So, yeah, this is in the same universe as GHOSTS ON AN ALIEN WIND.
Seen from the sky, the alien transport was huge. It couldn’t have been anything else, either: the impossibly clean lines were still beyond the reach of humanity, even decades after No Contact. It nestled in the waters by the north side of town as if it’d been designed to rest there, and Norm Baker thought it very well might have been the most beautiful made thing that he’d ever seen.
Beltran was clearly more used to sights like that, though. “That’s the Arthur Phillip,” he told Baker. “Horrible name, but the Old Man had a rough sense of humor. We’ve got it fitted to take a hundred thousand settlers at a time, so Churchill was a drop in the bucket. It’s still only half full as it is.”
The helicopter cabin was a lot quieter than Norm had expected, and had the jarring clash of aesthetics you associated with jury-rigged alientech. But it worked, like all alientech did. “I thought we were moving transportees to camps, then sending them to the colony worlds all at once?”
“That’s the old way,” Beltran grinned. “The eggheads finally got cold sleep reverse-engineered, so now we can just pod transportees up and stack them in the ship until we’ve got a full load. It’s nice and quiet, and we can stuff in three times as many people without casualties. Hell, we can even move the ship to the process sites, and that cut down the spoilage rate all on its own.” He looked out the window at the scene below. “Nothing against the Old Man,” he continued, “but it’s a Hell of a lot better now.”
#commissionearned