Alevia Devron, aboard the flagship Onward, 3 years later.

  The Onward had previously been commanded by Executive Officer of Engineering, Collier, and turned over to ExO of Science Ellie with the sanctioning of the First Contact Project. It took three years to reach Pietera. Like many people on the ship, I immediately became captivated by the Piets.

  We ate up all the information we could as the ship’s long range sensor reports came in, becoming more detailed as we grew closer. We took turns with manual sensor sweeps, gave names to the Piets and other natives we liked to spy on, and gossiped about their day-to-day activities and what set them apart from the rest.

  We held a ship wide naming competition to decide what to call them. The name that stuck wasn’t even part of the contest. It started as an acronym coined by a research team, Primitive Indigenous Extra-Terrestrial Species. They started calling them Piets amongst themselves, and soon the name grew like wildfire across the ship’s net.

  Administration expanded the Security Department so all communications with the Fleet could be strictly monitored. Everything pertaining to intelligent life or the potential hint thereof was filtered, and the rest was shared with the fleet as normal. It didn’t bother anyone. We understood the need for secrecy and we all wanted to do this.

The planet:

  The Piet homeworld consists of several continents and a saltwater ocean slightly toxic to life. Nothing larger than a dolphin is able to live there, as far as we could tell from long range sensors. The entire planet was going through a seasonal drought as its orbit brought it closest to its sun.

  The continents support a diversity of flora and fauna, caused by elevated rates of radiation and mutation. The planet was larger and had greater gravity than Earth Standard. Most creature’s and plant’s evolution tend to be slightly shorter and squatter as a result. There are a few pockets of what could only be compared to rain forests. While most of the plants and animals cannot even be compared to those found on Earth, Pietera has many geological similarities, like lakes, rivers, mountains, forests, active tectonics, and a strong magnetic sphere.

  Many populations of plants and animals dwindle during the droughts, causing whoever remains to compete for what little prey and water remain until summer ends. Many others adapt in amazing ways and the only thrive in the summers. Two continents are connected by a large body of marshland that dry into a land bridge during droughts. Elsewhere on the planet, sea levels rose as the ice caps melted. Pietera has no satellites, instead getting its weak tides from its sun.

  Rather than relying on strong tides, Pietera has a strong network of ocean and air currents, continental shelves, and runoff drainage that acts as the planet’s circulatory system, ensuring that they use their tides to its fullest advantage. The planet has an abundance of natural resources that the Piets lack the knowledge and technology to exploit. This fact was omitted from public reports, as to not attract any potential prospectors.

The Piets:

  Most of the Piets settled in small hunter gatherer villages, surrounding underground aquifers, in a vast rocky desert region near the equator. They had not domesticated any food or animals.

Unauthorized reproduction: this story has been taken without approval. Report sightings.

  Evidence from archaeological probes, sent ahead by the Gate station, shows they used to share the planet with a large flying reptile of prey, and this may be one reason they evolved colorful carapaces, to ward off those very predators. And what may have caused them to build shelters around water sources and take up spears made from the needle-like beaks of a smaller species of leathery creatures with powerful legs that allowed them to jump to amazing heights, and using leathery wings to glide down, or dive onto prey, as they chose. The creature was so large and needed so much food and water to survive, once the Piets settled the aquifers and competed with the reptiles for food, they began to die out during the droughts.

  The Piets gather information primarily by sense of smell, not nearly as good as an Earth dog’s, but they can create a much more detailed understanding of their environment with their olfactory senses. They can track other species, decide to avoid them, gather in groups to run them off or hunt them down. They communicate with each other and other species over large distances through chemical signalling to mark territory, announce their presence, and even “talk” across villages. They are sensitive to vibrations in the rocky ground, which is how they find water sources too far beneath to smell.

  They are all extremely nearsighted. They can only see clearly what they hold in their front wiry appendages. Past that, it is all blurry. It looks like written language doesn’t stand a good chance of coming about naturally for them. The Piets on other continents are all nomadic or seminomadic, migrating from region to region with their food sources and suffering or dying out when food runs low. They face competition from many scavengers and some species that fool their sense of smell. But they are the dominate species.

  They exhibit solitary, tribal, and limited hive-minded behaviors. They are individuals networked through a simple language of chemical signals. At this stage, humans were small scattered tribes didn’t leave shouting distance from one another for very long. The Piets appear to be one large tribe able to work together over much greater distances than we could.

  They have males and females; the males compete for rights to fertilize a female’s nest of eggs, not violently, like other species. They flaunt their carapaces, give gifts, and, most amazing of all, they mix simple chemical signals and direct them at the female to excite her. Like a crude love poem and potion in one. The more interesting the signal, the better chances of being given charge of the nest.

  Afterwards, males and females distribute work evenly throughout the tribe, even guarding nests of other mating pairs when needed, and looking after each other’s young. They don’t seem to have any sort of hierarchy, except for their complex mating rituals, and the most qualified and experienced individuals leading others to work or hunt or explore.

  Once we started abducting the Piets and studying them more closely, it was revealed that Piets are naturally hermaphroditic. They start with both male and female reproductive systems, and can choose to change their sex in response to the wider community using chemical signals to trigger a sex change in demand for more males or females. But developing one system means atrophying the other, so while some chose to remain fluid throughout their lives, most specialize in one sex, laying more eggs or producing stronger fertilizer than those who don’t.

  If one village is deficient in resources or has an imbalance in the population, the other villages send what is needed and take away what is not. They are also extremely curious. They like to branch out and share what they find with the group. That’s how the splinter tribes spread to other continents. We see evidence that this has been their way of life for hundreds of thousands of years, with very little progress. Then again, humans existed as hunter gatherers for over two million years before the Agricultural Revolution.

  They also care for their sick, deformed, and wounded. If a Piet has some sort of deficiency, they contribute what little they can. And unlike many predators, humans and chimpanzees included, the Piets don’t bully or alienate the weaker or different members. Sometimes they do if the group doesn’t like an individual’s chemical signals, comparable humans getting into verbal altercations with each other. They are not as aggressive or individualistic as any predator we have seen. And they can’t express complex enough thoughts to have any major disagreements amongst each other yet.