Incursion Vector

006

[▲] Tāwhiao Retreat, New Zealand, Earth

Damien's family practically owned half the entire island of New Zealand. Or at least that's what Nim thought as he pointed out where they would be staying as the ferry broke atmosphere and headed for Auckland.

His family actually owned and operated a cultural and wildlife preserve which offered guided tours and funded a science center dedicated to the research, cloning, and repopulation of native species wiped out during the late 21st and early 22nd centuries of human expansion. Apparently it was something they were all very proud of. Nim never had been able to comprehend the purpose of cloning dead things and throwing them back into an environment centuries removed from the one they were supposed to inhabit. Unregulated and accelerated industrialization on the Asian, African and South American continents had ended up wiping out most of the planet's non-urbanized populations with antibiotic-resistant diseases and chemical cancers, but nobody was cloning tribes of Amazonian or African aboriginals and releasing them back onto their ancestral lands.

Though that probably had more to do with the fact that cloning an entire human being was one of the few crimes punishable by summary execution on Terra Core. The regulations got a bit more lax the further out into the Colonial territories one traveled, but in Terran Alliance space, if you were convicted of reproducing a human subject (regardless of whether or not it had a nervous system) they walked you out into the court's main yard and put twenty lead bullets in your chest just in time for the prime time news lead-in. She had always thought that very ironic considering the Terran Alliance military industrial complex was the largest supplier of cloned medical tissues in civilized space.

Nim was forced to admit, despite the fact that she was feeling really land sick, the Tāwhiao Retreat was something to see. The air was sticky and smelled like... nature, the sounds were coming from real birds and monkeys, and the food wasn't served by a line of cooks who doubled as general maintenance crew. It was prepared and laid out on a table half as long as her fighter by a group of elderly women that everyone in the family called "Kuia." She spent most of the day wondering which particular Kuia had been the one she had spoken to over the com until a lady with a knee-length braid of white hair walked over and introduced herself as being both Damien's grandmother Elizabeth and the one who had ported her call to their timely rescuer. Apparently "Kuia" meant "grandmother" or "great grandmother" and Damien had five of these relatives, all of them under the same roof of his gigantic four-story fortress of a house.

After receiving the grand tour and discovering that the place wasn't one giant domicile but rather a web of apartments arrayed around a central greenhouse, covered deck, and an open common room where most of the family gathered, they spent another hour or two eating what the kuias had laid out while being introduced to all the other relatives that had gathered. Damien was the youngest of nine children and both of his parents came from similarly-sized families. Most of his siblings were well on their way to having families of eight or nine kids themselves and Nim found it rather hilarious to see a horde of plaid-wearing grade school kids dogging the steps of the recent Frigate graduate, calling him “uncle” and asking for “cool stories of stuff like the Terran Marine” before they were herded off to bed.

With the number of adults currently in the Lewis-Amotawa family they could have crewed their own corvette. Considering the combined children under the roof it was entirely feasible that in another decade they'd be able to man a destroyer with nothing but blood relations.

Most of the afternoon and evening was filled with everyone swapping stories of what was happening beyond Terra Core. Damien was the only one in the family that had joined the Navy; his brothers and sisters were all active or retired from the Planetary Vanguard, and a vast majority of his cousins, aunts, and uncles not living on Terra Core permanently had done at least four years of service in the Exoplanetary Infantry's Colonial Engineering Corps. Much to everyone's disappointment none of them knew any more than what was already known to Flight Methuselah about the First Contact Incident, and after about an hour that topic had staled and everyone went on to chatting in their own groups about whatever was interesting at the time.