Paws and Planets (5 page)

Eventually it
was decided to call the planet, Dagan … home.

About seventy
tvans before touchdown, Dakaru punched in the codes that would
commit the
Limokko
. The spaceship sped along, nose first and
belly up.

The
Limokko
was not yet flying, because there was no substantial
atmosphere at the altitude she was orbiting at. The only way to
exert forces to enable her to begin the landing process was by
thruster action, these thrusters turning under Dakaru’s direction
to face backwards to their normal position and opposite to the
direction of travel. Dakaru instigated the small adjustments
necessary to deploy the thrusters correctly, his digits almost
moving too fast for Saru to see what they were doing. Soon the
Limokko
was in exactly the right position.

The ship
emerged from this delicate manoeuvring in the descent attitude,
nose forward and slightly upward, and belly now facing downward.
Now that her speed was below the critical orbital velocity she
started to descend. There was no going back, there was no longer a
way to halt the descent.

At around
thirty-five tvans before touchdown and at an altitude of many
thousands of velos, the
Limokko
entered discernable
atmosphere. Though still extremely rarefied and thus containing
little oxygen, there was now enough external matter to undergo
ionisation, and the plasma flare began to form. From this point,
the angle of attack was critical, Dakaru was visibly sweating as
the altitude decreased and he was tying to maintain it by
continuously adjusting the thruster trims. If he dove any shallower
the ship would experience excessive lift and overfly her
destination, into the mountains and any steeper and she would burn
up. At an altitude of eighty thousand velos, the directions
controls became usable. Dakaru then performed a series of s-bend
turns, banking the
Limokko
at each turn, the object being to
lose speed more quickly. The
Limokko’s
snout edged closer
and closer to the surface.

“We’re coming
in too fast,” cried out Dakaru in a panic.

“Increase the
inter-output into the elevator exchange,” Saru ordered, also
watching the speed dials with growing concern.

Saru performed
a rapid mental calculation.

Use the
alternative landing site,” he ordered as he extracted the relevant
data from the computer banks and transferred it to Dakaru.

With ponderous
might the
Limokko
veered that infinitesimal amount that
would mean she would land on the alternative site, some distance
north of the original.

Saru held his
breath and prayed that she would retain enough ‘lift’ to keep her
high enough over the mountains.

”I hope the
lake is a shallow one,” commented a frowning Zahra, analysing the
scrolling data on the screen in front of her.

“The Nahoko
reported it to be fourteen kells in depth,” Saru replied, not
taking his eyes off his own screen (the ship was twenty kells in
height).

“What’s at the
bottom?”

“It didn’t
investigate that deep.”

“Hope for the
best and prepare for the worst,” said Dakaru with some attempt at
levity, “escape hatches are primed. We’ll get out, never fear Saru,
even if it is a lot deeper and she begins to settle, or sinks for
that matter.”

“In that case
we’ll have to leave everything behind,” Saru reminded him.

“Better that
and being alive my old friend,” he replied, “she won’t sink
immediately anyway, even if there are a hundred kells of mud and
slime at the bottom, she’s airtight.”

“Your attempt
at humour,” said Saru, “is misplaced,” but he didn’t look annoyed,
“I agree with you.”

The
Limokko
dropped planet wards, juddering on occasion, the hum
from her engines growing louder as more and more kinetic energy was
transferred to the elevator exchanges.

“Stop
worrying,” said Dakaru, “we’re going to make it. I can feel it in
my wings.”

“I also,” said
Zahra as she manipulated the codes for the landing protocols as
they descended through some large air pockets.

The
Limokko
stopped juddering and continued more smoothly, a
steady glide towards the lake.

She was visibly
slowing now, but it was imperative that her momentum was kept
going, not too much, in case she should come in too fast and crash,
not too little, in case she dropped like a stone.

It was ten
tvans to touchdown, the
Limokko
was still forty thousand
velos up and on the underside of her belly close to the leading
edges it was hot enough to melt steel. Plasma flaring had ceased
and had been replaced by reactive hypersonic flow. Drag was
increasing with the reactive deceleration. Dakaru was preparing
himself to take over control as soon as they reached a stable
supersonic regime. Her nose pitched forward so that she was
pointing downwards.

The Lai
compressed their wings into their sides and braced themselves for
landing impact.

She landed in
the lake with a gigantic splash that sent ripples of water over the
nearby land by as much as two hundred kells.

* * * * *

For better
or worse
, thought Saru,
here we are
. Turning to Dakaru
he gave his last order as the Limokko’s Susa. “Open all hatches and
get the floats away. Ltsctas out. Everylai else grab personal
possessions and follow them. Everylai on dry land as soon as
possible. We will come back and gather what else we can when we see
she is actually going to keep afloat.”

Afterwards,
Saru was very glad he had given that order.

A bare thirty
tvans after the wet and bedraggled Lai had reached the lake shore
the
Limokko
began to sink. She had sustained too much heat
damage during entry on her lower hull for it to stay in one piece
for long. The Boton’s report to the contrary, the lake was a deep
one, it’s inky depths full of thick oozing mud, and with her
underbelly damaged the
Limokko
could not sustain
floatability for any length of time.

Only the
prepared items that they had had the foresight to place on the
rafts and grav-floats remained to them to remind them of their
journey.

The Lai, some
three hundred and so of them, watched as their home sank deeper and
deeper into the bubbling water. By night-time even her top frame
had disappeared.

The Lai
gathered what items were left to them and picking up their burdens
made their way into the forest that would become their new
home.

* * * * *

From a safe
distance the furry native inhabitants had been watching the events
with naive inquisitiveness.

At this stage
of their species’ development they might not be able to speak their
surprise at what they had seen out loud but they had fair-sized
brains and could communicate quite nicely with each other with
sight and sound.

Little did
these creatures know that they had just witnessed the catalyst that
would bring on their mental development by leaps and bounds.

Little did the
Lai know that their assessment of these creatures’ sentience had
been as wrong as wrong could be.

A partnership
based on mutual respect and friendship was not to be long in
arriving and would survive and flourish during the generations to
come.

* * * * *

EPISODE 4 –
DAGAN

SENTIENCE

Anything you
can do we can do better!

“Saru? May I
have a word?” Dakaru peeked his golden head into the leaf roofed
daga that belonged to Saru, his mate Sanua and their three
ltsctas.

Saru looked up
in a benign fashion. He so enjoyed the tvans sitting on his and
Sanua’s hardening eggs. As he was wont to say; the process of
laying, hardening then hatching was so much more pleasant and
enjoyable now they were no longer on the ship.

Their family,
the ltsctas, Maru, Velua and little Belu had hatched on board the
Limokko. Their eggs had been laid in one of the specially designed
compartments and the subsequent gestation of the little ones
fraught with the difficulties peculiar to space travelling. Gravity
levels had been the main problem, not being entirely conducive to
successful hatchings. Sanua had laid five eggs on that occasion and
only three had developed to full term. This time four had been laid
and they were in high hope of four live egg-emergences. Certainly
the scratchings and movements he could hear and feel underneath his
belly were encouraging.

So it was with
a happy countenance that he turned to Dakaru with the unsuspecting
words, “of course you may my friend. Anything wrong?”

Dakaru rustled
his wings.

“Not wrong
exactly,” he said, “unexpected and it will happen soon if I am any
judge. Fact is, its already starting.”

Saru’s interest
was caught but he took his time in responding. With a wingtip he
touched the egg lying slightly to the right of the others.
Satisfied that all was as it should be he gathered in his wing with
a rustle of his own and concentrated his gentle gold-glowing eyes
on Dakaru.

“What is it?
It’s all going splendidly.”

The Lai had
been resident on Dagan for eleven summers now and nothing had
occurred to date to make him concerned about their future here.
They had moved out from the lakeside where they had landed and had
travelled west to an extensive cave network more suited to their
living ethos. After the generations spent aboard the
Limokko
, none of them had felt comfortable living among the
trees and had been more than pleased when after a flyover by Saru
and Dakaru they had found out about the existence of the caves.

Now they had by
and large become acclimatised and accustomed to the openness that
was planetary life but they still preferred to settle inside the
reassuring confines of stone when nightfall beckoned.

Saru still felt
a sensuous pleasure feeling the winds eddying around his body, so
much so that he knew he could never get enough of it and the
flying; that wasn’t just sensuous, it was pure and undiluted
rapture. To be able to fly for as long as he wanted and for as far
as he wished was pure heaven, playing in the air currents, even the
rain falling as he flew was the most wonderful and stupendous
experience.

The Lai had
learned how to survive on the most basic level. They had even found
hunting for the food with which to fill their bellies more than
catered for their natural instincts, submerged as it had been with
the highly technological existence of their previous lives.
Hunting, Saru had found, gave him a most gorgeous feeling of
achievement and absorption as he selected just the right zarova or
kura for lunch. The native herbivores he had found, had not that
many brains, all they did was try to run away, in most cases
unsuccessfully. The striped jezdic were a bit more intelligent and
had learned to be wary of the winged death that swooped down from
the skies but the zarova and kura panicked and ran, often straight
into the paths of their hunters.

Not that
learning how to hunt had been easy. The Lai had learned much from
watching the lean and striped four legged carnivores who had
watched the first Lai explorations of their world. These creatures
were masters of the hunt, working in groups to single out then bear
down on their next meal. They were now accustomed to sharing their
hunting grounds with the Lai and it didn’t appear to bother them
overmuch. They had remained friendly and inquisitive and not
frightened in the least. This was in part due to the decision by
the Lai not long after their arrival not to hunt these creatures,
in their turn, the Lind, as the Lai named them (they resembled a
long dead native species that had once inhabited Daiglon), treated
the Lai with a healthy respect and during the first season or two
had largely kept their distance.

As Dakaru had
said, they were cute, with an appealing inquisitiveness and there
were plenty other creatures nearby with far more meat on their
bones to fill the empty bellies of the Lai so what was the point of
hunting the scrawny Lind?

However, as the
seasons had progressed some of these Lind had lost their initial
wariness and their natural inquisitiveness well to the fore, had
tentatively approached the domtas of the Lai, tails wagging, furry
ears up and tongues lolling.

Nowadays most
Lai family groups kept one or two or three or four around them as
pets, feeding them and tending to their wants much as the
primitives on a planet the Lai had visited on their way here had
co-inhabited their caves with the once wild felines and
canines.

Saru knew that
Dakaru had recently taken to taking the two who had adopted him and
his family out hunting with him. They were good at flushing out the
browsing zarova from the often thick undergrowth and chasing them
into the open right into the swooping talons of Dakaru. They were
pretty good at sniffing out the hiding jedzic too. Saru had heard
Dakaru boasting about their prowess on the hunting grounds.

“But do they
leave what they have killed for you to collect or do they eat it
themselves?” had teased Jansu, a young black-golden skinned
descendant of Brai and Lai both.

Dakaru had been
most indignant at what he interpreted as a slur on the morals and
habits of his well-trained pets and had bristled immediately,
shaking his ear knobs, pretending that he could not have possibly
heard aright.

“Yes they so,”
he had insisted with mock indignation, “I told you they are well
worth training. Strange as it may seem to your black-covered
disbelieving ear knobs but it is almost as if they understand what
I am telling them.”