On my mission (make that “mission” because I was actually just standing there) the humans were already finishing up. Tarik was carrying the tool cases back to the shuttle, which was parked on the flat ground past the trees. Iris had finished the router diagnostics and had tuned in to the team feed to watch Karime’s conference. Ratthi had stopped looking at his data and was watching Tarik walk.
Then Bellagaia said, “First, before we get started with our questions— Some of us don’t want to tell you this. But there’s another colony site on this planet.”
Uh, yeah, we know that. The primary, and the other factional sites.
It took Karime three seconds to process the abrupt statement. (She was almost as good at not looking annoyed as Mensah was.) She kept her expression neutral and patient. “I’m sure we can accommodate their needs.” She gestured to Danis and Variset. “If there are other members of the different groups who should be present—”
“No, not one of our groups.” Bellagaia cut her off. Danis and Variset gave Bellagaia “what the hell” expressions. They didn’t like that she was saying this, whatever it was about. “Another site entirely. They split off nearly thirty years ago. They’re at the pole, near the terraforming.”
On the team feed, ART said, For fuck’s sake.
I said, aloud, “You have to be kidding me.”
The last thing we needed was more colonists. It was going to throw off all the contingency planning and resource-estimating and calculating that the humans had been doing.
It was going to keep us here longer.
Onboard ART, Martyn, who was monitoring from ART’s lounge, almost spilled his cup of hot liquid and said, “What?”
Sitting next to him, Kaede tapped the ship-wide comm and said, “Seth, come in here, please.”
On our router hill, Iris muttered, “What?” Ratthi turned to stare at me, worried. He hadn’t been monitoring that feed, just our separate mission group. Tarik, on his way back from the shuttle, saw that there was agitation and jogged to reach us faster. I added Ratthi and Tarik to Karime’s mission feed, which was quicker than explaining.
In the underground colony room, Karime lifted her brows. “Another occupied site?” I thought she was being careful not to show too much reaction. It was the way Mensah would have played it. On the feed, she said, The terraforming stations on the other continents are all supposed to be uninhabited auxiliaries, correct?
Correct, ART said. Perhaps they are intoxicated.
Karime replied, You know, I’ll believe anything right now.
Bellagaia explained, “They left when the contamination reports first started. In the beginning, we would hear from them on the comm, sometimes they’d fly in for holidays. Less over the years. We grew apart. We can’t call them directly, they have to call us.”
When she said that, I had a moment of hope. Maybe these other humans were imaginary. Humans are great at imagining stuff. That’s why their media is so good.
Possibly Karime also had a moment of hope because she said in a very even voice, “Why do they have to call you?”
Bellagaia explained, “The comm won’t work up there. It’s interference from the terraforming batteries.”
On the team feed, Iris said, Peri, would that kind of interference block your initial scan for signals?
ART answered, Yes, it did. But there was no priority for further scanning after the active colony site was located.
Sounding resigned, Seth said, So there could be another colony site.
Kaede said, There’s nothing about that in the mapping data we found in the drop box station.
Martyn added, Didn’t we get visual images of the engines at the pole?
Reconstructed scan images of the engines themselves, not the terrain around them, ART said.
“If we want to talk to them, we have to go there,” Bellagaia was saying. “But when this last outbreak started, we were afraid to send anybody up there, that we’d just be spreading the contamination. So they were never infected.”
Danis muttered, “We think they were never infected.” Impatient to get back to refusing to be convinced to not be stupid, she added, “They’re probably dead.”
One of the others, standing back in the doorway, said, “We survived. Until now.”
There was a murmur of “Despite you” from someone in the back, but the other humans pretended to ignore it.
“I see.” Lines formed on Karime’s forehead. She was distracted, listening to the chatter in the feed. Before I could put up a filter for her, ART said, Please stop excessive speaking on the mission feed and they all shut up. I know what humans are like, so I had only given Ratthi and Tarik read access. Karime said, “You said they were at the pole?”
Bellagaia nodded. “Yes, near the service base for the terraforming engines. They were mostly the original technicians who serviced the engines before they went on full automatic. They said they had found a good site up there to build in.”
Karime was thinking fast. “We can speak to them, warn them. Does Barish-Estranza know about them?”
Bellagaia shook her head and looked pointedly at Danis. “I don’t know.”
Danis’s expression was militant. “Our group wouldn’t tell them.”
Variset added, “We think our group wouldn’t tell them.”
Danis conceded, “The others might. Some of them are still confused.”
That caused a lot more muttered commentary from the audience in the doorway. Apparently they also thought Danis’s group was confused. Three sent me a report saying the movement and activity in the surrounding humans was still non-hostile. Yeah, I fucking know. (I didn’t say that, I just sent Acknowledge.)
Another human wriggled into the doorway and said, “That site, it was never meant to be a secondary site. It won’t be on the original colony charter.”
In ART’s lounge, Seth pressed his hands to his face and groaned. For a second I didn’t get it. I mean, I want to press my hands to my face and groan, too, but I pretty much always do.
Oh, right, I get it. The University’s legal case stipulating that this planet was a sovereign political entity and not salvage was based on the re-creation of the original colony’s charter that Pin-Lee and other humans had been working on. This was going to trigger another revamp. And with the new Barish-Estranza explorer here, we were running out of time.
Planets are big, and we could have missed other landing and habitation sites. ART must have scanned for other air bubbles at some point (I didn’t know what it did in its spare time), but when we first got here it mostly hadn’t given a crap about anything except finding its crew. The kind of mapping scans that would turn up low-impact habitations were usually done by satellite. (Or pathfinders, most of which ART had weaponized.) The planet had no intact satellites, just orbital debris from dead ones, too fragmentary to be identified as Corporation Rim or Pre–Corporation Rim.
ART said, The terraforming site would create signal interference that would disrupt both communication and feed traffic. Yeah, that’s what I thought. ART added, It would also interfere with a colony-sized air bubble installation.
Seth was frowning as he flicked through reports. He said, Right, right. That initial pathfinder scan was looking for air bubbles.
Karime nodded to herself. “Okay, that makes— Can you tell me anything else about this other colony site?”
Bellagaia gestured to the doorway behind her and said, “This is Corian.” She used a pronoun that our translator rendered as vi. “Vi’s the historian.”