PART II: Land Whale

  When we began planning for the current mission, we took all of the big variables into account. Levi and Eric had to plot out orbital trajectories as well as where the best Lagrange points would be. Kiernan looked into virtual reality over the radio with mild success. And I made logistical plans for how things would go down.

  Our away team picked up parts of our old mission and started working on a series of relays to make communications more reliable.

  Help might show up slowly. If we ever pushed the big red button we probably needed immediate help. That would be a bit of a problem, what with help being nearly a week of space travel away. It was a risk that I was willing to assume.

  Once we landed, the three probes would stay in orbit. At least for a little while. Mercy, Ip, and Malcolm would be taking our spots as the helms. They’d been traveling with us the entire way, making the trip into more of a family vacation.

  Our main concern was operational security and in addition to plotting our approach, Levi had helpfully plotted the path of the satellite. I knew Kiernan had done so several times for her own edification.

  The satellite itself was ever so slowly losing altitude, still indicating that it was probably out of power. We could follow the autopilot path he’d set out for us and easily get into a stealth mission, avoiding detection, if we kept to the plan. This meant no deviation from the major movements; all changes had to be run against the satellite's path.

  Because the last thing we needed was for the satellite to see us.

  You could hide from the radio spectrum, just by not emitting anything but you couldn’t hide from the visual spectrum. So the best way to stay off the intergalactic paparazzi tabloids was to just not be there when a camera could see us.

  So the longer we flew, the better a chance that we would be seen if they were actually trying to see anything. The better the chance that we got noticed and I didn’t want that kind of exposure.

  Regular background radiation and heat might be visible as well as possibly other things we hadn’t picked up, but my eyes definitely glazed over at Eric’s longer explanations.

  In this solar system, we would be winning hide and seek. I had one goal for the team: I didn’t want to be seen. If we reveal ourselves it would be for a purpose.

  I had asked about a special cloaking technology and I had gotten an answer that was between a laugh and an ‘oh, you’re serious?’.

  I had my top people working on it and they laughed at me. At least now we’d all be working the same job. And yes, they laughed harder when I told them I was serious.

  One astral body in flight was an anomaly, but four flying in tandem? That was a clear indication of something. And the entire time we were flying in we would be visible to anyone with better telescoping ability than we had. The fourth thing? That was a standard Falcon drop ship that the original Malcolm had used extensively. Once it was done dropping us off, it would take a few drones and scout out the surface of one of the moons. Due to the low gravity and what we hoped was a high ore concentration, Mercy and her team might be landing on the moon themselves. We’d prepared by giving their probes landing gear. It wasn’t part of the original design, but Eric and Martin had a fair bit of time to fix it.

  The hope was that they could use one of our precious few 3d printers and some of the ore they found to print more printers. Then it was on them to see if the printing would be better on the surface of that moon or if they should start shipping material to an offsite facility. They had been loaded down with enough robots to make an after school science club drool.

  I’d advised caution in this regard, but since I’d given Mercy the lead on this mission, she was going to be the one that made the call. Levi was still around, as well. They would have their mission, that of being a hidden over watch, and we would have our ground mission.

  ***

  We approached at a low altitude from the far side of the planet. We had taken to calling it a bunch of names, Beta, Bravo, Ball of Mud, but none had so far stuck. I wanted to suggest Jotunheim, but it was fair to say that there were no giants.

  Boston remained the current consensus and it narrowly beat Baltimore because I got an extra vote as Team Chief on tie breaking matters. It certainly wasn’t going to be called Wakanda, even if all of Eric's various models had it labeled as such. I’d taken the time to scrub through those and update it to Boston.

  On the large HUD that we were sharing with the Falcon dropship, we projected a 3d image of the planet as well as our positioning relative to the area we were going to as we trudged along in the atmosphere. For some reason, the feeling of gravity appeared all too real in a real fake body.

  It remained a jarring constant, to say the least.

  “How’s it looking, Levi?” I opened a radio channel to relay back up.

  There was some lag between the Kuiper belt where the donut was in its orbit, but for the most part, we could speak back and forth via short messages. It was the waiting that really killed me. Levi and Eric both were on the short list for space duty as well as my shit list for their various shenanigans, which meant that someone had to stay back and work on getting more out of our space artifact.

  “I’m not seeing any activity, but damn do we need to upgrade our cameras. This is not going to go well.” Levi sounded chipper. “Cameras, sonar, radio, it’s all on the to do list. All going to be upgraded if I am able to do some work while the kids are on vacation. It’ll be good to see if Mercy and her team are able to set up a printer closer to you guys.”

  His message of course had a fair bit of lag time, so often the three of us would have moved on from a topic before he was able to send a witty quip.

  “Exciting work you have ahead of you.” I mused, “Lots of xenoarchaeology, if you play your cards right.”

  “Hey boss,” Eric said as we waited for Levi’s next message, “When does it go from being graverobbing to archeology?”

  “Fifty years.”

  “Probably a little longer if the crabs have anything to do with it.”

  Eric, through our shared VR, was taken aback. Mirroring our actual flight pattern, Kiernan had created a VR that looked like a regatta of three boats and one ship. Eric’s explanation of the difference between a ship and a boat was one of the more entertaining things he’d been about.

  Of course, I was busy sunning myself on the deck of the lead ship, while Kiernan and Eric splashed around in the VR hot tub. She’d done amazing work on fluid dynamics, and it really looked like she was going hard on her bikini volleyball motif. Nearly as hard as she’d gone in the bikini itself. I was certain that she’d not been so shall we say, endowed, while she was human. She, of course, had crabs all over her bikini.

  I found that engaging with the snark in a professional manner gave me the grace to let them fall on their own faces.

  “Crabs really are taking over my crew. I’d better not be getting saluted by a giant claw anytime soon though.”

  “Yes, Ma’am!” They echoed.

  We’d had a few girls' talks over our time and it wasn’t like there was much in the way of gossip. By the time we’d been on our way I’d just heard most of her stories, and she’d heard most of mine. It was part of the reason we played dungeons and dragons. Made-up stories between characters and nonplayer characters had become the new gossip, while also filling in the need for social interaction that had nothing to do with our mission.

  “Hey, Stevie, you immediately answered the grave-robbing question. You didn’t want to mull that one over? Maybe a bit?”

  “I’d rather just pick an arbitrary response to end the discussion.”

  “Boo. That makes sense,” Kiernan said as she splashed Eric, “But you’re probably off by a few years. Someone’s a little grave robber, nyah nyah nyah.”

  “Hey!”

  “There’s a margin of error that I’m not comfortable with, but you’re more than welcome to freelance.”

  Eric splashed her back, savagely hitting her with about half the water in the hot tub. It of course refilled immediately. Magical VR hot tub water was great in that way. You could always count on it to adhere to fluid dynamics as well as not at all.

  “Is that water even hot the way you two are playing?” I said.

  “...would be better if he stopped getting all of it at once. Seriously I’m supposed to be the one with the cool VR powers here. Oh and while we’re on the topic of grave robbing and archeology, I’ve got a good one for you both. I made this one in the morning, and I call it Betamax Brew.”

  Kiernan summoned her FERMI avatar, which of course was currently another busty volleyball player. I gave her a fair bit of side eye as it carried out a tray with an amber looking liquor for all of us. The avatar lingered over the hot tub pouring out glasses for both of them.

  I got up in order to clink virtual glasses with the crew.

  That was when I smelled the fruity notes of the Betamax brew and appreciated that I was able to share this moment with the team. It really was something going on a journey and still taking a facsimile of the good life with you.

  And then I got splashed, which of course meant war.

  “You’re not going to make it out of there alive, you scoundrels!”

  I’d like the record to state that I wiped the floor with them.

  I cannot; they won this round.

  As with any operation where I was in charge we’d drilled the planetary insertion several times.

  “I can’t believe that I’m saying this, but I believe that I’m in agreement with Kiernan,” Eric replied, splashing back, “I was thinking more like seventy years.”

  “You guys are still on the grave robbing thing? Come on. Let’s think about what is in front of us right now. We have the opportunity to actually do some first contact here,” I said, barely holding back my excitement.

  “The chances that there are people on the planet? Well, aliens are good, but the sparse terrain and all of the things that go with it? If we hadn’t seen the glint from that area, we wouldn’t be landing so far from it,” Kiernan said, trying to justify the slog that I now knew awaited us.

  Sure the android bodies would be able to walk all day and night, but that meant that we had to be paying attention the whole time. That sounded pretty boring.

  We’d all done a lot of working in solitude as a team, but this would be different. A lot of the things that we could do in virtual reality weren't available in the real world. Things like putting ships on autopilot was not even possible. Doing the hot tub on a yacht thing was definitely out of the picture. Or so I thought.

  “Mercy, since you’re going to be close for a while, I have a special request,” I said, placing a hand on her arm.

  “Sure boss, but uh, I was told you don’t …. er swing my way?” She replied.

  She knew. She had Kiernans as well as Jennifer's memories to rely on.

  I wasn’t taken aback. Two women, one of them a lesbian on a long trip? An extended trip to see the stars?

  I’d thought about it.

  That was about the extent of it, and Mercy was Kiernan more or less, but a little more gothic. Or perhaps her style was a bit more brutalist? I’d seen her VR and it was a bit noir, a lot of concrete, mixed with plants overtaking gotham. I almost assumed that she would be setting up an office where she could drink whiskey and talk incessantly about dames.

  “I know that Kiernan put you up to that one, so I’ll let it slide.”

  Mercy brightened, her dark hair seeming to shimmer. That I knew was one of her new inventions, avatar addons that let you see someone's mental state if they let it be known. Let the record show that I’d turned her offer down on wearing a corset that changed colors like a mood ring.

  This tale has been pilfered from Royal Road. If found on Amazon, kindly file a report.

  “Right now, we’re able to ‘live’ inside the androids, and we can stick in our separate virtual realities. I know that they have a shorthand radio, but I want to see if we can… connect directly?”

  Mercy’s setup was an old New York City diner that was conveniently on the second floor of my Yacht. It was bigger on the inside, one of the fun tricks of VR. Her FERMI was the avatar minding the grill, who occasionally threw mean looks our way.

  “You’re thinking something, probably like a link cable? Like you have an ethernet jack and you’re hardwired to each other?”

  I thought about what she was asking. Adding a cable probably wouldn't be too much work. But then again I asked Eric for several things that he claimed were either impossible, improbable or heretical. I can’t help that he didn’t want to make my Cthulhu monster come to life. A girl’s gotta have dreams, right?

  “I don’t know. I know that it would be a lot of work to change the hardware. Heck, even just a firmware change could kill one of us.”

  “Probably something like a detachable radio that is able to… I’m still a little hung up on the amount of bandwidth you would need. It’s fine for us because we’re out in the middle of space, but I guess…”

  “You guess?”

  Mercy had that look on her face that made me think I was about to be some sort of experimental control.

  “Back on old Earth, television used to go over the radio waves and you would use an antenna to catch it. It would still broadcast very well. If you could find out a part of the spectrum that you could use… and that part could carry enough, you might be able to broadcast in nearly enough… or rather I should say, at high enough strength to speak like the way we are now. But perhaps we could work on a mesh network, a little mobile ad hoc one would be correct. No promises, and it’s an exciting idea that I’d be glad to work on for you.”

  I nodded to her.

  “That is the best I can ask for. Do what you can, and hopefully we don’t need it.”

  “I’ll give it my best, oh and Stevie?”

  I got up to pay my fake bill at the diner, something that her FERMI always insisted on. It was the only time I got the approving look from the old gangster.

  “Yes?”

  “Kiernan really likes you and you both have a lot of things in common. And no I’m not saying that because I’m a clone of her and I want us all to get along. The network isn’t the only thing that I can make out of mesh.”

  I would have blushed, but instead I just grinned.

  I had noticed that the diner was very nearly the aesthetic that I’d grown so accustomed to. I hadn’t even noticed it. Kiernan would not have made her personal space look anything like this, and I didn’t know if Mercy was really just trying something different for the sake of it or not. Either way, perhaps I could be nicer.

  We were going on a girls trip after all - Girls plus Eric.

  Our Falcon had a long wave radio that could make the call out into space and we were all going to carry shortwave radios to call back up to the Falcon when it was up on the moon, acting as our space platform.

  These worked well out on the donut, but we hadn’t done extensive testing. That would be first on the list, as the absence of radio waves made it tricky to replicate a different situation. The mesh network that was a part of Mercys ad hoc network was the second one, but that was to talk between us. She had of course chosen the name MADNET because in her words, it was suitably maddening to create. No one had denied her the naming rights.

  When we made the final preparations I cross loaded my all new beer can mainframe into one of the androids.

  Eric had chosen to print a clone that would take over his duties while he went down the gravity well to Boston. He’d waited until we were close to leaving to print Martin. My backup was on the donut and Kiernan’s backup Mercy was already scheming. All three of us would be hoping for them to carry on the mission. They’d indicated that they would stick around for a while before doing their own thing.

  “Any reservations, tell us now boss,” Mercy said.

  “None. Let’s do this,”

  We’d symbolically represented the changeover on the screen as we had one last virtual reality shindig.

  Mercy's team would stay in orbit and then detach once they knew we weren’t in danger of a party wipe. Based on the orbit of the planet's satellite, they would be keeping their team at the opposite side of the planet at all times. This way when she flew above us she would be able to get better images of the planet.

  Hours later we slowed down to our final landing zone

  We picked a spot near a low mesa that would stop anyone nearby from seeing the parked Falcon unless they were almost on top of it.

  We were still well away from where we would be rucking out to, but as machines, the distance didn’t really matter much. Of course, the large stone mesa stood in our way, but we intended to climb over it on our way. The walk around wouldn’t take that long either. We had nothing but time. It was good that we’d be able to use the relatively clear dirt patch.

  “It’s good to be on land, right?” Eric bent over to feel the neatly packed dirt.

  “Are you going to kiss it? I don’t think that the planet is going to magically turn into a prince if you do,” Kiernan said.

  “I’m colonizing it. For Wakanda!”

  “You don’t even have any potatoes to colonize the damn planet, so I sincerely doubt that will work out well for you.”

  Our two android bodies for all intents and purposes were us. Mercy had extensively tested the MADNET on the way in and being able to talk over wireless or by voice made things distinct. It would be a lot easier to whisper sweet nothings to my sweet baboo, provided I had one.

  We spent a few hours hiding the Falcon with some of the nearby bushes. It would be visible only from overhead if someone came in from a very particular way. We needed a way out if things got bad. We had no idea what we were going into and we didn’t want to fly directly over them and reveal our presence.

  We didn’t range far out and I learned a bit about the plants we were grabbing. They either grew fast or were very sturdy because a lot of the brush that we had removed had either begun to grow or bud where we removed the plantlife.

  “I’m curious to see what, if any of the animals look like around here. They’ll have plenty of food if they’re herbivores,” Kiernan said, “Maybe they’ll be like dinosaurs, or laser dinosaurs.”

  “What’s the difference between a regular dinosaur and laser one? Also my money is on crabs,” Eric said, “Due to the ongoing carcination of the universe.”

  Eric, always was a fan of telling me that we would all end up as crabs.

  “In that case, my money is on dinosaur crabs, so I’ll win either way,” I said, moving a large trunk of dead plant matter to surround the Falcon.

  “You’re just playing the odds with both of us,” Kiernan said.

  “Yes. You’re right. I don’t know if I told you this, but the house always wins.”

  No one took the well laid bait. They knew I was the house in this scenario. As long as they were under my command I was the house, or the company man. I was they. I was the crab.

  After a while, Eric came back over.

  “Hey, Stevie, have you noticed that the more you punch these trees, the more they seem to resist? It’s like, punch harder, they get harder.”

  “Yeah that’s… hmmm. Maybe you’re just tired?”

  “That doesn’t make sense.”

  “I know. But having never ran into a problem like that I thought we should note it.

  I went outside to find the trunk of one of the trees we’d been felling. Aside from the leaves sprouting from the bottom up, they weren’t too different from Earth trees. The leaves starting low actually helped with the whole camouflage thing.

  The whole hard trunk thing was well outside of my wheelhouse so I was going to let the engineer do his thing. Maybe they just didn't like the sound of his jokes?

  We finished our camouflage around nightfall. Thanks to a smaller than earth spin, the planet had a day and night cycle of between 12 and 14 hours, like earth, and the full days were closer to 26 hours.

  We took a quick inventory of what we were bringing and then set out after dark. Eric’s android hands were very tired at that point but he felt like with a bit more observation he would get it.

  At a regular slow pace, we would traverse approximately 490 kilometers and arrive in roughly a week, give, or take a day. We could run the distance if we really wanted to, but I wanted to get a feel for the land as we went as well.

  We also could have expanded out into a ranger wedge as well, but I wanted to keep my Team close by. This wasn't earth, so the chances of something that could eat the tough tree trunks was better than even.

  None of the local fauna moved in the night. The plants were no more than two meters high either. We picked what I felt like was a very weird area.

  Eric desperately hoped to see something local that would explain anything. Really any good news would be a welcome change.

  As dawn broke, we found that we had walked through a series of large craters on our way. That was when we started seeing the scorch marks and the land whales.

  “That’s an interesting animal,” I said, “looks like we might need to go around it?”

  The fact that the plant life looked like jumped up bushes made me think that we would be seeing smaller animals. It became apparent that there were a lot of smaller insects, but one or two main large animals on the planet.

  The one that concerned us the most was the brontosaurus sized land whales. Their low jaws looked custom made to chomp on one to two meter tall bushes, which they did often. Their big mouths were wide and aside from their chewing sounds they were harmless. I didn’t think that fighting one would be a problem but I didn't want to go round for round against the largest jaw in the star system. Above their huge jaws, adorable eyes made them look like axolotl and they had long whiskers even though with lizard-like skin.

  Behind every adorable land whale was their support staff, the only other large creature, though large was probably a misnomer with the size disparity. Insects and remora like creatures followed the land whales, scooping up some of the branches left in their wake. These creatures were all floating oval sacs with multiple protuberances. They didn’t bother us and we stayed a fair distance away from them.

  I really held back from telling Eric to punch one for science. It would have been a rough go for him as I saw one of the floating sacs easily impale another with shocking accuracy. The insects swarmed the downed creature before it hit the ground.

  As they roamed around the crater we’d just walked up, we saw that the land whales seemed to clear the bushes in very uneven lines. They were so uneven that it set me off a bit.

  “They could mow the grass a bit better,” Eric said.

  “We travel to a different star system and the first thing you notice is that the giant herbivores don’t chew on the local flora in a distinct pattern?”

  “Now that you say it that was, boss, yeah.”

  I groaned.

  “There was a battle here.” Kiernan said, “It’s not readily apparent but in some of the places that these beasts are eating, you can see that the ground… something exploded and the bushes grew over it.”

  She wasn’t lying but I really could have used some sort of forensic landscape architect. Heck, these bushes that were all over the place were enough of a find that I was ready to call home. I knew that asteroids could do damage but there was an atmosphere here so…

  “I’m thinking it was more of a carpet bombing, or some sort of attack, the likes of which we’ve never seen,” Killmonger said. “We haven’t seen anything that would be able to attack anything in orbit and some of these seem like orbital strikes. Whatever got attacked, melted. In the middle of this is something metallic. I’m saying carpet bombing, because of the straight lines.”

  He turned to observe the center of the crater that we were walking on. Once the land whales came into view we’d stopped. Something about clearing the top of the crater had probably given them pause. Either that or they’d already eaten through the stock of plants there.

  A lot of that crater had been open, though a few bushes grew. The entire rim of the crater was clear as well as the first twenty meters or so off of it.

  “Let’s investigate but keep your head on a swivel. We don’t know how long this thing has been here. I don’t see smoke or fire, but let’s keep in mind that it could still be hot.”

  We approached the middle of the crater. A short black mound in the center was about the size of a sedan. Although the mass was uniform in color, it was anything but uniform in texture. It was clear that the mass had hit the ground at a high speed and vaporized the surrounding area. Looking around the crater was of uniform diameter for the most part. Whatever was here, if there was anything nothing was left. Nothing but brown dirt and sand in the crater.

  “Alright. Take a good look. I’ll radio Levi to take some shots of this from orbit.” I hoped that eventually we would get a better eye in the sky. Otherwise, we would have to deploy some secondary way of getting a closer view. I made a note that we would have to investigate that. At least I was bringing my three sets of eyes for a closer look.

  We finished up where we were and continued. We didn’t see much until the fifth day when we came upon something that looked like an empty dwelling. From about a click out we slowly approached it until we got close. A dome rose in the same color as the ground around it. On one side a large opening of about one meter in height gave perspective. Inside, empty floors and walls greeted us. Kiernan cleared the dwelling. Killmonger and I stood watch.

  “Nothing in there, except for what looks like a blanket and some benches,” she said.

  Killmonger and I peeked inside. I had a vague sense that I was looking at a place that someone left in a hurry. There were blankets strewn about.

  “It looks like someone was here recently,” Killmonger said. “I would put it between a few weeks to a few months. But also, we don’t know these people and their customs. There could easily be another explanation."

  “Let’s move on.” I was already thinking about a design for a land vehicle to speed up things. Maybe something to put into the queue. I tucked that away as well. We could use a more military grade ice cream truck, but that was neither here nor there.

  We moved a little farther and on the seventh day we hit phase line alpha. Making phase lines in The Basic School, Marine officers were expected to create lines that when crossed, indicated a next part of the battle, or the shaping operation. I had long since dropped a lot of what I had learned but I kept a few phrases. Or in this case, phases.

  We arrived at the next part of our shaping operation: movement to contact.

  From nearly three miles away we took stock of what we could see. One thing jumped out to me: it looked like a refugee camp. There was no organization that I could see. Just a mass of tents in a pattern that made me wish again that I had been consulted on design choices. I would have made this place run a heck of a lot better if I was in charge.

  The bipedal humanoids matched the corpse that we found deep in orbit. They all looked similar except for their ridges which followed different patterns on different individuals. I couldn’t make out much more than that without going in closer.

  “There’s around five hundred of them,” Eric said.

  "I'm not a fan of their layout," I told him.

  "We get it, you're a control freak. Well the universe does not need to conform to your specific way that things ought to go," Kiernan replied.

  She was looking away as Eric had taken his time to make an approximate count. Someone had to be the force protection guy.

  We got closer, but they either weren’t looking or didn’t care. On the side to the right of us was a large patch of agriculture complete with what looked like greenhouses. I took a few minutes to tabulate what they had. If nothing else, it would give me a basis for comparison. If this was how much food a group of this size required, then I could extrapolate a few things.

  None of the plants were familiar. They were arranged in neat little rows, like an orchard of trees that bore a crop of purple pears. They didn’t look too tall, at around one and a half times their tenders, it didn’t take much to harvest.

  On the furthest side, a sleek looking drop ship sized vehicle stood on its own. The ship called to me to take a closer look, possibly steal it myself and go for a joy ride with two friends. I had to really shut down that part of me that wanted to do so. That was the thing we stayed the furthest from.

  I was here, doing a job. Sure I was making history in the process, and we would need to have a big discussion about what to reveal about ourselves this evening but for now?

  I could take one evening off with the crew. We withdrew to plan our next moves and out there far from home, I couldn't help but smile.

  We were not alone in the universe.