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something like this. Even though
they had a night shift to work, that cool evening the whole world had stretched
before them like an endless sea of opportunities.
    Until Talbot strode back to the car and scattered
them with the words, “Rigo, you’d better go in. Your mother needs you.”
    And that had been it. His father wasn’t coming
home. His mother had to come to work in the mines because his father’s contract
still needed filling and they still needed to eat. His little sisters were
immediately sent to school for the duration of his mother’s shifts, and the sea
of opportunities rose into a sea of debt that was slowly drowning them all.
    ***
    A sol train ride after Ethan’s visit with Kaia he
was at the office. He faced his first task of the day: recording the next in a
series of tutorials on how to read Xardn. The Colony Offices valued his
expertise, and since the trouble with the Others on Beta Alora, there was a new
interest in his work with the dead alien language they had spoken.
    Several things had changed in the colonization
efforts after the Earth Government had sold the 4000 passengers on Ethan’s ship
to the Others. A new fear of aliens was driving most of the spending back on
Earth, and the defense budget had skyrocketed.
    When Ethan’s tutorial was finished, he had just
enough time to grab a bowl of warm, clear sweetbean soup before his meeting
with the Coriol Defense Committee. His official title was “Alien Consultant.”
He wasn’t sure if that meant he consulted about aliens or that he was an alien
who consulted. Sometimes he certainly felt like the latter. When the Offices
wanted a simple answer, it was often hard to sum up the complexity of his
experience with aliens, good and bad, into a single, always-true maxim.
Sometimes he thought he’d be a better consultant if he had never met any aliens
personally.
    A Real-Time Communications session was already
going when he got there. RTC was one of the things that amazed Ethan. The
screen showed a group of people back on Earth, broadcast almost instantaneously
through the vast void of space that had taken him half a lifetime to cross.
They could never have RTC without Yynium. Even so, it was only available at the
Colony Offices and Company Headquarters in each settlement, and at the military
base. It wasn’t used frivolously.
    Marcos Saras was in on the link, too, from his
office across Coriol. Hovering beside him, the skeletal Theo Talbot and
Veronika Eppes, as always.
    Ethan liked to think that he and the other
governors were in these meetings to protect the people of Coriol from Saras,
but he suspected they were actually there to protect the Yynium and the
interests of the UEG. The Colony Offices were present in every settlement and
were owned by the United Earth Government.
    The president of the United Earth Government was
on the screen now, with her Defense Chair and the head of the Earth Security
force.
    “Though our meetings are often routine,” she was
saying, “I’m pleased today that I can report to you, as I have to the other
settlement defense committees, that construction on the Minean defense fleet is
completed.” The screen switched to images of the most intimidating ships Ethan
had ever seen. Armored and armed, they reminded him of sleek stingrays, with
wide, blunt wings and a tapered tailfin.
    There were appreciative murmurs around the room,
but the president was obviously disappointed by the lack of outright cheering.
The committee in Coriol knew that however beautiful the ships, they were still
a long way from their destination. The SL-driven ships had taken fifty-three
years to bring members of the committee from Earth to Minea, while Saras and
his cronies had made the trip in five.
    The president went on. “Your fleet is ready, but
we don’t have enough Yynium to send them. We need more of it than ever before.
If our interactions with the Others of Beta Alora have taught us anything, it
is that we need