Post by Lorpius Prime on Oct 26, 2009 1:29:10 GMT -5
From the Book of Crusades:
The War in Heaven continued, and it frightened Man. In the twenty-seventh year of his reign, King Thoman ordered that ships be sent out from Garden to gather news of the war. Captain Rayam's ship found a host of Angels reducing a demonic fortress in the land of Bear's Eye. The Angels told them that the LORD was angry. The Kings of Man had fallen under the sway of demons, and the LORD had condemned Garden to the frosts of Hell. When they heard this, Rayam's men threw themselves at the Angels' feet to profess their ignorance and beg salvation. The Angels took Rayam's ship and ordered him to sail it to new lands beyond the boundaries of Heaven.
Thinking back on the shipwreck, I'm really not sure how we held it together. Even right after the battle, when we were first stranded, everyone knew that we were doomed. We were so far off from the front and such a tiny deployment that we'd be lucky if anyone back home even remembered what we were trying to do. And it was just all the more ironic that we'd succeeded. Being trapped put quite a damper on our victory celebrations. Sure, we'd taken out the colony, but everyone who might have cared was dead or dying as a result.
Still, somehow we managed not to lose it. Blame military discipline. All of us knew there wasn't any hope, but none of us would admit it to one another. So we just hunkered down and treated it like a survival exercise.
Lieutenant Maruska was the only other officer in our escape pod, and she was a trained biologist. Without her, those first few months groundside would have been a hell of a lot rougher, and I was happy to let her make most of the critical decisions. We also had a couple of petty officers from the tactical section, a civilian psychiatrist from the ship's support staff, and a couple of Bat technicians. Both of the Bats were middle-aged and male, and I think they were the unhappiest of the bunch; at least they were the quietest. The prospect of spending the rest of their lives stuck on an empty planet probably hit them harder than us Humans. At least we had representatives of both sexes.
As for me, well, technically I was Acting Captain of the cruiser GJS Trent, although it took a while before the authority really sank into my head. I mean, I was a Lieutenant Commander and I knew how to act like I was in charge, but I was only a Comm Chief, I'd never commanded my own ship. Total responsibility for the lives of my crew—what there was left of them—was not something I'd ever expected, and for which I'd never prepared. I'm ashamed to admit it, since it was a clear part of my responsibilities as an officer, but there it is. If the others—Lieutenant Maruska especially—hadn't been so damned competent, I probably would have gotten them all killed within a week.
Anyway, we bungled along for a few days before we found the colony and decided to dig in outside the spires. I couldn't have told you why we did; perhaps we were attracted to the shadow of civilization, even if it was built by the Demons. We didn't find anything useful inside the spires, of course. As far as I'm aware, no one on our side has figured out how any of their tech works, and none of the drones inside were alive to explain it to us. I know the Gazwaht thinks the Kyhyex know more than they'll tell, but I never bought into that theory. Not even the Kyhyex are that stupid.
Maybe I should mention that all of us survivors were Fedayeen. I'm all for wiping out the Demons to the last drone. I mean, it pretty much is us or them, right? I don't have a lot of patience for all of the Jihad's spiritual crap, though, Glory To God and all that jazz. Sure, it works for the Mujahideen, and I don't have a problem with that, but I just signed up to save Humanity. And, yes, to get a little revenge. But that's really all. And hey, shouldn't that be enough?
So we camped out by one of the outer spires. At least it was a solid foundation to use to build some shelters. Maruska helped the Bats design some simple shelters which we dug into the ground. Actually, they were pretty nice. There wasn't any particular need to be conservative, so we each got apartments bigger than most ordinary civilians could afford on New Atlantis or New Mecca. Of course, our apartments didn't have internet access or running water, so there were trade-offs.
Actually, we did build ourselves a waterworks eventually. It took a few months, though, since we had to design it from scratch and none of us really knew what we were doing in that regard.
Food wasn't a problem. Or maybe I should say nutrition wasn't a problem. The planet had plenty of grasses and molds which we could metabolize (after some machine processing) well enough. None of it was terribly palatable, though. Once the emergency rations we had from the pods ran out, there just wasn't any joy in eating anymore. This was something else that the Bats took even harder than the rest of us, but they'd been missing meat since we lost the ship.
We settled into a routine after a while. Sustenance wasn't a problem after the first few months, the waterworks and power generators were low-maintenance and the gardens pretty much took care of themselves. The local climate was mild and our shelters about as comfortable as we could make them, so there weren't any serious complaints about living conditions.
We were just bored out of our minds. Sure, if we really wanted to nitpick we could each spend a good three or four hours a day maintaining the shelter and support systems or gathering food. But that still leaves a hell of a lot of time to just sit around. Even the video games we had in our media library got boring after a while. It doesn't matter how much you switch up the games when you're playing against the same six people; eventually you're just so familiar with everyone else that there aren't any surprises.
Instead, we started filling our time with "useful" work. Our psychiatrist—Dr. Adrian Pierre—had it easy: he treated our situation like a case study and began writing a book on the whole experience.
The rest of us needed something a little more tangible, however. Eventually we settled on a project which was large enough to keep all of us occupied for a long time: building a ship.
It was a complete boondoggle, of course. The Bats could build some simple gravity generators, but nothing approaching a warp drive, FTL or sublight. Not that that even mattered, since we couldn't have powered such a thing with the pitiful solar collectors we were using for basic energy. I think we could have built fusion reactors given enough time, but that was a project of decades. And no one was inclined to start at the very beginning by surveying the planet for enough uranium to make a fission reactor. Even if we had decided to go down that path, we'd have died of old age before we had a working starship.
So we aimed low: a chemical rocket. If we could just boost ourselves off the planet, maybe we could find something worthwhile in space: some piece of wreckage from our ship or the Demons' orbital infrastructure. Even that was a pipe dream, but at least it was something we could see to fruition within our lifetimes.
By the end of our first year after our shipwreck (and I'm counting by Earth standard here, we'd run through less than a quarter of the local year) we had just finished building the tanks and condensers which would let us create and store liquid oxygen for the primary engines. They were only tiny prototype models, and we'd have to expand our production capacity several times before we could make fuel in useful amounts. But still, it felt like quite an achievement. We all got drunk—even the Bats—and had a three-day-long party.
The party might have dragged on for a full week if someone hadn't dropped a disruptor into the local star.
We never found out who actually did it. On the one hand, if it was a Jihad fleet, or even one from another of the Line races, they should have detected us on the planet and established contact. But we never detected any sort of communications ping. So it had to have been the enemy.
On the other hand, the Demons have never been known to use disruptors. We weren't even sure they could make the things, although it was probably a safe bet that they could have if they'd ever wanted to. That's the thing, though, they wouldn't want to. The Demons are all about acquiring more resources, not destroying them. Dispersing a star runs pretty contrary to their entire philosophy.
Still, most of us preferred to think it was the Demons. After all, who knew how much the Demons had changed while we were out of contact? We were over a thousand light years away from the Line, and plenty physicists still maintain that FTL travel fucks with time in ways we don't even begin to comprehend. God only knows from what time the Demons who attacked our star came.
Of course, the same logic applied to our side. Who knew what sort of communications or sensor gear a friendly fleet might have been using? And if our mission was long forgotten, they may not have even bothered to scan the planet at all.
We didn't talk about that possibility.
Whoever it was, we realized what had happened a few weeks after the disruptor must have been deployed when the star's luminosity began to change. In a way, that was a small miracle. If the emission stream hadn't been nearly perpendicular to our orbit, we would have found out within a few days when a beam of relativistic plasma vaporized the planet.
Not that our fate would be much more fun. We didn't have enough information about the disruptor to say whether the star would just simply cease fusion, freezing us all, or if it would first expand into a red giant and consume the planet. The former was the more likely case, it's extremely tricky to calibrate and deploy a disruptor in exactly the right way to inflate a star before killing it. But the Bats especially take pride in solving that sort of complex problem, and there are plenty of Jihad captains who'd see it as worth the effort to condemn a Demon planet to hellfire.
I'm emphasizing how utterly and impossibly screwed we all were to give an idea of just how strong the will to live we subsequently discovered really was. If some had asked me what I'd thought we'd probably do in such a situation even a few days before it occurred, I'd have probably said that we'd all sit down for a nice, final drink, and then commit suicide. I thought we were all just barely keeping the depression at bay.
I was wrong, fortunately. The knowledge that our star was dying actually kicked us all into a survivalist frenzy I could have hardly imagined before. We considered and rejected a number of contingencies, and by the first day had decided that our one best chance at survival was to dig. The planet still had a pretty active core, enough to give it a magnetic field stronger than Earth's. Without a star, that would be the biggest and most lasting source of energy available. If we were going to have any sort of chance of tapping it, though, we'd have to act fast.
So we split into two teams, and there wasn't much question about the tasks. The Bats stayed on the surface with most of our manufacturing equipment and computers. Their task was to design and build all the equipment we'd need to survive in a subterranean environment using only geothermal energy until we could build fission reactors. The rest of us, the Humans, started shoveling.
Back in my early days of service, I might have resented that division of labor. But it was instantly obvious to everyone that none of Fedayeen could seriously contribute much to the Bats. They needed to work quickly, and we'd just get in the way. Besides, digging and reinforcing a tunnel hundreds of kilometers deep that wouldn't collapse in a tectonically active environment was no easy chore, either. It taxed all of us to our limits, and I'm still not really confident that it would have worked. Actually, I'm pretty sure the whole thing was guaranteed to cave in on us before long, but we would have had at least a fair shot at sustaining ourselves after being buried. After all, we were going to have to seal ourselves in eventually. So we might have made it.
Still, I didn't want to find out for sure. And I'm glad we didn't have to.
The Cherubs arrived five weeks after we started tunneling. By that time we knew that we had about another two months before the star lost too much of its mass to keep up a fusion reaction. Although if I'd known the Bats had figured that out by assigning our only AI to analyzing the star instead of working on plans for our tunnel, I would have flayed them alive.
I'm ashamed to admit that they took us completely by surprise when they came. We were still a military force and we should have kept up some kind of watch for intruders. But by that time we were so intensely focused on getting the new habitat built immediately, that we let our guards down. It's my fault as the commander; I was too willing to let the Bats take over the one project that I forgot I was responsible for other duties as well.
In any case, first contact occurred when the Cherubs drove a truck into our camp. The only reason they weren't immediately incinerated was because the Bats up top mistook them for Humans.
Work stopped on the tunnel immediately when we got the message that a rescue party had finally arrived. By the time we reached the surface, the Bats had realized their mistake, destroyed the Cherubs' truck, killed one of them, and were holding the rest at gunpoint.
Yeah, so it was my fault. I still really wanted to throttle the Bats.
My feelings about the Bats' initial mistake go back and forth. On the one hand, the Cherubs do look remarkably like Humans, much more so than any other species we've encountered, including the Tads or even the Bats themselves. On the other hand, some of the key differences include hairless, disproportionately large heads; skin colors consisting mostly of black and green, and earlobes the size of hubcaps—actually fleshy display crests, but they're in the same place as our earlobes.
By the standards of the other Line races, it was about par for a first contact. By Human standards, it was a disaster. With every other alien species we'd at least started by talking reasonably. With the Cherubs, the shooting had started before we even knew how to talk with them.
Oh, we were pretty sure they had a spoken language like everyone else (except the Kyhyex, of course, but it's always except the Kyhyex). They'd shouted some sort of greetings at the Bats to begin with, and definitely seemed to be chattering among themselves after they were rounded up. Unfortunately, we didn't have the slightest idea what they were saying.
It was a problem Humanity had never had to deal with before. The Bats spent a good year analyzing our languages before making contact with us, while the Tharn took even more time. And since the Bats already knew how to talk to everyone else, we never had any serious problems communicating with the other known species.
The Cherubs were an unknown, however. We did have the one AI, which I immediately had the Bats put to work figuring out Cherub-speak. The three survivors couldn't provide anything like the sample size the AI needed, however, and certainly not enough context.
My companions were greatly amused to see a trained Communications Officer reduced to hand gestures and exaggerated monosyllables.
I did my best to indicate that we were sorry about the destruction and killing. I know I made a hash of it, but I think the fact that we were now babbling rather than shooting at them calmed them down a little. At least they stopped flinching so much whenever any of us went near them.
That was the best we could do with them. We figured there was a decent chance that there were more around, however, and the more we could find the easier it would be to begin talking with them. Plus, in the event that they were hostile, it was better for us to move as fast as possible.
I had the idea of analyzing the handful of equipment the Bats had confiscated from the Cherubs and what we could salvage from the truck. The truck was a lost cause, but the Cherubs had been carrying two devices which seemed to be electronic. One of them we couldn't figure out how to operate. The other one, we could: it turned out to be a laser pointer, possibly a range-finder or microphone as well.
I was still playing with the other device, which I thought might be a radio (and hoped was not a weapon) when of the Petty Officers, Hasim Emirati, told me that he'd found an unencrypted radio broadcast with his communicator, and that it sounded like the same language. Once we knew it was there, the Bats had no trouble using our simple sensors to place the source of the signal somewhere in space. The Cherubs had a ship, or at the very least a satellite. I thanked Hasim, and he was nice enough not to call me an idiot.
The War in Heaven continued, and it frightened Man. In the twenty-seventh year of his reign, King Thoman ordered that ships be sent out from Garden to gather news of the war. Captain Rayam's ship found a host of Angels reducing a demonic fortress in the land of Bear's Eye. The Angels told them that the LORD was angry. The Kings of Man had fallen under the sway of demons, and the LORD had condemned Garden to the frosts of Hell. When they heard this, Rayam's men threw themselves at the Angels' feet to profess their ignorance and beg salvation. The Angels took Rayam's ship and ordered him to sail it to new lands beyond the boundaries of Heaven.
* * *
Thinking back on the shipwreck, I'm really not sure how we held it together. Even right after the battle, when we were first stranded, everyone knew that we were doomed. We were so far off from the front and such a tiny deployment that we'd be lucky if anyone back home even remembered what we were trying to do. And it was just all the more ironic that we'd succeeded. Being trapped put quite a damper on our victory celebrations. Sure, we'd taken out the colony, but everyone who might have cared was dead or dying as a result.
Still, somehow we managed not to lose it. Blame military discipline. All of us knew there wasn't any hope, but none of us would admit it to one another. So we just hunkered down and treated it like a survival exercise.
Lieutenant Maruska was the only other officer in our escape pod, and she was a trained biologist. Without her, those first few months groundside would have been a hell of a lot rougher, and I was happy to let her make most of the critical decisions. We also had a couple of petty officers from the tactical section, a civilian psychiatrist from the ship's support staff, and a couple of Bat technicians. Both of the Bats were middle-aged and male, and I think they were the unhappiest of the bunch; at least they were the quietest. The prospect of spending the rest of their lives stuck on an empty planet probably hit them harder than us Humans. At least we had representatives of both sexes.
As for me, well, technically I was Acting Captain of the cruiser GJS Trent, although it took a while before the authority really sank into my head. I mean, I was a Lieutenant Commander and I knew how to act like I was in charge, but I was only a Comm Chief, I'd never commanded my own ship. Total responsibility for the lives of my crew—what there was left of them—was not something I'd ever expected, and for which I'd never prepared. I'm ashamed to admit it, since it was a clear part of my responsibilities as an officer, but there it is. If the others—Lieutenant Maruska especially—hadn't been so damned competent, I probably would have gotten them all killed within a week.
Anyway, we bungled along for a few days before we found the colony and decided to dig in outside the spires. I couldn't have told you why we did; perhaps we were attracted to the shadow of civilization, even if it was built by the Demons. We didn't find anything useful inside the spires, of course. As far as I'm aware, no one on our side has figured out how any of their tech works, and none of the drones inside were alive to explain it to us. I know the Gazwaht thinks the Kyhyex know more than they'll tell, but I never bought into that theory. Not even the Kyhyex are that stupid.
Maybe I should mention that all of us survivors were Fedayeen. I'm all for wiping out the Demons to the last drone. I mean, it pretty much is us or them, right? I don't have a lot of patience for all of the Jihad's spiritual crap, though, Glory To God and all that jazz. Sure, it works for the Mujahideen, and I don't have a problem with that, but I just signed up to save Humanity. And, yes, to get a little revenge. But that's really all. And hey, shouldn't that be enough?
So we camped out by one of the outer spires. At least it was a solid foundation to use to build some shelters. Maruska helped the Bats design some simple shelters which we dug into the ground. Actually, they were pretty nice. There wasn't any particular need to be conservative, so we each got apartments bigger than most ordinary civilians could afford on New Atlantis or New Mecca. Of course, our apartments didn't have internet access or running water, so there were trade-offs.
Actually, we did build ourselves a waterworks eventually. It took a few months, though, since we had to design it from scratch and none of us really knew what we were doing in that regard.
Food wasn't a problem. Or maybe I should say nutrition wasn't a problem. The planet had plenty of grasses and molds which we could metabolize (after some machine processing) well enough. None of it was terribly palatable, though. Once the emergency rations we had from the pods ran out, there just wasn't any joy in eating anymore. This was something else that the Bats took even harder than the rest of us, but they'd been missing meat since we lost the ship.
We settled into a routine after a while. Sustenance wasn't a problem after the first few months, the waterworks and power generators were low-maintenance and the gardens pretty much took care of themselves. The local climate was mild and our shelters about as comfortable as we could make them, so there weren't any serious complaints about living conditions.
We were just bored out of our minds. Sure, if we really wanted to nitpick we could each spend a good three or four hours a day maintaining the shelter and support systems or gathering food. But that still leaves a hell of a lot of time to just sit around. Even the video games we had in our media library got boring after a while. It doesn't matter how much you switch up the games when you're playing against the same six people; eventually you're just so familiar with everyone else that there aren't any surprises.
Instead, we started filling our time with "useful" work. Our psychiatrist—Dr. Adrian Pierre—had it easy: he treated our situation like a case study and began writing a book on the whole experience.
The rest of us needed something a little more tangible, however. Eventually we settled on a project which was large enough to keep all of us occupied for a long time: building a ship.
It was a complete boondoggle, of course. The Bats could build some simple gravity generators, but nothing approaching a warp drive, FTL or sublight. Not that that even mattered, since we couldn't have powered such a thing with the pitiful solar collectors we were using for basic energy. I think we could have built fusion reactors given enough time, but that was a project of decades. And no one was inclined to start at the very beginning by surveying the planet for enough uranium to make a fission reactor. Even if we had decided to go down that path, we'd have died of old age before we had a working starship.
So we aimed low: a chemical rocket. If we could just boost ourselves off the planet, maybe we could find something worthwhile in space: some piece of wreckage from our ship or the Demons' orbital infrastructure. Even that was a pipe dream, but at least it was something we could see to fruition within our lifetimes.
By the end of our first year after our shipwreck (and I'm counting by Earth standard here, we'd run through less than a quarter of the local year) we had just finished building the tanks and condensers which would let us create and store liquid oxygen for the primary engines. They were only tiny prototype models, and we'd have to expand our production capacity several times before we could make fuel in useful amounts. But still, it felt like quite an achievement. We all got drunk—even the Bats—and had a three-day-long party.
The party might have dragged on for a full week if someone hadn't dropped a disruptor into the local star.
* * *
We never found out who actually did it. On the one hand, if it was a Jihad fleet, or even one from another of the Line races, they should have detected us on the planet and established contact. But we never detected any sort of communications ping. So it had to have been the enemy.
On the other hand, the Demons have never been known to use disruptors. We weren't even sure they could make the things, although it was probably a safe bet that they could have if they'd ever wanted to. That's the thing, though, they wouldn't want to. The Demons are all about acquiring more resources, not destroying them. Dispersing a star runs pretty contrary to their entire philosophy.
Still, most of us preferred to think it was the Demons. After all, who knew how much the Demons had changed while we were out of contact? We were over a thousand light years away from the Line, and plenty physicists still maintain that FTL travel fucks with time in ways we don't even begin to comprehend. God only knows from what time the Demons who attacked our star came.
Of course, the same logic applied to our side. Who knew what sort of communications or sensor gear a friendly fleet might have been using? And if our mission was long forgotten, they may not have even bothered to scan the planet at all.
We didn't talk about that possibility.
Whoever it was, we realized what had happened a few weeks after the disruptor must have been deployed when the star's luminosity began to change. In a way, that was a small miracle. If the emission stream hadn't been nearly perpendicular to our orbit, we would have found out within a few days when a beam of relativistic plasma vaporized the planet.
Not that our fate would be much more fun. We didn't have enough information about the disruptor to say whether the star would just simply cease fusion, freezing us all, or if it would first expand into a red giant and consume the planet. The former was the more likely case, it's extremely tricky to calibrate and deploy a disruptor in exactly the right way to inflate a star before killing it. But the Bats especially take pride in solving that sort of complex problem, and there are plenty of Jihad captains who'd see it as worth the effort to condemn a Demon planet to hellfire.
* * *
I'm emphasizing how utterly and impossibly screwed we all were to give an idea of just how strong the will to live we subsequently discovered really was. If some had asked me what I'd thought we'd probably do in such a situation even a few days before it occurred, I'd have probably said that we'd all sit down for a nice, final drink, and then commit suicide. I thought we were all just barely keeping the depression at bay.
I was wrong, fortunately. The knowledge that our star was dying actually kicked us all into a survivalist frenzy I could have hardly imagined before. We considered and rejected a number of contingencies, and by the first day had decided that our one best chance at survival was to dig. The planet still had a pretty active core, enough to give it a magnetic field stronger than Earth's. Without a star, that would be the biggest and most lasting source of energy available. If we were going to have any sort of chance of tapping it, though, we'd have to act fast.
So we split into two teams, and there wasn't much question about the tasks. The Bats stayed on the surface with most of our manufacturing equipment and computers. Their task was to design and build all the equipment we'd need to survive in a subterranean environment using only geothermal energy until we could build fission reactors. The rest of us, the Humans, started shoveling.
Back in my early days of service, I might have resented that division of labor. But it was instantly obvious to everyone that none of Fedayeen could seriously contribute much to the Bats. They needed to work quickly, and we'd just get in the way. Besides, digging and reinforcing a tunnel hundreds of kilometers deep that wouldn't collapse in a tectonically active environment was no easy chore, either. It taxed all of us to our limits, and I'm still not really confident that it would have worked. Actually, I'm pretty sure the whole thing was guaranteed to cave in on us before long, but we would have had at least a fair shot at sustaining ourselves after being buried. After all, we were going to have to seal ourselves in eventually. So we might have made it.
Still, I didn't want to find out for sure. And I'm glad we didn't have to.
* * *
The Cherubs arrived five weeks after we started tunneling. By that time we knew that we had about another two months before the star lost too much of its mass to keep up a fusion reaction. Although if I'd known the Bats had figured that out by assigning our only AI to analyzing the star instead of working on plans for our tunnel, I would have flayed them alive.
I'm ashamed to admit that they took us completely by surprise when they came. We were still a military force and we should have kept up some kind of watch for intruders. But by that time we were so intensely focused on getting the new habitat built immediately, that we let our guards down. It's my fault as the commander; I was too willing to let the Bats take over the one project that I forgot I was responsible for other duties as well.
In any case, first contact occurred when the Cherubs drove a truck into our camp. The only reason they weren't immediately incinerated was because the Bats up top mistook them for Humans.
Work stopped on the tunnel immediately when we got the message that a rescue party had finally arrived. By the time we reached the surface, the Bats had realized their mistake, destroyed the Cherubs' truck, killed one of them, and were holding the rest at gunpoint.
Yeah, so it was my fault. I still really wanted to throttle the Bats.
My feelings about the Bats' initial mistake go back and forth. On the one hand, the Cherubs do look remarkably like Humans, much more so than any other species we've encountered, including the Tads or even the Bats themselves. On the other hand, some of the key differences include hairless, disproportionately large heads; skin colors consisting mostly of black and green, and earlobes the size of hubcaps—actually fleshy display crests, but they're in the same place as our earlobes.
By the standards of the other Line races, it was about par for a first contact. By Human standards, it was a disaster. With every other alien species we'd at least started by talking reasonably. With the Cherubs, the shooting had started before we even knew how to talk with them.
Oh, we were pretty sure they had a spoken language like everyone else (except the Kyhyex, of course, but it's always except the Kyhyex). They'd shouted some sort of greetings at the Bats to begin with, and definitely seemed to be chattering among themselves after they were rounded up. Unfortunately, we didn't have the slightest idea what they were saying.
It was a problem Humanity had never had to deal with before. The Bats spent a good year analyzing our languages before making contact with us, while the Tharn took even more time. And since the Bats already knew how to talk to everyone else, we never had any serious problems communicating with the other known species.
The Cherubs were an unknown, however. We did have the one AI, which I immediately had the Bats put to work figuring out Cherub-speak. The three survivors couldn't provide anything like the sample size the AI needed, however, and certainly not enough context.
My companions were greatly amused to see a trained Communications Officer reduced to hand gestures and exaggerated monosyllables.
I did my best to indicate that we were sorry about the destruction and killing. I know I made a hash of it, but I think the fact that we were now babbling rather than shooting at them calmed them down a little. At least they stopped flinching so much whenever any of us went near them.
That was the best we could do with them. We figured there was a decent chance that there were more around, however, and the more we could find the easier it would be to begin talking with them. Plus, in the event that they were hostile, it was better for us to move as fast as possible.
I had the idea of analyzing the handful of equipment the Bats had confiscated from the Cherubs and what we could salvage from the truck. The truck was a lost cause, but the Cherubs had been carrying two devices which seemed to be electronic. One of them we couldn't figure out how to operate. The other one, we could: it turned out to be a laser pointer, possibly a range-finder or microphone as well.
I was still playing with the other device, which I thought might be a radio (and hoped was not a weapon) when of the Petty Officers, Hasim Emirati, told me that he'd found an unencrypted radio broadcast with his communicator, and that it sounded like the same language. Once we knew it was there, the Bats had no trouble using our simple sensors to place the source of the signal somewhere in space. The Cherubs had a ship, or at the very least a satellite. I thanked Hasim, and he was nice enough not to call me an idiot.