176: DISCOVERED (Patreon)

“We need to convince Antarctica to give us an AI,” Tal says one day at breakfast, not looking away from the computer as ke talks. “We’ve tried everything else and it’s impossible. Mama can’t do it. Amy’s dregs won’t work without brains, and I think we can all agree that hooking up another chronostasis ring to the ship to feed it dream logic is about the worst idea ever. No one here can build one, and the onboard ship checked everyone still alive in chronostasis and they don’t have anyone who can do it either. Either we get one through the Vault, or that ship launches on manual control and primitive computer systems only.”

“We survived that way for years last time,” Tinera says, but without enthusiasm – we’ve had this discussion dozens of times before. She sips her liquid breakfast.

“Yeah, barely, for a few years, heading on a straight path. But javelins are complicated. Anything that fucks up in one system can have effects on a dozen other systems, and it doesn’t matter how many doors ‘Nish welds open or how many atmospheric checks we put in, without a proper AI regulating everything, something’ going to break, and then something else is going to break, and if we’re sending that ship out for centuries at a time, enough things are going to break that everyone will die. Also, it’s going to be more complicated, with all the stuff we need it to do. They’re still figuring out how to place the solar panels so they can steer the fucking thing without burning them off. It needs docking capabilities for harvesting vehicles, and that means the whole ship needs to be able to smoothly go into zero rotation while damaging nothing on a regular basis or that docking needs to be possible while it’s rotating, we’re going to have to pack on a bunch of external processing just to stop people from having to bring radioactive materials into the living areas, it’s all a nightmare of complexity. Humans can build it, yeah, but maintain everything for centuries? It’s going to fall apart without an AI. It just is.”

“Antarctica’s best bet is destroying the Courageous before it can give Hylara what it needs to provide for itself,” Captain Klees says. He’s eating a salad, eyeing Tinera’s choice of breakfast with some distaste. “That’s the only motivation they have to build us a shuttle system. They’re not going to give us an AI. If anything, they’ll pretend to give us a good AI and give us something that’ll destroy the ship as soon as it’s implemented, just in case they can’t destroy the ship with the shuttle. If we can’t build our own, do we have any real chance of taking what they give us and making it safe?”

Tal shakes kes head. “If they give us a bomb, we can find it. If they give us an AI bomb, no chance. I couldn’t even fix Amy, and she was only dangerous by accident.”

“So we don’t ask them yet,” I say. “They’re going to figure out that we’ve given the Hylarans seeds at some point. At that point, the game is going to change. If the shuttle system isn’t complete by then, we need to find some other way to get them to want to help us, some other way it benefits them to get the Courageous back out there. So we need to hold off on asking for an AI until then, until we’re all behind the same goal.”

“If we had something to convince them of that, we wouldn’t be lying to them right now,” Dandelion says. “Aspen, don’t forget to take your drugs.”

“Well, we’re going to have to think of something, because the lie won’t last forever, and they’re going to be very, very angry at us when they find out about it.” I swallow the pills she hands me. “I feel fine, by the way. I think my body’s probably done with the dead synnerves.”

“Do you want to find out you’re wrong by collapsing in the middle of hauling titanium into place on the launcher?”

“Yeah, I know, I took the drugs.” I’d take any drug she gave me without question. Dandelion doesn’t cry or pick at her arms as much as she used to, but I don’t know if she’ll ever be fully comfortable with herself. She looks the happiest and most focused when she’s providing healthcare for someone.

We table the issue of the AI for now, and keep working on the launcher. The frequent rainstorms on Hylara are both a blessing and a curse. They greatly slow down work on the launcher itself, which is a problem, but once all our construction vehicles are built and parts for the launcher machined, that gives us time to spend instead on building parts for the shuttle. Which means that Antarctica send us the shuttle designs and start pushing materials for it through any time the Vault has room.

With the shuttle plans and the launcher plans, construction becomes less urgent, at least on our end. Antarctica wants the project finished as quickly as possible, but we can take our time so long as they keep sending us the materials. If we can get all the materials for the project from them, construction time no longer matters on our end. We start lying about how far we are on constructing the shuttle, staging photos and pretending we need more materials to keep working, to speed up their process.

They start delaying shipments of Venusian pornography to Mars in order to prioritise our spaceship parts, which shows how serious they are about finishing the project.

It is the flowers that do us in in the end. With the launcher five hundred metres short of its planned length and not enough titanium to finish it, and most of the critical materials for the shuttle sitting underground in boxes waiting for use, a staged picture of six Hylarans bolting a docking arm onto a ‘nearly complete shuttle’ (empty shell) at the base of the launcher has a few tufts of grass, mostly hidden in shadow, peeking around a supply crate in the background. Among the colourful items in the open crate, we all missed it. Someone on the other end of the Vault didn’t.

It was never a fair game, really. I have to assume that the arrival of the Courageous is big news over in the Earth system. Presumably, the pictures we send are circulated far and wide while people watch the tense race against time to get our brave stranded sick astronauts back up to their doctors and protect the distant colony from infection, or however they’re explaining things out there. So there are probably countless people on the other end scanning those photos, whereas we have less than four hundred exhausted and overworked individuals who are spending most of our brainpower trying to get this stuff built and figure out exactly how the shuttle is designed to destroy the Courageous. (It has to be in the shuttle. They need to destroy the seeds on the Courageous before they can be dropped to Hylara, and their only weapon is the shuttle – it’s the only motivation they have for helping us build it. There HAS to be something wrong with it.)

So, yeah. We all miss the grass in a photo. And the Antarcticans, or someone on their side of the Vault anyway, don’t. We find this out via a copy of the picture sent through the Vault, and a letter:

Capt. Klees,

An explanation is required.

Rault

“Well,” I say. “We pulled that off for longer than I thought we’d be able to.”

“I’ve got like half a dozen lies ready to cover this,” Tinera says. “Are we going to keep lying to them?”

Captain Klees shakes his head. “The idea that we’d sit here like good little astronauts for this long and not start sending down seeds was already unbelievable. The only reason it could’ve lasted this long has to be sheer wishful thinking on Antarctica’s part. We need to decide on this with everyone else, but I think we’ll probably end up coming clean.”

“Good,” Dandelion says. “Keeping the photos and things sterile was exhausting.”

“The Hypati launcher isn’t finished,” I say. “We can codge together the shuttle on our own if we have to, as it was designed, we don’t have a source of titanium apart from the Courageous, and they’re going to need it up there. Five hundred metres is a lot of acceleration, that means more fuel, which means more weight. We need to keep them cooperating just a little longer, to finish that launcher.”

“I think this is a great opportunity to find a way to get them to cooperate without wanting to kill us,” Tinera says. “Rather than betting our lives on being able to find every sabotage they put in the shuttle. Seems to me it’d just be easier to incentivise them not to sabotage it in the first place.”

“If you’ve got a way to do that, I’d love to hear it,” Captain Klees says.

“Maybe they were never going to kill us,” Tal suggests. “Maybe they were helping out of the goodness of their hearts.” Ke grins.

“And maybe the alien spider queen is real after all,” I say. “So we’re calling a meeting?”

We call a meeting. The entire Leadership pack into the little room at the base of the radio tower with us, and we call the ship. They have enough people awake up there now that the crew we know are all well rested and able to meet with us without delaying anything important. I wonder idly whether there’s any political attention up there, between the original crew who know and talk to us ground crew (and therefore have direct influence on planetary affairs), and the newcomers, who don’t. There probably isn’t any dangerous tension. Captain Kae Jin seems pretty good at avoiding stuff like that.

The Leadership, through Tana, have received a letter with a copy of the photo, too. Tana’s letter is six pages long, but can also be summed up as essentially ‘an explanation is required’, padded out by a lot of confused questions, vague threats and furious admonishments.

“You should keep lying about the timeline,” Lina advises us over the radio. “We need to be able to bargain with these people, and that means giving them space to to think they have something to gain from us and vice versa. They need to see a way out through dealing with us, so we need to fashion our story accordingly.”

“Did you learn that trading stolen organs on the black market?” I ask.

“Not helpful,” Captain Klees admonishes me. “Lina, what do you mean about the timeline?”

“Our story is this: we reported the situation accurately in the first round of letters. You landed, some of you were suffering post-chronostasis problems, you went into quarantine, you contacted Antarctica for help. Nobody lied.”

“On that timeline, the extent of terraformation we’ve achieved is impossible,” I point out.

“Yes. We’ll keep lying to them about that. All they’ve seen is a bit of grass. What happened is that the local authorities, lying to you about the chain of command, started organising for food production on the planet and told you not to tell Antarctica about it. You, by which I mean the ground crew, followed orders. So far you, the Hylarans, have algal biotanks and have started experimenting with growing grasses in preparation for food growth in the future, but all you have that’s edible right now is algae. This explanation does throw the Hylaran Leadership on the tracks, but it’s a little difficult to get you more on the tracks than you already are, so.”

“And making them think we have less agriculture than we really do will keep them on board with the shuttle plan?” Celti asks. “It’ll make them want to destroy the ship before this gets any worse?”

“Likely, yes. There’s a variety of ways that they could respond, but I think they’ll pick one of two most likely moves. Either they’ll demand an immediate freeze on any further resource drops and push even harder for the shuttle to be finished as quickly as possible so they can use it to destroy the ship, or they’ll go the other way and demand a full landing as quickly as possible, and start sending resources for that. It depends on whether they decide to throw their weight behind the status quo, keeping the Hylarans in charge of the Vault and removing us as a complication, or whether they decide to throw their weight behind the Courageous, deciding that we’re more easy to fold into a command structure and more cooperative. We can work with either.”

“They’ll want to work with you guys, obviously,” Celti says. “After something like this, they’ll trust you, not us.”

“I really doubt that,” Captain Klees says. “They’ll be angry at you, but they’d definitely prefer to remove us and work with you, if given the option.”

I nod. “You’re a known quantity. They don’t know nearly enough about us to think they can predict, trust or control us.”

“Of course they’ll trust you more,” Tana insists. “You’re their people. You’re all Earthzone.”

Lina barks a laugh. “You think we’re like them? We’re time travellers. We don’t have a clue what Earth is like now. You know them ad they know you much better than we know either. They can work with you; they have been working with you. They’ll be mad as fuck at you for this, but they’re not ditching something that works for a bunch of unknown criminals from their great-great-great-grandparents’ time.”

“If they know we have algae, and can make food and plastics,” Celti points out, “they lose their hold over us. They can’t starve us.”

Captain Klees smiles. “I daresay you’ll be getting much nicer food coming through that Vault for you from now on, as well as other minor luxuries. They can’t control you by giving you the bare minimum any more. They’re going to have to trade a better quality of life. You can survive without them for decent periods of time with algae; that gives you more negotiating power. But you’re dependent enough on them to make you a better choice than us, if they want control over the Vault.”

“And even with the things you have that they don’t know about,” I point out, “you’re not completely independent of them. You can’t manufacture everything you need to survive here. Even when you can, this planet simply doesn’t have enough nitrogen. Your nitrogen source is the food that comes through that Vault, and you can compost waste and use airlocks to keep crops in a nitrogen-rich atmosphere and use atmospheric pumps to pull what you can out of the larger atmosphere when you run low, but the available nitrogen puts a hard limit on the size of the colony you support. If you don’t receive food or nitrogen through the Vault, the amount is going to decrease over time through airlock leaks and shed skin and soforth. You’re in a better position than you were, but you’re going to keep needing the Vault for centuries. And even if you had everything the ship carries, Antarctica knows that.”

“Still,” Lina says over the radio, “we can’t rule out the possibility that they’ll put their weight behind us Courageous colonists instead, because we don’t know what their society is like. We don’t know what social pressures they’re under, or who actually makes the decisions back there. Our arrival and settling of this planet is the fulfilment of the promise of the javelin project; does that still matter to anyone back there? We don’t know. And the longer this situation goes on, the higher the chance for more groups to get involved, and the less predictable it becomes.”

“So,” Captain Klees says. “Let’s write some letters. And wait.”