Heirs of Earth

1.1.2Rasmussen was a beautiful world: green and temperate around the equator, with an even split between ocean and landmass. Both poles were icebound and surrounded by turbulent berg-filled oceans; the air was high in oxygen, supporting a diverse ecosystem that boasted insects large enough to bite an android in two and tree trunks dozens of meters across. Its primary, BSC5070, was a G6V star slightly redder than Earth's; Rasmussen orbited close to the center of its habitable zone. Marcus Chown, the UNESSPRO mission sent to explore the system, had arrived fifteen years earlier and established an extensive orbital complex from which detailed biological and geological examinations had been made. Under the leadership of Rob Singh, terrestrial contamination of the environment was kept to an absolute minimum. Even during the arrival of the Gifts, the pristine ecosystem had barely been disturbed. To all intents and purposes, it was a paradise, which was what made it so hard for Caryl Hatzis to deliver her pronouncement. "In five days," she said, "this planet and everything on it will die." The assembly was silent. "Three days later," she went on, "Zemyna and Demeter will follow then Geb and Sagarsee. And then--" She paused, allowing a faint echo to underline the significance of the silence with which she presaged her next words. "And then there will be no more colonies left. Everything UNESSPRO strove to achieve will be gone. All that will remain of humanity will be our ash and dust on the worlds we once visited." Hatzis felt the pressure of eyes on her, virtual and real. The meeting had been called at Rasmussen to coincide with the arrival of the Spinners at Sagarsee, the colony world of the BSC5148 system, the last of five loosely clustered systems known as the Alkaid Group on the opposite side of the sphere of space humanity had explored from where the Spinners had first appeared. Unless humanity's enigmatic benefactors abruptly changed their modus operandi, Sagarsee and the rest of the Alkaid Group would be the last worlds visited by the Spinners--and the last attacked by the Starfish. If humanity was to survive, then this was where Caryl Hatzis and her ragtag band of engrams would have to make their stand. She forced herself to speak with dignity and poise when all she wanted to do was to scream out her frustration and outrage. "We have tried communicating with the Spinners, and they haven't responded. We've tried communicating with the Starfish, and they, too, have ignored us. We've tried resisting the Starfish, and that almost got us killed. So now we have to figure out what we do next. "If we do nothing," she said, "we die. We've seen it happen to the ostrich colonies--the ones who tried hiding in systems that had already been attacked or on worlds the Spinners hadn't visited. They thought they would be safe, that the Starfish wouldn't consider them a threat. But they were wrong, and they paid for it with their lives. To that end, should any colony represented here today choose that option, you will forfeit your gifts and your ftl communicators. This is not open to discussion; if the human race is to have any chance at all, it requires every resource it can lay its hands on." She paused, half-expecting a reaction to this, but there was none. Everyone was fully, finally aware of the harsh reality of their situation. "One of the options open to us is to follow the lead of the Yuhl and remain in the wake of the Spinners. We can use the gifts to fashion arks large enough to contain all our hardware, all the processors required to run the engrams and contain our memories of Earth. We can merge the hole ships, and like the Yuhl we can jump from system to system, taking what we need to keep our fleet functioning. According to the Praxis, our new friends have been doing this for two and a half thousand years, so there's no reason why weWilliams, Sean is the author of 'Heirs of Earth' with ISBN 9780441011261 and ISBN 0441011268.