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Personal Journal of Lieutenant Jean-Baptiste Chevalier de Lisieux
Saturday, 24 July 2297
We arrived at Aurore in the early morning, although “morning” is a word that has since lost much of its meaning.
The Jean Bart emerged from stutterwarp and began the long manoeuvre into the system. Next was Laetitia appearing at our door and announcing that we absolutely had to see Tithonus.
Tithonus was difficult to miss.
The brown dwarf filled much of the viewing gallery’s forward display, a vast striped furnace of ochre, crimson and near-black. It was not truly red, Laetitia informed us. Most of its radiation was infrared and therefore invisible to the human eye.
She's quite the know-it-all. Useful at times, insufferable at others, but mostly just plain boring.
Aurore was there too, although it took me a moment to notice it. Our new world appeared small beside the swollen bulk of Tithonus, a blue-white and greenish marble caught in the giant’s embrace.
Beyond them shone Eta Bötes, or Notre Soleil as the locals call it, brighter than Sol but so distant that its light lacked the familiar force of an earthly day. Rubis, the system’s red dwarf companion, was visible only as a hard red spark until the display enlarged it for the passengers.
Two suns, five giant planets, the second of which is a brown dwarf large enough to make a world look like a moon.
“It is a moon,” Laetitia reminded me.
“A nearly Earth-sized moon.”
“That does not prevent it from being a moon, not a planet.”
She then began a lengthy monologue about what makes a planet a planet and not a moon. I did not pay her any attention.
The Jean Bart could not approach directly. Tithonus possessed a magnetic field appropriate to its grotesque size, and Captain Deschamps was apparently unwilling to test whether a luxury liner could be magnetized from end to end without inconveniencing its passengers. We therefore followed a circuitous path, avoiding the worst regions before settling into a station-keeping orbit over Aurore’s cold pole.
There were worse ways to spend the time.
The ship had been designed to show its passengers the worlds they visited, and Aurore rewarded the effort.
The cold pole was a white immensity, colder than Antarctica and surrounded by a dark ocean. Storm systems coiled above the water in bands hundreds of kilometres long. The cloud tops glowed pale beneath Notre Soleil and red beneath Tithonus, with lightning flickering inside them like artillery seen through smoke.
Laetitia continued her monologue, explaining that Aurore was tidally locked to Tithonus. One side always faced the giant. The centre of that hemisphere—the so-called hot pole, though it was not a geographical pole at all—was a baked highland where few human beings had reason to go. The opposite face was the cold pole below us. Between them lay the temperate regions where people could live with remarkably little assistance.
François watched the storms.
“How little assistance?”
“The atmosphere is breathable from sea level until it becomes too thin at around five thousand five hundred meters.”
“Doesn't sound too bad..”
“There are earthquakes,” she admitted. “And tidal surges. And severe storms in some regions.”
“How severe?”
“Apocalyptic.”
François nodded as if this confirmed something he had always suspected about "habitable" planets: They were positively lethal and just waiting to kill you, but they were more sneaky about it than most worlds.
Our shuttle departed several hours later. Most of the passengers were colonists, commercial travellers, or returning officials bound for one of Aurore’s three principal settlements. We were the only new legionnaires aboard. This seemed a poor reception for the future of French arms, but I accepted that the timing of interstellar transport cannot always be adjusted to provide an honour guard.
I watched the Jean Bart recede through the shuttle window.
For three weeks, the ship had been our entire world. It had carried us through four systems and several kinds of trouble, not all of which could reasonably be blamed upon me. Now it dwindled into a silver spindle with its two rings turning silently around it.
There was no ceremony to mark the end of our voyage. No band played. No one fired a salute. The shuttle simply descended, and the Jean Bart became another bright point above us.
Laetitia sat beside the window, speaking almost without pause as we crossed the cold pole. I believe she had slept at some point since the previous evening, but I cannot prove it.
The ice below us was not smooth. Mountain ridges rose through it like the spines of buried animals. Near the edge of the ice sheet, the glaciers fractured into long blue chasms before reaching the polar ocean. The water was almost black beneath the cloud cover, streaked by pale bands of foam. There were no towns along the shore and no ships upon the waters.
The tides could be extreme, Laetitia explained. Aurore wobbled slightly in Tithonus’s grasp, and the giant answered by pulling at its oceans. The polar sea was shallow in many places. Under the wrong conditions, kilometres of coastline might be drowned and uncovered within a single tidal cycle.
“Which is why no one builds there,” François said, sounding hopeful.
“Yes.”
“Good.”
We left Aurore’s true north pole behind and continued towards the French colony.
The change came gradually at first. White gave way to grey stone and tundra, then to broad sweeps of low blue-green vegetation. Rivers twisted through the land in silver threads. Forests appeared, though their colours were wrong: deep teal, pale turquoise, and a blue so dark that it seemed almost black beneath the reddish light.
From orbit, Aurore had looked beautiful in the abstract manner of all living worlds. From the shuttle, it became impossible to mistake it for anything but a garden.
It was not an iceball with one tolerable valley. It was not a desert made habitable by domes. Life covered it wherever cold, heat and altitude permitted. Forests climbed the hills. Great mats of vegetation spread across wetlands and river valleys. Something moved in herds on an open plain below us, though at that distance I could not say whether the creatures possessed two legs, four or some unreasonable number in between.
Laetitia pressed closer to the window.
I graciously moved aside before she climbed across me.
“The dominant photosynthetic pigments are adapted to the combined spectrum of Notre Soleil and Tithonus,” she said. “Though ‘photosynthetic’ is an approximation in several major clades. Some xenobotanists argue that—”
François closed his eyes, a pained expression on his face.
“You asked her to sit with us,” he mumbled.
The native wilderness continued for hundreds of kilometres. Then, almost without warning, it ended.
Straight lines appeared.
Fields divided the land into enormous rectangles and curves. Roads crossed them. Reservoirs shone between farm complexes, and settlements clustered around junctions and rivers. The vegetation below became greener and more familiar. Wheat, maize, potatoes, orchards and pasture had replaced the native blue-green growth over vast areas.
It was France seen through alien light.
Not old France, certainly. The villages lacked church spires, the farmhouses were built from composites, and Tithonus occupied far too much of the sky. Yet human beings had taken this strange soil and made it yield familiar crops. Cattle grazed beneath a brown dwarf. Vineyards followed the sunward slopes.
For the first time since leaving Beta Canum, I understood that Aurore was not merely where we had been sent.
It was a place where people lived.
Port Loubet appeared beneath us as a scattering of buildings, then expanded until it seemed to cover the horizon. Nearly two million people lived there, though no single centre contained them. The city sprawled across the lowlands in broad districts separated by transport corridors, parks, canals and older agricultural land that development had surrounded without entirely consuming.
Most buildings were low. The colony had learned early that height was an uncertain investment on a world that regularly shook itself. Newer towers rose in a few districts, built with foundations and active bracing that Laetitia would no doubt have described in detail had the descent not finally forced her to remain quiet.
The spaceport lay uncomfortably close to the city. It had been placed there when Port Loubet was a frontier settlement and no one had imagined that it would grow around the landing fields. Our shuttle passed over warehouses, fuel installations and rows of buried blast barriers before wheels touched the ground.
The hatch opened.
The first air I breathed on Aurore was warm, damp and smelled faintly of wet stone, vegetation and something metallic I could not identify. It was perfectly breathable and yet subtly wrong. The lower gravity was more immediately agreeable, close enough to the Jean Bart's simulated spin gravity to feel familiar.
François descended behind me, carrying twice as much.
Laetitia emerged last and stopped beneath the open sky.
Tithonus hung on the horizon.
Only its upper curve was visible from Port Loubet, but that curve stretched impossibly far, striped and luminous through a veil of high cloud. It did not look like a world in the sky. It looked like the edge of another universe rising beyond our own.
Rubis was also visible as a red star, while Notre Soleil cast a muted golden light through the haze. Between them and the glow of Tithonus, there seemed to be no direction one could look without finding some reminder that Earth was very far away.
A ground crew unloaded our cases. Families reunited. Tourists and officials were collected by drivers holding tablets with their names. The three of us remained beside our luggage until an eight-wheeled armoured personnel carrier rolled across the apron and stopped in front of us.
A legionnaire climbed out.
He was broad, compact and perhaps forty, with close-cropped greying hair and the expression of a man who had been sent to collect three parcels and found that one of them had brought a sword.
“Sergent Mirek Nowak,” he said. “Camp Danjou.”
“Lieutenant Jean-Baptiste Chevalier de Lisieux.”
His eyes rested briefly upon me.
“I know.”
“This is Aspirant Cassart and Légionnaire Blanc.”
“Of course.”
Nowak opened the rear hatch and indicated the vehicle’s interior.
“Bags inside. People after.”
“Do we have far to travel, Chef?”
He looked at the stripes on his sleeve, then at me.
“Less than an hour, Lieutenant.”
We left the spaceport through industrial districts and the outskirts of Port Loubet. The city seemed both dense and strangely open, its low buildings extending for kilometre after kilometre. Older neighbourhoods had narrow streets and shaded courtyards. Newer ones were arranged around transport hubs and broad avenues built to accommodate military vehicles much larger than ours.
Nowak drove as if all civilian traffic had been placed there to test his patience.
He offered no formal commentary, but proved responsive to direct questions.
The large structure to the south was a fusion plant. The ridge beyond it had once been a native forest and was now a military communications site. The canal carried water from reservoirs in the interior.
Beyond the city the land opened into farms and villages. Terran vegetation dominated close to Port Loubet, but native life persisted in uncultivated gullies and along distant hills. Blue-black mushroom trees stood beyond fields of green grain. Strange crab-like creatures crawled across the road.
Camp Danjou appeared without ceremony.
There was no grand gate facing a parade ground. The camp had grown outward over half a century until its perimeter encountered roads, civilian districts and its own satellite facilities. Security barriers, vehicle entrances and clusters of buildings stretched across a considerable area.
Some structures were new and sleek, with smart surfaces that changed shade beneath the shifting light. Others were prefabricated boxes which had plainly arrived with the first colonists and then resisted every attempt to replace them. Between them stood a scattering of verandas, arches and pale façades from an era when some commander had decided that a proper colonial garrison ought to look romantic.
Camp Danjou managed to be crowded and spread out at the same time.
Nowak delivered us to the reception building, where a tall, lean man with a weathered face was waiting.
“Adjudant-chef Rolf Eberhardt,” he said. “Welcome to Aurore.”
At last, a proper reception.
“Thank you, Adjudant.”
“You have spent three weeks on a passenger liner.”
“That is correct.”
“You will want to stretch your legs.”
I should have recognized the danger.
Eberhardt looked at our luggage, then at the three of us.
“Leave that. Sergent Nowak will see to it.”
Nowak’s expression suggested this was the first he had heard of the arrangement.
Eberhardt pointed across the camp.
“I will show you around.”
He began to run.
François followed him without comment. Laetitia stared after them.
I drew a deep breath of Aurore’s warm, unfamiliar air and set off in pursuit.
Glory, after all, rarely waits beside the baggage.