Terry Pratchett - The Long War

After an hour or so the airship paused, the light subtly different. When Jacques looked up he saw butterflies, a tremendous swarm of them, all around the ship, battering silently at the windows of the observation deck. Most were small, plain, but some were more colourful, and some had wings the size of saucers. The sunlight shone bright through their pale substance.

Chen laughed at their reaction. “Butterfly world. What the westerners call a Joker. Of course an ecology needs more components than just butterflies. Nevertheless, here in this part of China, butterflies are all that come to greet us. We have no idea how this has come about, what is different here. Yet here we are. You see, Roberta Golding, I told you we would be counting butterflies! What do you think?”

At length Lieutenant Wu Yue-Sai said, “It would certainly be hard to demonstrate chaos theory here.”

They were all silent as they worked that out. Then Jacques was the first to laugh.

Roberta, however, merely looked puzzled.

The crew of the Benjamin Franklin did take seriously their mandate to project the authority of the US Datum government across the Long Earth. It wasn’t all about saving kittens stuck up trees, as Maggie told her crew.

Which was why the twain made an unannounced stop at a town called Reboot, Earth West 101,754, in a stepwise New York State.

A small group led by Executive Officer Nathan Boss—a rare jaunt for him away from his desk—were landed from the twain in a kind of clearing of trampled-down mud, beside a spidery trail that ran up from the coast of the local copy of the Atlantic. Nathan had seen the layout for himself clearly from the air, aboard the Franklin . The town itself was out of sight but a short walk away, cut into the green of the crowding forest: neat little fields and houses with smoke rising up, all connected by wide dirt tracks.

This was one of the first of what Captain Kauffman was calling their “hearts and minds” assignments. They would turn up unannounced at a community on some world like this, in order to make themselves and their mission known, and, well, to gently remind these colonial Americans that they were still Americans… This early in the mission they were still finding their way. So was Nathan Boss, his first time in charge of a ground team.

And in this case the logistics were surprisingly complicated. This town and its stepwise neighbours were linked in a kind of extended Long Earth “county’. So the Franklin was hopping between the worlds, visiting one community after another, dropping equipment and setting down groups of sailors and marines at each of those neighbours.

There were lots of ways such an operation could go wrong, as Nathan was all too well aware.

Add to that the fact that the worlds of the Long Earth were themselves somewhat bewildering, for the twain’s mostly Datum-born crew. As the Navy guys waited for the marines to follow them off the Franklin , reflexively they spread out to form a perimeter, though there was no visible threat, here in Earth West 101,754. They looked around, evidently kind of baffled. Most of them were from urban backgrounds. Well, there was no urban background here . Nothing but the muddy clearing. Nobody around but a deer (well, Nathan thought it was a deer) that peered at them from out of a clump of forest. Nothing to read but a sign, home-made, hand-lettered:

WELCOME TO REBOOT

FOUNDED 2026, A.D.

POP. 1465

Ensign Toby Fox, the IT nerd type from engineering who had been tasked with making a census of the Long Earth, dutifully wrote down the population number.

There was no sign of sun under a clouded-over sky, but the warmth was intense for an early May day, and Nathan was immediately sweating in his combat fatigues, with his pack on his back.

It was when Lieutenant Sam Allen came down from the twain, the last to land, and the Benjamin Franklin popped away stepwise with a soft implosion of air, that the real trouble started.

Allen was in charge of the small chalk of marines attached to this expedition. As his own guys stood around, evidently feeling a little lost in this latest new world just like the sailors, Allen started badgering Specialist Jennifer Wang. “So where’s our equipment?”

Wang already had her own pack off her back and was working her radio and locator gear. “Lieutenant, our gear was supposed to be landed within a half-mile, not on top of us—”

“I know that. Which way, Specialist?”

Nathan knew that the equipment drop, a bunch of trunks in rope nets, had radio beacons to alert the arriving troops of its location. But Wang looked confused. She worked touchscreens, and even twisted dials on a very old-fashioned-looking radio receiver. All she picked up was squawking music, a clatter of guitars.

Midshipman Jason Santorini, listening in, grinned. “Chuck Berry. My dad’s favourite. Mint stuff, even if it is like a hundred years old, or something.”

“That’s just some dumb local station,” growled Allen. “Some kid in his barn… Turn it off.”

Wang complied.

Ensign Toby Fox was a small guy, and more nervous than the rest. Now, before Nathan had a chance to get hold of the situation, Fox was the one who was unwise enough to ask Allen, “So, Lieutenant, where is our stuff?”

Allen turned on him. “In the wrong fucking place. Isn’t it obvious?”

“Actually it’s probably in the wrong, umm, fucking world, Lieutenant,” Wang put in. “Or I’d be picking up its bleep by now.”

By checking rosters, they soon figured it out. The drop had been made at another town, New Scarsdale, the “county” seat.

Wang said, “There’s your error, sir. Scarsdale is over on 101,752.”

Allen said, “Whereas this dump—”

Fox checked his milspec Earth counter. “Right now we’re on 101,754, sir. Where we were supposed to be.”

Somebody had miscounted the stepwise worlds. Nathan suspected miscommunication between the two command lines, the Navy crew and the marines, Datum-born, Datum-trained crew who weren’t used to thinking in terms of planning for operating across different stepwise worlds in the first place. It happened.

“What a screw-up,” Allen raged. “And those damn Navy boys stepped on without checking they got the rendezvous right.”

Everybody else just stood around, too nervous to be the one to reply. Somewhere something growled, a huge bear maybe, a deep rumble like an earth tremor, and they gathered closer together.

“OK, OK,” Allen said. “We need to send a runner. Get that ship back here, and bring us to the gear, or the gear to us.” He poked a finger at random. “You, McKibben. Get your Stepper out and get moving—”

“Sorry, Lieutenant,” said the man, “no can do. I left behind my Stepper.”

“You did what?… OK, who the hell else is here in Earth One Hundred Thousand and Shit without the most elementary and obvious piece of kit of all, a Stepper to get him home again?”

They all looked at each other.

It was an obvious omission, Nathan thought. They were putting on a show of force here; they had come down lightly armed but wearing flak-vests, load-bearing harnesses, and packs with general gear and ammo, and whatever specialist stuff they had to carry. Anyone with any experience knew the score. From the K-pot on your head to the combat boots on your feet, it was a heavy load, and you left behind whatever you didn’t specifically need for the mission. They were only supposed to have been down here, in this small town in this one peaceful world, for a couple of hours. Why carry a Stepper box? Which, built to military specification, was a heavy, robust piece of kit.