Misha, Robert, and Helia talk about picking up any
sort of emissions from the planet. They have seen nothing so far,
on any band -- the only thing that has registered anything has been Marquis
Marcus Crestworthy's psionic sensors.
Misha asks the Captain if there's any way to communicate
psionically with them.
The Marquis replies that telepathic communication
is difficult, and isn't supposed to be possible with non-humans.
The range is prohibitive, and there's no way to relay psionics or anything.
The state of the art on the sensors is to determine whether there's psionic
activity going on or not, and at what level, not even what sort of activity.
Misha says that the creatures are clearly intelligent,
based on the structures they've built.
Marquis Marc tells him that there's an ongoing discussion
between the zoologists and anthropologists over that very subject.
For one thing, the presence of those creatures in the village doesn't mean
that they built it. Secondly, the zoologists point out that there
has been no behavior exhibited that requires intelligence -- but likewise
nothing that contradicts it. They need more information.
Making contact with the natives was not, of course,
in the original mission plan. In fact, the mission was supposed to
avoid letting the natives know they are here. Obviously that failed
when the creatures attacked the probes...
Misha later continues the discussion in private with the Marquis. Their psionics make them worth investigating from the point of view of his research. This wasn't the creature he was expecting to find -- he reviews the turtle rumor for Misha -- but they are definitely interesting. The probes have seen the turtle too, but haven't seen any evidence of the potentially psionic behavior.
Misha's approach is that leveling the village, and seeing if and how they build a new one, might indicate how intelligent they were. Helia objects strongly to anything like that.
The Marquis suggests that they wait until it gets
warmer, so they can observe the creatures more easily. It won't be
long before the snow starts to melt. He also contemplates dropping
a psionic sensor somewhere else on the planet, like where the gcarrier
crashed, to see if there's any activity there.
His final decision is to drop the ocean sensors
in place, then wait for a week to see what information they can gather.
There are no objections.
William Avon fires off the ocean probes; the better one takes up position fine, but the other stops sending when it hits the water surface.
The Marquis decides to wait before launching the hardened psi probe; they will only be able to make another half dozen probes, and he wants to conserve them this early into the mission. Mich and Robert are directed to prepare the remaining six, allowing space for sensor packages. They do a fine job of putting together a design for a modular probe, where sensor packages can be slipped in easily.
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The week passes quietly. Among the crew, a
lot of card playing goes on, while the scientists avidly devour all the
data being relayed back.
The zoologists are still delighted
with all the data rolling in, including from the successful ocean sensor.
Robert has been working with the Hiver computers.
He has picked up a fairly good idea of the layout of information, and the
architecture of the system, but is severely limited by the ability to understand
the hiver language. The techniques he's learnt, however, have vastly
expanded his skill in decrypting human-based secure systems, and in penetrating
deliberately obscure architectures, such as (hypothetically) Imperial naval
base systems. He is now a pretty decent authority on hiver computer
systems.
The village now is clear of snow. It's a collection
of stone huts, but not a great deal of detail is visible at this altitude.
The Marquis orders a regular (non-psionic) probe to be prepared so they
can get some data for the anthropologists. The probe has a rough
ride down, but it does take up position properly.
There are creatures moving in and out. They
resemble snakes with a large number of small legs. The diameter and
length of the body seems to vary, and the skin seems to ripple. The
size varies from two to three meters in length. The entrance to the
hut seems to be at ground level -- there's a flat stone that they come
up under from. There are no clothes, and no sign of them carrying
anything.
The buildings are nicely fitted rock; Misha had
seen marks as if they had been chipped to shape.
The creatures go off singly or in groups of up to
six. They return, sometimes with the body parts of some other creature.
The body parts are being carried in their mouths -- their posture varies
from S-shaped while holding their burden in the air, to traveling along
the ground. The zoologists can identify one of the body part sources
-- a large herbivore (also observed at the other site), about ten times
the size of the creatures, hacked up into many pieces.
So far nothing indicates more than animal intelligence.
The Marquis goes over all the data records, and verifies
that the number of creatures that left always returned -- they have.
None showed any obvious injury.
Misha suggests going down again -- and the Marquis
agrees that following a hunting party would give valuable information.
The Marquis, however, is concerned that they could attack at a large distance.
Misha counters by suggesting that if they go down with no psionics, and
don't get too close, that they might not attack at all.
The Marquis reviews the official first contact procedures.
It is clear that the mission has already acted well outside the cautious
official standard operations. He's reminded of the neural activity
sensors -- but of course they have very limited range, and readings of
semi-intelligent and very primitive come out much the same, so it's not
clear exactly what use the sensors might be.
In fact, official first contact procedures -- and
precautions -- have been pretty much ignored. Direct contact, lack
of decontamination, and so on.
Now as for the NAS operation, the gcarrier is equipped
with one. A team could do a flyby and try for some readings.
Helia suggests putting some object, such as the
Rubik's cube she produces from her toy bag -- or perhaps a large black
monolith -- into the village and seeing what they do with it.
The Marquis also suggests that sending a probe down
to the other village might be a useful exercise.
The Marquis realizes that the creatures have not
been following regular paths from the village -- in fact, they seem to
be deliberately avoiding laying down trails. They are moving so as
to make sure they aren't passing over the same ground all the time.
Marquis Marc directs that one of the remaining probes
will be put down at the village, and follow the first large hunting party
to leave the village. The current probe will remain on station, while
the following one will be flown remotely from the Third Eye by Helia.
A hunting party of five creatures
leaves the village. Helia starts the mobile probe following them.
A little way outside the village, one of the creatures stops and looks
directly at the probe. Another one of them dives into the ground,
while the other three also stare at the probe.
A view of the mobile probe
from the static probe shows no abnormalities.
Helia starts to bring up the
probe, but it's responding quite sluggishly. Mich reports that all
systems are working correctly, but Helia is having problems pulling it
up.
Still, it does ascend.
As it gains altitude, it responds better, and soon Helia brings it to orbit.
The hunting party is still
in sight of the other sensor -- they return to the village, including the
digging one, which surfaces before going into the village. There's
no real visible difference in the one that went underground; all of them,
however, seem slightly darker in color than the ones in earlier videos.
Helia flies the Third Eye
over to the probe, opens the back door, and backs the ship over it.
Mich is there in the bay ready to secure it (which he does). The
Marquis comes back to check on it -- he wants to see, hear, and smell it
in an atmosphere.
Mich fires it up. The
"stealth" lights flash, it hums, and does a remarkably good impression
of a disco ball.
For some reason, the connections in the probe were a really sloppy job. The Marquis decides to wait a couple of days before relaunching it. He also directs that the probe that's on station should be raised a good bit higher. All the natives seem to have gone into the huts -- there's no activity visible.
The Marquis would like to put together a probe with ground penetrating radar, but the Third Eye doesn't contain any appropriate components -- after all, in these days of densitometers, why bother? Marc makes a note to add that equipment to the stores for the next expedition. It looks like the gcarrier is their only option -- it is, after all, why a Kankurir-class gcarrier is standard complement on this ship.
The plan is for a 500m altitude pass, slowly enough to get good readings from the sensors. The anthropologist wants it to be very slow indeed -- they settle on 5kph.
Akim backs the gcarrier from the bay and heads down to the village. It's a flawless mission -- Akim drives the gravcraft perfectly, and the sensor operators get excellent readings.
The data is interesting indeed.
The NAS reveals 40 - 60 life forms, and gets a distinct "Intelligent" reading
-- not even semi-intelligent or primitive.
The densitometer reveals that
the mounds are the top level of a 10 m deep pit. There are indications
of some internal structure, perhaps flooring or something. There
are passages of various sizes interconnecting the whole thing underground.
One of the pits opens out underneath to a much wider area, about twice
the
hut diameter -- the others all just match the hut diameter. The doorways
are a channel, about 50cm, that runs underneath a flat stone at the base
of the hut. It does look like they're made for the creatures.
The rock used for the building
structure is different from the locally occurring rock, which is very soft
-- soft enough that some of the tunnels have been dug through it.
The cap rocks are much harder, and have apparently been cut and brought
here. The zoologists, when asked, say that it is unlikely that the
cap stones could have been chewed to shape -- but the local rock is soft
enough to be chewed.
The Marquis wonders about whether
these creatures built this village all by themselves, or if something else
built it, or if they stole the rocks to build it. There's insufficient
evidence for any of these, except that the physical size does seem to match
their stature.
The creatures do, however,
deliberately obscure their trails. Clearly they don't want their
location to be known by something that can follow the trail. That's
not normally instinctive behavior.
The probe at the original village
observes something -- simultaneously, one comes up from the door of each
of six huts, and looks up into the air. They stay perfectly still
for about ten minutes, then head off together.
Helia takes control of the
probe and follows the hunting party. Marc hopes it's successful;
about 60% of the groups that go out don't come back with anything -- but
all the larger groups come back with something.
The group heads off over the
badlands. The terrain gets more broken -- ravines, gullies, and so
on. Helia continues to track them.
Eventually they reach a ravine
-- it's been eroded through the soft rock, with boulders and so on at the
bottom. It looks like it's carried flood waters at some point.
The crew watch the creatures
take up position in hiding on both sides of the stream. To cross
the stream, they stretch out -- elongate -- over and then pull the back
across. It looks like they're very flexible, without a stiff skeleton.
Both the creatures and the
crew watch and wait. The creatures keep watch, looking off into the
distance upstream.
After about fifteen minutes,
something approaches fairly rapidly from upstream. It's quite large,
around 200kg, sort of like a conical tube. It gets about 20m from
the creatures and suddenly collapses. There's no apparent cause --
it just collapses with a flumph. The creatures all come out of hiding
and cut it up with their teeth. They flop it over and start cutting
meat out of the underside. Four of them cut meat, handing it to the
other two which stack it.
The limbs also extend and
retract, and appear to have opposable digits. They're using them
to pass the meat around.
The creatures continue to
strip the carcass until they have a full load for everyone, then carry
it back to the village.
The probe is left watching the carcass -- for the zoologists to observe scavengers and so on -- as the creatures return to the village.
The Marquis turns to the crew
on the bridge. "What happened to that creature," he says, "Is what
happened to me before. They psionically attacked it, then cut it
up. If they psionically attacked you guys when you were down there,
that's what would happen to you."