“I don’t know that we can tell from here, but I was about to do a second go-around for a closer look. We can see if the sensors pick anything up.”
“Honestly!” Phillips muttered. “You’d think she’d never seen an alien planet!”
Irritation flickered through Annika, but before she could comment, the captain did.
“We don’t see many that look like this—in fact I haven’t seenonesince I left Earth.” He hesitated. “And there aren’t many places back home anymore that would compare to this.”
Annika’s gaze was drawn by movement below them as the captain circled and dropped lower. Squinting, she managed to make out a strange creature racing toward the trees on the plateaux above the waterfall that had taken her breath.
She discovered there were actually three of them—whatever they were—strung out by their best speeds in racing away to hide among the trees.
They appeared to have six appendages—four legs, two arms. The one nearest the trees skidded to a stop and turned to look up at them. Pulling something from his back, he used it to launch a projectile in their direction.
“And the natives appear to be somewhat hostile,” Captain Stoddard murmured, then added dismissively, “Primitives—nothing that could disqualify the find.”
“I expect the ship scared the crap out of them,” Phillips pointed out. “You know … They remind me of …. Something. I can’t quite ….”
“Centaurs!” Annika gasped. “At least from here. Probably wouldn’t look much like those mythological beings up close.”
“Well get some damn video!” Captain Stoddard snapped. “Quick! Before they disappear. That’s a need to know—we aren’t just tourists.”
Annika gaped at him in dismay for a second before she scrambled to comply. “I thought it was auto-recording everything.”
“It doesn’t record in space,” the captain said dryly. “What would be the point of that?”
Exactly.
And she should have thought of that—wouldhave if she hadn’t been so stunned by the beauty of the place.
She was going to get fired if she didn’t getsomethingfor proof!
Annika struggled with her embarrassment and her irritation with herself that she’d been so busy gawking like an amateur she’d missed an opportunity to get a good look at the natives and, more importantly, to record it. “I might have caught a little footage before they managed to get into the woods. I’ll do a playback later and examine it. Could you get a little closer to the cliffs so we can get a look at those dwellings? Or do we have a probe we can launch?”
The captain shook his head. “We only have a handful of drone probes left. I don’t think this warrants the use. It looks ancient. Just note it on the map for the science geeks. They can check it out when they get here.”
Annika was disappointed, but he was right. It did look old and long since abandoned and it wasn’t her job to do more than catalogue such sites for specialists in the field to study.
Her actual job was landscape engineer. She was a trained geologist but her expertise was targeted toward finding suitable colony sites. They’d sent probes, of course, to discover mineral deposits and so forth, but it took a human to examine potential settlement sites since humans would live there. A successful colony was dependent on more than basic essentials. It needed to be as ascetically pleasing as possible to support a healthy morale. Someone needed to assess any and all threats within a given locale—as in was it as healthy an area as could be found? Or were there features that could make the colonists prone to sickness? Was there any kind of geological death traps close enough to be an issue? Were there plants, animals, or beings that were hostile or poisonous in the immediate vicinity?
Planets that were habitable were generally inhabited—occasionally by higher intellect beings, butalwaysby something and many of those creatures, and plants, were deadly.
And then there were the geological threats.
And weather patterns.
It was far more than a matter of whether or not a colony could survive without ‘podding’—building a self-contained human environment on a hostile world—which was a damned expensive and time consuming enterprise and something the company liked to avoid whenever possible.
They also wanted to be as certain as they could be that they’d built as far from natural disasters as they could for economic reasons.
Building a colony, complete with processing plants, was a damned expensive gamble. They liked to hedge their bets as much as possible that the investment would pay off—not be swallowed up in a fissure, or blown away by a volcano, or swept away by a flood.
Fortunately for their plans, the geology as well as previous occupancy suggested this could be a place with a lot of potential for a colony—and it was beautiful enough to have people fighting over a spot—icing when one considered it was well within walking distance of a huge gold deposit and only a few clicks from other ore and mineral deposits of interest.
“I’m going to drop a marker,” she muttered a little absently as she programmed a beacon and launched it toward the center point of the site she’d chosen. “It isn’t likely we’re going to find a better place for a colony this close to one of the target deposits.”
She watched her instrument panel until she got a confirmation that it had planted and the beacon began broadcasting its signal. She was so focused on making notes and adjusting the camera for pictures that she didn’t see what hit them.
All she knew was thatsomethingstruck the ship. The next thing she knew all hell broke loose. There was an explosion that made the entire ship buck and shudder and then every alarm on the ship went off seemingly at once.
