Powers of detachment served well, as several days of intensive language acquisition wore on with questions burning in the back of Asach’s mind. The old Master held the rank of Keeper-of-Words, charged with maintaining the legends associated with Sargon’s line. Lagash sifted these for human phrases. Most of these were in Middle Anglic. Asach painstakingly built a vocabulary from Tok Pisin to Anglic. They worked through numbers, nouns, actions. They called in other Masters, including the customs Accountant. They called in Doctors. They called in Miners. The young Master kept records, and had a phenomenal memory. Eventually, they exhausted the confines of the room, and Asach was allowed outside. They called in Farmers. They learned enough to carry on crude conversations. Laurel sat in stunned silence on the sidelines. Asach tried to draw her out, but received in answer only stoic tears.

Asach requested food.

“I will ask the Lord,” said Enheduanna.

Dizzy with hunger, Asach managed to send another round of bursts that night. Laurel moved like an automaton, muttering prayer.

“Wait!” called Asach, as a pinhead-sized light fluttered. “Hold it there!” This time, there was a reply:

FLASH Quinn Eyes Only.

Read attached Barthes report. Are ‘Swenson’s Apes’ Moties? Is Motie presence: New? Expanding? Threat? . Re: pre-Accession rules—prime directive applies, plausible deniability authorized. Possible translation keys attached. Advise efficacy. Barthes unblocked. Will provide him full Library data. Comms relay authorized as needed. Standing by for jump. All Due Haste. Renner.

Next came a copy of Barthes’ message with the Swenson’s Ape report, and a stream of sound files. Telemetry followed, with transmission windows and azimuths to the satellite.

Asach swore as the last of the cloak’s stored energy drained, and pondered the options. The bottom line was: Do what you can, and do what you have to, to protect the Empire. Screw pre-Accession rules if you must. Use Barthes if you can. You’re on you own until we get there. Oh yeah, thought Asach, screw it up, and we’ll swear we never knew you. Well, that was just about right. At the moment, resources included a nineteen-year-old suffering a crisis of faith, a librarian half-way across the continent, some files that would remain unreadable until daylight, and not even a pot to pee in.

‘Let’s get some sleep,” said Asach. “Big day tomorrow.”

At least this time Laurel nodded.

Blaine Institute, New Caledonia

Another team was pulling an all-nighter. They were working and reworking numbers from the nearly five-hundred-year-old Naval Initial Assessment Report, because that’s all they had to go on.

“But sir, there’s nothing there!”

“Look again.”

The Lieutenant was adamant. “It was just a standard Naval Level-1 prospecting survey. No orbital industry, no significant orbital ores, no radiation of any kind, no industry reported. Except at the known urban centers—Bonneville and Saint George. And the few known mining camps.”

“Determined how?”

“Standard auto-classification array. Two full passes, one-hundred-percent coverage, data dumped for software recognition and mapping of vegetative cover, hydrology, man-made features, and specified geology.”

“Well, run it against the new Motie data.”

“Sir, I did. Nothing. There’s just no signature indicating pre- or post-industrial development whatsoever, except for the known colonies. Hell, their atmosphere is even clean. They just plain skipped hydrocarbons. At least as fuel. If there are any. The survey identified no seeps, and they never developed any petrochemical industry. They went direct to solar at founding.”

“Then do it the old fashioned way. Put human eyes on it, and look at the ground.”

“That’s a lot of ground sir. It could take—”

“Start with these coordinates.” The team leader passed them over. Neither knew where they’d come from. Renner knew. Lord Blaine knew. They were the last transmitted location from Asach’s tracking collar. At close range, the cloak knew where the chip was. The satellite knew where the cloak was. As long as Quinn and the cloak stayed in close proximity, whenever the cloak talked to the satellite, Renner knew where Asach was.

“Pull it up.”

The lieutenant waved hands about, and New Utah appeared on-screen in a three-dimensional swirl, already rotating and zooming down so fast that contours of weather systems; continents; oceans; poles; were gone before they’d even registered. The pale blue pinprick with a surrounding scatter of pink and red fields that was the fledgling Bonneville swept past in a wink. Then they swooped over the flat, white panne of The Barrens, followed by a spooky disjoint of seeming to fly through a mountain ridge, then bursting forth over a brilliant field, now emerald; now aquamarine in the shifting light.

“Pull back, then stop.”

Even for a jaded pair of terrain analysts, the view of the brilliant river delta, slashed between ranges of scrubby mountains, was breath taking.

“Zoom in again.”

But there was nothing there, save scattered earthen mounds dotting the lustrous fields.

“Can you pull in closer?”

The lieutenant shook her head. “That’s it, sir. Ten meter’s the limit on a Level 1 Survey.”

Meaning that anything smaller than ten meters wide didn’t even appear. The major nodded. “What’s the vegetation?”

“Best guess is some kind of cyanobacteria. We’d need a full assay to be sure.”

The major nodded again. Everybody knew what that was, and it was no surprise on a world with a native oxygen atmosphere. Without blue-green “algae”—really a photosynthetic bacteria—there wouldn’t be an oxygen atmosphere. It was a primary adjunct to all terraform maintenance. The stuff grew everywhere: fresh water, salt water, inside rocks, hell, even in the coats of some animals. It formed globules, mats, filaments; partnered up with funguses to make lichens and rhizome mats; survived under ice caps, so long as light could get to it. Finding a form that grew in grass-like-stands in a river delta on a planet subject to climate extremes did not require a huge leap of evolutionary imagination.

“Do we have anything else for this area? Any comparator?”

“No sir. That was the only survey. It looks like Maxroy’s Purchase only surveyed as far as their base colonies.”

The major nodded again. Survey was expensive. A full planetary survey was probably well outside the budget of a religious order.

“What about the first Jackson expedition?”

“That was a just a delegation shuttle, sir. No survey mission.”

The major nodded. “Right.” She got up to leave, then thought again. “What ship?”

“Sir?”

“What was the shuttle vessel?”

The lieutenant consulted records briefly. “Oh.” Looked again. “Private registry, sir. Imperial Autonetics. Nauvoo Vision.”

The major smiled at this. “Ah.” Smiled again. “And by any chance, lieutenant, has Nauvoo Vision filed a survey record?”

“Like I say, sir, private vessel and—oh.” The lieutenant tapped some more. “That’s odd.” More tapping. “It looks like—somebody—posted restricted files—sir that’s not a Naval cipher.”

“Uh huh. Filed when?”

“That’s what’s odd. They weren’t filed with the original commission report. They came directly from—um—” The lieutenant had the very chilling sense that this was not something it would be good to know.

“Captain Renner?”

“Yes sir. Yesterday. I’m not on original distribution, so I didn’t see them. They’re IA proprietary.” The lieutenant looked nervous.

“Relax, L-T. Bury leant the ship to the Jackson Delegation back in the day. You can’t blame Imperial Autonetics for sneaking in a bit of survey on the side. Looks like Renner dug it up for us. Open sesame,” said the major, punching an access code.