Plague Planet (The Wandering Engineer) Read Free Page A

land to remain
untouched by the colonists for at least a century to give them plenty of time
to take root.
    They buried pockets of biomass for conversion into fossil fuels
over the centuries, and even cleaned up the devastated forests. It had been a
windfall of good publicity for the company when it had needed it.
    Still, due to the planet's location and its' population's
selective interest in only north American, European, and Russian biota the
planet didn't have tropical rain forests or jungles. Most of the northern
continents were pale echoes of what the America's and Russia had back before
the AI war.
    Perfect Circle had tried to change some of that, they'd seeded
remote areas with additional seeds, but had mixed results. Apparently the
director of terraforming repair on the planet had been a bit of a crusader. She
had diverted some of the funds to such projects and had eventually been found
out and fired. She'd remained on the planet and risen into politics on the
world before she'd been killed in a suspicious incident that hadn't been
detailed. It was odd that the incident and the woman were even mentioned.
    The most contentious part of the Perfect Circle deal was the
location of a series of island prisons. Apparently the resort company did a
sideline business running private prisons. Since Epsilon was a cross roads to
other systems it became a dumping ground for excess prison population before
the war.
    The resort had another side to it as well, a mental health
institution for the rich. It was part rehab, part private resort prison for
those people who had a great deal of money, or their children. If they ran
afoul of the law they would buy their way out and come to this world to
'meditate and recover'.
    With some of the seedier side of civilization already on the
planet it wasn't too surprising that some of the original colonists took
offense to it. They attempted to tame the lawless groups with heavy rules
banning alcohol and illicit substances but that only drove them underground and
made the population complicit in its trade along with its consumption.
Unfortunately organics thought they needed these substances to have a good
time.
    Irons paused as he caught that last line. Apparently the being who
had wrote the entry had been an AI. He snorted and read on. The next part was
from Sprite. She'd assembled the information from various sources. It was
filled with qualifiers and appendix notes. He ignored them, focusing on the
main content.
    Most of the world had been rural; the back to basics people hadn't
been interested in a recreation of the cities they had run away from. During
the Xeno war the planet had been resettled by refugees from Pyrax and other
systems that had been devastated by the war. But the lack of industry and a
population unsupportable with the current infrastructure had caused chaos and
famine. Also, most people wanted as far away from this sector as possible so
many had moved on over the decades, most were tradesmen or people with some
education wanting a better life for themselves or their families.
    This had given rise to the power of the mob. They had grown in
both popularity and power, for they took care of their own people. Everyone got
a cut, and you got what you put into the business. Robber crews roved the farms
during harvest time. Any truck was targeted. Some farmers cut deals with the
mobs and either just turned their contents over to them willingly or burned
their own crops and hid their stores.
    The clusters of refugees had been driven mad by hunger. Eventually
they had broken out of the confines of the camps and turned on the land like
locusts. Like many other colony worlds the devastation had torn the bonds of
civilization apart. Ships stopped coming to the planet and the people were
trapped with no place to go. They spread out, eking out a living the best they
could with whatever they could get their hands on. Apparently some places like
Crater city held on to their civility but