I forgot that I was going to explain about the Wreck last time. I will this time, but a couple of related tangents first.

I was reminded sideways by a snotty e-mail from a Brazilian who plans to emigrate when she's old enough, and clicks on anything having to do with anything 100 klicks or more above the Dirt's surface. (And N.B. to correspondent in Atlantis, it may be Oceanus to you, Earth to everybody else, but it's still only the Dirt to me. Sorry if you're offended. Watch your language. I BCC'd your mother.)

Brazilian pointed out that everybody who has a clue about the Big knows what the Wreck is, and I don't have to assume that everybody on the Dirt knows nothing about the Big.

A bit of background, because, face it, you need it.

I had never been down to the Dirt in my life until just after the first war. I'd met the Admiral (only a captain then) through a mutual friend (see the first entry in this log) and later she invited me down to spend some time with her and her family.

When Command (they run things up here for the UN) found out I was going, they asked a favour, for which they would pay me. I was checked out to stay down for three months (after one month of 1 gee treadmill stuff at the L5 hospital) and could I take some of that time for a simple speaking tour of some Canadian and American schools within flying distance of Toronto? They wanted some live PR for immigration (that's what they called it then, now it's officially emigration, sounds more frontiery, I guess). I said yes.

So I spent some time travelling around, mostly to schools (yes, spacers, real-time meat-in-the-seats 'say present but only if you are' schools), and the occasional town hall meeting, real and VR.

Kids down there knew about the war, but since it had come nowhere near the Dirt, it was like a car-accident in another country. Sad but irrelevant. Command (and the UN) wanted me to give them my first hand account of things, which I did. I even had pictures. No, it wasn't morbid. My suit took them while I was in action and I kept them.

I remember a class in a town called Georgetown, outside Toronto. It was at one of the local high schools, the oldest as a matter of fact. It had seen better days, a long time ago. My speech was supposed to be a reward for all the high-rollers in the senior class, but in the end, they just opened the doors and let half the school in. The rest were watching in VR or on the screen in the cafetorium. I was popular.

I talked. I showed pictures. I talked some more. Sadly, some of them didn't care at all about the invasion or our losses, just the time off from classes. They didn't seem to understand - maybe couldn't - what the presence of two intelligent species fighting over territory implied about the galaxy, about our future, even when I spelled it out for them.

And I quote: "We are not alone. This isn't the tag-line from an old movie. This is the truth and it is terrible or awesome, as your imagination allows. Some of you might want to immigrate someday. Do it. And I can't tell you to forget all the dreams you might have about life out there. Go out with all the dreams you want. Just remember, that for the first fifty years, it was just us in the Big. There was no enemy but ourselves and our own inexperience and even stupidity. But the Thaiax invasion changed that completely. From now on, it is in our own best interests, as individuals who do not want to die, and as guardians of our own species, to be constantly aware that war could happen again at any time." (And as you know, it did, three years after the end of the first war.)

Well, it was mostly like pissing in the Big talking to these kids. That kid from Atlantis might understand about beautiful but innately deadly environments, but they didn't. Out here you can kill yourself two meters from your front door by pressing the wrong button on your spacesuit, failsafes be damned. And a very important point I tried to make over and over: your best buddy can kill you with one teensy stupid mistake. "The evolution of human culture in the Big is lamarckian," is what I told them, and left the ones to look it up who wanted to. It's memetic, too, of course. Letting the next guy know what killed you also goes into the rule-book for everybody else.

J.J Earthling can't get killed by forgetting a doorcode. (Spare me the e-mails, it's a generalization, not an absolute. I know what the crime rate is in some places down there.) J.J can't kill the family by pressing the red button instead of the blue one. And do you all know what happens if you're stupid enough to go EVA during a coronal mass ejection? Out here, if you're not on your toes all the time, you're 64 bytes in the obits tomorrow.

So to finish up my point to Brazilian, there is a lot you need to know and truly believe to survive out here. And you never know enough. But, guess what? You can't just go out with a memorized list of do/don't do. You have to be observant on every level. The Wreck taught us that. (Yeah, I know. Finally.)

Five years before the start of the first war, let's see. Control was keeping things humming at Earth/Luna (yes, one says Earth/Luna not Dirt/Luna). OR/Aeneid was single-handedly taming the Asteroid Belt and extending the frontier out to Jupiter and Saturn. As new ships came off the assembly lines at Ceres, they were sent inwards, sometimes with robot pilots, sometimes with meat. The people who'd commissioned them or selected them out of a catalog would pick them up and sign on with the next caravan going back out. The Guard (now Service and the Fleet) had regular scheduled runs according to orbital stats. Safety in numbers because there were pirates.

Hey, another small tangent, because some of you don't get this when it's really easy. Earth orbits the Sun in one year. So does Mars, but it's one martian year, which is about two Earth years. Ceres' orbit is even longer, and Jupiter's even more so. You don't aim your ship at Mars where it is when you leave, you aim where it's going to be when you get there. Huh?

Ah, my old friend Distance, and his brother-in-arms, Celestial Mechanics. Factors to consider when planning a trip outside Earth/Luna are basic. Say you're a freighter captain with a contract to take some luxury items to Mars. They mass a certain amount on top of what your ship does, fully fuelled, provisioned and crewed. Your contract stipulates a latest allowable delivery date. Where's Mars going to be by that date? So your departure time, speed and fuel consumption all depend on that. How much mass do you have to get to Mars in how tight a time window? Does the Guard have a caravan scheduled that matches up, or do you a) go alone (dangerous) or b) try to get a caravan of your own together and get the Guard to fly along? Let's say b).

So you're on your way out to the Asteroid Belt with your caravan and a couple of Guard ships armed with mass-driver rail-guns, some big lasers, and maybe experimental plasma cannon at that time.

In an earlier post I mentioned that we put telescopes on everything because we have to. Part of the original reason was to find approaching objects whose path might or might not intercept your own. On an outbound caravan, that would almost certainly be pirates, since anything natural would probably have been charted and redflagged years before. But we look at everything anyway, cuz we don't call it the Big for nuthin'.

You find the Wreck. Your name goes down in history and it's all you talk about at parties for the rest of your life.

Captain Mike Cecutti was the ranking officer on that (real) caravan. (Invite him to a party. He loves it.) The trip was unscheduled and the due date tight, so they were going faster than usual on a non-standard trajectory, but they were being tracked from Earth/Luna and from Mars. If the trip had never happened, or if the Guard had refused to accompany the caravan, the Wreck would probably never have been found. But it was.

At first they thought it was a wrecked human ship of non-standard (ie, non OR/Aeneid) manufacture. The second thing they noticed was that markings on the hull appeared to be in the same alphabet as the inscription on the Czech Probe.

It had been holed by a high-velocity object and then apparently been almost completely cannibalized and left adrift. Calculations suggested that at one point some years before it had been in or very near the Jovian system.

It took some doing, but with Guard negotiated changes to that freight hauler's contracted delivery date, and some fuel borrowed from the caravan ships, two of the Guard ships hauled the Wreck back to Earth/Luna. It might have been easier just to take it to Mars with them, but Control wanted it back home ASAP.

Now be aware that there really were pirates. They came from small rat-hole colonies out in the Asteroids who needed food, air, volatiles, reaction mass for their fusion plants, whatever.There weren't a lot of them, and lost colonies died fast, but they were a definite nuisance on single ships and even caravans. Uusally out in the Asteroids, but they been known to attack within Mars' orbit.

Ships had been disappearing without a trace, or found holed in exactly the same way, for several years at that point. The pirates had been blamed for all of it. The Wreck suggested very strongly that the aliens who left the Czech Probe had attacked one of their own ships exactly the same way ours had been.

You see where this leads. We'd been under attack for some time by then, and didn't even realize it.

You may not know that a very appropriate (for us) expression from an old movie became very popular around that time. "Keep watching the skies!"