Fragments 1: Devolution Landing

The Martian

The group gathered on the landing field and checked out their bags as they waited for the final member of the team to emerge from the shuttle.

His head come through the hatch first and he looked around carefully like a turtle poking its head from a shell. He was tall, angular, extremely thin and looked a little nervous.  His eyes darted around as he inspected the view before descending carefully down the steps onto the surface. Elveren may not have travelled very often in her life, but this young man had not travelled at all. He had only left his home world two days ago and this was the first time that he had ever placed a foot on an alien planet.

"Well done Professor Babin," Androbos said, in what he hoped was an encouraging tone.

"Thank you Professor," the young man replied as he shifted uneasily on his feet. "I feel a bit heavy..."

"That's the gravity," Ran said as he slapped the newcomer on the back with a grin on his face. "This is a bigger world than home. You'll get used to it though."

Babin nodded slowly, although he didn't look very convinced.

Androbos didn't know how he felt about the fifth member of the team. Professor Marcus Babin was not an amateur or an intellectual light-weight. In spite of his young age he was the most prolific expert on Dorian's Planet in the entire galaxy and had published sixteen papers and four books on the subject. He had an incredible gift for linguistic archaeology and was a big name in several other fields. There was no-one that he would have rather spoken to about the dig, but having him along in person was a completely different matter.

Marcus Babin had lived his entire life on one small world, and most of it had been spent in an isolated university where gifted prodigies were nurtured from an early age. He had become a full professor by the age of twenty-four and was generally regarded as one of the great minds of his generation. He was an unquestioned genius, but had lived an extremely sheltered life. Marcus was also painfully shy, lacked social skills and suffered from a number of minor conditions. He was definitely an academic rather than a field worker.

All of this would have been bad enough, but the young professor had also been brought up on a world which tended to generate prejudice and fear throughout the known galaxy. He was a Martian.

The Martian Empire had fallen fifty-four years ago, but the violent collapse had left a trail of devastation in its wake. Billions of people had died in various wars of independence and their aftershocks were still working their way through millions of inhabited worlds as human civilisation slowly recovered.

A number of treaties were in place to prevent the Empire from rising again. The population of the Solar System was controlled by law and there were strict limitations on inter-planetary trade. The biggest issue, from the perspective of Professor Androbos, was that Martian citizens were forbidden from all interstellar travel, and this made the young man's presence on Dorian's Planet extremely problematic.

They had skirted the issue by using a legal loophole. This involved asking Marcus to apply for Sirian citizenship. He was therefore travelling on a provisional passport. Nevertheless, it was extremely unnerving to be taking an illegal Martian into a potential war zone. As before, this was not a battle that Androbos had been able to win.