“You’re going to die.” Lin’s dire statement swept through the hab dome as Andrea settled down for breakfast the next day. “The good news is it won’t be from disease.” Andrea smiled at Lin’s attempt at dark humor as she peeled the wrapper off her breakfast and continued to listen. “I wrapped up the testing on your cloned organs and immune system implants. I exposed them to all the parasites, and microorganisms I’ve managed to find, including some particularly nasty and contagious pathogens from the guards I nabbed. The blood and tissue samples they left on the cable scraps contained some real doozies, so I infected your cloned organs with them yesterday after we returned. Some of these things have really outlandish capabilities and will give your system a significant workout, but your immune systems, both biological and mechanical, are so overbuilt that even ‘magical’ plagues don’t seem to push them to the limit. I’ll hang onto the full experimental rig so I can test your immune systems against new parasites and diseases as I collect them. All that data will be perfect for training your immune system on new threats.”
Andrea grinned at the good news. “That’s great, and the timing is perfect. I’ll be coming into much closer contact with these people, now that I’m meeting by their camp. Even with the limited information I’ve gathered from my work with Unla-Ela so far, it’s clear that there are a number of different and populous societies on this planet. At some point we’ll probably be visiting many different towns and cities, so your collection of dangerous diseases and parasites will likely grow substantially.” Andrea took a bite of her cheesy potato meal bar and, with her mouth full, switched to using their group chat as she asked. “Speaking of dangerous, did you get a closer look at the damage that weapon did to the combat drone?” Lin sent her a shrug in their chat before responding out loud. “I decided to prioritize the immune system testing yesterday, I wanted to have that finished before you went to meet them outside their camp this morning. Inspecting the damage to try and figure out what that baton did is my first task for today. I'll update you with what I learn. If you don’t think it’ll cause problems you could also ask them about it. I'd love to compare what I find with their explanation and I’ll repair the drone while I’m at it. Of course, there are plenty of extra combat drones already fabbed up, so for your meeting today you can just bring your compliment up to strength from our reserves.”
“Actually Lin, I’d like to fab a heavy lift drone and a passenger module for it to carry. For now I’ll have a pair of combat drones lift me to the meeting at their camp, but that’s both uncomfortable and less safe than a purpose built air transport.” Andrea finished the meal bar and switched back to speaking as she continued. “The early morning start to the meetings and the distances to be covered, means the Donkey is just not going to cut it. Besides, considering the wildlife around here, the less time I spend in transit through unsecured territory the better.” With a contemplative hum Lin spoke. “Give me a couple of minutes to look through the fabricator queues and shuffle stuff around, a heavy lift drone is a pretty big job, so it might be a few days before it’s ready.” Andrea nodded silently before gulping down a glass of water and grabbing a second meal bar, this time pastrami on rye.
The rest of her breakfast in hand, Andrea stepped out of the hab dome. A shower and good night’s sleep had done wonders. She felt fully recovered from the light muscle strains incurred by her rescue of Unla-Ela the day before, and Andrea’s mind felt fresh and ready to work. Last night, with the residual stress of action and after hours of additional language study following her return to base camp she’d felt pretty fuzzy headed, though she’d made noticeable progress in picking up Unla-Ela’s language.
Andrea unwrapped and bit into the second meal bar as she strode towards the head of the bore shaft Lin started days earlier. In the intervening time it had steadily been driven deeper and deeper into the ground. Andrea decided that she’d take a look at the geological data they were gathering once she had a lull in her work with Unla-Ela and the other aliens. The automated systems hadn’t flagged anything as an urgent concern and that would have to be good enough for now. Both Lin and Andrea had plenty to do and, despite not needing to sleep, Lin still couldn’t do anywhere near everything that needed to be done for a proper new world survey. Each of the duo had their own set of specialties and, while they did cross train on some things, neither was qualified to conduct every aspect of an initial planetary survey. Andrea’s clear priority was the first contact with an intelligent alien species, but she intended to continue fulfilling as much of her usual duties during a new planet survey as possible.
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On the plus side, with at least 5 years before the estimated reappearance of the aperture Andrea and Lin had plenty of time to work with. As Surveyors their missions were about getting a broad and shallow understanding of a world before others came in to build on their work. 5 years was 10 to 12 times longer than the usual duration of one of their missions. The main reason for their current sense of urgency at their tasks was a combination of self-preservation and intense curiosity. The diverse and unusual phenomena they'd been observing were both fascinating and dangerous. When the presence of a mysteriously humanoid looking sapient species was added to the mix on top of that, the need to quickly learn as much as they could became urgent for both curiosity's sake and for their own survival.
While Andrea finished her breakfast by popping the second meal bar wrapper in her mouth, she sent a quick instruction to the food fabricators to start adding breath mint properties to the wrappers. Already anticipating the results from her latest culinary inspiration Andrea opened the access hatch for the borehole and stuck her head in, to peer down the shaft. The concrete walls and ladder had been printed with integrated lighting that illuminated the space clearly as it plunged dozens upon dozens of meters into the ground. Andrea could hear the distant crunch and grind of the burrowing drone at work deep below and when she engaged some of her visual enhancement implants she could even make out the tail end of the machine the ribbon umbilical running out of its back and up along a recessed channel in the printed wall of the shaft.
"Hey Lin! It just occurred to me that pending a study on geological stability, which it'll take me a while to get to admittedly, we might consider moving our base camp underground. With the strange phenomena we've witnessed it might be prudent to fortify our position, if something similar to that stampede began barreling towards our base camp it could be problematic. Even if we were willing to resort to lethal force, with the extreme range of capabilities we've already witnessed there's no guarantee that we'd be able to successfully defend the camp. I don't think that's an urgent need but we're going to be here for years even if it's just to stash some backup fabrication and power generation equipment we should dig out some sort of underground redoubt. That way we'll always have some sort of fallback position near the aperture chamber."
Lin had by this point finished her work shuffling around the fabricator schedule and gave an exasperated sigh. "Wow, you are just all about giving me extra work to do today aren't you? I think you're right though, in fact this time I'm a step ahead of you. I've already scheduled the boring drone to excavate and reinforce a small chamber about 100 meters down. I was thinking we could stash a backup fabricator and power generator down there, then cap and disguise the entry shaft and leave it here when we move our base camp. I wasn't intending for it to be a habitation so we don't have to worry as much about the geological stability of the area. If it collapses that wouldn't be great but at least we're not going to be in it." Andrea nodded along as Lin spoke. "That makes sense. We can have some backup equipment safely stashed in short order rather than waiting till I have the spare time to do a proper geological survey. It's not like it'll be difficult for us to fortify our camp on the surface fairly substantially. At this point I think our original reason for staying low-key has mostly gone out the window. I'd still like to keep from being too obtrusive about our full range of capabilities, but next time we move our encampment fortifying it more robustly shouldn't be an issue. We can pretty quickly print out some reinforced concrete walls around the perimeter and excavate reinforced ditch obstacles. Though I'm hesitant to do that too much since that will leave a fairly long-lasting mark on the landscape, even if we break down the walls and fill in the ditches as we leave."
Andrea stepped back, closing the borehole access hatch as she did. Through their local network she tasked 6 combat drones with accompanying her. She watched them run through some quick preflight diagnostics before lifting off and forming up in the air overhead. “I’m heading out now Lin, it’ll take about 20 minutes to fly over to their camp this way so I should get there almost exactly an hour after first light. Well we’ve got a bit more time than that, we arranged the meeting using their units of time and the closest equivalent they’ve got to an hour is about 8 minutes longer, as far as I can tell. Once I’m fluent enough in their language I’ll make sure to get a better understanding about how they experience and measure time. That can be pretty critical for maintaining good relations, particularly if we plan to explore and interact with their society more closely.” Lin messaged her a thumbs up and one of the nearby sample collecting drones paused in its work to wave at Andrea. With a smile at the cute gesture, Andrea directed two of her escorting combat drones to drop their tow lines down. She hooked the lines onto her field uniform’s integrated hip attachment points and, with a wave back at the little sample collecting drone, Andrea launched into the sky dangling beneath a flying v of buzzing combat drones.