(Lamtara Rise, Ziunov, Ihm Imperium)
When she had seen the wreckage of the ship from atop the
rise, she’d measured the range to be just over forty kilometers away on a
straight line. On flat ground, that would have been a day’s walk, perhaps two
if they took it easy, or had problems. In the mountains, however, it is not so
simple as just moving in a straight line. Privately, Zass thought they were
making fairly good time to move through trackless mountains, keeping their
orientation despite the weather and their instruments going haywire just as the
flyer instruments had. It was evening on the fourth day after sighting the
wreckage, and they were now at a small shelf not two kilometers below the wreck
site. Tomorrow, they would be able to see the wreck itself.
Bhox nudged her with his large elbow. “Sister, I don’t think
we’ll find a better spot to make camp before the sun leaves us. I know you
wanted to be at the crash tonight, but…”
Zass shook her head. “No, you’re right. I wished we could
make it, but I already sent the message saying we would not be able to make it
this night. That collapsed ridge from the wreckage set us back too much.”
Roxl laughed. “I’m just glad that the radios still work! Not
good if you need help and have to climb all the way out of the mountains to get
it, and then climb all the way back because the flyers won’t fly.”
Zass smiled at her brothers. “Yes, thankfully it is just the
nav computers and sensor readings that are affected, not communications.
Otherwise the Matriarch wouldn’t have approved this job without twice the crew,
to make sure we could make a trail back to base. Anyway, set up the camp, and
I’ll call in and let them know our status. Throsk gets first watch tonight.”
Standing watches on the side of a mountain might seem like a
foolish idea, but there were wild
animals that lived in the mountains, and more than a few of them were quite
capable of eating a full-grown Ihm, and weren’t shy about trying. A few of the
most worrisome ones were too stupid to realize that they couldn’t actually digest an adult Ihm, but that hardly
mattered to the person being eaten, as they’d still be dead. So yes, setting a
watch was a standard practice, even on the side of a mountain. ESPECIALLY when
you were on a side of a mountain and the instruments you usually used to keep
the predators away couldn’t be relied on to work properly.
The next morning, they ate a cold breakfast of chilled
ruglee jerky, and began their final climb. Two hours later, they had crested
the final rise, and were able to look upon the wreckage from up close.
And that was when the first surprise came.
“Where is all the wreckage? Are we in the right spot?”
Zass didn’t bother to rebuke Uathru’s words, which could be
taken as disrespect against her navigational skills. If she were honest, she
was wondering much the same thing herself. “Of course we’re in the right spot!
You see that huge-ass hole in the shelf? That’s solid rock! You don’t just make
a hole like that with a hammer. We’re looking at an impact crater for sure, and
recent, none of the edges have been weathered.”
“Then where is all the wreckage? There’s just a few pieces
of hull on the ground! The pictures we’ve seen suggested there was a lot more
of the wreckage intact.”
Indeed, that was the question. The configuration of the hull
plates was the same as they’d seen from the initial satellite pictures and from
other long-range scans, but now when they got here, the hull fragments were the
only thing left!
Bhox shook his head. “There’s been cloud cover since the
crash. No chance for satellites to update the visuals, just the heat scans and
EM readings. Looks like we got swindled.”
“Another company? We’re the only salvage group on the planet
that could make the climb.”
Roxl grunted. “Unless there was someone with a flyer crazy
enough to fly in without instruments or comm beacons. They’d be flying blind,
and who knows what would happen to electronics after prolonged exposure to
whatever’s causing this, but it isn’t impossible.”
Throsk growled. “Or maybe they’re the ones causing the
interference.”
Zass shook her head. “Nope, not believing it. With the
amount of space this wreck covered, you’d need more than a single flyer to do
this much salvage work so quickly. And there’s no way a whole team of flyers
flew up here with no navigation and no one told the clan. Something else is
going on, here.”
Bhox shrugged. “Well, it looks like there’s drag marks here.
Why don’t we follow them, and see where things go?”
Zass nodded, and said, “Let me call this in, so people know
something is weird up here, and then we’ll do that. Meantime, find someplace to
stow the equipment, and break out the weapons and armor. If there are other
people, or maybe survivors, up here, they may be having restless trigger claws.
Either because they came up here to steal our claim, or because they’re not
sure who is coming for them. I don’t want the hassle of explaining to the
Matriarch why one of you louts died because we got cocky following the trail.”
Two hours later, the field hampering navigation and
instrumentation near the mountain fell, and a call went out that shook all of Ziunov.
(Confederate News Network Broadcast)
A human male is pictured, in a business suit. The location
appears to be in front of an Ihm government building, with its signature
rounded lines.
“This is Chet Ubetcha
of CNN, reporting live from Ziunov in the Ihm Imperium, on the border with the
Terran Empire. Approximately two Galactic Standard months ago, a spacecraft of
Terran origin crash landed in a remote mountainous region of the southern
continent of Ziunov.”
“The crash was
originally believed to be the result of a faulty FTL mass-detection safeguard
system, causing the ship, which was classified as a light freighter, to emerge
from hyperspace too close to Ziunov’s atmosphere while travelling at a high
rate of speed. The ship, tracked on satellite and other scanners, was believed
to be a total loss due to the speed and location of the impact.”
“Initial Search and
Rescue efforts were hampered by intense electromagnetic fields and particle
residue in the atmosphere surrounding the crash site, disrupting navigation and
other instrumentation in the atmospheric craft attempting to respond to the
crash site. When satellite imagery showed the total destruction of the
freighter with a sizeable impact crater, the crash was deemed unsurvivable, and
Search and Rescue efforts were called off.”
“Because of the
terrain and the difficulties with instrumentation, salvagers from the
Whitescale clan won the right to salvage the wreck and ascertain the cause of
the lingering interference. Six hours ago, three of the team of five Ihm were
rescued alive off the mountain when the disruption field fell.”
“Earlier, I was able
to interview one of the survivors when they were out of surgery.”
The picture changes to a two shot of Chet and a white scaled
Ihm female in hospital robes, with one arm in a sling and a patch over one eye.
She is identified as Zass Whitescale.
CHET: [Junior
Matriarch] Whitescale, thank you for taking the time to speak with us. May I
begin by offering our condolences for your losses. Let their spirits find their
ancestors with honor.
ZASS: My thanks. Few
knelfi know the traditional words. You may call me Zass. And I agreed to speak
to you because my brothers did not make it off that mountain, and they deserve
to have their story told.
CHET: For our viewers
who are not familiar with the Ihm Imperium, the Whitescale Clan is the premier
hazardous terrain salvage company on Ziunov, yes?
ZASS: Yes, that’s
right. As [Arctic-equivalent] Ihm, we have an advantage in most mountainous
terrain and other hazardous environments, with the exception of our
ocean-dwelling cousins who can breathe underwater in the deeps.
CHET: So your group
was the best suited to the conditions on the mountain, and you went in prepared
for a wide range of possible hazards, correct?
ZASS: Yes, we’re
professional salvagers. If it were going to be easy or safe, they would call
the flat-land companies. We go in expecting all possible environmental hazards,
as well as more conventional hazards, like hostile wildlife or rival salvagers.
That doesn’t happen often, given the jobs we go on, but we prepare for it all
the same.
CHET: Can you tell us
what happened on the mountain?
ZASS: Flyer dropped us
off on a two-day hike from the ridge-line. That was as close as they could get
us without their instruments being affected. As we hiked in, we found
communications were not impaired, and so we were able to give regular reports.
When we reached the crash site, the entire site had been stripped clean, except
for some large hull fragments that had melted into the stone of the impact
crater.
CHET: Another team
beat you to the site?
ZASS: No. There’d been
bad weather in the mountains for a while even without the interference. You may
have been able to find one pilot crazy enough to fly in those conditions and
hope they didn’t die, but enough to bring in the equipment needed to clean up
the site and remove all the debris? Every salvager on the planet was watching
that mountain. Someone would have seen it.
CHET: So where did the
wreckage go?
ZASS: Well, that’s what
we were hoping to find out. We could see drag marks leading from the impact
crater to a tunnel that had been drilled into the mountain. I called in the
possible hostile activity, so the Clan had a flyer ready, if we could get the
disruption field down. My brothers and I, we armored up and got ready for a
fight, just in case. Like I said, we prepared for rival salvagers, but
sometimes we find survivors, and sometimes they’re a little too eager to shoot
first and talk later.
ZASS: Anyway. We
entered the cavern, but we quickly found that there were traps in the halls.
Some were crude, just monowire strung across a hallway, but others were some
real nasty pieces of work. But like I said, we prepare for things. Traps in the
hall aren’t that much different from a salvage site that is likely to fall
apart around you while you’re trying to locate the priority items.
ZASS: It was maybe one
hundred, two hundred meters down the corridor that we encountered our first
real problem. Blast doors slammed shut behind us, and a human opened fire on us
from a concealed position. Throsk got hit in the shoulder, but wasn’t down.
They weren’t expecting us to have armor. Roxl managed to get him with a shot as
he was reloading his weapon, which was a psyshot assault rifle.
ZASS: From there…
<looks away from camera>
CHET: If you like, we
could continue later…
ZASS: No! No. I’ll go
on. We fought our way through the damn tunnels, which were turning into some
kind of base, until we found the source of the disruption, some big piece of
Imperial tech. There were more fighters coming, so we had to hurry. We used
some thermite charges and burned the thing up. That shut the thing off nicely,
and must have caused some kind of failsafe to go off, because a door opened in
the wall, leading to a tunnel heading out.
CHET: Did the fighters
follow you?
ZASS: That was the
strange thing, they didn’t follow us, even though we where carrying Throsk and
Uathru, which slowed us down. We got out, and called in the flyer for immediate
evac.
CHET: Was there any
indication as to who these fighters were?
ZASS: <shakes head
no> Nothing. But… when we left the tunnels, we saw an inscription above the
cave that wasn’t there before.
CHET: What did it say?
ZASS: It was in some
old language the computer identified as Latin. ‘Gloria in Machina Deo. Deus
regnat.’
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Be sure to read my published works!
Frozen Soul series (Sci-Fi Supervillain story):
Frozen Soul https://www.amazon.com/dp/B071R125QT
Tales of the Void Traveler https://www.amazon.com/dp/B06ZZ52G37
Rules-Free VRMMO Life (Dark Fantasy GameLit):
Volume 1 - Tutorial
Amazon: https://www.amazon.com/dp/B071VPRNDB
Barnes & Noble: https://www.barnesandnoble.com/w/rules-free-vrmmo-life-stuart-grosse/1128941349?ean=2940161995297
Amazon: https://www.amazon.com/dp/B0774T354X
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Book I - Game Start https://www.amazon.com/dp/B071LT5WGL
Omnibus I - Books 1-4 https://www.amazon.com/dp/B077X2KR7Y
City of Champions Online (Superhero GameLit):
Issue I - Origin Stories https://www.amazon.com/dp/B075SHXQS1
Lewd Dungeon (Dungeon Core GameLit):
Book 1 - Welcome to the Apocalypse https://www.amazon.com/dp/B07BB34DHF
Omnibus 1 - Books 1-4 https://www.amazon.com/dp/B07FBPF6HR
The Kalipshae Affair (A First Contact Short Story): https://www.amazon.com/dp/B0739V6R6T
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