He was rewarded with a muted cheer. ‘You said it, Captain.’
A gong’s low chime, the call to prayer, filled the cabin of the little flitter. The men had their solar amulets fixed outside their suits to their wrists, and they consulted these now, shifting in their seats so they could face towards Sol itself. Soon the murmured prayers began.
Stillich turned too. He knew where Sol was, actually; he could find it from the constellations, even distorted by this translation to the Tau Ceti system. But nearly twelve light years from Earth it was tricky to pick out the home star, so dim had it become. That, of course, had always been proclaimed by the Shiras as the natural limit to the human dominion: the Empire of Sol was to be that bubble of space close enough that you could see the home star with the naked eye, and so be able to pray to its munificence.
But Stillich knew that the Shiras’ control depended on more practical considerations. The Facula was a GUTdrive starship. More than a thousand years after the pioneering journey of Michael Poole, this was still the peak of mankind’s interstellar technology; no means of faster-than-light travel had been discovered, save fixed wormholes, tunnels in the sky. Like all its sisters in the fleet, the Facula was a sublight ship, and a Navy manned by humans and forever contained by light-speed had a certain natural reach.
The Facula was capable of sustaining a one-gravity acceleration for years, indeed decades. Including time for acceleration and deceleration she could reach Alpha Centauri in a mere forty-three months as measured aboard ship, and Tau Ceti in a little more than five years. But in flight, thanks to relativistic time dilation, the crew’s heartbeats were slowed, their lives extended, and the voyages as measured by the external world were longer – it was fourteen years to Tau Ceti, as recorded on Earth.
And it was this rigidity of relativistic time that set the true limits on the Shiras’ interstellar grasp. The young crew of the Facula were soldiers of the Empress; they would fight for Shira XXXII if there was a reasonable promise that they would be brought home. But it had been discovered that any longer than a generation elapsed back home and that promise was inevitably broken, loyalty always dissipated by an excess of culture shock; any longer and a flight became an emigration. AS anti-ageing technology made no difference, for this limit was a function of human consciousness, not significantly altered by extended lifespans – and besides, all soldiers were young, as they had always been. Even using sleeper pods would not help; that could only cut down the subjective flight time, not the objective interval.
Thus, given the fundamental limits of light-speed and human capability, Tau Ceti was about as far as the Shiras could ever extend their Empire. But it was enough, for no less than nineteen star systems, plus Sol, lay within that limit of loyalty. And this mission was proof that the Shiras would enforce their rule right to the boundaries. If this colony was illegal, it would be broken up.
The time for prayer was over. The marines folded away their amulets and closed their faceplates.
And the flitter ducked into the murky air of Tau Ceti’s second world.
They landed briskly on the perimeter of the largest human settlement, close to the shore of an island-continent. The hull cracked open, and the marines in their environment suits spilled out to set up a secure perimeter around the flitter. Glowing drones flooded the air, and bots began digging trenches.
Amid all this activity, Stillich peered about curiously.
A lid of cloud turned the pale light of Tau Ceti a dull grey. They had apparently come down in a field, where Earth vegetation drew sustenance from the nutrients of an alien soil, no doubt heavily nano-worked. But plants of a more exotic sort, with leaves of purple and silver-grey, clustered among the green. There were structures on the low horizon, unprepossessing, just shacks, really. People stood before the shacks, adults with hands on hips, a couple of children. They watched the marines with apparent curiosity but no sign of fear or deference.
Although Tau Ceti was actually the most sun-like of all the stars within the Empire of Sol, such were the distracting riches of Alpha System that only one serious colonising expedition from Earth had been mounted here – and that ship had been reassigned to a more urgent mission and had never been heard of again. Officially this colony did not exist – and yet here it was. Stillich found it deeply disturbing to have discovered this blind spot of the Empire, for where there was one, there could be many.
‘Walk with me,’ Stillich said to Pella.
He set off towards the shacks, and Pella followed. Marines shadowed them, weapons in hand.
‘What a dump,’ Stillich said. ‘This world, this dismal farm, those shacks. To come all this way to live like this.’
Pella, characteristically, was peering into her data desk, rather than studying the world around her. ‘They will be grateful we have come to save them, sir—’ She stopped suddenly, a hundred paces short of the shacks. ‘Look.’ She pointed to a kind of earthwork, circular, little more than a system of ditches and low ramparts cut into the ground. ‘This is what I saw from the drones. Can you see the way the ground has been flattened within the perimeter, as if something has been set down here? And over there—’ She pointed. ‘Residual traces of radioactivity.’
‘They came here in a GUTship,’ Stillich said.
‘Yes, sir. They brought it down and dismantled it. They lived in the lifedome, just here, and used the GUTdrive for power.’
‘And now it’s all gone.’
‘And quite recently too – I mean, a few decades . . .’
A woman approached them. Short, squat, she had the heavy shoulders and big hands of a farmer. She looked perhaps forty, though with AS tech she could be any age. She wore a facemask and a small air pack, but no other environmental protection. She grinned, showing good teeth, and said something in a liquid dialect that Stillich’s systems began to translate for him.
He waved that away. ‘Speak Earthish,’ he snapped.
The woman eyed him, perhaps deciding whether to obey him or not. ‘I said, “Welcome to Home.”’
‘What an original name,’ sneered Pella.
‘You don’t need to wear those fancy suits. An air mask will do. We long since nanoed out any nasties. A couple more generations and—’
‘You should not be here,’ Stillich said. ‘This colony is unauthorised.’
‘Well, you’ll have to take that up with my grandfather, who came here from Alpha System when Footprint got a bit too full for his liking.’
‘You are secondary colonists from Alpha, then. As I said – unauthorised.’
Pella looked around. ‘Where is your grandfather?’
‘Dead these forty years. Don’t you want to know my name?’
Pella snapped, ‘Your name is irrelevant. The GUTships you used to get here were the property of the Empire of Sol.’
The farmer laughed again.
Pella, her temper quick, her ego strong, raised her arm.
Stillich touched her shoulder to restrain her. He said, ‘Woman – you, or your grandparents, broke up your transport ship to build your first colony here.’ He gestured. ‘You lived in the lifedome. You used the GUTengine for power. And yet now these things are gone.’
‘You reassembled the ship, that’s obvious,’ Pella said. ‘And other vessels. But why? Where have you sent them?’
The woman responded with another grin, surly.
This time Pella did strike her, using her elbow to dash the woman to the ground. Marines rushed in, weapons raised. ‘Take her,’ Pella said. ‘And her children. Torch this place. We will have five years to empty her of all she knows, before we reach the Solar System once more.’