Plague Planet (The Wandering Engineer) Read Free

they'd visited them first. A few were named for Veraxin
explorers, but Veraxins in the early days weren't known for taking on missions
of exploration.
    He'd had to look it up in the Encyclopedia. Fortunately someone
had left an entry about the name. The Jason, one of the earliest hyperspace
exploration ships had discovered the system and named the planet out of a bit
of amusement. He could understand that in theory, explorers tended to run
through their famous and inspiring name list rather quickly. But Epsilon
Triangula?
    It turned out that they had named it not for what the words meant,
but for the letters. E.T. A joke about Extra Terrestrial.  Apparently future
settlers who bought the rights to the system and terraformed it never bothered
to change the name. That showed their lack of imagination.
    The planet had been heavily terraformed using asteroids and nano
air exchangers over a period of fifty years or so. The asteroids and comets had
given the planet a jump start, battering her a bit, he could still see some of
the massive craters, but they had done the job. They'd even managed to move the
planet from the outer most edges of the Goldilocks zone and into the deeper
habitable zone. The comets had added additional water and other gaseous
materials to the atmosphere to thicken it and give the nano terraformers
something to work with.
    The mountainous exchangers and their power supplies were gone, not
due to any bombing but because they had been sold off to help clear the colony
of startup debt. That was typical; they had probably been used to terraform a
quarter of the planets in the sector. But the craters and island rings where
asteroids and comets had impacted and burrowed into the crust were still
self-evident, again, like the naming of the planet no one had bothered to
smooth their ugliness over.
    In fact, some had become tourist attractions. One small city was
near a crater lake. It was called Crater City, another indication of the lack
of imagination of the populace.
    There was even a perfect circle lake in the south west of the main
continent. Islands dotted the lake and Sprite focused on it for a brief moment.
He snorted at the words stenciled into the cliff. “Perfect circle lake resort
and spa.”
    “Sounds like a tourist trap,” Sprite replied.
    “Most likely.”
    The planet had been bought by a consortium of back to basic
colonists and businesses, financed by the low interest loans of the time period
before the Xeno war. They had leased several colony stasis ships to make the
run back and forth between the core worlds and the new colony once the
terraforming had produced a hospitable environment. They hadn't even waited for
the trees and plants to take hold as they had on Eden or other worlds. In fact,
according to the encyclopedia entry there had been some scandal involving the
colonists clear cutting great swaths of forests for firewood in the first
winter. The response from the colony leaders about those news reports were a
resounding mind your own damn business.
    Of course with the additional greenhouse gases in the air and the
lack of solid ozone, not to mention the lack of trees to keep the oxygen levels
maintained they'd had problems. The algae in the oceans and other waterways
hadn't spread far and fast enough to sustain the oxygen atmosphere so twenty
four years after the incident the colony had come to the Federal government
asking for assistance. They had nearly run through their resources and since
the planet had never supported life it didn't have other natural resources they
could access. They'd gotten a cold shoulder response.
    According to the report, the colony representatives had been
approached by a lobbyist who had also been in the capital at the time. They had
struck a series of deals in a bar. Six months later Perfect Circle resort had
broken ground.
    They'd used aircraft to do an orange peel over the planet, seeding
it with additional plant life. They had also set up reserves of