Blaine Institute, New Caledonia
Another team was pulling an all-nighter. They were working and reworking numbers from the nearly five-hundred-year-old Naval Initial Assessment Report, because that’s all they had to go on.
“But sir, there’s nothing there!”
“Look again.”
The Lieutenant was adamant. “It was just a standard Naval Level-1 prospecting survey. No orbital industry, no significant orbital ores, no radiation of any kind, no industry reported. Except at the known urban centers—Bonneville and Saint George. And the few known mining camps.”
“Determined how?”
“Standard auto-classification array. Two full passes, one-hundred-percent coverage, data dumped for software recognition and mapping of vegetative cover, hydrology, man-made features, and specified geology.”
“Well, run it against the new Motie data.”
“Sir, I did. Nothing. There’s just no signature indicating pre- or post-industrial development whatsoever, except for the known colonies. Hell, their atmosphere is even clean. They just plain skipped hydrocarbons. At least as fuel. If there are any. The survey identified no seeps, and they never developed any petrochemical industry. They went direct to solar at founding.”
“Then do it the old fashioned way. Put human eyes on it, and look at the ground.”
“That’s a lot of ground sir. It could take—”
“Start with these coordinates.” The team leader passed them over. Neither knew where they’d come from. Renner knew. Lord Blaine knew. They were the last transmitted location from Asach’s tracking collar. At close range, the cloak knew where the chip was. The satellite knew where the cloak was. As long as Quinn and the cloak stayed in close proximity, whenever the cloak talked to the satellite, Renner knew where Asach was.
“Pull it up.”
The lieutenant waved hands about, and New Utah appeared on-screen in a three-dimensional swirl, already rotating and zooming down so fast that contours of weather systems; continents; oceans; poles; were gone before they’d even registered. The pale blue pinprick with a surrounding scatter of pink and red fields that was the fledgling Bonneville swept past in a wink. Then they swooped over the flat, white panne of The Barrens, followed by a spooky disjoint of seeming to fly through a mountain ridge, then bursting forth over a brilliant field, now emerald; now aquamarine in the shifting light.
“Pull back, then stop.”
Even for a jaded pair of terrain analysts, the view of the brilliant river delta, slashed between ranges of scrubby mountains, was breath taking.
“Zoom in again.”
But there was nothing there, save scattered earthen mounds dotting the lustrous fields.
“Can you pull in closer?”
The lieutenant shook her head. “That’s it, sir. Ten meter’s the limit on a Level 1 Survey.”
Meaning that anything smaller than ten meters wide didn’t even appear. The major nodded. “What’s the vegetation?”
“Best guess is some kind of cyanobacteria. We’d need a full assay to be sure.”
The major nodded again. Everybody knew what that was, and it was no surprise on a world with a native oxygen atmosphere. Without blue-green “algae”—really a photosynthetic bacteria—there wouldn’t be an oxygen atmosphere. It was a primary adjunct to all terraform maintenance. The stuff grew everywhere: fresh water, salt water, inside rocks, hell, even in the coats of some animals. It formed globules, mats, filaments; partnered up with funguses to make lichens and rhizome mats; survived under ice caps, so long as light could get to it. Finding a form that grew in grass-like-stands in a river delta on a planet subject to climate extremes did not require a huge leap of evolutionary imagination.
“Do we have anything else for this area? Any comparator?”
“No sir. That was the only survey. It looks like Maxroy’s Purchase only surveyed as far as their base colonies.”
The major nodded again. Survey was expensive. A full planetary survey was probably well outside the budget of a religious order.
“What about the first Jackson expedition?”
“That was a just a delegation shuttle, sir. No survey mission.”
The major nodded. “Right.” She got up to leave, then thought again. “What ship?”
“Sir?”
“What was the shuttle vessel?”
The lieutenant consulted records briefly. “Oh.” Looked again. “Private registry, sir. Imperial Autonetics. Nauvoo Vision.”
The major smiled at this. “Ah.” Smiled again. “And by any chance, lieutenant, has Nauvoo Vision filed a survey record?”
“Like I say, sir, private vessel and—oh.” The lieutenant tapped some more. “That’s odd.” More tapping. “It looks like—somebody—posted restricted files—sir that’s not a Naval cipher.”
“Uh huh. Filed when?”
“That’s what’s odd. They weren’t filed with the original commission report. They came directly from—um—” The lieutenant had the very chilling sense that this was not something it would be good to know.
“Captain Renner?”
“Yes sir. Yesterday. I’m not on original distribution, so I didn’t see them. They’re IA proprietary.” The lieutenant looked nervous.
“Relax, L-T. Bury leant the ship to the Jackson Delegation back in the day. You can’t blame Imperial Autonetics for sneaking in a bit of survey on the side. Looks like Renner dug it up for us. Open sesame,” said the major, punching an access code.
The fly-down played again. This one was more limited. It covered only the track from orbital entry to the parking spot at a geosynchronous station above Saint George. But that was all they needed. They ran the pass in reverse. During the intervening half-millennium between the reports, mountains had spilled their guts onto the plains below. Bonneville had grown from pinprick to splodge, rail lines and a highway now connecting it to Saint George; the brilliant flash of the DAZ-E field and the flat, fenced expanses of the Hopper strips and Lynx port; the endless rows of associated warehouses clearly visible. The flat, white panne of The Barrens was now punctuated by scratches of roads and tracks; crossroads and pumping stations; emerald wheels of circle irrigation. An airstrip made a creamy, scrub-bounded cross against the white glare. This time they brushed the range top, then bursting forth over—a vast expanse of gridded, lifeless grey, featureless beneath the imager’s lens. A rectangular black slash of water marked where the once-meandering delta’s estuaries had been.
“See?” said the lieutenant. “Nothing there. Fits in with that Swenson’s report about what happened around Saint George. At some point, they went in, cut drains through the marshes, laser-leveled the fields, and brought in heavy cultivators. Didn’t last, though, and once it wore out, they abandoned it. Pity. They turned really productive wetland into salt desert, for the sake of a few decades of crops, at best.”
The major nodded, and rose to leave. “Ok. Get some sleep, but keep looking for anything important. I’d ask better questions, but I can’t think of any yet. See what you can come up with.”
12
Paternity Suit
Enki answered Ninmah: "I will counterbalance whatever fate—good or bad—you happen to decide."
Ninmah took clay from the top of the sacred water in her hand and she fashioned from it first a man who could not bend his outstretched weak hands. Enki looked at the man who cannot bend his outstretched weak hands, and decreed his fate: he appointed him as a servant of the king.