Description: Chapter One Jack Holloway set the skimmer to HOVER, swiveled his seat around, and looked at Carl. He shook his head sadly. "I can't believe we have to go through this again," Holloway said. "It's not that I don't value you as part of this team, Carl. I do. Really, I do. But I can't help but think that in some way, I'm just not getting through to you. We've gone over this how many times now? A dozen? Two? And yet every time we come out here, it's like you forget everything you've been taught. It's really very discouraging. Tell me you get what I'm saying to you." Carl stared up at Holloway and barked. He was a dog. "Fine," Holloway said. "Then maybe this time it will stick." He reached down into a storage bin and hoisted a mound of putty in one hand. "This is acoustical blasting putty. What do we do with it?" Carl cocked his head. "Come on, Carl," Holloway said. "This is the first thing I taught you. We put it on the side of the cliff at strategic points," Holloway said. "Just like I already did earlier today. You remember. You were there." He pointed in the direction of Carl's Cliff, a massive outcropping of rock, two hundred meters high, with geological striations peeking out of the vegetation covering most of the rock face. Carl followed Holloway's finger with his eyes, more interested in the finger than in the cliff his master had named for him. Holloway set down the putty and picked up another, smaller object. "And this is the remote-controlled blasting cap," he said. "Which we attach to the acoustical blasting putty, so we don't have to be near the acoustical blasting putty when we set it off. Because that's boom . How do we feel about boom, Carl?" Carl got a concerned look on his doggy face. Boom was a word he knew. Carl was not fond of boom . "Right," Holloway said. He set down the blasting cap, making sure it was nowhere near the blasting putty, and that the cap receiver was inactive. He picked up a third object. "And this is the remote detonator," Holloway said. "You remember this, right, Carl?" Carl barked. "What's that, Carl?" Holloway said. " You want to set off the acoustical blasting putty?" Carl barked again. "I don't know," Holloway said, doubtfully. "Technically it is a violation of Zarathustra Corporation safe labor practices to allow a nonsentient species member to set off high explosives." Carl came up to Holloway and licked his face with a whine that said please please oh please . "Oh, all right," Holloway said, fending off the dog. "But this is the last time. At least until you grasp all the fundamentals of the job. No more slacking off and leaving all the hard work to me. I'm paid to supervise. Are we clear?" Carl barked once more and then backed off, tail wagging. He knew what was coming next. Holloway glanced down at the detonator's image panel and checked, for the third time since he placed the charges earlier in the day, that the detonator was keyed specifically to the blasting caps placed into the charges. He pressed the panel to answer YES to each of the automated safety questions and waited while the detonator confirmed by geolocation that it was, in fact, safely outside the blast radius of any charges. This could be overridden, but it took some hacking, and anyway, Holloway preferred not to blow himself up whenever possible. And Carl was not so fond of boom . CHARGES SET AND READY, read the detonator panel. PRESS PANEL TO DETONATE. "Okay," Holloway said, and set the detonator on the skimmer floor between him and Carl. Carl looked up expectantly. "Wait for it," Holloway said, and swiveled around in his chair to face the cliff. He could hear Carl's tail thumping excitedly against a crate. "Wait for it , " Holloway said again, and tried to spy the places on the cliff he had drilled into earlier in the day, using the skimmer as a platform while he inserted and secured the charges into the drill holes. Carl gave a little whine. "Fire!" Holloway said, and heard the dog scramble forward. The cliff puffed out in four spots, spewing rock and dirt and hurling vegetation for meters. The cliff face darkened as the birds (which is to say, the local flying animal equivalent to birds) that had been nesting in the cliff face's vegetation took to the air, alarmed by the noise and sudden eruptions. A few seconds later, four closely spaced cracks snapped the air in the skimmer's open cockpit, the sound of the explosions finally reaching Holloway and Carl-loud, but without the Carl-worrying boom . Holloway glanced over to his right, where his information panel lay, sonic imaging program up and running. The sonic probes he'd placed on and around the cliff were spewing their raw feed into the program, which was collating and combining the data, turning it into a three-dimensional representation of the internal structure of the cliff. "All right," he said, and swiveled around to look at Carl, who still had his paw on the detonator, tongue lolling out of his mouth. "Good boy!" Holloway said, and dug into the storage bin to pull out a zararaptor bone, still heavy with meat. He unwrapped it from its storage film and tossed it at Carl, who fell on it happily. That was the deal: Press the detonator, get a bone. It had taken Holloway more than a few tries to get Carl to press the detonator accurately, but it had been worth the effort. Carl had to come on the surveying trips anyway. Might as well have him be useful, or at least entertaining. Now, it really was a violation of Zarathustra Corporation safe labor practices to let a dog blow things up. But Holloway and Carl worked alone, hundreds of kilometers from ZaraCorp's local headquarters on-planet and 178 light-years from its corporate headquarters on Earth. He wasn't technically a ZaraCorp employee anyway; he was a contractor, just like every other prospector/surveyor here on Zara XXIII. It was cheaper that way. Holloway reached down and rubbed Carl's head affectionately. Carl, engrossed in the raptor bone, paid him not the slightest bit of mind. An urgent beep came from Holloway's infopanel. He picked it up to see that the data feeds were suddenly spiking through their bandwidth. A low rumble thrummed its way into the skimmer cockpit, getting louder the longer it lasted. Carl looked up from his bone and whined. This noise was perilously close to boom . Holloway glanced up and saw a column of dust rising violently from the cliff wall, obscuring everything behind it. "Oh, crap," he said to himself. He had a very bad, sinking feeling about this. After a few minutes, the dust began to clear a bit, and his very bad, sinking feeling got worse. Through the indistinct haze, Holloway could see that a portion of the cliff wall had collapsed, the borders of the collapse roughly contiguous with where he had placed his explosive charges. Stark geological striations glared out from where vegetation had been before. Birds swooped into the area, looking for their nests, the remains of which were a couple hundred meters below them, the wreckage muddying and rerouting the river at the foot of the cliff. "Oh, crap," Holloway said again, and reached for his binoculars. ZaraCorp would be awfully pissed he'd just caused a cliff collapse. ZaraCorp had been working hard over the last few years to reverse the long-standing public image the company had as a rampant despoiler of nature-earned, to be sure, by actually despoiling nature on a number of planets it had operations on. The public was no longer buying the argument that uninhabited planets had higher ecological tolerances than inhabited ones, or that these ecosystems would quickly restore natural equilibriums once ZaraCorp had moved on. As far as they were concerned, strip-mining was strip-mining, regardless of whether you were doing it in the mountains of Pennsylvania or the hills of Zara XXIII. Confronted with overwhelming public opposition to his company's ecological practices (or lack thereof), Wheaton Aubrey VI, Chairman and CEO of Zarathustra Corporation, said "fine" and ordered ZaraCorp and all its subsidiaries to exercise practices consistent with ecological guidelines suggested by the Colonial Environmental Protection Agency. It was all the same to Aubrey. He was no friend to the various ecologies of the planets his company was on, but ZaraCorp's Exploration & Exploitation charter with the Colonial Administration specified that the company would receive tax credits when conforming to CEPA guidelines, so long as the incurred business costs were above a meager cost-of-development baseline formulated decades before anyone cared about the ecological despoilage of worlds they would never actually set foot on. ZaraCorp's ostentatious new regime of ecological best practices, in other words, helped drive the company's tax indebtedness to something close to zero, a neat trick for an organization whose size and income were a nontrivial fraction of that of the Colonial Administration itself. But it also meant that events that tarnish

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