Earth’s First Colonies

This is an incomplete early draft, so please excuse any grammatical or spelling errors. Please also feel free to comment about the errors so that I can fix them. Thanks for your interest, and remember this is my original work. I do not authorize anyone to copy, download, distribute, or use in anyway other than to view on the “The Raving Muse” blog.

“Dear Lord, . . . I think they’re human.”
The captain walked over to the helmsman’s console to see what he was talking about.
“What else would they be?”
“But sir they’re, . . . well, they’re living like animals.”
The captain leaned over the helmsman’s shoulder and considered the image on his view screen. What the captain saw could have been a scene from earth during the dark ages. Men carrying swords, others tending fields, buildings made of stone and thatch.
“Its not possible for humans to survive like that anymore is it? I mean how would they cope with the extended life spans and elevated birth rates? How would they maintain their implants?”
The helmsman looked around the bridge after putting the image up on all the screens around the room.
“Obviously its possible or we wouldn’t be seeing it,” the captain said walking back to his own console.
One of the xeno-agriculturalists offered, “They wouldn’t have implants if they were born on a world like this, but they would still live hundreds of years even without modern medical science.”
“You think the whole planet is like this?” The helmsman’s voice rose in pitch as he spoke
“Alright,” the captain interrupted, “We’re a colony ship not a rescue group. We aren’t equipped to help these people. I want all applicable departments to start working on an alternate destination and begin harvesting any resources we can from this system without touching this planet or any others we find that are inhabited. Any department not involved in those tasks I want you to study this planet’s inhabitants the best you can without interfering with our primary mission, and prepare a report to send to Earthgov with our updated mission status. No one goes to the surface without my express consent, and I won’t be giving consent unless its a life or death issue so don’t ask. “That’s it. Get to work.”
The command center instantly began to buzz with activity and noise. The captain leaned in close to the colony governor’s ear, “I sure would love to go down there.”
“Me too,” she whispered back, “but that’ll be somebody else’s mess to clean up.”
“Too bad.”
“Do you think this means the stories are true?”
“They must be, why else would there supposedly be no sightings of the original hundred colony ships after so many hundreds of years? It would be a hard thing to keep quiet, but then again we’ve all heard the stories.”
“It seems unbelievable.”
“Which is probably how they’ve been able to keep this secret so well for so long.”
They both watched the captain’s screen as a scene played itself out on the planet below. A man holding a sword striking a pile of hay while speaking to a child. The boy nodding and imitating with a stick as his weapon.
“If they are keeping it quiet that means nobody’s coming to clean this up.”
The captain began cycling through different places on the planet which had human activity as they were talking.
He responded, “but why change it? These people have obviously overcome whatever problems living with modern altered DNA in a less than modern society would cause.”
The image fell to a scene of massive battle. At least a million lay dead as hundreds of thousands more continued to battle. A castle of monumental proportions stood with multiple breaches in its walls. From the piles of dead it was obvious the invaders had been held outside the walls be sheer force of numbers, but the defenders seemed to be falling back little by little into their own walls. The invaders having even greater numbers than they.

The governor broke the silence first speaking to no one in particular. “The struggle for resources must be enormous. Trying to feed billions with only pre-modern era technology must be impossible.”

“That’s if the vegetation is edible on this planet at all. It’s impossible to tell from here in orbit, but the vegetation could be piousness or just not have the right make up to be nutritious at all. If the plant life isn’t just right they could eat until the burst and still die of starvation. . .” the xeno-agriculturalist’s voice trailed off considering what seemed to him as a most annoying way to die.

“Obviously they have something to eat or they would have all died off long ago,” the captain pointed out the obvious fixing his xeno-agriculturalist with a less than amused gaze as he continued, “it still not anything were equipped to even start to deal with.”

The governor leaned forward looking even more closely at her monitor, “but we could start the snowball rolling down the hill.”

The captain’s eyebrows immediately sprung up as he noted that she had spoken loud enough for others in the room to hear her. “In my office,” the captain said quietly being careful to hide his sudden frustration with the governor in front of the crew. Once they were safely in the office he let his frustration slip a little. “What Exactly do you mean by that?”

Her response was unaffected by his frustration and came only after giving him a pause pregnant with indifference. “I only meant that you know as well as I do that Earthgov is just going to cover this up like they have been all along. If we want we can send our reports to others . . .”

“What others?” He interrupted and then continued,

‘Who would believe us anyway? After so long no one really believes the first 100 even survived. A few people even deny they were launched at all . . . something about a government scheme to calm the public about over population. Look, I understand you want to help those people. So do I, but Earthgov pays the bills around here. I know we’re self sufficient now, but don’t you think they don’t have ways to make things a lot harder for us. Especially if we get stuck in a long term terraform situation.

 

~ by J. Scott on 25Jul07.