A Desert Called Peace

Chapter Two

Cochea,

Provincia del Valle de las Lunas, Republica de Balboa,

Terra Nova, 10/7/459 AC

Art, precious metals and the occasional young slave were not the only in-demand product of Earth. Music, too, was popular, in particular the wild and violent sounds of the twentieth century. Earth literature also had its place on the new world. Both had been brought by the original immigrants in the form of computer discs. Much had been lost, of course, but much had survived the days from when the old computers wore out. Indeed, developing new machines capable of reading the old discs had given Terra Nova a leg up in artificial intelligence, generally.

As with many immigrant tongues on Old Earth-American English, Quebecois French and South African Dutch, for example- many of the languages of Terra Nova retained many features that had been lost to their mother tongues. Indeed, a man or woman of the twentieth century would likely have found the English of the Federated States more comprehensible than that commonly used by the Anglic-speaking proles of Old Earth. In any case, this made much of the older music of Old Earth quite in tune with Terra Novan listeners.

Of course, Latin hadn't changed in millennia. It was LatinSatanic flavored Latin at that-which flowed from the speakers in the book-stuffed library:

O Fortuna

Velut Luna…

High on one wall of the library hung an ornate, embossed certificate, in Spanish, signifying a high decoration for valor from the Republic of San Vicente. The gilt name emblazoned on the award was Patricio Hennessey de Carrera. Posted beneath the certificate, framed with obvious pride, hung a letter of reprimand-in English-from a general officer of the Army of the Federated States of Columbia. It was addressed merely to "CPT Patrick Hennessey." Both certificates-dated fifteen years prior, long before Hennessey's promotion to his terminal rank-described the same series of events, though in rather different terms.

The library was large, with bookcases covering three of the substantial room's four walls. Against the fourth, under the certificate and the letter of reprimand, stood a desk and chair, each made in the main of dark-finished Lempiran mahogany, hand crafted and richly carved. A man approaching middle age, just beginning to go gray at the temples and with a face weathered beyond its years with the wear of sun and rain, sat at the desk, eyes fixed on a book.

The book was one of many. Reaching floor to ceiling, the volumepacked shelves of the library held the essence of a lifetime's interest and study, more than seven thousand volumes in all. Even over the broad, deep desk more bookshelf space was stacked and-like the other shelves-filled to overflowing. Still more reference material resided on computer micro-discs inside cases stuffed to the brim.

Despite appearances, there was an order and a theme to the volumes. The library was, in the main, about war. If there was a book on the plastic arts-and there were several-the owner had studied them because he knew that art had propaganda value in war. If there was a book on music-and there were dozens-that was because music, too, was both a weapon of war and a remarkably subtle yet powerful tool for training for war. If there were books on the Marxism that had made its reappearance under the Volgan tsar during the Great Global War-and there were some few-it was because the reader believed in knowing one's enemy.

There was even a copy of the Koran.

However, most of the library was more obviously military. The collection covered, as nearly and completely as possible on Terra Nova, every human age and culture as it pertained to armed conflict. An English translation of Vegetius rested next to another copy in the original Latin. Apparently not as confident in his Greek as in his Latin, the reader kept most of Xenophon in bilingual texts-Greek and English alternating pages. Plato, Rousseau, Machiavelli, Aristotle, Hitler, Lenin, Mao, Annan, Nussbaum, Harris, Steyn, Fallacci, Yen, Peng and Rostov… war was about philosophy and politics, too, and so the reader studied those as well.

Eyes fixing upon the Nussbaum work, a gift from his parents many years prior, the reader thought, Amazing that that line of thought should have succeeded in contaminating not one but two worlds. What utter nonsense!

A stranger, given time to realize the single-minded purposefulness of the library, might eventually have concluded that the reader considered war his art; perhaps all he cared about.

The stranger would have been wrong. War was not all the reader cared about, nor even what he cared most about. It had been a job and was still a hobby; it was not a life.

The reader, one Patrick Hennessey, late of the Army of the Federated States of Columbia, put down the book he had been studying and closed his eyes, deep in thought.

Decision Cycle Theory, the Observation-Orientation-DecisionAction loop, plainly was working against Nagumo at Midway on Old Earth. How and why is combat on the ground different? Friction? Scale and scope? The vulnerability of large single targets like aircraft and aircraft carriers compared with the endurance and ability to soak up punishment of ground forces composed of many small units and separate individuals? Nagumo's pure frigging bad luck?

Hennessey's aquiline face frowned in concentration. Pale blue eyes, normally slightly too large for the size of that face, narrowed. A viewer would not have been able to see the darker circles around the irises that typically gave those eyes their frighteningly penetrating quality. "The eyes of a madman," said some, not always jokingly.

Have to think on this one. Hennessey resumed his reading.

The satanic sounding Latin piece ended, to be replaced by:

"I see a red door and I want it painted black

No colors anymore I want them to turn black…"

To Hennessey the music was a drug, a way of purging the unwelcome feelings and emotions, most of them dark, that otherwise might have taken possession of him. Between that, his calming scotch, cigars and cigarettes, and-most especially-his wife, he kept the surge of feelings under control or, at least, at bay.

A cigarette burned in the ashtray on the maple inlaid into the mahogany desk, smoke curling up about twelve inches before being sucked outside by a ventilation fan. The fan dispersed it to a courtyard surrounded on all sides by the house Hennessey and his wife, Linda, had had built following his departure from the FS Army.

The cigarette was interesting, or, rather, the tobacco in it was. Despite many disapproving clucks from progressives back on Old Earth, a number of the early colonists had made sure to bring tobacco seeds. Once planted on Terra Nova, the tobacco had come under attack from a virus unknown on Old Earth. Whether this virus was native to Terra Nova, or a mutation from the earlier transplanting by the Noahs, or something unmodified and native to Old Earth that had either died out or never been identified; no one knew. The subject was hotly debated.

The effect of the virus, though, was to remove nearly all of the carcinogens from the tobacco. It remained addictive and was still rather unhealthy. It remained highly profitable to sell, the more so as it was considerably safer than Old Earth tobacco.

Of course, the sale and use of tobacco had come under even more virulent attack as Terra Nova developed its own brand of "progressive." Couching their arguments in terms of health, what these truly objected to was the profitability of the commodity. Progressives hated profit.

They hate profit, Hennessey thought, unless it's their own.

Hennessey knew about progressives. Especially did he know about cosmopolitan progressives, or Kosmos. He should have; he'd been raised to be one. The lessons had never quite taken.

Hennessey's library was in the very back of the house and reached from inner courtyard to rear windows. By turning his chair towards the rear Hennessey could see the one hundred and twenty-five foot waterfall that had made his wife, Linda, fall in love with this particular piece of land. The waterfall had its memories, memories that brought a smile to his face. There by the swimming hole, under the screened bohio… when the kids were all asleep… Oh, my…

The smile disappeared when Hennessey looked at his hand as it picked up the cigarette. He took a satisfyingly deep drag and pulled the cigarette away. Dainty disgusting thing, he thought, holding his hand out. Sickening for a soldier to have such small, miserable, soft hands. Oh well, the rest isn't so bad. And it isn't like I'm a soldier anymore, anyway.

"Not so bad," was it. He was never going to win any beauty contests but…

Hennessey was somewhat slight of build and regular featured, with extraordinarily intense blue eyes. A reasonably well formed chest topped slim hips, themselves atop legs unusually massive, the result of many, many miles of heavy-pack forced marching in his younger years. They were infantry legs, plain and simple. Even several years of relative idleness had not robbed them of their strength. He was developing a slight paunch, something he made some effort to combat.

Turning his attention away from his utterly unsatisfactory hands and fingers, Hennessey's eyes wandered over the bookcases containing his library. He put the cigarette down, replacing it in that hand with the iced whiskey. The cubes made a tinkling sound as he sipped while continuing to peruse the library's shelves.

Hennessey's eyes came to rest on a simple metal-framed picture of Linda, his wife, now visiting his-mostly estranged-relatives in the Federated States.

He looked at the picture and glowed with love, thinking, I am one lucky son of a bitch.

Twelve years now they had been husband and wife; twelve years and three children. And still she looked like the eighteen-year-old girl he had married. If anything, so her husband thought, she was more lovely now than when he had married her.

Next to the one portrait was another, that of Linda with their son and two daughters. We do damned good work, don't we, hon? Miss you.

Hennessey looked up from his family portraits. He thought about waterfalls, then left the library to take the short walk down to the one behind the house. There was a small bohio, or shed, there, along with some garden furniture. He sat down in one of the padded chairs, losing himself in the sight and sound of the splashing water.

God, I love this place, he thought. He didn't mean merely the waterfall, nor even the entire property. He meant Balboa, possibly the only country in which he had ever felt truly at home.

Odd thing, that. But what's not to love… outside of, maybe, the government here? The people are bright, hardworking and friendly. The men are brave; the women loyal and lovely. The land is… well, "beautiful" hardly does it justice. He watched Linda's multicolored pet "trixie," Jinfeng, sail across the waterfall. It came to rest on the branch of a large mango tree and began to eat the fruit it found there.

Just beautiful.

Balboa, being largely jungle and also somewhat sparsely settled, retained more than the usual amount of pre-settlement flora and fauna. Jinfeng was one example. But mixed in with the green of the jungle around the waterfall were some other species, bluegums and tranzitrees, the latter so named because their bright green-skinned fruit was intensely appetizing to look upon, and the mouthwatering red pulp inside intensely poisonous for man to eat.

Lower animals could eat tranzitree fruit without ill effect. It was conjectured in some circles that tranzitrees had been developed and placed on Terra Nova by the Noahs-the beings who had seeded the planet with life untold eons ago-expressly to prevent the rise of intelligence. Certainly the tranzitrees had been artificially created, as had bolshiberry bushes and progressivines. The latter two were, likewise, poisonous to intelligent life but harmless to lower forms. Their complex toxins did build up in some food animals, were they allowed to eat of them, rendering those animals equally toxic. This, too, would have tended to limit the development of civilization, even had early intelligent life managed to survive the tranzitrees, bolshiberries, and progressivines, by limiting the food supply.

The tranzitrees had no real use but aesthetics. The bluegums, on the other hand, were cultivated locally for their edible nuts, high grade lumber for cabinetry and furniture, and the refinable resin-a rubberlike compound-which gave them their name. All were blue, as were the trees' leaves. The leaves were used to make a rather good dye.

Of course, there's no law in this place. It's all who you are related to, who you know, who are your friends, what bribes can you pay, and how much clout do you have. A well-connected man can get away with murder-some of my in-laws have- manslaughter, anyway.

Want to set up a new business? "Well, my brother-in-law is at the planning commission. I am sure he could help you if you made it worth his while." Need to buy a chunk of land? "My cousin, the procurator, could probably help but he doesn't come cheap." That's all fine for me; I'm connected through Linda's clan. But what about the average Joses? They're screwed, unless, that is, they know somebody.

Add a little law, a little integrity, to the government and this place could be perfection.

The maid, Lucinda, found him under the bohio, lost in thought.

" Senor?"

"Yes, Lucinda?" he asked.

The woman was older, from a poor family, and never terribly pretty. Nonetheless, her family had been in service to Linda's for generations. This explained why she had taken a job even at the wretched salary earned by a domestic in the undeveloped and unindustrialized parts of Terra Nova. Hennessey tried to treat her kindly and, had she been asked, the maid likely would have voiced no ground of complaint.

" Senor, there are two men here to see you. One is from the Fuerza Civil; a Major Jimenez. The other is General Parilla. You know, sir, the old dictator?"

"Xavier? Here? Great! And Parilla? Wonderful, Lucinda." Hennessey rousted himself from his chair and walked briskly to greet his old friends and former enemy.

He reentered by the back office door, then walked briskly across the cobblestoned way that led through the courtyard. In the open courtyard Hennessey stopped briefly to study the clouds gathering overhead. To himself he muttered, "Storm again, from the west, it seems. Oh, well, I've always liked the rain."

The door leading from the courtyard to the foyer was open, befittingly so in country so warm. Hennessey passed through it without pause and saw two men, rising politely from the overstuffed chairs in the iridescent bluegum-paneled foyer.

Rank had its privileges. He thrust out a welcoming hand first to retired (forcibly retired) General Raul Parilla; short, dark, gone a little fat now with his years of service behind him. Most of the general's still abundant hair had gone to gray.

The general returned the clasp warmly. "Patricio, it is good to see you again after all these years."

"Sir… you too, sir." Hennessey meant it. Cut off, as he was, from his old army, he valued the contact even with a foreign one. Though it would be pushing things, really, to call Balboa's Civil Force an army.

Smile broadening at his other guest, Hennessey greeted a friend of much longer standing and even deeper feeling. Indeed, so close were he and Xavier Jimenez that neither of them much minded that they had once fought each other nearly to the death… and had fought to the deaths of many of their followers.

Where Parilla had grown a bit rotund with the years, Jimenez remained whippet thin, a lean, black hunter and racer.

No words passed between Jimenez and Hennessey. With friends so close, none were needed.

"Lucinda," Hennessey called. "Please bring a bucket with ice, a bottle of rum, some coke and some scotch to my library. And three glasses, as well, please. Gentlemen?"

With that, Hennessey led the way back across the courtyard. Parilla and Jimenez stopped to admire a statue of Linda Hennessey that stood at one end.

"She hates that thing," Hennessey said, "but it helps me when she's gone."

"It's a beautiful piece of work, though," Parilla commented.

"So's Linda," said Jimenez.

First Landing,

Hudson,

Federated States of Columbia, 10/7/459 AC

There was a screeching of tires followed by curses and the tinkling of broken glass as Linda began to walk across the street to the restaurant where she was to meet with her husband's cousin, Annie. She scrunched her neck down, looking somehow guilty, and proceeded to cross.

For some women the word "breathtaking" was only bare justice. Linda Hennessey was one of them. Though she would never have claimed to be so, she was beautiful; simply beautiful, the kind of woman who can stop traffic on a busy downtown street just by being there. Hennessey had seen her do just that, more than once. It didn't usually cause a traffic accident, though. Still… that happened, too, sometimes.

On the other side there was a man leaving the restaurant in company with a woman. He walked into a lamppost. Linda tried not to notice.

She had to repeat herself three times to the maitre d' before he actually heard a word she said, and he was plainly gay. That wasn't caused by her accent. A wave of awed silence washed across the restaurant floor as she was led to the table where Annie awaited. Conversation didn't resume until she was seated and, for the most part, out of sight.

Dark complected, she had a high cheekboned, heart-shaped face set off by large, liquid brown eyes. She also had a classic 90-60-90 centimeter figure and though for modesty's sake she wore a bra, she didn't need one. Her breasts stood out and up on their own, as if she'd won the war with gravity and dictated her own terms. She had perfect teeth, even, straight and white like newly polished ivory. Her midnight black, wavy hair gathered light and cast it about her face like an angel's halo.

Unusually enough, her looks meant little to her. They were a gift to share with her husband, yes, as well as a gift to pass on to her children. But she hadn't earned any of that perfection; she'd been born with it. She didn't even have to work at it. Even though she valued those looks less than someone who did have to work at it might have, she knew they usually had an effect on people, and generally a very positive effect.

Thus, she didn't understand, she could never understand, just why her husband's family loathed her so. She was sweet to them, as she was sweet to everybody. She dressed well. She carried herself with a bearing that was aristocratic, true, but never arrogant. She never condescended. She spoke well, both in the Spanish they seemed to refuse to admit was a civilized language and in rather cultured, if accented, English, as well.

It was surprising, then, that neither her looks nor her character did any good at all with her husband's family.

Linda sighed. Patricio's family has never liked or accepted me. I suppose they never will. No, that's not quite fair, she amended. With the exception of this one cousin, they despise me. But Annie is always friendly. These trips would be a lot more difficult than they are but for her. Linda smiled at her husband's cousin, seated opposite her in the crowded First Landing restaurant.

Annie Hennessey was taller than Linda by almost half a foot. Where Linda was dark with midnight hair, Annie was pale white and dark blond. Not as pretty-well, few were-she was still quite an attractive, and exceptionally well built, woman in her own right. She felt none of the common jealousy at Linda's uncommon looks.

Linda sighed again. "Why don't they like me?" she asked.

"Like you?" Annie asked. "Honey, everyone likes you… oh, you mean the family. Well… they're just assholes." Leaning forward across the table to be heard over the hubbub of the crowd, Annie said, "The thing is, Linda, dear, that you make them feel inferior. After all, what is my family but a bunch of broken down farmers who grafted themselves onto some down and out families of WASPs? Well, and a few well-to-do Jews, too, of course.

"But you on the other hand? When the first major colonization ship to this part of the world made its final approach orbit you had ancestors to wave to it from below. When they put up their first building, you had ancestors that said, 'There goes the neighborhood.' You even come from old money. Oh, not so much as we have, I know-not nearly-but it's older. And that counts, my dear.

"You make Uncle Bob's skin crawl, because everything he has clawed his way to, everything his father and his grandfather and his great-grandfather clawed their way up from, you came by naturally."

Annie stopped speaking and sawed and speared a bit of steak from her plate for emphasis.

"Is that why he insists on seeing me and the children at his office? Surrounded by his tokens and triumphs?" Linda asked.

"That… yes," Annie responded, slowly. "Other things too. You see, our family has been in decline for more than forty years. Not in money, but in people. We lost about half when the UEPF bombed Botulph. After that, few of the women wanted children. Of those few, some couldn't have any. Bob's wife never had any, for example. And when you subtract the couple of gay boys and the occasional girl who will never have children… nope, we are in decline."

Annie paused and leaned back in her chair, looking back across the veil of years. "I remember when I was a little girl everyone setting so much store by Pat. It used to kill me the way he was doted on. Yes, even us girl cousins… we all spoiled him rotten. He seemed to have something the rest of us had lost; a certain, oh, spark, I guess. Uncle Bob in particular expected him to grow up to take over the business."

Linda snorted. "Patricio? Business? He despises business."

"Oh, I know," Annie agreed. "He always did. Me, too. So I don't do it; I just live off the trust fund."

Annie sipped at her drink, sipped again… again. "I always understood him better than the others did. If I had been a man, I'd have joined the army too, to make my own escape."

She continued, "So, anyway, when he ran off to join the army at age eighteen, it just infuriated Bob. And enlisting rather than going to one of the military academies? Well, we haven't had an enlisted man in our family since Great-great-great-uncle Bill with the 12th Wichita Infantry in the Formation War. Then, when Pat insisted on staying in the army… well… it took the heart right out of Uncle Bob at first. That was when he cut Pat off, you know. It wasn't anything to do with you."

"Well, here I have one son and two daughters," Linda said. "They carry the name, they've even got your family's color rather than mine. And the women of my family insist on having children… lots of them. Speaking of which…"

"Yes?" Annie asked, expectantly.

Linda just smiled and held up three fingers, then slowly raised her little finger to make a fourth.

Cochea,

10/7/459 AC

As Linda and Annie dined in First Landing, in the Federated States, Hennessey, Parilla and Jimenez pored over maps from the Federated States invasion of Balboa, in 447, called "Operation Green Fork." Hennessey was working on a history of that invasion-something neutral and objective to balance the often propaganda- distorted works already in print. He had to work on something to keep busy and to feel useful, not having a job to call his own anymore. Indeed, he had several projects going at any given time. One of them was a translation into Balboan Spanish of a novel by an Old Earth writer he knew only as R.A.H.

Jimenez pointed a long, thin finger at the map. "Right there, Patricio. Right on that damned corner was where the war started."

Hennessey straightened up from the maps. "Tell me about it, Xavier."

As Jimenez spoke, Hennessey went to his computer and began to type, fingers blurring over the keyboard.

Zabol, Pashtia, 10/7/459 AC

Some miles from the center of the city of Zabol a bearded man hunched over a keyboard. Very slender and tall, as were most of his people, the man had to hunch deeply, uncomfortably, to perform his task. In the dim light the glow of the computer monitor illuminated his face to the semblance of a demon, though in daylight his face was quite decent and even handsome. Distantly, an electrical generator groaned, the sound traveling down damp, narrow hallways. The generator brought light and heat, and powered the fans that brought fresh air to this elaborate complex of caves and tunnels painstakingly carved and blasted from the living rock. The complex was one of several, not all of them in Pashtia.

Abdul Aziz Ibn Kalb brought up a free e-mail service, Firestarter, and then typed a sign-in name-"islandsrfrdude"-and a password. The screen changed to reveal an account with nothing but spam in the inbox, and no messages sent. He began to compose a meaningless message.

Composition completed, Aziz attached a photo as a jpeg file. The photo, properly processed, contained a message, simply, "CA39, Desperation Bay, Execute, 11/7."

Aziz saved the message to his draft folder, which was actually physically located on a server far, far away. He then closed the account. When it was opened later in the day, in Yithrab, it would be copied to a different account and saved into yet another draft folder and server. From there it would be opened in Lancaster in Anglia and copied yet again to a different account. Finally, when opened in the rebuilt city of Botulph, in the Federated States, it would never actually have been sent. There would be no easy trace to Zabol or to Abdul Aziz.

That task completed, Aziz typed into the computer, "Wahoo. sig."

Botulph, Federated States, 10/7/459 AC

"The orders are received. We go tomorrow."

" Allahu akbar. Allahu akbar, " the swarthy men congratulated each other, shaking hands and slapping backs in unconstrained joy. God is great; God is great. Now, finally, they were chosen to strike a great blow against their greatest enemy. Now, at last, they would bring home to the Great Demon the meaning of war. Could there be any doubt of their coming success, their cause being just and the Most High being on their side?

"Shall we rehearse again?" asked the youngest member of the team.

The leader smiled indulgently and answered, "No need, Samadi. We have rehearsed so many times any one of us could cut a throat in our sleep. Go out. Have a good time. Just be asleep before midnight and remember that tomorrow night you will be feasting among the houris of Paradise."

Samadi simply shook his head in the negative and went to his room to study his flight manuals.

Yusef, the convert, likewise didn't go out. Instead he pulled out the guitar that he loved and began to play and sing something of his own composition:

"I've been dreamin' fait'f'ly

Dreamin' about the jihad to come…"

Interlude

21 January, 2037 to 14 March, 2040

… to emerge, unknown to Mission Control, somewhere… else.

The robot didn't know where it was; the star and constellations matched nothing in the catalogue. It didn't know how it got there. Most disconcertingly, it had lost touch with Mission Control. It blared out a distress signal. It blared in vain.

This was where good programming came in. While this precise turn of events had definitely not been foreseen-no one on Earth remotely suspected the existence of such a flaw in space-other emergencies which that have required a certain amount of independent judgment on the part of the ship had.

The robot did know it was still functioning. It did know there was a star ahead. It could sense that planets orbited that star. It knew that it had a mission. And it had a star map of the stars as it emerged in the new system, which map was updated over. With this, and what could be gleaned of the solar system in which it found itself, the robot got to work.

Having a star ahead was important, for without photons to brake its flight the robot-ship had little choice but to continue on to wherever the solar winds or inertia might take it. Its own maneuvering capability was quite limited.

Accordingly, the ship began furling the sail, pumping out the gas that held it erect and reeling in the filaments that connected it to the ship. When this was done, the entire assembly was rotated using some of the small amount of conventional fuel carried, to where the robot decided the sail was best suited to braking. It was then unfurled. The light from the sun was not sufficient to fully brake, however, if the ship followed a purely straight path. The robot began calculating an orbital path that would allow it to come very close to the light and heat of the foreign sun, thereby chopping its velocity to something it could work with.

This took several months, months well spent in analyzing the system. It found, for example, that the fourth world was in the right range to support life. It found further that the other five planets spinning about the local sun were not, being either far too hot or far too cold. There was no asteroid belt.

The fourth world, further, showed an oxygen nitrogen atmosphere, had an albedo indicating that it was about seventy percent covered in water and thirty percent in land, and had polar icecaps and some seasonal variation, though less than Earth's. It had small moons, three of them, which were certain to produce tides, though of lesser intensity than did Earth's sole companion, Luna. Spectral analysis showed plant life in profusion and limited volcanic activity. The closer the robot-ship came to the world its programming had settled on, the more it saw weather, as well.

The robot-ship was never designed to land upon any world, whether of its origin, its intended target, or this new and unknown place. It was equipped to explore, nonetheless, if a found world had an atmosphere. In the last half of its cylinder, carefully cradled, rested two parachute landers and two high altitude gliders. It released one of each over the fourth world as it passed close by.

The glider was never intended to come to a rest and did not. Released from the ship at low velocity relative to its target and with wings folded, it simply went ballistic until reaching the first thin traces of gas in the fourth planet's troposphere. At that point it deployed its wings. Solar powered itself, with a small propeller for propulsion and control surfaces for minor adjustments, it fought for control against the wind that threatened to rip it apart and the gravity that sought it in a deadly embrace. It was touch and go for a while but-to give NASA's executives their due; when they take a bribe to buy a Japanese-built gliding drone for interstellar exploration work, they at least make sure the drone can do the work before cashing the check-the glider skipped along, its microminiaturized camera and radar mapping the surface.

The gliding drone lasted quite some time. Not so the first parachute lander. It actually had a much easier time of it, initially, surviving entry into the planet's atmosphere and coming to rest lightly under its deployed parachute. It even managed to release its parachute precisely as it touched down, the wind carrying the 'chute off and allowing the lander to use its cameras and other sensors unobstructed. Sadly, however, as it was sending a continuous stream of video information to the Cristobal Colon, said stream showing a number of very large and tusked herbivores, one of the herbivores stepped on it, crushing it completely. The ship had to wait several months before it was in position to deploy another, and that came down on a different part of the planet.

The other glider-drone, too, was eventually deployed, thus cutting the mapping time down considerably. After all, there was a limited amount of time left to complete the mission and the Cristobal Colon, while it was never bright enough to actually understand what had happened to it, was certainly intelligent enough to follow its programming and retrace its steps.