Chapter Text
“Captain, we may have an anomaly here.”
“Finally, it's been a while since we found something interesting. What is it?”
With the press of a button, First Officer Anvi Shastri sent the planetary scan data to the main screen of the science ship, for the entire bridge to see. The world below them should have been a relatively normal, if large, arctic world. But it… wasn’t. Nearly the entire planet was covered in thick, swirling clouds, thick and hanging low over the landscape. And the infrared scans painted an even stranger picture.
“Something is generating a tremendous amount of heat on the surface. The atmosphere itself seems pristine; almost too clean, virtually no greenhouse gasses at all. But there are thousands of intense point sources of heat on the planet. Whatever they are, they seem to be generating vast amounts of water vapor, covering nearly the entire surface in thick cloud cover. The rainstorms must be… intense.” She grimaces, imagining what it must be like for whatever poor lifeforms are left on the surface.
“So… what, someone set up to terraform, left, and forgot to turn their space heaters off?” The Captain of the ship, Adila Onobanjo, already seemed bored. She was a legendary scientist, credited with the surveying of nearly a third of the galaxy. But when you’ve seen everything, it all gets a little stale. The only reason she still commanded the UNS Lagrange was because her campaign for president had failed (only because, as she pointed out anytime the subject came up, the recently-incorporated Glebsig population had not been properly informed of the upcoming election!).
“That's what I’d think too.” Shastri replied. “Although, I’d question anyone who would use actual heaters instead of just dumping more greenhouse gasses into the atmosphere. But no, this seems unlikely to be deliberate terraforming.”
“And why’s that?” the captain asked, an eyebrow raised but otherwise uninterested.
“Because these structures are truly massive . Comparable in size to a starbase. And, even better, some of them seem to emit radio signals; sporadically, and only a handful of them to a handful of others. But whatever they are, they do talk to each other.”
“Interesting. I assume you already ran an analysis?”
“Of course. Whatever these things are broadcasting, it doesn’t look much like language. The closest thing on record is the internal language of the Tebrid Homolog, but even that is quite different.”
“Seems pretty open and shut then, some kind of pre-spaceflight Machine Intelligence. A Rogue Servitor that never bothered looking up?” The captain looked bored again.
Anvi hesitates. “That seems like a reasonable guess, especially considering the tops of these heat-emitting structures- whatever they are- seem to have cities on them. But… These cities, if that's what they actually are, are completely empty. Silent. If it's a Rogue Servitor, it doesn’t have anyone to serve anymore. And besides, that’s not the really interesting part.”
“Then please, tell me the really interesting part.”
“For that, I’ll defer to David.”
David O’Hara, the Lagrange’s resident Geology Officer, cringed slightly before straightening in his chair to speak. Situated in the far rear of the bridge, he was not used to the limelight- geological anomalies were quite rare.
Suppressing his anxiety, he sent his own graphical analysis to the ship’s main screen.
“The surface of the planet is mostly what you’d expect from a planet with so much rain- with the exception of the built-up areas, of course. But what’s really strange- I’m not sure what exactly the core of this planet is , but it’s not normal. Its density is far too low, and seems mostly uniform from the bottom of the crust all the way down to the core. If I didn’t know better, I’d say it's almost like the interior of the planet is entirely liquid water. Really it’s a miracle the planet has a magnetosphere at all.”
Captain Onobanjo points an accusatory expression at the First Officer.
“Well why didn’t you lead with that?”
“I thought I should build up to it,” she replies smugly. “Your verdict, Captain?”
“Lower our orbit for a more detailed scan. And someone get the Academy on the line, and tell ‘em we’ve found something interesting.”
Anvi was starting to get excited. This new world, officially designated Esperi 2 but increasingly nicknamed Rainworld, was looking more and more interesting. This was good on its own merit of course, but she had her own reasons to be glad. The more interesting the anomaly, the more interesting news she got to report to the captain; and that meant more opportunities to impress her. As was probably obvious to just about everyone on the ship, First Officer Shastri was vying to one day become Captain Shastri; and her best chance was to impress the current captain, so she’d put in a good word when the opportunity arose. She knew she was being obvious about it, but the thing about impressing someone is that it doesn’t matter if they know you’re trying as long as you succeed. And Rainworld gave her plenty of chances to impress.
Just now, walking back from a briefing with the rest of the chief crew, she had a bit of a skip in her step (which was somewhat annoying to the rest of the crew walking behind her). Rainworld was turning out to be very interesting indeed.
The more detailed scan had revealed a number of things; the massive heat-producing structures were just the tip of the iceberg. The metaphor was apt, as they peaked above the cloud layer, their tops just about the only thing on the planet visible from above. They were all roughly comparable in size and shape: massive rectangular prisms held hundreds of feet above the ground on six massive legs. Each of these mysterious structures had a city on its top surface. These cities were relatively small, varying in size, condition, and layout between structures, but all of them were unequivocally empty. The structures (someone had floated calling them ‘humidifiers,’ but Anvi preferred to remain professional) were somehow even more than they had appeared at first glance. Their interiors proved difficult to interpret with the ship's scanners, but one discovery that had come as quite some surprise was the crystal clear footprint of antigravity technology inside each and every one. This implied a much higher level of technology than they had first suspected. Some of the more political-minded had even floated pausing their research until they could confirm that they weren’t undeclared assets of any particular empire, but the captain had ruled that one out quite quickly.
Another big surprise, if perhaps less important, was the discovery that terrestrial life was much more common and diverse than was anticipated, given the somewhat nightmarish conditions on the surface. The biological team wasn’t in agreement over exactly what this meant, but they insisted that it meant something . The two most popular ideas were that either the surface was somehow much less hostile than it initially appeared, or that the ecosystem was somehow maintained or modified for one reason or another.
The main topic of research had been the areas immediately surrounding each structure. Each of these facilities sat atop a massive concrete pad enclosed by a large circular wall, upon and through which infrastructure for these ‘humidifiers’ snaked. From orbit, they could identify railways, plumbing for vast amounts of water, drilling rigs, factories, and what even seem to be residential buildings. These, as well as a number of structures located deep beneath the muddy ground far away from the humidifiers, seem to confirm the presence of some intelligent species who built all of this before disappearing. Unfortunately, the age of all of this architecture was very difficult to determine from orbit, as no model seemed to explain all the data. These structures, including the humidifiers themselves, were either much sturdier or much younger than they first appeared. Given the intense rains every night, it seemed as though everything should wash away relatively quickly, yet it all seemed almost perfectly intact; almost. A handful of collapsed humidifiers had been pinpointed, massive piles of wreckage that somehow still emitted varying amounts of heat and steam. The archaeological team was quite insistent that studying the collapsed structures was just as important for determining the history of this planet as was studying the intact ones.
Unfortunately, the most important research topic, the planet itself, remained unexplained. The closest thing to a reasonable hypothesis for its strangeness anyone had proposed was that it may be some form of planetary egg, as had been reported some time ago from the Commonwealth of Man. If this were true, it would make this world an extremely valuable second data point on such an incredible form of life, particularly considering how the lost colony-turned-rival empire had destroyed the creature that had hatched from the world-egg.
However exciting the prospect may be, Anvi knew that Captain Onobanjo was hoping it was incorrect; even if it was only the second ever found, that still meant it wasn’t new . And while Anvi herself quite liked the idea of finding a still-embryonic voidspawn egg, she suspected it was something else. Whatever the structures and missing civilization were on the surface, they had to be connected somehow .
Unfortunately, they were rapidly approaching the point at which they could learn no more from their vantage point in space; even the ongoing efforts of translating or decrypting the radio signals that some structures emit had run into a wall, with any of their own broadcasts directed at the planet being ignored. Thus, the meeting: the discussion that it was finally time to send the first exploratory drones to the surface, and where they should go.
While the drones themselves weren’t all that exciting to Anvi, what it entailed was .
The captain had made the mental leap from orbital surveying to surface exploration. Even if it was only in the form of automated drones for now, crewed expeditions would follow soon after.
And being First Officer, Anvi would be on those expeditions. She couldn’t have asked for a better opportunity to prove herself worthy of her own ship.
Back in her personal quarters, she peered out the window at the cloud-covered world, slowly spinning away beneath them: her ticket to her dream job. They had decided on the optimal location to launch the first drone: a particularly unique facility that sported not one, but two humidifiers, one still standing, and one collapsed. It gave the perfect opportunity to see both.
The drone would be launched first thing tomorrow.