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Chapter 609   Unassing the Area

They stopped briefly at the fifty kilometer mark, since that was the flight ceiling for the unmanned collection drones that had been sent to collect samples from the ocean. Even with gravity drives, there was still a practical limit for machines that small.

Two of the drones were caught by the whipping root tendrils, but the other eight managed to return safely to the lander and deposit their samples in the stasis fields prepared for them. And the pilot wasn’t willing to wait around, as it seemed the roots were growing at a speed visible to the naked eye, so he rocketed straight up toward the Karman Line in a maneuver that the marines who normally rode in landers called “unassing the area with a quickness.”

They soon reached the Farsight, then slowly crept through the ionic stasis shield that kept the boat bay pressurized. The flight up from the surface had taken minutes; passing through the shielding on the boat bay, on the other hand, took over an hour as they were being incredibly careful to avoid any kind of contamination from the planet. It was easy enough to do—the entire lander was inorganic, on the surface at least, so all they had to do was eliminate any biological material that was “stuck” to the vessel.

Disinfecting the people aboard, however, was a much more complicated and involved process. After all, it was impossible to tell the difference between biological material that was a part of them and biological material that was native to Proxima Centauri b, and the surface of their environmental suits couldn’t be 100% inorganic like the surface of a lander could.

Thankfully, that had been anticipated, and problems that the empire could anticipate were already half solved. The rest was simple engineering.

Thus, the suits themselves were disposable, and layered. The passengers of the lander just had to remove the outer layer of their suits and discard them while in a perfect vacuum, then head through a series of decontamination airlocks before the whole mess (NOT including the people, naturally) was ejected from the Farsight to burn up in the atmosphere of the planet below them.

The explorers tottered their way to a designated quarantine area on wobbly legs, or at least most of them did, anyway. The crew members of the Farsight and the security team were quite used to handling high-G maneuvering, so their strides were as sure as they had been before the sudden evasive maneuvers. Of course, there was another aspect as well—the researchers were noncombatants, so they were very much unused to the rigors of combat, both mental and physical alike. They couldn’t help but picture what would have happened, had the “root” caught them.

One of the hallmarks of a good scientist was a good imagination, and they were very, very good scientists.

As for the soldiers and crew of the Farsight, well... not much needed to be said for them. They had all been taught in Athena’s School of Hard Knocks and Harder Heads, and in comparison to that, what they’d just gone through was just another Tuesday for them. Nôv(el)B\\\\jnn

……

Farsight bridge, 36 hours later.

“Bring the crew down to Condition Yellow,” Captain Marinakis said as Ayaka entered the bridge. He motioned her to her seat next to him as he recorded the all-hands announcement.

The Farsight had gone to Battle Stations the moment the first “root” had attacked the lander, then stepped down to General Quarters after the lander returned. Though the Exploration Fleet ships were lightly armed—by imperial standards, anyway—they still had a number of orbital supremacy weapons aboard. Kinetic energy weapons were considered to be just good sense, and their LiDAR system could be weaponized by the simple expedient of providing it with enough power to turn the normally harmless lasers into powerful weapons.

It would burn out the emitters after being fired once or twice, but those one or two attacks would definitely let who, or whatever they hit knowing they had been kissed.

Ayaka shook her head at the captain and gestured toward the briefing room. “The scientists called a meeting,” she said, then ducked into the conference room just off the bridge.

The moment the door closed and she was alone in the room, she leaned against the door and sighed in relief as she slid down it to sit on the deck. Although she had been trained in what to do if she experienced problems on away missions, experiencing it in reality where catastrophes wouldn’t simply be dragged out of a simulation into an after-action report where they ran down everything went wrong, well... that was a different feeling altogether.

She’d had time to decompress and rationally sort through the stress reaction in quarantine, but somehow being on the bridge of the Farsight had just... brought it home to her. She had almost died, and not only her, but everyone she was in command of. It was a weighty burden to bear, and that fact was only just now hitting home for her. Things she rationally knew were becoming things she intuitively felt, and she found herself disturbed by it. So, she took a few minutes to get her headspace in order, then rose to her feet, tugged at her uniform to ensure it was in pristine condition, and checked her facial expression for any sign of stress. Finding none, she nodded to herself and stepped back onto the bridge.

As soon as she walked in, the debriefing began. The bridge disappeared from around her and became a conference room with a long table, at which sat Fleet Admiral Bianchi, accompanied by his intelligence officer, science officer, and the heads of various research departments that had remained aboard the TFS Proxima.

With everyone in attendance, the debriefing began.

“We have decided to suspend landings until further notice,” Ayaka said in a grave tone. “As the commander on site, it’s my thinking that we need to analyze the information we have and determine just what that ‘root’ was before we return to the surface. Or at least as closely as we can, anyway. From the satellite ring, we noted an uptick in mana, almost as if the root was a conscious, sapient being, or perhaps it isn’t sapient and was just responding to our intrusion like a horse would to a fly that was buzzing around it. The problem, at least as I see it, is that we simply don’t know enough to know just how much we don’t know.”

The participants at the table nodded in understanding.

“As to what exactly happened,” Ayaka continued, “I’ll let the researchers from the Proxima go over that. They’ve had 36 hours to go through the raw data while we were in quarantine, so they’ve got the best idea of exactly what was going on. Miss Standing Bear, the floor is yours.”

Ayaka returned to her seat as a Native American woman stood from hers and walked to the head of the table.

Rebecca Standing Bear nodded to the people at the table and delved right into the heart of the topic. “From the data we collected, and until and unless any evidence arises to the contrary, our initial conclusion is that Proxima Centauri b has evolved intelligent life. And that intelligent life has already reached the awakening stage of its evolution. As you can see here from the Henry’s Eyes sensors....”

Having begun the briefing with that particular bombshell, her presentation of the data lasted quite some time before she opened the floor to questions.