Anyway, his general social inoffensiveness was just sufficient, when added to his undeniable competence, to get him on the crew, and then some combination of evaluations and computer subroutines kicked him up to be head of the Terraforming team, one below Overall Command, because if you had a slightly deranged genius on the team it was probably better to let him cox than row. That was the actual comment of the psychologist who recommended the promotion and Senkovi, having got into that file as well, treasured the perceived compliment.
But they needed him awake now. In that unreal ocean he strained, but the touch of the tentacle never quite reached his finger, and all his pets were long dead and gone on an Earth more than thirty light years away.
Disra Senkovi opened his eyes, aware that his beatific smile had crossed over from his dream and was still on his face. He felt refreshed and ready to start his day. A quick interrogation of the ship systems assured him they had arrived, their long cold journey done, the deceleration over. He sat up, stretching (more for the form of it than from any need, but he was used to doing all sorts of things because people do them, as a sop to the sensibilities of his fellows). He was neither alone in his sleeping compartment, nor surrounded by the bustle of a woken crew. Instead, his performance had an audience of one: Yusuf Baltiel, Overall Command.
‘Boss,’ Senkovi acknowledged. The lack of context to Baltiel watching him wake was disconcerting. Senkovi liked to have a handle on cause and effect and was usually smart enough to avoid surprises. He queried the ship again and found a weight of data embargoed, blocked from him, blocked from everyone except Baltiel himself. That’s not good.
‘I need a second opinion,’ Baltiel told him.
‘Let me guess, the planet’s not there?’ It had been the joke with the very first exoprobes – sometimes the data said there was an Earth-type planet but the indicators were just a bunch of other factors conspiring to give that impression. Of course, a probe had actually been shot out here, accelerating far faster than a manned ship could manage, checked that an actual terraformable planet was present and reported back. They wouldn’t just send a manned mission off on a whim, now, would they? Senkovi really didn’t want to have to turn around and go home.
‘There’s a planet.’ Only now did Senkovi notice the curious tension to Baltiel, a man generally in complete command of himself. He was practically vibrating like a plucked string. ‘There’s a planet,’ he repeated. ‘But there’s a problem. I’m keeping it hush, for now, but it’s too big for me to make the call. I need you to see.’
Because of the embargo – which Senkovi felt was a childish way to go about things – they actually had to walk to Overall Command to see the thing Baltiel was so agitated about. Everyone else was still peacefully on ice. Who, then, was all this cloak and dagger supposed to thwart? He kept throwing queries at the system to find out what he could and couldn’t know, because the computer wasn’t able to tell him what was off limits until he hit a nerve and it clammed up on him. Actual walking from one place to another was, in Senkovi’s book, something the future should have done away with long before, and his legs were having difficulty with the rotational gravity so that he bandy-kneed his way around the edge of the crew ring behind Baltiel’s brisk stride. Baltiel was blocking transmission back home, he discovered uneasily, despite the fact that any urgent cry for help Senkovi might make would take thirty years and change to arrive. It wasn’t like he’d be able to hold a murderous Baltiel off for that long, or indeed at all.
‘Just tell me, boss,’ he complained to the man’s back.
Baltiel stopped, turned. There was a kind of fervour in his face that made Senkovi flinch. He’s found God, was his instant thought, which was all sorts of extra not good, especially considering the most recent news from home. He had idly sifted through the updates while walking – all of it was decades out of date, but it looked like Earth had gone through a spot of trouble a while back, with anti-science terrorism and all sorts. Makes you glad you’re in space, man.
‘I need you to see.’ It wasn’t just mystery for the sake of it. Baltiel had drawn himself up to deliver the revelation, and failed.
A hundred more rubbery steps and they arrived at Overall Command, where the large screens displayed solar and planetary data and a visual representation of the destination system they had at last achieved, known as Tess 834 after the long-ago Earth-orbiting satellite that had first picked it out of the firmament.
Senkovi started with the big stuff, making sure the star wasn’t about to go nova, looking for major disruptions or absences among Tesses 834b, c and d, the three colossal gas giants that filled out the waist of the virtual orrery and had the privilege of the first few letters because their mass had them detected first by Earth’s instruments. Two of them were not much shy of Jupiter for size, one of them quite a bit bigger. Nice meteor screen for our inner worlds, he thought. ‘E’ and ‘f’ were further out, rock-and-ice monsters carving lonely paths in the reaches where the system’s sun was little more than one more star among many. Of inner worlds there were three, one of them virtually rolling through the star’s upper atmosphere, the other two close neighbours in the broad habitable zone but as different as siblings could be. Senkovi pulled up more data, still looking for the problem. The outermost of the pair, Tess 834g, was a little smaller than Earth, shining with an icy albedo through a thin atmosphere shorn of greenhouse gases. Any heat thrown its way just bounced right back off and was lost to space; Goldilocks zone or no, any fair-haired visitor was going to find her porridge inedibly frozen save at high summer around the equator. The other, their target Tess 834h, was warmer than Earth, slightly larger, its atmosphere muggy and heat-retaining, jealously hoarding everything the sun threw its way. There was a moon large enough for its gravity to make tides and keep its spin axis stable, and initial scans showed the presence of most elements human life would find useful. All in all, it would be a good match for human habitation once they’d let the terraformers loose on it. They could install a working ecology with a minimum of fuss and then maybe someday people could come and live on it. Or else that crazy lady Kern would arrive and do unspeakable things in the name of science. A lot of the terraforming team were frustrated with their glorious champion and leader Avrana Kern because her priorities did not seem to actually match the mission statement, while Senkovi was frustrated with her because she was doing all the fun stuff he would have preferred to do.
‘This all looks . . .’ Good, except it all looked a bit too good, now he mentioned it. Oxygen content on Tess 834h in particular was higher than he would expect. ‘Ah . . . what am I . . .?’
‘This was one of the late surveys,’ Baltiel said over his shoulder. ‘By then they were very focused. They’d given up looking for the other stuff. The left-field stuff.’ The real stuff. He hadn’t said it but Senkovi heard the ghost of the thought in the other man’s words.
The ship had performed its own survey as it closed in with the Tess 834 system, its instruments far in advance of the old exoprobes, drawing up a detailed picture of the terraforming challenge ahead. The ship itself had not blinked at the data, nor considered that it was making a discovery. Just like the exoprobe, it could only see what it was looking for. Senkovi was having a similar difficulty. He even pulled up the best visual image of the planet, taken by the ship as it zipped past on its way to brake around the red-orange sun. A single brown megacontinent, a great ink-coloured sea, spiralling wisps of cloud. ‘This looks ideal terraforming territory, to be honest . . .’