A Sinner's Eden

Chapter 195 - EVO

***Tirnanog, Mount Aerie***

***Magnus***

Thankfully, we didn’t have to directly run off to another mission once Astra and I consulted the elders.

The clans would inevitably have to contact all human settlements on Tirnanog, but we currently had our hands full with the kingdom.

Additionally, while the Thich were no longer a concern, Vier’s home city was completely untouched. Hostilities had been put on hold for the time being, since Vier’s airship fleet had been decimated. There was no way for them to rebuild their forces before winter. And while we got reports about sightings of scouting vessels, everyone was of the firm opinion that Vier was no longer capable of mounting a meaningful assault.

That left us with all the time we needed for preparations – and for Gilbert and his people to figure out how to get us to the other continents. The teleportation sphere got us connected to the kingdom, but only by random chance. I wasn’t keen on spinning the wheel any further after we had already lost good people to these scouting missions. And who guaranteed that most of the sphere's destinations were even on Tirnanog in the first place?

It would be ideal to find some sort of map or register with all the possible destinations neatly explained, but I was beginning to believe more and more that this wasn’t in the cards. The alien’s alien-ness, pun intended, included a serious lack of documentation for all devices and installations.

Apparently, being a single, super smart operator who designed most of their devices on their own meant that writing convenient user manuals was a waste of time. So, our people had to reverse engineer almost everything on the moonbase, except for the most obvious tech. It was only lucky that we had a few very smart people. While the clans had lost most of Earth’s technology, it didn’t mean that all the theoretical knowledge had faded. The problem had been access to the right resources, and my people helped out with the things that were truly lost.

And if something was completely incomprehensible, Gaia, our generous super mind, was always just one chat message away – if she deemed it worth her time to share her knowledge.

So I spent most of my time bringing Astra up to speed, who had finally acknowledged the genius of my invention. The ability to manipulate space was magical – and there was no way I wouldn’t wring every possible advantage out of it.Our spending more time at home was naturally welcomed by our kids and the cats. And since we had the time at our hands, we also visited Loopsfast and his two mates. The poor sod was still fretting over his eggs, while Cadence and Elegance seemed a lot more indifferent towards their brood.

“You should have told me earlier that drake males have to watch out for the eggs until they hatch!” I apologised. “I would have never urged you into trying to hook up with both of them if I had known!”

‘Doesn’t matter,’ Loops responded while proudly showing off his nest. The eggs had been relocated to Mount Aerie with the help of some drake riders. And while the first nest had been kind of bare bones, Loopsfast had gone through some serious effort for this one. It was still made out of local fauna, but he had used vines to intertwine countless branches. No easy feat, given that drakes had no hands, so I wondered how he had done it. Mixed in between were bushels of glowmoss, which gave the entire creation an otherworldly appearance.

‘Whether one egg or many, the same effort. The more eggs, the better!’ was Loopsfast's sagely reply.

I guffawed. “I suppose that is one way to look at it. Are you sure you don’t want to add a third girl to your harem while you are already at it?”

‘Next breeding season! Will try!’ Loops replied confidently. ‘Melody didn’t take mate, yet.’

Aaah, what happened to my introverted mount? Where was the drake who was fretting over being noticed by his crush? Had Loopsfast been taken over by some sort of parasite?

Astra scratched her head. “Wasn’t Melody the third female drake who was on our mission to Hochberg? I am honestly surprised that you didn’t go for her too already.”

‘Not ready,’ Loops replied. ‘Tried but not ready.’

Ah, well. Given the size difference between male and female drakes, Loopsfast had little to no chance if the woman of his choice had no interest.

We kept chatting for a while. At least as much as the drakes could be chatted with. The more time I spent with Loopsfast, the more I learned that drake-minds were pretty much one-tracked.

During our mission, the drakes had their breeding season, so Loop’s number one concern had been impressing females. And while he could be distracted with other topics, his mind would take every opportunity to return to the main matter at hand, which was impressing females. In hindsight, his infatuation was obvious.

And now that he had his eggs, most of Loops’s thoughts revolved around hatching the eggs, caring for the eggs, and keeping the eggs safe.

The drakes were intelligent beings, but I could see why they never developed a more complex society or technology. If your instincts were so strong that you couldn’t think about anything other than concerns of immediate, animalistic survival for more than a few minutes, then you had a problem.

And the females, well, I wouldn’t call them stupid, but they were definitely less chatty than Loopsfast. Which pointed to a different problem.

The tale has been stolen; if detected on Amazon, report the violation.

On the other hand, given how badly the clans got along with most of the other creatures on Tirnanog, maybe the drakes' shortcomings weren’t a bad thing for the drakes – and for us.

Having to regularly fight with some of the more organised pests was already bad enough. I still shuddered at the memories of that rat incursion. They had been a little too human-ish for my tastes. Hopefully, someone other than me would take care of them permanently at some point.

Three weeks passed while Astra and I upgraded our equipment with the new technology. What started as modernised medieval armour, driven purely by our filaments and muscles, slowly became more than a simple protective shell. The structural reinforcements and new weaponry reminded me of mechanised spacesuits.

I could only chuckle at the thought that we had already unwillingly proven that at least short exposure to a vacuum was possible. It made me wonder whether Gaia had anticipated such a possibility and intentionally gave us the ability to survive such conditions.

Anyway, there was still not much higher technology like computers involved in our suits. That wasn’t necessary, given our unique abilities. Thanks to our mutations, manipulating electricity and magnetic fields came naturally to us.

Life was perfect – for a time.

As with all things in life, things just couldn’t stay the way they were.

“We managed to adjust one of the wormgates to one-directional activation!” Gilbert announced proudly at the most recent intelligence meeting. “That means we no longer need a gate at the start and the end-point. It still doesn’t have the same reach as one of Earth’s gateway stations, but we should be able to reach anywhere on Tirnanog!”

I groaned inwardly while listening to his enthusiastic explanation, remembering all too well that there were still uncontacted colonies on the planet.

Another week later, Astra and I found ourselves standing at the edge of a huge canyon.

The vegetation wasn’t anything like the one in Jeng’s verdant jungle. Instead, it was more similar to the Old Camp’s redwood grove. Of course, the trees weren’t truly redwoods, but they reminded me of them. Most of the flora was acerous shrub, no more than ten metres in height, but every few hundred metres one of those giants emerged from the otherwise very monotonous undergrowth.

It seemed like the giants needed their space from each other, while smothering all the smaller plants beneath them. It prevented the area from becoming a true forest.

Astra pointed along the canyon walls after taking a look at her compass. “We have to go in that direction, if Gilbert was right that his wormgate dropped us about ten kilometres to the south of that lighted area. If we follow the canyon at a moderate pace, we should get there in an hour or two.”

“Moderate, eh?” I chuckled and shouldered one of the two large cylinders, which were our emergency ticket out of here. They were giant flywheel batteries, which should hold enough power for us to jaunt back home without the need to wait for Gilbert to open the wormgate again. It was nonetheless planned to be opened every three hours in case we decided to return.

Astra shouldered our second escape ticket while clarifying herself, “Moderate for us. We still need to look out for any threats. This place seems much nicer than that slime-mould deathtrap we stepped into last time.”

We started our journey, taking great leaps and flash steps along the canyon’s rocky ridge-line, thereby avoiding the dense underbrush beneath the redwoods.

After about twenty minutes of travel, we stopped. Our first encounter with the local fauna was a large, six-legged creature which was grazing the underbrush as a whole. With about forty metres in height, it towered above the local plant-life, except for the redwoods. It was still smaller than the saherna from back home, and unlike them, it used a single, long trunk to rip small trees out of the earth, which were then relentlessly chopped up by a multi-segmented maw that reminded me more of a saw blade than a normal mouth.

It was similar to a helicoprion fossil, only that it was attached to a more elephant-like creature.

“Do you think those are responsible for keeping the forest pruned?” Astra asked while we watched the creature feed.

“Definitely,” I replied. “Those saw-teeth combined with those jaws look like they would have no problem with our armour.”

Astra laughed. “I suggest we simply avoid finding out whether they are omnivores. Shouldn’t be too hard. It looks very slow.”

“The saherna also look slow, but they can go at a relentless pace once they come into gear,” I pointed out. Of course, that still meant we could outrun them. I only pointed it out because Tirnanog’s creatures often managed to defy expectations. “And that trunk looks like it could chuck a tree far enough to be a bad surprise.”

Astra nodded. “So we just stay away, a hundred metres?”

I shrugged. “Sounds safe enough.”

One of the rules we learned on our missions the hard way was not to engage with any creature we hadn’t seen fighting before. Although it was a nice rule to have, following it was sometimes difficult. Especially when some ugly critter desperately wanted to hug you.

Astra looked away from the monster that had garnered our attention and pointed in the direction in which we had been going. “Are those people?”

I turned, and my eyes followed where she was pointing. It was hard to tell, given that our particular type of vision enhancements didn’t help with far-sight in the slightest.

Squinting, I unclipped the Thich range-finder I had appropriated from one of their anti-air guns. At this point, it was a cherished souvenir.

A moment later, I grimaced while I counted the group that was rapidly closing in on our position.

“There are several creepy things which have a little too much similarity with the night-terrors from home. Although these look a little bit like the white-stalker we had to deal with at the mycelium. I hope they aren't just as strong, or we might be in trouble, no matter our recent advancements.”

Astra’s eyes snapped towards the sun blazing above our heads. “But it is in the middle of the day! How many are there?”

She retrieved a spyglass of her own from her belt.

I clicked my tongue. “Hard to tell. They are popping in and out of those rocky crevices as they advance. At least twenty. What has me more curious are the five people who are following them. One of them is looking at us as if he can see. No spyglass, though.”

“A sensory adaptation for enhanced long-range vision isn’t too uncommon,” Astra pointed out. “Aerie and Hochberg mostly invest in different types of sensors, but in Jeng’s forest, there is a type of bird which gives an awesome sight mutation. Most of their sensors take it just because it is so easily available in the local area. Do you think they are controlling those night-terrors somehow?”

“Best case. They look like they are using them as hunting dogs,” I murmured. “Have the Aerie ever tried to train them?”

“Hah!” Astra let out a derisive snort. “Do you want to train something that wants to rip off your face? More likely, one of those guys is a psychic who can control those things somehow. If I were you, I would secure that toy of yours. Looks like they will reach us soon.”

Seeing Astra’s advice as sound, I took off one of the rings from my finger and expanded it until I could stuff the range-finder into the pocket space. Then I switched it back.

Another dedicated ring was switched to its spetum-mode, and both Astra and I brought out the protection drones, which I already gave a small test run at the kingdom.

The preparations took some time, but eventually, we were as ready as we could be for what was coming.