Chloe is studying a Stepdaughters of Chiron zine when we track her down. She’s got the little booklet open to a page with a sketch and description of a type of native life I haven’t seen yet, fool’s fungus. Cleve jumps straight into business. “We just talked to Roze,” he announces. “Basically, the short of it is that Data Haven has a problem—”
“A problem?” Chloe mutters. Whenever I’ve seen her, she’s been cool and collected, but I can hear the frustration in her voice now.
“—and we need to figure out what we want to do about it. Roze identified you as somebody who has the respect of the survivalists in this place.”
“Data Haven has many problems, actually,” Chloe tells Cleve, glancing up at him and then back down at her zine. It’s clear he doesn’t have her full attention.
He nods. “That’s what we’re learning.”
“So, if you could be a little more specific…?”
“Yeah, well, the one that I was talking about is that Morgan Industries is sending an army through here.”
Chloe puts the zine down and sits up straighter, looking directly at Cleve. “Did you say that they’re sending an army?”
Cleve throws up air quotes. “A small army, yes.” He lists out for her all the troops we saw in the dome.
Chloe takes more of an active interest in this news than Roze did. “We have to do something,” she says. “We have to stop this army, block the pass, something.”
“Yeah, that’s what we’re doing,” Cleve agrees. “So we’re pulling together the council so that we can talk about this and other issues that we apparently have here. I mean, the floors need to be cleaned!”
“Wait, what council?”
“Well, right now it’s you and Roze,” Cleve says.
“Wh-what? Whoa! What?! I’m not on a council!” Chloe protests.
“And we’re going to talk to Tenoch, and—”
“Slow down! Slow down!” Chloe says, an edge of panic in her words.
“Look, this isn’t a permanent thing, just an ad hoc position,” Cleve assures her. “People can elect councilors later, but we need to start somewhere. If you have somebody else you can back who survivalists will listen to, tell me.”
Chloe agrees to the temporary appointment once it’s framed less as a councilor role and more as recognition that she is someone who can get all the survivalists to support the decisions of the council and contribute to the actions against Morgan’s Planetary Security Force. She doesn’t hold back her ideas then. “We can set up an ambush of Morgan’s forces, take them out entirely or route them—”
“Did you not hear the numbers Cleve quoted?” I ask, incredulous that she believes that would work.
“It’d be a difficult ambush,” she acknowledges, undeterred. “Though we might also block Miasma Pass. We’d have to find some way to do it, though. We don’t have explosives, so it’ll be hard.”
Cleve’s satisfied with this chat; he’s got her promise to come to the council meeting, and that’s enough for him. I would much rather have everyone approach that table already primed for a reasonable response, though. I don’t want the meeting to be hours of disagreement that result in no decision being made. Or worse, the wrong one.
I do my best to discourage Chloe from pursuing direct conflict with the Planetary Security Force. Blocking the pass, that’s my ideal solution here. We don’t need people shooting at each other, particularly not when one side has trained soldiers armed with laser guns. I make it clear to Chloe that this is not just some large repo squad with baseball caps and pistols. The University of Chiron is supplying officers with high tech weaponry. Cleve backs me up. If all of our survivalists die in a full-on shoot out, Data Haven will starve.
Once she understands the full scope of what we’re facing, Chloe backs down. “Ah, yes, we don’t have the forces to directly engage them at all, really,” she acknowledges.
“Though, if you can strike their supply lines instead of their people,” I suggest, “then you can actually recover additional materials for Data Haven.” Chloe likes the sound of that. In the upcoming council meeting, she’ll support supply raids and blocking Miasma Pass.
“And make your list of problems,” Cleve reminds her. “The council needs to solve those, too.”
“Yes, definitely,” Chloe agrees. “Let me add these to your list.” Cleve pulls out his notebook. He places a checkmark next to Chloe’s name and then flips to a new page to take down her grievances. I’m expecting complaints about leaky plumbing, but Chloe leads with something far more serious. “Someone’s been stealing rations in the last week,” she declares. “There are fewer than there ought to be, based on the inventory. And there were already not that many. Your party has been gone for the last week, so we know it’s not you. And there are rumors that someone in Data Haven is a Morgan collaborator. Either somehow getting information back to Morgan Industries or ready as some kind of sleeper agent. I don’t know if this is even true, but it’s definitely a murmur that’s going around.”
“Is that a rumor that’s kind of always been circulating or a new rumor?” I ask.
“It’s relatively new. After you two and Corazon showed up. We don’t usually get people in groups. I mean, we don’t even get people at all that often. New folks got people thinking. Roze vouched for you, but how well do we really know Corazon?”
Cleve snorts. “If it’s her, she’s a really good actor. Put her in a room with Morgan, and she’d kill him with her bare hands. I’m pretty sure I can vouch for Corazon.”
Chloe shrugs. “All I can tell you is, that’s the rumor going around. That might affect how people want to deal with this larger problem of the Morgan army walking on top of us. Like, do we want to tell everyone all the plans? Do we want to try to find this spy before the conflict? Is that the person who’s stealing rations? I don’t know.”
“Well, I think that if we can get a good enough council together, we’ll be all right. Roze mentioned Tenoch and the Ekes. Any thoughts?”
“Tenoch couldn’t possibly be it. I don’t think they have the capability for that kind of betrayal. But I also don’t think they have any particular loyalty to Data Haven. If Morgan moved in and said, ‘I own this now,’ Tenoch would just keep tinkering.”
“How did Tenoch come to be here to begin with?” I ask. Anyone at Data Haven had to go through a lot of effort and personal risk to get here.
“I think they were one of the first people to find these parts of the wreck,” Chloe tells me. “And as for the Ekes… Astrid and her expansionists… maybe. But they’re pretty aggressive about wanting their own society. They want Data Haven to be a peer to the Morgan domes, not hidden.”
“That goes for the brother and the sister?” Cleve asks.
“No, Shilp didn’t do so well in the Morgan domes—well, neither of them did. I think he’ll just want to do nothing about this army. Or, you know what? He’d probably be willing to collaborate. I bet if Morgan told him that if he sold out Data Haven it would wipe out his debt, Shilp would do it. I don’t know if he’s actually the collaborator, but he would certainly have a motivation for it.”
“Perhaps that exile group misses the comforts of the dome,” I muse. “Even if they weren’t personally able to partake of them, they knew that they existed.”
“Yes,” Chloe agrees. “Especially Shilp. Not necessarily the luxuries, but just the things. Everything we have here is makeshift or scrap from the ship.”
Cleve scribbles some more in his notebook and comments, “I’m adding chore distribution to the agenda,” he tells Chloe. She describes to us one of the failed methods used in the past, a randomized chore assignment program. Certain people kept coming up while others never did, so it didn’t last for very long. I’m not surprised a hacker would program a chore wheel that way, but I can see why the approach failed.