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War's Oversight

Chapter 01

Sarah turned her body in a final surge of effort, and kept a grip on her shovel as another load of loose rock sailed a short distance through the air to land in the bed of the wheelbarrow nearby. She let the shovel fall to the dusty ground with a dull clank!, and after flexing her fingers a few times to ease the burning she felt in both her hands, she plucked the cap from her head and then swiped the back of her sleeve across her forehead.

It's got to be some kind of punishment, she thought, to sweat this much at midday and then freeze at sundown. She stood for a moment, breathing deeply in the aftermath of her exertions, but not without the flush of honest exercise in her cheeks, and with relief at the notion that the hard part of her day was nearly over.

In a perfect world, she would never have needed to expend the effort. From her cramped and cluttered desk back at the base, she could have dispatched an autonomous aerial drone to fly to the very spot on which she stood, collect a load of mineral samples from the debris scattered all around her, and be waiting in the hangar for her after she barely had time to grab a cup of coffee from the mess hall.

She could also have dispatched a wheeled rover to make its way across the dusty landscape, over ridges and around rock formations, to chip away its portion of the terrain and load it into a series of compartments before making its way back. On the way, it could perform the necessary pulverizing of the rock and the mass spectrometric tests needed to determine exactly what the sample contained, sending the results via satellite link to her desk computer and allowing her the time to grab a coffee and catch up on a few days' worth of data analysis before delving into the results transmitted from the rover itself.

Not unless we discover something valuable here, she thought. Fusion fuel ...precious metal deposits ... anything that would justify allocating some more resources to this barren rock. She turned her gloved hands over and stared for a moment at the patches of dust that mottled the fabric over her palms. All we have here is dirt. No drones, no rovers, and just the one satellite. She gave a short chuckle. And that's assuming that the Tabbies don't show up and blow it out of orbit.

She braced her shoulders for a moment, arching her back to stretch it out, and then bent to pick up the shovel again with one hand. Light and well-balanced, the shovel was made of some kind of composite material, she recollected. Carbon nanotube fibers in a matrix of ... well, some kind of polymer, she thought. She could envision a distant ancestor of hers doing the same kind of task. Perhaps they had a shovel with a metallic blade. Maybe even a shaft that was made of wood.

The wheelbarrow, which had a narrow magnetic strip on the side of its bed, accepted a matching magnetic patch on each of the shovel's handle and blade and grabbed hold of the lightweight tool from her hand. The wheelbarrow, in turn, was also composed of a lightweight composite material and had telescoping handles to aid the user in lifting a full load under the slightly elevated gravity that Omicron Kappa 3 imposed on its inhabitants. The direct sunlight of Omicron Kappa itself, however, was something the wheelbarrow couldn't remedy.

Sarah was starting to grow uncomfortably hot under her utility suit - especially as the fabric was not designed to breathe particularly well, but more so to keep the dust that blew across the planet's surface from sticking to her skin and causing all sorts of irritation. On her home planet, Earth, she would have happily unfastened the garment and let the fresh breeze of a sunny day blow across her skin and through her hair. In a brief moment of vanity, she shook her head briefly and felt some of the local breeze move unsatisfyingly through the unflattering ponytail that her long, brown hair was tied into.

She glanced at her cap, which was as anachronistic as the shovel and wheelbarrow were in an age of hyperspace travel and nanotechnology, and flipped it back and forth by the bill for a moment to shake the dust loose. It was, unlike the tools of her labors, something she genuinely owned and treasured, it having been handed down through her family for two generations. It was a replica of a cap worn by people who would have played baseball on Earth in centuries past, where there was enough free time, open grass, and temperate weather to encourage the sport. Although faded, and with some fraying around the edges and the embroidered figure on the front despite the advances in textile materials in the years since the first baseball caps, it was still recognizable as having once been white in color. The embroidered figure still depicted, if somewhat abstractly, a black line drawing of a short, squat figure with an ovoid head, a pair of red dots for eyes, and a small antenna bent to the figure's left. She rubbed a finger over it gently, as if lost in thought but afraid to touch something so old for fear of damaging it. After a moment, she reversed the cap and set it firmly on her head, tugging the bill down against the sunlight from above. The cap was not merely an heirloom - it was practical. Her hair covered what little of her neck was exposed above her suit collar, the cap's bill shaded her face and eyes, and her ears remained free to hear what was going on around her - such as it was.

She took the battered canteen that held a cherished place at her right hip and freed it from its holster, and took a swig of stale but chilled water through the mouthpiece at the top. It cooled the dry sensation in her throat and took away some of the heat in her cheeks, for which she was grateful. Replacing the container, she glanced around quickly to see if she had forgotten to pick up any of her gear, and then grabbed the wheelbarrow's handles and heaved it roughly into motion.

"Base, this is Palmer," she said, tucking her chin against her collarbone briefly to ensure that the communicator at her collar was able to pick up her voice. "Samples from site 5 have been collected. Returning to storage."

The scratchy and somewhat muted voice of a male colleague replied after a brief pause. "Palmer, this is Base. 'Glad to hear it. If you hurry you might make lunch with the rest of us."

She quirked a wry smile for a brief moment. "No promises, Base. If I twist an ankle out here among these rocks, I'll be at the mercy of those overworked SARtechs."

A short guffaw from Base. "Fair enough, Palmer. We'll try to save you a sandwich."

"Just don't drink my beer on me again," she replied. "Palmer out."

From her communicator there was the briefest of chirps, and then silence.

With the sight of New Boston Colony's tall, white buildings of pre-fab plastic a short half-hour's trudge away, she took a moment to plan her passage through the ridges in the shallow depression between her and her home. As all the native rock on Omicron Kappa 3 was a uniform dark grey in color, it would be easy to get lost in a series of twisting ridges and craggy peaks with the wheelbarrow hampering her ability to travel in a straight line. She was considered a skilled field technician by her peers, however, needing little help from her wristcomp or from Base to re-orient her once she was moving with purpose.

She considered digging her earpiece out of one of her suit's numerous pockets and setting it to play some music, but she decided against it. She preferred to spend some of her time at work doing some daydreaming or recollections of her childhood. Besides, she thought, _even though I know I'm alone out here for kilometers, the wasteland around me gives me the creeps sometimes._Intellectually she knew that there were few people on the planet, and that Omicron Kappa 3 boasted no life higher than a few plant species, but there were times when the sensation of isolation made her feel acutely aware of somehow being watched. She felt better with her ears open and free.

She shook her head to herself. War or no war, she thought, why would the Tabbies come here just to keep watch on me? The very idea seemed absurd.

Sarah remembered having asked her grandfather, who had smiled patiently at a young woman's curiosity, what the figure on her baseball cap was supposed to represent. Having just inherited it, she wasn't sure what to make of the odd gift, but she'd learned enough about social grace leading up to her 13thbirthday to express some interest. "It's an alien," he'd said, in his gruff and deep voice but with a smile on his lined face. "I think it was supposed to be a Martian." With a twinkle in his eye, he leaned conspiratorially close and asked, "Do you know what a Martian is?"

She had decided she would try to impress him with her knowledge. "Yes, Papa," she'd replied, "A Martian is a person from Mars. But I learned in school that there were never any aliens on Mars, even before people went there. I've never even seen a picture of an alien like the ones my teachers talk about. The Borvis, or the Rantavan, or the Sembla, or the Chakri - none of them are supposed to look like this." She'd made a sudden realization, though, and had continued excitedly. "Dad said that you'd met the Chakri before, right? What do they look like, Papa?"

Even as she'd asked the question, the fading twinkle in her grandfather's eyes had made her realize that she'd said something wrong. The knowing smile on his lined face had faltered, and had started to turn into a frown before the old man seemed to recollect himself. His restored smile had been forced, she'd later realized, and his eyes were no longer really focused on her face.

"Your Dad is right, sweetie," he'd said, almost reluctantly. "I met the Chakri many years ago. They look something like you and I, even if they look a little bit like your pet Mittens." He'd absent-mindedly put a hand to his knee - the one on his right leg, which he'd sometimes taken off and waved around when she'd been a toddler, to make her laugh. "That's why some old folks like me call them Tabbies," he'd continued. "But I hope you don't have to meet them, Sarah."