Free City of Pearl by Karen Traviss

Are you able to walk?”
    â€œI’ll get used to the gravity,” she said, and noted that Josh was a head shorter when she drew level with him. He could still walk faster, though: it would take her a few weeks to get used to weighing an extra seven kilos. They walked up the long sloping road to the surface, passing windows that spilled brilliant light. There was so much of it. It seemed to burst out from underground, as if there were a sun at the heart of the world. Shan pointed at the sunken dwellings.
    â€œHouses?” she asked, then tried the same question from a new tack. “Why are they like that?”
    â€œUsual reason. Saves energy, lets in enough light,” Josh said. “And we do get some ferocious gales round here sometimes. What do you think of our church, then?”
    â€œVery impressive.” She recalled the inscription, a boast from the days of the Raj, when Europeans occupied India. GOVERNMENT WORK IS GOD’S WORK . “A labor of love. Especially building it underground.”
    â€œLocal custom,” Josh said, a little awkwardly, and nothing more. He steered up a long ramp to the surface again. She looked back and found she could pick out the tops of submerged buildings catching light but otherwise as buried as missile silos. “Manufacturing plant is down there. The bot gear has lasted pretty well, but we don’t use it all the time.”
    The houses were more randomly dotted the farther they walked, and it was harder to spot them in the landscape because of that. It struck her that it might be a defensive precaution. If it were, then it was a defense against an airborne enemy who targeted by sight or by heat signature. Or maybe it was, after all, just a sensible way to build against the weather in this place.
    â€œNo unwelcome visitors?” she asked.
    Josh’s voice changed again. He wasn’t very practiced at deception, that was for sure: she was on to something.
    â€œMost of our visitors are very welcome,” he said. “Take a look at the doors when you visit one of our houses.”
    Shan decided to drop the subject until later. It was the time for tourist questions about flora and fauna and weather. Whatever sore spot she kept touching, this was not the time to pick at it. And it was still not the time to ask about aliens.
    She stood and looked out towards the horizon and saw a fertile land with a marbled blue moon hanging over it like a displaced Earth. And she saw a battlefield, too, because now there would surely be those who would want to leave Earth and come here. Not many would be able to make it, perhaps, but there would be enough of them to overwhelm the colony. It wasn’t a thought she wanted to put out of her mind. The Suppressed Briefing wouldn’t let her anyway. Perault’s voice spoke of the need to preserve the colonist’s mission.
    Perault was almost certainly dead by now. The realization caught Shan unawares.
    â€œThe fields are out there,” Josh said, and brought her back to the here and now. The land sloped gently away from them, and she could pick out many little beige-clad figures scattered amid random patches of varied greens that abruptly gave way to the wild blues and ambers a long way in the distance. But fields meant horizon-stretching squares, one color per box, and lots of machinery. Her brain struggled to make sense of it.
    â€œYou’ll have to forgive me. I can’t tell what I’m looking at. I can’t see boundaries.”
    â€œThere aren’t any. We plant in small patches and combinecrops. We were persuaded against monoculture. There’s a lot of soy down there, and wheat.”
    â€œI’m impressed that you can grow crops in the open.”
    â€œWe can now.” Again, that slight pause before answering: maybe he had some biotech that he didn’t want the commercial team stealing. “We can grow a great deal, some above ground, some below in