Astronomicon: Behemoth

Chapter 17 - Going for a Drive

While waiting for Meera and Santiago to get back to her with the preliminary results of their dissection of the fruit samples and alien carcass, Megan was replaying her E.V.A. suit's recording of the lobsters on one of the large screens in the briefing room. She was alone apart from Ekono who was dozing in one of the chairs built into the outer wall of the room.

Megan had Foxy rewind the recording to the beginning and play it again for the third time. The creatures fascinated her. The more she studied them, the less like lobsters they appeared to be, but the name had already stuck. The entire unfrozen crew of the Arcadian already referred to them as "the Lobsters" consistently.

She idly wondered what they were actually called; how they referred to themselves. It was probably safe to say that their own name for their species was a rapid pattern of click sounds that humans would never be able to say. She then wondered if they would be offended to be named after some very loosely similar creature on Earth, if they ever found out.

Everything recorded on the video seemed to confirm that the creatures were friendly. After enhancing the light level so that she could see more of the creatures in the background, she slowed the playback and studied the movements and reactions of all the creatures that were within her suit's field of view. At no point did any of them react aggressively or appear to prepare or even possess any kind of weapon.

As soon as it finished, she asked Foxy to replay the matching footage from Aron's suit and watched that with equal fascination, studying every detail and attempting to measure the responses of the Lobsters to everything the two of them did. The aliens certainly avidly watched everything the humans did but it was virtually impossible to work out the emotions behind their actions. The best she could say was that they tended to be nervous but, given the situation, that was completely understandable, especially as humans were over three times their height.

Having watched the final seconds of Aron's footage as the Lobsters scuttled fluidly through the wide doorway, she performed a flick gesture to close the video and then told Foxy to call Meera. It took a few seconds for Meera to answer the call.

"Yes, Megan?"

Meera was wearing her E.V.A. suit, but as she was in the lab, that was to be expected. She seemed to be manipulating something below the bottom of Megan's screen. Whatever it was, it was holding her gaze away from the camera.

"Meera, any news yet on that carcass?"

"You should talk to Santiago," Meera replied casually. "I'm working on the fruits."

"You're the exobiologist. Alien life is your job!"

"I'm just a biologist. My expertise is in possible alien cells, bacteria, spores and algae," she explained. "Santiago is a doctor, trained in surgery and post-mortems. If you want someone to cut up a corpse, he's the one you want."

"Did I hear someone talking about me?" beamed Santiago, swinging into view from Meera's left side.

"Are you doing the post-mortem?"

"Yes, Commander. There are weeks of work for us there."

"What have you found so far?"

"Please be aware that these are very early findings, Commander."

"I realise that," she replied impatiently.

"Well it has a bone structure, not drastically dissimilar to mammals on Earth, but I have no idea what it's made from. The bones are less dense than ours but made up of multiple layers. There's a tough outer skin to the bones, rather like stiff plastic and then a very light honeycomb material inside."