Eden's Dragons

Chapter 1: Hotel Florida

DATE: Year 487-A, Sol 2

LOCATION: Hotel Florida (Europa)

The Hotel Florida was the largest man-made structure on any of the moons of Jupiter.

It was one of the last things the Saganites built before their exodus from Jupiter to the brown dwarf Nemesis in the Oort Cloud to work on the Zipline to Alpha Centauri.

The Saganites had been trying to get further from the Earth ever since they first departed it in the 22nd century. In that way they were different from the other lineages of humans living across the Solar System. When the Rip happened and humans off world lost contact with Earth, it didn't mean much to the Saganites.

They'd already gone no contact for generations by then.

In fact, the Jupiter Sagan Cities were largely the stuff of neo-myth in the early post-Rip days. The Saganites finally revealed themselves to humans in the late 200s in what was called "the arrival," as if they were aliens. Just a few years years later they departed for Nemesis, leaving behind just one of the Jupiter Sagan Cities, massive ships built in low Earth orbit that were flown to the atmosphere of Jupiter. And the Hotel Florida.

Constructed in the Year 300-A, it served several purposes. The Saganites trumpeted it as a symbol of their feelings of friendship toward all humanity. It also served as a place to funnel all the people who had been making their way to the Sagan Cities since the Saganites first revealed themselves. It seemed like a paradise compared to the rust devouring most human settlements three hundred years after the Rip.

The Hotel Florida stood under an atmospheric dome. It had short term stays, long term stays and a cryogenic unit.

Most of its services and amenities were automated. The 25 floor structure only had five full time staffers. The Saganites made a deal with the Jupiter Lunar Federation for security. The JLF had never been permitted on Europa before. A small war broke out after the Saganites departed when the MTC tried to take over. The JLF deployed as many forces as they could muster, and it took some negotiation to get them to withdraw back to the Hotel Florida dome. The Saganites agreed to fund construction of two new settlements on Ganymede.

Eventually the NEC stepped in and made the Hotel Florida a Commons Zone, a then-novel mechanism the New Earth Consortium had been using to try to expand its power independent of the Charter Associations, like the MTC and even the Jupiter Sagan Cities, that were its constituent members.

In recent years NEC budget cuts had hurt the Hotel Florida. What little interest the remaining Saganites on Jupiter had was completely gone. A lot of people assumed the last of the Saganites were waiting for an opportunity to head for Nemesis themselves. Armed groups started taking over portions of the hotel, charging for access to pay amenities, collecting tolls in hallways and regularly blockading the exits.

So it seemed almost like an inevitability when the top floor of the hotel blew up.

Nobody expected the dragons.

Chapter 2: Alien Tall Tale (Part 1)

DATE: Year 486-B, Sol 668

LOCATION: Hotel Florida Bar

The trader across from Talcott Poe was just telling him that on his last trip to Titan, he had seen an alien. It'd been a profitable trip, and he had been paid in tea bricks. The bar at the Hotel Florida had a very favorable exchange rate between tea bricks and alcohol. The bricks were used in several of the drink recipes.

-And it looked just like you? Poe asked. He'd heard stories before, and he knew this trader, who's name he hadn't even caught, had had a lot of the drinks his bricks, in tiny slivers, help to make.

-Well, let me start earlier, the trader said, stumbling over his words as he poured another drink in his mouth.

-No, I don't like that. You said you saw an alien and it looked just like you. Okay, that's a hook. Don't go backwards now.

The trader looked at him and laughed.

-What's the rush? Where'd you say you were headed anyway?

-I'm a local.

-I meant after the bar.

-I didn't say, Poe responded. And what did you say your name was?

-Kitchen Lister. Like the warship. He smiled.

Poe remembered his name now, he'd thought of the warship when he heard the trader said the name, but then started remembering the stories of the war and forgot how he had gotten there.

After the bar, Poe was headed to the top floor of the hotel. He stayed at the Hotel Florida, but only for six or seven days out of the week. He spent one or two every week traveling to Ganymede to visit his daughter, one of just three children under ten in her mother's domed settlement of three thousand. The human population across the solar system was plummeting, under two million at the last census, and children, whether natural born, assisted, or cloned, were getting even harder to come by.

-Do you want to hear the story? About the alien?

-Yes.

Chapter 3: Alien Tall Tale (Part 2)

DATE: Year 486-B, Sol 614

LOCATION: Saturn Ring E

The trader, Kitchen Lister, had not actually been on a routine courier mission to Titan, that's just what he told Poe. He had equipped with ship with a collector and gone off on the long trip to Saturn because he'd learned from a reliable source that the geysers on the moon of Enceladus were peaking again, and there were new deposits of organic material on Ring E.

The sources were not mistaken. Ring E is the furthest from Saturn of the 7 main rings. They were labeled A through G, but went in a different order: D, C, B, A, F, G, then E. Why they may have been labeled that way hadn't been known in hundreds of years. It's likely the furthest ring was called Ring E because it was formed by the material Enceladus spouted out from its geysers, mostly water vapor and ice but also organic compounds and even salt. The organic compounds were valuable. Many of them could be used to produce high-nutrient slurp, making the long trip out to Saturn worth the cost even up to the charters and settlements on Mars.

The fresher the compounds the more they were worth. Kitchen Lister parked his ship with the collector facing one of the outer columns of ejecta from Enceladus. The collector, outfitted with a specialized filter, capturing the material from the geyser, separating the water vapor and ice from organic compounds, and the organic compounds by type, and letting the rest pass through.

Lister relaxed while the collector did the work. That's when he saw the alien, outside his generous viewport.

Chapter 4: Alien Tall Tale (Part 3)

DATE: Year 486-B, Sol 668

LOCATION: Hotel Florida Bar

-I've got a big viewport because I do very well trading, Lister said proudly.

-And the alien was outside it?

-Yeah, Lister confirmed. And he looked just like us, well, except without the, you know, he said, patting on the body armor he and all humans wore, which provided radiation shielding, allowed the loading of oxygen tanks, administered vitamin shots, and otherwise helped humans survive in the harsh environs they carved out for themselves across the solar system.

-What was he breathing?

-He was just out there, in space, Lister continued. He lowered his voice. And I could hear him in my mind.

Poe had heard this before. Aliens were a myth humans remembered came with them from their days on Earth, before the Rip. The Saganites had, on their own, conducted extensive searches of the Jovian moons, and the West Martian archaeologists scoured ancient lakebeds for signs of a former Martian civilization, having taken the legends of a sleeping King of Mars found by the Chin-Astro Mining Concern in the early days of settlement literally. And there was the affair on Triton, when nearly three hundred men and women at the Triton Trading Outpost claimed to have come under siege by alien warships.

In each case psychic abilities played a role in the stories. The legend of the sleeping king of Mars is that he communicated with the CAMC surveyors telepathically and the Triton traders claimed the alien warships had psychic weapons.

So Lister claimed the alien outside his generous viewport communicated with him through thoughts.

-What was he thinking?

-Explosions, lots of explosions. Addis Ababa Station, the Mars elevator, even the Hotel Florida.

-Yet you came here anyway, Poe pointed out.

-He said he could stop it, Lister said in a whisper.

Poe knew it was too late. The explosives had already been set, and even an attempt to remove them would trigger at least the outer layer, causing significant damage.

Chapter 5: The Snow Man

DATE: Year 487-A, Day 3

LOCATION: Arrokoth (Kuiper Belt)

The Saganite exodus to the Oort Cloud had been fraught with difficulty, and hundreds of settlers and their equipment disembarked far earlier, spreading through that region of the Oort Cloud.

After the Nemesis expedition arrived at its destination, nearly a light year away, work on a faster-than-light zipline began first in the direction back, before the more massive undertaking of tearing a short cut to Alpha Centauri, or, for that matter, wherever the astro metrics specialists decided was most promising. The work on the zipline back to the solar system from the Oort Cloud, then, gave the scientists time to survey potential extrasolar plants to settle, while the engineers figured out how to put the theory behind zipline tech into practice.

In essence, a first ship makes the voyage along the path of the zipline in a sublight speed. There's a lower limit of speed at which it doesn't work, but it's not very high.

As the first ship makes the voyage, it pulls the spacetime foam attached to the zipline base at the starting point, cutting a line through the foam until it gets to the destination, where it deploys a second zipline base to attach this line of foam to.

The zipline back to the solar system, and to the Kuiper belt specifically, was a lot more successful than the one to the star the Saganites decided to embark to. It took multiple zipline base designs to even get to a launch phase, and the first generational ship had failed, losing contact some seven years into its voyage. A second generational ship was still on its way. The scientists weren't sure the zipline would hold.

Despite the zipline, there was a lot more contact between the Saganite remnants on Jupiter and those in the Kuiper belt than between either of those and the Saganites around Nemesis in the Oort Cloud, and generally contact between the Nemesis Saganites and the remnant went exclusively through a transmission station on the small snowman-shaped asteroid Arrokoth, which was monitored further along by the Saganites on Pluto, who had settled into the ruins of the Pluto Underground Cities, whose original human population died off some three hundred years after the Rip. That they held on that long had become a kind of myth, too, about human resilience across the solar system.

Ganna Grove arrived at the transmission station on Arrokoth because none of the Saganites were confident in their ability to bring any of the ships in the Kuiper fleet up to condition to take the zipline to Nemesis. It was a sorry situation. The Nemesis Saganites ran a ship intermittently once every few years, for visitors between the two. It was mostly used by Nemesis scientists visiting further into the solar system. No one from Nemesis particularly stayed in the Kuiper Belt, and the ship rarely brought any Kuiper Belt Saganites back with it.

The shipyard on Makemake, brought into a synchronous but still distant orbit from Pluto, had started working fervently to get a ship ready for the zipline, mindful a window for a potential Nemesis arrival meant sending a ship was prohibited. The Nemesis Saganites had stopped sending the schedule of their arrival because of the growing technological gap between the two, but the Kuiper belt Saganites knew when they were prohibited from using the zipline, though they hadn't sent a ship in forty years.

It took the table chiefs nearly a day to reach the conclusion that a transmission from Arrokoth, while it would take a year and a half to arrive at Nemesis, might still be the fastest way to get a message to the Saganites there about what had happened on Europa.

Ganna was told to stay on Arrokoth after she was done. The transmission was unmanned. The receiver for transmissions from Pluto had broken a long time ago, and all it could do in its last years is send back a limited set of space weather data it had collected.

So she was needed to manually input the message about the return of the Europa aliens. The explosion at the Hotel Florida wouldn't have concerned the Nemesis Saganites at all. Even the ones on Jupiter had already outsourced the investigation to the JLF security forces, far more concerned with the spectacle of the dragons that they couldn't publicly explain.

Chapter 6: Sunday

DATE: Year 487-A, Day 3

LOCATION: Cupertino Cathedral (Qaddafi Mars Authority territory)

News of the terrorist attack at the Hotel Florida spread fast, if somewhat inaccurately. The death toll in some initial reports was as high as 20,000, which would have been more than the entire population of the Hotel. Nevertheless, while the original explosion occurred on the top floor, structural damage from lack of maintenance brought the fire to several other floors, and inadequate exits turned much of the interior into a death trap. Several thousand people died or were presumed dead, and other hotel residents started a search and rescue operation that lasted weeks before turning into a scavenging and scrapping operation.

It had been the largest single day loss of life in the solar system since the last war, and with the precipitous decline in the population recorded through several generations of relative peacetime made the Hotel Florida attack that much more a story of interest for people who otherwise didn't pay attention to the news elsewhere on their planet, moon, asteroid or space station, let alone on one in a totally different part of the solar system.

It was a Sunday, and on Mars the Cupertino Cathedral was as packed as it had been seven days earlier for Easter services, with believers once again travelling hundreds of kilometers across Mars to worship at the oldest church on Mars, named after Saint Joseph of Cupertino, the patron saint of space travelers.

It had been a small structure when it was put up in the first wave of settlement on Mars, which was not successful, and the site was used to establish a church with the same name. Eventually, it became the seat of the diocese on Mars, and after the Rip, the primary church authority, whose head was called, at first derisively but eventually with fondness, the Space Pope.

The church kept a seven-day week for its calendar, but while humans held on to the convention at first, by the time of the Rip the eight day week, 86 of which fit neatly into a Martian year, had already largely taken over. Unable to become accustomed to the concept of a 688-day year, however, after the Rip, when the Earth calendar became a complete fiction except for religious purposes, the Martian year was divided into 2, an A for the spring and summer and a B for the fall and winter, its 344 day length approximating what humans felt as the Earth year.

Pope Martin XII celebrated the mass. It had been so well attended because people wanted to mourn the dead, and because they were afraid of the reports, less substantiated and less believed, of dragons over the hotel. Could they have been fire-breathing dragons?

Martin didn't address the issue at first, talking about the loss of life and warning the people not to go looking for monsters to blame. A lot of suspicion had been laid on the Martian Trading Corporation for the Hotel Florida bombing. The MTC had made an offer to purchase the hotel outright from the Saganites the year before, looking for a foothold in the Jovian system after several failed attempts. Along with the church, the MTC was one of the oldest institutions in human society, tracing its lineage back to the CAMC, although the link was debated and question. It often placed the two institutions on the same side of political divides. The pope didn't want the people to look at the MTC like a monster.

He didn't mention the reports of the actual monsters, the dragons, but told a story about a saint who had had a vision of the Virgin Mary on a planet, with rays of the sun coming from her hands, and said she'd been told to forge a medal of that vision, a medal that even now was still being struck and worn in the hopes of a miracles.

-Visions, too, he said, could be shared. And here, too, we shouldn't look for monsters.

Then he started to talk about visions of aliens, the stories space travelers have told since the first humans came out into space, always airy visions. There had been sightings of aliens and their ships on Earth, too, he explained, stand-ins for the angels and demons humans could no longer see.

-But it's not so with aliens, Martin continued. God gave humans dominion over the Earth, and we lost it. Creator of the universe is he, but he gave us dominion only over the Earth. We're in borrowed space, on borrowed time.

He ended abruptly.

Chapter 7: The Explosion (Part I)

DATE: Year 487-A, Sol 2

LOCATION: Hotel Florida, Penthouse (Europa)

The sound started like a knock deep in the walls, a not unfamiliar sound to Juntin Broad, who had lived luxuriously, if unwillingly, in one of the penthouse units of the Hotel Florida for the last dozen or so weeks, his parents holding him there while they negotiated with a couple of families with an excess of daughters as well as a representative from the Martian Trading Corporation who had traveled all the way to Ganymede.

For the Broads, Juntin represented the culmination of their work on genetic engineering. He was a lanky, like the humans raised in low-gravity, and a heavy-bone, like those born on Mars. He was better than a pristine, and most importantly, he was pliant. The start of the new year opened up the books, particularly for the MTC, and the Broads expected to have Juntin sold by the end of the week

The Broads had Juntin in the traditional style, injecting the child-bearing Broad with a biochemical cocktail to trigger the first phase of genetic modifications. After birth, Juntin was given growth hormones that accelerated his aging. He was educated in a rote manner, and a steady stream of injected pharmaceuticals helped shape his personality.

Juntin recognized the knocking sound as something in the hotel that hadn't been working but was starting to. He'd noticed the sound during the faux seasonal shifts at the Hotel, when the manner of gases used for environmental controls became different.

The knocking turned into a kind of creaking or ripping sound, building in tension, slowly at first, and then like a runaway train. And then the sound exploded, pulling the walls and floors of the hotel as if out of their supports and into the fire that bubbled below.

Chapter 8: New Year's Eve

DATE: Year 486-B Day 688

LOCATION: New Paris, Main Colony

The end of the B-years saw a lot more festivities than the end of the A-years because the Sol count reset to Day 1. In a way it was a double new year's eve celebration. The human language had evolved that year meant two things, the 688-Sol cycle, and the A- and B- years, the particular meaning evident from context and verbal and non-verbal cues.

Most of the solar system followed the Martian Calendar, using the A and B years and the Sol Count, but naturally there weren't as many celebrations. The largest celebrations were on New Paris, the largest of the chartered associations on Mars, and the location of the planetary headquarters of the MTC. It was also, mostly because of that, that Mars' time zones began with New Paris.