Approach in Formation
Session: 2019-03-18
The records for the session before this one are lost. What remains is a list at the top of his next page, under two words — Last time — and it is enough to tell the shape of it.
The Hippocampus was ambushed on the way out. An Eoxian ship, his note says, that should not be here; it had come in from the Armada, and he marks it as the outlaw group. There was debris after, scrap and organic parts. Deku passed out and was dragged off. Then the quarantine zone, and the Drift Rock, and the Acreon.
His notes on the rock are the most careful thing on the page. A rocky asteroid, roughly a thousand feet across, irregular, airless, rock and metal. One face of it sheared clean away, with no impact crater, as though something had protected it. And the rock interfered with their scans. He wrote that down twice in different words, which is how you write a thing that bothers you.
The Acreon he describes the way you would describe an animal found alone in the wrong place: a medium transport, armed, hard-used, rough and alone. Three airlocks, the aft one open to vacuum. They docked. On the starboard side they repressurised and found the gravity working, the signs of a fight, and a dead space goblin. Somewhere in that first passage through her they met the Akatas.
Under that he wrote one more line, set apart: Undead do not show up on scan.
They rested eight hours aboard her. When they woke, one of them was gone, and almost at once they heard the Hippocampus detach from the hull.
The records have them at the bridge windows, watching the shuttle shrink into the dark. It was their only way out of the quarantine zone. They talked it over and agreed that Qwitch had most likely taken it to find medical help. Someone said, Actually — that is exactly what Qwitch would do. The records do not say who.
— I have always liked that they settled on the generous reading. A stranded group can turn on itself quickly. This one decided its missing member had gone for help, and then got on with the ship.
There were four of them now. His notes for the morning carry a single instruction, written large: Approach and search in formation!!! — Cover. His notes rarely raise their voice. This line has three exclamation marks. Whatever the lost session taught them about moving apart in a ship like this, it was learned hard.
They took the port passageway first. Bren Talic led, sneaking up the corridor and ending with a spin into the open. It was a kitchen. Nothing happened in it.
The next door opened on the crew quarters, and inside were two space goblins, Nug and Zerpuff, panicked and terrified. The fight lasted two rounds. It ended when a malfunctioning junk-laser detonated and killed them both. Whether they would have surrendered once they understood the party were not Akatas, nobody can now say.
Note the creature in the hollow log that does not strike.
Do not mistake fear for teeth.
— the Observances, from the Readings on Approach
The storeroom came next. The door was opened without anyone checking it for traps, despite being asked about it more than once, and a laser trap went off in the chest of the one in front. That was the party's reptilian member, who took it better than most would have.
In the port cargo hold they found another Akata, and the package the ambassador had asked them to carry. Bren Talic was adamant that it stay sealed and that they keep their agreement, and he talked the others round.
The starboard cargo hold held two more Akatas, and nothing else.
The Akatas left something behind. Both Bren and Deku caught the disease they carry, and by the end of the search the party's two front-line fighters were sickened and fatigued.
A xenodruid learns early that contagion is an ecology of its own. It moves along contact, and contact is what a front line is for. The two who stood closest to the Akatas were the two who caught it. It was nobody's mistake. It is how the system works.
His notes had already recorded what they knew of the creatures. Akata — aberration. Cause disease. Susceptible to salt water. Those three lines found their way, much later, into the Field Canon.
ON CONTAGION — aberrant fauna in sealed hulls (later additions)
Scans read the living. The undead pass beneath them. An empty readout is not an empty room.
Some stone will not be read. Note it, and stop trusting the instrument near it.
A hull open to vacuum at one end has been entered, or left, by that end.
Enter in formation. Keep cover between the party and the unopened door.
Check the door before the hand. If the hand must go first, send the hardest one.
Not every creature aboard is the predator. The frightened hide where people sleep.
A faulty weapon in a small room ends what talk might have ended.
Know the vector before contact. The akata carries sickness. Contact passes it.
Salt water harms it. Carry what harms it.
The sickness takes the front rank first. Expect the strongest to be the weakest by nightfall.
(Kopalo, from field notes; the Acreon.)
— the Field Canon, on Contagion, later additions
The Canon tidies his notes into rules. The notes themselves are less sure. They are a list of things learned too late to help, written down so that they would not be learned late again. Novitiates are taught the section as procedure. I think it reads better as a record of a bad day.
That is where the records leave them: four in a ship that was not theirs, with two of them sick, the shuttle gone, the crew unaccounted for, and a set of double doors at the back of the ship that nobody had yet opened.
The last line on his page is short. Next time — access to logs.
He was still trying to find out what had happened to the crew.