Ship’s Notes: The Last Colony

One more colony, and then I will turn back to the Linked Systems.  My choices are either to take the quicker option of Telivoni, or take the longer option of returning to Tien Terra.  Telivoni is under martial law, last time I checked, and they may well have increased security since I left.  However, it is much closer.  I promised Maria to get back to a place to repair Susana as quickly as possible, however I am not convinced Telivoni is the best option.  There are a number of space stations that would be relatively easy to visit, being away from the main habitable planet and thus the alien crash site.  However, I am not convinced that any of these space stations would have the resources to repair Susana.

But that is assuming we have money, and that is assuming that our next prospective colony (Colony-224, by Linked Systems naming standards) is going to have something worthwhile to trade.  I hope we have simply been unlucky so far.  A dead colony, and then a world of vicious primitives.  Not that we did not receive anything from Arcadia—we have replenished our food stocks, and I processed a sufficiently large quantity of fuel—but they had nothing of value to the Linked Systems.  I am, at least, glad that we did not have to trade them weaponisable technologies for the food – it would be embarrassing to come back here and find that they had nuked the world to death because of data we gave them.  (Note: If we do sell information in the future to more responsible primitives, it would be useful to write up a guide for advancing technology from the primitive to the modern – one cannot make microprocessors from sand, so to speak.)

I was hoping that Arcadia, being very close to C-224, had been tracking its neighbor, as that would give us the state of C-224 within half a gigasecond.  Unfortunately Arcadia, as previously mentioned, is primitive, and did not have the space telescopes needed for such observation, so we are travelling to C-224 as blindly as ever.  I wonder if C-224 is watching Arcadia.  13 light years is not so very far.

At any rate, once we finish the space-based repairs, travelling to C-224 will be easy – no more than 100 kiloseconds before we reach observation range.

Alas, space-based repairs are taking a while, particularly with only having one engineer, and not the better one either.  I’ve been tempted to get someone to be an assistant for Maria, but I suspect that they would only cause trouble.