Bestial Planet

Chapter 17: Diversions

Yora, Roisin and Lancieta were in the communications room, the first two sitting at a coffee table while Lancieta was pacing. Yora was tinkering with a translator upgrade and Roisin had collected a stack of books in the room over the past few months. Lancieta sat down and looked at the other two in contemplative silence for a moment.

"He's been gone for at least a month. I hope he hasn't gotten himself hurt... or stuck. He still tries to act like he has opposable thumbs."

Roisin answered without looking up from her book. "He'll be fine Lancieta. What we need to be worrying about is finalizing our contact protocol since more and more Humans are waking up."

"We still haven't done that in 3 and a half Earth years?" Lancieta asked, more rhetorically than actually wanting an answer.

"Well, you and Jinrai have come up with a few plans but you've never said you were ok with them one way or the other Captain." Yora said looking up from his project for the first time in hours. Lancieta was trying to rationalize her predilection for not finalizing a protocol.

"It's not going to be as easy to explain what happened to other humans as it was to Panzer, especially if they lost their memories as Panzer has... I wonder if he's remembered anything else."

"Captain, to be fair, he did almost attack us and then he tried to starve himself to death."

"Exactly, not everyone is going to be as easy to deal with."

"I don't follow ma'am." Yora put down his tools. He was having trouble wrapping his head around what she meant. Lancieta responded immediately as if she'd practiced the answer to that specific question.

"What if they try to form a militia against us? What if they don't want our help? Worst case scenario: they set up posts around the sections and wait us out. Slowly killing us off as we try to scrounge materials. We can't live in these Sections forever no matter how many miles long they are. Our power sources are running out and they're falling apart."

"Ah... I hadn't thought of that." Yora conceded reluctantly while knowing that Lancieta was still worried about making concrete decisions that affected others.

"That's why you're a junior engineer and I'm Captain, Yora."

"Clearly..."

At that moment an emergency communication came through and a frantic Layrok "The assassin" as Vould would refer to her, appeared on the main screen.

"Captain, transmission from intelligence officer Layrok."Lancieta nodded to Rould and gave him a wink. He nodded his head and disappeared from the screen as Layrok appeared. She was frantic.

"Captain! Ma'am! Someone's awake and they've been outside for an hour! We don't know what to do! The twins are freaking out and..."

Kor and Jora were standing behind Layrok, glaring at her for over-reacting.

"We're not freaking out!"

"Yeah! She is! We just asked her why not talk to the Kangaroo?"

"Why not! I told them why not captain! Kangaroos, as Roisin told me, have the ability to kick with immense force! What if the human gets angry with us like you said Panzer did! The human could destroy one of our bodies! We don't have the facilities to repair our bodies properly! We've run through most, if not all, the spare parts we could find just trying to recover from the crash landing! I don't know how to communicate properly with other lifeforms! Why do you think I maintained the intelligence archive! I'm a great fighter, sure, but that's useless when trying to communicate to someone that the reason why their entire world changed is because your ship was sabotaged by some asshole war monger!"