Then Originator ruins were discovered.
The original survey hadn’t picked them up, because Jericho was covered in a dense quasi-jungle and the local life generated its own electromagnetic interference. Both factors made it a hard world to survey. But eventually, settlers had started bringing back stories of strange things from the interior and the discovery was made. It didn’t seem a priority, until Originator relics thwarted the Architect attack on Lycos, and suddenly life on Jericho seemed much more appealing. Hostile wildlife beat having your world torn apart by a moon-sized alien.
Eventually the war ended and Jericho’s scientists, backed by the newly formed Hugh, asked everyone to please vacate so they could get on with their work. The Jerichan settlers refused to be thrown out of their new homes, thank you very much. This led to the creation of the Jerichan Resettlement Board, and the ongoing attempt to relocate its colonists. This led in turn to the Nativist movement’s Jericho Chapter, formed to protect the colonists’ ‘rights’。 And to make plenty of other trouble besides.
Idris had burst into real space at what he fondly imagined was a discreet distance from Jericho. However, its entire system was buzzing with traffic. It seemed someone had turned the trouble up to eleven.
The colony planet itself should have been the crew’s main priority, but the Vulture God crew’s attention was caught by one of the outer planets. It was being pulverized into an asteroid field, and its debris trailed along the curve of its old orbit for over a hundred thousand kilometres. Idris brought up images: the planet was swarming with vast factory-machines like city-sized flatworms. Past the ravaged curve of its horizon loomed a great bristling lump of mutilated-looking technology. This was a Naeromathi Locust Ark, the Jericho system’s very unwelcome visitor.
Humans ran into the Naeromathi almost half a century before Earth fell. The creatures roamed the Throughways with an apparently insensate hunger, breaking apart worlds for raw materials and ignoring any requests to stop. For the next few decades, humans and Naeromathi would clash repeatedly. Nobody had any idea where the Naeromathi homeworld was located or even if they had a governing body. They just turned up, devoured and built more arks.
So it went, until something even bigger than the Naeromathi came along. The joint human–Castigar colony of Amraji were fending off one of the species’ vast Locust Arks, when an Architect arrived to make the whole business moot. When the Naeromathi attacked the Architect, that established the first common ground between the species. The Naeromathi really hated the Architects, and the Architects were why nobody had ever found the Naeromathi homeworld. Which didn’t mean finding a Locust Ark chewing up planets in the Jericho system was a terribly comforting thing. Current détente suggested that they wouldn’t proceed to munch on Jericho itself, but they were a strange, lost species and there were no certainties. All of which seemed beyond the pay grade of Jericho’s lone military vessel, the tired old cruiser Samphire, which looked as though it hadn’t had an upgrade since the war. As if to compensate for its impotence against the Locusts, the Samphire was bombarding the Vulture God with demands instead.
Olli had set them up with a cover ID as the Jenny Kite, in case people were watching for the Vulture God. It was only meant to fool a cursory inspection, not a full-on military inquisition. Kris spent a few fraught minutes liaising with a suspicious navy lieutenant who couldn’t work out why a deep-space salvage vessel would be touting for work out here – and he had a point. She’d eventually sold him on the story that, as there was so much damn junk floating about in-system, the Jenny Kite was here to scavenge crumbs from the Naeromathi’s table. She had a feeling their details would be on the next military packet ship out of there.
‘They think we’re in league with the Locusts?’ Olli demanded disgustedly. ‘I mean, why all the suspicion?’
‘They think we’re Nativists,’ Solace put in simply. All eyes turned to her.
‘Why . . .?’ Kris asked, and the Partheni gave her an odd look.
‘Seriously? Jericho is on the Parthenon’s red list. We don’t come here. It’s prime Nativist recruiting territory.’
Apparently nobody else had known this. Kris herself had only just learnt the potted history of Jericho, and as far as she was concerned, the place was a backwater armpit.
‘Well, it wasn’t the Nativists who stole our ship or killed our friends,’ Olli said flatly. ‘Wasn’t them came to steal our pilot, either.’