Moon Flower Read Free

“So they organized a follow-up mission that included an ambassador and a diplomatic staff in addition to all the usual scientists, mapmakers, et cetera. That was about eight months ago now. The trip out took close to two months. As far as anyone can tell, they seem to have arrived in good shape. But before they’d been there for another two, the whole operation was coming apart.”
    Callen’s brow creased. “Coming apart?” he repeated. “How do you mean?”
    Borland turned from the window and made a throwing-away gesture. “Disintegrating. The reports back started getting fewer and fewer, and what did come through wasn’t making any sense. People started saying that the mission objectives were all wrong or didn’t matter, and talking about needing time to ‘rethink values’ — whatever that’s supposed to be about. I’m talking about experienced Interworld task-group directors and project managers, not a few academics with some cuckoo-land theory of sociology who went along for the ride. Then they started disappearing — first the scientists; pretty soon it was everybody. Before long it didn’t seem there were enough left in the base to run the communications properly. As I said, it was all coming apart.”
    Callen frowned while Borland waited for a reaction. There had been a few cases of disaffected groups taking off to fend for themselves in uninhabited wilderness worlds, and one instance that he knew of where a religious sect who helped set up a colony among a population of primitive tribes had decided to go native and departed from the Terran settlement to spread their word. So long as the numbers were small and not sufficient to affect the main enterprise to any significant degree, the normal policy was to let them go. With scant resources at their disposal, the Terran authorities took the attitude that if there was discontent wanting to express itself and potentially disruptive energy that needed dissipating, everyone would be better off if they did so elsewhere. In any case, anything that helped spread Terrans and their ways farther abroad could only be good for business in the long run. But he had never heard of anything on this kind of scale, affecting virtually the entire mission.
    “What kind of values were these people talking about?” Callen asked at length.
    “You tell me.” Borland made an exaggerated display of showing both hands.
    “What did we get from the SFC?” Callen asked. Since Interworld was a client, the mission would have carried an armed Milicorp contingent for security and defense. The Milicorp Security Force Commander would be able to communicate directly with headquarters at San Jose, independently of Interworld’s regular channels.
    “He was a general officer, second star,” Borland said. “Name of Paurus.”
    Callen shook his head. “Can’t say I know him.”
    “It doesn’t matter much. He vanished somewhere across Cyrene, along with just about all of his unit. It’s lucky for the rest of the mission that the natives don’t seem to have much inclination toward hostilities. The coop’s wide open, and the guard dog has gone AWOL.”
    “The whole unit?” Callen looked disbelieving. “You mean it even got to our people too? Along with their officers?” This was serious. That the subject was not general knowledge within Milicorp, and even Callen had not been brought into it before now despite his executive status, was no great cause for surprise. Extraterrestrial development demanded high stakes with a prospect of high returns, at high risk. Information that could deter or unnerve investors was treated as highly sensitive and dispensed strictly on need-to-know basis.
    “It gets worse.” Borland moved from the window to his desk, and turned to support himself in a half-sitting position against the edge, arms folded. “A second follow-up mission was thrown together at short notice and arrived at Cyrene on a ship called the Boise a little over a month ago. The