Somebody’s World
Laura Montgomery
Laura Montgomery is a practicing space lawyer who writes space opera and near-future, bourgeois, legal science fiction. Her latest book, The Gear Engages, is the fourth in her Martha’s Sons series, which is set on the lost colony world of Not What We Were Looking For. Mercenary Calling is her most recent near-future novel and it follows one man’s efforts to save a starship captain from charges of mutiny. Her author site is at lauramontgomery.com.
On the legal side, Laura’s private practice emphasizes commercial space transportation and the Outer Space Treaties. Before starting her own practice, she was the manager of the Space Law Branch in the Federal Aviation Administration’s Office of the Chief Counsel, where she supported the regulators of commercial launch, reentry, and spaceports. There she worked on issues ranging from explosive siting to property rights in space. She has testified to the space subcommittees of both the House and Senate, and is an adjunct professor of space law at Catholic University’s Columbus School of Law. She writes and edits the space law blog GroundBasedSpaceMatters.com and speaks regularly on space law issues.
Clients never provided their lawyers enough time, and this was one of those times.
Joseph Stern walked as fast as Yoel Aronson, first mate on the Copernicus, not only because he could but because he had to. Aronson, who seldom saw cause for formalities, had come and fetched the lawyer himself.
There was only one problem. “I don’t see how I can brief her. I’ve had no time to prepare, and”—Joseph paused for both breath and emphasis—“you still haven’t told me what it’s about.”
“Try to be a little more excited, please,” Aronson said. “Here I take you from whatever it is you do that you always complain about, and I bring you genuine interstellar law and you get wrapped up in trivialities.”
“Like knowing the topic?” Joseph walked faster. He was older. Like Aronson, he’d made the journey on the Copernicus from Earth, but he was diligent about his rejuvenation appointments and looked to be in his thirties. He felt like he was in his thirties, and picked up the pace when they reached the starship’s interminable stairs, determined to make the first mate suffer, even if only a little. They were going from almost a full g to about three-quarters, which Joseph found psychologically useful for maintaining the pace.
“I’m telling you the topic,” Aronson said. “It’s glorious. Some girl found a thing on Aitch.”
“The planet?” Joseph asked. The Copernicus was supposed to be assessing Ross 248h for resources and colony sites. The planet was referred to by its unofficial nickname “Aitch,” and had yet to be dignified with a real name. “What is this ‘thing’?”
“It doesn’t look natural,” Aronson said. He easily matched the pace Joseph was setting. “We have all sorts of images. A clean-shorn mountaintop, scraggly structures around the edges—all an intrepid explorer could hope for barring aliens themselves. Her supervisors were ignoring the girl—because she’s young and was way too excited. Sometimes I think we shouldn’t get to live so long. We ossify. Present company excepted, of course,” he added breezily. They exited the stairs and headed down a new corridor.
“Of course,” Joseph said drily. “Go on.”
“We’re going to go look at it,” the first mate said.
Joseph skidded to a stop and Aronson overshot him before coming back around like a ship under sail. Or a water buffalo. Aronson braked, beaming.
Joseph hardly dared believe it. “We are? Me, too?” He’d brief the captain on anything she wanted to hear. He and his wife had joined the visionary expedition to the star, Ross 248, not only because they wanted humanity to have a future home, but for the adventure of it. Now, he was about to go to a planet, a new planet, an alien world. True, it didn’t have any breathable air—just a little thin nitrogen atmosphere—but he would be one of the first people to set foot on it, feel the lesser gravity, see…what? An alien artifact? The blood rushed around in his head and it wasn’t the starship’s Coriolis effect.
The first mate had the grace to look chagrined. “I’m going. So is Alexa Prandus, the young woman who found the thing. I’m sorry, Joseph.” He tried one of his charming grins. “You know lawyers never get to go anywhere: you’re too valuable.”
Joseph snorted a laugh. “Not a one of you thinks that.” No, if lawyers were valuable, then the Patrol’s lawyers would have gotten it right about Eden. Eden was the world Joseph Stern truly longed to visit, and the one they should have been orbiting. The Copernicus had been slated to go there first until the Patrol pulled the plug on humans settling Eden. Now the Copernicus orbited Aitch’s moon, and, when not helping the Cerites construct their settlement, was tasked with assessing the cold, almost airless Aitch.
Ross 248e—now formally named Eden for its breathable air, its earthlike atmosphere, and (Joseph figured) the poisoned apple of its amino acids—had been explored three years before the Copernicus arrived in the system. With the home system facing trouble, and for a mission of multiple starships sent to find new planets that could support Sol System’s inhabitants, it had failed mightily with Eden as far as Joseph Stern, Esq., was concerned.
Eden had life, but no intelligent life. The Patrol, which was semi-independent of the rest of the fleet (although not entirely), had surveyed the planet, but its probes had found neither mud huts nor cave dwellings, much less technology or advanced artificial structures. The admiral had authorized Patrol personnel to explore in person. Her people had breathed thin alien air, had lethal encounters with predators, and otherwise endured the stuff of adventure. To Joseph’s eye, however, where they had strayed into biblical territory was when they ate the fruit of the alien tree, the flesh of alien animals, and thus were cast out of the world. In short, what they ate made them sick. Joseph had taken to indulging his literary side and had been pleased he’d caught the parallels.
The Guardian E had established several research stations on Eden. That effort had cost the lives of too many Patrolmen as they encountered native predators. But scientists had quickly established that Eden’s flora and fauna deployed amino acids not used by Earth life. Although the amino acids weren’t poisonous, human ribosomes would use them in a case of mistaken identity, and produce a protein that didn’t fold right, which meant a person’s cells couldn’t function properly. As a result, all the food-curious personnel had become suffused with lassitude and ennui, to malady levels, suffering for months on end after their gastronomical adventure.
Rather than treat her disobedient personnel as an object lesson to the others and order the rest to really, truly not eat the wildlife, Admiral Gordon had determined that Eden was not compatible with Earth life. She had believed she faced two choices: sterilize the place or relinquish any plans to treat it as a possible home for humans.
The admiral wasn’t a scientist. She wasn’t even a lawyer. Joseph had called his legal counterpart on the Patrol’s Guardian E not long after the Copernicus had arrived in the Ross 248 system. Much had happened before the Copernicus’ arrival, including a deadly solar flare, and Joseph had wanted to catch up—and maybe do a little sharing. The Patrol attorney Harley Lund had not been forthcoming about his client’s reasoning, which was much as Joseph had expected. Still, Joseph had accomplished his real goal, which was to complain about the admiral’s failure of imagination. All it would take for Eden to be compatible with Earth life would be for the humans to not eat the aliens, he’d pointed out. They could sterilize an island, find a barren rock, or otherwise carve out a niche in a valley somewhere, plant crops, graze livestock, and see if Eden could support human life over the long term. The Patrol attorney had listened, shaken his head, and told him what was done was done.
“Also,” and here Harley had dropped his voice, “there’s a second reason. This isn’t a secret and you’ll likely be hearing it sooner or later, but the admiral is concerned that the life on Eden seems genetically engineered, and whoever did it might not like it if we interfere with their work.”
“But you’ve found no other signs of such people? Aliens?”
“Nope,” Harley had said.
Joseph had bitten back his observations. They wouldn’t have been polite.
“You should take me with you,” Joseph said to the first mate. Aitch was a sterile, low-gravity destination. Nonetheless, it was a planet, not a ship, and Joseph longed for nothing so much as to stand on solid ground. Being present at the discovery of an alien facility—whether it was a spaceport, a sports arena, or an apartment complex—sounded great, too.
Aronson gave a single shake of his head. “Not up to me, man. Maybe the captain will let you.”
“I’d give her a better briefing if she let me go,” Joseph muttered, but he started walking again.
They found Captain Kymba BeKinne in her conference room on the bridge deck. It had real wood paneling, and the carpet was—given the length of the journey alone—a worn antique. Like the rest of the population of Copernicus, Captain BeKinne was a normal from Earth. She was approaching the end of her second century, and it showed in the lines that even rejuvenation could no longer erase from her face. Her shoulders were set in a permanent forward sag, but her back was still straight with no hump, and she was meticulous in her person. Where Aronson slouched in baggy clothes with his uniform collar frayed at the nape of his neck, BeKinne’s uniform fabric fell uncreased and smooth. No one made bikini jokes.
Shortly after her ship’s arrival, she’d been made director of the Ross 248 Project, which gave her authority over everything in the Ross 248 system, except the Patrol. Still, the Patrol coordinated with her.
“Mr. Stern,” she said, “please be seated. Has my first mate filled you in on what we’ve found?”
“Thank you, Captain,” Joseph said, and took the proffered chair. Aronson didn’t sit. He pressed his thighs into the back of another chair, standing like a ship’s figurehead leaning into the wind.
“All I know,” Joseph said, “is that you’ve found something on Aitch that looks like it might be artificial.”
BeKinne blinked like an owl. “I must give credit where credit is due. Alexa Prandus, a brilliant young woman, was reviewing imagery from 248h for us. She noticed that one of the mountains appeared unnaturally flat. The plateau is ringed with what look like structures. We’ll be sending a lander down.”
“I’ll tell you all about it later,” Aronson said cheerfully.
BeKinne gifted her first mate with a basilisk stare. Joseph felt himself drawing back.
“She is a most stubborn young woman,” the captain went on, returning to her original train of thought. “She diverted a probe—without authorization, mind—to take a closer look. There are structures. Clearly artificial.”
“And,” Aronson continued with relish, “the Guardian E sent robot scouts and found nothing. No life, no electronics, nothing. The Patrol says it’s abandoned.”
Joseph felt a spark of legal excitement, his mind reviewing the implications for Eden. Nonetheless, he felt obligated to check: “Is that a legal determination or is the admiral just saying no one has been there for a while?”
“I don’t know,” the captain said. “Is there a difference?”
“Oh, yes.” He set the question aside for later. He had a dim recollection that the law of finds could apply.
“Copernicus is an Earth-registered ship, and must comply with Earth law,” the captain said. “I want to send a lander down, but I need your views on whether we are entering someone else’s property. I would also appreciate your own thoughts on abandonment.”
“It’s got a lot of craters showing a lot of meteor hits,” Aronson added. “The ship’s analysis shows metals near the surface from those hits.”
The captain sniffed. “While that would be a great benefit, it is neither here nor there to my question for Mr. Stern.”
Aronson gave Joseph a significant look, complete with narrowed eyes and a head tilt. Joseph ignored it and chose his words carefully, but not so carefully that he wasn’t clear. “I think I’ll have to go with the landing team. This is a novel legal question.”
The look the captain gave him wasn’t the basilisk stare she had inflicted on her first mate, but neither was it warm with approval. “Indeed. I am sure, however, that structures were abandoned on Earth repeatedly. Over millennia even. There appears to have been consensus about such matters, particularly with regards to ships lost at sea, where the admiral tells me abandonment is not assumed. Her lawyer tells her there was an extreme reluctance to find that treasure ships have been abandoned. I would like to know how it’s applied here.”
“I will have to review the law, Captain,” he said. “I did not have time before our meeting. Even so, I believe I should go with the landing team. We may have to think hard about which of the elements to apply. The more I know about the facts on the ground, the better I’ll be able to discern what’s relevant.”
“I’d rather you just told us what to look for, and we’ll bring you pictures. Or we’ll patch you into a helmet. I have a xenobiologist and archaeologists who would question why you get to go and they don’t.”
It was time to up the ante, and to show he had a replacement just in case Aronson had been serious about his value. “Let me also bring my young associate, Emily Patel. This would be a tremendous opportunity for her.”
“That will be enough, Mr. Stern. Neither of you will go with the landing team.”
“One thing I will have to think about,” Joseph continued with determination, “is the statute of limitations. Many states have different time limits on how long something must be left before we may call it abandoned. Here we are in interstellar territory.”
The captain’s lids hooded her large round eyes. “Mr. Stern.”
“We need to take relativity into account. Possible differences in technology in travel time. There’s been a certain amount of theoretical legal work conducted on what statute of limitations should apply over interstellar distances and timelines.” He didn’t tell her he’d read that entertaining speculation in a science fiction novel. That would have been off-topic—a digression even. “Who knows what other aspects unique to interstellar travel we’ll have to take into account? I will need to review it and think things through after seeing it with my own eyes. The more I know the better I can answer you and provide legal guidance for the archaeologists and biologists. It’s not like they should start working without proper legal guidance.”
She looked at her first mate, as if the lawyer’s presence was his fault.
Aronson gave her a sunny smile. “He’d be no trouble. We’ll have the Patrol with us, two sentient AIs, and Alexa herself.”
Everyone waited. The captain’s eyes took on a certain cunning. “Right. You may go, Mr. Stern. Do take care. I wouldn’t want anything to happen to you.”
Or to any of the other troublemakers, Joseph thought. He knew she wasn’t a fan of her first mate.
Outside her office again, Aronson eyed Joseph with amusement. “You asked for your associate, so she’d have something to turn down.” It wasn’t a question.
“Client service is important,” the lawyer said. He hesitated, reluctant to ask his next question, but Aronson wouldn’t take his prize away now he had it. “Why does she even care? We can look at it without figuring out if it belongs to someone. We could even just start digging.”
Aronson’s mouth pursed, primly. “She’s meticulous and precise.”
“She’s a stickler,” Joseph agreed.
Aronson took a long-suffering breath. “She doesn’t want us crawling all over someone else’s property. She’s always like this. If you try to streamline anything, it’s cutting corners. But, Joseph”—Aronson was no longer clowning—“I do want to crawl all over it. And extract resources.”
“That makes perfect sense,” Joseph said, inwardly gleeful. If he found the structures on Aitch had been abandoned, it would be a legal finding. Legal findings had precedential value. He thought of Eden and smiled.
* * *
Two days after the captain had requested her first legal briefing, and one day after Joseph had provided a rundown on the principles governing abandonment—concluding with the conservative advice that for now they treat whatever they found as belonging to someone else, given the uncertainty surrounding possible interstellar statutes of limitations and the seeming lack of any alien available to contest a finding—the lawyer stood in an airlock leading to the Hold, Copernicus’ sole landing bay.
Joseph hadn’t been in a pressure suit in years; in it he felt clumsy and strangely large, and they hadn’t even put their helmets on yet. The first mate looked comfortable and happy in his suit, and the Patrol members wore theirs like a second skin. The two sentient AIs wore only themselves.
Joseph had said nothing of his personal policy preferences since he’d been assigned to analyze whether the alien structures might have been abandoned. Sure, he’d complained in the past about the admiral’s decision to declare Eden off-limits, but he’d not mentioned it in the last two days. Nor had he let anyone know he hoped to find the structure abandoned. After all, if the one place in the Ross 248 system the aliens had obviously visited was abandoned, it could be reasonable to assume the same for Eden, and he hoped no one else drew the connection until after BeKinne had made her decision.
Joseph found Alexa Prandus intriguing. She was a diminutive creature, with a halo of thin, fluffy yellow hair held back by a headband. Fortunately for her, her teeth were straight and even, which was good because her nose tilted up like a chipmunk’s. She was a clever young thing. Everyone said so, including the folks who’d mocked her for insisting that the Aitch images showed something worth exploring. She’d received both a demerit in her employment record for her diversion of the drone and a commendation for finding the Oddity. “Oddity,” Joseph had to agree, was a better term than the more generic “thing” that Aronson had called it.
Some were even calling it Alexa’s Oddity, and Joseph wondered with amusement if she’d be coming to him asking to be recognized as the owner. His late hours the last two nights qualified him to brief her, but he suspected she’d find the legal requirements too onerous to satisfy.
The lead Patrol officer was a handsome normal, not one of the ectomorphic Cerites. No Cerites, genetically engineered to thrive on Ceres, would be accompanying them into Aitch’s gravity well. The officer was only a lieutenant, going by the insignia on her suit, but Joseph fancied he’d read the telltale signs of rejuvenation around the eyes, and on her they suggested she was a lot older than the thirty years she appeared. She wore her ash blond hair long at the back of her head and short near her face. Her dark eyes passed over Joseph with indifference before settling on the Prandus girl.
Aronson directed them to put their helmets on, and Joseph’s settled into his suit’s collar with a heartening hard suck. His pulse was up. He could feel it in the suit’s sudden isolation, and the display in the lower left corner of his helmet confirmed the news. It was nothing to be embarrassed about, he assured himself. Landing on an alien world was exciting enough to elevate anyone’s pulse. It was excitement, not nerves.
They cycled through the airlock. At 638 meters in length with both ends possessed of doors leading to space, the Hold in the Copernicus’ center felt like a giant hole. Although protected against radiation and the cold of space, it lacked air. Its gravity was about sixty percent of Earth’s normal gravity, and Joseph felt light on his feet despite the pressure suit he—like the rest of the team—now wore. Artificial lights illuminated activity throughout the hold, from personnel moving crates, fuel lines, and mysterious, slender cannisters from the storage areas, to those servicing shuttles.
They trooped lightly across the bay to a Patrol dropship from the Guardian E waiting by the Hold’s massive doors, and up the ramp. The Hold’s doors would open only enough for the dropship to exit, he’d been told, and felt more than a little anxious as to whether that was enough.
In his seat at the rear, he could only just see the back of the pilot’s head and that there was a cockpit window. Aronson, the Patrol officers, the sentient AIs, and Alexa Prandus herself all merited closer access to the door than he did. He assumed that Aronson or maybe a Patrol officer would be first down the ramp when they landed. They might all be thinking what they’d name the new planet, that privilege going to whoever first stepped foot on a new world.
The door came down with a delicate but heavy contact, again registering as suction to his alert state. He swallowed hard.
It might have been his imagination, but he thought he felt the engines spin up, the vibration echoing faintly somewhere in his bones and inner ear.
The AI and the pilot ran through their respective checklists. The engines cycled with a thrum that echoed in his bones. It was not his imagination this time. The Hold’s massive doors pulled back to show a sight one never saw on Earth: a field rich with stars undimmed by atmosphere and artificial lights. Ahead, Aitch beckoned in somber blacks, grays, and browns, with streaks of palest rose and shadow showing craters and what might appear as mountain ranges from the ground.
The dropship moved forward, its suite of tiny thrusters all firing. However brief the spacecraft’s time in the Hold, it was long enough to experience unsettling jerks and thrusts as it oriented itself, and the light gravity dropped to no gravity. Joseph told his stomach to be quiet, and it was.
He saw the ship’s distant window move from black to thick stars to Aitch’s curve intersecting the lower corner of the window. Aitch looked five times as big as the moon seen from Earth. Still, it felt vastly far.
The AI did nothing to make Aitch fill the screen and soothe Joseph’s sudden anxiety. He’d been fine on the starship. He should be fine in this little dropship. He understood that one didn’t plunge straight at a planet, that the craft needed to change planes, and that they would enter an orbit before slowing and landing. Joseph would, however, have felt much better had the ground merely grown larger and larger in front of them immediately. It didn’t.
A hard burn at two g’s followed by almost thirty hours in free fall left Joseph queasy and exhausted. People read and talked. The Patrol members spent a good amount of time quizzing Alexa on how she’d found the Oddity. The Patrol members handled it fine, but with everyone encouraged to stay in their suits, Joseph had trouble sleeping the first night. The second night, assisted by a pill from a Patrol member, he slept a merciful fifteen hours.
Finally, the ship’s AI granted Joseph his original wish, and the view shifted from black sky and stars to cratered rock and a horizon that went from “below” to “in front” with a switch his stomach noticed. Aronson ordered helmets back on.
The dropship shed velocity and no small amount of shielded heat. They were coming in on a high plateau with flat terrain screaming out in front of them. Aitch’s “day” lasted over two weeks, and the Oddity was in daylight for their visit. Joseph watched.
Earlier drone surveillance had shown a road leading to the plateau below, but rock covered the road’s outlines well enough that two grown women had vociferously debated its existence. Drone footage had also shown acres of flattened mountaintop that could serve as a landing site. He knew they had to be near it when he felt the thrusters firing from below.
Slowly, and with as much care as the most nervous participant could wish for, the lander began its vertical descent, the engine’s vibration reverberating through Joseph’s whole body. He squinted at the colorless sky ahead.
He worried about rocks. If rocks were on the road, wouldn’t they be on the landing site as well? He wished he could see out a closer window. It was hard to help the pilot when he couldn’t see what was going on.
A clang reverberated up through his seat, suit, and body. They’d touched down. The dropship didn’t tilt onto its side. Joseph swallowed, and his heart started beating again. He blinked. The anxiety still filled him, but the hard fear was gone.
The gravity on Aitch at sixty-five percent was just a little greater than the Hold deck on the Copernicus, but noticeably less than the ninety percent of the Village Deck where he lived.
He realized Aronson was giving instructions through the radio in his helmet. People were standing up, and the pressure in the lander began to drop as air got sucked back into the craft’s tanks. The human race didn’t spill air needlessly.
Joseph shook himself. He’d been so lost in his own head that he’d missed much of what Aronson had said. This was no way to participate in an adventure on a new planet. He needed to focus on what was happening in front of him.
“Ms. Prandus,” Aronson said. “You found the thing, so I want you first on the ground.”
The young woman’s gasp of pleasure was appropriately muted but sincere. “Yes, sir.”
One didn’t hear changes to the ship, one felt them, and Joseph felt the door open up as the large ramp extruded toward the ground with a grinding thrum.
The sun shone directly overhead, its red-gold light framing a dark oblong of shade beneath the ramp. Alexa’s suited form moved into the door, where she paused at the top of the ramp. “Commander Aronson,” she said in a small voice the rest of the team heard through their suits’ radios. “It looks like glass. Under the dust. Thought you should know.”
“We know,” Aronson said. “Don’t go under the dropship. There’s probably a pool of molten glass from the antimatter drive.”
Alexa’s helmet jerked as if she nodded. She straightened and headed down the ramp. Aronson followed, and Joseph watched as the two helmets disappeared from his sight.
“There’s no pool there,” Alexa’s voice came over the radio.
“And it’s not even a little warm,” Aronson said after a moment’s pause in which he must have checked sensor readings. “Look. I’ll take this as a sample.”
The four Patrol officers went next. The pilot was staying with the lander. 9-of-Megan, one of the sentient AIs, gestured to Joseph where he waited in the back of the lander.
He tried to walk calmly toward the door. The pilot had put the lander down within a hundred meters of the plateau’s edge, beyond which lay empty space. Where the lander’s thrusters had cleared dust back in a large circle, the ground shone as if someone had heated it to melting. It looked like lava. Or glass. Had the occupants done this themselves? That could be a sign of intentional abandonment, destroying what they left behind. Or had they suffered an attack and all lay incinerated within the vitrified rock? Then the question would call for analysis under the rules of war.
He headed down the ramp to a new world. Ms. Prandus had been entirely correct. The surface was smooth, and he slid along it tentatively. The reduced gravity did nothing to mitigate the feeling he was about to fall. Fortunately, a newly settling coating of gritty dust allowed Joseph to tell himself he had enough traction to walk normally. All the others were.
Off to the right, he could see the first mate and Ms. Prandus, two figures breaking up the ring of dust formed by the lander’s thrusters, one tall, one small, both standing with hands on hips and heads tilted back, staring at a structure ahead of them. He headed toward them.
The nearest structure was itself an oddity, its masses cantilevered, and both strangely proportioned and sometimes steeply slanted. Joseph blinked in the red-gold light, unsure whether the size of the structure’s components meant it was farther away than he understood or that its builders were smaller than the average human. Clear of the lander, he stopped and looked around. Maybe Aitch was like the Moon, where the horizon’s proximity confused everything one had grown up internalizing about distance, ratios, and proportions on Earth.
A full circle survey of the plateau showed similar edifices dotting its edges. Maybe the previous occupants had blasted out the center and not cared that there were buildings still left standing.
“Stern,” Aronson’s voice sounded in his helmet. “Quit your gawking and give us all a reminder.”
Joseph cleared his throat. “Sure. Here’s the thing. We’re looking to figure if the place has been abandoned in the legal sense. I know it’s alien. I know we don’t know what we’re looking at. Don’t think about that. We do know what we’re like. We build things and leave them. The Oddity’s builders might be like us. Maybe not. But it’s legitimate to use ourselves, our perceptions, and our interpretations as a baseline for understanding this place. We know we’ll likely get lots of things wrong, but we have to try by our own lights to tell what happened here.”
“Yes, yes,” Aronson said. “We’re aware of that. Get to the guidance, Joseph.”
Joseph felt a moment’s brief sympathy for the captain. “I don’t want anyone discounting their own observations just because they might be wrong, Commander. Anyway. Look to see if any equipment is still here. Or something that looks like equipment. Look for spots where something might once have been but is gone now—different colors on the floors, empty power outlets, bare cupboards. If the rooms are full, that will matter to the legal analysis. Do we see signs of violence? Signs indicating a planned return? Ideally, the builders would have left a note, but we all know it won’t be in any human languages, so translations would have to wait for the linguists. Ms. Prandus will be collecting samples for dating.” Dates would be interesting, but, as he’d noted earlier regarding the times it took to cross interstellar distances, not necessarily relevant.
“That’s it?” Aronson asked.
“That’s it,” Joseph replied.
“Lieutenant Mooring.” Aronson turned to the Patrol officer nearest him. “Set up your people as you wish, but I would appreciate at least one of you joining us inside.”
“Wouldn’t have it any other way, sir,” Mooring replied. Her people began silently rearranging themselves.
They headed toward the closest structure.
They reached a large oblong hole where a door might have been in the building. The Patrol lieutenant went in first before allowing the others to follow her. “No sign of an airlock,” she said. “It looks like someone cut around it and took out the door and the frame completely.”
Her helmet light showed over rust-colored dust and rubble, and dull shards of door. It was good they’d brought their own lights, for, unlike in modern life in modern buildings, nothing came on as they entered.
“Don’t touch anything,” the lieutenant growled.
The rooms were extended oblongs, with doors and doorframes missing just like in the front. They canvassed the structure as a group, Aronson turning down Alexa Prandus’s pleas to be allowed to go look where she liked, even stopping her once when she began to wander off on her own. The first mate was kind about it, no doubt appreciating that her proclivities were how they knew about the Oddity in the first place. Nonetheless, they traversed the oblongs and steep inclines together. The ceilings of the rooms—if they were rooms—proved not as low as they’d appeared from the outside, and Aronson, the tallest of the team, had a couple decimeters’ clearance for his head. The humans wandered from empty oblong to empty oblong.
Joseph felt his excitement mounting. It looked abandoned to him. There was nothing in the structure, but his imagination—and a youth misspent reading science fiction—made him realize that if he voiced the hope aloud three people at once would point out that, for all they knew, they were inside a giant computer, toilet, or tea cup, none of which would be cluttered with furniture, doormats, or the detritus of life. There was dust aplenty, however.
Looking back over his shoulder, Joseph saw the line of boot prints they’d made, some clean, some blended into each other. “Do you think,” Joseph asked the first mate, “that someone could estimate how long this has been empty based on the dust?”
Aronson raised a hand palm up. “I’d think so, but don’t know.”
“Look at this room,” Joseph said. “There’s dust everywhere.” It not only stood thick on the floor but coated the walls as well.
Alexa stood at the other side of the oblong, her back to them. She studied a wall, her head moving in a regular scanning pattern. Intrigued, Joseph watched her.
She held out a hand. She was clearly going to touch something, but Mooring’s endless scanning was about to disclose Alexa’s defiance of her orders. “Lieutenant,” Joseph said, and Mooring turned to him as Alexa wiped a hand over the wall.
“Yes, Mr. Stern?” Mooring asked.
Alexa hunched down and increased the area of her swiping.
Joseph cleared his throat. “I was wondering if splitting into two groups might be allowed? Now that we’ve seen so much of it.”
“We haven’t seen all of it,” Mooring growled.
“Understood.” Joseph’s work was done.
Alexa let out a high-pitched squeal. “Look! I think it’s a power outlet!”
Mooring spun. “I said not to touch anything.”
“Lieutenant,” Joseph said soothingly, “our boots have touched plenty.”
“It’s the floor,” she said, deadpan.
“For us, it’s the floor—maybe not for the aliens.” Joseph kept his voice deadpan, too.
They all crowded around Alexa hunkering low by the wall. She pointed at a hole maybe a dozen centimeters above the floor. “See? It’s a very even hole. And it goes back into the wall.” Her finger moved closer.
“Don’t put your finger in it, child!” Mooring’s voice rose, no longer deadpan.
Alexa snatched her hand away. “I would never,” she said, and they could all hear the grin.
Joseph no longer controlled his excitement. “Even if it’s not for wiring,” he said slowly, calmly, as if he weren’t thinking about Eden, “it was for something.”
“And whatever that something was,” Aronson continued the thought, “it’s not there now. Someone may have taken it out. Does that mean it’s legally abandoned?”
Again, Joseph was a model of measured calm. No Patrol officer was going to say he’d prejudged the question. “It’s certainly a factor to consider. But we’ll have to look at the totality of everything we see.”
Alexa wiped the ground with a gloved hand. “And look here, there’s a line.”
“Like there was something there for a long time,” Aronson said. “Does that matter, Counselor?”
“It does,” Joseph said, keeping the glee from his voice. “It likely means they removed whatever it was before they left.”
If the aliens had left Aitch, perhaps they’d left Eden, too—abandoned it, to be precise, and the admiral’s concerns over past owners returning could be overturned. He had no illusions that the admiral herself would change her mind. That would have to wait for a change in command, but the groundwork would be laid. It had been a long journey to get to Ross 248. He was a patient man.
The other structures proved similar to the first. They speculated that large ones might have been hangars, but they were empty, so it was all so much guessing. The found no metal, no technology, only vitrified stone. Aronson picked up a sample from an impact crater, musing that he wanted its properties as a thermal conductor checked. It would be interesting to know how the aliens had turned so much to glass. Joseph prayed that no one would ask him about the intellectual property issues associated with alien technology. He certainly wasn’t going to bring it up.
The Patrol set up monitoring equipment, and they headed back to the ship.
* * *
Joseph started work on his analysis for the captain the morning after the trip to Aitch. He drafted at a fever pitch, the words flowing easily, the legal tests for the law of finds and abandonment handily supported by all the team had found: the empty hole, the lines showing where something had once sat, the glassine state of the whole plateau. Oh, the reasonable inferences he could draw.
His comm lit with a Patrol name he recognized. He sent the image 2D to his stationary flat screen. Some of the youngsters couldn’t be bothered with visuals, but Joseph liked to see who he was talking to. His caller, Harley Lund, was the Patrol attorney he’d called when the Copernicus arrived in the system.
“Harley,” he said with genuine warmth in his voice and real trepidation in his soul. He liked the man well enough, but he doubted this was a social call. Lieutenant Mooring would have had time to brief her superiors, and they would have had time to speak to Admiral Gordon. Gordon would, of course, have had time to speak to her lawyers. From a bureaucratic perspective, the call’s speed was actually impressive.
“Joseph,” the Patrol attorney said. “How’ve you been?”
They exchanged pleasantries, but when Harley’s heavy black brows drew down, and his lips pursed, Joseph braced.
“I hear you got to visit Aitch,” Harley said. “I’m jealous.”
“Thank you. I was thrilled.”
“We need to talk about what you found. What you might be recommending to the captain.”
“Sure.” Joseph slapped an expression of benign interest on his face. BeKinne wasn’t just the captain of the Copernicus. She was the head of the whole mission.
“I wanted to give you a heads-up on how we’re thinking about this,” Harley continued, as if the Patrol was in charge. “Under the laws of salvage, the original owner retains title. The builders should still own it.”
Joseph’s stomach clenched. “I’m not applying salvage rules. I’m using an abandonment analysis and the law of finds.”
“Yes,” Harley drawled. “I heard. We’d rather you didn’t. We looked far back into Earth’s history to find what we think is most on point. Ships lost at sea are it.”
Joseph bit his tongue. Harley’s admission that his analysis had been result-driven was disarming but not helpful. This was about Eden for the Patrol just as much as it was—however privately—for him. The Patrol didn’t want a finding that the aliens had abandoned a planet, because that would lead to the next logical inference: namely, that they’d abandoned the whole star system. And that would undercut the admiral’s rationale—her real rationale—for keeping humans from settling Eden. Joseph wished he hadn’t unloaded his views regarding the admiral’s moratorium on settlement on Harley back when the Copernicus had first arrived.
“This is not ancient times,” Joseph said carefully. The Patrol wasn’t in charge, but he knew full well that Captain BeKinne would listen to the Patrol if it insisted. “Lost ships are always recovered now.” Transmitters, tracking and retrieval technology, and meticulous and eternal record storage had long obviated the need for complicated cases about races to the bottom of the sea.
Harley’s cheekbones grew rosy with his smirk. “But the legal principles are parallel. Earth’s past is full of analogous cases. People squabbled over treasure ships a lot, and the courts have said numerous times that when something is lost at sea, title remains in the owner. The mere passage of time and nonuse are not sufficient, in and of themselves, to constitute an abandonment.”
The pedantic quoting of case law was too much for Joseph. “Your people said the Oddity was abandoned after the robotic reconnaissance—before we even went.”
Harley looked disappointed. “Joseph. You and I both know that wasn’t a lawyer talking. The person who said ‘abandoned’ meant only that the place is empty, no one’s there and hasn’t been for a while. He’s not a lawyer, just someone saying it looked safe to visit.”
They stared at each other. “Go check out the case law,” Harley said. “Start with the US case of the Columbus America. You’ll see what I mean.”
“I will,” Joseph rasped, appalled at the sudden roughness in his voice.
Harley smiled. “You’re a good man. I knew you’d help us out.”
Joseph was still staring at the blank screen when it pinged again. For once, Yoel Aronson’s countenance lacked its usual good cheer. “We heard from the Patrol,” he said sourly.
“Me, too,” Joseph said. He had a lot he wanted to say. “Let me come see you.”
“I was going to find you.”
“I figured, but I like to walk, too, sometimes.”
Joseph found Aronson in the hall outside the bridge, pacing. “The admiral had her deputy call me,” Aronson said. “She’s going to ask for a meeting with the captain. They want whoever built the Oddity assumed to be around.” The first mate started them walking down the hall.
“To still have title,” Joseph clarified.
Aronson stomped down the hall. “They said it was legal. I can’t figure why it matters to them.”
“They don’t want the precedent.”
Aronson’s head snapped around. “Did the Patrol lawyer say that?”
“Not in so many words.”
“But precedent for what?” Aronson demanded.
“For Eden, I think. Maybe I’m wrong, but I will confess—as someone who thinks we should pick out an island on Eden and work on settling it—that finding Aitch abandoned would suggest that Eden’s been abandoned, too.”
Aronson perked up. “That would be great.”
“I think so,” Joseph said. “You think so. The Patrol doesn’t. The admiral’s human-safety rationale doesn’t even make sense to me.”
Aronson shot him a look. “The scientists don’t agree.”
“No one got sick,” Joseph pointed out, “until they ate the forbidden fruit. The answer is simple. Don’t eat it. We should grow our own fruit. From Earth. And avoid the plants that eat us.”
Aronson chuckled and hugged the wall as a group of half a dozen toddlers following a woman passed them by. “She’s worried about the owners coming back,” the first mate said.
“Exactly,” Joseph said triumphantly. “And that’s why she says we can’t settle there. But if we say the aliens have abandoned the system, then we could settle on Eden. The admiral’s highly speculative concern—not that I have anything against unfounded worries—would continue to keep her awake at night, and settlement would make it worse. She doesn’t want that. She wants to tell any aliens who showed up that we left their stuff alone and they shouldn’t kill us.”
“But what do you really think, Counselor?” Aronson said. “Remind me to ask you your inner thoughts more often. You’ve been holding out.”
“I’ve been trying to be objective. Wanting the same thing as one of my clients…well…you…is all to the good.”
“I’m so glad,” Aronson murmured. “But, see here. It seems to me we’ve been doing a lot of assuming. For instance, it could be different aliens. One set built things on Aitch. Another set tinkered with genetic engineering on Eden.”
“Just because Paul abandoned his car doesn’t mean you abandoned your house?” Joseph asked.
“Yes!” Aronson was pleased.
“It’s a reasonable inference. So is the opposite, and given the calls we both got, I think we can tell the admiral has inferred the opposite: the aliens are the same.” Joseph didn’t want to make the next point out loud, but now that he’d spilled his guts on his hopes and dreams for Eden, he felt that he had to fully disclose his own pressures. “Also, the different-aliens logic doesn’t help Eden.”
Aronson frowned at the floor. He’d stopped stomping but still walked with a measured tread. He looked up, his brow clearing. “You want the precedent.”
“I do,” Joseph admitted. “Even if it’s far in the future, I want it to be possible.”
“What else?”
Joseph sighed. “I could distinguish the Oddity from Eden pretty easily.” A relevant difference between the two planets would let Copernicus extract metals from Aitch and the admiral continue her settlement moratorium for Eden.
“How?” Aronson asked.
“We only found them on one mountain. At most those people owned the whole mountain. At the least, they owned just the mountaintop. No one owns all of planet Earth. I could point out it doesn’t matter whether the aliens abandoned their mountain or not, because that’s the only place we have evidence of habitation or ownership.”
“But then you don’t have the precedent you want—that a whole planet got abandoned.” Aronson was never slow on the uptake. “Because you’ve got this material difference.”
“I am pleased with your mastery of legal lingo, grasshopper,” Joseph said automatically, but he couldn’t see a way around that one.
The first mate beamed. “I get lots of things. But, Joseph, these arguments will all work. We’ll get to extract the metals, do anything we want on Aitch. No one’s going to budge the admiral on Eden. Not anytime soon. You can hit her with a two-by-four of precedent and she won’t care.”
Joseph sighed. The first mate wasn’t wrong. “I don’t want to use those arguments.”
“Sorry, buddy,” Aronson said. “You may have to.”
They’d reached the lounge with its view of the moon and its planet beyond. “Have I told you my secret plan for Aitch?” Aronson asked. “The Prandus girl is going to name it. She was the first to set foot on it, so it’s her privilege.”
Joseph wasn’t listening.
* * *
The meeting about whether the Oddity was abandoned or not took place three days later. Captain BeKinne, as the titular head of the human mission to Ross 248’s star system, would decide the question. That didn’t mean, however, that she would ignore the Patrol’s advice or preferences.
Joseph prickled with anxiety. Aronson’s confidence in the outcome was misplaced, he was sure. The first mate had approved Joseph’s plan to argue against applying the rules of salvage, serene in his certainty that their ability to distinguish between the Oddity and Eden would carry the day as a fallback. Joseph wasn’t even confident of that much. Any military mind that would deprive humanity of the most obvious settlement choice in the system was not a reasonable mind. Captain BeKinne, in her endless quest to get everything exactly right, would still have to weigh Admiral Gordon’s concerns against whatever the law allowed even if she agreed with her attorney wholeheartedly.
Joseph’s research had, unfortunately, shown him that there was indeed a line of cases where the courts had been reluctant to find that an owner had abandoned a ship based merely on the passage of time. Under the rules of salvage, this resulted in the owner having to share a hefty percentage of the value of the find with the person who found the ship and salvaged its contents. It also meant the salvor had to share a hefty percentage with the owner. No questions of payment arose at Ross 248h, of course, but the principle of continuing ownership was what the Patrol wanted established here.
If only BeKinne hadn’t asked for a legal analysis.
But she had, and here they all were in the captain’s conference room on Copernicus’ Deck 6, their holographic projections as real as if they’d attended in person. Admiral Gordon was a normal human, but angular and attenuated in both face and form. Thick frosty brows framed long eyes, a narrow nose, and a bloodless mouth. She sat at one end of the conference table, a stark contrast to Captain BeKinne’s dark warmth at the other end. The leaders each had their seconds-in-command to their right and their attorneys to their left, and the middle of the table was populated by two policy wonks from each ship. 5-of-Chandra and the Cerite Leader, C’Helios, attended virtually as observers. The computer inserted them mid-table and across from each other.
After everyone agreed it was good to see each other and that the matter they were addressing was important, the captain nodded to Harley Lund and Joseph Stern. “I have both of your memoranda, gentlemen. Mr. Stern’s memo starts by saying that the decision regarding whether to find abandonment is a factual one and rests with me. Mr. Lund’s memo did not address this point. As mission commander, I am inclined to agree with Mr. Stern, but must ask whether you have any objections to that proposition, Admiral.”
Gordon turned her cold face to her attorney. “Mr. Lund?”
“No, Captain,” Harley said. “We have no objections to you being the decision maker. Of course not. We do hope to persuade you on an important legal point, however—namely, that under current circumstances we should not reach the question of abandonment at all.”
Harley cast Joseph a bland look, but Joseph knew what it meant. Of course, BeKinne was the decision maker. There was no reason for Joseph to have belabored the obvious in a memo, no reason other than to remind BeKinne of her responsibility and reduce the chance she’d relinquish her responsibility to Gordon.
BeKinne looked down the table at one of her policy advisors. “I am advised that sound policy reasons exist to find abandonment, but please be aware that I am more concerned with getting this legal question right. Mr. Lund. Please begin.”
Harley leaned forward, hands clasped tightly and elbows digging into the table. The Patrol’s end of the table was a projection, so it didn’t look like he was sinking through the surface. “Captain. Admiral. The Patrol is applying the rules of salvage. We think they are appropriate in the interstellar context we currently face. What this means, of course, is that under those rules we do not presume abandonment. For one thing, we all know how long it takes for an interstellar journey. We have no reason to believe that other races move between stars more swiftly than we do.”
Joseph squirmed inside. This was precisely the argument he’d made to the captain so flippantly the week before. If BeKinne was looking at him, he didn’t check.
“Thus, where courts in the past have determined that the passage of over a century does not allow a presumption that an owner has abandoned a ship, we must presume even longer periods of time here. Millennia might be more appropriate. Additionally, we have to face the fact that these possible owners are not getting a chance to be heard before you today. As a matter of equity—of policy—we shouldn’t make unilateral decisions without all stakeholders getting a chance to speak.”
Joseph controlled the desire to interrupt. He knew better. He looked young, but he was an older man who knew to bide his time. Harley continued talking, summarizing all that he had said in his memo, BeKinne interrupting occasionally for clarification. He reviewed numerous cases from Earth’s past where courts had found that the original owners had not abandoned possession of their lost ships, even though they did little or nothing to reach them, and BeKinne indulged her curiosity too far, Joseph felt. He took notes. There were many points to which he would need to respond, although there was also an annoying amount of repetition. Maybe Harley intended to put Joseph and the rest of his audience to sleep.
Whenever Joseph checked on BeKinne, she was checking on the admiral.
When Harley at last wound down, Joseph saw that only an hour had passed. It was an annoying sign of the state of his nerves. Just prior to the meeting, the first mate had reminded Joseph that if his attempt to use the law of finds failed, he expected Joseph to do his duty and use the other arguments. Joseph knew that Aronson would if he didn’t persuade the captain that salvage principles didn’t apply.
The captain called for a ten-minute break, and when they all returned she looked to Joseph. “Mr. Stern, I would appreciate your views as well.”
Joseph moved smoothly through all his gratitudes for the opportunity to speak with everyone in the room, offer whatever assistance he could, and address the interesting argument that the Patrol had devised.
That done, he thought of Eden and allowed himself a deep breath. “I will not repeat everything from the Copernicus memo, but there are several issues I wish to highlight. It is Copernicus Legal’s position that the mission should apply the law of finds rather than the law of salvage to the Oddity. But first let me observe that even if the Ross 248 mission were to apply the rules of salvage, we should still find that its owners abandoned the Oddity, and that is because a presumption may be rebutted. The Patrol’s counsel speaks of a presumption of ownership staying with the original owners as if it is a final decision. It is not. The very court decisions on which the Patrol relies allow that one may show with clear and convincing evidence that an owner abandoned his sunken treasure ship.”
“It’s impossible,” Harley said, showing he didn’t share Joseph’s qualms about interrupting. “Any such finding would be unilateral. It wouldn’t account for interstellar distances and times. It took us over a hundred and ten years to get here. Who knows how long it will take these aliens to return?”
Nettled, Joseph opened his mouth, but the captain spoke first. “Thank you, Mr. Lund. I believe you have already made those points.”
“It is those concerns,” Joseph said, glad of the opportunity Harley had just provided, “that require us to look more closely at whether to apply salvage rules in the first place. The Patrol’s attorney”—not the admiral, never the admiral; she was way too alarming and it was always prudent to blame the lawyer—“has fallen prey, like many before him, to a metaphor. It is an inapt metaphor. The planets in outer space are not like the ocean. They are like land. The law of finds applies on land.”
“That was in your memo,” Harley muttered, but the comm system faithfully picked it up and ensured everyone heard.
Joseph’s lips thinned. The man needed to stop interrupting. “Allow me to emphasize what was in my memo,” he said. “Thinking of outer space as an ocean certainly has cultural moorings.” He used the word deliberately. “But a metaphor does not turn into an analogy on that basis alone. It is perhaps hard to see from the inside, but much of ship culture comes from a branch of service that traversed the waters. Thus, spacecraft are called ships. The Patrol adopted naval hierarchies and terminology, speaking of captains and admirals, decks instead of floors, all-hands instead of meetings, and on and on, including the navy’s godawful early hours.”
Aronson was staring at him, bemused.
Joseph wondered if he sounded irate. He resolved not to, and spoke serenely once more. “Let us be clear. Presumptions in favor of the original owner retaining title in sunken treasure ships arose for one simple reason. For centuries, it was extremely difficult, if not impossible, to reach ships as they lay on the ocean floor. Thus, it was appropriate for courts to offer the original owners some protection in the form of a rebuttable presumption. But that is not the case here.
“Consider a case where a riverboat went down. The original owners took what they could from it, including furs, government-owned specie, machinery, the ship’s boilers, and half of six hundred pigs of lead. Two years later an island began forming around the wreck, on which trees grew eventually to a great height. There the court found relevant that the owners did not attempt to remove the rest of the lead in the two years they had before the island formed. The court found the owners had abandoned the lead and it belonged to those who found it.”
Harley grunted, but if he said something, this time it was inaudible.
“Perhaps the void of outer space is like the oceans. Perhaps. However, today we are talking about a planet. The right approach is to treat planets as land, not as water. We can walk on them. Many are as stable as Earth’s terra firma. Aitch is. Most of them have large pieces of ground—continents’ worth—that are not covered in water, the water that made it so hard for Earth’s ancients to recover sunken treasure ships. The land on Aitch is more like the land on Earth than it is like Earth’s oceans. That’s because it is land. Therefore, the law of finds applies so we can do an abandonment analysis.”
The captain was nodding at him. He felt the slightest easing of his tension. Sure, she would go off and deliberate, but nodding was a good sign.
“What about the Outer Space Treaty?” Harley snapped.
“Which one?” Joseph inquired.
“The Outer Space Treaty of 1967. It defines outer space—where the maritime analogy certainly applies, as you yourself noted with our admirals, decks and all-hands—to include all celestial bodies, meaning planets.”
Aronson no longer looked bemused. He looked intent. He wanted the minerals on Aitch, and he didn’t want Joseph screwing up because some ancient treaty written by people who couldn’t imagine being off-planet said planets were outer space and this made people think that land was like an ocean. Aronson opened his mouth. The first mate clearly planned to save the day.
“All my points still stand,” Joseph said quickly. “First, that treaty was written at the dawn of the Space Age by a primitive people, even before anyone had set foot on the Moon. Either they, too, suffered from the inability to distinguish between planetfall and vacuum, or their reach was so limited it didn’t matter that they thought of everything off-planet under a single rubric. Second, the treaty itself is no longer in effect, and, as Mr. Lund well knows, that matters.”
Harley sniffed. It was an indignant sniff. “I raised the point only to show that our so-called metaphor has quite a long history.”
Joseph would have sniffed, too, but it wasn’t dignified. Harley had been caught out trying to apply dead law and everyone knew it.
The captain raised a finger. “I do not think,” she said, “that your point is…well, ah…grounded, Mr. Lund.”
The room froze, and Joseph watched in shock as BeKinne dimpled at her own pun.
“Relying on both memos and today’s meeting, I will apply the law of finds based on advice of counsel. I find it hard to equate a mountaintop with an ocean.”
Joseph’s eyes went wide, but he kept his face calm.
The captain was not done. “My scientists tell me the mountaintop scarring happened over ten thousand years ago, maybe twenty. Like the riverboat scenario Mr. Stern described, the owners took their machinery with them. They took not only their doors but their doorways. They left only empty outlets and shadows on the ground. I will not ask the Patrol to disturb its findings regarding other planets.”
Joseph let out the breath he hadn’t known he was holding. He stole a look at Aronson, and the first mate dropped him a shallow wink. Joseph hadn’t figured the captain would make up her mind on the spot. He’d worried she would take her time and give the admiral a chance to speak to her privately. That clearly wasn’t going to happen.
The admiral knew it, too, and her frosty brows were lowered. “We have security considerations,” she said ominously.
“Certainly,” said BeKinne, “and I will not ask you to revisit them. I will ask you to put the Oddity under Patrol protection.”
Gordon’s face grew tight. They all knew that the admiral’s security considerations were about Eden more than the Oddity.
Joseph didn’t care that BeKinne wasn’t going to ask Gordon to change her mind on Eden. Getting the law right was a long game. Someone other than Admiral Gordon could revisit the issue, and they could all agree later that any aliens had abandoned the whole system.
“Good enough,” Gordon said.
Harley had been scowling at the table while the clients talked, and Joseph watched as the other attorney shook off his disappointment. Like all lawyers, he had to be used to things not always going his way, and if Gordon was satisfied, he could be, too. Now Harley addressed the captain with an earnest sincerity that showed he had no hard feelings. “Thank you for settling that, Captain. By the way, what’s the plan for naming Aitch?”
Had it been anyone else, Joseph would have said she’d rolled her eyes. The captain turned to her first mate. “Would you care to explain what you’ve done?”
Joseph went rigid. He knew. Aronson had told him the new name. There was no need to get the admiral’s back up further. She’d find out soon enough, and she didn’t need to hear it in public. He tried telepathy on Aronson, willing him to wait, and not to let on that Aitch was now—even in Aronson’s avuncular jest—somebody’s world. It felt too much like rubbing it in.
Telepathy didn’t actually work, and once again it failed Joseph.
Aronson gave them all a wide smile. “As the first on the ground, Alexa Prandus has the privilege of naming the planet, of course.” It was the new tradition, as good as any. “She won’t do it. She’s suddenly all shy.”
BeKinne snorted. “Who was second?”
“Me,” Aronson said, with an even bigger grin. “So…now that we’ve established Aitch belongs to no one, we can call it Alexa’s World.”
Gordon stiffened as if slapped. “That doesn’t mean anything,” she snapped.
“No,” Joseph said quickly. “It means nothing at all.”
The year 2643 / 60 AA
Poseidon’s Sea
Eden is off-limits for settlement. Normal humans reside primarily on the starship Copernicus and in the section of Toe Hold known as the Primate Quarter. Neither is desirable as a long-term home for normal humans. One possibility considered by the Ross 248 Project leadership is terraforming the third planet, informally known as Poseidon’s World. A small group of explorers and scientists are sent to sail Poseidon’s world-spanning red sea to determine if it can be modified for Earth life—but not everyone has the same objective.