3.9.
Life was on hold. They were prisoners, though they had done nothing wrong. Nothing more than stumbled upon a military secret of some kind. They didn’t know what they had found, which was good. If they had, then the consequences might be more severe than what was effectively a time out.
Sarah played the strange poker-like card game with the teenagers she’d befriended as she reflected on the situation aboard the Toormonda. Once per day, the Toormonda systems instructed them to gather in the common area where a soldier appeared and inspected them. They were repeatedly told that they were not to be harmed. But neither could they leave.
The ship itself was under a military lockout. It was providing them food, water, and shelter. But its instruments were locked out, and its drive systems were controlled by the military forces that were holding them hostage.
Once the soldier left for the day, the students, Dornoda and Sarah were left to fill their time however they could.
They had no entertainment media except for Sarah’s phone, which had her music library on it. Everything else had been purged.
So there had been a lot of efforts to entertain themselves in other ways. Sarah had learned to stick to the public areas of the Toormonda and to make noise while moving from one room into another if she didn’t want to see teenagers doing things that she didn’t want to see.
Not that she could judge them too much. There was no Tuunka Powan; everyone on the ship was on birth control, and the Yonohoans were pretty lax about those things as long as they didn’t lead to unplanned births.
It was just so damn boring.
And she’d officially moved into Dornodo’s room. Their one and only night together hadn’t been their one and only night together. They weren’t bothering to hide it, the teenagers knew. Nobody cared, except to be happy for them.
Some of the tempers on the ship were running ragged, but so far nobody had snapped.
Time passed. Slowly.
She played the alien cardgame with the girls for a few hours.
Then she went to find Dornodo, and they retired to his room for a few hours.
Then she played Yonohoan poker again.
Rinse and repeat.
Life was on hold.
Every time the soldier returned, Sarah dreaded that she was going to be dragged back and brain-scryed again. But the soldier just visually confirmed their health and left.
How long would this go on?
~~~~~~~
Towari walked around the rock that had fallen from the sky. He poked it with one of his arrows, frowning. What was this thing?
It was empty, that much was apparent. He had seen this thing fall from the heavens and felt the reverberating impact as it collided with the ground. He had rushed to inspect the crash site, and when he arrived he’d found this empty shell.
It wasn’t made of stone. He tapped it with his arrowhead and listened to the sound it made.
Clink clink clink.
What was this? What had come to the deep valley in the hidden forest where the Mokoari hid from the world?
Clink clink clink.
The narrative has been taken without permission. Report any sightings.
He had seen metal before, but this was not proper metal. It was not ceramic either, but somewhere in between. It was such a strange substance.
Clink clink clink.
He climbed into the interior and found that he fit just fine, with plenty of place left over. At fifteen years old he wasn’t quite full grown, but he was pretty sure that anyone from the Mokoari could fit in here.
He saw something shining and pressed it.
Between one blink and the next, he night had fallen. He blinked in surprise and jumped out of the magic capsule that turned day to night. He looked over and saw a fire, and he saw a god standing above it, poking the fire with a finger as though it couldn’t burn her.
He screamed and ran all the way back to his village.
~~~~~~
Enedi watched the boy run away in terror and shook her head softly with amusement. The poor little primitive had accidentally triggered the stasis lock on her drop pod. He would have been frozen in time, potentially for centuries, if she hadn’t returned to the pod to make camp tonight.
So this was Earth, huh? Lots of green. The animals of the rainforest were making a lot of noise, but her suit filtered most of it out. She picked up a rock and allowed her nanites to process it, turning it into a rocktala before throwing it into the fire so that it could generate energy to record her report.
“This is Enedi, Forward Scout Rank One. The region immediately surrounding my landing zone is lush with animal and plant life. There are humans here, but they are very primitive. Hunter gather level primitive, I believe, although I only observed them from stealth for a short while. Will modify my appearance and attempt to infiltrate their society in the morning, after I have rested.”
In the morning, she stole clothes from one of the huts, sneaking through the village with the use of her suit’s stealth system. She worked up her courage, then forced her nanites to change the shape of her face and the color of her skin. She screamed in agony at the pain of the transformation, but it was nothing but pain. Pain was the body’s way of telling you that you were alive.
Her suit puffed away, and she dressed in the villager’s loincloth and breast coverings, then wandered back toward the village. That was one valuable piece of intelligence that had come from the Earthling Sarah; don’t try to infiltrate without arranging clothing first. It would seem obvious, and if she had landed somewhere more advanced Enedi would have assumed as much as well.
In this forest, with this little tribe, however, she wouldn’t have bothered with the extra step nine times out of ten.
She walked brazenly into the village with a smile on her face and waited to see what would happen. The villagers stopped to look at her. Most continued on with their day a moment later. An old woman came up to her and said something.
Enedi shook her head and covered her mouth. She couldn’t talk.
The old woman mimicked eating something, and Enedi nodded. She was hungry. She was served some sort of grain with grubs mixed in. She ate it without revulsion, surprising at the succulent and fatty taste of the insects.
The boy from the night before was staring at her. She stared back. She smiled at him and gave him a little wave. He turned and ran away.
She decided that she liked these little people. Hopefully she could help them find a voice in the cosmos. Just like she had for the Yonohoans, once upon a time. In another life. A different her, but still her.
She wondered how Eodar had done in his scout training. He’d been a cute little kid, and she hoped that he’d made it all the way through.
~~~~~~
Eolai stood over the empty drop pod. His soldiers were securing the area, but he knew that it was pointless. The scout would be long gone by now. He felt a deep seeded sadness in the pit of his stomach. This was not supposed to happen.
“Contact General Turnball, President Walker, and any other military leader or head of state who will take my call,” Eolai said.
The device that he wore on his wrist, which served as a medical bracelet, a PHDA, and several other functions, threw up a sign informing him how many people he was connected to. Abruptly the space began to fill with bodies as holograms of the world leaders appeared in the clearing where the drop pod had landed in the middle of a plowed field.
“Hello Eolai. I’m assuming that this is important?” Turnball said.
“It had better be,” Walker said. “I was in the middle of an event.”
“My apologies, friends. But I have important information regarding the event which was observed a few hours ago. Using stealth technology, a force of scouts have infiltrated this beautiful planet.”
“Okay, what does that mean?” Walker asked. “We have a thousand John Does wandering the planet?”
“Yes, although most of them are not so politically significant,” Eolai agreed. “However, it is worse than that. There is only one reason that this could have happened that I am aware of, my friends. I fear that somehow, someone has woken up a swarm. May the ancestors watch over us in this time of darkness, for we will need their guidance now more than ever.”