(Lamtara Rise, Ziunov, Ihm Imperium)
When she had seen the wreckage of the ship from atop the rise, she’d measured the range to be just over forty kilometers away on a straight line. On flat ground, that would have been a day’s walk, perhaps two if they took it easy, or had problems. In the mountains, however, it is not so simple as just moving in a straight line. Privately, Zass thought they were making fairly good time to move through trackless mountains, keeping their orientation despite the weather and their instruments going haywire just as the flyer instruments had. It was evening on the fourth day after sighting the wreckage, and they were now at a small shelf not two kilometers below the wreck site. Tomorrow, they would be able to see the wreck itself.
Bhox nudged her with his large elbow. “Sister, I don’t think we’ll find a better spot to make camp before the sun leaves us. I know you wanted to be at the crash tonight, but…”
Zass shook her head. “No, you’re right. I wished we could make it, but I already sent the message saying we would not be able to make it this night. That collapsed ridge from the wreckage set us back too much.”
Roxl laughed. “I’m just glad that the radios still work! Not good if you need help and have to climb all the way out of the mountains to get it, and then climb all the way back because the flyers won’t fly.”
Zass smiled at her brothers. “Yes, thankfully it is just the nav computers and sensor readings that are affected, not communications. Otherwise the Matriarch wouldn’t have approved this job without twice the crew, to make sure we could make a trail back to base. Anyway, set up the camp, and I’ll call in and let them know our status. Throsk gets first watch tonight.”
Standing watches on the side of a mountain might seem like a foolish idea, but there were wild animals that lived in the mountains, and more than a few of them were quite capable of eating a full-grown Ihm, and weren’t shy about trying. A few of the most worrisome ones were too stupid to realize that they couldn’t actually digest an adult Ihm, but that hardly mattered to the person being eaten, as they’d still be dead. So yes, setting a watch was a standard practice, even on the side of a mountain. ESPECIALLY when you were on a side of a mountain and the instruments you usually used to keep the predators away couldn’t be relied on to work properly.
The next morning, they ate a cold breakfast of chilled ruglee jerky, and began their final climb. Two hours later, they had crested the final rise, and were able to look upon the wreckage from up close.
And that was when the first surprise came.
“Where is all the wreckage? Are we in the right spot?”
Zass didn’t bother to rebuke Uathru’s words, which could be taken as disrespect against her navigational skills. If she were honest, she was wondering much the same thing herself. “Of course we’re in the right spot! You see that huge-ass hole in the shelf? That’s solid rock! You don’t just make a hole like that with a hammer. We’re looking at an impact crater for sure, and recent, none of the edges have been weathered.”
“Then where is all the wreckage? There’s just a few pieces of hull on the ground! The pictures we’ve seen suggested there was a lot more of the wreckage intact.”
Indeed, that was the question. The configuration of the hull plates was the same as they’d seen from the initial satellite pictures and from other long-range scans, but now when they got here, the hull fragments were the only thing left!
Bhox shook his head. “There’s been cloud cover since the crash. No chance for satellites to update the visuals, just the heat scans and EM readings. Looks like we got swindled.”
“Another company? We’re the only salvage group on the planet that could make the climb.”
Roxl grunted. “Unless there was someone with a flyer crazy enough to fly in without instruments or comm beacons. They’d be flying blind, and who knows what would happen to electronics after prolonged exposure to whatever’s causing this, but it isn’t impossible.”
Throsk growled. “Or maybe they’re the ones causing the interference.”
Zass shook her head. “Nope, not believing it. With the amount of space this wreck covered, you’d need more than a single flyer to do this much salvage work so quickly. And there’s no way a whole team of flyers flew up here with no navigation and no one told the clan. Something else is going on, here.”
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Bhox shrugged. “Well, it looks like there’s drag marks here. Why don’t we follow them, and see where things go?”
Zass nodded, and said, “Let me call this in, so people know something is weird up here, and then we’ll do that. Meantime, find someplace to stow the equipment, and break out the weapons and armor. If there are other people, or maybe survivors, up here, they may be having restless trigger claws. Either because they came up here to steal our claim, or because they’re not sure who is coming for them. I don’t want the hassle of explaining to the Matriarch why one of you louts died because we got cocky following the trail.”
Two hours later, the field hampering navigation and instrumentation near the mountain fell, and a call went out that shook all of Ziunov.
(Confederate News Network Broadcast)
A human male is pictured, in a business suit. The location appears to be in front of an Ihm government building, with its signature rounded lines.
“This is Chet Ubetcha of CNN, reporting live from Ziunov in the Ihm Imperium, on the border with the Terran Empire. Approximately two Galactic Standard months ago, a spacecraft of Terran origin crash landed in a remote mountainous region of the southern continent of Ziunov.”
“The crash was originally believed to be the result of a faulty FTL mass-detection safeguard system, causing the ship, which was classified as a light freighter, to emerge from hyperspace too close to Ziunov’s atmosphere while travelling at a high rate of speed. The ship, tracked on satellite and other scanners, was believed to be a total loss due to the speed and location of the impact.”
“Initial Search and Rescue efforts were hampered by intense electromagnetic fields and particle residue in the atmosphere surrounding the crash site, disrupting navigation and other instrumentation in the atmospheric craft attempting to respond to the crash site. When satellite imagery showed the total destruction of the freighter with a sizeable impact crater, the crash was deemed unsurvivable, and Search and Rescue efforts were called off.”
“Because of the terrain and the difficulties with instrumentation, salvagers from the Whitescale clan won the right to salvage the wreck and ascertain the cause of the lingering interference. Six hours ago, three of the team of five Ihm were rescued alive off the mountain when the disruption field fell.”
“Earlier, I was able to interview one of the survivors when they were out of surgery.”
The picture changes to a two shot of Chet and a white scaled Ihm female in hospital robes, with one arm in a sling and a patch over one eye. She is identified as Zass Whitescale.
CHET: [Junior Matriarch] Whitescale, thank you for taking the time to speak with us. May I begin by offering our condolences for your losses. Let their spirits find their ancestors with honor.
ZASS: My thanks. Few knelfi know the traditional words. You may call me Zass. And I agreed to speak to you because my brothers did not make it off that mountain, and they deserve to have their story told.
CHET: For our viewers who are not familiar with the Ihm Imperium, the Whitescale Clan is the premier hazardous terrain salvage company on Ziunov, yes?
ZASS: Yes, that’s right. As [Arctic-equivalent] Ihm, we have an advantage in most mountainous terrain and other hazardous environments, with the exception of our ocean-dwelling cousins who can breathe underwater in the deeps.
CHET: So your group was the best suited to the conditions on the mountain, and you went in prepared for a wide range of possible hazards, correct?
ZASS: Yes, we’re professional salvagers. If it were going to be easy or safe, they would call the flat-land companies. We go in expecting all possible environmental hazards, as well as more conventional hazards, like hostile wildlife or rival salvagers. That doesn’t happen often, given the jobs we go on, but we prepare for it all the same.
CHET: Can you tell us what happened on the mountain?
ZASS: Flyer dropped us off on a two-day hike from the ridge-line. That was as close as they could get us without their instruments being affected. As we hiked in, we found communications were not impaired, and so we were able to give regular reports. When we reached the crash site, the entire site had been stripped clean, except for some large hull fragments that had melted into the stone of the impact crater.
CHET: Another team beat you to the site?
ZASS: No. There’d been bad weather in the mountains for a while even without the interference. You may have been able to find one pilot crazy enough to fly in those conditions and hope they didn’t die, but enough to bring in the equipment needed to clean up the site and remove all the debris? Every salvager on the planet was watching that mountain. Someone would have seen it.
CHET: So where did the wreckage go?
ZASS: Well, that’s what we were hoping to find out. We could see drag marks leading from the impact crater to a tunnel that had been drilled into the mountain. I called in the possible hostile activity, so the Clan had a flyer ready, if we could get the disruption field down. My brothers and I, we armored up and got ready for a fight, just in case. Like I said, we prepared for rival salvagers, but sometimes we find survivors, and sometimes they’re a little too eager to shoot first and talk later.
ZASS: Anyway. We entered the cavern, but we quickly found that there were traps in the halls. Some were crude, just monowire strung across a hallway, but others were some real nasty pieces of work. But like I said, we prepare for things. Traps in the hall aren’t that much different from a salvage site that is likely to fall apart around you while you’re trying to locate the priority items.
ZASS: It was maybe one hundred, two hundred meters down the corridor that we encountered our first real problem. Blast doors slammed shut behind us, and a human opened fire on us from a concealed position. Throsk got hit in the shoulder, but wasn’t down. They weren’t expecting us to have armor. Roxl managed to get him with a shot as he was reloading his weapon, which was a psyshot assault rifle.
ZASS: From there…
CHET: If you like, we could continue later…
ZASS: No! No. I’ll go on. We fought our way through the damn tunnels, which were turning into some kind of base, until we found the source of the disruption, some big piece of Imperial tech. There were more fighters coming, so we had to hurry. We used some thermite charges and burned the thing up. That shut the thing off nicely, and must have caused some kind of failsafe to go off, because a door opened in the wall, leading to a tunnel heading out.
CHET: Did the fighters follow you?
ZASS: That was the strange thing, they didn’t follow us, even though we where carrying Throsk and Uathru, which slowed us down. We got out, and called in the flyer for immediate evac.
CHET: Was there any indication as to who these fighters were?
ZASS:
CHET: What did it say?
ZASS: It was in some old language the computer identified as Latin. ‘Gloria in Machina Deo. Deus regnat.’