Chapter 1

"Governor! We have a situation that requires a decision at your level."

John Wells, the Governor of New Eden colony, was not pleased to receive this imposition. He had not long got home to his two wives, and was looking forward to a quiet evening at home with Gloria and Muriel, and their four children.

"What is the problem, and why can't it wait until tomorrow?"

"Murder, sir. We knew nothing about it until two teenage girls arrived at the Security office, screaming about their mother being hurt."

"Okay, that sounds serious. We have not had a murder before now. This is indeed worrying. Tell me more."

His informant explained, "The man, Joe Fabricci, is one of the track layers who are building the rail line to the site of the tunnel through the mountains. He is a big fellow, as they all are. It is a tough job, laying concrete sleepers for the rails, then fixing the new rails to the trackbed.

"The trouble is that there is a lot of tension that gets built up. Drop a concrete sleeper in the wrong place, and you could get a serious injury or the guy who got in the way could be the one who suffers. We don't have a proper hospital on the planet, so access to quick decent attention for a major injury is not possible. We have to ship the victim to Rehome or Earth, depending on the injury. All we can do is stabilise the patient.

"In the case of this guy, he was taking out his frustrations on his wife. From what we gather from the girls, Joe was liable to fly off the handle at the slightest provocation, and his wife took the brunt of his anger. Several times, the girls say, she stepped in and took punishment meant for one of the girls."

John was horrified. "He tried to beat his daughters? A big man, wanting to hit little girls? Horrendous!"

"Yes, sir. It seems that yesterday the crane driver let a sleeper slip at one end, and it swung past Joe, missing him by inches before landing on the ground. He was boiling with anger at the driver, and his mates had great difficulty restraining him from attacking the driver. The driver was already terrified at what he had nearly done by accident, and was in no condition to protect himself if Joe had got to him.

"Anyway, Governor, Joe got sent home early, in the hopes of allowing him time to unwind slowly, and be back at work the next day in a better temper. It was not really a good idea: Joe got home early, still fuming, and found that his wife was relaxing, listening to music after a busy day of housework. He didn't see it that way. He assumed she had put her feet up all day, and set about her. She fell over and hit her head on the corner of a table. The corner pierced her skull, killing her almost instantaneously.

"Joe then realised what he had done, and went mad, smashing up everything within reach. The girls were upstairs, and when they saw their mother lying dead, blood pouring from her head, and their father rampaging around, they feared for their own lives. They were already scared of him. They went back to the older girl's room, to climb out of the window, wearing their outdoor clothing. They were quite clever. They tied a sheet to a bed that they dragged to the window, and the older girl climbed down outside, then dropped the rest of the way. She called to a passer-by, and he caught the younger sister in his arms as she dropped.

"They told him what they had seen. He immediately took them to the Security office, for them to tell their story to a peace officer. Security sent several officers to the family home, and with difficulty arrested Joe. They found no signs of life in his wife, so the secured the site as a crime scene.

"This was only an hour or so ago, Governor, so we have been trying to sketch out the sequence of events. We have the family at the Security office, but we are not happy about the father being anywhere close to the girls. They are scared he might harm them next.

"What we would like, sir, is for you to come and see for yourself the situation, and decided what we should do now. We are not geared up for such traumatic events; only in general terms, and mostly it comes down to: consult the Governor!"

John Wells saw that he had no options: it was his job. He called Muriel, as the elder wife, and told her he had to go to the Security office on a matter of urgency. He would get back home when he got back, he said, and asked her to tell Gloria not to worry.

He hurried out the door and across several streets of the settlement to the Security office. It was a building he was familiar with, but only as a place for getting a briefing on local crime statistics. He had often joked about making them redundant, as there was so little crime being reported. "The biggest crime here, boys, is paying you to do damn all!" he had joked. Now they were fully earning their pay.

New Eden was the second extra-solar human colony, with the active assistance of Rehome, the first colony. In line with the first one, the planet was discovered and chosen for human settlement by The Personalia, the intelligent machine race of spaceships who provided the transportation between planets through their manipulation of dark energy.

This was not to say that the colony was a simple, straightforward settlement. No colonisation effort ever seemed to be that easy. The planet on which New Eden was trying to be planted had a series of continents, all of which were populated by mega beasts: creatures of monstrous dimensions and ferocious demeanour, combined with herds of grazers which featured thick bony heads and protective actions against predation.

The fortunate discovery that one location was free of these creatures was marred by its being fenced by a ring of massive mountains, in itself the reason for its suitability as a settlement site. This mountain range kept out the mega beasts, but also kept in the human settlers. As a result, the settlement would be restricted in population size unless they could first of all get through the mountains, and secondly find some means of coping with the beasts roaming outwith the protective rocky heights.

As the first ground transportation that could efficiently move people and freight long distances, a railway network was the obvious solution for getting to the mountains, but not for surmounting the peaks. That would require tunnelling, and tunnelling through rock was slow and expensive in time and manpower. It also didn't help that ground level inside the gigantic crater – for that was what the ring of mountains was in reality - the ground level was substantially higher inside the crater than outside it, through erosion without any outlet of note. The only egress that allowed water to escape was a small lake with a runoff over a steep cliff to the lower level.

This gave the rail plan the obstacle that going straight through on the level that suited trains would bring the line out the other side, dozens of meters above ground level. Some gentle gradient had to be established, either inside the tunnel or on the outside. The solution developed by the human planners was to impart a curve to the tunnel, slowly swinging it round so that the exit was almost parallel to the cliff face, and the tunnel at that point became a cutting inside the cliff face; a line gouged out and running along the cliff as the gradient gradually brought it down to the exterior ground level. At places where the cliff extended further out, the cutting resumed life as a tunnel. At other points the cliff had eroded and the gap would have to be bridged for the rail line to continue.

So much for planning. The idea was grand, but the execution was problematic. A curved tunnel is much longer than a straight one, and then continuing it as a cutting open on one side was technically difficult to achieve. Using normal techniques, it would take many years to cut through so much solid rock. That was the first technical problem to be solved.

The second was the protection of settlers and farmers from the marauding animals out in the rest of the continent. In theory, they could all be shot and destroyed. In practice, humans had by now accepted that destroying an ecosystem by removing the top predators and the main grazers would most likely have unforeseen and disadvantageous repercussions.

Besides that, The Personalia had an ethical view of all life. They did not like any plans involving wholesale slaughter of a species, just to provide more living space for humans to expand into. Thus they would be unlikely to transport weapons for humans to destroy these species. They expected humans to come up with a more ecologically sound solution.

Once again, theoretical solutions were easily advanced. The basic premise was extremely simple: get the mega beasts to stay way from the area that the humans wished to settle. So, how do you do that?

With more "normally-sized" animals, you put up a fence, and that keeps them out. Try that with larger animals, and it becomes impractical. Trying to keep elephants out of fields of crops in Africa showed how impossible that was. Elephants simply walked through most fences as it they weren't there. The mega beasts would be similar in that way. Any postulated fence would have to be on a gigantic scale to be effective.

Around this time, The Personalia had designed, constructed and delivered to a railhead on Rehome a huge machine for laying new rail lines: placing ballast, compacting it, and installing track on top, complete with sleepers to hold the rails in place. Someone on Rehome suggested using lengths of rail track as fence posts on New Eden, delivered by The Personalia.

This ridiculous suggestion was initially dismissed, but when the proposal was expanded to have The Personalia dropping them point first from orbit, impacting into the ground sufficiently hard to make them strong uprights for a fence, linked by powered cables as an effective electric fence sufficient to repel any beast drifting into it, minds were changed.

At this stage, physics reared its head. From orbit, a section of rail line would be heated to white hot at its leading point. This might be enough to soften the metal to the point that instead of piercing the ground, the rail might puddle and rebound from the surface. An alternative proposition was to float the rails by balloon to a lower lever in the atmosphere, there to release the rails at a precise angle. The difficulties of doing this from a balloon led to its conversion to delivery from a chosen height by Landership. The Landership could release each rail at the exact angle and direction to impact a chosen spot, each the precise distance apart and in a line that would continue along the boundary that the fence was aimed to mark out.

There was some concern that the ground would vary a great deal in density. A patch of ground could be marshy, another could be solid rock, and others in between. The Personalia made a judgment as to the solidity of each landing site, and altered the selected impact accordingly, by changing the height of release.

Even with all the advance planning, this operation would require thousands of rail sections, so, in order to reduce the cost, The Personalia bought entire stretches of redundant railway line on Earth from the companies that were lifting the old track, for not more than the price of scrap metal. The surface condition of the sections of rail was of no concern. As long as the length of line was intact and suitably strong – and most of it was – it would suit the task as fence posts.

Decisions about the line of the fence turned out to be a compromise. The settlers wanted as much land as possible enclosed by the fence, but the greater the area, the longer the fence required, and the longer it would take to clear the area of beasts and then make the links between the posts to prevent the fauna from returning.

The humans of the colony had introduced another important factor into the equation: This physical barrier between the fence posts. The Personalia had explained that such physical constraints were not needed, as they could install transmitters on each fence post to project sound vibrations at frequencies which would deter any of the worrisome beasts from returning.

Humans, however, distrusted any intangible barrier. They were afraid that if power to the transmitter was lost, the invisible barrier could disappear without anyone noticing. THAT would be a threat to any farmer and his family. Not one potential farmer was willing to place his trust in a set of hundreds of transmitters. In human experience, anything mechanical or electrical has the potential to go wrong, and cause a disaster. Strong cables of thick metal wire netting might possibly give way at some point, but an electrical current along the fence should instantly show a breakage and alert everyone. To the minds of the settlers, that would give them warning, and would also allow members of the security service to come along and dispose of whatever had broken the fence wire.