mc776 | Nano Writing Month, 2017.18

Every day, write some bit of fiction. Preferably over 50 words, but there will be no standard beyond "something". Posting is entirely optional.

Our initial task had been to head back down to planetside and retrieve a few inert specimens.

There was no landing site near where the least mangled, vaporized, becindered, etc. bodies were located, which meant we had to land some distance away, hoof it to the target, and drag them back.

Meanwhile, it was clear that they were moving back into those areas and we'd have to get past them somehow.

To add another complication, it seemed that the least mangled, vaporized, becindered, etc. bodies were also the ones most quickly being eaten by the survivors. Some might have their eggs in them, according to at least one rather graphic scene that the aerodrone showed us.

Captain Alvarez initially deemed it conclusive evidence that we had not discovered a new species of people; Orgoth, Finkelstein, Gunnerbot and I could each name at least three cultures (albeit with overlap) we'd read about or encountered that engaged in ritualistic cannibalism of their war dead. In response to the word "ritualistic", she had us watch some of the clips where they were fighting each other over a segment of one of said dead, with some scrap of intestine hanging out of it. Bits of sickly brown goo were flung from that scrap as they fought.

A childhood memory flashed through my head of Uncle Karl drunkenly punching out Fr. Gabriel and taking the chalice by force one Sunday, the culmination of a year's escalating disagreement over the nature and purpose of a penance he had put him on. We were amazed that Fr. Gabriel had only sustained some bruises and a twisted ankle, when the blow had knocked him clean through the royal doors into the altar...

The doors...

"Hey! Stop the drone, turn back, a bit more, to the left... what's in that building over there?"

...

They started attacking us on sight when we landed. But no more: unlike the mass "bring them out that we may know them" welcoming committee from the other night, any given one of them only started attacking when we got near it and it wasn't busy doing something else. The attacks were so few and far between that the Trashpanda was dinging out periodic warnings that it should be set to low power mode when not in use, as the captain plinked perfect little central nervous system shots into each attacker with her .44 before the rest of us could even react.

Sometimes we faced more than one. Sometimes one of them would attack us right in front of another that was busy gnawing on a corpse: we'd kill it, the other one would just continue as though nothing happened. Other times it would turn and start on the fresher meat. Other times they'd forget us and start fighting each other instead.

We specifically watched for the following:

Coming to the aid of the wounded: never. Just ignored or finished them off for food.

One following the other to help fight us: ambiguous. When more than one attacked us, there would always be one first, but none of us ever noticed any communicative act taking place. The only exception: when they were already fighting and one of them turned away to attack us, then the other would follow it trying to continue the fight but upon noticing us would - sometimes - change targets.

Attempts to coordinate an attack: never. See above.

Attempts to retreat or attack from a better angle: occasional retreat if wounded.

Language: nothing we could pick up. We had spent about 18 man-hours before deploying going through the footage for patterns in gesture and sound. We managed to find:

howling in rage when attacking
howling in rage when hurt
howling in rage when dying
howling in rage when mating, which seemed to consist entirely of ambush attacks and did not appear at all consensual on part of the smaller victim which, from subsequent victim-eating and egg-laying footage of some of the perpetrators, was apparently the male
howling in rage when laying eggs (about half of them were always smashed after laying)
howling in rage when defecating
howling in rage upon seeing another move within a few metres of one's most recent fecal deposit
howling in rage upon seeing a corpse that had eggs in it (they would not eat any egg-infused corpse)
some kind of hrrmmm, hrrrrmmmm purring or rumbling when idle

Care of young: none. Orgoth snuck up behind one of them that we found laying some eggs in the carrion (this happened a lot) and waited until she had trudged off a safe distance before picking up a few. As he did so I, standing a few metres away, announced that he was picking them up and gestured in his direction. She attacked me and me only. We tried this a few times and it turned out we could do whatever we wanted with the eggs and they wouldn't even notice. Probably why they had to lay so many damn eggs to begin with.

"Could be a feint to make us think these weren't eggs, or that they otherwise weren't valuable. Some birds do that."

"Commander, a killdeer feigns injury to lure a predator away from her brood. What this creature did had no causal or symbolic relationship to Orgoth and the eggs. It clearly looked like it was responding to your voice and attacking you, not defending the eggs in any way."

Captain Alvarez picked up one of the squishy little glowing lime-green things and squinted at it. "Are these even eggs, though?"

"Well, we definitely know what their poop looks like." I found my hand already reaching for the disinfectant while I spoke. It wasn't until we were close-fighting like this that we learned that feces, thrown by hand or launched directly from the tail, were a common projectile weapon for them.

It was decided that samples be taken of both.

Most of the city streets were blanketed in a layer of their shells, along with all the poop. Most of these were clearly molts, though many of them were covered in purple-grey blood stains and claw and tooth marks. Samples were taken of these as well.

We were getting a bit more discreet in our movements by the time we made it to the building I thought looked like a church. Just around this corner, cross the street to avoid the couple of them hunched over a corpse (but train the camera on them because look! group activity!), cringe at the ear-splitting howls you never get used to upon them smelling an enemy nearby, move on when they think it's each other and start tearing each other to pieces (with more of those howls), scurry along and climb over the rubble "into" the roofless building with the shrine on the far end.

Everything was covered in bits of their shells. We stepped in and I saw it - the empty whiskey bottle tossed aside in the entry hall. Same brand our bountiful bastard quarry was known to drink.

Orgoth stopped and blinked. "Does anyone smell rotting meat?"

Everything had just smelled of feces and mould and strange alien body odour up to this point. At Finkelstein's feet was a dead one of them with a big round hole through its head. Most of it had been eaten but what was left was covered in tiny scavenging animals. I heard the captain and Orgoth make very girly-sounding noises of horror and disgust behind me as we all realized those tiny slimy scavenging animals had been discreetly crawling all over everything this whole time. I picked a couple of the misshapen fat wigglers off of the teeth of my chainsword and turned to Finkelstein who was already picking a few from the rotting head and placing them into specimen bags. We could study them later.

"How odd," said Finkelstein as we did this. "Why would they leave so much meat untouched?"

"Can anyone tell what kind of weapon caused this head injury?"

"Well, if it's not one of us, then it's either Guillaume or... something in this building..."

It was a long, tedious and stressful chore combing the place for traps while one's thoughts were constantly interrupted by loud, screeching howls that seemed to be designed to trigger every negative emotion in a sapient being's brain, only occasionally signalling actual danger. Fortunately the place itself was quite sensibly laid out: we started in a small narthex about the size of two shipping crates side by side; the walls on the far end were intact enough to block our view of the nave beyond, accessible primarily through an arched doorway eight feet deep that looked like they could survive a direct hit from the Ellobius' main guns. Two corridors led out from either side of the narthex, running along either side of the nave and leading to other rooms whose purpose could no longer be identified.

All the walls were ridiculously thick. The doorway into the nave was a little corridor in itself. Everything that was still standing was covered in deep and intricate carvings. Lots of scenes of mountains and plants of some sort, and something like... four-armed snake people? ...

"Oh my God, guys, guys! Up to the right! Above the dead guy!" Gunnerbot added little blinking arrows to all our helmet displays for emphasis; this didn't actually help, since he didn't know which way each person was facing, so we just looked at where he was pointing Finkelstein's helmet camera.

"Is that... an evolutionary progression?"

"Got the little fish - well, shrimp - coming out of the water and everything!"

"But look! It goes past the people stage and... turns..." Captain Alvarez looked along the progression, then down at the "dead guy".

We stood there looking at the scene for a few seconds. We barely even noticed the intermittent howling.

"So it means they were people?"

"Were." Orgoth did not sound very confident as he repeated that word.

Gunnerbot made a non-linguistic noise. It was a sad noise. I could only nod in agreement.

Captain Alvarez tilted her head, shifted her weight, walked around me to look at the carving from another angle, before finally breaking the moment of silence. "Wait, what the fuck is going on in this picture!? If they all devolved into these things then who did this carving!?"

Finkelstein nodded in partial agreement. "It is a very odd arrangement when you treat this as an absolute, uniform progression. But if you think about how evolution actually works, it's entirely possible that members of the more intelligent species had survived long enough to see the later forms evolve, and decided to create this record for whatever posterity might survive the degeneration."

The howling was getting to me again. "But if they were still around why would they let all this" - I gestured at all the literal crap around us - "happen!?"

"What do you propose they might have done to stop it?"

"Well, you know, just culled their numbers a bit. Build some barriers, keep them from breeding... contain them so they wouldn't be a threat..."

"Commander, let's suppose it really were that simple and, at that time, the species had already formed several distinct, non-overlapping groups exactly as depicted here with no intermediary forms that would immediately raise ethical concerns about what you have proposed - or, rather, escalate the already-existing concerns to the level of total deal-breaker. Consider that it is almost certain that there is some kind of technology in this city that Guillaume was using to control and weaponize the degenerate form that we have encountered. Now let's suppose that, at the latest, these carvings were made by these guys here" - they gestured toward the slightly-bored-looking form with the swords - "but did so in a world filled with people like these" - they gestured towards the angry hunched profiled figure, then at the one with the crown but no apparent calvarium - "who were perfectly willing to use these" - they made a broader gesture that included both the final carving and the rotting remains of the real thing - "to maintain their own power in the world, and thus had an interest in the proliferation of the latter."

Orgoth ran his gaze down the sequence again, then glanced at his own Trashpanda. "So your theory is that we're dealing with the remains of a civilization that got overwhelmed by its own bio-weapons?"

"I'm not necessarily saying that, but it is one of the possibilities. It could also be that this civilization had died out for some other reason and for whatever reason only the non-intelligent form survived."

The captain still didn't sound convinced. "Could it be that we're just reading this wrong and it isn't a progression at all? It could be a hierarchy of some sort."

One by one, each of us looked at the carvings, then at the captain, and shook our heads. Even Gunnerbot did so with Finkelstein's helmet camera. Maybe it was a cultural bias, but the reading as a sequential narrative was irresistible to all of us.

"I'm not saying I don't feel it either, I'm just saying these are friggin' aliens we know nothing about and their ideas about these things might have a totally different context from what we might expect."

I walked over to another wall. There was a depiction of a large battle between the highest-form snake-people. One of them, dressed in beautifully geometrically decorated armour, their helmet raised to reveal their face, was coiled and bent over cradling another who lay bare-chested and clearly pierced with a fatal wound. They gazed into each other's eyes with wordless, eternal love and grief. To the right was the first figure again, their helmet cast upon the ground, kneeling (to use the term loosely) before a grim, cruel figure with a scythe and empty eye sockets whose hard, angular face seemed not to contain any internal flesh. To the right of that was that first figure again, leaping off a cliff; beyond that, the mural was too defaced and broken to make sense of, but I caught something that looked like ocean waves and the scales of a very large fish.

One of them came crawling in and started attacking the dying figure in the first panel. Captain Alvarez took it down before it could do any damage.