Democracy 101: The Tyrany of the Majority

Back on Hale's Moon, they elected me Mayor.  Ultimately, a role that became the de-facto governor of the entire world.  A small world, to be sure, but as the leader of the only major settlement on the little terraformed rock, my authority extended to more or less the entire world.  When the survivors of Caliban settled on Hale's and founded the Destiny township, they were arguably independent of our governance.  But they still used our traffic control and still recognized what passed for Customs being based out of the main settlement.  They controlled their own settlement, but understood that we controlled the rest of the world.

Not that it mattered much then.

Not that it matters at all now.

Dragon's Egg doesn't really have much of a government yet.  There is what remains of the town elders who came over from Hale's, including myself, who kind of serve in something of an advisory capacity to the rest of the town, and were working with the Alliance liaison - when we still had one.  When Blue Sun started to exercise more influence, and the mercs took over "protection," the council stopped meeting so often and people stopped caring so much.

Now, though, noises of a new Sheriff were in the wind.  Which made sense, given the nearest thing we had to Law Enforcement was people shooting anyone who tried to rob them.  Not a bad solution, actually, but some actual civil law was a step towards actual civilization and a step away from being a company town.  Next step would probably be an actual Mayor.  Assuming it all got that far.

It was actually surprising how many folk had signed on for the election for Sheriff.  Even one of the former Mercs, who'd decided to forgo the old life and settle here, was signed on.  Wasn't going to vote for him myself, but that had more to do with my planning to vote for Gallagher, seeing as he'd been Sheriff before on Hale's and me feeling he'd do a good job of it again here.

Thing is, it is a step back onto the path we'd all originally thought we were on when we came to Dragon's Egg from Hale's Moon.  Re-establishing a thriving colony with a sense of community and a new sense of purpose.  It just hasn't been turning out that way.  The discoveries of who wrapped up into the colony Blue Sun really is hasn't actually made a lot of people comfortable.  Sure, there were some business advantages to having less Alliance oversight, but being a company town for the most part wasn't actually good for us.

Well, not good for most of us, anyway.  Maybe I'd been too passive in letting KHI Corporate move the orbital maintenance facility elsewhere.  On Hale's, the KHI presence had been something of a counterpoise to the Blue Sun presence.  That and the colonists having inherited the mining operations from Weyland Yutani when they abandoned the colony.

Here, we didn't have that.  Blue Sun's roots here went deep and there was little chance of ever escaping them.  It kind of begged the question of why I stayed here myself.  Sure, I'd jacked the communication network almost since the arrival.  I had my own drones and feeds from all the local security systems.  But there was still this creeping feeling that I wasn't quite in the right position.  Too much visibility without the power to compensate for it.  The solution was probably to drop further out of sight, rather than to try and gain more influence.  Let them forget I was here so I could go about my business.

Of course, I could always retreat back to my command ship or, if I wanted to enjoy the comforts of a living biosphere, I could further develop the little place I'd set up half way round the planet.  There really was something to be said for a sheltered beach house...

Elect a Sheriff
Vote early and vote often
Is that how it goes?

The kids in the hall. I mean mine.

On Hale's Moon, I knew virtually everyone who called the world home.  There were a few people in the distant outlaying settlements, if three prospectors living out of a grounded Dakota class transport could be considered a settlement, that I didn't know.  But I usually knew of them even then.

On Dragon's Egg, it hasn't been the same.  A lot of folk coming and going and, to be honest, I haven't felt the close attachment to the people that I felt on Hale's Moon.  On Hale's I knew the names and faces and stories of over a thousand residents.  On the Egg, I doubted I knew more than a hundred.  At least not personally, and the majority of those were people who'd come with us after the Core Rebound that destroyed Hale's.

There was an old saying about not seeing the forest for the trees.  It was a reference to being so close to the details that you couldn't see the bigger picture.  It was a comfortable place, actually, if your weapon of choice was a chainsaw.  It seemed though that I was sliding to the other extreme.  I couldn't see the trees that made up the forest.  From low orbit, it was just a big green carpet.

That didn't mean I didn't know about, or care about, some of the very close to home details.  Like the Frog  kid and Lily's K2 going missing.

The search lasted days, focused mostly on some of the "old mines" that, ultimately, were a bit of a mystery on a newly released for occupation world.  Just another detail that had been either omitted or erased from the terraforming records of this world.  Fortunately, that's where they found the boy.  Locked away in some cage, surrounded by crazy people.

Ittai nani ga okotte iru?

Crazy people.  Living underground.  In a mining complex.  Considerably bigger than the test mines we'd found when we arrived.  On a world that had been inhabited for barely a year.  The mind boggles.  But the fact was they were there, both the tunnels and the people, and the boy.

Of course, it didn't help that there was an implication that the tunnel system was changing at a fairly rapid rate.  Which indicated active digging on a scale considerably greater than the pilot mines and exploratory digs our locals had started could manage.  Let alone Lily or K2, with a passion for digging.  And . . . the lack of seismic signatures we'd gotten so used to on Hale's Moon where rock mining was a way of life.

Only one thing came to mind which might be able to tunnel that quickly and quietly, and that thought was not something I wanted to dwell on.  Though it did prompt me to reposition one of the crowbars.  If we did have a mother bot on Dragon's Egg, I wanted to be sure we were in position to make it a smoking crater if we needed to.

But all this just led me to the conclusion that I needed to know more about the world we were living on.  Supposedly, the records were open.  Obviously, that was not really the case.  Which meant I was going to need to do some digging myself to get to the facts behind the truth.

I would know.  It was just a matter of time.

But, in the mean time, we still had to find K2.

Child of the sand
Digging into the unknown
What have you found now?