When the cadets had filed out he turned to the young princess, “Thank you that was an enjoyable evening.”
“You’re welcomed,” The princess was shocked as the sergeant sometimes only talked to them to yell at them for something they did wrong.
“Princess,” cadet continued, “You have brought this to life for me tonight.”
He left then and took a lot longer than he was supposed to for his bed check. He owed that much to these cadets who were trying to learn more about their first queen.
Chapter 9: Roustabout’s 2nd Voyage
The Princess looked tired when she walked into the class room the next day. She had stayed up all night reading; but not the queen’s diaries; but the narrative of Roustabout’s second voyage by the voyage’s historian Violet Perkins. The general was about to say something; but decided not to.
When the rest of the cadets were settled the general began, “Roustabout was not an exploration support ship. But my mother Jonesy, and General Langtree and a brilliant engineer named Hooper had within a couple of days working around the clock to get her ready, had turned her into one.
“The loading of the Roustabout was different this time. The four surveyor flights were uploaded and chained down to the hull of Roustabout. This would be where the surveyor crews would make the voyage. At the other hard points on the hull had four containers chained down containing the pioneering party’s equipment. A landing craft was docked at the docking port, while another was loaded on the hangar deck. The pioneer team was hot bunking in Roustabout. There were two hundred souls aboard the ship. The ship was never designed to handle this load. They were all experienced in survey, scouting, primitive construction, and trail blazing. Accompanying them were a Trena Mounted Patrol Special Weapons and Tactics Team along with a Militia SpecWar team. Included in the team was a handpicked team of biopeople from the associations.
“None of the biopeople had worked on this planet. They were there simply to convince any clones that they might find on the planet that they were not from EBio and that they would be okay with the people from Trena. By the time that the Roustabout left orbit that captain was making bets whether his ship would be able to carry the load or not.
“They made planet fall ten days after they departed Trena.” The general continued her lecture.
###
The Roustabout entered the solar system where Zulu Foxtrot 89 was as a ghost. They were in full stealth mode. They were passive not transmitting. The signals intelligence team began the task of listening for any communications traffic. They were surprised, when they heard no voice or data signal. There should have been a beacon. Identifying the star system, how to contact traffic control and other pertinent data an arriving star ship needed to know. But there was no beacon.
“I wouldn’t worry about there no being a beacon,” one of the biopeople commented. “EBio hid a lot of their resources. There’s a beacon and sentries. When we cross a line they’ll let us know.”
“Let’s continue on,” The captain said to no one in particular.
They crept in system using the elint platforms’ full stealth capability they discovered several smaller planets that were on the fringes of the solar system.
“I image light from yonder star,” a technician on one of the surveyors indicating the system’s primary remarked, “would freeze solid on their surface.”
As they continued in they discovered a large gas giant several AUs out from the primary with a constellation worlds orbiting them. None were able to support life.
“Skipper,” one of the mapping crew spoke up as Captain Vaughn walked into the mission coordination center of the ship, “Good news!”
“Oh,” Captain Vaughn replied.
“No asteroids! Or rogue planetoids,” The chief replied.
“That’ll make everyone’s day.” Vaughn commented.
At length they entered the inner solar system they found three planets. All of them were able to support life.
“Skipper,” the mission coordinator spoke up, “I would like to redirect the surveyor flights to foxtrot.”
“What about the other two planets,” the captain asked.
“We’ve identified foxtrot as this one here,” the mission coordinator responded pointing to a dot in the holographic image, “We feel that that these two worlds here are not in our contract.” He pointed to the other two worlds, “We are certain that they are uninhabited. What we want to do is to check these two worlds out after we check on Foxtrot. They are not listed in the records as being owned by Miss Wilson. At least we can’t find the records on who owns these worlds.”
“Let’s assume for the moment that Wilson Enterprises owns the entire system. Let’s check out foxtrot first then we’ll worry about the other two.” Vaughn stated, “It is time to look at the planet we’ve come to explore.”
“Attention,” the mission coordinator called pressing the button that would let him speak to his surveyors, “ninety nine surveyors. You are clear to begin surveying planet
Zulu Foxtrot 89.”
“Double ought eight,” The mission coordinator on Surveyor 008 called into his communicator.
“Zero one zero.” The mission coordinator on surveyor 010 confirmed the mission assignment.
They approached the planet in a wide formation separated by several thousand miles. Surveyor double oh eight took the north pole of the planet, and double ought ten took the South Pole. They would orange peel the planet; just as they had on Cherokee. This time they were hoping that they didn’t find anyone on the planet.
It took several hours to survey the planet. The planet had four continents. They appeared to be mostly empty of any sign of human habitation. The middle one was the biggest of the four and had evidence of past habitation scattered over it. There was a large town or small city in the center of the continent at the confluence of two rivers. The town looked more or less intact. Some of the buildings had been ravaged by time and the weather. There was no sign of any one living anywhere on the planet. The river that the two smaller rivers formed in the middle of the town, it flowed north towards, the north coast of the continent. As the river flowed north there were many small towns and villages along both banks. The small towns all had docks. A couple of the docks had barges tied up to them. In one instance the barge was still tied up to some sort of tug. It appeared that the entire river was navigable.
“There’s not a lock or dam on the entire river.” The mission coordinator commented. “Not even for flood control.”
“There are flood walls around each of the villages,” one of the sensor operators remarked. “Even that one, down near the delta has flood walls.”
The largest town before the delta did indeed have flood walls. But it also had several graving, and dry docks. There was one ship that had been abandoned in the middle of its construction. The crew of surveyor double oh eight were shocked to see several boats had been beached. A good many of them were up on cribbing. Some of the cribbing had failed and the boats had either crashed down among the cribbing or were lying on their sides.
To the east of the outpost was a spectacular home looking out over the northern ocean. It was up on a cliff looking east onto the ocean. The home was U shaped with the open end of the U facing the ocean. The dominant feature of the home was a stained glass atrium over the pool that was in the space between the U’s uprights.
“That’s the planetary mangers place,” one of the crewmen said, “What little data we have on the world shows that this building belonged to the planetary manager. I think they called that village Out Post 1.”
They continue their survey. They were impressed with the level of development the main continent had and how little development was on the other three continents. They had one or two small settlements on each continent and some roads but there was nowhere near the development of the main continent. Even the buildings and the other things left behind there was no sign of the people who bu
ilt what they were seeing. It was if everyone went home at the end of their day. Even though there was plenty of animal life on the planet the surveyors found no evidence of primates or other animals being the precursors to sentiency. There didn’t appear to be any one on the planet.
“There’s no one down there,” Mission Coordinator on Roustabout mused. “I think it’s time to land the survey parties.”
In the mission coordination center Captain Vaughn turned to his communications signals intelligence team, “Let’s see if can wake up the Care Taker.”
The communications signal intelligence leader nodded, “Roustabout connect me with the Care Taker!”
“Okay baby,” the voice of a centuries dead entertainer replied. The Roustabout’s Artificial Sentient went to work. Before leaving Trena he had spent some time conversing with Kellogg and General Alphine, Miss Wilson, financial guardian. They had come up with the protocol to get the Care Taker to acknowledge them. If that didn’t work Roustabout was going to assault the Care Taker by over whelming the system in such a way that it couldn’t respond.
“Zulu Foxtrot Eighty Nine,” Roustabout broadcasted on all the channels the Care Taker was supposed to be listening to, “to this is corporate alpha omega with upgraded data for your station. Stand by to receive data!”
“Standing by,” the Care Taker replied.
Roustabout sighed in relief and sent the data packet to the Care Taker. As part of the packets he was sending down was the code to shut down. Everyone held their breaths as they had no idea how sentient the Care Taker might be. If Care Taker was more than a dumb AI they could be in trouble. If the Care Taker suspected a hostile takeover this was where he could react accordingly. If the planet had even rudimentary planetary defenses then Roustabout was in trouble. The Roustabout didn’t have any weapons to fight anything. Their best weapon was stealth, then speed. They were in luck the Care Taker’s last message was, “Care Taker off line!”
Everyone including Roustabout breathed a sigh of relief. As the holographic image of Roustabout sighed he took the bandanna from around his throat and wiped his brow.
The captain seeing the hologram wipe his brow commented, “Me too Roustabout! Let’s get the ground teams down.”
“Mr. Kellogg said that the computer system was in the main town.” Captain Vaughn mused, then ordered, reinforcing the mission plan, “Have the first mission in the town.
They are to find and permanently disable Care Taker.”
“Yes sir,” the ground mission coordinator said from his landing craft.
The first mission team landed at the largest city at the confluence of the two rivers. It was strange. They made a standard landing and off loaded a couple of hover jeeps and drove through the abandoned town.
“It looks like any abandoned town,” One of the Mounty’s commented. He was looking at the buildings. Some of them had broken windows, some had roof damage. The doors were wide open. The damage was not man made. More like that of storms or other weather. But other than storm damage and debris there was no evidence the town had been abandoned in a hurry. They passed a parking lot with trucks and heavy equipment parked in neat orderly rows. The town was not in bad shape over all. It looked without a doubt that the people who had lived there had just picked up and left. It appeared as if the last one who left the city had turned the lights off and shut the door.
At length they finally found the headquarters building.
It was in the center of town in a large ornate building that reminded the ground team leader of a government building. He thought of it as city hall. Its door was unlocked. Providing no barrier to the ground team. They entered the building. Here too, the building was clean. There was no paper or debris in the building, just some animal droppings and a musty smell of a building being closed too long. Only the office furniture was left. They carefully swept through the building, praying that it was abandoned. They found it deserted like they did the town.
They found the computer center. It was buried in the basement. The door to the center was open. It was spooky. It was silent. The typical noise associated with a large computer were not present. The cooling fans, power supply fans and all the other noise generators had been shut down. The computer that ran the planet’s infrastructure was indeed off. The team wasted no time as they disconnected the computer from all power sources. But they didn’t stop there. They opened the computer itself and removed the memory core. They very essence of the computer. They searched the center for a backup but didn’t find it. It became a priority for all the teams. Where was the backup? The location was probably in the memory modules they had removed.
As they left the building the Trenaport Mounted Patrol criminalist with them commented, “I’ll be happy when we can interrogate that computer. I wonder what else it might know?”
“Well until we can get this crap to a computer forensic team,” the ground team leader pointed to a large crate sealed with evidence seals, “that computer could be a
Pandora’s box!”
“Ground Leader this is Surveyor 008 priority traffic,” The mission coordinator on the surveyor flight called interrupting them.
“Go with your priority,” The ground leader called back as he sat down in his jeep. He had escaped from an EBio facility years ago. The memories were coming back. Not all of them good. He was a little uncomfortable being on this world and in this town. “Ground Leader, radar mapping indicates that there may be a mass grave in a meadow 2 klicks north of town.” The surveyor’s mission coordinator called, “We would like you to dispatch a field team to check it out.”
“On it,” the ground leader replied nodding to his driver to take him to the site.
When they got there, they found a large meadow, maybe a quarter of a mile on a side. The meadow was covered with flowers from one end to another. The meadow was flat there were no mounds or small hills in the meadow. He didn’t know what to expect. He had never seen a mass grave; not even in pictures. The meadow was tranquil and serene almost park like.
The escaped bioman did not want to disturb the site at all but they had to drive onto it to obtain the data they needed.
“Alex,” he nudged the driver of his jeep, “Turn your sensor pod on. I want you to drive straight through the meadow.”
Before they got five feet into the meadow the sensor suite began to provide data. The ground team was hoping that the mass grave was that of the original occupants, their hopes were dashed when the sensor suite began reporting the bodies the sensors were discovering were those of biopeople in the grave site. One of the sensors emitted signal that activated the identifier chip each clone was given the moment they were considered viable. Thousands of identifier were being triggered and recorded by the sensor suite. Within a short period of time they began to find pieces of bodies, and then small children. The sensor technology allowed them to determine that there were a thousand bodies buried in the meadow. The bioman was heart sick. Here were a thousand of his fellow biopeople who had been violently put down, and he couldn’t do anything about it. They couldn’t prove who did it, let alone if EBio was responsible.
“Ground leader to all personnel,” The ground leader called over the all call channel,
“From now on the meadow just outside of town is off limits. I want a guard on it.” “Aye-aye skipper,” someone called.
Later as they made the planet ready to occupy over the period of a few days, a low brick wall began to be built. It was spontaneous. No one claimed to be the architect who designed it. The bricks came from a pile near a building that had been abandoned during its construction. People not on duty would wander over and spend several hours working on it. It wasn’t a very good wall, nor very professional, but it would last almost forever. There were a thousand bricks in the wall. The wall was five feet high and a thousand feet long. The low height allowed people to see the meadow; but prevented them from entering the meadow itself. The bricks held the serial numbers of t
he ID tags the sensors had found. One for every bioperson who were believed to have been executed in the meadow. Over the years it became a matter of honor for biopeople to make a pilgrimage to this wall when they were first on world to pay homage to the biopeople so honored by the new settlers on what would become known simply as Home.
The survey and pioneer parties found no other mass graves. The small towns were never inhabited by EBio and were in near perfect order. There were signs of EBio exploration; but few of the buildings showed signs of occupancy. One of the large warehouses had been turned into barracks where the clones had been housed. They also found the abandoned cloning and reproduction labs. At least that’s what the explorers thought they were, but there was no equipment in the building. The ground leader was tempted to destroy them but he had to remember he was the agent of Jill Wilson and he couldn’t just order the destruction of her property.
A week after their landing Captain Vaughn came down to meet with the survey parties. They met at the small abandoned space port. It had five large landing craft pads, a small control tower and two hangars. They gathered outside one of the hangers. Some stood, other’s sat with their backs to the hangar. The senior officers were discussing the results of their explorations.
As the officers were meeting, a shy historian who was quietly observing everything and had, when she could, conducted interviews of many of the team members, she stood with her back against the hangar as the captain spoke with his officers.
“Well it is deserted,” the captain replied, “we’ve found nothing on the ground that indicates the planet has any population.”
“That is if you don’t count the large herds of cattle and sheep we’re finding,” someone said.
“But there is no sign of human life on the planet,” Vaughn asked.
“Yes sir,” The ground leader spoke up, “We have found no sign of recent human habitation of the planet.”
“We also have not discovered any pre-sentient primates.” An anthropologist spoke up. “Nor any sign of aborigine settlements. There is no native intelligence on this world.”