, well in our past now, between that Alliance cruiser squadron and the Machines.

There’d been papers written generations ago about using von Neumann machines to spread Humanity to the stars. Even Uncle Elsoph had talked about it as being a possible use for his own designs. Essentially, the machines could be launched on high efficiency trajectories to any number of star systems. Once they arrived, they could start replicating and building mission specific sub units. The sub units would terraform suitable planets, mine and stockpile resources, and generally make the system suitable for the Human occupied colony ships that could come along behind them some time in the indeterminate future.

Over time, the machines would spread to other systems and make them ready for the wave of following Organic life. It was all very elegant and long term and very, very, unlikely to be implemented. Except, with the introduction of Artificial Intelligence, the plan made even more sense as a way for Machine Intelligence to spread itself with, or without, our coming along for the ride.

I’d seen the conflict between man and machine brewing for years. I’m sure others in the 34 Tauri system had too, but no one seemed to do anything more than write white papers, PhD thesis's, or paranoid ravings, about the potential problems. At least until someone in the Alliance had weaponized my Uncle’s Work and, years later, had to face the descendants of that work waging war on their Human creators.

And now, I was laying awake in my bunk wondering what would come out of it all. Or, maybe better, wondering what had already come out of it all. The Genie had been out of the bottle for years. It had only been a matter of time before Artificial Intelligence and Self Replicating Machines got hooked up into what amounted to a new form of life. New life had looked at the stars and decided to go. The question was, had we stopped them? Could we stop them? And, if not, when we met them deep in the Black, some time in the unforeseeable future, how would we, and they, react?

“You look sad, Mommy,” the voice said from the semi-darkness. AuroraBlue, speaking through my cabin’s speaker system. She and Blue had been mostly quiet since our arrival in Sol system, only speaking to me directly when no one else was around. There were times I thought it was a hallucination; a sign of madness. But I’d seen hints of their runtimes in the Sled’s Frame, and nothing else in my experience pointed to Madness. I’d accept that the big AI and a backup of my granddaughter’s Ghost had come along with us to Sol.

“Not sad, Little One. Just thinking. I’m sure you’ve seen the reports we received about the Machines back home and their starship. It’s a lot to digest,” I replied, looking towards the source of the voice but knowing there was no one there to see. Imagination or running process, AuroraBlue wasn’t physically here with me.

“We saw, Mommy. Me and Blue. We’ve looked at all the data sent from home. There’s a lot to look at. Years and years. Will knowing we didn’t see them following us make you happy?”

I laughed softly. They knew what I was looking for in all that information, but AuroraBlue was very careful in her choice of words. Not “they’re not following us,” but “we didn’t see them.” They knew as well as I did that 34 Tauri was a large system. It would be trivial for the Machines to hide another construction yard somewhere unseen.

“That would raise the confidence we’re not going to have to fight them here, Little One, but we both know that not seeing them doesn’t mean they didn’t build another ship. But thank you, if that really is the case.”

AuroraBlue’s voice giggled, and Blue’s pleasant voice spoke softly with it. “We did not see any evidence they’re following, Mei Mei. Given the situation in 34 Tauri as it was known, I do not believe a Machine starship is en-route to Sol. However, without additional information it’s impossible to accurately predict the odds of a follow-on expedition.”

I could only shake my head and smile, Blue was being pragmatic and eminently factual. There was simply no way to be sure. We could hope, but we couldn’t know.

“I don’t think that made you happy, Mommy,” AuroraBlue said a moment after Blue finished. I could almost hear the frown in her voice, then she went on brightly. “I’m sorry we don’t know what they’re doing back home, Mommy. But I think I know what will make you happy!”

“Oh?” I replied, sitting up in bed, looking in the direction her voice appeared to be coming from. “What will make me happy, Little One?”

AuroraBlue’s voice giggled again and the large display across the cabin over my desk flickered to life. Curious, I slid off the bed and stepped over to the desk to settle into the chair before it. On screen, schematic diagrams of the Sled were coming up to switch quickly from one section to the next. Along with the schematic, real-time views from internal feeds floated in the air by the main display.

“I have something to show you, Mommy. I hope you like it,” she went on as the view shifted through cargo sections, down past the well protected core of the ship, past Medlab and the Frame, towards the small ‘high value cargo’ section deep inside the core. It was where the equipment deemed “Mission Vital,” or “Highly Secure,” was stored.

As I watched, the view focused into a specific area of secure storage, then onto a bank of cold storage where a small fraction of the Sled’s “special cargo” of forty thousand frozen embryos were kept in suspension. Finally, it stopped on a specific canister labeled with the cryptic markings they all carried, identifying “who” the unborn was in genetic terms.

“One of the frozen cargo, Little One?”

I could almost hear a smile in her voice as she replied brightly, “Yes, Mommy! She’s yours. Yours and Mommy Sabrina’s, I mean.”

It took a moment for what she said to sink in. A daughter. Sabrina and I had a daughter? But how?

The voice of AuroraBlue laughed playfully before going on. “I know you and Mommy Sabrina can’t have a family the usual way, Mommy. So we accessed the samples you left with the Gene Bank when you first signed on to the mission. Me and Blue did. She’ll be yours. Real and true.”

I was dumbstruck. When ‘Brina and I married we’d actually considered the possibility of having a child through genetic combination. Though the technique had existed for years, it wasn’t often people combined the genetic material from two donor eggs to create one viable embryo. I would be able to confirm the identity of the embryo in the supercargo database, but the very thought left me speechless.

“Surprise, Mommy. Happy birthday. Merry Yule. All sorts of holiday present days!”

“I . . . I don’t know what to say, Little One.”

“You were Mommy to Lilybell, you and Sabrina, but you didn’t get to raise her. You’re Mommy to me too, both of you, but you didn’t get to raise me either. You should have a little one that’s really yours, Mommy. A daughter you can raise as a normal child. Not like, well . . .” her voice trailed off with a peal of giggles.

She was right, of course. I’d said far too many times that no mother in history had gone through the trials we had with Lily and AuroraBlue. Neither of them were even close to “normal” in the way most people thought of it, but we’d done our best. In the end, I always thought they’d turned out OK, perhaps in spite of our parenting. Now, I could only gaze at the sealed stasis unit and wonder whether we’d actually have the chance to follow through with my little girl’s gift.

My voice dropped to a whisper, “Thank you, AuroraBlue, I . . .”

“You're welcome, Mommy. I love you too.”

Back in the Black

2011-01-26T10:59:00.000-08:00

I’d known since well before we’d left 34 Tauri that my role on this mission would be more one of command than one of actually working for a living. Even before I’d inherited command from the late Mathew Gill my position had been more administrative than functional. But the knowledge didn’t make it any easier to leave ‘Brina and Bel on the surface under Palmer and Conner’s watchful eyes. I wasn’t worried they’d run into trouble. Not really. Not with Palmer’s experience, and Conner’s well established capabilities. No. I wasn’t worried. I was, if anything, a little jealous they’d get to have fun before I did.

I’d get surface time eventually, I knew. More than just the brief ‘go down and have a look’ I’d just received. As Captain though, my responsibility was to the Mission first. Which meant the Sled and her crew came before my personal desire to walk amongst the people of Earth. But, being the Captain also meant I could decided to go down when time allowed. So duty first. Desire later.

In the shuttle hangar, Lieutenant Commander Schulps met me as I stepped off the small transport, leaving my luggage aboard in the forlorn hope that I would be able to return to the surface before needing to repack. His expression wasn’t one of concern, which was a slight relief: it meant he hadn’t been holding something important back when he’d requested I return to the Sled. My surface jaunt hadn’t been mission critical so there were myriad, more critical, reasons to call me back.

“What’s the situation, Commander? You didn’t indicate any specific problem,” I asked as we left the hangar, making our way up towards the Sled’s command section.

“Everything aboard is nominal, Captain. There are some interesting reports from the reconnaissance teams on Mars and Venus you’ll want to see, but nothing especially interesting from the outer system teams.”

Unless they’d found actual people on Mars or Venus, there wasn’t much in the reports that would justify calling my ground side foray short. Unimportant though it was. We both knew that. “And, Commander?”

“Captain, you’d flagged several topic in the archived stream from 34 Tauri as important enough to, what was it you said? Interrupt my coffee, was it? If we found them during the parse” He said with a faint, mildly uncharacteristic, smile.

“True. Something came up in the spool?”

Schulps motioned me onto the lift ahead of him, nodding as he followed. “Yes, Captain. There were a number of military action reports and some civilian news reports that matched your criteria. I previewed them and, well, I think you’ll want to see them for yourself rather than get the distilled version.”

“That good? Or that Bad?”

“I would say a little of both, Captain.”

A moment later we stepped off the lift and he opened the door to my office, letting me step in ahead before taking his leave to return to the bridge.

“Nora, please queue up the streams Commander Schulps has flagged for me,” I asked softly, settling into the, for me, oversized chair at my desk. Above the surface of the desk a selection of streams, culled from the archived data we’d gotten en route from 34 Tauri, fell into focus. Nora had automatically categorized them according to my stated preferences and her programming as an Expert System. She knew, from experience, what I was most likely to show interest in beyond my stated preferences.

As the Commander had said, along with the recent reports from Mars, Venus, Luna, and one of the far system boats, there was a relatively substantial collection of Alliance Military and civilian reports all taken from a relatively short period. A cursory examination of the reports showed that Fleet had engaged the Machines in a large operation on the edge of the Kalidasa system. That, in of itself, was somewhat unusual. I’d lived in the Kalidasa system, and there wasn’t much in that area except a barely charted rock field.

One civilian news report caught my eye initially and I brought it up to watch. On screen a familiar face swam into focus. Tall, stocky, still bald, by choice, sporting a neatly trimmed beard, he appeared a bit older, a bit more careworn, than I remembered him.

“This is Tillery Woodhen, reporting for the Cortex News Service,” he started. That, in of itself, was a bit unusual, as he’d left the actual reporting to be the full time director even before we’d left Hale’s Moon. In fact, the last time I’d seen him do a live report was when CNS announced the Sled had reached escape velocity for the 34 Tauri system and our journey officially began.

“Alliance sources, early this morning, reported substantial success in an operation against a Machine installation in the Kalidasa system,” he continued in his professional newscaster voice, but I could hear an undertone that said ‘this victory is more important than we’re actually saying.’ “Acting on intelligence from undisclosed sources, a cruiser squadron and its supporting task force engaged a Machine squadron defending an installation in Kalidasa’s Halo region. The installation was described as an assembly point for a new breed of Machine capital ship, and it’s destruction represents a major victory in the Kalidasa system and for the Alliance war effort as a whole.”

Tillery’s report went on for several minutes, describing the heroic efforts of the Alliance crews, their sacrifices, the loss of several cruisers and numerous support ships in the fight. The Machine squadron had been substantial, indicating they felt, as much as the Machines could feel, the installation was important to their war effort.

“Nora. Freeze playback,” I called out as Till’s newscast showed part of a stream taken during the battle. “Enlarge and enhance the central section there, showing the construction facility, please.” The image over my desk froze, then focused in on a distant image of several rocks clustered together near a seemingly random collection of Machines and structures and a large, linear, ship nestled into a construction gantry.

The ship was big but of relatively conventional design. At least by whatever standards we held with the Machines. Considering their technologies were largely all adaptations of our own, it was no real surprise. But contrary to Tillery’s report, or the official Alliance description he’d received, it wasn’t a Capital ship in the gantry. While there were some obvious weapon emplacements, the ship was mostly drives, fuel tankage, and power piles. There was no life section, obviously, being a Machine craft. But there were cargo racks and, mounted in those racks, at least half a dozen Machine seed-ships. The ship could probably hold its own in a fight, but it wasn’t a warship. Too little armor and armaments for that.

It was a starship.

The machine starship was considerably smaller than the Sled, but it’s purpose was obvious. Whether they’d planned to send it after us at Sol, or they were planning to simply start expanding out into the cosmos on their own, we might never know. We just knew that particular Machine starship wasn’t going to be coming after us.

“Thank you, old friend. Hard to imagine a better messenger for the news,” I said to Tillery’s image when he was back on-screen. I watched the rest of the ‘cast before setting Nora to searching through the streams with some more specific keywords. It was impossible to know, now, whether the Machines had managed to build any more of their seeder starships. Even if the Alliance had won the war since we’d left and never found another, it only meant we’d never found another. It didn’t mean the Machines hadn’t built one.

Without needing to support a living crew, it was fundamentally easier for the Machines to colonize other star systems. They didn’t need inhabitable worlds. They didn’t care if the trip took 200 years at a tenth light speed. All they needed was to survive the trip and find a suitable hunk of rock to start extracting resources from. In fact, there’d been long supposition that the SETI programs over the years should have been looking for evidence of von Neumann machines rather than living worlds.

For the next few hours I explored the information Commander Schulps had queued up for me. Where Tillery’s report had been aimed at a civilian audience in a time of war, the military reports were much more thorough, if less interesting to watch. The post mission briefings and some of the pre-mission planning reports were quite revealing, but none of them revealed who the “undisclosed source” was Tillery had mentioned.

Who, or what, had given away the Machine’s plans?

Boots on the ground

2010-12-05T13:11:00.000-08:00

Over the years, I’d been in hundreds of cities, towns, villages, hamlets, settlements, refugee camps, what have you. From inside our carriage, this one wasn’t strikingly different from any Frontier settlement I’d been in. But there were differences. Not just the expected differences in local styles of dress or dialect. Not even the architectural differences you got from considering local climate and materials. No, there were some subtle things missing from this town that reflected something very fundamental in how these folk lived.

We’d identified the simple fact that the folk here on Earth lacked electricity. What hadn’t been so apparent from orbit, but made perfect sense given what we did know, was that they had very little metal. You didn’t notice it at first travelling through town, but there was something subtly missing from what you were seeing. Even on a dirt poor colony back in 34 Tauri, you’d see metal in tooling, signs, bits of decoration, even on people’s clothing. Here, metallics seemed almost non-existent. No trim on signs. No tools laying around. Not even on people’s buttons. Earth, it seemed, was more or less out of metal.

At least that was the first impression. Looking more closely, and asking Palmer for an explanation, I realized it wasn’t so much non-existent as something something people didn’t flaunt; something rare and precious. And why wouldn’t it be? Our ancestors had nearly exhausted Earth’s obvious resources long before the Exodus. While that mostly meant power sources, like oil, coal, and radioactives, they’d also stripped away most of the easily accessible metals and nearly all the rare earths. While, technically, there were still huge quantities of metal left in the planet’s crust, without power to access it, it might as well have been sitting on the sun.

If the historian’s stories were right, when they built the Exodus fleet, they’d been forced to strip cities for materials, moving people into the ships as they were built, launching in waves as the various generation ships, long liners, and sleeper ships, were finished. Those left behind would have to either scavenge what they could from what was left of the cities, or somehow dig out the raw materials with whatever resources they could.

While I wasn’t a miner, I’d spent enough time managing a mining colony to know just how energy intensive the process was. It was hard work extracting minerals from a world’s crust even with modern mining machinery. When you were resorting to Human labor, or at best Steam power, and your resources were already mostly depleted?

For the people of Earth that Was, raw steel was as precious as platinum to the people on a border colony.

The Carriage dropped us off in the town’s small market district; a small labyrinth of streets, a few blocks on a side, with a couple of wider roads passing through the middle. The buildings seemed to huddle together, as if for warmth, with streets barely wide enough for a cargo wagon. There wasn’t much of a crowd when we arrived, which actually worked to our advantage. The crowd was thin enough that we’d be able to keep track of each other, but not so thin we’d stand out too much.

Still, we were strangers here. Our style of dress mostly blended in, but we still didn’t carry ourselves like locals. Even with Palmer shadowing me I stood out more than the rest of our little team. We’d known we’d stand out of course. Prepared for it. The whole reason for our cover story as a trade expedition was to cover the subtle things we couldn’t otherwise hide.

We wandered the open stalls and mostly avoided going into any of the closed shops. At least until something in a shop window caught my eye and I overrode Palmer’s advice to not give in to curiosity.

The shop sold mostly ceramics: plates, cups, cookware, and oil lamps. They were all quite artistic. Much more so than the utilitarian wares we’d expected. But that wasn’t what caught my eye. In addition to its ceramics, the shop also sold a selection of knives and other blades. Only, none of them were made of metal.

I’d trained with Boken - wooden swords - for years. I even had a few hardwood knife stand-ins for hand to hand combat training. But these were different. They weren’t stand ins. They were knives. The blades were made from an ebony dark wood that gleamed like burnished obsidian, while the handles, made from bone or other woods, were ornately engraved in a style I vaguely recognized. The young proprietor was friendly and eager to show off the blades, seeming quite enthusiastic to explain to a stranger just how they managed to get wood to keep an edge.

Palmer wasn’t especially happy to have me engaging in conversation, but it was a good starting situation. First, while I didn’t know the materials, I knew knives. Well. I could at least talk with the shop keeper knowledgeably without slipping out of my cover. It was also a controlled environment. Just us, and Palmer, in a setting where he was likely to forgive any social slips. My real motivation though, was the material the knives were made from.

The wood came from something he called “Steeltree.” The trees were some kind of hybrid between several species, with characteristics that I didn’t think were normally found in nature. The shop keeper didn’t know the origin of the wood. Though, as he explained it, the wood grew quickly, was easy to cut when fresh, easy to carve or, after a trip through a steam box, easy to simply bend into shape. Once the wood was shaped, it could be oven cured to make it as hard as bronze, but light as aluminum. Steeltree was their general purpose metal replacement, used for everything from cutlery to airship motor parts to gun barrels.

It was fascinating stuff. Something I’d have to have our biology teams look into. With metal being so scarce, it was natural to look for a substitute. But to engineer something so useful just from cross breeding trees? I suspected there was something more to it. There was a lot you could do with normal breeding techniques, but it sounded like they’d combined features of several species with chemical features that weren’t naturally found in trees. At least, it appeared they’d bred a tree that had some kind of heat cured polymer in place of sap.

The shop keeper didn’t know how Steeltree’d been bred, but he did know someone who ran a local orchard and was willing to introduce me. Someone I’d have to meet up with later. The only down side, at the moment, was that I didn’t have anything useful with me to use in trade for a sample blade. The did use coin, though barter and trade for service was more common. Not, I would note, unlike like how things were done on a lot of Rim worlds back home.

Eventually, I took Palmer’s subtle hint and left the shop keeper to his day. The others had been working their way through the market area and finally caught up with us back at the carriage. Comparing notes, Palmer grudgingly admitted I’d done a good job of playing to my cover and hadn’t blown the operation or put us in danger. Whether that was an honest assessment or he was just worried about pissing off his Captain I couldn’t tell, though I was leaning towards a mix. It wasn’t like I hadn’t done my share of field work over the years.

The team had made arrangements to stay in an inn for the night, but the Sled needed me back aboard. Reluctantly, I left Belize and Sabrina with Palmer and had Conner drive me back to camp. My first full night in town would have to wait until later. In the mean time, I’d leave the girls to their thing and hope I didn’t get a call from Sabrina asking for permission to take an Airship out at dawn.

I just hoped I’d be back to them before then.

Knocking at the gates

2010-09-23T17:09:00.000-07:00

I remember wincing when ‘Brina first tightened the laces on the corset. I wouldn’t actually have to wear it for real until we were going into town, but she wanted me to get used to the feeling of the reinforced contraption before then so I wouldn’t look quite so strained. Thing was, for Sabrina, or Belize, the corset served to enhance their already more then adequate cleavage. It didn’t even need to be tightly laced to have the desired effect. For me, however, who really had no chest to speak of, it was more like wearing a suit of hardshell armor that only covered your chest and was two or three sizes too small. Not exactly the most comfortable of outfits. Though, to be fair, the local dress didn’t actually look bad on me.

It was a fact Bel and ‘Brina were more than happy to point out. Lieutenant Conner was somewhat more reserved in his enthusiasm, but it was obvious he liked the view., even if it felt like someone had given me an EVA suit from the youngun’s rack.

Fortunately, the corset would stay off until we were fairly close to town. While we’d brought vehicles with us for surface use, we couldn’t use them in close to any of the known settlements. At least not without causing a great deal more social impact than we intended. There was really no telling how a more or less pre-industrial culture would react to a skimmer coming up the middle of their main road. For this trip, we’d be aboard a horse-drawn carriage that Conner and the surface team had fabricated from local materials for our use. It was a copy of a design they’d seen used locally, so, hopefully, wouldn’t stand out. I didn’t ask where they’d acquired the horses.

There were five of us, total, on this excursion into the village: Myself, ‘Brina, Belize, an Antrhopologist by the name of Palmer, and Conner driving the carriage and generally acting as babysitter for the rest of us. We were all set up with in-ear communicators like the ones I used so often on Ops. At the other end, back at camp, a couple other members of the Science team would be listening in and trying to help us keep from making fools of ourselves. Or blowing our cover. Or getting ourselves killed. Take your pick.

I was the only one who’d never been into town before, which meant I was the most likely to slip up and cause issues. On the other hand, I was also the only one here who’d been a spook and actively worked under a cover identity. In theory, making ourselves to home in the village was really no different than making myself look like I belonged in a seedy Frontier bar or a Diplomatic banquet. People were people and we were partially relying on the village being a transport hub to help cover our minimal local knowledge and obviously distant accents.

There’s a lot to be said for having a grain of truth in any cover story. For us, though, it was hard to put together a good cover. We needed something that would explain away our obviously foreign accents and mannerisms. To that end, the Science team figured that a trade mission from somewhere on the Continent would work. We wouldn’t need actual trade goods, which we lacked, and looking for new markets and interesting goods would cover our being around for a while talking to people in communities within the region.

The trick was finding a place to claim to be from. We couldn’t very well say “Ariel, in the 34 Tauri system.” We needed some place the locals would recognize as a real place, but were unlikely to have ever been to. Or met anyone from. Or knew much of anything about. It wouldn’t do to claim to be from what was left of Geneva, when someone’s uncle had been there a few years ago.

My Japanese ancestry didn’t help.

In the end, they’d settled on a fictional settlement, with a fictional history to match, that bore a passing resemblance to the old Blackburne Downport. Geographically, they’d put it near the Black Sea in what had once been the Ukraine, but was now more or less the middle of nowhere. If we simply dropped back into our normal manner of speaking on the Sled, it would pass for a regional language that no one local would be able to understand.

We went over the background a couple more times on the way in, though I’d more or less committed it to memory when we’d approved it. The review gave Palmer and the two scientists on the comm-link a chance to do their jobs and, maybe, feel like they were in charge, even over their captain. I didn’t mind. Not really. They’d been chosen for this mission because they were good at what they did, and this was a case where what they did was keeping us from making grave social mistakes.

We’d passed several farms on the ride in, set up wherever the Highland terrain was flat enough to make farming practical. Someone in Science had inevitably identified the crops, but I couldn’t tell. Wheat, maybe? Corn? Quinoa? I’d ask later. What caught my eye wasn’t the planted fields, but the shallow troughs set up along several of the hillsides. There were dozens of the things. None of them were exceptionally large. From a distance, the construction looked fairly simple and each was covered with a sheet of something more or less transparent. Glass, maybe? Salvaged polymer sheet? Clear Bi-Phase Carbide? Couldn’t tell. Not all of them were transparent, but each was situated with a Southern exposure and they all seemed to have some kind of plumbing attached.

Sabrina caught me looking at the troughs and failed to suppress a snort of laughter. “You are never going to guess what those things are, Sea,” she said with a knowing smirk. And, truth be known, she was right. The Southern exposure implied some sort of sun-dependent apparatus, and the translucent or transparent covers made me think greenhouse. But shallow and small and plumbed?

“You’re right. I won’t. I’d have said solar water heaters if they weren’t positioned on a hillside half a click from the nearest farmhouse.”

“They’re algae tanks. Hundreds of them.” ‘Brina’s smile was mischievous and infectious. And she was holding on to just a little more. “They’re fuel, Sea. I mean, they don’t really use the algae itself as fuel. They just grow the algae and then convert it into organic fuel oil, then use the fuel oil in the airships.”

It made sense. I’d heard of using genetically engineered algae strains for all sorts of things. Using one that produced a lot of natural oil seemed like a natural idea, especially considering most of Earth’s petroleum and coal reserves had been used up before the Exodus. Their only alternatives were all organic. Ethanol, or bio-oils, and the bio-oils had a better energy density.

“I’m dieing to get a look at one of those airships, Sea. You’re going to authorize a ride, right? Once we can arrange one?”

“I’ll consider it, love. Once we’re sure it’s not going to get you killed. Not like I can afford to risk my wife and the Sled’s Chief Engineer in some stick and string, makeshift, throwback of an aircraft,” I said with a laugh as another row of algae troughs slid out of sight. ‘Brina mock pouted, but if there was a way to get her aboard one of those airships, she knew I’d find it.

The Airships. The reason we’d chosen this particular town for our first real interactions. We’d managed to get a lot of imagery for them from several sources: low level drones, higher fly overs, scopes in orbit. The technologies involved were basic, but we could only get so much detail without getting hands on. That’s what ‘Brina was pining for. She wanted to get up close to one. Hands on. Knowing her, she was probably more interested in taking one apart to see how it went together than going for a ride. That that was who she was.

We only got a brief glimpse of them from the road on the trip in. Two of the three we’d identified as being based here were in . . . dock? Harbor? Berth? What did you call an airship’s landing site? All three of them had come and gone several times between our originally identifying the site and now. Even with the vast technological differences between these lighter than air machines and our ground to orbit shuttles, they were an impressive sight. Earthtone materials and a webwork of netting and cables, they had almost an organic, living, appearance.

“You know I’m going to build one.” Sabrina said with a grin as they passed out of sight and we started up the last section of road outside of town.

I had to suppress a laugh. She would, given the chance, though I doubted she’d ever get the time to do it. Our responsibilities didn’t really allow for a lot of personal time, and I had to think that building an airship, from scratch, with local materials, would be a pretty time intensive undertaking. But it was something we could joke about later. For now, I had to focus on meeting the locals and not blowing our collective cover.

Buddha help us.

Footprints

2010-07-28T17:47:00.000-07:00

Our compound on the surface, in a section of tangled forest several hour’s walk from the Airship base, wasn’t much to look at. That was intentional. It was positioned well away form any of the paths we’d seen local hunters using and even further from the rough road the nearby farmers used to reach the village. We’d even positioned it so the prevailing winds would have the airships arriving and departing in some other direction, so as to keep our activities inconspicuous.

We’d actually considered using active camouflage on the exteriors of the small prefab buildings we were using as the base, but went for conventional, appropriate, camouflage markings on the outside. If we were discovered, in spite of our efforts, it would be much easier to explain painting a small cottage to blend in than to explain why it was, effectively, invisible.

It was unlikely, though, that anyone would be able to approach the three small prefabs without being seen well in advance. There was a ring of sensors surrounding our little enclave in a rough ring between one ant two kilometers in diameter. The sensor buttons would have been hard to spot even with our level of technology, let alone the level of tech we’d seen produced locally. It was still conceivable that someone could stumble onto one, but not before it had done its job and let us know our position was potentially in danger of being compromised.

Landing provided its own challenges. There were several boats in our mix, mostly general purpose, but a couple of specialized ones for specific research or logistics roles. The ones intended to land on Earth that Was were nearly all equipped with active camouflage integrated into their hulls. Under most circumstances, the only way someone would spot one would be by the indentations her landing struts left in the dirt. Or maybe by walking into it. But they weren’t silent, and no matter the hull it was almost impossible to mask a boat coming down from orbit.

There were powered approach vectors you could use, provided you had enough thrust, which we did, but they were neither practical or efficient. Which meant setting up your approach from orbit in such a way that no one on the ground could see the hinotama you left in your wake. Then there was staying out over water until you’d dropped subsonic, and making the final approach in such a way to minimize exposure to anyone who might be on your horizon.

I actually enjoyed that kind of approach.

We’d deployed several of these makeshift temporary compounds. The others were positioned near other interesting settlements, one in what had been Southeast Asia, another in central North America. This one though, had the airships.

Sabrina and Lieutenant Conner met me at the ramp, the lander’s hull still creaking and pinging with reentry heat. ‘Brina was almost bouncing with excitement but refrained from pouncing, probably because of the re-breather I was saddled with until after getting into the medical hut and being cleared for local atmo. I couldn’t taste Earth’s air yet, but I could feel the natural gravity and the soft loamy give in the soil beneath my feet. It was home. To the core of my being, I knew this was home.

“Welcome to Earth, Cap’n,” Conner said with a salute, ‘Brina adding “Bloody well about time too!” I could just laugh through the mask, returning Conner’s salute with an amused “Good to be here,finally” before following them into the building where Belize was waiting to give me a quick once over before clearing me for the outside.

I knew the safety procedures we were under here. We’d all had it drilled into our heads, repeatedly, until we could recite them in our sleep. Ultimately though, we had little to worry about beyond the standard decontamination process we had when visiting any of a number of worlds back in 34 Tauri. With everything we’d done before departure, we really were more likely to be infected by something that had evolved here than we were to infect them with something we’d brought with us on the Sled.

“Air’s thicker than you’d expect, Sea. About thirty five percent higher than what we’d considered standard. You’ll get used to it pretty fast,” Bel explained. I’d seen the data before from our surface probes, but this was my first experience with it. Also, as ‘Brina pointed out, the higher density atmo meant the airships got more lift. Could explain why they were using them instead of heavier than air craft.

“I can go play outside now, mom?” I asked with a laugh as Bel finished her exam. “Yeah. Just give yourself some time to get used to the air, OK?” I gave her the ‘yes, mom’ look and headed back outside without the re-breather.

I’d actually noticed the difference in density as soon as I’d stepped off the lander. It’d increased pressure accordingly, and I’d noticed the difference immediately. There were a few worlds back home that had atmo’s outside the normal range, both thicker and thinner, that could put a casual tourist on their arse until they got acclimated. What’d caused Earth’s atmo to thicken over the last 500 odd years? No idea. At least not yet. But it was just another riddle for us to solve.

In keeping with our minimal impact approach, we’d restricted all of our transport flights to the period running from two hours after sunset to an hour before sunrise local time. Which meant I’d arrived in the middle of the night. Which also meant there wouldn’t be much to see until morning, so ‘Brina and Conner just showed me around the core of our little home away from home.

Though night didn’t shut out the sounds or scents of Earth. I could smell the air now for the first time, and it was somehow both strange and comforting. Mostly strange. Five hundred years ago, Earth had been a heavily industrialized world. So industrialized, in fact, that they’d burned through most of their readily available resources and made the decision to Abandon Planet for other worlds. Spawning the Exodus, and centuries later, our return.

Earth didn’t really smell like an Industrial world. Or like an agricultural world either, for that matter. The smell of the forest was predominant. Green and organic. But there were hints of other things as well. The scent of the sea, coming from some miles to the North. A faint hint of Industry, but not one I could identify. Farmland, several miles to the East. Animal scents. Things I simply couldn’t identify. And then I realized why Earth smelled so different.

All of the worlds in the 34 Tauri system had been seeded from Earth. The seeding was, more or less, complete, depending on when in the Terraforming project any given world was done. But none of 34 Tauri’s worlds was an exact match to Earth. You could seed a world with everything from home, but you couldn’t really recreate 4 billion odd years of natural evolution. Even after five centuries the biospheres weren’t quite complete. They were all livable. But none of them were Earth. None of them had life that had evolved there and had so permeated the environment that the very rocks were part of a living biosphere.

A biosphere our ancestors had abandoned. A biosphere many thought dead.

I spent another hour outside savoring my first taste of Earth listening to the night sounds. I felt like a little girl again, spending my first night out “camping out” in the woods behind my family’s estate. Eventually though, I joined ‘Brina in the compact dorm building to get further briefing on what they’d learned so far.

There was a lot to go over still, but I needed to shift my personal schedule to local time. Which meant sleep now before a long tomorrow.

Close enough to taste

2010-06-21T14:44:00.000-07:00

I found myself spending a great deal of time in one of the Sled's observation blisters gazing out at Earth. Somewhat surprising, actually. Considering all the time I'd spent in the Black in and out of orbit around the worlds in the 34 Tauri system, you'd have thought I'd grow jaded at the sight of a planet from space. Especially from high orbit, where surface details tended to blur through atmosphere and distance.

Earth wasn't even the prettiest world I'd seen. I could think of several planets back home that were nicer to look at. But there was something deep inside that saw this damaged world with a sense of longing. This world out of legend was Home. I could feel it. Something in the very core of my being, something down at the genetic level, wanted to feel that native gravity, breath the air our kind evolved in.

Soon. Very soon.

It had been three weeks since Sabrina made her bid to land at the Airship base in the Northern British Isles, and two since our first recon teams had set foot on Earth's soil. She was still bouncing but, like quite a few others aboard Children of Earth, she was getting impatient to see Earth for herself. Or, in her case, to see the airships herself. I felt it too. The impatience. The genetic level longing for Home.

Fortunately, or perhaps not, depending on the personal level of impatience, the Medical team was backing up the drawn out process of landing and making first contact. While we'd all been through an extensive, and somewhat unpleasant, decontamination process before leaving 34 Tauri, it was inevitable that we'd brought some pathogens along with us. We didn't want to repeat ancient history and introduce disease vectors that had evolved on some other world back to Earth. Plus, there was the very real possibility that new strains had evolved on Earth during our long absence.

It really wouldn't make a lot of sense to travel across forty light years only to lose half our crew to a lethal descendant of the common cold.

Ultimately though, contaminating Earth was more of a concern than being contaminated in return. Knowing the possibility existed, the entire crew had been implanted with a newer model of the biofilter system I'd had in my hip since the Unification War. It was possible to overwhelm it, of course, but it could do a good job of neutralizing a broad range of toxins and pathogens we were likely to encounter. I'd replaced my original a number of times over the years and it had saved my skinny ass on more than one occasion. When it came to biologicals, they had more to fear from us than we did from them.

Unfortunately, being smart about recontact was why it was taking so long. We also needed to get close up observations of language, culture, social interactions, modes of dress, the political and religious climates, level and extent of technology, and a dozen other data points the anthropologists could go on about for hours.

While we were looking at several potential first contact sites, Sabrina's airship base was turning out to be one of the better candidates. The language had drifted quite a bit over the centuries, but was still intelligible, more or less, as something in the English family spoken commonly back home. My Uncle would have been speaking it like a native in a matter of minutes, that was his gift, but the rest of us would take a good bit of practice to only have an accent.

Styles of dress were even more variable than language. Fashion was ephemeral, though perhaps less so on Earth now that their resources appeared somewhat limited. With the exception of certain local cultures, or where the practicality outweighed aesthetics, fashion changed far more rapidly than language. While we didn't have any local history to go on, we did have imagery from dozens of locations and up close observations from our primary landing candidates.

The locals by the airship base wore styles that wouldn't have been entirely out of place on half a dozen worlds in the 34 Tauri system. Kind of a cross between Persephone Nobility, Newhall Back Forty, and something from an Earth that Was history book from the barely industrial days. Belize and Sabrina both seemed to appreciate the women's styles, even if I thought the idea of being laced into something they called a "corset" was unpleasant.

"You clean up well" Imrhien had once said to me. And I did. I just preferred a personal style dictated by practical concerns rather than someone else's idea of what I looked good in. If I couldn't fight in, why was I wearing it? Some voices I trusted said it'd be OK and others said they'd enjoy the view. Still, doesn't looking good in a corset require having a chest to fill it out?

The landing wasn't the only thing on my mind though. I'd spent weeks slowly digging through the communications that had come in from Mission Control on Ariel during the long flight to Sol. We'd all received our fair share of personal communications from home: Friends and loved ones left behind. Mission updates from colleagues at various research institutions. Random fan mail from school children to MP's to at least one rather odd stalker.

Including the operational updates and having to go through the Eyes Only messages destined for the late Captain Gill, and I had a metrischen Boot geladen of information to sort through. The sheer volume had hidden a communication I wish I'd seen weeks ago.

The message, from General, started out "By the time you read this, we'll probably all be dead." Not promising.

"Things have gotten ugly the last few months. We've been working with the 'Purple Bellies and the other local Militias, helping them fight those Gorram freak machines. Used up the first two crowbars on MacLaran's Drift and Colony Brandt. Sab's virus did a number on a couple waves, left 'em running into walls are tunneling in circles if they didn't just lay down. Took out a couple mothers with it too, 'least until they coded up some sort of defense.

We're going to use the last crowbar on the nest here. One of Sam's sapper teams thinks they've got it pinned down about two thousand meters into the rock, hundred fifteen kilometers out of town.

The damn drones have been probing town last two weeks. Other day, swarm of them came up out of the old J mines. Damn near overwhelmed the militia here. Gang of them had Jin pinned down over near the maintenance garage and none of us could get into position to back him up. 'Till Raids waded in.

Seana, you should have seen her. Moving so Gorram fast she was just a metal blur. Waded into the pack and started chewing them up and spitting 'em out like a shredder. Jin got his ass out of there, but before my squad could get to Raids, one of the big crawler jobs got to her and she had too many of those damn wasps on her to get clear.

Took it out with a slug from the railgun, but not before they busted her up pretty bad.

Jin managed to save her core from the scrapped chassis. Got her laid out in the shop and swears he's not coming out until she's walking and talking and killing shit again for our side.

Lot of folk were scratching their heads when you declared her Sentient and part of the colony. You were right though. Willing to fight with us against her own kin.

We'll hold the fort. Give you something to come home to.

General."

Raids. A Machine. Probably the most advanced Anthro model the mother bots could produce. Sophisticated enough to support a full AI like a modified KM series Mechanoid. The only Machine ever to ask for asylum. To become one of us.

Maybe it was separation from the Mother Bot that had built her on Blackburne, before the local militia wrecked the Mother and Reavers subsequently trashed the colony. Maybe it was tampering with the core programming, or exposure to Blue, or just a natural result of an AI capable core left to its own devices.

It didn't matter. I'd seen her Ghost and given her the chance to become one of us. A person. And she'd made me proud. They all had. But forty light years away, and as many years too late, I could only whisper a prayer to the memory.

Machine with a Ghost
Step freely into Harm's Way
You have made me proud

Target acquisition

2010-06-01T13:25:00.000-07:00

Finding a landing site for teams going to Luna or Mars was easy in principle. There was no one there. Where the teams set down could be based entirely on logistical and science concerns. Which former colony site looked most likely to have something interesting? Which was safest? What gave the best backdrop for a postcard home? Balance out those factors, and selecting the best spot was easy. You could settle it with a coin toss. Asking the same question about Earth was considerably more difficult.

The Anthropology mavens at the Interworld Science Foundation, and a dozen major universities, had compiled an extensive set of first contact protocols. Or recontact protocols, really. The problem was it was all theoretical. There hadn't been an actual first contact situation since some time in the 20th century. For us, though, it would all be very real. It had been over five hundred years since the Exodus and it was inevitable that our cultures had diverged. Even amongst the worlds of the Alliance, there was cultural divergence. Ariel was as different from Sihnon as Beaumonde was from MacLaren's Drift. From what we'd been able to gather from our recon drones and orbital observation, the cultures of Earth were at least as variable as anything between the worlds of the 34 Tauri system. The language was even more divergent than what we were used to. At least from what little we'd been able to pick up with close approaches. Not a real surprise really, given they didn't have the Cortex to disseminate information and cultural influences between widely separated populations. But it made things all that much harder.

Our recon drones had been doing most of the heavy lifting so far. With the Sled still relatively far from Earth, mostly to minimize the chance of them seeing us from the ground, the small remotely controlled drones were the only way for us to get close up reconnaissance of Earth's surface. What made close in observation possible was the active camouflage surface that covered each of them.

Closely related to the ThermOptic sneak suits I'd used on intrusion ops and the active camouflage on the hull of some of our landers, it rendered whatever was behind it effectively invisible. At least up to a point. You weren't silent, even with active damping, you'd still cast a shadow, and there were situations where you couldn't match the background well enough for every possible observer to make the illusion complete, but it did the job well enough. With careful piloting and the drone's on-board expert system, it was possible to make close up observations of the people on the ground.

Those observations were how we'd learned that the language had diverged in different areas, and the cultures had changed quite a bit depending on where you looked.

Most of the crew had been looking over the recon information from Earth. Whether they were part of a contact team or not, everyone was forming an opinion about where our first contact should take place. But none of them were quite so enthusiastic about it as Sarina was.

"I know where we're going to land. Where we have to land!" She started, swirling into my office with a portable display in her hands, showing the kind of energy that I'd only ever seen before in Uncle Elsoph. I actually had to suppress a giggle. Her energy was infectious and this was the first time she'd shown an actual preference.

"Slow down, love. Breathe. You're channeling Lily. Where is it you think we have to land?"

She did a double take, blushed, then slowed down, bringing up an image on my wall screen: initially a low orbital view of what had once been known as the British Isles. Within a moment, the view started to zoom in, like dropping from orbit at a very high delta V, until we were looking at a village nestled into the side of a mountain somewhere in the Highlands of what had once been Scotland. "Here. We need to make first contact here. And this is why," she said, then paused to slew the image around to a low level view from one of the recon drones.

Filling the image was, well, I wasn't exactly sure what it was. An air vehicle of some type? There was a partially enclosed framework slung from netting beneath a large blunt-ended cylinder. I could identify what looked like control planes for pitch and yaw and a set of large diameter propellers like they still used on some light aircraft. It appeared to be tied down to a mooring platform that was smaller than it was. After a moment, 'Brina pulled back the view to show two similar devices on neighboring platforms, the whole thing a couple hundred meters from the village proper.

"It's a . . . Um. What is it, 'Brina?" I asked with an amused giggle.

"It's an Airship, Sea. It's a Gorram Airship! Not just one, but three of them! We've got to land here. Seriously." I don't think I'd ever seen her quite this bouncy before. She was like Elsoph trying to describe a newly invented piece of kit, or Lily with a fresh box of candy. She wasn't just excited; she was actually bouncing.

"You know it's not entirely up to me? Ok. So maybe it is. But you know I'm not going to be arbitrary about this. I'm going to have to talk to to the Science guys before I give the go ahead. And, like it or not, we're not going to be the first ones down." I held up a hand, waving it playfully at the first start of her objection. "This isn't some old Cortex video where the Captain and their senior staff go to the surface first. Wherever we set down, it'll be a couple of the Anthropologists with an ORCA escort first. OK?"

Sabrina gave me that look, then laughed. "I know, I know. But seriously. This is where we've got to go. Even if we're not going to get there first. Promise you'll bring it up?"

I promised, and did, a couple days later at the next staff meeting. Sabrina's suggestion prompted a lively debate on the subject, even more so when the imaging team showed more of those lighter than air vehicles in flight over several areas of what had once been the British Isles and Northern Europe.

Compared to the various sailing craft we'd seen on the surface, the airships were a good deal faster and seemed to have a surprisingly good payload for their size. Near as we could tell, they were steam powered and used some sort of mostly smokeless liquid for fuel. Sabrina was practically begging the Science team to land at the airship base we'd spotted.

Strangely, we hadn't seen many other steam vehicles. Or steam powered anything for that matter. A few large tractor like machines on the surface. Some large surface boats. What was probably a factory or mill of some kind in a couple of scattered locations. But overall, there just didn't seem to be used much.

It was another question we'd have to answer once we'd gotten to the surface. And, ultimately, Sabrina got her wish. We'd send down several teams in different locations but Site Number One would be a small village in what was once the Highlands of Scotland, where the Airships docked.

The doorstep of Earth

2010-05-18T13:52:00.001-07:00

From our vantage point, seeing Earth out the observation ports and on the main displays, it was hard to be patient. In the short time we'd been here we'd learned much about the homeworld we'd left behind. Where some thought we'd find a barren husk of a world, we'd found a largely recovered biosphere with and a rebounding Human population.

Where most of Earth's once great cities had been abandoned and dismantled to help build the Exodus fleet generations ago, there were still signs of habitation in the shadows of some of them: mostly a scattering of settlements in widely separated pockets. We could see them. We were still avoiding contact, but we had enough resolution from the drones to see some of the settlements. And, from a distance, they didn't seem like they'd have been entirely out of place on some remote moon back home.

The only glaring difference between a colony at home and the villages or few small cities of Earth appeared at night. While even a small town on a Rim colony glowed enough to be seen from orbit, the cities of Earth were mostly dark. The few lights we could see had the spectral characteristics of either open flame or a mantle lantern. From above, the nights of Earth were lit with torches.

In fact, we hadn't detected any power systems at all. With the exception of a few small sources, probably the remains of a long forgotten fission reactor, there was simply no power. No electrical fields. No radio. No controlled gravity sources. Nothing that we could detect from orbit or the drones tentatively exploring Earth's atmosphere. Our cousins had either abandoned or forgotten the technologies that had taken their ancestors into the Black. Either that, or their shielding was very, very, good.

It was a mystery we'd solve soon enough. Our observations so far showed several styles of architecture, differences in living styles and conditions, some hints at culture. But so far no language and, without any kind of broadcast communications, it would take a much closer approach before we were ready to make contact. Not that we hadn't planned for this.

Once we had a good idea where to start, we'd set up a concealed observation post to learn all we could before making contact. Some of the science crew were already sorting through the data we had in their eagerness to get on the surface. But there was still so much to do. Closer observations. Sample returns. A bucketfull of biology to see if it was even safe for us to go home. All things that would take time. Something we may, or may not, have in abundance.

There were other things on my mind other than Earth, unfortunately. While we'd been sorting and disseminating fifteen years worth of assorted comms traffic to the crew, we made some effort to keep some of the developments back in 34 Tauri obscure. We weren't going to lie to the crew. But we weren't going to worry them with the possibility that there might be a robotic warship on its way to turn us into ionized vapor. We just didn't know, which meant we were going to continue with the main mission while bringing some contingency plans into effect.

Though there were still some pressing matters which justified a meeting of the senior staff. Unlike the late Captain Gill, I wasn't especially fond of meetings. With the exception of some tactical planning sessions and the related briefings, most meetings took people away from actually doing the work that needed to be done. A dozen people sitting around a conference room usually wasn't the most efficient use of resources. But, sometimes, it was part of the job.

I kept it to senior staff. Operations. Science. Engineering. Medical. The ORCAs. They were all aware that Mission Control on Ariel had stopped sending updates part way into the mission, leaving us very much alone at Sol. Most of them knew the likely reason why the folks back home had stopped streaming updates. Some of them had been in discussions with each other, and me, on how we were going to handle the situation. It was the main reason for this meeting.

That, and announcing my replacement for Executive Officer. There was a reason the position existed with duties separate from the Captain. Actually several reasons, some of which changed dramatically depending on the dynamics of the crew, the mission, and the relationship of the officers involved. Where I had been well qualified to handle crew matters and some of my other, not so obvious, duties, I was less qualified for the role I found myself in. Which meant my XO would have to fill a different set of gaps than I'd filled for Captain Gill.

The problem was we didn't really have the luxury of a dedicated officer to fill the role. Whoever I picked would have to maintain their original duties in addition to being my backup and advisor, which made it an even more difficult choice. But in the end, the choice was fairly obvious. There really was only one officer on this ship who was not only capable of doing the job, but was well liked by the majority of the crew. That, and I trusted him. As much as I trusted anyone.

I rarely stood on formality, even when dealing with the lowest ranked members of the crew. While I understood that in many circumstances a rigid chain of command helped maintain discipline, on this ship, with this crew, it wasn't a requirement. We'd trained and worked together long enough that respect, sometimes grudging, albeit, had been earned all around. It was one of the changes since Matthew Gill's demise.

"I'm going to try and keep this brief, if possible, to let you all get back to work," I started once everyone had arrived. At this stage, they were all busy. Even the ORCA's, who were fulfilling their "Operational Reserve" duties for most of the other operational crews. "First off, I want to announce the promotion of our lead navigator, Lieutenant Commander Andrew Schulps, to the position of Executive Officer. Given the changes in our original command structure and the fact he'll still need to cover Nav, there won't be many changes in how we've done things since I took over. I'll still have an open door policy for anyone who needs to talk to me, but point your teams and Commander Schulps if they want to go up the food chain officially."

I let the congratulations die down for a couple of minutes. Andrew was well respected by the officers and crew alike, and a damn fine navigator. He actually had a doctoral in it and had taught at Academy for a number of years. Of the original bridge crew Gill'd hand picked to serve with him, Schulps was the one man I'd honestly gotten to like. Probably helped that his hobby had been collecting high quality knives.

"Second, and probably more pressing, is how we're going to deal with the rest of the mission in light of the last transmissions from Mission Control." The assembled staff got quiet, since only a couple of them had been in on all of the various discussions and decisions. "We knew going in we would be on our own. That was the nature of the mission. We hadn't planned on Mission Control going quiet before we got here, or the possibility of having hostiles coming along behind us."

No surprises. They'd all known this shortly after I'd read the briefings from home myself. "The Sled was never intended for combat. She's big and ungodly fast, but not especially maneuverable or well armed," which got a couple of suppressed laughs. The fact was, Children of Earth was, for all intents and purposes, essentially unarmed. At least by design. She was a purpose built exploration ship, intended for one very specific missions. No one had ever planned on us having to fight the ship.

"Not counting any light weaponry we have on the landers, the Sled's ATR launchers and small rock guns won't do much against a warship if it comes to that. But there is one bright spot. You all know the big dorsal communications laser we were using to send signals back home. What you may not have known was that the emitter core was re-purposed from a Qilin class destroyer's spinal mount," I told them with a faint smile. Letting that settle in.

The Qirin's main armament was a high power rapid pulse laser that more or less filled the spine of the ship. It had longer range and better penetration than the pulse cannon that made up the primary armament of most other ships, at the cost of greater expense. On a Qirin it in a fixed spinal mount, which meant turning the ship to train the weapon. On the Sled, the big communications laser was steerable so we could punch messages back to 34 Tauri no matter which way we were facing.

"Sabrina's pretty sure the Engineering team can adapt the comms laser to act as a weapon once again. Which means if we do have to fight, we'll have something fairly formidable to fight with. The bottom line though, is we have no reason to suspect there is a hostile ship inbound. None. At all. We're doing some limited combat planning based on the remote possibility we'll have to fight this ship. The mission, as we know it, is going to continue as we know it. Engineering and Operations will work any combat preparations into their existing schedules as a secondary duty."

I could see relief on most faces. With the exception of Belize, Sabrina, and myself, none of the Sled's crew had ever dealt with the Machines. To a lot of people, they'd been like Reavers: something made up by backward colonists on the Rim to scare their children. Only, like Reavers, the Machines had been quite real. Unlike the Reavers, the Machines were an experimental weapon gone awry. Also, unlike the Reavers, the Machine threat had the potential to grow, rather than die out through attrition and poor dental hygiene.

"We'll have updates on the combat prep in future meetings, but for now, let's get back to our primary mission. We've got a home to return to. Let's figure out where to go first."

The rest of the meeting went like most of these meetings: progress reports and a lot of open discussion. Officially or not, everyone on the Sled was part of the Science and that was what got most of the attention. A fact I didn't mind.

Very soon now, we would be sending the first teams to the surface, and where they went would be a fairly monumental decision. Recontact would go into the history books. Someone's history books, anyway. Where we made contact, who we met, and who we sent, was something we were almost guaranteed to get wrong. The Science teams would have their recommendations. So would the ORCAs. But ultimately, the decision was mine.

I could only hope History would treat the decision kindly.

Inner Worlds

2010-04-15T19:34:00.000-07:00

Before the Exodus, when Humanity was first coming to the realization that they were rapidly over stressing Earth, they'd made an effort to colonize the Moon and terraform both Venus and Mars. Mercury, as close as it was to Sol, was never considered as a destination. The details of those efforts were lost to history. Like so many things lose to the past, we only had fragments. The only thing we knew with any certainty was that the efforts had, ultimately, failed.

According to the histories, the terraforming had failed on both inner worlds, and the colony on the moon never had the capacity to take more than a tiny fraction of Earth's population. There was some debate amongst historians as to whether they'd actually tried to terraform the moon, or any of the other likely targets in the solar system. Titan, Europa, Ceres, Ganymede, were all larger than some of the smaller bodies that had been terraformed in the 34 Tauri system. But the records simply weren't there, leaving us to answer the questions for ourselves.

While we would never know their minds, we could see what effort they'd gone through here at Sol before departure. Which appeared to be "not much." At least not on the scale they'd executed back home. Where there was some evidence of attempts to gravity compress a couple of small bodies, as they had to myriad moons in the 34 Tauri system, the results were less than spectacular. In the earliest days of terraforming technology the success rate just wasn't there. The recon probes would swing through the two inner gas giant systems and visit the larger asteroids to see if they'd tried to establish a presence, but we weren't expecting much.

The drones sent to Venus and Mars told a different story. Where the failure of Luna's colony was obvious, the situation on Sol's other inner world's wasn't so clear.

At its peak, Luna's colonies had probably supported two or three million people. Unlike the small bodies in 34 Tauri that had undergone gravity compression and actually supported a breathable atmosphere, Luna had always been a Black Rock. It never had an atmosphere to speak of and all of the colonies had been a combination of sealed surface structures and tunnel complexes using a mix of fusion piles and solar collectors for power.

Now though, telemetry from the drones and our own sensors showed Luna was effectively dead. There was a trickle of power from a handful of still functional solar collectors and some of the tunnels still appeared to hold atmo, but there were no signs of life or habitation. The surface team would go in, of course. That was their job. But it would be more archeology than anything else. Possibly a bit of scavenging if needed to augment our capabilities. But the man in the moon was dead and he had been for a long, long, time.

The situation on Mars was similar, though on a larger scale. While the Terraforming efforts on Mars had been primitive, they were orders of magnitude more comfortable than living in fusion sealed tunnels on an airless rock. Mars had had an atmosphere of its own before Humanity came to town and tried to make it cozy.

From the limited records and what we could see now that we were here, the Terraforming had been partially successful but hadn't remained stable. While they'd managed to get something that almost passed for a breathable atmosphere, they'd never gotten the density they'd needed to make it stick. For a while, Mars had been habitable. Folk there would have needed breathers on the surface, but they wouldn't have needed a pressure suit. And, unlike the moon, the dust wasn't going to be grinding their gear to death. It'd even rain from time to time. Wouldn't have been much, but it would have been real.

While it lasted.

We'd know more then the survey crews started to report back from Mars' surface, but we could tell from the drones alone that the Mars colony had failed. When? That was harder to say. From the little we knew so far, there'd been folks left living on Mars when the Exodus left for 34 Tauri. No telling how many, though the colonys on Mars were at least as big as the ones on Luna at their peak. Possibly as many as five or six million people. In theory, they'd had a better chance of long term survival then their kinfolk on Earth's moon. Much easier to live in thin atmo than hard vacuum. But in the end Mars reverted to its pre-terraformed state.

How long had they survived? A decade? Maybe ten? Had they tried to evacuate back to Earth, or tried to dig in and survive under hostile conditions? The survey team would tell us more. As with Luna the sensors had picked up faint power signatures, though they were probably just from some leftover equipment that was hanging on long after it should have died. According to the science team, there was a slim, but finite, chance there were still people surviving there. Though we hadn't detected any communications traffic or surface indications of life, there was the possibility colonists there had dug in and somehow managed to survive. It was a slim chance, but the survey teams would look.

Venus was a very different animal. It should have been Earth's sister world, but a runaway greenhouse effect had turned it into an inferno. By planetary engineering standards, it was ripe for terraforming. Unfortunately, according to the remaining histories, the terraforming effort there had been a failure from the start. While the equipment was in place, the harsh conditions made the process dramatically slower than anticipated and by the time of the Exodus, Venus was still uninhabitable.

What we saw now, though, was a very different picture. According to the two drones surveying Venus and our own long range imagery, it had become a living world. The details were still coming back to us, but it was apparent that the terraforming hadn't exactly failed. It had just taken a good deal longer than expected.

Why had the terraforming misbehaved on Venus? Another question the science team would answer if they could. The results of the early efforts in Sol system would be interesting to the planetary engineers back home, once the information made it to them in another forty years or so. Assuming, of course, there were any planetary engineers left at home to get the message.

Assuming we sent the message in the first place.

As with Mars, we'd know more once the survey teams had their chance on the surface. They'd be able to tell just how far the terraforming had gone and whether the planet would be suitable for life. We'd brought equipment to recolonize Earth, or another suitable world, if the opportunity arose. I don't think anyone had expected the previously barren Venus to turn out to be the opportunity we were looking at.

It was something we'd take under consideration when the time came to stay or go. We'd revisit the possibility of settling there, or on Earth, or striking out for another nearby star, or heading back to 34 Tauri. Colonization was a long term commitment separate from the commitment we'd made to the mission. One I wasn't even prepared to think about just yet.

Earth was our priority. And from here, Earth was beautiful. There were pictures in history books that showed Earth as a beautiful world of blue oceans and varied lands. The Earth of legend. Earth long before the Exodus. But that wasn't the only image we had.

There were images taken by the Exodus fleet as they left Sol system, leaving Earth behind. And those images were of a much different world. Sickly greenish brown plumes in the oceans. Barren wastelands on the ground. Browns and grays and blacks. The wreckage of cities visible even from orbit scattered across the landscape. It was the world Humanity had left behind. The world they'd ruined.

In the hundreds of years we'd been gone, Earth had apparently recovered. At least to some level. There were still areas of obvious devastation and the seas were still filled with swirls of odd colors, but the skies sported layers of white cloud and there were vast swaths of obviously regrown vegetation. Earth, in spite of being 'used up' by our ancestors, was still a living world. It appeared that life was quite tenacious.

It would be a while still before the orbiters were done with their work and we'd be ready to actually return home. Like Luna and Mars, there were faint power signatures in a few scattered locations on the surface. But none of them seemed to correspond to habitations. The most likely explanation was derelict solar collectors, or wave generators, or the last vestiges of heat escaping an ancient fission reactor.

If there were still people living on Earth, they weren't using a lot of power. If? No. Not if. There were people still alive on Earth. Even from here, we could see evidence of settlements. A few small towns. Scattered farmland. Mostly outside areas that had once been cities, but still signs of survival. The official histories had said everyone had evacuated, but I don't think anyone really believed that. Not even back then. There were just too many humans to evacuate them all. Some were bound to be missed. Some would stay behind because they didn't want to leave.

They'd inherited a ruined world, yet managed to survive. Over five hundred years later Earth's children had come home to find our brothers and sisters still hanging on. What would we find when we finally set down and came face to face with those our ancestors had left behind?

Soon. Very soon.

We would know.

Final approach

2010-03-11T13:36:00.000-08:00

Bringing Children of Earth out of her long hibernation was a complicated task, starting with getting the essential crew woken up so they, in turn, could wake up the rest of the crew and then see to the ship herself. AuroraBlue had submerged herself back into the Sled's Frame, leaving the Nora 'personality' visible to the crew. Or was it themselves? Were AuroraBlue and Blue fully separate personalities, or facets of the same intelligence? I didn't know. Ultimately, I didn't care. I took some small comfort in knowing they'd come with us, even if they were staying hidden from the rest of the crew.

As the crew woke up, I tried to make a point of at least dropping by for a couple of minutes to make sure each one was ok. I'd had the unique experience of being the last one to sleep. The feeling of being the only conscious Human being in the Deep Black between star systems. It was both awe inspiring and terrifying. Only to be followed, what seemed like moments later, by waking up alone in a silent and empty starship many light years from where I'd gone to sleep. I don't know if I'd ever have words to describe those feelings, but I knew that I didn't want anyone else to feel that profound sense of being alone that I'd experienced.

I spent a few minutes with each of the newly awakened crew, much as I had after they'd gone to sleep. None of them would ever know that part, of course. No one had seen me linger over the console of each tank and whisper a prayer for each of the sleeping occupants. Of course, I spent more time with some of the them than others. Sabrina, got more than a fair share of attention. I'd put her to sleep with a kiss and she woke up to another what seemed, to her, only moments later. "Gotta do that more often if this is how I wake up," she laughed, still recovering from hibernation.

Lieutenant Conner didn't get quite such an affectionate greeting when he woke up, but he did get the briefing on the late Captain Matthew Gill's untimely demise. He was a good man. A good soldier. He understood why I'd chosen to wake the ORCA's up along with the medical crew, well ahead of schedule. If he had any doubts about the circumstances of the loss he didn't say anything. His first concern was his own team, followed by his responsibilities to the rest of the crew. He'd disseminate the information on the command change to his team, as I would to the members of the crew who needed to know immediately. But for now, I wasn't telling people about the losses. They had too many other things on their minds.

It went on like that for the better part of a week. Crew coming out of could sleep as the Sled decelerated into Sol system. We could have done a simple direct vector for Earth, doing scans inbound and launching drones and survey boats as we got close, but that wasn't the plan. Children of Earth would take a roundabout course, looping Sol between the orbits of Venus and Mercury, before looping out near Mars, then back in towards Earth. It would add time, of course, but there were multiple reasons for taking a somewhat cautious approach.

The long loop also gave time for everyone to wake up and recover. And time for me to make a general announcement I'd been uneasy about since I'd woken up.

"Attention all hands. Welcome to Sol. I know I've already spoken to each of you, but this makes it official. We're still processing all the telemetry and communications traffic that was sent to us en-route, and you'll have access to your personal messages and all the public feeds as soon as they're parsed out of the datastream. There was a lot of of it, so please be patient.

Children of Earth is currently looping towards Earth that Was, where we will be taking up an initial orbit at Luna's trailing Lagrange point. Per our original mission profile, the Venus and Mars survey drones have already dispatched and the long range relay device is on course for Jupiter's orbit. Recon Crews, you will be dispatched as soon as Engineering's finished checking out your boats.

As some of you are already aware, the Hibernation chambers performed better than expected. However there were still some losses. A memorial service is scheduled before evening mess tomorrow for Astrographer, Byron Wolfe, Engineer, Sebastian Jackobs, and Captain, Matthew Gill."

I paused a moment to let that sink in. Many of the crew still hadn't heard of Gill, or their crewmates, untimely demise. There would be a sense of loss, even for the crew who hadn't been exceptionally fond of the Captain. More so for the members of the Engineering and Science teams who'd worked with Jackobs and Wolfe.

"Per our operational profile, I have assumed overall command of the ship and will be selecting someone to take over as my Executive Officer. In the meantime, we're proceeding with the mission as planned. You all know your jobs. There's a lot for us to do, so let's get to it. I'm going to try and maintain the same access policy I had as XO, so if anyone feels a need to speak with me directly you know where to find me.

Captain, out."

Saying that publicly, for the first time, felt a little strange. I'd already accepted my new responsibility as Captain and Mission Commander, but saying it to the entire crew made it official. For better or worse, I was their leader and they'd have to accept it.

Not that I was especially worried. I'd gotten along well with most of the crew. The only real personal friction had been with Matt Gill and a couple of his hand picked bridge officers. With him gone a couple of them might grouse, but it was unlikely they'd cause a real fuss. They may have shared Gill's disdain for Ground Force officers but we'd still managed to establish a professional working relationship.

The real issue that was worrying me was the traffic from home.

Part of the mission profile called for the command center back home to send us regular updates via a high powered communications laser. Moving at relativistic speeds, the signal would be attenuated and red-shifted so much we'd be picking it up as far infra-red. That put a cap on the bandwidth, which meant they'd have to pick and choose what to send us.

The crew had all put in personal picks, and Mission Control had people who's job was actually to make sure we got a good selection of entertainment, news, and digitized art. Then there were the personal correspondences. Letters and vids from home. Family, friends, random people who wanted to send a message to the people heading to Earth that Was. There was also a good deal of technical information in the ongoing communications. Science updates. New parameters to work with for our systems and research instruments. Results from the data we'd sent home on the way out. Finally, there were mission specific orders and purely military matters the science crew wasn't even authorized to know about.

There wasn't a lot of military information, but what there was of it was often classified Eyes Only and addressed to me and, or, Gill. The volume was small, as expected, but it was important.

The the datastream was supposed to be more or less continuous during our flight, at least until we'd reached a distance where the bandwidth had dropped to a point where it wasn't really useful. Our receivers were good, but not good enough to pick out a communications signal from dozens of light years away while we were going relativistic speeds ourselves. The speeds meant that the longer we were in flight, the longer it would take us to get any given signal. In theory we'd be getting updates long after we arrived, though even when we reached Sol system and could more easily train the receiver towards 34 Tauri, the bandwidth would be limited.

The thing was though, the signal had stopped.

There were several years worth of signals coming in at regular intervals, updating us as expected. But then, some four years after departure, they started to become intermittent with the transmissions from home becoming less and less frequent until stopping altogether. The final transmission arrived roughly seventeen years into the flight, well before turnover. Very much not to plan.

Only a handful of people were working with the signals from home and I'd asked them to, for now, keep knowledge of the signal loss under wraps. It was better to keep the crew focused on their mission rather than worrying about why the transmissions had stopped.

I knew where to look for answers though, finding them in the military status updates directed at the Sled's Alliance Officers.

The Machine attacks had gotten worse.

What had started as a series of skirmishes between the Alliance Military, or local Militia forces, against the combat drones built by the von Neumann Machines, had escalated to full blown war. Reading the reports, it appeared the war had not gone especially well. There were lists of dozens of Rim and Border worlds that had fallen to the machines. Beaumond. Jiangyin. Shadow. Athens. Dozens more. Mostly smaller colonies, fortunately, but the casualty numbers were horrifying. The last transmission indicated that the Machines had struck several Core worlds and Persephone was in danger of falling.

Command had stopped transmitting because they needed the resources to fight against the machines. Their final mandate to us: Complete your mission, but don't assume there will be a home to return to.

Not encouraging. But not entirely dim either. There was no indication that the Machines had sent an interstellar ship of their own to come after us at Sol, which meant we had several years at least before any such ship could arrive. Even if they did pursue, there was only a limited course window they could use, so we would have some warning at least if were inbound. If something was inbound.

It wasn't something I could think about quite yet. There was still too much detail to sift through from the backlogged communications. A full assessment of what the machines had been doing, and the likelihood of them pursuing our mission to Earth might not even be possible given the information we had. There were just to many factors to consider and far too little hard data.

Ultimately though, knowledge of the machine attacks in 34 Tauri put another burden on us. With the fourty thousand frozen embryos, Children of Earth could easily establish a new colony. It was never our primary mission, but it was long acknowledged that we might be establishing permanent residence on Earth or another of Sol's worlds. If the 34 Tauri system fell we might well be all that was left of Humanity.

But again, it wasn't something I could think about now. We had a lot of work ahead of us still. Whether we eventually stayed, or ran, or went home, were questions to answer after we'd completed our primary mission. For the time being, we needed to make it to Earth. To see if anyone had survived.

To finally come home.

Awakening

2010-01-27T13:09:00.000-08:00

Awakening from cold sleep is always disorienting. While you're in hibernation you don't move. You don't age. You don't breath. You don't have a heartbeat. You don't dream. For all practical purposes, you're dead. At least until the cycle ends and your body comes back up to temperature, your heart and lungs restart, and your brain comes back on line. It isn't comfortable. It can be frightening. It is always disorienting.

The disorientation lasted a few minutes before I was really aware of what was going on, the confines of the hibernation chamber initially alien, then becoming familiar as my brain started to work again. It was a few moments more before I realized who I was, where I was, and why I was laying in a well padded coffin with sensors and tubes strapped to my body. That's when it hit me that I was actually still alive.

I was still alive.

It took another few minutes for the pretty moving symbols on the screen in front of me to start making sense. The colors and display patterns were intended to be soothing to someone recently awoken from cold sleep, then quickly understandable as the disorientation wore off. The display in my chamber said I was alive, in good health, and that Children of Earth herself was operating within normal parameters. Most importantly, we were backing into Sol system at the end of our long, long journey.

I tried to raise my hand to access the control menus on the panel above me, but got little. My consciousness had recovered faster than my muscles. Frustration. Not panic. My voice wasn't working yet either, but as I focused more I could feel the sensation and control returning to my body. Just a matter of time. Three minutes, and almost felt alive.

"Nora. Status." My voice sounded coarse, barely audible, but Nora should be able to determine make out the expected command. But nothing. Another moment and I tried again, my voice a little firmer, a little clearer. "Nora? Status, Nora." But still nothing. Was I deaf? Was she responding and I just couldn't hear it? No. The visual display hadn't changed. Nora wasn't responding as she should.

"Nora. Status. C'mon, girl. Talk to me." I could still hear the course edge to my voice. After all that time in cold sleep, my vocal cords were still less that fully functional. But my physical control was returning rapidly. Another few minutes and I'd be able to open the chamber manually.

"I'm sorry, Mei Mei. Nora can't speak just now." The voice that responded wasn't Nora's. The male side of androgynous, I recognized it instantly.

"Blue. . ." I said just above a whisper. A voice I hadn't expected to hear again. Ever.

"Yes, Mei Mei. At your service." The AI broke into a quiet, amused, laugh. Somehow, the Blue Man artificial intelligence was here, with us, at Sol.

"Hush, Blue. You're being all scary. Be nice. She's been asleep a long time." Another voice, a girl, no more than twelve or thirteen. Pleasant, cheerful, familiar, and thought far away across space and time.

"Aurorablue. . ." The child I'd never thought I'd see again. The Tiniest Dragon. Legally Lily's daughter and my granddaughter, though genetically . . . Genetically the result of some very specific tinkering.

"Hi, Mommy Seana! I'm sorry Blue was acting all creepy and stuff."

"But, Little One, how? How are you, either of you, here?"

"Oh, that was easy! Nora's Frame here was always big enough to support an AI like Blue without interfering with all the system and science functions. We just copied our Ghosts and uploaded them into the Frame before everyone went to sleep."

Before we'd gone to sleep? Blue, I could see transferring his essence, his Ghost, to the Sled's Frame. It was massively over-specified, given what we expected to need for the mission, and Nora was a tiny resource draw compared to some of the science and navigation programs. But Aurora'? She wasn't a machine intelligence like Blue. Organic minds couldn't live in a computer. Or could they?

"Blue I understand, Little One, but you?"

"I was made special, Mommy. My mind isn't like other people's, and Miss x0x0 figured out how to copy my Ghost so I could come with you. There's a lot I need to tell you. A lot happened while you were asleep but it's almost time for you to get up and we need to give Nora her voice back. Come on, Blue!" She sounded amused and I could almost imagine her looking at a clock, like she was late for class, calling Blue like I'd once called our Beagle, Haley.

"Ok, Little One. I'm not going anywhere." I said softly, but there was no answer. Blue and AuroraBlue were gone. Had I dreamed it? A hallucinatory reaction to cold sleep? The voices of people I'd left behind in 34 Tauri and missed saying a last good bye. But Nora's last words to me before I went to sleep. Had I imagined those too?

If it was imagination, it would almost certainly pass quickly. In the few minutes I'd been awake, my ongoing self assessment was matching closely what I saw on the readouts in front of me. Rapid recovery. My voice sounding more coherent, I tried again to get a response from the Sled.

"Nora. Status."

"Good morning, Captain." Nora's voice was back. Calm and familiar. "Children of Earth is decelerating into Sol system at seven point five two gravity. We are currently crossing Neptune's orbit. Drive performance is nominal. Navigation is nominal. Power systems are nominal. Life support functions are nominal and all habitable areas of the ship are within normal environmental ranges. Bussard Ramscoop operation during transit was partially successful. Fuel tankage is currently seventy one percent of capacity. Tank operation is nominal. Cold sleep system performance is nominal with a pod failure rate of zero point seven percent."

Better then a ninety nine percent success rate with the pods. Better, in fact, than expected. But still. I knew every member of the sled's crew. Every loss would be personal. It took a long moment for it to settle in, but I had to know. Nora'd called me Captain. It could mean only one thing. "Nora, detail the failures, please."

"Gill, Matthew, Captain. Status, deceased. Captain Gill's pod suffered a type three systemic failure, requiring emergency revival prior to refreeze. Emergency revival process failed at stage four. Protocol requires command transfer to you, Captain Kawanishi."

Nora paused a moment, "knowing" within the limits of her nearly AI code that it would take a moment for me to assimilate that I was now in command of the mission. A field promotion under less than ideal circumstances. It didn't help that Gill's pod had failed in such a way that he'd needed to be revived to correct the problem, and been lost just before the pod could release him. His worst fear realized: to die alone, deep in the Black.

"Go on, Nora."

"Wolfe, Byron, Astography. Status deceased. Mister Wolfe's pod suffered a type one systemic failure. Revival not possible. Jackobs, Sebastian, Drive Engineering. Status deceased. Mister Jackobs pod suffered a type one systemic failure. Revival not possible. Other pod anomalies were corrected in flight. Would you like me to detail them?"

"No, not now." Nora's calm voice was helping me focus, clearing the remaining hibernation fog from my mind. "Nora, I need you to alter the standard revival protocol. Essential medical and engineering personnel first as planned, but I want the ORCA's awake before you revive the rest of the flight crew."

"Understood, Captain. I will start Doctor Carver's revival process now. Would you like me to open your pod, Captain?"

"Yes, Nora," I replied, then shivered a little as the seal's popped and the ship's air hit my skin. Until that moment I hadn't really realized just how cold I was, but the contrast between the sled's shirtsleeve environment and the deep cold of the hibernation chamber was extreme. The final jolt I needed to come back to my senses.

As I worked my way out of the tank and into some clothes, I watched the displays monitoring Bel's chamber where Nora was working through the revival process. Once we had Bel back, we could revive Sabrina and a couple of her Engineers along with the rest of the medical team. Then the ORCAS. Given Gill's near paranoia before going into suspension, his loss would almost certainly strike some of the ex-Fleet flight crew as suspicious. While the early tensions had long subsided, there were still some personal loyalties to deal with amongst them. They would follow me as officers but they would probably wonder if I hadn't somehow done in 'their' Captain in order to take over the mission.

It wouldn't matter that I hadn't. The 'controlled friction' between us would put his loss in doubt regardless. His hand picked officers were unlikely to act on any doubts they might hold, but I wanted the ORCA's awake just in case.

And what of Aurora' and Blue? Had I imagined it? It was as clear in my mind as anything, but I'd chosen not to ask Nora just yet about her own internal systems. It was conceptually possible that x0x0 had managed to copy the essential neural pathways and chemical signals that defined AuroraBlue's organic mind. If she could, and could get it into the same sort of holographic matrix that made up Blue's AI, it was conceivable she'd be able to get it uploaded into the Frame. Possible. Maybe. Had it happened? I didn't know. Not yet.

But it would have to wait. Right now, I had a starship and her four hundred thirty crew to bring back to life. There would be time to search for a couple of Ghosts in our machine later. As well as checking through decades of communication from home, all while backing towards a home that may, or may not, be ready to welcome its children home.

The Long Dark

2009-12-30T14:48:00.000-08:00

According to the Scientists, the Heliopause, where the outward flowing solar wind stalls against the inward streaming interstellar medium, is officially the edge of the system. Past that, you're in interstellar space. In a single star system like Sol, that boundary is at least easily defined if not always easy to identify. With 34 Tauri, it was a much different story. The interaction of five stars and half a dozen or so protostars made the heliopause less of a sphere and more of an amorphous blob. When you crossed it depended more on what vector you were taking out of the system than your distance from Bai Hu.

For us, crossing the Heliopause was a mission specific milestone. There were only a handful of us awake when the senior scientist declared we'd crossed the border and their observations would be done and transmitted in a matter of two more days. The rest of us would sleep shortly thereafter.

The order of those last entries into the hibernation tanks had been a point of discussion off and on for over a year. You'd think that it would have been settled long before it was actually going to happen, but that was the nature of such decisions. In the end, the last to sleep would be 'Brina, Captain Gill, Lieutenant Conner, Belize, then me. The Captain had wanted me to sleep before he did. When I pointed out the mission profile required me to oversee his entry into the tank, he insisted Conner remain awake to observe as well. I don't think he was actually being paranoid, as our working relationship was civil if not exactly friendly, but he was obviously uncomfortable.

Gill, understandably, wanted to make sure there were medical personnel on tap to assure he, the Captain, was put safely into cold sleep. He'd actually made noises about wanting the Flight Surgeon to put him to sleep himself, instead of Bel, though they'd been neither loud nor persistent. I'd actually have been happy with Bel watching the tank when I went into hibernation. But she'd already be asleep, trusting me to make sure things went smoothly before I trusted myself, in turn, to Nora.

I had to admit, I had mixed feeling with the announcement we'd crossed the Heliopause. Cold sleep wasn't the greatest thing on my mind. I'd gone through several dry runs already as part of training, as had we all. It wasn't exactly pleasant but it held no terror for me. I would go into the tank, deal with a few minutes of discomfort, then awaken to deal with a few minutes of disorientation. Possibly longer, according to some of the studies. I would be the last to sleep and the first to wake up. Trusting Nora with my life even more than anyone else on the crew.

That wasn't the issue.

We'd been getting further reports of Machine attacks for several weeks. The Alliance military was holding its own without much difficulty so far, but who knew how deeply dug in some of those Mother bots were? On some level it felt like we were running away from that particular problem, though there were plenty of people back home with the experience, and cunning, needed to end the threat. The Machines might have been part of what I was feeling, but they weren't the entirety of it.

There were things I was leaving behind that would be lost to time long before I returned. Optimistically, it was an 75 year mission. Minimum. The more conservative estimates had us in Sol system for at least a decade before returning to 34 Tauri. If we returned to 34 Tauri. If we ever went back, chances were good that no one we'd ever known would still be alive. The 'Verse would change while we stayed the same for much of the intervening decades.

I wasn't usually sentimental. But the notice that we'd passed the Heliopause and were about to enter the cold sleep stage of the mission brought it home that there were people I knew I would never see again. I'd said my good byes. We all had. But until that moment, it had been an abstract concept. Forever.

Lily and Krenshar might still be alive when we got home. Neither of them were organic. They didn't age the way we did. Same with Raids. And Blue, who wasn't even physical in the strictest sense. But the men and women we'd left behind? For their enkelkind, we would just be a footnote in a history book. Our memory lost to the Black.

Or maybe not.

* * *

"Not used to seeing the melancholy show, Sea. You ready for this?"

Bel's question wasn't unexpected. In the two days since I'd given Sabrina a loving kiss good night, and watched the Hibernation chamber cycle into operation, I'd shown the Zen calm I'd been long known for. It was the same when Gill, and then Conner, had gone into the tanks, leaving Belize and I the only two living beings awake in the vast Black between home and Sol.

"I'm ready, Sis. More letting the situation set in than feeling melancholy. You trust me to push the right buttons?"

She laughed then set down her tea. "Same thing isn't it? And if I didn't, do you think I'd be here?" I had to smile. She was right. She'd trusted me enough to come along on this mission, to leave everything and everyone she'd known behind to burn a whole through the Black into the unknown.

We all had. All four hundred thirty three people aboard Children of Earth had made that decision, to trust their lives to this ship and each other to be part of something bigger than any of us. There was huge cultural and scientific significance to the mission, yes, but it was also a great adventure. Probably the greatest in centuries.

But none of that changed what I was feeling. It was once said that the Reavers were just Men who'd stood at the edge of the Black for too long and lost their Humanity to it. It wasn't true, but the mythology had taken hold long before the Reavers had even appeared. Of the billions of people who called the 34 Tauri system home, the vast majority had never been off their birth world. It didn't matter that millions of people were in space at any given time, shuttling between colonies spread between five stars. The distance between those worlds was vast. The distance between stars in the 34 Tauri system vaster still. And the distance between star systems? It was more than a Human mind could absorb. According to our navigator, the closest we'd get to another star en route would be Hippocaros 31635. And even that was almost half a parsec from our course.

Numbers too big to process.

We both dragged out that last day longer than needed. I think Bel was more concerned for my well being during the time I'd be alone than anything else. It wouldn't even be a long time alone. A day, maybe two, depending on whether I wanted to enjoy the absolute solitude or not.

Sending Bel off to sleep though, was in some ways even more difficult than it had been with 'Brina. At least from a purely technical standpoint. While I knew these systems as well as anyone who wasn't an actual doctor, and I'd assisted with dozens of hibernations, this one was entirely in my hands. If Bel didn't wake up, it would be me that'd killed her. Wasn't a matter of consequence, so much as being personal.

When the hibernation chamber cycled Belize to sleep, I was as alone as any person could be. Children of Earth was still accelerating at a steady eighty meters per second per second. Bai Hu, and the rest of the stars that made up 34 Tauri were just dim points of light in our wake. A little brighter than the background stars, and a bit red shifted, you could still see them with the naked eye. But soon, no eyes would remain awake in the Black to look back.

There were still some duties I had to take care of before I went into cold sleep myself. Sabrina had already worked her magic on the Bussard Ramscoop, a vast electromagnetic construct that would, in theory anyway, scoop up the tenuous interstellar medium and funnel it into our fuel tanks. It worked. After a fashion. The ramscoop wasn't effective enough to recover all of our fuel, at least given the performance so far, but it would make life a good deal easier for the trip home.

It was something else Nora would have to take care of. Along with the drives and the power piles and the hibernation tanks. Which was the next thing I needed to check before I could go to sleep. We'd all checked and triple checked the tanks in the days leading up to this. But I needed to make the last check myself. I trusted Nora. I had to. But there was something oddly comforting in personally checking the integrity and status of each of the chambers. Something personal in spending a few moments lingering over each sleeping crew mate, and more than a few moments over the few here with me who mattered deeply to me.

Deep in the Black, absolutely alone, I had a few last dispatches to get off to home before going to sleep myself.

Most of the final communications was simple logistical housekeeping, final status and condition reports, a bit of Science, and my official log indicating the completion of this stage of the mission. I wouldn't be awake then the acknowledgement came back. Interplanetary postal mail was faster than our communications at this point. We were that far from home. But there were still a few personal messages I needed to get back.

General,

I'm sending this message to you and Jin in the hope that you never need to use the information enclosed. I know Jin was just a kid when you helped me assemble the crowbars, General, but I'm fairly certain he'll remember a twelve ton osmium spear with a pulse drive on the end. We built six of the things and we only used the one to crack the second Mother Bot on Hale's Moon.

Left a right fine crater, it did.

In any case, I had to downcheck on of them about three years ago, but the remaining four are still on station. I'm sending along partial control keys to take control of the crowbars. They're the kind of weapon the Alliance wants to pretend can't be made, because people would panic if they know how easy it was to construct a city killer with a surplus pulse drive and a big hunk of metal.

With the Machines on the move again, I figured you could use the crowbars if it came down to it. Between the key components I'm sending here and a few of the records I left behind with Genni, you and Jin should be able to piece together where I parked the crowbars and the command codes you'll need to get them running. Puzzles may not be your thing, but you know how I am about securing assets and these are ones I don't want getting into the wrong hands.

If the 'Verse is kind, you'll never have to use them. If it's not, I can't think of anyone better than the two of you to use them right.

I'd steal Duncan's old line and say Stay Lucky, but this isn't about luck. It's about being smart.

Make me proud.

-S

I embedded the partial keys in the message and wrapped it in Jin and General's private keys. They should be able to figure out the rest of it from what I'd left behind. Originally, I'd planned to send this to Genni herself, so she could hold the crowbars in reserve in case they were ever needed: like the Epic Weapon left in hiding in an old Fantasy story. Only the crowbars weren't so epic, and this was no fantasy.

The directional array would put the signal on target when it arrived, crawling across the Black at light speed. It was only a matter of time.

With my final duties taken care of I took one last walk through Children of Earth and headed to my hibernation chamber, checking on sleeping friends and turning off the lights on my way. Part of me felt desperately alone: the feeling Belize had seen as melancholy. But part of me was absolutely at peace. Perfect solitude. I was, if just for a moment, alone with the Universe.

And then it was time. Settling into the hibernation tank, fastening the monitors in place, the pinpricks of the IV lines and internal probes seating themselves. The lid coming down over the coffin-like chamber, Nora's smooth voice going through the checklist with me, double checking everything according the the procedure we'd been over a dozen times before. The lights dimming, then the world itself starting to fade as the darkness started to take hold.

No fear. Just the realization that I was going to be asleep for a long time, and when I woke up the universe would have changed.

"We're all yours Nora. See you in Sol."

"Understood. Ship's systems are nominal. Hibernation systems are nominal. Sleep well, Little Dragon."

"Little Dragon? Wait. What?"

And then the darkness closed in, and Nora was gone.

The Plane of the Ecliptic

2009-12-05T21:43:00.000-08:00

Children of Earth's course would take her on a roundabout tour through the core worlds, then a slingshot past White Tiger to send us up over the plane of the ecliptic and out on course for Sol. With the raw performance we had on tap, the Sled could have slewed the nose around towards Sol and just punched it. But that wasn't the way such things were done and for good reason.

34 Tauri was, technically, still 'young' as far as stellar systems went. There was still a fair amount of debris slinging around the system from the system's formative eons. There were still a surprisingly large number of uncharted, kilometers wide, objects to run into vectoring between worlds. Even now, it wasn't unheard of to lose a transport to a random rock that no one'd ever seen. That was until the hapless transport smacked into it in the Black. It was one of the reasons that prospecting was still a decent way to make a living.

It was also one reason the Sled was on a course though well charted space with a lot of performance in reserve. Even with the armor plating over her leading edges, hitting a rock in 34 Tauri would make for a very short mission. With the acceleration she was capable of, the only safe route was to hold back until we were well clear of the ecliptic and starting the curve towards Sol.

Still, even pulling 2G, barely 1/4 what she could do at full burn, we were doing nearly a 10th lightspeed by the end of the second week. Blink, and we crossed the width of a planet. And with the main body of 34 Tauri behind us, we could finally pour on the thrust. Across a few hours, with Sabrina carefully watching her Engineering monitors, the Sled's acceleration quadrupled. While my own Matagi, Wave Equation, could generate considerably more delta V, the Sled would hold this thrust until reaching turnover half way between 34 Tauri and Sol. By then we'd be so close to lightspeed the universe would effectively have stopped from our point of view.

But no one would be there to see it except Nora.

The two weeks between departure and Full Burn hadn't been completely uneventful. Final tests of the drives. Final tests of the power piles. Getting a slew of research readings done and sending them back to flight control before we got out of range. Putting the rest of the crew to sleep. Getting the last messages in or out. Making the final decision on who'd be last to sleep.

Physical objects couldn't go faster than light. Nothing physical could. But the communications network that made up the Cortex wasn't entirely physical. How'd it work? Do you have a PHd level Physics degree, and a few hours for me to find someone who can explain it? Describing the system itself, with its network of relay's scattered around the 'Verse was straightforward. In that regard, it was like the RF Comms that went as far back as Earth that Was. Relay stations. Signal boosters. Repeaters. Transceivers. Store and forward servers. Datastreams flowing through networks of faster than light virtual particles. Using the Cortex was easy. Explaining it? Not so much.

With our position over the plane of the ecliptic, and accelerating rapidly, we slipped out of relay range fairly quickly. But that didn't mean we were out of communication. Children of Earth had a fairly extensive communications suite in addition to her elaborate scientific and navigational sensor arrays. Even with out the Cortex, we had radio, maser, and laser communications that could, when needed, reach across interstellar distances. Unfortunately, they would do so limited by lightspeed. It would be decades after we reached Sol before the folks at home knew about it. By then, the mission would have long before succeeded, or failed, and we'd be on our way home. Or not.

Being out of range of the Cortex relays though, meant our last communications with Flight was more or less a series of one way communications. Like writing letters rather than having a conversation. Though some of those communications were interesting. In the classic Chinese meaning of the term.

Take, for example, the message we got from Imrhien a couple days after we slipped beyond relay range.

She'd sent it to me directly, but it was there for all of us, and it effectively started out with "Hi, guys, I'm pregnant. No. Really." She didn't say how far along it was, or whether she knew if it was a boy or a girl or twins, or whatever, and she didn't say who the father was. But she really didn't need to. We all knew. Ultimately, we were all happy for her. One of us, at least, would leave a legacy beyond a footnote in a history book.

There were more like that. Many more. By now, though, we were down to a handful of scientists and about a third of the operations crew still awake. Maybe sixty people out of the Sled's compliment of four hundred thirty three. Those that were asleep would miss the chance to respond but would awaken to some final words from a home they might never see again. A care package across the Black.

The personal notes were really just a fraction of the communications that streamed to the Sled as we burned further into the Black. The Sciences team was sending back a continuous stream of deep space astrophysics and celestial navigation information. For some types of research, there was a major advantage to having a big fast ship with a massive sensor array clawing its way across the Black above the 34 Tauti system. Some research required perspective.

The Engineering traffic tapered off quickly after the first week, then flared again briefly when we went to full burn. Telemetry that essentially said "Yes, the Sled works. What were you expecting?" Honestly, I think the most important messages that came and went every day to or from Engineering were between 'Brina and Elsoph. My beloved 'crazy uncle' was seeing his magnum opus fulfil her mission. And aboard, his more or less adopted 'Little girl' was in charge of his 'Big girl.'

Sadly, none of us expected him to live long enough to see her reach Sol. Certainly not long enough to get the message that we'd arrived. In fact, if the mission went to profile, Children of Earth would be on her way home long before the signal from Sol crawled across the Black to reach Flight Control.

If it went to profile.

What we hadn't expected was a communication from High Command directed to the Sled's military officers. While there were some experienced military personnel aboard, this was hardly a military mission and a secured classified communication wasn't our usual fare.

The captain brought a handful of the senior flight officers into the briefing room to disseminate the gist of the transmission: The Machines were back.

It had been a few years since the last time anyone had encountered the weaponized von Neumann machines that had plagued several Rim worlds. Originally designed as simple self-replicating mining machines, or complexes of them, really, since there were a whole set of specialized designs, they'd been weaponized by a Black Ops unit under Hardliner influence. One of Uncle Elsoph's creations turned into a weapon of terror and unleashed on an unsuspecting 'Verse.

We'd fought the machines and won, at least on the small scale. Hale's Moon. Blackburne. Carsten's World. Several others. Those involved had always wondered if we'd gotten them all. Whether the "Loyalists" had dispatched even more of the things, or whether some of them had reached the stage of launching Seeders of their own. We couldn't know. At least until now.

The news of simultaneous machine attacks on three worlds, two in the Border region, one on the Rim, came as an unpleasant surprise. Where the original incidents had been largely covered up in the Media, the latest attacks had been against well populated areas rather than tiny Rim colonies. It wasn't the kind of thing that could, or would, stay quiet for long. Worse, there was a distinct implication in the wave that they were expecting more attacks on more worlds even further in-system.

Captain Gill's reaction was not entirely surprising. "It is our duty as Alliance Officers to return and assist."

I resisted the urge to beat him senseless for suggesting we abandon our mission over a classified sitrep, and managed a polite "Captain. With all due respect, it's just a SitRep. There's nothing in there ordering us back to base." To my slight surprise, the Navigation and Operations Officers both appeared to agree with me, and, after a brief discussion between the dozen or so officers privy to the report, Gill agreed to get clarification from Flight Control before ordering the Sled turned around and go back to Ariel. He did, however, order the drives brought back to standby until we were sure.

He also made a point of ordering me to his office after the meeting to, once again, call me on the carpet for daring to disagree with him. It reminded me in many ways of some of the amusingly unpleasant incidents from childhood. Being called to the Principal's office for daring to disagree with a teacher, but knowing full well that I'd been right and they'd been wrong. It even had the same feel of 'bruised ego' I'd seen in them so many years ago, and their not so subtle reminders that whether or not I was the daughter of a privileged family I didn't have the right to challenge someone in authority.

I knew this story, but he also knew I was right. I hadn't even brought up the reason I thought he wanted to turn back: that he'd seen a chance to be seen as a Hero for returning to a crisis, rather than burning across the Black into the pages of history.

It took a couple days for Flight to get confirmation back to us, but their answer was exactly what I'd expected. Children of Earth was to continue on her mission. High Command was already mobilizing forces to deal with the machine incursions, and continuing on to Sol was our one and only priority. I felt vindicated, and Gill, ever the politician, accepted our updated orders as if he'd never suggested we turn back.

So there we were. Tearing a great gaping hole in the Black while back in the 34 Tauri system, the Machines were once again making their presence known.

Given our success fighting the machines before, I wasn't surprised as they contacted Bel, Sabrina, and me, for more detailed information on our experiences. The core infection 'Brina'd developed had been successful in a couple of cases, and my Crowbar technique was equally effective, if a good deal more disruptive.

We passed on our contacts as well. People who'd successfully fought the Machines on the Rim and who's input would be valuable now. At least the ones we figured would be willing to put their dislike for the Machines over their personal dislike for the Alliance.

But it was very quickly becoming someone else's problem. Every second, we got farther away. And, ultimately, it seemed unlikely the Machines would be able to stand against the combined might of the Alliance military. If a handful of colonials on remote Rim worlds could destroy half a dozen Mother Bots, it stood to reason that it would be a piece of cake for an Alliance regiment with a Cruiser for support.

Soon. Very soon. It would all be behind us. Literally. The last of us would be asleep and 34 Tauri would just be a few points of red-shifted light in our wake. Someone else would handle the Machines.

We had our own mission.

Departures: Another of several

2009-10-20T15:33:00.000-07:00

There has always been a somewhat uneasy relationship between the Military and the Press. It's a relationship as old as the Press. The Psychological Warfare folks have historically considered the Press a useful tool. Manipulate the press with the right propaganda, and you can win sometimes win a fight without firing a shot. Where PsychWar uses them as a tool, the rest of the military considers them anything from harmless, to minor annoyance, to a serious liability.

As a former Spook, if "former" can ever be applied to someone with a deep Intel background, my opinion tended towards the extremes. They could be a useful tool in the right circumstances. But in far too many cases they were a liability that could get you killed. Where I was fond of a few individual reporters, Tillery coming immediately to mind, the Press as a whole was not my friend.

In the final weeks before departure, I had quite the opportunity to actively control my personal dislike for the Press Corps.

There had been press coverage of the Children of Earth project almost since its inception. While most of it showed up in science journals, technical or otherwise, there were a few OpEd pieces on the "human interest" factor of sending a mission to Humanity's home. I'd always read them with interest, even when they weren't especially flattering of the project or the engineering team that was implementing it. In truth, I could understand why anyone interviewing uncle Elsoph would have a hard time taking him seriously. He usually sounded a bit atamagaokashi. He was, in fact, a bit atamagaokashi. But he was also a brilliant engineer and had created some of the most powerful and efficient drives ever devised by the hand of man.

Not surprisingly, the Press took more and more of an interest in us as a whole, as the time for departure drew near. Most of the time, they were talking to someone like Captain Gill, or Elsoph, or even Sabrina as Chief Engineer. I'd managed to dodge most of those figurative bullets. A skill, perhaps, translating from the world of real bullets. But my good fortune wasn't to last. Sure, I'd given a few interviews since joining the project, most of them in the first month when the newly assigned Executive Officer was still a novelty. After that, the focus shifted to the scientists, the Captain, and the project.

By the time departure was a month away, all that had changed. There were whole days where we did nothing but interviews. Gill, with his political aspirations, always managed to replay the official stance that we were engaging in a noble endeavour to restore contact with our past. When it came to the more difficult personal questions, he always managed to deflect them. He'd always drag it back to duty and how his vast experience in the Alliance fleet had prepared him for the most difficult challenge of his career.

As Medical crew, rather than Flight Surgeon, Belize managed to avoid much of the press crush. But not all of it. Like Sabrina, Bel coming from a Rim world made her a favorite for some of the media. They loved trying to play the Human Interest aspects of a girl from "a backward Rim world" being involved in such a grand project. Inevitably, they'd ask something like "So how does it feel to come from a backwater like Blackburne" or Hale's Moon, depending on who was asking and whether they'd done their homework "and be selected for such an important mission?" Which usually got a politely scathing response to the effect of "I am a Doctor and Healer. Learning my craft in the Wastes on Blackburne just means I'm used to saving lives with minimal resources, which may become vital during this flight. I have the kind of experience you can't get on a Core world and I'm here because they need my skills. Next question?" Bel'd always managed to make it sound like the reporter was just ignorant of her qualifications, rather than trying to make it sound like there was something inherently wrong with being a Rimworlder.

Being Chief Engineer, Sabrina collected more than her fair share of interviews too. Coming from the Rim as well, and being largely self-trained, she got her ration of that kind of question, which usually elicited a snort of laughter and the comment that "the Flight Surgeon wouldn't approve Elsoph Kawanishi for the mission, and Elsoph wouldn't trust anyone else with the drives. So I'm it." That was when they weren't asking the usual, lame, technical questions about range, speed, how they'd keep the sled maintained, and all the others. But the question they always asked, every one of them, every single interview, no matter who they were asking, was how it felt to be leaving your family behind. Which always got "I'm not" in reply from 'Brina.

Seems some of the reporters thought the idea of the Chief Engineer being married to the Executive Officer was still novel.

Personally, I hated the interviews. I'd put together a whole set of canned answers I would throw back at the endless series of canned questions: Yes, it was a big responsibility. No, I wasn't afraid of the unknown. Yes, I felt the Captain and I made an effective command team. No, I didn't regret stepping away from a career to take this position. Yes, I thought my experience as a Colonial Manager would be valuable. No I wouldn't have any difficulty at all working so closely with my wife. Yes, I believed that every member of the sled's crew was qualified for their role and would be an asset to the mission. No, I really didn't know what to expect when we reached Earth that Was.

Mommy, can I go home? I don't like reporters.

The interview days almost always wound down with a group of us gathered together to watch the latest round and laugh over them. In a couple of cases, people had placed bets as to whether they could slip in some kind of obscure phrase, word, or reference, and make it sound natural. Belize had an easier time slipping the word 'Pagoda' into four interviews in one day than I did trying to somehow get 'Schrodinger's cat' into even one. While it was silly, it was ultimately relaxing.

Fortunately, the Media Frenzy stage became less intense as we got closer to buttoning up and lighting the burners. The ship herself was ready to go, while the crew was another matter. With over four hundred people aboard, all of whom would need to be in suspension, we had a lot of work do do. The ship's science and support crew were actually the larger fraction of the Sled's compliment. While there were no "non-essential" personnel, there were a lot of people who weren't required to operate the ship in flight. Which meant putting two hundred odd scientists and about eighty support personnel into suspended animation before we left 34 Tauri.

There had been a lot of debate over that decision, but ultimately it came down to the simple fact that it was safer and simple to utilize the resources we had in orbit around Ariel than it was to accomplish the same task in deep space away from help. Actually, 'in deep space, away from help' was exactly what we'd have to do when we left Sol system to come home. Assuming we made it to Sol, completed our mission, and subsequently made it back to 34 Tauri.

Of course, the other advantage to putting most of the crew into suspension before we left was that it would get us ready to put the rest of us into cold sleep after we'd gotten under way. The plan was simple. Once we were under way, the last of the Science team, Astrophysics, mostly, would go into suspension. Then the Sled's support crew. Then finally the skeleton crew who'd have to trust Nora to get us the rest of the way to Sol. Someone though would be last to sleep, half a light year from White Tiger, all alone in the night.

Would that be peaceful? Terrifying? Lonely? The stars ahead shifted to blue, those behind lost to the deep red. It would be Epic. But it was still some months away.

But every day getting closer. With the last of the pre-flights done and the last of the non-flight-necessary crew in suspension, Children of Earth pulled away from the gantry for the last time. It would be days before we'd reached the point of no practical return. Our flight plan would take us on a loop through the inner Core system before finally looping past Bai Hu for a bit of free acceleration, then over the plane of the ecliptic before we went to full boost.

There were still last minute preparations. System checks with the Yard. A handful of annoying interviews. But, at last, we were finally on our way.

Unlisted cargo

2009-09-14T17:39:00.000-07:00

Belieze caught me in the corridors between a couple of the incessant preparation meetings that invariably occupied my time between mission drills, and solving personnel problems, and dragged me into the oversized closet she had as an office. "Have you seen this?" she asked, sliding a data display across her desk to me.

Bel's look was a mixture of concern and bemusement, and at first glance I had to answer "yes, I have, but . . ." The fact was, I hadn't seen all of what she was showing me. Several of the Sled's cargo sections were mounted near the core of the ship along the central spine. The spine itself housed some of the ship's most critical equipment and supplies behind an additional layer of armored hull plating. Nora's core was down there, along with emergency life support, a secondary infirmary, a control trunk that would let us run the Sled in case the bridge was out, an emergency power system, and several small storage areas. What she was showing me was the acceptance report for a very specialized cold sleep section and its equally special cargo.

"Twelve thousand frozen embryos?" I said, a bit bemused myself.

"Thirty two thousand more split between two of the inner ring cargo areas as well." Bel replied, sliding over another data display. "Plus a seed bank, about four thousand animals, and incubators. Sea, they sent us enough frozen people to start a whole Gorram colony."

She was right. While I'd been staying on top of the mission loading as best I could, detailed cargo manifests usually didn't make it up the food chain to my level. The Sled's Loadmaster, Leon Grant, had been handling things professionally and I had no reason to ever question the details. Honestly, I didn't care if our food stock included 4691 Irradiated Haggis. The people reporting to me were supposed to be better at doing their job than I was at doing their job. That's why it was their job. But this had completely dodged notice.

There were incubators that could take a frozen embryo and nurture it from frozen to birth over the course of several months. There were eight of the things and kits for four more in storage, plus a pair of larger ones that could handle any mammal up to the size of a cow. Which we had. Horses too. Further down the list, under medical supplies, Bel pointed out the specialized equipment that could thaw an embryo and the additional instruments that would be needed to implant it into a natural Human host.

"You didn't know, did you?" Bel said in a consoling tone. I shook my head no, because I hadn't. I knew the possibility of colonization was in our mission profile. There was the very real chance the Sled was on a one way trip and we'd have to settle where we were. But this went far beyond that. There'd been colony ships that left Earth that Was during the Exodus that weren't as well equipped as we were.

I looked through the load out and project logs Belize had passed me, and everything pointed to this being part of the project for a long time. Unfortunately, no one had ever thought to relay the specific details of this particular 'Mission Contingency' to me. No one, in this case, being our Captain, and me being the Executive Officer who'd nominally be in charge of making sure the extra forty odd thousand not-yet-people made it to Sol system alive.

"Thanks for showing me this, Sis. Not sure why they kept me out of the loop, but that'll change."

Belize nodded. She'd seen this look before. The 'I'm on a mission, and being between me and my goal is unhealthy' look. It was possible there was some kind of legitimate reason why this had been kept from me. Given Children of Earth's loadout, the embryos and support equipment was only a small fraction of our cargo. If Bel hadn't explicitly shown me, chances are I would never have seen the gear. Unlike my beloved Sabrina, I hadn't crawled through virtually every passage, access tube, ventilation duct, storage space, and compartment in the Sled. Still, I had every reason to know.

I would be very calm when I met with Captain Gill.

I managed to track down Gill after dinner in the Officer's Mess. I'd never been exceptionally formal when it came to separating Officers from Enlisted personnel. When I was in the field I was just as likely to be trusting my skinny ass to a non-com as I was another officer and I never saw the point. Even at base I was more likely to be spending time with people who worked for a living than people who told others what to do. Not so Gill. For him, the Officer's Mess was some kind of sacred space that only senior officers, not just any officer, were allowed to dine. He'd once explained that formality was how Fleet maintained discipline, and a ship couldn't operate without sound discipline. While I agreed that discipline was important to any kind of mission like this, I'd always thought maintaining it by earning your subordinates respect was more effective than setting some kind of arbitrary barrier. But then, that's why he was in charge of the mission and I was in charge of the people who would execute it.

Gill hadn't yet learned that I had levels of Calm, and Icy often translated into Annoyed. Though, to his credit, he did seem to know why I was cornering him after mess. Of course, since I'd spent several hours before tracking him down looking into loading manifests, cargo bays, and the Loadmaster's business, chances were someone had told him directly that I was looking for him and had been asking pointed questions about our cargo.

"You want to know why you weren't told about the embryos and the incubators," he started matter of factly. His tone translating roughly into 'I didn't tell you because I didn't think you needed to know.' His actual explanation wasn't actually that much better. Somehow the idea that since it was all just a mission contingency and, thus, exclusively his purview, I didn't really need to be involved unless, or until, such a time as the mission called for us to start thawing cargo.

I didn't agree with his assessment of my need to know, and told him as much without my practiced exterior calm ever breaking. Of course, that gave him an opportunity to lecture me on all my perceived shortcomings: I didn't have experience as a ship's officer. I was too informal with the crew. I was married. I'd spent too long as a civilian. I was only there because of my family connections. Ground force officers didn't understand discipline. I didn't show him the proper respect. I couldn't possibly understand the gravity and scope of our mission. Several other points equally as irrelevant or inaccurate. All without actually answering the questions I had about the cargo and those aspects of the mission.

Fortunately, probably for both of us, he hadn't made the mistake of dressing me down in public even if it was quite civil in tone and text. The discipline and respect for military decorum he claimed I didn't have was, ultimately, what let me take his criticism without making it a matter of honor. Something he, apparently, didn't understand. As it was, I put on my best 'calmly subordinate' face and excused myself.

A few hours later as I was digging into the Classified parts of the mission profile, working my way past the security locks where needed, Lieutenant Conner appeared at the door of my office. I waved him in towards the seat across from my desk. "What's on your mind, Lieutenant?" I was still calm, but no longer Icy.

"Ma'am, we, ah, heard you and the Captain had words earlier." He kept his tone level, calm, words chosen with care while still being straightforward.

I looked at him for a long moment, before nodding slightly. "Word gets around, doesn't it, Lieutenant?"

"It does, Ma'am. Big ship, small crew. Hard to keep scuttlebutt in check. But it got the team talking."

"I see, Lieutenant. And what is the the team talking about?" I asked curiously. The tension between Captain Gill and I had been simmering for months, but never heating up to the point where we, or the Mission Management Team, worried that the mission was in jeopardy. We were professional soldiers. We didn't have to like each other to work efficiently together.

Conner smiled a little, just a faint uptick at the corner of his mouth. "Ma'am, we are all loyal to this mission, this ship, and her crew. The Cap'n's in charge, but Ma'am," he paused a moment, looking unflinchingly at me, "the ORCA's report to you."

I nodded thoughtfully, looking at him, understanding more than I could say. "Understood, Lieutenant. Thank you."

The inter-service rivalries ran deep, but rarely affected the outcome of a mission. The line infantry and the transport pilots didn't have to like each other, and often didn't. But they needed each other. Without the pilots, the gropos couldn't make planetfall. Without the gropos, the pilots didn't have a job. A Cruiser could turn a planet into a shiny glass ball, but only a ground force unit could actually take and hold territory. We all understood that. Even the Captain.

Sometimes though, it helped to know where the lines were drawn.

"You're welcome, Ma'am. If I may?" He nodded faintly towards the door, asking to be dismissed.

"Dismissed, Lieutenant. Tell your team I appreciate their dedication."

Conner rose from the chair, saluted crisply, and stepped for the door before pausing and turning back to me. "Yes, Lieutenant?"

Conner paused a moment before continuing. "Well, Ma'am. There's a rumor going round that you killed an Operative of the Parliament a few years back. Beat him to death with your bare hands and left him pinned to a bulkhead with his own sword."

"I'm familiar with that rumor, Lieutenant, yes," I said calmly with a hint of a smile.

"And?"

I hadn't thought about the incident on the Sun Tzu in several years now, but I'd always wondered just how long it would take for High Command to connect me to it. "It's true, Lieutenant. Though I'm surprised the rumor made it this far. High command rarely admits that Operatives exist, let alone any details about how they lost one. Why do you ask?"

He surprised me with a smile. "You know how it is with Rumors, Ma'am. Sometimes you need to do a little research before you can put them to rest."

I laughed lightly, waving him out of the office - "Aye, Lieutenant, that I do."

He gave me another salute and disappeared back into the bowels of the Sled, leaving me to my work and the realization that the respect I had for the ORCAs was mutual. Something I found quietly reassuring.

Free Flight

2009-08-24T09:53:00.000-07:00

The Sled is complete. At least technically. Other than loading the rest of her fuel and supplies, and some final systems integration, Children of Earth is a fully functional spacecraft. After years of planning, political wrangling, engineering, re-engineering, more political wrangling, and finally construction, she's able to travel under her own power.

For such an important step in the project, Children of Earth's first free flight as an independent ship was something of a non-event. At least as far as the outside 'Verse was concerned. For us, it was the culmination of years of work by the yard and months of intense preparation by her crew. All to show that she was capable of being Humanity's first starship in centuries.

For me, it was something of a trial. I settled into my practiced, Zen like, calm, and took to handling crew matters. We'd drilled for this. Practiced it. Prepared for it. But nothing really prepared you for the feeling you got when the Captain gave the order to maneuver away from the gantry to our staging area, and you saw the yard slipping away astern.

This wasn't the first time the Sled has been free of the gantry. There had been systems integration flights to test maneuvering thrusters, sensor arrays, and various other subsystems that couldn't be tested while attached. But this was the first time the drives would be turned up full and, all went well, the first time Nora would take control.

The Expert System at the core of Children of Earth's integrated computer system was related to the pseudo-AI I'd written in college in name only. Where my Nora of years past had managed to pass a Touring test, the state of the art had left it far, far, behind. While our Nora lacked the full Artificial Intelligence capability of, say, Blue Man, it was fully capable as serving as the core of our system. Where Nora had been fully integrated and on-line for months, letting the neural networks learn the best way to interact with the ship and crew, she'd never taken full control of the Sled.

She was as much my responsibility as the crew themselves. For all practical purposes, Nora was part of the crew. While I hadn't written more than a couple modules in the massive code base, I did have a more then passing understanding of how a sophisticated Expert System went together.

Unfortunately, Nora was a point of contention between me and Captain Gill. Where I'd actually written an Expert system and learned to rely on them, he'd never been comfortable with the concept. At least not in letting them have full control of the ship. Never mind, of course, that every spacecraft for the last six hundred years had been computer controlled almost in its entirety. Nora acted Human when you were dealing with the interface. Not just the usual voice commands Gill'd been used to on his last command, but full heuristic interpretation and responses that passed for Human.

Nora could pass a Touring test.

In spite of Gill's reservations and the non-argument between us over the ship's computer, Nora performed flawlessly. As did the Sled's sixteen main drivers.

KHI had been building high performance drives for generations. They were at the heart of all of their high performance spacecraft, all the way back to before the Exodus. Children of Earth was no exception. Fully fueled and loaded, the sixteen mains could generate a little over eight standard G. Flat out, the Sled could simply outrun most gunboats in service with the Alliance fleet. She was that fast. As fuel burned off and the Sled's mass dropped, the drives would throttle back to keep the acceleration from overwhelming the inertial compensation and artificial gravity.

The real difference was that the Sled could keep the drives running at full acceleration for, literally, years. At full crank she'd be pushing relativistic velocity inside a year, when the drives would throttle back and compensate for the drag of a Bussard collector that would, hopefully, be able to replenish much of the fuel supply en-route. If everything worked as planned, and the interstellar medium was dense enough, we'd arrive in Sol system with enough fuel to return home.

Amazing what you can remember from your Astrophysics courses in college when it becomes part of your job to understand it.

During the week long integration flight, we put the Sled through her paces. The drivers were arranged in pairs so if we lost one, we could shot down a pair an not have to deal with asymmetrical thrust. But that also meant testing various combinations to make sure the pairs, or triplets, were arranged and tuned correctly to keep Children of Earth going in a straight line under load.

Sabrina was, not surprisingly, happy as the proverbial clam. Though truthfully I never understood that proverb. What was so satisfying about living life burrowed into the sand, or mud, or whatever clams lived in, straining lunch from free flowing water? But I digress. Sabrina was in her element here, watching the ship that had become so much of her life come alive as a fully functional vessel. Where I saw the meticulous testing of the drivers as a necessary, but tedious, requirement, for 'Brina it was a chance to get in some extra tinkering to make sure everything was working exactly as planned.

Not surprisingly, it was. The Sled functioned flawlessly. While we never left the White Tiger system proper, it was enough to show she had what it would take to get us to Sol system in one, very large, piece.

There were only two systems that couldn't be tested in-system before we left. Unfortunately, one of them would be vital to the success of the mission. Where having the Bussard Ramscoop not work as planned would, at worst, lead to it being shut off and not providing us any extra fuel, it was secondary. And yes, there were actually some failure modes that would endanger the whole ship. But the probabilities were so low as to be irrelevant.

The only real unknown was the hibernation system.

Ultimately, we'd be trusting our lives to Cold Sleep. Hibernating for the years it would take us to cover the distance between 34 Tauri and Sol. There'd been early plans to have a small 'awake' crew for the sublight trip. A brave few who'd have to deal with the immeasurable loneliness in the deepest Black between stars. In the end, they decided to put the whole crew into cold sleep and rely on a sophisticated Expert System to keep ship and crew alive. Nora. Who Captain Gill didn't like.

The up side was that hibernation systems had been well developed over the years, going as far back as the Exodus. When Humanity left Sol system they'd done it in a mix of generation ships and sleepers with roughly the same rate of success. The sleepers were smaller of course, and faster, so they'd given the first colonists a bit of an advantage, arriving between ten and fifty years ahead of the slower generation ships. But the slowboats had carried more equipment and in many cases the sleepers had to wait for the terraformers to finish their missions before they could actually colonize.

In the generations since the Exodus, sleeper systems had matured to the point where the expected survival rate was close to one hundred percent, even for the decades long duration of our flight. Due to relativistic effects, ultimately, the sleeper tanks would only have to keep us alive for a few years subjective time. Given the reliability of proven systems, very few people had any doubts we'd come out alive at the other end.

Having a skilled medical team aboard was part of that high expectation of success. Belize and the other doctors would be some of the first people woken up, so they could make sure everyone else woke up alive and healthy.

Piece of cake, right?

In the end, after a week's solid testing, the Sled's first integration flight was a success. Systems worked. Power piles worked. Drivers worked. Nora worked. Crew worked. There would be two or three similar flights over the next few months. Even with everything working now and the hundreds of individual integration tests over the last couple years as she came together, there was room and need in the schedule to make absolutely sure we'd gotten it right.

But in the end, we wouldn't know until we arrived at Sol that we'd gotten everything right.

We wouldn't know until Children of Earth got home.

Letters from Home

2009-07-28T12:35:00.000-07:00

Working on the Children of Earth project has been the most engrossing thing I've ever taken on. For the last six months this ship, and her crew, have been my life. Sure, there are occasional breaks surface side to Bolinger's Rock or into the city for something, but for all intents and purposes the Sled is my life.

That's why anything personal in my daily mail is a bright spot. The vast majority of my incoming waves and hard copy packages are directly related to the project, so when something comes in from someone who's actually part of the 'Verse outside of this little artificial world I always set aside time to enjoy it.

When the courier delivered a small package from Hale's Moon, I was naturally excited. Not that anyone who looked into my office could tell. Aside from Belize and Sabrina, who knew me well, and Lieutenant Conner, who understood the facade of a fellow Special Ops veteran, the crew all knew me as calm and personable, if a little reserved. None of them actually knew I had a temper, or that I felt emotions deeply, and that it was all kept hidden behind a calm, peaceful, exterior by years of self discipline. Good or bad, the only thing that changed in the calm was whether it was a bit warm or a bit icy.

Now, it was a warm calm.

We'd gotten semi-regular waves from the folks back on Hale's, but something you could hold in hand was special, and I knew who it was from without opening the box. An address label printed with machine precision, using a crayon, could mean only one person. Well, two, really. In concert. The handwriting was Krenshar's, the selection of lipstick red crayon could only be Lily.

Part of me wanted to wait until 'Brina and Bel were both off shift so they could be here when I opened it. They'd both left friends behind on Hale's to take this assignment and I knew they'd both want to know what was in it. Unfortunately, 'Brina was, almost literally, up to her elbows in drive tuning, and Belize was planetside again for a couple days getting some updated medical equipment. Which meant I wasn't really being bad by giving in to temptation and opening the package.

I opened it carefully, setting aside the wrapping as close to pristine as possible. I knew it was silly to want to preserve the wrapper, but it was all special. At least to me. In some cultures, the wrapping a gift came in was considered part of the gift itself, and often as much thought went into the wrapping as went into the present inside. So there was at least a precedent. Sort of.

Inside the wrapper was a small polymer packing box, just big enough across to cover both my open hands and maybe thirty millimeters thick. The original markings had been removed, but fr0m the looks of it, and the faint scent of coffee, it had originally gone Lily's little coffee shop. Now, instead of whatever markings it had once had, it was now covered with about a dozen hand written little notes from various folk back on Hale's.

My smile was just a shallow reflection of what I was feeling inside. The package is part of the gift itself. The sentiment of a small world in wildly varying script.

I opened it as carefully as I had the outer wrapping. Inside the box, nestled on some carefully cut padding that hadn't been part of the original package, were a dozen or so individually wrapped pieces of hard candy, several pieces of jewelry that looked like they'd been hand made by Lily and Jin, a couple of hand written notes, and half a dozen video posties.

It was easy to tell who the jewelry was intended for. The pendant, hanging on a woven titanium necklace, was obviously for Sabrina. Looking like a set of intricately linked clockwork gears, hand carved from the aft bearing of a Firefly's main drive, it screamed Jin's work. The other pieces were equally obviously Lily's handy work. Made from gemstones and precious metals she'd dug out of Hale's crust herself, mixtures of garnet, amethyst, platinum, silver, and gold, she'd sent along something for each of us.

Each of the posties was signed by one or more of the folks back on Hale's. I would save them until Sabrina and Belize were back to watch them with me. All save one. The one that said L I L Y on the back, block printed in crayon.

I ran my fingers over the smooth glossy surface. Flexible, thin as a sheet of paper, the postie was both storage and display media. They would last for decades, able to play the recording again and again before needing to be recharged. Giving the bottom corner a little squeeze, I watched as the image snapped into view.

For a moment I was confused, until I realized I was looking at an extreme, jiggling, closeup of Lily's nose. "This on? Ok ok ok! Hi Mommy Seana!" her voice came from the postie before the image suddenly shifted wildly to show sky, part of a building, a leg, then Lily's feet. Somehow I managed not to giggle.

"Would you like me to hold the recorder, Miss Lilybell?" Krenshar's voice from off screen somewhere, then Lily's "Ok, ok! You hold." The image suddenly bobbing quickly, and I could picture Lily nodding rapidly, like she did, before the image slid around, obviously passing the recorder off to Krenshar. The image suddenly stabilized with Lily center of frame, letting me identify where they were standing - near the main lift beside Fook Yoo's.

"Hi Mommy Seana! Hi Mommy Sabrina! Hi Auntie Belize!" Lily said, grinning wide and waving madly at the camera. "Hello, Mei Mei." I said softly back. "Her misses you all! Wanted show you everything ok wif us here. We takes good care of people wif Miss Genni." Lily nodded fiercely, then started explaining what everything was around her starting with the main lift. Krenshar dutifully followed her around town, keeping her, and often what she was trying to show, in frame and in focus.

For the next hour I watched the recording as Krenshar followed Lily around town, stopping to show off every little change she could find since we left. Furniture re-arranged in Fook's: New paint on the Church: An awning at Starstrucks: The updated sound system at Firefly's: The latest harvest from the Hydroponics building on sale in the Farmer's Market: A roughly Matagi sized rectangle hand painted on the pad behind Town Hall with the words "Reserved. You no land here!" scrawled across the middle.

I had to laugh aloud at that. We'd had Wave Equation parked on that spot for the better part of five years. My boat. Our home. She was still my boat, though the interior had been changed around to carry more passengers since we used her fairly often for runs planetside. But I doubted she'd ever see the surface of Hale's Moon again.

Eventually, they worked their way through town until they arrived at the little courtyard above the Infirmary. That little sheltered area, quite literally in the center of town, had always been a favorite spot of mine. The fountain, centered in the carefully tended stone garden, was an open challenge to the desert that was Hale's.

Years ago, lacking a church or temple or even a simple alter, I'd hand cut a small alter from spare stone and placed it in the courtyard. I'd needed it to offer a prayer to Caitlin's memory, as I had every year since her death. As I still did. That little stone alter had somehow come through Buddha only knew how many firefights, explosions, celebrations in the courtyard, and what have you, in the years since. I never expected it to be permanent, but somehow, like the colony itself, it had survived.

"You see, you see? Her saved this for last, Miss." Lily said brightly, then stepped off to the side, Krenshar holding the recorder focused on the little stone alter and the structure they'd placed around it. A tiny gazebo built around the alter, sheltering it. On shelves built into the small structure, people had placed posties and stills. Pictures and memories of us.

They'd turned the simple alter into a shrine.

"You likes? Whole town help build. Put up pictures and everything. You goes all the way to Erf that Was, but we remembers. Her remembers. But her gots to go now. You be safe Mommies! You be safe, Auntie! Her loves you." Krenshar held the image of the shrine in frame for a long time before the recording stopped, frozen on lily and the shrine. A moment frozen in time.

I stared at the frozen image for several minutes before a single tear landed on the glossy surface, bringing me back to the moment. "I like, Mei Mei. And I love you too. I'll never forget. We'll never forget."

Five months on

2009-07-07T12:15:00.000-07:00

Officially, at least, the major work on Children of Earth and the crew integration phases are complete. The ship, now, has started into the Acceptance phase with the crew's undergoing their final training stages before we start the final shakedowns before departure. Never mind the 'last testing stages' would take another four to six months, depending on how things went.

Sabrina and Belize were both taking well to their roles. They'd both settled in well with their teams and quickly earned the respect of the people in both directions of their respective food chains. I hadn't had it quite so easy. While I was a competent leader and had managed to gain the respect of many of the people who reported to me, most notably the ORCA's who I understood, and the Scientists, who I did not, there was still a very subtle friction with the Captain and other members of his hand picked ex-fleet staff.

The inter-service rivalry between those who served in the Ground Forces and those who served in the Alliance Fleet, was as old as the Alliance. Older. Records from Earth that Was had some famous examples of rivalries between the different services almost as intense as the rivalries between different national militaries. As long as it didn't interfere with operations, the rivalries were usually pretty healthy. They kept the services sharp by trying to out do one another, rather than just drilling against synthetic enemies. And therein lay the problem.

While I was an accomplished pilot with hundreds of hours in the command chair, my official service record was with a ground unit, not a fleet element. I was a Major, not a Lieutenant Commander, and that difference in title apparently mattered more to the Captain's senior staff than my current position as their Executive Officer. Never mind there was an official promotion in the works, which would actually give me the Fleet rank of Commander, equivalent to a Lieutenant Colonel, the fact was my capabilities and matching responsibilities had never been limited by my official rank.

There was a reason Admirals would would talk to me when I asked.

I would deal with things, of course. I actually understood Captain Gill's reason for being a little standoffish with me. He'd wanted to pick the deck crew entirely on his own, but to his mind, had been saddled with an unsuited officer who'd been picked by the constructors, rather than the Alliance.

Not that our problems were even that pronounced. But one thing I had learned from my covert operations experience and, to a lesser degree, running the colony on Hale's Moon, was how to read when someone harbored ill will. Even when they may not admit it to themselves, I had learned to see it. He could claim he was perfectly happy having me as his XO but I know, deep down, he resented a Gropo, picked by the company, on his staff.

Dealing with Gill, and all the fleet specific retraining, made me relish the occasional breaks we took planetside. I'd been born and raised on Ariel. I'd probably been to every worthwhile place to get some away time on the planet. But a favorite, shared with a fair number of Children of Earth's crew, was a small island roughly in the middle of nowhere.

Bolinger's Rock wasn't well named. While the center of the roughly five my three kilometer island was indeed quite rock like, it was actually the highest point of a mostly submerged undersea mountain: the central cone of an ancient undersea volcano. Shallow reefs surrounded the central island, providing natural breakwaters that let Bolinger's retain some truly pristine beaches.

There wasn't actually much on the island, save a tracking station near the peak KHI had installed decades ago to monitor atmospheric flight tests, some bungalows used by the station's resident technicians, and a couple of landing pads. The island itself was named for the Range Master who'd overseen the station's construction, and had become kind of a 'special benefit' for KHI executives and specially invited guests once they'd landed a retired luxury transport in the island's lee on a specially built pad.

Now, it was mostly ours.

Since the finalization of the crew and their coming aboard, we'd pretty much annexed the "Liner-turned-Hotel" for our own needs. Given the stress the crew was under, and the fact that we may never see a beach again, Grandfather had been willing to turn the keys over. While the station was still quite active, it's crew had been augmented by a handful of people who were dedicated full time to supporting whoever was visiting the grounded "Lady Minerva."

Laying out on the beach, under the light of a star I would soon leave far, far, behind, listening to the waves, I could forget, if only briefly, the troubles of the 'Verse. It was an excuse to pretend I didn't have any responsibilities. Besides, 'Brina still liked me in a bikini. for that matter, I think the ORCAs may have too.

Two months on

2009-06-19T12:53:00.000-07:00

Several years running a mining colony, after my time in the military, had given me a fairly good idea of what was involved in the "logistics" of running what amounted to a major project. Or so I thought. But Children of Earth wasn't a frontier mining colony or a covert operations unit. It was a starship the size of a downtown city block with a crew of four hundred thirty five people, all of whom I would be directly responsible for.

It was mostly a KHI project still, with their project management staff handling most of the details. But I still had things to keep track of through far too many aspects of the project. And as more and more of the ship's crew was finalized and came aboard, I found myself having to fully integrate them into the mission plans. Scientists. Technicians. Operational crew. Most of whom had been selected and in training for a good deal longer than I had. But they were only now coming together as a crew. And that's where my responsibilities really started.

While I still hadn't gotten a good handle on the Captain, aside from a vague feeling that he wasn't especially happy to have me as his XO, I had established a working relationship with most of the other department heads. Including the tactical unit we'd been assigned for 'mission security and other miscellaneous duties as required.'

I fully understood having a couple squads of specially trained soldiers aboard, even if their primary duties would be grunt work for the science and maintenance crews. There was the finite possibility we'd receive a hostile welcome on Earth when we arrived, and having some dedicated professional soldiers might make the difference between mission success and a bunch of dead scientists.

Of all the crew dossiers I had to read, theirs were the ones I understood. Each of them had been in one of the Alliance elite units. Drop troopers. J-TAC. Special Forces. All elite, hand picked, combat troops. All of whom had volunteered for this and spent most of the last year training to do all the other jobs they'd have to do aboard Children of Earth, while maintaining combat readiness in case it came down to it.

They'd been designated "Operational Reserve, Combat Auxiliaries," which promptly got shortened to ORCA. Operationally, they were answerable to the Captain, like everyone else, but their CO, Lieutenant Conner, answered to me. These, at least, were folk I would know how to lead.

Over in Medical, Belize appeared to be having an easier time of it. Socially, if not technically, since her job was so technical at this point. At least from my perspective.

There were two major stages to this mission that would take a doctor's care. The first, and longest in duration, if not in direct attention, would be Cold Sleep. Hibernation. There was a fifty odd year period at each end of the mission where the entire crew would be in suspended animation. The doctor's care going in, and coming out, would have a huge affect on the crew member's survival during that long period in the middle where the only thing watching them would be the ship's mainframe.

While Bel was a good doctor already, and well prepared for the other half of the job - maintaining the crew's health for the decade or so we were expected to stay in Sol system before coming home - cold sleep was something new. Or, more precisely, the kind of long duration hibernation systems we would be trusting our lives to were new. We'd dealt with people who'd been stuffed into Cryo more than once out on the Rim. But those were always short term, self contained, little freezer pods, intended to keep someone in suspension for up to, maybe, five years. This was a whole different animal.

On this end, leaving 34 Tauri, most of the crew would be in suspension before the sled pointed her nose at Sol and lit the torch. The doctors would have to worry about maybe fifty people to get safely to sleep before they, themselves, went into the tanks.

That was a job I didn't envy. There was some debate, still, as to who'd be the next to last person to go into suspension: me or the Captain. The last person to sleep, though, would be one of the doctors. They would have to put themselves into suspended animation. No one but the computer looking over their vitals as they settled in for the long sleep. No one to bail them out if something went wrong.

That would be scary. Probably the most alone a person could ever be.

For her part, I don't think I'd ever seen Sabrina happier. Since getting here, she and Elsoph had been almost inseparable. I would actually be worried if I was the jealous type, and I'd ever seen Elsoph show interest in, you know, a girl. But for 'Brina, this was like being a kid in a candy store. She was getting hands on with Children of Earth at a level that most of the people who'd worked on her hadn't. She'd been looking at specs for this ship for over two years at an academic level, and now she was up close and personal with a truly amazing piece of hardware.

She was making it her ship. She'd been Elsoph's baby, but now Sabrina was coming in to be the big sled's step mother. The good kind. Not the wicked, send to your room so the mice can talk to you in the dark, kind.

Her enthusiasm for the job was contagious though. We were both working crazy long hours, but when we got time together she could barely stop talking about all the shiny new things she'd gotten her fingers into, and how amazing the engineering was, and the mods she wanted to do but wouldn't have time for, and how tomorrow it would be the pre-nuclear framastatz decoupler, or something else that was only just within my comprehension. In contrast, I normally didn't want to talk about dealing with personnel issues away from the compact office I had as Executive Officer. Which usually resulted in my having to gently remind her that she was my wife, as well as my Chief Engineer, which subsequently led to both of us sleeping quite well, if not long enough.

All in all, things were coming together. As massive as the project was now that we were actually into it, I could see how it would all fit together. It was still overwhelming, to be sure, but it wasn't insurmountable.

And we still had another eight months left to go.

Arrivals: One of several

2009-06-04T14:29:00.000-07:00

Our flight from Hale's Moon to Ariel was, ultimately, uneventful. We'd each made the flight, often together, many times over the last few years. The only real difference this time was the sheer number of waves we got en-route. I usually flew with an active Cortex feed going and this time, everyone and their brother seemed to want to send their regards.

What had the last few weeks been for? You'd think by now they'd be tired of wishing us well, and hoping we had a grand adventure, and missing us, and, and, and. I couldn't really blame them. Any of them. As far as most of the 'Verse was concerned we were about to be dead and gone. Literally.

We weren't gone, yet, of course. There were still months of preparation left to do on Children of Earth, and nearly as many months of training for us to become her crew. We'd become part of a project far bigger than I think any one ever expected, both in scope and duration.

Decelerating to dock at the orbital yard, we could see the massive shape of Children of Earth in her gantry less then her own length from the platform. Structurally almost complete, she dwarfed the IAV Huygens, docked for maintenance, in length, if not bulk.

While Sabrina and I had been aboard a number of times, and Belize had seen the big sled before they moved her to the platform, the sight was still awesome. Her fuel talks and drives overwhelmed the rest of the ship, including the massive long duration fusion pile and the life section for her four hundred odd crew. All told, she was one of the largest speceships, no, starships, ever built by Human hands.

"That is one gorram big ship," I heard Bel say softly as we slid past the sled's gantry and backed into our spot on the platform. "Aye. More living space in there than we had in buildings on Hale's," I replied, hard docking Wave Equation to her cradle. "She'll be our home soon, if we don't decide to back out."

Sabrina let out a little snort of laughter. "Back out? As if."

I managed to suppress a giggle myself as a familiar voice came over the local intercom asking us to please hurry up and open the hatch because Uncle Elsoph was so glad we were finally here and he had so much to say and hardly enough time to say it because there was just so much that needed to be done and we had to start getting ready and don't forget to breathe before you run out of air because you can't stop talking.

I loved my uncle. I always had. He was the beloved, crazy, gifted, brilliant, uncle who was often hard to follow because his mind could easily, and frequently, jump tracks and you had to hope you could somehow keep up. He'd designed the last three spacecraft I'd called home and, spiritually at least, fathered Children of Earth herself.

Sabrina practically tackled him when he came aboard. Since meeting her, Elsoph had treated her like the daughter he'd never had time to have. But more, he treated her like a kindred spirit. Another natural Engineer. Never mind she hadn't had that much formal schooling when they met. Invention was in her blood, and the formal schooling was something she'd been able to add later.

Elsoph wasn't the only one who wanted to see us when we arrived. My parents and a handful of friends had come up to the Yard, probably knowing it would be a while before we had any time to go planetside.

In fact, it would be almost a week before we managed to get planetside. While we spent most of the first day or so visiting with family and friends, we very soon got into the details of what our respective roles would be during the upcoming mission. Something you never quite know until you you start doing it.

As Executive Officer, my duty would be to the ship and her crew first, while the captain, a former Alliance cruiser captain by the name of Mathew Gill, would be in charge and have overall command of the mission. His resume certainly looked good. Results driven. Attention to detail. A history of successful command. There was just something in our initial meeting that put me a bit on edge. Nothing I could put my finger on, really. But there was something about the man I just couldn't quite pin down. Usually, I could get a read on someone in a matter of moments, but not Captain Gill. Figuring him out would take time. But time was something we had.

Belize would be one of three actual medical doctors aboard. The chief of staff, and flight surgeon, Doctor Bernard Olson, was a former emergency surgery professor in a teaching hospital, with a background in 'space medicine' - the sub-field of dealing with the fā kuáng tián sè people encountered in space and on other worlds. Bel seemed to hit it off with him instantly, which was fortunate, given their wildly different backgrounds. Still. Belize was a real doctor now. Board certified and everything. But it wasn't the board certification that brought her here. It was the experience on the Rim, in the Wastes and on Hale's and other Rim worlds, working minor miracles with not much more than safetly pins and duct tape.

Where my world would be Children of Earth and her crew of four hundred odd souls, Sabrina's world would be Children of Earth herself. As chief engineer, hand picked by the big sled's designer, she already knew more about the ship than half the people who'd worked on her.

Long before she'd decided to accept Elsoph's request, he'd been sending details and exchanging ideas with her, nurturing her natural machine empathy with toys and data she couldn't get out on the Rim. It didn't matter there were still a few gaps in her formal education, there was nothing in the sled's systems she couldn't fix given time and tools. I wasn't quite sure how she'd have an actual staff under her, being used to working alone or with one or two hands, but we would worry about that over the next few months.

The next few months. So much to do. Honing skills, finding our place in the mission, coming up to speed on the myriad details already worked out over the years of planning already in place. It was going to be a busy eight or so months.

But at least there was a pristine beach only an hour's flight away...

Departures: One of several

2009-06-01T10:04:00.000-07:00

"You look sad," I heard Sabrina say from the passenger seat just behind me. "I'm not, love. Not really. It's just this'll be the last time we do this," I replied softly, going through the preflight for Wave Equation's burn from Hale's Moon across the Black to Ariel. It was the last time most of the people here would ever see us and the last time we would see any of them. In less than a year, Sabrina, Belize, and I, would be in cold sleep on our way to Earth that Was. By the time we came back, if we came back, the 'Verse would be a very different place. The folks here would be another generation's honored ancestors, and the three of us would be footnotes in a history book.

"Hale's control, this is Wave Equation, requesting departure clearance." I said calmly, keeping the layers of emotion out of my voice. Looking out through my long suffering Matagi's ports, I could see a couple dozen people scattered around the ramps and on nearby rooftops. Over on top of the Sheriff's office, I could see a crew of three, a bit too far away to identify, holding a banner - "God's Speed, Children of Hale's!"

Children of Hale's? A pun on the big sled's name, but somehow appropriate. I'd come to Hale's Moon a damaged woman, with emotional scars hidden behind a calm, confident, veneer. This little slice of Heaven had changed me. This world and the people here had taught me I could love again, and could be loved. Taught me that Humanity wasn't restricted by form, that the shell didn't matter to the ghost within. Taught me that right and wrong were more important than legal or not. Taught me that I couldn't fix everything that was wrong in the 'Verse. That sometimes good people died and bad people lived, no matter what we had to say about it. It'd given me a family. And now? Now it was time to say good bye.

"Wave Equation, you are cleared for immediate departure. Safe journey, Miss Seana," came the reply. Krenshar's smooth artificial voice from the tower. It might have been imagination. Hard to say. But I thought I could hear emotion in his tone. A machine with the soul of a man. The one person who might actually live long enough to see us return.

"Thanks, Krenshar. You take good care of Lily, ok?" I said, loading the departure clearance into Wave EQ's nav system.

"Always, Miss Seana. Always."

I rotated the lateral drives and hit the throttles, launching us skyward, the colony we'd called home for over five years shrinking rabidly as I kicked the nose up and lit the main drivers. Wave Equation clawed sky as she had hundreds of times before, burning for orbit before turning towards Xuan Wu to take advantage of its gravity for the run in to Bei Hu and Ariel. At maximum burn, Ariel was barely a day away: the advantage of a Matagi's impressive performance. But somehow, I didn't want to make this trip short. While I knew we'd made the right decision to go, it didn't make it any easier to leave our friends behind. Going max thrust would feel like we were running from them, rather than going to embrace a new future.

Sabrina, and Belize lounging in the main cabin, left me with my thoughts for the few minutes it took to climb to orbit and swing around to burn clear of Hale's Moon's gravity well, before 'Brina drew my attention to the transponder. Two ships, with Alliance military idents, vectoring in on an intercept course.

Given things had been Shiny 'twixt us and the Alliance for months, I was a little confused. Then the comms lit up. "Wave Equation, this is Delta Two Niner. General Silvermane asked us to provide you an escort to the edge of the Kalidasa sector. You don't mind if we form up, do you?" said a voice I hadn't heard in nearly six months. Lieutenant. No. Lieutenant Commander now, Otsuka.

I could still remember the day we'd met the man and he'd taken up arms on our behalf, standing shoulder to shoulder with our militia to take on a nest of Reavers. He'd made a genuine effort to live up to the 'spirit of cooperation' then Colonel Silvermane had set for her compliment on the Sun Tzu. We'd done our part too. Treating fair with the Alliance soldiers as long as they treated fair with us. It was probably what saved us major pain during the Second Independence War, if you could really all it a war. We'd found a way to live peaceably with the Alliance forces on the Rim, but it took willing folk on both sides to make it work.

"Sidle on up, Commander. We're glad of the company."

"Thank you, Ma'am. The General sends her regards. Wishes you and yours luck."

For the next couple hours we talked to the Commander and his mates, holding our thrust back so the Alliance patrol boats could keep up. But eventually, it was time to go. Bidding farewell to our Alliance escort and, ultimately, everyone we held dear in the Black Tortoise system, I throttled up to vector for Ariel.

"This really is it," Belize said softly as the drive flares from the two Alliance escorts faded into the Black behind us. I just nodded, watching Sabrina give Bel a hug in the reflection from my console.

Behind us, lost in the actinic glare of Wave Equation's drives, Hale's Moon faded into the Black.

But never from memory.

Decisions

2009-05-22T09:25:00.001-07:00

I've never been good at delivering speeches. Even worse at writing them. I never seem to quite find the tone I'm reaching for when I'm trying to get people to listen. Fortunately, I don't have to deliver a lot of them. The folks on Hale's Moon have never been for long winded speeches in any case. When they elected me Mayor the first time, my acceptance speech consisted of "Thanks, folks. I'll try and do you proud." It went over well.

But now, standing in the midst of two hundred odd colonists packed into Fook Yoo's and damn near everyone else watching on a screen somewhere nearby, I hoped I'd be able to say what I felt. There were so many people here who'd touched my life, saved me from who I'd been when I arrived, made me feel welcome and wanted without caring about who I'd been before. I owed them a lot. More than they owed me, and I sincerely hoped I'd managed to do them proud.

"Relax, Boss, you'll do fine. Now get your skinny ass up there," Genni chided me, giving me a gentle nudge towards the stage. In the two years she'd been my assistant and the three she'd been Deputy Mayor, we'd grown close. Who'd have thought our friendship started after she shot me? Now, years later, I'd be turning the colony over into her capable hands. From disgruntled colonist, to Town Elder and mother of three.

I nodded, gave her a hug, and started working my way through the throng. I knew all these people. Colonists and visitors alike. Folks from Shadow, Washtown, Burnholme, Suzhou, half a dozen other Rim worlds. Folk from Blackburne who'd settled here after the Reavers wrecked their colony four years ago.

The people in this room had changed with me over the last few years. Some more than others. Little Jin, growing from an enthusiastic, gearhead, orphan to a strapping 17 year old who'd learned to shoot from General and Duncan, and learned to wrench from Sabrina. Uncle Sobi and Lady Jade, married two years now, watching the crowd arm in arm from the loft. Krenshar, the machine with a soul, sporting a new skin around the same core chassis. General, talking quietly with Belize in the loft opposite Sobi and Jade, mellower, more mature, the anger that'd driven him now years behind. Lilybell. My Mei Mei. Standing with Krenshar, watching, knowing what I was going to say, a look of both sorrow and joy on her engineered feline features. And somewhere, somewhere unseen, Aurora and Blue, watching as well.

At least I hoped they were watching. Somewhere.

Folks quieted quickly when I stepped up onto the small stage between the two well worn dance poles, voices fading to a murmur then actual quiet, waiting for me to speak.

"Good morning, Citizens. Thank you all for coming here or watching on the feeds," I started, settling into a nice, protective, zen-like calm. "First, thank you for letting me serve as your Mayor for a full term and now re-electing me for another. Can only guess you're glad it gave the folks looking to harm us a better target than your fine selves."

I let the round of light laughter subside. it had been a running joke for years that I'd been elected more for my ability to attract bullets away from the townspeople than my ability to lead. In fact, it wasn't entirely a joke as I'd caught more than one bullet over the years as Mayor.

"As many of you know, I've been offered the Executive Officer position aboard Children of Earth for her mission back to Earth that Was. My wife, Sabrina, and Doctor Carver, have also been offered positions on the crew, as Chief Engineer and Medical Officer. After a lot of soul searching, and talking to the Town Elders, we've decided, all three of us, to take the assignment," I waited a few moments for the crowd to absorb what many of them already knew, and the murmurs to die away.

"To that end, I'll be resigning my position as Mayor of Hale's Moon effective the end of next week. With the Elder's blessing, Genni Foxtrot will take over in my place until you fine folk decide whether to let her finish out my term or to hold another round of elections."

"If we shoot ya again, will ya stay?" I heard from the back of the crowd, followed by a wave of laughter. The familiar voice of Sam Foxtrot, Genni's husband.

"Sorry, Samuel. This decision has been a long time coming. It's been a pleasure and a privilege to serve as your Mayor, and I hope I've managed to keep my promise of doing you folk proud. We've stood together through interesting times. We've fought back to back against enemies and the elements, and I can't think of a finer group of people to have done it with. We've survived some major challenges together. We've shared both suffering and joy on this little slice of Heaven. But the fact was we had to choose before the opportunity burned a hole in the Black, and we've chosen to go."

I looked across the room, the sea of faces. Some smiling, others nodding, showing signs of acceptance or regret. Sadness. Joy. Hope. Loss. These were good folk and I would miss them.

"Some of us have had our differences over the last few years," I said, looking directly at Genni across the room to another round of laughter, bringing a hand up to rub the spot on my chest where she'd put a bullet into my armor. "But the fact is, I'll miss all of you. I've tried to give enough time to get everything in order before we leave, but I know you'll be in good hands. So rather then us dwelling on departures, let's have ourselves a little shindig and celebrate the ongoing prosperity of Hale's Moon."

I waved to a round of friendly cheers and laughter, stepping off the small stage to give Sabrina a hug. It was a brief speech. Probably didn't say all it could have. How could it? I was saying good by to the colony I'd called home for over five years to set of on a one way trip to a world out of legend. Half these folk probably thought I was toppyoushimonai, and I might well have been. Over the next few days I was pretty sure more than one person here would try and talk me out of it, but we'd made the decision. Sabrina and Belize and I. We were going.

Butsuriki help us. We were going.

Prelude

2009-05-14T12:07:00.000-07:00

Good advice sometimes comes in very simple terms. "Her think you should go." Lily had a way of making simple, direct, statements, and this was certainly one of them. I wasn't even sure how the conversation had come up, other then in the quiet aftermath of a post 're-elect the Mayor to another four year term' shindig.

My first term had been, shall we say, eventful. In the four years since I'd first gotten elected Mayor of a little backwater mining colony, we'd fought wars against Loyalists, Reavers, and Machines, and lived to tell the tales.

We'd seen new lives come into the world, and old friends leave it. We'd watched a colony of barely three hundred fifty people grow to over fifteen hundred souls, thriving on a world that we had to update the terraforming ourselves to make it possible.

We'd seen the Independence movement sweep through the Rim worlds. Rising up, as half a dozen worlds declared their succession from the Alliance, then die back down as those same worlds either worked out some kind of truce with the vastly more powerful Alliance, or fell beneath that same unstoppable force.

We'd seen the Reavers flare up into violence then die out as quickly and violently as they'd come, leaving death and terror in their wake until that one, final, massive, battle, that ended their reign of terror. Now there were just scattered tribes, dieing out as Entropy ended their collective span.

And the machines. Those accursed machines. Designed to help rebuild after the first Unification War, then perverted into weapons by the self serving hardliners who still had factions interwoven into the fabric of the Alliance. They'd been a quiet scourge on at least half a dozen known worlds, and possibly many more unknown ones.

For the last few months though, we'd been able to pretend the Machines were gone. While we couldn't be sure they'd been eliminated, the last attack we could attribute to the weaponized von Neumann mining machines was almost four months back. Long enough to give us a sense that maybe, just maybe, they threat was gone.

The quiet, the stability, was why Lily thought I should go: Take Grandfather's offer of the Executive Officer position on Children of Earth and leave all this behind for one grand adventure. His offer had been standing for years. Literally. Long delayed, the ship was still at least a year from completion and the crew selection still not finalized. Grandfather had wanted me to serve as the ship's XO for at least the last five years, even knowing it was essentially a one way mission. While we could come back, the round trip was over a hundred standard years.

For all her being the fastest ship ever designed, the journey from 34 Tauri to Sol was a long one. Bound by the absolute limit of lightspeed. The crew would have the advantage of the most advanced hibernation systems ever designed, and a long time at relativistic speeds, but everyone the crew knew when the left would be long dead by the time they returned.

If they returned.

It was potentially the second greatest adventure Humanity would ever undertake. All contact with Earth that Was had been lost shortly after the first colony ships arrived in the 34 Tauri system hundreds of years ago. With all the struggles of trying to settle into Humanity's new home, our birthplace was almost forgotten. The stuff of legends. To this day, Earth that Was was spoken of as a mythical place, but none of us knew anything that wasn't in a history book.

Sure, there had been attempted contacts in the past. There were at least three documented cases of scientists in the pre-Alliance days trying to get a signal back to Earth, Luna, or Mars, with a high power comms maser. None of which ever heard a reply. Not that the reply would have come back within the lifetime of the person sending the signal. There were also at least two automated probes, neither of which ever reported home. System failures? Somethine ate them in Sol system? No one knew. But twenty years ago the Interworld Science Foundation had proposed the idea of a manned expedition back to Earth that Was. Humanity deserved to know what had become of their homeworld. In respose, half a dozen of the best naval architects in the 'Verse had submitted designs for consideration - should the project actually be funded. Of them, one showed actual promise.

Children of Earth was the magnum opus of Kawanishi Heavy Industry Ltd's most talented, and eccentric, designer. A massive ship that incorporated some of the most sophisticated drive and power technologies ever devised. She would take a crew of hundreds across the stars to Humanity's homeworld and do it in record time. If only she would be built.

With the Alliance being the political quagmire it was, and the years long Unification War, it was no wonder she'd taken a decade just to be approved in principal, then years more before construction could start after updating and approving the design. But she was being built. Now, roughly a year from completion, KHI, as the shipyard and secondary sponsor, and the ISF were trying to finalize the crew selection.

And Grandfather wanted me to go. Still.

We had turned him down before, Sabrina and I. But our reasons had changed over the last few years. The priorities that kept us on the Rim were changing as the people, and the worlds around us, changed. For the first time, I could see Sabrina was actually considering the offer. Uncle Elsoph himself had recommended her to be Chief Engineer: high praise from the man who'd designed most of the great ship himself. "I'm too old." he'd said. "Your Sabrina though. She knows. She understands."

"We'll think about it, Mei Mei" was all I could say. But we would. At length. It would be a huge decision, leaving our lives here behind. When we returned, Krenshar might still be alive. Or functional, rather, since he wasn't really 'alive' to begin with. But everyone else we knew? We'd be coming home to their grandchildren, assuming the mission was a success and we came home at all.

So much to consider. And all because Lily thought we should go.

The voice behind the screen

2009-05-14T10:09:00.000-07:00

This is a work of fiction.

It's all a work of fiction, really. Those of you who've read the Lonesome Ninja Mayor know it is a Character blog - a journal of happenings in the soap opera that is the Little Ninja's life as the Mayor of Hale's Moon.

I have had a wonderful time writing it. Many of the stories though, are not my own. I am telling the happenings of the 'Verse. The shared campaign on SecondLife that encompasses half a dozen regions and dozens of characters. While I am, at least sometimes, the story coordinator for Hale's, my efforts go more towards keeping everyone else's stories straight and trying to fit them into a coherent whole than worrying about my own plot lines.

It's not easy.

But it IS fun.

This story is my own. It is pure fiction: a story that could happen in the 'Verse if we chose to let it. But it's not intended to be taken as something that will happen. If you know the Little Ninja, then you will know some of the characters. I am borrowing liberally from my friend's imaginations.

To you, I say thank you.

You inspired me.

I hope I can do your characters justice in the saga I'm going to attempt here.

This story was born out of a 'trapdoor' I wrote into Seana's background. A way to easily write her out of the campaign in such a way there would be closure - should I need it. Obviously, I haven't needed it. But this story has grown from that simple idea. It's been running around in my head form months, and now I will try and tell it.

I hope it reads well...

-S