Exigency

Chapter 1.1

Minnie descended the ladder from Wheel A to the lab pods. One of her probes had M’d her a proximity alert. She had more than three hundred of them distributed across Threck Country, but she recognized this probe’s unique identifier the moment it appeared in her fone:

  ALERTS:  MIN1311 – 1m PROXIMITY – IL

Under different circumstances—those occurring more than two weeks ago—Minnie would have been concerned that an intelligent lifeform had come within one meter of an observation unit. But this particular OU, originally intended for a much less precarious position outside the densely populated Threck City, happened to lose a sail during its early-morning descent, landing just off a stone walkway outside the main wall. Panicked, Minnie had prepared to send an incident report to John and Aether (protocol required the mission commander and assistant commander be notified of much lessor predicaments. But she’d paused mid-compose.

Minnie had waited for the station’s next flyover and proceeded to reposition one of the optical arrays, zooming in to estimate the probe’s visibility to passers-by. She’d seen in the display that the remaining sails had dissolved upon landing, and the porous, camouflaged outer shell blended well with the surrounding mulch and soil. What if she gave it a day to see what it could gather? The team had never had eyes and ears in so busy an area.

Two weeks and no less than 1,000 IL proximity alerts later, MIN1311 had provided a windfall of data—data that would’ve taken months, possibly years, to gather with more discreetly placed probes. Minnie had been able to fill in thousands of gaps in the City dialect, capturing slang, idioms, and much more casual conversation than the very formal language she’d been able to record during public assemblies.

Ever watchful, John had inquired about MIN1311 the day after it landed.

Minnie had lied. “It’s nowhere of concern right now, but I’m going to have its internals destruct after nightfall.” She hadn’t said that nightfall.

Two days later, she received an M:

    JOHN:  Is MIN1311 taken care of?

She’d replied, taking advantage of the ambiguous wording: Yes, it is.

She didn’t know how long she planned to keep it there observing. Indefinitely? She’d be caught for sure. But she’d performed multiple risk assessments! If a Threck noticed the probe and picked it up, the internals would instantly self-destruct, leaving only a hollow, charred core within the shell. The Threck might keep it as an interesting find, show it to acquaintances. Worst case, the object would be given to a Threck with geological knowledge. Recognizing the shell’s foreign material, they’d tool it open, revealing the burnt core and minute fragments of internals. Their most likely final analysis: some sort of meteorite.

So what was the big deal? After all, the probes were designed with the assumption that an IL would eventually discover one and crack it open.

Minnie stepped from the ladder’s last rung to the lab floor, and noticed Ish sitting in her own lab area across from Minnie’s, her hands in a combox, manipulating some object on the planet surface. A workaholic even more obsessive than Minnie, Ish had apparently rushed straight here after group.

Ishtab Soleymani was the mission’s lead specialist on the primitive Hynka race that dominated the northern hemisphere of Epsilon C, or Epsy, as it had come to be known. Though the Hynka were brutal predators, Ish was extremely protective of them. She even refused to call them Hynka.

The Threck, for whom Minnie was lead specialist, had recently begun dabbling in transoceanic exploration, and at some point encountered these terrifying behemoths. They branded the creatures “savages”: Hynka.  At the time, as Ish had yet to determine a single name by which the team could refer to her ILs, the Threck word became the default. Once Ish finally ascertained what her darling predators called themselves, Hynka had already become ingrained in the team’s heads. And besides, the hissing, guttural Oss-Khoss just didn’t roll well off the human tongue. Minnie didn’t think the bloodthirsty beasts would be all that offended.