Not that he had a lot of time to think about that. Everyone was racing so frantically to get the prelanding work done before the ship fell into orbit around Novalis that they barely had time to sleep and eat, let alone worry about their social lives.
The DVI was central. The count on free volatiles would tell them whether the planet was geophysically capable of supporting plant and animal life. It was the DVI more than any other single set of numbers that the Aziz A’s would be looking at when they decided whether or not to greenlight the mission and transfer the team to the landing module. And when the DVI went south, so did all hopes of making planetfall on schedule.
The crux of the problem was Bella—and, in a more general way, the very presence of Aziz and Motai constructs on what was supposed to be a purely scientific mission.
The Novalis mission was a one-shot sprint-style expedition: fast and cheap, but by definition shorthanded. Each team member had to be capable of assisting with, or if necessary taking over, mission-critical tasks outside their normal areas of specialty. Indeed, one of the main arguments for including the Aziz A’s and the Motai B’s instead of four more scientists was that they had the generalized practical expertise to take up the slack for the life-sciences teams.
Things hadn’t quite worked out that way.
The two Aziz A’s, with all the goodwill in the world, lacked the training and technical skills even to serve as lab assistants. And the Bellas…well, the Bellas were turning out to be complicated.
As Arkady had predicted, they were quite easy to tell apart despite their uncanny physical resemblance. By the second day out of cold sleep, Arkady had privately dubbed them “Shy Bella” and “Bossy Bella.” Shy Bella barely spoke unless spoken to, and when she did screw up the courage to get a few words out you had to strain to hear them. Arkasha and Laid-back Ahmed both claimed she had a wicked sense of humor, but they were the only two crewmembers besides her pairmate that she was comfortable enough to joke with. And frankly Arkady wasn’t sure how comfortable she was with her pairmate.
By Syndicate standards, Bella’s diffidence verged on social deviance. Arkady had wondered how a construct with such a personality fault had made it through the MotaiSyndicate’s famously stringent culls…until he saw her at work in the orbsilk garden. At that point the mystery of why she’d been spared culling gave way to the mystery of why such a supremely gifted silk thrower had been exiled to the social backwater of a long-term survey mission. No matter. Whatever the reason, at least on this trip they wouldn’t have to worry about defective solar sails or hab ring seal blowouts.
Bella’s pairmate, on the other hand, could have used a healthy dose of shyness. Bossy Bella was that rare thing in Syndicate society, and space settlements generally: a truly rude person. Watching her in action, Arkady could only conclude that socialization in MotaiSyndicate crèches involved a lot fewer lectures about consideration, politeness, and Lotka-Wilsonist ideals, and a lot more of the aggressive jockeying for social dominance that was supposed to have vanished with the abolition of class oppression and private genetic property. He got the distinct impression that Bossy Bella was used to reigning over her fellow Motai B’s from the top of some primitive pecking order and was now working out just how far she could push her bullying in a group of science-tracked A’s who weren’t used to taking orders or deferring to anyone.
So far Bella’s pushing had worked pretty well. By-the-Book Ahmed liked her. Laid-back Ahmed tolerated her. The Rostov and Banerjee A’s were either blissfully blind to social nuance or too busy to notice.
But now Bella had let her social jockeying bleed into Aurelia’s DVI. And Aurelia, being an Aurelia, was out for blood.
Technically, what modern Syndicate ecophysicists did wasn’t terra-forming at all. Certainly it had little to do with the sledgehammer-style “planetary engineering” that early human terraformers had attempted when they hurled the first unmanned seed probes out of their solar system.
Most Evacuation-era terraforming starts had gone belly-up, leaving nothing behind but impact-scarred wreckage interesting only to historians. But where luck and skill had been with the original terraformers, their remote seeders had created impact craters in which the precious free volatiles collected and life could eventually thrive. The original terraformers had called these chains of isolated island ecosystems “oases.” Syndicate terraformers, none of whom had ever seen Earth’s oases, just called them “potholes.”
The pothole worlds (Gilead had been one when the first generation ship fell into orbit around it) were not terraformed but merely potentially terraformable. Each pothole evolved as its own separate planet, separated from its neighbors by sterile highlands lashed by lethal dust storms and solar radiation. Most of them flared into brief unstable life, then crashed. As Arkady’s first biogeography teacher had pointed out, knowing that isolated population fluctuations took the form of undamped oscillations around a stable equilibrium was small consolation if a downward oscillation dropped the population of a critical organism below zero. But some potholes survived. And a few, a very few of them were still there when the first-generation ships arrived: the scattered seeds of viable planet-spanning biospheres.
All but a handful of human colonies failed anyway, even where they were lucky enough to land on pothole worlds. The number of ways colonists had found to choke, drown, starve, or poison themselves was awe-inspiring. In most cases, however, the ultimate cause of death was startlingly basic: failure to adapt.
Dead colonies—including the genetically nonviable colonies of walking ghosts that the Treaty euphemistically called “bare branches”—died for one of two reasons. Either they refused to retool Earth-born customs and expectations to fit the unforgiving fragility of synthetic biospheres, or they refused to accept the invasive genetic engineering humans needed in order to survive anywhere but on their native planet. Colonies that survived only did so by facing up to the cold equations of life after Earth’s ecological collapse. They gave up the dream of building a second Earth. Or they gave up the dream of staying human. Or they died.
The Syndicates had given up on both those dreams. And in doing so, they had earned the privilege of working miracles. Which meant that the new worlds, the worlds out in the Deep beyond the treaty lines, were theirs for the taking.
Novalis was a typical Syndicate terraforming mission. It unfolded in four phases, only the last of which involved launching a manned driveship toward the target planet. Or rather, the presumed planet. For when the first remote probe launched, its target wasn’t a planet at all but merely a suggestive infrared excess in the spectrometry of a distant star.
The first probe swooped around Novalis on its subluminal flyby and found planets, two of them in orbits that were at least theoretically compatible with the presence of liquid water.
A second probe arrived eight months later, its launch window carefully scheduled to give the RostovSyndicate ecophysicists time to chew on the first round of raw data. In a maneuver that was always touch-and-go in terms of fuel conservation, it fired its onboard thrusters in order to translate into the plane of the most promising satellite: a more or less Earth-sized planet, blessed with a more or less Moon-sized moon that had the geophysicists whispering hopeful little phrases like “satellite stabilization” and “mild Milankovitch cycles.”
Translation was successful. The flyby happened—a spectacular display of interstellar sharpshooting at a mere seventy thousand kilometers above the target planet’s cloud-shrouded surface. The probe dropped seven automated landers before it hooked around Novalis’s yellow sun and shot off on its final voyage into the unsounded Deep.
Four of the landers vanished without transmitting any data at all.