The Terraformers

by Annalee Newitz

Genres: Hard Science Fiction; Space Exploration

Synopsis

From science fiction visionary Annalee Newitz comes The Terraformers, a sweeping, uplifting, and illuminating exploration of the future.

Destry's life is dedicated to terraforming Sask-E. As part of the Environmental Rescue Team, she cares for the planet and its burgeoning eco-systems as her parents and their parents did before her.

But the bright, clean future they're building comes under threat when Destry discovers a city full of people that shouldn't exist, hidden inside a massive volcano.

As she uncovers more about their past, Destry begins to question the mission she's devoted her life to, and must make a choice that will reverberate through Sask-E's future for generations to come.

A science fiction epic for our times and a love letter to our future, The Terraformers will take you on a journey spanning thousands of years and exploring the triumphs, strife, and hope that find us wherever we make our home.


'The Terraformers is so engaging, you could almost miss the pyrotechnic worldbuilding and bone-deep intelligence. Newitz continues doing some of the best work in the field' James S. A. Corey



'A complete reimagining of the great galactic story of terraformers. Startling fun!' Kim Stanley Robinson


'Newitz always sees to the heart of complex systems and breaks them down with poetic ferocity' N. K. Jemisin


Also by Annalee Newitz
Autonomous
The Future of Another Timeline

Release date: January 31, 2023

Publisher: Tom Doherty Associates

Print pages: 304

Sample

1

PLEISTOCENE FETISHIST

When in doubt, don’t kill anyone.
—Environmental Rescue Team Handbook

 

Destry could smell the smoke long before she saw its improbable source. There was some kind of person—possibly Homo sapiens—tending a fire at the edge of the boreal forest. She squinted, trying to make out details from half a klick away. The person’s skin was so pale she guessed it had hardly met real sunlight, which meant they were definitely not a stray worker from one of the construction camps. When the intruder crouched next to the flames, she caught a glimpse of red beard merging into a tangle of hair. In their hands, a hare was speared and cooking on an expensive alloy spit. The sight was horrifying, and Destry flinched back reflexively.

“Let’s stop,” she whispered to her mount, a thick-barreled moose with red-brown fur and a crown of antlers spreading from his forehead like a pair of massive, cupped hands. He flicked an ear in acknowledgement as she slid off his back and into his long shadow. Sinking down on one knee, Destry pressed her bare fingers into the soil, spreading them wide, establishing a high-bandwidth connection with the local ecosystem.

Thousands of sensors welcomed her into the planet’s network, their collective perceptions knitting together from shards of cached memory, fragments of recorded sensation and perception. In this state, she too was a sensor, processing data through her eyes, nose, tongue, skin, and ears. What she perceived she shared with the ecosystem. She could feel the sensors collaboratively reviewing the scene from her perspective, learning that she wanted to know more about the mammal at the edge of the forest. It was like her body had become the land. Her awareness stretched forward, racing through root systems and over insects, tasting acid levels in the soil. The person’s feet on the ground registered as pressure on her back, and she smelled redox reactions in the fire. Each sensor’s evaluation joined the swelling chorus in her ears as the tiny machines voted on what their data points might mean: polymer, hair, carnivore, unprocessed excrement, dead trees, carbon cycle perturbation, predator, metal, fur, synthetic microbiome. As Destry’s data surged across the field and into the forest, the sensors could see what she did, and their analysis coalesced into a strong probability: Homo sapiens in the region for eight days, causally linked to tree loss, small mammal loss, excrement buildup, complex toxins.

But there was no data emanating from the person, save for a persistent encrypted stream aimed at an orbital satellite. Out here in the bush, she didn’t have the tools to analyze it. All she had were implants that made sensors recognize her as one of their own. She was the only ranger built this way; all her colleagues back home had to use bulky access devices if they wanted to ask a flower about its nitrogen uptake.

Disconnecting from the ecosystem, Destry unfolded her muscular frame and ambled into talking range with the intruder. Her cropped gray-black hair was matted with sweat, and a trickle found its way through the road dust on her cheek, revealing a streak of deeply tanned skin. Wind pricked a few tears from her blue eyes. She kept her hands visible. Basic protocol in the Environmental Rescue Team was to approach in peace, no weapons drawn, aiming to help.

“Hey stranger!” she called after a few minutes. “I’m ERT Ranger Destry Thomas! D’you know you’re on unoccupied land?”

The person looked up, their flat, blank face twitching into an awkward grin. Definitely Homo sapiens. They stood, technical jumper gleaming dull gray in the late afternoon sun. Now that she was closer, Destry could see a small cabin tucked into the trees, next to a collapsible trellis where a few pelts were stretched. Mink, hare, beaver. A flicker of outrage licked the inside of her ribs, but she kept it in check. No point in getting flustered.

“Who are you? What are you doing on this land?”

The person’s mouth worked as if they hadn’t spoken for a while. “G-good evening, ERT Ranger Destry Thomas. Don’t think I’ve ever seen Environmental Rescue on a private planet.”

Destry ignored his comment and ran her hands through the waist-high grass, connecting to the sensors that dusted each blade. Whatever was happening inside the person’s encrypted stream, it was getting thicker. Data poured down furiously and shot back up again.

She stopped a couple of meters away from the fire. “What’s your name, stranger?” One hand was free, and the other settled lightly on her holstered gun, slung low over her right hip.

“Name’s Charter. I’m not looking for trouble, Ranger. I’m here to experience the Pleistocene. It’s the purest environment for mankind.”

She groaned to herself. Charter was the default male name for Homo sapiens remotes. No wonder he was regurgitating that fat data stream. Somebody was controlling him from offworld, probably thousands of light-years away, using this proxy body to get their jollies in the ecosystem she’d sworn to protect. Out there, in the volume of galactic space claimed by the League, some people believed you weren’t really human unless you’d experienced a Pleistocene environment on an Earthlike world. Hence the lure of her planet, Sask-E, whose fragrant forests some distant asswipe was currently smudging with uncontrolled carbon waste.

“All right, Charter. I’m not sure who you are or how you got here, but this is unoccupied land. It’s not your habitat.”

“Verdance is going to start selling it pretty soon. No harm done.” Charter was starting to sound whiny, hinting at the personality of whoever controlled him.

“You need to biodegrade everything in this camp and get off this land right now.”

“This ecosystem is my birthright.” Charter planted his feet firmly next to the fire. He still held the spit with the hare’s skinned, burned body in one hand. “It’s the origin of all mankind, and everything we do now is shaped by it.”

A cool arctic wind threaded through the forest, and fir tree branches gestured wildly overhead. But Destry felt sweaty, inside and out; she ran an arm across her forehead, smearing the dust on her face into a thin, gritty mud. Walking closer, she gave up the pretense of talking to Charter as if he were alive. Now she looked into the wide purple eyes of the expensive biotech toy and addressed the distant person controlling him. “Listen. You haven’t identified yourself, and I don’t know where you are coming from. But you put this remote here, and you damaged the forest. You’re trespassing. You killed animals, which is a crime. You need to pack up your remote right now and get off Sask-E before I report you to Verdance.”

She hoped the threat was enough. Charter’s controller could be sued for what he’d done. The only thing preventing her from reporting him right now was the fact that she liked talking to Verdance security about as much as they liked dealing with unripe real estate. Sask-E was supposed to terraform itself for another thousand years before anyone had to worry about its existence.

Charter yanked some flesh off the hare and put it between his teeth, chewing awkwardly. “You know that man evolved to eat meat, don’t you?”

It would have been hilarious to hear a completely fabricated Homo sapiens remote taunting her like that if it hadn’t been so nauseating to watch. “I’ll ask you again to move along. This planet is still under construction, and hunting could destabilize the local food web.”

Charter shrugged. “Don’t be dramatic. Why don’t you and that mount leave me to enjoy my dinner?” He made the question sound like a command, as if he was used to ordering a lot of mute servants around. Destry frowned. How had he found this star system, anyway? Planets under development weren’t listed on public maps, and there was no way he stumbled on it by chance. His controller must have access to Verdance’s real estate databases, which would make him some kind of insider. Or a rich guy with a taste for Earthlike worlds who paid a tick to burrow quietly into Verdance’s data systems. She fiddled with her holster, then walked her fingers back. There was a chance she could get in trouble for shooting this thing, even if he wasn’t supposed to be here. If her boss was displeased, she might be grounded and forced to handle regulatory compliance garbage for years.

The remote kept staring at her, chewing with his mouth open, while she weighed her options. She could take him out, and potentially get caught. She could report him, but he might do a lot of damage while she waited for Verdance security to act—if they acted at all. Either way, she’d be forced to spend decades rebalancing the local environment. No matter what she did, there would be trouble, so she might as well mitigate it.

She tried again, using her calmest voice. “Listen. This isn’t a debate. You need to get off this land.”

“No can do, Ranger Destry Thomas. Best be on your way. My compliments to you on the well-stocked forest, though. This meal is just like the ones our ancestors ate during Earth’s Pleistocene.” The remote stretched his lips in a badly executed attempt at a smile. “Here on the savannahs where our species was born, I can experience evolution firsthand. The only thing that would make it more authentic would be some nice moose jerky.”

The anger rising through her chest finally found her tongue. “This is not a savanna, you pus-licker. It’s boreal forest.”

With one fluid motion, she slipped her gun from its holster, spun it up, and shot the remote between the eyes. Charter’s data stream stuttered and stopped as he crumpled. Killing was always a last resort for an ERT ranger, but this controller was using his remote to threaten Whistle, and that could not stand. Destry signaled her friend and he trotted through prairie grass to the still-smoking fire. “We’re going to be here for a while,” she said.

Whistle couldn’t reply aloud to her—his mouth was built to a perfect Pleistocene moose template—but he could text. The sender in his brain reached out to network with hers, skipping across the radio spectrum, looking for a way to be heard; when he found it, he typed: Looks bad, Destry.

The moose had a limited vocabulary, but it got the job done. He was right: she’d turned a shit situation into a slurry of blood-flecked diarrhea. Stretching up a hand, she rubbed the warm, furry hide of his neck. “You can graze if you want. You’ll want to have lots of energy for the trip back.”

Whistle turned to press his fat muzzle into her gray-black hair, exhaling a blast of warm air. During their months on patrol in this vast, continent-spanning forest, Destry’s usual stubble had grown long enough to tickle her ears. Whistle felt genuine affection for his partner, but this sudden urge to nuzzle was definitely enhanced by the sight of an abundant carpet of pinecones a few meters beyond the campsite. They were his favorite food.

Meanwhile, Destry had to start the long, grisly process of sinking all this carbon. She retrieved a few tools from Whistle’s saddlebags: an axe, a tin of metabolizers, a sheet of carbon-capture membrane folded into a tight square. Tramping around the campsite, she saw no obvious ejector pods or shuttles nearby. Charter might have hiked in from a distant landing site, though his pale skin suggested recent decanting. What if somebody at Verdance spotted the vessel by satellite feed and started asking questions? Or another ranger picked up what had happened from the sensor network? She needed to find his ship and erase what she’d done. Whistle munched contentedly as she deleted the last few minutes from the forest around her. Then she issued a ticket to the ERT bug tracker: I found a trespasser’s campsite in the boreal forest. Composting it now. Can somebody please check satellite footage at these coordinates to see whether there’s a vessel in the area?

They would get her message in the next hour or two. Probably. As long as it found a relatively uninterrupted path through the tall grass, routing through sensors that were mostly intended for monitoring air and soil conditions. The important thing was that she’d left some receipts. Now, if the ship was found, she could plead ignorance about its payload. Which—what exactly was that payload? Obviously Charter’s controller was some kind of rich dilettante, hopped up on environmental determinism. He didn’t even recognize that the planet was closer to a Devonian Period Earth, 350 million years before his beloved Pleistocene. Sure, the food web was post-Cretaceous, full of mammals and angiosperms alongside the more ancient birds, insects, and conifers. But there were still a lot of synapsids running around, looking like giant, furry lizard-otters with sails on their backs. As the ERT’s top network analyst for ecosystems, she had to call it like she saw it. This was hardly a perfect reproduction of Earth when it was a million years younger.

The reason none of these inconsistencies mattered to Verdance was that oxygen levels were holding steady at the required 21 percent, thanks mostly to the thick layer of trees Destry and her cohort planted—millions of them, all across Sask-E. Over the centuries their roots burrowed deep into the planet’s two megacontinents, Maskwa and Tooth, breaking up the sterile rock and accelerating the weathering process that drew down carbon. As long as the carbon cycle was unperturbed, they could proceed on schedule and stabilize all the interlocking environmental systems. Any extra load on a freshly built ecosystem like the boreal forest might set them back centuries.

And now some joyrider from who knows where thought he could chew through their labor like he was entitled to it. Because of some pixelated idea about how Paleolithic humans lived. Glancing at the hare’s mutilated body and the skins stretched nearby, Destry winced. He’d taken so much life from an ecosystem he supposedly loved.

Carefully burying the firepit in loose soil and leaves, she dragged the remote inside the cabin, arranging the animal remains next to him. She clambered up the high, peaked roof to survey the damage. He’d built the whole structure from trees that the planet desperately needed to maintain its atmosphere. Destry whacked at the wood with an axe, kicking chunks of it down to the floor inside. Soon most of the roof lay in shredded lumps next to Charter’s bedroll and rucksack, and it was relatively easy to yank the wall posts out of their shallow holes in the ground. The racket brought gravelly commentary from ravens overhead, and a few curious squirrels and foxes poked their heads out of the brush.

As the sun sank, Whistle left off his crunching and headed back to the wreckage that Destry was arranging in a careful pile over the now-dismantled cabin floor. The moose sent: Should we sleep here?

Destry glanced at the dimming sky, where the gas giant Sask-D emerged as a bright pinprick next to the rising pear-shaped moon that orbited Sask-E. “I’m almost done,” she said. “I think we can make it back to camp tonight.” She cracked the tin of metabolizers open with a screwdriver and sprinkled wheat-colored husks packed with microbes over the splintered wood, skins, and Charter’s body. It began to decompose almost before she could unfurl the filter membrane with a snap of her wrists, settling it over the whole mess like a transparent funeral shroud. Some carbon would escape, of course, but the filter would capture about 80 percent. By the time the full moon returned, this invader’s campsite would be nothing but a rich humus beneath a layer of pine needles.

Earth’s boreal forests didn’t work like this; they had sandy soils that would take months to decompose this waste. But Earth was thousands of light-years away. Here on Sask-E, in the far north of the megacontinent Maskwa, the ERT cultivated a tropical microbiome in the forest floor because it was a better carbon sink. On the surface, Sask-E could pass for Pleistocene Earth. But if you actually bothered to squash its soils through a sequencer, you’d know in a second that it was actually a crazy quilt of ecosystems borrowed from half a billion years of Earth evolution—and life on hundreds of other worlds, too.

Not that Destry would ever travel through a wormhole to see Earth or those other worlds firsthand. Verdance didn’t allow their workers outside the atmospheric envelope of Sask-E, and blocked their access to offworld comms too. The company liked to keep its workforce focused on terraforming, which was their right. Ronnie Drake, the company’s VP of special projects, loved to point out during one of her sudden, inconvenient project oversight meetings that Verdance had paid to build this planet, including its biological labor force. Everything here—other than rocks, water, and the magnetic field—was part of Verdance’s proprietary ecosystem development kit. And that meant every life form was legally the company’s property, including Destry and Whistle.

The filter looked steamy now. Water droplets ran across its underside, leaving long, sooty tracks behind. Whistle nudged her and she looked into his long, quizzical face, its contours as familiar to her as the positions of the constellations overhead. Verdance wouldn’t classify him as a person, but Destry was pretty sure he understood this ecosystem as well as she did.

“Ready to go?” she asked him.

He sent: Hop on.

She climbed into the saddle, wrapping herself in wool blankets and strapping down with canvas belts as Whistle trotted out of the trees. Night had fallen, but the moon illuminated fields of shivering grasses that edged the forest. Her goggles picked out the glowing heat signatures of small mammals on the prowl for seeds. As the shadows played havoc with their morphology, Destry and Whistle appeared to merge into one animal, muscular and dappled in silver. The illusion became more profound when Destry leaned into Whistle’s neck, wrapping arms around his warmth, and whispered: “Let’s fly.”

The moose launched into a bumpy canter, accelerated to a gallop, then jumped into the air as if he were leaping over a fallen log. His back muscles bunched and relaxed as the ground veered away from them. Soon they were hundreds of meters over the prairie, watching a pack of coyotes far below, yapping their way through the dusk. Destry’s legs prickled slightly from the gravity mesh adjusting under Whistle’s hide, but then they leveled out. Overhead, the Milky Way tumbled down the center of the sky in an uncontrolled deluge of stars.

 

---

 

2

LA RONGE

Home is a bargain with nature.
—Environmental Rescue Team Handbook

 

Glancing at the position of the sun in the west, Destry calculated that they had a good chance of making it home in time for dinner leftovers. After she and Whistle had composted Charter, they’d spent another two weeks in the field because an ERT geographer replied to her bug ticket with coordinates for the remote’s space vessel. The stench of decomposing metal alloys still stung in her nostrils.

Whistle had flown all day, almost 720 klicks from the mineral-rich mush that was once an atmosphere entry pod. Destry would need to return for more readings in a few months, but for now it seemed the ecosystem held its precarious balance.

A few tiny ranger stations dotted the grassland, throwing symmetrical shadows from peaked roofs. She sent a greeting to each as they passed.

Ranger Destry Thomas returning. Hello!

Hello, Destry! Ranger Squab Marshelder here. Welcome back.

It went on like that for many klicks as the sun sank, though Destry spent slightly more time talking to some rangers than others, depending on how much she liked them.

At last they could see the compacted dirt road to La Ronge below, illuminated by long-wavelength visible spectrum lamps whose deep red glow didn’t attenuate the sky’s darkness overhead. Whistle descended gradually before landing at a full gallop, slowing to a walk before the urban ecosystem embraced them. La Ronge’s skyline was dominated by apartments stacked in slowly twisting spirals, each floor angled a slightly different direction so that everyone’s rooms could capture sunlight. Most of the densely packed city, however, was only a few stories tall. Market squares and courtyards were edged by barns and domos, long, rectangular public buildings with arched roofs covered in mosses, clover, and shallow-root herbs. She dismounted and walked alongside Whistle as they turned a corner and followed the main road downtown. Gardens were everywhere, sprouting in tufts from wall pockets or sprawling for blocks alongside streets busy with pedestrians, bikes, and trucks.

They crossed a low bridge over a stream ruddy with city lights, and Destry felt a twinge as she watched a family of hares drinking at its edge. At least the small mammals were safe here. Destry and Whistle followed the road north toward the ERT campus, where each had a bed. Paper lanterns strung overhead illuminated the broad sidewalk where a few evening shoppers considered the day’s remaining wares: bruised fruits and vegetables, a slightly burned loaf of bread.

Two cat-sized drones hovered down on eight rotors to land on Whistle’s right and left antlers. They had smooth X-shaped bodies with sensors spread like freckles along each axis, and they were small enough to use conventional flight rather than gravity mesh. “Long time no see,” they said in unison. “The city misses every aeronaut.” Though they had two bodies, Hellfire&Crisp shared a consciousness; it was therefore hard to say whether the drones were a plural or singular they.

Whistle snorted and sent a public text: Hi there. Good to be back.

The drones took off again, ignoring Destry. Whistle had a social life that he didn’t tell her about, and she didn’t ask. It was one of many non-verbal agreements they had that made their working relationship deeply amicable and pleasing.

Their first stop was the ERT barn where the moose lived with other mounts. At its wide door, Destry relieved him of her saddle before giving him a rubdown in the spots he couldn’t reach.

“Have a good night, pal,” Destry said.

He nudged her with his nose. You too.

The ERT domo for hominins was at the end of a dirt path bordered by night-blooming primroses and mint whose mingled scents sweetened the air. She had to duck through an arch in a whimsically pruned hedge whose contours were determined annually by the rangers in training. Right now, it was supposed to evoke the undulating body of a swimming placoderm—an homage to the Devonian armored fish who still roamed the seas. Ahead lay the domo, its wide, three-story bulk packed with dorms, lounges, and the main dining hall. It was one of the few buildings on Sask-E built with wood, carefully culled from nearby spruce and fir populations to promote a diversity of new growth. Its creamy outer walls were treated with a transparent polymer to protect it from weathering, and the high, rounded roof was wattle and daub. Double doors opened as Destry’s face came into range, and she walked down the yellow-lit throat of the hallway with its colorful murals, handprints, and informational posters.

No matter how many centuries she lived here, returning to this domo always filled Destry with a sense of accomplishment. She was an Environmental Rescue Team ranger, and her home here was proof.

Still, her position wasn’t solid. Destry recalled what that pus-sucker had said through the lips of his remote: It was strange to find an ERT ranger on a private planet like this one. Most of the planet’s hominin population were workers made from standard templates, decanted and controlled by Verdance—technicians, engineers, and farmers who lived in La Ronge but spent most of the year dispatched to remote construction sites. There was no ambiguity in the law when it came to those workers; Verdance could use them however it wanted. But the ERT was a profoundly public institution, with campuses on nearly every League world. They couldn’t technically be owned by Verdance, or anyone. Destry wasn’t sure what kind of twisted, legal logic her boss, Ronnie, had deployed to establish an ERT campus here.

The ancient order of environmental engineers and first responders traced their lineage all the way back to the Farm Revolutions that ended the Anthropocene on Earth, and started the calendar system people still used today. According to old Handbook lore, the Trickster Squad—Sky, Beaver, Muskrat, and Wasakeejack—founded the Environmental Rescue Team 59,006 years ago. That’s when the legendary heroes saved the world from apocalyptic floods by inventing a new form of agriculture. The Great Bargain, they called it. A way to open communication with other life forms in order to manage the land more democratically. The ERT started with domesticated animals—ungulates, birds, small mammals, model organisms like rats—and over the millennia since, rangers had invited more species into the Great Bargain as their opinions became necessary for land management.

Ronnie had decided that the ERT should be involved in her terraforming project, and so she built one. Apparently the Verdance VP was a true believer in the Great Bargain, but she also wanted to make money on colonization. She couldn’t resolve this contradiction, so the Sask-E ERT ran like a moose with overgrown hooves. They had access to a planetwide network of sensor data—as well as the ERT Handbook, with its stories about ecosystem management. But the company’s ban on offworld comms effectively shut them off from other ERT communities. As far as Destry could tell, no one knew about the rangers here in La Ronge. That was convenient for Ronnie. She could appease her ancestors by respecting ERT traditions, but also please the executives at Verdance by keeping everything and everyone on Sask-E privately owned.

A thick aroma of fried onion in the domo promised leftovers, and Destry sped up with anticipation. The dining hall was the biggest room on this floor, occupying the entire west side of the building. When she poked her head inside, the place was empty and mostly unlit except for one area where half a dozen junior rangers were eating a late meal together. Thankfully, there was still a heaping tray of pierogies and pickled mustard greens on the grab table. Loading her plate, Destry sank gratefully into her favorite corner chair and reveled in the luxury of eating food made by someone else. The dumplings were still warm, and she’d scored a few stuffed with spicy lentils as well as potato and curried carrot. But there were always surprises, especially at late dinner. Destry smeared fried onion on what she thought was a potato pierogi, only to discover it was sweet cheese, and was therefore making a terrible face when her best friend, Nil, appeared in the doorway and yelped her name.

“Destry! You’re back! Any news from the forest?”

She swallowed with difficulty, stood, and gestured for him to join her. “Everything is in balance,” she said, evoking the time-honored greeting to avoid mentioning all the out-of-balance shit she’d seen. The two embraced before sitting in companionable silence at the table together.

When they were young, she and Nil were sometimes mistaken for each other. Both had thick black hair, shaggy and straight, which always hung in their eyes. Working in the sun, their skin tanned to a dark brown, and they bulked up with muscles rather than growing lean like their colleagues. Now, almost four hundred years later, it was easy to tell them apart. Destry’s hair was a salt-and-pepper fuzz sticking up around her face, while Nil’s was still long and black. Destry’s work outside kept her face tan and her arms thick with muscle, while Nil’s lab work had lightened his skin and given him a small, soft belly. Only their matching eyes remained unchanged: they were the bright, clear blue of shallow coastal waters. When they were lucky enough to be in the same place at the same time, they were inseparable. Even when she was sick of humans, Destry could tolerate Nil.

Gulping a pile of pickled greens to wash the weird flavor out of her mouth, Destry gripped his shoulder warmly. “What’s been happening down here in the city, my friend?”

“Everything’s in balance,” he replied noncommittally. “I was just checking the bug tracker and it looks like one of the big lava tubes at Spider Mountain collapsed. There’s been some seismic activity so it could be an eruption coming. I was thinking of getting off my lazy ass and doing some fieldwork down there.” He paused and looked hopefully at her. “Want to come?”

Because Sask-E had no plate tectonics, volcanoes rarely erupted out of nowhere: they oozed magma for millions of years in the same locations, creating massive, cone-shaped mountains. The two friends had dealt a lot with these formations, though for different reasons. Destry investigated breakdowns in local ecosystems from toxins expelled during eruptions, and Nil tapped lava flows to create volcanic soils for forests he was irrigating. His offer was tempting. Still, she had been looking forward to sleeping in her own bed for a while after three months in the bush, especially after that disturbing encounter with the remote. And if she was being honest, the tropical ecosystems near Spider Mountain weren’t her favorite. She’d always preferred the prairies.

“I don’t know, Nil. I’m pretty exhausted.”

He looked mildly put out, then concerned. “Did something happen out there? I saw your bug report about the space vessel, but I didn’t read it.”

Destry repositioned one of the lentil pierogis on her plate, carefully piling it with onion and mustard greens. She chewed for a while as Nil waited patiently. It was another reason why they remained friends; he was willing to wait through her hard-edged silences.

“I didn’t report this, but I had to kill a remote. A default male Homo sapiens.” She forked the last bite of dinner into her mouth. “He was murdering small mammals and eating them. Never seen anything like it. I don’t mind saying it was downright spooky.”

Nil looked disturbed. “I think a whole slew of crackpots are going to start coming to Sasky now. Verdance just opened up bidding for plots.” Like everyone in La Ronge, he blurred the syllables in the planet’s name together, and Sask-E became Sasky.

The Verdance announcement was news to Destry, but it did explain how the remote had found his way here. Verdance was probably spraying everyone in League space and beyond with ads for their latest artisanal terraforming creation, ten thousand years in the making. The real estate developer was known for indie projects like Sasky, which was ripening into one of the few known Earthlike worlds in the League—and that made it an enticing outlier among the thousands of habitable planets that speculators were terraforming at any given time.

Verdance was really leaning into its whole “Earth rebooted” marketing pitch, too. Anyone who bought property on Sasky would be required to live here in a Homo sapiens body, which was packaged with the real estate. That meant settling here was very expensive, which seemed to make buyers salivate.

Destry frowned at the thought of more people sending their remotes to poison the biosphere before it was open to the public.

Nil put a hand on her arm. “Did the remote say why he was here?”

“He was a Pleistocene fanatic. Said the land was his birthright as a human, along with some other determinist feculence.”

Nil rolled his eyes and sighed. “I have a feeling our jobs are about to get a lot more annoying.”

Destry pushed back from the table. “I need to get to bed. Let’s meet for breakfast?”

Nil nodded and they walked to the hallway together, mounting the worn ceramic stairs to the sleeping quarters. On the first landing, they paused. Destry was on the third floor, and Nil was on the second. He embraced her goodnight and whispered in her ear. “Shall I join you?”

She felt the familiar pull toward him low in her belly. It had been awhile. Part of her craved what he offered, but a bigger part was bone-tired. Destry kissed Nil’s warm lips and hugged him harder.

“Another time, my friend.” She ran her hands up his arms and stepped back to appreciate the sweetness of his familiar face. “It’s good to see you, though.”

He grinned easily. “Good to see you too, my friend.”

Destry mounted the stairs and plodded past a dozen darkened doors to the one that glowed a soft green, anticipating her arrival. Inside, she barely glanced at the walls, where ivy cascaded out of pockets near the ceiling, parting around a few square cubbies crowded with framed pictures and favored mementos. It was only when Destry peeled off her clothes and dove between the clean covers that she realized her skin was still gritty with dirt, charcoal, and who knows what else from the composted space vessel. Washing would have to wait, just like Nil’s comforts. For now, sleeping alone in her tiny personal space with its window full of night was the greatest pleasure she could imagine.

That’s when her external comms pad hooted loudly. It was a sound she heard only when somebody was calling directly from Verdance. Ronnie. Groaning, she rolled over and waved on the light, muscles and mind aching.

She didn’t even have a chance to accept the call. Ronnie’s access was high enough that she could pipe her face into any room, any time. A crisp hologram of the VP’s head and shoulders now hovered at the foot of the bed. Her hair was a pale, iridescent blue, perfectly layered to cascade across the shoulders of her emerald jacket. Her brown skin was richly moisturized, almost dewy, as if she’d recently had a tissue reconstruction. Though proud of her traditional Earth values, Ronnie was Homo diversus, a catchall subspecies name for hundreds of customized hominin builds. Her fashionable forehead sloped back steeply, and her skull was elongated into an elegant egg shape. Gills gleamed on either side of her throat like jewels.

“I’m sorry if you were sleeping.”

Destry ran a hand over her eyes and shrugged off the fake apology. “What can I do for you?”

“I see you filed a bug report about a vessel but failed to mention that you killed the remote who piloted it.”

So much for covering her tracks up there in the boreal forest. “He was trespassing, killing trees and animals. If I’d left him there, he would have set back development of that forest by years. I asked him to leave three times before I shot him. You can see the footage for yourself.”

“Don’t treat this lightly, Destry. I have client relationships on the line here.”

Something about her condescending tone reminded Destry of early training, when she and the other recently decanted ERT rangers watched an old video of Ronnie talking about Earth terroir. Using her sweetest and most nurturing voice, the Verdance VP explained that only Homo sapiens could truly nurture the terroir of Earthlike ecosystems, which is why Destry and her H. sapiens cohorts were so important. They would turn Sask-E into an Earth-away-from-Earth, a special world that honored humanity’s origins. Back then, when Destry was still under the protection of her mother and father, she thought Ronnie was the wisest person in the galaxy. In the centuries since, her feelings for the VP had curdled into wrathful disgust. Not that she could ever show Ronnie anything other than calm obedience. That’s what she needed to muster if she was going to make it through this conversation intact.

“I’m confused,” Destry said as nonconfrontationally as possible. “That remote wasn’t on official business. It was unmarked, with a generic name.”

“That remote was sent by Lem Rackleworth’s son.” Ronnie gritted her teeth in a smile. “He is an investor in our parent company, and his son Devin is interested in buying some land on Sask-E.”

“I asked him to identify himself and he refused.”

“I saw the remote’s logs. You shot within a few minutes of encountering him.”

Destry was shocked fully awake. Ronnie was combing through her investors’ son’s logs now? That was a new level of aggressive micromanagement.

Ronnie continued. “His remote was very expensive, and Lem is threatening us with a lawsuit. You’re a good ranger, Destry. A good investigator. But if I can’t work this out with Lem, there is nothing I can do to intercede for you. Do you understand?” Her words hung in the air, deliberately vague. Acid crept its way up Destry’s throat from her stomach. An extremely belligerent investor might get her kicked out of the ERT. She’d lose what little power she had to shape the environment on this planet.

Destry looked into the photons animating Ronnie’s face, searching for pores in her shiny skin. She thought about her parents, who were no longer around to reassure her that Ronnie was far away and couldn’t do any harm. Besides, that had been a lie. Ronnie was always around, turning minor infractions into catastrophes. Destry forced herself to sit up straighter. “I understand, Ronnie. Thanks for letting me know.”

And then the hologram was gone, Ronnie’s threat adding ambient stress to the uncomfortable reminder that she wasn’t ever entirely alone. Shaking with more than exhaustion, Destry lay down and waved off the lights. Even the weight of foreboding couldn’t keep her awake. Outside, the northern constellations crawled across the sky, obliviously waiting for someone from a distant star to claim them as property.