Spike came walking across my desk, meowed once, and plunked down on my keyboard. I accepted a coffee refill from Jeeves, then turned to Marvin. “Okay. Excitement’s over. What’s up? You wanted to talk to me about something?”
Marvin nodded and stood. He dismissed the La-Z-Boy and walked over to my work desk. Pulling up a wingback, he invoked a globe of Eden in mid-air over the desk, with a small section of one continent outlined in red. “This is the current range of the Deltans. I’ve excluded the old village, since they no longer live there—”
“—and that was more of a refuge than a permanent home.” I nodded. “They hadn’t even been there for a full generation.”
Marvin bobbed his head in acknowledgement. “Anyway, I’ve been doing a lot of digging—literally, in some cases—and I’ve arrived at a reasonable estimate of Deltan population movements over time.”
He looked at me expectantly, and I made a rolling motion with my hand for him to continue.
“They do not appear to be from this area at all. It looks as though the sentient Deltan subspecies originated here…” Marvin rotated the globe and pointed to a different part of the continent. “…and moved from there to the current location.”
“And they’re no longer at the old location? Why?”
“That’s what I don’t get, Bob. I’ve found a lot of evidence of abandoned Deltan villages, and some burial sites, but not nearly enough graves to account for the expected population.”
“Predation?”
“You’d think, but then we’d find Deltan remains here and there, at least in the form of piles of bones. You’ve seen what the gorilloids leave behind when they’re done with a meal. They’re not fastidious.”
I rubbed my chin, gazing at the globe. “That doesn’t make sense, anyway. From your notes, the original area didn’t have gorilloids at all. So they moved from a safer area to a more dangerous area, and disappeared in the safer area.”
“Then fled the more dangerous area to set up in an even more dangerous area.” Marvin shook his head in confusion. “They aren’t morons. They may be just in the process of becoming human-level sentient, but they have common sense. We’re missing something.”
I shrugged, and sent the globe spinning with a flick of a finger. “It’s a mystery, Marvin, and we do love a mystery.” We exchanged grins. After all, Bob. “But the important thing is that they’re much safer here, compared to where we found them. They’ve settled in nicely in Camelot, the hunting’s good, and the gorilloids are beginning to get the hint and have pretty much stopped trying to pick off Deltans.”
“You’re really going to call their village Camelot?” Marvin gave me the stink-eye. “Every time you say it, I hear Knights of the Round Table.”
I grinned at him and waggled my eyebrows. “It’s only a model.”
Marvin rolled his eyes and stopped the globe. “Anyway, I’ll keep at this, but we’re at a disadvantage here. On Earth, scientists were building up from existing knowledge of a world they understood. On Eden, we’re starting from scratch.”
“Yeah, and even then, it took years for them to figure out things like the fate of the Anasazi.” I sat back and shook my head. “Yeah, I get it, Marv. I have to admit, I’m glad this is a pet project for you. I did some basic research and exploration when I landed, but it wasn’t a priority for me.”
Marvin chuckled and, with a parting nod, disappeared back to his own VR.
2. Colony Site
Howard
September 2188
Vulcan
Colonization of a new planet was always so easy in science fiction. Actually, scratch that. It was never easy. Something always came out of the woodwork to endanger the colony. Well, they got one thing right. Sort of.
On the plus side, nothing was bursting out of people’s chests. However, setting up a human colony on Vulcan was turning out to be a little bit like being pecked to death by ducks. Large ducks. With teeth and claws. Milo’s notes and planetary catalog made it very clear that setting up would require attention to defensive strategies. The ecosystem was prolific and competitive.
The colony ships Exodus-1 and -2 orbited Vulcan, most of the colonists from the USE enclave still in stasis, waiting for the settlement teams to prepare a site. Construction teams, security teams, and engineers worked day and night to clear enough jungle and build a home for this first wave of humanity.
The USE colonists would also be expected to provide some support to future colony ships. Exodus-3 was only a few months behind us, and more would be coming as fast as Riker could build them.
Like we needed the extra pressure.
Five days after humans set foot on Vulcan, the planet claimed its first casualty.
[Message from the security chief. There has been an attack]
I nodded to Guppy, acknowledging the information. I took a moment to minimize the monitoring window that had been floating in the air in front of me, and ordered the construction AMIs to continue on their own. They could handle most of the tasks involved in building the orbiting farm donut, and they would text me if they ran into something above their pay grade.
I turned in my chair and raised an eyebrow at Guppy, inviting more information. But the GUPPI system interface, in the form of an avatar resembling Admiral Ackbar, wasn’t inclined to volunteer anything beyond the basic facts. Huge fish eyes blinked at me, waiting for a command. Accepting the inevitable, I motioned with my hand, and he pushed the video window to me.
The window showed the head of security, Stéphane Brodeur, with that look people get when they’re on an adrenaline high—wide eyes, slight sheen of sweat, nostrils dilated. He began to speak as soon as he saw me. “There has been an attack. The therapod-like predators that we’ve tagged as raptors. Northwest corner, at the fence construction boundary.”
Brodeur spoke with a pronounced Quebecois accent. I wondered idly how he had managed to get into the USE colony, but dismissed the question as irrelevant. I frame-jacked for a moment and sent a couple of drones to the fence construction area, then returned my frame rate to normal. A human being wouldn’t even notice the millisecond glitch in my image. “Casualties?”
“One.”
“Dead?”
“No, but it will need the new paint job.” Brodeur grinned at me.
I raised an eyebrow, and he continued, “A small group of raptors attacked a backhoe. The equipment will need the paint touched up. We killed most of the animals, and the rest ran off. One of the carcasses is being sent to Dr. Sheehy for necropsy.”
“So what can I do?”
The security chief shook his head. “About the attack, nothing. It’s done, and we’ve taken care of the attackers. I am hoping you can set up surveillance of some kind.”