“I’m with you, too,” said Olivenko.
“No, truly,” said Rigg. “All we need is your help out of town.”
“In about a half hour, I’m going to be absent without permission,” said Olivenko. “By the time you’re safely out of town, I’d better be with you and never come back, because I’ll be a deserter. They hang deserters.”
“Then you can’t come with us,” said Rigg. “It was selfish of me to ask. Just give us some ideas about how—”
“Are you joking?” said Olivenko. “I watched your father pass through the Wall and die, young Rigg. And ever since then, I’ve only wished one thing—that I could have gone with him. Maybe I could have saved him.”
“You were a child then, an apprentice scholar,” said Rigg. “What could you have done?”
“Why do you think I became a soldier?” said Olivenko. “So that if there was ever such a need again, I’d be fit to do it.”
“I never thought much of deserters,” said the old soldier.
“Well, you can smear that opinion on your elbow and lick it off,” said Olivenko. “Because I’m not deserting. They’ll only think that I am.”
“What are you doing, then?” asked Param.
“I’m following the prince and princess of the roy
al house into exile,” said Olivenko.
“Oh,” said Loaf. “That’s all right then.”
CHAPTER 23
Carriage
Three years after the stasis pod sealed itself over Ram’s inert body, the preservation of a wide and deep sampling of the native DNA of Garden’s life forms was complete. So also was the collection and stasis of the Garden flora and fauna that would be restored to the ocean and to the isolated small continents after the extinction event.
The expendables did not speak to each other; their analog communication devices were solely for use with conscious humans. Instead, they were in constant conversation at a digital level, sharing experiences and conclusions as if all were inside each other’s minds.
The ship’s computers were not disgruntled—or gruntled, for that matter—that Ram’s last instruction had been to obey the expendables. The ship’s computers did not care who gave them their orders. For that matter, neither did the expendables. But the expendables’ deepest programming gave them a mission that even Ram could not have contradicted, and in order to protect that mission, they could not be subject to the mechanical reasoning of the ships’ computers.
There was no ego. None of the mechanical devices called computers or expendables had any interest in “getting their way.” They had no “way.” They only had programming, data, and their own conclusions based on them.
The nineteen ships left their near-Garden orbits and rose nearly half an Astronomical Unit, until they were in optimal position. Then they configured their collision fields to the right level of absorption, dissipation, rigidity, and storage and began to accelerate toward Garden.
They did not impact with the planet simultaneously. Instead, they hit at carefully calibrated intervals and angles, so that when the series of collisions ended, Garden had a tilt sufficient to create seasonal variations and a rotation rate slowed to just over 23 hours.
Unlike meteors, which are themselves largely or entirely vaporized when striking a planet, the ships themselves were not affected in any way by the collisions, except that they came to a sudden stop. Even that was mitigated by internal fields in each ship that absorbed the energy of inertia loss and passed it beyond Garden’s magnetic field.
The large chunks of debris thrown up by the impacts soon returned to the surface—except that none penetrated the fields that rose columnlike directly above each ship. The result was that when the new surface of Garden took shape, there were nineteen smooth-sided shafts leading from each ship to the open sky, which pointed, not straight out from Garden’s center, but rather at such an angle as to remain in constant line-of-sight with satellites in geosynchronous orbit.
Meanwhile, thick dust almost completely blocked the sun’s rays from the surface of Garden, killing all plant life that had not been burned up in the waves of shock and heat from the collisions. Most of the native animals that did not die immediately, or suffocate minutes later, starved to death. In caves, in certain sheltered valleys, a few species of plants and animals survived on Garden’s surface; in the ocean, many species of plants and animals that could tolerate low light and heavy silt continued to live.
Garden was not dead. But most of the surface was devoid of visible life.
• • •
“The first thing we have to do,” said Olivenko, “is get better clothes. Or worse ones, depending on how you look at it.”
“The royals do,” said Umbo. “Loaf and I are dressed exactly right.”
“Please don’t call us that,” said Rigg.
“He’s right,” said Loaf. “Get out of that habit, or you’ll say something that gives us all away.”