Since everything went so smoothly patching up Cleve’s scalp, I decide this would be a good time to get Dr. Citali outside to measure what happens when I’m healing something. In this case, me. When Cleve and I get down to the medical center, she’s leaning over a seated Arx, stethoscope to their chest. “Yeah, that sounds pretty good,” she says, straightening up.
“Yeah, just like I was saying,” Arx tells her, clearly having already told Dr. Citali that they feel fine. “Ah, and like, I guess I should store my medicine here?”
“Yes….” Dr. Citali says, drawing the word out as she considers how to deal with the possible addiction here. She glances over the fine print on one of the vials and then adds, “Yes, it requires particular temperature and conditions for storage, so if you want it to stay good, I’d better take care of it here.”
“Oh, awesome!” Arx says with a grin, happy to turn over the small hoard they took from the basement of the clinic. “But I’m cleared for—”
“Yes,” Dr. Citali cuts in. “Any sort of physical activity is fine.”
Arx hops off the table to go and notices us there. “Oh, hey Mariah, hey Cleve!”
“Fitting back in fine?” I ask. “Things haven’t changed too much in a month or two, have they?”
“Uh, not really. Though I feel like some people forgot about me. Rude!”
“Takuto didn’t though,” I point out.
“No, of course not! He’s awesome. I’d better make sure I don’t forget about him. So I’m going to go see him—” Finger guns! “—right now.” Arx slips out the door, leaving Dr. Citali to us. Louisa’s here too, sitting on one of the stools nearby, studying a zine.
“If you’re free, Marina, I’d like you to monitor me outside while I attempt to… chironically deal with my arm.”
She nods vigorously, and Louisa helps her start gathering materials together. When Louisa leaves to cart the first load of equipment outside, I get Marina to open up more about what the Stepdaughters have been doing these past several decades. The main question I want answered is why it was so easy for Morgan to saddle blame upon them.
“Okay, so, activities that the Stepdaughters of Chiron have been performing… Well, that factory shutdown—” She does not say attack. “—that was something that when I came here I knew I definitely wanted to plan. We need to shut down those factories. We previously did something similar in nature against Morgan Industries’ fishing. They’ve been dumping Earth fish in the water here, so we have to stop that spread. Who knows what it’s going to do to the local Chiron environment! Over the past several years, we’ve had run-ins at sea between Morgan Fishing and our explorers out trying to learn about the native sealife here. We did a bit of a naval disruption. It kept their fishing ships from going out until we were able to clear out the Earth fish we’d already found.”
I don’t have a good mental image of the continent we’re on, but it turns out that the main settlements of the Stepdaughters of Chiron are somewhere else on the same coast as the Morgan domes, though on the eastern side of the landmass. “I haven’t personally been at sea,” Marina adds, “but that’s something that many of our people take great interest in. One ship did sink during the disruption, but as far as I know, no one was hurt.” It’s news to me and Cleve that the Stepdaughters have better seafaring capabilities than Morgan Industries.
Marina goes on to share that the Stepdaughters have also stolen samples from some Morgan farms. She uses the term extracted, though. Morgan Industries has been able to grow crops well, which is something the Stepdaughters would like to learn from. In addition, they want to make sure the process isn’t hurting any native life.
“Do the Stepdaughters of Chiron have any sort of equivalent to you at the University of Chiron across the water?” I ask.
“I wouldn’t be surprised if there were at least informational exchanges between our two groups, but I don’t know if there’s this degree of embedding. We’ve tried to send official emissaries to Morgan Industries to object to them fishing around our territory and spreading Earth fish, but they do it anyway.”
“You’ve probably already heard by now that the Morgan Planetary Security Force is being sent out—”
“Uh, yeah, someone mentioned something about an army coming?”
“Right. Their goal is the Stepdaughters of Chiron,” I tell her. “There was a declaration of war.”
Marina’s clipboard slips from her hands and clatters to the floor. She slaps a stick of gum in her mouth and sits down heavily on a nearby chair. “What?! I know our groups don’t get along, but outright war?”
“There’s more to it than that. Morgan has this new terraforming subsidiary, and they have this ‘Earth Corridor’ push to settle more of the land to the east.” Marina groans at my words, but I continue, needing to get this all out. I’ve had more time to think this through than she has. “The Stepdaughters of Chiron are to the east, so the two go hand in hand: wanting the space and blaming the people who are in that space. The factory ‘activity’ is the PR icing on the blame-the-Stepdaughters-of-Chiron cake.”
“Ugh!” Marina holds her head in her hands.
“This is new to you?” Cleve asks.
“That an army is going to come marching? That they’re declaring total vendetta against us? Yes, that’s new!”
Cleve’s questions remain even-keeled. “So they haven’t been claiming you as enemies of the state, then?”
“Look, we haven’t gotten along. There are a lot of disputes over who controls exactly what territory and the fact that they don’t understand they can’t just dump Earth fish into the ocean here. But those are things that can be worked out! Oh, god! They’re going to go—So many people are going to die!”
“Which is why we’re trying to get Data Haven to slow down the troops,” I reassure Marina.
“I need to get word back to the Stepdaughters.”
“And we want to do that. But we have to set up a defense here first. If we can slow them down, then we’ll have time to reach the Stepdaughters and let them know what’s going on.”
“Is Data Haven with the Stepdaughters on this?” Marina asks, uncertainty and hope mingled in her voice as she looks up at me and Cleve. “I’m helping them out, doing what I can, but…”
“You should have more of an answer to that than two strangers do,” I tell her. “We’ve started talking to people, trying to get them onboard for this defense, but what have you been doing all this time, other than applying bandages for them?” I feel for her and I understand she’s upset, but it is long past time for her to step up to the plate. How did I end up more of a Stepdaughters of Chiron agent in one month than she’s been in however long she’s been here?
“I’ve been studying xenofungus!” Marina shoots back.
“Have you been winning their hearts and minds?” I press her. We’ve talked about this very issue before, in the context of the Morgan domes, but change has to start at home, and for her right now, that’s Data Haven. “You were sent here to forge alliances. Have you done any political work here?”
“I’m not a diplomat!” Marina protests.
“If we do this defensive action Data Haven is taking a side,” Cleve tells her. “Can you vouch that the Stepdaughters of Chiron will be good allies?”
“Of course we would be good allies!” Marina interjects.
Cleve isn’t done yet, though. “That they will take Data Haven as an ally? Or do they already consider Data Haven an ally?”
“I don’t think I would go so far to say that Data Haven is considered an ally right now. Definitely it’s considered a friend, one with which we’re willing to explore a deeper relationship. And based on how I’ve gotten along with people here, I support that. They’ve got a lot of interesting things that would be helpful for us; we have things that would be helpful for them. There are some disagreements, but that’s normal, that’s fine.” She lets out a long breath. “I’m sorry, it’s just… war… Everything we’ve worked to set up, it’s going to get erased!”
This positioning has got to feel threatening to Marina, with her seated and us standing. I crouch down in front of her and pick up her fallen clipboard. From that less intimidating position, I tell her, “That sinking feeling you feel in the pit of your stomach, that is how I felt when I saw the troops arrayed for display in the Morgan dome.” I offer her clipboard to her, continuing, “But we have the workings of a plan. We can do this. What was your mandate coming here? It wasn’t just to do research.”
“Look at my huge collection of fungi,” Marina says, gesturing at her office, with its shelves of terrariums—chironiums? “Yes, I said I would be a diplomat—I wanted to do field research! This was the opportunity to do it.”
I soften my tone. “Marina, you told me you lost your sibling to the dangers of the natural world here. You didn’t come here just to study xenoflora. You came here to learn things and to get Data Haven’s computational and intellectual forces behind the research, so that no one else would have to go through that loss. You have to get Data Haven onboard in a practical fashion to achieve those research goals. I understand that this situation with Morgan is a lot to take in, but we have plans. Cleve and I are making headway. And we’ve taken the rover for a test drive already, so traveling through the Monsoon Jungle will be a safer trip than it was before.”
“We have geography on our side, and we have the advantage that they don’t know that we know,” Cleve adds. “Or where we are, for that matter. And we have intel on their forces.”
Between the two of us, Cleve and I talk Marina back from hopelessness and despair. “There’s a plan,” she says quietly. Then with more confidence, “You’re right. This is one of the reasons I was sent here, so I could work on this. And you said you’re already working on slowing them down?”
“Yeah. We’ve been talking with people here who have sway to get them onboard with that. And as soon as we have those details all worked out, we can head to the Stepdaughters of Chiron,” I tell her.
“Yes, yes. You two are coming with me, right?”
“Yeah! Cleve’s agreed to drive. And to formalize relationships between these two locations,” I say, glancing up at him for confirmation.
“Yeah, I guess we’d better do that,” he says. “Formalize the alliance, right? We can’t just have it loosey-goosey, ‘oh we might be friends.’”
Marina seems to have calmed down, so I stand up and give her some space. “Cleve, let’s be honest, you’re the head of that council. You’re coming as a political representative, not just a chauffeur. And I’m coming as, well, me,” I say. Hopefully there’ll be the necessary medical equipment and expertise for the scientists there to learn something from my condition that is useful for the rest of the human inhabitants of this planet. “And to see Deirdre.”
“And as the person who should be the diplomat,” Cleve mutters.
“Don’t worry, Cleve, I’ll hover one step behind you, quietly advising you on what to say,” I joke with him.
Cleve shakes his head in disbelief at this whole situation. “We just woke up a month ago, and we’re taking over!”