Chapter Two

Reshuffle

Taylor stares at his daily log, and sighs. So far, he has written the date.

Somewhere outside he can hear rustling as some creature or other works its way through foliage; while the general chatter of the marketplace floats up through the louvred blinds. There's plenty to record - but he can't find the energy to do it; not when he has another, altogether more dreaded, piece to write.

He needs to compose a speech for Commemoration - mainly because if he doesn't, he'll probably not be able to say anything at all. Given how decisive and firm he he would normally be, it freaks everyone out if he's struck dumb.

What do I say this year, Wash?

Alicia Washington, excellent deputy and valued friend - though he was too haunted by the ghost of Ayani to seek out more than that. She's been gone two years, and there's still an enormous hole in his world that he can't find any means to fill. There was always more time. Always more time.

And then there wasn't.

How many times had she saved his life? Been there when he needed someone to talk to? Always present, always ready to listen, and then she was taken away from him. By his own son.

His rugged face creases into a scowl at the thought of Lucas. This is the one time of the year that he tries so hard to avoid thinking of that moment when he and Skye looked across at that fallen body, only to find that it was no longer there. After what he did; he doesn't deserve to be remembered during Commemoration. The guilt and sadness Taylor feels the rest of the time can come back when it's over.

No. Commemoration is for people who deserve it; for the people who gave their lives for their homes. For her.

He looks at the log: still just the date.

Why didn't he take that step? He wanted to, and he's sure that Wash did, too. Sure, she would've had to resign as his deputy - but Shannon could've taken her place. Hell, he has taken her place. Would it have made a difference if she hadn't been the second in command? He shudders as he realises that it almost certainly wouldn't. Wash could never have taken the invasion lying down. Civilian or not, she would've fought and died just like she did as a soldier.

He is jerked from his reverie by a sudden shout of laughter from outside, presumably at a joke, though he didn't hear the punchline that inspired it. Oddly, it's a comforting sound - a sign to him that, no matter what was lost, what they have saved is worth it, more than worth it.

Setting his melancholy mood aside for a while, he starts to dictate; only for the ping of an incoming message to interrupt him.

Dammit. With a flick of his finger, he accepts the notification, and finds himself with another complaint about Malcolm cancelling someone's research project.

"God, not again." He groans to himself, when are these damned scientists going to stop whining about their cancelled projects? Don't they realise that they're never going to get their papers into any scientific journals any more? Perhaps, if he ever has the time, Malcolm will start one just to give them the chance to indulge - but when they are laying the foundations for their very survival, fancy-pants high-concept science will just have to wait.

He looks up at the sound of footsteps, to see the man himself in the doorway.

"I got the complaint." Taylor confirms, looking at the scowl on Malcolm's face, "I take it you didn't give Doctor Chang a shiny new toy to make up for taking his project away?"

Malcolm stuffs his hands in his pockets, "I'm really sorry about this, Commander. There aren't many diplomatic ways of telling someone that they can't carry on their research anymore - not when people think their project is some kind of scientific holy grail. I chose people for their expertise; the egos come as part of the package, I'm afraid."

Taylor casts a slightly sidelong glance at his Chief Science Officer, who has the grace to redden somewhat. Malcolm's ego is barely less enlarged; or fragile, for that matter. To be fair, he's grown up considerably since he first arrived, and he certainly more than proved himself during the occupation; but still, he can be as much of a diva as the rest of his staff now and again when the mood takes him. At least - unlike his staff - he knows it.

"I've reassigned him to the aeroponics unit." Malcolm adds, "They need his skills there - but he prefers to spend his time with the mass spectrometer, so I think actually going out and getting up close and personal with gooey plant substrates isn't what he had in mind when he accepted a place on the Seventh."

"I think I understood about thirty percent of that statement, Malcolm." Taylor advises, dryly, "Suffice to say he's got something else to be getting on with. I'll have a word with him; try to reinforce your advice."

"I'd appreciate that, Commander. I'm not sure how much more diplomatic I can be - but I'll try. I've had projects halted myself, so I know what it feels like - and I know how silly people can get about it." He admits.

"If it's any help, I'll send out a general reminder asking them not to involve me unless you've actually killed them."

"Believe me, Commander," Malcolm grumbles, "At this rate, that could well happen."

Malcolm is departing as Jim arrives, and they exchange a brief nod before Jim mounts the steps to the Command Centre and wonders what kind of mood Taylor will be in.

"Another complaint about our favourite Malcolmus?" he asks, as he breezes in.

Taylor nods, "I can't blame Malcolm - he's only doing what I told him to; but it's causing me a whole lot of grief. They can't seem to work out their problems like grown-ups over there." He shrugs the problem aside, "Anything going on that I should know about?"

Jim shakes his head, "Not right now. Everything's quiet in the compound, and there's no sign of any trouble outside it either. That deserted encampment we know of is still deserted - and there's no sign of any human life within twenty clicks or more."

"I wouldn't mind knowing what's going on beyond twenty clicks or more."

"That's something we can talk about later." Jim says, planning to save his suggestion for the senior staff meeting.

"Fair enough. How did your boy's big night go in the end?"

"Pretty good. Boylan saw the takings this morning and had the good grace to keep his mouth shut. I guess he wasn't expecting it to go that well without alcohol in the house and a few rogue card games on the side. Now we get to see if the 'Boylan's Coffee Place' experiment works out. Coffee's the one thing that he did have some luck with growing."

"It would be good to see old Tom chewing his liver out to see that place doing fine without his illegal behaviour." Taylor muses, a slightly wicked smile tugging at his lips, "Wipe that cynicism off his face."

"Well, he's the one getting the profits, so it's not like he's going to sabotage the place. It wasn't making a terra while he was trying to find a way to get more booze back into it." Jim smirks, "I don't think he's ever been this law abiding before."

"Enjoy it while it lasts." Taylor's voice drips sarcasm.

"I think that's about it until the meeting. I'll see you later."

Taylor nods as he departs, and goes back to his dictation.


Seated at her workstation, Maddy reads through the results on her plex and sighs: another failed test. While Malcolm has warned her that scorpion venoms are infuriatingly resistant to antivenins, she didn't really believe him; and she is being obliged to learn that science isn't necessarily speedy when it comes to getting worthwhile results. Having assumed it would be a reasonably straightforward task to identify the components of the venom and counter them, she is beginning to wonder if she's any good at chemistry at all.

She looks about to see where Malcolm is, and stares in surprise to see him bent over a desk in the locked room where the scorpion lives. Given that no one else will go near it, she approaches rather tentatively, and knocks on the door. Looking up, he nods and lets himself out.

"Sorry Maddy - it's the one place I can go at the moment where no one bothers me."

"With that thing in there? I'm not surprised." She admits, then shows him her results.

"Ah." He nods, "That's a shame - that compound looked pretty promising on paper. That's the way it goes sometimes, I'm afraid. I wouldn't get too fixated on a positive result - sometimes there isn't one."

"I know - it's just…" she looks very disheartened.

"You wanted to do a quick job on your first research project?" Malcolm finishes.

She nods.

"You might not believe it, but you are, you know. Negative results are just as valuable as positive ones - the trick is realising that. We record what doesn't work, and we keep going until we find something that does. If it's any help, it took Clair Patterson six years to complete his dissertation, because he couldn't find an uncontaminated specimen of rock. He got his answer in the end - and it's barely changed since. Not only that, it's thanks to him that it got out that we were poisoning ourselves with atmospheric lead - and he found that out purely because of his problems trying to get hold of specimens to test."

"Maybe - but he was trying to calculate the age of the Earth." Maddy says, wondering where Malcolm is going with his pep talk.

"And you're trying to find something to make sure that little arachnid in there and his friends don't kill people. I'd much rather we got it right than got it fast. Slow and methodical beats quick and slapdash every time."

"I hadn't seen it that way." She admits.

"That makes you no different from anyone else in the labs, then. We've all been where you are, and we all thought the same thing you did." Malcolm advises her, sagely, "I've had a bit of a dig, and I've found some medical papers covering the development of other antivenins which might be helpful. I'll send them to you when I get a spare minute. There might be some other options we can filch."

"Filch?" Maddy has never heard such a term before.

"Steal." He translates.

"Steal? You?" she stares at him in mock horror.

"Naturally. I'm a scientist, how else do you think we get papers published?" he quips as he turns back to the locked door.

"Doesn't it worry you, being in there with that thing?" Maddy asks, frowning through the window at the vivarium and its occupant.

"Believe me, it's better than having angry scientists complaining at me." He pauses as his plex pings to alert him to a message. Reading it, he snorts with amusement and shows Maddy the text.

I'M NOT COMING ANYWHERE NEAR THE LAB UNTIL YOU GET RID OF THAT EFFING SCORPION.

She frowns again, "Effing?"


Elisabeth reads through the results of Maddy's latest test, hand delivered by her supervisor, "So, nothing's worked yet?"

Malcolm shakes his head, "Not so far. She's getting discouraged, I think. I hope I headed her off at the pass with a pep talk - I'd hate to lose her so early on. She's singularly talented."

"Don't worry about that - she's got a lot of grit. She'll keep at it until she gets a result, even if it's not the one she was expecting."

"She definitely takes after her mother." Malcolm smiles, then his expression changes slightly, "Ah, I think one of your patients is looking distinctly unwell." He is backing off, and Elisabeth turns just in time to witness a rather pale young man vomit lavishly into a basin held by a sympathetic nurse. Being used to such unpleasantness - as both a doctor and a mother - she is unconcerned, but she is also well aware of how other people react to emesis. Jim is just as bad.

"Sorry about that," she turns back to see that Malcolm is now standing halfway across the ward and looking resolutely in the other direction, so she crosses to join him, "He thought he was eating an edible mushroom in his dinner last night, but it turns out that he wasn't. He'll be doing that rather a lot for the next few hours, I'm afraid."

"I do not envy him in the slightest."

"Don't worry about Maddy, Malcolm." Elisabeth assures him, "She's very good at learning from her mistakes, or from setbacks. Just keep encouraging her."

"Will do. Oh, by the way, I'll need to get some more venom out of that scorpion this afternoon. I'll let you know when I'm going in."

"Sounds like fun."

"I suspect it'll be more fun than that boy's having." Malcolm shudders at the sound of more puking.

"See you in half an hour." Elisabeth smiles, as he beats a hasty retreat.


Taylor sits back from his plex with a sigh of relief. All his incoming messages have been answered, his log is updated, and he has a few spare minutes to stand on the balcony and get some air before the senior staff arrive for their weekly briefing. Before he gets up from his desk, he looks over the message he received a week ago, and wonders how his team will take the news he's about to spring on them.

Sooner or later, they're going to run out of luck; he is not fool enough to think that these halcyon days will last forever. Their technology is working fine, but what if it stops? What if they lose the Eye? What would happen to them if the bio-beds in the infirmary became nothing more than beds?

He needs to go more low-tech; to have that on standby, ready and waiting to spring into action should they lose their technology. All that stands between them and a slow descent into savagery is their reliance upon electronics. If they were to lose that - then holding the colony together would be next to impossible. They can synthesise antibiotics - but who amongst them can weave cloth or make shoes?

The answer to that dilemma has been busy in a distant corner of the colony since the people who look after it came in on the Seventh pilgrimage. Most people don't know what they do, and those who do know tend to view them with amusement or scorn. Or both.

Today, however, that will have to change.


Compared to most of the colony, the far end, well away from the houses, is a much dirtier and noisier place, the experimentation here being based on technologies far older than those upon which Terra Nova tends to rely.

"The tuyere's blocking again, Max." One of the men tending the prototype blast furnace reaches for an iron pole and bends to start bashing the slag out of one of the four air pipes that feed oxygen into the smelting meteorite ore within.

Unlike the muscular men around her, Yseult Maxwell is of medium height and build, her long brown hair gathered up into a bushy ponytail to keep it away from the heat. Crouching beside her colleague, she nods, "That should do it. Keep watching, we shouldn't be too far away from obtaining a bloom."

To call the rather diminutive structure a 'blast furnace' seems rather optimistic, as it is still highly experimental; until Pete, her capable woodsman, had established a sensible coppicing regime in the primitive oak woods that encroached into the back of Terra Nova, she couldn't have got this far - the amount of charcoal would have been impossible even for those enormous woods to supply. Not that they had access to ore until the Sixers abandoned the mines.

"What time are you meeting Taylor this morning?" her assistant, Mike, asks.

"Half past eleven. I think he wants to warn his senior team about me first."

"I bet they'll have one hell of a shock to have one of the Mickey Mouse brigade in their company."

She sighs at the edge of scorn in Mike's tone. They all rather resent being thought of as a bunch of useless freeloaders who spend their days messing about with waterwheels, millstones, looms and ancient strains of wheat; but Commander Taylor recruited them for a reason, and now it seems that their time has come.

"You only have to look at them, Mike." She smiles, "Now that their clothes are starting to look so worn, it's dawning on people that if they want new ones, they have to make them entirely from scratch. Maybe we should charge for our services. That would make them appreciate us a bit more, wouldn't it?"

"Hell, yeah. I wanted to punch out that jerk from the science labs last week when he asked why we were wasting our time pruning wild trees."

"Which one was that?"

"No idea. Pete, I think his name was. Or Paul. Maybe Phil. It began with a P."

"I'll look out for him and hit him with my superior status."

"Only if it comes with a rover." Mike grins, "It's a hell of a walk back to the Command Centre."

"Why do you think I requisitioned the bike?" She looks at her watch, "Actually, I'd better go - I can't walk into a meeting covered in charcoal dust."

"I'd give good terras to see the looks on their faces if you did."

The journey back to her home takes only a quarter of an hour on her bicycle; it would be more than twice that on foot; and she is glad she pushed for it to come through with the Tenth Pilgrimage. If she hadn't, she'd be walking - their smelting efforts are too experimental to allow her to build a bike herself.

Showered and changed, she starts to gather together a few bits and pieces to demonstrate her work. As she does so, she looks across at a framed photo of a man with red hair, green eyes and a kind smile, "I think our time's come, Niall. I used to wonder why we'd been recruited to come here when everyone made fun of what we did. No one saw this coming - or maybe Commander Taylor thought it might. I'm not sure."

She smiles back at the photo. They'd been so happy together - even though their world was in its death throes, they still found joy in it. Despite losing him barely a year into their new lives in the Cretaceous, he had loved being able to see the stars, and it had been worth it just to see that look of amazement on his face. To look upon a sky full of stars with wonder is not just the preserve of the children.

That she is nervous is an understatement in the extreme. Until a week ago, she and her team had gone almost entirely unregarded. Even the occupation had barely touched them, tucked away at their end of the Colony. The Phoenix Group weren't remotely interested in ancient technologies, and thus they had not even been granted the opportunity to assist in turfing them out.

Then Jim Shannon had destroyed their link to the future, and suddenly Terra Nova was on its own - possibly irrevocably. With supplies set to last, most had continued to ignore them; until a message had arrived on her plex, out of the blue, from Commander Taylor.

It had been a bizarre job interview; the Commander himself visiting her personally to conduct it, and with none of his immediate senior staff. What he was offering was simple - promotion for her to his senior team, increased prominence and resources for her projects and the creation of an entirely new department: Sustainable Industries. Yseult has always considered the Commander to be a rather remote figure - albeit a paternal one - and the discovery of his passion for the colony and its success has been something of a revelation. Compared to the highly qualified Elisabeth Shannon and Malcolm Wallace, she is little more than a collier and metalworker - but then there's an element of science in what she does, too, isn't there? Perhaps that's just as well, as she'll be reporting to Doctor Wallace, and the last thing she wants is to look an uneducated idiot in front of her new boss.

She's never met him before, and certainly couldn't place him in a crowd - though Mike and her miller, Graham, who have - seem to regard him as a bit of a pompous twerp. She likes that word: 'twerp'; it confuses the hell out of her American colleagues, not being used to some of her more 'British' terms of speech - which is not bad for a German.

Setting her finds into a backpack, she smiles at Niall again, squares her shoulders, and heads out to meet her new colleagues.


"Now that we have a cure for syncillic fever," Elisabeth reports, "the lack of herd immunity is no longer an issue - though I won't know for sure how well that immunity is developing until we've come through the winter. Most people who've come through since the eighth pilgrimage have been inoculated, but there have been some instances of infection in spite of being vaccinated, which suggests to me that not all batches of vaccine were the genuine article. Either way, we have a cure now."

"Sounds promising." Taylor nods, "Anything else we should know about?"

"Apart from Timothy Peate suffering the aftereffects of eating some toxic mushrooms yesterday thanks to a misidentification on his part, I have no emergencies in the infirmary - just scheduled procedures." She looks across at Malcolm, "Unless you get careless with that scorpion this afternoon."

"It's still in the labs?" Taylor asks.

Malcolm nods, "For the time being."

"Shannon?" Taylor invites Jim to make his report. For some reason, he always refers to Jim by his surname.

"We had a glitch with a surveillance camera on the perimeter overnight, but there's a repair team on it this morning. Other than that, we're secure. The Sixers' camp is still deserted, so they're all still up in the Badlands with the Phoenix Group soldiers - though what they're doing and, well, how they're doing, is still open to speculation."

"Still?" Malcolm asks, "Do we have any idea what they're doing up there?"

Jim shakes his head, "It's a hell of a way from here - if we're going to send someone to find out, then it'll be a trek. They could be anywhere up there. If they're still there at all."

"I do not want them anywhere near here." Taylor grunts, "You have a plan, I take it?"

"Send Guzman and a team out there to scope them out. It's been two years and we've heard nothing. Maybe they're all dead - maybe they're planning something. We won't know until we go and find out."

"Sounds wise. Give me a proposed manifest ASAP and we'll get them onto it." He turns to Malcolm, expectantly.

"First things first," Malcolm begins, "I just wanted to apologise - again - for my team. I thought, until recently, that I was managing a science department rather than an infants' school. I think I've managed to more-or-less bang it into their heads that our job now is to support the survival of the colony, not to win nobel prizes."

Taylor nods, approvingly.

"I've refocused our resources to develop the aeroponics nurseries, which will maximise the growth of seedlings for the agriculture teams, and I've got Rob Stanley looking after our experimental physic garden. Maddy Shannon is working on an antivenin for that species of scorpion that started invading last summer, and the biochemistry team are assessing the medicinal properties of a range of plants." He pauses.

"What?" Taylor prompts.

"Well, I don't know if anyone else has started thinking this - but, now that we have no contact with 2149, or 2151, or whatever it is back there by now, I'm beginning to wonder if we need to start thinking a bit more low-tech. A lot of my equipment is starting to show some significant wear and tear - and, while I can maintain everything for the foreseeable future, it seems sensible to look for some home-grown solutions before we find ourselves with nothing but useless junk." He sounds almost ashamed at the concept of being unable to repair something electronic.

"He's right, Commander." Elisabeth agrees, "At the moment, everything I do has an electronic safety-net. We learned a hard lesson when that meteorite hit - once we lose our access to the electronics, we have to go back to doing surgery the old fashioned way. Even I haven't done that in a long time. At the very least, we need to consider more basic practicalities." She plucks ruefully at a rather frayed sleeve.

Taylor nods, "That's something that's been on my mind for a long time: longer than you think. About a couple of years before you got here, Malcolm, we had a few nasty moments with things breaking down; and even though we had two pilgrimages a year back then, getting spare parts and replacements was still one hell of a performance. I decided then and there that we needed people who could manufacture basic materials in a more primitive setting - metals, cloth and the like - so I put in for some people who could do that sort of thing. I ended up with a bunch of experimental archaeologists. They came through on the seventh."

"Ah, yes. I remember." Malcolm muses, "I should've kept up with what they were doing. I never got around to it."

"Experimental archaeologists?" Jim asks.

"People who try out ancient manufacturing techniques based on archaeological evidence - metalwork, pottery and cloth." Elisabeth supplies.

"I knew that; it just sounded weird - made it sound someone built them in a lab."

She smiles a facetiously sympathetic sort of smile at him for his lame joke, then turns back to Taylor, "Actually that sounds like rather a good idea, Commander. We've pushed scientific discovery ahead of everything else while we've been here - so to have something practical that we know we can rely on seems eminently sensible."

"I found them a large sector at the far end of the colony to work." Taylor resumes, "They've been there ever since. I get reports now and again - but we've ignored them for the most part. That's something that we can't do anymore, so I'm upgrading them."

"Upgrading?" Jim asks, not sure whether to be intrigued, bemused, or worried at a larger workload.

"You have a new department to manage, Malcolm." Taylor advises, enjoying the look of consternation on the Chief Science Officer's face, "Sustainable Industries. I'll make as many resources available to you as I can to support them, but they need to link up with your work so that we get their activities as effective and efficient as we can. One day, we're going to need what they do, so now seems like the best time to start working on that."

"Will there be a department head to liaise with?" Malcolm asks, his tone rather brittle. He hates to have surprises sprung on him like this.

"There will." Taylor smiles, entirely unsympathetically, "She'll be here in about five minutes."