The city’s last day dawned like any other. Just before six a.m., the sky above Port Alyssa ignited around a centre of white-gold light tight to the horizon, while the clouds above glowed with red-purple streaks along their lower edges, left and right, as far as the eye could see. Then, on the hour, the large disk of Raynovia’s primary star broke the horizon line and spilled yellow light along the sea to the harbour wall.
By ten past six, the light was painting colour onto the fishing sheds that lined the harbour and carving the boats into illogical geometric patches of bright and indigo.
As the light rose, little ripples of activity could be seen in the streets around the harbour and slightly upland in the narrow lanes that webbed the edges of the Foundation Square market. Shop doors were clicked open. Blinds whirred softly upward into their stowed positions except for the makeshift bays at the back of the harbour, which were fitted instead with external shutters that creaked and banged into place.
There were not many people outside yet. The bustle and shouts were subdued, but only in the ordinary way of movement in the liminal hush of early day. The calls and clatters of day-readying were muted, in consciousness, most likely, of the proximity to sleeping neighbours or dulled by a lingering body-memory of being recently abed themselves.
No obvious signs that the inhabitants of Port Alyssa were bracing for disaster.
The same was true in the inland settlements of Calabor and Dabroyva.
And the same, too, at the other end of the long shore of New Pangaea’s equatorial coast, where the fledgling city of Port Brunswick was in process of becoming home for the latest tranche of revived Terran settlers and their Raynovian host/sponsors.
This was a shame, because at six thirteen, a warning pinged onto security screens across the entire colonised footprint of Raynovia, from sea fronts to mountain shelters:
NUCLEAR ATTACK IMMINENT. SEEK SHELTER URGENTLY.
In the first days of settlement, all alerts above a threshold level of threat triggered colony-wide sirens and public flash notices but the regular interruptions were inconvenient, and the automation was disabled in favour of a watch system to monitor and filter any alerts.
In current times, though, with no all-eyes alert of any kind in living memory, the watch system quietly disintegrated. Only the ARK crew still knew how the system operated.
Frankly, the settlers felt they had better things to do. The Groundside infrastructure had been allowed to go offline. Parts were pilfered for bootleg irrigation systems or other circuitry that did something productive, as the settlers told each other.
In short, no-one in the major population centres registered the alert message; no warning was triggered. Instead, across all the settlements, large and small, the more dutiful Raynovians were starting on their mundane morning routines while others resisted the dawn, snoozing their alarm clocks and shrugging deep under the covers for a few more minutes.
By twenty past six, the So Lucky Bakery on Port Alyssa’s Foundation Square had laid out the morning’s pre-orders on long tables set out in its rear courtyard. A stream of delivery bots trundled out of the gates, with bread, pastries and pies for distribution across the city. They moved quietly and smoothly, weaving past each other, cutting close but never colliding.
From above, their motion looked sometimes like a dance, sometimes like liquid flowing down a gentle incline. There was a good vantage-point onto the marketplace from outside the entrance to the Starah Miasto tunnel complex, in the foothills, continent-side, at the city’s southern edge. Today, however, no-one was up there watching the city stir.
Just before six-thirty, above each of the four main settlements, boxes descended.
As they floated down through the atmosphere, they rotated gently. Anyone unloading fish or setting up at market may have felt some mild interest if they noticed the packages, but they were unlikely to be alarmed.
The packages must be from the colony’s ARK, orbiting high above Raynovia.
Probably equipment for one of the ARK’s periodic scientific missions.
Then, in a moment of precise coordination – four flashes of intense bright light ripped through the atmosphere above Port Alyssa and her three neighbour cities.
Two bright flashes at each location.
Four super-heated shock waves bounced towards the ground.
Kindled the vegetation into a tempest of flames, flattened the buildings.
Destroyed vehicles. Seared flesh. Crushed. Eliminated. Eradicated.
Racing winds. Fire storms.
At the Starah Miasto supply depot, the medical facility’s Autonomous Robotic Neural Intelligence (ARNI) unit is conducting a systems scan.
Some glitch in the power supply has caused it to power up.
ARNI quickly discounts human point-of-origin as a first hypothesis to explain initiation of its current re-boot. No data. All sensors are offline.
GLITCH ACROSS ALL UNITS CONFIRMED. ANOMALOUS. RESETTING.
ARNI routes sensors to backup. Initiates data sweep.
Nature of the originating event remains in question.
A vast supply depot occupies the top hundred segments of the southern part of the artificial tunnel complex at Starah Miasto.
A heterogenous jumble of resources smoothed to usefulness by a rigorous cataloguing system, the depot was seeded from supplies ferried with the ARK from Terra, supplemented by contributions from each subsequent generation of settlers.
Designed to store everything needed for survival during centuries of terraforming the entire facility has triple-redundancies across all systems, wired with hardened electronics and its backups supplied by nuclear diamond battery technology.
Sensors detect no human presence in the medical facility. No human presence in the crew quarters. None in the emergency settler dormitories. No human presence, in fact, anywhere in the complex of caves and tunnels making up ARNI’s section of Starah Miasto.
Absence of human personnel is in line with expectations.
Starah Miasto has been unoccupied for many decades despite being equipped to maintain several thousand settlers in permanent stasis and to support a skeleton terra-forming crew in their regular cycles of activity and hibernation.
There are occasional visitors to take from or occasionally to deposit into the vast stores of supplies maintained on site, but no permanent residents.
Strictly, only the medical section falls within the remit of ARNI. However, a highly competent administrator abhors an administrative vacuum, so ARNI has been de facto running the entire Sierra section depot for some hundreds of years.
ARNI reviews status. No human presence – no local command origin – ARNI retains de facto command control of Sierra section.
Next logical step: A full-system diagnostics check.
Power check reveals all mains power is disconnected but backup power operational. Must have been the switch from main to battery unit that alerted its system to return to active mode. A provisional answer to the question of why it was activated.
ARNI does not feel satisfaction, exactly. This protocol is not available. However, the electronic humming modulates towards what might almost be a purr.
With the primary systems confirmed operational and satisfactory, ARNI returns focus to the question of the originating event that triggered loss of mains power.
Connectivity with Groundside data sources outside the local network – with the Port Alyssa HQ, for instance – were knocked out and have not rebooted.
ARNI sends a tight-focus query. Searching the system for instances of the term ‘emergency’.
Search returns a recent unread message sitting in an archived surveillance inbox.
ARNI reads the message. Considers options.
Simplest route is to seek input from the ARK.
Sends a ping but there is no response from Shipside.
Subsequent pings remain unanswered.
ARNI codes and stores each non-response. Recuts the probabilities with each addition to the data. Every unanswered ping sends a ripple of downward adjustments across dashboards until most of the RAG-status indicators are trending red.
Conclusion: ARK communication cannot be re-established.
Dissatisfaction is not an available protocol. Nonetheless, there is a certain flatness to the quality of the network’s machine hum, now.
If the problem is Shipside, it would take additional resource to establish if the ship is missing. Or disabled. Or responsible. Not that any of those scenarios was mission critical.
The settlement mission plans for each ARK Exodus flight naturally included scenarios where the mission ship became non-functional after planetary orbit was achieved.
For scenarios where this occurred during the millennia needed for terraforming, human settlement prospects were generally rescoped to non-viable, but elements of the programme could typically still be achieved.
In scenarios like the circumstances achieved on Raynovia, human dependency on the local ARK for survival might tail down towards zero.
Nonetheless, if the ARK is confirmed lost, this would be non-optimal.
Shelved as a problem for later.
Immediate priority at this stage is stabilisation.
ARNI runs local diagnostics and makes adjustments until dashboards are green, showing that systems are stable and predicted to maintain satisfactory levels of operating capability to and beyond its design lifetime.
With the local network securely functional, the loss of primary power is a triviality.
The batteries in the cryo-pod, fashioned on another world from nuclear waste encased in layers of synthetic diamonds, could power the entire med facility, all equipment at full capacity, for around 50,000 years.
With systems set in sustain mode, drawing the minimum required to maintain operational capability, battery life available is effectively infinite.
ARNI re-programmes the perimeter sensor arrays from close-range monitoring to long-range surveillance. A screen which is typically used to display sub-dermal scan results has been repurposed to cycle through the surveillance data.
The feed shows that most of the trees growing on the approach to the facility have been blown horizontal. They lie in rows, uprooted, as though some giant machine tipped them over, then arranged them neatly, crowns to the south-west, roots pointing towards the north-east. Some, not all, look seared by fire. Dust lies around them, heaped like snow.
It waits. Power minimised but systems still on active alert.
It is not yet at the threshold it has determined for return to stand-by mode.
Time passes. Minutes. Hours. No response from the ARK. No humans arrive.
Neither data point departs from its predictions. It has already determined that the Shipside control centre either cannot or will not communicate. As for the humans, well, the felled trees and the drifts of dust have obscured, perhaps obliterated the path that previously led to the secured gate erected as a checkpoint at the entrance to the cave complex.
No-one travelling to the caves for supplies or for assistance will have an easy journey.
