Arrival: Chapter 19

  “Beg your pardon Sadhika, but… but shouldn’t we be shifting all of our priorities to investigating those tunnels at this point?” Blair asked.  “Isn’t the biggest and most ominous unknown now the possibility of intelligent life on this planet?”  Sadhika and In-Su had resumed their investigation of the jungle with their teams after Neil and Wiremu had returned to their own work sites.

  “The place was old Blair… very old.  We think that whatever… or whoever had the ability to make those tunnels is long gone now.   If we thought they were still around I’d absolutely agree with you though.  Still around or not though don’t worry, we still intend to fully investigate but first we need to adequately establish our colony site.  As I’m sure you understand I am both pleased and dismayed that it is at the top of a very long list of things we need to investigate, a long list of things which demand investigation, but which have to wait until our primary task here is done.”

  “I understand…” Blair answered thoughtfully.  “Still though, I wonder what they were like… and what happened to them.”

  “Impossible to say at the moment but have you noticed Blair, the total absence of anything like a mammal?  So far I’ve noted various kinds of insects, cephalopods, lizards… but no mammals.   Instead some of those cephalopods and lizards seem to have adopted some mammalian qualities, like I have to assume based on the way they were moving warm bloodedness, definitely some kind of active metabolism.”

  “I had noticed that… so it’s unlikely that whatever intelligent life was here was anything like a mammal, let alone a primate… although, from what I understand people on Earth always thought that cephalopods had the potential to become more intelligent… didn’t they always consider octopuses to be quite intelligent?”

  “Oh yes, we certainly did… I was thinking the same thing,” Sadhika affirmed.

  “Of course, it’s also entirely possible that we’re just on the wrong continent to see the kinds of life which do resemble mammals on this planet.”

  “Or, the classes of life which we can’t even recognize as having any similarities at all with any kind of life on Earth.  To be honest I’m a little surprised that we’re finding kinds of life which we can generally recognize at all.”

  “Well,” In-Su piped up, “you call them reptiles and cephalopods, but they’re not really.  Such classifications were even on Earth somewhat arbitrary anyways.   We have witnessed animals which converge on a number of similar characteristics as classes of animals we recognize from Earth, but they’re not actually from the same class or anything.”

  “You’re right of course,” Sadhika replied with a smile.

  “You know… I still just can’t get over how lucky we are,” Blair remarked.  “I know the mission founders really did their homework before leaving Earth, but there was still a lot of hoping and praying involved.”

  “Not as much as you’d think,” Sadhika answered as the group of twelve made their way through the jungle.  “There was a lot we could confirm ahead of time based on the atmosphere’s spectrograph… and there was a lot we could pretty safely infer based on it.”  She paused to consider what the woman had really meant by her comment.  “You’re quite right though, the planet on a whole really is pretty much just as we’d hope it would be.”

   “It’s dangerous to presume too much,” In-Su warned.   “We’ve only been here a short time, and there is still much which can yet go wrong.”  He meant things which were hard to predict with observations so limited in time, like the worst storms, volcanic activity, and earthquakes.   They’d have to wait hundreds of years to see what weather events happened only once a century, and thousands of years to see what geological events happened only once a millennium.   He reflected to himself that at the moment they should really be more immediately concerned with the group which had broken away from the crew.  At the moment this undeniably remained their greatest threat.

  The man with one of their two shotguns, who was at the front of their group as they moved through the jungle, shushed everyone and motioned for them all to get on the ground as he himself laid down with his weapon in front of him.  The others followed his lead and laid down themselves.  After a few moments of silence, everyone started wondering if he’d errantly imagined some danger. 

  Then, they first heard the sounds.  To the human ear they sounded like squishing and sloshing sounds, but In-Su thought that maybe he could detect a certain patternicity to it.  Then the three figures came into view and the crew became able to put image to the sounds they’d been hearing.  So far undetected, the group watched as the animals moved past them at an angle, first they got closer at they moved, and then as the humans and their simulant leaders watched, they passed by and began getting further away while continuing to make their odd but distinctive sounds.

  The creatures were a little over one meter tall, and supported themselves on three limbs which looked like the blunt cylindrical legs of an elephant.  There didn’t appear to be any joints in their legs, but they appeared to go from being rigid when weight was put upon them, to somewhat loose and limp when swinging through to their next step.

  The creature likewise had three arms, each rooted in-between two of the legs so that there were six equidistant projections from the dome topped round cylindrical main body of the creature.  The legs came down from the core of its body, while the arms projected down to the side from higher up on the outside of the body.  All of this was topped by large black eyes at the end of short antenna like structures projecting out of the top of their bodies, which moved the eyes around to allow the creature to survey its environment.   Overall it looked a little like a giant squid which had stood up on three shortened tentacles, and brought three other tentacles up to operate more like arms.

  When they were at their closest, Sadhika could see that at the end of their arm tentacles, the appendage was split into four smaller tentacles which appeared to have as free a range of motion as the arms, both of which appeared capable of fully omnidirectional motion like an elephant’s trunk.  She remarked to herself that something like that would be at least as effective for using tools as a human hand, if not even better or more resilient.

  The group watched as the animals moved off and eventually went out of sight and presumably earshot as well.

  “Wow…” Blair said quietly.  

  As they all slowly got up, ever surer that the creatures had moved on, they were caught by surprise.  A different, much larger, and much deadlier creature surprised them all by emerging from an obscured ridge behind the group, and aggressively charging at them.  The ground could be felt to shake with the weight and aggression of the attack.  It was the same kind of horned panda dinosaur the simulants had encountered the day before.  Its coloration had helped it camouflage into the foliage of the jungle.

  It only took a couple seconds to reach them, which was far faster than anyone had any chance to react.  It charged and gored Blair in the back and through her chest, lifting her up several meters into the air.  Her limp body briefly paused in midair, and then fell back down to the ground where she was viciously pounced upon by the beast who held her down with its front feet and began tearing at her flesh with its teeth and biting out whole mouthfuls of flesh and bone.  It availed itself of Blair’s corpse seemingly without any interest in nor fear of the rest of the group at all.  Within seconds the man and woman with the shotguns had fired and killed the animal, but Blair was already long dead.

   

  Shaken and in shock, In-Su and Sadhika’s group somberly carried Blair’s body out of the jungle and back into the clearing where the shuttle and FDM were situated on the shuttle’s runway.  Everybody else’s objectives of the moment were paused due to the tragedy, and all were reassembling in the staging area.  Even these industry drones at the other end of the runway had been switched to standby to silence them.  On his way back to the landing strip area from the clearing which would become the new town, Wiremu and his team had retrieved the corpse of the beast so it could be analyzed in detail on the ship along with the quatropus they’d already brought up.

  There had been a variety of reactions to her death, and the kind of death she had suffered.   Some were devastated, others seemed indifferent, but most were simply still in shock and had yet to really process the reality of what had just happened.

   “Expected losses… acceptable losses.” Wiremu whispered grimly to Neil out of earshot of anyone else.  In-Su and Sadhika were closer in with the rest, and he seemed to be saying it to reassure himself as much as anybody else.  “No different from the habitat module I lost earlier today…   The problem though, is that they all know that as well as we do, but we all still have to stop everything and wait for them to-”

  “They knew her…” Neil offered softly.  “To them she was family… their sister.”

  “Yeah,” Wiremu sighed as he arched his back and stretched, “I know…”  The simulation of a grizzled old half Maori sighed deeply and allowed himself a moment to acknowledge the gravity of the tragedy.   “She seemed like a lovely person and I’m sure if I’d have known her better I’d be a lot more beaten up about it.”

  “What’s this?” Neil asked as he and Wiremu saw Sadhika and In-Su walking over to them with the rest of the crew.  

  Armina Shostak was at the front of the group with the other two sims and she said: “We’ve all been training for this mission since we were born.  We’ve always known there was a good chance that we would lose people… we all know that there’s a good chance she won’t be the last…  We know this, and we know that the mission goes on; we all know that that’s what she’d want.  We will all grieve in our own way, and in our own time.”

  Wiremu stepped forward and put his right hand on the woman’s shoulders and rested it there while he placed his left hand on her cheek.  He was moved; he hadn’t expected that reaction from them.  He was proud.  

  Although he was too proud a man to actually allow himself to cry in front of the crowd, it took considerable effort for him to control himself.  Despite his best efforts, a gloss nevertheless came over his eyes as he said softly but firmly: “I’m proud of all of you… and I will help you bury her when the time comes.”