Cloneborne 077 – An Alien Vessel (Patreon)

The mental state of the political analysts had become very concerning over the past few days, and they’d somehow dragged the economic analysts with them. No reports about it were coming to his attention yet so it wasn’t ‘official’, but their friends on the ship whispered in concern, and Tiikasia would be a poor Ohmadia if he didn’t listen to the mood of his crew. He had gone to check on the matter himself and found their section of the Science Department… well, exactly as reported.

Rirris was standing on the outskirts of the political analysis area, her legs twice as long as usual to enable her a higher viewpoint so she could survey her various scholars. They seemed to rapidly vacillate between uncontrollable weeping, manic laughter, driven focus, and a sort of staring in existential ennui as they sat at the mix of desks, tables, cushioned areas of deck, and chairs that filled their section of the department, with the nearby economists looking like they were inclined to follow as they worked with the drive of men and women who were desperately trying to make sense of the world. At Tiikasia’s approach, Rirris turned to him and clicked her claws in acknowledgement. “Ohmadia,” she said, their eyes now on the same level.

“Rirris,” he said. “I heard reports about the state of some of your scholars. They appear to be accurate.”

“They’ll be fine,” Rirris said with the sort of flippant disregard that Tiikasia recognized from old warriors watching over softshells having a first-week-of-training breakdown. “They’ve just been talking to the Kaedekin that Rain introduced them to. Remember how you were when you found out our hosts didn’t have laws or a government?”

“How could I forget?” Tiikasia said, his antennae flicking.

“Well, this is the result of them finding out the Kaedekin don’t have a system of currency,” Rirris said.

“That’s… admittedly rare but…”

“Or system of barter.”

“Oh. Well, that still has some precedent…”

“Or anything like a system of social credit points.”

“All right, that’s less precedented…”

“Apparently their Supply and Logistics branches just announces how much food and materials their whole civilization needs for the coming taon, and people just go out and either grow it, mine it, or refine it without needing any other incentive…”

“… well, we came here knowing they would be a completely alien civilization,” Tiikasia said rather than try to figure out how a civilization like that would work. Theoretically, it worked in small villages and reclusive hermitaries, where everyone knew each other and had for years and any newcomers were integrated over a period of time, but surely that wouldn’t work for a whole planetary civilization. “I’m sure things will begin to make more sense once we get to know the Kaedekin better.”

Rirris made one of her human sounds. “It will probably get worse before it gets better. Any political or economic models about the Kaedekin will probably need to start from the beginning, because most of the established models don’t seem to apply to them. Or at least, we don’t understand enough of their civilization to understand how they fit.” Her head suddenly plummeted from Tiikasia’s eye-level, and he looked down in time to see her legs reforming back into matter, and at their usual length. “So, are we still on schedule for getting them that understanding today?”

Tiikasia clicked his claws in an affirmative. “Yes, the Kaedekin have signaled they will be ready to escort our ferry in about a suwamo, and have confirmed there are no changes to the approach and landing procedures.”

“Or the decontamination procedures?” Rirris said.

“Those are unchanged as well,” he confirmed. Apparently, setting prospective visitors on fire with magic was something the Kaedekin did, and they were being told in advance because it seemed the humans—and their allies—had been very reticent to undergo it. A part of him felt vaguely amused that the humans—and their allies—were being used as test subjects to refine the Kaedekin’s procedures for visitors. Their hosts had sent several pages worth of instruction to prepare them for what those procedures would be, at varying levels of literacy. The ones without any sort of writing whatsoever, only simple pictographic representations of the Free Peoples, had been instructive in showing what they were expected to do and faintly horrifying in that they were expected to be set on fire. Fortunately, the pages with actual words clarified that the fire was magic-based and not actually just making people walk through fire.

Most people who had read the instruction had been amused to note that the font the Kaedekin used for their approximation of written freespeech strongly resembled the one used in the labelling of a popular mass-produced beverage.

One suwamo and fourteen paize later, Tiikasia found himself in one of the Dhekhajhyde’s ferries with fourteen other people. On the screens that relayed the view from the side cameras, he could see the familiar shape of the Kaedekin ‘fast courier’ craft escorting their vessel. They were elegant things, with smooth curves and short wings that implied they had ground-to-space capability. Given how the vessel’s thrust seemed to be based on the Kaedekin’s magic, Tiikasia would not be surprised to find out that the thrust systems for the courier craft needed to be directly imbued by one of the Kaedekin, perhaps even two. After all, why use Void Dust when there was someone available to imbue something directly?

Absently, he flexed his claws, feeling the gauntlet of the vacuum armor wrapped around them. The armor he was wearing had been modified for his use, which meant that Ahgido had managed to install twice the normal thickness of plating on it compared to all the others. The only reason it wasn’t triple-armored was because the hydraulic and actuator systems would have been too burdened to move at a normal pace. As it was, he was fairly certain that if he ran in this it would either shake itself apart or have so much momentum the only way he’d be able to stop would be to tuck in his legs and try to skid to a stop, or crash into something.

Given he was big enough that running full speed at unarmored humans had often been enough to kill them during the war, and their hosts where human-sized, -shaped and -massed… yes, he would definitely not be running today. A deliberate, dignified procession would be his walking pace, no matter how exciting things got.

And if this somehow turned out to be a trap… well, he had twice the armor of anyone else and could kill human-sized beings by running at them. The shinkamrai fought so that others wouldn’t have to. That scenario was unlikely, despite Ahgido diligently planning for it. Such was the Head of Security’s duty, after all. That was why they were in one of the ship’s heavily armed and armored ferries, and their group contained two of the ship’s Symbols, as well as a watershaper and dragonshaper, not counting Rirris herself. The watershaper—Ulada, a Nakki from the Engineering Department—had been rigorously screened to ensure they weren’t acting as a carrier of anything dangerously infectious or likely to mutate in case their suit was breached. Given the level of armor on the suit, the only ways that was likely to happen would either be a deliberate attack, or some sort of accident involving industrial equipment or military weaponry.

In addition, there were also two obvious warriors and six of the ship’s scholars. Two of them were the most emotionally stable of the political science and economics scholars, while the others consisted of three of the ship’s cultural sophontologists and one of their legal scholars. While the Kaedekin claimed to not have any laws, they had to have some sort of unifying code of some sort, and one of the legal scholars might be best suited to identify it.

Looking over everyone, Tiikasia would have though he was leading a boarding attack towards human ships to try and disable their systems, but the situation broke the illusion. Rirris and Ulada were speculating about the Kaedekin fast couriers on the screens, doing a cursory visual breakdown of the vessel.

“There!” Rirris exclaimed as a jet of white propellant erupted from one of the series of smooth, lens-like structures dotting the craft’s hull, which adjusted its trajectory. “Definitely some sort of emission point for their magic, because that’s definitely not a vent!”

“And given how the emitters are distributed across the hull, they’re likely highly maneuverable…” Ulada said, the girefa engineer taking notes with one pair of hands. “If they can also be used to generate those barriers of theirs, then depending on how much structural integrity those barriers have, Kaydekeen might be able to completely insulate their craft during atmospheric reentry by taking the reentry plasma on a barrier while the craft itself remains in vacuum.”

The carefree enthusiasm kept him from sending him back to those times, and he listened to it without interrupting as Rirris added to the list of questions they wanted to ask the Kaedekin.

“Ohmadia, I recommend that you stay behind on the ship and—”

“Noted, Ahgido,” Tiikasia said, grateful for the familiar routine. “However, our hosts know to expect me, so doing as you suggest might set back the progress we have made with the Kaedekin.”

In front of them, Lamppost Fortress loomed like a wall of pinkness as they followed a path of light leading them towards an open landing bay. The bay was behind a translucent wall that shimmered with the Kaedekin’s magic. Vennfluid, Tiikasia recalled, a permutation the Kaedekin used when they wanted something to be permeable to solid objects but not liquids or gasses… or just wanted to replicate a fluid. He’d seen the Kaedekin use it to fill up space in a container that they wanted to generate a vacuum in.

“Ohmadia, this is ferryman Zokytsi,” the ferry’s pilot contacted him. “Be advised that the Kaedekin had signaled that we are entering the deceleration area and will begin decelerating us.”

“Acknowledged, ferryman,” Tiikasia said. “Tell them we’re ready, but be prepared to step in if necessary.”

“Acknowledged, Ohmadia.” There was a crackle as the ferryman shifted to address everyone. “Attention! Impending gravity shifts! Prepare to compensate! Impending gravity shifts! Prepare to compensate.”

A few fingers later, Tiikasia felt a moment’s disorientation and an instinctive urge to start leaning forward as his body told him the ground he was on was starting to tilt slightly. He managed to catch himself, helped by the fact he had two pairs of ambulatory limbs. Rirris stumbled slightly, then made a frustrated sound as she remembered she couldn’t just grow more legs because she was in vacuum armor. He managed to reach out and hold her steady as the ferry was pulled into the landing bay. It wasn’t long before his antennae’s sense of what direction gravity was calling ‘down’ returned to normal, and a shudder when went up through his feet as the ferry’s landing gear settled down onto the deck of the landing bay.

“We’ve landed, Ohmadia. Sensors reading the outside of the house is a vacuum, as the Kaedekin said it would be. They’re waiting mext to the ferry.”

Tiikasia glanced at the  screens showing the views on either side of the ferry, and saw that Rain had come to meet them at the head of a delegation of Kaedekin. “Acknowledged, ferryman”

It was now their turn to be the guest on an alien vessel.