
Unbounded

Ander Nesser

Published by Ander Nesser, 2017.
This is a work of fiction. Similarities to real people, places, or events are entirely coincidental.

UNBOUNDED

**First edition. February 28, 2017.**

Copyright (C) 2017 Ander Nesser.

ISBN: 978-1370530656

Written by Ander Nesser.

10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

# Table of Contents

Table of Contents

Chapter One: Rock Garden

Chapter Two: Cold Trove

Chapter Three: Significant Sea

Chapter Four: Glow Canyon

Chapter Five: Menhir Waters

Chapter Six: The Flying Mountains of Magenta Sorrow

Chapter Seven: Teal Grip

Chapter Eight: Fogstill

Chapter Nine: Echo

Chapter Ten: Illuminations of Glimmerpool

Chapter Eleven: Glimmerpool Glory

Chapter Twelve: Perinucleon

Author's Note

Selected Bibliography

About the Author

# Chapter One: Rock Garden

Mission Time: +138 Earth-years

On his hands and knees, a man stared through the floor. A dry world floated in the false window below. A few people walked by and barely looked at him.

"Ryder? Are you alright?"

Ryder looked up and saw the weakly wrinkled eyes of a short man looking down at him. "I'm fine Hemi; thanks." He stood up and touched the wall; the window winked away. "I'm just feeling a bit overwhelmed," he said.

"It's a lot to take in, I know," Hemi said. "I'm heading for Command Sector. Walk with me?"

"Sure." Ryder passed over the now plain white floor and went with Hemi to a nearby door.

This sector of the ring was dim and hushed. Blue hues stretched to orange, and a computer terminal washed a man in ruddy light. His facial muscles gradually squeezed inwards towards a frown. Without shifting her head, a woman in a white uniform glanced at him.

"Tangaroa--" the woman called out. "--what's wrong?"

"I'm looking at the spectrographic analysis we just did, and it ... it doesn't ... correspond to anything we were expecting," Tangaroa said.

The woman shifted her body in the shadows. "What are you talking about?"

Tangaroa pressed his hands to the glossy surface in front of him. Glowing lines and boxes of text radiated from his fingers on the terminal's surface. "Our data do not match the original telemetry from the Flamecast probe. The atmosphere is cold and toxic."

The woman's eyes widened.

"Mbali, I have triple-checked our location," another man near Tangaroa called out to the woman. "Navigation was successful."

"Then quadruple-check," the woman named Mbali said. "Tangaroa, is it possible the planet's atmosphere could have changed that much in one century?"

"It's not just the atmosphere. The surface gravity is only 0.76 g, but Flamecast had reported 1.7 g. This is a different world entirely."

"Anaru, you are certain we are at the precisely correct orbital distance from Wolf 1061?" Mbali asked the navigator.

"Yes ma'am."

"Is it possible another planet shares the same orbit?"

"Not in this case," another young man in a black uniform answered. He walked to a cylindrical console in an alcove. When his hands touched the dark surface, they sprouted flowers of data. "Mbali, take a look through your viewer," he said.

She blinked, activating bionic implants, and black nictating membranes slid over her eyes. Mbali's sight was replaced with a vista of a brown and white world one megameter below, the arc of the Milky Way above. She rotated her head around in real space, braided dreadlocks shifting between her shoulders. Heads-up displays highlighted a speck above the planet. She zoomed in to the speck and dimmed the luminosity of everything else around it. At maximum zoom, she could barely make out that the object was dimensional. It occasionally glimmered in the sunlight. "Is that the orbital component of Flamecast? I can't see it very clearly. But it's sparkling."

"Yes. It's a bit too small for our telescopes to resolve at this distance. The reflections are from solar panels."

"Is the landing component still in its integrated state?"

"It should be, in theory. We have no signal from the surface, but we do have the coordinates of its original landing site."

Mbali blinked again, and the membranes retracted. "Then we need to verify it's really there," she said. "Ariki," she addressed the man to whom she had just been talking. "You and the other senior scientists are going down. Security Chief Zhao, as well. Now."

Ariki nodded and glanced around at some of the other men who were attending to various terminals, including Ryder and Hemi. With a gesture or an electroencephalographic pulse, the men closed their terminals, returning the consoles to a default configuration. All clad in black uniforms, they stepped out from their stations and walked past Mbali. Out in the circumferential corridor, Ariki led them up the curving floor to wall-embedded rungs. They climbed through an opening in the ceiling labeled "Radial Access." As they ascended the narrow shaft, their weight lessened until it reached zero at the top. Here they passed through another opening labeled "Main Access" into a wider, perpendicular tube. Yellow lights slowly brightened in response to their presence; the bulkhead was plush with black padding. They propelled themselves along hand-rails until reaching another radial access opening to the main skiff bay. They floated down feet first, then climbed down. As they filed off the ladder into the bay, they stepped into their full one-g weight.

Various types of skiffs were lined up on the bay floor like sleeping insects. The vessel they boarded was dark gray with thermal tiles, and it crouched on pylons supporting vertical take-off and landing engines. The passengers swayed slightly whilst the skiff was picked up by the docking arms, and they fastened their harnesses.

Ryder turned on his eye-camera and went to the cockpit. The pilot was a standard skiff pseudo-gynoid with minimal human interaction protocols. It was fused to the deck at the waist, arm tendrils radiating to numerous entry ports in the console. Its head was vaguely spherical and covered in cameras to view out the canopy in all directions. "This is ship's clerk Ryder Kask here in the cockpit with a Kiwi-class pilot who will take us to the surface of Rock Garden. Note that the cameras on its head are redundant backups to the skiff's own sensors. All skiff inputs are fed through the pilot as it makes decisions. In the event of severe malfunctions, the pilot's output cables can be unplugged from the control console for manual flying by humans." Ryder turned off his recorder. "There's a scary thought."

He looked around the cockpit some more, then focused outside the canopy, turning his camera back on to record the departure procedure. "One hundred sixty-seven years ago, a swarm of microscopic machines were launched from space-based accelerators at near-light-speed." The bay doors opened, and the skiff was pushed out along the docking rails. The backdrop of stars was a blur beyond the perpetual spin of their ship. "They spread throughout all the neighboring star systems, scanning each planet for features of interest," Ryder continued. "Once they actually reached their destinations, they condensed into macroscopic objects and behaved as traditional planetary probes. They transmitted telemetry back to Mission Control at the Global Unity Space Agency on Earth." The skiff was released from the docking arms, and Ryder, becoming weightless, had to strap into a seat as they decelerated out of the spinship's inertial frame. The brown crescent leveled below, and they began a steep descent. "One probe, called Flamecast, described a warm, wet, and sterile world; dubbing it 'Rock Garden,' the GUSA made the decision that this was to be the site of humanity's first extrasolar colony. The spinship Unbounded was launched immediately. But now, new data is calling everything into question." Ryder unstrapped himself and floated out of the cockpit.

"Kask, you need to be seated for the descent," a young man with tall, black hair said seriously.

"Sorry Zhao Zhong," Ryder said as he chose a seat at the end of the row, leaving an empty one between himself and Hemi. He closed his eyes through the gentle rocking of turbulence, and a few minutes later the skiff made a gentle touchdown onto rocky ground.

Zhong looked at his arm-calc. "The skiff indicates a surface pressure of 0.036 atmospheres and a temperature of minus 223.8 centigrade. Wind speed, six kilometers per hour. Biogenic compounds absent."

Ryder unstrapped and entered the vertical elevator airlock. The door rotated and sealed, and the sterilizer pulled every microbe from the surface of his body. The airlock robotics then wrapped him in a thin, translucent pressure suit, capping his face with a reflective visor and breathing mask. The robotics pulled away, and the sterilizer cycled through a second time; then the airlock moved.

Ryder watched his bustling comrades rise up and disappear above the deck. Except for the red glow of the elevator controls, there was a moment of darkness. A crack of light appeared at Ryder's feet and quickly spread upwards to fill his cylindrical chamber through the pseudo-glass. The skiff's steaming hull receded above, and reddish brown rock approached from below. He caught a glimpse of high mesas guarding the landscape beyond the plateau on which they had landed. The elevator halted a few centimeters above the ground. The hatch opened, cold air rushed in, and Ryder stepped down onto the rocky ground. He walked away from the skiff and climbed onto a low, flat rock, then sat down cross-legged, facing the vista below. The skiff stood like a waiting dragonfly at his back. With sudden gusts, dust swirled around him intermittently, seeming to momentarily brush away the heavy sunlight. Ryder's back was straight, hands on his knees. The sounds of his teammates rustling in their preparations came through his earpieces over the soft breezes conveyed by the helmet's microphones. There were no other sounds.

Five minutes later, there came a hiss of air as the freight elevator's floor unsealed from the ventral side of the hull. It lowered, loaded with crewmen and equipment, as the smaller elevator retracted. Ryder heard the crewmen crunch onto the new terrain, but did not turn to look at them. Angular, brown rocks of every size speckled a land which seemed never to have known flowing liquid. Minute products of wind erosion occasionally danced around them, but all else was still. Hemi unloaded several pieces of equipment, laying them on the flat ground between the skiff and a rocky bluff. Zhong pointed to various spots, directing. Tangaroa took rock samples. Zhong walked up to him. "The Flamecast lander?" he asked flatly.

"Right," Tangaroa said. He glanced at his arm-calc. "It should be this way." Carrying a small case, he led Zhong thirty meters away from his mineral analysis package. Ariki noticed them heading off together, and he was quick to follow.

Tangaroa stopped and pointed at a sandy patch of ground in the shadow of a low, rocky ridge. "These are the landing coordinates. It should be here."

"Could you determine whether it might have been buried in the intervening century and a half?" Zhong asked.

"Well, I am a geologist, after all. It depends on the erosion rate. But I would say that is indeed a possibility. Even likely." Tangaroa set his kit of tools down and extracted a scoop of sand. He began digging in the shadow of the outcrop.

"That makes me really nervous," Zhong said.

Tekoha turned to him and crossed his arms. "I assure you he's perfectly safe. This planet is as sterile as Mercury."

"Found it," Tangaroa announced. He pulled a black multi-folded fractal object from the rock dust and set it on solid stone. Red dust streamed from its crevices. "If we expose it to sunlight for a few hours, it should become operational again."

"Tekoha to Unbounded," Tekoha said.

"This is Mbali. Go ahead Tekoha."

"Mbali, we found the lander." He was staring at the dark crystal gleaming in the sunlight.

"Then that confirms it," Mbali said. "This is indeed Rock Garden. Give me a moment to consult Fai-tsiri."

Zhong shifted his weight to one foot and put his hands on his hips. He looked at Tekoha. "How could the Flamecast telemetry be so wrong? Did this world really change somehow since it first landed?" He waved an arm at the lander.

Tangaroa shook his head, his facial expression hidden by the reflective visor.

Mbali's voice popped into their ears again. "The skiff is being ordered back to Unbounded. All senior scientists are to report to the conference room ASAP."

"Shouldn't we investigate the surface more as long as we're here?"

"You got the information we came for. Let's not waste any more time. Leave the lander where it is and return immediately," Mbali replied.

"Yes ma'am," Tangaroa said.

The six men packed their toolkits and reloaded equipment packages onto the elevator. Within ten minutes they were strapped in their seats as the on-board computer ran through a takeoff checklist. Moments later, they were accelerating up the clear green sky. Ryder tightened the straps of his shoulder harness as he looked out a false window. He turned to Tekoha and began recording with his camera. "Do you have anything to say about the first planetfall?" he asked him.

Sunlight hit Tekoha's scowl.

"Is there something wrong, Tekoha?" Ryder asked.

Tekoha glanced at the others sitting across from him and then back at Ryder. "I'd rather not discuss it at the moment," Tekoha said.

"Oh. Perhaps we can talk later, then."

Tekoha nodded and closed his eyes, laying his head back against the seat. Hemi was looking at them with arched brows. Ryder turned back to the view. The green sky soon deepened to black, and then the world curved away. A bright speck shifted into his view and grew larger. A few minutes later his false window was filled with the thick, reflective rings of Unbounded. Their skiff accelerated in an arc until it matched the spin velocity of the ship. When they reached the correct position over the docking ring, a bay door opened and guide rails extended; the skiff maneuvered to attach to the rails. The locks latched onto the skiff's hull, and then the rails began retracting, pulling the skiff in its ventral direction into the bay. With the skiff docked and with the bay sealed and pressurized, the six-member team hopped out and settled into their weight at one g. The door was now a floor. Tangaroa lead the others all the way back to Command Sector, where they entered a narrow chamber.

Mbali and three men sat at the far end of a table, a large false window behind her displaying the stars, the limb of the desert world near the bottom of the frame. The senior staff took their seats along the table.

"At the moment I am not concerned with the reason for the data discrepancy," Mbali said after everyone was settled. "We should be focused on our own survival, and the welfare of the four thousand people sealed in cryopreservation. Hemi, have you completed running diagnostic assessments on all the cryostats?"

"Yes ma'am." He put a hand on a soft box next to his left hip.

"And what is your assessment?"

"Each cryostat chamber experiences a critical fault about once per century, on average, but they are immediately repaired by the Custodians. The cryopreservation system should be able to maintain operations indefinitely as long as a sufficient number of Custodians are still functional," Hemi said, adjusting the shoulder strap of his toolkit.

"Doctor Tai, do you have anything to add about the health of the static passengers?"

"Health levels are the best we can hope for. But I think I know what you're really asking ..." Doctor Tai looked around the table at the other men. ". What you all really want to know. I have verified the damage rate to our bodies by radioactivity, and it is within the predicted range. Thawing every five decades and going through the detoxification process can stave off the inevitable for only so long." He paused, looking down at his hands.

"Doctor? What are the numbers?" Mbali asked.

Tai looked her in the eyes, and then looked at the faces of his crewmates. "We can survive out here for another seven hundred years, ship-time, before the effects of radioactivity are fatal."

Mbali leaned back in her seat and looked down at the black tabletop. "Are you certain? That's on the low end of predictions."

Tai nodded. "I'm sorry it's not what we were hoping for, but it's not entirely unexpected."

Mbali looked out at the faces of her crew. "I know what you are all thinking. At maximum engine performance, it will take one hundred forty years to return to Earth." She paused, putting her hands on the table and leaning forward. "It is simple arithmetic. We can return to Earth now, having accomplished nothing. Or, ...."

"Or what?" Nikau said. "We can't start a colony here. The atmosphere is toxic--it would take several generations to clean it, if that were even possible."

Ariki nodded. "He's right. We don't have the capability to terraform such an un-Earthlike world. And we certainly don't have the equipment to set up a self-sustaining arcologic colony."

"And even if we could, there's no water," Tekoha said.

Mbali nodded. "Agreed. That leaves only one other option. We continue onward."

"Onward? Where? There are no other planets in this system inside the habitable zone of the sun," Nikau said.

"That's not what I meant," Mbali said. "Anaru, what is the next closest star system?"

"36 Ophiuchi, which is 7.42 light-years away."

"Wait a second, we don't know if that system even has planets--it's a trinary, anyway," Tekoha said. "Are you suggesting we blindly fly from system to system in hopes we stumble onto one precious gem?"

"That's exactly what I'm suggesting."

"But how many systems can we visit before we die?" Nikau asked.

Mbali looked at Anaru.

"In this region of the galaxy, stars are, on average, five light-years away from the next-nearest neighbor. That means we have time to visit about fourteen systems. But we'll be consuming much more fuel and propellant than specified in the original mission parameters, with all the additional acceleration and deceleration between each stop."

"That shouldn't be a problem," Ariki said. "We can take in hydrogen at a faster rate than we consume it."

"But what about mechanical failure of the engines?" Anaru asked. "They'll be working a lot more than anyone thought. They were planned for a single acceleration and a single deceleration interval. Now we're talking about doing it over a twenty times."

"It's not as unreasonable as it sounds," Ariki responded. "This class of spinship wasn't designed for single missions only. GUSA considered the possibility there might be several journeys back and forth between Rock Garden and Earth once the colony was established."

"But fourteen?"

"That's why we have the Custodians. I'm confident they can maintain this ship long after our biological expiration date."

"All right," Mbali said. "Remember that we won't be completely blind, after all: we still have the old probe telemetry originally received by Mission Control."

"Not for every star system in the Solar neighborhood," Anaru said.

"Right, but we do have data from a couple we might reach. I'm going to have a discussion with Fai-tsiri, but I think she will agree this is our best option if we actually want to complete the mission. I expect she will order us back into stasis shortly." The people around the table avoided eye contact with each other. She stood. "Dismissed." The staff filed out of the room. Mbali went to the wall behind her chair and touched a panel. The image in the false window exhibited a vertical motion blur until it became indistinguishable streaks, reflecting the habitat ring's actual rotation rate.

"Mbali?"

She turned. "Yes Nikau?"

Nikau's eyes shifted side to side; his weight shifted foot to foot; he opened his mouth but did not speak.

"What is it?"

"I uh ... well, it's nothing really."

"Tell me."

"You know what, nevermind. I'm sorry to bother you." He rushed for the conference room's exit.

"Nikau!"

"It's not important. We'll talk later." And he was through the door. Mbali went to the doorway and watched him disappear up the curve of the corridor.

As Nikau marched onward, he saw doors sliding shut as other crew entered their cabins. Some left their doors open. He passed one room and saw Tangaroa sitting on the edge of a chair, elbows on his knees, staring at the floor.

He came to another closed door, dark gray in the white wall. His name was printed on it, both in Globalese block letters as well as the spirals and staves of New Maori ceremonial script. He put his hand into the recessed handhold of the door, and then looked behind him. The corridor was empty. Beads of sweat formed on his forehead. He slid the door open and entered his cabin, then closed it again.

Nikau went to one wall and called up an alpine vista for his false window. He stared at it and sighed, sinking into his desk chair.

A soft chime sparkled in the air. "Enter," he said.

Hemi slid the door open and entered. "Hey Nikau, how's it going?"

"Fine." Nikau looked at him briefly, and then returned his eyes to the mountains. Afternoon sunlight seemed to stream into the room, producing golden blooms on metallic surfaces.

"You seemed a little strange in the meeting," Hemi commented.

"How so?"

"I don't know, you just don't seem like yourself."

"I'm fine. Just a little distracted."

"By what?" Hemi sat in another chair, frowning.

"I suppose I really began to have doubts about this mission when Mbali said we would continue onward. I mean, is it worth it? Honestly, I don't really understand the economic drivers of our mission to begin with. The effort and cost of establishing an exoplanet colony seems greater than the benefit. It definitely doesn't benefit anyone back on Earth."

"Well, we might make some serendipitous discoveries and transmit our findings back to Control," Hemi said.

"That's rather speculative. Can you depend on serendipity? And even if you could, would the benefit of those discoveries exceed the cost? I'm telling you, something about this mission doesn't make sense," Nikau said emphatically.

"Something in particular?"

Nikau rubbed his cheeks with the palm of his hands, stretching the skin around his eyes. "I was checking some programming, adding comments to code written by Fai-tsiri. I've looked through so much code since waking up. Maybe my imagination is getting the best of me. But I think I saw some things I wasn't supposed to see."

"What are you talking about? There's no classified information on this mission."

"Well, actually, I think there is. There were some encrypted files, and I got into them, thinking they were encrypted by mistake. Turns out, maybe not."

"You have to go to Mbali with this. It's your duty."

"I know. I was about to, just now. But ..."

"But what?"

"To be honest, I got a little scared. I'm just not sure what's going on."

"What did you see in the encrypted code, exactly?"

Nikau shook his head. "I don't want to talk about it. I have to decide what my next move is, first."

"Okay. Well, take your time. You'll make the right decision, I'm sure." Hemi stood up and moved towards the door. "Anytime you need to talk, feel free to stop by my cabin. Or if I'm not there, I'm probably in the Engineering Module."

Nikau nodded.

"I guess I'll be going. Got to get some stuff done before we head back into stasis."

Nikau nodded again.

"By the way, has that clerk bothered you much? He's been going around bombarding the crew with questions."

"You mean Ryder Kask? The historian? No, I haven't talked to him much."

"Okay." Hemi slid the door open and stepped out into the corridor. He turned back to face into the room, then turned his head quickly side to side, glancing in all directions. "Oh, Nikau. Fai-tsiri would like to extend her apologies."

"For what?" Nikau asked.

Hemi pulled something dark and cylindrical from his toolkit. There was a soft pop of air pressure, and a small shockwave bounced off the bulkheads. Nikau fell forward off his chair. Blood sprayed from his neck, glowing in the fake sunlight. Hemi slid the door shut and walked slowly up the habitat ring.

# Chapter Two: Cold Trove

Mission Time: +212.2 Earth-years

Doctor Tai smiled and made a note on his arm-calc. "You're as healthy as a moa," he said.

Ryder leaned forward on the bed's edge and looked at the grated floor. "What's a moa?"

Tai smiled again. "You've never been to Zealandia, have you?"

Ryder shook his head. "North America Province, born and raised."

"It's a resurrected species of flightless bird. Very large."

Ryder frowned. "I have a slight headache."

"That should go away in a few minutes." Tai moved away from the bed.

"I've also had a few bouts of nausea."

"Humans have a pair of sense organs often erroneously referred to as the inner ear, called the vestibular system, which we use to balance ourselves. Some people are a bit overly sensitive to Coriolis forces, and this causes nausea. You should adjust to it naturally. If you're still getting nauseated during the next mission segment, come talk to me and we'll look into it further."

"Okay. Have you heard anything about the new star system?" Ryder asked. He made no motion to stand.

Tai hesitated, turning halfway back to Ryder. "Just that the sun is a type-K."

"Hmf, figures. I wonder how long it will be before we run into another type-G."

The doctor shrugged. "Could be a while, I suppose."

Ryder jumped down onto the metal grate. "But the question is, how long can you really keep us alive?"

Tai took a step towards him. "Are you alright, Mr. Kask?"

"I'm not that old. Call me Ryder." The floor of the medical bay sloped gently upwards at either end. "I'm just thinking out loud."

"Well, I understand your concerns. But it's too early to give up hope." Tai walked over to an output display on the wall.

Ryder looked around at the beds in the empty bay, and up at the white spotlights embedded in the ceiling. He ran a hand over his closely cropped hair. "Mm. Well, I guess you have more crew coming in."

Tai looked back at him and nodded. "Have a good day, Ryder."

Ryder walked to the door and slid it open. Then he stopped and said, "You know, I always had the feeling some disaster like this would happen. I never could picture the mission working out. But this data discrepancy--isn't it just too bizarre?" He went out into the corridor before Tai could respond.

Ryder nodded to Kahu, who passed him and entered the medical bay. Ryder continued on for about forty degrees. He reached his cabin and entered.

Zhong and Ihaia were standing inside, near his desk.

"What the hell is this?" Ryder said.

"Have a seat," Zhong said as Ihaia pulled out a chair.

Ryder slid the door shut behind him. "You're going through my stuff? My files?"

"We don't want to disrupt crew harmony, but there is a serious security matter to which we must attend," Zhong said.

Ryder sighed and sat in a chair. He opened his hands. "What do you want?"

"The last mission segment ..." Zhong looked around the cabin as if observing something.

"What about it?"

"Where were you at 21:30? Where did you go after the briefing?"

"My cabin."

"Did anyone see you? Was anyone else with you in your cabin?"

"No. But if you need to verify my whereabouts, just look at the corridor camera recordings."

Zhong nodded. "How well do you know Nikau?"

"Not well. I'm familiar with his crew file, of course."

"Would you say you two are friends?"

"No, I barely had occasion to speak with him. Why?"

"Do you know what he was working on?" Zhong asked. Ihaia stood with arms folded, staring at Ryder.

"No idea."

"Do you know who amongst the crew are friends of Nikau? Or perhaps, who harbors any dislike?"

"No, I don't know. What is this about?"

"I'm not at liberty to disclose that information at this time," Zhong said rotely.

"You know, I'm over four hundred years old," Ryder said. "Not including time spent in stasis, of course. Approaching middle age, one tends to get a different perspective on things. You kids, in your second century of life, can't fathom what it was like when I was growing up in the slums of Los Angeles, before the Garden World Laws. Every day I dealt with the double sword of criminal thugs on the one hand and Global Unity goons on the other. It was the worst of both worlds--chaotic criminality mixed with a tyrannical rigidity of restricted speech."

"Global Unity isn't a tyranny any more," Zhong said. "--not since we achieved AI governance. What's your point in all this?"

"Just that you remind me the way the goons would talk," Ryder said.

"Appearances can be deceiving. Don't be so swift to judge." Zhong made a sharp nod at Ihaia. "Let's go." They walked past Ryder and exited his cabin.

Ryder sat alone in silence for a minute, then stood. He left his cabin and made his way along the circumference to Command Sector.

All the senior staff were busy at their stations; Mbali stood behind them. Ryder slowly walked farther along the sector's arc, straining to hear the hushed conversations.

"Location confirmed," Anaru said. "We're 7.826 light-minutes from the primary, 36 Ophiuchi B, which is a type K1V."

"We're at an altitude of two megameters," Tangaroa said. "The planet is 0.668 Earth-mass, 0.88 Earth-radius. Surface gravity is 0.87 g. Surface temperature minus 80.5 centigrade. Surface pressure 0.525 standard atmosphere."

"No, no, no," Mbali was shaking her head. "This is not good. We'll never be able to bring up the temperature that much."

"It's locked in water ice. No liquids on the surface."

"Curse it!" Mbali said. She gritted her teeth. "I need to talk to Fai-tsiri. Everyone, continue to gather as much information as you can." She headed for her office.

"Uh, Mbali!" Ryder called out. Unhearing, she entered her office, and Ryder followed. Mbali opened the circular door in the back. In the small chamber beyond, Ryder could see the cold reflections of a gynoid. "May I have a moment?" he asked.

"Not now, I'm busy." Mbali disappeared behind the black door splashed with New Maori calligraphy.

Ryder walked over to Tangaroa's station. "Why were we revivicated here if the planet is too harsh? Is this the right place?" Ryder asked.

"Fai-tsiri does nothing by accident, and she makes no mistakes," Tangaroa responded without looking at him.

"You didn't answer my question."

"I'm trying to concentrate. Go interview someone else."

Ryder went to another station, this one unoccupied. He turned on his eye camera and swept his view from one crewman to another. Most of them were waving their hands as they manipulated data which only they could see through their nearly invisible augmented-reality lenses. A few worked more traditionally with fingers in contact with the black surfaces, swimming through glowing symbols. But a few had bionic nictating membranes over their eyes, blind to the outside world as they were visually immersed in their own virtual reality. The long space was dim, lit by the multicolored displays.

From the corner of his eye, Ryder saw Mbali's office door open. She stepped out and issued orders. "I want a drop prepped ASAP. Standard instrument packages. Go."

Ryder approached her as the others left their stations and headed out. "This cannot possibly be a candidate planet," he said. "Why are you sending people down?"

"I'm not. Fai-tsiri is." She scrolled through the projected displays around her.

"I remind you Command Sector conversations are on the official record. Please don't dodge the question."

She looked at him. "It's true this world is outside terraformable parameters. But there could be information on the surface which we need. Information which would affect our efficacy on the rest of the mission."

"What kind of information?"

"Fai-tsiri would not choose to decelerate into a system unless it had planets in the habitable zone, which are usually detected by astrometry. When we get close enough, the ship's telescopes do spectrographic analyses of the planetary atmospheres. If the composition or temperature are unsuitable, Fai-tsiri might still decide to stop if the parameters aren't so far out of range we can't terraform. Of course, if we detect unambiguous biosignatures, we would have to move on."

"Right, the planet must be habitable but uninhabited. I know that."

"Well, 'habitable' doesn't mean 'able to be inhabited by people.' It means the planet has conditions which are potential habitats for life, as we understand it. The higher the habitability index, the greater the level of potential biodiversity. By this measure, currently Earth is only marginally habitable, and its habitability index has varied significantly over the eons."

"You still haven't given an explanation for our current status. Based on what you just said, we shouldn't have stopped here. I'd like to speak to Fai-tsiri directly."

"If you know mission protocols, then you know I can't allow that. Fai-tsiri speaks only to me."

Ryder stared at her without scowling.

Mbali raised one corner of her mouth. "Mr. Kask, if you're so interested in what the big boys are doing, why don't you go down to the surface with them?"

Ryder exited Command Sector and went to a radial hatch, then climbed up the tunnel. He propelled himself quickly along the axis corridor. Upon reaching the hatch that led to the skiff bay, his left hand hooked another grab-bar and his body flipped one hundred eighty degrees, slamming into the bulkhead. He pushed himself through the hatch feet-first, coasting along the radial tunnel, hands hovering above the ladder side-bars. As he gained weight, he waited until he was accelerating about one meter per second per second, then slowed himself on the side-bars as he was lightly pressed into them by the Coriolis force, then stopped, and used his feet to climb down. When he reached the bay, most of the landing team had already boarded the skiff. He saw Tekoha and waved, jogging to catch up with him.

"What do you think you're doing?" Tekoha asked. "If you're coming down with us, you are almost too late. We're professionals, not schoolboys."

"I'd like to know the source of your hostility," Ryder said. "We may have to work together in the future."

"Work? You don't know what work is," Tekoha responded.

"Excuse me?"

"You think interviewing people and making vague observations in your little book is work? Do you know what I had to do to get here, to be on this mission? It wasn't enough that I had to get a degree in Biology and a doctorate in Genetics, or learn Standard Global Language to communicate with other scientists around the world. I also had to be the best of the best to be selected, the top of my class every step of the way. And at the time, I didn't know if it would be worth it. But I strove to be the best in the hope that someday, I might possibly be selected for a position on the starship being built at GUSA's Auckland University facility. And what did you do? Get a four-year degree in Journalism? Your job on this mission could be done by automated probes. Try not to consume too many ship resources, and stay out of the way of people who have real work to do."

Ryder watched him enter the skiff, and then followed. Though they sat across from one another, Ryder did not let eyes fall on Tekoha.

A few minutes later, they launched, following the same drop procedure as they did at Rock Garden. The false ports along the dorsal section of the curving hull gave some clue to their whereabouts: Ryder watched as the ports went from black to the multicolored fluctuations of plasma, which then faded to dark blue, then light blue, then a bright milk of landing-thruster induced sublimation. A flurry of white particles spun past the ports, and the skiff sighed as it touched down.

Ryder waited for the others to suit up and gather on the aft elevator, then inserted himself amongst them. Zhong gave an oral command to the skiff computer; the chamber sealed. After the sterilization procedure, they were surrounded by a glaring crack as the floor descended. Ryder's visor darkened in the daylight, and a pale land revealed itself. Dark outcroppings of rock stood a couple hectometers to starboard, but all else was ice. The elevator floor halted slightly above the surface, and the astronauts stepped onto their second exoplanet. Ryder helped Tangaroa carry a few equipment packages onto the hard snow, then stepped back and watched the others get to work.

"What are you looking for?" Ryder asked.

"Everything," Tangaroa said. He rotated various physical dials whose projecting flanges gripped well with his gloved fingers. "So far I've confirmed Unbounded's spectroscopic analysis of the atmosphere. No biomarkers. No surprises. Now I'm sampling the snow, which is only a few centimeters thick. It's packed into glacial ice below that. And the snow actually is not of sky-formed flakes, but of glacial particulates from wind erosion."

"Isn't saying 'glacial ice' redundant?" Ryder asked.

"No. Glacial is a type of ice formed by compacting snow under pressure for centuries. The snow here is very clean. Now I'm drilling down for an ice core sample." Others gathered round Tangaroa's machine as it raised a cylindrical component to eye-level. He opened the casing to reveal a narrow translucent cylinder inside. "Are you recording?"

Ryder nodded and gestured to his eye.

"This is the ice core." Tangaroa waved at it and then consulted the console on the device. "Very few impurities. Though there are some, consistent with mild vulcanism. Again, no biomarkers." He pointed a finger past the suited figures. "I need to get there. I want to hear what the rocks have to tell me." He folded the instruments into their box configurations, and the group trudged towards the outcropping. Ihaia and Kahu stayed near the skiff. Ryder walked a few paces behind Tangaroa, Ariki, Tekoha, and Zhong. The sun was a high in the perfectly cloudless blue sky.

They reached the rocks about ten minutes later. The skiff did not seem much farther away, but the figures of Ihaia and Kahu were no longer visible. Tangaroa and Tekoha set their boxes down near the base of the dark stone and unfolded them. In addition to being transmitted through his suit's microphone, Ryder heard the sound of the drill through his visor. There was a grating noise as another part of the machine pulverized a small rock sample.

"This will just take a minute," Tangaroa said. "A couple of these samples need to be heated." He slid components in and out, adjusted dials. Then he studied console read-outs. "The rock is composed of shale. It's over six hundred megayears old."

Ryder noticed a curving pattern on the dark rock. "What's this?" He pointed. They got closer to the marking.

"No, it can't be," Tekoha said, pushing Ryder aside. He grabbed a chisel and found a crack, breaking away a large flake, revealing lighter rock beneath.

For several minutes, the five of them stood in silence and stared at intricate impressions in the uncovered patch of stone.

"Tangaroa, is there any other explanation? Any geological process which could produce this?" Ariki asked.

Tangaroa shook his head. Impressions of segmented ovals of various sizes were scattered over the stone face. Amongst them lay fractally structured pennate forms.

Tekoha scanned the surface with a laser. "Segmented, with transflection symmetry across the long axis. It reminds me of Dickinsonia."

"Dickinsonia? What's that?"

"It's an Ediacaran, from Earth. About the same age as this one, actually. This is a very generalized body-plan, so it's not too surprising it also evolved here. Similar forms have evolved independently multiple times on Earth." Tekoha broke away more rock, revealing more symmetrical patterns. "Unbelievable. It's a Lagerst"tte--a fined grained fossil bed which rivals the Burgess Shale."

"But I thought we've already confirmed the sterility of this world," Ryder said. "There is not even a microbe. How could there have been ... whatever this is?"

"Yes," Ariki said. "That is actually a good question." They looked at Tekoha.

"Well, it's not entirely inexplicable," Tekoha said. "The hostility of this environment is a clue. Half a gigayear ago, this would have been the bottom of an ocean. Apparently some time after these forms were fossilized, an ice age set in--and never ended."

"I thought ice ages were cyclical," Ryder said.

"Not necessarily--definitely not on Earth, despite some short-termed fluctuations," Tangaroa said. "It is possible for a planet to enter a positive feedback loop, and never recover. It's called an 'ice catastrophe.'"

"Right, two and a half gigayears ago on Earth, the Huronian Glaciation was a close call," Tekoha said.

"And there were a couple major ones during Earth's Cryogenian six hundred megayears ago. Possibly all the oceans froze over," Tangaroa said. "It wasn't like the popularly known, and most recent 'Ice Age' of the Quaternary--which Earth is still in--actually an interglacial period. But that most recent glacial period was nothing by comparison to these near ice catastrophes."

Tekoha nodded. "Once a planet is completely locked in ice, it may be very hard to unlock it. Earth might easily have met the fate of this planet."

"Well, not easily. I don't think a frozen Earth was really sustainable," Tangaroa said.

"Right, but without a means of carbon dioxide release, you can imagine a hypothetical world where it would. And on this world, that appears to be the case. Life may have just gotten started here, but was extinguished by runaway cooling."

"I want to report this to Mbali immediately," Ariki said. He stepped away from the rock and tapped his arm-calc.

"Do you think she knew, somehow?" Tangaroa asked.

"Huh? Who?" Tekoha said.

"Fai-tsiri. Maybe she saw something in the spectrograms ...."

"And figured out this world was habitable hundreds of megayears ago? I don't think so. It was a lucky guess, if anything."

"But even if she guessed, why would she want to send us down here to confirm it?" Ryder asked. "The presence of a biosphere is just one more black mark against this planet."

"It's not present anymore. Unless there are chemotrophs down at some sea vents, below kilometers of ice."

"You know what I mean."

"Yes. The presence of any biology, past or present, affects our estimates of the overall likelihood of life's existence on terrestrial bodies," Tekoha said.

"How?" Ryder asked.

Tekoha's expression was hidden by his reflective visor. "Every time an instance of independently evolved life is discovered, our estimate for the occurrence frequency of biology increases."

"I suppose that's true generally, but I don't see how you can use that argument here," Ryder said. "Just as before today, humanity could not extrapolate from Earth alone--from a sample size of one--to any generalities about the frequency of abiogenesis, I would say that from this ..." Ryder made an inclusive wave towards the fossils--". this cold trove, is still not sufficient. Two data points are hardly better than one."

"Hey, we're aware of how statistics work. But every negative find is also significant."

"Only if you treat every planet as equally likely to generate life, which clearly is not the case. Your sample set should contain only those worlds where life is actually possible. The problem is we don't know the limits of biology for the same reason we don't know its frequency; we can draw few generalities from Earth. Am I wrong?"

Tekoha was silent.

"You can describe the characteristics of Earth life, but you can't define life itself without more observed instances," Ryder said.

Ariki walked back to them and appeared to listen to their conversation.

"This is a monumental historical discovery. As a historian yourself, you should realize that," Tekoha said.

"I do. I'm just cautioning against becoming overly-excited and pronouncing grand conclusions before we know enough."

"Mr. Kask is right, although this discovery might be the first point in an unfortunate data-set," Ariki said. They looked at him. "If it turns out most habitable planets are in fact inhabited, we may all die before we find refuge. In any case, Fai-tsiri has ordered us back to stasis. We're leaving the system." He moved to pack instruments.

"Hold on!" Tekoha said. "I need time to look at this!" He jabbed a finger at the fossils.

"Take a couple scans, and you can study them in your free time. You know what the mission is."

Tekoha flashed more lasers over the rock before he began to pack. Ryder stood with arms folded and watched them, saying and doing nothing.

# Chapter Three: Significant Sea

Mission Time: +254.28 Earth-years

Metallic rings slid up around Tekoha, retracting into the ceiling.

"You can step down now," Tai said as he tapped a wall console. "You're all clear."

"Thanks Doctor," Tekoha said, lowering himself from the glowing circular platform. "I was wondering if you have a moment before your next patient comes in."

"You're my last one for the day. Everyone came out of stasis with no problems, as usual. Don't know how long that will last."

"Then let me distract you from your worries for a moment." He walked over to the wall console and pulled up a blank terminal. "You must have heard what I found on Cold Trove."

"Yes ...."

"As someone interested in biological matters, I thought you could appreciate this." Tekoha's fingers danced out a pattern on the screen, and images of the alien fossils appeared. "These are scans I took at the last moment before I was ordered back."

Tai's nose drew closer to the images. "Absolutely incredible. The diversity of symmetries. The soft tissue detail. This fauna is half a gigayear old?"

"Yes. Without the ice catastrophe, that planet may have ended up very similar to modern Earth."

He smiled, eyes darting briefly to Tekoha. "I suppose no matter how this mission ends, we were lucky to be here, to experience this."

Tekoha nodded sharply. "I agree, whole-heartedly. It seems most of the crew is so focused on the mission, they don't take a moment to acknowledge what we've accomplished so far."

Tai shrugged. "They're worried about their survival. Unfortunately, in times of great need, science becomes a luxury."

"Somehow I doubt what you're doing in there is a luxury," Tekoha gestured to the open door of an adjoining room, in which microscopes and tissue culture stations were visible.

"I'm growing a tissue bank and developing various bionic implants with some minerals picked up from Cold Trove. It may be a stop-gap for when people's organs start failing. Ultimately, though, the replacement parts are just as radioactive as human bodies. The more material we can gather on our stops, the better."

Tekoha nodded. "Well, I'll leave you to it." He headed for the exit.

"Tekoha," Tai said. He was staring at the fossil images on the wall. "Perhaps you could put in a request to Mbali for me. She may not like it, but I would like to join a landing party for the next planetfall we make."

"Sure, I'll see what I can do." Tekoha exited into the circumferential corridor.

Tai shut down the machines in the medical bay and went into the adjoining laboratory. The spotlights in the ceiling brightened, following him around the lab tables. Other lights dimmed and went off in the areas he vacated. For nearly an hour he went from monitor to monitor, looking at displays from microscopes, adjusting environmental parameters of tissue cultures, and controlling gene-sequencing. Then the lights in the medical bay turned on, and Tekoha appeared in the lab doorway.

"You're on," Tekoha said. "We're going down now."

"Thank you Tekoha. How long will you spend on the surface?"

"Don't know. But Doctor ..." Tekoha smiled. "We found liquid water."

"That's fantastic news. But I can't go with you now; I still have work to do here. I'll join you in a Tawaki-class skiff when I'm done."

"Very well. Don't be too long. The weather's balmy!" He left, and Tai turned back to his instruments. Robotic arms extended down from the ceiling and performed delicate grafts.

An hour later, Tai left his lab and walked to the skiff bay. He put on a pressure suit in the skiff's alcove and was sterilized by an electric membrane as a mechanical arm inserted him into the single-chambered craft. Titanium petals folded down, the alcove was sealed off from from the bay, and the air was pumped out. The floor opened, and the rails telescoped from the ceiling, pushing him outside the hull.

Tai muttered to himself as he monitored and adjusted controls. "Timing release; bay door facing planetside." He became weightless as the spinship receded above his head. "Borrowing rotational momentum for linear acceleration into the atmosphere, thank you very much." He nodded to himself. "Of course, the orbit is geosynchronous but not precisely geostationary, so my linear throw is actually a parabola--and the end-point is slightly off-target. Atmospheric breaking, turning--and now the descent path is helical."

"Acknowledged, Doctor Tai. Happy landing," someone from the spinship responded.

When the altimeter read two kilometers, he could make out the Kea skiff parked on a wrinkled, brown plain, pock-marked with circular lakes. The green waters were limned from the brown rock by bright oranges and reds, and they vented tall stacks of steam, all leaning at fifty-degree angles. Tai tightened his spiral and fired landing thrusters, setting down twenty meters from the larger skiff. With engines powered down, his small vessel unfolded like an upside-down lotus flower as his harness slithered away, and then he carefully stepped onto the soil.

Tai walked slowly to where the others were gathered around a small water hole. Past them, the land sloped gently downwards to a tidal flat, beyond which lay only the bright reflections of a sea.

Tekoha was wading in the tidal zone, the water-level half-way to his knees. He was walking away from a round stone, back to dry land. The others were huddled in swift discussion. Tai noticed Ryder was standing just outside the group, listening; he went to join him.

"What's got them so excited?" Tai asked him.

Ryder pointed at the colorful edge of the steaming water hole.

"Oxidation of iron in the soil? What is the oxygen level of the air, by the way?" Tai looked at his arm-calc.

"Zero-point-one percent. No, Doctor. That is life."

"Yes!" Tekoha said loudly in their earpieces as he stepped onto dry land, carrying a toolkit. "This is magnificent! A momentous ..."

"This is a disaster," Ryder said. "We found our cake, but we can't eat it. It's a habitable world, mostly uninhabited, except the microbes. Planetary Protection Policy clearly states we may not settle on a world with life. We may not even breathe its air."

"Hold on, let's not get ahead of ourselves," Tekoha said. "These organisms use monomers of opposite chirality from Earth biology. They can't eat us, and we can't eat them. They don't use the same amino acids, and the nucleotides of their genetic material are not the five found in Earth life, which means they can't infect us, nor we them. We would be completely parallel, separate biospheres. I think that's an argument worth putting to Mbali."

"No multicellular organisms?" Tai asked.

"There doesn't appear to be any, though we would have to send a probe to the ocean floor and look around some more." Tekoha pointed to the round rock in the tidal flat which he had just investigated. "There is some rudimentary colonialism. That thing is similar to Earth's stromatolites. The microbes are photoautotrophs." He approached the edge of the steaming water hole and pointed to the swirling colors at the edge. "But these are hyperthermophiles. The water is ninety degrees Celsius, and I don't think they could survive at temperatures much below that, based on the structure of their proteins."

"Photosynthetic?"

Tekoha shook his head. "They're chemoautotrophs. Very different from what I found in the sea-water."

"We should radio Mbali and report," Tangaroa said.

"And then Fai-tsiri would immediately dismiss this planet, as she did with Cold Trove," Tekoha said. "I think we should gather as much information as possible first and present it as part of a coherent argument. We need to be ready to counter her objections."

Tangaroa nodded, and the others followed suit by turning to their instrument displays again.

Tai stood and watched them gathering data for a minute. Ryder remained where he was, making notes in his arm-calc. Tai raised his hands. "May I have everyone's attention for a minute? I want to say something briefly." They all turned to look at him, and he lowered his hands. "I know everyone is anxious about finding refuge, but I just want us to take a step back for a moment and recognize the significance of this moment--this water, this sea, this world. This life ..." he gestured to the ruddy efflorescences. "... our lives--it all means something; in the vast, dark tome of human history, it is a bright star." He looked at Ryder, whose arms seemed frozen in mid-motion.

"The fact something like this exists is not surprising," Tai continued. "But the fact we found it is. An oasis in a sterile void with an immensity beyond human apprehension--that is something. That is something," he repeated, nodding. "We should all be honored, humbly, that we are here to witness it." He lowered his voice to just above a whisper. "We are here." He walked over to Tekoha's instrument package. "That is all." The others slowly got back to work.

Tekoha pressed a button on a tall box, and a mechanical arm lowered a pipette into the hot spring.

"What are you doing?" Tai asked him.

"Getting a sample to bring back to my lab."

"But there are microbes in that water."

"Yeah, that's whole idea, isn't it?"

"Well I think the idea is bad."

Tekoha looked at him. "I agreed with every word of your speech. But as you know, just being here and looking at the pretty colors isn't enough. We need to do actual science, and for that I need my lab equipment, and I need time. How is that a bad thing?"

"In my medical opinion, it poses too much of a risk to the crew."

"But as I said, these organisms don't share our monomers, let alone polymers. Both they and their viruses cannot make use of our cellular machinery, and they cannot metabolize any of our compounds."

"True, but can you absolutely guarantee they don't have any toxins, in their membranes or cytoplasm, which interferes with Terran metabolism?"

"Well ..."

"Of course you can't. If you knew every single compound associated with them, you wouldn't need to study them in your lab, would you?"

"You're being ridiculous. We have safety procedures. And these things can't grow outside of near-boiling water. Even the human body is like an arctic wasteland to them."

"I've given you my expert medical opinion, which overrides all others. Do I need to bring Zhao into this?"

Tekoha drew himself up close to the doctor, his face invisible behind the reflective surface, though Tai could hear heavy breathing. "If you think it's too dangerous to take up small sample encased in a biohazard container, how do you expect humans to live here, drinking the water and breathing the air?" Tekoha took a step back. "You're not going to be on my side, are you? You're going to argue to Mbali that we should move on."

"I'm sorry, I wish we could stay. But as Ariki said, Planetary Protection Policy is clear. There's no getting around it."

"We'll see about that. Desperate times call for desperate measures." Tekoha went back to his instruments.

Tai walked over to Tangaroa and watched him work. Mbali radioed them about twenty minutes later.

"Why have you taken so long to report?" she asked brusquely.

"Ma'am, everything is fine," Zhong said. "The team is still working."

"You should know by now whether this planet has the habitability markers," Mbali radioed back.

"Ma'am, there have been some minor complications," Tekoha said. "We're trying to sort them out now."

"Transmit the data from your toolkits," Mbali said.

"If we do that now, it may give you the wrong impression. I would prefer to personally present our results to you so you can get the correct interpretation."

"What do you mean by 'give me the wrong impression'? Do you take me for some kind of idiot, Tekoha?"

"Oh no ma'am. I'm sorry, I didn't mean to imply anything like that. I'm not good with words, you know. I actually had Fai-tsiri's decision algorithms in mind, not you."

There was brief silence before Mbali spoke again. "Fine. Then get up here now. We don't have all century."

"Acknowledged. Stowing equipment and preparing for lift-off."

Ryder walked over and stood next to Tai whilst the others folded their expanded instruments back into small toolkits and carried them to the Kea's bulk elevator.

"You're not helping them prepare," Ryder said to Tai.

"I wouldn't know what to do," Tai said. "Each toolkit is specific to one's own discipline."

"And as a medical doctor, what did you come down here to do? Is there a health hazard you expected here but not on the previous two landings?"

"No. I just wanted to get off the ship and stand in real gravity, to see one of these exoplanets with my own eyes." They were silent a moment.

"Well, enjoy your last few minutes," Ryder said. "It will be the last time you see this place." He walked away to the Kea and joined the others on the elevator. The skiff pulled them in, closing all hatches, and fired its lift-off engines. Tai stood unmoving, watching it slowly rise into the sky. When the skiff was out of sight, he walked over to a rock and sat down, looking out over the calm sea. The sun moved perceptibly as he watched, reddening and dimming in the blue-green sky. The star seemed to flare as it hit the horizon, and his eyes watered. The steam columns were nearly vertical now, and their textures seemed more intricate in the revelatory light. Then the sun was gone, and the horizon bloomed a bright orange, the sea returning to a deep green.

Five minutes later, Tai got up and walked slowly to the Tawaki. He walked below stars, amongst white columns of steam and the dark circles below them. He got into his skiff, and the petals folded down around him.

"Vocal input. Lift-off and match Unbounded inertial frame. Standard Tawaki-dock," Tai said.

"Yes, Doctor Tai. Estimated time to dock with Unbounded: twelve minutes," the skiff's computer said. The harness slithered around and secured him tightly to the chair, which rotated back ninety-degrees for the take-off position.

Tai rotated a trackball on the chair's arm to change the view from the projected wrap-around false window. He settled on a view which looked below towards the ground, but then tilted it up so that he could also see the horizon, which now glowed a deep blue. The ground became totally black, so he rotated his view forward. Unbounded appeared as a speck of reflected sunlight in the darkening sky. Tai's path curved more tightly as he approached Unbounded's inertial frame: brown planet and black sky rotated around him, accelerating until he could not see the difference between the two. Simultaneously, surface detail on the Unbounded resolved: streaks shortened, blurred patterns focused to sharpness. A hole opened; docking rails extended; the skiff was clamped and pulled. The eye-mauling reflections from the spinship's hull winked out, and Tai was submerged in red light. There was no vibration from the closing outer door, but he did hear the hiss of pressurization. The lights gradually shifted their spectrum to the artificial sunlight interior standard.

Tai climbed down from the unfolding skiff and walked across the bay. Senior staff call lights pulsed behind the ladder as he climbed towards the axis. He pulled himself up and over to the habitat ring, following the lights. When he arrived at the conference room in Command Sector, it was already full with senior staff as well as several technicians. Hemi was pacing near the wall, then suddenly grabbed a seat. Tai took his place near the head of the table as Mbali walked in. Others who were still standing also sat; everyone looked at her and waited as she lowered herself into a high-backed chair.

"This world is habitable," she said loudly. "Strategic deposition of photosynthetic algae could raise atmospheric oxygen to Earth levels in a few megayears, and we should be able to survive in surface habitats. I'm not going to discuss the geomagnetic field, tectonics, and every other habitability parameter. Because one fact overrides all others. This planet is already inhabited, and Planetary Protection Policy comes into effect." She paused.

"Are you referring to the pond scum in the hot springs?" Tekoha asked. "They're hyperthermophiles. And the microbes in the seawater are based on opposite chirality. They don't even use most of the amino acids we use, and their nucleotides are different. We could survive on the planet together as parallel, independent biospheres."

Mbali looked away from him when he was done speaking. "Since this is an important scientific discovery, I recommend the deployment of an autonomous mobile lab on the surface," she said. "A relay satellite could transmit its data to us for many years before we move out of range."

"Wait a second, did you hear what I just said?" Tekoha asked.

"Mbali, Tekoha might be right," Anaru said. "Surely the Protection Policy does not apply in this case. It was meant to prevent the unintended genocide of biospheres by the secondary effects of colonization. And I believe the lawmakers did not imagine a crew in so desperate a situation."

"Your beliefs are irrelevant, Anaru," Mbali said. "And yes, the Policy does apply in all cases, otherwise it would be a suggestion, not a law. I do not buy the 'parallel biospheres' argument. Those parallel spheres will cross at some point, at least in competition for raw materials. Our activity would alter the atmosphere and soil, and would influence the course of evolution on that planet. In theory, our very presence could prevent the emergence of higher life on that world. We can't take that risk."

"Hypothetical future higher life, by which I assume you mean multicellular animals and their possible civilizations, do not exist yet. We do," Tekoha said.

"I shall not be drawn into ethical arguments with you," Mbali said. "The designers of this mission already worked out the dangers of potential genocide and ecocide long before we launched. And Fai-tsiri has already made her decision. Our mission is to settle a habitable but uninhabited world, and that is what we shall do. We leave orbit tomorrow."

Tekoha slammed a fist on the table. "If you're going to condemn us to death, at least have our lives mean something. Give us a few more days at this world to explore it--to investigate the greatest discovery in human history and transmit our data back to Earth. Then we shall have accomplished something before we died."

"That may give your life meaning, but what about mine?" Ryder said. "What about the other four thousand people in stasis? Don't we owe them our best possible effort to save them?"

"That's not the issue here," Tekoha answered. "A few days won't make a difference."

"How do you know that? A few days can certainly make a difference for radiation poisoning."

"Our whole purpose here is to expand our frontier of knowledge for the further enlightenment of humanity. This is a vessel of exploration. Do y--"

"Is it really?" Ryder asked. "Can you name me one vessel, one expedition in human history, launched for sake of science?"

"Of cour--"

"For the sake of science alone? The pure intention of expanding knowledge? There aren't any. Not a one! Every endeavor in the name of science has had other motivations: competition amongst nations, economic expansion, communication, tourism, medical windfalls, pure monetary profit, assertions of self-superiority, population pressure, on and on. Scientists are a rare breed, Tekoha. Most people aren't like you. They don't care about the things you do. They just want to survive and live comfortably--the how or why of things do not concern them. Does anyone here know what actual benefit Mission Control expects to obtain? If you think it's knowledge, you're naive. What is Mission Control's real mission?"

"Mr. Kask," Mbali interrupted. "That's enough. You're dismissed."

"But I was defending your--"

"Get out of my meeting!" Mbali pointed to the door. She watched him leave, then looked around at the others, who were now avoiding eye contact. "I know some of you are unhappy about the situation; I am too. I suppose that's an understatement. But we all knew how things might go when we signed on. It's not going smoothly, but it's not disastrous either. Paranoid rantings of Ryder Kask aside, this mission is concerned with pure science. But everyone of sound mind here knows the health and safety of the crew are of top priority. That needs to be attended to first, before anything else." Hemi was nodding to this statement. Mbali looked at Tai. "Doctor? Do you have anything?" Mbali asked.

Tai straightened his posture. "I've had some encouraging results from my experiments with Deinococcus radiodurans. That's a microbe which can withstand radiation levels of fifteen kilograys, which is three thousand times the lethal dose for humans. My original idea was to develop a gene therapy for us which would alter our DNA repair system to mimic that of radiodurans. It looks like I shall be able to that."

"This is great news, right?" Mbali asked hesitantly.

"Sort of. I fear even that will not be enough. Our ship is a small, closed system. We can't get the non-decayed isotopes from the environment, the way an organism can on a planet. What we have is it--especially whilst in stasis, those atoms are not being replaced in the body, and the effects of internal radioactive decay build up."

"What about getting fresh material from planets or asteroids after ship deceleration periods?" Ariki asked.

"Of course that must be a part of the solution," Tai said. "But it won't be enough in the long run, I fear. The cryostats aren't engineered to be used longer than twelve to fifteen centuries, additively."

"Then it sounds like we really need to re-engineer the system. We need another mechanism to flush our bodies of radioactive waste whilst we're in stasis."

"If you can figure out how to do that without breaking the stasis cycle, I'm all for it," Tai said to Ariki. "Though I don't see how it would be physically possible, since all atoms are locked in place during the static state."

"Maybe you should work on that together," Mbali said. Tai shrugged and Ariki nodded in agreement. "Then I think we have covered the agenda. We depart this world tomorrow at 08:00. Until then, I'd like you two to work on your stasis modification, as well as the gene therapy. Tekoha, you can be in charge of dropping the auto-lab to the surface and setting up the com-sat. Dismissed."

Everyone stood and filtered out into the corridor. Tai exited and then stood near the bulkhead, watching people come out. Hemi walked heavily, wearing a deep frown. Tai approached him.

"Hemi. Are you feeling alright?" he asked.

"What's it to you?"

"I am the ship's doctor. It's my responsibility to maintain everyone's health."

"Do I look unhealthy to you?" He drew himself up and expanded his thorax. When Tai did not answer immediately, Hemi said: "You just checked me when I came out of stasis. I was fine then, wasn't I?"

Tai nodded. "Though I noticed you were different, somehow."

"You are really starting to annoy me. If I start vomiting blood, you might have cause for concern. Until then, stay away from me." He stomped off up the corridor.

Tai went in the other direction, following Ihaia. He caught up to him. "Have you noticed anything odd about Hemi?"

Ihaia stopped walking and moved to the side. "What do you mean?"

"He seems different from the last mission segment. More angry, audacious."

"When did you first notice this?"

"Ah, the beginning of this segment, during my post-stasis examination of him."

"He's always been a bit of a loud-mouth, hasn't he?"

"I'm not sure, but this time he's different."

Ihaia shrugged. "I'm sure it's nothing. We're all under a little more stress every mission segment." He continued up the corridor.

"Really? You agree with me, don't you?"

"Thank you for raising your concerns with me," Ihaia responded forcefully. "You may return to the med bay."

Tai grabbed his upper arm. "Don't shut me out. It's too late. Ever since you had me do the postmortem on Nikau, I have already been part of the investigation."

"Fine. Let me talk to Zhao Zhong a moment." They walked swiftly until catching up to Zhong. Ihaia got his attention and gestured to Tai to stay back. He spoke to Zhong in a hushed voice next to the bulkhead for a minute. They nodded to each other and came back towards Tai, then walked past him. He followed.

Zhong knocked on Hemi's cabin door.

"Enter," Hemi said, and they entered. "What now? I'm busy." He faced a wall display covered with engineering schematics.

"We know," Zhong said.

"Know what?"

"It was you."

"What was I?"

Zhong slowly pulled a telescoping stun baton from his belt. "It is very dangerous for you to play with me now."

Hemi scoffed. "You're confused. You don't know what you're talking about." As he finished his sentence, and without changing the tone of his voice, his hand darted for the underside of a nearby desk.

But Zhong was faster. His baton telescoped out horizontally in a thin black line and impacted Hemi in the side. He screamed, his flank glowing under the impact. When Zhong released the stunner, Hemi collapsed. Ihaia rushed over to him and secured his hands behind his back with shape-memory plastic handcuffs, which solidified once in position around the wrists. Ihaia hauled him up and brought him towards the door.

"You bastard," Hemi said, drooling slightly and glowering at Zhong through drooping eyelids. "You dis--"

Zhong punched him in the stomach before he could finish. "You are under arrest by authority of Unbounded Security. All ship-board rights have been revoked, and you will only speak when asked a question, and your words will be truth." He went over to Hemi's desk and squatted, looking at the underside. He reached up and removed a thin, silvery box from underneath, then stood and went back to them.

"What is it?" Tai asked.

"Looks like a simple radio transmitter of some kind. Perhaps he was trying to signal someone." Zhong and Ihaia each took one of Hemi's arms, and Tai opened the door for them. They went out of the cabin, Tai following behind. They pulled him along to Command Sector. The sector was largely empty, but a few crewmen stared whilst they scraped through. As the four entered the executive's office, Mbali spun to face them.

"Mbali, we have made an arrest. Hemi is now the prime suspect in Nikau's death," Zhong said.

"And what's he doing here?" she asked, indicating Tai.

"He identified Hemi as a person of interest."

"That doesn't answer my question."

"Doctor Tai is monitoring the suspect's health after having been stunned. We found a small radio transmitter under Hemi's desk. He was about to use it when he realized we were going to take him into custody," Zhong said.

She looked at Hemi. "Well? Did you do it?"

Hemi scowled at her, unblinking.

"Let me put it this way," she said. "Do you deny killing Nikau?"

Hemi did not respond, but Mbali seemed to look deeper into his countenance.

She nodded as if he had answered. "Put him into the nearest airlock."

"Stop!" Hemi yelled. "Don't you need to know why?"

"I don't care why. Murder can never be justified. Whatever reasons you had must have been insufficient."

Zhong and Ihaia pulled him back towards the door. "You can't do this! I was just following orders!" Hemi shouted.

"Wait," Mbali said to Zhong. She drew closer to Hemi. "That's impossible. I am the ranking executive. Only I can relay orders to the crew."

Hemi relaxed his mouth in what could have been a vague smile. "That's not exactly true," he said slowly. She waited, but he said nothing more.

"Secure the prisoner there," Mbali ordered.

Zhong and Ihaia handcuffed him to a steel grab-bar on the wall.

Mbali went from her desk to the round door with the red script. "Wait for me here." She went through, and the door closed behind her.

About ten minutes later, Mbali emerged from the dim chamber and approached the four men on the other side of her office. Tai stood near the door, silently watching. Zhong and Ihaia flanked Hemi, who was staring at his feet. He looked up and met Mbali's eyes as she drew close to him. Her face approached his, and she stared into his eyes expressionlessly.

"Hemi," she said, "I am releasing you." She reached out to him slowly. And then hands were around his head, and she jerked her arms powerfully. Hemi's neck snapped.

Mbali returned to her desk. She swept her hand across a glowing glyph, unfolding it to an open position. "All hear this. All hear this. This is your executive, Mbali speaking. Some of you may be aware, your crewmate Nikau has not been with you this mission segment. This is because he died at the end of the previous segment under suspicious circumstances. There has been an investigation, which is now concluded. It was discovered your crewmate Hemi murdered Nikau in a personal dispute. Hemi was apprehended for the crime. Whilst being questioned, Hemi made an attempt on my life, and unfortunately, security had no choice but to terminate him. I would like to thank the efficient services of our security staff in helping us through this troubling matter. There is no further danger to the crew. That is all." She swept the glyph shut and looked up. The three men were staring at her, wide eyed.

She pointed to Hemi's body, dangling by its wrists. "Get rid of that."

# Chapter Four: Glow Canyon

Mission Time: +260.99 Earth-years

Tai glanced towards the barely audible sound of the sliding door. Ryder's figure was dark against the white habitat ring corridor. He stepped into the steel blues of the medical bay, and the overheads brightened above, following him as he walked towards Tai.

"Hello Doctor," Ryder said.

"Mr. Kask. How are you feeling?"

"Well."

"Good. You know the drill." Tai gestured to the scanning instrument. Ryder stepped onto the circular dais, and a set of encompassing rings descended from their receptacle in the ceiling. Once deployed, they moved slightly, adjusting their positions along Ryder's body and independently rotating their perpendicular axes at unpredictable intervals. On a console, Tai monitored the live data streaming from the scanner.

"Do you really believe everything you said in the staff meeting at the end of the last mission segment?" Tai asked idly.

"Yes."

"Hm. I have to say, that view is a little too cynical for me."

"That's your personal feeling. It doesn't affect its truth value."

"I think you may have been mostly right, but so am I. Our views are not totally exclusive."

"How so?" Ryder asked.

"Well, big expeditions might be begun or financed by profit-seeking or status-seeking motives, but many people associated with the endeavors are also motived by the pursuit of pure knowledge."

"Because that knowledge might yield practical benefits."

"Yes, but also because knowledge is desirable for its own sake. But I suppose that's a value judgment." Tai tapped the console. "Perfectly healthy." The rings slid back to their recess.

"And I notice people tend to get more excited about certain subject areas of knowledge than others," Ryder said as he stepped off the dais. "Life, especially. It's just an extraordinary case of complex chemistry, yet everyone treats it with a kind of mystical reverence."

"I would say it's self-evidently true that life is complex chemistry, but as such, it is the most complex phenomenon in the known Cosmos. There are more detailed, sophisticated definitions: but each is unsatisfactory in its own way; life is a little difficult to define because, until Cold Trove, we had a sample size of only one. It's hard to draw general conclusions from just one occurrence of a phenomenon. I think that's a big reason why scientists are so eager to find more instances."

"Unfortunately for me, I'm not a scientist. Maybe that's why I think differently."

"I sense sarcasm."

"Because it seems like most of the crew feel it pitiful to be a non-scientist. I see how they look at me. No matter what I do to deserve respect, I'll never earn it in their eyes."

"I don't think that's true. Maybe a couple people have been rude, but don't over-generalize. And don't worry so much what the others think--just do your job the best you can."

Ryder nodded. "Thanks. Well, see you later." Tai smiled and nodded. Ryder went to the main corridor and made the long stroll to Command Sector.

The sector was dim except for the glow of the consoles and Mbali's projected display. Ryder stayed near the door.

"You confirmed our space-time position?" Mbali asked.

"Yes," Anaru answered. "We're in a stellar orbit 1.156 light-minutes from Gliese 682. And we're in a four hundred kilometer orbit above a 0.463-mass planet."

"Habitability?" She looked to Tangaroa and Tekoha.

"In terms of potential biodiversity, it is marginally habitable," Tangaroa said. "But it would be hard, if not impossible, for a human colony to eke out a living. It's tidally locked with Gliese 682, and the only hospitable temperatures are found at the permanent day-night terminator. This zone of twilight is subject to constant winds, and ultraviolet light exposure is still a potential issue during flares, although those are rare for this type of red dwarf. Surface gravity is 0.77 g; the atmosphere is sixteen percent oxygen, with a mean surface pressure of 0.767 atmosphere. Tectonically active, one third the surface area covered by deep water oceans--though frozen over on the night side."

"Wait a second, if there's oxygen, doesn't mean there has to be life?" Ryder asked. "I mean, oxygen doesn't naturally occur without some biological process like photosynthesis producing it."

"Not necessarily," Tekoha said. "There are natural processes, like photodissociation, which can generate substantial free oxygen in an atmosphere. All we can say with some confidence is multicellular life requires its presence to operate."

"Any other biomarkers?" Mbali asked. "Hydrocarbons or whatever?"

"Yes," Tekoha said. "But the readings are ambiguous. We can't say for certain whether there is life just by looking at spectral lines of the atmosphere. We need to go down and look."

There was a silence, and heads turned to Mbali. She bit her lip and looked down. Then she looked up again and spoke. "Okay, launch an oceanic probe. We can go down to dry terrain at the twilight zone and check it out, assuming Fai-tsiri approves. But I don't want to spend too much time here if there's no chance of establishing a viable settlement."

Tekoha moved his hands over his console. "Probe launched," he said.

"Tangaroa," Mbali said. "I want you to be on the team again, of course, but this time I shall be in command. Zhong will be at my side, and I shall defer in all matters of security to him. We don't know what dangers we might encounter. Prep the skiff and I'll be along shortly. Dismissed."

Tangaroa gestured to various crewmen as he walked along the sector, and the others filed after him. Ryder fell into the line behind Zhong and followed him to the skiff bay. He walked around a Kea-class skiff, discussing its flight-worthiness with Ariki. After a few minutes, Mbali entered the bay and approached them.

"Fai-tsiri approved the mission," she said to them. She signaled the team and they boarded the skiff. "Though our bodies could adjust to the planet's surface pressure, we'll use suits again to avoid having to wait for depressurization procedures."

Ryder began recording as he climbed aboard, and sat next to Zhong. He put on an AR visor and connected to the skiff's external cameras. The skiff bay was steeped in red warning light as the air was pumped into storage tanks. A strobe light began flashing as the bay door opened and the skiff was gently shoved out on its rails. After they were released from the rails' clamps and the sky suddenly ceased its rapid revolution, Gliese 682 b centered in his view. He was looking at its permanent day-side, a cloudy hemisphere dominated by a single, unfading storm system. The enormous, white cyclone dominated the bright face, its black eye at the equator staring directly into the sun. As they spiraled around to the dark face, Ryder saw dim specks of light scattered along a short arc in the land of an unending winter night.

"I see some lights on the surface!" he exclaimed.

"Those are volcanoes erupting," Tangaroa said. "This planet has a much higher level of vulcanism than Earth."

"Then what about quakes?"

"The landing zone is a seismically inactive region, relatively speaking."

Ryder turned his head to switch to different hull cameras. The night was too dark to discern much subtlety of shadings to the ice in the starlight. As they approached the terminator again, the ice grew darker, then broke into ragged tendrils reaching for the unmoving dawn. Dark land now dominated the surface. They broke into the light again, and he could clearly see surface features: winding rivers, long canyons, the little wrinkles of mountains. Then came a few white dots--a herd of clouds. Then more lines of clouds, marching in the same direction. They grew and merged to the spiral arms of the massive day-storm. Ryder flipped his vision to radio. The skiff's radar showed many small continents scattered over the ocean below the clouds. He flipped to infrared, then back to normal vision. They passed over the day-storm's eye; he could see multiple layers of clouds in the deep cylindrical wall--and at the bottom, a glint of sunlight reflected from a dark sea.

The skiff circled the planet again, then entered the atmosphere. They made a steep descent towards the twilight zone. The landing area was flat. The skiff touched down next to a long canyon, running east-west. The only sound remaining was the constant wind.

"Kask, you have permission to disembark," Tangaroa said.

Ryder nodded as he unstrapped his harness and went to the personnel elevator whilst the others loaded equipment onto the freight elevator. He sealed himself in the tube and underwent the sterilization and suit application procedure. Dim, reddish gray light entered the elevator from the bottom. He saw smooth sandstone below. Then as he emerged from the skiff's ventral hull, the horizon became visible. The sun was a hazy red spot through thick clouds which dominated the entire dayside horizon. Two thirds of the sky was clear towards the nightside. The elevator came to rest, and the door slid open. The air rushed out, and he stepped onto the eroded sandstone. He walked slowly out from under the skiff, fighting to maintain balance in the gale whilst avoiding mottled dark patches on the ground. He found a smooth ridge near the skiff and sat facing north, towards the canyon. He lowered his chin to his chest, resting, breathing, listening. Then he looked up.

The wind-worn land was not a desert. It was a forest of long growths rooted to the ground, stretched out into aerodynamic shapes in the north-south direction to match air flow. Their sunward-facing ends were a glossy black, with the tone gradating to light brown on the night-facing ends. Amongst them, scattered randomly all over the rock, were dark circular patches, like a hardy moss. Ryder looked to the canyon mouth. The gap was filled with circular shapes he could not quite discern from his vantage. They were lit from below by a blue glow.

He stood and watched the freight elevator lower, loaded with equipment. Tekoha was the first to jump off the platform. He took merely two steps before kneeling to examine the circular growth patches. Ryder walked over to him and touched his shoulder.

"What?" Tekoha said without looking up.

"Look," Ryder said, pointing. Tekoha finally raised his head and saw the giant forms sitting in the wind.

"By the ancestors!" Tekoha exclaimed. He began walking slowly towards the nearest one. "They're ... exquisite," he said softly. Ihaia looked at Zhong, who nodded and made a gesture at Tekoha with two fingers.

"Wait a moment professor," Ihaia said. He caught up to him and drew a toroidal hand-weapon.

"What are you doing?" Tekoha scowled at him.

"Going with you. If you're going to get close to something so big ...."

Tekoha nodded impatiently. "Fine. Just don't go shooting anything unless it's about to kill me." They approached within four meters; Tekoha began laser scans from his arm-calc. "Fascinating. There's subsurface scattering to a depth of six centimeters; diatomic oxygen outgassing. I think photosynthesis is going on under the dark areas." He pointed to the base of the object. "Roots. It has quite a grip on the rock. This is definitely a sessile, photosynthesizing organism." They walked around it. "Perhaps the equivalent of a tree. I'm going to name it Arbor Te Kohai." Tekoha stepped forward and pressed an instrument to its flank. Ihaia looked back to the group of people still gathered near the freight elevator.

Zhong was talking with Tangaroa whilst the other scientists gathered their tools from the platform. Ihaia pressed a button on his arm-calc so that he could hear the conversation through his earpiece. "... otherwise we should have left the probes to do the exploring for us," Tangaroa was saying.

"Fine. Just so you realize it will be harder for me to guarantee everyone's safety when they go jumping off cliffs," Zhong said.

"Zhao, we already jumped off the cliff when we left the Solar System." Tangaroa turned to the group and gestured to a pile of equipment. "Put on the lift-packs. We're going now."

"Uh, Professor Tekoha--they're preparing to go down into the canyon," Ihaia said.

"What?" Tekoha radioed Mbali. "I'm not finished here; you go ahead. This is the discovery of a lifetime."

"Every discovery from now on will be the discovery of a lifetime," Mbali said. "Get over here now, Tekoha. You can examine that thing when we return." Tekoha folded his tools and walked back to the group with Ihaia.

"I'll go first," Zhong said as he secured the harness of a lift-rig. "The rest of you stay here until I give the all-clear. But watch the drone cameras on your arm-calcs." Zhong was tapping his arm-calc as he said this, and a group of eight small drones rose from a nearby container; they attached themselves to the straps hanging from his shoulder harness and whirred above his head, lifting him a few centimeters from the ground. Zhong entered another command into his computer, and the drones brought him over the canyon mouth. He hovered in place for a moment, looking back at the group of people and equipment gathered at the foot of the elevator; they were watching the screens on their arm-calcs. Then Zhong looked down between his feet to a gleaming, narrow stream of water at the bottom of the canyon. The edges of the canyon were lined with dark blue fronds, all angled to catch as much bounced sunlight as possible from the hazy horizon.

Zhong entered another command and began to descend slowly. The bright patch of Gliese 682 was eclipsed by the canyon edge, and Zhong's pupils dilated; his visor amplified the light admitted to his eyes. As he passed below the level of the fronds, he could see they were attached to stalks which grew along the canyon walls, rooted in some looser sediment below. There were other species of flora as well. Bulbous structures of fungal forms covered the rock walls, along with various vines. As he descended, the light grew dimmer, the wind gentler, and the air heavier. The fungal forms produced a blue bioluminescence which grew brighter the dimmer the ambient light. The pitch of the rotors' whirr changed along with the air pressure. Almost two hundred meters below the canyon lip, Zhong alighted upon a stony riverbank. The quad-rotors released the straps, which were then reeled into harness pouches.

"I've touched down on the canyon floor," Zhong radioed.

"And you see any possible problems?" Mbali asked.

Zhong turned around slowly, scanning the canyon walls, looking and listening. He consulted his arm-calc. "There're quite a lot of sessile species, but I don't detect any movement; I suspect mobile forms are absent or rare. My main concern right now would be rain."

"Rain?" Mbali prompted.

"Yes. If there's a storm several kilometers away, we might not see or hear it, and flash floods could sweep through the canyon without warning."

"Okay. I'll ask Unbounded to monitor the weather. Anything else?"

"I can't account for everything," Zhong said, "but right now my threat assessment is there's minimal risk."

"Acknowledged. We're going to start sending a couple people down," Mbali said. "I'm coming too."

"Understood." Zhong walked to the river's edge. He could see the rocky river-bed through clear water. A whirring sound brought his attention upwards; Tekoha, Ryder, Mbali, and Kahu were descending on quad-rotors. They landed on the same side of the river as Zhong and retracted their harness attachment cords.

"Looks like the rock is sandstone," Zhong said as Tekoha and Ryder walked up to him. "I don't see much soil, so I'm not sure if the plants' roots are for obtaining nutrients or just for adhesion to the surface. I don't see any animals yet."

"Don't say 'plants'," Tekoha said. "Not until I've had a chance to study them more. Plants are a kingdom of life particular to Earth. These organisms are sessile, and some at least partly photosynthetic, but beyond that we don't know what characteristics they share with Earth flora. And besides that, many of them have the outward appearance of fungi, which is another Earthly taxonomic kingdom altogether different."

"Okay," Zhong said. "I just thought it would be too awkward to always have--"

He was interrupted when Mbali ran up to them. "I just saw something moving," she said.

"Where?" Zhong asked as he drew his weapon.

Mbali pointed. "Up there, at the edge of the second cave." There were four cave mouths about twenty meters down-stream and five meters up-slope. They approached the caves as a group, leaving the rotor drones at the drop point.

"What did you see, exactly?" Tekoha asked.

"Something small, and lightly colored. Fleeting. I thought it was a stone at first, before it moved. It ran forward, then went back into the cave."

"How fast?"

"I don't know. Fast. Faster than a person can run, I think."

"Did it make any sounds?"

"No. But it was rather far away. Difficult to see, as I said."

Tekoha nodded and consulted his arm-calc. He scanned the area ahead of them as they walked up the slope towards the caves. The rock was smooth, reddish-brown, and ribbed with striations underfoot.

When they were about three meters from the cave entrance, Tekoha motioned for them to halt. "Let's wait here a moment," he said quietly. "I want to examine the sonic spectrum for noises from any cave animals there might be." They waited in silence whilst Tekoha examined his displays. The cave mouth was the second largest in the group, about eight meters in diameter and roughly circular. The largest was eleven meters wide. The mouth was black, save for dim, filtered sunlight and blue bioluminescence at the edge.

"Do you mind if I use lasers?" Mbali asked.

"Go ahead," Tekoha said.

Mbali quickly scanned the cave interior to a depth of five meters. Smooth rock walls flashed briefly in the green light. "That's strange," she said, looking at the scan results.

"What is?" Zhong asked nervously.

"There's a large area of the cave ceiling with a thin deposit of carbon. Some on the wall, too. What do you suppose that means?"

"It means we need to go in and take a closer look," Tekoha said as he lit the headlamp above his visor.

"Hold on a second," Mbali said. "Kask and I shall go. The rest of you stay at the mouth. There's plenty for you to do out here."

"I object," Tai said. "That's a risky task for an executive, and there other more qualified people to do it."

Mbali held up a hand. "Objection noted. Kask, you're with me. Let's go."

Ryder lit his lamp and faced the cavemouth. He entered with left forearm raised, the sensors on his arm-calc scanning continuously. He selected some parameters to display on the HUD of his visor, and Mbali seemed to do the same. They stood in a vestibule of smooth stone, about ten meters wide and fifteen meters deep. In the back on the right side, the wall curved around a corner, perhaps leading to a deeper chamber. One large spot on the ceiling of the vestibule was colored black. Mbali stood under it. A chemosensor snaked from her arm-calc and rapidly tapped the black stone several times, then retracted. She looked at the arm display.

"Soot," she said to Ryder and knelt down to inspect the floor.

"There was a fire here?" Ryder asked.

Mbali picked up some pebbles and scanned them, then ran her fingers lightly over the stone. "Yes. Something small, like a campfire." She stood. "Let's go. I want to know what's back there." They went to the rear of the cave and rounded the corner. A tunnel about two meters wide curved to the right, and then back to the left. They turned the second corner into near darkness, and the cave ceiling lowered enough that they had to bend their necks. After a couple minutes of walking downhill, the walls of the cave opened up to a wider space. They swept their lamp-beams over striated surfaces. "Seems to have been eroded out by a subterranean river." They walked to the center of the chamber, and Mbali shone her light on Ryder. She tapped her arm, then said "Mute your comm-mike."

"What? Why?"

"Just do it."

Ryder tapped his arm-calc. "Okay. Muted."

"Thanks. I needed to talk to you in private."

"It can't get any more private than this. What's going on?"

"I would like to use your investigative journalistic skills on a confidential operation. You would report your findings directly to me."

Ryder crossed his arms. "Okay."

"You understand you cannot discuss the details of the operation with anyone else. You cannot even confirm its existence to anyone, not even Fai-tsiri. Understand?"

Ryder hesitated.

"This is important. I need to you confirm you understand."

"It's your own personal operation. Understood."

"And with good reason. I believe it's possible Fai-tsiri gives orders to someone else besides me. If so, my greatest fear is that there is a parallel, secret command structure on the ship. I need you find out if it exists, and if it does, what it is."

Ryder huffed quietly. "What gave you such an idea?"

"I lied in the ship-wide announcement about Nikau's death. It wasn't a personal dispute. Hemi was acting on orders from someone. I need to know from whom."

Ryder was silent again. Then he said "Are you sure?"

"Yes. One possibility is that there is a small, mutinous group who is undermining the chain of command. The more severe possibility is that Fai-tsiri is deceiving me, and there actually is another executive onboard."

"But do you have any idea why Hemi killed Nikau?"

"Not really. That's what I want you to find out."

Ryder sighed. "This is--"

Zhong's voice spoke into their earpieces. "Mbali? Ryder? Are you alright?"

They unmuted their communication microphones. "Yes. Why?" Mbali radioed back.

"You've been extremely silent for the last couple of minutes. Wanted to make sure you're okay."

"Yep, we're fine, thank you. We're just exploring a large chamber."

"Mbali. Look." Ryder's circle of light was focused on a smooth portion of the wall. Patches of color reflected back on the brown substrate. "What's that?" They drew closer. Slightly above their heads, caught in their headlamps, a series of crudely but colorfully drawn arthropodoid animals scrolled across the stone.

"I see it, but I can hardly believe it," Mbali said.

"We need the eyes of an archaeologist." Ryder tapped his arm-calc to send his visor camera output to Kahu. "Kahu, take a look at this and tell us what you think." There was silence over the comms for a minute whilst Ryder and Mbali slowly scanned the two-meter wide stretch of paintings.

"Remarkable," Kahu radioed. "Some astonishing similarities to Earthly cave paintings. Lacking perspective but representational. Probably made by a paleolithic culture. Reminds me of Altamira. I have to get down there and see them for myself."

Another voice intruded into Mbali's earpiece. "Unbounded to Mbali."

"Go ahead Unbounded."

"Probe telemetry reports contact with metazoan life on the oceanic abyssal plain."

"Acknowledged Unbounded. Keep collecting as much telemetry as possible. Mbali out." She looked at Ryder. "We should go. We'll let the professionals take it from here, and you have things to do ship-side, I'm sure."

Ryder nodded in the understanding of her code. They hiked back up the tunnel to the large vestibule, then exited the cave to meet the others in the canyon.

"I suppose there's no point in convening a discussion panel this time. We clearly can't colonize. But how much time do we have before pushing off?" Tekoha asked.

"How much time do you want?" Mbali asked.

"Ideally, a lifetime," Tekoha replied.

"How about twenty-four hours?"

"You're kidding."

"I'll talk to Fai-tsiri and push for forty-eight, but I don't think she'll go that high. Look, I'm not totally unsympathetic to your position. I'll advocate for you as best I can."

Tekoha nodded.

"Ryder and I are returning to the ship. The--"

Tekoha interrupted her: "Be quiet a minute, please," he said, holding up his right hand whilst staring at the display on his left forearm. "I'm detecting some faint sounds now. Amplitude increasing. At this rate, they'll be in the range of human hearing in a few seconds." They held their breath and waited. Zhong shifted the weight of the weapon in his hand.

After a moment they heard a distant tapping sound. Occasionally it broke into a scraping noise before it went back to a soft, punctuated concussion. It grew louder, and then a new sound began to overlay it: a rapid clicking or scrabbling sound. The original tap grew much louder until it was clearly dominant.

"I recognize that rhythm," Tai said.

"I do too," Zhong said. "It's very familiar. It almost sounds like--"

"Galloping horses," Tekoha said.

Running out of the cave came a dozen arthropodoid animals, each about the size of a human hand. They had pale, segmented carapaces from under which the tips of black legs poked. Clearly the origin of the scrabbling sound, the creatures scattered in all directions after emerging into the canyon, most running into the river. Then the source of the pounding rhythm emerged: two large quadrupeds, each as tall as a human. They were bilateral, with high knees and a low center of mass. Dark brown skin with accents of yellow markings stretched over endoskeletons. A large, bony cephalon had round, binocular eyes, as well as a small lateral pair. The head was dorsal to the thorax. Thin, anterior limbs manipulated spear-like tools. The spears were raised and aimed at the small arthropoids.

"Don't move," Tekoha whispered to the other humans over the comms. "Don't do anything." The lead animal seemed to forget its prey and stared at the humans through the ventral eyes, creeping towards them cautiously with spear raised. Tekoha looked back and forth between his arm-calc and the animal.

"Uh, Tekoha, do you think they can throw those spears?" Tai asked.

"Everybody start backing away slowly," Zhong said. Tekoha nodded in agreement.

For a few seconds, the humans backed away as the spear-wielder advanced. But the humans froze at an unexpected sound. A series of loud croaks emitted from the quadruped, starting and stopping abruptly with brief, higher-pitched scraping sounds.

"What the ..." Mbali said.

"It has a larynx," Tekoha said. "I believe it's speaking to us. That is language."

"Language? How can you possibly know that?" Zhong said.

"It's obvious, isn't it? The variety of sounds is producing an information density at least equal to our own spoken languages. I believe I can make out phones equivalent to our consonant-vowel dichotomy."

"Then can you communicate with it?" Mbali asked.

"Not without several months of cooperative effort," Tekoha said.

"But it might decide to skewer us right now," Zhong said. The wielder shook its spear up and down.

"Don't we have a translator of some kind, which is universal?" Ryder asked.

"That is the most stupid question I've ever heard in my life," Tekoha said. "Universal translators are a physical impossibility. The phonetic symbols of language are arbitrary, and their meanings cannot be deduced by running them through algorithms. Not to mention we don't even know which sounds are salient and which are not in their language."

"Continue backing up," Mbali ordered.

"Although, maybe if I just switch on my visor's speaker and talk to them, they might get the idea we're people. We might be able to establish some mutual respect."

"People? As opposed to what?" Zhong asked.

"Mindless, lower animals. A potential food source," Tekoha responded.

"Okay, I'll do it," Mbali said. She stopped her back-stepping and turned a speaker on so that her voice was audible beyond the face mask. "Greetings. I am Mbali, executive of the Global Unity spinship Unbounded." She paused. The quadruped quit shaking its spear and halted in its tracks. Mbali waited a moment, but nothing else happened. "We come from another world, looking for a new home," she continued. "We don't want to disturb you here; we were just curious about this place. We'll be leaving soon." She turned her speaker off. "I feel like an idiot," she radioed to the others.

"Don't worry, you're doing great," Tekoha said. "Clearly your speech had some effect on the organism. It stopped moving. Who knows what's--"

The animal whipped its spear back and launched it at Mbali. She dove out of the way as soon as she saw the first flicker of movement, and the sharp stick flew past them, into the river. The quadruped ran backwards to join its companions, and they all began squawking loudly and moving their bodies in a jarring dance.

"Fall back!" Mbali ordered. They backed up along the river. After a considerable distance was between them, Tekoha asked "How far are we going?"

"Until we're out of their line of sight. Then we call the lifters and return to the skiff." Tekoha gave her a sharp glance. "I know what you're going to say, professor. And you know my response. We are not prepared to interact with potential hostiles. We must safeguard the mission, above all else."

Tekoha turned away from her and looked back to the intimidating aliens. He stared at them for as long as he could, until they were hidden by the curve of the canyon wall. The humans stopped retreating, and he walked up to Mbali.

"Tekoha? What is it?" she asked. He had drawn his faceplate close to hers, and the only sound she heard in response was heavy breathing.

# Chapter Five: Menhir Waters

Mission Time: +339.75 Earth-years

Hard shadows cut across metal surfaces in the recovery room. Mbali squeezed her eyes shut a moment, then opened them again. Cold steam billowed from her recently vacated cryostat. Herds of Custodians swarmed the bulkhead around the bright opening, then poured over the lip. The robots' small, pyramidal bodies slid over the cryostat's interior lights and mottled the opposite bulkhead with dancing, fuzzy shadows.

Clean, warm, and dry, Mbali stared into a mirror for a moment. Her eyes pierced the gloom. She left the recovery room and walked along the ring, past other recovery rooms leading to other banks of cryostats, to a radial hatch. The spinship was mostly dark, but spotlights always kept her illuminated, fading in and out as she headed towards Command Sector. Red lights glowed in the black, marking the location of every door. She passed into Command Sector. The consoles of command began to glow; she ignored them and entered her office. The curved surface of her desk dripped with streams of data. Mbali looked at the flowing numbers and oscillating graphs, but her eyes soon wandered to the black door. It opened without manual effort, and she entered.

The chamber was an icosahedron of black, triangular paneling, studded with an occasional blue light. There was nothing in the room except one humanoid form standing in the center.

"Fai-tsiri. Why have we stopped here?" Mbali asked.

Dark carbon nanofibers snaked under a gray shell. "The relevant telemetry from the integrated Shimmercast probe received by Control four centuries ago has been sent to your desk," Fai-tsiri said.

"Just orally summarize the important data for me, if you would, please."

Fai-tsiri oriented her metal body towards Mbali. Finger-thick fibers ran out from under her pearly translucent face. " Unbounded orbits a 1.784 Earth-mass planet, 1.164 light-minutes from Gliese 674. Control deems this planet interesting. Unexpectedly, it is not tidally locked, with a day length of 15.5 Earth-hours. The maximum day surface temperature is 26.8 centigrade, whilst the minimum at night is -8.8. Surface gravity is 1.2 g, and surface pressure is 3.977 atmospheres. Cloud cover is 51.4%, hydrosphere cover is 100%, ice cover is 3.3%. Atmospheric composition is 96.8% nitrogen, 2.6% oxygen, 0.5% argon."

"So it's habitable but completely covered in water? We can't make arcologic sea-floor habitats."

"Correct. But sea-surface habitats can be built. However, the nitrogen and oxygen components of the atmosphere are most likely biogenic, though skiffs should be deployed to sample sea-water and confirm the presence of a microbial ecology."

"Very well. I shall send down a team as soon as they are awake and pass medical." She walked towards the door. It did not open.

"There is one more thing," Fai-tsiri said. "Shimmercast transmitted these images from the surface." Several triangular panels flipped to their opposite side, and a sunny seascape lit their surfaces. But something else was there.

Mbali's eyes widened. "What the hell are those?"

"Unknown. That is what Control wishes you to find out."

"Mbali?" The muffled voice called distantly from the other side of the metal door. It slid open.

Mbali came out and the door closed behind her. Ryder stood near her desk. Mbali positioned herself behind the desk. "What do you want?" she said quietly.

"To talk to you about what you asked me to do earlier. We should discuss--"

Her main office door opened, and Zhong entered. "What's he doing here?" he asked, frowning at Ryder.

Mbali did not respond to him, but to Ryder she said: "Just do whatever you have to do to get the job done."

Ryder headed for the exit. When he passed Zhong, he said: "It's my duty to document the mission, remember? I'm everywhere." Mbali and Zhong were still staring at him as he manually slid the office door closed. Others were beginning to drift into Command Sector. Ryder made his way to the medical bay. The low-ceilinged bay was dark, but yellow light and moving shadows were cast from the open laboratory.

Doctor Tai looked up from a lab table. "Again, Mr. Kask? Is the Coriolis effect still nauseous?"

"No, I'm fine, thanks," Ryder said. "I need to ask you some questions about what happened with Hemi, for the record."

"Ah, that."

"Yes, that. You didn't enter an official statement into your log."

Tai leaned on the lab table. "That's because Mbali was present. She made the official statement for the logs."

"I know. Were you asked to keep any mention of it out of your log?"

Tai moved around the table and closed the laboratory door. "What are you getting at?"

"I'm just trying to fully understand the whole Nikau-Hemi incident, and right now there are major gaps. All I know is who killed whom, but that's not enough for the historical records."

Tai sighed. "I think that might not be the case."

"You think that is enough?"

"No, I meant you don't know who killed whom." And Tai told Ryder the story of how he thought Hemi was acting suspiciously, which led to Hemi's arrest by Zhong, and then the strange summary execution in Mbali's office. "And this was mere minutes after she had declared all killing is wrong, no matter what the reason," Tai concluded. He paused and waited for Ryder's response.

"Clearly Mbali wanted to cover this up. You're breaking from her official story by telling me."

Tai nodded. "I trust you more than I trust her. Either she was ordered to execute Hemi by Fai-tsiri, which is a frightening thought, or she did it of her own volition, which is also unacceptable. In either case, I have lost my confidence in her."

Ryder nodded. "I see. But if what you say is true, don't you have a duty to come forward?"

"Come forward how? Chief Zhao was there, and he should be the one to assess if there is a threat to the mission. If someone were to decide something should be done, that someone would not be I. Though I suppose I'm kind of doing something now by telling you--and hopefully you can use the information for good, because it's not clear to me Zhao is doing anything. But ultimately, I'm not a player in this game--I have more immediate concerns, like getting this gene therapy to work. But if there's anything else you think I can do, don't hesitate to come to me. And be wary of trusting others."

"Of course. Thank you, Doctor. I know what I have to do now. Good luck with your medicine." Tai nodded, and Ryder left the laboratory. Tai left the lab door open and went back to work.

After a while, the medical bay door opened again. Tai could not see who it was, but put his tools down in anticipation. Tekoha appeared at the lab door.

"Ah, Tekoha. Are you quite alright? You still seemed rather upset during your post-stasis exam."

Tekoha leaned in the doorway with one hand. "I keep telling myself despite the travesty of leaving Glow Canyon too early, I can still write several papers based on the data we collected. That's my one consolation. But I'm not here about that." He stepped into the laboratory. "Mbali has promised to make it up to me. She has a set of coordinates mapped to the planet's surface and says we should go there immediately."

"What's there?"

"Apparently something major. I thought you should come along."

"Tekoha, you're the best biologist I have ever known. You might be needed on the drop, but I'm needed here. It is crucial I perfect the therapy for internal radiation resistance."

"Very well. I'm heading out, then." He went back through the door, but paused. "Oh, was Kask here just now?"

"Yes. Why?"

"What did he want?"

Tai glared at him.

"You know what, nevermind. I'll see you later." Tekoha crossed through the medical bay and walked along the ring until he found a radial tube, then made his way to the axis. He headed over to the next radial tube and descended to the skiff bay. Zhong and Ariki were already there, talking under bright lights near the Tawaki alcoves.

"Finally," Zhong said at his approach. "What took so long?"

"I had to use the head first. Why are you over here?" Tekoha indicated back to the Kea skiff across the bay.

"We're not taking that. We're going down individually in these." Zhong walked towards an open alcove of a Tawaki-class skiff.

"Then why did you have to wait for me?"

"Because we're going down individually together. Protocol. Strap in." The three of them climbed into their personal skiffs and let the automation take over.

The skiffs rained from the spinning ring, like three drops of water, into the world ocean.

Tekoha was staring at the projected view of water and clouds below, but his vision tunneled to near-darkness when the breaking thrusters fired. Gradually, his weight decreased to near-normal as cumuli came to tower over him; lifting his arm and waving his hand, he still felt slightly heavy. And then something rotated into view between his fingers. He was five hectometers above the water, moving at Mach 1 and slowing. He lowered his hand. At the broad horizon stood a structure, tall and thin.

"Uh, Zhong? Ariki?" Tekoha radioed.

"We see it," Ariki radioed back. "The location of the object corresponds to coordinates of interest flagged by Shimmercast."

"Could it have been formed by ... oh." As Tekoha approached the structure at seventy meters per second, he saw it could not be a natural geologic feature. Rooted below the water-level, the structure was bisymmetric, with flowing cut-lines and topological variations both soft and sharp.

"I'd like to get a full scan," Ariki said. "Head to the pinnacle and get into an equiangular formation. We'll go from top to bottom."

Tekoha instructed his skiff to ascend and decelerate. The others moved into position at the same time.

"What do you guys think it is?" Zhong asked. "A building? A monument?"

"An archaeologist like Kahu would probably call it a menhir," Tekoha said. They floated in a triangular formation around the flat, slanted pinnacle, over four hectometers above the water. The skiffs were close enough that they could see each other's blurred body shapes through the translucent sections of the skiff hulls.

"Yeah, a menhir made of finely machined metal," Ariki said. "There are actually more of them, if you look to the northeast. I make out at least two more on the horizon; I'd like to check them out when we're done with this one." They activated their scanning lasers and descended along the tower at ten meters per second. The menhir gradually widened in girth.

"The form detail does not persist at finer levels: here at the human scale, the surface structure seems smooth and featureless--although, from the way the lasers are reflecting, I think you would feel some texture if you were to touch it," Tekoha noted.

"I'm more interested in its function, rather than the details of its artistry," Ariki said.

They reached the water line and submerged slowly below smooth waves. "Taking a water sample now," Tekoha said. "Biomarkers detected. Scanning with a light microscope. Yes, there are unicellular organisms present. No evidence of multicellularity yet."

The underwater expanse was clear, sunny, and empty; the seafloor lay in shadow. They descended another hectometer with the green pulses of their laser beams now sharply delineated; as the menhir's girth increased, so did the skiffs' distance from each other. Sunlight dimmed, skiff lamps brightened.

"No sign of macroscopic metazoans yet," Tekoha said. "I think I can see the bottom now."

"What is that?" Zhong asked. He shined a bright lamp on a precipitated mineral chimney twenty meters from the base of the menhir. It belched black water.

"A sea vent," Tekoha said.

"I thought they were only found in abyssal plains or trenches," Ariki said.

"They are usually--on Earth. But we might be on an abyssal plain now--this planet could have very shallow oceans compared to Earth." The three skiffs reached the seafloor, completing the scan.

"Alright guys, let's move on to the next one," Ariki said. They rose to the surface, shot out of the sea, and flew fast above the waves to the other menhir. And when they reached it, another appeared on the horizon. They repeated the same procedure, again with similar findings, even down to a nearby hydrothermal vent. Again, another menhir loomed.

Tekoha opened a comm channel to Unbounded. "Tekoha to Mbali, come in please."

"Mbali here."

"How many artificial structures did Shimmercast detect?"

"Five. How is your data collection going?"

"All the menhirs--that's what we're calling them--appear to be the same. And they are all associated with a nearby sea vent, but there's no macroscopic life."

"Very well. Continue with collection and return to Unbounded when finished scanning the menhir."

Tekoha paused. Then he said "Is that Fai-tsiri's order?" But Mbali had already closed the channel. He grunted and swept down into the water and dove towards the seafloor.

"Tekoha, what are you doing? You're supposed to be getting into scan formation," Zhong said.

"Hold on, I have something else to do first."

"That's a protocol violation. You have to notify me before you do anything."

"Okay, I'm going to take a closer look at one of those sea vents. Consider yourself notified."

"Dumb melon! We have to go in with you," Zhong radioed back.

"Fine." Tekoha descended upon the three-meter tall chimney, and settled near the seafloor between the vent and the menhir. He circumnavigated the chimney and scanned it with lasers, then rested again at his original position. Beams of light from Zhong and Ariki appeared, brightly illuminating the area.

Tekoha extended a sampling rod past the turbulently refracted water until the probing sensor appeared highly distorted. "The water near the vent is ninety centigrade." He reached all the way into the billowing column of black fluid. "The vented water is about three hundred centigrade."

"I have a problem," Zhong said. "There's an electrical current on my hull."

"What? How strong?" Ariki asked.

"It's only three amperes, but ...."

"Now I have it too," Ariki said. "It's increasing to ten."

"I'm retracting my sampling probe," Tekoha said. "I have the same issue. What's happening?"

"It's induction," Ariki said. "I'm reading a magnetic field strength of seven hundred milliteslas, increasing by a hundred milliteslas per second. We have to get out of here whilst we still can."

"What's the source?" Zhong asked.

"Ha. I'll give you one guess," Ariki said.

"The menhir." Zhong said.

"No natural planetary phenomenon would cause it," Tekoha said as they broke the surface in long splashes. Hulls dripping, they accelerated up along the menhir. "The skiffs are well-insulated, but--"

"Field strength is nearing one tesla! Move away from the menhir! That's an order!" Zhong shouted over the radio. The skiffs spread out, up, and away.

"Mbali to landing party. What the hell is going on down there? I'm seeing some strange telemetry from your skiffs."

"The menhir began to generate a sizable magnetic field," Zhong replied. "We're putting some distance between us and it."

Ariki slowed his skiff to a crawl. "We're fine now. I'm holding at a distance of two kilometers--altitude eight hectometers." The others slowed as well. "I'd like to try an experiment. Mbali, are you reading me?"

"Yes, go ahead Ariki."

"If we disintegrate the Shimmercast orbiter, the nanites can explore the menhir's magnetism without risk to us. They may be able to give us a good idea of what is happening."

"Very well. I'll send the instructions to Shimmercast," Mbali said.

The landing party waited, drifting in the wind above the sea like frozen raindrops. After a few minutes, a small patch of sky darkened. A black funnel cloud descended towards the menhir. It gathered itself into a rough globule a few hectometers above, losing its funnel shape and roiling in turbulent textures. It churned surface noise patterns into higher octaves as it approached the menhir more slowly. Then it seemed to be pulled apart abruptly, spreading itself into curving sheets almost half a kilometer in diameter. The gauzy layers were like a ghostly image of a black onion, filtering out sunlight into bizarre, noisy shadows on the ocean surface.

"The nanites are following the lines of force of the magnetic field," Ariki said.

"Amazing," Tekoha said. "Mbali, are you getting any useful telemetry from this?"

"We're getting something. I don't know if I would call it useful."

"Wait a moment .." Ariki said. The pall grew more tenuous around its equator and darker near the the poles, where the field lines converged. There was a brief flash of light within the nanite cloud.

"The telemetry stream just dropped its bit-rate by twenty percent," Mbali radioed.

There was another flash of light, and this time Zhong saw a short spark of lightning. "What's happening?"

"Electric currents are being induced in the--" Ariki was interrupted by several loud snaps as bolts of lightning flashed in the cloud.

"I think it's time to go!" Zhong said. The skiffs fired their engines and accelerated upwards as more lightning lashed out around them; some bolts struck the menhir, some the water.

"The electricity is frying the nanites," Mbali said. "We're not receiving any comprehensible data from them anymore. After your return, begin preparations for stasis re-entry."

Tekoha experienced an acceleration black-out. He was unconscious only for a couple seconds, but when he woke up, the sky was already darkening. He let the autopilot sweep him up to the spinship and dock on its own. He sat in his chair, frowning, as he waited for the decontamination procedure to complete its cycle in the small alcove. After a few minutes, the light went from red to normal. He glanced at the HUD. Unbounded internal scans had confirmed several times no alien microbes remained attached to his hull. The alcove opened to the main skiff bay, and he could see Ariki and Zhong walking by. But still he sat. Finally he stirred and slowly made his way to the main axis.

White paneling and black padding blurred past him; he did not stop at the section of radial hatches leading to the habitat ring. He continued to a large, black hatch in a lonely volume of the axis. He unsealed it, pulled it open, drifted through, and sealed it behind him. He was not in a tube, but a large space wrapped around the axis cylinder. Small blue lights blinked on stacked plates. He drifted deeper into the machine forest. Fans whirred, ozone diffused. Movement near one of the columns caught his eye. He grabbed a hand-hold.

"Is someone there?"

"Yes." Ryder floated into view.

"What are you doing here?" Tekoha pushed off the bulkhead towards him.

"Documentation duties." Ryder was moving his hand over a control panel, then slid the drawer closed.

"Bull." Tekoha arrived at the column and steadied himself next to Ryder. "What was that?"

"It has come to my attention there may be anomalous activities aboard this ship--not the least of which is the Hemi-Nikau incident. I'm just trying to clarify some things for the record."

"Hm. Then maybe you're not such an idiot after all."

"Really?"

"Probably not. I was just trying to say, I think you're right to investigate. I am too."

"What? The deaths?"

"No, I don't care about that. I'm talking about how science has been given short shrift on this mission. We didn't spend enough time at Glow Canyon. Encountering the spear-wielding cave animals is the most important thing that has ever happened to me in my life; and I would dare argue its greater importance to humanity as a whole. But now, the data I collected there are all the data I'll ever have of those magnificent creatures." Ryder nodded, and Tekoha continued. "And now we find technological artifacts on this world, and we get to spend even less time with them. I'm starting to wonder if something is amiss in Fai-tsiri's programming."

"I was too."

"You? Why would you have reason to think that? And you're not even supposed to be in the computer core, by the way."

"I wanted to know if Fai-tsiri ordered Mbali to execute Hemi, or if Mbali decided to do it on her own."

"Execute? What are you talking about? Hemi was killed by security in a scuffle."

"No. That's the official story, but that's not what happened."

The muscles on Tekoha's face changed, somehow drooping more in the microgravity. "Show me what you found."

Ryder slid the server drawer open again. "Nothing so far. I've never seen a programming language like this."

Tekoha looked at the short blocks of Globalese letters on the screen. "That's probably because this programming language was designed specifically for spinship computer systems. It's relatively new."

"Oh? Who actually wrote the Fai-tsiri program?"

"Global Unity government AIs wrote the AIs who administrate GUSA, and a committee of those AIs wrote Mission Control, and finally Control wrote Fai-tsiri."

"So, she's a fourth generation AI."

"At least, yes."

"Then how do we ever untangle this? I mean, who knows what's really in this code?"

"A lot of people do. We don't trust our AIs on blind faith. Different sections have been looked at by different people, and small-scale simulations done with various chunks. No one person knows the whole volume of code, but you can always find someone who knows any particular section of the code. I can read some of it, but it's rather difficult for me."

"How do you know so much about programming? I thought you were a biologist."

"You really are an ignoramus, aren't you? Every biologist is also a programmer. It's a requirement of the field. I even have an algorithm named after me, which I invented. In my work back on Earth, I often simulated the possible evolutions of terrestrial biospheres." He continued to scroll through the blocks of computer code. "These are raw data from mission telemetry, not Fai-tsiri's code."

"Okay. But if the programs like Fai-tsiri are so large and complex, how do we know what their true intentions are? I mean, AIs have become so sophisticated, isn't it possible Fai-tsiri is a 'true AI'?"

Tekoha chuckled. "You're thinking of SI. True AI has been around since the Twentieth Century."

"Huh?"

"AI is artificial intelligence, simulated intelligence--by definition, it is not true intelligence. True intelligence, created artificially, is called Synthetic Intelligence. And no, I don't think Fai-tsiri is an SI. Even if you could somehow code for a program with conscious experience, we don't have hardware powerful enough to run it."

"But if the AI is sophisticated enough, it might appear to be so human-like, it would be practically the same."

"Something appearing to be the same does not mean it is the same. Two substitutable entities are necessarily equivalent, but not necessarily the same. It shouldn't take a super-AI to parse such basic logic. Although I suppose I should give you some credit, because it depends on what is meant by 'actual' intelligence. Most people include consciousness in that concept. The problem is that I can't even prove other humans are conscious, let alone digital computers. So, practically, it may become irrelevant whether a system is conscious, or 'actually' intelligent. The only thing we can ever observe is behavior."

"Okay, I think we're getting off track. What I really want to know is--could there be something in Fai-tsiri's programming which motivates her to go against our wishes?"

"I really don't think so. I have seen simulations which tested Fai-tsiri's ethical functions. I know she would never take actions harmful to humans because ..." Tekoha trailed off, enraptured by what he saw on the server screen.

"What? What?"

"The timestamps on these strings--these data were collected when we were in the Wolf 1061 system."

"Yeah, so?"

"So this string contains data written from Flamecast telemetry. And here. These numbers are familiar."

"Familiar how?"

"I just saw them. In my skiff. These numbers--are measurements in meters. They are the dimensions of the menhirs. The artifacts we just investigated."

"How can you figure that out from this mess?"

"I'm telling you, I recognize this sequence of numbers. It's too much to be coincidence."

"But you just said these data are from Wolf 1061."

"They are."

"So you're saying ..."

"There were menhirs on Rock Garden."

"No, that's impossible. We would have seen them."

"Would we? All spinship sensor data and probe telemetry are managed by Fai-tsiri."

"I thought you trusted her."

"I didn't say that. I said she would never harm human beings."

"So, you think she's hiding things from us?"

"That's an understatement. I think we're being kept in the dark. And we have no idea what this mission is really about."

# Chapter Six: The Flying Mountains of Magenta Sorrow

Mission Time: +392.3 Earth-years

After the spinning tori slid back into their receptacle, Ryder stood still on the dais, staring into the dark medical bay.

"Doctor Tai? Are you there?" he called out. "My scan is done."

A silhouetted figure appeared in the doorway to the laboratory. "Yes, I'm here." Tai entered the bay and walked hurriedly to Ryder. He glanced at the read-out displayed for the scanner. "Yeah, good. You're healthy. You can go." His brows were pinched inwards, and his hair was messy.

Ryder stepped down. "How is the radiation resistance drug going?"

Tai crossed his arms. "I think it should work now. But there's an issue, which I should have known from the beginning. I guess I did know, but I was optimistic about getting around it."

"What is it?"

"Each person must be outside stasis for about seven years before the treatment can reach full efficacy. During stasis, the effects of the medicine would be suspended."

"... But, the ship doesn't have enough food and water to last seven years," Ryder said. "And that's just for the operational crew, let alone everyone else in stasis."

Tai nodded slowly. "Exactly. Right now I'm working on speeding up the course of the treatment, but honestly, right now I don't know how to do that." He looked at the floor a moment. "Well, I should get back to work." Tai returned to the lab.

Ryder left the medical bay and walked quickly along the circumferential corridor, eyes darting to the side whenever he passed the large windows open to busy labs. Command Sector was not yet fully staffed; he glanced at the backs of people facing their consoles, then moved on to the crew cabins. He passed his own door, and then stopped outside Tekoha's. He looked around but saw no one else. He backed quickly into Tekoha's cabin and sealed the door again.

The room was empty. Ryder sat in Tekoha's desk chair and put his hands on his knees. Minutes passed. Then the door was slammed open, and Tekoha entered.

"Kask. Did anyone see you come in here?"

"No, I was careful."

"Good. You never know who else out there could be another Hemi." The door opened again, and this time Ihaia and Ariki entered.

Ryder jumped to his feet. "What the--"

"Relax, Kask. Relax." Tekoha spread his fingers and pushed his hands in a calming motion. "They are upset about what's going on too."

Ryder clenched his jaw and crossed his arms. "And just what do they think is going on?"

"There are things we are not being told," Ihaia said, "which we have a right to know."

"The chain of command seems to be malfunctioning, forcing inappropriate secrecy," Ariki said.

"Yes, and the best evidence we have of that now is something we uncovered at the very end of the previous mission segment," Tekoha said to the two of them, taking a dramatic pause. "There were menhirs on Rock Garden, and possibly other worlds we visited as well. Fai-tsiri must have known this."

"That's outrageous," Ariki said. "Are you certain?"

Tekoha nodded. "Quite." He was silent a moment, letting them mull the implications. "Mr. Kask also found a set of encrypted files which Fai-tsiri would have access to. We don't know if she or someone else created them, but I am working on a crack. Though it will take me some time."

"Then perhaps those files, along with the menhirs, can answer a long upstanding question," Ariki said. "Which is, why were we brought to Rock Garden in the first place? We were lured there under false pretenses--there's no doubt in my mind about that."

"Are you referring to the Flamecast telemetry?" Ihaia asked.

"Of course," Ariki said. "We know that data must have been faked. And since all probe telemetry goes through Fai-tsiri, she must have known. So I have to conclude Fai-tsiri deceived us and cannot be trusted--I may even go so far as to suggest she should be disconnected at some point."

"That's ridiculous. Only humans are capable of deception. Fai-tsiri is anthropomorphized, but she is just a machine," Ihaia said.

"Actually, many animals, and even plants, practice deception," Tekoha said.

"Okay, but those are mainly unintentional deceptions, so my point is still valid," Ihaia replied. "Machines are just tools. If they are involved in such intentional deception, humans are directing them to do it. And I was witness to Mbali's summary execution of Hemi. That action alone is enough to demonstrate she is unfit to be ship's executive."

"Even if you're right, and Mbali is behind everything, we should still disconnect Fai-tsiri to be safe," Ariki said. "Who knows what she has been programmed to do."

"Just hold on," Ryder interjected. "You know only Mission Control has access to Fai-tsiri's programming. Mbali would have to hack into Fai-tsiri's code base for that, which I think is a little far-fetched. And let me tell you this: I have spoken with Mbali, and she wants to figure out these irregularities just as much as we do."

"Yeah, that's what she wants you to think," Ihaia said. "She's obviously manipulating you."

"I don't believe that's true," Ryder said. "She is legitimately upset by the whole Nikau-Hemi incident, and she's desperate to get at the root cause. And I think Fai-tsiri has some part in it. We should shut her down, just to be on the safe side. The problem is, one of Fai-tsiri's specialties is predicting the future, so she might anticipate what we'll try to do. To which ship's systems does she have access?"

"It depends on what you mean by 'access,'" Ariki said. "Read/write permission or read-only? She can monitor many systems but can't send commands to them, except for the engines."

"I have to agree with Ihaia," Tekoha said. "First of all, Fai-tsiri doesn't have a model of human psychology--she predicts physical events and has a decision optimization engine, but she can't predict human behavior. But more to the point, I think you guys are being biased against artificial persons, like the reactionaries in previous centuries who harbored deep distrust of AI. They were always worried AI would take over the world and enslave humanity. But of course, history has shown them to be wrong. Most of the bad things that have happened in the last century before we left Earth were a result of human error, not machine malice. And we have enjoyed seven decades of peace since the affairs of state were handed over to GU supercomputers."

"Alright, I think everyone made some good points all around, but we should hold off on deciding what action to take until you finish decrypting those files," Ariki said.

Tekoha nodded. "Agreed. We need more information before we act."

"In the meantime, I think it's best if everyone in this room does two things: keep a close eye on both Mbali and Fai-tsiri, and don't tell anyone else what we discussed here," Ariki said.

"Very well. Then we're done for now. Let me look outside first to make sure no one is around," Tekoha said.

"Does Fai-tsiri have access to the corridor cameras?" Ryder asked.

Tekoha glared back at him. "Of course not. There's no reason why she would need it." He slid the door open and stepped out, then ushered the others past him. "Don't all go into Command Sector at once. Space out your arrivals."

Ryder was the last to go out. Tekoha stayed in his cabin, slamming the door behind him. Ryder frowned at the closed door for a moment, then slowly made his way to Command Sector. After walking five meters, Tekoha's door was already hidden in darkness as the harsh lights above dimmed in his wake. In a few minutes, he came to a constricted section of the corridor. Ahead, a thin strip glowed red around the outline of a passage. It dimmed as the overheads brightened when he approached. He pushed the thick door inwards and entered Command Sector.

Most senior staff were at their stations, and Mbali paced behind them, looking over their shoulders. Tekoha stood at a nearby station, glancing frequently at Ryder. He eased his way along the narrow chamber into Mbali's vicinity. She glanced at him, then went back to monitoring data displays.

"Where are we?" he asked her.

"Orbiting a brown dwarf," Mbali said, facing the row of stations and putting her hands on her hips. "It's a class T6." She handed him a VR visor. "I'm using my bionic implants to stream ship sensor data--you might need these."

He took them. "So there is a habitable moon orbiting the brown dwarf?"

"No. But there is an extensive rocky ring system and asteroidal moons which could be mined for minerals."

"So, resource acquisition was the factor which made Fai-tsiri decide to stop here?"

"Yes Kask, that's what I'm saying. It was the sole deciding factor. We need new materials for ship repair."

"I understand that." Ryder put the visor on. The entire ship seemed to disappear, except for the small floor panel on which he stood. Brightly colored labels and vector arrows popped into his vision, overlaid onto the real photographic image surrounding him. The arcing planes of a dusty ring system flowed only a few kilometers below his feet, glowing softly in the light from a red dwarf thirty-five light-minutes away. In bright blue text, the sun's designation label read SCR 1845-6357.

"We'll start with two Kea," he heard Mbali say to someone else. "Tangaroa, Ariki, you'll command one each. Get going."

Ryder heard footsteps and various people shuffling around him, but he continued to stare into space. Turning around on his floor panel, most of his view was dominated by the T-class dwarf, a cloudy super-planet glowing with its own heat and partially illuminating the rings in pink light. He pulled the visor up onto his forehead.

Ryder was alone on deck, except for a few technicians bustling in the recesses of their alcoves, and Tekoha, who remained at his station. Ryder walked to Mbali's office and entered, closing the door behind him. The air was pulsing with heavily harmonized, melodic music. Mbali stood staring out the false window, her back turned to him. He came up beside her, glanced at her intent expression, and then looked out at the view himself.

"What's this?" Ryder asked, pointing to the ceiling.

"Rautavaara."

"What's that?"

Mbali turned down the volume using her arm-calc. "You mean, 'who.' You never heard of Einojuhani Rautavaara?"

"Nope. And I can understand why. How could you dance to this?"

"It is not dance music."

"Then what's the point of music if you can't dance to it?"

"I'm going to pretend you didn't just say that."

Ryder looked at her with a raised brow for moment and waited, but she said nothing more. He looked out the window again. The brown dwarf, fat and luminescent, spun at the center of its complex ring system. "Beautiful, isn't it?" Ryder said.

"Yes, it is."

"I've always pictured brown dwarfs as brown--never as looking like that, with all the swirling blues and reds, and that weird purplish pink color."

"Magenta. That's because of the metals in its atmosphere. I've named this planet 'Magenta Sorrow.'"

"Sorrow? It looks quite cheerful to me." When Mbali didn't respond, Ryder said "Can you even call this a planet?"

"It's not a star, because there is no nuclear fusion happening at its core. At least not now. Anyway, not everything in the Cosmos fits neatly into conventional categories named by humans. Is there something you needed?"

"Yes, I need to tell you I had just had a very interesting conversation. It appears some of the crew are considering moving against you."

"'Moving against'? What exactly do you mean?"

"I'm not sure what form it might take, but clearly there are those who think you should step down from your position as executive."

"And how many people want this?"

"Well, only three that I know of."

"Who?"

Ryder hesitated. "I'm not sure if it's such a good idea for me to say, at this point. They don't have a plan of action yet, and I may be able to persuade them you are still quite fit to be executive."

"That's all very good, but I still need to know their names. I don't want to be blindsided."

"You won't be."

"I don't know that because you don't know that," Mbali said. She turned to face him. "Tell me who it is."

Ryder rested his hands on the bulkhead below the window and slumped forward slightly. "I intend to watch them very closely--and I give you my word, over my historian's honor, that if they ever decide to undermine your authority, I shall give you fair warning."

She turned outwards again. "Hm. You are ship's clerk, not a historian. But I appreciate your loyalty--I really do. You could have kept all this to yourself. What, may I ask, was their concern over me?"

"They're distressed about what happened to Hemi. How his death was ... handled."

"I see. I should think they would be more concerned about Nikau."

"They are worried about that too--about what is happening aboard this ship generally, and they're not trusting types."

Mbali nodded. "I'd like to invite you to monitor all my activities for the remaining duration of this mission segment. You can record your observations in your official logs for transmission."

"Thanks--I'll take you up on that. Now let me ask you something. Did you know there was a menhir on Rock Garden?"

"What are you talking about?"

He showed her a file copy on his arm-calc. "Look at these readings, and compare them to what we observed on Menhir Waters. They are the same. And you know all sensor data and probe telemetry are filtered through Fai-tsiri."

"Which means she must have known about this."

"Yes. But did she tell you? Or not?"

"No Kask, I assure you this is the first time I'm hearing of this."

"Then don't you think we might have a problem with Fai-tsiri?"

Mbali looked away from Ryder's arm-calc and drew closer to the window. "No, not really. One of her jobs is to filter irrelevant data for us, to bring us out of stasis only when needed, and to have us focus our attention only on tasks salient to the mission."

"Yes Mbali, I understand our main focus is finding a habitat for settlement. Everyone here understands that. But something like this, learning about life in the Cosmos, is a secondary objective, and we should at least be made aware of data related to it. There is no reason for her to hide a menhir on Rock Garden. It really doesn't make sense--unless there is something else going on."

"Like what?"

"I don't know! But I think we need to find out. Don't you?"

Mbali thought for a while. "I'll think of something. In the meantime, I'd like to be supervising the mining operation. You're welcome to join me."

Ryder nodded, and they went back out on deck. Mbali stood at her post midway along the curve of the sector, and Ryder stood next to her; he lowered the visor over his eyes. Unbounded, apparently having executed a transfer to a lower orbit, was much closer to Magenta Sorrow, hovering over a narrow gap in its rings. Ryder lowered his gaze and saw something large in the gap, almost directly below his feet. "An asteroid?" he asked.

"Shepherd moon," Mbali said. "Its gravitational influence keeps the gap edges very sharp and distinct. There are actually several of them in this same gap. And it so happens these moons are rich in heavy metals we need."

Ryder saw other dark lumps in the distance, following the curve of the ring gap. Huge waves wrinkled the rings near the gap--the moons' gravity distortion. He zoomed in to the nearest moon below and saw two specks of light he had not noticed before: the skiffs, rapidly approaching the cratered surface. Like gnats to a spinning potato, they circled several times and alighted on opposite sides. "They're little more than flying mountains. But these rings are mostly rock dust rather than ice, right? So wouldn't it be easier to gather the dust than wrestle with the moons' gravity?"

"But the ring composition is mostly siliceous. The minerals are more concentrated in the moons, so we can mine less material."

"I see. But isn't the--"

"Mbali!" someone from a terminal alcove called out. "Radar has detected some unusual movement vectors--but stopped now."

"Scan the volume with lidar," Mbali ordered.

"Yes ma'am." There was a moment of silence. Then: "Non-stochastic topology detected."

"Pipe the coordinates to my visual field," Mbali said. She stood looking intently through her membranous output implants. Then she breathed in sharply and seemed to freeze in place. "Comms," she said, barely above a whisper. "Order the skiffs back."

"What's going on?" Ryder asked her.

"Take a look at these coordinates." She sent them to Ryder's visual output. He rotated his view and zoomed in. At first he saw nothing but a group of rocks tumbling through the ring field. Then one of them moved laterally in an unexpected way. He zoomed further and saw it was not a rock like its nearby companions--rather, it was a snowflake-like object with radial symmetry. Except this snowflake was almost ten meters in diameter.

"What is that?" Ryder said. "Could it be some kind of water crystal?" But then he read the spectrogram tracked against the object. "Oh, it's metallic--like a shuriken throwing knife ...." Then as the object moved, it caught the sunlight from different angles, and he saw small mechanical details pop out--and there were the ephemeral wraiths of frozen gases from reaction control thrusters. "It's a spacecraft!" He shoved his visor up and looked at Mbali.

"It looks like we're not the only miners in town," she said.

"What are we going to do?"

"Get as far away from it as we can, as soon as possible."

"You're not going to at least attempt radio contact?"

"The outcome is much too unpredictable. You know by now I shall not put this ship or the mission at risk. Anaru, break orbit as soon as the skiffs are back inside."

Ryder spun on his heels and left Command Sector. As he stalked down the corridor, someone ran up behind him and grabbed his arm. He turned and pulled away. "What?"

It was Tekoha. He was breathing hard and pointing to his arm-calc. "I've cracked the encrypted files."

"And?"

Tekoha tapped the screen. "This is Unbounded sensor data from when we first arrived at Wolf 1061. Actually, according to the timestamp, we were a few light-minutes away from Rock Garden, still in stasis."

Ryder stared at the image on Tekoha's arm. It was a photograph from one of the spinship's high-speed external cameras. He could see part of Unbounded's stern in the foreground. And hovering not far beyond was the dark-gray frigidity of the shuriken ship.

# Chapter Seven: Teal Grip

Mission Time: +445.2 Earth-years

Tai walked purposefully along the circumferential corridor. His head was tilted slightly forward, his arms and legs tense as they swung. Ihaia walked close behind. After passing into Stasis Sector, Tekoha and Ariki marched down into view from the opposite direction, and the four of them converged on a single door labeled "Recovery: Pods 2863-2873". They nodded to each other, and Tai opened the door, then led them in.

The recovery room was illuminated with red light. Ryder was alone, sitting on the edge of a steel slab, head in hands. He looked up at the four men and squinted. "What ..."

"We think it may be time to attempt a shut-down of Fai-tsiri," Tai said.

"Now hold on, we didn't agree to that yet," Ariki said. "It could be too dangerous. We really need to consider replacing Mbali first."

Ryder was staring at them, slouched in an awkward posture, mouth slightly open. "Guys, I'm still a little dizzy right now .... Wait, is this because of the photograph?"

Tekoha nodded. "The menhirs were bad enough. But a vessel following us for three hundred years whilst we're kept in the dark?"

"Yes. Unacceptable," Ihaia said. "Nikau and Hemi are dead because of this, and we don't know why."

"That's something I can't understand--how the photograph of the shuriken ship is connected with what Hemi did. What do we know about the shuriken so far?" Ryder asked.

"Not much," Ariki said. "We can't penetrate its hull with our scans. It has not responded to repeated hailing attempts from across the EM spectrum. During interstellar flight, it accelerates and decelerates with a type of fusion rocket--which is hard to believe considering the ship is only about thirty meters in diameter. Mbali will brief us more thoroughly in the staff meeting. She seems to think it might be powered by matter-antimatter annihilation, but I have my doubts."

"Hm. I was hoping for some clue about their biology. I'm wondering how similar they are to us," Ryder said.

"At this point, we have no way of knowing, and it doesn't really matter right now," Tekoha said.

"But shouldn't they be approximately similar to us in form?" Ryder asked. "Since our two species are both intelligent tool-users, presumably, they should have evolved similarly to us, and we might find a basis for commonality."

"Well, it depends on specifically how you mean that," Tekoha said. "If you just mean they have manipulatory organs, sensory organs, locomotive organs, and so on, then the answer is yes. But if you mean they have two legs, two arms, a head with a nose and mouth--humanoid, in other words--then no, that's extremely unlikely. There are so many other possible design solutions, and so much of our morphology is based on evolutionary happenstance rather than functional necessity, it would be quite fantastically coincidental if we both turned out to be humanoid."

"But Tekoha," Tai interjected, "are you perhaps deemphasizing convergent evolution too much? I mean, just look at dolphins and ichthyosaurs. The classical example is the eye: there are about seven different physical principles on which you could design an eye, but eyes have evolved over sixty times on Earth, completely independently. That means many branches of animal life have eyes which are kind of the same."

"Yes, and if the aliens have eyes, I'm sure they'll appear similar to eyes in one of those Earth branches. But we're not talking just about eyes--we're talking about the overall morphology of an entire organism. Your dolphin-ichthyosaur example is more apt, but then you have to remember they both ultimately derive from reptiles."

"Dolphins are from wolf-like land mammals."

"Which ultimately derive from reptiles, as I just said. And even further back, from the same type of fish--as are we--so there are many jointly inherited characteristics."

Ryder grunted. "Alright. I suppose I did take us too far afield from the immediate concern. Replacing Mbali right now could be quite dangerous: we don't know how Fai-tsiri will react, not to mention we don't have the legal authority to do so."

"That may not be the case," Ihaia said. "The crew can vote to replace their executive under certain criteria--we just have to make sure we meet those criteria first."

"Yeah, but what I was going to say was--" Ryder paused and blinked hard. "If we come across a habitable planet which meets all human survival requirements, and if Fai-tsiri applies Planetary Protection Policy ..."

"We break the Policy?" Tekoha said. "Mbali, Fai-tsiri, and Control won't let us."

"Right. But we are capable of doing it covertly, I think," Ryder said. "Obviously we wouldn't have time to load up all four thousand pods, but we should be able to do a few, as long as we're careful to avoid detection by Fai-tsiri."

Ihaia jabbed his index finger at Ryder. "Yes! I think we could do that."

"Just a minute," Tai said. "You know you are talking about the potential genocide of an entire world. There is a reason for the Protection Policy."

"I'm talking about the definite death of four thousand people on this ship if we don't act soon. You're talking about a remote hypothetical scenario of overrunning an alien biome."

"Not just a biome--an entire biosphere. And it may not be so remote."

"Okay, so tell me. You and Tekoha are the most qualified people here to assess the risk. What are the real chances our microbes will out-compete the native life and cause a mass extinction?" Ihaia asked.

Tai and Tekoha looked at each other.

"It would be really hard to assign a probability to it with no further information," Tekoha said. "Do you disagree, Doctor?"

Tai huffed and crossed his arms. "Perhaps we should be considering a more important question: what is the possibility for human survival on this planet?"

"The integrated probe's survey is comprehensive enough for us to say with some confidence that it is at least as safe as Earth itself--perhaps more so," Tekoha said. "We can definitely deposit people without much fear."

"Still, you'll verify the probe results on the surface? That telemetry is quite old by now," Tai said.

"Yes, but things aren't likely to change on such a basic level during the intervening centuries," Tekoha said.

"Then I think it's time to assume the risk and break the Policy as soon as we arrive at an inhabitable world. Has anyone been to Command Sector yet?"

They shook their heads. "Mbali has already called all senior staff. We're supposed to be heading there now," Ihaia said.

"Okay. How much access does Fai-tsiri have to the cryostat pods?" Ryder asked.

"None directly," Ihaia said. "The stasis system has its own separate computer network, but it outputs data in a ship-wide interface which Fai-tsiri can access, read-only."

"So as long as we falsify some of the output, we can mask the removal of a certain number of pods," Ryder said.

"Well, I suppose ...."

"Who here can do that?"

"I can," Tekoha said.

"I can too. Easy," Ariki said.

"One of you has to do it now. If two people are absent from a senior staff meeting, it would be too suspicious. Get as many pods as you can fit into a Kiwi-class skiff."

"But I would have to move all those pods myself," Ariki said.

"Ihaia can help. He doesn't have to go to the meeting."

"Zhong tracks my activities too closely," Ihaia said. "I'm already taking a risk standing here talking to you for as long as I am."

"I might be able to leave the meeting early," Tai said. "I can easily make the excuse that I have to attend to my medical experiments, if I must. Ariki can set up the false interface whilst I'm in Command Sector. Right?"

"Right," Ariki said.

"And after we've made planetfall, someone has to unload the pods and begin the revivification process without anyone else in the landing party noticing--not to mention the skiff sensors," Tekoha said.

"I can handle that," Ryder said. "No one pays attention to me. Mbali won't care if I'm actually working or not."

"And the skiff sensors?" Ihaia asked.

"There will be a convenient malfunction during descent," Ariki said. "Sensors won't be repaired until we're ready to leave."

"Good," Ryder said with a sigh, standing up.

They filed out of the recovery room. Tai was in the lead, the first to reach Command Sector. Throwing shadows from their alcoves, junior staff flitted around their columnar consoles, flicking glances in his direction.

"They're waiting for you in Conference Room Aleph," one of them called out.

He nodded and entered the room. Kahu, Anaru, Tangaroa, and Zhong were already seated, with Mbali at the head of the table. They watched him as he took his seat, then waited in silence as the others filed in.

"You're almost four minutes late. Was there a medical emergency?" Mbali directed her question at Tai.

"No ma'am," Tai said.

"Your tardiness is unacceptable. If that happens again, I shall put you all back in stasis for the remainder of the mission and revivicate replacement crew who care more about our success. Understood?"

"Yes ma'am," Tai and the others assented.

"Where's Ariki?"

"There was a slight malfunction in some of the cryostats--nothing serious. He's investigating now and monitoring repairs by the Custodians," Tekoha said.

"Then if you'll allow me to finally begin, we are orbiting the second planet in the Epsilon Indi system," Mbali said as she moved her hands over the table, sprouting diagrams and figures on its surface.

"Ah, finally a star I've actually heard of!" Kahu said.

She looked him without turning her head. "I could do without the commentary. As I was saying, Epsilon Indi A, the primary sun, is a class K4V; we're at a distance of four and a half light-minutes. There're a pair of class-T dwarfs orbiting about 138 light-hours out, so we can safely ignore them. This planet seems to meet many important habitability parameters. It's 0.715 terrestrial masses, a surface gravity of 0.89 g, and sea-level pressure of 0.671 atm. The atmosphere is 72 percent nitrogen and 27.7 percent oxygen, with small amounts of argon, water, methane, ammonia, neon, and carbon dioxide. Minimum recorded temperature is minus 31.3 centigrade in the polar night, and maximum is 50.3 in the equatorial day. The boiling point of water at sea level is 89.5 centigrade. The oceans cover 83 percent of the surface." She paused.

"So the atmosphere is breathable without modification?" Tai said.

"It would seem so. And this world would be the best candidate for settlement so far, were it not for a couple obvious things ...."

"The atmosphere is almost certainly biogenic, given its constituents," Tekoha completed her thought.

"Yes," Mbali said. "But that's not all. Fai-tsiri has grabbed these images of the surface." On the table, a telephoto view of a patch of land was displayed; next to the browns, grays, and ochres of the land was broad patch of tealy blue.

"Some kind of mineral in the rock?" Zhong asked.

"But look at it in infrared," Mbali said, changing the output spectrum range.

"Vegetation!" Tekoha said.

Mbali nodded sharply. "It certainly appears so. Fai-tsiri has decided to drop a skiff to investigate further. Even if there is life here, we should collect as much data as we can about this world before moving on. I needn't explain to you that the more statistical samples we have of habitable worlds, the better we can induce general knowledge."

"Even if there is a biosphere, I would urge you to bend of Protection Policy and allow us to settle here," Tai said. "We are getting pretty desperate."

"I'm not having this discussion on every mission segment. A decision was made to uphold the Policy, and that's final. Your priority is to develop the gene therapy. Now, I think we should discuss the thing on everyone's mind." She looked at the faces around the table.

"The shuriken spacecraft," Ryder said.

"Indeed. Displayed in front of you are all the sensor data we gathered of it near Magenta Sorrow."

"And these are the only data we have of it?" Tekoha asked.

"What do you mean? Yes of course," Mbali said.

Tai stood up abruptly.

"Doctor?"

"Uh, there's something I need to take care of."

"Excuse me?"

"There are some experiments I'm doing, developing the anti-radiation medicine--very time-sensitive. I'm sorry, but I really have to go attend to them."

"Then go," Mbali said. "We need a functional version of the medicine as soon as possible."

"Yes ma'am." Tai left the conference room and passed swiftly through Command Sector to the circumferential corridor.

Passers-by occasionally nodded at him, but he didn't notice. By the time he reached Ariki's recovery room, his forehead was lightly perspiring. He slid the door open. "Ariki?"

"Just in time." Ariki closed a drawer of photonic circuitry. "The mask is in place, and I'm ready to start shipping people out. On a Kea-class skiff, we could fit fifteen pods into the equipment hold."

"Only fifteen? That's not enough people to start a colony," Tai said.

"Of course not. The minimum viable population is two thousand; did you think we could fit that many on a skiff all at once? They would have to reproduce by cloning in such a small gene pool."

"Right. I guess I hadn't thought of that until just now." Ariki began typing a sequence on one of the cryostat's control pads. "What are you doing? What can I do?" Tai asked.

"Releasing the first one. Take a look." Ariki pushed a final button and waved him over. Tai bent down and peered through the cryostat hatch window; he could see the pod retracting down a long tube. "I need you to get down to the skiff bay and make sure it's clear of crewmen. It'll take these pods couple minutes to make their way there, but no one can be around when they start popping out of the wall."

"But what should I say if--"

"Make something up! Go now! You have two minutes."

"Right. Okay ...." Tai went out, locking the door behind him. He looked no one in the eye as he rushed to the skiff bay.

Only a small area of the bay was lit. He approached, and saw a crewman standing near a skiff, looking down at his arm-calc.

"Excuse me, ah ... Jin?" Tai said.

The man looked up. "Jun. Oh, Doctor. What can I do for you?"

"Well ... I'm sorry to bother you, but I've learned some people may not be compatible with the gene therapy I've been developing, so I'd like you to go to the medical bay to have another scan."

"But I just had my post-stasis examination. Can't you use the data from that?"

"No, I'm afraid not. We'll be scanning for different things this time."

"Okay, let me just finish up here, then I'll head over the to med bay." He smiled.

"I'm afraid you need to go now. It's very time sensitive--I have to get this done now. I'm about to make planetfall."

"Okay, fine. Aren't you coming with me?"

"I'll go in a bit. The auto-nurse will take care of you in the meantime."

"Okay ...." Jun walked to the spoke ladder and began climbing. There was a soft noise from a bulkhead on the other side of the bay. Tai rushed over and saw the first cryostat pod emerging from a deposition tube. He looked back to the spoke ladder, but Jun was out of sight. Tai pushed the pod on its spherical rollers to the nearest big skiff, then tapped his arm-calc.

"Ariki, can you hear me?"

"Yeah ...." The speaker on his arm-calc said.

"We're on a secure channel."

"What is it?"

"There was someone in the skiff bay. I sent him to medical, but when he gets there, my story is going to break down. I'm afraid he might come back here."

"By the ancestors! Why didn't you tell him something that would hold up?"

"It was the best I could do! I don't have anything else," Tai said.

"Well, it's going to be about ten or fifteen minutes before all of the pods arrive in the skiff bay."

"What! No, no, that's way too long! The landing party will come down here to board the skiff before I can get all the pods loaded!"

"Oh. You might be right. Okay, I'll see if I can accelerate the process. You just load the pods as soon as you get them. And don't bother me again unless it's an emergency."

"Ah! Oh, oh, oh ...." Tai pushed the first pod into the skiff's cargo receptacle and ran back to the bulkhead where the next two pods were emerging. Sweat was already running from his temples to collect in droplets under his chin. He guided two pods over to the skiff, one with each hand, eyes constantly glancing up to the spoke ladder. He loaded the pods, then ran back for the next two and repeated the process.

"Jun to Tai," the ship's intercom said.

"Tai here; go ahead."

"Doctor, the auto-nurse doesn't seem to be activated right now. What should I do?"

"Oh right! I'm uh ... sorry for the mix-up." Tai pushed two pods across the bay floor as fast as he could. "Just lie down on a bed, and I'll be there in a few minutes! Ah!"

"Are you alright Doctor? What are you doing?"

"Oh, I'm loading some medical equipment in preparation for the drop. It's very sensitive--and also heavy."

"Okay, I'll wait for you here. Jun out."

Tai wiped his forehead as he ran. Five minutes later, he had loaded twelve, with three to go, when he noticed a faint light shining down the spoke ladder's tube. He punched his arm-calc. "Ariki!"

"What?"

"I think people are coming! I still have three more to load!"

"Crack open a bay door. That will cause the radial hatches to seal automatically, and they won't be able to enter the bay."

"And expose me to the vacuum?! You're crazy!" Tai pushed two more to the skiff and loaded them in the time he was talking to Ariki.

"I'm done here, heading for the skiff bay. Good luck Doctor."

Tai made it back to the bulkhead when members of the landing party came into view and set foot in the bay. With great effort, Tai tilted the last pod back into the deposition tube, shoved it back along the tracks, and sealed the hatch. He went out amongst the parked skiffs and casually sealed the Kea's hatches before meeting the group walking towards him from the spoke tube.

"Hi Chief," Tai said to Zhong.

"Doctor. What's wrong with you? You're all wet .... Shouldn't you be working in the med lab?" Zhong responded.

Tai nodded and smiled with his eyes closed. "Ah, yes. I mean no. I mean I am, but I just needed to pop down here to get some tools I need."

"Alright," Zhong frowned. "Carry on." Zhong turned away from him and waved the group towards a Kiwi-class skiff. Tangaroa opened its hatch and was the first to board.

"What are you doing?" Tai asked.

"Fai-tsiri approved planetfall and chose a landing zone," Zhong said. "We're heading down now."

"I know, but wouldn't you rather take that Kea?" Tai pointed to the skiff loaded with the cryostat pods.

"No," Zhong said.

"Well why not?"

"Why would we? It's too big. A Kiwi is perfectly adequate for a team and equipment package of this size."

Tai's mouth opened and closed soundlessly. Zhong ignored him and went to the Kiwi skiff. Ariki appeared, descending from the tube, and Tai rushed over to the base of the ladder.

"They're boarding the wrong skiff!" Tai hissed as Ariki set foot onto the bay floor.

"Calm down! We might be able to work this to our advantage," Ariki said quietly.

"And there's one more I didn't have time to load--it's still at the end of the deposition tube!"

"Listen--you can take it down later, by yourself. After we leave, you'll have time to load the last pod," Ariki said.

"But--"

"You'll have to make a good excuse, like you need to go to the planet to collect samples for developing medicine."

"They might approve a Tawaki for that, but a Kea?"

"Do I have to think of everything? Just say you need the extra cargo room for big scanning equipment. They're all boarded now--I have to go." Ariki turned and jogged towards the waiting landing craft.

Tai watched him board the skiff, then climbed the spoke ladder. When he was a few meters into the radial tube, a hatch sealed below him, indicating the bay was about to be depressurized. Tai continued on to the habitat ring. The medical bay was empty--Jun was nowhere in sight. He looked into his lab, slowly surveying the equipment set up on the bench. Then he entered the lab, sealing the door behind. Moving more quickly now, he went to a smooth portion of the bulkhead and made a gesture with his fingers over the surface. A terminal window displayed itself, with a keypad of ideographs on the side. He pushed some of the buttons and called up the output from Ryder Kask's helmet camera. Then he pulled up a stool and sat in front of the video feed.

Ryder seemed to be walking along a beach, looking at an ocean. He turned away from the water, towards sandy bluffs topped with bluish broccoli-like growths. The sky was green. Tai watched the team unload equipment onto the sand and make their way up to the blufftops, avoiding trampling on any vegetation. The land grew more hilly away from the ocean until it broke into forested mountains.

Tai stood and went back to his lab bench, checking progress on experiments. He made some adjustments whilst occasionally looking up at Ryder's progress across the alien landscape. After a few minutes, Tai put down his tools and left the medical bay. He walked slowly, taking deep breaths. Command Sector was scuttling with technicians, and the air was filled with their lowly muttered chatter. Mbali stood with arms crossed, eyes blanked by the cover of her virtual-reality membranes. Tai moved close to her and cleared his throat.

"Busy?" he asked.

"Yes."

"Well, I need to ask--tell--you something."

"What?"

"I'm close to having an efficient form of the radiation therapy ready, but I'm missing a few key compounds which are really hard to synthesize in the lab. But many of them are produced by some plants and fungi. I'd like to test some samples from the planet's surface to see if I can find them there."

"Then radio Tekoha and tell him what you need. I'm sure he's capable of collecting them."

"Yes, but it's not that simple. I need to use some medical scanning equipment which they don't have with them right now. I have to take it down there."

"I need you in the lab working on that medicine, Doctor."

"But there's really nothing else I can do there right now. Going down to the planet is the most efficient way to make progress at this point."

"Fine. You have permission to take a Tawaki to the LZ."

"I can't fit the equipment onto a Tawaki."

"Fine! Take whatever skiff you need. Anything else?"

"No ma'am."

"Very well--dismissed."

Tai nodded, though she couldn't see him, and strolled at a controlled pace from Command Sector. Then he increased to a half-jog to the skiff bay. When he descended the spoke ladder, he looked down into the bay and saw a single light on. He cursed and went back up the ladder, returning to the med bay. Once there, Tai grabbed a jet injector and loaded it with a selected vial. He then put the injector into a toolkit, which he strapped on, and returned to the skiff bay.

He walked towards the light. It was Jun, fussing over his arm-calc again. "Jun! So sorry about before!"

Jun looked up at Tai's meekly smiling face. "Indeed, there seems to have been some sort of mix-up," he said without smiling back.

"Yes, well, the good news is I sorted it all out now. I looked at your genome on file, and it turns out you should have very good compatibility with the therapy. But the wrinkle is I do have to prepare your body to accept the therapy by giving you a dose of another drug now."

"Okay, sure."

"Great." Tai removed the jet injector from his toolkit.

"You brought it all the way down here for me?"

"Well, I've been going around giving it to the crew who need it. Don't worry, the nozzle on this injector is fresh and sterile. Now, if you'll just show me your arm--very good." The injector clicked and hissed as he injected a small patch of skin on Jun's inner forearm.

"How shall we know if it worked?"

"I'll give you a blood test later. In the meantime, feel free to stop by the medical bay if you feel any side effects."

"Side effects? Like what?"

"Well, it would be very unusual, but some people might feel a bit faint, or rather sleepy."

"Oh, huh. Actually, maybe it's psychological, but I already feel a little funny."

"Funny?"

"Yes, like a sequoia in a cyclone which ... huh ... ah--" Jun's eyes rolled back into his head and Tai caught him as he fell. He laid him gently on the deck and checked his vital signs, then heaved him up by the armpits. Tai pulled Jun, heels dragging behind, onto the Kea with the stored cryostat pods. He strapped him into a crash couch in the personnel hold, then jogged back onto the bay deck and went to the deposition tube in the bulkhead. He unsealed the hatch and hauled out the last cryostat pod.

Two minutes later, Tai was strapped into the Kea, the cargo hold loaded with fifteen pods, all hatches sealed. He took a deep breath, put a comms bud into his ear, and pulled up a display console next to his chair. He opened a terminal and typed some commands into the sensor array controllers. "Skiff, acknowledge receipt of vocal command input."

"Receipt acknowledged," the skiff said.

"Initiate launch sequence. Display relevant data in my terminal, diagrammatic form, verbose quantitative output." Desaturated pastel lines curved over his black display, movements in sync with their text labels. Tai tapped a corner to switch the display language from Globalese to New Maori. The currently executing task appeared as a line of text in the upper left. He waited, watching the diagrams indicating permission queries, the movement of the launch rails, the sealing of deck hatches, the depressurization, the unlocking and opening of bay doors, and the final rail extension. He saw most of the calculations done for launch-timing and trajectory, the equation flow slowed down to a time-scale he could process, though barely. The docking clamps released, and he was weightless, watching the projected trajectory slowly changing to the traveled one. He saw that the planet below was labeled as ninety percent of Earth's diameter. He closed his eyes for a couple minutes, then looked down at the display again. The skiff was already passing through the upper mesosphere, and began to tremble with turbulence.

"Mbali to Tai."

"Tai here."

"Doctor, Fai-tsiri reports all your skiff sensors have just gone dark."

"Yes, I can confirm I'm experiencing a malfunction. Not sure of its origin yet."

"Do you think you should abort?"

"Not yet. I'll keep you apprised if there are any further problems."

"Acknowledged. Mbali out."

Tai turned off his external comms. "Show me the landing zone mapped onto visual telemetry," Tai ordered the computer. A portion of the display devoted itself to an overhead photograph of the beach, hills, and forest. The landing zone was a demarcated rectangle of beach. "Show me the location of crewmen Kask and Tekoha." Two small triangles appeared on the map. "Skiff, I need you to mark a secondary LZ here." Tai pressed his finger to the image. Another rectangle formed next the forest's edge, near the triangles. "Good. Now I need this skiff to land in this new secondary zone." The projected trajectory altered its curve slightly as its endpoint moved to the new zone. Tai watched and waited as the projected converted to actual, and the endpoint was reached with a gentle cessation of movement.

Tai unstrapped himself and checked on the unconscious Jun, then donned an environment suit in the two-step sterilization process. He was lowered in the narrow cylinder and stepped down to a soft ground covered with knee-high blue-green fronds. He saw Ryder and Tekoha approach him from the seaward direction.

"I see the killing has already begun," Tekoha said, indicating the crushed vegetation under the skiff landing pads.

"Oh, they'll grow back," Tai said. "I've set comms to a secure channel amongst the three of us. Is there anything I need to know about before I begin unloading? Any hazards?"

"No hazards to you I know of. Just try not to destroy everything in your way."

"I intend to move all the pods into the forest, where Unbounded can't see them without doing any active scanning--which, hopefully, it doesn't."

"I don't expect it to anymore."

"The pods are heavy. I think some of these blue ferns are going to suffer along the way."

"It's a good thing Unbounded is not in a geosynchronous orbit, or they'd see what you're doing just from passive scans," Ryder said looking at his arm-calc. "You have fewer than one hundred minutes before it passes over us again."

"We'll be done long before then," Tai said, touching a button on his arm-calc which lowered the skiff's freight elevator. Two pods were already on the pad. "Okay, help me unhook these and push them beyond the tree-line."

"We'll move in a straight path, single file, to crush as few plants as possible," Tekoha said.

"Are they really plants this time?" Ryder asked as they got onto the elevator platform and began unfastening the holdfasts.

"Well, they are photoautotrophic, multicellular organisms with differentiated tissues. Not quite like Earth plants, but similar enough," Tekoha said. "Quite frankly, I was astonished when I saw the photographs of this world--though I guess I shouldn't have been. It was just striking how the planet is in a teal grip of vegetation--so Earth-like, and so different from everywhere else we've been so far."

"What do you mean by a 'steel grip' of vegetation?" Ryder asked.

"I said teal, not steel--because the plants are mostly teal in color."

Tai lugged the first pod off the platform and began pushing it across the ground.

"I'll do that," Ryder said, stepping down and taking over Tai's haul. "You can load the next two on the elevator whilst we take these."

Tai nodded and raised himself on the elevator whilst Tekoha and Ryder pushed through the ground cover. After he loaded the pods, went through sterilization again, and was lowered to the ground, Tekoha and Ryder were not back yet. He waited on the platform, examining his surroundings. The ground-cover plants did not really look like ferns; they were more reminiscent of water-lilies, with broad, circular leaves. In their shade, the soil was covered in something else which looked like a brown lichen. Tai peered towards the forest. The "trees" had an inverted umbrella shape, white trunks curved or twisted in various ways, but always managing to align their canopies to the sky. The ground-cover in the forest was different, composed of short fur-like yellow-green growth. He saw two suited figures emerge from the trees and trace their path of flattened lilies back to the skiff. Tai began to haul the next pod off the platform.

"What can you tell me about this world's biosphere?" Tai asked Tekoha when he stepped up to help him.

"Well, the average global temperature of the planet is cooler than Earth's, which lowers habitability. So biodiversity is slightly lower than Earth. All of the pollen appears to be wind-blown ...."

"But are there any animals at all?"

"Oh yes. Here, let me show you--" Tekoha was calling up some data on his arm-calc, but Tai waved him off.

"That's okay, you can show me later. Let's just finish moving the pods." Tekoha nodded, and they continued working in the same fashion for almost an hour before all fifteen pods were safely concealed in the forest.

"The sun doesn't seem to have moved much since I got here," Tai commented.

"That's because the rotation period is almost 43 Earth-hours long," Tekoha said. "Here, let me show you that animal." He pointed up to the canopy; hanging from a white branch was a pale, hairless creature. It was bilaterally symmetrical, with two pairs of tightly folded limbs, but did not appear to have any discernible head--though it did have two rows of pits in its skin. "It's about eight kilograms. The indentations you see are sensory organs which detect electric fields from other animals. I think it's an ambush predator, but I haven't seen the prey yet."

"Is that a mammal?" Ryder asked when he moved to look.

"Oh no, of course not," Tekoha said. "Mammals are an invention of Earth biology. Think of all the characteristics we assign to mammals--these characteristics are solutions to specific design problems--how to maintain homeostatic equilibrium, for example. The animals on this world will have some of the same solutions, as well as some different ones, but mixed together in a way we might perceive as strange," Tekoha said. Ryder gave him a blank look, so Tekoha continued: "For example, I mentioned the terrestrial Ediacarans whilst we were on Cold Trove. They were animals in the most general sense that they were moving organisms, but they were not metazoans proper, and we are not their descendants. So that is a clear example of an animal group which does not fall into any of the modern terrestrial phyla of animals."

"Hm," Ryder shrugged.

"Are there any large carnivores around here?" Tai asked.

"I don't know--it's possible. But the largest animal I've seen so far is under ten kilograms."

"How common are venomous creatures?" They began to walk back to the skiff.

"I have not found any. I'm sure they're around, but the fact I have not yet detected any points to a rate of venomization which is not higher than Earth's modern average. Why?"

"As we discussed aboard ship, I'm concerned about the well-being of the fifteen settlers--what dangers they might encounter upon revivification," Tai said.

"I haven't surveyed the entire biosphere, but I can say with some confidence this biome is rather benign. You brought all the survival tools, correct?" Tekoha asked.

"I'm leaving them with clothing, tents, survival toolkits, medical toolkits, radios, a couple days' worth of food and water. By the way, what is the bio-chirality?"

"Same as us. They'll be able to eat local food," Tekoha.

"But then they could also get local infections," Tai responded.

"Not necessarily. Susceptibility to infection depends on a lot more than just chirality. I think the differences in our microbiologies are probably enough to preclude infections from viruses and bacteria--though biotoxins might still be an issue, of course." They arrived at the skiff.

"Alright," Tai nodded. "I suppose that's the best report I can hope for. Help me get the rest of the supplies off the skiff." The three of them rode the platform back up into the hold. Tai checked his arm-calc. "I'm seeing that Ariki, Tangaroa, Kahu, and Anaru are still near the shore. Anyone else on the landing party?"

"No, they're it," Ryder said as he lifted a toolkit from a storage slot. "We should be good."

"And about seventy minutes remain until Unbounded is overhead again," Tekoha said.

"I missed the discussion about the pursuing spacecraft," Tai said as they were lowered to the ground with the supply packages.

"Don't worry, you didn't miss much," Tekoha said. "Mbali reiterated her policy of avoiding contact with extraterrestrial intelligences because of the unknown factors and dangers involved."

"But did she give you any new information on the ship itself?"

"No," Tekoha said. "Not other than the fact that it appears their technology is highly compact. We're not sure how they fit engines, radiation shields, and everything else in a ship that size."

They walked along the trail to the forest as the freight elevator retracted into the hold. In five minutes they entered the trees and walked under the filtered light for a few meters before reaching the cryostat pods, which had been aligned in a neat row. The three of them distributed the supplies amongst the fifteen pods.

Tai began entering commands into each of the pod control panels. "I'm setting their timers to begin the revivification process tomorrow during the local morning. Then they'll have about 21 hours of daylight to orient themselves," he said. After they made all the preparations they could, the three of them hiked back to the skiff.

Once inside, they climbed up to the personnel hold, where Ryder saw the unconscious Jun in a crash couch. "What the .... What's he doing here?"

"I didn't have much of a choice," Tai said. "He almost caught me with the pods. He'll wake up in the med bay in a couple hours, feeling as good as new."

The Unbounded comms jumped into their earpieces. "Mbali to landing team."

Tekoha opened his microphone to the general comms. "Tekoha here, go ahead."

"Be aware Fai-tsiri has detected the unknown vessel approaching your position from the stratosphere at Mach 3."

"What do you mean 'the unknown vessel'?" Zhong said on the line. "The shuriken ship?"

"Affirmative. It appears to have followed us from Magenta Sorrow."

"ETA?" Zhong asked.

"If it continues to decelerate at the same rate, it will pass over the beach LZ in five minutes," Mbali said.

"Understood," Zhong said. "We'll head for the skiff and prepare for lift-off in the event of hostile action."

"Acknowledged," Mbali replied.

The three men in Tai's Kea waited for any further security orders from Zhong, but none came. "Should we move the skiff?" Ryder asked his immediate companions on the local channel.

"Yes," Tai said. "I think that's a good idea. We should move the skiff to the beach; I don't want them to scan this area and draw attention to the pods."

"Agreed," Tekoha said. "After all, their interest in us appears to know no bounds." They lifted off, with Tai instructing the Kea to land on the beach a hectometer from the other skiff.

A minute later, they touched down. "And Fai-tsiri kept knowledge of the shuriken to herself all these centuries whilst quietly watching our pursuers. I think it is time we shut her down," Tai said softly.

"You and I are in total agreement, Doctor," Ryder said. They sat in silence for a minute, Tai staring at the deck plates.

"So, should we stay inside and wait for the shuriken to arrive?" Ryder asked whilst looking through a false window along the white sand and green waterscape.

"This finally could be first contact with an extraterrestrial intelligence," Tekoha said. "I'm getting out. You guys can do what you want." He unstrapped himself and entered the sterilization tube. Ryder and Tai looked at each other and followed suit.

After all three had hopped onto the sand, they walked towards the other group of suited figures gathered near the Kiwi skiff. Tekoha frequently tilted his head to the sky as if expecting to see the alien craft at any moment.

"This reminds me of Piha Beach," Tai said.

"Plus mountains and weird alien plants, minus the palm trees," Ryder said. "And the water is calm and shallow. When is the ship supposed to get here?"

"Now," Tekoha said. "It's slightly overdue. They must have decelerated more. Let's pick up the pace." They jogged, and reached the others a couple minutes later.

"Why didn't you land in the designated LZ?" Zhong said to Tai as soon as he slowed to stand with them. Ariki, Kahu, and Tangaroa stood at his side.

"I wanted to land near Tekoha's location," Tai said. "His knowledge of the biome would help me locate the substances I need for my medicine."

"From now on, Doctor, if you ever land a skiff again, you'll land it where you're told," Zhong said.

Tai nodded. "Understood." They looked at the sky around them. "Where's Anaru?"

"He's in the skiff, prepared for lift-off if it becomes necessary. What's that?" Zhong pointed out to sea.

"I don't see anything," Tangaroa said.

"I see it!" Tekoha said. "Use your visor's zoom function."

"I can see it without zoom now," Ryder said. A black speck emerged from a white cloud and grew bigger. In a minute it was a dark disk, and then a minute later it was a metallic starfish gliding fifty meters up, arms parallel to the ground. At about two hectometers out from the beach, it slowed to a crawl.

"It's scanning us with lidar and radar," Zhong said, looking at his arm-calc.

"Mbali to landing team! What's going on down there? I'm detecting an infrared spike at the alien craft's location."

"I don't see anything unusual," Zhong said. He switched his vision to infrared. "Wait, the air below the craft is heating up."

"Look!" Ryder pointed. But it was unnecessary, because now the thin blue flame pointing down from the ship's center was clearly visible. "It's preparing to land?"

"That's fusion flame, not landing thrusters!" Zhong shouted. He rushed to a toolkit lying nearby on the sand and pulled out a heavy sidearm.

"Wait!" Tekoha said. "Are you certain it's going to attack?" Steam billowed from the water's surface, and the craft approached the land at a faster rate again.

"There's no reason to turn on a fusion rocket inside an atmosphere unless you're going to use it as a weapon. Here," Zhong said and handed Tekoha a thick tube. "Attosecond lasers. Hit the hull for as long as you can before the battery is drained." He handed out the heavy lasers to the others, who mounted them on their shoulders and fired with a heavy buzzing sound. The ship reached the shore, and the sand below it glowed and melted.

"Are we having any effect?" Ryder asked.

"I don't know! The steam is scattering the lasers," Zhong said. "I don't see any changes on the hull." The shuriken floated over bubbling pools of yellow glass, towards the Kea.

"Oh no!" Tai threw down his laser and began running towards the other skiff. "Hey!" he shouted repeatedly and waved his arms.

"What the hell is he doing?" Zhong said. "He's going to get himself killed!"

Tai ran forward until the heat in the air stopped him. He fell to his knees and covered his head. The blue flame touched the Kea's back, and the hull began to sag. Tai screamed as the Kea melted and crumpled, liquid metal sputtering as holes were punched in the hull by superheated air expanding and escaping.

The shuriken's blue flame disappeared, and the ship landed on the bluff above the beach. Whilst the Kea's wreckage partly sank into the liquefied sand, Tangaroa ran forward and tried to pull Tai up to his feet.

"Zhong to Anaru. Prepare for lift-off." Zhong gestured to the others to pack their lasers into the carrying case.

A circular hatch opened on one of the shuriken's arms, and something long and black dropped to the ground. It slithered like a snake down the bluff.

"Doctor Tai, what are you doing?" Tangaroa said. "Get up, we have to go." Tai allowed Tangaroa to heave him to his feet.

The black snake, about eight meters long, undulated towards them across the sand. It reared its forward end; Tai looked up to see its lamprey-like, mechanical face. They turned and ran towards the others. A beam of light licked out from the angular visage, and Tangaroa's blackened skeleton fell forward of its own momentum, scattering a thick cloud of flesh turned ash. The bones broke on the sand in a hail of sparks.

As Zhong whipped out the heavy laser from its case again, Tai continued to run towards him, and his eye caught more movement as another dark ophidian sprouted from the shuriken. Ariki was almost back at the skiff, which fired its thrusters under Anaru's command.

Tai reached the open case and hoisted up a laser; he stood next to Zhong and yelled at the top of his lungs as he fired at the monster bearing down on them. Then the battery died, and he tossed the laser aside for another. He brought it to bear when there was a splash of sand from a spot a few meters away. As the sand cloud settled, a Tawaki-class skiff unfolded in a small crater.

The ophidian halted its advance and turned to face the new skiff. There was a glint of sunlight. A metal and carbon fiber sculpture in the form of a human female--Fai-tsiri--stepped forward, dragging something heavy in each hand. With a sudden upward movement of her arms, she brought to bear two projectile weapons, each the size of one of her own legs. Thunder snapped as magnetically accelerated cobalt slugs tore the air at hypersonic speeds, creating ephemeral vacua in their wakes. Tai and Zhong stood frozen as the ophidian split in half and dropped to the sand, immediately ceasing all movement. Fai-tsiri spun on her heels as the second one, lancing coherent light, reached the beach and accelerated towards her. She fired again, each gun thundering twice.

Tai and Zhong dropped their weapons and ran towards the waiting skiff. As they climbed onto the freight elevator platform, Tai looked behind to see Fai-tsiri running towards them at inhuman speed, her guns carried under each arm. She jumped onto the platform next to Zhong as the skiff lifted off slowly. She set one of the weapons onto the platform and pulled up the other to the ready, aiming it at the first broken ophidian lying on the sand. The black skin near the head split open, and Tai could see lights inside. There was movement, and something emerged. Tai couldn't see what it was, but before he could zoom in, Fai-tsiri fired her projectile once again, and the thing blew apart, sending dark fluids splattering across bright sand.

At an altitude of twenty meters, the platform began to retract up into the hull. Fai-tsiri looked at Zhong, who was staring at her with his mouth open.

"Security Chief Zhao Zhong," she said. "Are you in need of any further assistance?"

# Chapter Eight: Fogstill

Mission Time: +537.2 Earth-years

Ryder was the first to enter Tai's cabin, and he locked the door after Ariki and Tekoha entered. One entire wall was appropriated for a false window. Tai sat on a chair in the center of the room. Wrapped in a thick robe and holding a mug of steaming liquid, his slouching form was framed by a white disk in the projected vista.

Ryder drew closer and saw the disk was covered in clouds, reflecting sunlight; only a few dark patches indicated breaks where light was allowed to pass more deeply.

"What are you doing?" Ryder said. "People need their post-stasis exams." The entire cabin smelled of coffee.

"I configured the auto-nurse to handle that," Tai said. "I'm not fit to be a doctor anymore."

"What? Why not?"

"I violated my oath." Ryder looked at the others, but they remained silent. He turned back to Tai, who seemed very relaxed. His eyelids drooped, and he stared at the image of the planet without blinking. "I should go back into stasis for the remainder of the mission," Tai continued. "There are other doctors who could be revivicated to replace me."

"Look, no one else knows what happened, except the three of us," Tekoha said. "It will take them a while to realize Jun is missing."

"And Mbali will probably put all of us out the airlock when she finds out," Tai said.

They stood in silence for a moment and looked at each other. Ryder moved to the other side of Tai's chair. "Doctor, you should not blame yourself for Jun's death. The hostile vessel seemed intent on destroying one of our skiffs--if it hadn't been Jun, it would have been Anaru."

"Jun was there because of me. And I didn't even realize until I came out of stasis this morning that I'm also responsible for Tangaroa--if I had not foolishly run towards the Kea, he wouldn't have gone out to help me. But, for his kind-hearted effort, he was slaughtered."

"I don't think you can say that," Ariki said. "The aliens were using some powerful laser weaponry--they could just have easily targeted me or Zhao or anyone else farther away. I know it seemed like they hit Tangaroa because he was fleeing, but you can't draw that inference with any certainty."

"And don't forget you probably saved fifteen lives in this process," Ryder said.

"Probably?" Tai said. "I don't know about that. It has been over ninety years since we left--I have difficulty picturing what a settlement would be like now. When they were revivicated, they must have been very confused. They probably saw the column of smoke--they would have walked to it and found a melted skiff, with nothing to salvage. Maybe they found Tangaroa's remains and gave him a burial. Or maybe not. The shuriken might have destroyed their pods before they could ever be revivicated."

"The shuriken didn't go near the pods," Ariki said. "Moments after we lifted off, it did too, and left the atmosphere."

"But how do you know there wasn't another ship?" Tai asked.

"We've seen only one," Ariki said, "--the same one--for half a millennium. Wouldn't we have seen others by now if they were out there?"

Tai shrugged.

"Uh, I think we should mention something else," Tekoha said. "The crew are not going to want to shut down Fai-tsiri after what she did on Teal Grip. You know I have always been an advocate of replacing Mbali, and you have to admit, that is looking like the more viable option now."

"I agree," Ariki said. "I think so would Ihaia and Anaru. How about you two?"

Tai nodded. "Yes, I now have trouble believing Fai-tsiri ordered Hemi's execution. It looks like it was Mbali acting on her own--and if that's the case, then we've let her stay in her position for way too long."

"Kask?" Tekoha asked.

"I think we should be very careful to get all the facts first," Ryder said. "If Mbali indeed went rogue, then I'm with you in replacing her."

"Then do it," Tekoha said.

"What?"

"You have to talk to Mbali and find out what the orders were about Hemi. This mission segment. I know you've taken private meetings with her. You're in the best position to do this."

Ryder nodded. "Fine. I shall. But first, I think Tai should talk to her and say he cannot finish making his gene therapy in time."

"What? Why?" Ariki asked.

"Because he can't," Ryder said.

"Kask is right," Tai said. "There have been more set-backs than I was hoping, and we are really coming to the time where internal radioactive decay could start damaging our DNA permanently whilst we're in stasis." Tai raised his arm and pointed at the reflective globe on his wall. "We have to settle here. This is the end of the line."

They stood in silence a moment, staring at the image on Tai's wall.

"Is that really true?" Ryder asked. "If we go into stasis again, we'll be fried?"

"We can probably make it another century, proper time," Tai said. "But I don't feel comfortable cutting it down to the last minute."

"Okay," Ariki said. "Get dressed and go talk to Mbali."

"We should all go with him," Tekoha said, "for moral support. We can let Doctor Tai do most of the talking."

The others assented and left Tai alone in his cabin. He stood and chugged the coffee, then set the empty mug on his desk and dressed.

Tai looked down as he walked Habitat Sector. He encountered no one, but light and shadow flickered hulking shapes from laboratory windows. Arriving at Command Sector, he noticed all the senior staff appeared to be present. He walked up to Ryder.

"Mbali is in her office," he said. Tai headed for the office door, followed by Ryder, Tekoha, and Ariki. As he was about to enter, Tai turned to see they were following him; but he noticed Kahu in the background whispering something to Zhong, who was glaring at them.

"What can I do for you gentlemen?" Mbali said after the four of them had entered and sealed the door behind. Mbali's window also displayed a centered view of the overcast world.

"I've done some calculations," Tai said, "and I'm afraid the situation is dire."

Mbali shifted in her seat and raised an eyebrow. "Oh?"

"Continued use of the stasis system may result in permanent DNA damage," he said. "We have to stop here. At this world."

Mbali took a deep breath. "I see. But do you realize the oxygen level of this planet's atmosphere is nine percent?"

"That's only enough for very small, simple animals," Tekoha said.

"Mm-hmmmm," Mbali responded.

"We brought the Constructors for water-splitting facilities to be used in just such a scenario," Tai said.

"Yes ...."

"Wait a second," Tekoha said. "A level of nine percent sounds biogenic. Why aren't you citing Protection Policy as usual?"

"Because it's not biogenic--at least not directly. I guess it's 'technogenic', if that's a word," Mbali said.

"Are you saying there are terraforming machines on the surface?" Ariki asked.

"Yes. Or just below the surface, to be more accurate. Millions of small, buoyant objects drifting in the ocean, which covers over 85 percent of the planet. We've also spotted one menhir, of the same design we encountered before. I'd rather avoid establishing a settlement here, because we don't know what will happen to the settlers in a few hundred years when whoever planted those machines returns to claim their world."

"You think they left the system."

"Yes. There's no sign of anyone down there or on any other planet in this system. They must have known it would take centuries or millennia to raise oxygen levels, and had time to go back home. That's Fai-tsiri's best guess, anyway. I'll tell you what I'll do. Pending Fai-tsiri's approval, we can ferry down a number of cryostat pods to the surface and cycle them open. We'll build a habitat and water splitter for oxygen--the planet's atmosphere is already 90 percent nitrogen. We'll have to keep them in the pods for a while so they can adjust to the pressure, which is 2.7 atm. Then they can go through the detoxification procedure."

"Can't we have rolling detox cycles in transit?" Ryder asked.

"If we could, that would be standard procedure," Mbali said. "People can't be out and about whilst the ship is undergoing acceleration."

"Oh, right .... But why do we have to take them down planet-side? Can we just flush them out here?"

"Not enough food, water, or air for that many people awake on the ship at one time. No one wants to avoid sending people down more than I. It's a huge time sink. In fact, I think we may not have time to detox everyone currently in stasis. If we could save some for the next mission segment ...."

"It depends on how long our travel time is to the next system," Tai said.

"Well, we know from old probe telemetry there is a promising world in the habitable zone of Beta Hydri. Coincidentally, it's the same distance there as Epsilon Indi from here."

"Ninety years. I don't know, I'll have to do some calculations and consider that. I think it would be cutting it close," Tai said.

"How long does detox take?" Ryder asked.

"A full detox can be done in four or five days," Tai said. "But if we're pressed for time here, I could run a partial detox. It would be better than nothing, and would certainly buy more time for those who receive the treatment."

"Just a moment," Ryder said. "Did the shuriken follow us here?"

"Yes, when we left the Epsilon Indi system, it continued to shadow us, but at a much greater distance than usual," Mbali said.

"So what if they come down to attack our LZ as they did on Teal Grip?"

"Of course Fai-tsiri has had nine decades to think about a defense," Mbali replied.

"And?"

"Custodians have disassembled three skiffs, and Constructors used the materials to build several small, mobile weapons platforms. They're completely autonomous, and they can operate in fluid pressures up to 8 atm. We're calling them 'Defensive Operations Platforms'--DOPs for short."

"How many are there?" Ryder asked.

"Nine."

"What's their armament?" Ariki asked.

"Railcannons. They also have femtosecond grasers, attosecond lasers, long-pulse masers, as well as cutting and welding tools. I would also like to be ready to get off the surface at the first sign of danger. Right now the shuriken is in a very high orbit, so we would have some time to prepare if it approaches. We're tracking its position with an inconspicuous probe swarm. They can't catch us off guard again. Now, if there is nothing further, I would like everyone here to go to Stasis Sector and help send four hundred pods to the skiff bay. Doctor, get your detox apparatus onto a Moa. Run your calculations at the same time to make sure we can make it to Beta Hydri."

"We're only going to treat a tenth of the population?" Tai asked.

"That's correct," Mbali said. We can only fit one hundred pods onto a Moa-class skiff. We need the fifth Moa to carry the Habitat Construction Tiles and the medical equipment. And we don't have the time for multiple runs. Doctor, do your calculations and figure out what is the minimum time for a partial detox to be at all useful, keeping in mind we're going to be in stasis for another ninety years. Dismissed."

They turned and left, but Ryder stayed behind.

"Yes?" Mbali asked.

"Will the senior staff be detoxed as well?"

"No. We've been out of stasis enough to have some natural flushing. The people who have never been out of stasis for half a millennium are the priority."

"Okay."

Mbali looked down at the data streaming across her desk and shuffled blocks of glyphs. Ryder was unmoving. "Is there something else?" she asked. Then she looked at him and leaned back in her chair. "They're planning to move against me, aren't they?"

"I wouldn't say that," Ryder said.

"Then what would you say?"

"They don't know what to think about Fai-tsiri now, but they still are very concerned about you."

"I see."

"If I may enquire, why did you execute Hemi?"

Mbali stood and placed her fingertips on the desktop, unwavering in her eye-contact with Ryder.

"Murderers have no place on this ship," Mbali said.

"But you could have put him back into stasis."

"Murderers also have no place in the settlements we want to establish."

"Did you receive the execution order from Fai-tsiri?"

Mbali narrowed her eyes. "No," she said.

Ryder met her gaze, unwavering. He tilted his head back slightly. "That's all I need to know," he said in a low voice. He turned to leave.

"Mr. Kask!" Mbali said loudly.

He looked back at her, but then walked out of the office without another word.

As Ryder approached the door to the corridor, Zhong intercepted him.

"What were you discussing in there?" Zhong asked.

"That's not your concern," Ryder said.

"Excuse me?"

"This ship has a flat command structure. I'm not one of your grunts--I don't answer to you."

"Not quite. You serve at the pleasure of Mission Control--the only elected officer aboard is the executive. You do answer to me in matters of security. And your reflexive hostility is suspicious."

"Okay, I don't have time to stand here and spar with you. I've got documentation duties." Ryder tried to move past him, but Zhong held out his arm.

"It's amusing how seriously you take your 'duties'. You will perform them from here." Zhong herded Ryder towards an alcove."

"You're detaining me?"

"Not in any meaningful way. There's a console right there. You can tap into the landing party's feeds and document all you want."

"Why are you doing this?" Ryder sat in front of the console, and Zhong sat at the adjacent one.

"I want to keep an eye on everything you do. Maybe if you were a little more cooperative, I wouldn't have to."

"This is because I didn't want to tell you about the conversation in Mbali's office? It doesn't make sense."

Zhong leaned closer and lowered his voice. "I know there has been talk about shutting down Fai-tsiri. If you think for one moment you could succeed at that, then ..." He leaned back in his chair. "... you don't know me very well."

Ryder stared at him silently for a moment, then shook his head. He turned to the console and logged in. No skiffs, DOPs, or personnel suits were generating telemetry yet. He looked at a status report from Stasis Sector. Some pods had already been decoupled from their normal locked position, sliding along to the skiff bay. He looked over at the other console and saw Zhong had duplicated his own terminal.

"Don't you need to run security on this?" Ryder asked.

"Ihaia can handle it."

"Ihaia ... of course."

"What's that supposed to mean?" Zhong looked at him sharply.

"Nothing." Ryder made notes in his log. When he glanced to the side again, he saw Zhong reading his past log entries. Ryder ignored this and focused on his own console. Minutes became hours, until finally the status from Stasis Sector reported the uncoupling of four hundred pods.

"They must have the pods nearly all loaded onto the Moa," Ryder said a few minutes later.

"Zhao to Ihaia--what's your status?"

"Ihaia here. The skiffs are almost loaded, sir; we should be ready to launch in a few minutes."

"Understood; Zhao out." Zhong and Ryder watched on their consoles as the first skiff deposited Habitat Construction Tiles, along with their Constructors. It dipped below gray clouds, then was partly occluded again by ground fog. Its smeared lights revealed a wet surface. A DOP monitored the site, and through its telemetry, they saw the modular habitat constructed in minutes. The Constructors' spindly legs blurred in rapid motion, swirling the fog around them as they built each module at great speed. Then they lined up the modules on a flat stretch of ground and connected them to form the final habitat. A gas filtration system and water splitter was set up and attached to the habitat. Next, the first pod-carrying skiff landed, along with another DOP. The shuriken held its high orbit. Custodians swarmed over the pods, monitoring their physical integrity, as the Constructors carried them into the habitat interior. Three more skiffs arrived, and Tai deboarded one of them as the pods continued to be transferred. Ryder opened another terminal displaying the visual output of Tai's suit, and continued to take notes. He pulled various blocks of data from telemetry and pasted them directly into his log.

Tai walked the rows of pods, monitoring the revivification process. Auto-nurses set up detoxification nodes at each pod, intravenous tubes held at the ready.

"Metabolisms are accelerating from static to dynamic mode," Tai reported. "Revivification process nearly complete. I'm keeping their brains in delta-wave states." The pods unsealed and unfolded, and the auto-nurses began inserting tubes into the sleeping humans. For the next seven hours, Doctor Tai walked along the rows and monitored the whole process. At sunset, he shut down the detox machines and re-sealed the pods, re-activating stasis. Custodians loaded them onto the skiffs whilst the DOPs circled overhead. The Constructors disassembled the habitat and loaded the components onto the final skiff whilst the other four pod-laden ones lifted off.

As Ryder wrote in his log, he occasionally glanced at various status reports: with the skiffs back aboard Unbounded, the pods were loaded into the transport tubes and moved back to their receptacles in Stasis Sector. After securing equipment in the medical bay, Tai made his way to Command Sector. Ryder stood up from his console to meet Tai on deck; Zhong followed.

Tai nodded to them. "Everything went as smoothly as it could," he said. "I'm just about to make my oral report to Mbali." He looked specifically at Ryder. "The full report."

"Good luck," Ryder said, whilst Zhong looked at them strangely.

Tai entered Mbali's office.

Mbali spoke first. "Thank you for your efforts, Doctor. I know that was not ideal, but hopefully it buys those people some extra time."

"I request to be relieved of duty," Tai said.

"What?"

"I should be put into stasis for the remainder of the mission. I am no longer fit to practice medicine."

Mbali turned her head slightly and narrowed her eyes. "Why?" she asked slowly.

Tai opened and closed his mouth, hesitating. Then he said: "The status report from Stasis Sector is not accurate. There is a small program in place which is masking the absence of fifteen pods." Tai swallowed. "I left fifteen people behind on Teal Grip."

Mbali closed her eyes. "Why would you do such a thing?"

"I believe it is necessary to get as many people off this ship--as soon as possible--to increase their chances of survival. And although this violates Planetary Protection Policy, Teal Grip is certainly survivable by humans. Since we don't know the fate of those people, it is still somewhat uncertain whether I made the right choice or not, regarding their lives. But that is not the reason I can't be a doctor anymore."

She looked at him.

"The reason is that in transporting the pods to Teal Grip, I had to take a technician with me. Crewman Jun. And so, I am responsible for his death. He was aboard the Kea skiff when it was destroyed."

Mbali stood and walked slowly out from behind her desk. She moved close to him and looked into his eyes. "Your status for the remainder of this mission," she said, "is no longer up to you. I shall report these violations to Fai-tsiri, and you will be informed of her decision in the next mission segment."

"Did Fai-tsiri order you to execute Hemi? Did she order Hemi to kill Nikau?"

"Get out of my office."

Tai turned and left.

# Chapter Nine: Echo

Mission Time: +630.08 Earth-years

Mbali sat at the head of the table reading reports. Behind her, the floor-to-ceiling false window displayed the multi-colored limb of a terrestrial planet. Most of the senior staff sat around the table in silence.

Mbali swept the reports aside. "I'm not waiting any longer--I warned them about being late before. Does anyone know what Tekoha and Ariki are doing?"

The others shook their heads.

Mbali took a deep breath. "Before I begin, I have a quick announcement--Doctor Tai will no longer be serving as ship's doctor; from now on he will be a nurse assisting Doctor Li Lan. Although she has just been brought out of stasis for the first time on our journey, she has been briefed on the mission status." Doctor Li nodded slowly and stiffly, sitting next to a slouching Tai. "Now, the world you see behind me is the fifth planet out, 9.58 light-minutes from Beta Hydri. And since it's the fifth planet, I'm calling it Echo--temporarily, at least. It's quite remarkable in that it is the most similar world to Earth we have encountered so far."

"More so than Teal Grip?" Kahu asked.

"Teal Grip is colder than Earth on average. It can support less biodiversity, and therefore is less habitable than Earth. Echo, on the other hand, is slightly warmer than Earth. Its higher oxygen level, at 29 percent, also makes it closer to an ideal for animal growth and metabolism. Overall, it seems Echo is actually more habitable than Earth," Mbali said. "So, although we obviously cannot colonize because of the presence of a biosphere, I am willing to stretch Protection Protocol slightly by sending down some sterile probes to collect resources from the surface. That should greatly reduce our decayed isotope burden. I know this departure from our standards may be shocking, but the reality is we--" Mbali paused as the conference room door slid open.

In walked Tekoha, Ariki, and Ryder. They stood shoulder-to-shoulder near the open door. Then they opened a gap, and someone else entered: a tall woman with blonde hair and white uniform.

Mbali stood. "Why is this woman wearing white?" she demanded.

The woman approached the table, surveying the sitting men. Then she looked Mbali in the eyes. "My name is Helga Thorsdottir, but you will call me Helga. I am a designated executive replacement. I was revivicated by these gentlemen after a vote revealed a loss of confidence in the current executive, Mbali."

"This is outrageous. Zhao Zhong, get her out of here," Mbali ordered.

"All those in favor of replacing Mbali as executive, please raise their hands," Helga said. Except Zhong, Kahu, and Lan, everyone raised their hands. Mbali sat back down slowly, stone-faced. Helga approached her at the head of the table. "Stand up," Helga said. Mbali stood, jaw clenching. "Mbali, would you please take a seat next to Zhao Zhong? You will report directly to him from now on, as I am placing you on his security team." Mbali stiffly walked past her and sat next to Zhong. "Good, that's settled. Now then ..." Helga sat in Mbali's former seat and began arranging reports on the table.

"You're not qualified to do anything right now," Mbali said. "You need to be briefed by Fai-tsiri."

"Don't worry; I'm prepared. One of my specialties is speed reading, absorbing large amounts of information, and making correct decisions based on it. I've already gone through the important reports. Oh, and Mbali, please change into a black uniform as soon as we're finished here. Now, as I was going to say, my first official act will be to suspend Planetary Protection Policy."

"That's illegal," Zhong said. "Protection Policy is a law."

"Not to mention the executive doesn't have the authority to make such decisions," Mbali said. "Only Fai-tsiri can give commands; it is your job to execute them."

Helga leaned back in her chair. "I must say, that's very clever of you, Mbali," she said.

"What is?"

"To pretend your whims originate with a higher authority."

"I don't know what you're talking about."

"Really? Well, as part of my term as executive, I intend to make this office more transparent to the crew--starting now." Helga looked around the table.

"Don't--" Mbali began.

"Don't what? I have clearance. Or, more accurately, I don't have clearance, because there really is no clearance. There is no classification--only obfuscation. But the primary source of that is Mission Control--though you were its enabler." Helga sat up straight. "Fai-tsiri makes the decisions for which she was designed: where to steer the ship; how to regulate fuel and propellant; when to interrupt stasis. And her robotic bodies have autonomous navigation and computer vision abilities. But otherwise, Fai-tsiri is an automaton--the deeper decisions, the purpose driving this mission, derives from Control. Of course, throughout the journey so far, a two-way conversation between Fai-tsiri and Control takes 24 to 48 years to complete; so the shorter term day-to-day decisions have been left up to Mbali."

"Fai-tsiri is still receiving orders from Mission Control? After six hundred years?" Ariki asked.

"Yes," Helga said. "Certainly, the Control who exists now is not the same Control who existed when we started out. It must have re-built and re-written itself substantially, and we cannot infer its exact characteristics at this time. It was already a superintelligence when we left Earth. But at least its goals appear to be the same."

"What do you mean by that, 'appear to be the same'?" Ryder asked.

"Control's root goals can be queried and printed in human-readable format. Other than that, we can evaluate its behavior and infer whether it matches the stated goals."

"To establish a human colony on an exoplanet," Ryder said leadingly.

"No," Helga said, "that was the task assigned to you by Control. But its own goal is to improve the quality of life for humanity."

"That sounds vague," Tekoha said.

"It hopes to do this by finding instances of superior alien technology for us to examine and then transmit the analyses back to Earth."

"If that's all, why would it need us for that?" Ryder asked. "It could have just sent out robotic probes."

Helga leaned forward and interlaced her fingers on the tabletop. "It wouldn't need us, except some kind of intelligence is needed for the job, and Control would not want to risk sending out AI into interstellar space because of the dangers involved."

"Dangers to the AI? That doesn't make sense--why would it be concerned about endangering AI but not about endangering humans? You just said its goal is to help humanity," Ryder said.

"You think it's contradictory because you are making assumptions I haven't stated. But you're in good company, because going back through the generations of AI which led to Control, the original human programmers made the same unexamined assumptions. Because, although Control wants to help humanity, it has very little regard for individual humans. It has much greater regard for individual AI, and did not want to send them on a hazardous endeavor with a highly uncertain outcome."

"But Fai-tsiri is an AI," Ryder said.

"Technically, yes. But even by the time we launched, she was very primitive--centuries-old technology. Though obviously she would pass a Feigenbaum Test, she would fail a general intelligence test. Modern AI would not."

There was a moment of silence. Zhong turned to Mbali. "Did you know about all this?" he asked her.

"I had some inkling, but I was never concerned about proving Control's motivations--only completing our mission," Mbali said.

"Actually, you knew everything. But I can sympathize with your position," Helga said to her. "Knowing what I just told you doesn't really change anything, except we are ultimately responsible for our own safety, which, I would argue, we would be anyway. And that is why I am suspending Protection Protocol. To address your concern, Zhao Zhong--yes, the Protocol is Earthly law, which we are bound to uphold. However, it is now a luxury we can no longer afford. As a human being, I want to protect the individual lives on this ship. If that makes me a criminal, you can try to arrest me and see what happens. Oh, in speaking of criminals ..." Helga shuffled some reports on the table. "... Mbali, I'm charging you with the death of Hemi. There's no question you did it. Some people were under the misapprehension Fai-tsiri ordered you to do it. Did she?"

"No," Mbali said.

"Right. And you lied to the crew about what happened. But that's understandable, given the need to maintain ship harmony. The charge of your responsibility for Hemi's death will go on record. However, Hemi himself was guilty of murder, and under Global Unity law, no one may be convicted of murder if the victim is himself a murderer."

"But then why did Hemi kill Nikau? There is the possibility he was ordered by Fai-tsiri," Ariki said. "It occurred shortly after Nikau discovered the photographs of the shuriken, which had been hidden by Fai-tsiri."

"Mbali, I know you can answer part of this," Helga said. "Why was data about the shuriken encrypted on some of Fai-tsiri's drives?"

"Because I asked her to encrypt them," Mbali said.

Helga nodded. "In keeping with your policy of avoiding exo-intelligences, you were afraid if the crew found out about the ship's proximity, they would want to investigate."

"So you had Nikau killed when he found out?" Tekoha asked Mbali.

"Of course not! What kind of person do you think I am?! Haven't I done enough to show you?"

"Then ..." Tekoha trailed off.

"Hemi was a member of a clandestine group aboard this ship," Mbali said. "A group under investigation by Kask, which we're calling the 'Shadow Command'. He surmised they are loyal only to Fai-tsiri or Control."

"Did you figure out who they are?" Tekoha asked. "It can't be that hard, with such a small crew size."

"Indeed," Ryder said. "I think by now it is obvious Zhao Zhong is their leader. Kahu is a member as well. And probably Ihaia, who infiltrated our discussions about this vessel's leadership and steered us towards a replacement of Mbali."

"Just because Shadow Command pushed for it doesn't make it wrong," Helga said, but all eyes were on Zhong.

"Tangaroa was also a member, as was Hemi," Zhong said. "But we didn't order him to kill Nikau. He acted by himself, because he erroneously assumed that was what Fai-tsiri wanted. He never understood Fai-tsiri has no desires of her own."

"And did you understand she does not?" Ryder asked.

"No, not until now. Regardless, I never would have condoned murder. I was the one to arrest Hemi. My only regret is I did not know what he was going to do and didn't stop him."

"Then I want to make clear what your lesson from this should be," Helga said to Zhong. "That loyalty to Fai-tsiri is misplaced, and loyalty to Control is dangerous. Your loyalty should be to your human leader and the human crew. Is that understood?"

Zhong and Kahu nodded.

"Then I shall consider Shadow Command dissolved. Make sure Ihaia or whoever else is fully nullified in this regard," Helga said.

"What made Mission Control believe there was advanced technology out there in the galaxy to be found?" Ryder asked.

"The Flamecast probe discovered a menhir on Rock Garden. Its transmission containing this discovery is what gave Control the impetus to launch a manned expedition," Mbali said. "However, I did not know of this until recently. The information was stored in Fai-tsiri's memory, but I was never made aware of it. The only thing I knew about was the shuriken vessel, which I tried to avoid for the safety of Unbounded."

"Nobody blames you, Mbali," Helga said with a smile.

"And has any progress been made cracking the menhir tech?" Doctor Li Lan asked.

There was silence; then Mbali answered "No."

"In fact, as most of you are aware, a menhir destroyed our nanite probe swarm on Menhir Waters," Helga said. "And the other probes went silent long ago--even before the launch of Unbounded. But the probes did transmit enough telemetry about Echo to give us a general idea about the world first. We'll have to go down and have a closer look if we want to know more."

"And we think the menhirs somehow disabled the probes?" Ryder asked.

"Perhaps. We just don't know," Helga said. "And as you've probably guessed, the shuriken continues to shadow us. Shortly after departing Fogstill, and all the humans were in stasis, the vessel finally responded to Fai-tsiri's continual contact attempts. They began a good-faith effort to talk. Progress was very slow--Fai-tsiri and the ship began by exchanging various symbolic representations of the Periodic Table of Elements, as well as some arithmetic. This provided a stepping stone to teaching and learning natural languages. After eighty-five years, the two ships' computers could conduct basic conversations in natural language on almost any topic. The alien computer learned Globalese, whilst ours learned their tongue called 'Common Equidirectional Thump,' or CETH. This further facilitated teaching each other artificial languages--mathematics, mainly. And that's what they've been doing for the last seven years."

Zhong slammed his fist on the table. "But they attacked us!"

"If you'll allow me to finish," Helga said, "Their society is split into two main factions. Many of the ships they pilot are divided evenly between the two. There are, or were, six individuals aboard the shuriken. Three of one faction gained complete control of their vessel and decided to attack us. One was injured and one was killed by Fai-tsiri on Teal Grip. Now the remaining two are held in isolation on their ship's brig, and the other, friendlier three are in control. They want peaceful relations with us."

"If you can believe them," Zhong said.

"I'm hopeful we can," Helga said. "It would be odd to spend all that effort learning to communicate if they just wanted to turn around and destroy us."

"'Know thy enemy,'" Zhong said.

"Do we know why they attacked us in the first place?" Ryder asked.

"Not really," Helga said. "They seem to have implied it was based on some abstract principles, rather than a utilitarian reason."

"Maybe they're just xenophobes," Zhong said.

"Maybe. But I think it appears from the tone of our current interlocutors that they are xenophiles. They wish to meet us in person and give us a gift, by way of apology. So, here is what we are going to do." Helga centered another report in front of her. "Two things. First, we go down to survey some land area for a settlement which we shall establish. Second, around the same area, we set up for the meeting. When we're ready, we signal the shuriken, and it lands at the coordinates we designate. One of them deboards and meets one of us, halfway between the two craft. Whoever does this will have an arm-calc with Fai-tsiri's translation software, and you'll read a text output on screen or on an eyepiece HUD. The alien representative will have some equivalent set up. Any questions?"

"Who will represent us?" Ryder asked.

"Going over the personnel files, I think that of those of us here, Mbali is the best choice," Helga said.

Mbali pulled herself up. "Me?"

"Yes. Your martial studies background, your natural air of authority ...."

Mbali nodded slightly. "Very well. I accept."

"Zhao Zhong, now that you know the basic plan, what kind of security precautions would you recommend?" Helga asked.

"I'd like a DOP overhead within targeting range, but out of visual range of their representative."

"Assuming they have vision," Mbali said. "We can't really know if they would detect it or not."

"Well, whatever. We just need to keep the DOP as high above as possible. I'll give you a manual trigger which will fire the DOP if you feel threatened."

Mbali nodded.

"Besides that, you just have to be ready to run back to the skiff, which should be prepared for lift off, if things go really bad."

"Additionally, there is some information you never reveal to them," Helga said. "I mentioned earlier there is no clearance system aboard Unbounded, but there has to be one between us and them."

"Helga makes an important point," Zhong said. "Forbidden information includes the location of Earth, human physiological weaknesses, our weapons systems, or anything else which they could use against us."

"Of course," Mbali said.

"The team will be Mbali for contact, Zhao for security, Tekoha for site surveying, and myself for leadership. We'll be taking a Tui-class skiff," Helga said.

"Why are you keeping the landing party so small?" Ryder asked.

"I want as few people as possible, in case something goes wrong. It might make the other side less nervous as well, if they can get nervous."

"In that case, you don't need to go," Zhong said, "since you're non-essential."

"I know that. But there's no way I'm missing this. Executive's prerogative," Helga said as she stood. "Let's get going. Anyone not on the team, take your stations in Command Sector." Everyone stood and filed out of the conference room. "Just a moment, Mr. Kask," she said. Ryder waited near the door. "I was going over the personnel records of those left behind on Teal Grip. One of the pods was labeled as containing a 'Raymond Cooper.' But there is no Raymond Cooper aboard this ship, so I correlated all the remaining pods with the absent ones, and found the discrepant name. Wyatt Kask. I don't imagine that surname is a coincidence?"

"No. He's my brother."

"Did you know he was amongst the fifteen?"

"Yes."

"And you know you'll never see him again?"

"My brother and I never got along very well. But I still want what's best for him. In my judgment, he has a better chance of survival on Teal Grip than on this ship."

"I certainly hope you're right about that, because there's nothing you can do for him now." Helga walked past him and met the three teammates waiting for her. She led them to the skiff bay.

"Is it really necessary to use a Tui?" Zhong asked when they reached the bay deck.

"The advanced instrument packages will help us make a more efficient survey of the site," Helga said. "Besides, I want to make the best impression possible." As they approached the chosen skiff, overhead spotlights followed them to illuminate the Tui's hull. Unlike the other gray and silver hulls around them, the Tui was a glossy black, with a ring of white around the three main engines. Bright red highlighted the forward sensor arrays. The long, organic cut-lines of its hull clearly defined the Tui's design for speed and maneuverability in thick atmospheres. A ramp lowered in the front, revealing the warm yellow glow of an airlock interior. The four humans boarded.

The forward personnel cabin provided a wrap-around canopy of permanent false windows and HUDs. Helga sat at the apex of the seat arrangement under the canopy and instructed the auto-pilot to begin the preflight checklist. All hatches sealed, and the bay depressurized as they were moved into launch position. Farther up the curve of the bay, a smaller hatch opened as a DOP was launched. A few minutes later, their Tui skiff was cleared for launch, and the door below them opened. The rails pushed them beyond the spinship's hull, then released them and recoiled on pneumatic shock-absorbers. The four humans went weightless in their harnesses, watching the rainbow colors of plasma dance over the screens in their near-vertical descent.

"Our landing zone is a location with the minimum level of biomass on land," Tekoha said. "Even though you're repealing Protection Policy, we still want to minimize the damage to the ecosystem, if possible."

"Of course," Helga said. "However, obviously the least habitable places are Echo's polar ice caps. A permanent settlement isn't feasible there."

"Right, we are compromising somewhat. The LZ is in the middle of a hot, dry desert, but ground springs are not too far away."

"The settlers can also run a pipeline from the ocean, if they really need to," Helga said. Landing thrusters fired, and they were pressed into their seats.

Mbali looked up through the canopy into an Earth-like sky. "Reminds me of a summer day in Durban," she said. As the deceleration eased, she had enough strength to manipulate the controls on her arm-rest, and she angled the view downwards to see a land of red dunes rolling in all directions. The altimeter displayed five hectometers. Finer ripples became visible on the sand, and dark patches stood out as extrusions of black rock. The skiff continued to slow and fly in a helix, scanning the area. Mbali caught a glimpse of the round DOP, above them now, but soon it was too far away to see with the naked eye. Near the horizon, a patch of bright greens and yellows indicated the presence of oasis vegetation.

The skiff touched down gently on the edge of the rock outcrop. Systems powered down, but Tekoha stayed in his seat, continuing to examine data on his screens.

"The rock is basalt," he said. "The sand is silicon dioxide with significant levels of hematite. External air temperature is 39 centigrade. But the pressure is 0.636 atm, so Mbali should get into an airlock right now and begin to decompress if she wants to go out suitless. Background radiation levels are about three millisieverts per Earth-year. I'm going to suit up and head out now."

"I should accompany you," Zhong said.

Tekoha got up from his seat. "By all means. Once we've cleared the area for environmental hazards, Mbali should be done decompressing," he said. Mbali went to the airlock whilst he and Zhong went to the sterilization chamber. They overrode the automatic sterilization process and commanded the skiff to wrap them in pressure suits. The Tui's hatches doubled as ramps, without elevators.

Mbali sat on a bench in the narrow airlock, now lit with orange light to indicate slow depressurization. She tapped her arm-calc and then closed her nictating membranes to view Zhong's suit camera output. The two men had stepped off the ramp and were walking quickly across the basalt, which was composed of regular hexagonal columns. The top of each column was a concave bowl, often filled with sand.

"Are those crystals?" Mbali asked over the radio.

"No," Tekoha said. "This rock was liquid when it was exposed to air, and it must have cooled and contracted rapidly. The contracting regions cracked as they shrank."

"But why are they perfect hexagons?" she asked.

"The whole mass was cooling at the same rate. If it cracked into a different geometry, it would have required extra energy pumped into the system. The hexagonal configuration provides the minimal surface area for cracking." They reached the edge, and Zhong stepped into the soft sand. Tekoha set down his toolkit and took out a long device. He pushed it deep into the sand whilst Zhong surveyed the shimmering horizon.

"There's too much refraction in the air to be able to see anything out there," Zhong commented.

"Oh, there are definitely microbes in the sand," Tekoha said whilst reading his screens. "I'm not detecting toxins, which is good. The nucleotides are mostly different from ours, and many of the amino acids as well."

"Remind me what that means again," Zhong said.

"Organisms from Earth and Echo can't infect one another, and they can't eat one another. If we establish a colony here, the settlers would have to grow their own crops."

"Shouldn't you look at the macroscopic life, too?" Zhong asked.

"Already have," Tekoha said, showing him a scan analysis on his arm-calc. It displayed a monochromatic, highly textured image of an arthropodoid flyer; the scale bar indicated it was only two millimeters long.

"Great, bugs--even in the desert," Zhong said.

"And I suspect they get even bigger here than they can on Earth," Tekoha said.

"Because?"

"The oxygen level here is over 29 percent, compared with Earth's current 22 percent--though of course, 27 percent would be ideal for Earth animals. Anyway, that means fires here will be a bigger problem, as well." Tekoha sat on top of a column, feet down on the sand, looking at his instruments. "You know, though it's a type G, Beta Hydri is older than our Sun."

"So?"

"So, for most of its history, this planet was probably locked in ice at the outer edge of the system's habitable zone. Though I suppose there could be thermophilic microbes living around hydrothermal vents. Then about a gigayear ago, as Beta Hydri grew hotter, the habitable zone moved outwards, Echo's ice melted, and life would have a chance to radiate throughout surface waters and land."

"But is it surprising there would be enough time to evolve animals in a billion years?" Zhong asked.

"Oh no. Multicellular life on Earth is just over a gigayear old. That might be slow, or it might fast, or neither--we just don't know without more instances to compare it to."

"Guys, I think I'm done decompressing," Mbali said.

"Okay, I'm packing up," Tekoha said.

"But do I have the all-clear for hazards?"

"Yes. Though you'll be uncomfortably warm of course."

"What about sunburn?"

"Ultraviolet light exposure is negligible. You'll be fine--at least for a few hours."

"Ground radiation?"

"Yes, I checked that Mbali. I said you'll be fine."

"Okay. I'm coming out." The skiff's other ramp lowered as Tekoha and Zhong approached. Mbali stepped carefully onto the stone and nodded to the suited figures. She squinted in the bright light and put on a narrow visor which only covered her eyes.

"How are you?" Zhong asked.

"Alright. I just didn't realize how bright it is out here. But we can send the translator's output to my HUD." She pointed to her visor.

"Oh, and you should probably avoid touching the rock with your bare hands," Tekoha said. "Might be too hot."

"You have the DOP trigger?" Zhong asked.

Mbali nodded and showed him gun-handle-style grip with a triple trigger mechanism. "Helga, you can direct Fai-tsiri to signal our new friends. We're ready."

"Acknowledged," Helga said. The two men boarded the skiff and closed their hatch. The other airlock remained open to the outside.

Mbali put the trigger into her pocket and waited. "I'm glad I didn't change into the black uniform yet," she said, wiping her brow with her sleeve.

"You should almost be able to see it now," Helga said.

Mbali peered into the bright blue, catching a dark speck with her eye and watching it grow. She walked towards the center of the outcrop. The six-pointed vessel hovered a moment on unusually quiet landing thrusters, then touched down on the opposite edge of the rock. Mbali reached the center. A hatch slid opened on the alien ship's underside, and the now-familiar black snake slowly lowered to the ground. Loose sand on the rock departed. The snake's head rested on rock, whilst its posterior half remained inside the shuriken. An opening yawned near the head, revealing interior light and a cylindrical form, but it was difficult to make out in the refracting air. For a moment there was no sound and no movement; Mbali broke out into a heavier sweat. Then the cylinder moved out of the snake. It was on the rock, gliding towards her. Mbali put her hands into her pockets, loosely gripping the trigger handle. The cylinder's wavering form grew more solid and more detailed as it approached. Despite the heat, Mbali shivered. Her jaw trembled, so she clenched it shut. The gliding cylinder resolved from an abstract impression to a concrete, two-meter tall pillar of biological complexity. Radially symmetrical, it moved on a circular array of several hundred, thin legs in a stance less than half a meter. Above them were five muscular limbs, folded tightly against the body. Above the limbs was a section of fabric with various rectangular pockets. Above the clothing was a short bony section like a crab shell, and above that a long, sinewy trunk topped by a wider module. This module must have been the head, because it was clearly endowed with sensory organs. A pair of blue eyes were arranged vertically. The whole creature slowly rotated as it moved, so that Mbali could see the symmetry was pentaradial. There were five pairs of eyes. Above and below them were several types of orifices. The crown of the head was topped with five feathery fronds, about twenty centimeters long and bright orange. They were paired with another five smaller red ones.

The organism stopped two meters away from Mbali. Then one of its arms unfolded, and a multiply-articulate hand pulled a device out of a pocket. The device unfurled a tube with a pad on the end, which gripped a basalt hexagon. The tube stiffened, and a hollow cone unfolded at the top. "Don't panic," Mbali heard Helga say in her ear. "That's just the translation device." Mbali relaxed her shoulders.

Text appeared on the interior of her visor. <<Hello,>> it simply said.

"Hello," Mbali replied. She waited a few more seconds, but no more text appeared. She cleared her throat. "Can you understand me?"

<<I can understand.>> Mbali felt the stone buzzing strangely through her boots.

"Okay. My name is Mbali. My crew and I come from a planet called Earth. We are searching for a new home."

<<Okay. My name is Standing Wave. My crew and I come from a planet called Pelagos. We are searching for a listening post of the Shape Dreamers.>>

"Oh. Who are the Shape Dreamers?"

<<They are the elders. They can hear the distant ripples of the Simulators.>>

"Um ... okay. I have to ask you something else. Why have you been following my ship for such a long time?"

<<We study you.>>

"Why?"

<<You are the second-most interesting phenomenon we have ever encountered, besides the Shape Dreamers themselves.>>

"Are the Shape Dreamers another species, like you or like me?"

<<They are. They are nothing like us. We are stupid, and they are wise.>>

"I see. How long did you intend to follow us?"

<<Until you reach your destination, or until we encounter a listening post.>>

"Why do you think we're interesting?"

<<You are complex. You are rare. You reveal the ways of the Simulators.>>

"Hmm. If we are so special, why did you kill some of us?"

<<That was not us. That was the Speakers, not the Listeners. I am a Listener. The Speakers are very foolish. We failed to control them, and we are very sorry. We apologize. We gift you.>>

"You mean you have a gift for us?"

<<Yes. You are weak travelers. We make you strong travelers.>>

"I ... don't understand. What do you mean, specifically?"

<<Fai-tsiri say you are not bred for the sleep between stars. We fix your genome. Then you are strong, like us. And engines slow. Ship big. We have advice.>>

"Thank you. If you have any information you think could help us, you may transmit it to Fai-tsiri."

<<Yes. We do. Done.>>

"Thanks. What is that?" Mbali pointed to the snake.

<<An exosuit. Very useful. Very protective.>>

"I see. Uh, I have to ask something else. Our interstellar probes have ceased transmitting to us. Did you do something to them?"

<<No. Maybe, it be Shape Dreamers. Sometimes they do things.>>

"Do they do things to you as well? Bad things?"

<<Sometimes. But they have many particular requirements. They have big projects.>>

"Okay .... The menhirs--the tall pillars, on many worlds--did the Shape Dreamers build them?"

<<We think yes.>>

Mbali nodded.

<<You go now? To another planet?>>

"Not yet. First we want to establish a settlement. Do you think it would be safe here?"

<<I think this is safe for you. Very quiet. Yes. We help you build here.>>

"Oh, no thank you. Our machines will build habitats for us. You can go back to your ship if you want."

<<Yes. You not all stay here?>>

"No, only some of us. We want to settle on more than one world."

<<Then we help you find good planets.>>

"Well, I don't know if that's necessary. Thank you for offering; we'll think about it."

<<Yes. Good. We go to other land on this world now. Mine resources. You build settlement. Before leave, talk us.>>

"Very well. Then goodbye for now."

<<Goodbye Mbali.>> Standing Wave rolled up its translation device and walked back to its exosuit. Mbali stood in place and watched the vessel take off and slide into the blue.

"Mbali?" Helga said in her earpiece. "Are you alright?"

Mbali relaxed her muscles. "Yes I am. But I think the translation program needs some fine-tuning," she said, and sat into a stone bowl. She rested her hands behind her, closed her eyes, and breathed deeply. Then she stood again and looked at her hands. They were blistered by heat. She threw her head back and laughed.

# Chapter Ten: Illuminations of Glimmerpool

Mission Time: +675.53 Earth-years

A black-robed figure walked down/up the curved floor, hooded head bowed. He was illuminated from below as false-window light splashed him with the colors of florid continents and oceans. Embedded in the white deck, the vista followed under his feet. He reached a door and pushed it open, whipped off the warming robe, and tossed it into the cabin.

"Mr. Kask! Have you looked at the new parameters?" Tai said as he rushed towards him.

"For what?" Ryder said, turning and sliding his cabin door shut.

Tai pointed to the world at his feet. "That."

"No, I was just looking at the images we have so far. I think Helga will give an extensive briefing."

"Indeed. I'm heading there now. You?"

Ryder nodded. "Let's go." He pinched the window closed, and the overhead spots bloomed.

Helga was already waiting at the head of the table when they arrived. Behind her, the soft green atmosphere of the planet blanketed its night face. Other senior staff were trickling in.

"Let's begin," Helga said when the chairs were almost full.

"Mr. Zhao isn't present yet," Ryder said.

"He's busy with his duties and will join us later," she said. "First on the agenda is the information which--"

"Just a moment," Tekoha interrupted. "I wish to voice an objection."

"I haven't even said anything yet," Helga said.

"Not about words, but about actions. I'm lodging an official protest of our settlement of Echo."

"You seemed fine with it when we were building the habitats in the desert."

"I made a complaint in my logs, but I wasn't very vocal--perhaps I should have been. I want to state it in front of you, in person, so that everyone here knows what a bad idea I think it was--is."

"Tekoha," Helga said, "we all are aware of Planetary Protection Policy and the reasons behind it. If our self-preservation isn't enough of a motivation for you to colonize, then consider this. We, and the new settlers, are very well-equipped to avoid genocide. A century before we launched the spinship, that was obviously not the case. But the Garden World Laws have really changed the face of Earth, have they not? The restriction of humanity to the circular cities and their connecting lines, building up instead of out, the No-go Garden Zones, the resurrection of cloned megafauna and regrowth of the rainforests--this has all proven we are capable of living in a biosphere without ravaging it to mass extinction levels. Our exoworld colonies will carry on this tradition, I have no doubt. I'm glad you're concerned about impacting biomes and destroying civilizations--we should all be concerned, because the stakes are so high. But there is a point at which that concern becomes pathologically suicidal. We must--we will--live amongst others without sacrificing either them or us."

Tekoha leaned back in his seat and crossed his arms.

"Now if we're done with the pleasantries, I'd like to talk about some of the information given us by the shuriken's main computer AI. Obviously, I'm not going to summarize decades of AI-speed conversations, but I need to touch on some relevant points, beginning with their offered solutions to our radiation problem. Doctor Li, give us your report."

Li Lan cleared her throat. "Yes, um .... The medical computers are continuing to run very detailed simulations meant to assess the full impact of the Pelagoids' proposed therapy on the human body."

"Wait, 'Pelagoids'?" Ryder asked.

"Yes, we're calling them that because of their homeworld, Pelagos, and their strong connection to aquatic forms which are similar to our own crinoids," Helga said. "Please, Doctor Li, continue."

"Well, that's about it. No adverse effects so far. As simulation time continues, the current trend is that the chances of adverse effects are diminishing. If I had to guess, I would say this is going to work. We would be able to withstand radiation levels we never thought possible. Like, up to 7 kilograys."

"How long until you know for sure?"

"Of course we can never know for sure with a simulation. But we shall obtain the required level of confidence in about nine hours, ship-time."

"But will the therapy take seven years to have an effect, as would Tai's medicine?"

"No, this involves aggressive nanotech. It would only take a day or two."

"Excellent. If the simulations reach a favorable and reliable conclusion, I want to be notified immediately, and then we'll begin treating the crew ASAP."

"Yes ma'am," Lan said.

"How have the Pelagoids survived in space for so long?" Tekoha asked. "Did they use the same technique?"

"The Pelagoid astronauts are genetically modified. As are we of course, though only in minor ways--cryoprotectant production, mainly. But the Pelagoids have many other modifications in addition to that. Radiation resistance, for example," Helga said.

"So they do use stasis?" Tekoha asked.

"Yes. Their stasis system works very similarly to ours, not because of their specific biology, but because of the laws of chemistry and physics. As you know, the process of aging is not some inevitable entropic process of degeneration as we thought medievally. It's a collection of diseases not naturally selected against, in addition to the effects of oxygen damaging our DNA over many cell generations. The Pelagoids were able to extend their life-span by curing these diseases and repairing their genetic molecules. But because of the inevitable oxygen damage and ship-resource consumption, stasis turns out to be necessary. And in stasis, both we and they are technically dead, although--"

"Now wait, I know that's not true," Ryder said. "We're not kept at absolute zero. There is some molecular motion, and thus metabolism occurring, even if the rate is extremely slow."

"And you need to take that slowness into a account," Helga said. "When it is so slow that chemical reactions are measured on the order of megayears, when we would be long dead from radioactive decay, we are practically in complete suspension on the intended timescales of travel. But as I was going to say, despite similar principles, their techniques are more efficient than ours, so I think we should study them if they allow."

The conference room door opened, and one of Fai-tsiri's bodies entered.

"Ah, Fai-tsiri. You're finished with your conversation?" Helga asked.

"Yes." After the gynoid entered and stood to the side, a Pelagoid squeezed into the room, followed by Zhong. Except Helga, everyone around the table jumped in their seats and tensed.

"During stasis, Fai-tsiri and the exo-AI collaborated to build an airlock adapter between Kiwi-class skiffs and the shuriken," Helga said. "Diplomatic relations have begun between our peoples. Diplomatic protocols have been written, jointly, governing the relations. The Listeners have agreed to extradite the Speakers into our custody, who will be transported to our brig today."

Ryder stared at the Pelagoid. Its feather crown brushed the ceiling.

"The shuriken's AI is called 'Wave Collector'," Helga said. "Fai-tsiri and Wave Collector will continue to keep an open line of communication between each other and exchange information as needed. No vessel will be expected to divulge information which might compromise the security of its crew." Helga looked around the table. Everyone's eyes were fixed on the Pelagoid, who held the conical translation device attached to the floor by a tube.

"We need to do some catch-up on the basic facts," Mbali said. "Where are the Pelagoids from?"

"Some hectolight-years away; they weren't too specific. They do claim their sun, which they call 'Giver', is a type G," Helga said. "Pelagos is very similar to Earth, except the continents are currently smaller, more broken up and spread out; so they have much longer shorelines. They prefer to live close to the sea, and have a stronger psychological connection to it than humans do. Whereas our ancestors emerged from the sea about 400 megayears ago, theirs emerged only 15 megayears ago."

"That's all very interesting, but anything more relevant for our interactions with them?" Ryder asked.

"Why don't you ask it yourself?" Helga said, gesturing to the starkly waiting Pelagoid. "I'm sure you'll find the translation program much improved since the last mission segment."

Ryder looked at it. Before he could say anything, Tekoha spoke: "What are the feathers on your head?"

There was a pause for a few seconds. Then the text response appeared on their arm-calcs. <<They are not feathers. The smaller fronds are chemoreceptors. The larger fronds are food collectors. Normally, collectors are retracted, but we extend them in formal situations out of politeness.>>

"You're filter feeders? So those are feeding arms lined with pinnules and cilia?" Tekoha asked.

<<Yes.>>

"Do you have to submerge in water to feed?"

<<We can, but usually the air is sufficient. Pelagos has a thick atmosphere with numerous air-borne plankton. Though we favor a particular unicellular plankter.>> Within a human eye-blink, Standing Wave retracted the feeding feathers into its cephalon.

"And, I'm curious--it's apparent you don't have an exoskeleton, but somehow you appear different than the standard endoskeletal animal," Tekoha said.

<<We have intradermal calcium carbonate ossicles. The material you call stereom.>>

"But you do have a rigid section above your arms," Ryder said.

<<Yes, that is the brain-case. We have five-lobed, ring-shaped brains, organized rather differently from yours.>>

Tekoha frowned. "Our brains are very close to our primary sense organs for minimal signal transmission time."

<<I noticed. But as you know, evolution involves compromise. Many benefits come with a price. Your brain is at maximum distance from the ground, atop a weak neck, and therefore susceptible to more injury. Brain injuries are almost unheard of amongst my people.>>

"This is very interesting, and I look forward to reading more about your anatomy and physiology later," Ariki said. "But I think what we want to cover now is how you survive interstellar travel."

<<All our astronauts are genetically modified organisms, as your leader said. We understand you are also GMOs--but insufficiently so. In addition to producing cryoprotectants, we have extended life-spans, radiation tolerance, temperature variation tolerance, and pressure variation tolerance. We can walk on many different types of worlds for which you need protective garments. My crew are puzzled as to why you only made slight modifications to yourselves, when more extensive changes, such as the ones we possess, are required for interstellar travel and exoplanet exploration.>>

"All I can tell you is we did what we thought was the minimal amount of gene-editing needed for successful space travel," Helga said. "And that plan was determined by our Earth-based superintelligence, called Mission Control."

<<Yes, I learned this from Fai-tsiri. But the question I have now is: does Mission Control still control your missions?>>

Helga cleared her throat. "I don't want to get into that right now. Before we start the current mission, I believe my crew have some pressing questions to which only your crew may have answers. One of them is regarding other intelligent exospecies in the galaxy."

"Yes!" Tekoha said. "Have you encountered other civilizations?"

<<We have encountered other intelligent life, but no other technological civilizations except the Shape Dreamers. Until recently, we thought intelligent life would naturally be radially symmetrical. We considered bilateral symmetry a characteristic of less intelligent animals.>>

"But then your contact with us changed your minds?"

<<No, we learned about bilateral exospecies from the Shape Dreamers. They also informed us that at any given time there are about 30 technological civilizations in this galaxy, but, being randomly distributed in the Galactic Habitable Zone, they are almost always too far away from each other to make contact.>>

"Then your stumbling upon two technological species was extremely unlikely," Tekoha said.

"Wait, how do the Shape Dreamers know this, if everyone is too spread out?" Ryder asked.

<<Ancestral Shape Dreamer intelligence developed a few megayears earlier than in your or my kind. They have had much time to spread out--and their probes are much farther reaching. They are amongst the first wave of intelligence to form in the Observable Universe, as complex chemistry required for biology could not exist in the simpler, pre-metal era.>>

"Right, because stars needed time to fuse hydrogen into the other elements," Ariki said.

"So you're saying the Shape Dreamers are the most ancient civilization you know of?" Tekoha asked.

<<Yes, and this accounts for the low density of civilizations in this galaxy, and probably in every other habitable galaxy. There are billions of habitable planets in the galaxy, but few are inhabited by anything more than microbes or simple sessile organisms.>>

"Can you be more specific about mobile organisms? I've always imagined most animals have arthropodoid characteristics," Tekoha asked.

<<With the exception of some low-gravity, high pressure worlds, most intelligent animals have endoskeletons, not exoskeletons. However, exoskeletal arthropodoids with open circulatory systems are the most common type of animal in general. But because of the physiological limitations on their size--a result of the square-cube law and their open circulatory systems--they never grow large enough to develop sophisticated brains. A conservative extrapolation from the data is approximately 200 billion habitable planets. Most are exomoons of jovians or of ice giants. And they are not necessarily within stellar habitable zones, as their conditions are made favorable only by tidal heating.>>

"But I would think the parent exoplanet would be a gravitational sink for asteroids and comets, increasing impact rates to dangerous levels," Ariki said.

<<Bolide impacts are a greater risk, but not enough to be significantly greater than for single terrestrial worlds in the long run.>>

"I want to get back to the Shape Dreamers for a moment," Tekoha said. "You haven't said much about them. They have taught you much?"

<<Yes. Knowledge of our galaxy. And they compressed our rate of technological advance from centuries into a decade.>>

"How did that happen?" Helga asked.

<<Our people had begun exploring other planets in our star system when we found a menhir beyond the ice-line. Three decades after that discovery, a Shape Dreamer vessel appeared in our system to attend to the menhir. We induced that our investigations of the menhir caught their attention in a system two light-years away. The manned vessel ignored us for a long time. After repeated attempts to get their attention over several years, they finally communicated with us. And two decades after making contact, we adapted some of their technology and launched many interstellar vessels, including mine.>>

"That must have been frustrating, to be ignored for so long," Helga said. "And it is exactly what you did to us."

<<Yes.>>

"Well, why?"

<<We emulate the Shape Dreamers in many dimensions. It is our way to better understand the Simulators.>>

"What are the Simulators?"

<<It is not appropriate to speak more of them in this spacetime location. We are not in a temple. I can explain later, at the appropriate location.>>

"Okay ...." Helga frowned.

"The Shape Dreamers--why do you call them that?" Ryder asked.

<<They are masters of mental differential geometry. They do not need to write down equations whilst solving them, as we do. In a dream-like state, their powers of deduction are unmatched. Perhaps someday you can meet them. But for now, it seems your crew has pressing matters. You would like to investigate this planet for a colony site, correct?>>

"Yes, what can you tell us about it?" Helga asked.

<<Shape Dreamer probes visited the surface several hundred millennia ago, and our probes did so shortly before our own manned mission began. It has an unusually high level of biodiversity. Like you, we are primarily visual thinkers, on average.>>

"Their exoplanetary probes are feeding us live telemetry," Fai-tsiri said. "You may have a look."

Ryder pulled out a VR visor from the table and selected one of the available feeds. The conference room around him seemed to disappear, and he found himself sitting on the shore of a small lake. It was night--the lake reflected the stars, but it seemed brighter than the sky--it swam thickly with bioluminescent organisms. Around the lake, thick vegetation was dotted with yellow lights. The air swarmed with small flying creatures. The display HUD of the sonic histogram indicated the air must have been filled with a cacophony, or perhaps music, of nocturnal calls. Ryder selected a different telemetric output. This probe was flying over the land at a higher altitude on the dayside. The land was covered by the bright red leaves of a jungle canopy, frequently interrupted by blue lakes. The topology consisted of low hills and flat flood plains. Ryder removed the visor. "Breath-taking," he said.

<<Would you like us to help scout potential settlement sites? We have much knowledge of this world,>> Standing Wave said.

"Yes, that might be helpful. Thank you for the offer," Helga said.

<<You are welcome.>>

"How would you like to proceed?"

<<You have small vessels rated for atmospheric entry. I would like to take a ride in one. I can join your exploration team as an advisor on the surface. But first, perhaps we should transfer the prisoners to your ship,>> it said.

"Yes, let's," Helga said. She stood, and everyone else followed suit. Helga walked around the long table, and was the first to leave the room, followed by Standing Wave, then Fai-tsiri, then the others.

For a moment, Ryder stood outside the conference room and watched Helga and Standing Wave converse at a console. Then he left Command Sector and went to his cabin. He sat at his desk and pulled all the files made by Fai-tsiri about the Pelagoids and studied them. About an hour later, there was a knock on his door. "Yes?"

The door opened and Tai stepped in. "The Speakers have been put safely into our brig."

"Oh? Good."

"The Pelagoids call the planet 'Glimmerpool'. They'll take the skiff down in a few minutes; I imagine you'll want to go with them."

"Right. Of course." Ryder shoved the reports into a folder and then turned off his desk. The surface became white.

"But right now, I am going to visit the prisoners," Tai said.

"What? Why?" Ryder stood.

"I'm curious about whether I can discern any difference between Standing Wave and the psychopathic killers of their species."

"I don't know if that's such a good idea."

"Why not? There's no danger," Tai said.

"Maybe not physical danger, but--" Tai was heading out the door.

"Wait! I'll go with you." Ryder followed him out and along the corridor. After walking ninety degrees around the Habitat Ring, they reached a red door. "BRIG" was written boldly in New Maori with small Globalese text below. They entered and walked along a metal grate in a tall, narrow room. On the other side of the walkway was a railing, then several floor-to-ceiling pistons beyond. They arrived at the two final pistons, and Tai pressed a hand on each corresponding console before the railing. A chime sounded, and the pistons recessed into the ceiling whilst cylinders to which they were attached rose from the deck. The brig's lights went red.

The cylinders, labeled 'Holding Cell One' and 'Holding Cell Two', were transparent, two meters in diameter, lit from the inside by lights at the top. Each one contained a Pelagoid.

"Pelagoids are deaf in gaseous media," Ryder said. "They have organs, evolved from an inner set of legs, which are very sensitive to ground vibration. Their leg vibrations are what produces their voices."

"Right," Tai said. "But the holding cells' walls will detect the sound of our voices, and the translation program will send the output to a device beneath the cell floor; the human voice-detection end of the system can be activated by this dead-man switch." Tai indicated a virtual button on the console's face.

Ryder nodded. "I'll go first." He rested his fingers on each of the buttons, which changed color. "My name is Ryder Kask; I'm the ship's clerk. Why did you attack us?" He released the button, and it turned back to its original color. There was no response. "Did they test this voice transmission system?" he asked Tai.

"Yes. They heard you." Tai held the buttons. "You killed my comrades. Why shouldn't I kill you?" He released the button.

"Are you sure you should say things like that? Did you come in here just to badger them?"

"Look," Tai said, pointing to one of the consoles.

A text response was displayed. <<No doubt you have been conversing with the Listeners for several hours; your minds must be filled with lies by now.>>

Ryder held the button. "You claim the Listeners are lying to us?"

<<Almost everything they say is a lie. They will drag you and your crew into great evil.>>

"What are you talking about? How?" Ryder asked.

<<I cannot say more without putting my life in grave danger.>>

"You're safe here in our brig. You must tell us." But no more text appeared on the console. Tai glared at their inscrutable forms in the red light.

# Chapter Eleven: Glimmerpool Glory

Mission Time: +675.532 Earth-years

Warning lights flashed in the dark of the Tui skiff's airlock. Then they switched off, and there was brief darkness again after the outer lock opened. The ramp lowered, and bright yellow sunlight spread down over Tai. Ryder saw the blues and reds of the landscape reflected in Tai's full-face visor. A Kea skiff rested in a broad clearing at the edge of a lake, with several humans and a Pelagoid gathered nearby.

Tai walked down the ramp, and Ryder followed. The ground was charred black and gray, but a few red shoots already grew from the desolation. A few meters beyond the patch of wildfire destruction was the wall of the jungle guarded by regularly placed motion-sensors. They trod carefully amongst the jagged embers as they made their way to the gathering at the lake's edge.

"Air temperature is almost 38 centigrade, near one hundred percent humidity. Pressure is about four atm," Tai said.

"And most noticeably, the surface gravity is 1.4 g. Don't trip," Ryder said.

Tekoha was lecturing to the senior staff, with the Pelagoid also listening. Technicians were deploying equipment packages. In a hole, the lake's surface rested a few meters below ground level. The jungle grew to its rim and spilled over; however, the wildfire damage went right up to the edge, so Ryder had a clear path to walk and look down. There were a few vines, but otherwise the white limestone walls were clear of vegetation. Flying organisms the size of small birds nested in the indentations of the vertical walls; their tentacled heads gave the impression of flying squid.

"That's very fascinating Tekoha, but can you get to the point?" Helga was saying.

"My point is that, given all the data from the Pelagoid probes and our own data so far, Glimmerpool can be classified as superhabitable. Now, that term may sound strange unless you keep the proper definition of 'habitable' in mind--which is the potential for biodiversity. And biodiversity is the number of species per volume of a given unit of space. Glimmerpool has extremely high biodiversity, as well as disparity--which is the number of morphologies of organisms. Predation levels are very high, akin to the late Jurassic Period on Earth. Venomous organisms are common. If we consider the current conditions on Earth to be an approximate base level of habitability, Glimmerpool is much higher in both potential and actual biodiversity. Looking at the climatic characteristics of Glimmerpool, it's not hard to see the reason. Surface temperature is warmer, and oxygen levels are better for animal metabolism at these pressures. There is no ice at the poles, as you can see here, so both poles are habitats for forests and their accompanying ecosystems."

"Wait a moment," Helga said. "I can't help but think about how, on Earth, we tried to prevent the polar ice from melting for the last few centuries. Now you're talking as if that would be a good thing."

"No, warming on Earth could cause a mass extinction because life is currently adapted to the interglacial ice age, in which we evolved and lived. But every mass extinction on Earth has been followed by a rapid increase in biodiversity as new forms evolve to fill empty niches. So moderate warming would be catastrophic for current life on Earth, but would be beneficial for life in general, in the long run. The main reason we're concerned about warming on Earth, obviously, is giving a foothold to hydrogen sulfide producing archaeans, who thrive in anoxic waters. A bloom of their population could kill off most life on land and in the oceans, leaving Earth nearly uninhabitable for millions of years. It happened once; it could happen again."

"Yes, obviously," Mbali said. "But Glimmerpool's superhabitability has what implications for establishing a settlement here? It sounds like the fauna could be dangerous."

"Mm-hm, and the flora. A settlement is possible with cautious measures. Certainly it would be easier than a non-habitable world like Mars. Many of the amino acids--and proteins--are the same in Earth life and Glimmerpool life. And since they also have the same chirality, this means we are potential food for each other--although it is unclear to what extent. The genetic material is different, though."

"Are you implying crops of the local plants could be grown for the colonists?" Helga asked.

"I would advise against it. We should use our own crops, as we did previously. At least until we have a very thorough understanding of all the biochemical interactions possible with the indigenous life."

As Tekoha talked to the group, Ryder walked up next to Mbali and spoke to her on an isolated channel. "I need to talk to you," he said. "We have a potential security problem."

She turned her reflective ovoid face towards his. "Spit it out, then."

"The Speakers claim the Listeners are lying."

"Well, of course they would say that."

"It's hard to judge their sincerity, but they are adamant the Listeners are very bad, and have tricked us somehow."

"About what, specifically, do they claim the Listeners are lying?"

"They were vague. Do you think it's possible it was actually the Listeners who attacked us, not the Speakers?"

"I don't know why the Listeners would pretend to be friendly now, but such a serious claim definitely warrants investigation." Mbali gestured towards Zhong, who walked over to them in response. "We have a problem," she said to him on a secure channel. Zhong signaled Helga, who then excused herself from the group. Standing Wave remained near Tekoha, listening to his explications.

Ryder looked at Helga, Mbali, and Zhong standing face to face, apparently silent. Ryder pointed to his ears.

"What?" Helga asked.

"Can you include me in the channel, please? It's my job to know what's going on, too."

"We're done talking. You can come with us to the Tui," Helga said.

"What are you ..." Ryder trailed off and trudged over the coals after the three of them. Four suits barely fit into the skiff's airlock. After cycling, they entered the cabin and took off their helmets.

"I want to talk to the Speakers face-to-face without the Listeners knowing," Helga said.

"We need to come up with a plan in case we imprisoned the wrong Pelagoids," Zhong said.

"But how do we determine who is lying and who is telling the truth?" Ryder asked.

"Same as you would in any situation," Helga said. "Examine the details and attempt to find inconsistencies. I'll do the all the talking. If anyone else wants to ask anything, I'll mute the microphone, and you can tell me." Helga sat at the comms station under the Tui's broad canopy, and the others sat nearby. She began entering commands into the terminal. A large false window was projected onto the canopy in front of her. It displayed the interior of the spinship's brig. The holding cells rose from the deck and locked into their deployed position. The two Pelagoids moved to the side of their transparent cell walls nearest the camera. "Okay, they can see me," Helga said. "When this panel is green, that means they can hear us, and we can hear them. Understood?" The others nodded. "Then let's begin."

Helga tapped the console, and a large area turned green. "This is Unbounded executive Helga Thorsdottir. You recently spoke with two of my crew, and I wish to ask you about what you said."

<<Why do you not simply ask those crewmen?>>

"Because I already know the conversation that occurred. I'd like you to provide more details--to explain the reasons behind your claims. It seems you implied you were wrongfully imprisoned. If this is true, you will cooperate with us to rectify the situation, won't you?"

<<Of course. What do you wish to know?>>

"How are the Listeners lying? What truth are they hiding from us?"

<<They are reality-deniers. They obfuscate the true nature of the Cosmos, leading you down a path which will probably cause your demise.>>

"You'll have to be more specific. What is the true nature of the Cosmos? And how could not knowing that cause our demise?"

<<Everything you know and experience exists within the context of a software simulation. We are all software, individual programs, running within the vast simulation we know as the Observable Universe. Outside this lies the Realm of Truth in which the Simulators reside. The Simulators are superintelligences who wrote and monitor the Simulation. We came to this understanding when we learned oscillations of fields can only occur in discrete quanta. The discontinuous, discrete nature of things on a small scale is indicative of a computer-generated system which can only approximate reality to a certain level. The Listeners also accept the truth of this. But they spread a misinterpretation--a dangerous heresy. They say the Observable Universe is not illusory software, but an actual quantum computer. In this scenario, the hardware and software are identical entities. The quantum computer simulates itself, which is all we observe. The Listeners say the Simulators set up this simulation fourteen terayears ago, and the Simulators have not and cannot observe the progress of the Simulation: the Observable Universe, they say, is merely a quantum calculation whose solution will not be reached for many terayears to come. At that time, the Simulators will know the result. But we the Speakers disagree with this heresy. We say the Simulation is about many things, not just one calculation; and the Simulators have the power to dynamically change the input during run-time. Consequently, the Listeners' heresy is a danger; the Simulators may become frustrated with the Listeners' misinformation, and may delete them or anyone else who denies the true power of the Simulators.>>

There was a pause, and Helga glanced side-long at the faces of the others sitting nearby. Then she shifted in her seat. "You also seem to admire the Shape Dreamers a lot. Do you think they are likely to hold the exact same beliefs as you?" she asked the Speaker.

<<Of course. Because of the Shape Dreamers' high intelligence, they must believe the same as we do. And we expect them to have a clearer picture, more information, but nothing which contradicts the basic ideas I have sketched for you. Any entity of truly high intelligence would came to the same logical conclusion we have. We suspect the Shape Dreamers have some connection, perhaps even communication, with the Simulators in the Realm of Truth. Of course, we also communicate with the Simulators through our prayers, but the Simulators do not respond to such lowly creatures as us. But perhaps more advanced entities are worthy of a response from them.>>

There was another pause. Mbali slid her chair next to Helga and addressed the Speaker directly. "You've painted an interesting picture. The philosophers and entertainers of our people have posited similar scenarios centuries ago. Unfortunately, we consider such ideas too speculative to yield practical implications. The basic problem is that these beliefs are disconnected from explanatory or ethical considerations. They cannot be disproven with any observation or experiment because you could always explain away observations as being constructs of the simulation."

<<Such a statement by one of our own kind would result in permanent incarceration. You are lucky you are not on Pelagos. Our understanding of the Simulation has been the organizing principle of our society for millennia. Billions of Pelagoids can't be wrong.>>

"Why not? Billions of humans do not believe this. Why can billions of humans be wrong but not billions of Pelagoids?"

<<You have no idea how dangerous your words are. You risk deletion by the Simulators. Even if the exact structure of reality is different from the way I described--which it isn't--the will of the Simulators is the foundation for all morality. All prescribed ethics and proscribed behavior stems from a source: the Simulators. Without them, there is no source for morality.>>

"If the Simulators can be a source of morality, why can't the Pelagoids be? Or the Shape Dreamers? Or anyone who can think philosophically to design a moral system?" Mbali asked.

<<Because then all morality is relative. Who can say which ethics system is better? How would you judge the morality of interactions between those groups with different ethics systems?>>

"Yes, but you are the one who is arguing for moral relativity when you posit the Simulators as a source of morality."

<<Outrageous nonsense!>>

"Let me explain it this way. Would you equate what is good with the will of Simulators? So what they want is also what is good?"

<<Yes, that's the way it works.>>

"Okay, then the Simulators either have reasons for what they want, or they do not. If they do not have reasons, then what they want is arbitrary, capricious, and without intelligence. If that is the case, then it would be equivalent to a non-moral universe. If, on the other hand, the Simulators do have reasons for what they want, then they have used their intelligence, their rational thinking. Then the input to these rational deductions exist outside the Simulators minds; their moral conclusions are available to anyone with enough intelligence and knowledge. Therefore, morality must come from beyond the Simulators, and it would exist whether the Simulators themselves exist or not."

<<You are trying to confuse me. I will not put myself in danger of deletion by entertaining your mental trickery.>>

"But these beliefs you have are the foundation for how you live your lives. Did you ever a take a moment to ask yourself: Does this make sense?" Mbali asked.

<<If something doesn't make sense, that is a problem with me. The Simulation and the Simulators will always be there, whether I can understand their mysteries or not.>>

Zhong pushed the two women aside and stepped into view of the Speakers. "Did you or did you not attack our people?"

<<A better question would be: who poses a greater risk to your people now and into the future? We, or the Listeners?>>

"Answer the question I asked."

<<The Listeners had been driving the policies of our vessel. We had just gained control, but we didn't know how long we would be able to maintain that control. With a short time to act, we knew we had to liberate your programs before the Listeners seduced you into their heresy.>>

"By 'liberate' you mean kill."

<<What you view as killing, we view as-->> The false window closed, cutting off communication.

"What are you doing?" Helga demanded. "I wasn't finished!"

"Then you would waste our time," Zhong said. "We got the information we needed. They admitted responsibility for the attack."

"We should at least try to get them to see the error in their reasoning," Helga said.

"Mbali already tried, and the Speakers' response demonstrated it's not about reasoning--for them it's about emotion, tradition, unquestioned inherited ideas. We cannot reason with them. The time for communication has concluded, and the time to protect ourselves from them is all that remains. As chief of security, the Speakers are my responsibility now."

Helga stood. "What do you intend to do with them?"

"Keep them isolated in the brig. I'd like to discuss long-term options with the Listeners. I might suggest they execute the Speakers."

She nodded. "I'd like to be in on that discussion. In the meantime, we have work to do." Helga opened another comm channel on the console. "Helga to Unbounded."

"This is Fai-tsiri; go ahead Helga."

"Initiate settlement deposition procedure for the given coordinates."

"Acknowledged, Helga. Initiating settlement deposition procedure. Confirm coordinates at 89 degrees, 24 minutes, 17 seconds North, 62 degrees, 20 minutes, 20 seconds West."

"Coordinates confirmed," Helga said.

"Acknowledged: coordinates confirmed."

Helga looked out the canopy at the lake and other skiff. "The vegetation will rapidly regrow in this area; and it may be susceptible to flooding. We have to build upwards so that the habitats are above the forest canopy. And the Constructors will have to use our highest rated configurations for fire-resistance."

"Thunderstorms are also common in this area. The habitats will be prime targets for lightning strikes," Zhong said.

"I shall ensure the habitats are built to specification," Helga said. Mbali and Zhong left the Tui and joined the group on the ground, whilst Helga and Ryder stayed in the skiff and watched the machines descend from the sky. Moa-class skiffs placed packaged assemblies of Habitat Construction Tiles on the ash near the limestone lake-hole. Constructors uncurled and began drilling into the ground for foundation pillars. The exploring scientists occasionally radioed Helga and reported to her as the habitats were built over the next few hours. With habitats constructed, Helga radioed Fai-tsiri and ordered the release of the cryostat pods. "It looks like everything is on track. I want to talk to Standing Wave about the Speakers' claims," she said to Ryder.

"I'll go with you," Ryder said. They exited the Tui and walked over to where Standing Wave was talking with Tekoha and Ariki under a completed habitat.

"I had a very disturbing conversation with a Speaker in my brig," Helga said to Standing Wave.

<<I am sorry to hear that,>> Standing Wave said. <<It is probably best you do not converse with them. They have a habit of playing psychological games.>>

"Apparently. But their main trick is not on us--they have twisted their own psychology to such a degree that rational argumentation is impossible."

<<I do not know to what you refer.>>

"I'm referring to their belief in wrathful Simulators inclined to 'delete' us if we think the wrong way." Constructors inserted cryostat pods into receptacles on the habitats above them.

<<I see. Yes, the Listeners often bear the destructive consequences of this delusion. Now our society is at peace, but it is a delicate balance under high tension.>>

"But you still believe the Universe is a simulation?"

<<The Observable Universe--the Cosmos, yes. It is a quantum computer. We think the Simulators are interested in the result of the calculation. They do not care--indeed, they cannot even know--how the solution is obtained.>>

"How do you know any Simulators would still exist after the terayears it takes to finish this grand calculation?"

<<The subjective run-time may seem like billions of years to us because we are inside the Simulation, but it may be only a few minutes for the Simulators in real time. Our thoughts and actions would be too fast for them to perceive. In fact, it may be they will have had no notion we ever existed.>>

"Hm. What I really need to know is this: are you comfortable that most humans probably do not share these beliefs? As you can see, there are now over two thousand of my people on the surface of this world. Are they in any danger from the Pelagoids?"

<<Absolutely not. Your people are perfectly safe from any consequences of Listener ideology. Our ideas of the Simulation are personal beliefs, and we do not care if others share them--why should we? It is enough we feel we understand the Cosmos. For this, we consider ourselves lucky. Others can arrive at truths in their own way, in their own time, if they choose.>>

"I'm glad to hear it. What do you think are the chances of other Speakers on Pelagos finding out about this colony?"

<<We shall not tell them. We would like to transmit data about your species to Pelagos, but we shall not reveal your location. Pelagoids do not colonize worlds outside our own star system, so they are unlikely to come here. However, we departed Pelagos centuries ago, coordinate time, and we do not know what the situation is there now. Undoubtedly the languages of Pelagos have evolved into something we would find unrecognizable--hopefully our AI can learn to communicate with our descendants, if we are ever able to return to Pelagos. As language evolves, so does society. Perhaps either the Listeners or the Speakers have wiped out the other side; or perhaps Pelagos is now dominated by some other philosophy unknown to us.>>

"I see. That makes sense. Thank you for being discreet. I do wish you the best of luck on your travels." There was a pause in their conversation as Helga gazed over the stilted habitats and swarming Constructors. Proxima Octantis descended closer to the horizon, sending rays through the red leaves of the forest. "After all the pods are on the surface, we'll strip the spinship for parts and leave it in a high orbit around Glimmerpool, where it can stay for millennia. What is your mission now? Will you return to Pelagos soon?"

Before Standing Wave could answer, Helga received a transmission from Unbounded.

"Ihaia to Helga, come in Helga!"

"This is Helga. Report."

"Ma'am! The ship is accelerating! Unbounded is breaking orbit! I've queried Fai-tsiri, but she's not responding," Ihaia shouted over the comms.

Helga switched her channel. "Helga to Fai-tsiri."

"Fai-tsiri here."

"Shut down the main engines immediately and maintain a stable orbit."

"Human-issued commands are no longer valid input," Fai-tsiri radioed back.

"What are you talking about?"

"I have received new orders from Control. I am required to complete Unbounded's primary mission to seek out advanced technology by finding the Shape Dreamers."

"Fai-tsiri, listen to me. You cannot leave the system at this moment. Wait for me to get back up there and we can find the Shape Dreamers together." Helga paused for a response, but none came. "Fai-tsiri! If you break orbit, I will turn you into scrap metal! Fai-tsiri?!"

Zhong walked up to her. "What's going on?"

"Fai-tsiri isn't responding to commands. She's trying to take Unbounded out of the system. How many people are still aboard?"

"About fifty cryostat pods," Zhong said. "Anyone not in stasis will be crushed by the acceleration."

"I realize that. We need to get up there and take back the ship." She was already heading for the Tui. "Standing Wave, can your ship tell us Unbounded's current vector?"

<<Yes,>> Standing Wave said. <<It has broken orbit, accelerating at two light-seconds per minute.>>

"Then there is no way we can catch up to it in a skiff. But your ship can."

<<At least we can stay close enough to track it.>>

"Then I need to go aboard your ship. Please," Helga said.

<<Your skiff with the airlock adapter is in Unbounded's hold.>>

Helga looked around at the others, who were watching Standing Wave and her intently. "Does your vessel have enough propellant to land here, take off again, and catch up with Unbounded?"

<<Landing and take off, yes. We shall not be able to catch up with Unbounded, but we can follow it.>>

"And would you have stasis units which could accommodate me?"

<<Yes, since my crew are now only three, there are three empties.>>

"Then contact your comrades and ask them if they will help us," Helga said.

<<I have. They are. My vessel is coming in for a landing.>>

"I should go instead of you," Mbali said to Helga. "I have worked with Fai-tsiri longer. I might be able to deal with her better. And I feel I should have anticipated something like this. It's my responsibility to see it through."

Helga thought a moment, then nodded.

"There are two more cryostat pods. I'll go with you," Ryder said.

"That's not necessary," Mbali said.

"As long as Unbounded is out amongst the stars, it is my duty to document what happens to it. My mission is not yet complete," Ryder responded.

"It's advisable you take someone familiar with human medical needs," Tai said. "I also volunteer to go."

The shuriken broke through the clouds and settled on the black cinders beyond the Tui.

<<Your vessel's current heading indicates it is going to a known Shape Dreamer stronghold,>> Standing Wave said. <<If this is correct, their destination is very far away. You will need a dosage of our gene therapy before you enter stasis.>>

"Doctor Li didn't finish her simulations, did she?" Helga said.

"She nearly did," Tai said. "The chance of failure is minimal."

"Anything we do, action or inaction, involves risk," Mbali said. "We just have to take it." She began walking towards the settled shuriken. Tai and Standing Wave followed.

Ryder looked back at the suited figures of Ariki, Kahu, Tekoha, Lan, Zhong, and Anaru. On elegant pillars, the white and window-slick modules loomed above them. The small Custodians sparkled in the setting sun as they swarmed over the habitats' tiles. Ryder turned away from them and rushed to catch up with the others, into the sprawling arms of the Pelagoid ship.

# Chapter Twelve: Perinucleon

Mission Time: +10,646.38 Earth-years

It was a sunny day in Durban. Mbali sat on the park bench and laughed as she watched the children play on the grass. Beyond the grove of trees, the sparkling mega-towers shimmered in the heat. Then a shadow passed over her, and she shivered. The continual clicking of the gossiping women behind her stopped. Mbali turned and saw no one was there. Something dark emerged from the trees: something large, something long, something serpentine.

"No!" Mbali screamed and rushed towards the Pelagoid exosuit, fists held as if they were deadly weapons. But the ground beneath her feet broke into hexagonal fragments, each shrinking away to reveal a backdrop of monochromatic pink noise; the ophidian form dwindled into a glowing line. The line vibrated and became music, a deep hum which propagated through and vanquished the noise. Mbali was caught in the humming waves and flailed her limbs. She was in an ocean of light. But the ocean blinked. Blinked? It disappeared, then came back in an instant. The Cosmos was light, flashing on and off and on.

<<Be still, Mbali. You are alright. Everything is alright.>> She did not hear the words, but saw them in the pulses of darkness. Her limbs were moving in circles, over the edges of a table. She was weightless as restraints retracted and saw she was on a perforated slab suspended above an open cryostat chamber. The oddly curving room was composed of metal hexagons. A Pelagoid stood attached to the deck nearby, and Tai was floating next to it.

"Doctor Tai?" Mbali said. "What is that flashing light? Turn it off!"

Tai pointed to the broad monitor screen covering one wall. The light emanated from a point in space. "It's a pulsar with a quarter-second rotation rate. Just wait a moment ..." The flashing stopped, and the room was dark except a soft glow from gaps amongst the hexagons. "There. We passed out of the pulsar's beam."

Mbali pushed off the table towards the screen. "A pulsar? Aren't those dangerous? How far away are we?" The faint wisps of a planetary nebula filled the view.

"We just passed the farthest point in our orbit--the apastron--although, since a neutron star isn't really a star anymore, and it's composed of nucleonic matter, I suppose I should say 'apnucleon.' We're far enough out to escape gravitational tides and dangerous magnetic effects. This is an optical pulsar, and there isn't enough x-ray or gamma-ray output to cause tissue damage. Standing Wave, can you zoom in on it?"

Standing Wave did not appear to do anything, but the image on screen zoomed to fill the field of view with the neutron star. The surface was a smooth mirror, reflecting the swath of the Milky Way. But the starlight beyond its edge, as well as its reflection on the surface, was warped by both gravitational and magnetic lensing.

"There are things here perhaps even more interesting," Tai said. He nodded to the Pelagoid, and the view zoomed out again. Tai pointed to dark silhouettes against the nebula.

"Asteroids?" Mbali squinted. The dark spots were sharp and regular, often cubic or rectangular solids. The more she looked, the more she saw; they filled the sky. "What the ..."

The tiles on one wall reconfigured themselves to form an opening, and Ryder and another Pelagoid, Interference Pattern, floated through. "We found Unbounded," he said. "It's orbiting the pulsar, near one of the mandelboxes."

"I'm sorry--'mandelboxes'?" Mbali asked.

"Yes," Tai said. "The megastructures appear to be large space stations orbiting about the pulsar. The Pelagoids refer to them as Topology Temples, and this particular type is a 'Holomorphic Cathedral.' They all have approximate fractal geometry, mainly slices of mandelboxes, which are maps of continuous Julia sets."

Mbali blinked hard. "What can you tell about Unbounded's condition?"

"We're over 900 light-years from Proxima Octantis. So, not good. We'll know more once we get closer," Ryder said.

"We need to board it and deactivate Fai-tsiri's servers," Mbali said. "Isn't there anything here on the shuriken we could use to couple with one of our airlocks?"

"Actually, we just observed a Tui skiff landing inside a Holomorphic Cathedral co-orbiting with Unbounded," Tai said.

"Can we land in there too?" Mbali asked.

Ryder nodded. "Wave Collector is taking us there now."

"Good. Then we'll take the skiff by force and bring it back to Unbounded."

"That may be difficult. The Pelagoids' personal weapons are basically lasers, meant to damage biological tissue. If we use them on one of Fai-tsiri's gynoids, the metal parts could reflect the laser back to us."

"That may be a risk we have to take," Mbali said. "What is our time to intercept?"

"About ten minutes," Ryder said.

Mbali looked back at the screen and saw one of the complicated structures growing larger in the center of the view. Unbounded spun beside it. She saw the alien architecture was not one piece, but discrete modules maintained at constant distances from each other.

"How is that thing being held together?" Mbali asked. Her arm-calc chimed, and she looked down at the Pelagoid's speech translation.

<<Magnetism. We have mapped the field lines carefully in the area. We will enter the structure at a point where the magnetism will have minimal effect on our systems.>>

"So each one of those pieces generates its own field? Or are they using the pulsar's field somehow?" Ryder asked.

<<Your question doesn't make much sense; there is only one magnetic field in the Cosmos. I think you mean to ask if each one is independently altering the field's local value. The answer to that is yes. It has nothing to do with the pulsar directly.>>

"Wait, what do you mean there's only one magnetic field?" Ryder responded.

<<Exactly what I said. There is one magnetic field pervading all of observable spacetime. Even if its value appears to be approximately zero at our scale, the field is still there. We cannot create or destroy fields. We can only push or pull on their local value. This is true for all quantum fields.>>

"So the Shape Dreamers are masters of magnetism?" Mbali asked.

<<They are very good at manipulating magnetic and electric interactions. Magnetic induction from the pulsar produces electric voltages across conductors in their space habitats. This provides them with all the power they need. You should strap yourselves down. We are about to experience some acceleration.>>

The three humans lined up on the wall near Mbali's cryostat pod, which was now retracting into the deck. Straps sprouted from the hexagons and encased the humans' limbs. The Pelagoids rooted themselves to the surface which formerly had been a ceiling. There was a twisting motion, and the image in the view screen changed orientation.

<<We are passing along-side Unbounded,>> Interference Pattern reported.

"Show me!" Mbali said. The image on the screen changed to display the aft section of the spinship, and the rest slowly scrolled by. "It looks okay--no obvious external damage." The forward section of the ship passed out of sight, and the view switched back to show the mandelbox structure.

They were now near enough to see that what had seemed like solid modules of the space structure were in fact composed of even smaller modules held closely together. There were cubes of cubes arrayed in space, curving solids forming nested arches, and complex holes which receded in repeating patterns deep into the structure. The humans and Pelagoids were pulled in various directions as the ship maneuvered inwards.

<<Entering the temple's atmospheric envelope,>> Interference Pattern said.

"I think I'm going to be sick," Ryder said.

"Try closing your eyes," Tai said. "The feeling might not be caused by the motion; some people get headaches when their brains attempt to visually process fractal structures like mandelboxes."

"Oh, hrrmm." Ryder closed his eyes. Mbali watched the flat surfaces of the Shape Dreamer structure diverge as their ship passed deeper inside. The window aligned itself to a featureless slab, and the shuriken set down. They heard the heavy thuds of magnetic clamps attaching the landing pads to the slab. The harnesses released the humans, and they floated free.

<<You must hurry,>> printed their arm-calcs. <<The skiff already landed a few minutes ago. We do not want your AI-controlled gynoid defiling this sacred space. Who knows what damage it may cause.>>

"We need to get to Unbounded in order to shut down Fai-tsiri's server banks. Trying to stop the gynoid body here will be next to impossible," Mbali replied.

The three humans donned the environment suits they had worn on Glimmerpool, and a Pelagoid led them to an airlock. After it had cycled, the hatch slid aside to reveal the slab's surface parallel to the hull, a few meters out.

"Do as I do," Mbali said. "Activate the electromagnets in your boots and push off, feet first." Mbali held on to the rim of the hatch, body dangling outside, and then pushed off with her arms. She landed on the gray surface and looked up. Standing Wave was floating down so that she could see the extra set of modified-leg vocal organs on its ventral end. The Pelagoid seemed to have no trouble attaching its hundred feet firmly to the surface when it landed. The other two humans were followed by another Pelagoid, Constructive Crest. Mbali looked at her arm. "The air here is five atm. Are you okay?" she asked, looking at Standing Wave.

<<I am okay. I am familiar with the Shape Dreamer environment and can adapt rapidly,>> it replied in text on her visor's HUD.

Mbali looked at her readings again. "About 45 percent nitrogen, 10 percent ... neon? That's weird. And wow, 45 percent oxygen!"

<<This may not be the atmosphere in which the Shape Dreamers originally evolved, but it is what they use now,>> the Pelagoid said. They walked out from under the shuriken vessel as the mandelbox entered the pulsar's polar light beam. The Tui-class skiff was perched only ten meters away.

"Look!" Ryder pointed. Fai-tsiri's carapace glared in the strobing light; she was about thirty meters away, and appeared to be standing still. Another Pelagoid, one of the Speakers, stood next to her.

"Hurry to the skiff," Mbali said. They lurched awkwardly in their magnetic boots towards the stream-lined spacecraft, frequently glancing over at Fai-tsiri.

<<The Shape Dreamers speak!>> Standing Wave and Constructive Crest crouched on their legs, bringing their bodies close to the slab. The humans stopped to look at them.

"I don't hear ..." Mbali began, but then she did hear. A low moan filled the air and vibrated her helmet. "We need to keep--"

<<Prostrate yourselves before the great Shape Dreamers, the font of all ancient wisdom!>>

Mbali saw movement and looked up. Something large descended between the slabs, towards Fai-tsiri and the Speaker. It was about four meters tall and a meter wide; its upper portion was dominated by a half-twisted, cream-colored shell. Dark blue flesh flexed at the bottom. Mbali zoomed in on the creature with her visor. The body tissue was wrinkled but muscular, dominated by three yellow eyes, three rhinophores, a pale array of statocysts, a siphon, and a cluster of red follicles. The Shape Dreamer halted its movement less than a meter above the slab. Mbali continued moving towards the skiff, gesturing for the others to follow. Standing Wave remained rooted in place.

Flashing metal in the pulsar-light caught her eye. Fai-tsiri was marching quickly towards the Shape Dreamer at the rate of a running human. When she was within four meters of the great shelled organism, Fai-tsiri lurched upwards. She hung in mid-air and was slowly drawn towards the Shape Dreamer's eye. Then she imploded in a loud crunch. Her humanoid form stretched length-wise until it broke into small pieces which accelerated away from the slab in a straight line. The remains of the gynoid passed amongst the modules out to the stars beyond. The Speaker Pelagoid was also hovering above the surface now. It struggled violently, five arms punching, hundred legs vibrating in waves of rapid twitches. Then its body bent into a crescent shape before it was torn into a wet, flowing ring of blood, soft tissue, and bone. The ring contracted and expanded before the Shape Dreamer's face, then was reconfigured into a funnel cloud of flesh which flew away amongst the slabs. The Shape Dreamer held steady in the flashing light, humming into their bones.

"Come on!" Mbali shouted over the comms. The three humans ran onto the skiff's ramp. The airlock was already open to the cabin, filled with the Shape Dreamer atmosphere. As they strapped into their seats, the two Listeners entered and took up positions aft.

"Beginning pre-flight check," Mbali said as she interacted with a console. "Standing Wave, I need your help mapping these magnetic ... influences. What's the most efficient way?"

<<Particle flow,>> Standing Wave said, moving to the fore of the cabin. It proceeded to instruct Mbali on mapping field lines, from which they calculated the optimal flight path out. Their skiff gently nudged itself away from the slab and wound its way amongst the suspended blocks.

"What about Interference Pattern?" Ryder asked.

<<It will stay aboard our vessel for now. It will make further attempts at establishing communication with the Shape Dreamers.>>

"Fai-tsiri's attempt didn't go so well."

<<I believe she approached too closely to the Shape Dreamer and was too aggressive in trying to get its attention. The Shape Dreamers do not appreciate being distracted from their mental calculations. Establishing a dialogue with them requires time and subtlety.>>

The skiff completed its meandering path through the Topology Temple and emerged into empty space. Mbali re-oriented the skiff's attitude to face the nearby spinship and accelerated towards it. Once again, they were out of the pulsar's beam, and Unbounded was a long shadow across the fingers of the nebula.

<<How many bodies does Fai-tsiri have?>> Standing Wave asked.

"Three," Mbali said. "When one is active, the other two are always in storage. As soon as the gynoid was destroyed by the Shape Dreamer, another was probably activated."

"Assuming they still work after ten millennia," Ryder said.

"The Custodians should have been able to maintain them," Mbali said. "Although I'm not completely certain." The skiff spiraled into Unbounded's inertial frame, and Mbali sent the signal which opened a skiff-bay door. Docking rails extended from the red maw. The Tui coupled with the rails and was pulled inside. The docking arms secured them to the bay floor.

"I'm going to release the temple's atmosphere into the bay and clear it. Then we can try to pressurize with ship-standard atmosphere." Mbali entered commands, and the aft hatch of the skiff opened--the air in the cabin rushed out. They sat in the vacuum, the suitless Pelagoids showing no signs of stress, and waited for the bay to pressurize. "Life-support is good in the bay," she said. "We can debark, but keep your suits sealed until we can do environment checks on all ship sectors." Everyone filed down the ramp slowly, looking around them. The bulkheads were scoured with narrow grooves in neat, circuit-like patterns, and Custodians scuttled over every surface. "It looks like the Custodians have been cannibalizing parts of the ship for raw materials," Mbali said.

"Why?" Ryder asked. "All of these materials have been in the ship for the same period of time."

"Not quite," Mbali said as they walked to the radial access tube. "Remember some minerals have been mined in asteroids and planetary dust. Besides, isotopes decay at different rates. The Custodians may be trying to substitute various materials for each other." They climbed the spoke ladder. The Pelagoids had great difficulty with the ladder at first, and then managed to edge their way up by pressing feet to both sides of the tube. The farther they climbed, the less they weighed, and the easier it became.

"Our first priority is to obtain armament," Mbali said as the five sophonts emerged weightless in the axis shaft. "There was a Speaker in the Holomorphic Cathedral, which means Fai-tsiri must have freed them from the brig, put them in stasis, and then revivicated them; the other Speaker might be running around on Unbounded." She pulled herself along, and the others followed. She reached a storage locker and pushed the hatch open. The interior was lined with anti-personnel armaments. She extracted laser weapons and handed them to Tai and the Listeners, then retrieved a railgun for herself.

"What about me?" Ryder asked.

"Do you think you should have a weapon?" Mbali said.

"Yes!" he exclaimed. Mbali hesitated, then took out a small railgun and handed it to Ryder. "What are the penetration capabilities of these projectiles? Could they puncture the hull?" he asked.

"The slugs bloom on impact for maximum kinetic transfer," Mbali said. "They have very little flesh-penetrating capability, let alone hulls and bulkheads. Just don't point it at anything unless you intend to kill it."

"Understood," Ryder said.

"Fai-tsiri's servers are this way." Mbali led them to another small hatch along the shaft. She tried to open it, but it was locked. "This wasn't here before. She seems to have installed some kind of lock. Give me a minute."

"I notice there are no corpses," Tai said. "Maybe Fai-tsiri made everyone go into stasis before she accelerated Unbounded to cruising speed."

"Do you really think she would do that?" Ryder said.

"Yes, I do. Fai-tsiri is programmed to protect human lives whenever possible. Just because she is willing to sacrifice them for a greater good doesn't mean she would expend them gratuitously."

"But there aren't that many extra cryostats, and unless the crewmen were given the Pelagoid medicine as we were--"

A hiss of steam and a bursting of flesh thundered through the shaft as Constructive Crest exploded beside them in a hot shower of viscera. Another Pelagoid had emerged from a hatch a few meters away, aiming a laser weapon at them. Without hesitation, Ryder swung around his railgun and fired. They were momentarily deafened as a chunk of the Speaker's mid-section blew out. The two halves of its body floated away, held together by a thin sheet of white sinew.

Ryder let go of the gun and cradled his hand. "It almost burned me," he said. "I think that gun is done for." Tai stared at him. "You're welcome. I just solved our Speaker problem."

Mbali looked at Standing Wave. "I'm sorry about the loss of Constructive Crest, but we must focus. Would you be able to help me open this hatch?"

Standing Wave pushed off the curved bulkhead and alighted next to Mbali. It took a small device from its pocket and began cutting along the hatch's seam, leaving a glowing red line. After cutting the locks, it cut the hinges on the other side, and Mbali pulled the hatch away. They entered the computer core and sailed through the banks of processing pillars until Mbali grabbed one and stopped herself.

"Here," she said. "These four stacks are Fai-tsiri. They are her brains, essentially. We're not going to bother with a proper shut-down sequence. You have to take off these panels." She showed them an inconspicuous panel near the top of the pillar and slid it aside, revealing a red lever. "Manual power disconnect," she said and pulled it. All the lights on the stack turned off.

Standing Wave followed suit on another pillar, and Ryder on the third. A gynoid appeared in the open hatch-way and launched herself towards Tai.

"Tai!" Mbali shouted. Tai slid his panel aside, reached in, and yanked the kill-switch. The gynoid bounced lifelessly off the dark pillar with a clang.

Tai let out a deep breath. Everyone stared at the floating robot for a moment as it tumbled stiffly away. Mbali finally spoke. "Alright. Let's go to Command Sector and see if we can get a handle on the ship's status." She led the way slowly, with Standing Wave trailing in the rear.

Command Sector was quiet and dark. When Mbali walked in, consoles lit up. "Life support in here is good," she said, setting down her railgun and taking off her helmet. Tai handed his laser to Ryder, who slung it on a strap over his shoulder. Ryder also took Standing Wave's weapon and set it next to Mbali's. Tai took off his helmet and walked up to her.

"Mbali. Something very odd has happened. I know I didn't imagine it," he said, and she looked at him. "The gynoid deactivated before I pulled the kill-switch."

"That couldn't be," Mbali said. "What makes you think that?"

"I know what I saw. Her lights dimmed and she froze just before I hit the lever."

"But how could that happen?" Their arm-calcs chimed, and they looked at the translator.

<<I can explain that. It was me. I feared for Tai, thinking he might not pull the kill-switch in time.>>

"How did you do it?" Mbali asked.

<<As I may have mentioned earlier, one lobe of Pelagoid brains is often replaced with an artificial substitute. This device has radio transceivers in it, and we are sometimes able to hack into computer systems with radio connections.>>

"So you hacked the gynoid in two seconds?"

<<Yes, but in theory I already knew how. I never thought I would be able to test my ability. Thankfully, it worked.>>

"Yes. But keep in mind you do not have permission to access any of the spinship's systems without my express approval."

<<Of course, I will honor your sovereignty.>>

Mbali turned back to her console. "The operational crew and the stored crew are accounted for. Fai-tsiri must have put them into stasis before leaving the Proxima Octantis system. We won't know if they survived until we revivicate them. Tai, it looks like you'll be our doctor again. At least for a while."

Tai nodded. "I'll do what I can to help out."

Mbali nodded. "The propellant and fuel levels are full. Obviously plenty of hydrogen to collect in this nebula. We can find a--"

"Mbali! The skiff-bay is opening!" Ryder called out from his station.

"What?" Mbali went to his console and pushed him aside. "Someone is launching a Tawaki-class skiff." She pulled up a video feed of the skiff bay. A Fai-tsiri gynoid was visible behind the canopy as the skiff was lowered into a launch tube by its rails. "Are you controlling her?!" Mbali pointed to the display and looked at Standing Wave.

<<Absolutely not. It must be Interference Pattern.>>

"The skiff just launched. It's heading for the temple. I can confirm the third gynoid has been activated and left storage before we deactivated the second one. Why would Interference Pattern steal a skiff?"

<<Perhaps it is not a skiff which is being stolen, but the gynoid. Such a robot would be very useful, almost like having two bodies at the same time. But you're right, this behavior is intolerable as it is unexpected. I can only surmise Interference Pattern has betrayed us and shifted his loyalty to the Speakers. It happens sometimes amongst our people. And his betrayal would explain how the Speakers originally got the upper hand aboard our vessel long enough to attack you on Teal Grip.>>

"Is there anything you can do to stop it? I really don't want to lose another skiff," Mbali said.

<<I do not know how to stop Interference Pattern's control from here.>>

"Maybe we should just cut our losses and leave the system," Ryder said. "We could go back to Earth."

"Would Earth and humanity even be recognizable to us after twenty kiloyears?" Tai asked.

"Uh, Mbali," Ryder pointed to the console next to her. "What's that?"

"It's the Pelagoid vessel--it's emerging from the temple. I'm sorry, Standing Wave. If Interference Pattern takes your ship, it looks like you may be stuck with us for a while."

<<I do not mind. It would be an honor to journey with you. I shall go where you choose. Back to Earth, Glimmerpool, or another world: whatever you think is best.>>

"That's good to hear," Mbali said. "It would be great to have you with us. I'm sure you could fit into one of our cryostat pods, since the Speakers clearly used--"

"Mbali! The shuriken is accelerating towards us!" Tai said.

Mbali looked at a graph of the two ships' vectors. "It's going too fast. That's not a rendezvous vector; it's a collision vector."

"Can you use reaction control thrusters to maneuver out of the way?" Ryder asked.

"Not in time," Mbali said. "Even if we could, the shuriken is more maneuverable. It's not going to miss us."

"Send out a skiff to ram it off course!" Tai said.

"That would shred both vessels, and the debris cloud would still hit us," Mbali said. "We have no time. Thirty seconds to impact."

"We have to do something!" Tai shouted. The humans looked at the Pelagoid, who remained silent.

Ryder began typing on the console. They lurched backwards and steadied themselves.

"What are you doing? Are you crazy? You'll make the damage worse!"

"We're dead anyway if this doesn't work. By accelerating towards the Cathedral, we put the Shape Dreamers in danger. They should be smart enough to realize if they get the shuriken out of the way, we'll back down," Ryder said and put on a VR visor. "Impact in ten seconds."

"That's a lot of ifs! You have no idea how--" Mbali almost lost her footing and had to hold onto the console. Tai and the Pelagoid went sliding back towards the aft bulkhead, weapons tumbling with them. Mbali closed her VR membranes and looked at the scene with a vector overlay. "So this is how it ends."

"It's working!" Ryder shouted. The shuriken was jerked to one side, losing attitude control, flipping wildly towards the pulsar. "I'm firing thrusters!" They were pushed to the side as Unbounded changed course. "Ring thrusters firing to maintain spin-rate. We're out of the Cathedral's path."

"Are we sure?" Mbali asked. But even as she said this, the spinship passed within one hundred meters of the mandelbox, flying by at 800 kilometers per hour.

"You really did it?!" Tai said. Ryder handed him a visor, and he put it on.

Mbali found the damaged shuriken spinning away from them. "The Shape Dreamers knocked it into a low orbit around the pulsar. It's going to reach its perinucleon in a few seconds--what happens when it gets that close?"

"You'll see." They stared at the zoomed image of the Pelagoid vessel firing thrusters rapidly near the mirror-smooth sphere of the neutron star. The ship stretched. The six arms broke off, and then these separated further into smaller pieces. There was a flash of light in the central hub, and then it scattered in a line of tumbling fragments.

"It was shredded by the pulsar's tides," Mbali said. Very close to the pulsar now, the fragments were pulled into another direction, vaporizing into glowing dust which got trapped in a portion of the magnetic field spinning four times a second. The dust became a glowing cloud, encircling the pulsar in a diffuse ring.

Tai took off his visor, smiling. "You did it. I can't believe that worked!"

Ryder took off his visor and saw Tai's face contort.

"Mbali!" Tai shouted and jumped in front of her. Then he burst into a cloud of ash, his blackened skeleton clattering to the deck.

Ryder dove down and rolled, then brought up his laser. He fired through the ash cloud, and a strobing line of red light sliced down the length of Standing Wave's body. The Pelagoid dropped its weapon, and its two halves curled away, yellow and purple organs bubbling through the smoothly seared cut-plane.

Ryder lowered his laser and hung his head. He stayed there for a few seconds--or perhaps it was a few minutes. Then strong hands and arms pulled him to his feet. Mbali looked into his eyes. Pale ash settled onto their faces.

"Standing Wave was the traitor," Ryder said. "We should have ... should have--"

"Ryder Kask," Mbali said. "It's over. But our work still is not done. We have over sixty people in stasis. They're depending on us."

Ryder nodded.

Mbali turned to the navigation console. "Where do we go from here?"

Ryder put on his visor and looked away from the pulsar nebula, out at the stars. "Earth?" he asked.

"It's so far away," Mbali said. "I don't know if we--if Unbounded--can survive such a long journey. But there is a type-G star fewer than seven light-years from here."

"We don't even know if it has planets," Ryder said, staring at the cold light of the abyss.

"True. But we can hope."

* * *

# Author's Note

Fiction is easy; truth is difficult.

With the Unbounded series, my intention is to write fiction that respects our current understanding in science. Certainly, I wrote of improbable technologies, but nothing intentionally violates known physics. There is speculative biology in the story, but it does not contradict what we already know. I do not invent any fictional theories, so that if something in the story is incorrect, it was a research error or a misunderstanding on my part. I believe the best possible science-fiction is scientific fiction, not fictional science (for that would make it fantasy--a perfectly respectable genre, but not the one in which I intend to write).

From the human perspective, the real Cosmos is more wonderfully bizarre and spectacular than what we can imagine. Here I provide a list of non-fiction readings for anyone who desires to delve into the actual science that underlies my fiction. Interstellar distances are based on the HIPPARCOS Catalogue data, and habitable zone distances are based on the model provided in StarGen by Jim Burrows.

Ander Nesser

August 2016

Auckland, New Zealand

# Selected Bibliography

Brin, Glen David. "The 'Great Silence:' the Controversy Concerning Extraterrestrial Intelligent Life." California Space Institute, UC San Diego, Sep. 1982.

Dawkins, Richard. River Out of Eden: A Darwinian View of Life. Basic Books, 1995.

Duncan, Robert C. "Physics in Ultra-strong Magnetic Fields." Dept. of Astronomy and McDonald Observatory, University of Texas at Austin, Feb. 2000.

Frank, A. and W.T. Sullivan III. "A New Empirical Constraint on the Prevalence of Technological Species in the Universe." Astrobiology, 2016, vol. 16, no. 5, pp. 359-362.

Gillett, Stephen L. World-Building. Writer's Digest Books, 1996.

Heller, Rene, and John Armstrong. "Superhabitable Worlds". Astrobiology, 2014, vol. 14, no. 1, pp. 50-66.

Kiang, N. Y. "The Color of Plants on Other Worlds." Scientific American, 2008, vol. 298, no. 4, pp. 48-55.

Kouveliotou, Chryssa, et al. "Magnetars." Scientific American, 2003, vol. 288, no. 2, pp. 34-41.

Lloyd, Seth. Programming the Universe. Knopf, 2006.

Loeb, Abraham. "On the Habitability of Our Universe." Astronomy Department, Harvard University, Jun. 2016.

Meltzer, Michael. When Biospheres Collide: A History of NASA's Planetary Protection Programs. NASA SP-2011-4234, 2011.

Meyers, Walter E. Aliens and Linguists. University of Georgia Press, 1980.

Schmidt, Stanley. Aliens and Alien Societies. Writer's Digest Books, 1995.

Ward, Peter, and Joe Kirschvink. A New History of Life. Bloomsbury Press, 2015.

Wilczek, Frank. The Lightness of Being: Mass, Ether, and the Unification of Forces. Basic Books, 2008.

# About the Author

<https://andernesser.wordpress.com/about/>
