..[ MATIVO ]..
I had decided to give exploration another chance. After Years of not venturing out of the ship, not accounting for the occasional shuttle leisure ride just to stretch my pilot legs, I was feeling a tad bit anxious. While the others had been busy raking up experience points, I had spent all my time slouching in the safety of the ship. I might have trained myself harder than anyone else I knew, and read as much scientific data as I could get my hands on; but it felt like I didn’t know what I would be doing in an alien environment. It had been a mistake to stop exploring.
I promised myself to get back to exploring on a regular basis. I didn’t like the feeling that most of the crew were better experienced than I was at something that I had had an equal opportunity to gain as much experience as they had. In fact, I should have been going on explorations one after another. I had the authority to do that. But that first one had been so boring. And the ones right after that were no better. It had taken a while before the explorations started being fun. There was even a bet going on how soon we would meet an intelligent species. Was that why I had started exploring again? Who knows.
The planet I had chosen to break my dry spell had everything going for it. It was orbiting a eight billion year old K0V star. It was located slightly outside the middle of the conservative habitable zone, slightly larger than Earth but smaller than Ũsumbĩ IV. Sixty-three percent ocean cover. An estimated gravity of 1.1G. And a breathable nitrogen-oxygen atmosphere. Everything was perfect.
Being such a promising destination, an exploration team of one fifty had been chosen. It took us twenty-five Days to reach the planet. It was the second planet from the star, in a planetary system of five planets and countless moons. Our destination had only the one moon. And it was bare and barren, showing no signs of activity.
The planet on the other hand was a much different story. As we descend through the atmosphere, it became all clear that the planet was very different from Earth, and more like Ũsumbĩ IV. All landmasses from pole to pole were covered in lush green vegetation. From dense jungles that transitioned to woodlands and grasslands. And they were all filled with animals; flying, crawling, leaping, running, climbing. It was hard to find a spot to land that wasn’t close to a group of animals. And some of those animals looked very dangerous. I didn’t think it would be a good idea to separate into small groups of six. Even twelve didn’t seem like it would be big enough to keep those predators at bay.
“What do you think?” Cindy asked me after we finally found a place to land. In the middle of a lush green savannah grassland.
“We visit landmass after landmass,” I said. “We are close enough to the main ship we can afford to spend four Weeks here before we have to go back.”
“Exactly how did this planet end up with so many animals?” Matt asked.
“Something must be wrong with its food chain,” Breuer offered.
“No, I don’t think that is the problem,” Aquila argued back. “Every member of the food web is present. The grass and the trees, the grazers and browsers, predators, scavengers, and even the bugs that eat everything else that no one wants.”
“How do you know that? We haven’t even visited the planet yet,” Mwaura asked him.
“I saw it all while we orbited the planet in search of our first landing place.”
“No one could notice all that from up so high,” Breuer said.
Their argument continued as I turned to Cindy to start planning how we would exactly spend the coming Weeks on the planet. Our previous plan having been scrubbed.
“I’m thinking groups of twenty will be enough,” Cindy said, already shuffling the roster of crew we had.
“I don’t know,” Zheng said. She was the First Deputy Operations Officer, the highest ranking Operations officer for this exploration mission. “That might not be enough.”
“Why?” Cindy asked, pausing with her shuffling.
“Have you seen the size of packs of predators out there,” I said pointing to one of the view screens showing a pack that I approximated to be at least twenty cat-like predators feasting on an elephant sized animal they had just brought down. Just shy of hundred meters from the shuttle. “I was thinking something like thirty or forty.”
The shuttle was made up of three decks. The bottom one housed the Engine Core and, Cargo Bay and Craft Bay. The middle deck was the accommodation deck for the crew, while the top deck was the travelling deck, and also housed the Kitchen and Mess halls. We were all currently in the travelling deck, which had one-fifty seats for one-fifty people. It was also lined with view screens all around to offer views of the outside. Most of the crew were busy admiring the life and diversity of the planet while they waited for us to finish our meeting.
“You are exaggerating. This crew is capable of taking care of itself,” Cindy said, looking at Zheng for support.
“Forty is too many. We should also keep the groups we had already established. Either twenty-four or thirty should be fine.”
“Fine, twenty-four it is,” Cindy grumbled as she reshuffled the roster again. “Besides, the landmasses aren’t that big. The shuttle could move from one side to the other in less than an hour.”
It was ironic, a vehicle capable of moving thousands of times faster than light, restricted to such abysmal speeds.
The groups were fast formed, with Cindy completely hoarding the console. It wasn’t even her job to assign the groups. The first group, which also included me, were left at the landing site as the shuttle left to distribute the other groups all over the landmass. It would round us up at the end of the Day before taking us to the next landmass. There were close to hundred such landmasses. We would not be able to visit them all, so the crafts were send out to scout them.
The first thing I noticed was how tall the grass was. It went past my waist, effectively covering all the predators we had been able to easily see from the shuttle. Our sky blue battle suit wasn’t exactly camouflaging us at all. Maybe I should come up with different color schemes for different environments. I had the money to afford such a venture. Would I still be able to afford it if I had over a trillion troops to equip? I needed to have a talk with my financial advisor.
The animals all had green hues to their coloring, making them blend to the green vegetation better than us. It had me curious, was it possible there was more to this green coloring than just camouflage? Of course, there were the exceptions. Animals so big they stood out no matter how hard they tried. Then there were the splashes of color for the daring ones. Mostly those with the capability to fly.
My lack of experience in exploration meant that I didn’t even get command of my own group. Jonah got that honor. He had proved himself in the previous expedition, and this one too. He might get a command of his own ship in the near future.
He signaled us to move away from the feasting cats. Something that I was very on board with. After more than half an hour of wading through waist high grass, it finally started dropping in height. Going as low as the ankles in some places. We had passed through several herds of grazers, with the grass getting shorter the more grazers were nearby. Aside from the coloring, to me, they looked like any wildlife I would find on Earth. Green hued antelopes, green hued gazelles, green hued cattle. Or was it buffalos? Even the predators, you could see the resemblance to the jackals, wild dogs, cats and wolves of Earth. Ũsumbĩ IV had more drastic native differences.
Our stay at the landmass actually proved quite peaceful. Of course we never went anywhere near the large predators, except the already dead ones we found. We also steered clear of regions that had very tall grass. Near the end of the Day, we caught a gazelle and a buffalo like animals for complete analysis on the shuttles lab. We were going to spend four Weeks on the planet, feasting on its bountiful offerings seemed like a logical step.
By the end of our four Week stay, we had had few close calls with some very confident predators. Feasted on so much meat that some people had reverted to a more vegetarian diet. There were fruits, tubers and vegetables a plenty for that. Sadly, no sizable cereals or legumes.
But we had also made a very disturbing discovery, at least to me. No primates. Nada. Not even a tiny tinny little one. It was either they had never evolved to be, or had been hunted down to extinction. Or they had plain killed each other out. A very real possibility where intelligence and emotions were involved. For an Earth analog, it lacked the most important family of all.
..[ JACY ]..
Sylvia had not wanted to be on the same Exploration Team as Jacy, but she decided to ignore Sylvia’s opinion anyway. If Sylvia wanted to visit a world that wasn’t boring, then her luck with worlds would guarantee that. So, the first thing she did when she was cleared for missions was create a team with the two of them as members. She slowly added the other members after that. And as luck would have it, their turn came with Mativo out on an Earth analog they had found. With the one person who could overrule her light-Years away, Sylvia was trapped.
And Jacy was ecstatic; it had been a while since they spent time together. She had yet to pry any meaningful information from Sylvia about Mativo’s early life. Either Sylvia had been avoiding her or she really didn’t know how to extract information from someone. In fact, how had she not put them in the same exploration team all those Years.
“How do you feel?”
“I’m fine Frea. You don’t need to keep asking me that,” she told her best friend, making sure her irritation was clearly expressed.
“I’m still your best friend, I’m allowed to be worried,” she tried to defend herself.
“It’s been Months. Months, Frea!”
“It’ll take a while to get used to this new you.”
“I’m not new,” she told her, shooting glazes around the shuttle, thankfully no one was paying them any mind. “Besides you are undermining my authority as the Exploratory Commander.”
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“Some parts of you are,” Frea murmured. Sylvia’s snickering suggested she had picked it up. Jacy turned questioningly to her.
“Trust me, no one on this shuttle, on the whole ship even, would question your authority,” Sylvia said while raising her hands in mock surrender.
Frea and Sylvia started bickering with each other, and she grumbled to herself trying to ignore them for the rest of the trip to their destination. As much as she could, sitting between them as she was. Funny enough, they were both complaining about why she had brought them on the exploration.
…
“I think I saw bipeds scurrying away when we were descending,” Frea said as their group of six slowly made their way through the shrubs and dried out ground cover vegetation. Most of it had a grass appearance to it.
“Me too.” Mũsango added. “I thought I had imagined it though.”
“We are long overdue for some form of contact,” Paul, the groups physician, said.
“We have made contact already,” Murphy, the last member of the group, added.
“Not that kind of contact.”
Together with Sylvia, if anyone pointed out that the group was full of experienced personnel, Jacy would be fast to point back that she was not the exploration’s Operations Officer. But yeah, their group was well formed. Besides, for the many years they had spent in space, everyone was experienced.
She couldn’t see any constructions that could be used as dwellings, any civilization the bipeds might have was either far away from their current location or not advanced enough for that. There was always the possibility that they were cave dwellers. The only hills they could see where a ways away, it would take them the better part of the Day to reach them.
“They looked humanoid enough to me,” Sylvia said as she wiped off sweat from her forehead. The temperatures were high, high twenties.
“Switch on your suit’s thermoregulator,” Jacy told her. The fumbling of the rest of the group surprised her. “Seriously? None of you thought of that?”
But she got no answer from them.
They trekked on, heading towards a herd of grazing animals they could see ahead of them. Mũsango had suggested that they were not more than a kilometer away. And as they got closer and closer, Jacy had to agree with her. She had yet to get fully accustomed to her bioaugments. It felt easier to walk one leg than the other. Her biological leg felt weaker, like it was lacking in something. She guessed that was how people with a disabled leg felt like. She had spent the first two Weeks limping around, sometimes even using a clutch. Her fighting had been the most affected; she still couldn’t claim that she was back in tip top form, but the power of the bioaugments more than made up for it.
“Look at this,” Murphy said, pointing to the ground a step away from where he was standing. The group moved closer to see what had caught his attention.
A footprint. It was a freaking footprint. And from the way the other footprints leading to and going away from it meant that it had been made by a bipedal animal. The footprint did have some resemblance to that of a human. Only that the toes where a third the size of the overall foot, slightly spreading out. A sign of someone who had been walking bare feet for their whole lives. The footprint was of average size compared to that of a human. Either the bipeds were of average size, or they had abnormal feet for their size.
On closer inspection, ten distinct footprints were identified. All heading towards the herd. Jacy could clearly see the joyous looks on Mũsango and Sylvia’s faces. She felt the need to remind them the situation they were in.
“I want you all to remember that we are on the trail of hunters. They are more likely to see us as a threat than anything else.”
All she got was a chorus of ‘yeah yeahs’, but clearly none of them were listening. At least they all agreed to be cautious, and to try and not make their presence known until they caught sight of their quarry. There was always the option of announcing their presence from far away, but it had the high likelihood of making the quarry go into hiding. This could be their first intelligent contact; they were going to make sure they saw them up close.
For the next twenty or so minutes, the group fell into a Tag Team battle strategy. They stuck low to the ground, moving from shrub to shrub on easy quick steps. And only communicated in whispers through their Comms. Murphy was the first to sight them.
“I see weapons, ten o’clock.” Well, their weaponry at least.
“What do they look like?” Mũsango asked over the Comms.
“Spears. I’m not sure if it’s metal or stone tips.”
“I meant the bipeds. What do the bipeds look like?”
Murphy was silent for a while before answering, “I don’t see anything. Just the spears.”
“The spears are just there by themselves?” Frea asked. Ever since Murphy announced the spears, no one had moved or made the attempt to locate them. The fact that no one else was confirming Murphy’s observation meant that he was the only one to see them. If they were even there.
“They are peeking out over the bushes the bipeds are hiding behind.”
“Are they hiding from us or from the herd?” Paul asked. And it was a very valid question. If the bipeds were hiding from the herd which was directly in front of them, then they should be clearly visible to the group.
But Murphy was getting irritated by all the questions, “How would I know?” He nearly shouted. And everyone remained silent for a minute or two.
“Sylvia, move two bushes to your eleven o’clock and see if you can get a better view.” She was closest to where Murphy had called the spears to be. Jacy waited for a minute as she followed her order. Finally, a sharp inhale over the Comms alerted them that Sylvia had found something.
“Reptilian.” Was the first thing she said, taking close to a minute before she said anything else. “I don’t think we have been made. The three I see are all looking at the herd.”
There was a sigh of relief over the Comms, most probably from Paul.
“Movement,” Sylvia reported. “Towards the herd.”
This time, Jacy did sigh. “Let’s stay back, see how they fare.”
They were better armed than the reptilian bipeds, but it would be best if they began their relations on a good note. They were also close enough to the herd that they would be able to see everything.
A few minutes later, commotion signaled the start of the hunt proper. Peeking over her bush, Jacy saw several blonde grey humanoids chasing the herd as they threw their spears at them. One or two spears found their mark, but it wasn’t enough to even slow the animal down. The herd quickly dispersed leaving the reptilians standing in the middle of the shrubland with nothing to show for their efforts.
As Jacy was starting to feel sorry for them, she realized that some of the herd had made a large U turn and was making its way towards them.
“Incoming,” she quickly announced over the Comms, but it was too late for them to get out of the way without getting noticed by the reptilians.
Sylvia responded by standing up, taking aim at the leading animal and shooting it dead. She quickly followed that with two others before the herd decided to disperse further and avoid them. By the end of it all, five of the animals were down, dead or dying. Apparently, Murphy and Mũsango had decided to join her, each taking down an animal. Jacy stared at them and then at the animals and just shook her head. Well, any form of contact was contact still. Frea and Paul were the last to get up from their hiding spots.
Surprisingly, the reptilians were still there. But they appeared cautious, some had collected their spears and were holding them on aggressive stances. But they were doing nothing more. There were eight adult sized individuals and two juveniles. Or maybe they were the opposite sex.
“I would have thought they would scurry away and hide when we made our presence known,” Murphy said as he approached one of the felled animals.
“Maybe they think they can steal one of these from us,” Mũsango joked.
“You never know. There is ten of them and six of us. It could make them think they have a chance,” Paul said.
“Two of them are barely taller than kids,” Murphy said.
“By that analogy, Jacy is a child too,” Frea said. “Eight against four. Pretty good odds for them.”
“Don’t you mean eight against five?”
“Paul is still half way into his bush.” True enough, Paul wasn’t exactly out of his bush yet. From the reptilians’ point of view, either he was too scared or still a child.
“A little help here?” Sylvia asked and Jacy moved to help her. Only realizing as she picked up one side of the animal that she had no idea what they were doing.
“What are we doing?” The direction Sylvia was heading was a dead giveaway, but she still wanted to hear the explanation right from the horse’s mouth.
“We are taking it to them. Thanks.” The last part was directed to Frea who had come to help the struggling Sylvia. The animal weighed around two hundred kilograms despite its emaciated appearance. It had the build of a cow with a narrow torso and long legs. Other than that, it resembled a camel more. No horns, the head was that of a camel, the tail and feet too. And its coat was a brown blonde color. Standing, it had been around two meters tall.
At first, the reptilians got even readier for a fight, if that was even possible. But they relaxed when Sylvia had them leave the camel-cow animal several tens of meters from them. Compared to that, they went back close to hundred meters away. Several minutes passed without anyone moving, each group closely eyeing the other. Sylvia signaled them to add a second animal. When that didn’t get a response, a third was added to the pile.
“No they have more than us,” Murphy dryly commented.
“Do you want one of the animals?” Frea asked him.
“No way. But we killed them, they should be paying us something.”
“They will pay, one way or another,” Jacy said.
“How? Have you seen this place?” Murphy asked, gesturing to the desolate place the reptilians called home.
“Every citizen added to the controlled territory—”
“Empire,” Mũsango interjected.
“— will have to pay taxes to Mativo.”
“Still, this—” he began, but was interrupted by Sylvia.
“Look, they are taking them. Yeah, now we follow.”
“What?” Several of them asked.
Jacy had already seen that coming, especially after the second animal they delivered. It was what Sylvia had joined the expedition to do. After more than eight Years, she was finally close to establishing peaceful relations with an alien species. No one was going to be able to stop her.
She started looking for a tree sturdy enough to support the weight of the camel-cows as the reptilians seemed to be doing. Soon enough, they were walking a hundred meters behind the reptilians. Murphy and Paul carried the smaller of the camel-cows, while Frea, Jacy and Mũsango carried the larger one. With Frea and Mũsango taking the front. Her bioaugments were coming in handy in terms of strength.
Sylvia was dancing around the distance between the two groups. Sometimes helping the group with the kid carry their camel-cow whenever they fell behind the others. The first time they had run away leaving the camel-cow, but for some unknown reason, they came back and accepted the help. And on they went, getting closer and closer to the hills until they could make out cave openings.
It took them a whole hour to make it to the cave openings. There they found clearings made just outside the caves, where it seemed the reptilians spent their time when they weren’t out hunting. But everyone in the clearing, eighteen individuals by Jacy’s count, were staring at them.
And the reason for the reptilians’ partial acceptance became clear. Two of the individuals had the sky blue skin of their combat suit, with two crests rising from the top of their heads, going back to the neck and running along the shoulders where they tapered off.
And as Jacy got closer to them, she noticed that some of the others had those crests too. But they were barely there, only a centimeter or two in height. It reminded her of lizards that had dull coloring for the females and juvenile males, but the mature males got this vibrant array of colors. Their skin appeared scaly and dry, explaining their greyish appearance. They might turn a healthy blonde if they moistened it. Their faces were human enough with pale yellow slit eyes, a sunken in nose, thin to non-existent lips, and a long slim tongue. The few glimpses of teeth showed sharp dagger-like things, made for tearing flesh.
They didn’t receive much of a fanfare as they entered the compound. They deposited their camel-cows where the other reptilians had deposited theirs and collapsed to the ground in exhaustion at edge of the clearing. It had been an exhausting Day. No one bothered them for their entire stay there. Sylvia had tried to communicate with them for over two hours before she gave up and joined the rest of the group.
“I don’t think they have developed language yet,” she said as she settled down under the tree they had taken shelter under. “We are too early.”
And she was proved right when they started eating the meat raw. It might have been their diet preference, but Jacy had seen no sign of fire at all. After they had had their rest, they picked themselves up and went back to the shrubland. In search of another village. Maybe they would have better luck then.
They had several hits and misses during their stay on the planet. Thankfully, they had avoided any direct confrontations with the reptilians. Other groups hadn’t been so lucky. Only their continent had been populated by the humanoid reptilians. And of the three groups that had been on the continent, one never really made contact, with the reptilians always running away from them. The other group either had the reptilians avoiding them or fighting them, no time for interaction. Compared to that, they had been lucky. And Sylvia had collected a lot of data from all the encounters. She was more than certain now that they had not yet developed language or learnt to use fire. She believed they were close though. And Jacy agreed with her.
They had left beacons near all the friendly villages they had encountered. In a Year, a colonial ship would be arriving on the planet. Jacy hoped they had done enough for future positive relations. It would still take a while for the reptilians to be lifted enough for full integration to the rest of the people.