I unmasked and pushed back the headset. Hand was watching me with a faint smile tucked into one corner of his mouth.
‘Hardly a Cartel-approved perspective. Is he always that blunt?’
‘In the face of client stupidity, yes. It’s why they pay him. What’s this about experimental—’
Hand made a tiny shutdown gesture with one hand. Shook his head.
‘I wouldn’t worry about it. Standard Cartel scare line. It keeps unwanted personnel out of the no-go zones.’
‘Meaning you called it in that way?’
Hand smiled again. Sutjiadi said nothing, but his lips tightened. Outside, the engine note shrilled.
‘We’re on the beach,’ said Ameli Vongsavath. ‘Twenty-one point seven kilometres from the Sauberville crater. Pictures, anybody?’
CHAPTER NINETEEN
Clotted white.
For fragments of a second, standing in the hatch of the Nagini and staring across the expanse of sand, I thought it had been snowing.
‘Gulls,’ said Hand knowledgeably, jumping down and kicking at one of the clumps of feathers underfoot. ‘Radiation from the blast must have got them.’
Out on the tranquil swells, the sea was strewn with mottled white flotsam.
When the colony barges first touched down on Sanction IV – and Latimer, and Harlan’s World for that matter – they were, for many local species, exactly the cataclysm they must have sounded like. Planetary colonisation is invariably a destructive process, and advanced technology hasn’t done much more than sanitise that process so that humans are guaranteed their customary position on top of whatever ecosystem they are raping. The invasion is all-pervasive and, from the moment of the barges’ initial impact, inevitable.
The massive ships cool slowly, but already there is activity within. Serried ranks of clone embryos emerge from the cryotanks and are loaded with machine care into rapid-growth pods. A storm of engineered hormones rages through the pod nutrients, triggering the burst of cell development that will bring each clone to late adolescence in a matter of months. Already the advance wave, grown in the latter stages of the interstellar flight, is being downloaded with the minds of the colony elite, decanted and awoken to take up their established place in the brand new order. It’s not quite the golden land of opportunity and adventure that the chroniclers would have you believe.
Elsewhere in the hull, the real damage is being done by the environmental modelling machines.
Any self-respecting effort at colonisation brings along a couple of these eco-AIs. After the early catastrophes on Mars and Adoracion, it became rapidly apparent that attempting to graft a sliced sample of the terrestrial ecosystem onto an alien environment was no elephant ray hunt. The first colonists to breathe the newly terraformed air on Mars were all dead in a matter of days, and a lot of those who’d stayed inside died fighting swarms of a voracious little beetle that no one had ever seen before. Said beetle turned out to be the very distant descendant of a species of terrestrial dustmite that had done rather too well in the ecological upheaval occasioned by the terraforming.
So. Back to the lab.
It was another two generations before the Martian colonists finally got to breathe untanked air.
On Adoracion, it was worse. The colony barge Lorca had left several decades before the Martian debacle, built and hurled at the nearest of the habitable worlds indicated on the Martian astrogation charts with the bravado of a Molotov cocktail hurled at a tank. It was a semi-desperate assault on the armoured depths of interstellar space, an act of technological defiance in the face of the oppressive physics that govern the cosmos and an act of equally defiant faith in the newly decoded Martian archives. By all accounts, pretty much everyone thought it would fail. Even those who contributed their copied consciousnesses to the colony’s datastack and their genes to the embryo banks were less than optimistic about what their stored selves would encounter at journey’s end.
Adoracion, as its name suggests, must have seemed like a dream come true. A green and orange world with approximately the same nitrogen/oxygen mix as Earth and a more user-friendly land-to-sea ratio. A plant-life base that could be eaten by the herds of cloned livestock in the belly of the Lorca and no obvious predators that couldn’t be easily shot. Either the colonists were a pious lot or arriving on this new Eden pushed them that way, because the first thing they did upon disembarkation was build a cathedral and give thanks to God for their safe deliverance.
A year passed.
Hypercasting was still in its infancy back then, barely able to carry the simplest of messages in coded sequence. The news that came filtering back down the beams to Earth was like the sound of screams from a locked room in the depths of an empty mansion. The two ecosystems had met and clashed like armies on a battlefield from which there was no retreat. Of the million-odd colonists aboard the Lorca, over seventy per cent died within eighteen months of touchdown.
Back to the lab.
These days we’ve got it down to a fine art. Nothing organic leaves the hull until the eco-modeller has the whole host ecosystem down. Automated probes go out and prowl the new globe, sucking in samples. The AI digests the data, runs a model against a theoretical terrestrial presence at a couple of hundred times real-world speed and flags the potential clashes. For anything that looks like a problem it writes a solution, genetech or nanotech, and from the correlated whole, generates a settlement protocol. With the protocol laid down, everyone goes out to play.
Inside the protocols for the three dozen or so Settled Worlds, you find certain advantageous terrestrial species cropping up time and time again. They are the success stories of planet Earth – tough, adaptive evolutionary athletes to a creature. Most of them are plants, microbes and insects, but among the supersized animals there are a few that stand out. Merino sheep, grizzly bears and seagulls feature at the top of the list. They’re hard to wipe out.
The water around the trawler was clogged with the white feathered corpses. In the unnatural stillness of the shoreline, they muffled the faint lapping of wavelets on the hull even further.
The ship was a mess. It drifted listlessly against its anchors, the paint on the Sauberville side scorched to black and bare metal glints by the wind from the blast. A couple of windows had blown out at the same time and it looked as if some of the untidy pile of nets on deck had caught and melted. The angles of the deck winch were similarly charred. Anyone standing outside would probably have died from third-degree burns.