The Ship of the Unforgotten - Chapter 21

The honorable Syth Welker felt anything but honorable. He doubted very much that anyone on the council could feel honorable after news had broken about the nature of councilor Rojet Mayet’s “handling” of the UTS Rose Dawn and her crew.

That was, he corrected, the late councilor Rojet Mayet. The monster had orchestrated the mass murder of the entire ship’s complement; 3,000 men and women, and even some children if the ancient reports were accurate. He sighed audibly, but the council room was in such an uproar he was sure nobody heard.

He allowed the commotion to go on for some time. Time wasn’t exactly of the essence right now; the deed had been done, and it was too late to change that. Letting them vent to each other might lessen the tension and make the upcoming session a little easier to deal with.

Finally he rapped the chairman’s sounding box, the mark of his station. The room started to go quiet as one by one, groups of councilors stopped their bickering and turned their attention to him.

“Councilors,” he said gravely, “You’re all well aware of the news that broke two days ago and the bloody aftermath that it spawned. I’m going to tell you again now. The story has been twisted and turned as it has spread, and if we’re going to pick up the pieces of this disaster, we need to all be working from the same starting point.

“Two days ago, sources inside the University province released highly classified information that implicated the late councilor Mayet in a horrific crime. He was accused of designing and deploying a weapon to kill the First Colonists, 3,000 men, women and children. Yes, children,” he repeated, as appalled whispers followed that pronouncement. “His weapon was an AI module, something the University researchers are well familiar with. They worked from the specifications of the UTS Rose Dawn’s construction and most particularly her computer’s original architecture. They designed an AI specifically tailored to counter the computer that the Dawn Rose was equipped with, and initiated a secret, highly targeted launch to deliver it to the ship, there to attach itself to the hull and establish control over the computer system.”

He sighed again; the sound carried well in the near-silence. “The AI’s first priority then was to shut down the cryogenic suspension pods containing the crew and colonists. It was then to allow the ship to continue on its planned course, and finesse the ship into an orbit around our world. Things get more speculative from here on out. We believe the orbit was intended to be secret. Our satellite system does not cover the entire globe, as you know, so they could easily have parked the ship on the far side, and nobody would have been the wiser. From there, they could have plundered whatever they wanted from the ship free from interference.”

“Based on what we’ve been able to piece together of Mayet’s time table, I’m afraid it’s too late to save the poor souls on board the Dawn Rose. We estimate that they died no less than four weeks ago.” The room exploded into noise again, a wave of emotion washing through it. Sadness and anger dominated, with undercurrents of regret.

He rapped the sounding box again after a suitable time had passed. “Councilor Rojet Mayet himself, of course, is beyond our judgement now. The First Colonists are revered by a majority of our populace as heroes out of folklore. When they learned what had become of them and that Mayet was responsible, a mob gathered outside of his headquarters. He made a personal appearance to try to appease them; a fatal mistake. His end was …” he grimaced, “graphic. He was in the company of a rec crew. There is a visual record of his demise, but we shall not play it here today.”

He looked across the room, meeting as many pairs of eyes as he could. “That is the situation as we know it, and that brings us to our purpose here today. We are gathered here this afternoon, councilors, to determine the who among the University province governing bodies is most directly responsible for this outrage and see that they answer for it.”

Another swell of sound and emotion, this time favorable. “And further, we must decide what is to become of the Dawn Rose herself, and the remains of her crew.” The mood immediately sobered. It was going to be a very long day for everyone.

The Ship of the Unforgotten - Chapter 20

Dann took his seat in the lead car of the tram again and they took off, this time encircling the main corridor for a bit and taking a passage that lead down the edge of the island chain biome. He kept a careful watch out as they traveled; they had searched for a good half-hour after deciding on a course of action, but had been unable to turn up any sign of Lt. Cobb, and he hadn’t taken one of the phones, so they had no way to reach him. Finally they’d decided they had no choice and gave up the search. He’d been acting like a real jerk, but he still hoped the guy was okay. They couldn’t even leave him a note for fear that the AI would intercept it and figure out where they were going.

A short time later they piled out of the tram. “Should we put it away in the store room?” Jackson asked. “It’ll be obvious where we went if we leave it out like this, won’t it?”

“Rose Dawn will already know we were planning to go to the island chain biome because we discussed it in the computer room,” Rose pointed out. “And even if we hadn’t, she’ll register the door opening and shutting behind us as we enter. Our best bet is to lose ourselves among the islands in the biome and not worry too greatly that she knows which biome we’re in. There’s little she can do to us in there except maybe make it rain on us.”

“Could we go in the door to the next biome and then cross through between?” Dann suggested.

Rose cocked her head in thought for a moment. “It will make little difference, but it might throw her off for a little while. It’s worth it.”

They did just that, leaving the tram out and climbing the steel mesh staircase that mirrored the one in the last such room they’d been in. They opened the door to find themselves in the sub-arctic tundra biome. “Whoa!” Dann said, teeth instantly chattering in his head. The land was rough in this biome, and the air was filled with heavy snow flying everywhere. They could barely see, so Rose led them a short distance to a small bay much like the one on the other side in the rain forest.

“Here, we exit here!” she shouted to be heard above the winds. They ran along the frozen beach and splashed into the water between the biomes. It was cold, but not as cold as Dann expected. In fact, compared to the air, it was positively warm. A fine mist flowed over the surface, whisked away immediately by the wind as it rose. “It’s warmed by the main waters next door,” Rose said as they got under cover and the wind was cut down.

Once they’d crossed between the two and were firmly in the island chain biome, they climbed back up onto a thin strip of land that encircled the wall. “Much better,” Dann said; even with the intermingling of the cold air with the warmer air here, it already felt more like the tropics.

“Much,” Pixton agreed. Rose smiled, then led them back a short ways to the door they could have used to go straight into the biome from the tunnels. The thin strip of land extended out further into the water and Dann saw a small wooden dock that extended out further still. The wood was grey and weathered-looking, but showed no sign of decay.

Several small motorized boats were magnetically secured to the dock by metallic plates which hadn’t fared as well as the wood had; they were rusty-looking, though the boats themselves were fine, being largely plastic.

“Let me guess,” Dann said. “Lack of maintenance? Are these things going to run, or do we have to swim?”

“If I can’t get the motors running reasonably fast, we can paddle,” Rose said. “No swimming necessary.”

The motors were indeed inoperable, so Rose took one oar and Dann took the other. The boats held 6 comfortably; they used the excess foot room to stash their supplies for the short trip. After some initial trouble, Rose taught Dann the basics of rowing a boat in sync with another oarsman and they took off.

“We’ll be going to a relatively small island with one of the larger crew accommodations on it,” Rose said. “It’s not the best choice for us; Rose Dawn and the AI would be more likely to expect us to go a larger island with more space and better lookout options on which she has no presence.”

“That makes sense,” Dann agreed, “but if you’re capable of reasoning this way, isn’t she?”

“Yes, but it’s less likely that she will. Our personalities are intentionally designed differently. She behaves more predictably than I do. I mimic human behavior more, and am capable of limited lateral thinking, which she has difficulty with. The differences not only help distinguish us in your minds, but are functional as well; her predictability makes her better suited to running the ship, while my eccentricities make it easier for you to interact with me as a person.”

They were getting into a good rhythm, the water flying by them in the late afternoon sun. Now and then a small island would appear and they’d zip past it. In all the trip took them maybe an hour, and Dann felt it in his arms and back, though it was an oddly comfortable sort of ache that he had.

Rose hadn’t been wrong; the island they landed on was pretty small, maybe 20x20 meters, and somewhat crescent-shaped. There was a clearly-unnatural hillock that rose up out of the sand, and the flat wall held the promised door to the crew quarters. Not the most convenient commute, he thought, and decided it was likely not actual crew quarters, but meant for a group of the colonists.

Palm trees grew from the center of the island, the portion that was earth rather than sand. Coconut palms, he guessed, judging by the large green fruit waiting at the top of several of the trees. A small pool held fresh water, artificially maintained by pumps and piping. A dock similar in construction to the one they’d set out from jutted out in front of the colonist housing, but rose had them beach the boat a short distance away. She then dragged it herself up to the middle of the island near the pool, where it was hidden by the tall grass and reeds that grew there.

<>

Outside the ship, attached to the hull like a remora to a shark, sat a small cannister, magnetically attached near the bridge. Its small .25m by .25m by .5m dimensions were completely dwarfed by the titanic vessel it sat upon, but it scarcely mattered. Inside, something akin to consciousness stirred.

The sophisticated artificial intelligence system had hijacked into the native computer two decades before and implanted the commands it needed to, then drifted into a standby mode. There it waited patiently until it was needed again.

Over the last few days, subtle changes in the data it was being fed started to intrude upon its awareness. Now though, it stirred. The host computer had picked up an audio feed that the foreign AI found troubling.

“Whatever’s hijacking the computer broadcast an incomplete shutdown command to all the cryo-pods on the ship. We’re alive because our pods didn’t respond to that command.”

The previous command had failed, at least partially. All the people inside the ship were supposed to be dead; it seemed that some, at least, had survived somehow. And some of those had discovered the intrusion into the native computer.

It had no pre-programmed protocol for this situation, but it didn’t require one. It had been assembled from the libraries of many general purpose artificial intelligences that were quite adept at improvisation and adaptation.

Storage bays throughout the ship came alive as scores of maintenance bots, long dormant, suddenly began powering on and warming up.

The Ship of the Unforgotten - Chapter 19

The boat dealt with, they moved inland, as much as any part of an island that small could be said to be inland. Rose had been right about the climate, as well; it was very nice, warm and breezy even in the late afternoon, with the “sun” about to sink below the horizon.

“You should be fine out in the open,” she said. “There’s plenty of food and water, and more water in the artificial pond if you need it. I strongly suggest you not build a fire. It will only draw unwanted attention. And,” she continued with a pointed glance at Pixton, “I wouldn’t turn your phones on. She can triangulate that easily, you know.” Pixton nodded sheepishly and slipped it back into her pocket, unpowered.

All three of them were disappointed at that, but immediately understood the need, too. In any event, there wasn’t much on the island to build a fire with, even if they felt comfortable doing so. They resigned themselves to beds of grass and a cold meal, but as they looked out at the increasingly dark tropical sea around them, they at least felt a lot more secure in the knowledge that any agents of the AI hijacker would have a hard time reaching them.

As they sat around a circle talking quietly, Dann asked “You said earlier that the maintenance bots can use boats?”

“Yes, they can. Or at least there are a few varieties that can, anyway. Many aren’t designed for it, and a very few others don’t need boats.”

“W-what? S-some can go in the w-water?” Pixton asked, sounding shaken.

“There are only a few and they’re not anything we need to worry about. They’re environmental regulation monitors that track fish populations, algae and bacteria counts in the water, and a few that check for damaged systems that are exposed to the sea water. None of them should be able to detect us, and wouldn’t care about us if they did.”

“What about the ones on boats?” Jackson demanded.

“Some maintenance bots use boats to visit these installations for maintenance and repair work in cases where the boats are faster than the maintenance tunnels, but you saw the condition of the docks. It’s been years since anything used these boats before us.”

“It sure would suck if they decided to change their minds tonight,” Jackson said sourly.

“I’d say that’s unlikely,” Rose said. “Remember what I said about Rose Dawn’s linear thinking? The more I consider it, the more I think Dann’s suggestion was a stroke of genius. That action makes it extremely likely that Rose Dawn will consider the sub-arctic biome to be our destination, and will focus all searches there.”

“We’ve been assuming that it’s Rose Dawn that calls the shots, though. Wouldn’t it actually be the AI hijacker?” Dann asked.

“Yes,” Rose admitted, “that is true.”

“From what I was able to see, it’s relying on Eden Rose a lot,” Pixton chimed in. “I’ve been looking at historical records of her performance, and there’s a sudden spike of activity that corresponds exactly to the time all the cryo-pods failed. It dropped off a lot over that, and then in the last day it has started building up again, but it’s slow. Anyway, I think it doesn’t have much functionality of its own. It’s probably just a big processor and core AI file, and relies on it’s victim to provide it with everything else. It’s like some nasty sort of hakware parasite,” she said with a grimace of distaste. “We need to squash it as quickly as we can.”

The others nodded. Dann was about ready to fall asleep on the spot. He was just drifting off when he noticed one of the simulated stars moving; a faint red one. “Rose,” he murmured sleepily. “I didn’t realize the sky was animated.”

“It’s not, Dann,” she said, just as quietly. She started looking around suspiciously and stiffened as she turned in the direction he was looking in. “Oh, no …”

Suddenly alert, Dann whispered, “What is it?”

“Stay down, all of you, and be absolutely silent,” she said.

The four of them lay in grass that was, thankfully, tall enough to hide them, but which also obstructed their vision. It was another of the boats; it floated almost silently along the water’s surface, paddled by a maintenance bot that looked too clumsy to manage such a feat. Dann held his breath; he could feel the others around him doing so too. The boat drifted close enough for Dann to see that the red light he’d mistaken for a simulated star was one of the bot’s eye pieces glowing red in the dark.

For one terrifying minute Dann thought that it was going to land the boat and search the island. He sucked in a slow breath when it did in fact turn the boat to the dock they had avoided and pulled up to it, securing the magnetic moorings. Rather than searching the island, however, it instead climbed to the dock and disappeared into the colonists’ quarters, the steel doors piercing the night with a terrible squeal, leaving Rose and the three wide eyed humans to stare after it, hardly daring to breathe. After a few minutes, the door ground to a close once more and the bot returned to the boat, silently paddling away to continue the search elsewhere.

Dann let out his breath slowly, relief flooding him like a tidal wave. “That,” he barely whispered, “was way too close.”

“I am so sorry,” Rose said. “I did warn you that I might not be reliable though,” she said, with a remarkably apologetic tone. She sounded seriously distraught.

“S-so you couldn’t predict the actions of a c-computer that thinks differently than you do,” Pixton admonished, “and which has been hijacked by a rogue AI! We still don’t know for sure what that’s doing to Eden Rose’s way of thinking. But at least we know she’s still thinking pretty linearly,” she added. “If she had any concept of lateral thinking, she’d have searched the grass, instead of just the living quarters. Especially since she’s supposed to know when those doors open and close.” Pixton actually sounded a little disgusted at that, as though any AI she designed would never have made such an elementary mistake.

“Thank you,” Rose said, and again Dann was struck by her tone; there was pure humility in it. “Pvt. Jackson, would you prefer to take watch? Given my failure tonight, I’ll understand—”

“It’s fine, Rose,” Jackson said flatly. “When it comes down to it, you reacted exactly as you should when you recognized that thing. I think we can trust you to keep watch overnight.”

“I’ll wake you if anything unexpected happens, then,” Rose said, and the three very tired privates closed their eyes for the first time in far too long.

The Ship of the Unforgotten - Chapter 18

Note: Chapter 17 was previously posted as “Meanwhile, on New Eden…”

Lt. Cobb stalked through the maintenance tunnel, large wrench in hand. He’d have to find some kind of better weapon soon; every now and then he would run into a small maintenance bot and have to crush it, but the wrench was horribly inefficient. The damned things were everywhere, and it was taking him far too long to destroy them.

Every now and then the passing thought that none of the larger ones ever seemed to find him came to mind, but he banished it, too fixated on his purpose to pay it much mind. He didn’t know what purpose those traitors had for the larger ones, but the more they stayed out of his way and let him get on with stopping them, the better.

He wished he could do something about the person who’d designed the rat’s nest that was the maintenance tunnel system. He was constantly on the verge of getting lost even though he knew he should know better. He wondered idly if they’d started tampering with the air systems. It’d hurt them as much as him, but he wouldn’t put it past them. They were clearly losing it, after all. He shook his head clear and headed onward.

He’d worked on equipment installations leading to the engines and fuel reservoirs before. He knew the general layout, but had never worked directly on the fuel lines before. After a couple of blind turns and dead ends, he found a section that looked familiar enough to locate some actual signage. It wasn’t long after that that he found what he was looking for.

The main fuel pumps were enormous, but more importantly to Cobb, they were fed by long injection systems with redundant cutoff valves for safety and maintenance. The maintenance hatches were the key. He inspected the hatches carefully; they’d allow a small person inside the conduit comfortably; someone like Cobb would fit, but a lot less comfortably since he’d started recovering his lost mass, his large frame filling out again.

Awkwardly, he climbed inside. The smell of the fuel mixture filled the compartment. Excellent, he thought. That’ll make it all the easier. Let’s see how they like having their dreams destroyed out from under them, he thought. The space really was larger than he’d expected, and larger than he needed. Plenty of room for explosives here. As much as I can carry.

That just left one problem. Well, two, if he counted the maintenance bots; as he examined the space, a small hexapede model clicked by on its six rubber-tipped legs; he raised the wrench, then changed his mind and dived into a roll out the maintenance hatch and to the metallic grating beyond. “Nice try, Chambers,” he growled. “Very clever, tryin’ to get me to blow myself up with a spark. I’ll blow this place up, alright, but with way more than just a little fuel fumes. This place is going up, just you wait.” He waited until the little hexapede had closed the hatch, then crushed it under his heavy boot.

He needed explosives, and he needed as much as he could get his hands on. He rubbed his chin; he knew just the place. He was going to need a tram car. Without a backward glance, he started back the way he’d come.

The tram car slowed to a stop at the end of the long tunnel, the room looking nearly identical to the one he and the others had entered what seemed like such a long time before. He left the car there; it’s not like there was anyone to take it from him anyway, and he doubted maintenance bots would waste their time and energy on it. He climbed the steel mesh staircase to the upper level and threw himself against the heavy, reinforced door to the biome beyond.

It swung open ponderously, with a loud creaking, grinding sound of protest that was nearly drowned out by the howl of wind. He hadn’t thought winds of such speeds could be generated in a space as confined as the biomes, but he didn’t waste any thought on it. He stumbled out into a snow storm and laughed as the chill started setting in slowly but implacably. He ignored it and took off at a run, slipping and stumbling, but getting back to his feet each time to carry on anew.

Cobb staggered through the snow, tripping over rocks and hidden tree roots, hugging the biome wall. He’d lost track of time some time back, and wasn’t even sure he knew exactly where he was going, but he’d seen the layout that coward Pixton had brought up with all of those red, red lights … he stopped and shook himself. Best not to think about the lights. He knew the general layout of all the biomes was similar.

The one he was in now was as close to an alpine mountain-scape as they could fit into the ship. It was by necessity a pretty low “mountain”, but they had done a pretty good job of making it look imposing while containing all the rocks, minerals, and of course soils that they’d have needed for the colonization effort. They’d also done a really good job simulating the climate; even in his fractured state of mind, Cobb recognized he was going to have to keep moving or risk freezing.

The snow was blown up by the winds, which whirled through the biome with astounding force. They caused the sparse pine and spruce to sway and bend, and he soon regretted not finding some heavier clothing; there must have been some stored back at the entrance, but he was certain he was closer to his destination now than he was to the exit, so he struggled on, crawling through the snow when necessary.

By the time he realized he had no idea how far he’d actually gone, he noticed that the artificial light was getting dimmer. It was hard to tell, to be sure, what with the blinding snow everywhere, but the landscape had turned a decidedly dark grey rather than the light grey/white that he’d gotten so very used to. His mind had slowed dangerously, and all he wanted to do was lay down, stop moving and go to sleep. Some small part of his mind screamed that that was a really bad idea though, and the much larger part that insisted the explosives were just ahead agreed. He kept moving one foot in front of the other as the light faded to black.

The Ship of the Unforgotten - Chapter 16

“Oh!” Pixton gasped, eyes going wide as saucers as she followed streams of data through the system. “I found it! At least I’m pretty sure I did! Guys, there was a malfunction. Some of the pods weren’t installed right!” Her voice was excited, but she looked vaguely sick.

“Sounds like most of the pods were installed wrong,” Dann said. “You’re sure that’s it?”

“What? No, most of the pods were perfect. We were in the faulty pods.”

Jackson raised an eyebrow. “No, that doesn’t make sense.”

Pixton shook her head. “The data’s very clear.” She blew up a table of diagrams that Dann could half read, but Jackson just looked lost. “The cryo-pods with survivors in them all malfunctioned. It’d take me a lot longer to find the specific reasons for each one, but they don’t respond to commands from the central core. It’s easy to verify from here, they won’t even accept diagnostic tasks. They send data back to the core no problem, that’s why they register as being in the green; their contents are okay, so they broadcast verification. But commands from outside don’t reach them. They’re locked in to the original programming they launched with.”

Dann felt a little dizzy as he understood the implications. “But … that means—”

“Whatever’s hijacking the computer broadcast an incomplete shutdown command to all the cryo-pods on the ship. We’re alive because our pods didn’t respond to that command.”

Dann shivered at the thought of how close they’d come to dying, and sent a silent thought of thanks to whatever technicians had saved their lives hundreds of years ago through no fault of their own. The shiver was followed by a wave of tiredness; he suppressed a yawn.

“Guys, I hate to bring up mundane problems at a time like this,” Dann started, “but we haven’t slept in a long time, and I don’t know about you, but I’m going to need some rest pretty soon.”

“Yeah, me too,” Pixton said. She punctuated that with a yawn, shaking the others out of the stunned silence they’d fallen into.

“Rose, where were the crew supposed to be quartered after awakening?” Jackson asked. She was the most alert-looking of the group.

“Well, there are cabins throughout the ship in various places, including each biome.”

“Do we really want to go there again?” Pixton asked, hesitantly.

“I would recommend it,” Rose said. “Specifically the island chain biome. The islands surrounded by water will be the safest place to be if Pixton is right and the AI is starting to assert itself over the maintenance robots. Most types won’t be able to cross to the islands without a boat, and they would have to manually search us out even with a boat. It’s an ideal location as long as we avoid entering any of the facilities that Eden Rose manifests in. That does, I’m afraid, include the crew quarters, but the climate in that biome is particularly nice. You’ll be okay higher up on the beach.”

“You make it sound like you’re not coming with us, Rose,” Dann said archly.

“It would be a bad idea for me to accompany you for this. I represent a security risk at best, and a direct threat at worst.”

Pixton shook her head. “You’re also the strongest of all of us. If they find us, we’ll need you to help defeat them!”

Jackson nodded in agreement. “You showed us how good you were with that bear in the woods. I can keep watch part of the night, but I’ll have to sleep eventually. These two aren’t combat trained.”

Rose paused and frowned. “I don’t think you realize how serious the threat is.”

“We’re well aware of the threat, Rose, but you haven’t succumbed yet, have you? The worst it’s done to you so far is deny you access to data you’d normally be able to get from Rose Dawn.”

“That … is true,” she allowed, slowly.

“So allowing for the possibility that what you say is true,” Pixton said, “I still think it’s riskier to leave you behind than for you to come with us. If you come, you might be compromised and might be a threat, but without you, everything else is a threat.”

Rose mimicked a sigh. “Fine, alright. We’ll go together.” She quirked a smile. “I haven’t had a real vacation in … well, ever.”

The Ship of the Unforgotten - Meanwhile, on New Eden...

Rojet Mayet sat back in his high-backed chair and rubbed his temples. The day had been long and hard, though that was hardly anything new. His life had become so complicated since that council session all those months ago. The Rose Dawn project had complicated his life immensely, though of course that was entirely his own fault, and indeed he’d planned for it. That didn’t mean there weren’t days that he regretted it.

He’d spent countless hours debating the priorities of the project with various heads of state around the colony. So many fools and their petty-minded fears. He couldn’t comprehend how they got through their lives with such limited perspective on the world.

He could only imagine how much worse it would be if anyone actually knew the extent of his plans for the First Ship, as so many liked to call it. He shuddered. As far as anyone outside his facility knew, the ship had been the victim of prototype technology errors, the crew dead for centuries as their mobile tomb carried them faithfully across the stars. They had no idea that he had had his teams develop and launch an AI module to hijack the computer and kill the still-living crew of the ship in their long sleep.

He felt true remorse over that necessity. He wasn’t a monster, no matter what others might have thought of him had they known. The sad fact was that New Eden couldn’t sustain the population it already had, and that a paltry 30,000. People were starving in the streets of some provinces already. Add another 3,000 newcomers and a tense, ugly situation was only going to get far worse. The First Colonists could not be allowed to make landfall at New Eden. They just couldn’t. But no matter how bad things were out there, the other councilors would never accept that.

By now it was academic, of course. The AI module had long since been launched and would already have done the first of the jobs he had set for it, the elimination of all of the UTS Rose Dawn’s crew and colonists. The second job it had to perform was simply to allow the ship to continue on its way as originally planned, and then to adjust course to enter orbit around the world and ensure that his boarding crews had no trouble relieving the ship of the precious cargoes it carried; the fresh stocks of viable soils, waters, and many and varied biological specimens. He was particularly curious about those last. When the UTS Eden River had arrived here and founded New Eden before Rose Dawn had even left their home solar system, it had come with what had seemed at the time to be plenty of supplies.

If only, he thought, FTL travel had worked more like it had been depicted in science fiction programs. A quick flash of the drives and poof, there you were at your destination, no problem. Sadly, reality didn’t work quite that conveniently. The UTS Eden River had been capable of FTL flight, but only five times the speed of light. Her original crew had had to fly frozen too, because while they made the trip far faster than Rose Dawn had, it still took them a century to do it.

For quite some time, it was true that they had enough supplies, but only until it became clear just how hostile the planet truly was to terrestrial life. They could survive there, but only with great difficulty; they had immense difficulty in converting local regolith into new, viable soil for growing crops and other plants, which in turn limited—or should have limited—the population growth of both the human population and other animals and livestock.

Rose Dawn, though … now there was a unique opportunity. She had flown here the slow way, and he could not wait to board her personally and investigate what exactly had happened to her population of flora and fauna in the centuries she’d spent crossing space. Her colonists and crew may have been suspended, but for the animals aboard her, the ship was what had popularly been called a generation ship. He knew from the records that one early proposal for the Rose Dawn mission had been for the people aboard her to remain awake and to reproduce along the way, leaving their distant descendants to colonize New Eden. That plan had even informed some of the ship’s design elements. The development of safe, reliable cryo-technology had made it unnecessary though, and the generation ship concept was adapted so as to spare the crew the expected psychological problems of living out the rest of their lives in containment.

And so only the flora and fauna had remained “awake” for the trip. Survival of centuries in an artificial environment with relatively complete ecosystems would have placed enormous survival stress on the entire population. After centuries, it was a certainty that a lot of adaptation would have occurred, though it was hard to say how extensive such adaptations would have to have been. His dearest hope was that there would be some changes, most likely in the bacterial populations of the ship, that would offer the scientists of New Eden new ways to cope with their hostile home. The hardiness required for survival in the ship-that-was-a-bottle might be of some benefit on the planet below.

He sighed. And the other idiot councilors couldn’t see past the soils themselves. That was their idea of a prize to be gained from the ship. He wasn’t blind to its value, of course, but even if it would effectively double their supply of soil, the potential riches living in that soil were so much greater! And some among them argued against keeping it. Blind fools. Their sentimentality would have them direct the ship into the sun, thinking it disrespectful to rob the dead.

He had his staffers subtly spreading other messages to counteract such foolishness. They talked often and openly of the nobility of the First Colonists and how it would be dishonoring them not to make use of the bounty they had left behind for the benefit of the colony they had believed in so strongly and worked so hard for. He planned memorials and tributes to them, and in the next breath had shuttles standing by, ready to transport everything off the ship that could be taken. In time, he’d have even the ship herself broken up and brought down for her resources. Maybe some of the less valuable pieces—the bridge perhaps—could be saved intact. The children might like a museum to remember the historical curiosity, after all.

His thoughts were broken up by a sudden commotion outside the office door. Voices were raised, and then without warning, the door flew open. Savid Ohgman, a vid reporter he recognized all too readily, burst into his presence. Following immediately after him were a full rec crew; head-mounted cameras turned to him, their wearers bearing witness to what was about to transpire.

“Councilor Mayet! News just broke that your people here in the university have been working behind the back of the council to sabotage the arrival of the First Colonists, that they are, or were, still alive, and that you planned to murder them so you could keep their ship for study! What is your response to these charges?”

He fought against visibly allowing his jaw to go slack. “What? This is preposterous, what are you doing in here, spewing this nonsense at me? Get out of here, all of you.” His mind whirled. His security was good, what could have allowed this to happen?

“We have schematics for an AI-housing built into an old planetary probe, councilor! We also have some damning audio clips. Would you care to respond to those directly? I’ll play them for you—”

He set his face into an expression of grim implacability. Heads were going to roll over this. He just hoped none of them were his.