He sighed, letting the information flow from memories he didn’t notice until now. While nanite work-gangs were mining, terraforming the hill and building the new town, even more of them would flow across the valley, clearing the trees and trimming them into usable timber.
It wouldn’t look like this for long.
“So how does it feel to be home?” John asked, coming to stand next to his brother.
“It feels good,” Frank said after a while to think about it. “It also feels a little… empty.” He looked at John. “No ghosts here.”
John raised an eyebrow.
Frank shook his head. “Not like that! I just mean… Humans have tens of thousands of years of history on Earth.” He looked back out at the valley as a light breeze hummed several intertwining notes in the trees.
“Back home, there’s always history all around us, even in Cali.” He smiled. “Remember when you found that old mine-shaft?”
John nodded. “We used to pretend we were grizzled old ’49ers, bush-whacking claims and all that nonsense.”
“Everywhere you look, back home, there’s stuff like that – evidence of a past Human presence.” Frank nodded down the valley. “Here, though, not a hint of history on the breeze at all.”
Everything was new.
Coming Soon…
Ragnarok, Town Site
Frank looked down at the hilltop. Its irregular top had been smoothed out, leaving a small park area with roughly two hundred native trees near its center.
The materials from the terraforming had been deposited on a hard surface adjacent to the park. Because it would be surrounded by a street and would wrap partially around a central public square, those surfaces had been paved with a very believable cobbled surface. That surface made an excellent place for the automated equipment to deposit materials from both the terraforming and the mining operations.
He shifted in his seat, if you could call the edge of the shuttle’s decking a seat. His legs dangled freely over the side. “I suppose you’re used to this kind of ride,” he said, glancing left at John.
“This is a little more unsettling,” John admitted.
“Because it’s an alien world?” Sushil asked from Frank’s right side.
“Because the helos we used in the Bolivar Restoration had skids under our feet. Less likely to slide out if someone starts shooting at us and the pilot needs to change course.”
“Meh,” Frank said. “We’re tied off. If we fall out, we’ll just have a better view.”
“Better make sure that harness is adjusted properly,” John said. “My sister-in-law won’t thank me if I bring you back to her a eunuch.”
The councilors on both sides of the craft chuckled but then everyone shut up at the same time. “The streets are starting!” someone behind Frank said, nearly shouting in his excitement.
“Now, that is something that I find unsettling,” Sushil admitted, looking down as the roads grew behind a froth of tumbling nanites.
Frank shuddered. “Nobody wants to see how the sausage is made.” He looked at Sushil before his friend could ask. “Old saying back home. Nothing ruins the taste of a good sausage like watching it being made in a big factory.”
“Especially when you’re imagining the machinery turning you into a sausage,” Sushil mused. “I plan to worry very much about that horde of microscopic machinery running amok and turning us all into sausage in our sleep.”
“I wasn’t going to say anything,” John admitted, “but that kind of freaks me out as well.” He grimaced, shaking his head. “I know they’ll move on to prep the fields and run the mines once they're done here. Honestly, you’re in no more danger than you would be at any random location on the planet but…”
“But maybe they remember they were here,” Frank said. “Maybe they’ll get homesick or decide to put the hill back the way it used to be.”
“Gentlemen,” Mal said, coming to stand in the middle of the decking, “I can certainly understand your concerns, given that you’re all new to this way of life, but I can assure you that nobody has ever been accidentally killed by nanites.”
“Accidentally?” A councilor turned to frown up at Mal in the relative darkness of the shuttle.
“In the early days of the empire’s Brushfire Wars, we were short on munitions, so we programmed blocks of nanites to tear apart enemy ships.”
“And how does this sound reassuring?” Frank asked him.
“It has to be done on purpose,” Mal said, sounding surprised that the colonists were still unconvinced. “They had to program a lump of nanites to expand in random directions which disrupted critical systems. They would have stopped before slicing a crewman in half because of restraints, hard coded into every single nanite in existence.”
“Sounds to me,” Frank said, “like the nanites still killed the crew, even if indirectly.”
Mal sighed. “Look, I could say your house killed you, back on Irth, if I stabbed you through the neck with a chair-leg while you slept, right?”
“Hells no!” Frank retorted indignantly. “You killed me, the chair was just a weapon…”
“Ah!” Mal exclaimed in triumph. “You see? Anything is a weapon in the wrong hands.”
“But this is a weapon of mass destruction!”
Mal screwed up his right cheek as he thought that over. “Given the right commands, yes. Some lunatic who wanted to kill you all would have to come up with the right idea, though. If he just tried to make them eat the town while you slept, the worst thing to happen might be that you fall into your basement when your bed disappears.”
“Or we wake to find the town sealed in beneath an impenetrable dome,” Sushil suggested. “I doubt these little machines would blame themselves for our eventual suffocation.”
“Gods!” Mal exclaimed. “I thought I had a good handle on why the Quailu fear us so much but that is pretty dark! I don’t know of a single instance in the history of the empire where some maniac has used nanites like that.”
“He’s got a point,” John admitted. “If someone is determined to kill you all, there’s dozens of ways to go about it, just like on Earth. Poisoning the water source, setting off a bomb… Hell, he could sneak up to our orbital patrol, take over a freighter or something and nudge an asteroid down onto the town.”
“That’s not even counting the weapons they’d have up there,” Frank added.
“Nukes.” Sushil nodded.
Mal stared at them, mouth hanging open, eyes wide. “Gods!” he finally said again quietly. “You people… We’d better keep this conversation to ourselves. The empire’s already afraid enough. Hearing you lot talk would start them on a preventative war!”
“Streets are in,” a councilor pointed out. “They seem to be starting on digging now.”
Frank looked back out. There were a few dozen squarish depressions forming now. The nanites were removing dirt and rocks from where the basements would be and they would be converting much of it into carboncrete walls as they worked their way down.
He looked back to the central square and then followed the network of streets, looking for his own home. He was fairly certain he’d found the spot but there was no excavation happening yet.
He was enjoying the luxury suite on the Mouse but it wasn’t home. He wasn’t the only one itching to move in.
Trisha was eager to get started on their new life and, though he was having fun on the Kuphar hanging out with Terry, Vikram was eager to get his feet on the planet as well. He was really looking forward to moving into his new room and not being on a separate ship from his mother.
The boarding bridge made it a short walk but there was still that element of separation and Frank wanted them all under one roof before the lad started to resent his new step-father taking Trisha away from him.
“Walls!” Sushil exclaimed.
Frank glanced at the chairman and followed his gaze. Sure enough, one of the first structures to be excavated was now rising above the street level. Carbon
crete set more quickly than regular concrete and it was more workable as well. The outer shells of the walls were solid enough but the interior structure was more foamy to provide insulation.
Unlike concrete, these walls were structurally sound after a handful of hours, allowing a two- or three-story structure to be erected in a single day. The structures rising from the ground beneath them would be ready for them to move into tomorrow morning.
They say that Rome wasn’t built in a day but Unity sure as hell would be.
The designs for the town structures matched well with the wall that would be the last structure to go up. They had the look of heavy masonry walls and flat topped roofs that could catch the rain-water, reducing reliance on the rivers running around the hill. The flat roofs also provided extra usable space if anyone wanted a rooftop terrace.
The design picked by Frank and Trisha would have a central courtyard surrounded by two floors and a small bachelor suite on the third level for Terry. He smiled down at the growing town. It was looking increasingly likely that Terry wouldn’t be a bachelor for very long.
Come Together
Unity, Ragnarok
“Ayyoh!” Trisha exclaimed. “Where is that boy!”
Frank came out to the upper walkway surrounding the courtyard and looked across to where she stood in Vikram’s doorway.
“He went with Terry to check out the view from the wall,” Frank told her, watching as she walked back around to their side. He liked watching her walk…
“You know,” he said in what he hoped was a sly tone, “that means we have the place to ourselves.”
“And it means he still has all of his belongings packed away in those containers,” she said, brushing past him and returning to their own bedroom to continue unpacking.
“Never once have I had to tell him to do the needful.” Her annoyed voice drifted out to the walkway. “Now he’s running off in every direction.”
Frank stayed at the railing a moment longer. It’s probably not about Vikram, at least not entirely. Trisha had seen her entire life change, as had Frank. A new world, new spouse, new dependents for each (if you counted Terry).
That was a lot of stress, even if you didn’t acknowledge it openly. It was bound to bubble to the surface every now and then in response to a mild annoyance.
He walked into their room, moving over to where she was pulling out a bundle of socks from one of the storage containers sent down from the Kuphar.
Trisha stood, still holding the socks, giving him a quizzical look. She let out a cute little squawk of surprise when he wrapped her in a hug, socks tumbling to the floor.
She relaxed into his arms, resting her head on his chest.
“It’s Vikram’s way of dealing with all the change,” he said into her hair. “He’s focusing on the exciting aspects, and there’s more than enough excitement to be had on an alien planet.”
She untangled her arms and wrapped them around his back. Another pair of socks bounced off his feet. “You’re right,” she said. “He has plenty of time to settle in. I suppose the last thing a young man wants to do on a new world is unpack his shirts.”
He lowered his head, nuzzling her neck.
“The food!” She leaned back suddenly. “I need to get it off the heat.”
She giggled at the look on his face. “Later,” she promised. “After the celebration. Tonight’s big party is one thing my son would never miss out on and we don’t want to embarrass him, do we?”
“Embarrass?”
“Do you want him to hear his neighbors speculating about his newlywed mother showing up late, with her hair a mess and her food overcooked?”
Frank had to admit his hopes were a bit unrealistic, for the moment. Discretion is the better part of valor, he thought. Or maybe anticipation is the spice of discretion? He realized she was already on her way to the walkway to reach the kitchen on the first floor.
He went to continue the search for the food containers every family had so they wouldn’t have to come in from their crops every day for lunch. He had a hunch they’d be in the larger container on their roof where he’d stored some of his old-fashioned farm implements.
He opened the hatch on the side and, sure enough, the bundle of insulated containers and fitted, detachable plates and cups fell out and dealt his kneecap a glancing blow.
“Ah!” He grabbed his knee, ignoring the rolling bundle. He leaned against the edge of the container waiting for the pain to subside.
The bundle rolled under the railing, falling to land with a soft thump on the garden bed in the middle of their courtyard. Trisha’s surprised voice wafted up to the third level but he didn’t catch what she’d said.
“Found them!” he shouted.
By the time the containers were cleaned of the precious dirt they’d brought all the way from Earth, Frank’s knee was ready for a walk. They carefully poured the food into two of the larger receptacles, closed them up and attached four plates to the top, concealing a stack of flatbread.
Their walk to the main square led them down a narrow back street to one of the main thoroughfares, all of which were pedestrian only. A soft glow came from the ornate, imperial-style streetlamps, giving the town a warm, festive feel.
Frank had never been much of a city-boy but he thought this must be the most beautiful place on Earth. He smiled shaking his head. The most beautiful place in the Human fief, he corrected himself.
The flow of colonists thickened as they neared the square. Everyone was exchanging friendly greetings, whether they knew each other or not. We’ll all know each other soon enough, Frank thought.
His own feelings of being a minority were gone now. Here, so far from Earth, having met aliens, it was easy to forget how he differed from other Humans.
And if he remembered any of it, it seemed so unimportant now.
They reached the square and went first to the pavilion, just inside the park. It was a permanent structure, solid columns supporting an ornate, groin-vaulted roof of carboncrete, cunningly arranged to look like stonework.
They dropped off the food with the volunteers who’d be in charge of the meal and then moved out into the square to greet their neighbors.
The square wasn’t really very square and that suited everyone just fine. It was more of the central kidney bean. One end of the bean-shaped area was overhung by the trees of the park. The other end had a Hindu temple, a Sikh temple, a Christian church and the town-hall.
Frank had already spent plenty of time standing in the square, staring in slack-jawed awe at the sight. This world had an abundance of gold and it was no big deal for their nanite miners to bring it to the surface.
The soaring, terraced levels of the Hindu temple, the graceful domes of the Sikh temple and the large domes of the Venetian-style Christian church all had a thin coating of the precious metal.
Though her job description was literally ‘come to the republic and be a teenager’, Gabriella had done an incredible job of taking an imperial standard design and turning it into a home for the hundreds of new Ragnarians.
The placement of the religious buildings had been a topic of an entire heated council session. It had finally been decided that they would all have a place on the central plaza as a reminder to all that the republic was committed to freedom of faith.
There was still extra parkland surrounding the square, set aside should any other religious buildings be required. In time, further structures would likely appear. The second wave of colonists would come once the first wave started to produce a self-sustaining level of food.
The ceremonial part of the evening included elements from the three faiths of the colonists. Captain Hennessy participated on behalf of the colony’s small Christian population and his words seemed well received.
Frank found him later, talking with Sushil, a plate of food in his hand. “That was an interesting ceremony, Captain… Captain-Reverend?” Frank shrugged. “What exactly should we be calling you?”
“Captai
n is fine,” he said, “or just plain Bill, as long as I can call you Frank instead of ‘Councilor’. Captain-Reverend makes me sound like a conquistador or something.”
“They would have been Catholics, yes?” Sushil asked.
“Doubtless they would have said so,” Bill said carefully, “but I doubt they’d have gotten along very well with a Catholic from the modern age.”
“You said you were Presbyterian, right?” Frank asked.
Several colonists were drifting over and Bill offered them an easy nod of greeting. “I was,” he said, “but I think we put too much emphasis on... marketing, for lack of a better word. I was never all that comfortable with denominations.
“It just seemed a little cruel for the Almighty to reveal himself to a small group of folk and leave the rest to rot in Hell.” He took a bite of his food.
“Seems to me,” he continued a little indistinctly, “all those other faiths out there might lead to the same place. I’m not gonna claim they’re headed for perdition just ’cause they don’t carry the same membership card I have.”
“This is a good approach to take,” Sushil said. The crowd murmured in agreement.
“Most definitely,” Father Sulak’s gravel-echoed voice startled most of the Humans. They turned to see the alien oracle standing at the back of the crowd.
He moved closer, the colonists making way for him, partly out of politeness but almost certainly out of unease as well. “Faith must always be a personal matter,” he rumbled. “When you force it down someone’s throat, it stops being faith.”
“Then you’ve killed it,” Hennessy said, nodding his agreement. “All you have left is a carcass called dogma.”
“I think you people will fit into our republic just fine,” Sulak said. “But I confess, my reason for coming here was to ask what that is.” He pointed at Hennessy’s plate, proof that he was picking up Human gestures.
“This?” Bill held up a skewer. “It’s called chicken tikka.”
“You understand,” Sulak said gravely, “that, as an oracle, I’m compelled to seek out the divine in all things…”
Ragnarok: Colonization, intrigue and betrayal. Page 11
