In the sky above Ansaf, towards the bright and 'east' of the sun by about twenty degrees, a new star is born in the sky.

To the people of Ansaf: If the comet impacts the drybright, it might put dust into the atmosphere, reducing light worldwide. We must be prepared to establish temporary farms on the bright edge, to be abandoned again when the dust clears. Therefore, Lei proposes:

A truce with the Freedom Democracy, so that the soldiers, mostly werewolves, can prepare to settle new growth.

A joint mission with the Allheart Alliance to visit every drybright shrine that becomes accessible.

A global treaty, signed now, before the exact effect of the comet is known, that if parts of the chartreuse are harmed more than others, whether due to dust or direct impact, the habitable land will be divided proportionally to the current occupied area.

To the people of Ansaf: See how the Lei scheme. They claim to know the results of this unprecedented impact. But who exactly do they claim knows? Elves. They can't share what they know to anyone else. Next, they will offer to 'lend' you educated elves to manage the migration for you.

As for this treaty, it is obvious that the comet will be likely to impact Lei. We will not shift our borders, especially not in the contested northern Wedge area where they will most likely request, and we are insulted that they think us so gullible.

To the people of Ansaf: sounds like kite mirrors are going to be vital to survival. Get yours now before the prices go up!

But if you do go into the drybright, we are eager to buy any metal you find. [Ore identification guide attached.]

To the people of Ansaf: We accept Lei's treaty. Due to our drydark colonization, we have twice the area one might assume based only on our length along the chartreuse.

You have one town in the drydark.

Two! More soon.

See how the elves unite to crush anyone who dares to question their omniscience.

As the 'comet' approaches, its trajectory is changing. Fairly rapidly. It takes a while to figure out and do the orbital math, and the catfolk working with goatseers to make detailed observations are baffled until the key insight.

The comet is accelerating. Slowing itself down relative to Ansaf and maintaining an intercept course. What looks like a dust tail is actually - some sort of titanic rocket.

Somewhere between four and a half wakes and five wakes four hours left, if it continues at the same rate of acceleration. 

At the tip of the star-bright rocket plume, focusing hard against the glare, the faint shape of a long box can be made out. It's framed by two thin wings, larger than the rest of the shape and glowing softly with dull-red heat. Below the working temperature of iron.

People of Ansaf, we must prepare to meet the aliens with peace, dignity, and pride. Let us all establish embassies near their landing site where we can show the best of our culture.

Says Lei, who isn't going to be the one hosting the aliens. Also a spacefaring society will obviously support Freedom.

The metahumans have returned! Repent!

Repent what? 

Failing to explore all the plant and animal species on Ansaf in the time allotted!

Exploring with improper motivation! Notice how the good species like werewolves and catfolk are from animals that are pleasant and fluffy?

Fools, all exploration is wrong! Human magic is a temptation we must resist!

Additional data on the planet has been gathered. Telescope shows signs of life.

Approach speed is still much higher than ideal landing plans. The drive will continue burning as long as possible in order to provide the best chance at a soft landing.

The fusion torch grows brighter and brighter and brighter in the sky, polite enough to point the drive plume away from where the exhaust will bombard the planet with charged particles. It never truly rivals the sun, but just being clearly visible in the sky is an achievement on that front. More details can slowly be gleaned as it approaches, along with an estimate of the ship's size. It's over a kilometer and a half long, and about 500 meters across. The massive radiators frame the main body like elegant dull-red wings, two great fans of pipes glowing in the dark.

In a completely sealed space between the inner and outer hull, nestled just below the drive's radiation shroud, there is a device.

The device is sensitive enough to magnetic fields to detect when the landing system, which changes the geometry of the radiation shroud by shifting it into a heat shield, activates. Just to be sure, it also contains a physical switch which will be depressed if the radiation shroud moves in the correct direction.

It's a very simple device. It has to be, to survive who knows how long with no maintenance, bombarded by radiation, in the cold rear workings of the vessel, and work perfectly at the correct time.

Long-term stable explosives are truly a wonder of modern chemistry.

The torch drive shuts off, at length, and the UNSS Exodus begins preparations for a controlled landing with heavy aerobraking. Each pod should have enough fuel in its independent housing to land safely, in ideal circumstances. The circumstances are far from ideal.

But the drive goes dark, and the radiators cool off and stop glowing and begin folding away for storage during the last few hours of approach, as the unstable Brigman Cores are moved forward in the hull where they won't be exposed to the rigors of re-entry...

BOOM

The UNSS Exodus is clearly visible to anyone who cares to look with magically enhanced vision as one of the great radiators shears off and tumbles into the void, scattering fragments everywhere. There is a fire aboard the ship, gouts of flame emerging from the engine section as it begins to tumble.

Closer... Closer...

The pieces hit Ansaf's atmosphere and begin glowing with friction plasma.

Exodus AI has been thinking at maximum speed ever since the first shockwave. It fires attitude thrusters. It strategically blows out more panels and equipment to stabilize the spin. It tries to control the tilt as the numbers dance wildly, the key one being the number of crew likely to survive, second being the pods with vital colonization equipment...

Aerobraking continues as the hull takes far more heat than it was ever expected to, though not quite as much as it was designed to. Just in case.

The ship sheds copious amounts of debris as it descends, a fireball streaking across the sky, crossing directly over the chartreuse. The boxes lining its side peel away, some smoothly and some spinning wildly. Some stabilize themselves with rockets, and others fall freely. What's left of the enormous molybdenum pipe radiator hits the side of a near-drybright mountain and shatters into thousands of pieces, still stinking of its boiled-off ammonia working fluid. A few small pieces of debris, mostly unrecognizable bits of metal, land in the thin green line where the tidally-locked planet is habitable.

Most of it lands fairly deep into the drydark.

Oh well the aliens were cool while they lasted.

The alien ship's big hot things don't seem to have a purpose, so being big and hot must itself be their purpose. They look like water-extraction books, but hot instead of cold. Is this how the alien ship survives the direct sunlight? But there's no air in space. Is there a way for heat to move without air? Is the sun gradually getting colder?

Wait. Is the heat from sunlight the same heat that the sun is losing?

We will buy all that metal! 

...We will buy some of that metal, at the attached prices, with a considerable bonus if you take payment in kite mirrors to be delivered in the future.

The debris is collected, the fleeting weird smell noticed, and -

Wait this is all molybdenum?!

Such an irony for it to fall so close to the contested Wedge molybdenum mine.

Their name for molybdenum is more like 'pure - Bb flat 4 beats - Ab sharp 20 beats - Bb flat 6 beats - Ab sharp 1 beat'. The way to identify a metal ore on Ansaf is: 

Grind it very fine.

Eat it.

With liefling help, don't die. Also, grow metal claws. 

The liefling can sometimes say if the metal is 'pure', but that means that one metabolic pathway is used, not that it's a chemical element - both concepts that Ansaf science does not have a solid understanding of.

Cut off of the metal bits of your claws and smash them into two precisely-shaped musical free reeds, like what's in a harmonica or accordion. It helps to have a werewolf make a mold and a mouseling use a very small cursor to check the measurements. 

Compare the pitches of the reeds to reference pitches, not only determining the notes but also the rate at which they beat against the reference pitches.

Finally, heat the reeds in a standardized glass flame and check the pitches again.

This is also often the easiest known way to extract metal from ore. But fortunately, the most important use of metal is nutritional, and for that, the ground ore can simply be mixed into soil.

Lei, now that we all have as much molybdenum as we could ever need, how about you take the far reaches of the Wedge and we move our northern border tengward by 5 klicks?

No. Just on principle.

Did someone not follow the best practices for earthquake-proofing? Again?

No comment.

People of Ansaf: we invite you all to work with us to recover the crashed alien ship. It will be a glorious expedition, striding deeper into the drydark than ever before. Set aside your arguments and take up this work of which legends will be made!

When a kitsune teleports, do they take their temperature with them or shed it?

Kef has a lot of sway right now and can immediately hire a kitsune to test that. And a liefling to tend to the kitsune's health. And one of every other available species, just in case.

Brrrrrrrrr ow ow ow why does warming up hurt more than being cold

Kitsune carry their temperature with them.

Excellent! Either way would have been excellent, actually, but now he can start designing a protocol to use kitsune to transfer heat to the expedition!

Uh, Fuzzer? I think you're missing something obvious. Like, really obvious.

Until we test it, we won't know if this is better than just using catfire.

Uh huh.

Want to bet?

No, you're right. This time.

Oh good, so you can stop torturing the poor kitsune now.

What do you think of this method for making an enclosed tube - not a tunnel, above the surface. It doesn't have to be strong, right, it just has to contain air and be fast to build. And then the expedition can get food supplies by equartier.

She could have left whenever she wanted!

Dear sister, an elph must go to support this endeavor, but never fear, I will take on the risk, even should I perish in the lonely void.

If you must, dear brother. If the shrine of Kef is your last, it will stand forever a testament to your bravery.

(Good. She needs to protect the Kef experiment.)

Meanwhile, the survivors of the crash find themselves on a frigid glacier, with their pods floating in water that was melted by the impact and is rapidly refreezing.

In the final seconds before impact, all the stasis pods, all the cargo pods, all the colonization modules were frantically launched with new descent programming.

The automatic landing systems universally failed.

So Exodus AI initiated emergency override, and took manual control of the thrusters in each pod. The pods, smaller and flying separate from Exodus's main hull, mostly landed easily... Mostly. The final act before impact was to trigger emergency re-awakening for all colonists, an abbreviated process that would leave them feeling groggy and sick, but awake enough to respond to the crisis.

The main hull hits first, all the modules floating lightly over it, scattered like dandelion seeds. It ploughs a long streak into the ice, sending shattered debris up in great showers, some of it impacting descending pods... It was never designed for such rigors. The impact is a hundred times beyond even the worst 'rough landing'. As the massive hulk grinds against the ice at hundreds of miles an hour, it rapidly disintegrates into so much aluminum, titanium, steel, circuitry, and wiring. The resulting debris field is a long oval as pieces fly up or are buried under hills of loose broken ice, and only small sections remain recognizable and intact. The Brigman Cores, in particular, were built tougher than anything else. They bubble and ooze hot blue plasma where they landed, each one melting the ice further with the energies inside, steadily melting small craters into the landscape.

The major modules, exposed on the outer hull, were disadvantaged in their landing. Several of the landing thrusters failed, sending the vital modules tumbling or hitting the ground at high speed, turning billions of dollars worth of high-end equipment into so much scrap. Others, outer hulls still glowing red-hot from re-entry, sank deep into the glacier as the ice greedily absorbed the violent energy of the descent, sinking into melting puddles of oily polluted steam and contaminated water. The pods are supposedly well sealed against anything that could threaten them, but the crash landing is a brutal test of engineering safeguards. 

Around half of them landed intact, on flat ground, if embedded in anywhere up to a dozen feet of ice once it refreezes. Some landed hard but not devastatingly hard, or at a steep angle or near a cliff or crevasse, subsequently falling and ruining whatever was inside. Some of them successfully completed their transformation into part of the debris field.

The smaller modules, the suspension pods, the medical module, the labs, the supply lockers and battery banks and shuttle bays, tended to deal better with the ice. They were deep in the hull, sheltered from the heat of re-entry, and less violent in their descent. The landing engines mostly produced large steaming puddles rather than melting away whole lakes, leaving them dug a foot or two into the ice in most cases.

Shen wakes up to a scene of smoke and devastation. This pod should contain the whole bridge crew, but... He only sees two others moving around.

"Damn it! This smoke-"

She starts coughing violently.

"There's an electrical fire over here! Grab the extinguishers before it spreads!"

They drill emergency procedures into you vigorously, when you're learning to be a pilot for humanity's first extraterrestrial colony. He knows exactly where the fire extinguishers are without having to think about it, and navigates to them through the smoke. The air is soon full of the sound of foam sprayers.

Meanwhile, Lucy has looked at the external sensors, seen that it's a human-safe atmosphere if very cold, and cycled open the external vents. Good think the wires for that are exposed for a quick manual override, ugh...

The smoke starts to clear. She helps with the fires. She can see out the window now- What she sees is... Darkness. Frost riming it, and then... A large field of ice covered in smoking debris, as well as quite a few relatively intact pods and modules. The scene is lit only by fires and the exterior emergency lights, sullen red, of all the dropped pods.

"Fuck! What the hell happened here? Did we crash-land on Avalon's pole...?"

"Let's put on our EVA suits. And close the vents again. We won't last long in these temperatures- And we need to start talking to people on the radios."

"No, we should check on the rest of the bridge crew now that the fire's dealt with-"

"The Captain is dead. So is the Pilot, First Officer, and Chief Engineer. It's... Pretty bad. You might not want to look." His voice is shaky. "Some of the juniors seem okay, but their pods didn't wake them up for some reason. I've started the process manually. I... I think you two are the highest ranking officers left."

"...Navigator outranks co-pilot. Lucy. I think this means you're in charge."

"No, that can't be right- No. I know the regulations as well as you do, yes, but- Dammit! How did this happen? I entered the course myself! It would have been a perfect equatorial circularization-"

"And I double-checked it! But- Figuring out what happened can come later. Right now we have an emergency on our hands. We need to start moving, not panic."

"Right." 

Leadership in a crisis situation is two thirds momentum, she vaguely remembers from somewhere... 

She sees figures emerging from one of the other lifepods, their helmet lights casting eerie, shifting shadows and streaks of light over the dark, blasted landscape.

"Okay. Anjay, supervise the rest of the bridge crew waking up and help everyone else into their EVA suits. Navigator's orders. Find me when they're all ready, including yourself. Shen, start making radio calls. Get a list of pods that survived the landing. Tell- Tell everyone to get their EVA suits on and report their status. I'm going to put on my EVA suit and inspect the pod exterior. We meet back in - fifteen minutes and report."

The rest of the day is a long blur of talking and movement, stress and muscle strain and the lingering effects of stasis combining into a miserable mélange of heartburn and nausea. The EVA suits are insulated against the cold, and have interior batteries to resist the wind's attempts to wick heat away, but the helmets stay cold and the gloves are fairly chilly too.

They're still lucky in a lot of ways. The radios are working fine, getting them an accurate head-count of the survivors and injured, and simplifying the searching and inventory. The atmosphere is breathable, which is a massive blessing. No relying on air tanks and sudden death due to suffication.

It's just very very cold. Whatever intact batteries people can find are draining quickly. Half of the important equipment is destroyed or frozen in ice.

And then there's the matter of shell-shock. Trapped on an arctic glacier, during a crash landing, with many of their friends and comrades dead... So many people spent their time wandering about in a daze. Shen felt it too, the urge to wallow in shock and figure out what the hell went wrong- But his job is to yell at people over the radio, and repeat things over and over, until there's some semblance of order.

She's good at swearing and shouting. She swears every other word into the radio, calls people reprehensible names, and says it's their own fault if they die from being too lazy to help in an emergency. It's the stress, really. Being rude and abrasive will probably come back to bite her. If they don't all die. It certainly gets everyone moving in mostly the same direction, at least... A swarm of fireflies, over a thousand helmet lights bobbing over the night-dark ice sheet and milling around in confused pools.

"Hey, anyone listening on this thing? I got one of the transport vehicles unboxed! You can see me waving around a flashlight on the roof of it. All vehicle team members, head this way! We're gonna get this baby up and running so we can set up that habitat module the bridge crew found! Warm beds are just a couple hours' work away!"

"Shen. I've noticed something alarming. The stars haven't moved. It's been hours- They should have changed position by now. Even if we were at a pole... The only thing I can think of is that we're on a tidally locked planet, some fucking how. We'll be subjected to eternal night, the solar panels will obviously be of no use..."

"If that's the case, we're going to need a reactor module... We've identified two habitat modules, a hydroponics module, a recycling module, and an entertainment module of all things- That one can wait. But nobody's reported seeing one yet."

"Put out a call, ask if anyone sees signs of it. And then let's head over to Mr. flashlight-waver so we can get on a vehicle and scout faster."

"Mary Hersch, Warrant Officer. I have bad news about your reactor module... I'm looking at it, but my geiger counter is going crazy even a hundred meters away. It's venting steam like crazy, and there's a big, obvious crack. This one is a no-go. If I remember the manifest correctly, there were three in total..."

"Shit! Mary, Lucy Carver here. We're in no shape to try and- Assess or contain that. Just avoid that whole area. Back off as far as possible. Make sure everyone around you knows to stay away! Do you have some way to mark it? Without getting close!"

"I'll... I'll figure something out. Hersch, out."

"Daniel Montero speaking. Command team, please switch to channel seven."

Shortly after, on a less public if not unpublic channel,

"An exclusion zone of one kilometer should suffice for immediate precautions. Long-term, we're going to need to evacuate the entire impact area. I can see the module in question where I am as well, and given the radiation signatures and fires, it will be carrying radioactive particulate into the atmosphere. If you'll indulge a historical reference... We're looking at a Chernobyl or Fukushima situation here."

"Mr. Montero, you're a physicist? Do you have any idea how far the radiation will spread?"

"Not primarily. I'm a medical doctor with degrees in several supporting sciences, including physics, biochemistry, and agronomy. You could say I'm a bit of a polymath- I have an eidetic memory. It's very difficult to guess. The winds here seem to be lower than on Earth's arctic but I have little information on the upper atmosphere, and I'm not a climatologist. Perhaps we could improvise some sort of weather balloon out of the survey satellites, but in the absence of more information... I would establish the habitat module at least twenty miles away, and ideally further."

"...We'll take that into account."

They don't find another reactor module in the next hour. At gentle prompting from Shen, Lucy makes the call: Evacuate, east (or, well, ""east"" is a guess at best) to a large flat plain of ice, gently downhill, against where the wind is currently blowing. The salvaged Transport Vehicle is able to- At length and with copious amounts of effort, chip away at the ice around the landing legs and cargo door of the first Habitat Module, and use its powerful crane to load the massive prefab bulk onto the crawler. The gravity here is earthlike, when much of the equipment was designed for something a little lighter... But they manage it.

They light beacons, recovered searchlights mounted on improvised poles, each one pointing in the right direction, towards the habitat. Their systems will run off of chemical generators, batteries, and power cells for at least a couple of days. Everyone needs to rest, and needs shelter from the cold. 

The prefabricated structure rises steadily from the landscape, the exterior lights seeming more comforting and beautiful than almost anything else could, in that moment. A steady stream of confused survivors trudges their way along the trail of lights towards the base... Shen organizes a team to take a quick census of the survivors and their skills as they trickle in. The number quickly reaches over a thousand. Given that the habitat module was originally designed for four hundred people, this presents some crowding problems...

Bass's crew have found a grand total of four exploration rovers, and gotten them all running just fine! They spend their time ferrying the least mobile survivors to the beacon on the horizon- The injured, and the children.

Dr. Montero quickly seizes a storage room in a convenient location as an improvised medical bay, and conducts a staff of nurses and volunteers like an orchestra.

The filtered air tastes stale and slightly bitter as the scrubbers choke on almost three times as many people as they were designed for. There are a lot more relatively intact modules out there... But that's something that can be dealt with tomorrow.

Or after eight hours of sleep. Whatever you call it when the sun doesn't rise.

Warrant Officer Hersch is kept up all night fielding question after question about what happened, and whether they're all going to die, and what they're going to do next, and so on. These people are going to grow sullen and resentful before too long, she can't help but think... That's how disaster situations always end up. All she can do for it is maintain order and let Lucy Carver and her team do their best. She's read their bios. Lucy can handle it, if anyone here can.

Oh my god, the situation is utterly screwed. FUBAR. The excrement has well and truly hit the air distributor.

There is ICE on her precious air intakes. The weight of the habitat module will slowly make it SINK down below if they don't figure out something clever. And what's this she hears about salvaging another reactor module? The first one has contaminated dozens of miles of ground! They can rely on solar panels, once the sun rises.

...What? Tidally locked? The sun isn't going to rise?

WELP.

"Boys, let's investigate the feasibility of building some WIND TURBINES, or perhaps some kinda geothermal tap! I know I saw some wind generators on the walk over here, but we're gonna need something to deal with the cold and icing, so get your brainstorming hats on..."

...Crew transponders active: 1103/1500.

...Bridge reserve power running out. Exodus AI will shut down momentarily.

Saving logs to disk.

Good luck... Everyone...

Life on Ansaf is constrained by food.

When the food is provided by the government of Sota, walking into the drydark is easy.

They build a roof as they go, in many segments of arch. Each segment has four pieces: two rigid blocks and two thin pieces of shell. All the pieces are light enough to be carried by catfolk, and installed by catfolk too - the blocks interlock with the adjacent blocks and the shell halves slot into the blocks below them, all with no werewolf magic required. The werewolves are mostly stationary, sheltering in the tube, taking the time to fully enervate the source rock and produce a batch of pieces all at once.

Every 25 minutes, a werewolf can produce about ten pieces of one type, which can be installed in about 25 seconds. Keeping a site of assembly continuously supplied, then, requires 50 werewolves. Times 4 sites of assembly, so 200 werewolves, and 200 catfolk... But actually, Kef can spare werewolves more easily than catfolk, keeping the turbines pumping at full power but shorthanding the mines. And the assembly itself, out in the cold, must be done by catfolk, but anyone can pull a cart.

The ground is uneven, but for now, they let it be, only using the most impeding boulders for source rock. It won't be worth delivering food by equartier until they're much deeper into the drydark, and there will be plenty of time to straighten and flatten the path before then. The ground is measured in advance by a mouseling and a boark, and the werewolves adjust each block to fit. The pieces of shell are all identical.

Working in two 15-hour shifts, approaching the crash site at one klick per hour, are: 700 werewolves, 100 catfolk, 10 boarks, 1 mouseling, 1 kappa, 1 elph, 5 gnomunks, 1 wroth, 1 kitsune, 1 vampire, 1 liefling, 5 frogolds, 1 gnoll, 2 stetcaps, 1 human, 1 goatseer, and 1 irontooth.

"...So given the current power readings and the minor miracle your boys pulled off with those wind turbines, Nina... We have just about enough power to run the habitat systems with a little left over."

"Yep. We have a lot more stored, about forty power cells worth, but running our vehicles very hard or building any more modules will drain that really quick. And there's a dozen other concerns I have in the longer term... Ice isn't a great foundation material."

"We have four intact Exploration Rovers and two transports, though I'd only trust one right now- Green Giant snapped two of her eight axles in the landing. We can fix her with time and resources. The rovers are great news, I have plenty of boys and girls who would be down for scouting the, uh, salvage field and looking for useful things."

"People are mostly in survival mode for now. They're thanking their lucky stars for being alive, hugging their families... Or grieving, for a lot of 'em. Losing over a fourth of our people is really not good. In terms of security and morale we don't have much to worry about yet."

"We have some observations of star motion. It's slow but measurable, and some math and estimates place us about four hundred kilometers into the 'dark side' of the planet. I think we should send a scout team there to investigate conditions in the light side. It might be better, long term."

"The solar panels would work, if nothing else."

"To return to the power situation, I believe it is imperative that we recover a reactor module."

"Oh come on. The first one gave a dozen people radiation poisoning- So far! Are you braindead, you want to risk the next one being damaged and poisoning us all?"

"Cool it down a notch, Nina. We might have no choice. The hydroponics modules, recyclers, mining modules if we find any ore under all this ice... All that takes a LOT of power."

"I'm well acquainted with the risks, considering I'm the one who has to treat the poor bastards. I'm also aware of the risks of dehydration, malnutrition, and hypothermia. Miss Carver, I urge in the strongest possible term to identify and secure a reactor module. For the future of our unwanted new home."

"Fine! Point taken. How the fuck would we even sink all that heat without melting the foundations we sit on..." Nina mutters.

"We want to find the other reactor modules and confirm their condition either way. So we know our options and if we have to set more exclusion zones. Bass, did you finish the radiation shielding I asked for?"

"Sure did, boss. Thin sheets of steel we can bolt to the rovers and expedition suits. I had the doc look at it and he said it will cut radiation exposure to about half if we follow good decon protocols. Might slow people down or cause a puncture or two but the pressure is okay, it's just cold. I'm planning to give scout teams two days of light work for every day out there, since it's bound to be grueling."

"Fix the other transport. Get me a hydroponics module. Send three rovers to look for a reactor, but catalog anything else they find too. Send one rover to look for a route to the bright side of the planet."

Snow falls over parts of the drydark, for the first time in a very long time, as the boiled ice from the crash site and fires condenses and slowly falls back down. Not that much. Just a light dusting. And only some of it is slightly to moderately radioactive.

The first large piece of debris they find is a bent steel locker door landing far from the rest by some freak coincidence. "T. Cooper" is engraved in it. The lock is fused into slag and the hinges are torn.

"There are bits of ice falling from the sky!"

"It's called 'snow' - the Storms make it sometimes."

"This is from the Storms?"

"There's a theory that there are more Storms deep in the drybright. Maybe there are more Storms deep in the drydark too.

The Storms happen where the air gets colder, as the darkward trade winds pass into the dark - maybe the crash heated the air and now it's cooling off again."

"Oh, that makes sense. This 'snow' can't be normal or there would be more of it."

"And if this much water was always moving from the Storms into the drydark, I think the chartreuse would be shrinking a lot faster."

Why did Lei send a gardener? Just because he speaks Sotalese?

He's not complaining! He's going to be the best double agent with no training on doubling agent who's ever doubled agent.

This is awesome.

She has already thoroughly examined Kef with her sonar - openly! - and sent a report back to Lei by messenger. One mission complete. Everything else that she gets to see now is a bonus.

Oh hey a vampire, you don't see those every cycle. "Hi, I'm Calsa! Where are you from?"

What a friendly catfolk. She wraps her wings* around herself. "I'm from Lei, the town bon-sharr-ili, if that means anything to you. It's nothing special."

*Winged humanoids on Ansaf generally have four limbs, not six.

"Are you going to defect when we get back to Kef?"

"Um. No.

Do you want to defect to Lei?"

"No! Okay, fair. Why, should I? I mean, I'm not leaving my family - my wife is a clerk for the Kef magistrate and my son is one of the surveyors up ahead - but, hypothetically, what's your pitch?"

"Let me think about that... I'm Chime, by the way. Actually, Ciolha, but if you don't speak Elvish don't worry about it - they call me Chime in Lei too.

...yeah, I've got nothing you haven't heard before. Lei is nice? It seems nice here too?"

"Very wise you are, Chime. Yeah, I read Elvish with Sotalese pronunciation, I don't know anyone who actually speaks it here."

"Oh, you mean you read High Elvish? Elvish, common Elvish, is written phonetically in Lei..."

"...Yes. That's what I mean. What, like, is common Elvish? Isn't the whole point of El- High Elvish that it doesn't change?"

"Oh, no, they both change! High Elvish is what elves speak, and people who work at shrines. But people don't learn to speak from elves, they learn from their family, and common Elvish changes ... hmm... half as much as most languages? I don't know, -" Chime flips the fingertips on one wing forward and wraps herself up again. "And it mostly changes by slang, and... the meanings of words slide around, but the words themselves don't change, if that makes sense? And High Elvish - it's a very big language. I guess it grows a bit, or shrinks, but what I really mean is more that people use different parts of it at different times, to make it clear that they're speaking High Elvish. Like, the word for 'kite' used to be a combination of the words for 'star' and 'cloth', or just 'star', or sometimes 'little bird'. Now, in common Elvish, we call a kite with the word for 'pool', as in 'mirror pool'. And now elves, when they're being fancy, they always say 'star cloth' for a kite, and they call a mirror a 'pool'."

"Wow. Oh no, are you cold?" She steps closer and flares up. "I've been in the drydark, or the dark side of the mountains, my whole life, so I forgot for a moment about mirror kites. I wonder what they call them in Nitatlel - the country bright of the mountains."

"Nitalhel - Nitatlel - is so pretty! I only got to see it for a minute, since I came here by equartier the whole way, even through the Argo aqueduct."

Is the catfolk hitting on her? Ew.

"Hey, mom, we found something with writing on in! Alien writing! Where's the linguist?"

Tomas is not, actually, a linguist. He's a liar, there's a difference.

"The writing is so crisp. Could it have been done with a casting?"

Merta kneels by the metal object. "I think so, yes. It looks more scratched, though."

"A pity. I was hoping the aliens might have had a species like werewolves but for metal."

"You think they might still be alive?"

According to his last briefing before departing the Freedom Democracy, the aliens survived the crash. But that information comes from a species that the rest of the world doesn't yet know exists.

Mofil places his block and silently turns back into the tube to get his next one.

They're having a lot of trouble with the ice. There's not much powder, but ice and rough ground still makes it hard to get a grip and move at speed. The planet Avalon (which this place obviously isn't) did have snow from the probe's data, so they do have snow chains designed for the rover's wheels installed, but you still want to go kind of cautiously.

All four scout teams are in contact with each other and Home Base, checking in regularly. The digital data links even work, so their tablet screens are filling in with map data as they go, and it's really easy to mark down landmarks. With the one rover assigned to looking for a way towards the sun, they spend the first couple of hours putting nav beacons on whatever can pass for a high point nearby. They'll help the computers triangulate everything, the further apart the better. They even have little wind turbines, miniature ones.

Then they drive up and down the glacier, looking for paths in the correct direction that aren't too covered in crevasses or steep slopes or loose pieces. It'll probably take several days, but as they map out safe 'roads' they'll be able to get to more distant areas faster in the future.

He also trained on the surveying equipment, doing all sorts of scanner-things he doesn't really understand in order to identify rich ore veins of useful materials, mostly iron. Magnets or something. They're not bothering with those yet, focusing rather on getting used to the terrain and navigating safely in near-total darkness. Maybe some adjustments to the headlights...

The salvage mapping teams found another transport vehicle in what looks like good order. Tomorrow, maybe they'll go fetch it and have that much more to work with. They also found a sheet of solar panels- Useless to them now, and several emergency supply lockers. The chemical power cells in those will at least stretch their electricity a little further, while she tries to organize a hundred fifty people to build wind turbines out of various bits of rubble and scrap.

Mary has a quiet word in person, not over the radio, with Lucy Carver. She saw where the ship's Small-Arms Armory landed and can guide a scout team to it, tomorrow. It's for the best if they recover those arms and ammunition soonest, just to make sure none of it disappears. There should be ten rifles, twenty shotguns, and thirty-nine pistols- Less the one she has on her person already.

...They'll deal with that tomorrow, on one of the rovers. Mary and three of her security staff can go personally with the salvage team to secure it, if they haven't found one of the reactors by then. The reactor would be higher priority.

For now, they have a LOT of waggling tongues and idle hands to throw at the Hydroponics Module that was dragged into base just now. Get to it if you want to eat something other than rehydrated rations!

We'll have enough electricity for this kind of high activity for... One more day at this pace. Two if we limit use of the vehicles more. And even with Nina's in-progress wind turbines we can't run the habitat, hydroponics, and vehicles all at once.

That's a problem for tomorrow. Keep moving forward.

One more thing. We need crate #65 from one of the hospital modules, or 18 people are at risk of death due to radiation poisoning.

A narrow canyon which has been running parallel to the tube now crosses their path. Diverting along it won't work, since it doesn't seem to be getting any shallower, bending the tube will make it harder to convert to an equartier path later, and too much time would be lost to the longer route. The journey will pause for a few hours.

All the active catfolk leave the tube and surround the area in front to keep it warm enough for werewolves to come out and build a bridge. Someone has got to have bridge building experience, right?

Sure. Some harpies would speed it up a lot.

"Okay. By how much? And what else are we missing..."

Well, not that much time, if they build the bridge out of stone that's already enervated. But if harpies gather loose boulders and pile them up to make the bulk of the bridge, the rest of the werewolves can spend that time stocking up on tube parts, and you know how the catfolk doing assembly are getting faster with practice and outpacing the supply of parts?

He did not know any of that, actually.

"Even if there are harpies in Kef it will take too long for them to get here to be worth it. But send for them anyway, so we don't have this problem again. And, in general, we need to prioritize making the path suitable for equartiers. If we had done that already, we might have been able to get harpies here fast enough to save time. I don't know what we'll need, for the next surprise, because no one has even tried to answer my question about what else we're missing, but we'll need to be able to get it fast."

"And I want updates from each team, every ten hours."

So, anything fun happening in Kef? Dancing? Swimming in the lovely warm aqueduct? By the way, Fuzzer wants harpies. Hey Quiet Pavel, how about we put soap on our feet and go sliding down the empty mine corridors? No, I don't know why he wants the harpies. Actually we should put the soap on our bellies, so we can run and then flop down and slide. I don't want to go back and ask him why; I'd have to redo all the soap.

"All that I'm saying is that it looks like a system similar to an alphabet, not that each letter necessarily represents a sound. I'm not even sure that the row of letters is a sequence in time."

Apparently Calsa's wife is a werewolf. Still weird, but Chime isn't offended anymore. Really, she shouldn't have been offended at all. Maybe lots of households cross a bit internally and just never tell anyone.

She wouldn't know; she hasn't been part of a household since childhood.

There's wind here, and it's been getting steadily stronger. Why is there wind here but not in Kef? Are the Cliffs of Sorrow, way back near Argolake, enough of an obstacle to thrust a calm area windward all the way out to Kef, but not any farther? Seems like a stretch. The wind must be coming from something ahead of them.

Has the wind been eroding the ground?

Yeah, there are signs of erosion. Is that good or bad?

Bad, because it means the wind is a permanent feature of the landscape, not just caused by the alien ship somehow. And do you know what else is a permanent feature of the landscape? I don't know either, but it's ahead of us.

The bridge is finished and they continue darkward.

"So you don't do any farming? That's so weird to me. In Lei, everyone farms. Even I schlepp stuff around; there's not nearly enough vampire work for a whole shift."

"I used to light fields in Argolake, or the lake itself, but not since coming to Kef. We do have farms in Kef, it's just that they wouldn't be enough to live on by themselves."

"Isn't that true of this whole part of Sota, dark of the Cliffs of Sorrow? What if Nitatlel didn't send food...I mean, I guess then you'd stop the Argo aqueduct, so it'd be bad for them too, so they wouldn't. But it just seems so fragile."

"All life is fragile."

"In Lei you really pack the people in, don't you? That seems more fragile."

"Oh, no, I mean, yes, the shrines keep very careful track of how many people there are and how to support them all, but no, it's not scary the same way. Each 'county' goes all the way from bright to dark, so no one is dependent on a treaty to stay fed, certainly not a treaty between different countries. And Lei is huge. If something bad happened to a county, there'd be space for everyone to go somewhere else.

I get the impression people don't travel much here?"

"Wha? In Lei people are forbidden to travel!"

"Nnno. People travel within their county all the time, and across counties there are cargo sledders and theater troupes and" flip fingertips out "rare species and exchange programs... You need a reason, but if you have a reason you can do it. Not like here where every don and magistrate makes up their own rules."

"I see what you mean..."

"And, like, your son is a mouseling? That would never happen in Lei."

"Hey, so, I'm a weird cat, okay? And Merta is a weird wolf. We rescued Siki from bandits who thought Kef would be an easy target, and then what, you want to take him away from a happy family just so he can be with mouselings in Argolake?"

"Well, in most towns there would be plenty of mouselings, just not Kef."

"Sure, there are mouselings in Archer's Tabbard, you wouldn't have to go all the way to Argolake -"

"No I mean, in most towns, he'd just go into a mouseling family from the start."

"Okay, sure. How's that relevant to travel, then? Would you take a child away from everyone they know, for a third time?"

"No!" She sighs. "Maybe I'm just used to life following a plan more than you are."

Ohh, probably someone involved in recommending him for the job is also an FD spy... Who is it? Who's the last person anyone would suspect? ...One of the emperors?!

"What goes on a door? Anyone? I have a list, but what have you all seen on doors?"

- "Exit"

- "Drakebreath!"

- "Granary #3"

- "You are now entering the jurisdiction of Argolake"

- "Jailers Only"

- "I'm at the dock, back before the end of the blood shift"

- "Knock twice for a good time"

- "Office of the Gnomunk Don"

- "Nafolia's Room"

- "Go away, I'm sleeping"

"Good! And I'll add 'catmother, watch over this family'. Assuming the text is permanent, we can rule out some of those. I also think that, given the small size of the text, it's not a warning or urgent advisory. What does leave us? Identification of something, but it's assumed that most people will already know it. Or, maybe, the value was in the act of writing, and it was not really meant to be read at all."

"A religious sign might be indistinguishable from a name, without more information. Like, maybe the small part with the dot is a vocative particle and the rest is a name. If we find more such markings and they all start with the cross and dot, that would be evidence in favor..."

blink-blink-blink... Nefanie is able to teleport right up to the bridge now, so the expedition is probably all the way past it. See everyone soon, back to work now!

Time to get reports from each team!

The assembly is now averaging 22 parts per minute at all four points, but constructing the parts is slower than before since the werewolves are also smoothing the path, down to only 74 parts per minute. The wind is still getting stronger. Morale is good - the gnomunks handed out fresh fruit. A flock of harpies arrived an hour ago. Fuzzer is trying to figure out a safe way to launch a ship in the cold, so a goatseer can take a look at the path ahead, without diverting too many catfolk from assembly.

Aha, two of these problems solve each other! Fuzzer can have 16 catfolk from assembly.

Fuzzer grits his teeth and thanks the wise Abilanedi for his excellent observation.

And how's the diplomacy going, my good man?

"So far, sir, all I can say is that the writing appears to be in an alphabet of some sort, and it's either a person's name or a religious message."

It's been a couple of days, and they're pretty sure they have an accurate count of all the... Survivors, now. So it's time to publish the casualty reports in the general hall.

She's really not looking forward to it. A lead weight in her stomach. Her child is okay. Arnold is with all the other children in an improvised schoolhouse, learning a hastily revised curriculum of technological and practical skills, like how the hydroponic systems work. Most of the children are okay, actually, but not all of them.

Three hundred ninety seven deaths. Twenty six out of a hundred. One in four. And maybe more in the coming days.

There's a steadily building pall of muttering and discontent behind her when she pins up the list. Travis Cooper - Confirmed Dead. Caroline Mathers - Confirmed Dead. Miguel Ortiz - Missing, Presumed Dead. Xiao Lee - Confirmed Dead.

Four reasons to grieve. Ninety nine times more, unread by her eyes.

7384: What a stone-cold bitch. She just pasted them up and left.

Reddeker: What was she supposed to do, give a speech?

7384: Yes.

Orangeanade: She's probably taking it hard too, just not in public. Would it be BETTER if she had a breakdown in the middle of the hall? I for one am glad stone-cold corpo lady is still sharp. It'll keep us alive.

7384: Who invited the boot licker?

Potato_Clock: The whole situation is fucked. This isn't even the right PLANET. They're not telling us something.

Reddeker: My wife is dead. It could just have easily been me. I want answers too. But we have to not die in the meantime.

Orangeanade: I'm sorry about your wife.

7384 has kicked Oranganade.

Reddeker: Dude

Reddeker has kicked 7384.

"The wind is actually really consistent - mostly in the same direction and around the same speed. Which is surprisingly convenient for designing these windmills. We can make the blades just big enough to max out likely production most of the time. I've got the fabrication workshop going, making the blades out of salvaged aluminum, stainless for the hubs and bearings. But the biggest limiter on how many wind turbines we can make will be the number of large electric motors. I bet we could build more, but not quick. So if you see any wrecked vehicles or damaged equipment with big pumps or fans in them while out salvaging, make those a priority."

"Sure thing, Nina. Another place we can salvage them is the landing engines and bay doors for the cargo pods. Might be quite a bit of work to extract them, admittedly- Maybe we can set up a few of the prefab houses closer to the debris field and base salvage work there? I'll bring it up. Though... I've still got boss's orders to sniff around for a reactor module. They actually scattered pretty far, there's three more big module landers we're checking today and the rest are in more inconvenient areas, past crevasses or up high slopes. There's still a lot of smoke and steam in the area too, I think the Brigman Cores are still burning."

"Maybe we could salvage one of those and use a regular old steam turbine."

"You think that's safer than nuclear?"

"If the other nuclear modules had as nasty a landing as the first one, yeah. I saw a camera feed from someone piloting a quadcopter in there. The fuel was literally leaking out of the core and pooling on the ground in a big yellow pile. That shit's incredibly toxic. The brigman cores are fusion- A lot more difficult to make and keep working, but less radioactive, less nuclear waste. They, uh, are probably pretty unstable from the crash though. Forget about it."

"A steam turbine isn't that bad of an idea, though. Someone mentioned geothermal a while ago, and we could always just - burn things. Hell of a waste and unsustainable, but in emergencies..."

"Do you know how to tell if this planet even has a molten core?"

"There were geological probes in some of the cargo bays. If any of those are intact, we can send 'em straight on down and two hours later we'll get a report on all sorts of things. Maybe even a map of useful ore veins if we're lucky. We've still got plenty of chances and options, you know."

"God, how are you so optimistic and cheerful?"

"Well, it's either wallow in doom, or keep trying things. And I hate wallowing."

Today's finds while carefully exploring the crash site:

An area of elevated radioactivity in a shallow valley! Lots of the dust from the nuclear module must have settled here. The team's rover slid down a slope with incredibly bad timing, taking half an hour to get back out. They rush home and through decontamination, already showing signs of radiation poisoning. Four more patients join Dr. Montero's radiation watch.

A cargo bay containing one of the Aurora's orbital shuttles! On a quick examination, it appears to be mostly intact, but one corner of the bay is kind of crumpled and lots of things fell over, so it will definitely need a thorough examination before any attempts to fly. They leave it for later.

And...

The precious reactor module. They've found it. Beyond a small ridge that hid it from vision in the crash site itself, with only smaller pieces of debris nearby. A careful, thorough check reveals no signs of radioactivity, and then Nina Gorman is called on video to examine the interior. It looks all intact, she reluctantly admits.

The rover assigned to brightward exploration has discovered a long, clear part of the glacier, almost a hundred kilometers of obstacle-free space following a ridge. They went slow and careful, marking the path and dropping occasional beacons as they went, and eventually turned back when everyone was getting too tired to safely continue.

We're getting that reactor module NOW.

What about my anti-radiation medicine?

What about my small arms armory?

What about salvaging food and materials from the crash site, just to play devil's advocate?

What about salvaging parts for wind turbines?

Power is life; They'll have all sorts of additional options with proper electricity and heat, even if they also have new problems. They can run the vehicles more, recover more modules. They can let people use power for nonessential purposes if any ends up spare. They'll even be able to power the mining module. Unless the reactor is fantastically unsafe, careful monitoring and rotation of those who work to minimize the negative impacts will have to do.

They have two working transport vehicles. The first one will fetch the reactor module today, then they'll do a very thorough double-check on it. Tomorrow, it gets assembled and turned on. The second transport vehicle can salvage the armory; They don't actually know where the hospital module ended up yet, wind turbines will hopefully be obviated, and the rest of the wreckage isn't going anywhere.

"What should we call this place, anyway?"

"...Call what?"

"The colony. It needs a name. Even if we ended up not at all where we expected to."

"...I've got nothing."

"Svalbard."

"...Niflheim?"

"Isn't Niflheim some sort of Norse hell?"

Mary shakes her head. "Not quite. Home of the frost giants."

"Pluto or Charon, as a reference to a tidally locked dwarf planet around Sol?"

"Charon is the boatman that ferries the dead. I don't want our home's name to mean death. Pluto at least was also a god of wealth."

"Does it have to be from mythology? I don't know anything about that stuff. Svalbard has that seed vault, it's tough but hopeful."

"Perhaps we could take public submissions and hold a vote. It might give everyone who's not a senior officer some sense of control or direction, if nothing else."

"...Sure, why not. One day to submit names, then we throw out duplicates and obvious bullshit or bait, then pick as many as you like on a forum vote on Exodus-Net."

"Well, if that's settled, we all have a lot of work to do, as senior officers."

He stands up and beelines for the exit without waiting for a confirmation.

The ship is a bubble of rock with space for the flock of harpies inside, along with the goatseer, one catfolk, and one frogold. A couple of tiny windows all the way around, and they'll leave a small hole at the top. Catfolk huddle around the outside getting the walls as hot as is comfortable to touch.

"All aboard!"

"Fuzzer! I can't believe I have to say this. We can't afford to lose you."

"It's completely safe. If anything goes wrong, the flock will gently set us down and we'll wait for rescue."

"And if it all shatters?"

"That would be even safer. There are two harpies for each of the rest, so they'll just grab us and fly directly into shelter."

"Oh, alright then, you've got it figured out. We still need you on the ground to coordinate, but I'll feel completely safe taking your place, thanks."

The crew boards, the cap is sealed into the entry hole, the harpies grab on and float...

The goatseer does nothing yet.

The catfolk, who is neither Fuzzer nor Calsa, stays in the center, away from everyone else, and burns.

The ship now weighs almost nothing, so all it takes to push it upwards is to compress the air in her mouth, swap it with uncompressed air below, gulp more air, repeat. Fresh air hisses in though the hole in the top. Gulp, swap. Again.

After half an hour, the goatseer reports that there is a mountain range in front of them. Light colored but dirty, with sharp curls worn into it by the wind. Also, there's another piece of alien debris about a deci-klick left of the tube's heading, thirty klicks forward, and it's small enough for one person to carry back.

After an hour, one of the harpies comments that the air is feeling the way it does when they go high up and there's not enough air and non-harpies start getting weak and ditzy. How is everyone feeling?

She is feeling fine just her mouth is hurting. How about they rotate the ship upside-down and she sucks air in from above, and then the exhaust will blow downwards.

Before they rotate the ship, the goatseer wants to watch outside more, since the windows have a very narrow field of view and who knows where they'll be pointing afterward.

There's a big plume of cloud coming from the direction of the crash site!

Well that they have to get a better look at. Get ready to tumble!

Actually, rotating the ship goes pretty smoothly. The three non-harpies just walk up the spherical wall and it gently rolls over.

Well, the catfolk trips over a handle and chills just in time to avoid setting the goatseer burning hungry, and gashes his arm on the goatseer's horn, but still.

Suck, swap, repeat. The ship goes up a bit more, but that just gets a slightly better view of the foot of the cloud.

After ten minutes of this, a blood vessel in Lin's nose bursts, and she's still fine, she could power through it, but if she keeps sucking air like this she might lose enough blood to be useless if there's an emergency later, so maybe it's time to go down?

"What on Ansaf is - right, aliens."

The new piece of debris is a disk of metal around a spherical piece of metal, with a big hole through the sphere and a bunch of small holes on the edge of the disk, and a sort of blob off to the side. Well, it probably wasn't a blob before the crash.

"More writing. Do you have any idea how it was written?"

Siki gets a tiny cursor from a box in his pocket and takes a veeery close look.

"Nope! But it looks the same as the writing on the door!"

"An alien species magic?"

"I guess. The writing has a sort of scratched or burnt or puckered texture that is not on the rest of the metal. So it's not metal-werewolves, it's something else."

There is so much writing all over.

30mm ANSI 150

WARNING - Do not remove bolts while system is under pressure - WARNING

NOT FOR OXIDIZER

WARNING - Check stem pressure before actuating valve - rated for 30 bar - WARNING

Hitachi 687601696339

PATENT PENDING

Do not tighten beyond 140 ft lbs

24VAC

"Alphabet confirmed, good call Tolesli! We've got some repeated words here. I wonder what that big one that goes at both ends of the line is."

*The phrases in Larian's analysis have been put through a ROT13 transform, and the numbers replaced with Arabic numerals. This is to promote verisimilitude.

The annoying human is serving a useful purpose, interfacing with the annoying elph, so she won't mind if he cribs her notes. It's an interesting puzzle. Everything written on here was probably written for a purpose; It looks expensive. What are the holes for?

What you do with something mysterious is you transform it into new shapes.

٣٠zz NAFV ١٥٠

JNEAVAT - Qb abg erzbir obygf juvyr flfgrz vf haqre cerffher - JNEAVAT

ABG SBE BKVQVMRE

JNEAVAT - Purpx fgrz cerffher orsber npghngvat inyir  engrq sbe ٣٠ one - JNEAVAT

Uvgnpuv ٦٨٧٦٠١٦٩٦٣٣٩

CNGRAG CRAQVAT

Qb abg gvtugra orlbaq ١٤٠ sg yof

٢٤INP

And from last time:

G. Pbbcre

It looks like a load of gibberish for the most part. One can start assuming various things-

JNEAVAT is loud and repeated, so it must be important somehow.

And it's an alphabet, and some of the big ones look similar to corresponding small ones - 'p' and 'P'. Furthermore, the first letter in each line is always a big one.

But- Ugh. Ugh! No, assumptions blind you to the truth sometimes. Just the facts.

Here are phrases that appear multiple times:

JNEAVAT - 4 times.
abg - 3 times.
qb - 2 times, both times before an instance of 'abg'.
cerffher - 2 times, both times between JNEAVAT.
sbe - 2 times. One time big.

Plus '١/something/٠' appearing twice, with two different characters in between. Words that sound similar aside from one sound aren't unheard of, but something about that set of characters is different, too. Some of these are obviously using fewer line strokes than others. And for the letters... Some of those are obviously the same, big and small versions... And they don't really have enough of a sample size for this to be very useful.

r: 18
V/v: 14
A: 13
g: 12
b: 11
e: 11
f/F: 11
N: 7
T/t: 7
E: 6
a: 6
n: 6
P/p: 6
٠: 5
z: 5
o: 5
c/C: 5
J/j: 5
u/U: 5
٣: 4
-: 4
Q: 4
y: 4
h: 4
G: 4
٦: 4
i/I: 4
s/S: 4
١: 3
q: 3
B: 3
R: 3
l: 2
٩: 2
٤: 2
٥: 1
K: 1
M: 1
x: 1
٨: 1
٧: 1
٢: 1
.: 1

"We're missing some of the small-large correspondences, obviously," she muses aloud. "And really, it's just very hard to confidently conclude anything here. Maybe the big letters are special somehow. Maybe the writing is - instructions - if this is an expensive, specialized piece of something larger. Which might make the long lines a pair of instructions or warnings, both to do with something spelled like this-"

cerffher

"...A machine, yes. That's the impression I'm getting. Like a mirrorkite or turbine. This one might be associated with warnings, too..." 

abg / Qb abg

"But, ugh, that's multiple assumptions one after another. This whole table is probably useless, just because of a lack of enough to analyze, and no context..."

Is CNGRAG CRAQVAT a maker's mark? It's displayed prominently. What is cerffher? What is this thing's purpose, anyway? It's a hole that can be opened and closed... Is it for water to pass through?

"Are the short words the most common ones? Nobody wants to spend five seconds saying 'yes'..."

...Useless. Bah. She continues to puzzle over it while idly shedding water anyway.

The blob has wires in it, but the material around the wires isn't very strong, at least now it isn't, and strongest parts of the blob are solid metal, so the wires are probably not structural. What else can you use wires for, other than embedding them into rock?

Money. Jewelry. Maybe the aliens have a species that uses metal wire like a mouseling uses reeds.

Hey boss, good news! The reactor module looked fine to the boys on the ground and it's outside the colony now, being looked over carefully by Nina and everyone else with relevant skills. Too bad about the rovers not going out today, but they took the chance to do a whole lot of checks and maintenance. Also, we had an idea to insulate the battery compartment so it'll lose less power heating itself up to operating temperature. We'll need a few of the parts and resources for that.

Make the rovers more efficient? Yes please. They're a lot more limited on power than material right now.

Power is nearing critically low levels. They have to shut down the hydroponics module, or at least bring it to minimal load, and pause most exploration for today. The rovers consume about 5 kWh per kilometer once you account for how badly the cold is screwing with the batteries, maybe 3 after Bass's fix, while the whole habitat module with all its efficiencies and rationing right now (cold showers, no space heaters, reduced lighting...) is consuming about 700 kWh a day. The wind turbines are bringing in about 60 kW, or 1400 or so kWh per day, though Nina's still working on more... Leaving 700 kWh for the rovers and transport vehicles (they're at least twice as hungry as a rover). 140 kilometers a day. Or 70 for a transport.

They've been burning through chemical power packs, stored hydrogen in fuel cells, and every battery anyone could find and haul in to keep the vehicles active. But the batteries and power cells they've been aggressively draining down so far are now almost utterly spent.

It's alright, though. The gamble paid off. The small modular nuclear reactor was designed more for reliability and ease of use than extreme productivity, but it will still easily manage a megawatt of electricity, conservatively speaking. And lots of waste heat to warm up the modules, so electricity doesn't have to.

"All hail the power of the atom..."

No exploring or salvage today other than this damned reactor. Godammit. Lucy may have a dozen good reasons for it, but... Fuck! 

Nina knows her antipathy towards nuclear power is at least partially irrational. God, Montero is so annoying, as if not mentioning the Pittsburg Disaster will make it hurt less. It's not easy to get over it when she's SEEN what radiation can do to people! Godammit!

Rad suits for everyone. Double, no, triple checks on everything. Every pump, wire, and seam. Every piece of electronics is run through the unit tests several times, and carefully examined by an actual person too, to make sure the unit tests aren't broken. They check the backups and think about building backups to the backups. They make checklists to be followed religiously. Everyone gets their suit checked over by someone ELSE. They can't access the core itself, it's permanently sealed, but they can run over the entire surface several times with very sensitive scanners and Geiger counters, looking for microfractures.

...And yeah, there are a few, and a slightly elevated level of radiation. No fucking way it would pass muster back home. The entire plant would be shut down and maybe condemned. But not dangerous... Probably. If they constantly monitor for it getting worse. This is the kind of radiation that gives you cancer in 30 years, not the kind that kills you in a week or two.

"Thank you, Nina. I'm glad you're the one checking it over, even if you hate this... So, great work."

"As long as you let me keep building wind turbines and bitching about it, we'll be fine. You know why I'm like this, right?"

"I don't think I do, actually. But I don't have to if it's private."

"It's not complicated or private. The Beaver Valley nuclear accident sent my folks to the hospital, and the grave not that long after. I was away for college. So... Yeah. It's irrational, but radiation gives me the fucking creeps."

"-God, I'm sorry. It's for the best. Do you want a day off?"

"Absofuckinlutely not! There are so many things that could still go wrong. Once we're more established, sure. Checks will be done to my satisfaction tomorrow, and we can... Turn it on."

They recovered the small arms locker yesterday; She ensconces it deep within a low-traffic area with one entrance, which also houses the security office. Redundant cameras, double-checking everyone who goes in and out and only her and two other trusted lieutenants are permitted to actually open the safe. The guns don't need to be visible, but they have 'em.

Shen is quickly finding his stride as an adjutant and assistant; Keeping Lucy's schedule, making lists of reminders and tasks and badgering people about them until they're done, soothing tempers and assuaging concerns. Manager work. Certain segments of the colony population are a lot more willing to talk to him than Lucy, with his military background and serious demeanor. It's... Fine. Needs doing.

These 22 radiation poisoned people are going to die without those drugs. I am doing my best, but that is the simple truth.

Everyone else is mostly dealing with little more than bumps and scrapes. He'll be watching like a hawk for any signs of infectious disease while conditions are this crowded.

Calsa stretches out next to Merta and whispers in her ear. "Hey. When we reach the mountains tomorrow and spread the wolves back, I bet a bunch of alcoves are going to be empty."

"It's going to be so boring making the elevator shaft, too. If a distraction happened to wander within reach..."

"Heh." And in a normal voice: "Ready for sleep, all?" (Mumbles from the werewolves huddled around her.) Flame chilled.

(Except for the involuntary burning inside her body - hence the huddle of werewolves - and, uh, the other involuntary burning inside her body.)

The mountain is made of ice.

From now on, they'll need to carry all the rock for the tube from here to the open end, including a vertical rise of a klick. The harpies will be busy.

Is this where the water is going when it leaves the chartreuse never to return?

Who cares, they're going to be rich! Well there's the aliens too, but even if that's a complete failure, there's so much water here. A mining town will be an obvious investment, and he's the elph to lead it.

"Since this is the last solid ground we'll have, I'm going to establish a shrine here. Prepare a site."

The werewolves aren't going to be any use until the ice-ground ahead is ready to build on. Most have already turned back to prepare the path for equartier travel, but now, almost all of the rest should go back too. If it were up to him, he'd keep only Merta (the Kef clerk) and Stepan (the oldest miner), but the Lei werewolf insists on seeing all the action herself and a bunch of Abilanedi's attendants are building a shrine for him.

They can melt the elevator shaft at least, right?

They can! Stepan insists on vampire supervision once there's a significant overhang, saying it freaks him out thinking about all the weight above him made of a material that he can't feel and can't predict.

chirp

It's not too cold when they're out of the wind and she's surrounded by catfolk!

chirp

Although the water trickling on the ground is presumably cold, since it was cold before and now Chime can't feel her feet...

chirp

...she will accept the offer to climb on Calsa's shoulders.

The glacier creaks.

chirp

Well there's not as much stress now, but she has a much better understanding of what stress in ice means now! "Hey. Y'all. Let's calmly walk out and take a break, and give the ice a break too, okay?" chirp "Chill" chirp "as much as you can." chirp "Nice and calmly." chirp "Run! Illthrift! Run!"

She tries to spread her wings, thwacking them into the walls, and clings on as Calsa splashes out of the tunnel.

Crack! The ice collapses in a jumble and rushes outwards after them - not just the bits they were melting, a whole chunk of the ice mountain.

When the screaming stops, there are: Three dead. One severely crushed (a gnomunk ejects his fruit and stores the victim) and thank the catmother it was a catfolk, adult werewolves are too big for a gnomunk to store. Many lesser injuries. And Abilanedi's new shrine is ruined, but Fuzzer is too upset to care about that either way.

So... Right after a big disaster is a horrible time to bring up the shiny idea he's had for a while and is having more and more thoughts about now that they're deep in the drydark.

It's dangerous. It's new and exciting. They're making history! He wants in on it as more than just 'there were a flock of harpies there'! The individuals of the flock hardly ever matter!

The turbines of Kef were an amazing thing to behold; Fire can become motion. And every waking minute he hasn't been flying in formation he's been returning to his old idea. Studies of live birds, of harpy and vampire and aasimar and tengu wing structure.

If you put a turbine on something light enough, to drive it forward, and also a harpy was there to reduce the weight of the turbine and catfolk and themself and the structure, you could probably get a bird-like shape to fly. And with wood and fabric and cords, or maybe even metal wires, and the weight-shifting and balance games every Harpy plays as a chick, you can warp the wings and turn. Such a ship would be warm enough, because of the catfolk, and fast because of the turbine and wing, much better for exploration.

Maybe. If it works. And doesn't kill them both.

So now he has sketches. Plans in a careful, precise hand with measurements, wood and cords and tense fabric like a kite's sails. He thinks it holds up and makes physical sense, Kyrie the old flock-captain looked at it and went 'hmm' instead of 'ugh'...

...He'll bring them up to that Fuzzer guy people seem to be deferring to after another shift has passed and things are calming down again. It might be safer, that's the argument, or at the very least it only risks two people and not fifteen.

It really is pretty terrible that people are dead. It's bad. He'll be respectfully silent and sad about it. But people die all the time and he didn't know any of them, so only so sad.

The reactor module is in as good a shape as could be expected. They tidied everything up. They triple and quadruple checked. They did ultrasounds on the core to see if anything inside was broken. The structure goes up, prefab panels for a fully sealed, negative pressure system that drops air outflow into some intense filters, the cooling tower is hooked up, the giant turbines in their pre-built enclosures are lifted into place with cranes before the prefab panels are assembled around them, the airlocks and decontamination showers and changing rooms for the lead-lined radiation suits all get set up one by one...

And then, they they turn it on. This is actually a 12-hour process, with much of the last of their battery power going into feeding the pumps as the reactor comes up to temperature. 

The cooling tower is a vital part of the overall loop. Everything is a closed system and heat, once added, has to go somewhere. It takes relatively cool steam after it passed through the turbines, and condenses it back down to room temperature water to go into the reactor again. The system was designed to work in a wide variety of atmospheres, but this one is actually denser and colder than what they expected. They have to heat up the feed pipes of the cooling tower manually, so the first relatively lukewarm and slow water flows won't freeze in the pipes wrecking them. This drains more of their starkly limited power. 

Thousands of gallons of pure water go in, slowly charging the system's closed loop to its full capacity... The cooling tower begins its work, with the air intake carefully regulated and slowly increased as the display of temperature sensors every five feet in the system slowly change colors...

Everyone but Nina, among the senior officers, is in a control room watching anxiously. If everything goes well, all the immediate crises will be solved. There will still be plenty of challenges and work to do, but there won't be an imminent looming specter of freezing doom.

"Engaging feed to turbine one," Nina says over the intercom.

The little fan icon begins turning. There are yellow warning signs; Pressure too low, temperature too low. But both of those are slowly increasing thanks to the carefully controlled storm of radioactive decay controlled by a sophisticated understanding of atomic sciences and tens of thousands of hours of engineering, all to... Boil water.

"...Ten kilowatts. Twenty. Thirty- Fifty kilowatts."

"Woo! We've got power, boys and girls. I want to hold the core's power level here for an hour to make sure the grid interlinks and power storage is all working fine."

"Go right ahead, Nina. We'll stand by up here. The emergency response teams are still ready."

The systems of the Exodus are well-designed and robust, of course- Well, aside from whatever failure or sabotage caused the whole crash thing, Bass guesses, so maybe some caution is warranted after all. Hrm.

Either way, nothing seems to go wrong after an hour, so Nina turns up the reactor power level, and then raises it further, and further. The generators turned on. The lights all came back up. The air filters started working faster. The heating system came on! And there are hot showers now, in the admittedly still really cramped teeny little apartments! The reactor module itself included a wicked cool superconducting magnetic energy storage loop, which is something like a magnetic flywheel or maybe an enormous capacitor? 

Man, magnets are weirder than any amount of fantasy story magic sometimes. He just knows vehicles. And his vehicles are coming out to play again! Four rovers, two transporters, all with freshly topped off batteries, ready to roll.

Where to, boss?

Mary doesn't have much to say here that hasn't already been said. It might be a good idea to look for the Exodus's bridge, whatever is left of it, to find the logs and hopefully get some answers. But it can wait one day.

Oh, the seismometers measured an ice quake early this morning. Magnitude 1.6- Too weak to feel, but evidence of at least some active geological activity. It might just be from something falling over at the crash site, though.

Can they tell where that 'ice quake' came from?

Nope. Not without a bunch of monitoring stations spread out over a wide area.

Like many things, that's a project for later.

They can relax a bit for the day- She's just off from enjoying a hot shower herself. It's cleansing. She even orders double food rations for the day to give everyone else more to celebrate. There's still considerable worry about food and nutrition in the medium term, but they have 30 days of food, the hydroponics module is currently sufficient for about 1/3 of daily needs, and more modules built in the coming days will help a lot with both those problems.

So, crash site salvage. They already know where another housing and hydroponics module, a recycling module, and an entertainment module are. She wants all of them. Housing and hydroponics first, to alleviate the grumbling from crowding and help with food security. Finding a path to the light side of the planet, exploring the surroundings for any notable features or possible resources, and continuing to survey the crash site are all important- Bass should devote one one and two rovers to each task. Does any of that sound like she's making a mistake?

"With all due respect, I'm sure the twenty one patients- One of them expired overnight, a miss Hailey Cuthbert- Suffering from acute radiation poisoning would appreciate all available measures to find a hospital module being taken."

-That is an excellent point. Bass, all four rovers are to scour the debris field. Look for the hospital module above all else.

Shen, quietly, sets up and announces the colony name submission board. It's a good thing for people to argue about and submit dozens of names to when they're enjoying a doubled dinner.

Come on boys and girls, the people need us! Rovers 1 and 2, get to high points and scan around with binos. Rovers 3 and 4, we're going to go along THESE routes. No stopping for salvage, it's not going anywhere, medicine above all else...

Green_Pinkie: The first harvest from hydroponics will be ready in another 2 days! Delicious lettuce, spinach, kale, and bamboo. Fruits like strawberries, blueberries, and raspberries will be most delayed, and potatoes are coming in bulk soon enough. These are all specially genetically modified crops, optimized to grow fast off CO2 rich air and bright redlights. Hydroponics team represent!

Reddekeer: Nice!

Potato_Clock: Ah, kale, the Toyota Hilux of vegetables. You can't even use it as a clock.

Orangeanade: Leafy greens are delicious! I don't know where all the vitamins and minerals are going to come from without them!

Green_Pinkie: We might actually run out of chemical fertilizer eventually. There's plenty for now, though. I looked through a whole cargo pod full of plastic barrels full of our special mix on the first day.

Potato_Clock: Speaking of which- HOT SHOWERS. God it's cold out there. The EVA suits weren't designed for this kind of wind, people have been making improvised extra cloaks to wear over them. Wish I had that idea sooner.

Reddeker: Things are looking up. We have a stable foundation now and can start investigating what went wrong, maybe get some answers.

7384: They'll investigate themselves and find no evidence of wrongdoing.

Reddeker: And I agree, actually being warm for once in the last week is really nice.

7384: They're using luxury to distract us from the real issues. Lucy Carver is up to something, mark my words.

Potato_Clock: If God himself gave you a magic wand, you'd complain that it didn't come with steak and fries.

7384: Fuck off.

7384 started a kickvote. Kick Potato_Clock y/n?

7384: wtf I can't kick 

Reddeker: Yeah, no more of that from you. I'm half tempted to permaban you if you're gonna keep this up.

Kickvote failed 1/11

Green_Pinkie: Let's all be civil here!

Orangeanade: I found a chess set in some of the personal luggage that was dragged here in the confusion. Anyone want to play with me? I'm at table 9 in dining room 3.

Paro isn't a doctor. On the thankfully-rare occasions when someone gets hurt badly enough to need a gnomunk, he grabs them, pops them out when told, and keeps his eyes shut and one hand on his nose.

The crushed catfolk was almost beyond his magic, presumably because - aaaahhh - the crushing increased his surface area to almost match Paro's own surface area. (He's overall a bit smaller than a catfolk but his tail is longer.) Now it's time to pop him out again, just for a second.

out - Doctor Shor looks the guy over while one of his assistants stuffs a mashed anesthetic leaf into his mouth and the liefling grabs the uncrushed arm to target him for - Doctor Shor yells out a medical term that Paro doesn't know and doesn't want to know - in

Paro throws up. He doesn't have free space to catch it, not that he's in a frame of mind to be able to catch a liquid right now, and his vomit mixes with the blood on the floor.

"'The vampire didn't know how to interpret stress in ice' - that's a relevant part of this incident's failure analysis, which is not your failure analysis and I don't think one is warranted."

"You did great, Chime." pat pat "All of us are alive because of you."

"You can't compare with an imaginary alternative!

I should have known to be doing something more cautious. There are different kinds of rock. I know that, I've been trained on that. I should have called the alarm before the first cracking sound, even, and then watched for a while by myself."

"Why? What part of your thought process at the time, and does it still seem like a mistake when generalized?"

"Why should I have called the alarm sooner? Why didn't I? It didn't look like rock looks under stress, and I should have stopped and realized that I had no idea whether it was safe. After it creaked and I knew it was bad, everyone was worried, I should have screamed to get out. I could make the excuses that unstable rock usually isn't an emergency, in my usual work, which is not supervising active excavation but inspecting old structures near the Pes orogeny, and that they're made of stone that's been worked over so much that it's smooth and strong. But that's corrupt. I was trained for mining, I should have used my training. Especially since I saw that the stone in Kef was mixed-up and raw. That should have jarred me loose from my habit."

"Unstable old rock isn't an emergency because it's been fine for a while and it will keep being fine?"

"Yes, and when people panic they get hurt."

    Stepan nods. "Even in mining, when a vampire notices something wrong, it's not an emergency. Flooding, bad air, and hungry fire are the emergencies."

"I don't know what training you have. I'm not asking for Lei secrets, but is there a particular procedure that you neglected?"

"Fuzzer, I think we know pretty well at this point what happened and what to do differently."

"This isn't just about Chime. If she made a particularly kind of mistake that other people might also make, we need to know that. I want to get enough value out of this to make the deaths worthwhile."

"Nnno. We memorize what different kinds of rock look like and how strong they are under compression and tension and shearing, and how heavy they are and stuff. The certification exam is watching a team of werewolves make a big stupid complicated structure with every possible problem and telling them how to fix it, in the right order...but no one ever says, first identify the rocks and then figure out how close to breaking they are and then decide if it's a problem. It's supposed to be obvious.

We practice by imagining different rocks in different situations, with flashcards to make sure we're doing it right. Not real rocks, and not just because that would be a huge waste of time for the wolves. I think the idea is that the training is exhausting, but once we're done, we can stroll along chatting with the foreman and it just works? If there was a procedure to follow, well, people might not follow it, but even if people were perfect, it would be tiring. Mentally. Ten hours of mentally-tiring safety-critical work in a mine is asking for trouble. If it's obvious, it's not tiring.

I don't thinnnk any of that's a Lei secret."

"Mm. I still think there might be a benefit from a very simple procedure; perhaps, on the very first chirp, check if this is a normal job or not. But for now, I'm only going to write, 'the vampire's training was insufficient'. And also, in the contributing factors, 'the vampire's prior experience may have led to complacency' - that's a technical term, not a moral judgement - 'because of the recent shift in the common work for vampires in northern Lei due to the Pes orogeny'. And that's still not the true root cause, but going deeper than that is for Lei to do."

"We should all take a quiet moment to think about how this is different from what we've done before," says Stepan.

"Emphasizing 'a quiet moment'. Don't get distracted second-guessing everything while you do it.

My last issue is why were we doing this dangerous thing at all. I have thoughts, but want someone else who wasn't involved in making the decision to handle this part of the investigation. I suggest starting by interviewing me and Stepan in private, probably some other people too.

To recap: we don't know why the ice collapsed. The evacuation went very smoothly. The shouts of the miners alerted the shrine-builders in time to run. We're going to take a quiet moment to think about how this is a new place deeper in the drydark than anyone has ever been. Be ready for someone to talk to you in private.

Now, looking forward, we have a bunch of ice, in chunks on the ground where we can play with them. We're still on two 15-hour shifts. I want every catfolk either studying the ice themself or helping someone study it. I know Merta has a bunch of ideas about building a tube out of ice."

"...Or something else similarly important. Now is a good time to discuss ideas."

- he looks over Audron's sketches and purrs -

"You're intending this as a way to scout ahead? No goatseer, just get close up and look ourselves? If you take this to a higher part of the ice mountain and leave the catfolk there, could you bring the contraption back yourself? Could you take an extra person, at least a vampire or a gnomunk, or a decently sized cursor? Can we test this without the mini-turbine - just a kite and you and a catfolk to keep you warm? For that matter, I'm not sure it needs the mini-turbine at all, at least just to get someone up the mountain, not a longer scouting trip..."

"So the thing is for all the Freedom to Grow lets me try things, things are expensive, none of this has ever been physical examples except a tiny wood and paper glider this wide," about a foot and a half, "Which I got a mouseling called Lenora to test the wing warping with a cursor with. I bought a lot of wood and cord and paper and went through several things that didn't work at all. I didn't think to bring it, delicate and all. I brought it up high with the cursor and cords for controls to scale and just let it go and she flew it- Lost control of it a lot at first, both mistakes in operation and in design. We did that for a couple of months off and on. There's a- It just spins and crashes if you get too slow. You can glide a good while, yes... There's probably arrangements that can bring more weight and people along. I don't want to overstate my confidence, I'm thinking a lot more about safety after yesterday."

"Hrm. Good. So there's two purposes - scouting and transportation - and two places you could work on it - Kef, or in the chartreuse. Not here, it's too cold and remote. You can disassemble the finished thing and bring it here through the tube, right?

I don't know how important scouting will be. I also don't know how important transportation will be, but hopefully it will become clear after experimenting with the ice.

...I think the most useful scouting job this could do is gathering information other than just what the ground looks like. Such as by bringing a mouseling with a sack of cursors who tosses one down each klick, or by bringing a vampire and skimming close to the ground. And for transportation obviously passenger capacity is vital. Either way, it has to be big.

I really want an aasimar. Then we'd have transportation up the mountain and scouting with the goatseer. You would focus on long trips, which I imagine the turbine will be necessary for.

In any case, most of the werewolves are going home soon, which will drastically reduce our food needs. Just a barge through the tube each cycle or so, and we'll keep it open for equartiers the rest of the time. So it would be no problem, logistically, for you to stay in Kef to work on this idea.

But the wind is far weaker in Kef. 

If it was just up to me, I'd want to send you to Nitatlel to try some designs in the wind, in a comfortable temperature. Someone in Kef could work on the turbine, or they could go to Nitatlel with you.

Alas, politics. Will the Freedom Democracy be okay with you temporarily leaving the expedition? If that's what you want?"

"Anything I make would be relatively easy to disassemble and rebuild. And that's a tricky question. They'll take me off of the expedition forever if I leave for even a little bit, I bet, and I do want to be here! I want to see the crash site! Try to figure out how that enormous ship worked! Maybe not if Sota lets more people from Lei and the Freedom Democracy join later? I tried pretty hard to get here in the first place! They're expecting books! First few chapters are ready for equartier-relay, actually. Uh, I'm really willing to take direction on how to depict the last wake, tragedies shouldn't - be made light of. It's mostly been prose about the mood, the landscape, the logistics and innovations, so far... Suppose I could send a message to Sixth Elector Lenisaf by kitsune and ask about a side project in Nitatlel or Kef."

"It's not my call to whether invite more people, but I'll mention it.

Did you hear much of the discussion? I think that sort of failure analysis is interesting but not sensational, if you keep it separate from the personal stories. And keep the personal stories just about what people directly witnessed; don't add a bunch about feelings and definitely don't make anything up. 

I'm planning to talk to a magistrate about how to properly do a failure analysis, eventually, and I'll invite you to that, so you can hear all about how my imitation compares to the real thing - If you're interested. I imagine the 'wisdom of the elves' isn't popular reading in the Freedom Democracy."

"A failure analysis is absolutely not the kind of thing my readers will like but it sounds useful. I didn't hear much of it. It's, uh, I like it there but I'm finding myself surprisingly sympathetic to other points of view? Trading some freedom for some security is a thing people might want. I think the exchange rate is- You know what. I shouldn't talk politics. It always leads to trouble. Nevermind that. I'll stick to facts and my own personal feelings, nobody else's, about the collapse."

He'll go find the kitsune and see if she wants to take an interview for his book some time and also he has a message for the queue. It's short; the Fifth Elector who referred him to the Sixth saw his designs and mini-glider for at least five minutes and seemed interested, so he doesn't have to explain the whole thing beyond 'a potentially useful innovation for transport or scouting' and the idea for a Nitatlel or Kef side-project proposed by Jake Fuzzer of Kef. (He does show off his sketches again though!)

"Yep, I stay out of politics." Meikalani draws a lot of it and she can keep it.

"There's no queue for me! One of the benefits of not being a vital component of the government!"

Nefanie ducks into the kitsune-closet for a minute. 

"Okay, message passed on and stuffed, jammed, rammed, and crammed into all relevant queues.

I didn't witness the accident happen; I was checking up on the path-smoothing teams and no one flagged me until they had written the whole announcement. But I'm always happy to talk!"

"Not necessarily about the accident. Just - the project in general, if you don't mind. Feel free to not answer any or all!"

His questions are: When did she first hear about the aliens? What did she think? When did she hear about the expedition? Is it exciting? What kinds of things does she do for the expedition? What about in her free time? What does she think about Kef, Abilanedi, Jake Fuzzer, various other expedition staff? What's her daily routine like? What does she think the aliens were/are (they might have enough magic to survive the crash! who knows!) like? Does she have anything she wants to say to readers in the FD?

When did she first hear about the aliens? "Do you count seeing the ship before I knew it was aliens? We joked about how fluffy its tail was. The liefling who visits us to collect fur said it was aliens."

What did she think? "I was dubious! Sounds like a prank, you know? See how long Nefanie will believe this story, get the liefling in on it too..."

When did she hear about the expedition? "The liefling came back the next cycle with someone from the government trying to hire a kitsune. I think I got the job because I'm just the right amount of serious. The really serious kitsune were busy directing equartiers and the really fun ones, you can't touch them with your eyes closed."

Is it exciting? "Of course! Well, I'm not excited every minute, but I remind myself about the aliens and that gets me excited again."

What kinds of things does she do for the expedition? "Messages, so far, which means most of the time not actually taking messages, just bouncing though the closets checking. Once the path is ready, I'll monitor the equartiers. We're using an exclusive-path protocol which I think will be a lot more fun than the usual block protocol where you never even hear the equartiers pass by. To signal an emergency stop, I have to leave the closet and put a ribbon across the path while the equartier is charging toward me!"

What about in her free time? "I visit Kef or Archer's Tabard or my friends back home. Or go running in the drydark and see how much farther I can get before I'm too cold and have to leave. I've gotten about a klick or two fel from the bridge but now I think I'll start again from here and go along the edge of the ice mountain."

What does she think about Kef, Abilanedi, Jake Fuzzer, various other expedition staff? "Kef is nice! I don't like being pinned in a big city like Argolake, but Kef is good. I'm trying to get invited into every house. Hi everyone if you're reading this!

I expected not to like 'Foreman Stirling', but Fuzzer is great. I want to give him a sampling of drugs and get him talking about math.

I want to get Abilanedi high too, but not for the same reason. 

Merta scares me. She's so hard, if she breaks it's going to be bad."

What's her daily routine like? "I don't really work a shift. I bounce around every hour or so while I'm awake and take life as it comes."

What does she think the aliens were/are (they might have enough magic to survive the crash! who knows!) like? "Stranger than any guesses I've heard. They're not going to be like some species we have with some small differences. They're going to be, like, wizards with metamorphosis between life stages, one of which is a cloud of goo."

Does she have anything she wants to say to Readers in the FD? "I'm a kitsune who lives on a mountain in the middle of the Storms and eats slowgrowth. My life is already as free as possible. And yet, here I am, trapped in tiny room on the side of a tube a bit over a meter wide, with ten people between me and the nearest kitsune-closet. How did this happen to me? Words. Words are powerful. Words are great! From teng to fel, from south to north, plant an allheart and call peace forth! Smash the shrines! Glory to Lei! You better print this exactly as I said it or I'll sneak over there and piss in your teapot, ha ha just kidding."

"And I should check on your message now..."

"FD said yes! They'll pay for your materials and send one more person, and Lei will also send one more. Nice, I've always wanted to see Nitatlel! We're going to have a great time, Audron."

He writes this all down!! And laughs at parts!!

"That's great news! Maybe we can take you into the sky some time once I have a big version nice and safe. I wonder if you had a closet on board you could come in and out of it? The weight would be noticeable. I guess now we have to do the boring stuff and figure out, like, when I should leave and how. Oh, hey, maybe it'll be ready in time to help once they figure out how to get up on to the ice safely."

Speaking of which, the Frozen City will send an aasimar along with three bodyguards.

"Was that what they were balking at this whole time? Four people they'll do but not three? Ugh. I mean, I don't know what the politics is, but I don't think they ought to be required to match the FD and Lei parties."

Koy also wants to send someone! Since they're in the Allheart Alliance, it's probably just a coincidence that they're announcing this now.

out

The perfectly ordinary chunk of meat that just happens to resemble a catfolk gets: 

- a test-fit in a stone casing

- a tourniquet on both legs

- lungs emptied of blood

- targeted again by the liefling

- scanned by the vampire

in goes the ordinary chunk of meat.

Paro retches. Gnomunks are herbivores.

Larian volunteers to write up part of the failure analysis. She focuses on the decisions being made.

How was it decided to use catfire to melt through the ice? Who decided it? When? How long did they think about it? Did you discuss the idea with others? When other people were told about the idea, were they told, 'this is what we're doing', or 'this is an idea we have, what do you think'? Did anyone ask if this might be dangerous? Did anyone ever flag that it might be unsafe? Did anyone FEEL like it was unsafe, but not say anything? Okay, and what happened after you mentioned feeling unsafe? Was any time spent considering alternate plans?

The questions are kind of accusatory but she does a good utterly neutral Bureaucrat Drone. We're just filling out a form here, everything's fine, just tell me what you remember.

She summarizes and anonymizes answers to a reasonable degree, and builds a timeline, and asks others to double-check her work, and adds the following tentative findings:

• The ice mountain was being treated as if it were familiar terrain. The expedition should be aware that the drydark is a hostile and unknown place, and generally proceed conservatively.
• The ice-melting proposal was considered from a feasibility standard first, and a safety standard second if at all. ('Would this work' rather than 'is this safe'). Expedition planners should make sure to consider the risks of any new plans or actions.
• Safety of the process was not ever specifically and deliberately considered during the initial planning. It was discussed only after the melting had already begin when a member of the team raised concerns. It should have been discussed earlier.
• The decision to proceed was made quickly. It should have been discussed more, even if it might delay the expedition's progress.
• The process was initiated at full speed right away. It should have been tried on a small scale first so any obvious problems could be flagged.
• The decision to proceed was made without consulting very many people. Discussion with more people could have flagged the problems that led to the accident.
• Those asked to contribute were asked in the context of a fully-formed plan, and therefore less primed to think about whether the process was safe and viable. They should have been explicitly asked questions like 'does this seem like a good plan' and 'can you think of anything that could go wrong if we do this' and 'do we have all the magics and skills and tools we need to do this'.
• The writer of this failure analysis addendum is not experienced in failure analysis. It may be missing obvious conclusions or come to erroneous ones. If anyone has literature about safe planning and failure analysis, please send it.

So that's how a professional does it. How on Ansaf did this quiet kappa get to be such a professional? ... Does she want a position on the leadership team.

That sounds like it will result in fewer people ordering her around on average, so sure.

It's Day 7 today. Someone graffitied a pithy joke on the cafeteria wall. Riiiight in a convenient camera blindspot. She's pointedly not looking for whoever did it, and just made sure someone got assigned to clean it off.

It's true, at any rate.

And on the seventh day, Lucy Carver saw the work that everyone else had done, and found it good, and rested.

"Yeah, we drove the rovers pretty hard yesterday," he says in their daily meeting. "But we did find the hospital module! Her thrusters fired just fine and she landed beautifully, just, on the other side of a little mountain from here. We only brought back the crates Dr. Montero told us were most important. The heavy transport will be necessary to get everything."

"I'm very grateful for the hard work and the find. The patients suffering from acute radiation exposure are still in the balance, but it improves their odds considerably. Five more have been identified as they leave the latent stage and came in for treatment, and the others are getting worse, so you've found them just in time, really. It's likely to be several weeks before everyone is fully recovered. In five days, we'll know whether anyone else is likely to die of it."

"Reactor's fine so far. Little to report."

"Do you think you could raise the new modules we brought back yesterday?"

"Only one each day, we don't have enough skilled hands to go faster safely. And we're using up a lot of our stocks of, I guess, 'hard resources', with all this construction, by the way. Hardware, electrical equipment, that kind of thing. Running the vehicles will wear that down too some, the environment isn't exactly friendly here- Things wear out, need replacing. It's not a major concern yet, and also there's plenty to salvage out in that debris field, but it's definitely something to be aware of."

"We can make more. The workshops and maintenance facilities attached to each module have all the tools and databases needed to run small-scale industry. Just about the only thing we can't do yet is fabricate new processors, but we have the tools to make the tools, there. Though specialized industries like that rely on specialized knowledge."

"There are tons and tons of spare field programmable gate arrays and other chips specifically because they're harder to make more of. Those are like generic all-purpose CPUs, sort of. Anyway. The bottom line is, we can make more hardware things like gears, bearings, batteries, and motors if we have the raw materials. Full machine shop and so on. Getting the raw materials is a medium-term concern- We'll need to identify good mine sites, set up a mining module, and then haul out the automated extractor and turn on the refineries. Plenty of electricity for it thanks to the nuke plant, and I was looking over the plans and think we can recycle some of the waste heat from depleted steam in industrial use too."

"I'm keeping an ear to the ground as far as the mood in the colony goes. People are relieved, of course, but that just leaves space for questions, like where the fuck are we and what happened. Morale is above average right now. Six out of ten. We definitely want to go look for the bridge and get the full story now, though."

"The two heavy transports are alright and can keep salvaging today, but our rovers need a break for recharging and maintenance, as I mentioned before."

"Nina, can you set up the other habitat module we recovered? Giving people more space to stretch their legs will soothe down tempers... Tomorrow it'll be the recycling module to preserve our supplies as best we can, then a second hydroponics module, then a mining module, and we'll go from there depending on what else we recover and how the situation develops."

"Sounds like a plan, boss. I guess there's no such thing as weekends around here."

"Perhaps once we're more established. In the meantime, the call for names for our new home has resulted in... Extensive... Results. Does anyone want to review them with me to pare it down? We might end up having to do two rounds of voting- To cut a list of dozens down to three to six or so, and then to choose one from that."

"Hoo boy, what are people saying to get that reaction out of you? I submitted 'Exodus' and 'Nova Terra' and 'Svalbard', but now I gotta see this."

He passes out datapads wordlessly.

Aeternis
AnyPort
Astraux
Aurora
Autonomous Republic of Crash Survivors
Avalon
Avalon't
Beyoncé
Blessing
Bob
Carver
Charon
Cryos
Cryothis
Discovery
Dog
Earth Two
Eclipsia
Eden
Eminent Domain
Endurance
Enterprise
Exodus
Exponential Growth
F1rst
Faith 
Fimbulheim
Foundation
Freljord
Frostbound
Frosthaven
Glacies
Glacium
Hawaii
Hesperis
Hibernia
Hope
Htrae
Icehole
Icelis
Igloo
Janus
Junkyard
Jörmungandr 
Marisa Espanoza
McMurdo
Michaelangelo
Mir
Nadir
New New York
Nivis
Nordis
Nova Terra
Oops
Permafrost
Pitcairn
Planet'); DROP TABLE SUBMISSIONS;
Pluto
Refuge
RenDaire
Santa's Workshop
Saturn 
Shark
Solstice
Stygia
Svalbard
Tabula
Target
Tenacity
Test option please vote for this
Thule
Valley of the Wind
Von Neumann
Wegotthis
Whiteout
Whiteplains
Winterhold
Yellow Submarine

 "...And that's only a little bit of it."

Dog. Seriously... Dog???

"'Please vote for this'? Okay, that's actually kind of hilarious."

She can't help but let out a snort of laughter at the 'drop table' one.

"At least people are having fun. I'll go over the deluge with you, Shen. Let's filter out all the jokes then post it, vote for however many you like, the ten with the most votes survive to round two?"

The first half of Marlene's life is directed toward structure and stability. Her parents are college graduates with big dreams and big debts, and she can't follow them. She knows it's a weakness, that she has the potential to launch the next Amazon or discover the Theory of Everything, but she can't. She gets a job unsticking robots in a warehouse and lives with her parents until she can afford a pipefitting class.

She knows it's a selfish, privileged thought, but she thinks it anyway: she can handle being poor, but she can't handle being broke, which is a different thing that's not entirely about money. Maybe the 'human touch' pays better than carrying shit for the actual pipefitter, but it leaves her mom a wreck every weeknight, and Marlene is not going to let herself get trapped in that cycle of burnout. So what, she's selfish and privileged and can't bear to think about how lots of people say they can't handle being broke and then go broke anyway.

It helps that she's lucky enough to actually enjoy rice and beans. It helps that she can fit herself into a tiny room without getting antsy about it. It helps that she doesn't have any expensive medical issues - and obviously she's not going to transition until she can afford the endogenous estrogen gene therapy, which costs as much as a car, and not a budget brand. (The implants are nice if you don't want to take pills every day, but they only last a few years, which is useless as far as she's concerned.)

When she turns thirty, her parents give her the money they had wanted her to use for college. It's not much, objectively, but it's about what she saves in a year, and it's enough for her to start studying to be an aircraft mechanic. "You always wanted to fly," her dad says. "Lots of people work in ground crew while they study to be pilots, right?" (She does not actually have what it takes to be a pilot, and he would know that if he actually looked. Then again, he somehow hasn't figured out that she's trans, despite her friends calling her 'Marlene' in front of him.) She snarls. "Where did you hear that, maybe last month when I was talking about my classmate Gary?"

She graduates and moves to Albany. She apologizes to her dad. She earns more money than she's ever had in her life and saves half of it.

The second half of Marlene's life is about enjoying the structure and stability she's secured.

She does her job. Night shift sucks, but if everyone hates it that's all the more job security for her. She runs every evening before work and then binges Wikipedia on the bus to the airport with her phone brightness on max, obsessing about a new topic every week or two.

She buys an old, sturdy computer and learns to program. She fills her GitHub with a dozen projects, each abandoned with more TODOs than functions. She downloads hundreds of pirated textbooks and reads the first chapter of each.

She finally transitions. (The way with pills every day; she likes having savings.)

And then, the Exodus project begins. It's obviously the purpose her life was missing up to now.

But can she get in? A background in the military would have been nice, like all those old astronauts. Her current job in aircraft maintenance seems like the next best thing. The only problem is that it's her only thing, and that's not good enough.

She makes a list of skills it would be nice to have. There's no way she's going to become a licensed engineer, but she can learn the basics, right? Actual engineers probably spend their day using specialized software for simulations that needs a bunch of on-the-job training anyway, right? She doesn't actually know if that's true, but it's her only hope. She finishes reading some of the textbooks and does the exercises. She's not going to be as reliable as a real expert, nor as comprehensive as a thumbdrive of files, but she's aiming in between those two: real, living, flexible understanding of the core parts of many fields.

She writes a terrible text-only rip-off of Kerbal Space Program. She makes flash cards. She begs every contact she has to get her a chance to shadow different engineers for an hour and see what their work is actually like. (And then she makes a list of everything she didn't understand.)

The Exodus applications open. She writes up a 'resume' that describes why she thinks she fills a valuable niche, only mentioning her traditional qualifications at the end - 8 years at United Airlines, Aviation Tech with A&P Certificate - and then getting weird again to say that she has studied to be an Avionics Technician too but didn't bother taking the test because that would mean less time for studying.

She gets in! ...to the training program. Which is also an extended interview. She worries every day that this will be the day they decide that she's too easily tired or unsociable or should have started studying a decade earlier, and each dinner the gossip is about someone else getting canned.

Launch date approaches. She gives away her savings to her friends, everyone who helped her, even hunts down that now-retired pipefitter. And a bit for her parents, grudgingly. 

She's not the next Bezos or Einstein, she knows that now. It was never an option. But she has a purpose on the mission. She can handle everything about about launching shuttles, even if the computers are destroyed and they have to do the math by hand, and she can design a replacement for any part if it's only one part missing and her replacement is allowed to be heavier and worse. She's not a genius, giving new insights to humanity. She's not even a mediocre mechanical engineer. But she can keep this chunk of knowledge alive.

Now it's the third ...half... of Marlene's life. It's exciting being on a new planet, of course, but stability is still vital. Carver is in charge now, and they have protocols for establishing a new government, and they must balance between populism and totalitarianism.

Her name submissions were Janus (kinda obvious, already the name of a moon of Saturn) and Icehole, which she hopes the officers don't veto. She meant it seriously, as a way to keep morale up.

"Hey. Merta. How are you?"

Mumble.

"You have work to do. You can't hide under a blanket. Well I guess you can hide under a blanket a little bit longer, while I borrow the incident report and bring it here and while you read it, but then you have to do things."

Merta whines and limply tries to pull Calsa under the blanket with her.

Calsa shakes her off. "I'm fine. I was hanging back with Chime so I was one of the first ones out.

The incident report is really interesting. Part of it was written by Larian, the kappa, who Fuzzer hired as a 'Safety Officer' on the spot. You should go introduce yourself to your new teammate."

The harpies, minus Audron, float a narrow barge along the tube with food and more people.

From the Frozen City is an aasimar, a thin seven-foot-tall winged humanoid covered with iridescent feathers, holding a rope that blends into a spike brandished by...

...a glowering stetcap (a short furry person with a thick square snout and tiny round ears) who looks around unpredictably.

Behind the aasimar is a wroth.

And there appears to be a whisshopper next to the wroth, but the whisshopper might actually be anywhere in the area. Only the stetcap would know.

And here's a black beetle with long antennae. Like a wroth or a whisshopper, he has more than four limbs. Six, or eight if you count his wings, or ten if you count his elytra too, or twelve if you also count his antennae. He carries a wax tablet with werewolf-carved writing on the backside, which he holds out:

Hi! I'm Siamek, the fourth contribution from the Freedom Democracy. Like a wroth, I can't speak, but I can hear fine and I understand Sotalese, common Elvish, and spoken High Elvish. I can write on this tablet in all of those, and I can sign in Nosimasna Pidgin, Signed High Elvish, and Teng-Allheart Wrothsign. I'm so happy to meet you all! My species is an FD secret :)

The contribution from Koy is a siren, fishy and feathery, with long dark green hair. She sedately steps off the barge and looks around. "Hello, new companions. I'm here to protect you, and I look forward to making new friends. But to avoid unfortunate misunderstandings, I must make it be known that if you try to breed me, I will kill you, and if you succeed at breeding me, the path between Koy and the baby will be built with death."

The fourth person from Lei is one of the emperors.

He knew it!

Experiments with the boulders of ice on the ground establish that it's more prone to break the more heat is applied. One of the catfolk is a jeweler, who compares it with how glass explodes if you put it in flame unevenly or touch it with a cold tool. Further experiments are focused on ways to apply small amounts of heat deep inside the ice without going into a dangerous place oneself.

Touch the ice with a hot stone rod? It works but you can't get very far with it. Make a hole and lower in a stone holding catfire on a chain? Sure, and you can scoop the water out with buckets. The jeweler points out that the water is analogous to hot glass and maybe shouldn't touch the ice... and experiments bear out that concern. So they'll make a tiny aqueduct to get the water off the mountain?

A team tries putting water into a piston and spraying it into the air, where it freezes and blows away. That seems easier, as long as the snow isn't going to be a problem somehow - a crew is assigned to make snow using that method, upwind of an unused part of the boulder pile, continually for a cycle.

Would it be possible to melt the ice by spraying molten ice on it? Yes, it's certainly possible, with the water getting pushed back out the hole to be heated again, but some of the water is disappearing... and then the boulder cracks and water gushes out. Ultimately, this way is slower, more complicated, and more unpredictable than inserting a flame-covered stone.

Back to the simple method, now with a shaft that spins a pump to push the meltwater out to the top.

Problem: if a catflame is incidentally covered in water, it boils a bubble of steam that can crack the ice. Solution: put the catfire into a hollow inside the rod, where it can't get wet. Problem: now the rod explodes. Solution to that: leave a tiny hole for hot air to get out while sealing the flame.

Problem: if water gets at the pump shaft, it can freeze and then it's hard to unstick the shaft without breaking it. Solution: use a bubble pump, like a tiny version of the really big pumps in Kef, using a tiny turbine to push the air, like in Audron's design.

The next challenge is connecting segments of rod together without leaking air or water, but actually making the tube has been good practice for that.

They confirm that boring an upwards sloping drain from the bottom works too. Getting them to meet is hard but it's fine if they need multiple attempts; they're going to need to remove a whole lot of ice anyway. They confirm that they can line the L shape with stone and gradually expand it.

Time go to on top of the mountain and start! With a ship like a bell. Everyone will stay inside the whole time. Normally the ship will be frozen (and if the ground collapses it's obviously fine). They go up by freezing the separate 'floor' and then everyone hauls the ship upward by rope handles. Going sideways is similar.