I looked out toward the brush. Between me and the tree line, one of the Mennonite men was instructing a group of other colonists on the finer points of driving an old-fashioned tractor. Farther out a couple of colonists were collecting soil so we could check its compatibility with our crops. “That’s not going to be a very popular position,” I said to Jane. “People are already complaining about being cooped up in town.”
“It won’t take that long to find them,” Jane said. “Hickory and Dickory and I are going to take the watch tonight, up on top of the containers. Their eyesight drops down into the infrared range, so they might see them coming.”
“And you?” I asked. Jane shrugged. After her revelation back on the Magellan about being reengineered, she’d kept mostly quiet about the full range of her abilities. But it wasn’t a stretch to assume her visual range had expanded like the rest of her abilities. “What are you going to do when you spot them?” I asked.
“Tonight, nothing,” Jane said. “I want to get an idea of what they are and how many there are. We can decide what we’re going to do then. But until then we should make sure everyone is inside the perimeter an hour before sunset and that anyone outside the perimeter during the day has an armed guard.” She nodded to her human deputies. “These two have weapons training, and there are several others in the Magellan crew who have as well. That’s a start.”
“And no homesteading until we get a grip on these things,” I said.
“Right,” Jane said.
“It’ll make for a fun Council meeting,” I said.
“I’ll break it to them,” Jane said.
“No,” I said. “I should do it. You already have the reputation as the scary one. I don’t want you always being the one who bears the bad news.”
“It doesn’t bother me,” Jane said.
“I know,” I said. “It doesn’t mean you should always do it, though.”
“Fine,” Jane said. “You can tell them that I expect we’ll know quickly enough whether these things represent a threat. That should help.”
“We can hope,” I said.
“Don’t we have any information on these creatures?” Manfred Trujillo asked. He and Captain Zane walked beside me now as I headed toward the village’s information center.
“No,” I said. “We don’t even know what they look like yet. Jane’s going to find out tonight. So far the only creatures we know anything about are those rat-things at the mess hall.”
“The fuglies,” Zane said.
“The what?” I asked.
“The fuglies,” Zane said. “That’s what the teenagers are calling them. Because they’re fucking ugly.”
“Nice name,” I said. “Point is, I don’t think we can claim to have a full understanding of our biosphere from the fuglies alone.”
“I know you see value in being cautious,” Trujillo said. “But people are getting restless. We’ve brought people to a place they know nothing about, told them they can’t ever talk to their families and friends again, and then given them nothing to do for two entire weeks. We’re in limbo. We need to get people going on the next phase of their lives, or they’re going to keep dwelling on the fact that their lives as they knew them have been entirely taken away.”
“I know,” I said. “But you know as well as I do we’ve got nothing on this world. You two have seen the same files I have. Whoever did the so-called survey of this planet apparently didn’t bother to spend more than ten minutes on it. We’ve got the basic biochemistry of the planet and that’s pretty much it. We’ve got almost no information on flora and fauna, or even if it breaks down into flora and fauna. We don’t know if the soil will grow our crops. We don’t know what native life we can eat or use. All information the Department of Colonization usually provides a new colony, we don’t have. We have to find all this stuff out for our own before we start, and unfortunately in that we’ve got a pretty big handicap.”
We arrived at the information center, which was a grand name for the cargo container we’d modified for the purpose. “After you,” I said, holding the first set of doors for Trujillo and Zane. Once we were all in, I sealed the door behind me, allowing the nanobotic mesh to completely envelop the outer door, turning it a featureless black, before opening the interior door. The nanobotic mesh had been programmed to absorb and cloak electromagnetic waves of all sorts. It covered the walls, floor and ceiling of the container. It was unsettling if you thought about it; it was like being in the exact center of nothing.
The man who had designed the mesh waited inside the center’s interior door. “Administrator Perry,” Jerry Bennett said. “Captain Zane. Mr. Trujillo. Nice to see you back in my little black box.”
“How is the mesh holding up?” I asked.