Strata

bumped into their shoulders, then grinned nervously and sat down.
    They were in awe of Kin, which she found slightly embarrassing. According to the files they were both from colony planets so new the bedrock had hardly dried, while she was manifestly from Earth. Not Whole, New, Old, Real or Best Earth. Just Earth, cradle of humanity, just like it said in their history books. And the double century mark on her forehead was probably something they’d only heard of before joiningJohn Company. And she was their boss. And she could fire them.
    The freezer drifted back to its alcove, describing a neat detour around a patch of empty air at the back of the room. Kin made a mental note to get a tech to look at it.
    They sat gingerly on the float chairs. Colony worlds didn’t have them, Kin recalled. She glanced at the file, gave them an introductory glare, and switched on the recorder.
    ‘You know why you’re here,’ she said. ‘You’ve read the regulations, if you’ve got any sense. I’m bound to remind you that you can either choose to accept my judgement as senior executive of the sector, or go before a committee at Company HQ. If you elect for me to deal with it, there’s no appeal. What do you say?’
    ‘You,’ said the girl.
    ‘Can he speak?’
    ‘We elect to be tried by you, Mizz,’ said the boy in a thick Creed accent.
    Kin shook her head. ‘It’s not a trial. If you don’t like my decision you can always quit – unless of course I fire you.’ She let that sink in. Behind every Company trainee was a parsec-long queue of disappointed applicants. Nobody quit.
    ‘Right, it’s on record. Just for the record, then, you two were on strata machine BVN67 on Julius 4th last, working a line on Y-continent? You’ve got the detailed charge on the notice of censure you were given at the time.’
    ‘Tis all correct,’ said Hendry. Kin thumbed a switch.
    One wall of the office became a screen. They got an aerial view of grey datum rock, broken off sharply by a kilometre-high wall of strata like God’s own mad sandwich. The strata machine had been severed from its cliff and moved to one side. Unless a really skilled jockey lined it up next time, this world’s geologists were going to find an unexplained fault.
    The camera zoomed in to an area halfway up the cliff, where some rock had been melted out. There was a gantry and a few yellow-hatted workmen who shuffled out of camera field, except for one who stood holding a measuring rod against Exhibit A and grinning. Hi there, all you folks out there in Company Censure Tribunal Land.
    ‘A plesiosaur,’ said Kin. ‘All wrong for this stratum, but what the hell.’ The camera floated over the half-excavated skeleton, focusing now on the distorted rectangles by its side. Kin nodded. Now it was quite clear. The beast had been holding a placard. She could just make out the wording.
    ‘“End Nuclear Testing Now”,’ she said levelly.
    It must have taken a lot of work. Weeks, probably, and then a very complicated program to be fed into the machine’s main brain.
    ‘How did you find out?’ asked the girl.
    Because there was a telltale built into every machine, but that was an official secret. It was welded into the ten-kilometre output slot to detect little unofficial personal touches, like pacifist dinosaurs and mammoths with hearing aids – and it stayed there until it found one. Because sooner or later everyone did it. Because every novice planetary designer with an ounce of talent felt like a king atop the dream-device that was a strata machine, and sooner or later yielded to the delicious temptation to pop the skulls of future paleontologists. Sometimes the Company fired them, sometimes the Company promoted them.
    ‘I’m a witch,’ she said. ‘Now, I take it you admit this?’
    ‘Yarss,’ said Hendry. ‘But may I make, uh, a plea in mitigation?’
    He reached into his tunic and brought out a book, its spine worn with use. He ran his thumb down it until the flickering pages stopped at his reference.
    ‘Uh, this is one of the authorities on planetary engineering,’ he said. ‘May I go ahead?’
    ‘Be my guest.’
    ‘Well, uh. “Finally, a planet is not a world. Planet? A ball of rock. World? A four-dimensional wonder. On a world there must be mysterious mountains. Let there be bottomless lakes peopled with antique monsters. Let there be strange footprints in high snowfields, green ruins in endlessjungles, bells beneath the sea; echo valleys