“Launching a probe to scan for signs of life,” Franklin eagerly reads off the sensor.

“Any barriers placed within their orbit?”

“Nothing from what I can see,” he eagerly prepares the probe.

“Don’t rush,” Franklin is new, this is his first mission with no training wheels.

“I’ve done this 100 times before.”

“Well, for 101, lets just take our time and be perfect. Pretend as if this whole mission rides on us being perfect, and let’s not pretend that we don’t make mistakes.”

“Duane, Sir, I don’t mean to be rude, but you can suck the life out of a room,” the excitement is gone.

I don’t want to kill his enthusiasm for the job, but when you’re excited you make mistakes. The same thing can happen when you panic. Staying calm and rational guarantees the training we all go through stays at the front of our heads.

“Have you found a suitable location for touchdown?”

“Yes sir.”

“Go ahead and launch the probe.”

I watch as Franklin calibrates the probe and double checks his coordinates for the launch. With a silent head nod I give him permission for the launch. There’s a small click that echoes through the ship for just a moment before a burst of light comes into vision. The probe is making it’s way to Romero leaving a trail of exhaust before extending wings and guiding itself to it’s target.

“Go ahead and activate the camera,” I instruct Franklin as it passes into Romero’s atmosphere.

The live feed goes by in a hurry even with the camera displaying what the probe has already passed. Birds cross onto the screen and quickly become dots as the probe continues to plummet towards the planet. The camera shakes as the probe slams into the ground, implanting itself in the soil. It begins to immediately transmit data to us. Soil temperature, composition and moisture levels are all first followed by air temperature. Radiation from the system’s sun and air quality are next. All are at levels acceptable for human life.

“Probe looks good,” Franklin says.

“Could you link it with the ship and scan for any odd weather patterns?”

“Give me just a moment,” he taps at the keyboard, occasionally pausing.

“Guess you didn’t do that part 100 times,” I joke.

“So now you can be fun,” he rolls his eyes. “Nothing odd in the atmosphere. Some heavy rain but it’s moving away from the colony.”

“Any signs of Revrell or Strux in the quadrant,” I ask Franklin.

“No signs of either.”

The Revrell are without a doubt, the most brilliant minds overall in the entire galaxy. I want to call them large bipedal chimps but they would probably find a way to prove I’m more chimp they are. At this point, it isn’t debatable. I’ve seen pictures of what a Revrell looks like without the enhancements but enhancement are what they do. So many members of their society have replaced parts of their bodies with cybernetic implants, even when unnecessary. Despite sharing the same initial form, there’s no real homogony to what they look like after what they call upgrades. They have a twisted ideology about moving the world forward at whatever cost. For instance, they initially had tails but they weren’t prehensile so doctors began removing them, considering them a hinderance. Now, they aren’t born with tails, either through rapid evolution or gene editing. They have colonies and research bases throughout the galaxy, many of which are unknown to The Galactic Federation. However, we know about Trellis. Trellis was originally one of their colonies designed to uplift a species.

The Revrell call it uplifting when they force a species to evolve rapidly until they are sapient. They do this to maintain the numbers game. The Galactic Federation is made up of many different species, allied for a common goal of uniting the galaxy. The Draconian Empire is made up of many species conquered by The Alpha Draconians. But the Revrell do not have the social skills to form alliances, and despite their vast knowledge, war is not a subject they know much of. With The Republic sitting right between the Draconians and Federation the Revrell artificially increased their numbers through uplifting.

One such species is the Strux, an insect like species complete with exoskeletons; some even maintain a small hard shell hiding wings that allow fight. They’re creepy honestly, I believe it’s because they have six eyes and a mouth, but I still can’t read their stoic facial expressions. The Strux are primarily treated as physical labor for the Revrell. They have massive numbers, high strength to mass ratio and they don’t live long enough to rebel. We found this old colony, likely where the Strux were first elevated. It had been abandoned and untouched for some fifty years when the Galactic Federation decided it would be a great way to kickstart a colony here. Up until we lost contact, it was working out great.

“What now,” Franklin asks once all the tests have come back good.

“Send out the drones, try to get images of the colony.”

Franklin begins typing and swiping at the screen to release the drones. The probe blossoms releasing dozens of micro drones but not nearly enough. I swipe around the screen monitoring the images captured by various drones. Franklin begins to work faster seemingly frustrated and panicking. He’s hoping I haven’t realized a large portion of the drones, particularly those heading towards the colony have taken flight without all of their equipment working. We’ve got plenty of audio feed, but most of the video is of wildlife beyond the colony.

“Is there an issue,” I ask Franklin.

“Well, it seems there might be some…well it looks like a few,” Franklin stumbles over his words, a good number, not a good number, but a high number of the drones may be malfunctioning.”

“Do you think if we landed the probe a little slower there may not have been an issue,” Franklin doesn’t answer. “Well, it’s a learning opportunity.”

“Sorry.”

“Just learn from it. We’ve still got audio. It’s muffled, but it sounds like there’s sounds of life within the colony. The footage we got shows the colony expanded much further than I expected. It’s a full city that sounds like it’s full of life. To get more detail, we’ll just have to go down there and check it out. I’ll let Marshall know that one of us will tag along. They were going down to figure out why communication had been cut off anyway, so it’s not a big deal.”

“It was my mistake, so I’ll go down,” Franklin volunteers.

“Wow, I was going to go but I’m amazed by your bravery,” I laugh.

“Yeah, yeah, yeah,” Franklin mocks me.

“Hey, I’m serious. Just learn from it. You know all the systems, you even managed to get a few of the drones back online. You just have to calm down and take your time. A lot of people would have panicked when the drones didn’t launch. But you made a mess, and you started cleaning up. That’s a good trait to have. For your first real mission, you did a pretty good job.”

“Thanks,” Franklin blushes at the compliment.

“Don’t let it go to your head. Just monitor the stream, I’ll go let Marshall know you’ll be coming along,” I pat Franklin on the shoulder as I make my leave.

Almost immediately I run into Marshall. It’s a small ship and small crew. It’s got living quarters for eight people, and that’s all we’ve got with us. This is just a contact and return mission. We’re not going out to fight any battles or do anything crazy, weaponry is minimum.

“Hey Marshall,” I walk alongside him.

“You can call me Marshall, but don’t let any of the soldiers hear you say that.”

Marshall and I go way back. We both finished the academy at the same time. I went on to study interspecies biology but he stayed an army man. He’s fought all over Sol and I’ve studied species all over Sol so we’ve run into each other a few times since graduating. It was just coincidence both of us ended up working for the Federation. They were looking for commanders to lead small crews and he was looking for something with less fighting. I was already there, a lot of biologists are needed when you’re attempting to design a world that works for countless different species. Since he’s joined up, we’ve worked a few different missions together that always went smoothly.

“Commander Randolph, probe readings on Romero are good. However, there was an issue with some of the drones so Franklin will need to join your team to collect data and possibly repair the drones.”

“No.”

“No,” I ask in surprise.

He pauses outside the conference room, “you have an army background, he doesn’t. You’ve passed multiple combat training programs, he’s passed none. He’s strictly a scientist, you’re a soldier then a scientist. If this goes bad, I need soldiers.”

“We don’t have any signs of anything being wrong down there. I don’t need to go, and it’ll be a good learning experience for a kid with a whole lot of energy.”

“I don’t need a kid with a whole lot of energy. I need a scientist who just so happens to know how to use an assault rifle.”

“It’s not a combat mission, we’re not going to shoot people. If it was a combat mission, your logic would make sense,” I’m getting frustrated.

“I know you want your protegee to get some hands-on experience and I know this isn’t a combat mission. But, as you stated we don’t have any real idea of what’s going on down there. If things go wrong, I want to be prepared for the worst-case scenario. Having an extra gun helps guarantee we all make it back. So as your commander, join us in the conference room. You’ll be part of our four, now five, man squad. Franklin can stay on the ship with the engineer. That’s an order, Dr. Benjamin,” Marshall smiles at me pats me on the shoulder in the same way I had done Franklin minutes ago before entering the conference room.