Starfall

Starfall minus 19 years

Tau Ceti

The flitter from the Facula arrowed towards the centre of the daylit face of the planet. Tau Ceti II was a small, warm, watery world, all but drowned by a vast ocean, and habitually swathed in cloud—and now, according to imperial intelligence, host to an unauthorised human colony.

"There's definitely something wrong," Pella said.

Stillich turned to his First Officer. Pella sat crammed in with the assault squad in the translucent hull of this intrasystem flitter. She was peering obsessively at a diorama of their target. Stillich glanced around at his marines, sitting in their smartsuits, the sunburst sigil of the Empire of Sol on their breasts. He got grins back, but he could sense their nervousness, and Pella's fretting wasn't helping.

The journey out from Sol had been over five years subjective, more than thirteen objective. This was Stillich's first interstellar jaunt under his own command, and he understood that his primary task during the cruise out had been to keep his crew interested, with a training programme half a decade long intended to sharpen them for this very moment, the planetfall. Stillich, in fact, had already started to turn his attention to the return journey, when another five-year programme would prepare the crew for the culture shock of their return.

To Stillich the journey itself had been the principal challenge. He had not expected the mission itself, the subduing of a ragged bunch of second-hand colonists from Alpha, to present any problems. But now here was Pella with her analyses, mucking up morale, right at the climax of the mission.

He murmured to her, "There's no evidence of any threat to us from these ragged-arsed colonists, Number One."

Pella was bright, but she was young, at thirty a decade or so younger than Stillich. And she had a strong, prickly sense of herself. "No, sir. But what we're seeing doesn't make sense. The colony looks wrong. Half-dismantled, rebuilt. Look." She showed him hastily processed drone images of circular landforms, evidence of abandoned structures. "There can't be more than a few thousand people on the planet. Why would you move?"

Stillich shrugged. "Weather. Seismic problems. There's any number of reasons why you might get your first location wrong—"

"These are interstellar colonists, Captain. They're unlikely to be so foolish. I'd be happier if we were going into this situation better informed."

So would I, Stillich thought, but he wasn't about to say so before his troops. He forced a grin. "We're just going to have to have our wits about us when we land. Right, lads?"

He was rewarded with a muted cheer. "You said it, skip."

A gong's low chime, the call to prayer, filled the cabin of the little flitter. The men had their solar amulets fixed outside their suits to their wrists, and they consulted these now, shifting in their seats so they could face towards Sol. Soon the murmured prayers began.

Stillich turned too. He knew where Sol was, actually; he could find it from the constellations, distorted by this translation to Tau Ceti. But nearly twelve light years from Earth it was tricky to pick out the home star. That, of course, was proclaimed by the Shiras as the natural limit to the human dominion—the Empire of Sol was to be that bubble of space close enough that you could see the home star with the naked eye, and so be able to pray to its munificence.

But Stillich knew that the Shiras' control depended on more practical considerations.

The Facula was a GUTdrive starship. 'GUT' stood for 'Grand Unified Theory'. The ship was essentially a plasma rocket, its exhaust propelled by a phase-transition energy that had once driven the expansion of the universe itself. After a thousand years this was still the peak of mankind's interstellar technology. But the Facula was a sublight ship. And a human navy forever contained by lightspeed had a certain natural reach.

The Facula was capable of sustaining a one-gravity acceleration for years, indeed decades. Including time for acceleration and deceleration, she could reach Alpha Centauri in a mere forty-three months subjective, and Tau Ceti in a little more than five years. But in flight, thanks to relativistic time dilation, the crew's heartbeats were slowed, their lives extended, and the voyages as measured by the external world were longer—it was fourteen years to Tau Ceti, as recorded on Earth.

And it was this rigidity of relativistic time that set the true limits on the Shiras' interstellar grasp. The young crew of the Facula were soldiers of the Empress; they would fight for Shira XXXII if there was a reasonable promise that they would be brought home. But it had been discovered that if any longer than a generation elapsed back home that promise was broken, loyalty dissipated by an excess of culture shock; any longer a flight became an emigration. AS anti-ageing technology made no difference, for this limit was a function of human consciousness, not significantly altered by extended lifespans—and besides, all soldiers were young, as they had always been. Even using sleeper pods would not help; that could only cut down the subjective flight time, not the objective interval.

Given such fundamental limits, Tau Ceti was about as far as the Shiras could ever extend their empire. But it was enough, for no less than nineteen star systems, plus Sol, lay within that limit of loyalty. And this mission was proof that the Shiras enforced their rule right to the boundaries.

The time for prayer was over. The marines folded away their amulets and closed their faceplates.

The flitter ducked into the murky air of Tau Ceti's second world.

They landed briskly on the perimeter of the largest human colony, close to the shore of an island-continent. The hull cracked open, and the marines spilled out to set up a secure perimeter around the flitter. Glowing drones flooded the air, and bots began digging trenches.

Stillich peered about curiously. A lid of cloud turned the pale light of Tau Ceti to a dull grey. They had apparently come down in a field, where Earth vegetation drew sustenance from the nutrients of an alien soil, no doubt heavily nano-worked. But plants of a more exotic sort, with leaves of purple and silver-grey, clustered among the green. There were structures on the low horizon, unprepossessing, just shacks, really. People stood before the shacks, adults with hands on hips, a couple of children. They watched the marines with apparent curiosity but no sign of fear or deference.

Although Tau Ceti was actually the most sun-like of all the stars within the Empire of Sol, such were the distracting riches of Alpha system that only one serious colonising expedition from Earth had been mounted here—and that ship had been reassigned to a more urgent mission and had never been heard of again.

Evidently all that had changed.

"Walk with me," Stillich said to Pella. He set off towards the shacks, and Pella followed. Marines shadowed them, weapons in hand. "What a dump," Stillich said. "This world, this dismal farm, those shacks. To come all this way to live like this."

Pella, characteristically, was peering into her data desk, rather than studying the world around her. "They will be grateful we have come to save them, sir ... " She stopped suddenly, a hundred paces short of the shacks. "Look." She pointed to a kind of earthwork, circular, just a system of ditches and low ramparts cut into the ground. "This is what I saw from the drones. Can you see the way the ground has been flattened within the perimeter, as if something has been set down here? And over there—" She pointed. "Residual traces of radioactivity."

"They came here in a GUTship," Stillich said.

"Yes, sir. They brought it down and dismantled it. They lived in the lifedome, just here, and used the GUTdrive for power."

"And now it's all gone."

"And quite recently too—l mean, a few decades ... "

A woman approached them. Short, squat, she had the heavy shoulders and big hands of a farmer. She was perhaps forty, though with AS tech she could be any age. She wore a facemask and a small air pack, but no other environmental protection. She grinned, showing good teeth, and said something in a liquid dialect that Stillich's systems began to translate for him.

He waved that away. "Speak Earthish," he snapped.

The woman eyed him, perhaps deciding whether to obey him or not. "I said, 'Welcome to Home'."

"What an original name," sneered Pella.

"You don't need to wear those fancy suits. An air mask will do. We long since nanoed out any nasties. A couple more generations and—"

"You should not be here," Stillich said. "This colony is unauthorised."

"Well, you'll have to take that up with my grandfather, who came here from Alpha system when Footprint got a bit too full for his liking."

Pella looked around. "Where is your grandfather?"

"Dead these forty years. Don't you want to know my name?"

Pella snapped, "Your name is irrelevant. The GUTships you used to get here were the property of the Empire of Sol."

The farmer laughed again.

Pella, her temper quick, her ego strong, raised her arm.

Stillich touched her shoulder to restrain her. He said, "Woman—you broke up your transport ship to build your first colony here." He gestured. "You lived in the lifedome. You used the GUT engine for power. And yet these things are gone."

"You reassembled the ship, that's obvious," Pella said. "And other vessels. But why? Where have you sent them?"

The woman responded with another grin, surly.

This time Pella did strike her, using her elbow to dash the woman to the ground. Marines rushed in, weapons raised. "Take her," Pella said. "And her children. Torch this place. We will have five years to empty her of all she knows, before we reach Sol system once more."

As the marines closed on the shack-like farm buildings, Stillich considered intervening. This was no way to run an empire, this use of brute force. But he didn't want to contradict his First Officer in front of the marines; the fate of this farmer wasn't important enough for that.

Pella stood with him, breathing hard, still angry. "Actually I'm not sure how concerned we should be, sir. Now I stand here, amid the rubble of these colonists' petty dreams—if some of them have taken their GUTships off into the dark, so what? There's no G-class star until you get to Delta Pavonis, eight more light years out from Sol. Too far away to bother us. Why should we care?"

But it wasn't obvious to Stillich that this new jaunt had been outwards at all.

Human space was sparsely settled, save for Sol system itself, and Alpha system. And if you weren't to travel outwards, a return journey to Alpha was by far the most likely destination. Stillich had visited Alpha himself, on the two previous interstellar missions of his career. It was a big, sprawling, increasingly crowded system—potentially richer in resources even than Sol system itself. And as a junior officer he had detected signs of rebelliousness there, signs that the Alphans were chafing under the yoke of the Shiras' taxes and political control, signs he had dutifully reported to his superiors.

It might be harmless. Maybe the GUTships had gone back to pick up another cadre of colonists for Tau Ceti. Or maybe not.

"Tidy up here," he said to Pella. "But do it fast; the sooner we get out of here the better. I'm going back to the Facula to send a message to Earth." Which itself would take twelve years to get there. He turned and stalked back to the flitter.

Pella called, "Sir, the colonists—are they to be permitted to stay?"

He considered. "No." That was the tidiest solution. "We have sleeper pods enough to transport these ragged villagers back to Sol. Get on with it, Pella. And avoid excessive violence."

"Sir."

Stillich heard screaming from the farmer's children. He did not look back.