143 - This Is Priceless

###### recording bee 5,481 #### Greg has no idea that I recorded part of the latest argument with Perrin.  I will keep this as a record for when we submit to the courts; when our decendants get off this rock. ####

Dag managed to catch the start code for that as it drifted by on the end of one of her dreams and she sat up in the darkness.  “Replay,” she said. “Save in First Empress history.”  She scrubbed her hands over her face and felt Yasna sit up in the bed beside her.

“Dag?”

“I caught another fragment from Petra.”

“Ah, may I help?”

It made her feel so good that he always asked.  Fec bees buzzed just outside the screen-filtered window but one or two always made it inside and she felt the tickle of the tiny bee feet on her hands and in her hair.

“Certainly, my dear.”  She reached out and he took her hand in the dark. The elusive code rode just on the edge of her dreaming but as he added his support code to hers, the faint, glowing phosphor trails behind her eyes grew stronger and she followed them into the thicket, trailing her mental safety line behind her.

Two steps in and she was surrounded by images, blocking squeals of noise or bellows of sound of some kind of natural disaster, the roar of water.  She’d only heard water in sufficient quantity to make that kind of noise once in her life, when her family had made their pilgrimage to the river cut at spring flood, to see the vertical water fall and the thousands of hive cities in the walls of the canyon, living off the spray from the river.

There.  Glittering in the dark was a truncated bit of recognizable data, that had the first Empress’s coding all over it.

### Perrin!  What is this crap?  Our contracts specified Terraformed.  This isn’t terraformed!  What in the name of sweet, right-handed, twitterpated, facecrapping, sudi skyle, Serbo-Yng, diarrhoeic Christ is this?  You paid the lowest bidder for these programs, half of them don’t work well, the other half don’t work with the first half or we’re getting these weird-assskyle frobbing things crawling up out of toxic, loose desert sand between these razor sharp islands?  Who in flaming hell came up with this top predator?”

“Oh, I did, Greg, you can cut the colourful ethnic swearing, I don’t buy it.  My dragons... I made them up of these little plate-lizards that are related to your precious birds. It’s security... and I don’t know what you mean about how bad the terraform is.  The software is working beautifully.”

Greg slammed both his fists down on the desk, making Perrin’s image jump and dance.  “On your one island continent and your archipelago... that’s about double the size of ours!”

Perrin was a very attractive man.  I confess that when he and I were lovers, before I married Greg, when we planned this whole new life on a distant planet that we owned, I banked his DNA.  He might be a pig but his genome is as attractive as he is. 

## “Sonnofabitch, Greg, calm down!  You’ve gotten your share of a terraformed planet and we’re working together to get it to where we all need to be### ### ###

### will be a thousand years before we have enough water on the surface to make puddles much less oceans! Until then we have a third of a year without any surface water at all and there IS no biomat holding all these toxics down.  Our kids are in the clinic every other day with lung issues and Petra’s up all night long trying to re-create a damned genetic disease to save our lungs!”

## That was the last fight.  Perrin had created monsters out of indigenous creatures to make travel between islands of terraform next to impossible, rather than more animals to allow us to live out here.  He lied about our contracts.  Outright lied.  I have records going back to landing showing that.

We’re dying out here.  We’re slogging through sand that blows up at every footfall.  One of the violent sandstorms blew threw and we lost a dozen people and most of the birds.  We had to kill them and crawl under them to not be taken apart by the blowing sand, catching their blood to run through the filters so we can drink it instead of ending up with blocks of blood pudding.  This is hell.  We’ve reached this island but it’s all badlands.  We need to find karst with some hope of reaching undersurface water. Babichka... I don’t want to die so many light years from hom### #### degraded image #### degraded image ###### #### #### ###

Dag hooked the data firmly to her line out of her head and hand over handed it out till she was aware of Yasna’s hand and then his arms.  “She was strong but she was so despairing, Yasna.  They lost so many people!  I don’t understand her.  I truly don’t understand half the words she’s using.  What’s a Babichka?  What’s a light-year? Terraforming? Software? Clinic? Genome? I can guess but they don’t make sense.”

“Shh.  There are certainly other bits of information floating around in people’s memories and in the Hives.”  He patted her back, the two of them rocking together back and forth in the dark, gently calming.  “You don’t have to figure it all out.  Just get it into public access.  Write down the data if it can’t be moved into a format that everyone can read.  Lin it out and everyone will know and other people can work to make sense of it.  You aren’t crazy.  These aren’t dreams fractured in time and space.  Someone will find proper definitions for these ancient old words.”

She heaved a sigh, blowing tiny bees out of the room, unseen.  “I worry that I’m breaking apart again.”

“I’m here.  I’ll keep you grounded.  Your team will help too.  Datrus likes your work and this...” his hand stroked her hair back from her forehead.  “... this is priceless.”