Free Frontiers 07 - The Expanse by Ryk Brown Page A

Vladimir told her as he began eating.
    “Crawlers are rather complex machines,” Lieutenant Montgomery explained. “Fabricating them would take considerable time and would tie up all four fabricators. Perhaps later, when there is room in the fabrication schedule.”
    “Sounds like we should fabricate some more fabricators,” Nathan stated.
    “Are any of these dishes meat-free?” Cameron asked.
    “Yes, sir,” the cook answered. “I prepared these two especially for you.”
    “Thank you.”
    “I guess there are vegetarians on Corinair as well,” Nathan commented as he began eating.
    “How can you not eat meat?” Jessica wondered.
    “How can you eat it?” Cameron responded.
    “Like this,” Jessica stated, placing a chunk of meat in her mouth.
    “Classy. It’s my great-grandmother’s fault, really. She grew up in northern Europe during the bovine plagues. So many died from tainted beef that people just stopped eating meat period. No beef, no fowl, no fish. Her parents organized a neighborhood farm where everyone helped cultivate their own food, so they could be sure it was safe.”
    “Seems a bit drastic,” Major Prechitt commented.
    “Perhaps to you and me,” Cameron admitted. “However, there were people dying by the thousands then. It was nearly one hundred years ago, and the knowledge from the Data Ark had yet to reach everyone, especially the smaller villages.”
    “It seems so impossible,” Lieutenant Montgomery admitted. “There has not been a case of tainted food products of any kind on Takara for centuries.”
    “A hundred years ago, our people were just reinventing propeller-driven aircraft,” Nathan explained. “After the bio-digital plague nearly destroyed humanity, we had to relearn everything. We had to reinvent things that had been used for hundreds of years.”
    “I’m confused,” Major Prechitt stated. “How did you get from airplanes to starships in only one hundred years?”
    “The Data Ark,” Nathan stated.
    “What is a Data Ark?” Lieutenant Montgomery asked.
    “Someone more than a millennia ago, before the great plague, decided to create a database to contain all the history, science, culture, and religion of humanity. When the bio-digital plague hit, the Ark was closed down to protect its contents. In the chaos of the following decades, the Ark was forgotten. It was discovered nearly nine hundred years later in a sealed facility in the Swiss Alps. Once the people of Earth figured out how to get it running again, we had access to all the information stored inside. Because of that information, we were able to jump ahead technologically more than three hundred years in only a century.”
    “Amazing,” the lieutenant muttered. “What type of information did it contain?”
    “Everything.”
    “A sudden influx of such scientific knowledge seems like it would be dangerous,” Major Prechitt observed.
    “Very true,” Nathan agreed. “Luckily, the people that discovered the Ark realized this early on. An international commission was formed in order to prevent just such a mistake from being made. It was quickly realized that the application of the knowledge had to be carefully chosen and monitored to prevent another catastrophe like the bio-digital plague. In fact, many people objected to accessing any of the data, claiming we weren’t ready.”
    “Seems a valid argument,” the major said. “Odd that you chose to develop a space program over preventing tainted foods from reaching the population.”
    “It didn’t go quite that way,” Nathan chuckled. “Once we learned that humanity had once colonized other worlds, we were curious to learn if they, too, had recovered. When we discovered that an empire known as the Jung had risen up and conquered most of the core and fringe worlds, we became concerned and decided we needed to be able to protect our world. Hence, we needed to be in space.”
    “But to go from airplanes to starships in a single century,”