Tachivenator astrocirros

To my credit, I did not scream like a little girl when it happened. I did jump, I hit my head on the top-most tent pole, kicked over my pack, and definitely said a few words that are less than appropriate for polite company. My adrenal system is probably fried for a good two months.

I’m getting ahead of myself.

So, this morning, I encountered the locals. Or, perhaps it should be said they encountered me. I’d been sleeping lightly all night. The night sounds on Minerva are creepy as hell. Things kept whooping and booming and shrieking in the dark. I didn’t know whether they were Minervan equivalents of owls, or whether it was some flesh-eating terror that would descend on me and eat my entire camp, tent and all, in one go. So I slept with one hand on my survival knife and my emergency comlink under my pillow.

It was just barely getting light when I heard rustling in the grass. It didn’t sound all that close, but it made me jumpy just the same. So I crept to the door of my tent, flipped the silencer on the zipper (gods, am I grateful for that innovation), and opened the flap.



So, yeah, totally didn’t scream like a girl. Just swore enough to curl paint and shrivel plant life.

“Good morn-ning!” it said, and showed its teeth in a horrific grimace.

I don’t remember exactly what I said in response. It was something intelligent. “Urrhh.. “ I wiggled my fingers in a pathetic wave.

“A D’Keda yalalea,” it continued, slowly mimicking me by wiggling claw-tipped fingers. I finally managed to coax my heart back down into my chest, and my brain slowly registered that it was saying “welcome.” Things that plan to eat you don’t welcome you first, in my experience.

My voice didn’t even shake that much. “Kaganu,” hello, I said. “Doku oki Tee.” I’m Tee.

Its grimace widened, and I finally realized it was trying to give its best human smile. I found myself grinning. E for effort, dude. “Doku oki Kohric,” it continued, and turned enough for me to see that its mane ended in a tuft between the shoulders. Really was a dude, then. He was gesturing, pointing to me and the tent, and then out over the hills ahead. “Come. Tee to be with D’Keda, yes?” He had a very odd accent, and spoke English very slowly. “Tee and Kohric go. Come!”

For all that he seemed to be in a hurry, he was very patient while I broke camp. He watched everything I did, sticking his long snout into every pocket of my pack, grappling at every piece of equipment, and even went so far as to lick my computer pad. Gross! And how do you deal with that? He was as tall as a Saint Bernard, but you generally don’t make good diplomatic relations with someone when you treat them like a dog. Down! Down! Bad sentient alien! No treat for you. Yeah, great. I plucked the computer from his paws with a smile fixed on my lips and tried to distract him.

“Is D’Keda far away?” I asked.

He flicked his enormous ears and looked blank. I pulled up my woefully insufficient dictionary and tried again. “Is D’Keda tay?”

This time I knew he got it. “Tay. Far. Tay. Hai! Yes! Hai. Two days. Come! Tee and Kohric go!”

Oh great.

I finished breaking camp and we headed out. After about two hours I was huffing like I’d run a 40K marathon. Kohric stopped and stared at me intently. He reached out one hand, pointed to my chest, then swung his finger up to point at my mouth. “Tee has weak breath?” he asked. He said it like you would say “Tee has botchulism?”

Awesome. Less than a day in and my guide already thinks I’m a first class weenie. “Breath strong in a few days,” I said, hoping he wouldn’t think I was a total charity case. I tried to slow my breathing and fixed my posture. “I’m fine. It’s okay.”

“We rest much until breath strong,” he said, and flopped down into the grass.

Damn.

Three rests and some unholy number of kilometers later and we stopped for the night. Kohric seemed disturbed when I went to set up my tent again, so instead I unrolled my sleeping bag and set it down right in the grass. I hoped there were no Minervan equivalents to scorpions running around.

Kohric seemed to be pleased that I was sleeping out. He pointed to the sky. It was a beautifully clear night. "Azu," he said, gesturing to the sky.

"Sky?"

"No," he said, and pointed again. "Azu." He shifted his hand and pointed again. "Azu." Then again. "Azu." I realized he was pointing at the stars.

"Stars," I said, feeling triumphant.

He did his horrible human smile imitation again. "Yes." I seemed to have made him happy.

The scientific name for the Azu-nah is Tachivenator astrocirros. It means "swift hunter from the orange star." The word star seemed to be in their name for themselves too. Sometimes I think life has more of a sense of humor than we realize.

First Encounter?

This morning the short-range shuttle from Ground Zero station dropped off first Ed, then Dr. Sutherland, then me on Minervan soil. We couldn’t take the Marco Polo into the planet’s atmosphere. Sub-light ships are specially designed for their purpose. They’re built to go fast, and if you ask for anything more complex, like, say, being able to land, or even just functioning in an atmosphere with significant drag, the ship doesn’t do so hot. Well, it blows up, actually. Hence the shuttle.

(Damn, are those things cramped. I mean, I’m not a big person. I’m only about 1.6 meters tall, and I was having a hard time standing upright. Poor Ed’s over two meters. He looked like a toy someone had smooshed into a box after playtime was over.)

The shuttle took a round-about course across the planet. We’ve each been directed to interact and learn from a specific Azu-nah tribe, each in a different environment. Ed was dropped off in an area that seemed to vaguely resemble a rain forest, except it wasn’t really hot at all. Dr. Sutherland is going to be plunked down in a desert. Don’t ask me why the planet scientist guy chose the place with the least plants. Guess desert slim molds are hot stuff.

I’m going to be in an environment that we don’t really have an Earth analogue for. It’s a bit like a prairie or pampas, a bit like a temperate forest, with a little chaparral thrown in the mix. It’s a hilly, sweeping environment with long swatches of grass and short, shrubby plants. There are individual trees that dot the grassy areas every handful of meters, and then there are larger more forest-like patches of large vegetation and trees near rivers and streams. It has distinct wet, dry, and snow seasons. Wacky biome if you ask me.

I’m to meet with the resident clan from this environment. My reference material says they’re called the “D’Keda” clan. I don’t have a clue what that means. Actually, I have so little info on the Azu-nah that it’s almost laughable. Here, this is the detailed species synopses they gave us.



Isn’t that sad? There’s no information! Who cares how tall they are! I want to know what not to say so they won't feed me to the closest carnivorous plant! The species info came with a very little, very basic Azu-nah vocabulary (like, I can say hello, goodbye, yes, no, and “where is the bathroom” and that’s about all). I’ll be lucky if I move past pointing and grunting in the next month. Fortunately the first contact team spent a little time with D’Keda, and left them with .. well.. basically kids learning toys to help them pick up English for the last couple years. Hopefully that’ll help. But those things are basically glorified Speak-and-Spells. I have a feeling there will still be a lot of Me Tarzan, You Jane talk for a while at first.

I spent the afternoon hiking across a high, hilly ridge, looking for them. The clans tend to be semi-nomadic, and range across a home territory. So while I know they’re somewhere in this area, I have no idea exactly where. So I’ve been just kinda wondering and looking for signs, while trying not to step on something that’ll bite me.

Being on an alien world is disconcerting like you would not believe. Have you ever been to another country? Or another part of the world that’s different enough that few or none of the trees, plants, and animals are familiar to you? It can be exciting or frightening, seeing so much exotic stuff. But the trees still look more or less tree-like, and the birds are all pretty easily identifiable as being birds. New bugs can be kinda freaky, but you’ll still always know a spider when you see one.

Minerva is different. If you don’t pay too much attention, it seems very Earth-like at first glance. There’s stuff on the ground that looks more or less like grass. But it isn’t Earth grass. Some of them have tiny nubby fruits on their underside, or little whip structures that flick back and forth in the wind, and some will suddenly twist shut, like a roll of wrapping paper when you get too near. One of the trees I passed today sounded like it was breathing. It had a deep, rhythmic sound, like an enormous bellows, and I know it wasn’t the wind. There are little creatures in the grass that look half bug, half chipmunk, and they make loud clicks like some weird bird. The sky isn’t the bright blue that I’m used to. It has a faint green-ish tint. And the sun is just a little too orange. Even the air is different. It's denser, thick with Argon, but with less oxygen than Earth. There's enough oxygen to support human life, but it's like I spent my whole life living at sea-level only to suddenly move to the Colorado Plateau. Five minutes into the hike and I was wheezing like an asthmatic. Hopefully my lungs will adjust soon and I won't have to use my rebreather. Every single thing I look at reminds me that this is NOT my world, and just how very alien Minerva really is.

I made camp for the night on one of the highest hills around. The sky is mostly blue now that the sun is setting. I think I may be getting close to D’Keda now. I was looking through my binoculars a few minutes ago before settling in for bed. I’d caught movement a few hills away. It was only there for a second, before disappearing behind the hill, but it looked close enough to the species info for me. Perhaps they’re watching me before saying hello? This is what I saw.



I’m calling it my first encounter, anyway, even if they haven’t seen me yet. Tomorrow I see if I can introduce myself.

Orbiting Minerva

We’re here! Eleven years, even if it feels like a month to me, and we’re finally in orbit around Minerva!

Look!



It’s RIGHT THERE! That’s another planet. It has alien life on it. Intelligent alien life! How friggin’ cool is that? We make a few sweeps from orbit, and then I get to explore that sucker!

Okay, fangirling over.

We spent about a week at GZ Station. It took a while for our various bits and pieces to remember how to work properly. Lots of rounds on the treadmill and free weights and we convinced our muscles to remember how to be muscles, and our digestive bits finally figured out how to work with more than that puree-of-nutrients color-of-barf soup slop they feed you the first couple days out of cryo. We aren’t staggering around anymore, and while I miss the entertainment of watching Ed crash into bulkheads, it’s nice to not find new bruises every night before bed.

Speaking of Ed, I should probably mention the crew. Also, it was an excuse to exercise my sketching (did I mention we’re on a tight budget? Going to have to document a lot of stuff the old fashioned way, since all my life support tech will be sucking the generator dry). There’s only three of us, but we’ve been working together, training, learning, everything for months before this little space jaunt.

Ed Bannik’s actually a behavioral scientist. He’s one of those super green types who loves to wander out in the woods and try to figure out what animals are thinking. I think he may have super-glued himself to the Marco Polo’s hull just to get to Minerva. No, seriously. He really may have, if he could have figured out how to deal with the no-oxygen-in-space dilemma.

Dr. Sutherland is next (his first name is Jerry, but he’s one of those serious scholarly types, and you can’t help but forget he has a first name). I caught him in a rare moment without his hat. He’d shit a cat if he saw this. We suspect he wants everyone to think the hat’s been attached since birth. And that “Doctor” is his first name. Anyway, Dr. Sutherland is a plant biologist. I think his first paper was titled something like “Growth Parameters of Granite-Based Rock Lichens and Their Effects on Slime Mold” or something equally riveting. He’s a nice guy, and I really like him. But his interests baffle me.

So then there’s me, Teagan Dodge. Eww. Why are self portraits so hard to do? Meh. Anyway, my degree’s in anthropology and environmental science. Nice combo, huh? Apparently someone thought so, because I somehow manage to land this job. Guess the eleven year road trip was a turnoff for some people.

So that’s our crew. We’ll each be working with an individual Azu-nah clan once we’ve landed on the planet, so we won’t see much of each other, but we’ll be in contact via simple visual lansat comlink. No long heart-to-hearts, but we can give a shout for help if we need to each other or to Ground Zero.

So that’s all for now. Tomorrow’s the full sat imaging profile of the planet. Then we pack….

Then we land.

Epsilon Eridani

Ugh. Whoever invented cryostatis needs to get a swift kick in the cajones. Or at least whoever forgot to make aspirin strong enough to whack the massive, feels-like-a-30-year-frat-party-hangover headache you have when you wake up. Damn! “You may feel some mild discomfort.” I’d hate to see serious discomfort, then. Ugh. I woke up yesterday, and the data screens are still making my eyes feel like stabbity death.

Thankfully I won’t have to go through that for a good chunk of time, though, ‘cause we’re here!

The Epsilon Eridani’s solar system, man! 10.5 light years away from Earth! I wonder what folks a couple hundred years ago would have said if they knew humanity would travel such ludicrous distances, or see star systems other than our own.

Anyway, according to our current course chart, we actually entered EE’s space yesterday. We missed seeing the outermost planet, unfortunately. Too busy puking up that nasty nutrient fluid they make you drink before chryo. So we missed seeing Bacchus. I wanted to see the Drunken Planet! Heh. Ah well.

For those of you who don’t know much about the Epsilon Eridani system, here’s the figure from my old Space Science textbook.




See why it’s called Bacchus? Even scientists can have a sense of humor sometimes.

So, as you can see, we’re up to our butts in asteroids right now. By 0800 tomorrow we should be passing Oceanus. The beacon probe in orbit around the planet is already transmitting some gorgeous shots of the planet. Oceanus is named for, well… take a wild guess. You already know about Bacchus.

Next is Ceres. I’m not sure why they named a monster gas giant, with boiling storms of hydrogen and helium all over it after a relatively benign goddess. It’s actually even bigger than Jupiter. But it doesn’t have that cool red spot. Instead it’s got these wild green and brown swirls. Maybe that’s why it got named after the goddess of agriculture.

And then, yes, there’s ANOTHER goddamn asteroid belt! It’s actually amazing there's anything left of Minerva with that nearby. But the planetary scientists say that between Ceres’ huge mass pulling some of the loose belt bits towards it, and with Iapetus running interference for rogue monsters, Minerva is supposedly pretty well sheltered. But they still get loads of meteorites. How cool must the night sky look on a clear night?

I gotta hit the gym. I haven’t had a good workout in years! Har har. I’ll leave you with a photo of Oceanus to oogle. Next stop? Ground Zero Station, Iapitus!

I can’t wait.