Chapter 3: First Disastrous Contact Attempt

The story by General Fealia of Deya on finding the humans continued:

The ship landed fairly close to a place called Dollar Settlement near the north coast. The name confused us as Dollar seemed to be also their money unit and a single Dollar was not worth a lot. So why name a place after low value money unit?

Anyway, the cloaked ship landed and I went out with the first lance of nine of us.

We should have understood that something was wrong as we heard a few things that were later identified as shots in the distance. Of course at that point we did not recognize the sound as such as everything was new about the environment and the sound was in far distance.

We started our way towards the cabin in open scouting formation, having landed an estimated half an hours walk away from it.

The higher gravity was annoying, but my troops and me where in good shape, and we only had light load with all the heavy weapons left at the ship, so it was not a big problem and we made good progress in the beginning...

... Until suddenly there was this predator in our way, it had black fur, snout and big teeth. And the fact that it was a predator and saw us as prey was clear when it stood up on two legs for a second, though it was only just under 2 meters tall, so a head shorter than most of us, but it was clearly not afraid of us, so it roared and charged.

Of course the end result was as expected, given that my troops are all veterans, it was quickly punctured by dozens of high velocity darts as the lead elements concentrated automatic needler fire on it, but it took an astonishing number of darts to bring it down.

We examined the body of the creature and noticed that the thick fur had actually deflected few of the darts and none of the darts had made it to the other side through the creature despite the needler being infamous for its normal over-penetration.

Later we saw couple of the “Deer” in the distance and indeed in low light conditions from some distance away you could mistake for one of us on our knees, but it was clearly different of course, but it was interesting seeing such similarity nevertheless.

When we had just started moving again, about 20 minutes after the landing, couple of fast moving loud aircraft flew overhead and they seemed to be looking for something. They looked sleek and were clearly military.

That should have been also a clue, but it was only obvious in hindsight.

When we arrived we were dismayed to see that there was a vehicle parked at the cabin with a uniformed human talking with the human we came to find. The vehicle was marked with texts like “Chippewa”, “Sheriff”, “Sergeant”

Our target man and the uniformed man were talking in what was quite unclear manner. The uniformed one was speaking something closer to English, but our target was clearly speaking some other language. And even the topic seemed unclear.