HWS Myosan, in Low Orbit around Eternity Planet
Digby sat back in his chair, physically and mentally exhausted but strangely exhilarated after another grueling day.
By the time he was born, the pioneering days of terraforming new planets and mass migration were long gone and almost forgotten. But now, seeing the promise a brand-new planet offered, he understood for the first time the excitement and vision that had driven millions of Earth’s people to look for a new beginning hundreds of light-years from home.
In front of him, the holovid showed Eternity in all its primal glory as it passed below the orbiting Myosan. Its atmosphere was the characteristic cobalt blue of all methane/ nitrogen/carbon dioxide worlds, interrupted here and there by smeared orange-brown-gray stains of high-altitude photosynthetic methane smog shot through with dark streaks of hydrogen cyanide and other exotic organic compounds, all the product of the intense ultraviolet flux that flayed Eternity’s upper atmosphere. Where clouds and methane smog permitted, Digby could see the planet’s surface, a mass of blues and browns of every shade imaginable; to the south, a mass of swirling blue-whites and grays wrapped around a black core announced the arrival of yet another huge frontal weather system coming in off the ocean to dump its load of rain onto the raw and scoured rocks that made up Eternity’s surface.
But after a lifetime orbiting the inhabited planets that made up the Hammer Worlds, Digby found it unsettling to see not even the tiniest speck of green.
That would change, Digby thought, wondering not for the first time at the extraordinary progress the Feds’ technology had allowed them to make. If he hadn’t seen it with his own eyes, he never would have believed the speed with which the former passengers of the Mumtaz were building Eternity Base, though he had to admit that if it were not for the AIs that managed and directed the entire process, progress would have been very slow. He thanked Kraa DocSec was not there to see the AI abominations at work, but it wasn’t, and what DocSec didn’t know wasn’t going to hurt him.
The first day had been the worst; getting the first lander down safely onto a planet without a decent runway and no precision navaids was always an interesting exercise. But the ex-convict pilot had done a beautiful job, encouraged, no doubt, Digby thought cynically, by the considerable incentives he had not to fail.
To minimize weight, the lander had been stripped nearly bare, its only cargo a one-man survey team and two laser rock cutters together with their integral microfusion power plants and their two-man crews. After a series of careful low-speed fly-bys to confirm that he hadn’t been given a swamp to land on, the pilot had put the massive machine down nearly vertically. Digby had watched with his heart in his mouth as the huge flier had touched down amid huge clouds of sand and gravel thrown up and out by belly-mounted hover control mass drivers firing vertically downward.
Within days and thanks largely to the brutal power of the Feds’ massive laser rock cutters, Eternity was the proud owner of a fully serviceable spaceport, with a single vitrified runway, laser cut out of the living rock and capable of withstanding the huge shock of a fully loaded lander putting down, complete with a milled antiskid surface, a microwave precision landing system, runway lights, crude storm drains, and a small plasfiber shed housing the air traffic control team. From that moment on, the flow of materials dirtside had never stopped as night and day heavily loaded landers thumped down to be unloaded quickly and then sent back into orbit for the next shipment.
And now, not even two weeks into it, Digby had every right to be pleased with the progress. He was especially glad finally to have downloaded the last of the passengers and crew of the Mumtaz. While they never had posed a threat, Digby felt a lot more comfortable now that the Feds were planetside and finally off that damnable mind-control drug Pavulomin-V. Nasty stuff and not recommended for prolonged use, especially in kids. They were better off where there was real work to be done even if Eternity Base had little to offer by way of recreation other than spectacular sunsets, nice beaches, and safe swimming in a sea whose biggest life-form was harmless cyanobacteria.
No, it had been a good week, and things were going well.
Eternity Base was well advanced even if still a bit crude. The comsats, navsats, and high-definition optical and infrared imaging satellites were ready to be commissioned. Downloading the terraforming support equipment would start in two days. According to the master terraforming AI’s schedule, the biomass plant responsible for the mass production of geneered bacteria, vastly more efficient at photosynthesis than their native cousins as well as the first of the methane-tolerant plant stock, would be operational in under a month. Even better, the carbon sequestration/oxygen production plant would be up soon, relieving the Mumtaz of the not inconsiderable chore of giving the 1,200 or so people now planetside the 2 to 3 kilos of oxygen they needed every day. It didn’t sound like much, but it all added up to more than 100 tons of oxygen a month.
But perhaps the best news of all was Professor Cornelius Wang. Despite the appalling way the Hammer had treated him and very much to Digby’s surprise, Wang appeared to bear no grudges and had thrown himself into the job of managing the terraforming project with a remarkable mixture of enthusiasm and drive. Digby was beginning to think that Wang might be a man he could trust to get on with it and not fuck up. Even the damn Feds seemed to respond well to Wang, which was a relief. They could be a stiff-necked bunch when they wanted.
Digby sighed as he turned his back on the almost hypnotic holovid. He could quite happily have watched it for hours, but if he didn’t get his weekly report finished and into the courier drone for its pinchspace jump back to Commitment, Merrick wouldn’t get it in time for the weekly Supreme Council meeting on Friday evening, and that would never do. The last thing Digby needed was to upset Merrick and be recalled. For the moment, Merrick seemed happy that he was staying here, though it was early days yet. To encourage Merrick to view his presence on Eternity as essential, he would slip a fictitious incident involving one of his security personnel-nothing serious, but disaster had been averted only because he had been there to manage it while his ex-Hell personnel got used to their new responsibilities-into his report. He might also talk up the amount of direction he was having to give poor Professor Wang.
Yes, he would paint a picture of good progress under difficult and demanding circumstances thanks to his firm leadership and control. That should do it.