EUe's first day on the job hadn't gone as planned. By the time he finally hovered out of the vessel's entry hole, the sun had already set, as had EUe's confidence. He was familiar with the feeling of hours of time slipping through his beak while he was busy acclimating himself to a given problem's idiosyncrasies, but… this went far beyond that. Maybe tomorrow would bring better luck, but, for now, he was crestfallen.
Crestfallen, and scared.
EUe walked back to the camp on foot, meandering left and right, rather than sticking to any straight path, his thoughts roaming as much as feet.
Who had built the vessel, and why?
How, if at all, could he reconcile the Impactors' clearly advanced behaviors with their apparently arbitrary, senseless reactions to various inputs?
What if these were some kind of weapons?
And then, there was the Scream. He couldn't have gotten that out of his mind even if he tried. It had the raw force of someone throwing paint onto a wall; an alien roar, if there ever was one. It felt alive to him in a way he couldn't quite put into words. Any form of intelligence—basal, instrumental, artificial, organic—had to have a means of detecting changes to its environment and reacting accordingly; that was just elementary. But the Scream went beyond that. By the time he'd left for the evening, the Scream had happened no less than a dozen times, and EUe couldn't shake the feeling that each one was even more frustrated and despondent than the one before. It was as if the Impactor knew someone was there, and desperately wanted to reach out and connect, but it just didn't have the means.
If Uka-yen had been there, EUe was pretty sure he would have told him that projecting his emotions onto an alien (artificial?) intelligence wasn't scientifically sound. But what else could he do in this situation?
At least the assumption that the Impactor wanted to talk to him gave EUe the hope that this first contact scenario wasn't predestined to meet a violent end.
All in all, he was about as close as he could be to banging his head against a wall without actually banging his head against a wall.
As he crested over the hill, EUe briefly marveled at the lights moving in the distance. He whistled mutely as he noticed that the lights were actually the drones he'd seen on his flight to the camp. Pushing off the ground, EUe flew up until he could see over the edge of the crater where the drones had set up their mining tunnels.
Things had definitely progressed. There were more drones than before, and where, earlier in the day, there had been naked, blasted earth, geometric forms now stood in silvery aggregates, forming an alien statuary.
Drones walked out of the tunnels, toward the statuesque forms, their bodies swollen with a glut of harvested minerals. But instead of dropping their cargo, the abstract insectoids climbed onto the developing structures and merged with them, passing off the mass they'd brought up from the earth. A moment later, a new—and smaller—drone would drop off from the structure in a spindly collection of legs, ready to scuttle back into the mines to dredge up more raw material.
EUe whistled in understanding. Through the drones, the Impactors were building more of themselves.
But why? Were the Impactors using UlU as a cosmic pit stop, as lU-twO had suggested, the way travelers would use a nectar station? Did they even care that they'd landed on an inhabited world? Did they even know?
Watching wave after wave of drones spawn from the Impactors, descend into the earth, and return with another haul of resources, EUe found himself growing quite anxious. If the aliens' project maintained its current rate of exponential growth…
He shuddered.
Why did it feel like the Impactors were in some kind of rush?
And just how much material did they plan on extracting from UlU?
The fearful part of EUe's mind squawked right in his face.
Could they be Universal Replicators?
That would be bad. That would be very, very bad.
Turning away, EUe flew back to camp as hungry for nectar as he was for information.
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He needed to tell the others.
He wanted to believe that this was just him being a kwekek again—overly sensitive—if not run-of-the-mill twEfE paranoia. And yet, as much he wished it weren't the case, EUe had to admit that there was a chance that the Impactors' arrival was a prelude to an invasion, or the first strike of one already in progress.
The smell of fire-roasted dashcrickets—elEka-a—tickled EUe's nares as he flew the short distance back to the camp. Looking down, he saw the researchers had set up a community dining space at the camp's center, among the scattered nest buildings and the dusty walking paths in between. They'd set tables and chairs around two tankards of nectar, and sat in leisure, clinking their drinking phials in celebratory toasts. gEl stood over a fire basin nearby, levitating stacks of dashcrickets in the flame, moving them onto awaiting platters once the forearm-sized, carapace-sheathed bugs were cooked to crunchy perfection.
More than a few of the dinner guests cleared away as EUe landed, and kept their distance from him throughout the evening, even when that meant stepping away from the tankards when he went to fill his nectariat's phials .
EUe tried his best to ignore them.
It helped that gEl turned out to be an excellent cook.
The chunks of roasted dashcricket practically came apart in EUe's claws. He effortlessly cut into the dashcrickets, ripping it into beak-friendly strips before downing it with happy clacks of his jaws. The seasoning gEl had used was better than anything they had back at the GTS. The dashcrickets had a sweet, tangy aroma that wafted up EUe's throat from where the meat sat in his gizzard.
gEl must have seen him relishing the meal, because the biologist walked up to him and gave him an arm-crossed stare, with a wry whistle.
"So," he said, "how did our mighty Gatherer fare?"
Now that gEl had stepped away from the fire, EUe realized he was positively filthy! gEl's feathers and clothes were covered in a liberal coating of dust, dirt, and tiny pebbles, along with the many stains made by the dashcrickets' cooking juices.
"What happened to you?" EUe asked. "Did you wrestle a baby gU-lUte or something?"
"Ha ha, very funny," the biologist quipped.
One of gEl's colleagues stepped in. "gEl and several others tried to capture one of the drones today. It didn't go well," he added, with an amused chirp.
"Did the camp not come with any washrooms?" EUe asked.
"I called dibs on cooking the dashcrickets," gEl replied. "I'm not going to let anyone else do it; they'd screw it up."
"…what does that have to do with my question?"
"There's no point in getting myself clean if I'm just going to get spritzed with smoke and bug juice afterward," gEl explained. "Besides, a bath feels better on a full belly."
He had a point, there.
gEl coughed and snorted, squinting his eyes and shaking his head. "Damn dust; it got up my nose! It feels like someone sprayed gravel all over my insides!"
"Steam up your bath, then, whenever you end up taking one," lU-twO said, joining the conversation. "That should clear everything up, though…" the astrophysicist slid down one of his second eyelids "…it might be too late to stop the bronchitis."
gEl flared his wings. "Bronchitis?"
EUe took a look through his spiritual sight, sweeping down his second lids.
Yep, there it was: threads of not-light tangled around gEl's throat, where they didn't belong. Many twEfE had patches of not-light like that floating around in their bodies. From microbes to twEfE, all living things had the ability and the right to pray to the gods for help. His family doctor had put it best: the microorganisms that naturally lived inside a healthy body often used not-light to trigger communions for themselves, for microbe stuff: making an acidic environment less acidic, waging war against enemy strains, that sort of thing. EUe had some patches glowing in his stomach; self-conscious of them, he hid them with a simple neutralizing veil, keeping the microbes' not-light from being sensed or seen, even though second eyelids.
Though EUe wasn't a healer, he had to admit the threads in gEl's throat did look a little unusual.
gEl's feathers drooped. "Wait… really?"
EUe nodded. "I'm afraid so."
gEl coughed. "Dammit!" He thumped his fist on his chest.
"I'm no doctor," EUe said, "but it doesn't look too bad. The sickest I ever got was when I had a stomach bug that, halfway through the infection, decided to commune with a god who really didn't like my intestines." He shook his head. "It was miserable."
gEl snorted. "That doesn't make me feel better!" He stomped his foot. "What if this is some kind of alien disease the Impactors brought with them? Things could get really weird! It could make me sprout tentacles! And I don't want to sprout tentacles!"
Well, I tried, EUe thought.
"Calm down, gEl," lU-twO said, "it's nothing out of the ordinary."
"How do you know?!"
"Age, experience, wisdom," lU-twO replied, rattling off the list on his fingers, "take your pick."
EUe noticed that the astrophysicist's feathers smelled of freshly applied bath oils. He must have just finished cleaning up.
"What happened out there?"
"We tried capturing a drone," lU-twO explained, "first without communions, and then with them. The drones used counterspells, throwing up storms of dirt and dust. We'll try again tomorrow, and this time with a bigger team. Hopefully, that will be enough." He glanced to the side and gestured with a wing. "Will you be joining us, tlE-la?"
tlE-la emptied her phial of nectar and set it down and then got up and walked over.
"As I told gEl earlier today," she said, "I'm no good at combat." She turned to EUe. "You should help them. A Gatherer's power would make it easy."
gEl coughed again. "Or, it would cause things to hopelessly spiral out of control as we set off our species' first ever war with an alien race."
"I think EUe's time would be best spent trying to unravel the Impactors' mystery," lU-twO said. "Speaking of which…" he turned to face EUe. "How was your first day? Better than ours, I hope?"
Folding his wings at his back, EUe leaned against the side of the nectar tankard.
"It didn't go superbly," he began, "but I do have a theory, if that counts."
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