As dusk drew in, the away team made their way back to the ship and battened down the hatches for the night. They decided that since they'd got their intrusion sensor packs blown up, they'd rely on old-fashioned sentries for their security. Lee took the first watch, keeping guard from the bridge.
When he turned off the bridge lights so as to be able to see out the windows into the dark, and once his eyes had adjusted somewhat, he began to make out what looked like faintly luminescent vaporous sprites moving around outside, hundreds of them.
Ah, fumbles. I just love 'em.
He immediately leaped to the conclusion that they were some kind of alien surveillance devices, and that an attack was imminent. He hit the alarm and got everyone back... fortunately no one had had time to actually get to sleep.
Since Lee was the only one on the team with military experience (Enkai'nos doesn't count, for he is but a simple supercargo, and not any kind of secret ultra-ninja assassin-spy or anything) the team took him at his word, and they decided to vacate the locality and find some high ground from which they'd have a decent view of the surrounding countryside. This was done without any problems.
Patience settled the ship down on top of a flat-topped hill, and Lee (now hopped up on a stimulant to keep him awake) and Enkai'nos went out to do a sweep of the immediate area.
Lee continued his run of luck with the dice by utterly failing to spot one of the centipede-creatures they'd seen earlier in town, this one roughly the mass of a centipede-shaped cow, barreling at him from the shelter of a tumbled pile of rocks and thorn bushes. Fortunately, Enkai'nos was a bit more alert, and shot at it with his looted alien ray-gun....
....which fizzled out after about ten or twelve metres. Clearly a very short-range weapon design.
Lee finally woke up to the danger, and shot at the creature with his trusty plasma rifle when it was almost upon them. The shot blew the thing's head apart in a shower of boiling goo, but a goodly portion of the beam was also reflected almost straight back at him, whizzing past his left shoulder.
Fortunately, Enkai'nos was standing to his right, or else there may well have been tears before bedtime.
Fascinated, Enkai'nos took a sample of the creature's iridescent carapace for later analysis. As he was working with the corpse, he observed a faintly luminescent vaporous sprite-like phenomenon gathering above it. Hmmm.
Back on the ship, they too had failed to spot the thing on sensors until it was opened up, whereupon it showed up on infrared like a flare.
The idea of having large, effectively invisible predators roaming about the place filled nobody with joy. They buttoned up the ship to make sure nothing could get on board, and settled down for some rest. Even Lee eventually collapsed into sleep once his stim had worn off.
Next morning arrived uneventfully, and they decided they needed a larger city. Referring to the cursory survey they'd done of the planet from orbit, they noted an unobliterated urban conglomerate of reasonable size within easy reach, no more than a couple of hundred kilometres away, so they hopped over there.
As they approached at low altitude, they noted a collection of several hundred areas on the outskirts of the city, each perfectly square, each with a slightly different texture and albedo. Intrigued, they descended to within visual range and found something startling.
One area consisted of perfectly regular piles of bones, each pile constructed of a single bone type. A pile of skulls, a pile of pelvises, a pile of femurs, and so on. A quick volumetric calculation of the skull pile indicated that there must have been several million of them in there.
Other areas were each composed of a single class of object. One that attracted their attention was an array of several hundred thousand vehicles, personal transportation modules probably, roughly analogous to an air-raft, though much more primitive. They were briefly attracted to what appeared to be a flying saucer, in the hope that it might yield components they could use to jury-rig a working jump controller, but on examination it quickly proved to be nothing more than a primitive internal combustion powered hovercraft, or at best a highly inefficient helicopter.
There were collections of various sorts of household appliances, children's toys, furniture, sculpture, and badly decayed piles of perishable substances — cloth and paper and the like.
Though a bit creeped out by the idea of an OCD obliterator taking the effort of arranging all their victims' stuff, they put the piles behind them and went in over the city proper. It was completely empty of anything but buildings, dust, and the occasional hardy thorn.
The buildings got generally taller towards the centre of the urbanization, and in several areas they detected signatures above the ambient radioactivity that indicated some sort of low-level nuclear activity. They landed the ship on a large open paved area beside one of the indicated buildings, suited up, and made their way inside. The doors were unlocked.
They used their suits' built-in rad counters to trace the signal, and made their way down underground. Though a bit of a labyrinth down there, it didn't take them too long to find the reactor and control room, and found that the reactor had been put into a more or less safe standby mode, just barely ticking over. Of who had done it there was no evidence at all.
Further investigation revealed a maintenance workshop, which still held some potentially useful stuff: circuit board blanks, boxes of incredibly basic switch chips, primitive photolithography and etching equipment, and a bunch of other bits and pieces that Janey thought could be used to build some sort of JayCars "My First Jump Controller" kludge. So they nicked the lot.
They spent the rest of the day humping the loot back to the ship's cargo bay, with occasional breaks to douse themselves with Radz-B-Gon.
Janey got on to designing something that might work well enough to get them somewhere civilised, and while she was doing that, the others decided to take a jaunt to the planet's moons to see if the inhabitants had progressed far enough to make that hop. They did find evidence of landers and what-not, and briefly thought of finding the Cape Canaveral equivalent in search of more computer stuff, but then decided that any such facility would almost certainly have been bombed to smithereens.
It took Janey just over a week to construct a jump controller that she's absolutely sure — well pretty sure — well fairly sure will work. The whole device takes up about ten cubic metres of the cargo bay to replicate a much more complex device that could be held in one hand. But at least they've got a thing (maybe) as long as nobody trips over the cables and unplugs something.
