Day Two
I made Alistair do all the heavy lifting today. There was no way I was even looking at those heavy drills. Given he was so insistent on working out in plain view, I was insistent he put his muscles to good use. What’s the point in exercising if it is not for practical purposes?
I used the early morning quiet to finish the analysis and upload the results on the air and water samples I managed to collect last night. I also took the time before the sun had fully risen to go outside and collect plant samples from the nearby area. It was helpful that Alistair did the cataloguing of the creatures yesterday because it was easy to identify which call belonged to which animal. At this time of day, the air was slightly more bearable and cooler. I collected samples of plants from the fields and the outskirts of the forest. Whilst Alistair was putting the probes into the ground for the underground mapping survey, I was able to run tests on these, creating a profile for the future colonists about the flora in the area. Something of note is that the planet seemed to be high in acidity, and this was reflected in the plants themselves. Some minor terraforming would be needed if the colonists wanted to use the land for agriculture.
By 11 am local time, the underground survey was complete and I had pinpointed three locations I needed to get soil samples from underground. This was also coupled with our task to identify local minerals and areas of groundwater for the colonists to exploit upon their arrival. The cave system nearby allowed us easy access to the underground, and this is where the pair of us travelled. Created by millions of years of water erosion (and I would hazard a guess that the sea water was slightly acidic, causing slightly acidic rain, as the river water ranged from an average of pH 6.832 upstream to a pH of 6.794 downstream along a 13km stretch, and taking into account statistical anomalies and other environmental factors), the cave was rather deep and wide, although we were able to move around the cave system easily. Something that was of note was that these caverns were abnormally large and largely dry; odd, since we did reach the groundwater level and observed large underground rivers and lakes. The answer to this was revealed when we were heading to the final sample gathering point; the caves were home to monolithic lithoid crustaceans. Miss Reyes would have been fascinated.
As these creatures were not traditionally sentient, I was not able to detect them telepathically, though it was soon clear that they reacted to electrical impulses in the locality, of which the electric impulses in my brain were the loudest to the creature. So naturally, I was the target of the creature’s attempts to kill me. Only recently recovered from the damage to my leg, ribs and back, I was forced to dodge and roll around the cave as the creature went on its rampage. Alistair tried to disable it but the creature did not feel pain, or at least, nothing was observed to indicate that it could feel pain. It was when the creature switched from attacking me to attacking him when he tried to crush the creature’s legs by pushing his arms into overdrive did I realise that the creature was following electrical signals, and I devised a method to distract it whilst Alistair was able to escape. For a moment, I thought his asinine hero complex would prevent him from going, thus leading to both our deaths, and I had to really stain my mental abilities to stop the creature from crushing him, but he quickly saw reason and disengaged. We were both fortunately able to get out unharmed.
What happened next is a haze, as I next remember waking up on the yacht with the EMH taking care of me, so I can assume that I had passed out and was transported to medical with an overwhelming headache. In any case, today was only marginally better than yesterday, and that was because the cave was cooler than the humidity of the river.
This is why I don’t do fieldwork. Tomorrow, I am just running tests on the yacht. Nothing is going to make me step foot onto this godforsaken planet again. Nothing.