Caution, indeed.
His data indicated the most common name for the star was Dolores. For a moment Dr. Plimick’s mind chased several humorous threads from that name. Ancient literature brimmed with associations. What brought him back quickly was the utter failure of the ship’s sensors to detect anything useful about the planet. He checked visual: a fuzzy white ball. Great; a cloud world.
The planet spun retrograde to Terran standard, and the gravity was just a tad light at 0.93. It was the fourth planet from the star, which was marginally larger than Sol, but well within expected habitable standards elsewhere. It’s year was a few days longer, so it’s orbit was just a bit farther out than Sol-Terra standard. Energy absorption from the star would make the planet a little warm, but the distance made it a little cooler. The magnetic belts were almost invisible.
The ship’s sensors were fully automated, of course, and he could see the computers trying different ways to get some readings. Eventually what took shape on the console before him reminded him of the earliest spool sets in the academic library back home. The data was copied from ancient sources in other formats, and on some of it, the spooling enhancements were more prominent than the actual information. Just so, the data on the planet was sparse.
The computers ran more checks to ensure this was the right star system, the right planet, etc. Eventually, the console reported with some moderate probability a wide equatorial band of nothing. That is, no apparent activity which could be interpreted as humanoid. The northern hemisphere was relatively quiet, and most of the active signs were in the south, ranging from sparse at the middle latitudes to fairly active in the far south, and tapering off some toward the pole. Extrapolations would indicate a moderate climate under such dense cloud cover, so polar regions might not be too harsh. There didn’t appear to be any actual cities, and most of the land was probably in the southern hemisphere.
This was just a bit more detail than he already had from previous surveys.
By now, most planets would have noticed the scanning and hailed his ship, or even fired on him. The planet below him remained quiet. The ship had also been attempting various forms of signaling, but so far nothing resembling any known signal came back. Then the ship’s sensors spotted a tiny artificial satellite, very close in to the cloud cover. It was almost flying as opposed to actually orbiting, since it was bouncing in and out of the thin outer reaches of the atmosphere, and hardly as large as a human body.
He watched the ship’s system track, then try to contact the thing. It was part metallic, along with plenty of organic materials, with wings of fabric. The ship guessed the fabric included some sort of passive solar energy conversion. He watched it for awhile, using both visual and sensor displays trained on the thing. It was very slow, very small, and didn’t seem to respond. Just as it began to approach the dark side of the planet, the little craft let loose a single squawk of radio signal.
The ship’s computers processed it quickly, and noted it was tightly compressed coding of an older standard communication protocol. It was terse, though not exactly dense in terms of language use.
Welcome to Dalorius Four. Safe landing at our southern pole. Please forgive the lack of guidance beacons.
He knew the ship could program itself to cross hyperspace and drop out on the surface at the south pole without the usual landing beacons. He decided to wait one more lap from their flying message pod. Meanwhile, he tried to research the name spelling, and found one peculiar reference to something about a religious group, something unsavory. However, the context was itself a little unsavory, coming during the last attempt at creating a galactic empire. An incredibly intelligent dynasty of some three men and one woman had managed to gather influence and power. But when the woman took the throne, she decided a means of better unity was religion. It was fairly open, pulling in a broad menu of current and ancient ideas. You could choose just about any flavor you liked, as long as your flavor didn’t include teachings contrary to certain imperial doctrines regarding interaction with political rulers.
While the whole thing collapsed in the usual ugly ways all empires fail, one of the episodes of decline included purging dissenting religious groups. The Imperial troops hounded some conscientious objectors, which naturally drove a fresh wave of colonization. One particular group was labeled with all sorts of hideous moral crimes, in a time when such was increasingly the tactic of unreasoning oppression. While every mention of this group was tinged with revulsion for their moral depravity, historians were pretty sure at least some of it was sheer propaganda. The group disappeared from the records just before the empire collapsed into the first of three, truly wide spread wars.
The official name was the Smiling Death Cult, but Dr. Plimick was pretty sure that was part of the propaganda. They didn’t seem to have a name for themselves. There were no overt connections to the star’s name, but he assumed either one of the leaders was called Dalorius, or it was a word with some peculiar religious significance.
At any rate, he settled back into his intuitive mode while waiting for the ship’s sensors to detect the flying message pod again.
