Airborn

“Of course I’ll be careful!  It’s not like we haven’t done wildly more dangerous things before, Sea.” Was Sabrina’s repeated protest when I reminded her, again, to stay on her toes during the flight.  I knew she would be, of course.  She wasn’t actually being reckless or anything, but I still had some doubts of the overall safety of the vehicle on which she would be riding.

“I know you will.  But it’s my job to worry, remember?  As your Wife and as your Captain.  Wouldn’t be right to fly near forty light years in cold sleep only to end your span crashing a stick and string steam balloon.”

Sabrina snorted with laughter, then leaned in to give me one of the bear hugs I’d come to adore.  “I’ll be fine.  Besides, I know full well you’ll have a skiff shadowing Victoria the whole way.  Now, let’s go!”

Following her from the carriage, I had to admit she was right.  We’d be watching the flight both from orbit and from a thermoptically camouflaged skiff a couple minutes flight from the airship.  Even if we hadn’t, we’d be able to track her movements with the miniature transponder each of us had implanted.  Though the device’s range was limited , Earth that Is was so quiet in the RF bands we’d be able to track one with a handheld from fifty kilometers off.

Walking up towards the landing platform where Victoria, and the similarly designed Triomphe, were tethered, I had to admit they were impressive.   I’d seen them before in daylight.  But here, in the pre-dawn glow and lantern light from the platform, they seemed even more impressive.  They seemed much larger than they actually were, immense and nearly silent, save for the faint hiss of steam and the rumble of the boilers.

The increase in Earth’s atmospheric density since the Exodus meant they could be heavier than a lighter-than-air ship of generations past for the same size envelope.  Being steam powered, they had prodigious amounts of waste heat to use for lift, and steam itself was a surprisingly good lifting gas.  Having the steam engine’s condensers as part of the airbag gave them additional lift while reducing the amount of water they needed aboard.  All in all, they were sophisticated, if low tech, craft.

Over 90 meters long and almost 10 in diameter, the ships ran with a crew of 15 to 20 pilots and could carry nearly 10 tons at 130 kilometers per hour.  Surprisingly, both, here, were armed with several short barrel cannon that could be used against either surface targets or other airships.  While their cargo capacity was relatively tiny compared to their sheer size, they were the fastest vehicles on the planet outside our own imported skimmers and spacecraft.

Angel and a couple of her officers, her Navigator and the Engineer Sabrina had been speaking with, came down from the platform to meet us, exchanging pleasantries in the early morning chill.

Sabrina gave me a quick peck on the cheek and immediately went to talk to the Engineer, Palmer in tow, as I went to meet Angel and her Navigator.  Our conversation the night before had been enlightening on several levels, regarding the local communities, the business of operating an airship, and the rivalries between various crews.  Apparently, it was sometimes hard to run them at a profit and, while she was somewhat vague on her own standing on the matter, she’d made it clear that some airship captains weren’t above operating as smugglers or pirates when need, or opportunity, arose.

I wasn’t actually surprised.  While I’d never resorted to actual piracy back in the 34 Tauri system, I had done my share of smuggling, and was actually proud of some of the runs I’d made back in the day.  Orbital observations of the airships had already suggested they were involved in both smuggling and commerce raiding, so Angel’s information only confirmed what we already suspected.

“You have my word, Captain Seana.  We will keep her safe.”  Angel assured me with a faint smile, mirrored by her Navigator’s mumbled agreement, then gave that little half bow she did before turning back to Victoria.

“My Cap’n’s right, ma’am.  Done this trip a hundred times on Victoria.  We’ll have her back afore supper,” the Navigator reaffirmed, then after a little bow of his own, took off after his Captain.

Conner joined me as I returned to the carriage, both of us watching Sabrina and Palmer as they boarded Victoria’s crew gondola.  “Still having doubts, Cap’n?” He asked, shifting smoothly into our native 34 Tauri dialect, eliciting a faint nod in reply.

“Some, Lieutenant.  But more worried about that contraption than Palmer or Sabrina’s abilities.”

Conner nodded, looking at the airship’s profile as the sky slowly started to brighten with the coming dawn.  “Not sure I’d feel safe flying one myself, but they’ve both been briefed.  They’re both wearing recorders, and they both have comms.  They won’t be out of touch and we’ll be close at hand if anything goes wrong.”  

He sounded confident, but I knew he took his role very seriously and had his own doubts about the advisability of this plan.  While the science teams were very interested in getting first hand information from Victoria in flight, the ORCAs would always look at the situation through their ‘keep the crew safe’ lenses.

Over the next half hour or so, as the sun came up, we watched them finishing their preparations for take off.  While there was a good deal less involved in launching an airship than there was in, say, boosting a transport to orbit, there was a crucial difference.  Where a Matagi pilot could just key in the preflight and confirm the on board systems were coming up properly, the airship crew had to do it all manually.  All of it.  From checking fuel levels and steam pressure, to making sure the ship was trimmed and none of the mooring lines would foul the props.  Someone had to do it themselves, rather than rely on a slew of automated systems and computer control.  Years ago, I’d seen the same sort of thing on a purely sail powered watercraft on Surfer’s New Paradise.  A Clipper, my Uncle had called it.  Every bit as manual, but Victoria had the added complexity of her lift system, boilers, steam turbines, and flight controls.

From our position a little down the hill, we could watch as, accompanied by the shouts of pilots and crew to release mooring lines, the faint hiss of steam through the turbines, and the distinct sound of propellers slicing air, Victoria majestically rose from the her moorings and set off into the brightening glow of sunrise.

Within a few minutes the airship had turned onto the first leg of her journey and was climbing to her cruising speed and altitude.  It was actually a little eerie to watch.  The steam turbines were surprisingly quiet and, since she didn’t need to rely on airspeed for lift, it was a bit like watching a grav lift boat clearing the ground before firing its main drives to make orbit: all, kind of, floaty.

For the next ten minutes we watched them clear off from the carriage, disappearing into the distance before the ridgeline finally blocked our line of sight, then mounted up to head back to camp so we could watch the feeds from the pursuing skiff and our crew’s recorders and comms.

On some levels, I was actually more envious than worried.  Yes, the airships were primitive by our standards.  They lacked most basic safety equipment, including parachutes, had no automation, communication, or navigation beyond ‘piloting’ and celestial navigation when they operated during night hours, lacked any sort of sensors that didn’t involve a crewmember’s abilities to see or hear, and were held together with organically grown components.  But Sabrina and Doctor Palmer were the ones going for a ride in it while I stayed behind under the watchful eyes of my ORCA protector.

I’d debated using the period of the trip to do more personal exploration of the town, but ultimately decided that it would be better to head back to our outpost and observe the feeds directly.  At least until it was time to head back to town and meet them on landing.  While I couldn’t be there in person, I could at least enjoy the trip vicariously through the displays.

From what we could see, and hear, Victoria gave a smooth and quiet ride.  Though I had to wonder what it would be like if they encountered any sort of inclement weather.  I’d flown through my share of storms over the years in everything from a tiny two many skiff up to patrol Corvettes and mid-bulk transports.  Considering how much they got bounced around, it seemed likely a lighter than air craft like Victoria would be a real handful for her crew when weather took a turn for the worse.

The weather though, was flawless.  Where the airship crews had experience to go on, we had satellite observation and could see the weather would be flawless for the entirety of the trip.  Which meant the feeds were steady and smooth while Sabrina and Palmer made a point of looking around at the ship’s operation as much as the scenery flowing by below.

During the flight, we’d been careful not to distract Palmer or Sabrina with any additional traffic.  The Science team had gotten a fair bit of practice feeding us tidbits when needed in town, but they were handling themselves fine.  However, when Victoria finally stopped at their first destination, I keyed into Sabrina’s comm set to find out how she was enjoying her little adventure.

“I love this boat, Sea!  I’m going to build one.  Promise you’ll let me build one!”  ‘Brina’s enthusiasm was as obvious as it was infectious. Though she did have the sense to keep her voice down, so no one would think she’d lost her mind talking to herself.

“If you think you can build one, you’re welcome to try.  After the mission reaches a point where you have that much free time?”

“If I think I can build one?”  she replied with a snort of derision.  “But I know.  Work first.  But this boat’s amazing, Sea.  It’s the kind of thing we’d have built back home when we had to work with whatever we had.”

“Glad you’re having fun.  You know you and Palmer will be writing full reports once you’ve gotten your legs back under you?  The Science team is itching to debrief you both to detail out everything they’re seeing in the feeds.”

She laughed again, forcing herself to keep it down so as not to draw undue attention.  “Yeah, yeah.  Full reports and commentary.  We knew . . . “  Her voice trailed off to as I heard someone approaching.

“Enjoy, love.  We’ll let you go and just watch from here.”

She kind of half subvocalized a response, then started talking to the Engineer who’d come to join her on Victoria’s gun deck.  I only half listened to their conversation, seeing the feed from her recorder on the screen in front of me, and from Palmer’s on an adjacent display.

This stop would be for only half an hour or so, then onto another, then the loop back home.  We would be watching, shadowing, but not interfering unless something went wrong.  With luck, nothing would go wrong and I’d be meeting them when they landed in the early evening hours.  If something went wrong?

We’d deal with that when, if, it happened.  In the meantime, we’d just vicariously enjoy the ride.

Business as usual

For having a small population, the Airship town managed to support two well attended taverns.  Or pubs.  Or bars.  Whatever you wanted to call them.  The larger and less rowdy of the two catered to the farmers, tradesmen, and general population of the town, while the smaller one catered to the Airship crews and the folks who supported them.  In truth, other than detail, the place would have been right at home nestled beside any of the smaller spaceports back home.

I’d spent a good deal of time in places like it over the years.  The Four Winds, they called it.  Often rowdy, with crowds that came and went across the course of the day, it was the sort of place a crew could settle in to to unwind, enjoy a drink, a meal, and some music.  And, probably, a good brawl now and again.  At least if the furniture and overall structure was any indication.  Not unlike, say, Fook Yoo’s back home, the Four Winds had seen its share of excitement.

It was also the sort of place where a Captain could get some business done.  There were a number of nooks around the edge of the main room where folk could get a bit of privacy and conduct business in relative quiet.  Not ideal, of course, but a common practice that probably predated the Exodus by a couple millennium.

Victoria’s captain met us in one of the small side nooks.  Palmer made the introductions, then stepped away to give us some privacy.  The Captain greeting me with an inclination of the head, sort of an abbreviated bow, rather than a proffered handshake, then pulled back the fur lined hood of her cloak.

Even if I hadn’t known ahead of time, I could tell Victoria’s captain was female simply from the profile.  But I hadn’t expected her to be quite so young.  Or pretty.  A cascade of curly red hair, fair skin, piercing sea green eyes, and an intensity that came through with just a gaze.  She was a few inches taller than I was, about ‘Brina’s height, though the hooded cloak concealed anything more.  Her voice, while soft and feminine, had an edge of hardness that sounded like she was used to giving orders and having them followed.  A bit like mine, actually.  

“I am called Angel,” she started, “You are their Captain, yes?”

“Well met, Angel.  Seana.  I lead the trade mission, but I’m not their Captain.”

A faint smirk crossed her face, then a nod.  “If you say so.  You would do well on deck though, I think.  The way you carry yourself.  How they address you.  Consider it a term of respect then, if nothing else.”  She looked past me then to one of the serving girls and gave her a hand gesture to order a round of drinks.  “To business.  You are here to confirm your Engineer’s trip, yes?”

I had to wonder immediately if she could she see through the cover that easily, or was she really just using it as a term of respect?  It was relatively easy for a trained operative to change their mannerisms to appear as something they weren’t, but considerably more difficult when you were an entire group trying to do the same thing.  More difficult still when half the group had no real covert operations experience.  Perhaps more of that was showing through than I liked.

“To business, yes,” I replied as the serving girl appeared with a round of drinks.  Some kind of sweet honey’d mead that I would have to be careful with.  “I understand the negotiations are basically done?  Just a matter of arranging payment and scheduling the flight?”

Angel took a sip of the mead then nodded in the general direction of the landing platforms where Victoria was berthed.  Docked?  Whatever.  “Yes.  We are leaving just after dawn tomorrow for a trip to a village down coast.  Weather holds, we will be back before supper.  Ten hours, perhaps twelve if there are delays with the cargo.  We’ll be shutting down the boilers for maintenance on the  when we return, and my Engineer’s eager to work with yours when they cool.  There is just the matter of some metal.”

Her price, in metal, was actually less than I’d payed for the Steelwood knives.  Given what I had heard for the cost of operating one of the airships, it was obvious Angel was putting far more weight on the help her Engineer expected then on the value of the metal.  On some level, of course, I was wondering just what sort of technical exchange my wife had promised these airship pilots.

“Agreed,” I said, smiling a bit, motioning Conner over to join us with the raw metal he was carrying by way of down payment on Sabrina’s flight, then measuring out a bit of steel and bronze to Angel’s satisfaction.

“I know you have other duties with your crew, but perhaps you could spare some time with me to explore other business opportunities?  I would like to think that we could do further mutually beneficial business on this mission and perhaps in the future.”

Angel nodded over her drink, motioning to the serving girl to bring a round to my crew and hers before settling back in the booth.  “Yes, Captain Seana.  I believe there is much we can discuss.”



(Author's note: My apology for the long delay here. I had this post started a couple weeks after the previous one, then hit a combination of writer's block and real life intrusions. Hopefully, the inertia is back.)

Back to the surface

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

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

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

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

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.