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some messages but then something went wrong. Perhaps their nuclear fuel rods imploded and caused a catastrophe which wiped them all out; those things were always pretty volatile and it wouldn’t have been the first instance of them doing so. Perhaps the arboretum failed before they could sustain themselves and they starved. Perhaps they landed too close to an active volcano and were wiped out that way. All of these things we are now, in this new epoch, able to counter. I have been trained not to make such mistakes, and a mistake is what it was that wiped out the Suki II. Do not worry yourself unnecessarily, Arianna, not when we have so much still to do.”
    “With respect Ma’am that doesn’t answer my question,” said Arianna. “As the librarian I need to know the full facts in case something unexpected happens and we need to act accordingly. People come to me for advice, Ma’am, for knowledge. I can’t give it to them unless you put me in the picture.”
    The Admiral smiled again. “Of course,” she said quietly. “And in answer to your question the Confederation did indeed consider the fate of the Suki II. In fact I was given orders that we are to look out for signs of wreckage and when we find it we are to conduct a full investigation as to what happened to it. But do you know who has commissioned this order, Arianna? The culture department. The report is required for historical purposes only for it is widely believed any lessons the Suki II may have taught us have already long been learned.”
     
    Arianna left the council chambers feeling deeply dissatisfied, although at the same time she couldn’t help feeling that perhaps the Admiral was right. No answers as to the fate of the Suki II were going to be unearthed, not after so many years. Right now everybody was looking towards the future, and Arianna knew she must do the same. Everybody was busy. Everybody was going about their business with a new urgency, everybody glancing hopefully out of the window in the hope of catching sight of their new home. Arianna should have been excited too, if not for herself than for her daughter who was soon to experience a real world for the first time. But leaving aside the unease over her historical research Arianna had other worries as well. She knew a confrontation with Sol was coming. At the moment the police officer was forcing himself to be polite, was swallowing every indignity she and Jak were inadvertently heaping upon his head and trying to remain absorbed in his work, but she knew it would not last. She remembered how he had begged her not to leave, how Ambra had held on to him and wept and refused to let go; even at eighteen months she had known, the pain of parental separation on a young child. Arianna felt guilty every time she thought about it.  
     
    Jak was busy preparing his rangers for arrival and conducting a training session on the simulators. Ambra was being babysat by Jen Henna the librarian. Sol would pick her up later. With nothing else to do Arianna returned to the library. Maybe she read and researched too much. Everybody thought it would be a positive paradise down on Hearthfire but she had read enough to know how difficult colonisation was. She had heard reports of colonists starving or freezing to death, of toxic winds that blew in and turned people to dust as they went about their daily business, of starships that broke apart upon entering the planet’s atmosphere and scattered the remains of the passengers like rain across the breadth of the entire continent. Arianna tried to snap herself out of her malaise. Those reports were from a long time ago. The pioneer probes were much better equipped now, the starships far more reliable and resilient and the training the best it had ever been. It will be fine, she told herself, and she imagined she could almost convince herself completely were she not haunted by the final message relayed by the colonisers of the Suki II, sent out just a fortnight