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once-beautiful world. What they saw was nothing like the reports had
claimed those few years ago.
       The seas that had been ‘boiled away’ were
still plainly visible, bright blue and gleaming with majesty, even from the fleet’s
moderate distance. As the Rhea and
her destroyer and cruiser escorts moved closer, they began to see that the
surface was not at all covered with the impact craters from some ‘unimaginably
devastating orbital bombardment.’ The valleys and forests, mapped out over a
hundred years ago by the first explorers, were still as beautiful as they had
been so long ago. Snow still covered the polar regions of the planet, as well
the higher peaks of the great mountains of the Granite Forest on the northern
continent of Erros.
       The only thing that meshed with the
after-war reports was the devastation caused in the cities, but even those
reports seemed exaggerated. The greater part of Mendahar was unscathed, and
Aberdeen fared little worse. The majority of the damage to the population
centers had been done at Crystal City. From what the sensors of the Rhea were telling the crew, the city and
the military base were in compete ruins.
       Inside the computer- and personnel-laden
combat information center of the Rhea ,
Captain Richard Krif stared out the single, expansive view port at the slowly
spinning world before him. He didn’t need to read the litany of updated reports
coming in every few minutes as the junior officers and technicians scanned the
planet below to know the underlying truth: when it came to Second Earth, the
majority of the public had been lied to. Having initially believed the reports
that had originated from the Unified Council, Krif now had to second-guess his
strategy for sending a landing team down. The game, it seemed, had irrevocably
changed, and he was faced with a ever growing list of unknowns.
       What would his landing team discover when
they reached the surface? The intrusion-detection satellites—supposedly placed
in orbit to protect the planet—were mysteriously missing. Richard needed to
know why, and he needed to know fast. From the starboard side of the room, he
watched as Lieutenant Commander Caitlin Hayes gave Shawn Kestrel’s Mark-IV
permission to depart for a second time. He then turned to the large status
screen at the head of the room as a pair of fighters streamed out from their
launch tubes on the starboard side of the carrier, momentarily passed by the
Mark-IV as it rocketed out of the bay. Not long after, several more craft
exited their respective launch tubes and maneuvered into formation.
       Krif watched in silence, the only noises
coming from the odd computer terminal acknowledging some random request by its
user. He sucked in a slow breath, held it for a moment, and then exhaled with
equal gradualness. “Kestrel, you’d better get me some answers, and you’d better damn well come back alive. I’m
sticking my neck way out on this one; I can feel it,” he said to no one in
particular.
       “Sir?” A technician addressed the captain
from an astrometric station directly below the slightly raised platform on
which Krif was standing.
       Krif turned his head down toward the young
man, annoyed that he was both talking to himself and that his one-sided
conversation was being overheard. “I didn’t say anything. Don’t you have that
sensor report for me yet?”
       “Ah…yes, sir. Right here, Captain.” The
young man fumbled when he almost lost his grip on the data tablet, turned, and
then handed it to Krif. Retrieving the cartridge from the specialist’s shaking
hand, Richard went back to observing the small band of mixed craft heading down
to the planet as he waited, as patiently as he could muster, for their first
report.
        
 

Chapter
2
        
 
       E verything
on this world looked just like the pictures of Old Earth that Shawn had first
seen as a young child, save for the enormous moon hanging just over