centre of the life-support section. There wasn’t a lot of instrumentation available to the three duty officers, just some fairly sophisticated consoles with holographic windows and an impressive array of switches. The AI actually ran
Our captain, Harrison Dominy Raleigh, was floating in front of the main sensor console, his right foot velcroed to the decking.
‘Do we have a problem?’ I asked.
‘Not with the ship,’ he said. ‘This is strictly your area.’
‘Oh?’ I anchored myself next to him, trying to comprehend the display graphics. It wasn’t easy, but then I don’t function very well in low-gravity situations. Fluids of every kind migrate to my head, which in my case brings on the most awful headaches. My stomach is definitely not designed to digest floating globules of food. And you really would think that after seventy-five years of people travelling through space, someone would manage to design a decent freefall toilet. On the plus side, I’m not too nauseous during the aerial manoeuvres that replace locomotion, and I am receptive to the anti-wasting drugs developed to counter calcium loss in human bones. It’s a balance which I can readily accept as worthwhile in order to see Jupiter with my own eyes.
The captain pointed to a number of glowing purple spheres in the display, each one tagged by numerical icons. ‘The Caesars have orbited over twenty sensor satellites around Ganymede. They provide a full radar coverage out to eighty thousand miles. We’re also picking up similar emissions from the other major moons here. No doubt their passive scans extend a great deal further.’
‘I see. The relevance being?’
‘Nobody arrives at any of the moons they’ve claimed without them knowing about it. I’d say they’re being very serious about their settlement rights.’
‘We never made our voyage a secret. They have our arrival time down to the same decimal place as our own AI.’
‘Which means the next move is ours. We arrive at Ganymede injection in another twelve hours.’
I looked at those purple points again. We were the first non-Caesar spaceship to make the Jupiter trip. The Caesars sent a major mission of eight ships thirteen years ago; which the whole world watched with admiration right up until Commander Ricardo Savill Caesar set his foot on Ganymede and announced to his massive television audience that he was claiming not only Ganymede but Jupiter and all of its satellites for the Caesar family. It was extraordinary, not to say a complete violation of our entire world’s rationalist ethos. The legal manoeuvring had been going on ever since, as well as negotiations amongst the most senior level of family representatives in an attempt to get the Caesars to repudiate the claim. It was a standing joke for satirical show comedians, who got a laugh every time about excessive greed and routines about one person one moon. But in all that time, the Caesars had never moved from their position that Jupiter and its natural satellites now belonged to them. What they had never explained in those thirteen years is why they wanted it.
And now here we were. My brief wasn’t to challenge or antagonize them, but to establish some precedents. ‘I want you to open a communication link to their primary settlement,’ I told the captain. ‘Use standard orbital flight control protocols, and inform them of our intended injection point. Then ask them if there is any problem with that. Treat it as an absolutely normal everyday occurrence… we’re just one more spaceship arriving in orbit. If they ask what we’re doing here; we’re a scientific mission and I would like to discuss a schedule of geophysical investigations with their Mayor. In person.’
Harrison Dominy Raleigh gave me an uncomfortable grimace. ‘You’re sure you wouldn’t like to talk to them now?’
‘Definitely not. Achieving a successful Ganymede orbit is not something important enough to warrant attention from a family representative.’
‘Right then.’ He flipped his headset mike down, and instructed the AI on establishing a communication link.
It wasn’t difficult. The Caesars were obviously treading as carefully as we were. Once the
The ride down was an uneventful ninety minutes, if you were to discount the view from the small, heavily- shielded ports. Jupiter at a quarter crescent hung in the sky above Ganymede. We sank down to a surface of fawn- coloured ice pocked by white impact craters and great
New Milan was a couple of degrees north of the equator, in an area of flat ice pitted with small newish craters. An undisciplined sprawl of emerald and white lights covering nearly five square miles. In thirteen years the Caesars had built themselves quite a substantial community here. All the buildings were freestanding igloos whose base and lower sections were constructed from some pale yellow silicate concrete, while the top third was a transparent dome. As the shuttle descended towards the landing field I began to realize why the lights I could see were predominately green. The smallest igloo was fifty yards in diameter, with the larger ones reaching over two hundred yards; they all had gardens at their centre illuminated by powerful lights underneath the glass.
After we landed, a bus drove me over to the administration centre in one of the large igloos. It was the Mayor, Ricardo Savill Caesar himself, who greeted me as I emerged from the airlock. He was a tall man, with the slightly flaccid flesh of all people who had been in a low-gravity environment for any length of time. He wore a simple grey and turquoise one-piece tunic with a mauve jacket, standard science mission staff uniform. But on him it had become a badge of office, bestowing that extra degree of authority. I could so easily imagine him as the direct descendant of some First Era Centurion commander.
‘Welcome,’ he said warmly. ‘And congratulations on your flight. From what we’ve heard, the
‘Thank you,’ I said. ‘I’d be happy to take you round her later.’
‘And I’ll enjoy accepting that invitation. But first it’s my turn. I can’t wait to show off what we’ve done here.’
Thus my tour began; I believe there was no part of that igloo into which I didn’t venture at some time during the next two hours. From the life-support machinery in the lower levels to precarious walkways strung along the carbon reinforcement strands of the transparent dome. I saw it all. Quite deliberately, of course. Ricardo Savill Caesar was proving that they had no secrets, no sinister apparatus under construction. The family had built themselves a self-sustaining colony, capable of expanding to meet their growing population. Nothing more. What I was never shown nor told, was the reason why.
After waiting as long as politeness required before claiming I had seen enough we wound up in Ricardo Savill Caesar’s office. It was on the upper storey of the habitation section, over forty feet above the central arboretum’s lawn, yet the tops of the trees were already level with his window. I could recognize several varieties of pine and willow, but the low gravity had distorted their runaway growth, giving them peculiar swollen trunks and fat leaves.
Once I was sitting comfortably on his couch he offered me some coffee from a delicate china pot.
‘I have the beans flown up and grind them myself,’ he said. ‘They’re from the family’s estates in the Caribbean. Protein synthesis might have solved our food-supply problems, but there are some textures and tastes which elude the formulators.’
I took a sip, and pursed my lips in appreciation. ‘That’s good. Very good.’
‘I’m glad. You’re someone I think I’d like to have on my side.’
‘Oh?’
He sat back and grinned at me. ‘The other families are unhappy to say the least about our settlement claim on this system. And you are the person they send to test the waters. That’s quite a responsibility for any representative. I would have loved to sit in on your briefing sessions and hear what was said about us terrible Caesars.’
‘Your head would start spinning after the first five hours,’ I told him, dryly. ‘Mine certainly did.’
‘So what is it you’d like your redoubtable ship and crew to do while they’re here?’
‘It is a genuine scientific mission,’ I told him. ‘We’d like to study the bacterial life you’ve located in the moons
