“Good enough,” the Senior Chief said, finally. We were, as Ensigns, allowed to refer to him by his first name, but none of us quite dared. “We don’t want the Captain to be put out by the condition of his shuttle, do we?”
“No, Senior Chief,” we said, together. A Senior Chief couldn’t be called ‘sir’ — he’d made that point clear the first time he’d had us as a group — but what else could we call him? His task — bossing the various crewmen around — wasn’t an easy one, even though no one in their right mind would have picked a fight with him. He’d once disciplined a drunken crewman by giving him a black eye and a sound thrashing. The crewmen might have called us ‘babies’ when they thought we couldn’t hear, but they wouldn’t dare defy the Senior Chief.
“Of course not,” the Senior Chief agreed. His voice lightened slightly. “It is particularly important when the Captain has decided that the Ensigns who were on the bridge are to accompany him to the surface. You wouldn’t want to be the person responsible for the mess, would you?”
“Lucky you,” Sally said, without heat. If she hadn’t been tired, she would probably have said a great deal more, perhaps even a discussion of my parentage. “Senior Chief, why is the planet called Terra Nova anyway?”
“Officially, because it was the first planet we discovered,” the Senior Chief said. He laughed, as if he were laughing at a very private joke. “Or perhaps it was just a case of someone lacking in imagination at the right time. That said… do you know what the inhabitants call it?”
We shook our heads.
He smiled, with the air of one imparting a great secret.
“Hell,” he said.
Chapter Four
The causes of the Terra Nova disaster — although the UN refuses to admit to this day that it was a disaster — are many, but the simplest cause of all remains unspoken. The UN attempted to ensure that every ethnic group on Earth received a ‘fair’ patch of ground on the new world. This might not have led to disaster, if the UN hadn’t then insisted that all groups were to be forced together on one continent, as, according to the latest political-science theories, they would form into a new community. This might have worked…if the UN hadn’t then taken steps to prevent, quite unintentionally, such a community from forming. It took twenty years to develop Terra Nova…
The war started the following year.
The Captain didn’t allow me to fly the shuttle, but I was able to sit up front with the Pilot and watch as we descended through the atmosphere of Terra Nova. It reminded me of travelling up from Earth on the orbital tower, back when I had been accepted into the Academy, but descending in a shuttle was somehow more exciting. Terra Nova looked a lot like Earth — it had the same mixture of green land and blue seas — but it was lacking the clouds of pollution that infested Earth’s upper atmosphere. The Political Officer had waxed lyrical about how pristine Terra Nova had been before humanity had landed on it, and how it was still a paradise, without the wrecking effects of capitalist terrorists.
Despite his words, I was actually looking forward to visiting the planet, although I was starting to realise that anything that was described in such glowing terms probably had a nasty sting in the tail. It was a lesson the Senior Chief had hammered into our heads repeatedly, starting with a lesson on space helmet safety that had included retch gas seeping through ‘sealed’ spacesuits and dozens of others since. The promises the manufactory people had made, the Senior Chief had warned us, could never be taken at face value. Checking and rechecking the inventory was part of our duties as Ensigns. Nothing could be left unaccounted for, even the merest item.
“That’s Landing City,” the Pilot said, as we continued to fly down the coastline. The city spilled out over the land ahead of us, somehow subtly different from any city on Earth. It took me a moment to realise what was missing. There were no towering mega-skyscrapers, each one holding thousands of people in a self-contained environment, but merely smaller blocky buildings. They all looked to have been turned out at the same manufacturer’s complex and they probably had been. I recalled reading that most colony worlds developed their own housing style pretty quickly, but the core city always kept the original settlement design. I couldn’t understand why. It looked pretty ugly from high overhead. “Do you know how many Landing Cities there are in the entire galaxy?”
I shook my head. “One hundred and seven,” the Pilot informed me, with a grin. He wasn’t — technically — in the chain of command, but we’d been taught that it was wise to listen to all of the department heads. They knew their own specialities and not much else, according to the official statements, but they’d been in space longer than any of us Ensigns had been alive. “Humans are not known for their imagination, eh?”
“No,” I agreed, as two silvery shapes shot past us. “What are they?”
“Fighter jets intercepting us and escorting us to the spaceport,” the Pilot said, checking his display. “The damned flyboys haven’t bothered to check in with us yet, either. They’re damn lucky I didn’t have my lasers on a hair trigger.”
The radio buzzed an inquisitive statement. “Shuttle One, UNS Jacques Delors,” the Pilot said. I lifted an eyebrow in his direction. I didn’t understand how he’d made sense out of that racket. “We are landing at the main spaceport, over.”
There was another burst of talking from the radio. “Understood,” the pilot said. “Altering course now to compensate.”
He grinned at me as the shuttle yawed through a long curve that took it around the city. “They’re going to escort us down to the spaceport,” he said. “It seems they’re having some trouble down there and perhaps we’ll need some help from them.”
I stared as the fighters closed in around us. They were crude aircraft, but the missiles and bombs they carried under their wings were clearly deadly. I couldn’t understand why they were carrying so many weapons. Even if there was trouble down on the planet below, the enemy couldn’t have any aircraft, could they? Enemy? The Political Officer had told us that the world was peaceful and tranquil.
“Here we are,” the pilot said, as we floated down towards the spaceport. It was a massive complex, surrounded by heavy defences and crammed with aircraft. I hadn’t seen anything so large since I’d left Earth. Even the Academy Flight Ground had been smaller than the massive airfield. “Coming into land…now!”
We touched the ground with scarcely a bump. “The Captain will want to see you now,” the pilot prompted, as the ground crew appeared from all around us. Some of them were pushing small fuel tanks, others were clearly soldiers, wearing standard UNPF urban combat outfits. The sight of them sent a chill down my spine. Was it really so important that the shuttle was guarded with armed men in the middle of the compound? “Have fun.”
I nodded. “Thank you,” I said. I had wondered if the Pilot harboured a grudge over my work on the helm console, but he didn’t seem concerned. I hadn’t placed myself there anyway. “It was a good flight.”