Free Soldier of Fortune: A Gideon Quinn Adventure (Fortune Chronicles Book 1) by Kathleen McClure

or basic first aid (should the lock picking or wall climbing go amiss).
    “So, my young ones,” she began as Gideon settled at the outer ring of dodgers (the youngest, as always, sat closest to Martine), “today you will learn, as I learned when I was young, how Fortune’s history began when Earth’s history came to its end.”
    “Earth?” Maurian, nine years old but only recently brought into the hive, looked at the fagin in disbelief. “Earth’s not even real! It’s just a place the Keepers made up so we’d follow their Laws.”
    “Not so,” Martine replied, but without the heat Gideon would have expected. “Earth existed, likely still does in her little solar system with her one, lonely sun,” she continued to all the children. “She was humanity’s first home, but the humans of Earth were a contentious, wasteful people. Because of this, they did not respect their home and so their home began to fail. Rather than do the needful and care for it, these contentious people turned on one another, scrabbling over what little remained.”
    “Like the Coal-far— like the Coalition forces,” Yribe, a boy of around 12 (and an ace at second story work) corrected himself at her glare, “attacking the United Colonies for our crystal.”
    “Some would argue about crystal belonging only to the United Colonies,” Martine said over the ensuing angry buzz of children in the throes of patriotism, “but there are similarities, as the Earthers fought many a war over oil.”
    “Like, olive oil?” little Aaya asked.
    “Like old, melted dinosaur bones,” Gideon threw in from the rear.
    Half the little ones let out a concerted ‘ewww’ and the other half clambered to know what a dinosaur was.
    “Thank you so very much, Gideon,” Martine said over the tumult.
    “Just glad to be needed.” But he put his fingers in his mouth and whistled loud enough to cut through the uproar.
    “Dinosaurs are similar to dracos and lizards and the like,” Martine spoke into the startled quiet, “but bigger — bigger even than a mastodon.”
    “But why fight over old melted dinosaur bones in the first place?” Aaya’s question emerged from the chorus of disbelieving ’nu -uhs ’.
    Martine smiled at the little one. “Because the oil those dinosaur bones melted into was for the Earthers what crystal is for us. Except oil was very dirty, very messy and it did not grow back after it was pulled from the ground.” She paused for the various sounds of disbelief from the younger dodgers. “Which is why,” she said when they calmed again, “the Earth became so polluted, and why so many people fought over it — fought so bitterly, it was not until Earth’s demise was certain that her children, our many-times great foremothers, accepted the need to work together —“
    “For world peace?” Yribe asked.
    “More like world pieces,” Gideon muttered, then hunched his shoulders again as Martine shot a look his way.
    “More,” she looked back to Yribe, “that some private citizens, those with wealth and resources, worked around their governments and together gathered the finest minds of their time to do the needful. The needful,” she continued expansively, “being the engineering and seeding of planets beyond the Sol system. Planets like our own Fortune.”
    “Were there others?” Yribe asked, leaning forward, arms resting on his crossed legs. “Other planets the Earthers made?”
    “That we do not know. We only know, from Keeper records, that many, many ships set forth to many, many systems, in hopes at least one would provide a new home. We may be one of many, or completely alone.”
    “Okay, so, maybe the Earthers were real,” Maurian admitted grudgingly, “but they couldn’t have been all that smart.”
    “Why do you say that?”
    “Because they left us here, all alone, with no way off and no way to talk to anyone else!”
    Even Gideon could see Maurian, who’d recently lost her parents to the Coal-fart slave