Mother and her children had developed a plan involving the introduction of new techne, supposedly based on fossils excavated from the ruins of human cities, to accelerate the natives’ industrial revolution and make their culture sturdy enough to withstand contact with humans. And it had worked, up to a point. Native civilisation had survived First Contact, but it had been changed, and was changing still. And now many of the natives were turning against their human guests, sharing conspiracy theories about secret projects to manipulate and control them, claiming that accommodationists and half-and-halfers were species-betraying collaborators, staging protests against human presence in the Union and the New Territories.

Humans had their own conspiracy theories and secret histories, attempts to bridge uncharted gaps in the two hundred thousand years between the Burn Line and their return to Earth. Before she moved to the mainland, Ysbel had helped to uncover a cabal of self-styled Originists who had been diverting scarce resources for their own ends. They believed that Mother’s seedship had not returned from an unsuccessful voyage, but had been dispatched from a hidden colony which survived somewhere in the outer reaches of the solar system. When they were caught, the Originists had been planning a mission to the radio telescope Mother had built on the far side of the Moon, expecting to prove that it was not an attempt to make contact with other seedships, as she claimed, but was instead maintaining a link between that hidden colony and its agents on the Moon and Earth.

Ysbel had used her share of the kudos for thwarting the Originists’ sedition to win a move from the Bureau of Data Analysis to Native Affairs, and the mainland. It meant starting over at the lowest level of a new hierarchy, but she was young, idealistic and unattached, and hugely enjoyed her first posting, a minor role in one of the bureau’s mass vaccination programmes. And after spending two years as contact and consultant for a team of native health workers in the Great Plains of the New Territories, she’d been transferred to the section of the bureau that arbitrated disputes and discord between natives and humans, becoming the junior agent at the Ogres Grave station.