LtCmdr Jovenan – Preventing anyone from doing something stupid by demonstrating how stupid it is myself
Jovenan
((Campsite, inside the cliffs, Callis I))
Jovenan was a planetary scientist. She had taken some courses in other fields of sciences as well, from biology to mathematics. The skills gained and the information learnt had proven invaluable frequently, sometimes saving her life. She was not, however, a linguist. Her mediocre language skills did nothing to help her figure out how to read a completely unknown language, written in a never-seen-before writing system. She was fairly certain that your average ship linguist wouldn’t have been able to do so either with just the information they had in their possession. They didn’t know anything about the language – did they speak it with their mouths, or did they use telepathy? Did they even have mouths? Which direction did you read the text, left, right, up, down, around in circles or back and forth? Did they symbols represent phonemes, syllables, morphemes, words, or was there even a connection with the language they spoke and wrote?
The pictures were marginally easier to understand, though Jovenan had to acknowledge another thing she was not: there was not a bit of art specialist, historian nor archaeologist in her. The one course in human history she had taken in the University in order to pass among humans and the one mandatory course at the Academy didn’t help her interpret the motivation for carving these figures to the wall. Did they represent a single scene, did they tell a story, were they symbolic or religious in nature? What meaning did the drawer assign to the figures and their relations to each other? Did the overlapping line represent motion, or did she get that all wrong too?
There was, nevertheless, one thing she and her team were: they were pretty clever. Lt K’Wara and Bergmen were out there, securing their base with ingenious instruments they had fashioned out of scrap and thin air. Doctor Bancroft had kept them all alive and was providing incredible insights into what the drawings could mean. It was the time for Jovenan to use her portion of that cleverness to interpret the drawings. She stepped closer to them and turned her body to align it with some of the more humanoid figures. Her one arm was elevated, while her legs were apart and slightly bent. There was some force in how she needed to flex the muscles of her legs, like she was ready to bounce from where she stood. The figure was doing something.
Jovenan: Throwing something. Or running. Escaping? ::looks back:: What’s that behind them?
Bancroft: ::stifling a yawn:: A lizard? No – wrong dimensions. Quadrupedal, though. Long tail. ::a pause:: Whatever it is, it doesn’t look friendly.
The quadrupedal was not exactly a small category of creatures. Knowing nothing about the planet and its fauna meant that she could assign the creature as pretty much anything there was. It might have been a predator, or maybe it was running with the humanoids. It could have been a pet or a farmed animal. It could have even been an intelligent species, escaping with the humanoids or going after them for whatever reason. Heck, maybe it was the sole intelligent species on the planet and the humanoids were its pets, farm animals or prey. Did the quadrupedal also make these drawings? Was the unfriendly appearance just their interpretation affected by cultural and biological bias?
Jovenan could barely stay awake. She broke her posture and stepped back next to the Doctor, rubbing her eyes. Blinking her eyes lazily, the figures had turned into blurry jumbles before her. They had spent hours exploring the tunnels, and before that, walking there from the escape pod, and who knew how long it had been since the incident in the orbit. There wasn’t much they needed to do today, not even much they could do right now. It was the high time to fulfil their another biological need and get some rest.
Jovenan: When the two get back here, I want you to take the first watch. Bergmen takes the last one. That way you and he get the most uninterrupted sleep. Does that sound good?
Despite the exhaustion preventing logical thought, she was quite happy with the order of watches. The night on Ura Neteos and the trips in the Academy had given her insight in what were the best and the worst parts of the night to be standing guard for the others. Although the amount of sleep was equal to them all, getting six hours of uninterrupted sleep felt much, much more refreshing than the set of two and four hours. The first watch had the benefit of others being somewhat awake for a part of it anyway, so there wasn’t really all that much to watch over, while the last watch gave you a head start to the day.
Lt Bergmen, who had suffered the worst injuries when they landed, deserved one of those lighter watches. Doctor Bancroft, the person whose level of exhaustion made the difference of fixing up an injured teammate and rupturing more of their organs if things turned bad, so that was also an easy choice for her. Besides, it would have looked bad for her as the superior officer if she had deliberately given herself one of the easier tasks. As for Lt K’Wara, Jovenan could volunteer them to the late night watch with her.
Bancroft: ::tight lipped:: Aye ma’am, thank you.
It didn’t take all too long for the two operations officers to get their work done, and the blueshirts heard steps approaching from the tunnels.
Bancroft: ::turning to greet them:: Welcome back. Y’all get the bone alarms all set, then?
Bergmen: No, Lieutenant. We didn’t make noisemakers from bones in the end; we just used aluminum foil from our food containers and pebbles.
K’Wara: They should make plenty of noise though if something decides to get too close for comfort, so we should take the chance to rest up.
Good. All good. That’s the extent Jovenan could think of the plan right now. She had approved of it earlier, so it was probably not all bad. The sleepiness made it far too difficult to say if that was really the case. The higher functions were already shutting down. She had reverted to thinking in her native language and translating it to Federation Standard before speaking out, like someone fluent in a language wouldn’t do. Did anything she had said in the last half an hour made any grammatical sense? “He get the most uninterrupted sleep”. Gets? Most uninterrupted… Uninterrupted the most sleep… No, longest… Why was she even thinking about it at the moment?
Bancroft: Per the Commander, I’ll be taking first watch. We’ve had a long day, and we’re not going to accomplish much more tonight. ::stretching:: Time for some shut eye.
Bergmen: Ok, I will take the third watch. Need my trench five, and have it five by five will not be bad.
Okay, that sounds… Wait, that was not at all what she had ordered. Jovenan tried to find the words for a moment to express that she had already decided otherwise.
K’Wara: Sleep sounds good. ::to Bancroft:: Good shift, Doc. And don’t stay up a minute longer than you have to.
Jovenan: ::to Bergmen:: No, you take the fourth watch. You need the most… you need as much rest as you can get. I’ll take the third watch. ::to others:: Doctor, when your shift is up, wake up Lieutenant K’Wara. Lieutenant, you wake me up when you’re done, ::to all:: or if there’s anything to report. Off you go! Good night!
The two goldshirts crawled to their respective tents, while the Doctor remained outside and assumed their duty as the guardian of the camp. Jovenan, too, picked one of the tents and made it inside. On Ura Neteos, they had slept on the rocky floor with nothing but the ceiling of the cave above them, so having a place like that to sleep in was almost luxurious – not really, Jovenan was far from the experienced survivalist or camper who had earned the right to call something like that comfortable. It was awful a thing, cramped, rough and cold. Right now, she would have sold her three teammates to get back to her bed on the Artemis, although that thought alone made her hate herself. Either way, it was impossible to sleep in there.
In three minutes, she had fallen asleep.
The dreams were merely flashes and images. They felt heavy, like a weight pushing her head or the feeling of being stuffy due to a flu.
Darkness behind the window. Non-persons in lurking behind the corners. Waterfall.
Vitor was there. Vitor was not there. Her heart was racing beyond the sleep, and cold sweat drenched her uniform.
Lizards chasing people. Lines on rock. Fire.
The entire world shook. She jumped awake.
K’Wara: Commander, you better out here. There’s trouble.
Huh? It took a couple of seconds to recognise the Lieutenant’s silhouette above her. How long had she been asleep? It didn’t feel like hours; she felt almost as tired as she had been when she first crawled into the tent. Only when she studied the Lieutenant’s words in her mind did she understand their meaning, and suddenly she was awake once more.
Jovenan: Coming.
Bancroft/Bergmen: Response
The Lieutenant withdrew from the tent and turned to look outwards. Jovenan pushed her head through the opening first and looked around. The three other tents stood empty around the campfire, and the waterfall continued to drown much of the sounds. She crawled halfway out of the tent and raised her head up so that she could see more.
K’Wara: Status?
Bancroft/Bergmen: Response
The goldshirts had already made it to the tunnels to check in on the perceived threat and back, while Jovenan was still only getting out of the tent. In other words, the junior officers had woken up each other first, decided what their approach to the problem was and acted on it all before thinking of alerting the senior officer on the scene.
Jovenan: ::hissing through her teeth:: And you only woke me up now?
Then, she heard the noise. A strange combination of low and high, of something being scratched against a surface and the stretched tarpaulin acting as a drum head as it was being clawed, echoing in the rocky tunnels. Something was definitely trying to get through it. What she didn’t hear was her own breath; only after several dozens of seconds of waiting for the tarpaulin to rip did she allow herself to let the air out.
She’d execute the mutineers later, they had bigger problems now.
K’Wara: That sounds like a bit more than a passing curiosity. We don’t have a ::glances to the hatchet with a frown:: productive way of fighting it back, so we need a deterrent of some kind, or a way to get away from it. And fast.
Bancroft/Bergmen: Response
Jovenan thought of the skeleton they had seen in one of the tunnels. They had figured out what had devoured the flesh from that poor person’s bones. Her eyes darted from one edge of the cavern to the other. There were drawings in the cavern. There were bones in the tunnels. There were no bones in the cavern. Why?
Jovenan: The people here survived long enough to carve all that to the walls. There must be something in here that kept the beasts away.
Bancroft/Bergmen/K’Wara: Response
They couldn’t just start testing different things. Her attention was drawn to the campfire. As she had said earlier, most animals were afraid of fire. Maybe they were also sensitive to light. It had worked on Ura Neteos. Might as well work here.
Jovenan: The tarpaulin’s fireproof, right?
Bancroft/Bergmen/K’Wara: Response
She picked two objects from the ground – a rock and a piece of metal, apparently – and stepped closer to the campfire. Since they were burning moss instead of wood, she couldn’t just take a log from the fire and use it as a torch, so instead she used the two objects as crude and very cumbersome oven mittens, picking up a ball of flaming material. Slowly, she approached the tunnel with the creature.
Just walk there, it’ll see the light coming through the tarpaulin and run away. If not, just throw the fireball around the cloth, that’ll be sure to freak it out. All animals are afraid of fireballs being thrown at them. Her legs were weak as she got closer to the obstacle they had constructed to the tunnel. Just a few more metres.
Then, the growl came through. It was quite likely louder than anything she had heard before. Its low pitch shook her, like the cellular bonds in her body had to fight against the force of a tsunami tearing them apart. Instinctively, she dropped everything and backed away, almost stumbling to her own feet. A tear appeared to the tarpaulin, revealing a claw.
Jovenan: Not working. Not working!
Bancroft/Bergmen/K’Wara: Response
TAG/TBC
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Lieutenant Commander Jovenan
Chief Science Officer
USS Artemis-A
E239911J11