The Chronicles of Pern: First Fall

First published as "The P.E.R.N. Survey" in Amazing Stories, September 1993.[2]

In the story, a team of FSP scientists scout a distant planet. Time is too short to resolve some mysteries, but they find it safe for human settlement, with resources to support residents but inadequate for commercial exploitation. Their report is coded P.E.R.N.^c meaning Parallel Earth, Resources Negligible, recommended for colonization.

Published two months earlier as a 157-page Wildside Press book (1993)[3]

Mariner and former starship captain Jim Tillek organizes and leads the evacuation of "Landing", the original site of the Pern colony where many people still live, most equipment and durable supplies are stored. One purpose is to take refuge from Threadfall in stone caverns of the Northern Continent, but the immediate threat is a local volcanic eruption. Lacking fuel or capacity for air transport, with few big boats, the colony must also use coastal and river craft that are not seaworthy. With the help of dolphin partners, most of the goods and almost all the people are dramatically secured.

"The Dolphins' Bell" provides another perspective on a major episode in Dragonsdawn, part three ("Crossing").

Original to the collection[4]

Years after the colony secured refuge in "Fort Hold" by expanding a cavern system on the Northern Continent, venerable animal husbandman Red Hanrahan leads the establishment of a second hold, a few days north in the same mountain range. The migrating people and livestock face the dangerous crossing of a rising river at "Red's Ford", which gives its name to the second city, as it were: Rua Atha (Irish Gaelic), later Ruatha Hold.

Original to the collection[5]

Years after the first dragon–rider couples move out of Fort Hold and establish Fort Weyr in a nearby volcanic crater, young queen dragonrider Torene leads the establishment of another draco-human community in a crater far to the north and east, the most distant habitable region. The leaders of Fort Weyr, Sorka Hanrahan and Sean Connell, authorize three new Weyrs at once, but the northeastern is first, named Benden Weyr for the Pern colony's founder and leader Admiral Paul Benden.

The action at Fort and Benden Weyrs continues Dragonsdawn by showing more of the earliest development of Pern's interspecies society.

Published two years earlier as a 126-page Wildside Press book (1991) and also in Analog, August 1991[6]

"Rescue Run" follows on from an event described in Dragonsdawn: The unauthorized launch of a distress beacon by a group of dissidents who believed the colony was doomed. Decades later, shortly after the end of the First Pass, this beacon is picked up by a starship in the vicinity of Pern, and a landing party—under the command of Lieutenant Ross Benden, nephew of the Admiral who commanded the Pernese colonization fleet—is sent to respond. A quick survey by Lt. Benden's party finds no sign of human habitation on the Northern Continent, where the colony has taken refuge in caverns, and finds only one surviving family group in the South, at "Honshu" excavation. The now-elderly Stev Kimmer, a greedy and corrupt original colonist, rules over Honshu and his adopted family with an iron fist. He persuades Lt. Benden that he and the others in Honshu are the only survivors of the biological and geological disaster (i.e. Threadfall), and that they are a group small enough to evacuate entirely. Benden agrees despite his suspicions of Kimmer's true nature, only furthered by speaking to the family that had long lived under his domination, as well as Kimmer's all but openly hostile attitude towards himself (as Kimmer holds Benden's long-dead uncle personally responsible for the "destruction" of the colony). The rescue is dramatically successful, though Kimmer is killed when he is shot out of an airlock (implied to have been "accidentally" opened by one of his "family"). Scientific investigation of Thread, as well as the belief there are no other humans on the planet—none of the Honshu refugees could refute Kimmer's claim that they were the last survivors of the Pern colony—leads the Federation to place Pern under strict interdict; the system is considered quarantined, all contact forbidden.