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.