The humans had noticed that, too. Ratthi was saying, “What are we thinking? That they really did find, or build, an underground habitat in a Pre-CR artificial cave system?”
Iris flicked through the reports the mission teams had assembled so far on the colony’s development. “We know they had the construction equipment. It may have seemed like a better option than a surface settlement, considering how close they are to the terraformer and the weather up here.”
Ratthi was dubious. “Even knowing about the alien contamination at the main site?”
Iris’s brow was furrowed, like the conclusions she was drawing troubled her. She said, “I was hoping the part about finding a Pre-CR dig was apocryphal, something the colonists came up with to make the stories about the splinter group who went off to live at the pole more interesting.”
Ratthi thought that over. “It would make sense, with an elaborate Pre-CR structure always within sight of the main colony, to make up legends about another even stranger one somewhere else. And the rugged band of adventurers, or alternately, the scary weird people, who went to live in it.”
Iris’s mouth made a tighter line. “It’s better than being honest about the fact that you had a split within your community bad enough to send a group looking for another home as far away as possible.” She shook her head and sighed a little. “It would be nice to know why it happened. It might help the colonists become more cohesive about moving toward an evacuation if we had a better understanding of their history.”
“You can’t do therapy on a whole colony,” Tarik said, “no matter how much they need it.”
“But if the story is true and they did find a Pre-CR site up here,” Ratthi added, “it makes the whole thing that much more mystifying.”
It should be reassuring that humans don’t get what other humans are thinking, either, but it just highlights how fucked up human neural tissue can be.
Ratthi waved a hand beside his head, like he was shooing away the idea. “We should stop speculating with no data. It’s much more likely that they’re living in an Adamantine-era structure created by the original terraforming crew, or that they built one themselves with the digging equipment that was left behind.”
Tarik was impatiently cycling through the long-range camera displays. “Speaking of data, I’m not seeing any indications of any kind of habitation—no roads, no structures, nothing. Peri, I don’t suppose a miracle happened and the terraformer stopped interfering with your pathfinder scan?”
Miracles are unlikely. ART-drone put the annotated pre-mission chart we had made into the team feed and on visual on the shuttle’s floating display surfaces. The chart basically said there were three probable reasons why we hadn’t noticed a secondary colony/habitation site on this continent earlier during ART’s initial scans of the planet: (1) the colonists here had deliberately meant for their power output and signal activity to be concealed by the massive interference broadcast by the terraforming engines’ normal operation; (2) the colonists put their site where they wanted to put it and didn’t consider the fact that they would be concealed by the terraforming interference because the other colonists knew where they were so the subject had just never come up; (3) they were all dead, due to the alien contamination or some other cause, and there was no power output or signal activity to detect. ART-drone added, As noted previously, limited signal traffic from pathfinders and the warning buoys is still possible. The humans here should be able to detect our comm pings at this close range. So they may be dead, their equipment may be damaged, or they may be deliberately ignoring us in an effort to stay concealed.
Ratthi frowned at the big patchy blanks in the incoming survey data. “We have no idea how much they know about what happened in the main colony area, either. They could be ignoring us because they’re too afraid to answer.”
ART-drone said, That would demonstrate a more developed sense of survival than we have previously encountered here.
“Benefit of the doubt, Peri,” Iris said. “I’m going to record an explanation of who we are and why we’re attempting to contact them and put it on broadcast.”
Since shuttle and pathfinder scans were useless, a search for human habitation would have to be visual. Video recording wasn’t affected by the terraforming interference, but since this was a shuttle and not a specialized survey vehicle, there was no search-and-interpretation package for visual data, only for scan data, because no one thought they’d ever need it.
ART-drone had already given me full access to all the feeds off the shuttle and had opened a new joint processing space for us. I pulled all the visual terrain data from the shuttle cameras and got it formatted for queries. ART-drone saw what I was filling our shared space with and sent me a list of topographical features and disruptions that might indicate human surface or subsurface activity. That saved a lot of time. I started running the comparison in ART-drone’s processing space.
Tarik curved the shuttle away from the terraforming engines and put it into a holding pattern while Iris got her broadcast recorded and sent. The humans talked about what to do next while Iris and Ratthi pulled up the original survey data to look at again. Or what we had left of it, since the original Adamantine files had been intentionally corrupted in what was possibly an attempt to protect the colony from the hostile corporate takeover that had destroyed the corporation. While they were scrolling through the data, Tarik said, “Does SecUnit want to weigh in on this?”
I had ScoutDrone3 up on the ceiling of the compartment, and it watched Ratthi glance back at me. I don’t know what he saw; my face felt normal. But Ratthi has watched me work on a lot of stuff, and I guess there was something about me that told him I was busy. (It was a big search, not something I could have done without ART-drone’s input and extra space. Plus it generated a shit-ton of false positives that I had to pull and study individually before I could dismiss them. (Example 243602–639a: no, that’s not a human-built structure, it’s just a weird rock.) This was not the kind of process I could do in background, even with ART’s help.) Ratthi said, “It’s working on something now.”
Three seconds later I hit a result. I still needed to finish the rest of the search to look for other indications, but the timing on this was too perfect to resist. I paused the process, said, “I’ve got a possible landing area on visual,” and sent it into the team feed and to the display surface.
To the northwest of the terraforming engines’ mound, a couple of kilometers out of the danger zone, was a section of ground, dust-covered but clearly too flat to be natural. Dirt had drifted up to disguise the edges, but what was visible indicated an octagonal shape. Also, it was about the right size for a couple of the colony aircraft to land and sit next to each other without pushing safety requirements. (The main colony had three left of the original set of air vehicles, and a few built-from-scratch models. The originals looked like early, half-assed versions of the company’s hoppers, with scratched and fading paint in the Adamantine brand colors. I could see why there wouldn’t be a lot of visiting back and forth, even if the two groups had been friendly; I wouldn’t have wanted to fly across a planet in one of those things, either.)
Ratthi expanded the display surface across the upper portion of the front port. Iris studied the image, nodding. “Okay, that’s got to be it. Good job, SecUnit.”