Chapter 24

..[ JACY ]..

When they first landed on the planet, it had been for a predetermined two-Day stay before they picked up and moved on. Like all the other seventy-two class five civilizations they had discovered, all they wanted to do was see what exactly life was like on the ground. Any roads? Clothes? What level of technology did they have? How close where they to industrialization?

Shuttle P41 was the lucky, or unlucky, shuttle that made the discovery. They alerted the neighboring ten shuttles on both side before going in for a landing.

With a crew of one-fifty plus the twenty-four she had brought with her on her resupply-checkup run, there was enough personnel to mound twenty-six landing parties and still leave enough crew to man the shuttle.

After three orbits around the planet, landing sites close to desirable locations such as large population centers, agricultural regions, a few uninhabited regions and the largest ruins they had seen, were selected. Jacy and her group of six got one of the average looking villages. Placed five kilometers from the village, any observant native would have picked up the shuttle as it landed and lifted off.

It took them over an hour to reach the village. Her comrades enjoyed idle chatter between them, but she was busy wishing she had at least one familiar crew member with her. Kacy had been on shuttle P41 but they had ended up on different groups. But Sylvia would have been more preferable. It’s not that she didn’t value Kacy, but the reality of the situation was that Kacy might be a linguist but she was no diplomat. And given how varyingly different they had been received over the Months, a diplomat wouldn’t hurt to have close by.

They had been received with adoringly sincere worships and guns blazing on sight. She still remembered the time when they had arrived at a village only for the whole village to go down on their knees with their heads held against the ground. Mativo had turned back and went to the shuttle without saying a word. Yoshika had done her duty as a diplomat then. They kept an unspoken agreement not to tell the locals what Mativo exactly was. Especially with how the degree of worship kept increasing the more they interacted with them. She didn’t know what the natives would do, but she knew what Mativo would do if they did more than just bow to him.

When they arrived at the village, the villagers were waiting for them with pitchforks, staves and swords. Some had what looked like it could have been an axe in the wrong universe. The natives themselves wore rough clothing, reminiscent of the Middle Ages era back on Earth. European Middle Ages; the Chinese were clothed in silk, what she saw was most definitely woven wool.

In terms of height, they wouldn’t stand out in a human population. There were a few individuals that had made it past two meters, most of the adult looking natives were between one meter seventy and one meter eighty. But she could still see bearded individuals lower than that. She didn’t think there were females on the meeting party.

They were very cat like, with hairy round ears at the top of their brown-black heads twitching ever so slightly. When they got close to within fifty meters of the village, an arrow was short to within a meter of them. A rough order, that sound more roar than words, was issued. When they tried to plead their case, another arrow was shot. Closer than the last time.

There were around two hundred natives, assuming they made up the village’s fighting force, it was safe to assume the village would have around one thousand inhabitants. They could take them on if it came to a fight, but they didn’t come for that. She gave the order to move on. They would try their lack on the next village, around seven kilometers away. If they picked up the pace, they would be there in an hour. They didn’t have the time to try and convince a hostile village to cooperate with them.

A few minutes past the one-hour mark, they came in the vicinity of the next village. They would have to make it work here or they would be forced to call it quits. The next village was a half-Day walk away, and they had caught glimpses of stalkers. The last one had been around ten minutes before the village came into view. They had passed over scattered farmlands, but this close to the village itself, every land available had been turned into farmland.

There were a few natives attending to the farms. They were so busy she managed to approach one to within three meters. Then they gave a high pitched scream of surprise. And the obvious breasts led Jacy to assume them female. The scream had drawn the attention of nearby natives. Most of them hightailed it back to the village with a few making cautious approaches.

Their victim was sitting down on the ground staring at Jacy with near black eyes and small rings of blue at the outside. Given her cat resemblance, Jacy assumed her pupils had enlarged in fear. What was the peaceful gesture here? She wondered as she dumbly stared at the woman. Mativo would simply haul her and use her to get into the village. That wasn’t exactly a bad idea but she wanted to try a more friendly approach.

Looking around, her group had surrounded them. Enough to keep the other encroaching farmers at bay. Her clothes, a pair of loose trousers and a shirt, were a brown grey color. Most probably a result of working on the farms a long time. She had light brown hair that appeared blonde when hit just the right way by the local star’s light.

Any talk gesture she knew of could easily be interpreted as eating too. So she pointed to the female and then to the village and gave her her best questioning look. The female stared blankly at her. And she gave up.

“Up,” she told the female as she motioned for her to get up.

But the female didn’t move. She tried grabbing her, but the female scurried backwards. She moved faster then, grabbing her by the shirt and bodily hauling her upright. She put so much force into the move that she lifted the female a few centimeters off the ground. The female was good deal taller than her, maybe even taller than Mativo. But she paid that no mind, as she used her free left arm to gesture to her and then the village. She then shoved the female in that direction, not enough to cause her to fall down, but enough for her to understand what she wanted.

During all that rough-handling, a few arrows had been fired at them but her group took care of those. There were two to the front as they got back on the road to the village, her behind them with the female a few steps ahead of her. Two to the sides and another bringing up the rear. The pulse guns had been drawn and they made sure the natives stayed out of the road. They took great care not to actually hurt anyone more than was necessary. They might be considered aggressive but they weren’t hostile.

Inside the village, they were met with a volley of arrows at first. In their full combat gear, those were no threat. But they had to take care of a few of the arrows that seemed to head a little too close to their victim. No use losing their only ticket for talks. But there was a roaring order and the shooting stopped. Soon, a very important looking person appeared.

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Dressed in blue and green, the only colors she had seen on clothes on the planet, it was easy to assume that he, and it was most definitely a male, was in charge. His head was covered in a thick mane of black hair with the edges being a dark brown. He was clearly over two meters tall and well built. He had been holding an axe, but he dropped it as he came into full view of their group.

At first, Jacy entertained the idea of the female being someone important to him. More important than just being a villager in the village he lorded over. But she discarded that idea; better be prepared for the worst.

He said something she didn’t understand. Of course she wouldn’t, it was a new foreign language. She sighed to herself as she resigned to the grueling coming hours that they would have to go through before basic communication of ideas could be established. She turned to their diplomat-linguist and nodded to him. He would take over until then.

As he moved to the front and started expressing the simplest of ideas, Jacy noticed what appeared to be chairs and tables outside a tavern-like establishment. She called to her diplomat and pointed at them, and even the local leader understood that much. He smiled at them and started for the establishment even before the diplomat could ask about it. They followed too and took seats in the rickety chairs. The local leader pointed at what appeared to be a wooden cup on one of the tables. Jacy opened her visor and nodded. A minute later they all had cups of a dirty liquid presented to them. She took a sip of the drink and found it a dilute alcohol. And her nanobots didn’t tell her there was anything wrong with it. She nodded and some of the others took sips. But one of them quickly spit it out, crying that he wanted water not alcohol. The diplomat took over, and a few minutes later, they had what could be water. Some of them kept the alcohol too. By then, the local leader had been joined two other seemingly imposing characters. But unlike him, they were dressed in the more common browns.

It took over an hour for the diplomat to get the leader to agree to one of the locals being injected with the translator nanobots. At that point, their victim became useless and she was let go. After another hour, they had established that they weren’t there to fight. Only talk.

They learnt a lot then. The village they were at was somewhere in the middle of a territory controlled by a group that believed in the existence of gods and devils, that created the world as they knew it and would destroy the world one day respectively. They believed that all Mbelisaf were servants to either one or the other faction. The previous dominant group that had sought to explain the mystery of their world had been declared servants of devils and persecuted for it. Anyone found to sympathize with their views met the same fate.

If Jacy understood it right, they had arrived in the aftermath of a religion-science war and the scientists had somehow gotten themselves killed. The planet was clearly not a good choice for a fast integration. A lot of people could still be pro-science or just simply not care, but religion was a powerful thing. It could take decades, centuries, maybe even millennia to get rid of. Mativo would have to go slow here, unless he intended to massacre all religionists and their supporters.

A lot of people didn’t agree with the religious group’s killing, but the economy was bad, and had been so for a few years. People needed the money and the religious group paid its soldiers handsomely. They were holding out as much as they could, but soon enough some of their villagers might go and join them.

Jacy would leave the job of untangling that mess to the Colonists. In thirty-six Hours, the shuttle would be back for them and the planet would be just another name on the map of The Empire.

Things had calmed down enough that the villagers had reduced their hostility towards them. And they in turn had holstered their pulse guns. They had even enjoyed a hearty meal together with the leader. It had been composed of meat and tuber-like things together with cuttings of leaves and fruits sprinkle on it. The farms must be for the tubers, Jacy assumed.

They were given a house to settle in when nightfall came. They kept a watch and slept in their combat gear as was customary when in hostile territory. Getting attacked in the middle of the night could not be ruled out. But the night went on smoothly without any issues. They were greeted with a heavy breakfast come morning, similar to what they had had the previous day. Either it was the best they could offer, or it was the only meal they could offer.

While some of her group went back to interacting with the leader and a group of five similarly dressed males that had joined him, she spent her day roaming all over the village. She noticed that while the skin tone was a near uniform white color with a few slightly darker tones, the height of the species was very varied. As varied as humans, and that was from just the two villages she had seen. The females were on average shorter than the males. The eyes had three possible colors for the iris; blue, green and the rare yellow. At least as far as she had noticed. She had seen no form of writing anywhere, either it had gone with the scientists or it had never existed. They would need a much more understanding of the local language to get the full picture of what it had been like under the scientists.

A few hours before their scheduled departure time, she got a message in her Comms. And it was bad. Several, not just one, but several of the other groups on the planet had been arrested by the locals. She couldn’t understand how that had come to be. Had the locals somehow had the technology necessary to overpower them? There had to be at least one bioaugment in the groups that got caught. Even if they ran out of power for the pulse guns and somehow lost their swords, a bioaugment could hold their own against a few the locals until they got to a relatively safe space. There was also the shuttle. They could have asked for help. With all those factors to consider, it didn’t make sense that a single group could have been captured, let alone several.

She cut her tour short and headed for the meeting place. It was time to mount a rescue mission and get their people from the clutches of persecution if the fate of the scientists of the planet were any indicator. She found them in the middle of a game she didn’t have the presence of mind to pay attention to. One look from her and the group was on the alert. At least the group was disciplined, another reason this whole situation didn’t make sense.

“Three groups have been captured. There signals were lost around here,” she told them as they gathered at the same table, bringing up the map of the planet they had uploaded. It showed a circle around hundred kilometers in diameter and twenty kilometers north of their current location.

“We have lost communication with all groups within that area.” She continued. “The shuttle will be here in an hour. In that time,” she turned to the diplomat, “try to learn as much as you about that area and what we might encounter there.”

..[ MATIVO ]..

I was back from an attempt at landing at a planet that housed a young Class Two civilization. Technically, we hadn’t been trying to land. More like acting as a distraction to keep them occupied as our other shuttles made landfall. Only five of the twenty-four shuttles that had tried to land managed to do that undetected. At least we assumed that they had been undetected. Any shuttle that suspected of having being detected had orders to pull back.

The natives had been very vocal when they detected us. They would send fighter-class jets and harass us until we pulled out of the atmosphere. In a way it had turned into a battle training of a kind to such an extent that the crew had been anticipating their turn to try getting past the dedicated defense the planet seemed to have put in place. I had to hold back some of them. We didn’t want for the natives to have discovered a way to inflict damage on us by the time the Colonial Ships got here. Because I wanted the planet, especially the people. They appeared to be exceptional pilots, unlike the contingent I had for pilots. There were the exceptionals of course, but the average skill level left a lot to be desired. And it’s the average that counts. After all, the exceptional are always too few to be of any help in the long run.

Of the little I had seen of the natives, they were a reptilian species with a dull-green skin. They appeared to prefer to wear trousers only as their form of clothing. The wing protrusions from their torso could be the reason for that though. The wings were too small in relation to the body and didn’t seem to have the capability to get any bigger, or smaller for that matter. They were essentially gliding wings, barely at that too.