Trident's Forge, page 3
Theresa was about to snap at him, but Valmassoi waved him off. “It’s fine, Preston. We’d be honored to include our chief law enforcement officer’s insights in our deliberations. That will be all for now.”
Merick bowed. “I’ll be just outside if you need anything.” The door clicked shut behind him.
“Now then.” Valmassoi held a hand out to two unoccupied chairs. “Detective, chief, please have a seat.”
“Thank you,” Benson said as he sat down. “But it’s actually just coach, or if you really must be formal, director of athletic preparedness and recreation. My wife is the detective now.” Benson reached over and squeezed Theresa’s hand.
“Of course you’re right, coach. Your reputation precedes you.”
“What’s this all about?” Theresa said.
Valmassoi held up a hand. “We’re about to start. We’re waiting on one more guest.” As he said it, a flickering, translucent image of Captain Mahama filled the seat next to the administrator. Her dark complexion stood in stark contrast to the drab gray and brown of her command uniform. Even from thousands of kilometers away and looking like a ghost, the woman effortlessly commanded attention.
“Can we clean that up at all?” Valmassoi leaned back to ask a holo tech hidden in the shadows.
“Sorry sir, there’s some high-altitude particulates interfering with the com laser. Probably from that wildfire on the other side of the continent.”
Valmassoi nodded curtly. “Can you hear me, Captain?”
After an almost imperceptible delay, Mahama’s ghostly figure turned to face roughly where the administrator sat and nodded. “Indeed I can. How do I look?”
“Like something haunting Scrooge’s house,” Valmassoi said.
Mahama smirked. “I’m afraid I neglected to bring any chains. Is the room secure on your end?”
“Yes.”
“Good, is everyone present?”
Valmassoi nodded in Theresa’s direction. “And then some.”
Mahama’s holo glanced over and smiled. “Ah, I’m sorry we didn’t think to include you on the list, Chief Benson. It was an oversight, I assure you.”
“Thank you, captain.” Theresa appreciated the courtesy, even if she doubted its veracity.
“All right.” Mahama laced her fingers together and cracked her knuckles theatrically. “It’s essential that everyone understands that this discussion is of the utmost sensitivity. Anything said here stays here for the time being.”
Benson adjusted himself in his chair. “I thought we were done keeping secrets. Sir.”
Mahama looked squarely at him. “It’s good to see you again too, detective.”
“Why does everyone keep calling me that?”
“Apologies, Mr Benson. Force of habit. I’m not making everyone swear an oath of secrecy. However, I am asking for a certain level of… discretion while we decide how best to respond to today’s events.”
“And what are these events, madam captain?” The question came from another familiar face, Dr Russell, who’d been named health minister just in the past year. She’d been the one to treat Bryan’s extensive burns and other injuries he’d received in the final showdown with Kimura three years earlier. Her plastic surgery work in particular was excellent. Few people knew his face well enough to spot the subtle scars left over from the skin grafts. Theresa could, but she never let him know it. If anything, the fresh skin had taken a few years off his face. She didn’t mind.
“I was just coming to that. Administrator, the video if you please.”
Valmassoi pointed at the holo tech and made a “get rolling” gesture with his index finger. A moment later, the lights in the room darkened as one of the walls lit up, displaying a scene that everyone in the room, indeed everyone in the city, had already spent hours watching over the last three years.
Video feed streamed from inside the temple on the continent of Atlantis the natives had built around the first of Pathfinder’s rovers they’d discovered. The rover itself was powered by a radioisotope thermoelectric generator with a half-life measured in decades, which was why it was still operating three years after being captured.
Aside from a couple of scientific instruments that had glitched or fallen victim to the natives’ curiosity, it was still fully functional and had been gathering information on their new neighbors the entire time. Much had already been learned about their physiology, culture, and even language thanks to the happy accident of the rover’s capture.
It appeared they were watching another of the Atlantians’ frequent offering ceremonies, where the village elders tried to earn favor from the rover with bribes of tubers, fungus, piles of seeds, and the occasional animal. The rover would show its gratitude by taking measurements, collecting and analyzing samples, and even dissecting certain specimens, all under the control of an exuberant exobiologist sitting in a lab aboard the Ark. They could only guess at what the natives made of its odd behavior.
Theresa watched intently as the rover’s binocular camera mast panned through the collection of aliens, their bioluminescent skin glowing in rhythmic patterns synchronized with the haunting melodies of their prayer songs. The scene was utterly foreign, yet compellingly beautiful. The sheer number of individuals jumped out at her. There had to be three hundred of them crammed into the circular room, well above normal. Attendance at these ceremonies had slacked off over the years, falling into a pattern resembling the spikes for Christmas and Easter Mass at the Catholic cathedral, and relative calm the rest of the year. But today didn’t fall into that pattern of holy days for the Atlantians.
Something had happened to bring a lot of faithful back into the fold. It was only then that Theresa pulled back from the video enough to look at the time/date stamp in the bottom right corner of the image.
“This isn’t a live stream?” she said.
“No,” Mahama answered. “This was recorded this morning, just after midnight local time for their village.”
“It’s certainly a big turnout. But what are we looking for, specifically?” Benson asked.
“The answer is coming right about… now.”
A wave of activity spread through the crowd, starting at the temple entrance. The natives parted to either side, allowing two figures to pass into the center of the room. It took a moment for the rover’s cameras to adjust on the pair of dark faces, but once the faces resolved–
“Mei Nakama,” Theresa said breathlessly as the rest of the room erupted in shouting.
“Order,” Valmassoi said sternly. “Quiet down, please.”
“She’s supposed to be dead!” This came from Gregory Alexander, latest heir to a very long line of bigwigs stretching all the way back to the construction of the Ark itself. His family name still graced the tallest residential building in Avalon module, and now he was the owner of the only custom construction company in the city. Since landing, his wealth and sense of entitlement had both grown at roughly similar rates.
Everyone was entitled to a home. But if you had the money and wanted something more than the standard, cookie-cutter layout, Alexander Custom Builders was where you went. And although his power and influence were substantial, he wasn’t a council member per se, even if it was rumored that several of them were deeply indebted to him in the form of exceedingly generous upgrades to their home designs, provided free of charge with a wink and a nod. Theresa found his inclusion at a “secret” meeting troubling, but pressed on.
“We were obviously mistaken, Mr Alexander,” Valmassoi said. “And I’d remind you that you’ve been included in this meeting as a courtesy, so please try to contain yourself.”
Alexander glowered, but returned to silence for the moment.
Theresa leaned back in her chair and smirked. The Unbound, or what remained of them after the trials of David Kimura’s coconspirators had thinned their ranks, had struck out for themselves and established a small fishing village twenty kilometers north of Shambhala. Close enough to trade with the rest of humanity when necessary, but far enough away to maintain privacy and independence, which had been the hallmarks of their hermit society even while they had eked out a living hiding in the sublevels of the Ark.
A sudden and powerful hurricane had leveled their village a year earlier and swept the bodies out to sea. Or so everyone had been led to believe.
“Well,” Benson put his arms behind his head. “That explains why we never found their bodies. There weren’t any bodies to find.”
“Then how the hell did they get across the ocean?” Alexander barked.
“Isn’t it obvious?” Theresa said. “They’ve been living as fishermen for two years.”
“Are you saying they crossed several thousand kilometers of open ocean in fishing canoes at the height of hurricane season? That’s preposterous!”
“It’s either that or the breaststroke,” Theresa replied.
“Actually, it’s neither.” Benson circled something on his tablet. “Can you give my pad access to the big screen, please?”
The tech in the corner glanced over at Valmassoi, who nodded his acceptance. Two keystrokes later and a satellite image appeared of the Unbound’s village from a day before the hurricane hit with a big red circle around one of the buildings by the shore.
“Everybody see that ‘barn’ right on the shore? Does it look suspiciously like an upside down boat to anyone else?” He zoomed in on a pair of large triangular tents. “And those are sails, if I’m any judge.”
“What are you suggesting, detecti… Mr Benson?” Mahama’s image asked.
“Simple. The Unbound planned out this whole thing. They built a boat that could handle the ocean right under our noses, then used the hurricane to cover their escape.”
“No way,” Valmassoi shook his head in protest. “We’d have spotted them. The satellites we have in orbit have centimeter resolution, for god’s sake.”
“Not necessarily,” Theresa added. “We don’t have anything near complete real-time coverage of the surface. We only had the eighteen platforms Pathfinder dropped into orbit when it arrived, minus the four we’ve already lost to breakdowns. There are gaps. We have to prioritize surveillance targets, and the open ocean isn’t high on the list. One of our birds can see if you’re holding a tablet. But we have to know where to point it.”
Alexander scoffed. “Are you telling me that a bunch of low-tech fishermen evaded the Ark and her illustrious crew?”
Theresa’s husband couldn’t help but laugh at that.
“Something humorous, Director Benson?” Mahama asked politely.
“Yeah, you. All of you. The Unbound spent their entire lives hiding inside a tube sixteen kilometers long with a million cameras inside it. Hell, they ran a damned farm without us knowing for thirty years. They know our systems, our protocols. They’ve been evading the crew for decades. You really think we could keep a lid on them down here, with an entire planet to hide on?” He snorted. “You’re dreaming.”
“But how did they navigate straight to the rover site over thousands of kilometers of ocean?” Mahama said. “That’s quite a feat.”
“That’s the easiest part to explain,” Benson said. “If you have the rover coordinates, just take a tablet and hack the GPS software and flip it to receive only. Then you’re passive and we have nothing.”
“You have a criminal’s mind, Mr Benson,” Mahama said.
“Thank you?”
“How far behind are we here?” Theresa asked.
“What do you mean?” Mahama asked.
“When did they land? When was actual first contact made and how long have they been in situ talking to the Atlantians?”
Mahama shrugged. “We don’t know. We only know they entered the temple for the first time yesterday.”
“How can we not know that?” Alexander asked with a huff.
“Don’t get so worked up, Greg,” Benson said. “You look like you could use some time outside. Why don’t you come try out for the football league? I’m sure someone could use a center of your… stature.”
“Over my dead body.”
“That’s the perfect attitude for a center.”
“If you’re quite finished, gentlemen?” Mahama scolded. “To answer your question, Mr Alexander, we’re searching back through archived images and data as we speak looking for clues we may have missed.”
“Well look for their damned ship parked on the shore. That should tell you.”
Benson tapped the table. “If they were smart, they’d have made landfall in the middle of the night and scuttled the ship before daybreak. The sats would never have the chance to catch them.”
“Awful lot of planning there,” Valmassoi added.
“And that surprises you?” Benson shifted in his chair. “These folks are survivors among survivors. Maybe it’s time to stop underestimating them.”
“So there’s no way to know how much of a head start they have?” Valmassoi asked.
Theresa held her hands open. “Maybe not. Well, actually…” She swiped her tablet a couple of times and the picture of the old village came up again with the suspected boat circled. “If that’s really the boat they used, and I’m almost sure it is, then it’s around what? Twenty, twenty-five meters long? Last census we took, the Unbound were right at thirty-six people, including four children that had been born since we landed. Between people and supplies, they would’ve been packed in tight. Fresh water isn’t a problem if they took that solar desalinization machine with them, but food would be a real issue.”
“But they’re fishermen, on the ocean,” Mahama observed.
“Yes, that’s true,” Benson jumped in. “But they were barely above subsistence levels before the storm, and that was using tidal traps and multiple boats with nets. None of which are going to work on the open ocean if they’re trying to get somewhere, because the nets create drag and slow you down, adding time to the journey. They could use hooks and lines, but you can’t pull nearly the same volume of game that way, especially out away from the more fertile coastal waters. So yeah, they may’ve been able to catch enough to supplement their stores to some degree, but they had to bring most of their food from the start. So that limits how much time they could’ve spent on the open water to, I don’t know, a couple months? Three months?”
“You sure seem to know a lot about fishing,” Dr Russell teased.
“He loves nature documentaries,” Theresa said. “Drives me nuts with them.”
The village on the screen shrank to a pinprick, then shot to the right side as Mahama took control and zoomed the view out to encompass a flattened representation of the entire planet.
“There are a few archipelagoes along the way where they could’ve stopped and replenished.”
“That’s possible,” Benson added. “But I think we’re shooting for a worst-case number right now, yes?”
Mahama nodded.
“OK, so how fast can a sailing ship average over water?”
Theresa consulted a database in her plant. “Call it five knots.”
“What the hell’s a ‘not’?”
“Right, sorry, about nine kph.”
Benson nodded. “OK, is that an Earth standard?”
“Broadly speaking, with a ton of variables, yes.”
“All right, average wind speed here is a little higher, so call it twelve kph, just under three hundred kilometers per day in ideal conditions.”
“Hold on,” Valmassoi jumped back into the conversation. “Are you saying they made the crossing in two weeks?”
“No, I’m saying they could have, if everything went perfectly. Which, as you know, it usually doesn’t.”
“But that still puts them on site for more than a local year!” Alexander said.
“A year,” Mahama corrected. “Earth’s year doesn’t have any meaning anymore.”
“Yes, fine, a year. That’s still enough time to learn the language and say all sorts of things. We could have a real situation here.”
“And that’s why this meeting was called,” Mahama tried to regain control of the conversation. “The question is what to do about it now that they have made first contact with the Atlantians for us.”
“Yes,” Valmassoi added. “Who knows what stories they’ve been telling the natives. We’ll be lucky if they don’t teach them how to build an invasion fleet to sail right over here and wipe us all out.”
“Can’t happen,” Alexander jumped in. “The Ark’s navigational lasers would burn any ship to ash before they got within a thousand kilometers of Shambhala.”
Theresa rolled her eyes, but Feng was the first to respond to the needless bravado. “First of all, the prevailing winds blow east to west. They’d have to sail right on around Gaia, then cross our whole continent overland. And second, I suspect Captain Mahama would prefer to find a solution that doesn’t involve wholesale slaughter of the people we’re trying to share this world with.”
“Too true,” the captain said. “The task before us now is basically public-relations damage control. The Unbound have forced our hand here.”
“Should’ve spaced the lot of them,” Alexander mumbled, but Mahama ignored him and continued.
“We have to either contain or counter whatever biased information they may have given the Atlantians about our presence and intentions.”
“How do we do that?” Valmassoi asked.
“We move up our timeline and send the diplomatic mission to introduce ourselves to the Atlantians.”
“When?”
“Last year would be ideal,” Theresa quipped.
“Snarky,” Feng said, “but entirely accurate. Maybe we got lucky and they stopped at a particularly beautiful tropical island for a few months and really did only get there two days ago, or maybe they’ve been there for a year already and only now got around to attending church. Either way, we need to get our people there immediately.”
“We’re not close to ready,” Valmassoi objected. “Waiting for a good translator program was the entire point of delaying first contact. We’ve only just started to get a handle on the natives’ language.”
“Because our linguists and translation algorithms have only had the audio/visual feeds from the captured rover to work with,” Mahama said. “And a lot of that has been repetitious prayer ceremonies instead of back-and-forth conversations. No, the best way to do this is just to drop right into the thick of it. We probably should have done it sooner anyway.”
Merick bowed. “I’ll be just outside if you need anything.” The door clicked shut behind him.
“Now then.” Valmassoi held a hand out to two unoccupied chairs. “Detective, chief, please have a seat.”
“Thank you,” Benson said as he sat down. “But it’s actually just coach, or if you really must be formal, director of athletic preparedness and recreation. My wife is the detective now.” Benson reached over and squeezed Theresa’s hand.
“Of course you’re right, coach. Your reputation precedes you.”
“What’s this all about?” Theresa said.
Valmassoi held up a hand. “We’re about to start. We’re waiting on one more guest.” As he said it, a flickering, translucent image of Captain Mahama filled the seat next to the administrator. Her dark complexion stood in stark contrast to the drab gray and brown of her command uniform. Even from thousands of kilometers away and looking like a ghost, the woman effortlessly commanded attention.
“Can we clean that up at all?” Valmassoi leaned back to ask a holo tech hidden in the shadows.
“Sorry sir, there’s some high-altitude particulates interfering with the com laser. Probably from that wildfire on the other side of the continent.”
Valmassoi nodded curtly. “Can you hear me, Captain?”
After an almost imperceptible delay, Mahama’s ghostly figure turned to face roughly where the administrator sat and nodded. “Indeed I can. How do I look?”
“Like something haunting Scrooge’s house,” Valmassoi said.
Mahama smirked. “I’m afraid I neglected to bring any chains. Is the room secure on your end?”
“Yes.”
“Good, is everyone present?”
Valmassoi nodded in Theresa’s direction. “And then some.”
Mahama’s holo glanced over and smiled. “Ah, I’m sorry we didn’t think to include you on the list, Chief Benson. It was an oversight, I assure you.”
“Thank you, captain.” Theresa appreciated the courtesy, even if she doubted its veracity.
“All right.” Mahama laced her fingers together and cracked her knuckles theatrically. “It’s essential that everyone understands that this discussion is of the utmost sensitivity. Anything said here stays here for the time being.”
Benson adjusted himself in his chair. “I thought we were done keeping secrets. Sir.”
Mahama looked squarely at him. “It’s good to see you again too, detective.”
“Why does everyone keep calling me that?”
“Apologies, Mr Benson. Force of habit. I’m not making everyone swear an oath of secrecy. However, I am asking for a certain level of… discretion while we decide how best to respond to today’s events.”
“And what are these events, madam captain?” The question came from another familiar face, Dr Russell, who’d been named health minister just in the past year. She’d been the one to treat Bryan’s extensive burns and other injuries he’d received in the final showdown with Kimura three years earlier. Her plastic surgery work in particular was excellent. Few people knew his face well enough to spot the subtle scars left over from the skin grafts. Theresa could, but she never let him know it. If anything, the fresh skin had taken a few years off his face. She didn’t mind.
“I was just coming to that. Administrator, the video if you please.”
Valmassoi pointed at the holo tech and made a “get rolling” gesture with his index finger. A moment later, the lights in the room darkened as one of the walls lit up, displaying a scene that everyone in the room, indeed everyone in the city, had already spent hours watching over the last three years.
Video feed streamed from inside the temple on the continent of Atlantis the natives had built around the first of Pathfinder’s rovers they’d discovered. The rover itself was powered by a radioisotope thermoelectric generator with a half-life measured in decades, which was why it was still operating three years after being captured.
Aside from a couple of scientific instruments that had glitched or fallen victim to the natives’ curiosity, it was still fully functional and had been gathering information on their new neighbors the entire time. Much had already been learned about their physiology, culture, and even language thanks to the happy accident of the rover’s capture.
It appeared they were watching another of the Atlantians’ frequent offering ceremonies, where the village elders tried to earn favor from the rover with bribes of tubers, fungus, piles of seeds, and the occasional animal. The rover would show its gratitude by taking measurements, collecting and analyzing samples, and even dissecting certain specimens, all under the control of an exuberant exobiologist sitting in a lab aboard the Ark. They could only guess at what the natives made of its odd behavior.
Theresa watched intently as the rover’s binocular camera mast panned through the collection of aliens, their bioluminescent skin glowing in rhythmic patterns synchronized with the haunting melodies of their prayer songs. The scene was utterly foreign, yet compellingly beautiful. The sheer number of individuals jumped out at her. There had to be three hundred of them crammed into the circular room, well above normal. Attendance at these ceremonies had slacked off over the years, falling into a pattern resembling the spikes for Christmas and Easter Mass at the Catholic cathedral, and relative calm the rest of the year. But today didn’t fall into that pattern of holy days for the Atlantians.
Something had happened to bring a lot of faithful back into the fold. It was only then that Theresa pulled back from the video enough to look at the time/date stamp in the bottom right corner of the image.
“This isn’t a live stream?” she said.
“No,” Mahama answered. “This was recorded this morning, just after midnight local time for their village.”
“It’s certainly a big turnout. But what are we looking for, specifically?” Benson asked.
“The answer is coming right about… now.”
A wave of activity spread through the crowd, starting at the temple entrance. The natives parted to either side, allowing two figures to pass into the center of the room. It took a moment for the rover’s cameras to adjust on the pair of dark faces, but once the faces resolved–
“Mei Nakama,” Theresa said breathlessly as the rest of the room erupted in shouting.
“Order,” Valmassoi said sternly. “Quiet down, please.”
“She’s supposed to be dead!” This came from Gregory Alexander, latest heir to a very long line of bigwigs stretching all the way back to the construction of the Ark itself. His family name still graced the tallest residential building in Avalon module, and now he was the owner of the only custom construction company in the city. Since landing, his wealth and sense of entitlement had both grown at roughly similar rates.
Everyone was entitled to a home. But if you had the money and wanted something more than the standard, cookie-cutter layout, Alexander Custom Builders was where you went. And although his power and influence were substantial, he wasn’t a council member per se, even if it was rumored that several of them were deeply indebted to him in the form of exceedingly generous upgrades to their home designs, provided free of charge with a wink and a nod. Theresa found his inclusion at a “secret” meeting troubling, but pressed on.
“We were obviously mistaken, Mr Alexander,” Valmassoi said. “And I’d remind you that you’ve been included in this meeting as a courtesy, so please try to contain yourself.”
Alexander glowered, but returned to silence for the moment.
Theresa leaned back in her chair and smirked. The Unbound, or what remained of them after the trials of David Kimura’s coconspirators had thinned their ranks, had struck out for themselves and established a small fishing village twenty kilometers north of Shambhala. Close enough to trade with the rest of humanity when necessary, but far enough away to maintain privacy and independence, which had been the hallmarks of their hermit society even while they had eked out a living hiding in the sublevels of the Ark.
A sudden and powerful hurricane had leveled their village a year earlier and swept the bodies out to sea. Or so everyone had been led to believe.
“Well,” Benson put his arms behind his head. “That explains why we never found their bodies. There weren’t any bodies to find.”
“Then how the hell did they get across the ocean?” Alexander barked.
“Isn’t it obvious?” Theresa said. “They’ve been living as fishermen for two years.”
“Are you saying they crossed several thousand kilometers of open ocean in fishing canoes at the height of hurricane season? That’s preposterous!”
“It’s either that or the breaststroke,” Theresa replied.
“Actually, it’s neither.” Benson circled something on his tablet. “Can you give my pad access to the big screen, please?”
The tech in the corner glanced over at Valmassoi, who nodded his acceptance. Two keystrokes later and a satellite image appeared of the Unbound’s village from a day before the hurricane hit with a big red circle around one of the buildings by the shore.
“Everybody see that ‘barn’ right on the shore? Does it look suspiciously like an upside down boat to anyone else?” He zoomed in on a pair of large triangular tents. “And those are sails, if I’m any judge.”
“What are you suggesting, detecti… Mr Benson?” Mahama’s image asked.
“Simple. The Unbound planned out this whole thing. They built a boat that could handle the ocean right under our noses, then used the hurricane to cover their escape.”
“No way,” Valmassoi shook his head in protest. “We’d have spotted them. The satellites we have in orbit have centimeter resolution, for god’s sake.”
“Not necessarily,” Theresa added. “We don’t have anything near complete real-time coverage of the surface. We only had the eighteen platforms Pathfinder dropped into orbit when it arrived, minus the four we’ve already lost to breakdowns. There are gaps. We have to prioritize surveillance targets, and the open ocean isn’t high on the list. One of our birds can see if you’re holding a tablet. But we have to know where to point it.”
Alexander scoffed. “Are you telling me that a bunch of low-tech fishermen evaded the Ark and her illustrious crew?”
Theresa’s husband couldn’t help but laugh at that.
“Something humorous, Director Benson?” Mahama asked politely.
“Yeah, you. All of you. The Unbound spent their entire lives hiding inside a tube sixteen kilometers long with a million cameras inside it. Hell, they ran a damned farm without us knowing for thirty years. They know our systems, our protocols. They’ve been evading the crew for decades. You really think we could keep a lid on them down here, with an entire planet to hide on?” He snorted. “You’re dreaming.”
“But how did they navigate straight to the rover site over thousands of kilometers of ocean?” Mahama said. “That’s quite a feat.”
“That’s the easiest part to explain,” Benson said. “If you have the rover coordinates, just take a tablet and hack the GPS software and flip it to receive only. Then you’re passive and we have nothing.”
“You have a criminal’s mind, Mr Benson,” Mahama said.
“Thank you?”
“How far behind are we here?” Theresa asked.
“What do you mean?” Mahama asked.
“When did they land? When was actual first contact made and how long have they been in situ talking to the Atlantians?”
Mahama shrugged. “We don’t know. We only know they entered the temple for the first time yesterday.”
“How can we not know that?” Alexander asked with a huff.
“Don’t get so worked up, Greg,” Benson said. “You look like you could use some time outside. Why don’t you come try out for the football league? I’m sure someone could use a center of your… stature.”
“Over my dead body.”
“That’s the perfect attitude for a center.”
“If you’re quite finished, gentlemen?” Mahama scolded. “To answer your question, Mr Alexander, we’re searching back through archived images and data as we speak looking for clues we may have missed.”
“Well look for their damned ship parked on the shore. That should tell you.”
Benson tapped the table. “If they were smart, they’d have made landfall in the middle of the night and scuttled the ship before daybreak. The sats would never have the chance to catch them.”
“Awful lot of planning there,” Valmassoi added.
“And that surprises you?” Benson shifted in his chair. “These folks are survivors among survivors. Maybe it’s time to stop underestimating them.”
“So there’s no way to know how much of a head start they have?” Valmassoi asked.
Theresa held her hands open. “Maybe not. Well, actually…” She swiped her tablet a couple of times and the picture of the old village came up again with the suspected boat circled. “If that’s really the boat they used, and I’m almost sure it is, then it’s around what? Twenty, twenty-five meters long? Last census we took, the Unbound were right at thirty-six people, including four children that had been born since we landed. Between people and supplies, they would’ve been packed in tight. Fresh water isn’t a problem if they took that solar desalinization machine with them, but food would be a real issue.”
“But they’re fishermen, on the ocean,” Mahama observed.
“Yes, that’s true,” Benson jumped in. “But they were barely above subsistence levels before the storm, and that was using tidal traps and multiple boats with nets. None of which are going to work on the open ocean if they’re trying to get somewhere, because the nets create drag and slow you down, adding time to the journey. They could use hooks and lines, but you can’t pull nearly the same volume of game that way, especially out away from the more fertile coastal waters. So yeah, they may’ve been able to catch enough to supplement their stores to some degree, but they had to bring most of their food from the start. So that limits how much time they could’ve spent on the open water to, I don’t know, a couple months? Three months?”
“You sure seem to know a lot about fishing,” Dr Russell teased.
“He loves nature documentaries,” Theresa said. “Drives me nuts with them.”
The village on the screen shrank to a pinprick, then shot to the right side as Mahama took control and zoomed the view out to encompass a flattened representation of the entire planet.
“There are a few archipelagoes along the way where they could’ve stopped and replenished.”
“That’s possible,” Benson added. “But I think we’re shooting for a worst-case number right now, yes?”
Mahama nodded.
“OK, so how fast can a sailing ship average over water?”
Theresa consulted a database in her plant. “Call it five knots.”
“What the hell’s a ‘not’?”
“Right, sorry, about nine kph.”
Benson nodded. “OK, is that an Earth standard?”
“Broadly speaking, with a ton of variables, yes.”
“All right, average wind speed here is a little higher, so call it twelve kph, just under three hundred kilometers per day in ideal conditions.”
“Hold on,” Valmassoi jumped back into the conversation. “Are you saying they made the crossing in two weeks?”
“No, I’m saying they could have, if everything went perfectly. Which, as you know, it usually doesn’t.”
“But that still puts them on site for more than a local year!” Alexander said.
“A year,” Mahama corrected. “Earth’s year doesn’t have any meaning anymore.”
“Yes, fine, a year. That’s still enough time to learn the language and say all sorts of things. We could have a real situation here.”
“And that’s why this meeting was called,” Mahama tried to regain control of the conversation. “The question is what to do about it now that they have made first contact with the Atlantians for us.”
“Yes,” Valmassoi added. “Who knows what stories they’ve been telling the natives. We’ll be lucky if they don’t teach them how to build an invasion fleet to sail right over here and wipe us all out.”
“Can’t happen,” Alexander jumped in. “The Ark’s navigational lasers would burn any ship to ash before they got within a thousand kilometers of Shambhala.”
Theresa rolled her eyes, but Feng was the first to respond to the needless bravado. “First of all, the prevailing winds blow east to west. They’d have to sail right on around Gaia, then cross our whole continent overland. And second, I suspect Captain Mahama would prefer to find a solution that doesn’t involve wholesale slaughter of the people we’re trying to share this world with.”
“Too true,” the captain said. “The task before us now is basically public-relations damage control. The Unbound have forced our hand here.”
“Should’ve spaced the lot of them,” Alexander mumbled, but Mahama ignored him and continued.
“We have to either contain or counter whatever biased information they may have given the Atlantians about our presence and intentions.”
“How do we do that?” Valmassoi asked.
“We move up our timeline and send the diplomatic mission to introduce ourselves to the Atlantians.”
“When?”
“Last year would be ideal,” Theresa quipped.
“Snarky,” Feng said, “but entirely accurate. Maybe we got lucky and they stopped at a particularly beautiful tropical island for a few months and really did only get there two days ago, or maybe they’ve been there for a year already and only now got around to attending church. Either way, we need to get our people there immediately.”
“We’re not close to ready,” Valmassoi objected. “Waiting for a good translator program was the entire point of delaying first contact. We’ve only just started to get a handle on the natives’ language.”
“Because our linguists and translation algorithms have only had the audio/visual feeds from the captured rover to work with,” Mahama said. “And a lot of that has been repetitious prayer ceremonies instead of back-and-forth conversations. No, the best way to do this is just to drop right into the thick of it. We probably should have done it sooner anyway.”
