Chapter 10: Scholar

“Now why the hell would a scholar be all the way out here?” Lena complained to nobody in particular, trudging through the mud as she followed Sleethe through the dense undergrowth. They had traveled some miles downstream, Lena riding her reptilian companion like a boat again, following the instructions of the elder. Sleethe had taken her to see him, and she had asked him where she might find a fellow scholar. She had only been able to understand some of the reply that he had given, but he had directed them to follow the river downstream by a measure of distance that meant nothing to her, and then to search in the bogs. Fortunately the vague instructions meant something to Sleethe, and he had taken her to what she had to assume was the correct location.

All of the other Krell lived in the village, so why was this scholar out in the middle of the swamp? Was he exiled? Some kind of hermit maybe? It didn’t look like there were any structures out here, no huts or neighboring villages. There wasn’t much of anything, really. After a while the thick mangrove forests that bordered the Krell settlement had given way to marshland, flat terrain with a few scraggly trees clinging to life here and there. There was a layer of water that covered the muddy ground, almost knee deep to Lena, she could feel the damp earth beneath her bare feet. Where the mud had been mostly barren before, it was now covered in reeds and grasses, these species apparently able to cling to the mud without the help of the mangrove roots. Maybe the soil was of a different quality here, or maybe these plants were just very specialized, she couldn’t say.

The going was certainly easier without her suit and her boots, she was growing accustomed to feeling her way along with her toes. In fact, in the nature documentaries that she was fond of watching, the hosts often removed their boots when they traversed this kind of terrain. It was easy to see why. There was much less danger of becoming tangled, or stepping on some kind of animal if you could use your toes to probe the waters ahead of you.

It had already been late in the day when they had set off, Lena unable to contain her excitement until the following morning, and the twin suns were just dipping beneath the horizon. She always got like this when there was a problem that needed solving, she couldn’t get a wink of sleep until she found a solution. Truth be told, it was actually much cooler now, and the planet was so dim that this twilight was hardly a noticeable deviation from the norm.

Sleethe marched through the tall reeds beside her, the plants barely reaching his knees, but they were at waist height for Lena.

“You see anything, big guy?”

He rumbled a ‘no’, and shook his leathery head.

“Just what the hell are we looking for, anyway? Does he live in a cave? A hut? Can you tell me why he doesn’t live in the village with the rest of his kin?”

“Too big,” he replied, giving her a sideways glance.

“Too big? How could he be too big? The elder is huge, and he can still fit in the village. He’s so big that he makes you look like ... well, me. Ok, bad analogy, but how can a Krell possibly get so big that he can no longer live in the village? He’d have to be ... no, no. That’s impossible.”

Sleethe must not have understood her, or maybe something was being lost in translation. The elder was so large that she sometimes found herself wondering how he could even move. The strain on his bones and joints must have been immense. There had to be some kind of upper limit on Krell growth, otherwise they’d get so large that they’d no longer be able to move, they wouldn’t be able to feed themselves. Could that be the only reason that they died of old age? Perhaps they got so large that, like a beached whale, their bodies just gave out?

She stopped, watching as Sleethe began to sniff the air. He must have smelled something. Lena opened her mouth to ask him what his was, but he put a finger to his lips, gesturing for her to be silent. Well, he had no lips, but he had learned to mimic the gesture well enough. He pointed into the distance, and Lena squinted, trying to see through the blanket of mist.

There was a shape there, not a Krell, something else...

From beyond the fog bounded a deer, prancing on four spindly legs, its body coated in a layer of fine brown hair that camouflaged it against the swaying reeds. It was a mammal, the first one that she had seen so far on Krell. Had they evolved here too? It looked so much like a water deer, uncanny. Could this be an example of convergent evolution, animals that lived in similar environments adapting similar traits?

She crouched, trying to stay out of view behind the straw-colored stalks, and raised her wrist computer. She zoomed in, taking a few snapshots before the skittish creature notice Sleethe, hopping off towards the cover of a felled tree. It slowed when it reached the rotten wood, sniffing it experimentally. The trunk had obviously fallen at an angle and was now jutting up into the air at forty five degrees, probably still attached to the stump by a few broken fibers. Must have been a big tree, how had it gotten here? There were none like it that she could see.

There was a terrific splashing sound, and the deer bleated in alarm, a crack like thunder silencing its terrified wail. The felled tree was moving, rising high into the air. That was no tree, it was a giant alligator! Its skull must have been ten or fifteen feet long, its monstrous jaws now closed around the struggling deer like a bear trap, pearly teeth as long as her index finger interlocking like a giant zipper. This was no Krell, it was a dinosaur, its horny scutes as black as night and as large as roofing tiles. Water rained down from its lower jaw, the leathery skin beneath its throat vibrating as it rumbled, a sound so deep and resonating that it seemed to shake the very planet that they were standing on. The thing rose like some kind of living obelisk, Lena now able to make out its neck and shoulders, it was so large and heavy that most of its titanic body had been hidden beneath the mud. Like a crocodile waiting for passing prey, it had been lying there with its mouth open, so large that it hadn’t even crossed Lena’s mind that it could be anything but a tree.

It juggled the now limp deer in its mouth, biting down on it and moving the body towards the back of its throat, the sound of bones snapping like matchsticks reaching Lena’s ears as she was transfixed by the macabre sight. It ate the deer, swallowing it almost whole, and then with a monumental crash it fell back to the marsh. It sprayed dark water like a tidal wave, displacing the liquid with its sheer mass, the ripples of which reached all the way to Lena despite her distance from the creature.

Lena could see the tip of its tail, what must have been thirty or forty feet from its head. Was it possible? Could this be a Krell that had grown to fifty feet? She couldn’t even process what she was seeing, this wasn’t even an animal, it had more in common with a tornado or an earthquake. It was a force of nature made animate, it could have crushed a UNN dropship like a used soda can.

It noticed them, turning its head in their direction, so large that it almost seemed to move in slow motion. Lena dropped to all fours instinctively as she felt its yellow eyes find her, tears welling in her eyes and snot leaking from her nose as she trembled, a primal terror that she had never experienced before overcoming her. It was like a nightmare. She wanted to run but she was frozen stiff, she wanted to scream but her voice had left her. Her lizard brain took over, her most primal instincts ordering her to hide from the gaze of this predator lest she become its next meal.

She yelped as she felt something touch her back, looking up through bleary eyes to see Sleethe staring down at her. He was perfectly calm and confident, cocking his head at her as if confused by her reaction. He warbled sympathetically, her translator buzzing in her ear.

“Do not fear.”

She took a few sobbing breaths, composing herself as she rose slowly to her feet, Sleethe holding her shaking hand in his.

“Scholar,” he said, pointing to the giant monster as it watched them curiously.

“Sorry,” she said, wiping her eyes with the back of her hand. “I wish you’d warned me beforehand.”

“Sleethe said big.”

“I guess that’s on me then.”

The ground shook as the monstrous Krell began to lumber towards them, crawling on all fours as a crocodile would, rather than rising to the usual upright posture. Was it so large that it could no longer stand? It strode slowly across the marsh, but it was so huge that within moments it was upon them. Lena had only ever seen something this large once before, when she had visited the Museum of Natural History in Chicago. She had seen Sue, the largest and best preserved tyrannosaurus fossil in existence. Sue was forty feet long, and this Krell was a little bigger than that. More importantly, Sue had lived sixty five million years before Lena had been born, and this Krell was staring right at her.

“Hello scholar,” Sleethe called out, Lena edging slowly behind him as she monster tracked her with golden eyes the size of softballs. There was no reverence in Sleethe’s voice, no respect that he had not afforded the other Krell. He was treating this as any old conversation, but this specimen was as a God to them. Good lord, it was over half the length of a blue whale!

It opened its mouth and replied, its tone so low that she felt it more than she heard it, rattling her bones like someone had taken her by the shoulders and was violently shaking her. The translator had completely given up, it couldn’t even attempt to parse this.

“Sleethe, you’ll have to translate for me, his voice is out of range of my pickup.”

“He asks why we come,” Sleethe said. He used his long tail to nudge Lena out from behind his back, and into the open so that the giant Krell could see her. He pointed to the red runes on her belly, and the scholar’s reptilian pupils tracked his clawed finger, its nictating membranes blinking slowly as it examined her. Sleethe must be showing it that she too was a scholar.

Lena composed herself, trying to calm the frantic beating of her heart. If she could wrestle a salamander then she could do this too. She might not be able to understand the giant creature, but it could understand her.

“We come seeking knowledge,” she said, trying to sound confident despite the wavering of her voice. It was a simple enough phrase, and the translator seemed to do a fair job, as the giant Krell gave her its reply. She could feel its breath on her skin even at this distance, it could have blown her off her feet like a jet engine if it had been so inclined.

“Scholar asks what knowledge you want,” Sleethe relayed. What did she want to know? She had been so frightened by the sudden appearance of the giant krell that she had very nearly forgotten. Ah yes, the Brokers. What she needed most right now was a timescale, when the Brokers had arrived on this planet, and when the campaign to retake their lost colonies had ended.

“I want to know ... when did the Benefactors arrive here?”

The great beast cocked its enormous head at her, it was the size of a car, and then it emitted a booming reply. Lena had to stop herself from covering her ears reflexively, its voice almost loud enough to hurt.

“Scholar says ten and two seasons.”

“Twelve seasons ago?” Finally, a measurement of time that made sense. ‘Season’ must refer to mating seasons, or so she assumed, but how many Earth years passed between seasons?

“Sleethe,” she said, “come here. I need your help with something.”

He turned to her, and crouched lower, watching her as she began to tap at her touch screen. It projected a flickering, orange hologram, the scholar looking on with mild interest as she began to enter in numbers.

“Ok, I need your help here, big guy. You’re the key to this, so try to understand.”

She had brought up the calculator function on her wrist-mounted computer, and it was time to do some math. Sleethe had lived and worked alongside humans, she knew that he had some grasp of human timekeeping.

“I need to know how long a Krell season is in Earth time, understand? Do you know how long a year is?”

He shook his head, and she cursed under her breath.

“Alright, what about a month? Do you know what a month is? If they told you that you were being deployed to the front, and that it would take two months to get there, how long would that be in seasons?”

He shrugged his broad shoulders.

“Come on Sleethe, you can’t be a soldier if you don’t understand time keeping. Maybe I’m going about this the wrong way...”

Perhaps using large measurements was throwing him off. If she started from the bottom rather than the top, maybe he would have a better idea of what she was talking about. After all, they seemed to describe numbers in values of ten.

“Imagine I’m your commanding officer, you know what that is?”

He nodded.

“Good, alright. I’m your commanding officer, and I tell you to be ready for roll call in one hour. Understand?”

Again he nodded, progress!

“You understand how long an hour is on the Pinwheel? How long is that for a Krell? If the elder told you to be somewhere in an hour, how long would that be?”

He scratched the leathery pouch of skin that hung beneath his lower jaw as he considered, Lena could practically see the gears turning in his head. Math apparently wasn’t one of his strong suits. Finally he held up a finger and thumb to the sky and closed one eye, like he was measuring something that only he could see. Lena gave him a ‘what the hell’ expression, and then he did it again.

“Small suns path,” he explained. Of course, he was measuring time by how far the suns would have moved across the sky.

“Yes! Good Sleethe, good! And how many of those does it take for the suns to rise and set?”

He took a moment to think, miming the passage of the twin stars overhead.

“Ten and four,” he said with a shrug.

“Fourteen hours in a Krell day, perfect, that must mean that there are twenty eight hours in one rotation. You’re a genius and you don’t even know it,” she said excitedly as she recorded the information. There was a problem to be solved, and so the marshland around her fell away, her fear of the giant scholar evaporating as she tapped at her touch panel.

“So if a day here is twenty eight hours, then how long is a week?”

Sleethe pondered for a moment, then shrugged. Damn it, the Krell were too primitive, they lacked the necessary knowledge to track the orbit of their planet and to keep accurate time. Life on the Pinwheel was so regimented, so orderly, they were probably called when they were needed and left to their own devices when they weren’t. It was easy to keep the time when the sunlamps in the ceiling of the torus turned on every day at precisely oh-five hundred hours, and shut off at twenty-two hundred hours, when you couldn’t go ten feet without seeing some kind of digital clock or hearing an announcement over the intercom.

This wasn’t going to work, what she needed was a frame of reference.

Lena turned her eyes back to the giant scholar, wracking her brain as she tried to think of a solution. There was a radiocarbon dating tool in her pack, the straps of which were now digging uncomfortably into her bare shoulders, but that method of dating only worked on dead tissue. You couldn’t carbon date a living creature. There must be some way to measure age in a Krell without having to rely on asking them, like the rings of a tree trunk, or dental growth standards in humans. If only Sousa were here, he’d be able to figure it out. Would she just have to give up and accept defeat?

The scholar shifted positions, spreading its immense weight about and getting comfortable. How much did it weigh? Large predatory dinosaurs could weigh up to about twenty tons, this Krell could conceivably exceed that.

Now that he was closer, and she was no longer cowering in terror, she could get a better look at him. Someone had painted him with the same scholar symbol that Lena was wearing at some point, it was on his shoulder rather than his belly, as his fleshy underside now seemed to be inaccessible due to his four-legged gait. The vibrant red dye was faded and old, but still visible. The aliens must reapply it periodically.

What shocked her more than its sheer mass was the fact that Sleethe had barely reacted when the scholar had risen from the marsh like a surfacing submarine. This was normal for him, mundane. How many of these things were scattered around the planet, could they grow even larger than this? Was this the fate of all long-lived Krell, to spend their later years living alone in the wilderness like a feral animal? She began to wonder how they fed themselves, and how much energy they must expend, even with their slow metabolism. Then she remembered how it had snapped up that deer. They probably ate everything that crossed their path. Would it have eaten Lena if Sleethe hadn’t been with her?

The scholar lifted its massive arm, the width of Sleethe’s torso, and scratched his neck idly. Something flashed in the dim twilight, and Lena’s eyes immediately locked onto it. There was something dangling from its wrist.

“What’s that on his wrist?” Lena asked Sleethe, forgetting that her translator was now doing a fine job and that she could have asked the question herself. She was almost afraid to speak to it directly, it looked like something that the ancient Aztecs or the Incas might have worshiped as a deity, Quetzalcoatl in the flesh.

The scholar replied, the sound waves making the water around Lena’s ankles ripple, and Sleethe turned to her as he conveyed the beast’s booming reply.

“Old necklace.”

So it was one of the Krell necklaces, beads and shells woven together with strings made from grasses and plant fibers. At some point the scholar’s neck had been small enough that the necklace would fit around it, but now the jewelry was little more than a bracelet.

Hang on, whatever materials that constituted the necklace would be dead, and it would therefore be possible to carbon date them. Carbon-14 is a radioactive isotope, found in the air in carbon dioxide molecules, and a small amount of this isotope enters the body of every living thing through the food chain. At least where carbon dioxide is present in the atmosphere, as it was on Krell. When the organism in question dies, it stops taking in Carbon-14, and the isotopes present in its body begin to decay. That radioactive decay is measurable if one has the appropriate tools, and thus it becomes possible to estimate the time of death by measuring the rate of that decay. She had brought the tool with her, the same one that she had used to date the wood in the temple. This might be her best chance to get some kind of accurate measurement of time in terms that she could understand.

“Sleethe, ask the scholar if I can take a closer look at the necklace.”

He relayed her request, and the scholar reached its long arm slowly towards her. A powerful urge to flee overcame her as his leathery hand came to a stop not a foot away, so large that it could have plucked her off the ground like a toy, but she powered through it and slung her pack off her back. She rummaged inside for the handheld tool, drawing it and taking a tentative step forward.

The scholar seemed unconcerned. He was so large that she couldn’t possibly harm him in any way, and he had no natural predators. She reached out towards the dangling beads and shells, the garment remarkably intact despite its obvious age and the wear and tear that this creature’s lifestyle must subject it to.

“When was this made?” She asked, taking a piece of carved wood in her hand and running it under the lens of the scanner. It was about the size and shape of a pocket watch, smooth and polished, with a decorative rune carved into its surface. There was a hole drilled in the top through which the string was threaded. These necklaces were made for individuals, the materials harvested on or near the day of their use. Just like when she had constructed the necklace that was now hanging about her shoulders, it was another one of their rituals, an event that the recipient was expected to attend. The scholar would know when this had been made, it would have been present.

It replied, and Sleethe translated the answer for her.

“Scholar says eight seasons.”

Eight seasons, perfect. Now if she could get a fairly accurate reading from the carbon dating tool, then she could compare the two numbers and come up with an estimate of how many years constituted a season.

Her eyes narrowed as the result appeared on her wrist monitor. This wood had died roughly two hundred years ago. It couldn’t have been cut more than a couple of days before the ceremony, so that meant...

She turned to her wrist computer, bringing up the calculator function and entering in values as the two Krell watched her curiously, her fingers flying across the touch panel.

“Yes!” Lena exclaimed, the glow of the hologram reflecting in her eyes as she read out the results. “I’ve got it, one Krell season is ... twenty five years. Really? You guys only have a breeding season once every twenty five years? I guess you have to give the generation that was conceived during the last one time to grow and mature. That explains what happened on the Pinwheel too, we’ve only been in contact with your people for about twenty years, that’s why your reproductive method took us off guard. So if a season is twenty five years, and your first contact with the brokers was twelve seasons ago, that makes ... three hundred years!?”

She glanced up at the scholar who was waiting patiently, her eyes wide.

“Scholar, how many seasons have you been alive?”

The giant creature rumbled a reply, and Sleethe translated for her.

“Scholar says doesn’t know. We don’t count that.”

Just like Sleethe then, the scholar didn’t know its own age. The Krell really didn’t seem fond of time keeping. The timescales that they lived on were so much larger than those of humans, and their metabolisms were so slow. Lena was gradually starting to understand their way of thinking, and why they appeared so deficient to humans. Those who didn’t know them better often assumed that they were stupid, slow in the sense that they seemed to live in another world, scarcely reacting to what happened around them and spending the majority of their time sleeping.

An hour was but the blink of an eye for them, a day inconsequential. They went into heat once every twenty five years, they only ate a meal every few months, for the vast majority of their lives their metabolisms were slowed down to a crawl. They spent all of their time basking and sleeping. If this enormous Krell was any indication, then they lived for centuries. Obsessing over hours and days would be like a human trying to manage their life down to the second. It just wasn’t a useful expenditure of effort.

An idea occurred to Lena, and she spoke through her translator again. This thing was old, it had been alive for at least three hundred years and change, likely longer. She had hoped to meet someone who had access to better records of what had happened during their campaign to retake the Broker colonies, but this specimen was so old that it might actually have lived through it. Perhaps it was even one of the Krell who had been artificially conceived by the Brokers.

“Were you alive when the Benefactors arrived?”

The scholar replied affirmatively, Sleethe translating the powerful blast of sound for her.

“Did you fight in the war?”

Another affirmative reply.

“Will you tell us what happened? What you saw?”

The giant Krell shifted its immense weight, settling in the mud, and then began to relay its story as Sleethe translated for Lena’s benefit.

The Krell were packed like sardines inside the craft, its featureless, white walls pressing down on them as they brushed shoulders. There were maybe fifty of them crammed into the Broker vessel, and Rahee was among them. All but a handful had been born of the metal eggs, and they knew only war. From the moment that they had cracked the shells of their eggs and they had emerged into the light, they had been trained for a singular purpose, to take back the Broker colonies from their insectoid enemies.

The ever expanding wave of Betelgeusian fleets had landed on the shores of Broker space one season prior, the mercantile race of traders finding themselves overwhelmed and completely unable to handle the threat. The Bugs had crashed down on them like a ruthless tide, seizing their fertile core colonies one by one, leaving the Broker forces in disarray. They had rallied what soldiers they could, artificial constructs and drones that fought on their behalf, the Brokers themselves too frail and too few to fight. But as their manufacturing centers fell along with their planets, their capacity was reduced little by little, until even what little resistance they were able to mount against the marauding insect fleets was crushed. But now that tide was being turned, the Brokers were retaking their lost planets with the help of the Krell.

They had descended from the skies one day on their shining, silver ships, both to extend the hand of friendship and to deliver a dire warning. Soon the Betelgeusians would turn their compound eyes on the Krell, so they had been told, and the tribal reptiles would be unable to endure. They had proposed a Coalition between races, a joining of their two peoples for the benefit of both. Take back the lost colonies of the Brokers, and in turn the enigmatic strangers would protect their home.

The elders had convened a great meeting, the first of its kind, in which representatives from a hundred villages had traveled to debate this proposal. In the end they had agreed, pledging kinship to the Brokers, and in doing so compelling the disparate tribes to come to their aid.

The Krell had left their planet by the tens of thousands, the Brokers arming and training them for conflict. They bestowed technological wonders upon them, weapons that could kill from great distances, armor that made one almost impervious to harm. Even so, their kin died by the thousands, the Brokers using their metal eggs to replenish the dwindling numbers of their army. This new generation grew to maturity alarmingly quickly, and many were cut down just as fast, expended on the battlefield like ammunition.

That was what Rahee had been told by the older veterans in any case. The grizzled soldiers were his only connection to his people’s culture and their oral history, as he too was born of the metal eggs. He had no mother, no father. He had been birthed by a cold machine rather than by a warm body. He had been Krell only in flesh back in those days, his mind and his soul had belonged to the Brokers.

The alarm rang out, echoing inside the tiny craft as the Krell shifted restlessly. They knew it almost by instinct, they had been conditioned to respond to the sound from the day they were hatched. Unlike his own people, the Brokers only taught what was needed and no more. Which alarm to respond to, how to fire a gun, and how best to counter the Bugs.

He checked his weapon and his gear as he prepared for the drop, the ceramic armor that enclosed him in a protective shell was the same matte white as the walls of the craft, as was the rifle that he held in his hands. He didn’t like to wear the suit, it chafed against his scutes, something about it felt wrong.

There was a rush of wind as a hole opened in one end of the craft, the featureless walls splitting apart as if the hull was no harder than mud. The Krell marched forward, jumping into the void two by two, until Rahee was standing on the lip of the dropship. He looked out over the landscape, the smell of salt reaching his snout. Every colony was new, different, no two were alike. After fighting on a dozen worlds he had become numb to the changes in gravity and atmosphere. This one seemed to be an endless expanse of ocean, the horizon flat in all directions, the blue sky almost indistinguishable from the water save for the presence of a few fluffy clouds. All around him were more of the cigar-shaped, silver vessels, hundreds of them disgorging their cargo of troops. The Krell leap from the ships and landed in the water far below, the white foam from the splashes of his fellow soldiers visible on its calm surface.

He braced himself, taking a deep breath that would last him for an hour and change, then he jumped. There was a brief rush of air before he felt his body enter the water, the height of the fall and his immense weight driving him far below the surface. The armor was light, it did not weigh him down. He looked about in an effort to get his bearings as he tumbled, finally locating the glow of the system’s blue-tinted star above him as his nictating membranes covered his eyes to protect them from the saltwater.

His kin were all around him, using their muscular, oar-like tails to swim into formation. A voice echoed through the water, powerful and resonating as it reached his ears. It lacked the poetry of the Krell, it was their Broker commander, ordering the attack to begin.