Chapter 1

When Cogo's father's father was a young man, a new star was born in the night sky. It was a tiny, blue white star, unnoticed by anyone on the planet. As the seasons passed and Cogo's father grew from a child into a boy, the star grew larger. When Cogo's father Gofna was eleven, on the hunt where his father Cogo's grand sire, was killed by lions, the star was prominent in the low southern horizon. When Cogo's father, Gofna, was a proud man of twenty, the star was the brightest in the heavens. When Cogo was born Gofna and the people of the temple in the land of Tors killed a boar in his honor and sacrificed a part of the meat to the god of that bright star. By the time that it was Cogo's turn to accept the sacred robe and sword from his father's body and stand up to lead the people, the star illuminated the sky at night and was clearly visible during the day. When Cogo's first man child was born, the village elders said that he should be blessed under the light at night.

The fusion flame burned continuously for well over six more standard years, decelerating the cargo pod at a steady rate of twenty earth gravities. The flame suddenly decreased in intensity, and then went out. For the first time in many years, the people slept under a dark night sky. Animals whose foraging patterns had been disrupted for a generation returned to the patterns dictated by timeless genetic imperative. During this time the pod made many attempts using coherent light, radio, and other means to contact the governing civilizations on the planet. No answers were received.

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The pod flew by the planet very low allowing the planet's gravity to assist it in altering its flight path. As the pod flew by, sophisticated on-board systems made millions of high resolution scans in all spectra. As the pod coasted out from the flyby, the computing facilities of the pod detected the wreckage of the original colony ship, buried under a landslide in the Southern Hemisphere. It was supposed to be in orbit. It was supposed to be orbiting a highly advanced planet ready for the final stages of colony world development. It was supposed to be awaiting the delivery of hundreds of millions of metric tons of advanced technology and support systems. It wasn't.

Emergency routines were activated. The ion thrusters blazed to life, altering the course and trajectory of the pod. The pod escaped the draw of the planet and coasted to a near stop, millions of miles out. The thrusters fired again, and the pod began an insertion orbit, but not to the planet.

The pod maneuvered slowly, conserving reaction mass, and entered a high altitude orbit of the planet's second moon. The pod was ten kilometers in length and over thirty in circumference. The mass of the pod was large enough, at nearly four thousand million metric tons, that given many tens of thousands of orbits, the orbit of the moon itself would change.

Deep inside the massive body of the probe, mechanisms that had lain silent for shipboard decades and external time centuries, awoke. The pod attempted to connect to or observe any form of electromechanical signal system that would indicate the presence of electronic or even electricity using cultures. The pod was unsuccessful.

The pod body began a slow axial rotation as the thrusters moved the massive cylinder into a vertical orientation. Eighty three hours after the cylinder arrived in orbit around the second moon, it separated into two halves. The halves were connected down a central axis by a massive vertical shaft. Mechanisms wove a transparent bubble between the two halves. When these maneuvers were completed, the pod looked like nothing so much as a soap bubble held in place between two massive buttons.

The bubble rotated slowly in distant orbit as a series of small bodies left the pod. These small satellites fired reaction mass motors and drifted down the gravity well to the earth-like planet that the moon orbited. The satellites used very little energy and kept their electronic signature as small as possible. The satellites took up equidistant stations around the planet's equator. The satellites were equipped with highly efficient and effective means of detecting all known forms of electronic communications. Unable to detect such the satellite network went passive, not even engaging in unit to unit communications.

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Initiate priority analysis of sapient activity.

Initiate emergency wake up routines.

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Intelligent systems in the pod ran scenario after scenario to explain the lack of communication and the wreckage discovered. While the data field was rich, answers were not forthcoming.

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1-12: 33! We don't have a 33^rd cortex.

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He woke up into a brief moment of disorientation. A vague pressure formed somewhere, and then suddenly there was a perfect and endless field of green grass and daisies. A robed female figure stood alone in the field, and walked toward him.

"Hello Mr. Wilton."

"Hi, call me Roger." He said.

"Roger, we've decided to activate you. Allow me to introduce myself. I'm Cortex 32. I'm the research and communications Cortex for this mission.

"Mission? Ah. So, it's safe for me to assume that I'm not in a scanner anymore?"

"Yes, that's right. You're a stored neuronal pattern. We're approximately 200 light years out from launch port on Eos."

"My goodness. 200 light years?"

"Yes. And we're orbiting the second moon of a system that is supposed to be an advanced colony system, originally founded from Earth system."

"Wow, okay. From Earth system? All that time ago? So why am I awake? I'm only supposed to get activated in emergencies that AI systems can't handle, right?"

The figure paused.

"Well, it's a bit complicated. It appears that there's no viable colony below for one thing. A second thing is that the colony ship was lost in a crash. A third is that the humans below appear to have a bronze age culture at best."

"Oh." A red leather armchair appeared behind him. He sat down in it.

"And you want me for what?"

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The pod, designed and equipped for servicing the technology needs of highly advanced planetary systems was forced to activate never before used protocols. The computing systems on-board consulted and played out scenarios for real time hours before arriving at a strategy thought likely to produce acceptable results.

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"We're sending you below, Roger. In a body."

"A body?"

"Yes, a nanoassembled synthoform body. I imagine you'll like it a lot. We're adding a lot of programming, a lot of enhanced, very enhanced, capabilities."

"And I'm to do what, down there?"

"Establish a civilization, look for an unexpected presence."

He blinked. "Umm ... unexpected presence?"

She smiled a tolerant smile. "Yes, that's the mission. You'll be filled in later."

He shook his head, staring at her. Her smile faded slightly.

"Oh Roger, one other thing. We're going to have to alter your personality and memories and do some identity adjustments."

"Personality and identity adjustments? You can't do that! I'm protected by the sentient rights act of 2134!"

"Well, we're under military jurisdiction right now, as odd as that may sound. Also, while it may be a legal technicality, we're not really going to adjust you. Just the copy of your cortex in the reconnaissance body. You're going to have to fit into a mid-bronze age culture, and while your skills as a historian and anthropologist are critical, there's a lot more necessary."

"For example?"

"Martial arts, survival skills, combat training, surveillance training, espionage skill sets. And we're going to have to do some specific knowledge suppression until gating factors are met."

"So let me get this right. You're sending me down in a nearly indestructible body with illegal and forbidden ethic violation skills, and you expect me to seed-kernel a civilization AND identify and eliminate a potential, unknown, possibly alien presence on-planet? All under some kind of personality suppression?"

"That's a good summary for now, yes."

"Holy crap. You're all off guidance, aren't you?"

"That's precisely why we need a human's advice on this."

"Advice? I'm a human pattern! You're supposed to yield command to me, not this crap."

"Well yes, this is unusual, isn't it?"

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A small payload shell detached from the service maintenance access hub near the meridian of the pod. Using small ion thrusters in a detachable belt, the pod directed the payload shell into a precisely determined entry curve. The thruster belt detached from the shell and returned to the pod.

The maintenance shell drifted slowly across the gulf between the moon and the planet below. After several days of drift, it entered a precisely calculated entry profile. As it did so, its exterior surface began to heat. Once a critical temperature was reached, the lifting coils of the shell were activated and the rate of descent began to slow. Heat began to dissipate into the atmosphere.