Senkovi considered that they could actually just go back to sleep for six decades and change, and have the ship wake them when Earth had made up its mind, but that smacked of a slavish devotion to authority that he’d never espoused. He was surprised at this crusading flame in Baltiel, though, who was apparently a less orthodox character than Senkovi had taken him for.
‘I hope you’ll support me in the command decision I’m making here. We can’t just go to work on this planet,’ Baltiel told them all. ‘It would be a crime, a genocide of something we may never find again in the lifespan of our species.’ And he was preaching to the choir, mostly. What made a terraformer? Apparently, a willingness not to terraform if there was something more interesting around, as though they’d all come down with ADHD. Seeing him frown, Baltiel sent over a direct message: Do you blame them?
No. And I’m broadly supportive of your decision . . . Senkovi threw back, letting the ‘but’ hang there, unspoken.
And there were a handful who would obviously rather be terraforming – they’d come out here to do a job, and though they weren’t unmoved by the marvels they’d been shown, they weren’t ready to just sit on their hands.
‘I propose we change our mission,’ Baltiel told everyone. ‘Our suite of technology here is designed to cope with a wide range of investigatory tasks as well as the actual rewriting of planets, after all. We have a duty to study what we’ve found here, to report on it for Earth. We won’t be the last here. This planet will become the jewel of the galaxy for scientists. But we can be first, and do a good job of laying the groundwork. We can be in the history books, all of us.’
‘All of us’ meaning ‘me’, but probably there would be other names in footnotes, or immortalized as geographical features. Mount Senkovi . . . or maybe not. Sounds like an instruction to a taxidermist.
And again, Baltiel had most of them, but a few more were unhappy with this turn of events now. They were, after all, experts chosen for a particular task, and this wasn’t it. Senkovi counted four: Maylem, Han, Lortisse, Poullister. The other seven were right with Baltiel about what they should be doing.
Senkovi decided this was his moment and flagged up a request to speak. Baltiel gave him the side-eye and asked for a little more context than that, and in return Senkovi just data-dumped the entire plan on him. Let’s see if he’s as clever as he thinks he is.
Baltiel blinked twice – that momentary pause was all the others saw – and then nodded briskly. ‘Mr Senkovi, you have the floor.’
Senkovi blinked too, licked dry lips, preferring to be the scorer than the scoree when points were being dished out. All eyes on him, he coughed to buy a little time, then said, ‘It’s not like they’d just leave us alone, after all.’ He didn’t have Baltiel’s grandiloquence. It was all he could do not to mumble into his chest. ‘You know what they were calling the terraforming initiative, when we left Earth orbit? The Forever Project. Because this is it. This is when the human race becomes immortal, you get me? We’re off Earth. We’re making new homes amongst the stars, whether the stars want us or not. We have godlike power. People will come here, expecting to find a home. They’ll be properly impressed by the jellyfish and the moving rocks and thing-what, but then they’ll start asking awkward questions like, “Which house is mine, then?” I mean, you know people. We all do. Moan, moan, demand, demand, “We came thirty light years and you’re showing us pictures of tidal marshland.”’ He essayed a small smile, saw a couple of people return it. Baltiel was expressionless, waiting. How the hell did he digest all of that? Did he get the ship to parse it for him? Did he hack my files and read it before the meeting?
‘But Yusuf’s right,’ he went on, making a nervous, fidgety gesture in Baltiel’s direction. ‘We can’t do the mission, not like we’re s’posed to. But we can do it anyway. Look.’ And he began bringing up his diagrams and data, which he could hide behind enough that his voice gained strength as he soldiered on. ‘The next planet out, Tess 834g – it’s mostly an iceball, right on the very limit of the liquid water zone, but it’s geologically active, and terraforming 101 says we can precision-bomb the faultlines to set it all off at once and then it won’t be an iceball for long, and the gas we get out of that will kill off the albedo, and after that it’ll be warm enough for the water to stay water. And there’s a little land. Just a little. And there’ll be more once the ice has slimmed down to liquid.’
‘Not much more,’ Han pointed out. ‘I get 2.1 per cent of total surface area, all small island chains.’ She threw her own scratch calculations into the communal virtual display for everyone to look at. Lea Han was the oldest of them, Baltiel’s senior by two years, and her maths was faultless at very short notice. Nobody was heckling the other guy, Senkovi thought, but Han was at least playing the game.
‘So the colonists live on boats,’ he suggested. ‘It’s that or they go live alongside your aliens, and how’s that going to go in three or four generations? You think everyone’s going to be a responsible neighbour?’
‘That’s a very pessimistic appraisal of the human spirit,’ objected someone – Senkovi chased down the name and got ‘Sparke’, and an assessment record that spoke of reliable competence without brilliance.
‘One I happen to agree with.’ Baltiel killed off the topic effortlessly. ‘We don’t know what the political milieu will be, amongst any colonists.’ And people’s faces showed that the old news they’d had from Earth was front and centre in most minds. Any new arrivals could be a wave of ideological maniacs, come to practice their mania out of the reach of their foes on Earth. ‘We don’t know what their priorities will be,’ Baltiel went on. ‘Mine is to conserve what we’ve discovered here, and to study it. I will be taking an independent module from the Aegean to remain in orbit around 834h. I’m looking for volunteers for that team. Mr Senkovi has my support to attempt a terraforming of Tess 834g, and he’ll retain the lion’s share of the ship’s resources to do so. He will, likewise, be looking for volunteers, and I can guarantee that, when we do finally get word to or from Earth, it’ll be his team that has a future in the terraforming business.’
Still not as interesting as studying flying medusae, though, Senkovi concluded, but he couldn’t say Baltiel hadn’t given him a fair crack of the whip. For himself, he was already considering the technical challenges of bringing the ice-world to life.
In the end he got Maylem, Poullister and Han, with Lortisse defying Senkovi’s assessment of him to join Team Alien. Three co-workers was, by his estimation, probably two more than he really needed. The machines would be doing the heavy lifting, after all.
‘One question,’ bright Sparke piped up, just as everything had been decided. ‘What if you find life under the ice on 834g?’
Senkovi shrugged. ‘Then, unless it has radio capacity and is a very quick learner, it’s probably fucked,’ he said.