Seven
On the surface
“I don’t like the looks of this,” Hector Gomp muttered quietly to his Captain.
On the other hand, Jean Barrett was frankly spellbound, despite the fix they found themselves in. Barrett and her Security troops, along with Hudson Amole, his three scouts, and his newly returned hacker/assistant Darrel Weems, were clustered around the shuttle, behind a field of tanglefoot and e-beam cutters.
Surrounding the meadow, keeping a safe distance for the time being, were a fascinating group of creatures. They did indeed look like upright octopi – but several of the larger ones wore roughly cured hides over their heads.
“Look at them,” Jean said softly. “Look how they move.”
The circle of – cephalopods? – swayed back and forth, almost as though they were dancing. The larger ones, each of which carried a wooden stabbing spear, would let out one of the deep rumbling sounds – all of them, in unison. From the hills around, more rumbling sounds came faintly in reply.
“They’re communicating,” Gomp opined. “Bet you anything there are more of them coming.”
“I bet you’re right,” Jean agreed. “Hudson, I hope your men have plenty of ammo – it looks like there are forty or fifty of them out there, and more on the way.”
The wealthy entrepreneur was distinctly pale and sweaty. “Our automatic defenses will hold them off.”
“For how long?” Jean waved a hand to encompass the small meadow, with the shuttle and three opened cargo containers sitting in the middle. “This isn’t much room for a colony.”
Amole ignored her. “Men,” he said, “I’m getting in the shuttle. Weems, you too. Captain Barrett, I’m afraid I’m going to have to borrow your ship for a while. I sure do wish you the best of luck here. Opp, Gatnz, Simms, cover them until you’re all on board.”
Jean felt her datapad vibrate in her jacket pocket. She pulled it out and looked at it, then laid a hand on Hector Gomp’s arm as he started to unsling his carbine. “Let them get on board,” she told him.
“What? Let them take our shuttle?”
Jean held her datapad out so Gomp could read the text message on the screen:
HAVE CONTROL OF THE SHIP AND SHUTTLE. WHAT IS YOUR SITUATION?
Amole and his men backed carefully into the shuttle, weapons pointed back at the Shade Tree crew. A moment later, Jean heard a squawk of alarm.
“The damn shuttle won’t answer controls!”
Hudson Amole’s head popped out of the shuttle hatch, his face a mask of alarm. “What did you do?”
“There’s always a bigger fish,” Jean told him. “In this case, you assumed you had the best hacker on this trip – but you didn’t. I suggest you get off my shuttle, you bastard.”
“Look at those things,” one of Amole’s troops said. “They’re changing color – looks almost like they’re dancing. What the hell?”
Jean turned away from Amole where he and his men scrambled out of the shuttle. She raised her datapad, slowly, and easily, and thumbed the RECORD button.
Hector Gomp shot his Captain a questioning look. “For the science types,” Barrett explained. “They’ll want vid of this, bet on it.”
***
The treeline
There were a dozen pods of creatures on hand now. The hunt leader of the pod with the wounded member was still the largest, oldest, and most colorful, and so the other hunt leaders and their pods followed its actions. The first hunt leader led them in what looked like an elaborate dance, bobbing, weaving, waving carrying tentacles and flashing patterns across skins layered with chromatophores. It looked like a dance, but it wasn’t a dance – it was a way of exchanging information, of exploring alternatives, of analyzing the situation before them, of evaluating risks.
It was a plan.
Unseen by the group of strange creatures gathered around the large gray object in the meadow, gatherers in the woods were picking dried pods of a local plant, breaking them down into a fibrous mass, and winding them around round throwing cobbles. When each gatherer had several such missiles, they brought them to the fire tenders that stood in the ring of creatures.
Suddenly, the elaborate dance stopped.
The shuttle
“Look,” Yvette Langstrom said. “They’re stopped that dance, or whatever it was.”
“Nobody move,” Gomp said quietly. “And for the love of Pete, don’t shoot!”
Jean lowered her datapad. “Is that smoke? Coming from just behind them.”
A smoking missile suddenly shot towards them, a small, round object trailing sparks and flame. The object landed between Amole and Weems, causing the hacker to yelp in surprise.
“What the hell?” Hector Gomp stepped over, stomped out the small grass fire the missile started.
“Look,” Jean Barrett said. They all looked up as thirty or more fiery missiles arced towards them. The flaming projectiles landed in the calf-high grass, quickly setting it ablaze all around the knot of humans.
Hector Gomp exploded into action. “Oh shit! Yvette, grab the extinguishers outta the shuttle. Mickey, cover us! Captain, I suggest you get in the shuttle, get ‘er ready to take off. I don’t think these things want us here.”
Hudson Amole had other ideas. “Open fire!” he barked. His ‘scouts’ replied, snapping carbine shots off at the ring of creatures. Several creatures fell, wounded or dead – and the rest responded by suddenly wheeling clockwise, then counter-clockwise. The patterns of chromatophores on their bodies flashed green, brown, yellow, tan, matching the forest background with uncanny accuracy – and making hitting an individual all but impossible.
“Turn on the defenses!”
The auto-defenses were lightweight e-beam cutters, slaved to a millimeter-band radar, controlled by a simple robotic brain programmed to fire on anything moving outside a set perimeter. That perimeter was defined by a force-field fender, a barely visible line of energy that the attackers couldn’t pass through easily, but that directed energy and bullets could. The fender formed a hundred-meter circle, with the shuttle at the center.
The flaw was that the fender only extended about four meters from the ring of emitters laid on the ground. The fender was designed to keep out wildlife, not hostile, intelligent creatures.
“What the hell?” Hector Gomp looked at his Captain. “Are you seeing this?”
One of the creatures ran into the fender only to be repelled by a cloud of sparks. Without a pause, several others extended tentacles, located the nearly-invisible fender, and then…
“Holy shit,” Jean Barrett breathed. “They’re making a pyramid.”
The e-beam cutter played across the field, cutting off tentacles, slicing gaps in the line of creatures, which responded by flowing liquidly together again. The pyramid grew in seconds, reaching the four-meter height of the fender – and then several creatures toppled over inside the protected area. Two were cut apart by the e-beams, but six others rushed the tight knot of humans. Hector Gomp, Yvette Langstrom and Mickey Crowe responded with carbine shots, as did Amole’s scouts. Jean dove inside the shuttle, started the drivers.
“Hold them back!” Gomp shouted outside.
One of the creatures slid around behind the shuttle, despite taking several carbine shots and having one tentacle sliced off by an e-beam. It stumbled over the cable powering the defense system – the cable hooked to the external power supply at the rear of the shuttle. The cable came loose. The defenses went down.
“Oh, shit, here they come.” Gomp risked a look over his shoulder. Captain Barrett was standing in the shuttle’s open port, motioning to him, come on.
The Security Chief was distracted by a squawk from Yvette Langstrom. He looked towards her, aware of the ring of creatures rushing them, hearing shouting, carbine shots. One of the larger creatures, one with a hide over its body, leaped through the air, wrapped Langstrom in a nest of lashing tentacles, and rolled rapidly away.
“Yvette!” Gomp shouted. He couldn’t shoot at the fleeing creature, couldn’t do anything, not with one of his people wrapped up in its carrying tentacles. To his right, Amole’s men were firing away, backing towards the shuttle. To his right, he saw Mickey Crowe fire the last shots in his carbine, drop it on its carrying sling, and draw his fighting knife. He fended off one creature by grabbing a tentacle, slashing – the tentacle came off in his hand. He threw it over his shoulder and stabbed again, fighting a defensive action as he withdrew towards the shuttle. The shuttle’s drivers were whining, louder and louder.
Then Gomp felt a tentacle wrap around his ankle and pull. He fell, losing his grip on his carbine. Something struck his temple. The world went dark.
Jean saw her two Security troops dragged away, but there wasn’t anything she could do from the hatch of the shuttle. Mickey Crowe was in the hatch itself, fighting one of the octopus-things; he finally dispatched it with his fighting knife even as he toppled backwards into the shuttle, the creature falling on top of him, covering him with thin green blood.
Jean Barrett leaped into the pilot’s seat and hit the hatch controls. She heard shouts from outside, but ignored them, firing thrusters and leaving the ground.
She was dimly aware of Crowe buckling himself into the co-pilot seat. She glanced at him; he was covered in green liquid but seemed undamaged. “Watch out your side,” she ordered. “I’m taking a quick run around the area.”
One hand on the control yoke, Jean took the shuttle up about a hundred meters above the trees, made a slow circuit of the area. Amole’s men took a few shots at the shuttle, no doubt out of rage at being left behind, but small arms had little effect on a shuttle built to take planetary gravity well transits in stride. Jean watched as the three hired guns used grenades to blast a hole in the ring of creatures and fled, dragging Amole and the hacker along.
“Well,” Jean said, somewhat rhetorically. As she watched, the surviving creatures milled about for a few moments, flashing and flailing, before pouring into the woods after the rich man and his employees.
She turned to Crowe. “Did you see which way they took Gomp and Langstrom?”
Crowe shook his head.
“All right.” She stabbed at a control. “Shade Tree, Barrett here.”
“Shade Tree,” the cool voice of the Exec replied instantly. “Good to hear from you.”
“Just wait,” Jean answered. “Mickey Crowe and I are heading your way now. The locals have Gomp and Langstrom, and Amole and his crew are running like hell, with a bunch of them on their tails. Get the whole Security crew stood up and armed, we have to come get our people back.”
“And Amole?” the Exec asked.
“Fuck him,” Barrett answered. She jammed the shuttle’s throttle to the stops, angling for orbit. She saw Crowe gesture towards the passenger compartment, looked back, saw the corpse of the creature. “Oh, yeah – tell Doc Dodd we’re bringing her a sample.”
“A sample?”
“Yes. Tell her to get her post-mortem kit out. I want to know what these things are.”
***
To see more of Animal’s writing, visit his page at Crimson Dragon Publishing or Amazon.
Operation Pointed Stick has begun! I am anxiously awaiting the rescue of Gomp and Yvette.
The mistake was not gunning all the ‘pods down to start with.
There, I said it.
Having Starfleet Command up your ass with both hands and a flashlight isn’t really the best ending…
Eh…less obvious than the nuke incident…
Never give up! Never surrender!
corpse of the creature
Hope that isn’t an unwarranted assumption.
Can you imagine if these creatures reproduced by fission?
Trouble with Tribbles but with adaptive camouflage tentacle monsters? You just might have something here!
Trouble with Tribbles but with adaptive camouflage tentacle monsters?
I think I saw that anime. I seem to recall a lot of … fluids.
And this is one of the reasons why I don’t eat octopus…
OK, now I gotta quibble – camouflage in what is introduced as an intelligent top-of-the-local-food-chain predator that doesn’t engage in same-species warfare?
Did it say somewhere that the TM’s don’t engage in intra-species warfare?
Also, camouflage is absolutely an advantage for hunting, and it appears that they use it as a means of communication as well. Sometimes that’s how the evolutionary mutation cookie crumbles.
I seem to recall the group mind was not just the immediate pod. Maybe I got that wrong.
It is a collective, which means no war between tribes. One mind, multiple creatures. Kinda like democrats.
No war between tribes of democrats? Bruh, have you ever heard the hardcore welfare statists going at it with the VHE environmentalists? Or the Stalinists versus the Trotskites?
When the Left seems united, it’s because they’re teaming up to crush some of their common enemies. Kinda like the events in the story?
I was making a joke!
Oh. Well, okay. looks for the contrail of whatever passed over my head
Have you ever seen a lion in the grass? No? Neither has anyone else.
I don’t see a hunting application or flaming missiles. So, these creatures know warfare.
Yes. Impressive siegecraft from “primitives”.
Eh, flushing game out of hiding/dens is a hunting thing. Heck, ISTR that there are some birds that spread fires for that purpose:
https://altoona.psu.edu/feature/researching-firehawks
Telepath
On Nov. 5, Americans hired Donald Trump to do three things: put more money into their pockets; lower prices for gas, groceries and rent and restore order at the southern border.
Trump was not hired to gut the Justice Department, abolish the FBI, pardon the Jan. 6 rioters, weaken our intelligence agencies, eliminate the Department of Education or “go wild on health.”
Trump’s initial nominations of Rep. Matt Gaetz (R-Fla.) for attorney general (now withdrawn), Pete Hesgeth for secretary of Defense, Tulsi Gabbard as director of national intelligence, Robert F. Kennedy Jr. as secretary of Health and Human Services, and Mehmet Oz as administrator of the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services go far beyond the directives he received from voters.
——-
Vivek Ramaswamy, who is working with Elon Musk and his Department of Government Efficiency, says that Musk “doesn’t bring a chisel, he brings a chainsaw, and we’re going to be taking it to that bureaucracy.” Ramaswamy added, “It’s going to be a lot of fun.”
But chainsaws are not what the voters ordered. The “fun” will stop when they conclude that less government is very different from no government.
The man knows precisely what the voters want; every single one of them.
I did.
#metoo
I was voting for flame throwers, not chainsaws.
Me three!
Chain saws, wood chippers and flamethrowers.
Why skimp?
Bulldozers covered in concrete and steel plate.
Last I heard voters wanted racism, sexism, and white supremacy.
E) all of the above
Trump was not hired to gut the Justice Department, abolish the FBI, pardon the Jan. 6 rioters, weaken our intelligence agencies, eliminate the Department of Education or “go wild on health.”
I think he promised to do everyone of those things at one point or another.
So, yes that is what we voted for.
Yes. He talked about all those things, and so did the people campaigning with him.
Damn straight. I sure as hell voted for a chainsaw.
The statist authoritarians never tire of telling Trump what he should be doing.
I am still a fan of TOK’s suggestion that these be called ‘briar patch stories’. Oh no! Trump is going to take a chainsaw to govt. bureaucracy? Oh my! What ever will we do? Whatever you do Mr. Twoscoops, dont improve on the efficient application of American citizens money! Anything but that!
Meanwhile in Lithuania:
https://www.zerohedge.com/geopolitical/gps-jamming-dhl-cargo-plane-crashed-short-runway-near-lithuania-airport
Interesting that some think there is fire prior to landing. Seems more likely than GPS jamming or some other fuckery.
ILS approach. So, GPS is irrelevant.
A mile short. TAWS/GPWS should have provided multiple warnings.
No obvious reason for this to happen short of a complete fuckup by the crew or serious mechanical failure happening at the worst possible moment.
The video shows what looks like controlled flight until there is a severe pitch down movement just before impact.
They were way too low a mile before the runway. My initial reaction is suicide by pilot.
Yeah not a GPS issue IMO. Had a bad readback at one point, but seemed to correct it. Suck to be a technician there right now because it calls into question if the ILS glidepath was off or if they were putting out harmful information (like they were working on it and had wrong info being radiated out).
However, that steep pitch down about ~50 ft from the ground is not good. I am surprised that the second pilot supposedly lived.
There’d be NOTAM if the ILS was being worked on right?
Oh correction, it wasn’t a pitch down, it banked. Thats a tough one and blackbox will clear it all up on what happened. Pilot and second seat should have known they were way too low unless they programmed something extremely wrong and were not monitoring out the glass and just watching their avionics.
Yes. I was just speaking from what it feels like when an aircraft using your systems has an accident. Not saying it was a factor or if they were even doing maintenance. It just makes you think “Did I do something wrong…”
Pilot sounded calm. I would be interested to also see their automation from AT perspective.
You are right. I thought it was a pitch down motion at first.
Total crap in there.. I don’t want to listen to the audio.. Watching Charlie Victor Romeo was hard enough.
Unless the Audio says “ILS RW 19”.. I won’t assume.. I have had GPS lock disappear a couple of times.. once SW of Washington DC, and another time on an RNAV approach into KMHT… Since I was visual at the time the system posted the error, I still landed.
Forgetting Die Hard2.. you can’t move an ILS, and the transmitter is local, and directional.
I see a statement about QNH readback mismatch.. but one milibar will make no difference in the altimeter setting.
Go Vikes!
https://x.com/RelocatedYeti/status/1861119057749008831
How many super bowls have the Vikes lost?
Haven’t you figured out that’s out favorite part of this?
Too many. It would have been better if they lost in the playoffs before reaching the Super Bowl.
Better to have Super Bowled and lost than to never Super Bowled at all.
At least they weren’t consecutive years
Tundra:
/sits here watching the Browns once again not make it to a Superbowl
All of them. Most years by the 8th game of the season.
Neph:
We vikings fans will be right there with you. It’s our destiny and what makes us still enjoy the fine and pleasant misery of a letdown!
Can you say “WIDE LEFT!!”?
So you’re saying it was complete bullshit?
https://www.nbcnews.com/politics/justice-department/jack-smith-files-drop-jan-6-charges-donald-trump-rcna181667
So, legal-type Glibs – will the charges be dropped with prejudice, or are they just biding their time?
Without.
I’m sure they’ll pass it off as, “There’s no point in going forward because he can do unfair things as President like pardon himself, and the SC gave him unlimited power to do things like order Seal Team 6 to kill the prosecutors.”
Also, checks for this circus were cashed. No backsies.
Does this mean we’ll never get a ruling on the legality of appointing Smith as a special prosecutor without Senate confirmation?
Now that I think about it…
The whole “fire tender” morph. Unless technological progress is super-stagnant on the octoplanet, that suggests to me that the cephaloentity can consciously decide on new body forms. It wouldn’t have time to evolve naturally.
Please forgive me a small rant.
I don’t watch a lot of TV and most of what I do watch is from the BBC or with British presenters.[1] For many years I’ve enjoyed the BBC’s “Have I Got News For You” of which there are usually two series of ten-or-so episodes a year. Yesterday I downloaded the latest episode, poured myself a drink, and settled down to watch it. I lasted 10 minutes. It’s turned from making fun of the news to Totally Partisan and it’s not funny. The best simile I can come up with is watching a non-athletic Junior High nerd compete in a compulsory sportsball event.[2] Yes, from the spectator’s standpoint the ineptness of the player compared to the athletic jocks[3] is notable and smirk-worthy but after the reveal it just becomes one of those things. You wouldn’t spend the whole game laughing at him.[4]
Except they now do. The latest episode started with a demonstration about the new British estate tax law concerning farmland, with a skewering of Jeremy Clarkson, someone who has done infinitely[5] more than anyone to expose of bureaucratic plight of the British farmer, and then started on Donald Trump. That’s when I paused the episode never to return.
HIGNFY used to be funny. It used to be comedic. Pointing and laughing at the Other Side just because they’re the Other Side isn’t funny and isn’t comedy. I see it as a measure of desperation. They’re so intellectually bankrupt they can’t think of anything else to do. Sites like the Babylon Bee[6] are funny because they still have the capability of understanding, encompassing, and extending a position into the absurd. The BBC has lost this.
End of rant. Thank you for your time.
Footnotes:
[1] Professor Alice Roberts! The next series of “Digging for Britain” should be coming out early next year.
[2] I have no idea how I conceived of this.
[3] Or even non-non-athletic non-nerds AKA normals.
[4] Any mythical libertarian women who want to chime in here are welcome to do so.
[5] Literally. I’m not aware of anyone else.
[6] I refuse to confirm or deny the rumor that the BB gets all its best ideas from here.
Forgive? We should thank you for the warning. You saved some of us some time I’m sure.
I appreciate a rant that contains footnotes.
<===
That is some professional ranting right there.
We really do have world class ranters.
But no bibliography.
I’d call it scholarly ranting, but that’s not necessarily a compliment these days. (Glibs academics excepted, of course.,)
Once Project 2025 is enacted, Vox.com, Msnbc.com, and Atlantic.com will all take you here.
I tried Have I Got News For You based on your recommendation. Parts of it were funny, but I noticed the partisan bent, too.
The BBC’s QI (Quite Interesting) is a BBC panel show I still watch. It’s much like HIGNFY but so far has a strict no-politics rule, like your better class of dinner party.
Re Lawfare – The best response, and it looks like Trump will do it, is to not adopt these tactics but punish the people who did.
It will be a fine line to walk, but I agree. If someone broke the law, prosecute them, but stop there.
This is why I like his stance on censorship. He can easily adopt the “anti-disinformation” stance and go after the Dem propaganda machine, but he’s not going to do that.