The Planetary Colony Ariane awaits the actual arrival of an ominous newcomer, the Starship Cleone. For several reasons, invasion is expected. All possible contingency plans have been made and in the last days there’s nothing left to do but wait. In the headquarters of the Conservation Service, who administer the Colony, Nick Woodville and Master Conservator Ellerene wait with their commanding officer, the Master Conservator General. It’s Sunday, and an unusual number of anxious people have been to the House of God for morning service. That’s over now, and Nick is at the window, watching them all walk through the Park.
SAMPLE.
The MCG's morning clerk came in, with a length of print strip in his hand. He knew the MCG hated the computer terminal and much preferred printed documents, but he also knew those printed documents were supposed to be neatly trimmed and tucked in a folder first. This, Nick thought, was a compromise of rather ominous quality.
"Excuse me, sir, very urgent. Further details are being put on your screen for when you're ready but I thought you'd want a print for reference."
The Old Man took the print strip and thanked his clerk courteously enough, but didn't actually look at the report until the door was once more shut with Con back on the other side of it. Then he looked at the print, studied it gravely for perhaps a full minute, while Ellerene looked anxious and a little impatient, and Nick merely waited.
Odd, he thought, how easy it is to wait today. Without feeling, without alarm, without wishing to know what was on that print strip. He would know soon enough. In the meantime, the warm air carried distant laughter as the children ran wild in the Park and that laughter sounded fragile, and unreal.
At what age, he wondered, does a child understand what slavery is? At what age will these children understand that they live, if they survive the coming storm, because their Starship masters have a use for them? Because they will be the next generation of labourers and serfs, the next generation of Ariane’s people to tend this world for the benefit of ignorant and arrogant Starship leeches? But perhaps they won’t be needed after all. Perhaps this Starship will install more in the way of power plants and technology, the synthesising and recycling plants she’s been used to for countless generations, and she will have no use for regressed primitives like us. Then there will be no Ariane children left, because they would only grow into rebels if they were allowed to survive. The’ll be wiped out, like the rest of us.
A gleeful shriek from the Park rose above the laughter for an instant. Nick turned back to the window and looked down, but it was too late for him to determine which of the scampering little ones had been so exuberant a moment before. Clusters of adults drifted up the Park, moving in and out of the shadows cast by the old trees, keeping an eye on their own children running on the open grass. Some of those trees were over two hundred years old. Would they survive any longer than the society that had cherished them for so long? Would the Starship Cleone like trees? Nick’s lips formed a tight and mirthless little smile. Cleone would have trouble wiping out all the trees, he thought sourly, if she tried. Birds would carry the little seeds, squirrels would bury the nuts and acorns, and new saplings would grow in the springtime, unless Cleone turned her lasers on this land, as Ariane had once done, to render it a sterile desert.
Nick’s imagination filled with the blissful memory of childhood, and stolen days of freedom. Tramping through the glorious summer afternoon, getting wet in little streams in the woods, getting dirty playing hunting and chasing games with his friends, plotting endless mischief, devising secret passwords and initiation tests to be inflicted on smaller boys who wanted to join the gang and have the same kind of fun. Monsters, boys. But it had been a good world, in those days. He remembered, far too well to berate his own two sons as severely as his parents said he must, when they did as he had done.
The Old Man spoke, his tone stony.
"We'd better have young Liam in quickly," he said. "Although I can guess for myself what this means."
He handed the report to Nick.
The first part of the report dealt with a signal pulse picked up by the monitoring systems on the obsolete Starship Ariane, as if it had been part of a normal sequence of pulses issued by a Conservator's tracer beacon in the defence zone. This signal did come from the defence zone, but it was on the wrong frequency and more than ten times the normal strength, and there had been only the one, single, pulse.
Below that was a reminder of the Starship Cleone's mapping schedule, as estimated by Liam, with a note confirming that she had just passed over exactly as expected with her trajectory, speed and timing just as they had been predicted. The timing of that strange pulse transmission was within the period Liam called the direct vision window .
Even though the MCG affected a dislike and distrust of the terminal on his desk, he could use it and had called up the data file even as Nick had been reading the print. Ellerene was reading the screen now, apparently coming to the obvious conclusion.
Someone had to say it, so Nick did. "She doesn’t need shuttles. She put something down on her way over. Direct energy transmission."
Ellerene tried to speak, and failed. Nick gazed at him, his own mind numb, unable to find any sympathy for him or for anyone else. This was the one thing nobody seemed to have thought of. Even Liam hadn’t thought of it. Every contingency plan was based on the use of shuttles for personnel transfer. Whether the threats and the ultimatum came before launch or after landing, it had been taken for granted that there would be a little time, a little warning, before the first contingent of armed storm troopers arrived. It would make little difference, of course. The Starship Cleone would still be up there, in orbit above the Colony Ariane, with her lasers primed and ready. The storm troopers were merely a tangible presence, protected by the threat of overwhelming punitive retaliation for the slightest move against them on the ground. Warning, in itself, was really of no value whatsoever.
But to have none
Teleport, that’s what it had always been called. It belonged in the realms of escapist fiction, along with the fabled hyperspace drive which the Starship Cleone demonstrably did not have. But this, she did have. Teleport wasn’t escapist fiction any more. The bogey man, the vampire, the wicked fairy, were as nothing compared with this.
Ellerene had managed to sit down at last. “It can t be true,” he protested faintly.” A technical fault. A coincidence. There’s no such thing.”
“No such thing as coincidence?” Nick demanded tartly. “This is no technical fault. This is the worst, most culpable error in evaluation this Service has ever made, bar none. But if we had foreseen it, there’s nothing we could have done against it”...
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