..[ JACY ]..
It was official, she hated swamps. All the times she had been to swampy places in strange new worlds, she had had to either run for her life, fight for her life or both, at the same time. She was officially done. The next time she found a world to be more swampy than was normal, she would turn back and head to the ship. She would face any consequences such an action would ask for than face another swamp.
“Sylvia, you’re being too friendly with him,” Mativo said to her left, giving Sylvia and her friend a blank look.
She turned and followed his stare and was appalled beyond measure by what she saw.
“You jealous? Never took you for the jealous type.” Sylvia said while she hugged her friend closer.
“Is that—”
“Yes it is.” Mativo didn’t let her finish that statement, and she was grateful for it. She wasn’t ashamed or disgusted by such things. It was just, no.
“Sylvia, I don’t think he is trying to hug you back,” Jacy told Sylvia while she pointedly directly her with her head.
It took a few seconds, too many if you asked her, for Sylvia to realize what was happening. “Aaahhh!!! Get off me! Get off me!”
She successfully got lose on her third try. She jumped with her pulse gun poised for killing. “Run before I kill you.”
And he understood, somehow he understood. He disappeared into the swampy forest in the blink of an eye. It was easy though, there were lots of his kind running around. To their left was a large lake, stretching for more than a kilometer. At least the parts that hadn’t encroached on the surrounding forest. And it also stretched into the forest for close to a kilometer in all directions. If the sliminess of the knobbily trees was a good indicator, then the level of the lake normally rose to above their heads. All their heads.
The place reeked, how so many intelligent humanoids could prefer to exist in such a place was beyond her. Because they were intelligent and humanoid enough. Except for their wet slimy skin, the wide mouth and the horizontal rectangle pupils. Don’t forget the webbed hands and feet. Though the feet looked close enough to a human’s if you didn’t pay them too much attention.
Their so called guide had brought them into a mating frenzy. Clearly either he didn’t understand them, or Sylvia didn’t understand him. Maybe that had been the reason for their cordial reception three Days before. Sylvia had spent those days trying to learn the friendly natives’ language. Mativo on the other hand had spent the entire time in a state of constant fighting. Jacy had been left alone, and she finally understood why; she was a male to them. the females were noticeably larger than the males. The females being around Mativo and Sylvia’s size while the males were slightly smaller than Jacy.
Mativo had understood what they had walked into from the start, but due to their history, he had had issues clearly explaining the situation. And every opaque comment he made had been received as a show of jealousy by Sylvia. She had doubled down on interacting with them even more. Jacy was ashamed to admit that she had only understood the situation when they walked into the frenzy. And there were organisms of all different colors, sizes and shapes. No wonder they so easily thought them part of the frenzy. The only shared characteristics were the humanoid body frame, and the sexes size difference.
“We never talk about this, ever,” Sylvia said as they made their way out of the frenzy and into the abandoned forest. “Not even to each other.”
“Yes.” Jacy said, her boots clashing through the ankle deep waters. Their camp was a kilometer away, they had some distance to cover before they regrouped with the rest of the group, more than five kilometers even further away.
Suddenly there was a splash, and she looked back to find Sylvia propping herself with her hands. Face close to the water, but from the looks of it, it had gone under first.
“There are pits. Be careful,” she said before getting back on her feet. A few steps and she was down again. She slowly got back up and moved behind Jacy, who was walking behind Mativo. Who was not hitting any pits at all.
The trees in the swamp were thin enough Jacy could wrap her arm around their trunks. She had been used to huge trees in all the planets they had visited. But this was different. Even the leaves were. From dark green to a yellow so light they appeared white. The biology behind those still escaped her.
“Did you know what was happening?” Sylvia asked her, having moved closer.
“When we got to the frenzy, yes.”
“Before. While we were at the camp?”
“No. I’m not a linguist remember. And no one was making passes at me,” Jacy said.
“He did.” She gestured with one of her hands, still dripping the murky waters of the swamp. “And I’m a linguist and they were making passes at me. And I still didn’t know.”
“I thought we weren’t supposed to be talking about it,” Jacy reminded her.
“I just want to get it out before we make it to the camp.”
“You were busy trying to understand their language,” she told her. She moved to step on a branch that was slightly off the trail, but safe looking.
“Don’t step on that.” She looked forward to find him still walking forward. There was no sign he had even looked back at all. The swamp was filled with fallen trees, and twigs and leaves. She had thought they might form a safe board to step on. She had read somewhere that people used logs to float down rivers. The trees here wouldn’t work the same then.
They continued on, quickening their pace to stay close enough not to stray from the safe path.
“He never warned me from the pits,” Sylvia grumbled.
“You know why. The same reason he didn’t directly tell you about the amphibians’ intentions.”
“I should have understood his language enough.”
“Whose? The amphibian’s or Mativo’s?” Jacy asked for confirmation.
“Both actually.” She replied in a defeated voice.
“I don’t think the amphibians have a true language. They are just a bunch of animals coexisting in the same area. Any language that arises, gets lost in that mess.”
“I see. They are too individualistic is what you mean. They lack the sense of community needed to develop language.”
“You just repeated what I said using fancy words, didn’t you?”
“Mine sounded way better,” she laughed then. And Jacy laughed with her.
“So all those jealousy remarks were his way of telling me I was receiving inappropriate behavior?”
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Jacy simply said, “Yeah.” She couldn’t have put it any better if she tried.
“So I did hear it, I just…”
“Understood it all wrong.”
“Do you think I should apologize?” She asked after a while.
“Nah. I don’t think he even cares.”
“That’s what makes it much worse.”
“Hurry up you two, I don’t like spending time here anymore than I have to,” Mativo said from the dry edges of the forest while they were still twenty meters in the swampy.
They hurriedly caught up with him as he turned right for their camp. Jacy in middle, with Sylvia to her left.
“I’ve been meaning to ask; why do I have such a hard time with the air blade?” Ever since she started working with the nanobots to access the Energy, she had easily reproduced most of the things Mativo could. Albeit at a much weaker level, but the air blade was chief among those that eluded her.
“I’ve found that when I have issues expressing an intent, it’s usually the structure of the intent that is the issue.”
“Like she is building it all wrong?” Sylvia asked.
“Yes. A castle of sand can stand a breeze, and a castle of steel, mortar can topple in a breeze if build wrong.”
“How do I build it properly?” she asked, glazing left then right. It wouldn’t surprise her if Sylvia knew the answer.
“Fast you have to know how you are building it wrong,” Mativo said as he slashed a twig from a nearby tree and lifting it up as it fell down. After he caught it, he gave it to her. The cut was so clean she was envious. But she had caught something else much more interesting.
“What was that?” she asked him.
“What?”
“You pulled it. As far as I know, we can only push.”
“Hmm… I don’t really know. Must have done it subconsciously, really.” And he looked just as stumped as he sounded. “We should find a way to analyze how the chip translates thoughts. Reverse engineer it, it could help understand instances such as that. The human brain never seizes to amaze.”
..[ MATIVO ]..
As we moved deeper into the forest, the ground slowly angled up. Turning from the flat floodplains of the lake, into the rugged rolling hills of the forest proper. The soil had slowly turned from the dark black thing found near the swamp to a healthy dark brown. I at least assumed that a dark brown on the planet was healthy. From the size of the trees to the amount of foliage and underbrush, my assumption must have been spot on.
We had regrouped with the rest of the group a few hours back. Aquila, Murphy and Paul. And were on our way to our second destination. The surrounding forest. Yeah, we were just going to roam around the forest.
The funny thing about the planet was that it had a lot of animals, and it had a lot of humanoid bipeds. Sadly, they weren’t as evenly distributed among the five main families. Only the amphibians and reptilians had an existing humanoid species. There had been reports of a mammalian humanoid but that was nowhere near our current location. No, we had an overabundance of amphibians and reptilians. We had had just about enough with the amphibians; we were going to try our luck with the reptilians.
The group had been divided into two for us to study each of the species individually. But so far Aquila, Murphy and Paul had yet to make contact with the reptilians. While we had had too much contact with the amphibians.
The trees that had gotten thick enough to require two arms to fully encircle were getting smaller again. At first I got anxious thinking we were going back to the amphibians, but I realized we were still climbing up. The sounds of the forest that had felt so alien yet familiar, had disappeared. We were coming up to something else.
We soon found ourselves following something akin to a well-trodden path. It had appeared as a gully at first, two meters deep, but there were no signs of water erosion. Only hard packed dirt. The trees had gotten so thin they were hardly nothing more than saplings. And the under vegetation so thick that other than on the path, I couldn’t see any dirt or fallen dried up leaves. There were plenty of flowers of all colors spread across the under vegetation. The whites, reds, yellows, purples and blues, all in full bloom.
The first thing we heard were the screams, then came the yelling. Or maybe it was the other way around. With alien throats and vocal chords, it was hard to tell one from the other. Then we saw them, hundreds and hundreds of humanoids rushing through the underbrush, crushing into the trees and each other, but never seeming to slow down. They were clearly running away from something. Comically so.
They didn’t have any weapons on them, and like the amphibians, they came in all colors, shapes and sizes. Sharing the one characteristic; looking humanoid.
They passed without paying us any mind. Only pitiful fleeting glazes every now and then. Then the screams and the yells slowly turned into something that sound very much like battle cries. I caught a glimpse of the new comers through the trees and was confused. They weren’t that much larger than the fleeing reptilians. And they looked similar enough they could be kin. Considering the first group was a mismatch of colors, shapes and sizes, the second was no different. Only that the average of the second group was noticeably larger than the average of the first group. The second group was fewer in number too. In fact, if the first group actually worked together, they could easily overpower the second group. But no, the second group was killing members of the first group it caught without fail. And the crude weapons they were wielding made it all the more easier.
“Stay and fight. Or retreat and strategize,” I asked as I drew my weapons and activated the nanobots. With that many opponents, I would need all the help I could get.
“Retreat and strategize,” Jacy said.
And that is what we did. We ran diagonal to the retreating group, hoping to get out of the way before the second group passed through. We ran up and down gullies. Over fallen trees covered in moss and lichen that made someone trip over if they were fool enough to step on them. We even had to knock a few of the fleeing reptilians to get them out of the way. We managed to slither off into the trees as the first of the pursuers made past our hiding location.
I signaled the group to head towards where the two groups had come from. Maybe then we would learn what exactly was going on. We creeped slowly and as stealthy as we could manage. I didn’t want those reptilians ambushing us. Any of the groups, but especially the second ones. They seemed to have enough of an intelligence that they could pose a threat. Especially with their numbers.
As we moved through the forest, we started coming across areas with clear signs of felled trees. We were getting close to the source of the pandemonium we had just encountered. When we finally came to what I thought was the source, I was very disappointed. Really.
Nothing, they were fighting over nothing. Just a bunch of trees thrown together to create something that a child would scribble on a piece of paper and call it a compound. There was no structure to speak of. Even the felled trees had not been used to construct anything. It was quite possible they had merely been stockpiling firewood. No, they didn’t use fire. Not firewood then.
Staying at the sidelines would get us nowhere. Our previous interactions with natives on the continent had been peaceful, but I still didn’t want to risk a group member. Especially not to a group of berserker lizards who had just learnt how effective weapons and tools can be. Because that was where they appeared to be in the stages of evolution. Discovery of tools. What a joke.
And still, contact had to be made.
“Sylvia, you ready for this?” I asked our resident diplomat-slash-linguist. For an exploration ship, those two job titles came coupled together.
“Well, nothing like a serving of hot-blooded reptilians in the morning to get your day started. Let’s do this,” she said, physically shaking her own body for a few seconds.
“I don’t think reptilians are hot-blooded.”
We slowly made our way into the clearing, keeping our weapons sheathed and hands out to the sides. It was the agreed upon non-aggression gesture. It could mean different things to different species but we didn’t have much of a choice in the matter. It’s not like we could send a letter ahead of time informing them of our visit and asking for them to write back with their preferred methods of contact. Also, I would never waste my time doing all that. I had learnt that dealing with pre civilization species was way easier than those that had already formed an advanced civilization. I had of yet to meet one as such, but considering how things had been back on Earth before we left, it gave a pretty good idea of what to expect. That was why I had a squadron of diplomats whose job it was to rein in such civilizations. Of course, I would pay them a visit or two to knock some heads.
There was less than hundred individuals. Those shouldn’t pose any problems. If the rest were to return, then it would be a different story. But I still thought our odds of winning even then were good. They stopped moving around their rumble of trees and just stared at us. A first good sign. They didn’t even move to pick up their weapons. A second good sign.
I relaxed as we got close enough to each other. The shorter ones were as tall as me, and the tall ones considerably taller. The only ones in our group for a size comparison were Aquila and Murphy. Paul was too tall. And the rest too short.
They were as stack naked as any of the other native species we had encountered. The lack of any outward sexual characteristics meant that they were most probably egg layers. They could still be viviparous, but they most definitely did not breastfeed.
I looked around trying to figure out what they had been up to, but I still came up blank.
“Does anyone have any idea what this people have been up to?” I asked the group over the Comms.
No one answered for over a minute. Then Murphy spoke over the Comms, “It doesn’t look like they have been up to anything really.”
“I figured as much.”
“They just cut down trees but have no idea what to do with them?” Aquila asked.
“Maybe we could show them a few tricks?” I offered. They were just like a group of young children waiting to be told what to do.
“That could be what caused the other reptilians their issues,” Jacy said.
“We could still show them a few tricks, but with our own wood.” Sylvia finally said.