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?