It still boggles my mind how disinterested Thara is in the actual scientific project going on here. The same is not true of Alakai though. As Thara leads us back toward the exit, he greets us brusquely. “You got what you came for?” he asks. He’s cooled down a bit—the gun is put away, replaced now by a laptop.
“Yes,” I tell him. “Unfortunately, everybody was dead, as you said, but we now have some data that might be able to help scientists at the Garden of Chiron with their research.”
“I recall you mentioning that there was another ship,” Dr. Van Hoff says. He turns his laptop around so that we can see the screen. There’s a picture of the night sky with a red circle drawn around a point of light. “Is it this?” he asks.
“Do you have any idea what distance that is?” I ask. “Is that in our solar system?”
“It is definitely in our solar system, yes,” he says. “Whatever this is, it is approaching this planet.”
“The ship could be that,” I say, voice laced with uncertainty. I’m going off a drawing of a vision that someone else had. There’s a limit to the level of accuracy here. It was close enough to a planet for Sal to sketch their impressions of one in the background. For them to have sensed it, it has to be within the “resonance reach” of the planet. “Where I grew up, the night sky was too bright to see satellites, so I don’t have a good feel for this. Is that dot moving in such a way that it could be in orbit around Chiron?”
“A Unity-class ship would be so much bigger than a satellite,” Cleve points out. Nights were plenty dark on the Canadian farm of his childhood. “It’d have to be further out.”
Dr. Van Hoff plays an animation of night skies, and we talk it over a bit more, eventually reaching the conclusion that this ship is in quite an extended orbit and in the process of coming in. That could take months, given the science of deceleration and all the steps involved in shifting the ship’s systems from interstellar flight to planetary landing.
“I understand that Sanctuary is in a miasma-free zone, and therefore many technologies can work without interference there,” I tell Dr. Van Hoff. “I’m curious whether the University of Chiron has the wherewithal to launch anything into orbit itself. Not that I would expect you to be able to monitor the results, but to at least send a message. Maybe you could get a satellite up there that wouldn’t be able to broadcast down to you, but it could reach people still in space. To warn them, for example, that if they get too close their systems will all fail, and they’ll crash and burn just like we did. Although… were you awake during Unity’s landing? I wasn’t. I don’t actually know what went wrong. I just know that the ship fell apart. But did it start falling apart when it encountered the miasma in the atmosphere? Or earlier? We’ve heard rumors that there was some sort of coup possibly, that the captain died.”
Unfortunately, Alakai doesn’t know why the ship started ripping apart on entry. “Was it unplanned-for features of the atmosphere or rogue agents initiating a split? This is a topic of ongoing debate and discussion still, thirty years later,” he tells us. “The investigations we’ve done have not yielded any answers. All we know for sure is that Captain Garland died. We actually know the exact timestamp, since we’ve recovered the log of his biometrics.” He shares that data with us, and the interesting thing there is that it’s before when Roze’s info logged Morgan entering the captain’s quarters prior to the discovery of the body. So when Morgan got there, Garland was already dead.
That… that changes some of the potential leverage we might have on Morgan. There is no longer circumstantial evidence that Morgan killed the captain. But what we might ask now is, what did Morgan do when he discovered Garland was dead? Or was he going into the captain’s quarters to check that the captain was indeed dead, having made arrangements for that ahead of time? Morgan almost certainly knows things that he has very intentionally not shared, and some of those could potentially be compromising—if we can push him to divulge them at an inconvenient time.
There are lots of ways to try to spin this, but maybe this is all just a dead end. Maybe when we get to the domes, we should focus less on what Morgan may have done thirty years ago and more on what he’s done since. Rather than rally planetfallers against him, the better option might be getting the Chiron-born to assert their own power. There’s a crop of twenty-somethings who’ve spent their whole lives under Morgan’s debt system, and many of them could be persuaded to throw off those shackles, if we can get the right information to them. And if that’s the approach Fritz wants to take. I want to stop this war, but he’s the one who will be living in the domes under the new world order once we’re done. I don’t know where I’ll end up.
I tune back into the current conversation to hear Alakai saying that the University doesn’t have the means to launch a satellite and an electromagnetic signal cannot penetrate the atmosphere. The miasmic repulsor protects them on the ground, but it does not extend all the way into the upper atmosphere. Regarding launching a satellite, it’s not that the University lacks the know-how, it’s that they don’t have the necessary physical resources. Dr. Van Hoff goes on at length about some sort of rocket equation which seems related to the massive amount of fuel needed, but I honestly don’t follow much of that. “Morgan Industries might have those resources,” he eventually concludes.
I let out a long breath, wheels turning in my own head. “And you think this trajectory is on the level of months, not years, for the slow-down approach?”
“We think. But we don’t know the exact capabilities of their engines. So it could be more, or it could be less. But if it’s on the same scale as Unity, you have a hundred thousand new people who think there’s going to be a fully functional society on this planet. And Sanctuary is, but—”
“Or who think everybody is dead,” I counter. “We never sent any message back to Earth, and that ship is getting nothing but radio silence from Chiron now. So they might be coming in to crash the same way we did.”
“They might be coming in to crash, they might be a hostile invasion force…”
Cleve snorts quietly at that supposition from Alakai, and personally, I agree. What could possibly have happened in the few decades after we left Earth that would make anyone devote such a pile of resources to launching an interstellar attack force? Unless Alakai is thinking that it’s a Progenitor ship, not a human one? I’m confident it’s not, but citing Sal’s drawing is probably not going to go over well with this scientist.
Scientist, right. That reminds me, there is a research project here I want to know more about before we go. “So, enough about what’s up there, let’s talk about what’s down here. What are you actually trying to find out about this creature with your subsonic tools?”
“Oh, the subsonic tools are just so that we can actually analyze free from harassment. It keeps the pests away. And it’s a nonlethal solution. So if you’re Stepdaughters of Chiron types, it’s fine; you don’t have to worry about it. I know they get very concerned about that. Can you imagine if we used something lethal? Then we’d have dead xenodragons everywhere, and that would just attract more beasts.” There is no actual concern in his voice as he brushes away any potential objections we might raise. Ensign Redd bristles a little, but she doesn’t say anything. She’s very good about following orders, and Cleve’s have been clear: she’s to follow his lead in everything. Getting back to the main thrust of my question, though, Dr. Van Hoff explains, “We’re doing research to try to determine whether the Progenitors modified or created these creatures in order to help us better understand how they worked and how their technology works.”
“So your interest is primarily in what the Progenitors did and not in the creature itself?”
“Primarily,” Alakai agrees. “If there’s useful information from the creature, sure. But I find that this is a wild planet. There’s more information to be had from the relatively civilized Progenitors. And there’s some amount of salvage we’re doing here as well.”
This conversation is over. I am not sharing anything I know about Progenitor weaponization of Chiron’s creatures with these people. The way that Dr. Van Hoff just worded his answer… I’ve seen what those “civilized” Progenitors did to craws. No, I am not aiding any of that. Time to go. “Just remember to turn that sonic repulsor off when you’re packing up to leave,” I tell him.
“I’m not leaving that here! We’ll need it in other places,” he says, with no concern at all about disrupting the life cycle of another group of creatures. What a callous man. The sonic repulsor isn’t nonlethal because that’s the right thing to do, it’s just that this tool is effective. I like people, broadly speaking, but Alakai Van Hoff… no. On Earth, I would never have considered myself an environmentalist. Here, though… The more people I talk to that bad mouth Chiron, the more I find myself taking personal offense at their dismissal of the life all around us. I suppose I’m now physiologically predisposed against them, as well.