Any tracks in the frost around the air/raft? No, but it looks like there might be at the caves.
How much charge has the air/raft got? Quite a lot.
Head over to the caves. There’s someone in the caves. He’s very paranoid and says he has a gun. It is not visible. He’s Erich Vaalan, commander of the rifthauler 5A7. Tass was one of his crew, which he acknowledges. Tass is willing to talk to him. We take the rations from the ATV too.
We go back with Tass and the rations. We call him and Tass talks to him. She confirms who he is, and they seem to be gradually getting towards an understanding. We leave Gani with Tass while Konash and I go and check the buildings.
The nearest one to the cliff has an emergency shelter inside it. Nothing else apart from quite a lot of litter, betraying a hasty departure. Meanwhile Tass and Erich are getting closer together. Tass is beginning to get angry, Erich has not noticed. Then she punches him and he falls down. She’s cross about the lockdown, quite reasonably. Erich is not seriously hurt, but is unconscious. He’s pretty starved and a bit dehydrated.
There are carvings inside the cave. I take a look and find they are disturbing, I don’t remember clearly what they depict, and I both do and don’t want to go back. We take him to the ship, decontaminate and restrain him, give him an IV and ask Akashirsha to watch him while he recovers. Kinash, Gani and I go back to look at the caves. They all have carvings. This argues for past habitation on this world. They would have been degraded by freeze/thaw cycles, so they can’t terribly old. Gani wonders if they’re psionic. I reckon they’re more like basilisks (pattern that do things to the visual nervous system).
We rig a camera on the end of a pole to get some pictures of the carvings. We aren’t going to look at the pictures, they are for the later investigation. Gani rigs that up
Talk to Erich, who has come round. He’s the commander and chief engineer of 5A7. He confirms the debris cluster, which looked like some kind of unfamiliar hull metal and was in an eccentric orbit round the planet. The astrogator (Niimu Ugaman) came down with tendrills first. People fled, he took the air/raft by himself, and say the other one leaving. He has his ID card, so we should be able to lift the lockdown on 5A7. He hasn’t seen any activity since escaping Candling.
We plan to decontaminate and load the air/raft and then head to the Observatory. We get lunch and then Konash takes the pictures of the cave insides. We decontaminate the air/raft and load it aboard 4A4. It’s getting late so we eat and sleep here, then head for the Observatory.
At the Observatory, there’s nowhere big enough to land the ship, and there’s a crashed air/raft nearby, which looks like a survivable accident. We fly off some distance to land, and overhaul the air/raft, which holds six people. Konash, Gani and I fly up there. The only sensible landing place is between the buildings.
We’re told to “hold it right there” with a shotgun pointed at us. It’s in the hands of a female naval petty officer on a crutch. We convince her that we’re rescuers, and two more people come out. She is Petty Officer Second Class Amelia Zurich, and the other two are Dr David Mil, an exobiologist who is in a couple with Zurich, and Dr Simnon Kiin, an astronomer.
They are all from the Candling Station crew. They’ve been surviving via compressor masks. We take them back to 4A4. Their story of the breakdown at Candling Station is consistent with what we have. Mil asks us about the tendril creatures’ speed of movement. He think the speed we describe is faster than he saw, but it’s hard to be certain; we didn’t get much of a look at them.
Next, we go after the ATV. We calibrate how well our one shows up on 4A4’s sensors first, and then use them for the search. We find the missing ATV in a gully, on its side, not obviously badly damaged. We land the ship some way off where there is level ground, and Konash, Gani and I take the air/raft to the ATV. No tracks in the area except tyre tracks. We land where we can be seen from the window, but there are tendrils inside. We leave it alone and return to 4A4.
We fly back to Candling Station. Dr Mil reckons destroy the tendril mass and don’t take samples. We’ll take his advice on that, he knows more about it. PO2 Zurich reckons she’s up to being our backstop. We give her ammo.
The next problem is how to burn it. Getting the Candling Station food processor to make volatile hydrocarbons will be hard, because those machines are built to be very reliable and difficult to mess up.
Tass points out we have lots of hydrogen available, and we realise the fuel processing plant stores the oxygen it makes when extracting hydrogen from water. That’s normally used for life support, to improve the atmosphere inside the buildings. We can build an oxy-hydrogen flamethrower, and mount it on the air/raft. The engineers set to work and have two successes on Armoury (Heavy Weapons).
Meanwhile, Konash and I take Drs Mil and Kiin, plus PO2 Zurich, to the Mission Control building, because they have credentials on the computer systems there. Everyone is in vacuum suits. Everything on the computers gets sent to and saved on 4A4.