Chapter 046: Cracking

Yalka Love Industries was a large major transnational corporation originally established within the Free State in the year 2403. It was a corporation specializing in catering to more adult needs of the general population of the Confederation of Mankind, producing anything from costumes and lingeries through stimulants and sex toys to extensive biotransformations and behavioural sculpting.

The Yalka’s operations were highly controversial even before it was blacklisted by the Supreme Tribunal of Mankind. It was naturally banned from markets of more conservative countries, but even the normally rather open Equality Front has done the same (though primarily due to its negative approach to transnational corporations as a whole). Despite that, it managed to expand swiftly and overtake the majority of the markets that it wasn’t banned from.

This lasted until the truth was revealed - truth that the Yalka Love Industries had extensive (and extremely illegal) ties with the Discord. The scope of those is debated to this day, with many suspecting that Yalka was a scapegoat. A way of severing all potential ties between the Confederation members and the Discord by showing that the threat of blacklisting for such a thing is a real one.

The Confederation-wide purge and seizure of assets had destroyed Yalka, with the majority of its cadres executed, mindwiped or imprisoned. The market for the more radical of the Yalka’s products has never recovered from the blow.

Encyclopedia Galactica

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***

TCS Cutlass, Hangar Section

07:22 09.08.2610 STT

Lieutenant Christopher Hall

Christopher didn’t ask Tiriel what was in all the crates that she had Ryan and Tendrik load aboard the shuttle - they didn’t exceed the shuttle’s loading capacity, and he assumed that those were just some necessary research stuff.

When she finally finished the process, he decided that it’s time to exercise his power as a commanding officer of the Cutlass.

“Any last minute questions or doubts?” He asked. The entire crew was scattered throughout the hangar in front of him, save for Dryad (who ended up joining the landing crew and was once again on his personal computer).

Cycle’s hand rose up.

“We’re landing on a tropical planet, yes?” It was a weird thing to ask, especially after it was already spoken a few times.

“Yes? What about it?” Christopher asked.

“Is it going to be one of those beach episodes?” The alien robot asked. Christopher suddenly felt an intense desire to commit suicide by exiting the frigate without a suit. Because of course the team’s alien watched whatever passed for anime today.

Couldn’t someone introduce some more ‘realistic’ human stuff to the Sidhe? Christopher could only hope that their civilization in general was slightly more informed. Unless it was some four-dimensional trickery in order to make potentially dangerous allies base their combat tactics on the ones they found in anime. Their strange interest in close quarters combat seemed to suggest that.

“No.” Tiriel replied. “We are landing on a completely alien world. Even if we have healthcare capable of dealing with every potential infection on our side, we cannot be sure that we won’t drag in anything deadly to local lifeforms. Which is why we are going to be wearing our suits, which, and let me stress that, will be vigorously sterilized before the mission. The same with equipment”

Nekia looked notably saddened by that. Christopher probably wasn’t the only person who expected a chance to spend a day or two on the beach.

“I planned to ask you if spending time on the beach with girls is part of being a Guild's officer.” It was, of course, Ryan who said that. “And then I wanted to ask if I’m allowed to move into another line of work. Be a petty officer and all that. But I guess it’s no fun if there are no swimsuits involved.”

Christopher had to agree that if it wasn’t for the whole ‘alien world’ and ‘intimidating mysterious messages’ bits, he would be extremely saddened that he was going to miss seeing Tiriel in a swimsuit. In those circumstances, though, he almost didn’t have time to regret missing out on that.

Tiriel grew up a bit. Or was nervous enough. To Christopher’s surprise, she didn’t throw anything at the engineer. She just sighed, visibly tired with his regular shenanigans.

Ryan was probably saddened by his transfer to the Cutlass. It severed his contact with the almost endless supply of women within the fleet. In Christopher’s opinion, he was still holding out quite well.

“Anyone have anything actually important to add?” Christopher decided to ask. Ryan stared at him with an ‘et tu, Brute’ expression on his face.

Tendrik sent him a message promising to delete Christopher’s browsing history if something happened to him. It was truly great to be loved by your subordinates. It would be even better if they at least treated the situation seriously.

***

Pontifex-II, Low Orbit

Day One

Lieutenant Christopher Hall

Christopher Hall enjoyed his first ever trip to a previously unexplored world (and thus becoming part of the history, in a way) quite well. He was nervous, of course. He kind of expected the angel to show up by now and give him some more cryptic clues.

Tiriel made one last check through the supplies, then she sat in the corner and started reading the Guild’s regulation on first landing procedures. Again. She was obviously much more nervous than it looked at the first glance, but her face betrayed none of it.

In Christopher’s opinion, she was bottling things like that too much for her own good. He saw what it did to her after Rukh’s death. But he had no idea how to start the talk without her simply avoiding the subject.

Nekia was as social as always. She seemed to be either oblivious to Tiriel’s plight or knew that trying to uplift her mood in that state was useless. So she was clinging to Christopher just a tiny bit, trying to engage him in a small talk.

That’s when Cycle entered the passenger section of the shuttle, coming from the side of the cockpit. Still as pristine white as always, but in its non-knight, civilian form.

“Lieutenant, I have a report to make!” Cycle announced, while standing at attention in front of him.

“What is it, Cycle?” Christopher asked. Nekia’s attentions were getting a bit tiring - she was doing her best, but he was simply too nervous to be glad that she is trying to make him not nervous - so he might use a distraction.

“We’re going to crash land in about twenty minutes!” Cycle continued standing there. Tiriel and Nekia were staring at Sidhe with eyes wide open. Christopher was busy screaming internally.

“What?” It was Tiriel who asked the question, mostly due to Christopher’s mind going to cuckooland for a while.

“I do not know why, but we are steadily losing attitude and velocity.” Cycle replied calmly. “I found no signs of mechanical malfunction. I also tried to contact the Cutlass, but I failed. They aren’t answering my messages.” This could mean a lot of things, but none of them good.

“I’ve tried to steer us towards the isle that was our original destination, but by my calculations we are losing altitude too quickly.” Cycle continued. “If I’m correct, we’ll land approximately five kilometers away from its coastline. I’ll… do my best to pick a shallow part of the sea to make recovery of our equipment easier.”

Christopher finally reached the acceptance stage of grief.

“I think…” He said, while ignoring the abjectly terrified Nekia whose inability to swim was a thing well known among the members of the Recovery Team Eight. “... it’s time to don our suits.”

***

Cycle was a really skilful pilot. The shuttle landed on the relatively calm surface of the sea just as she wanted it to, five kilometers away from the coastline. And in a place that was ‘only’ ten meters deep - the Sidhe didn’t need to breathe so Cycle could easily dive down for whatever they needed. Eventually. Unless something attacked them.

The shuttle, of course, was prepared for most emergencies. Sure, the constructors probably expected stuff to go sideways in space more than within an atmosphere of an inhabited world, but there was still an emergency raft. And the supply crates could float, so Tiriel picked two (after some frantic repacking) to come with them.

Five kilometres would be a tough trek in the water. Since they were in a raft, it wasn’t a problem. Christopher and Cycle continued to row (with the supply crates attached to the raft with some synthetic material rope) until they finally arrived at the beach.

The beach looked remarkably unremarkable. Lots of bright sand, some rocks here and there, the quite mountainous island in front of them with what looked like a forest covering most of it.

Cycle, Tiriel and Christopher pulled the raft ashore. Then Tiriel and Cycle - assisted to the best of her abilities by Nekia - moved over to unpacking the most important stuff, while Christopher decided to make a short trip into the island.

He had no actual reason to. He just felt useless, as there was already a crowd around the supply crate. He returned after less than five minutes, greatly agitated.

“Tiriel, uhm, we might have a problem..” She raised her head from the now open crate and looked at him questioningly. He couldn’t see that (she was wearing the suit), but meta-empathy had its uses. “I saw palm trees there.”

“Palm trees?” She seemed confused by what she heard. “No, that is pretty normal. Divergent evolution arriving at identical conclusions is impossible. It is a random process. But even random evolutionary processes will often result in something extremely similar. It is all defined by factors such as climate and surface features. Since this planet has an atmosphere composition extremely similar to the Terran one, and very similar climate, it is not entirely impossible for something very similar to palm trees to evol... “

“Tiriel.” He said. She paused her lecture and looked at him, this time even more questioningly. “There were coconuts hanging on them.” The beach turned silent for a few seconds. “Even the insides are identical.”

“Wh…” Tiriel seemed to have serious problems understanding what just happened. “Like, completely identical? Color and texture and that juice on the inside?” He nodded. “What?! Show me immediately.”

He did. She followed him all the way to the palm trees, scattered alongside the edge of the quite long beach. She appraised them properly. If his passive meta-empathy didn’t lie to him, she spent ten long seconds just staring at the trees with nothing but a complete surprise and shock filling her emotions.

“Those… are certainly coconut trees.” She finally admitted. Christopher half-expected to have to explain what those are when he returned from his short trip, but it turned out that Beleriand had those. “I have absolutely no idea why they are here, but without a doubt all I’m seeing from here is Terran flora.”

And fauna. There were crabs on the beach. Absolutely not alien crabs, unless those on Earth came from space and their presence was a part of long-term infiltration attempt of the interstellar crab empire.

All of that on a planet that never had any contact with Earth whatsoever. It was separated from Human Space for at least a thousand years, probably more - the jumpgate lay abandoned in a subsector that was only recently discovered. The technology to traverse the hyperspace conduits was a rare one, if Cycle wasn’t lying then the Sidhe didn’t have it before arriving in Human Space (and they were as a whole way more advanced than humans). In fact, none of the known contemporary xenocivilizations had it.

Even if the Precursors knew how to do it, they were still a few years of conventional travel from the human Core Worlds. Conventional travel through space that was at least somewhat inhabited. Depending on when exactly this world was created, getting actual samples of lifeforms from Earth to Pontifex required going through either the aurums’ or metallists’ interstellar empires, and neither of them were pushovers in their prime time.

Christopher's first exploration of an alien world led to a discovery that literally every grass strand on it was technically an Out of Place Artifact. Not like he expected a smooth ride after the whole angel business, but it was approaching ridiculousness.

“Let’s… focus on unpacking our things.” Tiriel gave up. Christopher followed suit.

***

The biggest long-term problem was going to be the whole ‘stay in your suits’ thing. The original plan was to use the shuttle as a place to sleep and eat while on the planet, since it has an airlock with an option to sterilize things inside. Since it was currently submerged, then they were going to have to expose themselves to the local air sooner or later.

Tiriel, naturally, expected all that when she heard the words ‘crash land’ so she prepared accordingly. The first three hours spent by Christopher on an alien world was pretty much composed of people bringing various things to Tiriel so she could analyze them in some sort of portable lab. Which, apparently, was going to tell her - with ‘reasonable degree of correctness’ if being exposed was going to kill them or the ecosystem.

In Christopher’s opinion she could as well try reading tea leaves for an answer. There were way too many things that could potentially end up being messed up by the contact. It’s not like Tiriel could test every lifeform out there for every single type of bacteria and viruses present in the landing party’s bodies. Not the other way around.

Cycle continued trying to contact Cutlass. To no avail. Christopher did his best to not think about the implications.

Seven hours in, Tiriel finally announced that it was time. The risks of some contamination were deemed minimal. The local biology was identical to Terran, and even the bacterial flora included only things already known to their immune systems. This hopefully meant that they weren’t going to kill the entire planetary biosphere in some far-flung manner.

The air was clear. He smelt a lot of salt in the air. Nekia tried to breathe in too much and ended up sneezing.

“So, did you take some sort of ‘Stranded on Alien World’ leaflet with you?” Christopher asked Tiriel.

“Not exactly.” The elf replied. “But I did have a basic survival training during my military service, so it should be alright for a while. I do not think that we will have to wait long for the rescue.”

Christopher suspected that she meant the rescue by the Echo. If the Cutlass was going to try anything on its own, he would have to slap whoever had the brilliant idea to do that in their work history files.

Then again, both the commanding officer and the de-facto exec were here. Who was going to make the decision to do anything? Without Dryad aboard, they couldn’t even fly anywhere - they had a pilot, but Kivanna was only knowledgeable about starfighters and shuttles.

Bad oversight on Christopher’s end, one that Keller or Lena Drathari was no doubt going to point out.

“Then I guess we’ll be relying on you.” Christopher said. Without adding ‘again’. “Let me guess, we start by finding a clean water source?” He remembered something like that from one of the games he played.

“I would start by having Cycle swim back to the shuttle and bring us a gun or two.” Tiriel replied. “This is an alien world, after all.” He hadn’t thought about that.

***

Pontifex-II

Day Two

Lieutenant Christopher Hall

The night was surprisingly peaceful. The gentle sound of the sea was a very good lullaby. Tiriel gave herself, Nekia and Christopher a brief medical check-up, but found no signs of potentially deadly infections.

Dryad stayed silent for most of the time. Cycle was anything but silent. The Sidhe seemed overjoyed to be stranded on an alien world. It was unnerving, to say the least. Unfortunately, unlike their team’s sole alien, the organic party members couldn’t just shut themselves down and wait for a few centuries for someone to pick them up.

Cycle also brought in some portable transmitters from the shuttle. Christopher decided to not ask Tiriel why she thought that a communication system capable of transmitting messages to anyone within a star system is something they urgently needed during their first planetary excursion.

It was both a transmitter and a receiver. Christopher decided to not send a message anywhere in the end. Tiriel agreed with him. The Echo should have known at this point that something went wrong. And sending a message only for something ‘else’ to pick it up wasn’t a good idea.

There was a reason why the Guild’s regulations encouraged self-termination if you were otherwise going to be captured by Discord’s raiders. A lot of reasons.

But all they got from the receiver was static. Distorted static. Cycle suggested exotech jamming. Tiriel and Christopher were inclined to agree. Unfortunately ‘exotech’ in this case meant ‘you can’t do anything about it, sorry’.

Being on the receiving side of exotech magic wasn’t fun.

Tiriel and Christopher spent most of the time together, doing the reconnaissance. Cycle stayed with Nekia in their little beach basecamp, which - considering the fact that Cycle was a human-sized tank in combat - should offer it enough of a defense.

It was mostly just a long trek through the beach. Rather scenic, if not for the guns. And the fact that they were (almost) alone on the planet. And had no way of leaving it. Not even romantic. And to Christopher’s slight sadness, she was wearing the work uniform.

He suspected they were going to go casual pretty fast if their reconnaissance brought negative results. It took them four hours to return to the base camp, but mostly because they kept stopping to probe the forest a little.

They found absolutely no signs of human - or any other species - habitation. No dangerous animals. Only some parrots, turtles and crabs of various sizes, and what looked like a group of sea lions.

In other words, it was a boring, uninhabited island. No other islands in sight. And it wasn’t large enough for there to be some sort of hidden village in the forest. The whole island was maybe ten square miles in size.

When they returned, Nekia gave them a questioning stare. Christopher simply shook his head.

“Nothing interesting, but also nothing dangerous.” Tiriel decided to be slightly more talkative. “Cycle will get its beach episode, after all.” Cycle has once again proven its complete lack of understanding of how humans worked by being visibly overjoyed.

“So, uhm…” Nekia was obviously going to ask the one question that Christopher didn’t want to answer. “When do you think help will come?”

“Judging from the fleet placement…” Christopher decided that it’s his job to answer her, even if he didn’t really want to. “... probably something close to two days? We got here in close to one day, but frigates are fast.”

“So, it is time for a two to three days long vacation.” Tiriel commented. “In all honesty, we could use that. Although it still does not feel right to do that while the rest is still on orbit. They could use a rest too.” Tiriel was empathetic and fair as always.

“Two to three days, huh.” Nekia seemed much less pessimistic all of sudden.

***

Pontifex-II

Day Seven

Lieutenant Christopher Hall

Early in the morning of their seventh day on Pontifex-II Christopher Hall came to a sudden realization that no help was coming.

Tiriel seemed to get to that point at least a day earlier, which made her well-hidden (but not from Christopher’s passive meta-empathy) nervousness bloom to levels previously unknown.

Stress ate through Christopher’s supply of serotonin like a binge-eater through an all-you-can-eat buffet. Even the discovery that Tiriel did, in fact, take a swimsuit with her (not even a very conservative one, just a standard two-piece thing) was a half-forgotten dream at this point.

“We might have a problem.” He said to Tiriel when Nekia was busy elsewhere. Their camp had moved under the cover of trees and had nicely expanded.

Of course, the original plan was for them to sleep on the now submerged shuttle, so they had no tents and so on, forcing them to sleep in the open, with little more than some improvised bedding and pillows brought from the shuttle and left to dry up for a while.

“Yes.” Tiriel replied. She was currently busy cooking something on an electric stove that they jacked to the portable solar generator. “We might have a problem.”

“Tiriel.” Christopher decided to make that talk now. “You remember how you gave me a stern talking about knowing when to fold and admit you aren’t faring well?” She looked at him questioningly. “I feel that it’s time for me to return those words to you.”

“I am only moderately worried.” She replied. “If anything it is mostly about Nekia, since…” Christopher didn’t let her continue.

“You didn’t switch the stove on.” He said. She quickly glanced at the stove to confirm his words, then she looked back at him.

“You are right.” She announced. “I am extremely worried.” There was progress. She spoke to him. And admitted that she was troubled.

“I’m not exactly going to go the ‘you don’t need to try so hard for us’ road, or anything like that.” Christopher said. “Mostly because I know how important it is to you to act like a noble should. It’d be rather counterproductive, since you’d probably excuse yourself from the talk after that.” She nodded, confirming his doubts. “So I’ll just say that it’s alright to share your problems with me, even if you are still keeping up appearances around Nekia.”

Tiriel’s approach to Nekia was that of a very protective older sister. Since Christopher recently started acting similarly, that was something they had in common. Nekia was painfully unaware that he was trying to siblingzone her.

“Fine.” She switched the stove on. “It is hard to list all the reasons for my worry. The worst part is that I cannot be sure that we will not see Discord or Truthseekers landing craft up there tomorrow.”

“Unlikely.” Christopher replied swiftly. “Listen, I know that skimming through space tactics and navigation coursebooks doesn’t make me an expert. But I was acutely interested in both ever since my arrival here, so I spent some time reading about those on the internet. I even consulted Dryad about it.” The AI was barely responsive, but did answer questions when prompted. “This is almost certainly jamming.”

“You are sure?” She finally looked at him. With her eyes focused on the now-working stove, it was no serious talk.

“Yes.” He replied. “No attack could overwhelm both the Cutlass and the fleet so quickly as to have no messages to reach us. This is certainly jamming. But since the people up there do not know what made us land the way we did, they are going to be very, very cautious about following us. With the whole angels thing, they might as well think that sudden cessation of communication is just a part of the plan.”

“I see.” Tiriel replied. “But there is still a problem that we have no idea what to do right now, yes?”

“Unfortunately you are right.” Christopher scratched his head. “I think the angels have a point with not wanting people to rely on them too much. For the past week I was pretty much waiting for our angel to pop up and tell me what to do.”

No signs of Precursor activity. No angel presence. Just nothing. What if the place they were supposed to go to was on a completely different island? Or underwater? Sure, Tendrik said that the ‘Come’ messages came from somewhere near it, but it was ‘somewhere near’ as in ‘somewhere within a few hundred square kilometres’.

Tiriel knew how to sink his boat, even when he was trying to improve her mood.

“For now we should focus on keeping a low profile.” Christopher decided to not share his thoughts with Tiriel. “And probably search through the island’s center. I’m sure we’ll figure something out in a few days.”

***

Pontifex-II

Day Fourteen

Lieutenant Christopher Hall

After fourteen days of being stranded - and still no resolution in sight - Christopher was forced to rethink his past statement.