Location: Dannal Station, Valya

Date: 39PE

Bronwen Patel held a cupped hand over her brow, shielding her eyes from the small, angry sun blazing aloof in the clear azure sky. Sweat collected underneath her white lab-tunic, coating her back and collecting at her armpits in a gravity-defying display of fluid-cohesion. The jungle air, thick and swampy was abated somewhat at the viewing platform, which extended out over the gentle cyan sea.

The sky, thick with colour, remained stubbornly empty, save for the pale ghostly bands of the planetary ring. No clouds nor birds crossed her vision, although she could hear the calls of the latter from the green-covered headlands pushing out into the bay. The whole jungle was alive with their songs; the diving whistle of Jacamer contrasting with the rapid-fire hollow beats of a nearby woodpecker, which in turn folded into the dry scraping sound of a Blackjack and the generator-hum of the Zaps.

Of course, Zaps and Blackjacks were not really birds, Bronwen reflected, but rather another kind of small, flighted creature that filled the same niche. With the woodpeckers and other birds, they were now a smaller part of a much larger orchestra, which could never have been assembled under the Terran sun.

The insects had come first, in Valya’s nascent terraforming project. They had been shot from the sky in bullets, to pave the way for lizards and birds. Algae, krill and smaller fish had been feeding, fighting, fleeing and mating in the alien seas of Valya for a decade already and now that stable food chain populations had been established and sea temperatures and pH were approaching acceptable Terran levels it was time to try something a little more ambitious.

And so, Bronwen Patel stood, breathless in the thick air, perspiring in the relentless sun, surrounded by ship-spotting hobbyists from the base and scanning the sky for the routine delivery of supplies to Valkyrie Station. Her annoyance grew as the sky remained stubbornly empty. She had rushed out of her lab to be here, to see the shipment come in. Her brain was beginning to play with her eyes, and she saw pinpricks of light appear and then vanish as soon as she focussed on them.

“How much longer, do you think?” Bronwen turned to Alcock, a thickset man with the profile of a heavy-weight fighter, if not the actual physique.

“We had the ten-minute warning…” he checked his terminal, “about fifteen minutes ago.”

“There!” One of the spotters yelled and began to vigorously make notes on their terminal. An excited murmur ran through the assembled crowd, drowning out the almost-birdsong from the surrounding forest. Several people started filming on their terminals, while a more serious-looking man attended to a tripod camera.

Bronwen shared in their excitement. Not at the sight of the new white star that had appeared in the sky twinkling defiantly in the harsh light, but in what its arrival meant. All frustration was forgotten. She watched as the pinprick of light grew brighter and took form; a short black tube seeming to grow quicker than the seconds could pass.

Fear began to overtake excitement at the seemingly reckless speed of the descent. A disaster now would set the project back by weeks, or maybe even months. With a mighty roar, and a gust of hot wind, the ship flared violently and decelerated to land on the black pad floating out to sea. A fleet of flat-topped barges were already approaching the pad to unload the cargo.

“Come on,” Bronwen instructed, already turning back towards the great glass dome that comprised the bulk of Dannal Station.

Despite the glass dome under the glare of the sun, the main station building was, thankfully, much cooler than jungle that surrounded it them. The breath of cool air was like a sigh of relief as they stepped from the observation platform and into the busy main terminal building.

From her vantage point Bronwen could see the cranes on the platform unloading the large freight containers from the barges onto waiting magtrains. Stood nearby was a short, pale young man wearing a tunic similar to hers and clutching a small black box.

She approached with Alcock loitering a few paces behind. As she got nearer Bronwen noticed the young man’s pale features had a tinge of green and he was shaking slightly.

“Are you okay?” She asked. The man swallowed and nodded before replying.

“Fine, thank you,” he said shakily followed by a silent heave. Bronwen took a step back. “Sea and Space both disagree with me, it seems.” He gestured to his case. “Are you Dr Patel?”

“I am,” she flashed her government ID on her hand terminal, and the young man did likewise. Quinten Barres, she read, Deygan Marine Mammal Program. The young man handed over the box. It was heavy, metallic and had a digital display next to the handle with a readout of the pressure and temperature inside. It all seemed to be in order. “Will you be coming back with us to Valkyrie Base?”

“I’m afraid not,” Barres shook his head. “I’m due back on the shuttle in three hours.” He looked wistfully over at the food court, where happier people were enjoying themselves. “I might grab something to eat, and I’ve got a remote link to a seminar.”

Bronwen nodded and thanked Barres for coming all this way. She felt sympathy for the boy. Her own descent into Valya’s atmosphere had been, a hellish experience and, although it had been five years since she had last stepped foot on Dannal Station, she remembered the flips and pirouettes in her stomach as though it had been yesterday.

The heavy box had its own ticket for the journey, but the seat next to Bronwen remained empty for the whole four-hours as she cradled the container on her lap. Alcock was sat opposite her constantly asking questions.

“When do you think we can start?”

“Hmm?” She had been staring at the digital readout, flickering occasionally between -80C and -79. For the briefest instant it flicked up to -78 and she had been ready to break into the train’s liquid helium stores before it ticked back down.

“When can we start?”

“We’ve got a mixture of eggs, sperm and E3s,” she told him. “I was thinking that you could help Simón with the in-vitro fertilisation, while I’ll oversee the E3 implantation personally.”

“It’s been a while…” Alcock began, but Bronwen cut him off with a glare.

“There is no one else at our facility with experience of the implantation protocol,” she sniffed.

“I did it in Iraddo’s group,” Alcock leaned back in his seat, arms folded, staring the box. “It’s strange to think, before we even properly understand the planet, we’re supposed to terraform it.”

“This is our home now,” Bronwen replied, “Deyga, Valya, Lepidus and even Gaius will form the bedrock of humanity for centuries to come.” The readout caught her eye again. ­-80­. “We don’t even know if the Earth is still around, or if there are other humans out there. I think we have a duty to survive and to ensure as much as Earth survives too.”

“That sounds very Terran,” Alcock offered.

“My parents were Terran,” Bronwen explained. “But I agree with the sentiment. If Earth is gone, why should we be the only survivors?” She didn’t wait for the reply. “Besides, if we’re going to farm and live here we need an ecosystem we can work with.”

Location: Valkyrie Research Station

Date: 39PE

“And so, I’m happy to report,” Bronwen concluded into the dark eye of her hand-terminal, carefully placed to omit the midden that was her desk, “that the in-vitro fertilisation is currently underway, and we will know if the procedure has been successful shortly.” She shut down the display and was about to send the message to the Council of Sciences on Deyga when there was a knock at the door.

A tall, well built young man with flowing brown hair entered the room. He was sweating but his face was the colour of ash.

“Simon,” Bronwen leaned forward on her elbows, “are you okay?”

“Alcock said I should find you. It’s the ‘blasts… I thought I saw something in the medium.”

A hit of anxiety shot through Bronwen’s heart. She could feel her own face blanche and raised herself up from behind her desk, deliberately. It was the only way for her to keep calm. They marched briskly through the glass panelled hallways of the institute, connecting the close-knit buildings of the campus. Valkyrie Station was busy growing outside, becoming more like a proper city. In peaceful times Bronwen liked to stand in the windows and watch the cranes and tall buildings come to life in the dying light. Without a glance, she led Simón down to the basement lab.

Alcock was sat in front of the microscope, a flask of cells resting under the lens. A mechanical hum permeated the space and fluidic systems breathed through their programs, but Bronwen could only focus on the buzzing in her own ears.

“Show me,” she demanded of Alcock, who wheeled his stool away from the microscopy station and gestured at the eyepieces.

Bronwen gazed down into the beige, bright microscopic world and quickly located the golf-ball bubble of cells. They seemed healthy enough. They were the expected size, the expected shape and they were free from the bulky, jagged debris that might suggest cell death.

“Are you sure you saw anything?” Bronwen asked.

“Check the focus,” Alcock answered. “You might need to cycle it back and forth.”

Not daring to fully feel the relief that was beginning to infect her fears, Bronwen twisted the knobs on the side of the machine and watched with bated breath as the Blastocyst swam in and out of focus.

And behind it, all around this large, imposing cell, she could see them. Thin, pale worms wriggling. Once she saw the first, the rest appeared like stars in the night sky. The growth medium was lousy with them. Fuck.

The blast floated under the microscope, oblivious and uncaring at the putrefaction surrounding it. She knew nucleic acid synthesis, protein turnover and mitochondrial function would all be fine, if they cared to measure it. This small collection of cells would happily go through a few more divisions. But it was dead. Reality just needed some time to catch up with itself.

“Do we know what it is?” asked the two scientists. Simon shrugged.

“Could be Terran, could be Valyon,” Alcock said. “We cultured with common anti-pathologicals, so maybe Valyon but it looks fungal to me.” He added with a sigh, “but truth be told it could be anything.”

For a second, with the blazing fury of an aggrieved parent Bronwen considered harvesting and sequencing the cell medium, so they could track down the microbe responsible. It was a fool’s quest, she knew, as her anger abated to be replaced by grief.

“How many?”

The silence was deafening. Simón looked at the floor.

“How many?”

“All,” it was Alcock again who answered. “We were preparing to split them tomorrow before the implantation.”

The implications of Alcock’s words were just another hit in the horrible series of events that had turned a pleasant afternoon into a nightmare. The in-vitro fertilisation had worked, but the embryos were not going to survive. And this was the easy bit, Bronwen thought to herself, placing a steadying hand on the lab bench. Simón looked close to tears.

“We still have the E3 embryos,” Bronwen announced. “We continue with the implantation as planned.”

“Do you need help?” Alcock asked, looking at Simnn.

“No,” Bronwen sighed, thinking of the checklist of things she needed to do. “No, you should both go home, it’s been a hard day.” In reality, Bronwen wanted to go to her office and cry in peace before she began the long process of thawing the embryos.

Location: Valkyrie Research Station

Date: 41PE

They called it the birthing room, though Bronwen felt the name evoked messy connotations that were at odds with its clinical atmosphere. The lab was mostly underwater and cut off from the greater ocean by a huge carbon fibre net. The monitoring station, where Bronwen sat, was a small semi-circular room built onto the face of an underwater cliff and accessed through a series of tunnels bored through the rock.

From the row of terminals built along the front curve Bronwen looked out through the murky depths of the pool. To her right, all along the cliff-face she could make out oval shadows, floating attached to the rock. The colony fleet had used the technology to fuel a baby boom in the twenties – Bronwen had been only a child when the programme had begun, but some of her younger staff, including Alcock, had been birthed in pods and raised in creches.

This text was taken from Royal Road. Help the author by reading the original version there.

Bronwen didn’t understand the rush, personally, and felt that leaving people to get on with it was the best way of growing the population. The technology had helped give Bronwen her career, and it had been quickly adapted for use in the introduction of mammalian species in the system. She glanced unconsciously at the time as she finished her observations and then, half a second later glanced back. Twenty-Second hour!

How had it gotten so late? Rajesh would be furious; he had been planning this night for weeks. Reservations had been made! Bronwen was trying to think of her excuse this time as she began to hastily throw her terminal and data-cores into a bag. Fear grew like a weed in the pit of her stomach, and something else akin to annoyance. How could she think of dinner when the children needed her?

The terminal pinged a warning with Bronwen’s hand poised over the door. Just a ping, not an alarm, she told herself willing her body to push through the heavy steel doors. Two more pings came in quick succession. She should look at the logs at least, for the next shift.

With a guilty shudder, Bronwen slipped the bag from her should and left it by the door. Four more pings arrived as she took the two steps back to the terminal and by the time she pulled up the window, with mounting horror she saw that all the pods were beginning to throw up errors.

Less than a second later Bronwen stiffened as the harsh alarms called out, in this room, throughout the labs and to the hand terminals of her staff wherever they might be. The warning was simple and meant that, whoever you were and wherever you are return to the lab. It meant that the pods had stopped working and the calves were in distress.

Screens overlaid screens as more errors came through. The shadows in the gloom were wriggling. Her children were dying. Vital data was coming in, the jagged peaks of heart monitors clamouring above each other on her screen as each pod called out in electronic distress, each one insisting their error was most critical.

How could every pod be throwing up an error? Was the water poisoned? Bronwen checked the water quality report and everything was normal. Bronwen scrolled up to the first error logs, but every time she tried to open it, a new error obscured the screen, demanding her attention. She struggled to answer the alarms quick enough. Tachycardia, sepsis. The inflammatory markers were off the charts. Potassium was spiking dangerously the gestational environment of the birth pods.

And still, no one had arrived.

Cytokine storm in all pods, significant distress, she typed into the terminal and sent it to all lab members. Where were the vets? One should always be on staff.

The first flatline appeared on the screen. Pod 54. Then pod 46, Pod 7. Each death was a ratchet cranking up the tension in Bronwen’s heart, making inaction less viable. Sweat was running down her back and she could not wait any longer.

The terminal overlooking the pods by the cliff was dark. It was networked in a partitioned intra-relay and could communicate unidirectionally with the pods. That is, it was the master switch from where Bronwen could manually birth the calves.

A second of hesitation cost the lives of three more calves and Bronwen, with a reckless giddy feeling, typed in her authorisation and executed the birthing programme.

The shadows outside the window began to contract, draining cloudy dark fluid into the surrounding water. It looked disconcertingly like blood, hanging in the water like a black nimbus. At eight months some would die anyway, regardless of whatever coordinated medical emergency could have caused this.

A tail emerged from the sea-end of the nearest pod and Bronwen gasped, her cheeks sticky from tears she only just noticed. It’s spasms gave meaning to the phrase alive and kicking while Bronwen came the closest she ever had to desperate prayer that she wasn’t witnessing the calf’s death throes as it kicked free of the pod.

Bronwen gasped.

The circumstances had not been ideal, and the project was all but dead now but in other circumstances seeing the dark, long thin creature suspended in the water as she took her first bursts of activity in the alien ocean would have been the highpoint of her career. There was a beauty as the blue whale, all but extinct on the Earth and revived now on two planets in the Ionad system, began to explore.

There was a shared empathy between them now, Bronwen felt. The colony ships had travelled trillions of miles across the galaxy, over millions of years, and had stared, as so many other species had, down the barrel of extinction. This was the new human story, but also the story for all the species they had brought with them, encoded digitally until they could be reborn. And as with humans, there was a chance for a new ending.

Legs trembling Bronwen fell to the floor and began to sob. Thin, haunting trembling whale song penetrating the lab through speakers in the wall. Fear paralysed her as the mournful melody continued and she could hear the death in the uniformity of the voices.

In less than ten minutes, Bronwen’s biggest fear had gone from being her husband’s anger at missing dinner to the death of her entire project. There was no coming back, she was certain, and began to think of all the things that would need to be done to restart and hand the marine-mammal terraforming group to new leadership. Her heart ached at the thought.

“I’m sorry,” she sobbed, words half formed. “Sorry, sorry sorry.”

As her breathing returned to normal, her thoughts began to examine the incident more rationally. The pods had all malfunctioned in similar ways at the same time. An environmental cause, the likeliest explanation, could be discounted. As a biologist, Bronwen suspected a biological cause.

“Yabai,” the heavy steel doors slid open with a curse and Bronwen saw Alcock and the vet, Amaya Galesh silhouetted against the bright lights of the hallway. They barely noticed Bronwen sat on the floor, her back against the terminal.

“Holy shit,” Alcock echoed with a breath, staring out through the main viewscreen.

Looking back, Bronwen could see hundreds of dark hulks, floating lifeless in the water. Some twitched, but many of them were still. Bronwen thought this must be what the aftermath of a battle or a massacre must be like. The living were nowhere to be seen, but the whale song continued. Out there, Bronwen realised, some calves had survived.

“Where were you?” Bronwen whispered at Amaya. “Where the fuck were you!” Her voice rose, demanding an answer.

“Er, I…” the vet glanced at Alcock and Bronwen noticed Alcock’s half-tucked shirt. Amaya had lost her bra beneath her clothes. The nervous glances between the pair told Bronwen all she needed to know.

“I can’t fucking believe it,” she screeched with anger. Amaya cringed away from the anger while Alcock stood to one side, aloof. Bronwen felt her hand twitch. She had never thought of herself as an angry person, but the presence of the vet and the technician in the now too small room hissed poisonously in Bronwen’s mind. She had to get out.

The halls were a warren, but Bronwen ran through them, not caring where she went but guided by instinct. More personnel had returned to the lab. Some tried to stop her, concerned but she blew past them, the desire to flee to the surface overwhelming everything else.

In the brightly lit atrium, between the Terran palm trees lining the entrance Bronwen nearly collided with Professor Janero, their senior vet. He was a short, greying man in his sixties, his suit fresh pressed and his balding hair close cropped to his head. Even in the midst of the crisis, Janero exuded a kind of well-presented calm.

“The Calves, we need to get out there,” Bronwen gasped, barely able to breathe. “We need to get out there and find them!”

Location: Valkon, Valya

Date: 42PE

The damage had been horrific. Only three of the calves survived and as time progressed it became clear that whatever had happened had cost more than life. It started when the audiologist noticed the disjointed songs. Attempts to correct the error had no effect and the whale voices remained disjointed. Two females and a male survived, but none was interested in any kind of social interaction with any other.

The injuries on the calves who had succumbed – widespread organ failure, meningeal inflammation, and vascular collapse – were consistent with catastrophic infection. And yet, Bronwen reported to the Deygan Science Councillate, they had yet to identify a pathogen. In months of screening, the water and pods had tested negative for every common or rare family of pathogen they had tested.

That Bronwen was still in post was owed entirely to Professor Janero, who had defended her approach of birthing the calves. That was before the other deficits in the survivors had been noted, and now the project would have to start again and Bronwen was just waiting for the moment she was replaced. The Council were sending a new senior scientist from the successful Deyga project and Bronwen suspected they would also be succeeding her.

But before any work could start, the root cause of the disaster needed to be elucidated.

“As you can see here,” Janero presented the slides to a packed meeting room. “The samples taken post-mortem indicate a catastrophic cytokine storm.”

“Do we know the cause?” Bronwen asked, interrupting the talk. Janero, breaking his flow turned back to answer.

“No, but, we know it was Terran and bacterial.” The professor moved the slides on with a swipe of his hand. “We found the presence of Lipopolysaccharide on average two milligrams per kilo.” Audible gasps could be heard in the room followed by murmurs of conversation.

“Is that a big dose?” Simon asked.

“It represents an incredibly potent infection,” Janero concluded.

“We assayed samples for gram-negative bacteria,” Bronwen pointed out. Janero shrugged.

“I’m no microbiologist,” the Vet replied. “But my working theory is that whatever caused the infection could not survive long in the water and died quickly.”

“We have sensors monitoring the calves, no way we wouldn’t have known about such a large infection,” Bronwen pointed out.

“The sensors rely on pH,” Alcock said. He had been cowed since the night of the disaster. Bronwen had wanted him gone as well as Amaya, but it could not be proven that Alcock himself had been negligent. “It’s possible that the pathogen might be anaerobic and not result in the characteristic lowering of pH.”

Professor Janero continued his presentation, but Bronwen’s mind was whirling with possibilities.

Location: Valkon, Valya

Date: 42PE

It was late, twenty-third hour, and the city outside Bronwen’s office had grown, even in the past year. The residential towers had gone up and now twinkled with orange lights. Valkyrie Base was still the only settlement on the planet, but already it was beginning to look like some of the smaller towns on Deyga. With open colonisation a year away, that trend was only likely to continue.

The buzz of the terminal interrupted Bronwen’s idle thoughts of the city. She turned to examine the data. It was something Alcock had said about the bacterial species that allowed Bronwen to narrow down the list of suspects.

Lipopolysaccharide was only produced by a specific set of bacterial species. It had to have been anaerobic to avoid triggering the sensors and it must be a particularly deadly infection to whales. In the space of one meeting, Bronwen had gone from hundreds of thousands of bacterial families to seven and the results were in.

The graph that came up on the screen was blank.

Frustrated, unable to believe that all the samples had been negative for everything, she reloaded the file and checked the names. It was true. The samples were negative for all seven of the families tested.

Bronwen let out a sigh and thought about going home. Instead she sent Rajesh a message telling him she would be sleeping at the lab tonight and pulled up the reagent records. If she was going to stay, she reasoned she should do something productive with the time and see what needed ordering.

She transferred the notices of low stocks to the central store when a word jumped out. She had read it millions of times in her career, but it had taken on new significance and demanded her attention.

Simon Neubuch had requested a new stock of Lipopolysaccharide.

“Can you tell me,” Bronwen said to the sweating post-doctoral researcher sat opposite in the labs meeting room, “for what you might use Lipopolysaccharide.”

“Er-“

“Please, speak into the microphone.” That was Doctor Southern, sat to Bronwen’s right. He was the fatherly-looking middle-aged man they had sent from Deyga. Simon swallowed and his skin paled to the colour of ash. Bronwen had seen the look before on the day his IVF had been contaminated.

“Er,” the young man leaned forward to speak into the recorder in the middle of the table. “We use it for all kinds of cell-culture work. We can use it to model immune responses to… er… to bacteria and things.”

“For the record, Professor Janero,” The vet was sat to Bronwen’s left, “What, in your professional opinion killed the Whale calves last month.”

“It was a catastrophic immune response consistent with bacterial infection as characterised by the presence of LPS in blood of the calves.” Janero concluded sternly.

“Now, Dr Neubuch,” Bronwen continued. “Would you be able to tell me why you need to replenish your stock of lipopolysaccharide?”

“I- I was running low,” Simon said unconvincingly, his voice quick.

“This is a terraforming lab, correct?” Southern asked decisively. Of course their line of questioning had been decided upon beforehand and all that was needed was for Simon to confess before they handed everything over to the colony authorities. “How often do you perform immune system modelling?”

“V-ery rarely,” the young man let out a nervous burp. Janero ignored it, while Southern’s brow wrinkled. “B-but my stock was running low, so I ordered new one.” Simon had started to cry as he spoke. “Alcock said he needed it, it’s cheap so I let him use mine!”

The three investigators exchanged a look. Simon was looking desperate.

“He said it was for the Valyon-Terran interaction study.” Silence filled the room and Simon’s hand dove into his pockets. “I wrote it down in my lab notes,” he frantically waved his hand terminal at the senior scientists.

In the end, Alcock decided he would rather not go quietly. Simon’s confession had started a trail that had led directly to the technician. His time in the anti-Terraforming group, Nogaia was uncovered, that he had mixed LPS with the growth hormones to provoke a huge immune response in the calves. Bronwen even suspected he had cultivated a relationship with Amaya in order to delay treatment.

Instead, Alcock took to his hand terminal and began broadcasting on the relay from the roof of the centre while the media covered the story and directed viewers to his diatribe. Bronwen refused to watch the broadcast, her career had been long and she knew the arguments against terraforming well. She saw it as a chance to extend the right of humans to live and survive to the other creatures of the Earth. They saw it as ecological desecration.

The incident had ripped a hole right through the lab and filled the void with an atmosphere of suspicion and recrimination. However, Alcock, it seemed, had worked alone. Any aid he had received was procured without the knowledge of those he tricked. All the same, Bronwen accepted Simon’s resignation and wrote him a glowing recommendation for a job on Deyga.

As to her own position, Bronwen considered it carefully. She had presided over an infiltration into her research program, which had resulted in the deaths of a hundred whale calves. The financial implications were astronomical, although no one seemed to know how to calculate the cost. After the investigation had cleared her of negligence, Bronwen had decided to tender her resignation. Doctor Southern, on behalf of the Council of Sciences, rejected that resignation. Now was not the time for a change of leadership, she had said.

Location: Valkon, Valya

Date: 62PE

And so Bronwen Patel stood on the floating platform, watching pods of juvenile wales follow their mechanical mother through the enclosure. A decade passed, then two, as the process of raising the whales became more refined and the mechanical mother was replaced by the first generation of viable adults. Her proudest moment came when they opened the enclosure and she could watch her children begin their own journey

Rajesh had left, not long after she decided to stay to lead the project. Councillate Director’s came and went. Le Pham was replaced by an older, more experienced director – one of Gudmunder Singh’s proteges only to be replaced again by a dynamic young leader who promised the stars, failed to deliver and was shot down by the Deimos scandal that had also claimed the career of Doctor Southern.

Valkyrie Base too, grew and changed, growing around the lab and extending across the bay. Colonisation had brought more people, which brought tension and government and human messiness. Valkon was now a sprawling metropolis, if not quite the size of Nupolis and a small drop in the ocean compared to the megacities of old Earth. The biggest change for Bronwen had been when the Valyon Councillate gained oversight of the project.

By then, the first bodies had begun to wash up onshore all over the planet. They had been bruised, broken, and cut, meeting violent ends in the depths of the ocean. Such torture, it had been, to bring them into this new world and such torture it had been to see them meet this fate. It was in that same ocean that Bronwen now dipped her toes, listening to the soft rise and fall of the sea’s breathing. Down there in the depths was as desperate a struggle for survival that had ever been seen on Earth.

It was a strange repetition of history, Bronwen supposed watching the white tails of departing ships from the beach by the viewing platform, that humans now lived, in various forms of legality, on most of the bodies in the Ionad super system but they still could not say what lay in the deepest recesses of the oceans on Valya. With a shudder she felt the cold waves nibble at her feet and wondered if, her children were somehow still there, singing their mournful tune.