Crècheships weren’t built to withstand the forces at play during a planetary landing. They were solely designed as engines of eternal warfare, meant to slip from system to system, unleashing swarm after swarm of modified men. As perilous as it was to land our ship, the five of us agreed that what came after the landing would be far more dangerous—meeting our hosts face-to-face for the first time, their soft naked skin to our hard metal carapace.
This fear was unfounded.
The crècheship landed in a territory known as Wind River. Twenty-two million acres of land within a sparsely populated subregion of the United States that our new hosts evacuated for us to meet our requirements for a new homeland. One of the most significant promises the U.S. made in its offer was that all the children born there would gain automatic citizenship. The concept itself was somewhat unusual, but upon examination, it was clear that citizenship was preferable to the alternative. The irony that the alternative was classification as “stateless aliens” was not lost on us.
