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When Mateo, Angela, and Ramses landed on this new colony planet, the latter
immediately started trying to figure out how to get back home. It wasn’t
right for Romana to make this decision for them. He was completely locked
out, and embarrassed by that. He guessed that the invisible probe he had
orbiting this planet were monitoring their progress. Once they
satisfactorily completed the assignment, it would automatically unlock the
recall program, and send them back home. Until then, they were forced to
help the locals come to an agreement regarding their grape conflict.
Romana didn’t send them off with nothing. Ramses had the equipment he needed
to sample the soil himself. The colonists had their own ways, but they
weren’t very sophisticated. They came here with personal tech restrictions.
They wanted to be as organic as possible, so while they happily maintained
their transhumanistic enhancements, they shunned powered tools. They weren’t
against them in general, they had just decided that they wouldn’t use them.
They were perfectly content with Ramses doing it for them. He discovered
that the south side of the river had better soil. The grapes would be happy
there, and they would also be able to expand the farm as needed.
After the locals agreed to follow Ramses’ suggestion, they hoped to be slung
back to Ramosus, but no such thing happened. Romana may have been waiting
until midnight central, but there could have been some other issue. Maybe
she needed to see that the colonists would indeed follow the new plan, and
not just a pinky promise. So they helped till the land manually until
midnight central approached, at which point they snuck off to a remote part
of the forest. There they waited for their time jump.
It was now a year later. The vineyard was absolutely thriving. It had grown
bigger than they thought it would in the short amount of time. Ramses
guessed that the sun was emitting more desirable wavelengths of light, but
he did not care to test it. They were ready to go. They should have been
returned by now. Maybe Ramses wasn’t right about how it worked, or Romana
was keeping an eye on them, and simply controlling it manually. Or maybe
something was seriously wrong somewhere else, like the team’s other
assignment site. Or Romana herself was in trouble.
“Are you sure you can’t bypass it?” Angela questioned. “Can you proverbially
reverse the polarity, and undo the lockout? Or find some kind of backdoor in
the system? We have our own slingdrives. We should maintain full control
over them.”
“You’re right, we should,” Ramses agreed. “Rather, I should. I don’t
know how she did it. Our onboard slingdrives are non-negotiable, but they’re
missing a component. It’s...if you know anything about guns, it’s
essentially the firing pin. The process won’t trigger without it, unless it
has some external trigger, like the Ramosus base.”
“Can you build a new one?” Mateo proposed. “Just the new trigger.”
“Hmm,” Ramses said. “I didn’t think of that. It shouldn’t be too hard, as
long as she didn’t sabotage anything else. I don’t even know how she gained
access to our catalyzers in the first place.” He pulled out his tablet, and
started tapping on it. “I can’t promise it’ll be done in a day since I’m
away from my lab, but I’ll work as fast as I can.”
“Take your time,” Angela encouraged. “It’s better to get it right than do it
rushed.”
“In the meantime, should we go back and help in the vineyard?” Mateo
suggested.
“Let’s leave them alone,” Angela decided. “They need to learn their own
limits. They will probably eventually bring external tech back, and just
become normal. I think we did all we were obligated to. I just wish I
understood why Romana doesn’t agree.”
Ramses was unable to finish. The next year, the vineyard was burnt down.
