family's color rather than mine. And the women of my family insist on having children… lots of them. Speaking of which…'
'Yes?' Annie asked, expectantly.
Linda just smiled and held up three fingers, then slowly raised her little finger to make a fourth.
Cochea,
10/7/459 AC
As Linda and Annie dined in First Landing, in the Federated States, Hennessey, Parilla and Jimenez pored over maps from the Federated States invasion of Balboa, in 447, called 'Operation Green Fork.' Hennessey was working on a history of that invasion-something neutral and objective to balance the often propaganda- distorted works already in print. He had to work on something to keep busy and to feel useful, not having a job to call his own anymore. Indeed, he had several projects going at any given time. One of them was a translation into Balboan Spanish of a novel by an Old Earth writer he knew only as R.A.H.
Jimenez pointed a long, thin finger at the map. 'Right there, Patricio. Right on that damned corner was where the war started.'
Hennessey straightened up from the maps. 'Tell me about it, Xavier.'
As Jimenez spoke, Hennessey went to his computer and began to type, fingers blurring over the keyboard.
Zabol, Pashtia, 10/7/459 AC
Some miles from the center of the city of Zabol a bearded man hunched over a keyboard. Very slender and tall, as were most of his people, the man had to hunch deeply, uncomfortably, to perform his task. In the dim light the glow of the computer monitor illuminated his face to the semblance of a demon, though in daylight his face was quite decent and even handsome. Distantly, an electrical generator groaned, the sound traveling down damp, narrow hallways. The generator brought light and heat, and powered the fans that brought fresh air to this elaborate complex of caves and tunnels painstakingly carved and blasted from the living rock. The complex was one of several, not all of them in Pashtia.
Abdul Aziz Ibn Kalb brought up a free e-mail service, Firestarter, and then typed a sign-in name-'islandsrfrdude'-and a password. The screen changed to reveal an account with nothing but spam in the inbox, and no messages sent. He began to compose a meaningless message.
Composition completed, Aziz attached a photo as a jpeg file. The photo, properly processed, contained a message, simply, 'CA39, Desperation Bay, Execute, 11/7.'
Aziz saved the message to his draft folder, which was actually physically located on a server far, far away. He then closed the account. When it was opened later in the day, in Yithrab, it would be copied to a different account and saved into yet another draft folder and server. From there it would be opened in Lancaster in Anglia and copied yet again to a different account. Finally, when opened in the rebuilt city of Botulph, in the Federated States, it would never actually have been sent. There would be no easy trace to Zabol or to Abdul Aziz.
That task completed, Aziz typed into the computer, 'Wahoo. sig.'
Botulph, Federated States, 10/7/459 AC
'The orders are received. We go tomorrow.'
' Allahu akbar. Allahu akbar, ' the swarthy men congratulated each other, shaking hands and slapping backs in unconstrained joy. God is great; God is great. Now, finally, they were chosen to strike a great blow against their greatest enemy. Now, at last, they would bring home to the Great Demon the meaning of war. Could there be any doubt of their coming success, their cause being just and the Most High being on their side?
'Shall we rehearse again?' asked the youngest member of the team.
The leader smiled indulgently and answered, 'No need, Samadi. We have rehearsed so many times any one of us could cut a throat in our sleep. Go out. Have a good time. Just be asleep before midnight and remember that tomorrow night you will be feasting among the houris of Paradise.'
Samadi simply shook his head in the negative and went to his room to study his flight manuals.
Yusef, the convert, likewise didn't go out. Instead he pulled out the guitar that he loved and began to play and sing something of his own composition:
'I've been dreamin' fait'f'ly
Dreamin' about the jihad to come…'
Interlude
21 January, 2037 to 14 March, 2040
… to emerge, unknown to Mission Control, somewhere… else.
The robot didn't know where it was; the star and constellations matched nothing in the catalogue. It didn't know how it got there. Most disconcertingly, it had lost touch with Mission Control. It blared out a distress signal. It blared in vain.
This was where good programming came in. While this precise turn of events had definitely not been foreseen-no one on Earth remotely suspected the existence of such a flaw in space-other emergencies which that have required a certain amount of independent judgment on the part of the ship had.
The robot did know it was still functioning. It did know there was a star ahead. It could sense that planets orbited that star. It knew that it had a mission. And it had a star map of the stars as it emerged in the new system, which map was updated over. With this, and what could be gleaned of the solar system in which it found itself, the robot got to work.
Having a star ahead was important, for without photons to brake its flight the robot-ship had little choice but to continue on to wherever the solar winds or inertia might take it. Its own maneuvering capability was quite limited.
Accordingly, the ship began furling the sail, pumping out the gas that held it erect and reeling in the filaments that connected it to the ship. When this was done, the entire assembly was rotated using some of the small amount of conventional fuel carried, to where the robot decided the sail was best suited to braking. It was then unfurled. The light from the sun was not sufficient to fully brake, however, if the ship followed a purely straight path. The robot began calculating an orbital path that would allow it to come very close to the light and heat of the foreign sun, thereby chopping its velocity to something it could work with.
This took several months, months well spent in analyzing the system. It found, for example, that the fourth world was in the right range to support life. It found further that the other five planets spinning about the local sun were not, being either far too hot or far too cold. There was no asteroid belt.
The fourth world, further, showed an oxygen nitrogen atmosphere, had an albedo indicating that it was about seventy percent covered in water and thirty percent in land, and had polar icecaps and some seasonal variation, though less than Earth's. It had small moons, three of them, which were certain to produce tides, though of lesser intensity than did Earth's sole companion, Luna. Spectral analysis showed plant life in profusion and limited volcanic activity. The closer the robot-ship came to the world its programming had settled on, the more it saw weather, as well.
The robot-ship was never designed to land upon any world, whether of its origin, its intended target, or this new and unknown place. It was equipped to explore, nonetheless, if a found world had an atmosphere. In the last half of its cylinder, carefully cradled, rested two parachute landers and two high altitude gliders. It released one of each over the fourth world as it passed close by.
The glider was never intended to come to a rest and did not. Released from the ship at low velocity relative to its target and with wings folded, it simply went ballistic until reaching the first thin traces of gas in the fourth planet's troposphere. At that point it deployed its wings. Solar powered itself, with a small propeller for propulsion and control surfaces for minor adjustments, it fought for control against the wind that threatened to rip it apart and the gravity that sought it in a deadly embrace. It was touch and go for a while but-to give NASA's executives their due; when they take a bribe to buy a Japanese-built gliding drone for interstellar exploration work, they at least make sure the drone can do the work before cashing the check-the glider skipped along, its microminiaturized camera and radar mapping the surface.
The gliding drone lasted quite some time. Not so the first parachute lander. It actually had a much easier time of it, initially, surviving entry into the planet's atmosphere and coming to rest lightly under its deployed parachute. It even managed to release its parachute precisely as it touched down, the wind carrying the 'chute off
