Return to Eden
Copyright© 2014 by Colin Barrett
Prologue
In decades of interstellar exploration humans had found no world bearing more than microscopic life forms ... until one vessel came across a world where life was so abundant that they named the planet Eden. And not only life but intelligent life, they discovered. But when the crew made a first landing there they were immediately attacked by the natives, and six of the eight crew members who landed on the planet were killed.
Not until a century later was another landing attempted by a new crew headed by sociologist Amanda Meiersdottir and a task force of military guards led by U.N. Army Col. Carlos Igwanda. This time they were greeted cordially by the natives, who initially made them welcome but soon lured the humans out to their village and again attacked—this time seeking to kill only the guards, while taking the scientists captive.
Igwanda defeated them with the loss of only a single trooper, by discovering that the natives communicated with one another telepathically via low-frequency radio waves and jamming their signal. He and Meiersdottir remained alone on the planet in an effort to learn more of the Edenites, fending off further attack by a threat to kill the sequestered females who acted as focal points for their telepathic linkage, and soon opened a dialogue with the Edenites' mental collective that both sides gradually came to find mutually beneficial.
Two of Igwanda's troops were in fact covert military intelligence operatives who had smuggled nuclear weapons on board and, unconvinced of the natives' sincerity in their new role, sought to explode the bombs and wipe out the entire Edenite species. Igwanda had, however, previously discovered the weapons and disarmed them; unable to carry out their plan, the two operatives committed suicide.