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.

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