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Personal Journal of Lieutenant Jean-Baptiste Chevalier de Lisieux
Tuesday, 10 August–Saturday, 28 August 2297
I was ordered to appear before Colonel Mathieu Delaunay during our eighth local day.
François accompanied me, as he now did almost everywhere. On the surface, this was partly because he had been assigned as my adjutant. But in reality, I suspect it was because he did not trust me to attend a meeting with a senior officer without becoming involved in something.
I brushed off his concerns at the time, but in hindsight, his vision was somewhat prophetic.
Colonel Delaunay commanded the 13e Demi-Brigade and had done so for the past decade or so. During his tenure, the Legion's involvement on Aurore had gone from a single battalion of light infantry to a composite force easily worthy of the name demi-brigade.
His office was located on the upper floor of the headquarters building. It contained maps of France and its colonies, including Aurore, unit insignia from several regiments, and framed photographs, including one of a much younger Delaunay standing among a class of academy cadets.
He rose when I entered.
For several seconds, he said nothing.
Then he grinned.
“Mon Dieu!” he exclaimed. “You truly are Henri’s boy.”
There are moments when resemblance becomes a burden.
I have been told throughout my life that I resemble my father (a resemblance shared with my oldest brother, but not the middle two, who take after Mother). Occasionally, it is meant as praise. Sometimes it is intended to imply that the original was superior.
This time it was clearly the former.
“You knew my father, Colonel?”
“Knew him? We were at the academy together!”
He crossed the room and clasped my hand in both of his.
“Colonel Mathieu Delaunay. Though I suppose you know that. Look at you.”
He stepped back and examined me with open satisfaction.
“The same eyes. The same chin. You sound like him, too.”
“My mother has said so on a number of occasions.”
“Your mother was always a sensible woman.”
He asked about my brothers and sisters and how the family fared under 'the new management' as he called it.
He spoke at length about my father.
“He was a fine officer,” Delaunay said at last.
“Yes, Colonel.”
“And you have done well yourself. The Somme. Colonial service. Commendations.”
“I have attempted to honour his example.”
“Of course you have.”
Captain Lukas Brenner stood near the wall throughout this reunion, holding a tablet and waiting with the patience of a man accustomed to his colonel’s memories. He was Delaunay’s operations officer, a fair-haired Bavarian with a face made severe by old burn scars along one temple.
When Delaunay paused, Brenner spoke.
“You were at the Somme?”
“Yes, Captain.”
“With the 6e Cuirassiers?”
“For the final phase.”
His interest had nothing to do with my father.
We spent the next twenty minutes discussing German and French combat walkers, the failure of several doctrinal assumptions, and the dangers of deploying machines designed for open manoeuvre into churned ground under persistent artillery observation.
Brenner had studied the battle extensively. I had lived through part of it. Between us, we arrived at several conclusions which would have displeased both French and German official historians. Our walkers had been outdated, poorly employed, and weakly supported. And, for the most part, our units had lacked the elan our opponents were clearly filled with.
Delaunay watched with visible satisfaction, as though my ability to discuss military subjects had also been inherited from his academy friend.
When our discussion turned to detailing the shortcomings of the French Army, especially a lack of fighting spirit, Delaunay's brow furrowed, and he declared the meeting over.
“We'll get you a platoon, Son. A young officer ought to have troops,” he said. “Staff work teaches a man how to move paper and how to drink. A platoon teaches him everything else.”
The prolonged acclimatization gradually became ordinary life. We learned to sleep beneath reddish light and wake by the clock. The taste of the air ceased to seem strange unless we entered a filtered building. Lower gravity stopped feeling like freedom and became normalized. Earthquakes remained frequent. Most were small. Camp Danjou ignored them unless alarms sounded.
The weather was less easily ignored. Storms could sweep across the region with astonishing speed, driven by the exchange of heat between Aurore’s hot and cold hemispheres. One hour the sky would be clear beneath the vast curve of Tithonus. The next, clouds rolled over the horizon like smoke from a burning city.
Capitaine Anaïs Mercier invited me to visit her parents during one of our personal cycles. Blanc tagged along, maybe hoping for free booze.
Mercier commanded 3rd Company. She was Aurore-born and bred, practical and direct, with the easy authority of someone who knew both her soldiers and the world upon which they served.
The journey took us beyond the outer districts of Port Loubet and through a succession of villages and agricultural settlements. The metropolis thinned quickly once we left its transport corridors. Low residential districts gave way to workshops, storage facilities, and fields. Beyond them lay communities of a few hundred or a few thousand people, surrounded by farms that stretched towards the blue-black hills.
Port Loubet and Lumière were the colony’s only true cities. Most of French Aurore was rural.
The roads were excellent close to town, then became increasingly less so the further we went. Bridges crossed gullies carved by seasonal floods. Sensor masts stood beside fields to warn of storms and seismic activity. Farm vehicles moved between green crops under a sky stained faintly red.
Everywhere, native life waited beyond the cultivated land. Tall, jointed growths clustered along streams. Sheets of blue-green vegetation covered uncultivated slopes. Once we passed a grove of dark trunks topped by wide translucent fans which turned slowly towards the light.
The Renaud farm occupied a broad valley sheltered from the worst winds. Marcel and Odette Renaud had arrived on Aurore in the 2250s, when Port Loubet had been a town and Camp Danjou still possessed empty land around it.
Marcel was lean and sun-darkened, with white hair and hands shaped by decades of work. Odette was smaller, energetic and capable of asking three questions before one had answered the first.
They received us as if we had travelled from France specifically to dine at their table.
Odette wanted to know about current politics, fashions, food prices, the condition of Marseille, and whether people on Earth still believed colonists spent their lives inside pressure domes.
Marcel wanted to discuss wine.
Their vineyard occupied a south-facing slope where Notre Soleil provided the best available light. Sensors adjusted irrigation and nutrient delivery while low walls protected the vines from the wind. The grapes were Terran, though several generations of cultivation on Aurore had changed them.
“They ripen slowly,” Marcel said. “Long day, weak light. Different soil. Different stress.”
He produced a bottle from a small cellar built into the hillside. The wine was dark, dry, and carried a mineral taste I could not place. It was not one of the great wines of France.
It was, however, unmistakably wine.
Beneath Tithonus, that seemed achievement enough.
The Renauds also distilled an apple spirit from orchards farther down the valley. Marcel objected to calling it calvados because Aurore was not Normandy. Odette called it calvados because explaining the distinction to visitors wasted time.
We ate outside beneath a covered veranda while the long day faded from muted gold to red. The farm lights came on, though the sky never became dark. Tithonus remained above the hills, immense and motionless. Native creatures called to one another beyond the fields with sounds like distant glass chimes.
Odette served bread baked that morning, cheese from their own livestock, vegetables from the valley, and meat which she assured us came from an entirely ordinary Terran animal.
Mercier spoke of growing up there. Earth was a place in books and family stories. France was real to her, but distant. Aurore was the ground beneath her feet, the weather she understood, and the fixed giant by which she unconsciously judged direction.
Her parents had transformed alien land into a French farm. Their daughter had been born beneath an alien sky and joined the Legion to defend it.
I began to understand Aurore.
It was not an imitation of Earth. Nor was it a temporary colony waiting to become something else.
It was a human world.
On our return to Camp Danjou, François carried two bottles of wine and a case of Odette’s not-calvados.
A local week later, Colonel Delaunay summoned me again.
This time Laetitia was already in his office.
She stood beside Captain Brenner near the central display, wearing the intent expression she normally reserved for xenological puzzles and opportunities to correct me. François and I entered together.
Delaunay indicated the empty chairs.
“I have a special assignment under consideration,” he said. “Would you be interested?”
“Yes, Colonel.”
François exhaled quietly through his nose.
Delaunay smiled.
“You do not want to know what it is?”
“I assume you would not have summoned me if it were unimportant.”
“Quite right.”
I noticed Laetitia attempting not to smile.
“And Aspirant Cassart is already involved?”
“She is.”
“Then I am certainly interested.”
François looked from Laetitia to me.
“I suppose I’m interested too,” he said.
“You are attached to Lieutenant de Lisieux,” Brenner said. “If he goes, you go.”
“That was what I was afraid of.”
The room darkened.
Brenner activated the central display, and a field of stars appeared above the table. One brightened and expanded into a diagram of the Arcturus system.
“Station Arcture orbits Arcturus B,” he said. “The companion of the primary giant. Its principal purpose is stutterwarp discharge, stellar observation, and support for vessels going beyond the French Arm.”
I knew the station by reputation. Anyone travelling between the arms knew it. Arcturus itself was unsuitable for safe discharge, so traffic used the smaller companion and Station Arcture’s facilities.
Brenner changed the image.
The first picture showed little more than darkness and sensor noise. A pale, indistinct shape occupied the centre.
The second had been enlarged and processed. It was not much clearer.
Something bulky hung against the stars. Its outline was distinctly ship-like, with a broad central mass and structures extending from it at angles that suggested drive vanes, habitation rings, and other familiar features. Scale markers surrounded it, each accompanied by a distressingly wide margin of error.
Laetitia leaned towards the image.
“When was this taken?” I asked.
“2295,” Brenner said. “The contact was recorded by secondary sensors aboard Station Arcture. The main array was occupied with traffic control and did not acquire the target.”
“Why not?”
“The vessel appeared briefly, beyond the normal traffic lanes. By the time the operators redirected the primary sensors, it was gone.”
“Stutterwarp?”
“Indeed. A drive signature was registered, but again, the level of detail is poor.”
The image changed again. Different analysts had drawn competing outlines around the blurred mass.
“How large?”
“Estimates vary,” Brenner continued. “Signal quality was poor. Range was uncertain. Best guess is at least cruiser-sized.”
Brenner paused.
“Possibly larger.”
Laetitia did not take her eyes from the display.
“Human?” I asked.
“No recognized design,” she said. "Though the drive signature somewhat resembles that of the newest German battlecruisers.
Brenner enlarged one section of the image.
Somewhere in those blurred pixels was an object large enough to challenge a cruiser, moving through a human star system without identification.
“Nothing else was recorded?” François asked.
“Nothing conclusive,” Brenner said. “There were irregular sensor returns during the following months. None could be confirmed.”
Colonel Delaunay folded his hands upon the table.
“Contact with Station Arcture has now been lost.”
The room became very quiet.
“For how long?” I asked.
“Classified. Long enough to rule out ordinary communications failure.”
“The Suffren,” Laetitia said.
Delaunay nodded.
That was why the ship had been diverted.
We had been reassigned at the last moment because the vessel meant to carry us to Aurore had been called elsewhere. Our luggage had travelled without us. We had boarded the Jean Bart, crossed four systems, and become entangled in events aboard her because Station Arcture had fallen silent.
The consequences had reached us before we knew the cause.
“A mission is being assembled,” Delaunay said. “Its orders are to proceed to Arcturus B, restore contact with the station, and determine what has happened.”
“Who's mission?” François asked.
Delaunay looked glum.
“Navy, of course. It's their ships, and they have marines with zero-gee training.”
Delaunay looked at Laetitia, then at me.
“I have, however, arranged to have my own people aboard. Aspirant Cassart has the academic background to assist with anything connected to the unidentified vessel. You have combat experience, Lieutenant, and a certain ability to involve yourself in unexpected situations.”
I accepted the compliment.
François apparently interpreted it differently.
“You would travel as observers and specialists,” Delaunay continued. “You would report directly to this headquarters upon your return.”
The image remained suspended above the table.
Grainy. Indistinct.
Delaunay looked at me.
“You volunteered before seeing this. Do you still want the assignment?”
My father had crossed half the world to fight in Central Asia. My brothers had remained in France to serve the family in safer and more respectable ways. I had come to Aurore because I refused to spend my life arriving after history had already happened.
Now something waited at Arcturus.
“Yes, Colonel,” I said. “I do.”
Laetitia nodded as though confirming a result she had already calculated.
François looked once more at the blurred vessel.
“I'm in,” he said after a brief pause.
The image was poor, the estimates contradictory, and its origin unknown.
Only on one point there appeared to be agreement:
Whatever had come to Arcturus was very large indeed.