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.