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.

Footprints

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

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

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

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.