I shut the maintenance hatch, tossed my tools back in the chest and closed it before I looked back up to regard Clines with long-suffering amusement.
“So why, then, Dave?” I asked, humoring him. If one of us didn’t ask, he’d just keep belaboring the point until we did. “Why didn’t the Tahni settle here?”
Honestly, it was a good question, though not one I’d bothered to ask when we’d been offered the chance to settle here. All we’d needed to know was that the climate was temperate, the land was fertile, and the scenery was pleasant. And that there’d be no Tahni trying to kill us.
“I’m glad you asked,” Clines said, grinning. “It just so happens I was attached to an Intelligence unit when I was working Fleet Security back during the war….”
“A top-secret Intelligence unit,” Vicky murmured, just loud enough for me to make it out.
“Yes, it was top-secret, Vick,” Clines said, shooting her a dirty look. “And after we’d invaded the Tahni home planet, they stumbled upon this group of systems in the captured records, and I got a look at their report.”
“They just left it laying around for you to read, huh?”
“Well, it was an enemy file, darlin’! Who would they be keeping it secret from?”
I had to give him that one. I grabbed the toolbox and my water bottle and started climbing down the access ladder. I’d have this pointless conversation, but I’d be damned if I had it on this metal baking tray.
“So, what did the report say?” I prodded, the turned dirt crunching under my work boots at the bottom of the ladder. “What was the big secret?”
Vicky rolled her eyes, but she knew as well as I did that Clines would tell this story with or without my encouragement, and our best hope was to get it as quickly and concisely as possible.
“Well, that’s just it, compadre, they didn’t know. The Tahni didn’t even know.” He followed me down the ladder, hopping off about a meter up and wincing as he landed. “Damn knee. Need to lose some weight.” He rubbed at the offending joint before straightening and proceeding with his war story. “Anyway, the Tahni didn’t settle on these worlds because their religious traditions say they’re unclean, for some reason. They didn’t get any more specific and the best guess any of the xenoethnographers had….”
“The what?” Vicky demanded, face screwing up at the term.
“Well, fuck if I know,” Clines admitted, “but that’s what the report said. The xenoethnographers said they thought it might have something to do with the Tahni equivalent of astrology that developed before they found out that the stars were all just big balls of gas.”
“We know all about big balls of gas.”
“Do you wanna hear this story or not?” Clines asked her, but then waved the question away, perhaps sensing he wouldn’t like the answer. “Never mind. Anyway, they….”
“The xenoethnographers,” I clarified, carefully maintaining a straight face.
“Yeah, them. They thought these systems were off-limits because they were in the wrong constellation and it would have been bad juju to put colonies here. But I think that’s just the easy explanation. The Tahni are superstitious, but they ain’t superstitious like we are. For them, everything was wrapped up in the Emperor, right?”
It seemed like a question, and not a rhetorical one, so I answered it.
“As far as we know. But I’m not a xeno….”
“Oh, shut up. I just don’t see them writing off all these systems just because they were in the wrong part of the sky. For them, controlling living worlds was everything.”
“Then what do you think it was, Dave?” Vicky asked, giving up on both the harvester repairs and her resistance to the conversation. She dropped down with more grace than me, a hell of a lot more than Clines, and pulled open the back of the rover, motioning for me to stow the toolbox.
“I ain’t got no idea. I just know there’s something funky out here and I think the government believes it, too. That’s why they stuck all us rejects out here.”
“What do you mean rejects?” I asked, frowning.
“Vets who they got an obligation to settle on a colony,” he clarified. “But there ain’t enough room on the established colonies for us because they ain’t been rebuilt yet from all the damage the Tahni did during the war. So, they talked us into settling here because no one else would come here. No one else was stupid enough.”
“There’s the civilians,” Vicky pointed out. That was what we called them, dividing the colonists into two camps, the vets, and the civilians. It wasn’t just our differing backgrounds that separated us, though. The civilian colonists had been settled here months before any of us vets had arrived, for the simple reason that all of us had been held in the military for a few months after the end of the war.
“The civilians,” Clines scoffed. He reached into a cooler in the front seat of his car and pulled out an insulated bottle of the local beer, twisting open the top and taking a swig before he went on. “They’re refugees. Their worlds were too torn up by the Tahni for them to be able to rebuild, so they got stuck here whether they wanted it or not. That’s why all of the assholes are such…well, assholes. Like that motherfucker Hellnick who lives against my eastern property line. Sour-faced dick won’t so much as come to his gate and say hi when I drive by.”
“Maybe he just doesn’t have all day to bullshit because he has a farm to run,” Vicky suggested.
“Either of you guys want a beer?” Clines asked, gesturing between us with the bottle.
“Thanks, anyway,” I said, shaking my head. “I’m already halfway dehydrated and it’s hot as shit out here.”
I was exaggerating. Compared to Inferno, this place was fairly close to heaven, but I guess I’d been spoiled.
“But you mark my words,” Clines went on, using the beer bottle as a pointer, “the Commonwealth put all us losers no one would miss out here like Judas goats, to make sure if there’s some weird alien threat out here, we get hit by it first before anyone else finds out.”
“Oh, Jesus, Dave,” I sighed, pushing open the driver’s door of our rover and falling into the front seat, letting my legs hang out the side. “They did not just stick us here as fodder for space monsters. You sound like a bad movie.”
“Do I?” He barked a laugh and pointed off through the fields in the direction the rock dragon had run. “I talked to one of the pilots on the lander that dropped me here over a year ago, and he told me that the plants and animals here are different than the ones on Tahni colonies, the ones they brought there from their homeworld. Totally different, evolved independently of them. But they’re also the same plants and animals that you’d find on any of the inhabitable worlds in the Forbidden Zone, even ones with different gravity. That means someone seeded the same sort of life on all those planets.” He nodded, his brows going up like a lecturer coming to a conclusion. “And all that life, here, the Tahni worlds, Earth, all the colonies we’ve settled on…it’s all based on DNA. Which shouldn’t be possible.”
“Panspermia,” I suggested, though I only had a vague idea what it meant. I’d gone through an accelerated and abbreviated series of general education classes for Officer’s Candidate School, and I remembered reading something about panspermia as an explanation for why DNA-based life forms had developed on different worlds.