There are few things, even in a galaxy of wonders, to match the view of Found from a descending orbit. Hornet Abernathy had heard this her entire life, from her birth in the Orion arm, to her taking up an academic scholarship on Arlenlaylen, but to have it so conclusively proved was still a shock. She had her face glued to the window display as the shuttle that took her from the E-liner to the planet's surface for the entire twenty minute deorbit, and she did her very best to not blink.
Found.
The heart of the Starship Corps.
Found.
The world that was, arguably, the birth of the Galactic Concordant itself.
Found.
The name itself was either a derivative of the ancient Terran world for
Foundry
-- or possibly for
Foundling
-- or alternatively, it was the derivative of an equally ancient Triskar word for
Place of Sensuality
or
Family Acquired Through Deeds.
The legends had it that Found had been a prize jewel at the apex of the three centuries of slowboat warfare between the Triskar Triumvirate and the pre-Concordant Terran governance of the United Nations. The two powers had fought it out, year by stuttering year, using ships that skimmed close to the speed of light using powerful ramscoops and plentiful interstellar hydrogen, with the goal being to be the first to claim the habitable worlds that were found by the dozens on the spinward boarder of the two burgeoning interstellar states.
Found had been the most promising and the most distant of those colony grabs -- and thus, a war goal for both powers. The fighting had actually been quite sporadic and almost bloodless due to the mathematics of interstellar warfare with Euclidean Drives. Any interstellar fleet could be detected years, maybe even decades, before it arrived at their invasion target and defenses could be fined tuned for their absolute destruction. So, while the holodramas and VR recreations focused almost entirely on the scant few famous battles from that era -- the Battle of Nguyen's Gap, or the Three Day Siege -- the majority of the 'war' had been a string of ramscoop races.
The person to colonize first got the world, no questions asked.
This sharp edged competition had led, at last, to Triskar and Terran colony ship arriving at Found at nearly the exact same time, leading to the most tragic and pointless of all the battles of all the war. The two ships, armed with little better than scrap-built contact nukes made by refining local asteroid mined radioisotopes and communication lasers upgunned into killing beams, had fought one another in orbit above a pristine world. Their wreckage had come down within a few kilometers of one another, and both ships had contained a single survivor: A Terran enby and one of the three then-popular types of Triskarian females.
Here, legends diverged. In one, the two scrap-built a transmitter, salvaged cryopods, and waited watch on watch, shifting in and out of coldsleep until their messages got a return signal, growing accord and peace between one another bit by bit until they served as
de facto
ambassadors between their peoples.
In others, they were screwing by day three.
It transpired that, without the impersonal barrier of light speed and the nigh instant killing fury of a starship battle...Terrans and Triskars were nearly identical as galactic species went. Yes, Triskar's had red skin and barbed tails that contained a paralytic toxin, but Terran urine was roughly as dangerous to a Triskar's glandular system and significantly easier to deploy in personal combat than the easily avoided tail-barb. The similarities continued right down to their governments both being scrap-built emergency placeholders that emerged from their worlds Unification Events. On Terra, a nuclear war and runaway carbon emissions had forced the United Nations to take charge. On Trisk, it had been a virus that had killed one in five Triskarians.
With accord reached and Found's second colonization wave creating a unified colony, the Triskarian and Terran people had created a concord. The first alliance between disparate species in the entire wartorn galaxy. Following dead on from that were breakthroughs facilitated by shared neurosciences which themselves ushered in the first general artificial intelligences, which themselves led to the Pantheon.
The Concord grew, species by species in their representative body, god by god in their computer infrastructure, until they had swept through the entire habitable ring of the galaxy and truly could be called the Galactic Concordant.
With nearly eight thousand years of history like that...
Was it any wonder that Found was a marvel beyond imagining?
Found was not a megalopolis world like Arlenlaylen. If anything, she had less urbanization and towning than Terra had during her
twelfth
century, let alone her hundred and twenty first. Rather, the management of Found had focused upon creating a wonder that could be visible from space if you knew what to look for, but invisble to anyone coming to the world without prior knowledge.
Or, at least, invisible until they landed.
Found had been Gaiaformed. The oceans were crystal blue, the forests shimmering green and red and gold, the deserts bountiful sweeps of russet sands, the polar ice caps hearty and pale white. By looking close and carefully, Hornet could see the subtle but inarguable intelligence at work -- forests did not simply grow, they
interfaced
with neighbor ecologies in ways that normal environments shaped by blind evolution simply would not.
The most obvious hint, though?
The
clouds
.
The clouds moved with fractal perfection, interlocking and sliding across the landscape with clear intent, rather than random chaotic patterns. As the shuttle hit the atmosphere and activated her a-grav to shunt away their speed, Hornet could see a cloud pattern ahead of them part and create a massive triple banded bullseye circle, which they shot through without even causing a ripple in the other clouds. Through the window, as they soared over fields of green grass and scattered forests, she could see people enjoying their days as tiny specs on the ground, surrounded by the iridescent haze of their helper swarms.
When the shuttle at last put down, landing on specially genengineered moss and grass that absorbed what little kinetic energy it still had with a soft
whump
, Hornet was practically buzzing with excitement. She stood as the people at the front of the shuttle started to exit -- and she had almost gotten all the way down the aisle before she remembered she had forgotten her suitcase. She hurried back, squeezing past annoyed Terrans and aliens, got her case, then was out and down the gangplank and onto Found's surface.
The air smelled rich and moist, with artful gusts of wind wicking the chemical smell of the shuttle's rocket up and away from her and the rest of the passengers. She grunted a little bit as she went from the shuttle's a-grav bubble to the surface actual gravity (which was a full .4 G higher than her home for the past few years) and sagged with the weight of her suitcase...only to then feel the weight lighten. She looked down and saw that, unobtrusively, a sleek deer-like creature had moved between her luggage and the ground and was now standing cheerfully under it, its huge, quadform eyes blinking clockwise up at her.
"Wow..." she whispered and then blinked as several butterflies flew overhead and dropped a large fruit into her hand. Unpeeling the fruit, she found it smelled delicious, and tasted even better -- and had enough water content in it that she had to catch at the juice that dribbled down her chin. Before she had even wiped, another butterfly came down and dropped a leaf in her hand that had the texture and softness of a silken handkerchief.
Hornet wasn't sure if she was impressed or terrified. She decided to settle on surreal? Was surreal a feeling she could be feeling? She shook her head and made sure to sync her comnet with the local net infrastructure. It took a few extra seconds as the hardtech in her head worked to understand the biotech emissions coming from the wifi trees that grew in every forest and biome of the planet. Once it had clicked, though, she immediately got a ping.
[[COMSCHOOL:
Welcome to Found, Miss Abernathy. A representative will be meeting you shortly.
]]
Hornet squared her shoulders as the other arrivals fanned out, not seeming to be particularly concerned about the world around them. Which, made sense. It was said that you could walk from pole to pole, buck naked, and not even get a sunburn on Found. She looked up at the sun and shaded her eyes -- and before she had even put her hand over her face entirely, a butterfly had flown between her and the sun and began to lazily beat its transparent wings, creating a shield between her eyes and the sun that kept the worst of the radiation out of her actual iris. She dropped her hand from her forehead, then started to bob her head left and right -- to see just how clever the butterfly was.
It started to jink wildly left and right -- and she laughed as she saw that if she
did
move her head fast enough, she could get sunglare right into her eyes. "Ow!" Hornet said, rubbing at her eye with her palm.
Okay, cool,
she thought.
A sufficiently hard working dumbass can still get themselves killed on a Gaia planet.
"You'd be shocked how many people actually try that, first time arriving," a cheerful, female voice spoke behind her.
Hornet turned and almost dropped dead from mortification right then and there.
She had done a lot of things she had never expected to do in the past week -- shag a teacher, get accepted into the Starship Corps, travel halfway around the galaxy after dropping out of college -- but she had never, in her life, thought she would ever do something
this
boneheaded infront of...a...
An actual.
Living.
Breathing.
