––––––––
"Our orders seem a little too specific to be part of a simple recon mission," the Skydancer's ship computer said. "Why don't we just give the planet a quick scan and move on?"
"Let's just do as we're told," Merital said, "We will investigate the planet and report back."
"Aye captain," the spaceship AI said.
Skydancer made a series of small course corrections and headed for the jungle planet.
"It's of no strategic importance that I can see,” Skydancer said to the captain, “It doesn't even have a name."
"Would you like to name it?" the captain asked.
"I would."
"Go right ahead."
There was a silence while Skydancer thought. The captain was pretty sure that the AI already had a name picked out but she appreciated the theater of the long pause for thought.
"Jade Stone," Skydancer said at last, “Let's call it Jade Stone.”
"Jade Stone it is," The captain said approvingly.
She turned to a communications screen and sent out a general call to the crew.
"Everybody to the bridge," she said simply, then hit a button to have the message repeated three times.
Her crew appeared a short while later, one after the other like students slinking late into a classroom. When they had all arrived, the room was feeling a little crowded. All the acceleration couches were full and people were standing pushed up against the back wall. The front wall was transparent armor and only one or two of the crew chose to stand with their backs to the stars.
"Welcome all," Captain Merital said.
She stood in the middle of the room, between the acceleration couches, framed by the big transparent armor window. She kept turning her head slowly, to make eye contact with the whole crew as she spoke.
"The planet you are looking at," she said, indicating the planet looming in the view, "Is Jade Stone. We don't know anything about it, but our mission is to investigate it. The investigation will include a deployment of satellites from orbit and scramjets operating from two airstrips that will be established by dropships. We'll be sprinkling the surface with some random drones too, but not too many because we may not have time to pick them up. Any questions so far?"
She was rewarded with a few halfhearted grunts in the negative.
"Well okay, that's the spirit people. Let's get a few slugs ready to go down and keep an eye on the drones and scramjets, and the real crew can handle the satellites."
***
The south continent scramjet base was operational in just two days, but was very utilitarian. They had a fence, an airstrip, a hangar, some scramjets and a sprinkling of temporary buildings, all carved out of the primeval forest of Jade Stone.
Keen and Punter were the only humans on the base, the slugs who had been selected to keep an eye on the scramjets and the drones. They were responsible for searching half a planet with their handful of scramjet recon drones, their phalanx of combat drones, a few engineering drones, and a set of the vaguest orders Keen had ever seen. Keen was the veteran soldier, and a sergeant, while Punter was a simple soldier who had never been promoted. He was a lummox of a man who had to be shoehorned into his combat armor.
Keen was walking the perimeter of the base, a habit she had picked up way back on Debelor. She had been in charge of perimeter security on a base among hostile local population. She had been taught then that a base with a secure perimeter was a thing to be treasured.
The site for this present base on Jade Stone had been blasted from the verdant jungle by the first dropship. The patch of blasted jungle was roughly circular but the ground had been left churned up and strewn with fallen trees. The engineering drones were still methodically gathering up the trees, ripping out those whose roots still had a hold, and carrying them outside the perimeter to be piled up more or less haphazardly in the forest.
Keen watched one of the engineering drones nearby. It was a huge machine, bigger than the trucks used to load and position goods in the hold of a starship. It was at least twice as tall as Keen, even in her combat armor, and towered over her as it went past. It was carried along on four legs, each with multiple knee actuators and shock absorbers to deal with most any non-vertical terrain. It had some of the massive remnants of the local tree-like fauna in its two giant, forward facing claws. It regarded Keen with numerous compound eyes as it came near, making sure to keep all dangerous edges and heavy weights away from the delicate human.
Keen was wearing her combat armor, of course, and was far from delicate, but that made no difference to the drone's programming. It gave her a wide berth and carried on maneuvering between the temporary buildings towards the base's only gate.
There were two drones positioned at the gate, doing sentry duty, their eyes simultaneously watching the engineering drone as it traversed the gate and scanning the surrounding forest for threats.
Keen was quite happy with her drones. They weren't cutting edge, special operations drones by any means, but they were good solid machines with heavy armor, a versatile set of weapons and pretty up-to-date firmware and programming. She was confident they would make short work of any of the local megafauna that might decide to get nosy and investigate the base. A few warning shots would send even the largest predator, an ungainly tripod with a cat-o-nine-tails for a face, stampeding off through the forest. The honor of naming the creature had gone to the other scramjet base, where they had decided on the evocative name of, lashmug.
Keen heard a couple of lashmugs blundering around nearby, but they must have seen the engineering drone coming because they made off through the trees to get away from it. Keen smiled.
"Stupid things," she murmured.
They had built an octagonal fence around their structures and around the scramjet VTOL pad, and it was at the corners of the octagon where the fence came nearest to the ragged edge of the blasted forest. At those points the forest seemed to be reaching out for the fence, the branches of the trees like sinuous but jointed, headless snakes, looking for something to twine around, seeming to sense the proximity of the fence.
She went to the main gate, then went out through it, under the watchful eyes of the sentry drones. She walked round to the nearest corner of the fence, where there was hardly enough space to pass without the branches brushing her armor. The trees' branches had to be growing an arm length per day.
She put in a call to Exploration Base North, to her counterpart, Masskin. Her signal found a likely satellite, recently seeded by Skydancer and started bouncing a wide stream of information from it. Masskin's hologram appeared beside her, projected from a camera in Keen's own suit, looking incongruous in the forest because she was standing in exercise gear, probably in the gym back at her own base. Keen kept walking around the perimeter and Masskin followed, although the legs of the hologram didn't move, smoothly repositioning to stay in her eyeline.
"Hello," Masskin said.
"Hello, It's Keen."
"Yes?"
"I'm walking the perimeter and I noticed the local flora is very fast growing. It's two days, at most, away from touching our perimeter, at the closest point."
"So?"
"So we don't know what forces it can exert, and how quickly."
Keen stopped to gather up a discarded length of metal. She held it against a branch and watched as the branch wrapped round it. It took about four minutes before the branch had a firm grip.
"Are you seeing this?" Keen asked.
"Yes," Masskin said, "Can you pull that piece of metal away from it?"
"Trying now," Keen said.
She started with just the strength in her arm but, although the branch did bend, she wasn't able to wrest the metal free. She started incrementally adding strength from the elbow and shoulder actuators of her armor. She went to ten percent, then twenty percent, and then, finally, the metal ripped free.
"It takes enormous force just to move one," Keen said.
"All right. You convinced me. I'm going to walk the perimeter," Masskin said.