Eric never saw the outside of the ship they traveled on. They’d been shuttled up to a space station orbiting Jefferson and through the hatch of a ship docked there, a small craft of obviously military design. Cobb, whose father had been an officer in the Star Patrol, suspected it was an ‘R8-A Scout Ship’, whatever that meant. It was fast—they spent most of the trip under acceleration at one gravity, with periods of turnaround and free-fall which indicated they’d passed through several wormholes and star systems.
They’d also met Agent Vela’s aforementioned associate, Special Agent Selva. She was another lupen, this time with brown fur, and just as inscrutable. Eric began to suspect XRD agents had their personal memories blocked out when deployed on duty. Now, she and they, along with Mara Vela herself, floated in free-fall before a computer console on the ship’s mid-deck. On a screen, a camera window showed Meridian hanging in space, an orb of blues and greens swathed in patches of clouds. A single moon, too small for its gravity to turn it round, swept out a low orbit.
“Even now, we can ascertain some things,” Selva said. “This system is old—about seven billion years—with a quiescent star and thin debris disk. The planet itself is similarly tame, with little ongoing plate tectonics and a low axial tilt which precludes much in the way of seasons. If you wanted a population of intelligent beings to endure for a long time without high technology, this is where you’d put them.”
“You think that’s what whoever founded Meridian did?” Eric asked.
“Indeed, the easiest conclusion is they set up a primitivist colony in a place where external extinction events would be unlikely to harm it, perhaps as preparation for a situation such as the Interstellar Dark Ages. The only real mark against its habitability is the high oxygen concentration, though that may play a role in its paucity of fossil fuels.”
“Right.” No fossil fuels, no easy industrialization. Sure, there were tricks that could be done with biofuels, but it took care and coordination lest too much plant matter diverted to industry cause famines. Meridian’s founders had wanted its population to stay primitive, or at least not advance beyond a certain point. Eric’s skin crawled. Was this a refuge, or some kind of giant cosmic prison?
They went over to a second console, another segment in the wraparound stations surrounding the deck’s outer wall. In its chair sat a crewman, a genetically-engineered posthuman with feet forming a second set of hands, who obligingly brought up a partial map of the surface. Eric got the feeling the crew had been ordered not to talk to them.
“This inland sea is at the heart of Meridian’s major civilization center,” Agent Vela said. “To the west is Dulaine’s Panarchy of Arztillan, and to the east a collection of other states, among them the Druza Freeholds. Dulaine previously seemed to be conquering further out to the west, but perhaps feels his strength has advanced sufficiently to challenge the other powers around the sea. I downloaded the latest satellite data, he’s launched two major offensives in the last three months alone.”
“Where do we drop?” Cobb asked.
“Here, further east of the Freeholds so you land away from people. It’ll be a bit of a journey but there should be villages where you can get horses. Our orbital track will line up with the drop zone in two hours; best get ready.”
Eric had spent what felt like most of the journey in fastlearner sessions, his brain soaking with mnemase as he absorbed language lessons, cultural details, and a primer on horseback riding. Now came the time to use it. He could back out, of course: Agent Vela had made it clear enough that one or two people could remain in orbit with her, if they wished, though forfeiting most of their compensation. But once again, she must’ve determined they’d see this through. As he fitted into a pressure suit and prepared to climb into the coffin-like capsule of a drop pod, he wondered if maybe she’d planted that idea in their lessons. To his horror, he found himself unable to dismiss it.
“Ready?” Vela looked down through his spacesuit faceplate. Eric gave her a thumbs-up, then lowered his arm as the pod’s cover folded shut and it slid forward like a shell into a gun. Everyone reported in on the radio, then Vela said, “Execute drop now, now, now.”
The pod slammed up into his feet, shooting out and free of the ship. His only visibility was through a little slit at head-level, he saw stars and the inky darkness of Meridian’s nightside. The pods had attitude jets and deorbit rockets, he felt it reorient and heard the heat shield deploy with the crinkling of expanding thermal foam. Orbital mechanics, the vagaries of which he did not pretend to understand, dictated their drop happen on the opposite side of the planet from where they hoped to land, and his pod fired its motors accordingly, acceleration throwing him forward against the straps.
He coasted in silence for intolerable minutes until the acceleration returned, this time pressing up on his back. The heatshield formed a fat cone with the pod nestled across the center, he watched an annulus of fire begin to play in a circle around its top. Plasma, formed when the atmosphere superheated upon compression. The acceleration picked up now as their trajectory went lower and lower; he saw another pod slowing down behind his, flames blasting across its heatshield like a blowtorch. Probably Rachel’s, all else being equal a lighter object would decelerate fastest.
The acceleration subsided to a gentle push, they were still in darkness and falling towards what felt like the gaping maw of a black hole’s event horizon. A tinny female voice sounded in his ears: “Eject. Eject. Eject.”
This was another thing he’d fastlearned, he reached down and felt the ejection lever with his hand, then twisted and pulled back. Pyrotechnic charges fired, blowing the hatch off the pod and Eric out on his padded descent sled. Dawn was rising, a red sunrise soaking the rolling plains and hills below which brightened as he fell further still. This had been Agent Vela’s compromise, an early-morning drop so as not to land in the wilderness at night, or risk being seen in daytime. His parachute deployed with a jerk and he slowed, giving him his first good look at the planet’s vistas.
Meridian’s high oxygen concentration, and the ravaging fires it caused, made thick forests rare; Eric saw only a few scattered trees, thin with bushes of leaves at top. Birds flitted about, chirping, while on the ground roamed a herd of giraffes. And dinosaurs. Yes, there were dinosaurs on Meridian—whoever’d settled it engineered them to live there, as they likely had with the other flora and fauna, and even the people as well. A colossal sauropod, neck raised high, cooed gently as he drifted down.
And right into a tree.
