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According to the tourist friendly information packages getting pushed at visitors in the Feed, the original terraforming had been a prestige project. The original corporation had wanted to show off their ability to not just terraform, but to worldbuild to exact and exacting specifications.
It had ended up bankrupting them.
And the corporation that jumped in with a hostile takeover. And the next. And the three after that..
Eventually someone got involved who didn’t, so now they had a beautifully terraformed planet with five small continents, each a detailed and faithfully recreated tribute to a time period on humanity’s original planet, complete with bioengineered fauna.
They could have just wiped out any hazardeous fauna, harvested the plant matter and started a farming colony - well, they did also start a farming colony - but apparently there’d been a lot of agitation from “save the fauna” campaigns.
At the end of the day the owning corporation had declared the planet 70% protected, with minimal industry - including a series of resorts, because humans are weird and it was conveniently located for a large chunk of the Corporation Rim to visit with not too much trouble.
All of which I already knew, because I’d researched it when Amena told me about how one in her friend group were apparently the offspring of a upper-mid-level manager on the planetary tourist board, and they’d been invited for a spring vacation at the Isla Nublar resort in exchange for advertizing rights.
Still, it was a well-established vacation planet, the on-planet security were allegedly experienced in keeping the humans away from the large fauna and vice versa, and local hospital statistics showed no significant differences from any other vacation planet.
So Amena (and her friend group) went, though not before there’d been adolescent sighs and “yes, Third Mother”.
My threat assessment module hadn’t really pinged on the entire thing.
Then…
ART entered the wormhole about half an hour after we received news of the attack. When we arrived, the atmosphere above two of the continents were appallingly thick with smoke, but fortunately the resort had not been on either.
The local authorities had not taken too kindly to a random university ship and their SecUnit butting into their raider attack catastrophe, but at the end of the day, once it was established that we just wanted to collect our particular humans and leave, they waved us through and focused on the bigger problem of two nextdoor business rivals offering their help.
So I led a team down to Isla Nublar, where the buildings were singed and smoking and a raider landing vessel - well, half a vessel - was floating in the sea outside the safety zone. A vast shadow slid past underneath it, making my threat assessment module scream at me.
The safety zone fences and forcefields on land that were supposed to keep the resort and the continental land mass safely separate were down. Large flying fauna were eyeing us from the top of resort buildings and land fauna lurked inside.
The only humans around were not alive, and most were half eaten. Ugh.
Amena wasn’t among them.
Which could mean one of two things. One, that she had been scooped up as indentured labour to be as had obviously been the raiders’ intention for the resort - except the evidence suggested that the raiders had run afoul of unexpected safety measures. A few obviously-not-uniformed-staff-or-un-uniformed-guests were among the half eaten humans.
Then we found a barely alive augmented human raider and chased off the two-legged, chittering fauna that’d been determinedly trying to yank out his augmented eyeball. He was happy to be saved, less happy to be held at gunpoint until he told me what I wanted to know.
Apparently, the attack had gone wrong - a maritime fauna had destroyed two of their vessels, crashing one into the control tower of the resort, and fauna had come streaming in. He had crawled from the wreckage and managed to hide for a time, but noticed a few people grabbing land vehicles and heading along the safari paths towards the mainland.
He couldn’t describe any of the refugees, but his augments had recorded them. There were clear visuals of at least two of Amena’s friends.
I pinged ART, asking if it had had any luck getting permission to deploy its pathfinders.
“Negative,” it replied. “The local authorities are stonewalling all external offers to re-establish the communication network as well. Considering the level of destruction, they are probably not wrong to worry about an attempt at a takeover.”
If I’d been human, I’d have sighed.
Instead, I checked my large projectile weapon’s ammunition level and turned towards the safari paths leading almost immediately into a densely forested area. Fauna was moving in the shadows of the foliage, and from somewhere inside something made a sound like a monster from one of my sillier shows.
“I take it we’re going in?” Tarik said.
“Yes.”
“I noticed a service garage of sorts half a kilometer back. Want me to take a couple of guys back, see if I can get us some transport?”
I sent one drone back with him and called the rest of them back from where they’d been swarming all over the resort.
Then, just as the first of Tarik’s new jeeps finally approached, that monster sound came from the forest again, and this time the fauna making it stepped out.
It was a two-legged beast, easily as high as most of the resort buildings, and with a mouth big enough to snap a human in two.
Ugh. I really hate planets.