Huston strafed the screen. The Clouds had been standing still but they weren’t there now. He suddenly saw them teleport-hopping and rapidly closing the distance toward his friends. A tremendously loud noise erupted into the scene. Huston imagined it was the drones dropping from their heights. He felt dizzy watching and sat back down.
“Get moving!” Knux was yelling as he ran away. “Back to the colony!”
“Oh God! Oh God, oh God, oh God. Security!” Tarma screamed, recognizing the danger.
The sound of their running steps, equipment rattling, and heavy breathing was broken by the staccato of heavy drone fire. The screen exploded as the ground between them and the approaching Clouds burst into the air with the impact of large shells.
“I’m going to die. I’m going to die. I’m going to die!” Tarma continued, his voice sounded at the edge of panic.
Huston felt the panic himself. He didn’t understand what he was seeing. He dimly registered Scott’s angry voice demanding to know what the hell had happened.
The leading Cloud suddenly teleported ahead of the group, into the immediate vicinity of Knux. Wielding a shimmering axe of some kind, the Cloud swept it over his head and sliced down - severing Knux’s leg from his body before violently teleporting into Knux’s crumpling body and slamming his screaming form into the air. Now separated from Knux, the other four Clouds caught up to the leader, having gone around the field of the drones’ warning fire. With the Clouds far from Knux and Tarma, the drones’ laced bullets into the Clouds. The leading Cloud that attacked Knux disintegrated in fire, while the others retreated under heavy suppression.
He finally found Tarma in the image, running back into a treeline, away from the scene of conflict. Knux wasn’t moving. The drones buzzed loudly above, circling the site.
“Uhh, control?! Tarma called. “Something happened. I don’t know what. They were Clouds … They … They came in, and they attacked us while we were out in the field. They got Knux … I don’t know. He might be dead. This thing came in - it had a sword. It sliced down, Knux went flying, then the drones opened fire … I don’t know how many, or where they are now. … I’m getting out of here.”
Huston stared in silence at the screen. Scott and Gangotra did as well. He wanted to yell or scream.
“What the hell!?” Scott finally ended the silence.
Huston didn’t know what to say. He weakly lowered his head. All he could do was hope his friend wasn’t dead.
“Gangotra, is he dead?” He asked the droid.
“No, we recovered Tarma. He’s fine, as was the equipment, hence the footage.” Gangotra replied. “Knux his badly injured. We’ve recovered his body and leg and moved them to the med bay. The leg is badly infected. Our doctors are controlling the worst of it, or trying.”
“Huston, I’m headed to the med bay. Find the Clouds and do it before we have to destroy them.” Scott said. His voice rang with grim authority.
Huston dropped his hands to the sand. It didn’t make sense. He wouldn’t tell Scott, but he knew from the decorations on the lead attacker’s staff that those weren’t the Clouds from the caves.
Chapter Twelve
“If that’s what you think, find the main body of Clouds.”
“Ok.”
Night was coming soon. Huston was still on the beach. The decayed bodies of the dead lay in every direction.
“I’ll send them over. Cooper will have firepower. We’re building a message to the Cavers now.”
And the line was closed.
Scott was sending two of the colonists Huston trusted most with commands to support him in rooting out the political structure of the landscape. The minister was excited to have Cooper on the planet.
It also caused him to think about just how young the whole venture was. There were still resources and colonists coming down. The colony wasn’t even completely built yet.
Everything had been rushed getting here. With Wallace’s world-altering tech and all the incentives of being first, the Copernica Corp had taken aim at the closest suitable planet with the unstoppable force of its boundless resources. But gaps in information were best revealed over time, and they hadn’t been willing to spend that. They’d trusted even their limited efforts to probe and survey the planet. Port Wallace was to be the beginning of the rest of history.
But they’d missed something they never thought they could, and the sudden shock of meeting two sentient alien species had quickly consumed the minds of just about everyone. It’d happened so soon.
And now, as advanced as the colony’s weaponry seemed to be, the aliens’ numbers, abilities, positioning, and mystery presented a real challenge to Huston, Scott, Gangotra, Tarma, and everyone else who’d strapped their existence to a spaceship and the unknown of a wild alien world. The humans could end up killing them all. It’d be a horrible stain to add to man’s legacy.
To prevent conflict, they needed to develop effective relationships. Scott needed to know who to talk to, where they were, and what they needed. On Earth, clan-based loyalties had muddied and ultimately crippled the effectiveness of treaties with Native Americans, even when not ill-intentioned.
Huston knew that Komorebi and the Queen reigned for their respective species, but what was happening under that umbrella? Were the Clouds and Cavers loyal to their leaders above lineage, clan, or willingness to voluntarily obey? He also knew that there were Clouds in the caves. It was possible that the species were capturing slaves from each other, but possible too that affiliation could be as fluid as preference. He needed to organize them somehow.
Like the universe they spiraled within, a tremendously violent process had stabilized the energy and dust here. He’d decided to start with the gravitational pull of geographic features, personalities, and cultural elements.
Day 22: Afternoon
Knux and Tarma were attacked by a group of Clouds earlier today. I watched footage. The lead Cloud was seemingly destroyed by the drone fire that came to Knux’ aid, but not before it crippled his leg with it's staff. The other Clouds immediately left and Tarma was able to run his way back to the colony. I learned of the attack as Scott did, and after a short talk following the footage he and Gangotra hung up to assess whatever it is they could.
I have no idea why they attacked. These are the details without interpretation. With interpretation, admittedly a biased one, the Cloud that attacked Knux looked to be one from the Cloud village. Specifically, the one who’d confronted the leader of the ceremony/ritual. I base that only on the symbology decorating the beings’ staff, which I may not have seen clearly in the footage.
When Cortez and his conquistadors arrived to the New World, the native population was forced to reckon the moment with a body of religious belief and legend they’d built over generations. What reckoning did we compel here? Or had the Cloud nation been splintering over something already, even if only a small group? And were the Clouds in the caves part of that group? I’d assumed the Clouds and Cavers enemies, but maybe there are other explanations for the ‘attack’ I thought I’d witnessed.
And who killed these people? I need to know more.
Huston pocketed his notebook. He stood up. There were a couple of hours of daylight left to search the Fisherman Village.
The caves were obviously the domain of the Cavers. And there’d been no indication of factioning. The Queen, recently enthroned if the reliefs weren’t historical, potentially commanded thousands. Their boundaries were unknown, though the map projection had indicated an overwhelming presence.
The FIsherman seemed bound to the swampy river. He’d look for clues to help figure them out.
But the Clouds were more difficult to pin.
Looking back down the trail toward the charred ruins of the beachside outpost, he wiped the sweat from his face. It was warmer in the valley. And humid. He felt the gnawing potential of Spring’s explosive ascent in the air. At least the nights would stay cool for a while longer.
An orange stained p
elt hung ragged from a branch above the trail as he got closer. Maybe a flag of some kind, it flapped in the wind, joining the melody of flappity and clackity sounds about the place. There were artifacts scattered in a few places, most notably some necklaces of shiny oyster-like shells and half-made baskets and tools lying around, but it otherwise may as well have never been inhabited at all.
The minister walked into the center of the village to stand under the shadow of the largest thing in sight. It reminded him of a longhouse, but wider and taller. There were two, nearly identical. He moved around them to see the rest of the site. Circled around the central structures were a ring of granaries, food storage sheds, and what may have been a smokery. Most of the food was gone, only smoked flesh and bones remained of the fish. Vegetables and fruit lay as a sickening black mixture of rot and compost. Many of the remaining seeds had been scattered from fallen baskets. Some had begun germinating where light penetrated gaps in the roof.
Small huts stretched into the woods on the other side of the village, curling into the mountainside. The lack of uniformity surprised him. Scattered and countless, some were burrowed into the ground or built atop low branches, but most were erected as free standing structures between trees. Whereas the buildings behind him were simple cabin-like structures of heavy logs, these homes were variously shaped and sized, with colorfully decorated pelts draping their sides here and there.
Turning, he walked back to the largest buildings and toward the one without a door- what he guessed was a commons used for ceremonies and meetings.
Huston stopped several steps from the entrance. Tall grasses wrapped around the building, sprawling outward. He noticed they grew around all of the structures, even growing inside them as far as the sun would allow.
The more he pieced together the story of these beings, the more he’d feel the weight of what happened. Anticipation thudded into his stomach as the wind carried a waft of must and wet wood from the the door frame. He smiled. The scene was haunting, but it was also a dream.
The sun would be setting soon. Huston had sat on the beach for too long after watching the video of the attack. He had plenty of time to pick a spot for the night, but he wanted to explore the village as much as possible before Tarma and Coop arrived. It had surprised him when Scott had called back to say that they were on the way.
He slapped at something biting his forearm. With this much water around, the sun’s descent meant bugs. He’d always preferred winter hiking for that reason.It was much warmer now that he was down in the valley. The coming of Spring and hotter weather would bring a maelstrom of life to the alien forest. Part of him wondered just how well the nanotech swarm would hold up against the full force of the world. But that was part of the commercial incentive of the venture. It’d be the greatest testimony any product could offer.
A sharp bird call pulled his gaze to the canopy. It was already gone.
He lifted his headset and its mounted camera from where he’d hung it on his chest strap, taking a picture of the rays of light funneling through openings in the branches to shine on grateful patches of infant flowers.The entire area was scattered with white, blue, and yellow wherever seeds had been fortuitously dropped. It was a beautiful randomness. A beautiful wilderness of ‘happened to be there’ and ‘happened to flourish’ built of an infinite sequence of movement and chance. And he stood in the middle of it. A being from a planet an impossible distance away, which happened to carry life, and which happened to be just the right temperature, with the right conditions, with the luck of not being crashed into by a universe of hurtling debris before movement and chance had birthed a species capable of light speed.
He moved to the closest patch. The flowers here were much further along than some just a few feet away. It reminded him of two trees he’d had growing in his backyard on Earth. The same species, planted at the same time and place, in nearly identical shape. Ten feet of separation had been enough to culminate in fifteen feet of vertical growth difference over just a few years. Disregarding subtleties in their respective makeups, marginal mathematical advantages in resource availability and consumption-- in this case, an hour of difference in sunlight between the positions of the two-- had meant a great deal in sum. The same was probably true of these flowers.
Looking around at everything, even what had happened to the group that lived here, marginal mathematics were at the heart. It could’ve been their decision making structures. It could’ve been environmental shifts experienced by them or those that attacked them. Or it could’ve been that their cultural creations, meant to address energy acquisition and storage in a way that was faster than having to wait for nature to moult physical changes, had ultimately failed them. Everything was math.
The scientists had become humanity’s mathematical advantage. They, their robotics, and every invention in the species’ history.
Careful to not flatten them, he bent to sniff their sweet fragrance, though he didn’t have to. Stretching and yawning at the touch of warmth, he lay amidst the flowers, sharing in the gobbling of sun. Huston raked his fingers through the black dirt. Peering into the micro of the granules and nearly imperceivable insect life, it was sobering to consider the vast unseen worlds beyond his sight.
He dug his hand in to lift a ball of soil. Not earth. It would take a while to get used to that.
Opening his palm, he wondered if any seeds or spores lay untapped within the clump in his hand. Tiny mathematical advantages, fractional geographic differences underlying success and failure, vegetation types, survival, everything. How many feet of elevation gain from the beach to where he lay? A tiny number even in context, but of such great consequence.
There was so much he hoped he’d get to understand about the planet and its cultures. He stretched his hand in front of his eyes to block the sun as he scanned the hundreds of rope lines littering the airspace of the canopy. They reminded him of childhood efforts to string a lattice of fishline over a koi pond in his yard to protect them from birds. If these beings lived here year-round, it would make sense for them to protect their food supply, which must’ve included fish and an array of small animals.
Standing up, the minister brushed dirt from his pants and tried to shake twigs and grass off of his back. He walked back to the large buildings, circling once more before approaching the open doorway.
He walked in, eyes strafing the room as they adjusted to the darkness. Pulling his flashlight, he lit the nearest opposite corner. Spraying the bright toward the ceiling, he was surprised, and saddened with a suddenness that felt like a punch to the throat, to see thin sticks dangling from the top quarter of the walls’ sides. Softly, as if making noise would interrupt his own appreciation, he reached to grasp the nearest stick and pushed outward. The top of the wall lifted out like an awning. It was heavy. He put his flashlight into his pocket to finger around near his head until he found a notch jutting toward him and rested the stick into it's recess. Indirect sunlight instantly swam through the opening to brighten the room.
Huston paused to brace himself before looking around the dimly lit space. No bodies. There were beds, though. Many, many, many beds. Fifty or more. This was the uniformity of barracks. A place meant to house but not coddle. Fur matting lay dilapidated across most of the beds. Another indication of the time that’d passed since they had, presumably.
The only other creature comfort in the lodge was a central fire ring. Curled over blackened fire debris and the inner wall of the sut stained ring, dead branches clawed their way across the top of the hearth from bamboo like stalks posted on the outside. They might’ve been meant for cooking, particularly since some were angled farther from the fire than others, but there were better ways to cook than a dome of skewer branches. Making sure to capture some photos and video of the interior, he walked back outside.
The second structure had a length of hide hanging from the doorway. He pushed it aside and entered a space much emptier than the other had been. There was a raised wooden dais on one
end, but the center was occupied only by fifteen large fire circles. He supposed it was a communal eating area. Wooden beams hoisted atop X shaped frames at each fire dangled green cordage with hooks shaved out of wood and what may have been animal horns.
He left the structure. The closest homes weren’t far. There were hundreds he could choose to begin searching. He opted for the most peculiar one in the direction he was facing. It was also the farthest, where the valley began sloping upward towards a high ridge.
A mound covered in an extraordinary display of brightly colored flowers as well as the entrance he’d need to crawl through.
Crouching next to the burrow, he shined his light in. Large logs framed the entrance and descended into the home to form a spine and wooden exoskeleton beneath the weight of dirt and vegetation. Looking back across the village, he slid in feet first, his breath catching in his throat as the first thing his light struck in the farthest corner of the space was a rock twelve foot tall and nearly twice as wide. Chiseled into its side were three lateral recesses, the topmost merely three feet wide. Had the house been built and buried around it?
Ignoring the rest of the room, he gingerly walked over, as if worried he’d wake the scene with his footsteps. He rubbed his hand along the sides of the recesses. The bottom two were cleanly and smoothly chipped out. But the top was shoddily done at it's edges, as if it’d been in the middle of being expanded.
“A child.” He whispered, circling the room with eyes only for signs of beds.
None. This was where they slept.
He quickly stepped back to light the top of the boulder, the corner of his widened eyes catching black scorch marks at the end of the light’s radius.
He closed his eyes and bowed his head for a moment.
Cavers.
He lifted his head again and swung his flashlight to see the extent of the relief burn. This was less detailed than the ones in the caves. A line of beings, he supposed they might be the Fisherman, stood connected with hands on shoulders to the left and right of three figures in the middle. The Fisherman were humanoid, almost fully erect, their arms sketched thicker than their legs, with featureless heads. The figures in the middle were clearly Cavers. They stood twice as tall as the Fisherman. One of them was no larger than a coconut.
Still Human- Planet G Page 10