Mountain rain hissed along the meadow's edge, its aurora-like waves touching down in stinging, staccato, icy curtains over the blue-green grass, slapping, slashing my face. The normal forest smell of lonely herbs and rot was richer here as I fought the foetid, thickening mud which refused to let go of my feet.  When I looked down, I saw why. Half-fleshed fingers had hold of my boot, reaching out of the mire. If I hadn't been so cold and miserable, I might have screamed. In another time I would certainly have screamed myself faint. If my days hadn't been so grinding, if I didn't know exactly what I’d found, I might have succumbed to those self-indulgences. Instead, I moved ten metres into the absurd shelter of the trees, hung my pack on a branch and pulled out my spade. It inflated as I carried it back and with the first stab into the mud, it started to stiffen. At least in the rain I didn't have to worry about forcing it to hydrate. I flipped out my pager. There were protocols to follow, rules, precedence and order. Of all things, this had the highest priority, an unpleasant chore that was almost an exciting break from the routine. I pressed one button and waited for the blinking green light to become permanent.
    The wind growled around me, pawing and shoving, rapping my waterproofs against me. The impenetrable ship-tech leaked from a dozen poorly repaired thorn scratches. That was the commonest gripe amongst the disembarkees, next to their leaking boots. The cold had started to suck away my strength, something that I’d never anticipated. Back on-ship the temperature had cooled by one point seven degrees since I was born. Here there was no referendum about taking another tenth of a degree off the ambient temperature. Here it had fallen ten degrees in three weeks. I’d never known such cold, such damp, mist-bound, wind-driven cold.  Another few days would bring snow and new problems to confound us. The green light glowed steadily so I flipped the pager away and started to dig.

Tech Bulletin 3 - Communications.

As you are aware, we have some communications issues. We only have two operating satellites. Others will be in position over the next two years (local). We have no replacement for the Gagarin comms hub at this time. There will be no skyphone service for at least one year (local). There are fourteen Qcom phones to be used in emergencies only. These have been issued to the Senior Staff. A software update has been prepared to allow peer-pagers to be used as low speed comms devices.

    Our fabricator was busy building another fabricator, so there would be no new equipment. The orbiters were grounded. Their fuel would provide barely enough heat and power for Virstin's first winter. We could live without moving satellites around, so no one was going up-well any time soon. Most of our critical equipment was spread over millions of hectares of Ramirez, Doeble's tiny satellite.  Bursting onto my tightly closed eyelids I saw people moving briskly, controlled, disciplined through the ship. I heard the shrieking, tearing hull. I felt the deck shear as section after section decompressed. I smelt the iron tang of distant fires. I opened my eyes and pushed that time away.  Sometimes it’s soothing to dig.
    By the time the others arrived, I’d exposed the face: a woman. A man and a woman who I barely knew started to dig without a word. There should have been a fourth, but no one else came.
    It took two hours to lift out the body, identify her, package her salvage and effects. Then we neatened the hole and deepened it to two metres. By the end, I was up to my knees in water, in the hole. It had to be right. We laid her back in and shovelled earth back to beat the water. The man cut sod to build up the grave. Finally, we took the woman's own aerial pole and pushed it into the marl.
    "It almost buried itself." It was the first thing the man had said. I nodded along with the other woman. I was too cold and wet to argue. Something had dug a hole, dragged her into it and piled earth over the body, something with teeth strong enough to score her leg-bones. A cache for the winter.
    "Yours." The other woman handed me the S&E bag.
    "Sure." More protocol. Three kilometres, there and back to Virstin and then another two to the worksite and still a full day's quota of work to do on top. Protocol. Obligation.

*

Clarification of 26.7

To preserve genetic diversity, parents shall not disembark with their children. There will be no exceptions. By Order, D.L. Disembarkation -5.

    "The effects of one of the Fallen. Cerys Herron. Female." I saw a ripple of recognition in the face of the clerk and felt a pang against my own coldness. "There was no sign of the capsule or other wreckage." The position appeared on the clerks map, somewhat accurately and he nodded.
    "The other four have been recovered from that capsule including her husband and an infant. It fell one hundred metres away. Did you discover her in your work area?"
    "No. I was en-route."
    She must have crawled. I consciously assimilated what I’d seen for the first time. Slowly. The state of her legs as they must have been and for a second I felt her passion for the mission and the awful cruelty of what had happened.
    "We can close the capsule now.”
    I was already leaving.
Lag phase, that’s what Lyall called this time. It means the time after inoculation, before the colony forms, when the population falls as a result of stress. Two thirds died during the disembarkation and landing and we kept dying afterwards. The term describes bacterial colonies and when I looked at the trees, the mountains and the naked stars I saw how very appropriate it was. After six months I still felt queasy, especially walking under a roof of cloud above the tottering trees. Deoble was so huge. So empty. The earthborn loved it. They were free again. Not me.
    It was a long walk back to hoe a mud-bath. I didn't know what to feel when I looked at the field.  Was I supposed to feel disappointment ? I felt nothing. No that wasn't true. I felt an abstract concern at my own growing detachment. Most of all I felt tired. Ice-bone tired and thick headed. All of the near-abandoned test beds were washed out. Most of the pathetic seedlings were washed away. There had almost been a riot when Lyall rescinded the indigenous-foodstuffs-only order. Most of the colony would rather have starved than risk Earth plants colonising the planet. Their concern was unfounded. The nutrient cycles and balances were too subtly wrong. Even the soil structure was a problem. Alien, almost floury, forming pockets of a natural gel which kept the indigenous plants watered, but stifled the terrestrials. A few stunted cabbages were clinging on and some turnips with battered, sorry leaves. Our attempts at cropping local foods were equally fraught. We didn't understand the lifecycles well enough to establish them. We would be foraging and testing for years. At the edge of the woodland vines had grown during the summer and were groaning with berries of all kinds, taunting me. Each was being analysed and that would take weeks. Meanwhile, the team had been harvesting them, segregating the crop and waiting for the results. Bit by bit, each plant would be named and categorised. A red flag for those which were plain poisonous, amber for those which were edible but would eventually ruin our protein metabolisms and blue for food that was edible with minimal danger. The techs were working on the amino acid problem, but their hands were full working out how to supplement the colonists’ diets to prevent malnutrition, rather than ways of fighting the analogues. I already felt hypoglycaemic most of the time, but put that down to fatigue and psychology. Arginine supplements had been the standing joke in the first weeks of the colony: don't take them and let your hair fall out, or take them and let your libido go out of control.  It wasn't so funny now.

Standing Order 11

Mechanised transport will not be used except in life-threatening emergencies until further notice. This will preserve fuel & helium stocks and enhance the general fitness of colony members. By Order. DL. Disembarkation +3.

    Our gathering was limited by the conditions and what we could haul back. Today it was too wet to pick fruit. Half the team had gone to cut wood. I found a rain sodden note instructing me to empty the fish traps. As I walked to the lake a padder ghosted across my path with a pelt of mist-like grey in stripes almost too pale to see, followed by others, eight in all. Each one locked my gaze and I shivered, fingering the one-shot sonic repeller in my pocket.
    The rain seemed to have stirred up every slime-toothed water creature in the watershed and they were fighting it out inside the traps. I hauled the first up on its pulley. Water streamed out of the improvised wooden slats leaving a muddy, thrashing mess. I started to haul out the bigger fish reciting the mantra of their names. 'Longfin Blue' - red which I flipped end over end toward the river without a glance. 'Lipspike': disgusting but tagged blue. I slapped it with the club and dropped it into the blue container. Two more reds. Something utterly disgusting, like a ball of slime. I stared at it for a second, blinked a snapshot with my headcam and tossed it away. There was a rich seam of untrout, two suckerfins and a huge plumpike which would have bitten me if it hadn't had its jaws around a gravel eel. In three hours my hands were ice-white and slime had risen half way up my arms but I’d filled both blue and amber bins, which was satisfactory. I turned to the Forest Survey's traps.
    The biggest predator discovered on Deoble so far was the bandback, a big cat which could kill a two tonne smooka. The biggest of all, something we’d called the apex, we’d never seen and had attained a mythical status. The grinnet was the most vicious, the size of a large housecat, with a big upside-down grin that hid a set of inch long needle fangs. This one was rattling angrily in its trap. Most of the others were empty. My hands were still slimy, but I couldn't get the last of it off with just water. I needed a full shower but it wouldn’t be my turn for another two days. My fingers were numb too and I fumbled with the lock. The grinnet snapped at the wires, close to my fingers. I fired a tag into it. Would it just leave, or would it want payback ? It sprang from the trap straight at my face. I flinched but it just brushed me and sped away, leaving my heart thrashing. Enough. Enough for today. I replaced the sugar-water bait - the survey didn't just want to attract predators - and moved to the last trap, guard down. Three krabbits were clustered at one end, whiskers twitching. They blinked huge, sweet eyes at me, slow and dark. For a moment I was kid again in the Menagerie.
    "Well hello."
    One of them started to preen its ears. The other two sniffed more intently. I upended the trap and they slid out onto the grass in a bundle. They had tiny white tails.
    Males.
    I was already backing away but it was too late. The krabbits moved like sparks, two towards the blue bin which they bundled over, the third went for my hand. The mouth was vivid for a second, and then my own blood, flushing out, bright red against the grey flesh. The pain came later, intense and unbearable in my frozen fingers. The others had picked out the choicest fish from the bin and dragged it away with powerful tugs. We’d come to regard the krabbits - the males anyway - as malicious. The opposite of their herbivorous females. The males always preferred the food humans most prized. I flicked on my  camera - this was nocturnal behaviour, rarely observed.
    I turned my attention to my hand. Terrestrial and Deoblean organisms metabolised the same sugars and fats. Proteins were subtly different but in general humans could synthesise their own amino acids from the deoblean analogues and eighty percent of those, and all of the DNA & RNA bases were common. Only two incompatible amino acids - deoleucine and deoarginine proved a problem. The larger systems of immunity and energy cycles had more differences. Deoblean organisms provided few of the vitamins that a human might need. The lack of compatibility in those higher processes meant that indigenous viruses didn't attack humans. Their modes of attack and genetics rendered them incapable of harming humans by infection. Deoblean antigens, on the other hand, were exotic and unfamiliar to the human immune system which was quite happy to mount spectacular reactions to them. Even more serious was the risk of bacterial attack. The human body, evolved to win an eons long war between microbes and higher organisms, has evolved mechanisms to cope with most terrestrial bacterial strategies. But not Doeblean ones.
    Since the landing, fourteen colonists had died of bacterial infestations. The meds refused to call them infections, because that implied some process of disease. In most of these cases neither the victim's body nor the resources of the med-centre had any say in the matter. Another twenty had serious close calls, often resulting in amputation.  I stared at my finger, smeared Scald all over the wound and let the pain hammer at me until my head swam.
    There was an hour left before ‘voluntary’ curfew by the time I reached Virstin. No one complimented me on bringing back the two full barrels of fish. I was just another colonist doing what had to be done. I headed for the medcentre while a boy, barely ten, cooked me the prime cut of the Plumpike. The med tutted at me and cleaned the wound with a symphony of lights: UV burners, laser cleaners, IR warmers and gamma flash. My hand was numb when I picked up my steak but it soon started to sting as the flames of the fading bonfire warmed my skin and the hot fish warmed my insides. The primitiveness of it suddenly struck home. The huge pyre of burning waste wood - we cleared more for land than we needed for building - the mulled partly fermented fruit mush, and the smell of cooking flesh - damned if you ate it and damned if not. It was fifteen minutes to curfew and the clerk was advancing on me.
    "She had a son. He's camped at the survey. Do the honours please."
    "I'm in the office soft-shift."
    "That's been reassigned. It'll take all day to get there."
    "Radio him. They have a comset."
    "Lyall feels the personal touch is better."
I wasn't at all sure that walking all day in the rain to Fuente would put me in the right mood to break the news nicely. Besides, the kid already knew his mother was dead. Just like mine. "I'll need a map."
    "It's on the back of the slip."
    After that, old Bob came and asked if I wanted to get warm. I declined politely.

*

    After a cruel dream about the zero-g bed that I would never see again and just enough sleep to make me realise how much I really needed, Jumilla shook me up. Jumilla had stopped morning pleasantries weeks ago. My ability to sleep through reveille was an unforgivable drain on resources, apparently. I dressed briskly, checking my boots for crunchers, checking the soles for wear and leaks and ran for breakfast. Jumilla arrived and started to eat without a word.
    Half an hour had passed since reveille – call it 5.30am - and the rain had already set in hard. The climate here was supposed to be mild, but that was based on a cursory analysis of likely weather patterns by a blade crew who had only eleven minutes to make the call. They had been pretty accurate too, except for the amino-acid thing and the weather. Abruptly I was back on the ship, on my warm, dry bunk, reading in the warm, dry light, listening to my mother pottering in the main room, smelling spicy, freshly delivered food, listening to the shimmering translocation engines, waiting for news of Blade 4 but knowing that they were waiting to die and hoping that blade 6 wasn't going the same way. Then the klaxon and Lyall's calm, cold voice.
    'Code white.'
    That was just like him. Thirty three years and even then, not a hint of triumph. But I could hear the ship's tone change, engines switching modes. My every nerve was electrified, I’d jumped off the bed and heard - through the walls - two and a half thousand people cheering. Everyone but him. He probably knew. Grace, my sister, certainly didn’t know what was happening. After all the cheering, I remember that my parents looked so scared. I shivered and Jumilla was waving her hand in front of my eyes.
    "I worry about you, girl, I really do."
    I walked through Virstin’s teeming morning, past gaunt, busy colonists, nodding at a few and passing the admin desk where I should have been starting my soft-shift. That would have been followed by hard-shift, out of camp keeping the colony barely alive. The jobs were drawn by lots and no one was excluded. Someone else could have gone to Fuente, but the clerk had probably done a deal for my turn in the office. I passed the gangs working on the new cabins. A couple of the guys whistled and I ignored them. Try as I might to hide my nineteen year old self inside grimy, unshapely gear, they still knew who I was. No. That isn’t right. They recognised the nineteen year old female. Old Bob told me that I was a flame among embers. I took that as code. Eight hundred colonists. Six hundred original embarkees, average age forty eight. Two hundred shipborn, average age fourteen. The numbers are approximate - I don't like to think about it all that much. I answered the whistles with a gesture - forefinger firing into the top of my neck. In shipborn vernacular, it meant that you could zombie yourself with no loss to your peers. Quite rude in a town full of intellectual giants. It was a subversive gesture which the elders detested. Ptomagen was no joke to them. Mental suicide with a lasting burden for everyone else.
    The medcentre was just four precious prefabs pushed together in a star, identical to the admin block except that the centre was occupied by a two storey selflander with two operating theatres. There should have been three medical landers but only two made it out and the other had parked itself six thousand metres up in the mountains. I offered my hand to the medtech.

Standing Order 14

No colonist will be required to become pregnant in violation of the principle of personal choice.

By Order. Lyall.

Standing Order 15

Contraceptives will no longer be issued by the medical team. Mandatory standard weekly supplement injections will now include optional multi-ovulation promoters. Anyone who opts-in will receive a 10% protein allowance uplift.

By Order. Lyall.

    The medtech checked me over briskly and applied a new dressing. Someone went off to find another infestation-inhibitor cartridge for me to take with me. While I waited, I walked down the line of beds in the 'natal ward. There were seven people there, receiving the best care in Virstin. The two men were at the end, playing chess in wheelchairs next to their beds. Looking slightly ludicrous with their misshapen bumps. Of the seven, five were quadriplegic from accidents during the fall or just before. The mission plans had assumed that everyone disembarking would be fit. They hadn't accounted for evacuating casualties out of the Gagarin.
    I left quickly.
    It rained hard for three hours. By then, I’d finished with the path that was quickly establishing itself over the ridge at the back of the camp and following an older doat path described on the map along a river. This was the river that came down from Fuente, though you couldn’t walk directly there along it. It joined up with the exit stream from the lake lower down, and then started to pick up glacial meltwater from its bigger tributaries. I was going the other way.
    I remember little except the grind of the journey. I remember climb after climb; the forests of tall, ancient featherfirs; the beginning of the barren limestone pavement; a crude bridge; waterfalls and ropes to help climb where it was steep. I remember the buffeting, alien snow,  so unlike the Gagarin’s perfect, blue, pressurized ice. I remember getting lost, finding the pass and the so called hut, pouring scalding soup onto my hands and looking up into a pair of diabolical eyes.
    The inquisitive unsheep had unsettled me and it was just an idiot ruminant. If something decided to stalk me up here . . . I decided to go faster. The marks on the shelter at the pass pointed the way, but somewhere I went predictably wrong. I retraced my steps for a while. Finally, with night almost falling, I saw the lights of the settlement a couple of hundred metres away in the depths of a cirque, beside a great black circle of water with waterfalls coming off the cliff faces behind. Another thousand metres up the granite black summit of Big Dave, one of the first peaks of the Osaka range, loomed overhead. My route took me past the neatly wrecked and cannibalised shuttle, its nose jammed into the scree. Finally, I passed a fat cairn. There was no campfire here. Everyone, all eleven of them, were inside one of the huts, huddled around a heater. A thick red cable ran to the settlement from a cairn a hundred metres away.
    "Why did you cover your fuser in rocks?"
    "Jesus didn't anyone teach you to knock!"
    "Sorry."
    "Leave her be. Nice walk honey? Rhey isn't it?"
    "I prefer Rheya to honey." The man helped me off with my sack and then sighed. They all groaned.
    "I'll bet there ain't ten kilos of supplies in there. Am I right, Rheya?"
    "What?"
    "You stupid kid. If you get sent up here you bring mail and supplies. Ten kilos. Standing order forty-four."
    Someone put an arm across the man's chest. "Easy."
    I ranted out my frustration, mixing snow, grinnet and unsheep and finally, to my own absolute horror, started to sob. When I stopped, they were all still looking at me.
    "Anyway. That's a day's loss of respite. If we tell." I glared. The man handed me a mug.” We won't tell if you won't."
    I sniffed the mug. It was mulled mush but it had a kick. Spirit.
    "If they find we've been using our fuser as a distillery, we'll loose more than respite."
    "I heard you lot were irresponsible prima-donnas." I drained the mug. "More please."
    The cabin was cramped, too hot and damp. There was food and more mulled mush. To my intense surprise, a fat, lustrous cat jumped onto my lap and curled up. I stroked it, tentatively. My specialisation had been biology and my first and last job on the Gagarin had been as vet's assistant in The Menagerie. I’d administered sedatives in the last hours to the frightened animals. The feel of the fur brought that icy recollection, something else to be suppressed. No animals should have made it down. Illicit distilleries were one thing, illicit fauna really was dangerous. Still. There was only one. The ecosystem might survive the shock.
    After an hour, as the others started to prepare to bunk, I remembered why I was here. They hadn't asked.  No one wanted it to be them. At least, by now, I knew who I’d come to see. He was nineteen, another shipborn I’d grown up with but didn't know now. The disembarkation had changed him as much as everyone else. I remembered a brash, brilliant kid full of practical jokes that had driven the engineering crew to distraction but I was looking at a dark, wiry man with callused hands and an undistracted focus on a pad of technical diagrams. He noticed my attention.
    “She eats krabbits. Male ones. She won't take the females and she won't eat anything else.”
    “Cats are weird.”
    “We think she likes the challenge.”
I put my hand on his arm. “Jorge.” He looked at me and blushed.
    "No, Jorge. It's not that."
    "Oh," he sat up, a movement that ended in a slump, "let’s go outside."
    It was clear now, the air still as polished ice, painted with stars in great waves across the sky. The nebula was rising behind the mountain, illuminating the horizon, even though it was still beneath it.
"I buried your mom yesterday."
    "Right." He switched off his pad.
    "You must have known it would come." I was useless at this stuff. I tried rubbing his back. A couple of the others came out.
    "Tough break man." He stared at his clenched hands as they whitened.
    "Was it quick. Could you see ? I know the capsule hit hard."
    "Yes. I think so." The view was vivid. The legs all wrong, the position. I fought away the image but couldn't. "Something like that."
    "You're."
    "Lying.” I paused. “I think she'd crawled from the capsule. Her legs were, well . . . she got a hundred metres, to a meadow, she'd fired flares, three I think. I think something got to her. Buried her"
    "Shit. Shit shit. I kept thinking she was in a different capsule still working her way in from a way off beam fall. I kept thinking she’d built herself a hut in the forest."
    "I'm sorry."
    "Sure. If you only knew how sorry I was,” there was a silence after that, which he broke with a squirm, “bury her deep?"
    "Regulation two metres."
    "S&E ?"
    I handed over the pouch. There wasn't much. A brooch, ID cards, tags. A couple of message cards. One labelled for him. He threw it into the rocks without reading it.
    "I want to see."
    "Sure. I'll take you if you walk me back."
    "Tomorrow, then."
    "Fine. That walk was so nice I just want to do it again, straight away."
    One of the older men led Jorge away paternally. Two more were using a big optical telescope to find Sirius and from there The Sun, as they still called it, ten thousand parsecs away. I asked them to show me the wreck of the Gagarin on Ramirez, the tiny moon, while I waited for someone to take me to my berth.  Sol would always be there, my home was gone. But our priorities didn't intersect, so I went to bed.

Clarification of section 46.8
   
46.8(b) is hereby suspended , specifically, Landshares may now be inherited from those who died between Disembarkation and Earthseal (dawn following disembarkation day). By Order. Lyall.

    When they woke me, the day was bright and crystal clear, nearly ten.
    "You looked like you needed the sleep." He handed me some jerky and a mug of herb tea. "There are detectable levels of a caffeine-analogue in that stuff."
    "Wow. Could you find some life-analogue in my life do you think."
    "Well, it's a better day for a walk. That will have to do."

    It was a better day, blue as stained glass across the whole horizon. The snow was sparse in the cirque and thick on the mountain above us. Behind that wafer sharp peaks stood in ranks, receeding in awesome waves to the north and south. In the south-west I could see all the way to the sea, but that just made me shudder.
    "How about your parents?" he asked as though some psychic queue had passed between us.
    "Dead, Jorge."
    "Sorry."
    "Found them?”
    “No.”
    “Then there’s hope.”
    “We are pooling our hope for the good of the colony.” A weak joke that sounded acid.
    "Hope won't save the colony though. That will." He jerked his thumb behind.
    "If they let you. If it works."
    "They will. It will."
    "How does it work."
    "We dig deep shafts. Water goes down, spins turbines which we salvaged from the shuttle. At the bottom, geothermal generators add more power. All that power electrolyses the falling water. Oxygen and hydrogen come back up other shafts. We cream some off as a by-product and burn the rest to generate more power. The waste is steam or warm, pure water.  Gravity into power. Easy."
    His explanation lasted two hours.
    "I hear the shafts will never be deep enough"
    "Red herring. It's all about tuning the system."
    "What about waste. The water isn't pure on the way in."
    "Sure. Fuente’s lake is oligotrophic, quite pure but not perfect. Most of the water around here is glacial runoff, full of till. Not good at all. But we will still get small amounts of chlorine, fluorine etc as by products. In time we'll need to sluice out the impurities. We need a long runoff tunnel for that, to make it completely efficient, but for now we'll pump it back out. Or make the hole so deep it comes back as steam."
    "Polluted effluent."
    "No. Remember that what comes out is power and the water we put in. In principle we have to put the impurities back into the water to minimise the impact. Nature abhors deionised water. Speaking of which." He handed me the canteen. It was shocking, icy.
    "The Commonwealth is sceptical."
    "The Commonwealth can go hang. This is our future, Rheya, the shipborn. There will be a time when we are the power here."
    "How far have you got."
    He stared at his steady gaited feet.
    "Twenty metres."  I laughed out loud at  that and almost skipped.

    "Cynic."
    "No. I think it's a good idea. Better than Gibson's home-made fission-pile."
    "Oh that guy’s a freaking menace."
    "Freaking ?"
    "What ?"
    "Six months downwell and you still say 'freaking' ?"
    "This could be a long walk. Hey. There's the lake." We reached the top of the pass, free of unsheep today. Here the granite ended and a thick seam of limestone arrested the mountains’ march to the ocean.  Below us lay Lake Gagarin, ninety kilometres of glacial blue alongside the towering Osaka range, surrounded by forest except for the brown smudge of the colony. I felt his arm on my shoulder and an unexpected, warm surge. 
    An interlude later, we were sitting huddled together beside a rock, watching raptors circling over the forest, glowing, buzzing. Confused. I fixed the last of my fastenings and he played with my hair looking withdrawn.
    "Where is she."
    "Half way between Virstin and the plantation," I pointed, "do you wish you hadn't tossed that card ?"
    "It's here," he waved the memory card at me, "I rescued it. Do you mind? This seems like as good a time as any.” I nodded and walked a little way down the hill and fired up two self heaters. After a few minutes he came to join me.
    "You OK."
    "Soon."
    "Cool." I handed him the soup.
    "Look." He handed me the reader.
    "No that's private."
    "Look at the time."
    "That's the morning after the fall. She must have written it where she lay."
    "Yes. Are you offended by practicality?" He searched my face, imploring. I thought of the man, in the rain, brutally folding Jorge's mother to get her into the grave.
    "No."
    "This is dated after the Earthseal ceremony." I had to think for a moment.
    "Oh. You inherit."
    "Yes. She stayed alive just long enough.”
    'Convenient'. I didn't voice the thought. Some feral instinct, some tempering of the cold and the sheer menace of the forest blinked awake inside me. Surely not.  "Lyall overruled that last week. You inherit their rights anyway."
    "Really."
    "Yes." All that unnecessary effort.
    "You too."
    "Yes. Not that it matters."
    "Of course it matters. What the hell else matters? What’s the point of being here otherwise?"
    "Building a world? Pioneering? Duty? Obligation?"
    "Sweet," he stroked my shoulder, "you're a sweetheart. I'm strictly a dynastic sort of guy myself."
    I decided to assault my doubts.
    "Krabbits only bury prey at night."
    "Really, really, interesting," he laughed but it was weak, “something else must have done it. Or maybe they buried her the next night.”
    “Maybe. Padders would have taken her during the day for sure.”  We didn't speak for a few minutes.
    "Well, nature calls."  He stood.

    Finally with some privacy of my own, I took out my injector kit. It was pre-loaded with the infestation-mitigator that the medics had given me. I took my disgusting colony-issue supplements and put the injector against my upper arm.  Jorge had been gone a couple of minutes and I noticed movement. I turned to look at him, my finger on the trigger. So was his. On the trigger of a roller-rifle. At the same time I  recognised the subconscious alarm. There was a faint black sigil, almost erased by hard scrubbing, on the liminium canister.
    Ptomagen. Zombie, corpsewalker, mindkiller. One shot and you have an IQ of ten and you will do whatever anyone tells you for the rest of your life. A suicide drug for people who though that their bodies might be useful when the pain of their mental life was ended.
    "No, Rheya, things will get better. Don't do it.” Jorge spoke aloud in an abstract voice. Disturbing. Shaking slightly. He’d been recording with his eyecam. Now he switched it off. "On second thoughts, keep going."
    "No." There was cramp in my belly. The calm part of me struggling to arrange these pieces into a new order. A lethal order. The mind is slow to accept those things.
    "It's quick. One shot. Sever those bicameral linkages. Kill your higher self and leave your body behind. You need never have a single thought again. It's that or this, I'm afraid." He raised the roller.
    "Is this a sex thing, Jorge ?"
    "Oh no no," he seemed genuinely offended, "nothing so sordid. I just need you out of the way. Zombie is more plausible than making holes in you, but I have a plan for that too. You don't need to die, just your mind."
    "I'm afraid I don't see the distinction. You sabotaged the pod?"
    "Afraid so. I didn't ask to be born on that ship. To be a slave to people who chose to be there. I saw a chance for advantage." He shrugged.
    "Five deaths. Including a child."
    "Nine and counting. I sabotaged the shuttle too." His smile was like a child's. A child who has broken something and thinks he has a clever lie to justify himself. "So that I could hide stuff like this." He waved the roller again.
    I realised that the injector was still pressed to my arm and then I was running for the boulder field. A rollerbolt hit my shoulder. I spun and saw him, thirty metres away. Then the pain started. The sheer power of the roller had saved me and now he was tuning it down, but I was already running hard.  The next shot left a hole in the ground, its energy dissipating in a sharp, angled jet of steam. Supersonic slugs of plasma hummed past me into the rocks. The next hit me in the neck. The power was much too widely dispersed this time, but it threw me forward and set fire to my hood. I was into the boulders - alive - and after that, the intense heat in my  back forced me to stop and hide but I couldn't stay hidden for long. I checked the first wound. It was a neat tunnel, right through me, three millimetres wide. Just right for discreet target practice against stones, but not for a human target. There you needed a wider beam and lower power, to dissipate explosively inside the body.
    Wait. I forced calm.  Suppressing the fear as I suppressed my memories.
     Most of my stuff was in my pack, I had half a litre of water in my belt. I needed to conserve that and I’d need more. We were into limestone country now, some way above the springline.
    Water.
    I fired the sonic repeller at him, making him drop the gun in shock. I ran for the pavement, ducking in and out of deep furrows. Two rollerbolts slid past, well wide. After a minute or so, I turned. Glancing briskly. He was running after me, rifle in hand, everything else abandoned for speed. He was fast, but I was keeping my lead. He would have to kill me, or worse, turn me into one of the living dead. He was bound to have more ptomagen. I turned down the slope. At the edge of the limestone pavement, where the stream levelled off after its steep fall there was a wide ravine and one crude bridge. I had to cross that quickly or he would take me there.
    I knew that he would know the land better than me. He ignored the bridge and cut me off. By coming down a scramble at the other end of the ridge he reached the steepest section. The river was still some way below. He was waiting on the steepest slope. My exit spread below him. I saw him when he fired. He missed by centimeters. I dived through a thorn bush, lost the waterbottle from my belt and scrabbled on behind a great boulder shaped like a scowling face. I heard him stepping on the other side.
    I was lost. There was only one way down and the ground was covered in knee-high brambles all the way to the trees - passable but slow. He could just wait in the rocks and pick me off. I heard the pop of my water bottle opening and shuddered.
    "Don't mind if I do," he knew better than to ignore the water. His own was in his pack, far behind. He might still have to chase me and dehydration would slow him down, "silly girl."
     I heard him greedily drinking the gorgeous, icy, strangely bitter liquid on the run and then I heard the scream and remorse burst over me like burning oil. It was piercing, dopplering from knowing horror to animal terror, tempered with grit-toothed agony. I stepped, shaking from behind the boulder. Jorge was rocking, staring, sobbing like a child. He looked up at me with big, empty eyes as I walked to him. The tears were an artefact, I knew. Soon he would settle into happy, suggestible bewilderment.
    "Why are you crying?" He shrugged. "Stop then." He did. Instantly. "Good boy." I ruffled his hair and he beamed. "Good. Now stay here and don't move."

*

    I staggered into the circle and slumped in a heap. A few weary heads looked at me for a second without much reaction and then a ripple spread around me. People moved to hold me up, a medic pushed back my fringe and examined the state of my face. Saying nothing
    “Wait wait. There's a cat.” A thought had kept me going on the way.  Something important. Something I had to pass on.
    “She's delirious.”
    “No! At Fuente.”
    “More smuggling . . .”
    “Should be sick.”
    “It must have been fed from ship rations.”
    “No. It eats krabbits. The males. She leaves the females and goes after the males. The guys at Fuente just thought she liked a challenge.”
    “Rest.”
    “We never tested the males. Too much trouble. Test the males. "
    "Rest now."
    I slumped..

*

    One or other wound became infested and three weeks passed in delirious isolation.
Finally, the heavy drape of the door hissed aside. Two men entered. One seemed somehow more vivid than the other. More solid. Purposeful and stone-like, trim and honed. Piercing. The object of my first and last crush.
    "Mr. Lyall?"
    "David, please. May I call you Rheya"
    "Of course."
    "Good. You know O’Brien."
    "Of course. Security. Please tell me you didn't kill the cat."
    "Good God no. We aren't animals, are we Mister Lyall?”
Lyall shook his head.
    “You were right, too, Rheya."
    "What about, David?"
    "The male krabbit accumulates leucine, probably as an evolutionary strategy against predators. Just the job for hungry humans."
    "Score one to me."
    "Two. Rheya. He's dead though." O’Brien took over now.
I paused, shocked, sinking.
    "No."
    "Mmm. We found him by the river. Big fall. Maybe he slipped before we came or maybe you told him to jump. I would have." I slid into the chair. He sat on the bed. "OK. No games. We know. We've known for some time that their capsule was sabotaged. We couldn't charge anyone though. The last thing we needed was to start accusing disembarkees of killing people without a smoking gun."
    "Quite, where would that end?" He didn't answer for a long time. Lyall looked slightly disappointed. He spoke next.
    "Touché,” he said, ”you remind me so much of Ellen," if he’d meant to flatter me, disarm me, it had worked, "whatever. You seem to have caught our first criminal. What did he do to you."
    "Fed me a mood-mod so that he could try and rape me. Then he tried to kill me."
    "We found the mood-mod in your blood, and the gun and the disguised ptomagen canister. We think his motive was to impregnate you rather than rape you.”
    “Only a man could make that distinction, O’Brien.”
    “Perhaps. Why did he do it, do you think ?”
    "It was about landrights. Advantage. He faked the message from his mother. Tried to place her death after the Earthseal ceremony. He didn't know that he inherited anyway. That gave him away otherwise. . ." I shrugged. Lyall laughed softly. 
    "Silly boy.”
    “Not quite.”   
    “Why?”
    “I think this is bigger. The cats. Think of the rarity. The shuttle going down. It’s about accumulating advantage. Cheating the system. He's not alone.”
    “Conspiracy?”
    “No. Nothing so grand.”
    “And what, “ asked Lyall, “makes you think that conspiracies are always grand things, planned for years by collections of cunning, well hidden individuals? Conspiracies usually arise where the disaffected collect and fester. Conspiracy is a rot, not a fire.”
    “No. I didn't see that. Not yet.”
    “I'll trust your judgement on that.”
    “Really?”  It looked like O’Brien was less convinced.
    “Yes really. I’d like you to keep this to yourself. For the good of the colony.”
    “I'm not sure.”
    “And yourself. Investigate if you like. In fact, I'd like you to be our first police officer.”
O’Brien was shocked. He started to interrupt but though better of it.
    “Police? We already have Security.”
    “Don't you see Security as more military ?”
    “Yes, but I don't see the distinction.” He laughed aloud at me this time.
    “You've lived your life aboard ship. The others haven't. I assure you, they see a significant difference and so do I. We need to police the colony internally and to protect its interests externally. You might think that we don't need those things yet, that we are too small?”
    “I did think that. Until recently.”
    “Quite. So. Do you accept?”
    “I'm compromised.”
    “Well, yes. You owe me. But then, anyone who got the job would owe me. It represents a certain power.”
    “I don't care about that.”
    “Oh yes you do.”
    “Yes. I suppose I do, at that. But no.”
O’Brien spoke again.
    "Maybe you’ll think differently after the baby’s born."
    Ice rippled across my skin. "What!"
    "Didn't they tell you ? You are carrying Mr. Herron's child. I appreciate that there may be issues, but he was the last of his gene-line."
    "No. That's impossible."
    "All part of his plan. His three shares, your four, one for the baby. Of course you inherit them all now, you and the baby."
    "I said we shared a moment, O’Brien, but it takes more than a change of mood to get me on my back."
    "Ah." He looked at Lyall and Lyall looked disappointed again. He coughed. Softly.
    "Well I can’t think what has happened there." He said. “Anyway. It’s done now. Get two friends to share and you have ten shares. You can have your own cabin, priority one."
    "You bastards. No." He looked me in the eye. He knew exactly what I would do.
    "He’s dead, after all." O’Brien seemed oblivious.
    "I left him there to be collected. Zombied. He was no threat."
    "A matter of opinion. Maybe you hoped the apex would get him. You didn’t walk him down after all. We have a duty of care to the helpless. We can't afford the scandal of course. Your word against the corpse."
    "I don't care. It should be public."
    "You would think that, which is why we offered you the job."
    "You've think you’ve trapped me. "
    I flew at them. Giving O’Brien five full nail slashes on his face. Lyall stopped me. Pushed me down. I was already weak and I collapsed. But at that moment, I saw something deeper in the relations of the two men, an insight into the whole colony, perhaps, and I saw in Lyall a mixture of the driven and the vulnerable. People had warned me about Lyall. Don’t look in his eyes they had told me. They were right. He had me.
    "I'm just a shepherd, making sure my flock is safely gathered in. You were always one for protocol. For obligation. Don't disappoint us now. Please, Rheya."

    I didn’t. I took the job but not because they’d trapped me. I did it because I knew it needed to be done. I knew that someone needed to look after order and protocol and I didn’t trust anyone else to do it. Most important of all, I knew that one day someone would need to remove Lyall from his pedestal, and I wanted that pleasure for myself.