Corian elbowed someone out of the way to get into the room. Vi dropped to the floor and curled vir legs up, facing Karime. Three didn’t alert, which was good. Threat assessment was reading Corian as a non-hostile anxious to communicate. Vi patted vir chest. “I keep the records, understood? This is not personal knowledge.”
Karime nodded. “Understood.”
Corian had an intent expression, like vi had been waiting for a long time to talk about this. “Contact stopped twenty years ago. There have been reports of connections, from maintenance taking up birds to check on terraforming progress, but none verified. The engines are too noisy.”
Somebody else countered, “Auntie said the connections had the right signatures—”
Bellagaia was watching Karime carefully and must have gotten some sense of the turmoil that was going on. To the others, she said, “Shush. Let Corian speak.” Amazingly, they shut up.
Corian continued, “It wasn’t just the contamination, see. I read the journals from the time they left, and they were separatist. Multiple disagreements on multiple levels. That’s why the lack of communication. We can’t tell you where they are exactly, because we don’t know. They wouldn’t tell us.”
I thought Karime was having the same “oh shit” moment as the rest of the crew but hiding it very well. She looked around at the colonists. “Thank you for trusting us with this. We won’t share it with Barish-Estranza.” She hesitated, clearly trying to say the next part without sounding like she was giving them orders. “I understand you haven’t made a decision about what you want to do yet. It’s in your best interest not to share it with them, either, until you’re certain.”
They may already be aware of it, ART sent.
“Important, yes, but that isn’t my primary concern,” Corian said, still focused on Karime. “The journals talk about a rumor that they had settled underground, in a cave system.”
Three’s drone saw Karime’s face sink and her shoulders tighten. Me too, Karime, me too. She echoed, “A cave system.”
Danis tossed her head. “With the geology of that region? A cave system big enough for a colony? Not likely.”
Ugh, you are kidding me. I had (a) visual input, which was Ratthi shaking his fist at the sky and Tarik making hair-tearing-out gestures and Iris sitting there with her face set in a wince; (b) the video feed from ART’s lounge, where Seth was gently banging his head against the table while Martyn patted him on the back. Karime said, “You think it’s another Pre–Corporation Rim site. Or an alien remnant site?”
“More likely to be Pre–Corporation Rim, but—” Corian made an openhanded gesture. “You see the problem.”
Yeah, we saw the problem.
Mensah tapped my feed from the Preservation responder. Seth just messaged me that we have an unexpected development. Is Karime all right?
Yes. She’s busy getting some fantastic news right now. I forwarded the last section of the conversation.
Some of the other colonists were protesting that there was no evidence of any other Pre-CR site and certainly not any alien remnant site, how could you even think that, etc., while Bellagaia looked at them like she was exhausted. Karime stayed focused on Corian, listening intently as vi talked. After vi finished, Karime asked, “Can you give me any more information where this site might be?” No, it turned out, vi could not, and nobody else had a clue, either, just that it was near enough to the terraforming engines to disrupt attempts to reach them by comm. Corian had been checking the records vi had access to, trying to locate anyone still alive who might have talked to the separatists at some point in the last twenty years, but with no success.
Mensah had had time to review the feed video. She muttered, “Oh, you have to be kidding me.”
Yeah.
Chapter Three
SO THERE WAS A fight at that point. Not a fight, a discussion. Whatever, agitated humans figuring out what to do.
Karime still had to continue with the original purpose of her meeting, trying to get the colonists to at least agree in principle to the idea of letting the University evacuate them to keep them from getting dumped into Barish-Estranza labor camps. Seth, Martyn, and Kaede were part of the argument/discussion—call it the argucussion—with Mensah and Pin-Lee on the comm from the Preservation responder. So Thiago and Turi and Overse had stopped working on what they were doing and tagged in to Mission One to give Karime advice and look things up if she needed it. Matteo and Arada were still working on medical upgrades. I backburnered all those feeds, though I kept a channel open with Three, who was still doing a good job of sitting there with Karime and not screwing anything up.
I wasn’t doing a good job of standing here, because my current three humans had just volunteered to go check out the new probably-not-apocryphal colony site. “We’re in a good position to get there without Barish-Estranza noticing,” Tarik said. Ratthi and Iris had already pulled the shuttle’s supply and equipment manifest into our team sub-feed and were going over it.
On the comm, Mensah said, “It’s not a bad idea.” I couldn’t pull video from the responder right now, but ART was supplying camera views from its galley, and I could see Mensah on the floating display surface there. Someone had pulled up the operation timetable in the general team feed, where Iris had just updated the completion of her team’s task with the routers. Mensah added, “And they’ve finished the last router. They have time for it, if they’re willing to go.”
“We can’t comm the colonists first and ask for a visit,” Martyn said again from ART’s lounge. “I don’t like that.”
“I don’t like that, either,” Kaede agreed. “We all know how dangerous cold contacts can be. But it’s not as if they’re refusing to answer. They may have no idea what the situation is here.”
ART was rotating through displays of all its data on the terraforming engines. It could “see” the engines by assembling a picture using the raw data from its scans, and it actually looked enough like a visual image to fool human vision, except that the topography around it was mostly extrapolated and sketched in. The amount of signal noise the engines were emitting blocked everything else out, so they were the only things the scan could pick up—this was the blackout zone the colonists had talked about. We could send in pathfinders but they wouldn’t be able to use their scans, either, so they would have to visually record and then return to a point where they could send ART their data. Barish-Estranza was trying to keep an eye on everything we did, obviously, but planets being large, that was impossible, just like it was impossible for us to know everything they were doing. If they did spot ART’s pathfinders entering the blackout zone, we could say we were gathering data on the status of the terraforming engines. But if we sent pathfinders into the blackout zone that then came out and delivered reports, and then we sent a shuttle in, that would tell B-E that we had found something worth looking at in person. Better to send a shuttle with the pathfinders, and log it as an evaluation of the terraforming engines.
I could have said all that, but ART was already doing it. Seth, who had been pacing the lounge with the heel of one hand pressed to his forehead in a way that seemed to indicate that he was having almost as great a time as I was, said, “Iris, see if they’re actually out there, make contact at your discretion, agreed?”
“Agreed.” Iris looked from Tarik to Ratthi, getting various signals of agreement. She said, “SecUnit?” and I realized she was looking at me, too.