"Okay."

In that case Lucien can send all the information back to Amalien command. It'll take a few days to get there so in the meantime he'll check in on how the Samarians are getting along with the away team.

The Samarians are happily low-key industrializing.

Any particular bits of tech people are excited about?

Apparently a subculture called the Manadavvi is into trains.

Trains are pretty great! Lucien will happily plan routes with them if they're interested.

Sure! They're the breadbasket of the continent and want to send grain everywhere.

Grain keeps pretty well so probably they want something focused on affordability and not speed? He can sketch on his datapad on top of satellite images of the planet - how about a large main rail line that should be easy to maintain and expand, with branches to get to particular distribution and supply areas.

Yeah, they probably want to hit Semorrah and then Breven, with branch lines supplying the angel holds and the existing water routes sending cargo down the river from Semorrah to Luminaux.

He makes a note of a few of the inconvenient areas of terain the trains would have to route around, especially any mountains.

They'll have to wrap around the southern edge of the mountains encircling the Plain of Sharon and they'll need a train-compatible bridge over the river where Semorrah lies but their route takes both into account. Breven is in a desert, though, is it hard to make rails stick in sand?

Yeah, usually people try to route around those. How windy is it?

Pretty windy. But Breven is a big Jansai city and since it's a desert they import a lot.

That's difficult but he has some ideas he'll look into.

Later, he asks Isabella if, first off, Jovah can hear them talking here. This seems like an important thing he forgot to ask earlier.

"He hears best when we're in flight or near one of the three hearing devices placed on the ground. None are very near here. But it's not impossible for someone to get a prayer answered standing on the ground anywhere else, it's just more sensitive to the immediate conditions. I think he doesn't listen through the Kisses but he is my source on that. If you'd rather communicate in writing I don't think he has any way to see indoors."

"Can he translate novel languages?"

"I don't know. I didn't ask about that."

"Okay."

He digs up a datapad for Isabella that can do written translation - they don't share a written language.

Probably not sensitive but thought I'd ask: do you know if Jovah would be willing to use his weapons at your request to do terraforming? There's a mountain here that's is inconvenient for supply routes and seems remote and a desert here where a bunch of it could be safely turned to glass with the sort of weapons my ship has.

Oh, that's easy. I would just need to call a lightning bolt down, there's a standard prayer. I'm not sure it would be a good idea to turn much of the desert into glass, though, how could that help?

I've never actually terraformed a place but I'm under the impression that if the right chemicals are mixed in beforehand and you can do it over a large enough range you can create a solid platform to put train tracks on? It's only come up a handful of times as a quick way to do terraforming on desert planets if you have a very large amount of energy available for a limited duration of time. Not sure if a lightning bolt is wide enough for the purposes I was thinking of. 

I don't know if it can do a wider burst. Would seeing a bolt tell you anything about the weapons without you needing to see them in person on the ship?

My science officer could probably learn something from it, yeah. 

Then I can call one somewhere isolated for that, at least.

Do you think you'll be able to get away with doing that as many times as you want or will Jovah get suspicious?

(The amalien written language actually has suspicious written with a pause to indicate how it would be pronounced, but Lucien's settings remove the pause after translation.)

I don't think it will get suspicious. It will have to be far enough away that no people notice.

Hm, do you know if the lightning bolt weapon is the same sort of weapon as the ones it has to use against ships?