When we stop for the night, I volunteer to take the first watch. There’ll be no shift for Takuto; Cleve wants the recovering teenager to get as much rest as possible. I gladly get out of the rover and stretch my legs. Cleve inspects the area to make sure he hasn’t parked on a wolf beetle nest. We’re good on that front, but he points out signs that water rushes through this area during heavy rains. This reminds us that we do have a river to cross before we reach the crash site. The water was low enough for us to easily ford a few weeks ago, but if the monsoon rains in this area have been heavy, it might be more treacherous now. That’s a problem for tomorrow, though.
We all share a meal, and then the others bed down for the night in the rover’s reclined bucket seats. I’m left alone outside, where I am free to intentionally open myself up to the environment, listening in via “miasma-vision.” I’m curious whether I’ll be able to hear the clanging any better out here, and indeed I do. There’s additional information coming in this time, too. For example, during the twenty quiet minutes of each cycle, plants that are still alive in the area experience an influx of moisture. With everything I’m picking up, I get a solid impression of what awaits us at the crash site: a hydraulic hammer drill. I’ve seen them at construction sites around LA; some enormous piece of metal is getting hammered into the ground, then cooled down with water.
The night progresses. It’s quite dark out now, but I hear the sound of a car door. Then Cleve joins me, having woken himself up for his turn at watch. “I’m pretty sure they’re already working at our crash site,” I tell him. “It sounds—to me—like they have some sort of hammer drill. So they’re actually digging now. I don’t know if it’s exactly where our cryopods are, or if it’s just in the area, but there’s been a lot of damage to the plant and fungus life around there. So there are definitely going to be people nearby.”
“Okay,” he acknowledges, no questions asked. “We’re going to have to approach carefully, then.”
“Yeah. Maybe we should go ahead and paint the rover now,” I suggest.
“All right, sounds like a plan,” he agrees. He pops the trunk, and we pull out the paints. It’ll be awkward juggling them and flashlights. That might also disturb Takuto’s sleep. So instead, I provide different, softer lighting. It just takes a small nudge of intention from me, and small patches of bioluminescent lichen on the trunks of the larger mushroom shrubs begin to glow. Soon the rover looks more beat up, with stretches of faux rust, but it’s also mottled with reds, greens, and blues that will help it blend in with the foliage wherever we end up parking it tomorrow. Cleve applies a healthy layer of dirt over the paint, as well. “Pretty good!” he says with a pleased smile when we’re done. He gives me a nod of satisfaction, and I tell him good night.
I do not join Takuto inside the rover, though. Instead, I lay my blanket out here in the open. I’ve felt completely comfortable out here all night so far; no use me consuming more filtered air than I need to. Cleve doesn’t argue with me about it; he just tells me he’ll let me know if any miasma comes rolling in. I’m not worried about that, though. I know I had a bad reaction to it when we first crossed Miasma Pass, but I suspect that was my system equilibrating to it. I’m not saying nothing out here could be poisonous to me, but I just don’t feel threatened by the environment. And I don’t think that’s naivety on my part; I think it’s the result of some deeper-level communication.
Cleve starts his perimeter sweep, rifle slung over his shoulder. I lay down and close my eyes, drifting off before too long. The next thing I’m aware of is an urgent hiss. “Thorne!”
I groggily open my eyes. “Uh… yes?” In the dim pre-dawn light I see Cleve crouched over me.
“Something got into our trunk. Monkeys, maybe? Or whatever this planet’s version is. I’m going to go look for it. Can you take watch?”
“Uh, sure,” I agree, pushing myself up to sitting and shaking my head, trying to wake up.
“All right,” Cleve says. He stands and starts looking around at the vegetation for signs of tracks. “What could go wrong?” I hear him mutter as he disappears into the foliage, headed downhill.
I get up and take a look at the trunk myself. The repair kit is in disarray, and there are far fewer tools than Tenoch packed for me. Did we forget to close the trunk after we put the paint away? Surely Cleve would have noticed that, even if I didn’t. I look at the latch and notice there are small scrapes. Something with a claw rather than fingers?
Cleve returns with a solitary wrench and information on the culprit. Our thief was a crustacean the size of a raccoon. He estimates six or eight legs, based on the tracks he saw. Those vanished into the small river we’ll be crossing tomorrow. “I bet it was a craw,” I tell him. That’s the name of the curious creature I saw in a stream on our way to the network node. I’ve since read up on it in Marina’s materials. “They’re smart. If they watched us open the trunk to take the paints out, they could’ve replicated that. They’ve got pincers like crabs, and they’re good at manipulating things with them.” The one I saw was picking up and examining rocks in the streambed. “They seem to like shiny stuff. It could be that the wrenches were gleaming in reflected light, and it found that interesting.”
“So weird,” Cleve says. He’s silent for a moment, and then he mutters, “I wonder if they’d be good.”
At first I think he means to have around, but then I remember who this is. “Oh, to eat? They’re intelligent!”
“So’s a raccoon, but you’d eat that, right? If you were starving? Now I know what to bait a trap with for these things: scrap metal!”
He’s free to mull that over as much as he likes. Personally, I think that if we come across this craw again, we should see if it will accept something else shiny in exchange for our wrenches.