So. Back to the lab.

It was another two generations before the Martian colonists finally got to breathe untanked air.

On Adoracion, it was worse. The colony barge Lorca had left several decades before the Martian debacle, built and hurled at the nearest of the habitable worlds indicated on the Martian astrogation charts with the bravado of a Molotov cocktail hurled at a tank. It was a semi-desperate assault on the armoured depths of interstellar space, an act of technological defiance in the face of the oppressive physics that govern the cosmos and an act of equally defiant faith in the newly decoded Martian archives. By all accounts, pretty much everyone thought it would fail. Even those who contributed their copied consciousnesses to the colony’s datastack and their genes to the embryo banks were less than optimistic about what their stored selves would encounter at journey’s end.

Adoracion, as its name suggests, must have seemed like a dream come true. A green and orange world with approximately the same nitrogen/oxygen mix as Earth and a more user-friendly land-to-sea ratio. A plant-life base that could be eaten by the herds of cloned livestock in the belly of the Lorca and no obvious predators that couldn’t be easily shot. Either the colonists were a pious lot or arriving on this new Eden pushed them that way, because the first thing they did upon disembarkation was build a cathedral and give thanks to God for their safe deliverance.

A year passed.

Hypercasting was still in its infancy back then, barely able to carry the simplest of messages in coded sequence. The news that came filtering back down the beams to Earth was like the sound of screams from a locked room in the depths of an empty mansion. The two ecosystems had met and clashed like armies on a battlefield from which there was no retreat. Of the million-odd colonists aboard the Lorca, over seventy per cent died within eighteen months of touchdown.

Back to the lab.

These days we’ve got it down to a fine art. Nothing organic leaves the hull until the eco-modeller has the whole host ecosystem down. Automated probes go out and prowl the new globe, sucking in samples. The AI digests the data, runs a model against a theoretical terrestrial presence at a couple of hundred times real-world speed and flags the potential clashes. For anything that looks like a problem it writes a solution, genetech or nanotech, and from the correlated whole, generates a settlement protocol. With the protocol laid down, everyone goes out to play.

Inside the protocols for the three dozen or so Settled Worlds, you find certain advantageous terrestrial species cropping up time and time again. They are the success stories of planet Earth—tough, adaptive evolutionary athletes to a creature. Most of them are plants, microbes and insects, but among the supersized animals there are a few that stand out. Merino sheep, grizzly bears and seagulls feature at the top of the list. They’re hard to wipe out.

The water around the trawler was clogged with the white feathered corpses. In the unnatural stillness of the shoreline, they muffled the faint lapping of wavelets on the hull even further.

The ship was a mess. It drifted listlessly against its anchors, the paint on the Sauberville side scorched to black and bare metal glints by the wind from the blast. A couple of windows had blown out at the same time and it looked as if some of the untidy pile of nets on deck had caught and melted. The angles of the deck winch were similarly charred. Anyone standing outside would probably have died from third-degree burns.

There were no bodies on deck. We knew that from the virtuality.

“Nobody down here either,” said Luc Deprez, poking his head out of the mid-deck companionway. “Nobody has been aboard for months. Maybe a year. Food everywhere has been eaten by the bugs and the rats.”

Sutjiadi frowned. “There’s food out?”

“Yeah, lots of it.” Deprez hauled himself out: of the companionway and seated himself on the coaming. The bottom half of his chameleochrome coveralls stayed muddy dark for a second before it adjusted to the sunlit surroundings. “Looks like a big party, but no one stayed around to do the clearing up.”

“I’ve had parties like that,” said Vongsavath.

Below, the unmistakeable whoosh-sizzle of a Sunjet. Sutjiadi, Vongsavath and I tensed in unison. Deprez grinned.

“Cruickshank is shooting the rats,” he said. “They are quite large.”

Sutjiadi put up his weapon and looked up and down the deck, marginally more relaxed than when we’d come aboard. “Estimates, Deprez. How many were there?”

“Rats?” Deprez’s grin widened. “It is hard to tell.”

I repressed a smile of my own.

“Crew,” said Sutjiadi with an impatient gesture. “How many crew, sergeant?

Deprez shrugged, unimpressed by the rank-pulling. “I am not a chef, captain. It is hard to tell.”

“I used to be a chef,” said Ameli Vongsavath unexpectedly. “Maybe I’ll go down and look.”

“You stay here.” Sutjiadi stalked to the side of the trawler, kicking a seagull corpse out of his way. “Starting now, I’d like a little less humour out of this command and a little more application. You can start by getting this net hauled up. Deprez, you go back down and help Cruickshank get rid of the rats.”

Deprez sighed and set aside his Sunjet. From his belt he pulled an ancient-looking sidearm, chambered a round and sighted on the sky with it.

“My kind of work,” he said cryptically, and swung back down the companionway, gun hand held high over his head.

The induction rig crackled. Sutjiadi bent his head, listening. I fitted my own disconnected rig back in place.

“…is secured.” It was Sun Liping’s voice. Sutjiadi had given her command of the other half of the team and sent them up the beach with Hand, Wardani and Schneider, whom he clearly regarded as civilian irritations at best, liabilities at worst.

“Secured how?” he snapped.

“We’ve set up perimeter sentry systems in an arc above the beach. Five-hundred-metre-wide base-line, hundred-and-eighty-degree sweep. Should nail anything incoming from the interior or along the beach in either direction.” Sun paused for a moment, apologetic. “That’s line-of-sight only, but it’s good for several kilometres. It’s the best we can do.”

“What about the uh, the mission objective?” I broke in. “Is it intact?”

Sutjiadi snorted. “Is it there?”

I shot him a glance. Sutjiadi thought we were on a ghost hunt. Envoy-enhanced gestalt scanning read it in his demeanour like screen labelling. He thought Wardani’s gate was an archaeologue fantasy, overhyped from some vague original theory to make a good pitch to Mandrake. He thought Hand had been sold a cracked hull, and corporate greed had gobbled up the concept in a stampede to be first on the scene of any possible development option. He thought there was going to be some serious indigestion once the team arrived on site. He hadn’t said as much in the construct briefing, but he wore his lack of conviction like a badge throughout.

I couldn’t really blame him. By their demeanour, about half of the team thought the same. If Hand hadn’t been offering such crazy back-from-the-dead war-exemption contracts, they probably would have laughed in his face.

Not much more than a month ago, I’d nearly done the same to Schneider myself.

“Yes, it’s here.” There was something peculiar in Sun’s voice. As far as I could tell, she hadn’t ever been one of the doubters, but now her tone bordered on awe. “It’s. Like nothing I’ve ever seen.”

“Sun? Is it open?”

“Not as far as we are aware, Lieutenant Kovacs, no. I think you had better speak to Mistress Wardani if you want details.”

I cleared my throat. “Wardani? You there?”

“Busy.” Her voice was taut. “What did you find on the boat?”