Wandering Star

by Steven Anderson

  Giz bowed his head, accepting the inevitable. He ran his fingers across the top of his mostly bald head, gathering his thoughts. What was left of his hair was left standing straight up, swaying in the slight breeze from the ventilators.

  Giz’s eyes locked on to mine, suddenly finding their focus point. “You, Theodore. You looked over your assignments?” I blinked, surprised by the suddenness of the question and he continued before I could answer. “Can you do everything on that list all on your own? Do you have time to do it all even if you were smart enough to know how?” I started to open my mouth, but he answered for me. “No, you can’t and you don’t. What were you planning to do?” I waited, expecting him to continue without me again. “Well?”

  “Um, well, I guess I was going to start at the top and get as much done as I could?”

  Giz looked over at Jenkins. “You’re right about the Academy. Damn if it doesn’t get worse every year. They used to load the kids up with so much work that they had to learn how to prioritize or die from sleep deprivation.”

  Giz settled back in his chair. “First you need to understand a bit about conditions on Dulcinea. Why do they want us there? Or really, who wants us there? Dulcinea’s population was already a couple of hundred million when the old Union started to fall apart. Now there’s over a billion. Their society is mature and prosperous, their technology nearly as advanced as anything on Earth, more so in some areas. So why do they need us? Here’s your first clue: take a look at your task list. It was created by the political leadership on Dulcinea, more specifically the University of Palma Sola and the Palma Federated States, working with the politicians that run the Reunification Commission. And what do these politicians want? They want to keep on being politicians. Sometime after we leave, the senators and assemblymen will tell the folks they want voting for them how they got Earth to do all these good things for the sovereign citizens of Dulcinea. And the senators and assemblymen on Earth will tell their constituents what good works the Reunification Commission is doing bringing the galaxy back together again, boosting export markets and creating jobs.”

  Realizing that he was getting off track, Giz paused before continuing. “Let’s look at this a little less cynically, and this is the real reason for us to spend time on a planet fall like Dulcinea. Their scientific community sees this as a two month long technical and scientific exchange meeting. We will be working one-on-one with some of the best scientists on an entire planet. They expect us to know something; more than can be learned from technical journals and virtual special interest groups. You’d better know what you’re doing. And just maybe, you might learn something from them along the way too.”

  I sighed. No pressure.

  Giz leaned back in his chair. “I’ll try to help you get started since none of us will be ready until we all are. And you,” he pointed a finger at Jake, “pay attention so we don’t have to go through all this again. OK, Ted, what are the main tasks on your assignment list?”

  “Geologic survey of someplace called the Margo Islands. I haven’t had a chance to look it up, so I’m not even sure where it is relative to Palma Sola. From the description it looks like they want information on its potential for agriculture, mineral resources and the optimal location for a small city.”

  As I talked I noticed Giz exchanging glances with other members of the team. “Problem?” I asked.

  “No, probably not. The Palma Federated States and the Oceanus Protectorate both claim the Margos. Twenty years ago they fought a nasty little war over them, but it was all settled by treaty.”

  “All wars are nasty and none of them are little,” Charlotte added. “The death toll was over four thousand, most of them when two PFS transport ships were destroyed by an OP special operations team while they sat at anchor at Palma Sola. I was there on my first assignment when it happened. We were evacuated.” She stood behind Giz with her arms crossed, reliving the moment. “I’d met a couple of the guys who were killed.”

  “Set the political situation aside for a moment. I doubt the PFS would send us anywhere dangerous or insert us into a potential combat zone.” Giz’s smile was unconvincing. Charlotte said nothing but I could see that she disagreed and was thinking it was exactly what the PFS was doing.

  “Let’s get back to your ‘shalls’ and resource loading. Your assignment document has several statements that start with ‘Reunification personnel shall,’ shall being the key word. You need to assign each statement a priority and decide how much of your time it will take to accomplish, whose help you need and how much of their time it will take. Now, why do you think they want you for this job?”

  “Well I don’t know much about what makes good agricultural land or where to build cities, but I do know something about determining mineral distribution and extraction. I did my thesis on geomorphologic modeling as a technique to identify probable distribution of economically valuable mineral resources.”

  “And a wonderful thesis title it is.” Hannah commented.

  “It takes the existing landforms and then rolls time back to see how the landscape evolved and what’s underneath it. I wrote the code for the simulation myself and tested it against known sites. It works pretty well.”

  Giz nodded. “That’s probably what they’re most interested in. Make it your number one priority and build the rest of your grid around it. For your time estimates make your best guess then double it before giving it to Angela.”

  “And I’ll double everything again,” Angela added. “That way it will be close.”

  Giz continued. “It’ll be easier when we get to the next planet fall on Cleavus. It’s uninhabited and unexplored, so we have a standard deck of tasks that we’ll be working to.” He looked at me and Jake and then Hannah. “Ask questions. Angela can do this in her sleep.”

  “And I have.”

  Giz looked at Hannah. “And just because you have one hop under your belt doesn’t make you an expert. Ask for help if you need it.”

  Hannah smiled back at him. “Absolutely, sir.”

  Giz pushed back his chair, shaking his head. “Get to work.”

  Jake and I brought up the template that Angela provided for our input and worked to come up with some sort of resource loading for each task on our lists. By midnight we had gone through two pots of coffee and restarted a couple of times after Angela reviewed what we were doing. Hannah had finished her tasks and was helping us enough that I had some hope of seeing my pillow before breakfast was being served.

  “Tell me again why we need to get this done by morning?” Jake had already asked that question a dozen times in the last six hours, so neither Hannah nor I even looked away from our displays.

  Hannah’s voice was an impassive monotone. “Because Angela needs time to correlate, de-conflict and prepare her report. And because you and Ted appear to have no idea how long it takes you to do anything except maybe drink coffee.”

  Wandering Star may have heard him ask one too many times and decided to answer him in her own way. The mess hall lights flickered and came back red.

  “Damn it, Star!” Angela yelled. “I swear I’m going to find every part of you and unplug it.”

  Wandering Star ignored her, of course, and we lost two hours standing around in pressure suits listening to Captain von Muller reminding us of the importance of our mission and his personal responsibility for our safety.

  In the end, Angela held our tech team all hands meeting when we were all finished at 0500. Jake’s and my inputs were judged to be ‘adequate’ and I assigned sleep a higher priority and longer duration than breakfast.

  I slept for only four hours before forcing myself out of bed. We were less than thirty-six hours out from Dulcinea, and for the past couple of weeks ship time had been slowly synchronizing with the planet’s twenty-two and a half hour rotation and Palma Sola’s local time. Sleeping in now would just make adjusting worse. I found Jake alrea
dy eating, or at least sitting at a table while his hand supported his head. Hannah was wide awake and ready for the day.

  “Are you excited, Ted?” Hannah looked excited, but that was her natural state.

  “I am” I replied, and it was true.

  She took a pickle from Jake’s plate, crunched it between her teeth. “They have us booked into the Palma Sola Hilton, same as last time I was there.” She passed me the room assignment sheet.

  “Two months living in my own single room.” I smiled. No Jake every minute of every day, no Wandering Star watching us or waking us up in the middle of the night. Not bad.

  Jake looked up at me, his forehead wrinkled in concern. “Well, two months for us, but how long before you ship out to the Margo Islands? You’ll probably be living in a tent. Try not to get shot while you’re there.”

  “You sound like you’d miss me.”

  He considered that for a moment. “Being with you full time has been…interesting. But yeah, I’d miss you.”

  “You should be careful, Ted,” Hannah added, “Jake would miss you.”

  I spent the next two days trying to learn as much as I could about the Margo Islands and the local political situation but there wasn’t much relevant to be found, other than that Charlotte was right about the war being nasty. The Margo Islands treaty had established a joint Palma Federated States and Oceanus Protectorate foundation that required bilateral approval of all development on the islands. Nothing had been done since then, but now maybe they had reached an agreement. Mahajan’s only advice to me was not particularly helpful.

  “You are a pawn,” he told me. “Be careful.”

  Orbit was achieved on schedule and our team had a bumpy shuttle ride down to Palma Sola at 0700 local time through a thick overcast. The surface temperature was -5 degrees C with light snow. As I walked through the terminal listening to Hannah and Jake’s excited conversation, all I could hear in my head was everyone telling me, ‘be careful, Ted, be careful’.

  CHAPTER 2

  PALMA SOLA

  THE PALMA SOLA TERMINAL WAS built more than fifty years ago using the ‘heroic renaissance’ architecture that was popular at the start of reunification. I found it inspirational when I was growing up to see images of these buildings on so many other worlds, massive curved forms of concrete and steel reaching toward space, demonstrating a common bond for all humanity. On Dulcinea the terminal’s architect had taken advantage of the eighty percent gravity to create forms that looked like they might crash down on the tiny people below at any moment. Even the view out the four story tall windows of the city on the other side of the bay was of no comfort. Snow was falling, the low overcast seemed about to swallow everything, and wind was kicking up whitecaps on the bay. I found myself missing the snug enclosed corridors of Wandering Star, now on orbit three hundred kilometers above the clouds.

  Jake was having none of my bad mood. “Why so glum? Fresh air! Open skies, sort of.” He gestured out the massive windows at the snow as the moving walkway carried us along. “We’re off the ship and on another planet! This is what you dreamed of your whole life. Smile! Stop worrying about those damned islands for a few hours and enjoy the moment.”

  I took a deep breath. Jake was right. Why did I always start worrying about the next problem whenever I achieved a goal? I smiled at him as he and Hannah rode along too close to each other.

  “OK,” I said, trying to cheer myself up, “Angela has us scheduled pretty tight all morning, but what are we going to go and do this afternoon? I want to spend at least a few hours being a tourist. Hannah, you were here a year and a half ago, what was your favorite thing to do?”

  “It was mid-summer then. I spent part of every day with my bare feet in the sand and playing in the water.” All three of us stared out the windows again. It was snowing harder now and the city was no longer visible. Hannah tipped her head to the side and looked at me. “There’s a trail that climbs a short way up the cliff to a little restaurant overlooking the bay. They had a huge fireplace in the center, unlit when I was there, but it might be fun to sit next to tonight and watch the city get covered in snow while we drink hot chocolate. If the trail is open.”

  “I like it. And before that?”

  “We’ll explore the city, maybe walk to the University if it’s not too far,” Jake replied.

  Hannah was still looking at the snow. “I’m glad I had Star print a warmer coat for me.”

  Walking out of the terminal to the waiting hotel shuttle was our first experience with real weather in over a month. I climbed in and sat next to Charlotte. Jake and Hannah were across the aisle. Charlotte’s mood seemed to be about what mine had been. She glanced at me and looked back out her window shivering against the cold air blowing in through the open door. She stared out across the bay, maybe looking for ghosts in the swirling snow. I felt I should say something to her, but no words came and I felt myself slipping back into my own worries. Peter Jenkins and Angela were sitting behind us. Jenkins reached over the seat and placed his hand on Charlotte’s shoulder.

  “Cheer up, Anaba. Two months of a soft bed, good food and pleasant work. This stop is a milk run. We could do it blindfolded.”

  Charlotte continued watching the snow out her window. She reached up and patted Jenkin’s hand. “Blindfolded.” She replied. She smiled but just barely.

  The Palma Sola Hilton was built along the bay, the three story main building curving between the beach and the broad road that ran for several kilometers through the city. A more modern tower had been added at some point to accommodate the increase in visitors since the start of reunification.

  “Last time they had us up there.” Hannah looked up as we unloaded from the bus. “The view is nice from the restaurant at the top, but the rooms are kind of bleh. The older rooms in the main building are nicer, they all have a view of either the cliffs out the front, or the bay behind the hotel. And the rooms are bigger.”

  I swung my backpack over my shoulder as we entered the lobby, wondering how Hannah knew what the other rooms looked like but decided not to ask. Angela confirmed our room assignments at the front desk where a sign displayed the hotel’s pleasure in welcoming the members of the Reunification Commission to Palma Sola.

  “We’ll all be in the Morgan wing. Your display pad and watch should both now show what room you’re in and either one will grant you access.” I tapped my watch, room 209. “Please get settled quickly. I’d like to see you all for a quick meeting in forty-five minutes. We have the use of the Colin Gray conference room for the duration. It’s located in the center of this wing on the ground floor so you can’t blame being late on getting lost.”

  Jenkins looked at his watch and smiled. “Ocean view rooms. The advantage of being here during the off season.”

  Room 209 smelled like it hadn’t been used in a while, but it was almost twice the size of the cabin I had shared with Jake, and it had a big bed, and it was all mine. My bag had been left in a corner, a small duffel I’d had since the Academy. I set my backpack on top of it and opened the blinds to look out at the snow covered beach and grey skies. I slid the door open on to the balcony and let the cold air rush in.

  Dulcinea. It had been only a name, its star only a speck of light visible when the sky was very dark. Now I was here feeling cold wind on my face. I quickly closed the door and flopped down on the bed. “Star?” I said aloud. No answer. It made me smile.

  A clock on the desk showed local time of 0936. The early colonists had kept Earth standard minutes and seconds, days and weeks so the clocks would look ‘normal’ until they reached 2238 when they would change to 0000. It was going to take getting used to, even with Wandering Star having slowly shortening our days for the past couple of weeks. It was very easy to lie there on my back staring up at the ceiling. I felt as if I had run a very long race and had earned a rest. In the back of my head though, I could hear Angela’s voice
whispering, ‘Now the real work begins’.

  I sighed, got up and unpacked my bag, hanging up clothes and dumping my toiletries by the sink. I stepped out into the hall and closed the door.

  Omar Gizbar and Mr. Mahajan were passing by on their way to the conference room.

  “So, Ted,” Giz asked, “how’s your room?”

  “It’s wonderful,” I answered.

  Mahajan laughed. “I imagine it is after doubling up with your friend for two months. I think you were nuts for doing that.”

  I took a deep breath before replying. “It wasn’t that bad.”

  “Says the man who has his own room for the next eight weeks.” Giz replied.

  “Until they ship me out to the Margo Islands.”

  “Yes, there is that.” Giz was still smiling but his eyes no longer reflected it.

  I walked along with them to the conference room. We were early, so I poured myself a cup of coffee and walked around the room looking at the images of the city and surrounding countryside that decorated the walls.

  Jake and Hannah came up beside me while I admired a picture of the Hilton taken from off shore. The water was a perfect turquoise blue, the beach wide and full of umbrellas and beach chairs, the view backed by the white cliffs that enclosed the north end of the city.

  “We have got to come back here sometime when it’s summer,” Jake nodded at the image.

  “It’s crowded and I got a sunburn,” Hannah said solemnly, looking at the beach.

  “I bet you were just miserable,” Jake taunted her, making her smile.

  “I’ll come back with you.” She looked from Jake to me. “Anytime. It was wonderful.”

  Angela called the meeting to order and we spent the next hour reviewing assignments again, but more focused on who we would be working with and where, the importance of submitting progress reports on time, and on completing our impossible schedules and task lists. Most work was to be performed at the University, except for Hannah who was doing a study on street slang. Jake would get some outdoor time as well, doing a survey of the microscopic critters whose shells made up the White Cliffs to understand their variation and evolution across time.