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Table of Contents
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Day 5, Noon
The security drones seem to settle into a less alerted posture, though they keep holographically indicating to Liz that she's in an area she's not meant to be in, and that she should take herself and her robot and leave. It also looks like the confrontation has otherwise drawn attention, another large machine, designed along the same curved, white-shelled line as the others is observing the situation from the air. It's considerably bigger, about the size of a 20th-century strategic bomber, and looks a lot like a dragonfly without a tail, supported by four rotors on their own articulated limbs. It appears to be monitoring the situation on the ground, but it's hard for anyone with telescopic capabilities to miss that it appears to be loaded for bear with multiple missile racks slung under its body.
Urist(the Dwarf), is still playing ACAB-punk tracks from Arianhod's music library unless someone's turned it off.
Arianhod
"Okay" She mentally wills the dorf to shut the hell up. "They've got a goddamn gunship. Take a comprehensive scan of that thing for later analysis. Lahm, was that the thing you saw over the pond?" She tries to analyze the situation. "To avoid spooking them, Galatea, get back in, I'll order the GEV to slowly reverse to our position, we try to get in the opposite side door so the bots don't directly see us, pack up the bot, and get the hell out of here."
Liz
Within her Galatea, Liz sent Arianhod a mental acknowledgement via the TacNet. "On my way."
She banished the holographic displays, but made sure to maintain total XP capture with her own morph and all the flying drones under her control. Slowly, cautiously she walked backwards towards the GEV…
Thanat
While waiting for the GEV to come close enough to get in discreetly, he sets it to study the flying drone with the telescope.
Lahmia
"I don't know, it was so fast. Raum could barely see it. In fact… Raum, show me what your eye has seen," Lahmia reviews the GA's sensor data and what it thinks it saw cast a shadow. It's a long shot but maybe he happened to be facing in the right direction.
Day 5, Noon
Raum provides Lahmia with a blurry image, having only just caught the flying machine/creature out of the corner of its sensors' field of view. After a couple of moments of study, it looks to Lahmia like the silhouette matches the flying security bot that's backing up the ground-based ones. Its location name generator also suggests the portmanteau "Shinehenge" for the quartz field.
Thanat, meanwhile, gets some nice shots of the gunmoth. It looks like a fragile machine, for all its heavy armament, anything hitting its exposed engines could probably make it drop to the ground, assuming they got in the first shot and made it count.
The security bots don't make any aggressive moves as long as Urist and the explorers are clearly pulling back, allowing them to load their GEV and turn around in peace. They follow at a distance, though, clearly well-programmed enough to confirm that their instructions are actually being obeyed in full, not just given lip-service. If they notice Thanat, Lahmia and Arianhod, they don't seem upset or otherwise ready to turn to violence over it, and in general their threat posture seems low, at least based on the standards of transhuman body language.
Thanat
"Great, we share our world with killbots. At least we got some more samples of their writing system for later. Back to the ruins, then the gate? We should use some our QE comm time so they get extra days to prepare whatever we need."
With that, he again orders Urist MacBeardssons to get ahead of the GEV and dig a path through the quartz.
"I think we should also request a scout missile or something of the kind, not one that goes into orbit. But something we could lob over the railgun, so that we can map it exactly for later. Hopefully it'll get pictures before getting shot down. We'll just launch from the savannah, near the spider bots, so they don't see it coming from the gate or the ruins. I'm sure they already 'know' in some way about those, but completely ignore them because they're not programmed to care."
Arianhod
"Let's think positively: We've just had TWO first contacts, neither of which ended in violence, which is an exceptional record for humanity. As for an atmospheric missile: I suggest we order one of those balloon drones and equip it with a sensor suite and radio booster, to serve dual purposes especially as we'll probably have enough people to be in two places at once."
Thanat
"Thinking positive is for pre-fall people, and see where that led everyone. Speaking of two places at once, how about forking ourselves? I don't know how Titanians or Venusians feel about that though."
"We'll have to be careful with the balloon, make sure it doesn't approach the altitude limit. Bots might not be smart enough to realise a dumb balloon won't reach orbit like a rocket could."
Lahmia
"It was indeed the gunship that buzzed me," Lahmia confirms Arianhod's question. She wonders if limited ammunition means the patrols are more inclined to ask questions instead of shoot first.
Arianhod
"Thank you, Lahm. Let's get out of here. Thant, there's a whole slew of bio-ethics involved, but you seem to be inferring we're Jovians or whatever. I'd like to set up the facilities so I can fork myself while researching though. Regarding the balloon, I figure if it goes up slow enough, we'll be fine."
(Voting to head back to the port and investigate that until day ~11 or so before heading back to the gate.)
Day 6, Late Noon
With the Dwarf having cleared a good deal of the path going into the quartz field, heading back out again is a lot faster. As they clear the edge and crest the nearest dune, anyone on surveillance spots that several of the security bots have followed them at a discrete distance and are watching them from the edge of the quartz area, even though it's well beyond the bounds of the forbidden zone they indicated. As the GEV starts making its way down the opposite side of the zone, the white hover-bots start pulling back into cover of the large crystals, apparently satisfied that they've kept the uninvited visitors at bay.
After six days of almost non-stop movement, the GEV is also holding up well, though one of the air intake vents it uses for engine cooling is reporting some issues with filter clogging. Possibly stray quartz shards or sand and dust from some of the arid areas they've been passing through. Nothing that prevents the GEV from functioning, it has massive redundancies for almost every system, but it'll void the warranty if they don't get it looked at by a licensed mechanic within the next five days.
Arianhod
As they clear the quartz field, Arianhod resumes the rather reckless driving that got them over the dunes in good time. "Well that certain was a thing, wasn't it? Thanat, Lahm, uh, this yellow ar notification keeps flashing." Arianhod's relationship to non-medical technology tended to be of the "use until it breaks, hand it to an automech or shove it in a fabber hopper" variety.
Thanat
"I know you're no Jovian, but I mean, you guys sure love your laws and regulations and committees and stuff, anyway, uh, I'm not a licensed mechanic. I can look at it though. A vehicle is just an upscaled synth with wheels, right? Or a downsized space hab on the ground, with wheels?"
Arianhod
"It appears its clogged up with crap, I assume someone from a scum fleet knows how to be a space janitor. And honestly, those rules and such are intended to keep people from torturing and enslaving infogees. If you're messed up enough to abuse your own alpha fork, I don't know what to say. I just sleeved mine into another fury and we beat the shit out of each other and then remerged. That's proper therapy."
Lahmia
"I shall have Abraxas examine it. How about we break for lunch once we're out of the crystals and get our bearings?"
Arianhod
"Sounds good to me. God, I don't have nearly enough meth to be doing this much nonstop driving. In fact, with this much open range ahead of us, this is a great opportunity for you all to learn to drive too."
Thanat
"Why would I bother? This thing drives itself. So does most stuff."
Arianhod
"Having backup skills, especially in a frontier context is critical. The most important part of having a backup ALI is learning when to override it."
Thanat
"We're about to fork you, good enough back-up."
"But, alright, I'll give it a try. Fair warning, last two vehicles with wheels I drove now sit in museums, and I had only four limbs back then. I always liked the hoppers more than the rovers… Probably the increased speed and risk of death."
Arianhod
"Great, get in the driver's seat." Arianhod pushes an AR setting and the GEV goes from Auto to Manual. "You got 8 limbs, you have no excuse for not being able to work a clutch and a stick. Yes, on GEVs and other vehicles, its all electric, but if you end up with one of those old dune buggy models, you need to know what to do."
Thanat
He takes Arianhod's place, while Arianhod takes the dead man's seat. "It's your funeral."
Day 6, Evening
They find Abraxas again, eventually, lodged under one of the seats, and set about reconstructing events from recorded video, audio and vague memories. Everyone agrees that they were off to a good start until Thanat got cocky and decided to do a sick powerslide like he'd seen Arianhod do. It almost looked like he was going to pull it off, too, until he accidentally nudged the controls switching the GEV into thrust vector mode rather than driving mode. He managed to disable it before it took them too far, but it was high enough that the GEV flipped like a dropped coin, landed on its roof and slid down a long dune before coming to a halt.
Thankfully the highly advanced airbag system protected everyone from any injury, except for Liz who didn't need any protecting but was probably laughing her virtual ass off.
There are now two flashing maintenance lights on the GEV's dashboard, the second one indicating that the windshield wipers have well and thoroughly cashed out.
Arianhod
"Good! This is an important leaning expirement uh…" Arianhod pings the morph containment units to see that the biomorphs aren't squished. "Let's right this up and try again…LAHMIA, YOU'RE UP."
Thanat
"That went well."
Lahmia
Lahmia is a bit gunshy in the driver's seat. She checks the mirrors (?), adjusts her seat (???), turns on the blinker and checks for right of way (in the desert) and takes the GEV over the next dune nice and easy. It takes forever. At least once it crests and starts going downhill, she gets more confidence in going at a reasonable speed.
Day 6, Evening
Lahmia drives like a grandma in an unfamiliar parking lot until she remembers that the GEV has jets, she only barely remembers to tell Thanat and Arianhod to hold on for dear life(or wear their seatbelts) before she jets over the nearest dune, scattering sand in all directions. She banks, she barrel rolls, she loops and several other tricks that the GEV really wasn't made to do and which almost drop them nose-first into the sand, but somehow she manages to catch it at the last moment every time and put them down with ease and grace on a flat-ish patch of ground.
Abraxas rates her flying an eight out of ten, and it also helped them clear a lot of ground. Odds are they can be back at the ruins between dawn and noon the next day if they don't get distracted by anything.
Arianhod
"Well done. Let's get back and set up a base camp and think what we're gonna ask Love & Rage to put together for us. Using the e-quantum transmitter, we can probably send text only requests for who we want." She thinks. "Still alive, send x, y, z, gear, looking for what, four people, mining experts, xeno-linguists, anyone with blue water port/ship experience, and general roustabouts. Tell them to send resumes back"
Day 7, Late Morning
Morning the next day, Lahmia picks up Buer's transmissions from the ruins again. They're a bit distorted because he's underground, but packed with mapping data. Apparently he fell into the water while trying to make his way out of the collapsed, flooded ruin and spent some time mapping the underground canals before eventually making his way up through the bottom of the second partially collapsed building. The video and mapping data combine to show an array of mazes, increasing in complexity as they rise through the building's levels. In several places, the walls have fallen in orderly ways, like they were built in sections and some of the poorly-fastened ones gave way first, simply keeling over rather than breaking down.
The ceilings also seem to feature regularly set lenses. Buer's visual sensors pick up machinery behind them which looks like some sort of wide-angled camera, patched into the building's omnipresent wiring.
He's also come across more samples of furniture for Arianhod to geek out over, including some that seem at odds with her initial hypothesis. Despite being human-sized and then some, Buer's come across what looks like a desk that would be barely knee-height to a human, and almost every piece of furniture that looks like its only purpose was to support something seems made for lying down on if a human was to get any use out of it.
There have also been plenty of closed doors which Buer, lacking any information to the contrary, has not tried to force. Most of them have unfamiliar-looking handle-and-lock mechanisms that don't look like human digits would be able to manipulate them.
Buer reports that his current position is at the top of the collapsed maze structure, trying to dig his way up through several meters of sand. He requests assistance.
Thanat
Just as the GEV stop, Thanat sends Urist out to help Buer, with orders to build additional ramps and destroy walls as needed, as long as it doesn't threaten the rest of the island.
"Don't think I need much, we can print near anything, and we have an autominer. I guess extra autominers and a minifac wouldn't hurt. We should definitely QE send them a list of jobs we need filled, and ask them to send us back files on the candidates, so we can review, pick and choose before the gate opens. An eight-limbed daitya sure would be nice, though."
While checking the info gathered by Buer, and now by Urist a little, Thanat starts whistling, off-key. "Home sweet home, huh?" he resumes whistling, somehow, it got worse, as he's also now whistling out of tune.
Arianhod
"Yeah, sounds good." To avoid anything like manual labor, Arianhod send L&R the request for the above folks. Maybe someone on the R-list is in town.
Day 7, Noon
Urist clambers out, unpacks, flexes its tools and stomps across the sand towards the ruin that Buer is currently trying to excavate itself from. After analyzing the situation for a few moments, Urist then demolishes a still-standing wall and starts digging a ramp into the sand to liberate the Explorenaut, freezing the sides of the ramp with quick-hardening foam and using a gas burner to turn the ramp itself into something like hardened volcanic glass. After about fifteen minutes, he reaches into the loose sand at the bottom of the ramp, picks up Buer and deposits it on the ramp.
Once Buer is clear, Urist walks back up the ramp, looks at another wall not in his way and demolishes that, too, apparently just for looking at him funny.
Arianhod
"There we go" Arianhod starts looking at the data Buer collected. "I guess we can start setting up camp?" Arianhod looks at the reply from L&R and clarifies,
"Geologist/mining experience, xenobiologist, xeno archaeologist, general construction/laborer and/or someone with bluewater ship/port experience." Arianhod also gives a list of their current gear in case they're wondering what to bring with them. She states she can sleeve up to one in her spare splicer if they're coming over as an infomorph. Moderate bio-cons okay, but anyone in a biomorph has to get a mod (provided for free, on-site) to operate outside a vacsuit locally.
Thanat
"And an astronomer, to figure out what's going on with those eclipses, and see if there's any other world interesting in the system. Or if the star's a flare star that could kill us all."
"I feel like the mod requirement might repel even moderate biocons, but, we'll see."
"We can start unpacking the prefabs. Should be enough space we don't need to demolish and or or recycle ruins just yet."
