Touchstone 1 - Stray

to survey the find. As planets go, Muina’s a juicy one. Large polar caps and a few arid splotches, but the rest a very habitable green and blue gem. Lots of lakes. Massive cities of empty, white blockish buildings. The Lonara did a quick aerial survey of the first big city they found, and could see no sign of human life, though plenty of animals. They set down on what looked like a parade ground, left a few drones, and reported back that the home world had been located at last.
    Both the Lonara and another ship, the Tsaszen , were sent to begin a more detailed exploration. Fifty crew altogether, a mixture of military and scientific specialists. The Tarens had known that Muina was dangerous – or had been when it was evacuated – so they’d expected to find it infested with Ionoth. But even before the Setari program began they’d developed plenty of effective anti-Ionoth weapons, and without their own cities and citizens in the way, that first expedition wasn’t really expecting major problems.
    They didn’t report back.
    A third ship, the Maszar , discovered only smoking rubble where the expedition was meant to be. The Maszar searched for survivors and found none, then returned to Tare. It was really sad reading the reports from that time. They had no idea what had happened. Had the ships been attacked by massives? Some kind of weapon? Sabotaged? There was a strong undertone in the reports that Kolar was suspected. The Maszar hadn’t even been able to find the drones.
    There was a lot of debate about going back in force or sending a small and very quiet mission. Small and quiet eventually won out. A ship called the Danna , carrying ten people. They tried to be sneaky, staying in the air a long time, landing well away from the city, scanning, scanning, scanning, and deploying a dozen drones. Half of them stayed with the ship and the other half went on a sled (‘sled’ is roughly what ‘deeli’, their name for their hovering transporters, translates to) to the site of the other crash to investigate. They arrived without incident and began sifting through the rubble, performing scans and searching for what seems to be the equivalent of a black box flight recorder. They were making good progress, not troubled at all by Ionoth or any other sign of attack, when they lost contact with their ship.
    When yet another ship was despatched to investigate why the Danna hadn’t returned, they found the five from the investigatory group camped beside the Danna ‘s shattered hulk. They had no idea why it had exploded. There’d been no attacks in the two days since, and they’d continued to do their scans and investigatory work and were very glad to be rescued, thank you very much.
    It took another exploding ship, the Netz , before KOTIS instituted a rule about ships only being able to remain on the planet for twelve hours. For their next attempt they established a camp of people on-planet and left them there, with regular two-day checkins. That worked really well for about a week, and they made good progress on exploring the city, looking for records and important structures and anything to unravel the mysteries of the past and present. It seemed smaller machines didn’t explode as quickly. Drones tended to not last more than a few days, but their sleds proved quite robust.
    Then a massive attacked them. About half the thirty people there died – were eaten. They tried again, a different site with more people. Four days later they vanished entirely, not even the bodies remaining, and no signs of battle.
    That all in the first year after Muina was rediscovered. And, twenty-nine years later, not much has changed. The Taren government reduced the permitted time on the planet to only three kasse. When they began to understand near-space a little better, they found that drones they set to power down instead of being constantly active usually didn’t stop working. The drones trundle about, a bit like the Mars Explorer, recording everything they see for an hour or so, and then transmit their recordings to a collection drone and shut down for the day.
    Satellites in orbit don’t explode, at least, and they’ve one up making a complete aerial world map. GoogleMuina! I could even look up my village. I still haven’t scratched the surface of the reports, just skipped through the main details. There’s too many for me to ever hope to read everything. And I haven’t found a single thing that seems worth telling Isten