Alex was very pleased with himself.

After all, he had good reason to be. His gut instinct had told him that Ellie was more than she appeared, and it hadn’t taken much to maneuver her into a position where she admitted who she was.

And she wasn’t just a nobody in Vesta.

She was Eleanor Vesta. The entire planet was named after her family. If there was one person who could truly help them, surely it was the important Ellie, right?

Or perhaps not, after what she’d told them about the nature of her exile.

“Why don’t you start from the beginning,” Alex said as Jenna took a seat next to him. Both of their faces remained glued on Ellie’s. “You’re really Eleanor Vesta?”

“I am,” insisted Ellie. “If I had my own P-com, I would show you but it was confiscated when I was exiled. But I’m the granddaughter of Allen Vesta. There’s really no one else in the entire colony who knows the history quite like I do.”

“So tell us then,” said Jenna. “Tell us more about Vesta. Tell us what we don’t know from the training modules.”

Ellie looked off into space for a moment. “It’s a really long story. It all starts, like most colony stories, with a star.”

Ellie pointed up to the western sky where the sun was starting to set.

“51 Pegasi has been known about for over a thousand years,” started Ellie. “It’s a star very similar to the Sol star that gave life to Earth. For the longest time, astronomers believed that there was a large planet that orbited the star, and they were correct. However, that planet wasn’t suitable for life. Instead, it’s a gas giant that orbits very closely to 51 Pegasi, and it’s usually visible from Vesta.”

With those words, Ellie pointed to the slightly smaller light a short distance away from the sun. It was large enough to be visible in the daytime, and Alex had watched it several times as they trekked across the Vestan environment.

“What they didn’t count on was the fact that there was another habitable planet within this solar system,” continued Ellie. “This planet was found about nine hundred years ago, long before the Great Expansion and the first FTL drives that would make space exploration possible. For the longest time, this planet lingered on the edge of human consciousness. We knew it was here but we had no hopes of reaching it. That was the case until the FTL drive was invented, but even then we had plenty of other systems to go to first. Alpha Centauri was the first system colonized and it wasn’t until about seventy years ago that someone first thought about colonizing Vesta.”

“Your grandfather,” said Alex. “He was the first human to step foot on Vesta?”

Ellie nodded proudly. “He was. My grandfather was from the District of Canada back on Earth. Life in those days was incredibly hard, as you both probably know.”

“It’s still hard,” muttered Jenna. “And it’s gotten no better in the last sixty years.”

“My grandfather was from a town that was devastated by low crop yields in the years before the move. Starvation was common, as were the young and old dying from malnutrition. Much of the soil in this part of Canada is still contaminated from World War 3. My grandfather was actually one of the lucky few to leave the town and make something of himself. He came into money via trading but when he returned to the town once he was older, what he saw broke his heart.”

“He knew they couldn’t stay on Earth,” she continued. “It was akin to a death sentence for most of the town. They’d never be able to have enough food so he did the next best thing. He applied for a permit to colonize one of the outer worlds.”

“I imagine that was quite difficult,” said Alex.

Ellie gave him an odd look. “How did you know? Most people assume it’s quite easy to get a permit in those days with all the stars available for colonization. How did you know that it was difficult for him?”

“I’ve heard talk about it when I served in the Orbital Wars,” replied Alex. “The Consortium isn’t as keen to set up new colonies these days. They have trouble supporting the ones that we have. It’s nothing like the days of the Great Expansion, when they would give a permit to anyone that could pony up the cash to afford it. Some even say the Consortium doesn’t want the remaining people on Earth moving away, at least when they can control it.”

“Very good,” said Ellie, smiling at him. “You’re exactly right. It took him five years to get the permit approved, and it was still a nearly run thing at that. In any event, my grandfather and several partners managed to convince nearly the entire town they would be better off in Vesta than they would be on Earth. Since they had nothing to lose, most of them voted to go with him. The first three hundred colonists left Earth, using a colony ship to reach Vesta. Of course, it still took the better part of a year to reach the planet, but what they found astounded them.”

Ellie gestured around her. “They were amazed at how similar Vesta was to Earth. Our atmosphere has less oxygen but nothing that our bodies can’t adapt to with enough time. Many of the newcomers wore breathers for the first couple years but they would eventually discard them. Your body will become used to the atmosphere. Other than that, Vesta is eerily similar to Earth. Our years are slightly smaller at only 345 days but our days are longer, at 27 hours. This was the home that we needed it to be. And it was without any kind of predators to us, at least in the beginning.”

Ellie’s face assumed a dreamy smile. “It was my grandfather who built the first biosphere, the protective enclosure that served as the first home for the colonists. Of course, it was awfully cramped having to provide living accommodations for three hundred colonists as well as start our nascent farming operation, but at least it provided us with breathable oxygen like we were used to back on Earth. You’ll notice that today as soon as you step inside one. It becomes so much easier to breathe. You’ll almost feel lightheaded at first.”

“Sounds like the colony was off to a good start,” said Jenna. “When did it all go wrong?”

The smile dropped from Ellie’s face. “Not for a long time, believe it or not. The colony was hugely expensive to run but for the most part, my grandfather was able to keep the dream alive in his lifetime, passing it off to my father, Adam, when he was old enough. However, my grandfather didn’t have unlimited wealth. And seeing as he couldn’t attend to his trading business in a remote colony like Vesta, his source of funds dried up. When he died, he was nearly penniless but Vesta was off the ground and she was thriving. We were up to around seven hundred colonists by that time, as well as four additional biospheres for a total of five.”

“Our colony didn’t grow very fast,” explained Ellie. “You see, my grandfather’s borrowing to finance the colony came from many different sources. Many of those sources were families that would one day enter the Consortium. And he wasn’t always capable of paying back those debts. Vesta earned a black mark against her name because of those unpaid debts, and I think that’s one reason why the Consortium still treats us like an errant, forgotten child. We don’t take first priority when it comes to getting more colonists, so I’m still surprised this colony mission was pushed through when it was.”

Ellie took a deep breath. “Everything was going just fine until about ten years ago, when my father was getting toward the end of his life. We were up to nine biospheres, with one more in construction when someone found gold in the foothills around the colony. You see, Vesta the city sits on a plain near a river. Across that plain is the start of the foothills, and if you keep going up, you’ll enter the mountains that run in a north-south course on this part of the planet. Gold is just as valuable today as it was in ancient times, and my father finally saw a way that we could end our money problems for good.”

“He ordered a new biosphere constructed five miles away from the city, in the foothills where the gold had been discovered. It was his hope that we would mine for gold, sell it to traders from Emporium or Alpha Prime, and we could finance our colony with everything we needed, including more people. What my father didn’t count on was our first encounter with the bears.”

“So you hadn’t seen a bear until that point?” asked Jenna.

“That’s right. Up until then, we assumed there was no other intelligent life on Vesta. Nobody had ever seen a bear before we went into those foothills in force, but all of a sudden, they started to attack all the workers that serviced the mine. Even worse than that, they started to emerge from the foothills to attack our people on the plains. As you know, the bears are frighteningly fast and strong, and we didn’t stand a chance. It forced the creation of a defense force but even that was decimated by the bears in short order. Our numbers began to plummet. Most of our losses were in men because they were the ones that worked the mines as well as staffed the defense force, causing the gender imbalance that we have today.”

“It forced a lot of changes in our society. Without the hope of resupply, our attitudes toward sex and relationships began to change. Instead of monogamous pairings of one man and one woman, we started to engage in polygamy. It’s not uncommon for one man to have two or three wives. Extramarital sex is also not frowned upon here. Rather, we encourage it. We encourage our couples and throuples to experiment around. At the end of the day, we need to keep up our population, and polygamy allows us to do that in the best way with our current gender imbalance.”

Alex and Jenna shared a look with each other. “Is that why you have more liberal attitudes toward sex then?” asked Jenna.

Ellie smiled. “Mostly. When you live on a planet like Vesta, where death could find you at any time, it seems silly to get hung up on social mores. There should be no reason whatsoever why I can’t tell Alex that I enjoyed looking at his erection like I did earlier. And by the same logic, I should be able to tell Jenna that I love the way her tits look in that top. There’s nothing to be ashamed about.”

Jenna blushed a deep red at the compliment, something that Alex found amusing. Even still, he wanted Ellie to get back to the story.

“So connect the bears to your exile then,” he asked. “I’m guessing the bear attacks are what led this Belladonna and Cassara to exile you?”

Ellie made a sour face. “Yes, but not directly. I’ve known Belladonna and Cassara for a long time. They crave power and they always have. They want to be the ones calling the shots in Vesta, and they don’t want to share power. It was this hunger that got them placed on the council with me, and seeing as I was the unofficial leader of the colony, it was this that caused them to scheme against me.”

“You see, when my father died, Vesta still had a bright future. Sure, the bears had started to attack us, but no one expected that it would get this bad. We bleed people constantly, and not a week goes by when one or two people don’t get snatched up and killed by the bears. Belladonna and Cassara were able to seize upon the people’s anxiety and fear of the bears to say that I wasn’t doing enough to protect them. That I wasn’t destroying the bears when I so easily could.”

Ellie laughed and shook her head disdainfully. “As if it was that easy. I have no idea how to stop the bear attacks. They just happened out of the blue and they don’t appear to be settling down anytime soon. It’s made keeping our colony operational extremely difficult. I barely have enough people to grow our food or to work the mines. We’re in danger of losing too many people, which was why we needed the new colonists from Earth. But I need to warn you, you’re coming to a planet that is deeply troubled—more than you know. And I fear that we might never be able to stop the bear attacks.”

Ellie hung her head. “I don’t even know if they would let me back into Vesta. I will escort both of you to the city, but I have no expectation that they’ll let me enter. My fate seems to be left to the bears, as terrible as that sounds.”

Ellie stopped speaking for a moment, causing Alex to wonder about her predicament. Her retelling of the history of the planet certainly seemed genuine (much more genuine than the bullshit story she fed them the day before), but like Ellie, Alex questioned just how much help she could be to them.

What would happen if they showed up at Vesta with Ellie? Would they be in trouble with the native Vestans for consorting with her? Could they find themselves exiled as well?

They were important questions but they would have to wait. At that moment, the hair on Alex’s neck began to tingle, and he knew that something was instantly wrong. Looking around the campsite, he wondered what it could be when he heard the unmistakable growl.

“It’s another bear!” he said, leaping to his feet.

At that moment, a large creature weighing several hundred kilograms came smashing into Alex, knocking him off his feet.