While the others were investigating the abandoned survival shelter, and finding a lot of nothing very much worth nicking, Patience on board ship noticed an energy blip appearing out near the hulk, followed shortly afterwards by another, then several others. She alerted the rest of the team, and this time, rather than offering their heads for a whacking, they decided to choose the path of caution and hide until they knew who and what they were up against.
Patience powered down her active sensors immediately so as not to be broadcasting the fact of their existence far and wide. By the time everyone was back on board the newcomers' numbers had swelled to a couple of dozen.
Hugging the ground, Patience relocated the ship into the shadow of a crater wall between them and the shelter site, just in case. Regrettably, this left the ship effectively blind to what was going on, so Lee and Enkai'nos humped a pair of sentry sensor packs up on to the crater rim — short range devices, and pretty much useless for seeing what was going on a quarter of a million kilometres away, but hopefully they'd give some warning if anyone approached too close. Enkai'nos got his up and running in no time at all by just following the instructions from the manual step by step, but somehow Lee managed to get his unit stuck in a feedback loop, and it was about an hour before the combined efforts of Enkai'nos and Janey managed to get it properly up and running.
Meanwhile, Lee went back to the ship for a nice, simple telescope that he could look through without having to worry about any sort of networking nonsense. At that range he couldn't see in great detail, but he could see enough to show that the newcomers, whoever they were, appeared to be scavenging and dismantling the hulk and neighbouring wrecks, and tumbling the remains down into the atmosphere of the gas giant. And they seemed to be working remarkably quickly and efficiently.
Once again the same old "we should talk to them" "we should hide" discussions ensued. They decided to split the difference by keeping the ship hidden, but sending a standard Terran communications blurp via an off-site aerial, so that the beam wouldn't lead directly back to the ship....
Which turned out to be a good thing, as it happened, because about ten minutes after the transmission was sent, all the ship's sensors whited out, and when they reset themselves, they saw that the site of the aerial and the shelter site and the two expensive sentry sensor packs were a boiling, fuming, molten crater. Clearly whoever these newcomers were, they were not interested in having any survivors around.
Someone noted that the strangers not only had jump technology, but obviously better jump technology than the Terrans, since they're able to jump right into a planetary gravity well. Which lead inexorably to the idea that they should hijack one of these alien vessels and steal, if not the whole thing, then at least their jump tech. The immediate problem was that the aliens vastly outnumbered and outgunned Our Heroes. What to do?
We've got to sort out a name for the team's ship.
Lee, keeping an eye on proceedings via his telescope, noted that their efficiency did not seem to be abating, and already the leviathan was well on the way to being completely skeletonized. Within a few hours, there were indications that the swarm was diminishing, and fairly soon it was down to the last couple who were engaged in dumping the remaining debris down into the gas giant.
The team came up with a Cunning Plan: they would take off, keeping the moonlet between them and the mysterious Dismantlers, detach the other alien escape pod, and send it on its way to attract (hopefully) a single dismantler ship to gobble it up while Our Guys stayed dark and invisible until the moment to pounce. A cunning plan indeed.
It went well initially and all according to plan except for the bit when it all fell apart.
As soon as the escape pod hove into view, both dismantlers immediately perked up and thrust out towards it... or at least, one of them did; the other one thrust directly towards the Good Guys... who had not seemed to take into account that the aliens were not restricted to passive sensors and could see them perfectly well sitting there with their engines ticking over and their life-support running and everything.
It did not take long before they were close enough to make out their configuration fairly clearly: definitely not like any Terran vessel anyone was familiar with, they looked roughly crab-like with a more or less spherical central mass surrounded by a fringe of articulated limbs, and with a pair of large pincer-like booms extending to the front. Almost as soon as they could see this, they could also see the tips of the limb-fringe light up, and a beam weapon of some kind just missed the ship, briefly knocking its sensors off-line — an EMP weapon of some sort, they theorized. And now they could see arcs of some kind of energy between the pincer-booms....
They quickly decided that discretion was the better part of valour, and took off for the cover of the planetary ring, attempting to lose the alien in hot pursuit. A chase ensued amongst the tumbling rocks, and a game of hide and seek for about six hours before they were confident that the disassembler craft had given up the pursuit.
Since they were basically fully fueled, and were only lacking jump control and navigation systems (pfft, who needs that stuff?) they elected to head back into the system to check out the potentially life-supporting planet they'd briefly seen when they first arrived. It took a little over six weeks to get back in under thrusters, and they settled down to do a more thorough survey.
Though there was some vegetation to be seen in the sub-polar regions, most of the planet was arid and barren. Although no signs of current habitation could be found, it was clear that it had been inhabited in the past. The ambient radiation was pretty high, though in environment suits they'd be safe enough for six or eight hours at a time. Built-up areas could be observed from orbit, as well as many, many devastated and highly radioactive areas at places like the confluence of rivers and the like — prime sites for major urban areas.
They decided to set down near a small, undamaged town, and everyone except Patience went off in the ship's air-raft to explore. Lee noted some odd tracks in the dust that looked like they'd been made by some small tracked vehicle. It was just a few minutes into town, and though everything seemed largely intact, there was no sign of life... except for a brief glimpse of something like a huge millipede, about four metres long and maybe half a metre in diameter, which scurried in under the foundations of one of the buildings.
Lee noted that it left tracks in the dust that looked like they'd been made by some small tracked vehicle.
 |
| It's purely coincidental that I just finished watching Fallout. Honest. |
Further into town they flew, to the largest building they could see, which bore a strong resemblance to a Greek temple of ancient Earth. They made their way inside, and found.... a bank. It was a bank.
The whole settlement looked like, and displayed the technology of, a small European or American town of the 1950s or 60s, when the Wild West was engaged in its genocides, and people used exploding hydrocarbons to power their velocipedes. On the walls of the bank were a group of portraits, showing a species clearly humanoid, but clearly non-human — strange fan-like ears, and no visible eyelids over large, bulging eyes.
Janey judged, by the general level of decay, that the place had been abandoned for perhaps fifty to seventy years. Certainly no longer than a hundred or so. Maybe a hundred and fifty. Two hundred perhaps. There was no sign of any inhabitants, but curiously, also no sign of any corpses.
